OO, THOSE AWFUL ONTOLOGIES

My title references an essay by snob-critic Edmund Wilson, who sneered at THE LORD OF THE RINGS with a snotty essay, "Oo, Those Awful Orcs." I say, if you're going to steal, steal from elitists; that way, you're just stealing from cheats.

My most sustained thoughts on the subject of "ontology" came about from my relatively recent attempts to suss out the works of Alfred North Whitehead. Even before finishing his most famous philosophical book, PROCESS AND REALITY, I wrote this essay to draw comparisons between his system and mine, based on a perceived conflict between his ontology and my epistemology. In response to Whitehead's statement that his philosophy concerned "the process by which subjective data pass into the appearance of an objective world," I wrote: 

It could be interesting to see what criteria Whitehead uses to measure his “objective data,” and what if any impact that would have on, say, Kant’s theory of the sublime—this being the Kantian concept that has most affected my own theory. I will say that within my epistemological schema, I rely on a sort of “objective data” that feeds into narrative constructs, and my own “satisfaction” with an author’s use of such patterns is more “intense” when I am convinced that the patterns used reinforce one another, creating my version of “concrescence.” However, within the sphere of literary narrative, “objective data” can be either things that the audience believes to be objectively unquestionable—say, the fact that the sun always rises in the east—or what I’ve called “relative meta-beliefs,” such as the Annunciation, the Oedipus complex, and the Rise of the Proletariat.

I later referred to all such "data" as half-truths, because that's how "truth" operates in fiction. But in more recent months, I began to consider, in the essay A NOSE FOR GNOSIS, that Whitehead's concept of an "ontology of subjective data" might parallel my concept of an "an ontology of fiction," by which I mean everything that *literally* takes place within a fictional discourse."

...I've been examining the idea that Whitehead's "pre-epistemic prehensions" comprised an ontology, while the epistemologically oriented apprehensions formed an epistemology. Prehensions as I understand them would necessarily flow from "knowledge-by-acquaintance," while apprehensions would line up with "knowledge-by-description."

A new wrinkle I'll now add on top of these previous observations is the following:

Since fictional ontology, whether one defines it as "literal content" or as "pre-epistemic prehensions," is comparable to "knowledge-by-acquaintance" rather than "knowledge-by-description," all judgments based on taste spring from a subject's response to a fictional work's ontology.

In 2012's THE CARE AND ESTEEMING OF LITTLE MYTHS, I defined the function of taste thusly: 

The notion of intersubjectivity explains much of the appeal of fiction.  Elitists like Groth generally insist that the difference between good and bad fiction is a matter of highflown sophistication; that which lacks sophistication is perforce bad.  Yet even elitist critics differ among themselves over what is good or bad in Shakespeare just as much as comics-fans do about the proper depiction of Batman.  The arguments themselves may be more sophisticated, but the response for or against any given work spring from the extent to which the work mirrors the subjectivities of critic, fan, or general audience-member.  But subjectivity doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and so we must speak of intersubjectivity as a way of understanding how persons from all walks of life can see reflections of themselves in the works of strangers, often strangers from other times and cultures. Thus, when we feel affection for the works of Shakespeare or of Bill Finger, what we “love” are shadows of our own tastes and personalities.

I still maintain that taste is not a matter of abstract justifications, though one can amuse oneself by debating the logical propositions that others use to justify the superiority of their tastes. Taste relates to the audience's identification with the travails, deserved or not, of fictional characters, and that means identifying with a work's internal ontology. 

The aforementioned Gary Groth, for instance, has often ridiculed the genre of superheroes with a variety of intellectual justifications. His few comments on his early comics-fandom have painted a picture of his younger self as simply ignorant of literary principles. But there's no reason to take Groth's word for his self-evaluation: that he formerly had the propensity to identify with fictional superheroes but then recognized their absurdity for intellectual reasons. A lot of readers fall out of love with a lot of genres that they may love intensely for a time, only to tire of them and chase after some other passion. Ontological identification arises from the reader's perception that the ontology reflects something he or she would like to see play out, regardless as to whether the fictional scenario reflects something the reader would like to see transpire in reality.

Now, if I am correct that reader-taste stems from identification with a work's ontology, how does that influence the same reader's ability to suss out a work's epistemology? My answer is that the reader's non-intellectual tastes can indeed influence whether or not one appreciates the epistemology that can be used to justify the ontology. Even without reading Edmund Wilson's famous anti-Tolkien essay, the title alone tells one that Wilson cannot countenance the basic appeal of villains who repel the reader on the basis of their ugliness and their violence. I'm sure Wilson had all sorts of intellectual justifications for that position, but I don't think that his judgments of taste, any more than those of Groth, stem from intellect, but from an ability, or lack of ability, to identify with the basic-- one might say "pre-epistemic"-- propositions of an ontological scenario. And if one can't grok the "knowledge by acquaintance," one is unlikely to find any validity in the "knowledge by description" used to justify the abstract principles aligning with the pure events of the story.

DEPARTMENT OF COMICS CURIOSITIES #23: WEIRD MARVEL HOUSE-AD

 While scanning through the 1975 b&w magazine KULL AND THE BARBARIANS for my Red Sonja piece, I came across this oddball house ad for Marvel's b&w line.

I've seen a lot of weird approaches to getting readers to subscribe, but invoking the analysis of dream symbols takes the proverbial cake. And the art in which the "dream symbols" appear like nothing more than a standard fantasy-trope: a doughty hero being attacked by a curvy female sending snake-phantoms his way.

Moreover, the art used sports the copyright "1972 by Gary Groth and Bob Kline." What? The enfant terrible of comics fandom, Gary Groth of THE COMICS JOURNAL, once worked for the Evil That Was Marvel Comics?

Well, probably only in a loose technical sense. I don't think Groth was ever an artist, but he had published various fanzines by 1975, and Bob Kline, whom I didn't know, was a popular fan-artist of the period. Probably Kline had some of his art published in one or more of Groth's fanzines, and one or both of them managed to re-sell some of that fan-art to Marvel Comics for spot illustrations like the one in the house ad. That would mean that neither Groth nor Kline had any say as to how the art was used, though it's the only time *I* have seen a spot-illo in a Marvel book being copyrighted by someone outside the company purview. Here's an example of a Kline cover for Groth's FANTASTIC ADZINE, which had a circulation of a thousand copies back in the day.

In 1975, I'm sure the name Gary Groth meant nothing to Marvel employees beyond his fanzine activities. One year later, Groth, Michael Catron and Kim Thompson bought a failing adzine, THE NOSTALGIA JOURNAL, which probably meant they also acquired TNJ's mailing list. The trio then re-fashioned TNJ into THE COMICS JOURNAL, which, whatever Groth claimed in later years, was predominantly just another fanzine back then. Only over time did TCJ become the scourge of industry mediocrity and so on. 

"WHY DID KIRBY THINK HE COULD WRITE?"

 I saw this question on Classic Horror Film Board, so here's my answer.

__________

That's a complicated question, and a lot of different people will give you different answers. I've done as much research as I can into the subject, but obviously I'm speaking of matters I didn't witness.

From his first independent ventures in comics, like a POPEYE imitation comic strip ("Socko the Sea Dog"), I think Kirby only "wrote" in the sense that he would map out the pencils and then add dialogue later. I'd be surprised if ever in his long career he actually wrote a script for anyone else. He hooked up with fellow artist Joe Simon within a few years of getting into comic  books, at least partly because Simon had a better head for business and for seeking out editorial contacts. When Simon and Kirby hit it big with Captain America (to be sure, an independent creation of Simon's), the two artists became flush enough to open their own studio. I would guess that Simon "wrote" in the same way as Kirby but the studio did accept scripts by other hands; in one interview, Kirby admitted that some other guy originated the Red Skull during that period. The only comment I've seen from Simon was the offhand remark that during their association he "would never let Kirby write," but he didn't elaborate. Most of the dialogue from the Simon-Kirby titles, both at Timely and at DC, is jazzy and efficient, but it's so much unlike the weird dialogue Kirby produced in the seventies that I tend to think the two artists had ghosts come in and smooth things out. 

