SELLING INVENTORIES

One peculiar phrase from this Tom Spurgeon essay caught my attention, due to its puzzling content:

The model that dominates comics discourse is self-inventory.

Though in the same paragraph Spurgeon passes remarks on the oddness of the comics medium, he never defines qualities he found in other media had that struck him as more normative. Maybe he made some mention of "l'difference" in other essays, but I find it interesting that he didn't think he had to prove his case. To the extent that many of his essays were directed at the sort of comics-readers who clustered about THE COMICS JOURNAL-- which admittedly used to include me-- it's a shame that he didn't think he even had to prove his case.

For me the peculiarity of the phrase is that it doesn't seem to take into account how much "self inventory" factors into all of human culture. I'm reminded of this quotation from Friedrich Nietzche on the matter of memory:

The so called unconscious inferences can be traced back to the all-preserving memory, which presents us with parallel experiences and hence already knows the consequences of an action. It is not anticipation of the effects; rather, it is the feeling: identical causes, identical effects . . .

As far as I can see, what Spurgeon calls "self inventory" is indistinguishable from Nietzche's concept of "the all preserving memory," with its idea that "identical causes" must align with "identical effects." It occurs to me that Spurgeon may've had some idea that comics fans were given to self-inventory because of the fandom's emphasis on checklists and completing issue-runs, though he does not make this express correlation in the essay. But how is that type of inventory different from any of the many "self inventories" that literary authors undergo to produce the fiction that's important to them. Hemingway was obsessed with the nature of masculine action, so much of what he wrote has him making inventories of how actions of courage or forbearance impacted the people in his stories. A poet like W.B. Yeats made inventories of the myths of many cultures, trying to tie them into one another in a grand pattern, while Faulkner was concerned with defining the American South. In all of these examples the authors drew upon their memories of whatever was important to them-- more or less in line with what Nietzsche calls "identical causes"-- and from that their creative priorities explored "identical effects," in which each artist saw his own face reflected in his fictional mirrors.

In a less artistic vein, "self inventory" seems to me the main way in which we take stock of our own natures. If an individual deems himself a good person, doesn't he take inventory of all the good things he's done? Or if that individual is down on himself, doesn't he do the opposite, inventorying all of his failures or embarassments? 

I frankly can't see any way that any person, whether interested in comics, Russian literature, or jai alai, doesn't resort to making inventories from one's memory in order to validate (or invalidate) himself. Maybe there are individuals who "live in the now," not resorting to delving into memory on a regular basis. But they would be rare individuals in the history of humankind. Perhaps this is why Nietzsche also wrote on the subject of memory:

it is possible to live almost without remembering and live happy, as evidenced by the animal, but it is still impossible to live without forgetting. Or more simply, there is a degree of sleeplessness, rumination, the historic sensibility that is harmful and ultimately fatal to living things, be it a man, a people or a civilization “

THE LAST TOM SPURGEON DEBATE

By the title, I mean that, since the passing of the former COMICS JOURNAL editor on November 13-- a JOURNAL obituary appears here-- this post will almost certainly be the last time that I debate anything he said in life.

One-sided debates with Spurgeon on this blog were infrequent but not unprecedented. I had debated him off and on on CBR and THE BEAT, usually in the context of my finding fault with what I deemed elitist pronouncements. I summed this background up in a CLASSIC HORROR FILM BOARD post:

I never met him in the flesh, though I argued with him often on a messboard in the early 2000s. The messboard was later deleted, so all of our arguments were consigned to the ether.
I would say that this essay captures his frequent if not constant ambivalence toward the comics medium, which I think I suggested was more of an ambivalence toward pop culture in general.
Still, I would certainly say he endeavored, on THE COMICS REPORTER, to be as inclusive as a news-blog could be, covering both the perceived "highs" and the "lows" of the medium to some extent. This made the blog a good follow-up to what the magazine COMICS JOURNAL (which Spurgeon edited for a time) used to be in the seventies and eighties, IMO. Believe it or not, coming from me, that's high praise.

So, unlike his many well-wishers, I had no personal connection with him. I think I've mentioned him in various essays here from time to time, but only once did I devote a short series of responses to one of our arguments. I feel reasonably sure he never read the series (and in his place, probably I would not have bothered either). The last contact I had with the man, if one can even call it that, was that I sent COMICS REPORTER a "news item" about my starting a FANTASTIC FOUR blog. I will say that Spurgeon, despite our having had acrimonious words in the past, did carry the item and that the blog did get a bump in publicity before I decided it wasn't going anywhere and so deleted the whole thing.

