Origins of the Comics Journal
by Jeet Heer
Monday, August 3, 2009
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It’s difficult for anyone now to understand how baffling and upsetting the Journal was in its early years. It looked like a fan magazine but it was harshly critical of comics. Instead of the happy patter of the Bullpen Bulletins it was filled with long interviews with writers and artists bitterly complaining about working conditions (work-for-hire contracts, nasty editors). And it kept saying that comics should be an adult art form, judged by the same standards applied to film and literature. Most of the reviews, at least to my young fannish eyes, seemed incredibly abrasive.
One reason the Journal struck such a discordant note was that the comics community was much more cohesive in 1980 than it is now. As Frank Santoro pointed out in an earlier posting, the direct market created a common ground. So the Journal was read by Roy Thomas, Art Spiegelman, Dave Sim and the very young Hernandez Brothers (who did some lovely pre-Love-and-Rockets fan art for it, always a highlight in the issues of the early 1980s).
If the direct market was a bridge, then the Comics Journal was the main reading material of the bridge.
Frank is right to say that the bridge is over. To borrow a haunting title of a Paul Goodman short story, we have witnessed “the break-up of our camp.” It’s difficult to imagine Roy Thomas, Spiegelman, Sim and the Bros. sharing reading material these days. The comics world is too splintered into different factions. As a result, the Journal has lost its centrality, its ability to generate debate and part of its circulation. To put it another way, part of the greatness of the Journal in its salad days was that it was read by a large number of people who hated its editorial stance, yet felt it was a necessary read (and these people needed to hear what the Journal said). These days, I’d guess that most readers of the Journal are already in alignment with the magazine’s outlook.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can see now that the Journal was not born of an immaculate conception: it had ancestors who contributed to its DNA. What were the early influences on Gary Groth? (I’m working here on the convenient fiction that Groth was the main shaper of the magazine. A more scholarly article would factor in other key players like Mike Catron and Kim Thompson).
1. The more intellectual side of fan culture. As the very name of the company Fantagraphics should tell us, Groth came out of fan culture, was a teenage fanzine maker. Some of the shoddiness of the early Journal (the terrible fonts, the slapdash layouts, the often hideous covers) was a holdover of fandom. But fan culture was more diverse than we sometimes think. Aside from all the geeky celebrators of superheroes, there was an intellectual elite of fans who held comics to a higher standard: Bill Spicer, John Benson and Mike Barrier being three good examples. These fans and the magazines they edited (Graphic Story Magazine and Squa Tront) had a wider scope of interest than most superhero fans (Barrier was the great Barks expert, Benson did pioneering work on Kurtzman, Eisner and Krigstein). This provided a grounding in comics history that strongly influenced the worldview of the Journal. These fans also often talked about the promise of adult comics and longer narratives: the graphic novel as a theoretical possibility before it became real.
3. Hunter S. Thompson. Tied to Rolling Stone was the figure of Hunter S. Thompson, whose impassioned, macho journalism had a big impact on Groth’s no-nonsense, gun-toting persona (although thankfully Groth doesn’t share in the Thompson mind-destroying drug use). One reason for Groth’s ill-fated and temporary alliance with Harlan Ellison was that Ellison was a poor man’s Hunter Thompson.
4. Counterculture politics. Politically Groth came of age during the tail-end of the Vietnam War and the beginning of the Watergate scandal. He was too young to experience the idealistic/optimistic side of the 1960s (the rise of the Civil Rights movement, for example). Rather, he came to political consciousness during one of the darkest times in modern American politics, when Nixon’s lawlessness led to a constitutional crisis. This helps explains Groth’s pessimistic anti-authoritarianism and his suspicion of established powers. It’s no accident that Groth once damned Jim Shooter by comparing him to Richard Nixon.
5. Gil Kane. I don’t think we can overstate the influence of Groth’s friendship with Gil Kane. Kane’s great 1965 interview with John Benson (in the original incarnation of Alter-Ego) was the model for what a good, free-wheeling Journal interview should be. Whatever his talents as an artist, Kane’s true medium was conversation: he was one of the great comics talkers, pouring out a seemingly endless supply of anecdotes and analysis. (Kane’s only rival as a comics talker is Art Spiegelman). No wonder the Journal kept interviewing Kane: He was the well-spring of smart comics chatter.
In interviews, Groth has talked about other influences, notably New York intellectuals like Dwight Macdonald. But I think these came later. The early Journal really doesn’t, to my mind, read like Partisan Review or Dissent. It really owes more to Graphic Story Monthly and Rolling Stone. The New York Intellectuals never really grappled with the nasty underside of mass culture the way the Journal would (despite Macdonald’s intermittent career as a film critic).
The Comics Journal was very much the product of a historical moment. That moment has now passed. In some ways, the magazine is the victim of its own success. We all know now that comics can be art. The question is, how the does the Journal re-invent itself for a very different era than the late 1970s? What sort of comics magazine do we need now, in the 21st century, now that alternative comics are a subculture strong enough not to need to engage with commercial comics?
