{"id":5670,"date":"2010-09-16T12:44:03","date_gmt":"2010-09-16T16:44:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/?p=5670"},"modified":"2010-09-16T12:44:03","modified_gmt":"2010-09-16T16:44:03","slug":"if-i-could-write","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/?p=5670","title":{"rendered":"If I Could Write"},"content":{"rendered":"

Exceptional one-person comic strips like \u201cLittle Nemo,\u201d \u201cKrazy Kat,\u201d and \u201cPeanuts\u201d were among the first to be championed as high art partly because standard industry practices such as \u201cghosting\u201d and assembly-line production obscure idiosyncrasies, freeze evolution, and desiccate scholarly and fannish narratives. Our impulse to uncover a human source \u2014 to project from reproducible artifact to traceable performer, so that we might begin to speak of cinematographer \u201cJohn Alton\u201d as we would of \u201cHumphrey Bogart\u201d \u2014 isn\u2019t just a taxonomic convenience. It also reflects frustrated feelings of gratitude and intimacy, as evidenced by the career of Walt Disney comics artist and writer Carl Barks. Although Barks wrote, drew, and inked his own work for decades, his employer blocked fan mail and withheld contributor credits on the theory that sales would decline if children thought anyone other than Walt Disney was involved in the comic books. As a result, Barks wasn\u2019t successfully contacted by readers until 1960, and his first interview (conducted in 1962) was only allowed publication in 1968. Given no clues other than style, loyal fans identified and collected Barks as \u201cThe Duck Artist,\u201d \u201cThe Good Duck Artist,\u201d or simply \u201cThe Good Artist,\u201d the last eventually inscribed on his gravestone. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014From “High, Low, and Lethem”<\/a>, a just-posted, confidence-killing essay in which the great Ray Davis takes nearly every subject I’ve written about for Comics Comics<\/em> over the last five years\u2014from Steve Gerber and Carl Barks to Jonathan Lethem’s Omega the Unknown<\/em> and the auteur theory’s connection to comics, among others\u2014and writes something actually worthwhile, intelligent, and stylish about them. He shows me up as a lazy halfwit actually. The funny thing is that I’m fairly certain he’s never heard of me or Comics Comics<\/em> at all, and the confluence of thought is purely coincidental. Oh well, I guess I need to try harder. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Exceptional one-person comic strips like \u201cLittle Nemo,\u201d \u201cKrazy Kat,\u201d and \u201cPeanuts\u201d were among the first to be championed as high art partly because standard industry practices such as \u201cghosting\u201d and assembly-line production obscure idiosyncrasies, freeze evolution, and desiccate scholarly and fannish narratives. Our impulse to uncover a human source \u2014 to project from reproducible artifact to traceable performer, so that we might begin to speak of cinematographer \u201cJohn Alton\u201d as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[85,197,273,713,1079,1230,1254],"class_list":["post-5670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-auteur-theory","tag-barks","tag-comics-vs-literature","tag-lethem","tag-ray-davis","tag-gerber","tag-hodler"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5670\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}