Obviously I'm not going to pass any judgments on his place in the history of American comics criticism. I will say that he never struck me as being as theoretically doctrinaire as either Gary "Revenge of Theodor Adorno" Groth or Noah "Ask Me About My Marginalized Status" Berlatsky. However, if he didn't suffer from theoretical rigidity, some of his essays were a little too free-form for my taste.

The REPORTER post to which I linked earlier followed Spurgeon's undergoing a serious medical procedure and a lengthy stay in the hospital. Parts of this essay are fascinating-- and then, there's this.

Every person passionately interested in an art form thinks that passion fascinating. In other art forms, however, there's an ease and commercial context to that initial relationship that makes coming to terms with it an answer to a throwaway question on a panel, or the first response in a 10-part interview, the part most likely to be cut and something almost always laughed over. Comics is odd, a medium of heartbreak and musty smells and approximations, and it doesn't have an easy commercial element except for a lucky elite. A very small number of people take to them in that wholehearted way that seems more common to other media. Art comics has a tradition where not long ago its champions fell in love with the form when they had so little access to its history and lived in such artistically fallow times they had no choice but to believe in comics that hadn't been made yet. Like the physical items in many collections, we carry all of it with us, the comics we loved as a kid and all the barely-formed reasons why, the comics that opened our eyes, the comics that we attach to a time and place, the comics that devastated us as adult readers for their skill and insight, the comics that we helped other people enjoy. The model that dominates comics discourse is self-inventory.

This was certainly not the first time Spurgeon showed diffidence about his love affair with comics. I never doubted that he was as committed to the medium as I am, but I find myself baffled by many of the phrases he uses to put comics in some special category even as he expresses that intense connection. What does it mean to say that the afficanadoes of other art forms have "an ease and commercial context to that initial relationship?" Did the "ease" have something to do with the fact that other art-forms, like painting and novel-writing, are validated by majority culture? Or did the ease have something to do with the "commercial context," the idea that a fan-- assuming the fan does not turn pro-- can vicariously enjoy the success of his chosen art-form in majority culture? But surely the rule of the "lucky elite" among art-practitioners applies to the other art-forms as well. How many novel-writers can subsist only on their novels, and how many have to keep day-jobs? And if the "model that dominates comics discourse is self-inventory," then in what way is it different from discourse on abstract art or on commercial film?

Obviously I will never get answers to these sort of niggling questions, any more than I did when I debated Spurgeon on messboards. I can only respond, as into the void, that I never have felt that the comics medium was a thing apart. Since I'm for the most part a Jungian, I think that everything that the medium expresses stems from the same collective psychic reservoir that every other medium draws from-- so that, on an essential level, nothing from the same reservoir can be a thing apart. I might have made some argument along those lines to Spurgeon had I ever debated him on a forum of some sort, and maybe he would have given a more satisfactory answer, given that personal debate can allow for more nuanced discussions. But that's another "might have been" that one can only fling into the void, knowing that there will be no answer.

NO FEUD LIKE AN OLD FEUD, PART 4

A lot of comics-forums remind me of a certain SOUTH PARK episode in which the main characters egged on a fight between two other kids who didn't have anything against each other. Often the posters on comics-forums don't care anything about the issues involved: they just want to see cyberblood.

But in Part 3 of this series A. Sherman Barros made an intelligent request as to my question, "Should I bother to respond to Tom Spurgeon when he'll never read it?" So I'm bound to tilt my lance at the Spurgemeister once more, and see if indeed his response is the "chickenshit mendacity" I predicted it would be.

Let's see here...

Seriously, I didn’t understand any of that. I also don’t understand why you think I’m suggesting you feel inferior to me and my kind, although it seems psychologically revealing that you’d just toss that out there. I don’t even know what “my kind” is supposed to mean (Methodists?), although again that I’m representative of some group that you might feel is against you could also be seen as psychologically revealing

Yep, bigtime mendacity. In addition to having tossing out a lame caricature of fanboys as (horrors) Wearers of the Dreaded Unhip Ponytail, Spurgeon tells me that he's sorry that "life turned out the way it did for you" as a stratagem to make me sound like a simple troll who's taking issue with his statements out of a frustration with life's unfairnesses. But that wasn't meant to make me feel "inferior," heck no. It was just another one of the sage observations by the guy who just got pegged (by someone or other on THE BEAT) as "the conscience" of the online comics-community. Odd thing to say of a fellow who unjustifiably accused one of your fellow workers of having given a blowjob to DC Comics, but hey, maybe tossing the rabid dog a steak will keep him from biting off your balls (if any).