Kirby and Simon collaborated on the farcical FIGHTING AMERICAN-- whose dialogue, TO ME, sounds a lot like the wacky scripting of the solo Kirby stuff later-- and then the two parted ways in the mid fifties. Then we see a few features written purely by Kirby, not quite as free-wheeling, but still tending to a lot of gosh-wow exclamations. He had a success with CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN in 1957 but he was teamed with writer Dave Wood. Was that at the insistence of his editors at DC, who wanted some quality control? I would think so, even though on the whole the CHALLENGERS stories were driven by Kirby's profligate imagination. I theorize that Wood just kind of went along with whatever wild gimmicks Kirby turned out. This is an important point because in Kirby's mind, he was really "writing" the whole feature and Wood was just adding dialogue that would suit DC'S editors.

Kirby got on the outs with DC's management and Atlas Comics, soon to become Marvel circa 1960, became Kirby's main account. Editor Stan Lee didn't immediately start turning out masterpieces with Kirby, and it seems like to Lee Kirby was just another jobbing artist, even though the two of them had crossed paths at Timely, when Lee was just an office boy. Then DC started its superhero revival, so Lee naturally turned to one of the artists best known for that genre, and thus FANTASTIC FOUR was born. There are a few surviving documents indicating that Lee did not at this time turn over sole creative effort to Kirby, and this would be logical, given that Kirby hadn't exactly had a ton of hits over the past ten years.  Once books like FF and THOR became successful, slowly the working relationship became more fluid, and it appears that Lee let Kirby "have his head" more often. For all that, though, it's obvious to me that Kirby did some things-- such as crossovers-- only because Editor Lee demanded them.

Over time, Kirby came to resent the fact that Lee got the writers' salary, when he Kirby was the one inventing most of the new heroes and villains. Personally I don't think he appreciated Lee's contribution to the dramatic heft of the new wave of superheroes, and I think he came to believe he had done it all and Lee just filled in the dialogue as had Dave Wood. In the eighties COMICS JOURNAL editor Gary Groth certainly encouraged Kirby in this belief, during which time Kirby dismissed the idea that Lee had ever contributed to the stories. He got both a writer's and penciler's salary when he went to DC, and so his later work at Marvel, Pacific and elsewhere was usually though not always on the same terms. 

And that's my view as to why Kirby believed himself both the writer and creator of everything he did after breaking up with Simon, except for a few isolated special projects.

REMEMBRANCE OF JOURNALS PAST

 Reader YBY wrote in the comments-section of this post: 

I always figured the people who worked [at the Journal] were true believers in the whole "comics should be grown-up and complex" view.

 As it happens, some ruminations on my experiences with the Journal fit in with another topic, so here goes.

On the general subject of making comics grown-up, the Journal didn’t start out with that high-toned ambition when the magazine began in 1976. In terms of content, the early Journal celebrated and criticized the same topics that engaged the greater part of comics fandom: genre-work from the major publishers and old fandom-favorites like EC Comics and the Carl Barks ducks. The Journal wasn’t the first fanzine to have couched its criticisms in a more intellectual tone, but Gary Groth succeeded in finding an assortment of writers who shared his waspish view of the medium-- including me-- which may have only been possible because mainstream fans had become more venturesome in their tastes in the early 1970s. At some point, the news section of the magazine became more adversarial toward the big companies (and some smaller ones), and that adversarial nature made the Journal notorious for its focus on controversial issues. Nevertheless, despite some of Groth’s later pronouncements, the Journal was still a fanzine. For what I remember as a full year, the magazine’s subscription page featured a still from the then-current STAR WARS hit, in which the movie’s characters were made to say something like, “That’s no fanzine—it’s too big to be a fanzine!” Some of the most memorable genre-celebrating essays of early issues included Cat Yronwode championing the mythic aspects of the WONDER WOMAN feature, and Ed Via devoting a long essay to the subtleties of Miller’s DAREDEVIL.

In this essay I provided a snapshot of the shift away from genre-celebration in the 1980s, the same period when Gary and Co. decided to emphasize “art” in the Journal while letting Amazing Heroes deal with all the genre-work. Still, while I was still contributing, I persevered in attempting to analyze the makeup of genre in my reviews whenever possible, rather than dismissing genre as the domain of mere hacks. I give credit to Gary Groth for giving Journal space to my very favorable review of Miller’s DARK KNIGHT RETURNS circa 1987, even though various personal remarks made it clear that he Groth abhorred the work. But by the early 1990s, the bloom was off the rose: genre was the enemy, and most of the writers were only too happy to jabber about commodification and similar Marxist fantasies in order to increase the magazine’s alleged intellectual heft.

In various essays I've argued that, in addition to the Marxist cant, many Journal writers subscribed to the Pedagogical Paradigm, claiming that superheroes could only appeal to children and that therefore modern fans were just as a bunch of big man-babies. No doubt the converted choir found this nonsense gratifying to their egos, but none of them had any better concept of what Art was than had the writers of the Frankfurt School, from whom many Journalistas sedulously copied. And yet, the dislike of genre may run even deeper than that.

In Malcolm Heath’s commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics, Heath describes the philosopher’s definition of the term “tekhne,” meaning a special level of excellence that a superior member of any profession—artist, philosopher, politician—reaches when he masters his craft. Yet, as if to contradict this emphasis on intellectual assiduity, at the opening of the Metaphysics Aristotle says (according to Heath) that “unreflective experience may produce the same result as ‘tekhne.’ In general, the ability to do something well does not depend on understanding, nor does understanding necessarily imply an ability to do it well.”

Because Art has so many multifarious dimensions to it, I’ve often disputed judgments by various critics whom I found overly dependent on judging Art by some purely intellectual metric. Such critics, while comfortable with a Harvey Kurtzman, had no vocabulary for dealing with the genius of a Jack Kirby, except to call him a “primitive” or something like that. I sought to use the mythic arguments of critics like Frye and Fiedler to argue for a wider perspective, and at one point I even asked Gary Groth if he’d want to print a regular series on “myths in comics.” He did me another favor by refusing the proposal. While I don’t recant anything that I wrote back in those days, back then I hadn’t yet defined what factors were shared by both religious and literary myths—a commonality I would now abbreviate to “poeticized knowledge.” Without a sound definition, my survey of the topic would not have been adequate, and any “myth-essays” I might have written back then would have suffered.

I will note in conclusion that when critics—in the Journal or anywhere—celebrate works for adhering to some intellectual concerns, they’re just doing what they were taught in school. Anything I learned about HUCKLEBERRY FINN in elementary or secondary school was almost certainly framed in purely intellectual terms, as in, “Twain does XYZ in order to signal his deep revulsion toward slavery.” That’s the sort of simple idea on which that high-school kids can base meaningless essays, in order to show that they at least paid some attention in class. Anything deeper, such as Fiedler’s claim that Huck and Jim represent a homosocial union that divorces both males from the troublesome world of family life, has to come later, when an individual has learned how to deal with abstractions of all kinds, not just with those that serve some narrow “pro-social values.” In fact, if the Pedagogical Paradigm applies to anyone, it would be to all those who avoid the deep waters of myth and symbol in order to content themselves in the kiddie-pool of rationality—

The big man-babies.

THE BAT-BACHELOR THREAD

I concluded my GROTESQUES AND ARABESQUES post without formulating a “bachelor thread” for the Batman comics-series, because I wanted to rethink the matter somewhat more in relation to the influential 1966 teleseries. I’m never going to attempt to review all the Batman comic books, but I have considered doing an episode-by-episode myth-analysis of the teleseries. To do so, I would need to determine what aspects of the comic’s “bachelor-thread" the series-writers chose to follow, and what aspects they replaced with others.

