Charles Burns inaugurates our move into studying graphic novels as a force in contemporary American literature. Burns was an early innovator in the comics genre. He first came to prominence through his contributions to graphic novelist Art Spiegelman's influential comics journal, Raw. Burns also contributed some of his earliest concoctions to the alternative music 'zine, Sub Pop. In addition to publishing a number of short stories and graphic works, Burns has contributed artwork to the Iggy Pop album Brick by Brick, crafted illustrations for a number of periodicals (such as The Believer and The New Yorker), and drafted the visuals for choreographer Mark Morris' re-writing of The Nutcracker. Having met and befriended Simpsons creator Matt Groening at Evergreen State College, Burns is also the tongue-in-cheek inspiration for C. Montgomery Burns.Raised primarily in the Seattle area, Charles Burns returns to the Pacific Northwest for his serial, Black Hole. Black Hole began appearing as a comic book in 1995, but wasn't entirely completed and published in a one volume book format until 2005. Combining impressive skills as a visual artist with a keen ear for story, Burns' surreal Black Hole combines surrealistic images with a story about the metaphorical plague of teenager-dom.
As a long-time comic fan, I was bemused in the 1980s and '90s by the rise in profile of graphic novels with the mainstream press and, later, the academy. As I would read about the latest Green Lantern maxi-series of X-Men trade paperback, I would see articles about how graphic novel such as the Hernandez brothers' Love and Rockets or Spiegelman's Maus were winning this or that award. What struck me was that the media beyond comics favored comics that were (a) drawn in an amatuer, often childish style and (b) typically semi-autobiographical stories about life in a subgroup or on the fringe of society. Presumably these were worthy of attention becasue they did not owe their exegesis directly to comics aimed at boys aged 9-12, as did Superman and Spider-man. What disturbs me about this phenomenon, from a comic book fan's point of view, is that works which are a true tours-de-force of the medium such as Dark Knight Returns or X-Men:God Loves, Man Kills are overlooked. Comic creators with fantastic graphic arsenals at their disposal like Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons are ignored in favor of people like Charles Burns. This begs the quesion, are members of the academy really in a position to judge what is truly the best the comics medium has to offer, given their background in written literature rather than comics?
ReplyDeleteAndrew, this is exactly my point. The well-loved but oft-ignored series Hellblazer takes up the bulk of my academic work, and while I'm glad to see "graphic novels" getting some press, the ongoing serials are entirely ignored, so essentially, the bulk of comics are ignored.
ReplyDeleteKate, yes, Hellblazer is another superb series - I haven't read all of them, but I've read several of the Garth Ennis and Jamie Delano issues. Very disturbing and wholly transgressive. This is what I mean by the amateur look of some fringe comics being favored over more mainstream work. Presumably these works are perceived by non-comics reading critics as possessing some kind of purity, when in fact much of it is just plain bad. The fact that the ordinary is often elevated to cult status is in itself of little concern to me, but that it's so often done at the expense of much better work is troublesome.
ReplyDeleteInteresting point about the academy and the rise of "the graphic novel" versus the comic book. I'm curious: how would Burns fit into this debate? As one of those bogeyman academics, I find that I am unsure as to whether Burns fits in with the Spiegelman or Superman crowd. His work isn't quite as overtly autobiographical as Spiegelman's (or Bechdel's), it doesn't get too invested in the lives of marginalized groups, and it's superbly drawn. But, it's also increasingly been afforded the kind of serious attention from critics that is usually reserved for "the graphic novel" and not the comic.
ReplyDeleteI'll be excited to discuss it in class, and also to think about how/ whether the divide between "high" and "low" culture is ever effectively transcended in academic work (I have my doubts).
As I briefly mentioned last night, I think Burns is closest to Clowes, who works in the tradition of many other independent comic artists--the genealogy would run: Crumb-Clowes-Burns, though this is just a general correlation.
ReplyDeleteBut I feel the need to reiterate my point about the value of the polemic in favor of the "traditionalist" viewpoint--non-Speigelman-esque comics have been wholly ignored by the academy, which is not the case in other "newly adopted" genres in English studies (think studies on film, genre studies [Westerns, etc.]). Try looking for something on any superhero aside from Batman or Watchmen on the MLA bibliography--it's not there. ImageText did an issue on Gaiman, but that's really the only work that's even attempted to approach serialized work.
Anyways, while I don't wholly subscribe to the argument that Maus and its ilk aren't valuable, I do find them boring in comparison with Hellblazer (issues on Tasmanian Aborigines, Thatcherism, race riots in London, etc.), Fables (wherein a group of fable characters are forced out of their magic homelands into the mundane world--diaspora), Sandman, Preacher, etc. And in terms of "indie" comics, which LOOK more similar to the canonized "graphic novels," Paul Hornschmeier's "Mother Come Home" and the MOME series are really quite fantastic. I guess my real critique of the canonized graphic novels is that their status as the "only graphic novels worth working with" reflects an intellectual laziness and a lack of desire to search out other things. Everytime someone finds out that I'm into comics and immediately asks if I've read Maus, I cringe, partly for the frequency with which this occurs, and partly for the fact that it has come to stand in for a huge, diverse culture. It's like if I said I was into Modernism and people (within the department) invariably responded with "Have you read Eliot?," or say I'm into theory, and they ask if I've read Foucault, or I'm into American poetry, and they ask if I've read Whitman. Lordy. It's almost offensive.
So, to sum it up, I think in spite of the obvious flaws in the traditionalist argument (namely because serialized comics have taken the form of talking heads for years, and many are still brilliant--we can easily critique the genius of Greoning, Barry and Watterson in the same way), it's necessary, because a lot is getting ignored and under-represented, while people write paper after paper on Maus and Persepolis, which stand in for all comics about as well as Star Wars stands in for all of sci fi, or Shakespeare stands in for all of Anglophone literature.