I guess I could spend the time trying to figure out what you’re getting at, attempting to identify where you went off course and trying to explain you out of what I feel are your leaps of logic and what I’m guessing you think are your great gordian knot splitting sword-slices of truth, but that would be silly and likely a huge waste of my time.

And Tom Spurgeon knows whereof he speaks as to leaps of logic, since as noted earlier Rich Johnson's cautious praise of DC's past achievements becomes in Spurgeonworld a "blowjob."

However, I don't think he knows what a "reducio ab absurdum" is. When I ask him rhetorically whether he thinks Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman should bow down before the Idol-Head of R. Crumb (a DC Comics reference that people on THE ABSORBASCON would probably get), I already know that he doesn't expect either individual to "worship at the feet of Robert Crumb."

The entire point of taking a premise to an absurd level is to show that the premise is absurd at its core. In Spurgeon's case it was this statement:

A lot of the rest of this seems like nonsense to me, too. To take one: Vertigo expanding what comics storytelling could do 40 years after EC comics did better comics in the same genres and 30 years into the underground/alternative comics revolution is pure boilerplate PR. I don’t begrudge DC being smart enough to put some of their hot comics of that time into a line and make more of them, and I quite enjoy many of their titles, and many of their creators are excellent and Karen Berger is a peach, but this view of Vertigo as a boundaries-pusher outside of anything but the most made-up, self-serving conception of comics is PR horseshit and needs to die.

Putting aside many side-issues-- that Rich Johnson did not call Vertigo a "boundaries-pusher" or claim that it had eclipsed EC and the undergrounds, that the Vertigo line was an attempt to *make* experimental comics "hot" under a banner of their own, rather than a marketing of comics that were already "hot"-- the central premise here is that once EC and the UGs reached some lofty level of quality, no one who didn't exceed EC and UG by Spurgeon's standards can claim to have "expanded what comics storytelling could achieve" (Johnsons's actual words). I suppose in Spurgeon's mind "expansion" correlates with the notion of real-life explorers pushing into new territories. I don't know if that's what "expansion" means to Rich Johnson, but I'm certain it doesn't mean that to me. Literary accomplishment, even in pop-literature, is more than just "who did what first" or "who supposedly climbed higher in the rankings of 'who's more significant.'"

In TS's final paragraph he floods THE BEAT with crocodile tears about the "damage" he thinks he's done me. Yes, flatter yourself some more, Tommy Boy. I once told TS during one of our long arguments that I'm naturally contentious by nature and, as proof, cited my long history of writing the lettercol of COMICS JOURNAL back when it was a magazine worth a damn. Many of my letters pick fights with various other columnists/essayists-- R. Fiore, Carter Scholz, Kim Thompson. Some led to long discussions probably no more profitable than this one; one led to a simplistic "fuck you" reply from none other than that Thompson boy. Sorry, TS. I've crossed swords with many before you and will cross swords with many after you. You're just not that special.

Are such arguments, long or short, a waste of time? In the sense that they don't accomplish any physical aim, like removing grout from your bathroom walls, they are. (Of course, one could say the same of ranting about other people doing PR for DC, which TS has carped at on other occasions before this one.) Still, even if you can't see your mind's muscles, they do need exercise even as the body's do. I didn't get much exercise contending with TS this time, but maybe the next opponent will offer more of a fight. I did think that anyone who wanted to be as insulting as TS was in his original BEAT post was someone who wanted the exercise of a good cyber-battle.

But-- it seems not so.

NO FEUD LIKE AN OLD FEUD, PART 3

I took a quick glance at the "Spurgeon blowjob" post, scrolled to the bottom, and saw that, true to form, Heidi McDonald had closed the thread for reasons beknownst only to Heidi.

TS managed to get in one last post before it closed, which I've not yet read. I suppose that it'll be more of the usual chickenshit mendacity, phrased in that clinical Spurgeonspeak that some fans take as evidence of intelligence.