My original thought for the Batman comic in toto was going to be something like, “the darkness of trauma, though usually breeding monsters, may also breed a slayer of monsters.” I even had this approximate notion in mind as I began GROTESQUES AND ARABESQUES, but in the midst of crafting the essay, I began to think a lot more about how Robin had altered the aesthetic of the series. Though he as much as Batman suffered a trauma that caused him to become a crusader against evil, Robin certainly does not become a “creature of the night.” If anything, his bright, colorful costume suggests the stubborn renewal of life and light after the temporary reign of darkness. The legendary Robin Hood was almost certainly the exemplar on which the teen hero was modeled, but arguably over time the more important connotation was that of the robin as “the first bird of spring.”

 Robin’s vernal presence certainly doesn’t dispel the monsters of fear and darkness, of course. He debuts after Batman’s encounters with a handful of early, somewhat crude grotesques—Professor Hugo Strange, the Monk, and the Duc D’Orterre—but the Boy Wonder is on the scene for all the major grotesques: the Joker, Clayface, Scarecrow, Two-Face. And because of the visual and narrative interplay of the grim Dark Knight and his playful “squire,” the writers began coming up with more villains who were more sprightly in nature, foremost being the Penguin. (As noted elsewhere, it took the writers a while to come up with a well defined version of Catwoman.)

So, having made Robin’s presence more essential to the overall developm ent of the Bat-mythos, the bachelor-thread for the overall series must balance the elements of darkness and brightness. Additionally, although the heroes are victims of trauma, many of the villains are less traumatized than simply maladjusted, usually by virtue of greed. Obsession rather than trauma as such seems to define the Bat-mythos. Batman himself starts the ball rolling by extending his chosen identity to such tools as the Batarang and the Batmobile; the Joker follows suit with a poison that causes his victims to laugh themselves to death, and so on. So perhaps a trial thread might read something like, “Though the Greeks wanted to find beauty only in bright things and ugliness in dark ones, virtue and vice have equal propensities to be either light or dark, depending on the nature of the obsession.” This thread-concept would even remain in operation during the era I call “Candyland Batman,” when Batman himself is very nearly the only character who projects any grotesque affects, and nearly every new villain is conceived along the lines of the Penguin’s arabesque obsessions, thus leading to crooks who base their crimes on the use of kites and freeze-rays and polka dots.

The idea of obsession, incidentally, glosses my earlier ruminations on the nature of artifice. Most if not all familiar literary tropes incite in their ardent readers a heightened feeling like that of obsession, but one channeled through the matrix of game-playing. The very attraction of a literary trope lies in the fact that it is artificial, like the rules of any game. Truly ardent lovers of mystery-fiction never tire of the consummatory pleasures they receive from the masterful resolution of a whodunit, while an outsider to such pleasures can only wonder, as did Edmund Wilson, “who cares who murdered Roger Ackroyd?” Obviously the love of the game runs deeper in some than in others. A Gary Groth may start out loving the aggressive fantasies of superheroes and barbarians, only to lose his taste for those pleasures, and to spend most of his career lecturing other readers on the childish nature of their fantasies.

When such fantasies are seen through a distancing lens, such as that of the campy irony present in the Batman teleseries, some audiences are pleased to think that they’ve escaped the hidebound rule of the old game, and entered a more challenging, more adult form of play. This would seem to the case with a 2014 essay by Noah Berlatsky, in which the author could not imagine why Bat-fans didn’t want to toss out old; childish Batman in favor with new, ironic Batman. I answered his question with my essay-series THE BATTLE FOR BAT-LEGITIMACY, but for the purpose of this essay, I want to look at how the teleseries attempted to rewrite the rules of the comic book’s scenario.

The essence of the word “irony” is that of saying one thing and meaning something else. William Dozier and his collaborators were certainly not the first pop-culture dabblers in this domain. Al Capp’s LI’L ABNER, though dominantly a broad comedy, is full of instances where characters revisit familiar story-tropes to indirectly make fun of them.The most famous of these appeared when simple-minded Abner would geek out on the gory misdeeds of his comic-strip hero Fearless Fosdick, a blatant send-up of DICK TRACY. There had been various superhero spoofs in comics and in cartoons before ’66 BATMAN. But Dozier and Co had the inspired notion to adapt the overall mythos of an established superhero-serial, playing it straight for kid-viewers but injecting any number of sly asides to please the adult audience.

This was, of course, a game no less restrictive than the rules of the Bat-comic, and nothing shows this more than the pastel-filled visual approach of the ’66 show. At the time of the show’s airing, DC’s two Bat-features had just made an attempt to reject the aesthetics of Candyland Batman, since the books weren’t selling as well as desired. This shift in editorial policy led to a very modest revival of grotesque/Gothic imagery, as seen in the May ’66 appearance of the Death-Man.

 However, though Dozier et al borrowed from a few stories that appeared during the post-Candyland phase, the show-runners were largely married to the aesthetics of Candyland Batman, where villains with weird obsessive traits popped up for no particular reason, almost existing purely to counter Batman’s own crime-fighting obsession. Mister Freeze was one of the few TV-villains to be given a particular reason for his criminal career. Usually, though, if there wasn’t something about a villain’s modus operandi that really begged for explanation, the writers dispensed with even simple melodramatic motivations.

In the universe of ’66 BATMAN—a admixture of both adventure-tropes and ironized versions of them— both the heroes and their villains still had their obsessions, but they barely tied in to any life-events (Batman mentions the cause of his crimefighting obsession once or twice, almost as an afterthought; Robin, like the majority of villains, gets no origin at all.) Thus the rules of the show were far more formalized than those of the comic book. For instance, during the first two seasons, the two-part episodes all have cliffhangers at the end of the first segment. Building on producers’ statements about their audience, presumably the idea was that kids would be worried about the heroes’ survival while adults would wonder what absurd trick the writers would use to save the good guys. Since all episodes in those seasons had to have a cliffhanger, every villain had to nurture the impossible dream of devising a deathtrap good enough to extinguish the Dynamic Duo. In such a ritualized world, neither darkness nor dark obsessions really exist. So my makeshift Bat-bachelor thread, when passed through the devouring gullet of the ’66 Bat-serial, becomes: “Virtue and vice alike take the form of pastel, often psychedelic arabesques, and virtuous arabesques only triumph over those of vice because the rules say that they must.”

That said, Dozier et al knew that they couldn’t quite undercut all the rules of the comics-feature, or they couldn’t be sure of winning over the kids. Thus, Batman and Robin’s fights are never burlesqued as one sees in most superhero spoofs. The gigantic sound-effects provide a distancing effect for adults, but do not efface the effects of two heroes who are just so good with their dukes that they can outfight three or four plug-uglies at once. Similarly, though Robin no longer serves the purpose of “brightening” Batman’s Gothic domain, he still fulfills the same role of the junior hero receiving tutelage from his elder. Though the duo’s goody-good personas are often subverted, the familial affection between the two is played straight.

To conclude, if I was ever to perform a critical analysis of ’66 BATMAN, I would have to look at each episode to see how well it balanced the use of adventure-tropes with irony-tropes, and whether or not the balance attained the higher levels of mythic discourse—just as a sustained analysis of all Batman stories might emphasize the balance between dark grotesques and colorful arabesques.

DEATHBIRD DESCENDS

On the passing of Harlan Ellison this week, I wrote:

_____

I never met Ellison, though I saw him when he spoke at a local convention, maybe in the 1980s. He worked the crowd really well, saying that everyone in our city was "bug***k*, which got great applause, though I'm sure he said the same damn thing anywhere else he spoke. He read his story "All the Lies That Were My Life," which I didn't care for, but his reading was riveting. I saw him a couple more times at San Diego Comicon, usually teamed with Peter David, with whom he had worked out a cute routine of pretend animosity.

DAVID: "I'm just being puckish."

ELLISON: "Well, puck you."

His sixties classic tales made a big impression on me, particularly "Deathbird" and "Repent, Harlequin." I was still writing occasional reviews for COMICS JOURNAL when he and Gary Groth were sued by Michael Fleischer because of remarks Ellison had made about Fleischer in a JOURNAL interview. Personally, I think Fleischer was less offended by what Ellison had said than by the fact that a JOURNAL reviewer had just torpedoed Fleischer's prose book CHASING HAIRY around the same time. I felt like I had a ringside seat as Groth and Ellison became deadly enemies after Fleischer's suit was dismissed. The feud was incredibly convoluted, involving other players like Peter David and Charles Platt, and the magazine GAUNTLET devoted a long, well-researched essay to the mutual bad behavior of both parties, though all that took place before Ellison sued Groth to block the publication of a book touching on their involvement.

