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<\/a>Gil Kane, an artist whose interviews are always worth reading.<\/p><\/div>A notebook on comics interviews and autodidacts:<\/p>\n
Autodidacts.<\/strong> I often think William Blake is the prototype for many modern cartoonists. Blake was a working class visionary who taught himself Greek and Hebrew, an autodidact who created his own cosmology which went against the grain of the dominant Newtonian\/Lockean worldview of his epoch. The world of comics has had many such ad hoc theorists and degree-less philosophers: Burne Hogarth, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Gil Kane, Neal Adams, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Gary Panter, Lynda Barry, Howard Chaykin, Chester Brown, Dave Sim, Alan Moore. These are all freelance scholars who are willing to challenge expert opinion with elaborately developed alternative ideas. The results of their theorizing are mixed. On the plus side: you can learn more about art history by listening to Gary Panter and Art Spiegelman talk than from reading a shelf-full of academic books; Robert Crumb\u2019s Genesis<\/em> deserves to be seen not just as an important work of art but also a significant commentary on the Bible; Lynda Barry\u2019s ideas about creativity strike me as not just true but also profound and\u00a0life-enhancing. On the negative side: Dave Sim\u2019s forays into gender analysis have not, um, ah, been, um, very fruitful; and while Neal Adams drew a wicked cool Batman, I\u2019m not willing to give credence to his theories of an expanding earth if it means rejecting the mainstream physics of the last few centuries. Sorry Neal!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Interviews Versus Art.<\/strong> This strain of autodidactic cartoonists explains why the comics world is blessed with many great talkers, artists whose conversations and interviews overflow with tart observations and juicy anecdotes. All the autodidacts I\u2019ve mentioned above give great interviews. In fact, I\u2019d go so far as to say that for some of them, the interview is their best form: I\u2019d rather read a long, juicy interview with Gil Kane than any comics by him. The same principal applies to Howard Chaykin and Alan Moore. To me, these cartoonists are all in the line of Dr. Johnson, whose conversations as recorded by Boswell are great but whose writing is hard to slog through. By contrast, while Art Spiegelman is a great talker I\u2019d prefer a new comic from him to a new interview. The same is true of Chris Ware, Seth and other comparable artists. That\u2019s a genuine divide: some artists are smarter than their works. Other artists are equally smarter or smarter, but their work is even more intelligent and meaningful than their articulate opinions and observations.<\/p>\n \u00a0The Importance of Interviews.<\/strong> I was initially annoyed at Ben Schwartz for including interviews in his Best American Comics Criticism<\/em> volume, but upon reflection I realized that he was a cagier editor than I would have been. The simple fact is that because of the intellectual poverty of most writing on comics, infected as it is with fannish boosterism and journalistic glibness, the interview form has been the crucial venue for comics criticism and comics history. As I said in the previous post, without all those great interviews with Kane, Crumb, etc. our sense of the history and canon of comics would be very different.<\/p>\n