I suppose I could read his parting blather and respond to it here, but I probably won't bother unless the stats for these posts should go up a bit. I don't expect that they'll ever go as high as they did for the essay MY NEW FAVORITE ADULT-X SPECIAL, but a few more pageviews would be hard evidence that someone out there would like to see Tom's ass cyberkicked a bit more.

Time will tell.

NO FEUD LIKE AN OLD FEUD, PART 2

So here's the exchange that prompted Tom Spurgeon's unveiling of his elitist tendencies, despite an earlier denial of same on THE BEAT.

Rich Johnson, seeking to choose the top comics-oriented story for 2010, chose the management changes at DC Comics. In truth, it was less a writeup of the particular changes from 2010 than a general summing-up of the company's past 20 years. This is roughly when the Vertigo imprint was created, which earns Johnson's restrained praise: "[DC] launched imprints like Vertigo to expand what comics storytelling could achieve."

After sketching a number of examples of DC's expansion-- Vertigo, Wildstorm, Paradox, and assorted merchandising efforts-- Johnson asks the questions:

Will the new DC Entertainment be as experimental and have a vision? Is the vision mining the existing characters for new movies and TV franchises?

Maybe other publishers will pick up the mantle of publishing innovation. There are certainly more out there now, more willing to take a chance on a new artist or author and take a chance on that new story.

Tom Spurgeon's response was to label this a "DC Comics blowjob." He devoted the rest of a rather confused paragraph to a harangue about DC's "shameful" ripoff of the Superman property, which for some reason he associates with 1978 rather than 1938. Then we get him accusing Johnson of having regurgitating DC's PR statements:

"Vertigo expanding what comics storytelling could do 40 years after EC comics did better comics in the same genres and 30 years into the underground/alternative comics revolution is pure boilerplate PR. I don’t begrudge DC being smart enough to put some of their hot comics of that time into a line and make more of them, and I quite enjoy many of their titles, and many of their creators are excellent and Karen Berger is a peach, but this view of Vertigo as a boundaries-pusher outside of anything but the most made-up, self-serving conception of comics is PR horseshit and needs to die."

I've always reprinted my first response in part 1. It was a bit supercilious but it contained a valid point: that EC stories also were not reinventing the wheel. I didn't address undergrounds as I was trying to keep the argument focused on a one-to-one comparison, but I would be happy to extend the same principle to the undergrounds. I would also note that there's really only *one* genre that Vertigo, EC and SOME underground comics all attempted-- and that's the horror genre. Where are the equivalents of Crumb's confessional comics at Vertigo? How many undergrounds devoted themselves to science fiction in the EC mold? Either there weren't that many, or I must've missed all those SF-issues of HORNY BIKER SLUTS.

Spurgeon's response to this argument was a restatement of what he'd already said, sans any justification but personal opinion:

I think the fact that EC did work at a lot like Vertigo of a similar if not superior quality 50 years earlier, and that all sorts of taboos as to genre and content in the alt-undground world were being broken in the 30 years leading up to Vertigo’s founding, kind of makes Vertigo less of the awesomely groundbreaking imprint than is frequently and broadly asserted on its behalf.

My response, to which TS declined to respond by saying he didn't understand it:

Is Moore’s SWAMP THING (admittedly a belated V-offering) not an expansion? Is SANDMAN not an expansion? Were Moore and Gaiman supposed to bow their heads in reverence before the Idol-Head of R. Crumb, for even daring to think they could add more to comics than he already had?

Vertigo is certainly not immune to fair criticism, but claiming that it isn't as good because it wasn't first to break all those taboos is hardly fair. Johnson does not actually claim that Vertigo reinvented the wheel, even the wheel labelled "great comic-book taboos." All he says is that Vertigo expanded "what comic book storytelling could achieve," which is simple truth. SWAMP THING and SANDMAN did expand the horizons, just as EC and the undergrounds had, albeit not the exact same horizons.

This is why pluralism as a critical discipline proves valuable. Though Spurgeon says he has enjoyed some Vertigo products, clearly he enjoyed the EC titles and at least some undergrounds more. This is his privilege. But it's a poor (and elitist) critique that asserts that any taste that finds SANDMAN more of a breakthrough than WEIRD SCIENCE-FANTASY must be the result of the author's desire to keep his tongue firmly applied to the boots of DC Comics.