I disagreed with a lot of what both Groth and Ellison wrote, though I sympathize with Ellison's love of popular fiction. He was also an unapologetic "comic book guy" at a time when his compeers in fantastic fiction would not dream of being associated with that tawdry medium. 

I'm tempted to sum up his career with the words, "Not always deep, but never dull."

A NOSTALGIA FOR SYNTAX

SYNTAX: --  the way in which linguistic elements (such as words) are put together to form constituents (such as phrases or clauses)-- Merriam Webster online.

After not having read THE HURTING for a couple years since I tried to engage blogger Tim O'Neil on the subject of Stan Lee, I happened across his newest post, TRUE BELIEVERS, part of a longer series of essays that I've not read. The substance of BELIEVERS is O'Neil's sussing out of his particular attachment to Marvel Comics and its characters. It's a refreshing piece in that, even though the author expresses more than a little disenchantment with current comics, he doesn't put forth some Grothian notion that comic books were a juvenile phase he should have grown out of, or that his life was hugely improved once he sold his soul to art-comics, or some such. For the most part, O'Neil attempts not to draw any morals:

Do you know why we care? I go back and forth – I’m not sure why I feel the way I do. There’s no conclusion here. Don’t look for a revelation, unless it’s your own. Certainty is comforting. It’s familiar. I don’t want to speak unless I know exactly what I’m about to say, and I don’t want to express an opinion unless that opinion is completely solid. It’s a lot harder to say, “I don’t know.”

I don’t know why comics hooked me. All I know is that they did. All I can do is try to tell you what I feel and think. Maybe you can provide your own answers.

I still found some grounds for disagreement, though, in the definition of one's attachment to a given mode of entertainment purely in terms of nostalgia, an attempt to re-connect with pleasurable aspects of one's upbringing:

There’s an old saying, credited to a man named Peter Graham, that the Golden Age of sci-fi is twelve. Knock a few years off and the same goes for comics: the comics you read as a kid will always be the best comics. Nothing will ever come close in your eyes to that first rush, from back before you knew enough about the making of the books to become cynical. Even if the comics you grew up with were awful (and they most likely were), they will always be the pure and uncut high for which you will hunger for the rest of your life.

This needs some modifications. First, I think it should be "the GOOD comics you read as a kid will always be the best comics." I can't speak for O'Neil, but my earliest memories of reading comics as a kid were informed by the sure and certain knowledge that some comics were memorable only because they were so bad. My memories are hazy of my earliest encounters with comic strips and kids' comic books, but I have a few recollections of displeasure. The earliest one I can conjure up had to do with my general disappointment that Gold Key's adaptation of the Warner Brothers cartoon characters not only failed to reproduce the hilarious anarchy of the animated shorts, but they also delivered far less entertainment than even middle-level funny-animals like WOODY WOODPECKER and TOM AND JERRY, much less the greatness of the Disney books.

Second, without endorsing Gary Groth's views on maturation, one does form different likes over the years. The child-reader who was grossed out by the DICK TRACY comic strip of the early 1960s became more tolerant of bloodshed by the 1970s, enough to appreciate at least mildly gory titles like Marvel's 1971 WEREWOLF BY NIGHT. So one's nostalgia isn't exactly the fixed point in time O'Neil describes. It's more of a continuum, formed by the fact that childhood becomes adolescence and one's priorities change, even if (arguably) one's basic tastes do not.

Third, I do have some problems with the idea that one only approaches entertainment in a spirit of weakness or disempowerment, though I don't rule those out entirely. O'Neil happily doesn't dwell on this too long:

I needed something. I needed something to hold onto when so much about the world didn’t make sense. I didn’t exclusively gravitate towards particular characters, although I obviously have my favorites just like everyone else. The characters themselves, I have always maintained, are relatively unimportant: what matters is the whole. What matters is that it hangs together into something resembling a cohesive aggregate entity, one story being told over decades by hundreds of people. 

But because his focus is exclusively personal, I think O'Neil misses seeing a pattern applicable to fans of all forms of entertainment: the reader's desire for coherence, to suss out many different views or takes on life and to decide what applies to said reader. One doesn't need the medium of an interconnected universe for this.

The word "syntax" is usually applied only to the way that words are used to form sentences, but it applies no less to the ways in which the ideas behind the words  cohere. This is something every person "needs" whether the world makes sense to them or not. People, whether they write stories or not, build up meaning through syntactical constructions, and an understanding of how this occurs becomes part of the Social Contract. I can't substantially disagree with Gary Groth if I don't understand how his conclusions proceed from his premises. So I think nostalgia for past pleasures, at least with respect to entertainment, stems from gaining a sense of empowerment as we master different levels of syntactical awareness.

In conclusion, O'Neil's essay again takes a shot or two at Stan Lee, but since I've already disagreed with his premises here, there's no need to repeat myself on this score. However, the reason I've continually referred to "modes of entertainment" is because I don't think anything O'Neil writes about comics applies only to comics:

Comics started off a shady business built to entice children into spending their money. They are still a shady business built to entice children into spending their money, but inflation and retail conditions meant their audience grew older without ever growing up. Just like me.

There may be individual artists who will starve in garrets for their individual visions, or will keep their works to themselves without any intent of publishing them. But none of these eccentrics ever created an art-form. Theater, literature, music and the visual arts become regularized activities when individuals in a society realize that they can specialize in singing or play-acting, and from this stems the role of "the professional," who must be paid for his or her services, so that he can continue delivering his art to society instead of stopping to plant corn or whatever. And none of these forms would gain traction if they did not offer the audience a way to see life through as many viewpoints as possible-- all of which adds up to a "syntax of experience."

NULL-MYTHS: TRASHMAN LIVES (1997)

I became re-acquainted with this old Gary Groth quote when I re-read my early essay POMO AND PLURALISM:

academic lintheads and popcult apologists display their usual confusion of values by mistaking something of social interest for something of artistic significance

Not long after, in my ceaseless quest to the Heart of the Collective Myth-Conscious, I happened to reread Fantagraphics' 1997 collection of what I assume to be all of the extant TRASHMAN stories of the late underground cartoonist Spain Rodriguez. I had read the collection years ago, and frankly didn't remember much about it, aside from the mildly enjoyable woodcut-like art-style and a lot of maundering Marxist politics.

But, upon re-reading the collection with an eye to seeing anything of symbolic depth-- wow, talk about something that has no "artistic significance" and is only relevant for "social interest!"

The TRASHMAN stories are little more than "men's adventure fiction" comics given a smattering of Marxist rhetoric about opposing oppression. Trashman, a revolutionary with a big gun and some inconsistent super-powers, fights the good fight against a vague assortment of bad guys who are supposed to represent the American political hierarchy. The first stories came out in 1968 and predicted a total social breakdown in the latter half of the 20th century, which allowed Trashman to motor around to different enclaves of tyranny and kick a lot of ass.

All of which would be fine, except that Trashman's adventures lack even the rudimentary imagination of the lesser kids' comics of the time. Trashman's opponents are largely faceless bureaucrats, whom readers of the 1960s and 1970s would see as representatives of "The Man." But Rodriguez shows no awareness of why these villains perpetrate their evil deeds-- including a little cannibalism-- except insofar as they are villains. Frankly, Mickey Spillane invested even his dime-a-dozen killers with more conviction.

There are brief touches of insight. In one story, two of Trashman's rebel-colleagues continuously insult each other in racial terms, but by story's end it's obvious that both of them are just using race to rag on each other, in typical "guy" fashion. In another tale, even more "socially significant" though no more "artistic," Trashman and another colleague are taken prisoner by a gang of female rebels: "Nasty Elaine and her She-Devils." This was at least not your typical guy-on-guy battle, though I've the impression that men's adventure mags frequently featured heroes getting captured by modern-day Amazons and the like.

It's a shame, because the minimalist design of Trashman bears some comparison with that of Gould's Dick Tracy, and it would have been interesting to see Gould's conservatism inverted by a charismatic "hero of the masses." But there's no flash in this trash, man.

THE RETURN OF THE DIMINISHING RETURNS

I stated elsewhere that I was sure THE HOODED UTILITARIAN would give me more grist fot my critical mill. I didn't expect Noah's leaky ark would so soon venture back to the same dead waters it had explored in the post I discussed here. But yes, J. Lamb, not content with having HU link to his elitist and over-politicized reading of the superhero genre, has written his first essay for HU, a 5-12-15 essay with the usual portentous title, "Figures of Empire: On the Impossibility of Superhero Diversity."

I have not yet waded into this Sea of Dead Thought, but I can predict a lot of things I bet I'll find in it.
The mention of "empire" in the title immediately suggests that the author has decided that superheroes represent the extension of the policies of colonial imperialism into post-colonial times, and that this in and of itself taints the superhero beyond all redemption. This means, as discussed in BLACK LIKE ME (HE SAYS), that any person of color who wishes to see himself reflected in a genre made for and by white men is at best self-deluding, at worst similarly beyond redemption.

I will also predict that once again, just as Lamb's earlier arguments did not provide any reason as to why superhero narratives *in particular* required "Whiteness" to function, this one will be the same. There will be no discussion as to why Luke Cage, Superhero, is more inherently demeaning to black people than Shaft, Private Detective or Will Smith's version of James West. Lamb, like his editor, knows that the main readers of HU are comics-fans, not fans of detective stories, westerns, or espionage, so there's no rhetorical advantage in accounting for the other genres. When I tried to point out that lacuna this was a major hole in Lamb's argument, Lamb simply did not answer, while NB simply did what he always did: changing the subject by saying some silly-ass thing about how the other genres were racist too.

A little history lesson:

Back when THE COMICS JOURNAL was a magazine, there was a similar, set-your-clock-by-it condemnation of the superhero genre.  Most of the JOURNAL's anti-superhero arguments were just as superficial as those that have appeared at HOODED UTILITARIAN, and as a onetime contributor I was appalled that Gary Groth, given his claims of intellectual superiority, would accept-- and sometimes write-- such tripe. I couldn't help but assume an ulterior motive. Gary Groth was publishing his own direct-market comic books. The superheroes dominated that market, and so formed Groth's most strenuous competition. Therefore, superheroes were bad.

Yet, given that Fantagraphics did publish several meritorious comic books (EIGHTBALL notwithstanding), I have to say that Groth's elitist tub-thumping may have served a good purpose, even if the essays themselves were full of crap. They were "bad theory," but they made for "good practice," because they galvanized a handful of readers to buy into Fantagraphics' self-adulatory view of its critics as tastemakers. Without Fantagraphics' particular brand of elitist hype, it's quite possible that the company would not have held on to its miniscule niche during the formative years of the direct market.

What "praxis," however, is served by Lamb' simple-minded denunciation of superhero diversity?  In the comments-section to which I linked in BLACK LIKE HIM, Lamb stated that, "Black hero-myths do not inform the superhero concept at all, and that people of color are more than welcome to develop modern narratives from those hero-myths. I'm confident, though, that the characters developed from that process would not be recognizable as superheroes."

Compared to Groth's savage attacks on a genre that he thought impeded the realization of "comics as art"-- an ideal to which he was dedicating his own time and money-- Lamb's ideological position comes off as insupportable pie-in-the-sky (that is, if the pie was filled with ordure). Does Lamb have an example of an ideologically pure Black Hero, or does he have the ambition that he might be the first to create Such a Hero? I think a third possibility the most likely: that Lamb is proposing an unrealized and unrealistic goal simply for the purpose of doing a superiority dance. "Mainstream superhero comics made me feel uncomfortable and marginalized because they always make Luke Cage look like a big dummy, so I'm gonna say that all superheroes are linked to post-imperialist politics, and something no self-respecting person of color should trifle with."

Or at least, I'm predicting that this will be the sum and substance of Lamb's argument. I suppose I'll try to force myself to delve into the discussion soon. But I'll have to hold my nose before I do.

On a side-note, by chance I came across a fascinating condemnation of one of the Hooded Utilitarian essays, written last January. I may force myself to read the original essay under attack as well, though everything that blogger Franklin Einspruch says about the HU writer in question echoes most of the complaints I've been making here about HU's Merry Marxist Marching Society:

someone who doesn't bother to question whether his particularly American and politicized interpretation of the cartoons is correct.

 Unfortunately, the modern tendency in politics is to establish a narrative, presume its truth, and proclaim accordingly. This was perhaps articulated best by Karl Rove when he famously disdained the reality-based community, but liberalism depends on this kind of narrated indifference to evidence as well.

You have revealed grandiose regard for your own interpretive powers, and they have betrayed you. You have demonstrated neither research nor reflection above that would indicate that you ever considered the possibility that something you wrote isn't true. Your political expression is so disengaged from anyone else's actual claims as to be masturbatory. 

STATUS SEEKERS, STATUS REJECTERS

Most online comics-critics prove themselves stunningly ignorant of the medium they critique, so there's some pleasure to be had from coming across a critical essay where the author knows his stuff, even if in the end I disagree with him.

On the blog THE HURTING, Tim O'Neil offers "Excelsior," a scathing look at the heritage of Stan Lee's Marvel.  While I don't validate O'Neil's arguments, his straightforward summation of Marvel's publishing history from the Golden Age onward provides a refreshing contrast to the hyper-ideological Marxmallow writings I've so often encountered on this subject, as noted here.

Still, even at the essay's outset there are some ideologically-informed problems with "Excelsior." O'Neil does not focus upon the many-splendored and usually opposed narratives of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, but he leads off his essay by reprinting a highly problematic statement from Jack Kirby, in which Kirby painted himself as "saving" Atlas Comics at a time when Stan Lee was helpless to do anything about it. Significantly, O'Neil links this Kirby-quote to a Wikipedia article, which also quotes Gary Groth saying that some of Kirby's hyperbolic statements should be "taken with a grain of salt." Given Groth's history in the matter, wherein he generally promoted Kirby's narrative over Lee's, he's certainly no adoring fan of Stan-- so if even Gary Groth disputes Kirby's hyperbole, this might not have been the most balanced way to begin the essay.  And no, stating that both men had "motivations" for proffering/denying the story isn't good enough.

O'Neil's theme statement appears quickly enough, though:

This was the myth you bought into when you became immersed in the books. They were hip, they were happening, they were cooler than Brand X. Marvel was what cool college kids read - literally, your older brothers' comic books, not like those staid Superman magazines you read as a child. Marvel Comics was on the verge of world domination, and Stan was the man with the plan.
It was an attractive myth because everyone but young children knew it was just that - a myth. Marvel was cool and the books were better than National - and all their later imitators - and all that was true, at least for a while. But they remained stuck playing the role of perpetual underdogs even after the reality had shifted.

Here's a place where exact quotes would have been appropriate. On one hand, O'Neil states that "Marvel Comics was on the verge of world domination," which is certainly how I remember the Marvel of those days, with Lee's constant affirmations that the 1960s began "the Marvel Age of Comics." I also remember Lee playing the "underdog card" a time or two, particularly when he tried to argue that comic books were just as good as any other medium. I recall that at one point he even claimed that many comics of his time were better-written than contemporary television shows. Whether one agrees with this statement or not, or deems Lee's statement to be more hype than honest estimation, it certainly shows that Stan did portray comics in general, and his company in particular, as underdogs who always had to prove their worth, as against those media that had always earned their cultural cachet.

However, a point I think O'Neil misses in the above quote is that there are two distinctly different ways for fans to regard underdogs.

Some fans are "wide status seekers." They follow a given creator-- writer, artist, actor-- when he starts out to find his creative footing. These fans cheer the creator on as he gains widespread acclaim, and feel validated when he gains it.