As a side-note, it's significant that both EC and the undergrounds, like most other comic books of their respective periods, predominantly featured short stories. Many of these were good, many were bad. But in other media aside from comic books, the model of the short story has pretty much given way to extended continuities. The progress of the television medium displays this increasing focus on the long story, going from the never-ending soap opera to the punchily-syncopated overlapping arcs of HILL STREET BLUES to the metatextual epic of LOST. And no matter what one thinks of the tastes of the direct-market comics-audience, this audience also has moved toward long stories rather than short stories. Thus one might fairly conclude that the boundary-expansions of SANDMAN and SWAMP THING (for all that Alan Moore borrows a helluva lot from EC Comics) may be, for this time, greater breakthroughs than those of bygone eras.

Of course a true pluralist attitude doesn't assume that one type of fiction is better than another because the former breaks more taboos than the other. An elitist one does, however, as elitism reifies itself by claiming that it pursues what Theodor Adorno fallaciously called "ideas," as against popular literature, which is only about the sensual. But it may be that any elitism that champions taboo-breaking as an absolute good in itself is not really interested in "ideas" as such, for "ideas" are not universally tied to the breaking of taboos, and I for one can find more interesting "ideas" in a decades' worth of DC Comics-- any decade one cares to name-- than in any decades' worth of undergrounds.

As William James noted, the true answer to any question depends on the terms by which the question is stated. And if the short version of this essay might be rendered, "Is a respect for Vertigo Comics' achievements an automatic 'blowjob' for DC Comics?", then I think I've made my answer more than clear.

NO FEUD LIKE AN OLD FEUD, PART 1

I was trying to avoid putting Tom Spurgeon in my subject list, but now it seems there's no avoiding it.

I've never met Spurgeon. I had ceased submitting to the COMICS JOURNAL about 1990, which is about two-three years before he became the JOURNAL editor. I don't recall having argued with him, as I did with so many others, in the magazine's letters-pages or elsewhere. My first arguments with him were a couple of really long ones on the Board That Must Not Be Named. In the last year or two I'd argued with him a few more times on THE BEAT, but none of those contretemps were nearly as long. That's at least partly due to the fact that the comments-threads could be shut down at any point by the management, though Tom has at times evinced a tendency to make statements and then blow off any attempt to make him back them up. Tellingly, when he thinks others do this to him, he puts on that fine JOURNAL veneer of righteous contempt.

In this post I've already alluded to one of those BEAT-fights. Now there's been another, which from my POV came about because I tried to question TS more closely about some of the points he made. Anyone interested can read TS' comments on a Rich Johnson piece at the post called TURN THE PAGE. But I will reprint my initial comment on Spurgeon's rant:

What an odd Spurge-splurge.

I respect EC Comics as much as the next geezerfan, but why would anyone state, as if it were unalloyed fact, that they pushed far more boundaries than Vertigo did? A lot of EC stories kick ass: a lot of them are just good time-killers. I’m not sure any of the kickass stories pushed any more boundaries than did SANDMAN. One could argue that, but not without establishing some sort of terms.

And while we’re attacking “conventional” stories, let’s not forget that an awful lot of EC stories build on established conventions picked up from prose stories.

Is the denigrating image of the ponytailed fanboy now that widely accepted over that of the fat slob? I never got the memo to that effect.

Now, that's supercilious as hell, to be sure. But I think TS went a bit overboard here in his comment to me:

Gene, like I said last time, I just feel sorry for you at this point. I am so sorry that life turned out the way it did for you, and that you’re so unhappy that you read personal insults into broad caricature and feel the need to strike back in a way, albeit in a way that hasn’t hurt all that much since I was 14.

I shouldn't need to point out that Tom Spurgeon has not one half-baked idea about how life has "turned out" for me. I have to assume that this extreme lameosity is (a) a standard Journalista dodge, to avoid answering faulty points by pretending that one's critic is an envious cretin, and (b) Tom's attempt to disengage by being as offensive as possible, far beyond the level of the merely supercilious (which is OK when Journalistas do it, natch).

I also shouldn't need to point out (though I will) that Tom's weird accusation is of a piece with all those accusations levelled at him and other Journalistas by more conservative comics-mavens, to the effect that they "hate comics."

In Part 2 I'll look at some of the stuff Tom said in response to my EC/Vertigo points, in order to show (as usual) the superiority of pluralism to elitism.