Other fans are "wide status rejecters." They too begin following a creator from the beginning, but they want that creator to retain an edge that separates him from run-of-the-mill entertainment. This isn't to say that these fans don't want their favored creators to prosper, but they want him to prosper in this "edgy" manner, gaining a particular status by making his own rules rather than conforming to those who confer "widespread acclaim."

Robert Crumb would probably serve as the exemplar of the latter creator. It's hard to imagine a Crumb fan who would have faulted Crumb when he shunned working for Marvel or DC, or for having refused to submit to Marvel's "underground magazine" COMIX BOOK. To have "sold out to the man" would have removed Crumb's edginess in the eyes of "wide status rejecters."

Stan Lee, by contrast, has probably been mendacious about many things. But I don't think he ever pretended that he didn't want to obtain the same cultural cachet enjoyed by books, films and television. It's also my impression that most Marvel-boosters followed the pattern of the "wide status seekers," and that they wanted others to validate Marvel Comics as something that deserved special attention. Though in a larger sense they were right-- Marvel does occupy a unique place in the history of American comics-- they were certainly naive in thinking that outsiders could see past the juvenile elements of 1960s Marvel Comics.

I speak as one who harbored an analogous naivete. In my youth I was not an exclusive Marvel booster; I wanted to see the medium of comics, or at least what I knew of it, boosted in the public eye. I knew that there was just as much junk-entertainment on TV as there was in the comics, and I was aggrieved that comic books remained the whipping-boys of other media simply because the medium had so often marketed its efforts toward juveniles. It took another fifty years for the medium of comics to gain a cachet of sorts, though one that was filtered through the media of films and television shows, while the comics themselves remained "underdogs" in the sense of being a form of entertainment pursued only by a specialized niche.  So, to the extent that I ever believed that comic books might be enjoyed by the average American reader, I was certainly a "wide status seeker." I did not cherish the idea of either the medium or any particular company remaining a little-known underdog just for the sake of being edgy. Ironically, it might be argued that even with the movie-TV cachet, the comics medium itself remains an underdog, albeit not a particularly "edgy" one.

So I reject O'Neil's thesis that there's a significant gulf between "the role of the perpetual underdogs" and the supposed reality behind it all. Long before Marvel Comics even existed, there was nothing new for creators to draw attention to their "underdog status" as a means to promote themselves. Arguably, this was the primary rationale of the highbrow literature of the 20th century: "Look at me: I'm difficult but rewarding, and only a few people are smart enough to dig my scene."

I also disagree with other aspects of the essay, but those will have to wait for separate consideration.

ELLISON AND ELITISM PT. 2

"As John Gardner said in his book ON MORAL FICTION, there is room in the world for trivial art, but it is only because high art exists and is recognized and is worshiped and honored that the world is safe for triviality."-- Harlan Ellison,"The Harlan Ellison Interview," TCJ #53 (1980).

As I've not read the Gardner book in many years, I can't say if Ellison has fairly summarized that author. I do seem to remember thinking that Gardner didn't offer much logical proof for his artistic judgments.

Judgment is a key factor here. Ellison is certainly not the person one would go to-- today or in 1980-- for a reflective analysis as to what makes one work good and another bad. What's interesting about this 1980 quote is that so little has changed after 30 years. To this day, would-be critics in any medium rail against trivial works as if they were direct threats to the survival of the "good stuff."  Few critics stop to ask whether or not the same audience that wants to lose itself in what Ellison chooses to call "shit" are likely to ever be attracted to what any elitist, be it Ellison or someone else, considers to be "high art."

One irony of Ellison's excoriation is that, in contrast to his interviewer Gary Groth, the author seems to cherish his memories of "trivial art." On one hand he sneers at mainstream comics for putting bad work out there just to fill pages and meet deadlines. Yet he speaks of his passion for the character of The Shadow, which was certainly framed by the same pulp-adventure aesthetic one sees in comic books. I doubt that I've read as many of the Shadow's adventures as Ellison, but what I have read strikes me as not only trivial art, but bad trivial art. The Shadow is IMO a classic character, but most of the actual pulp adventures strike me as dull mysteries that are just barely redeemed by the hero's supernal presence.

Later, following Howard Chaykin's less than reverential treatment of the Shadow for a 1986 DC Comics limited series, Ellison was irate with the artist for profaning the character. Suddenly, trivial art was important, because it was something Ellison liked. In a radio show for HOUR 25, Ellison commented, "At what point do we say, 'You're mucking with our myths?'"

It may be that for Ellison, calling the Shadow a myth is no more than empty rhetoric. Certainly it would seem to contradict his statement above. If trivial art is only redeemed by the existence of high art, then how can any example of trivial art stand on its own enough to be a "myth?"

In my Jungian-Campbellian view, of course, the Shadow is a myth not simply because I like it; it's a myth because it incorporates dimensions of Campbell's four functions: the psychological, the sociological, the cosmological and the metaphysical.  The depth with which a pulp-character comments on these aspects of life may be much more limited than that of whatever Harlan Ellison deems high art-- which, going on the TCJ interview, would seem to include Michael Moorcock-- an inclusion that might have raised the eyebrows of John Gardner.  But the salient fact is that even "trivial art:" can sometimes incorporate serious content, just as some "high art" is capable of moments of extreme triviality. This would include petty roman à clef  attacks on one's real-life enemies, for example-- which just might appear in some of the works of-- Harlan Ellison.

ELLISON AND ELITISM PT. 1

A recent forum-post reminded me of the momentous 1980 Harlan Ellison interview in COMICS JOURNAL #53. I hadn't read it for a while, and my memory was that the first time Ellison slagged the work of artist Don Heck, he was doing so in the mistaken impression that Heck had done the art to the 1970s comic NOVA.

Instead, as I reread the interview, it turned out that the NOVA reference came second. In the course of the interview Ellison was ranging all over the place, holding forth on his personal gospel of artistic excellence vs. journeyman mediocrity. On page 76, Ellison has just finished exulting in his own escape from the hell of network TV: "...they get you to write this shit and they corrupt you and writers are turned into mere hacks. I won't do it any more but there are plenty who will..."

Slightly later he makes the caveat that in some cases the willing hacks don't even have talent to start with, which brings him to an excoriation of the total worthlessness of all mainstream comics then current. Ellison asks interviewer Gary Groth to name the "worst artist in the field," and Groth names Don Heck.  When Groth also mentions that a particular publisher once praised Heck, Groth assumes that the praise was for Heck's ability to turn the work in on time. For Ellison this is tantamount to compromising the integrity of the work for a paycheck. Somehow it never occurs to Ellison that this contradicts his earlier point: if Heck had no talent to begin with, then, one may reason, how can he compromise the work?  But then Ellison is off again, touting Neal Adams as a conscientious professional who respects the work over the demands of the industry. After opining that "five thousand Don Hecks are not worth one Neal Adams," THEN he remembers how much he disliked the art of NOVA. He wonders if Heck was the artist on that work; Groth agrees that it was terrible art (as do I, incidentally) but neither remembers that Sal Buscema committed the crime against great art.

Four JOURNAL issues later, the magazine's lettercol carried several responses to Ellison's tirade, one of which came from Steve Gerber. Gerber praised some of Heck's work, not coincidentally work on which Heck and Gerber had collaborated. Then Gerber asserted parenthetically that Heck had suffered some personal tragedy in his life. In his response Ellison did not retract his opinion on Heck's work, but he did admit that in some situations "one should watch one's mouth."

Strangely, I recall reading an interview with Heck-- who passed away in 1995-- in which he denied that he had experienced any personal tragedy that had interfered with the quality of his work. In fact, I recall that Heck claimed in said interview that the story had taken on "urban legend" status in his field, where dozens of fellow workers believed it but no one knew precisely what had supposedly happened to the artist. But since I cannot at present remember where I read this, readers are advised to take my recollections with a grain of salt.

Next up: examining the roots of an elitism from over thirty years ago.

A TOPIC IS BEING BEAT-ED

The following is a reprint of my post on the BEAT regarding those ole debbils elitism and exceptionalism.  I may further develop these thoughts on the status of comics criticism later on.

____________________________

Larry Vossler said:

"As a recent “writer” for comics, the biggest problem is not the message (that is a problem no doubt) but who is reading the message and how it can be seen. While TCJ, CB, Factual, and HU have and continue to put out some great criticism, they’re mostly being viewed by the people who know about it. Instead of reaching to a bigger crowd in the States, the big two crowd, the message is mostly being spoken to the choir. And that choir is somewhat small compared to the mainstream comic crowd. And it’s that crowd that criticism should be aiming to get their attention. So it can A. expand their horizon B. Introduce new great works from other countries and from here C. To make them think differently when reading comic and apply that to their superhero comics and maybe in the process enhance the superhero genre."

I would agree but IMO the only way one can do so is with a synoptic approach; one that sincerely sees positive things in the superhero genre that are not "different in kind" from the positive things in the indie corpus of works.  In other words, it would have to be an attitude 180 degrees from the one expressed by Gary Groth when he recently explained that Fantagraphics did not publish its X-MEN COMPANION book because the publishers had a deep abiding love for the X-Men.  This bottom-line insincerity-- "we'll bring 'em in with appeals to the mainstream in order to introduce them to the good stuff"-- has had at best a checkered record, and not only with Fantagraphics.

How might a synoptic approach be synthesized?  Well, first it would help to know something about a few of academic criticism's efforts in that respect.  Of course I can quote Frye and Fiedler all the livelong day and it won't mean anything: critics have to make their own discoveries to form their own syntheses.  But the WILL to make such connections has to be there.

Noah said in response to Larry:

"Larry, I don’t really see HU’s mission as trying to get people to stop reading mainstream comics, or to tell them those comics are bad. We just had a long appreciation of Dan Slott’s run on She-Hulk, actually."

I can see how this would seem an adequate answer to the problem Larry raises but it really is not sufficient, any more than when TCJ's editors used to answer accusations of anti-mainstream sentiments by citing lots of positive mainstream reviews.  As long as the dominant attitude is one of elitism and exceptionalism-- that a given reviewer pays attention only to SHE-HULK or WONDER WOMAN when they reach some exceptional heights-- then that reviewer and his cronies will continue to project the aura of the aforementioned "self-jerk circle."

My argument should not interpreted as some sort of anti-exceptionalism: an apologia for bad work.  There is however a middle ground for which critics like Fiedler might be instructive-- and I'll leave it at that, as the vision of Tumblr afficianados trying to pore over LOVE AND DEATH IN THE AMERICAN NOVEL seems improbable even to me.  That sentiment about covers my pessimism about the possibility of the current indie creators-- or the mainstream ones, for that matter-- mustering enough chutzpah to write organized criticism.

ADDENDUM:

Adding in a second observation I made as the discussion, as always, tailed off into nothing much:

Osvaldo said:
“All this mainstream vs. “indie elitism ” talk seems so strange to me, if only because, until my recent interest in online criticism most of my critical reading on the topic of comics was in a variety of academic journals, surveys and anthologies, which seem to be just as likely to talk about The Falcon as Fun Home as Superman as Maus as Scrooge McDuck – though that is anecdotal experience and not based on any kind of rigorous examination of what’s been printed and the attitudes expressed.”


Correct, Osvaldo. It’s not that there are no elitists in academia, but the line between the popular and the literary/would-be-literary is not as firm as it used to be. It’s amazing to me that so many comics-critics have chosen to act as if they lived back in the 1930s, and ignore all the meritorious work that’s been done analyzing pop culture, from Robert Warshow to Gaylyn Studlar.

THE ONLY DEFINITION OF ART YOU'LL EVER NEED, PT. 2

In this essay I provided a definition of "play" from Johann Huizinga:

Summing up the formal characteristic of play, we might call it a free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious’ but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings that tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress the difference from the common world by disguise or other means.

Elsewhere in the essay I didn't see the need to provide a definition of "work."  However, it now occurs to me that "work" does require some definition when one is speaking of how its dynamic appears in the criticism of art-- with special attention here to literature as such.

In a series of 2008 essays beginning with MERIT RAISED, I sought to show the differences between three Frye-derived critical methodologies, applying all three-- "ethical criticism," "aesthetic criticism," and "archetypal criticism"-- in a compare-and-contrast of two thematically related works.  Of these three methodologies, I've stated elsewhere that "ethical criticism" and "aesthetic criticism" are the dominant approaches in academia.  Certainly one can see both approaches implied in Gary Groth's statement of standards in his January 2013 essay, examined at length here:

What constitutes “literary” values won’t be disposed of in this paragraph, but maybe we can agree that form and content have to be successfully married to create something of human relevance, depth, and substance, or otherwise offer the play of pure aesthetic pleasure.

The phrase "play of pure aesthetic pleasure" can hardly be separated from the general concept of aesthetic criticism, however the speaker might define said "play."  As for Groth's values of "human relevance, depth, and substance," I think, based on his many jeremiads against authors he has regarded as less than moral, I believe that the vague terms "relevance" and "substance" are simply stand-ins for his take on ethical criticism. (And indeed, most of the evaluations he makes of EC comics in the January essay deal with ethical rather than aesthetic concerns.)  Historically Groth, like the majority of comics-critics, has dominantly pursued ethical criticism, while only a smattering of these critics, such as R.C. Harvey, tend to examine aesthetic matters. 

Despite Gary Groth's inappropriate use of the word "play," I believe that both of these disciplines are focused not on "play" but on "work." As evidence of the real attitude underlying both disciplines, here, I cite Leslie Fiedler, who in his 1982 work WHAT WAS LITERATURE took a contrarian attitude toward the priorities of academic literary criticism.  Here he describes the dominant attitude of the hidebound academic to "junk literature:"

"...such 'trash' is available to almost anyone, requiring neither subtlety of perception, 'education,' or anything resembling good old true-blue Protestant Hard Work."

Slightly later in the same chapter, Fiedler proposes to "drastically downgrade both ethics and aesthetics" in favor of what he terms "ecstatics"-- a concept that deserves a future essay here.  Putting that concept aside for now, it's enough to see that Fiedler conflates both ethical and aesthetic criticism with what Max Weber defined as the dominant value of American culture:"hard work," the basis of the Protestant Ethic.

Is this conflation accurate?

There can be little question that ethical criticism is concerned with having a utilitarian effect on culture and/or society. In Part 1 of this essay-series I asserted:

"Serious work," in my view, includes the idea of using art to instruct, to inform, to render judgments upon "the selfish, the foolish, and the cruel," to make readers aware of the old homily "actions have consequences"

Now, in that same essay I mentioned the "art for art's sake" movement as one that opposed any ethical orientation in literature, citing Ortega y Gasset as a representative of that opposition:

...preoccupation with the human content of the work is in principle incompatible with aesthetic enjoyment proper.

I further noted that the proponents of a purely aesthetic justicification of high art used an approach similar to my concept of "thematic escapism:"

It's ironic that the "art for art's sake" ethos, in claiming that that art's technical excellence exempts it from moral considerations, employs a basic logic not far from my exculpation of popular literature from the expectation that it must be moral.

That said, "basic logic" does not imply identity, for the proponents of aesthetic criticism are in their own way advocating a different form of "hard work," the work that a skillful author produces when he goes beyond the formulas of  what Clement Greenberg chose to call "kitsch," and succeeds in producing "ambitious art and literature."  Greenberg cites the "art for art's sake" movement:

Retiring from public altogether, the avant-garde poet or artist sought to maintain the high level of his art by both narrowing and raising it to the expression of an absolute in which all relativities and contradictions would be either resolved or beside the point. "Art for art's sake" and "pure poetry" appear, and subject matter or content becomes something to be avoided like a plague.

In the end, though Greenberg evinces the usual Marxist fustiness toward the  "ruling class," he still validates the avant-garde artist in terms of the "high order" of the work produced:

That avant-garde culture is the imitation of imitating -- the fact itself -- calls for neither approval nor disapproval. It is true that this culture contains within itself some of the very Alexandrianism it seeks to overcome. The lines quoted from Yeats referred to Byzantium, which is very close to Alexandria; and in a sense this imitation of imitating is a superior sort of Alexandrianism. But there is one most important difference: the avant-garde moves, while Alexandrianism stands still. And this, precisely, is what justifies the avant-garde's methods and makes them necessary. The necessity lies in the fact that by no other means is it possible today to create art and literature of a high order. To quarrel with necessity by throwing about terms like "formalism," "purism," "ivory tower" and so forth is either dull or dishonest.

This stress upon constant reinvention, rather than the rehashing of familiar motifs seen in  kitsch, implies "hard work" just as much as ethical criticism does.  The only difference is that whereas the ethical critic advocates the utilitarian "work" that art and literature can perform upon culture and society, the aesthetic critic advocates what might best be called "work for work's sake."

But neither species of work is covalent with "play," and as Fiedler observes, both are inadequate to describe the nature of art. 

More in a forthcoming final section.

E.C.? P.C.!-- PART 4

If I got nothing else out of Gary Groth's EC essay over at the Journal site, at least I lived to read Groth pen these words:

I should mention here the obvious, which is that there is no consensus as to what exactly constitutes literary values.

 

In few if any of Groth's essays and reviews does he ever admit this lack of consensus.  Time and time again, regarding of what verdict Groth renders, he stresses the "argument from taste:" that persons of good taste are as a united front against the maundering hordes of the subliterate.  Certainly there's no doubt in his mind in the quote I cited here.  Art is art and the Punisher is junk and never the twain shall meet. 

The second most interesting thing about the Groth essay is that though it was written, at least in part, as a response to Christ Mautner's negative review, Groth does not address Mautner's assertion that some if not all of the EC works referenced were "melodramas."  Since I noted here that this is an important part of Mautner's review, this omission begs speculation.

Groth does mention the concept of melodrama in passing:

There was certainly drama of a sort in strips like Krazy Kat and Little Nemo, but it was the graphic element of the strips that propelled them into the first rank. There was melodrama in such strips as Rex Morgan, Mary Perkins, and Mark Trail (and probably others I don’t care to think about), but these were hokey, dull, tepid soap operas. There were adventure strips — Flash Gordon, Captain Easy, Prince Valiant, Terry and the Pirates — but these, too, were not first and foremost drama (with the possible exception of Valiant) so much as melodrama within adventure, sci-fi, or fantasy trappings where the latter were just as important as the former.

But EC attempted to do straight drama in comics form, undiluted by comedy or slapstick or adventure trappings. True, most of EC’s dramatic stories were bound within genres — crime and suspense and science fiction — but they played it as straight as they could within those — and their readership’s — limitations. The preachies were the most naturalistic, many unrelentingly grim and tough-minded, such as “…So Shall Ye Reap” and “In Gratitude.”
 

I won't get excessively picky about Groth's use of the term "melodrama" as an ingredient rather than a form, though I'll note that I would consider most soap-opera serials to be the purest incarnation of melodrama in the annals of genre-literature. I agree with Mautner that many of the EC stories reprinted are melodramas in terms of form-- while disagreeing with him that melodrama is something implicitly bad.  But I don't know whether or not Groth agrees that some of the EC stories are melodramas.  He does admit that they have flaws:

To bring us back to the original question of where EC resides in the history of comics: As I said, EC’s flaws are pretty obvious: Even when the artists were striving for greater seriousness than the ironic gore of the horror stories or the outrageous early sci-fi plots or even the clever but predictable crime and suspense stories, the writing was often overwrought, prolix, and ham-fisted, and the artists were straightjacketed by EC’s rigid visual grid (which Kurtzman and Craig avoided by writing their own stories, and Krigstein rebelled against time and time again).
 

 But flaws have nothing to do with the essence of melodrama; one can find flaws in any number of serious canonical authors.  To repeat what I wrote before:

Wikipedia defines melodrama as "a dramatic work that exaggerates plot and characters in order to appeal to the emotions." In my book that means that a melodrama is all about jazzing up the audience with hyper-emotional effects, not about making an appeal via the relative subtlety of so-called "serious drama."
 

I return to Groth's attempt to give EC Comics precedence as an innovator in terms of bringing the ethos (my word) of drama to the comic-book medium:

But EC attempted to do straight drama in comics form, undiluted by comedy or slapstick or adventure trappings.
 

The problem with this statement is that before one can sing hosannas to EC for its innovation, one must define on some terms what "drama" is in its "straight" form.  Preferably, too, since Groth so often dismisses earlier attempts at drama (or melodrama) because they have been "leavened" by other elements, a definition of "melodrama" would also be preferable in a paragraph like this (which precedes the long quote above):

Next, portraying drama in comics form had never been one of the form’s fortes. In fact, it had almost never been done successfully. The best newspaper strips over the first half of the century — Moon Mullins, Happy Hooligan, the Katzenjammer Kids, Mutt and Jeff, Barney Google, Popeye, the Gumps, Skippy, Mickey Mouse, et al. — always couched their drama in comedic terms (usually a mélange of slapstick, vaudeville, and gags) that also, miraculously, reflected a dimension of (usually) lower or middle-class life as most urban Americans experienced it. Slapstick + kitchen-sink drama. There were only three significant exceptions that I can think of — Little Orphan Annie, Dick Tracy, and Gasoline Alley, two of which were couched in adventure terms, and all of which had humorous elements to leaven the drama or make it palatable to what the newspaper editors or artists thought was their audience.
 

If I were to attempt a sweeping defintion of both terms, I would probably pursue something in the vein of the "subtlety/exaggeration" dichotomy.  Nevertheless, I would not consider GASOLINE ALLEY less of a melodrama because it has humor in it, any more than I would consider SHOCK SUSPENSTORIES to be "straight" drama even if all of the stories were devoid of humor (which they are not).

It's certainly Mr. Groth's prerogative to formulate a definition with which I disagree, be it based on a "purity test" or whatever.  What I find onerous is that Groth does not define his terms at all, being content to take refuge in his overarching view of historical development.  To be sure, his essay is a decent comics-history lesson, even if it's informed by his desire to submit a reason why EC Comics are important to every comics-fan's library.  But if he's going to speak of strips that have "couched their drama in comedic terms," it seems logical for him to define what there is about drama that is not comedic, or what a "pure melodrama" would look like as opposed to his impure examples of MARY PERKINS or FLASH GORDON.

Only once does Groth offer, albeit briefly, a literary POV from a resepected critic that might allow for some leeway in artistic evaluation-- a leeway Groth only rarely admits in other essays:

As an aside, it’s worth pointing out that looking for literary values in comic books from their inception in the ’30s through at least the ’70s and ’80s is a pretty fruitless task. This leads us straight into the territory of Manny Farber’s elephant art vs. termite art, but, put succinctly, there are a lot of fascinatingly recondite or rarefied or compartmentalized aesthetic virtues to be found in commercial comic books, none of which should be dismissed out of hand, but in terms of fully realized literary works — or oeuvres — very few.  

I should mention here the obvious, which is that there is no consensus as to what exactly constitutes literary values. My dear friend, Don Phelps, who is on the side of termite art, has argued persuasively that strips like Little Orphan Annie, Dick Tracy, and Popeye are examples of literary visual art.
 

But as he says, this is just an aside, after which Groth proceeds to take issue with Mautner's review and to cite the handful of EC works that for him "represent genuine artistic or literary achievement." 

Gary Groth admits that he doesn't intend to define art in this essay, which is entirely appropriate given his concerns:

What constitutes “literary” values won’t be disposed of in this paragraph, but maybe we can agree that form and content have to be successfully married to create something of human relevance, depth, and substance, or otherwise offer the play of pure aesthetic pleasure.

This is certainly an adept statement of Groth's own personal taste, but as a formal statement of principles, it's useless.  The statement does seem to be a very "drama-centric" definition in its first part, though the second part offers an "out" for works of canonical art (or would-be canonical art) that don't address issues of "relevance" or "substance" in what I've called a discursive mode.

Having found Groth's formulation flawed, the question becomes: can I do better?

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