Several men** are interviewed for this piece. Stan Lee describes superhero stories as ‘fairy tales for grown-ups. [Fairy tales] were stories about monsters and witches and giants and magicians. But superhero stories have that same flavor, but they’re done for adults as well as children.’

Others talk about the integral link between comic books and movies. Sharad Devarajan (CEO of Graphic India) defines comic books this way: ‘A comic book is essentially a movie with an unlimited budget […] where a creator just with a pencil and pen can kind of create worlds unimaginable.’ And Bryan Cooney (MCM Expo Group) describes a change in the reading/viewing habits regarding superheroes: ‘Everything goes beyond just the comic book now because it’s not just a book. It’s a comic book that’s tied in with a video game, that’s tied in with a movie. […] Thousands of people, they are exposed to comic books through movies as opposed to through comic books to the movie.’

The series presenter, Neil Curry, says that ‘Comic book sales in North America alone were close to half a billion dollars last year. So far this year, they’re up almost 20%.’ In general, the report implies that because of the record-breaking success of recent comic-inspired movies and the probable success of the forthcoming ‘Man of Steel,’ the comic book industry itself will continue to grow rapidly and achieve record financial success.

What kinds of comic books are being sold? A quick internet search shows websites devoted to tracking comic book sales, with Comic Book Resources and ComiChron being just two of them. According to John Mayo at Comic Book Resources, here are the Top 5 comic books for March 2013 as reported by Diamond:

Clearly, superhero comics constitute the vast majority of monthly sales in at least some parts of the world.

One oft-quoted bit of wisdom in comics scholarship is that in countries like Belgium and France, there is a strong comic book culture, where children and adults alike spend significant time and money on comics. This observation is frequently paired with the lament that there is too little of this kind of culture in most other European countries as well as North America. But is this changing? Is there a widespread and sustainable growth of comic book culture? And will it include all comics, not just the superhero stories?

**No women were interviewed on camera in Curry’s video report, and no female superhero was mentioned either. That’s probably a subject for a future blog post on Pencil Panel Page.

This comic has been extremely controversial in some circles. Probably the most even-handed, and theoretically interesting, treatment of the issue was written by one of our very own PPP contributors: Frank Bramlett. In  “The Confluence of Heroism, Sissyhood, and Camp in The Rawhide Kid: Slap Leather”, Frank examines the use of camp – understood by Bramlett to be a kind of voice (or linguistic ‘masquerade’) – in the characterization of the Rawhide Kid. In this paper he forcefully argues that the comic uses camp to position the Rawhide Kid as a defender of ‘sissyhood’ and an enemy of ‘sissy-phobia’ while simultaneously defending more traditional human values, including (heterosexual) family, parenthood, and marriage.

Now, if this were all there was to it, then there wouldn’t be any need for this post – Frank’s paper is a pretty thorough and pretty excellent examination of the issues. But Zimmerman (this time with Howard Chaykin as artist) has produces a new installment in this narrative – a second miniseries called Rawhide Kid: The Sensational Seven. In this comic the Rawhide Kid gathers together a posse of famous gunslingers, including Annie Oakley, Billy the Kid, Doc Holliday, Kid Colt, Red Wolf, and the Two-Gun Kid, and they set off to save Wyatt and Morgan Earp from the evil  Christo Pike.

The comic is interesting for, among other things, the way that it blends Marvel continuity, actual historical facts and people, and not-so-factual legends based on those actual persons. But more importantly, for my purposes, at least, it is interesting in the way that it portrays the Rawhide Kid.

In this installment of the story, the Rawhide kid is still ‘out’ (in the sense that the reader knows, as do some of his associates). But the story itself is, for the most part, a more traditional western tale than the first miniseries. Although the Rawhide Kids sissyhood is played for laughs throughout the comic, the narrative doesn’t provide anything like the tension between, and resolution of, various conflicting themes (sissy-versus-macho, hetero-versus-homosexual, etc.) that play out in the narrative of Slap Leather. In fact, the story in the more recent miniseries is structured around a symmetric shootout at the conclusion of the narrative, with each character facing down an evil ‘version’ of themselves. The Rawhide Kid’s opponent – Kid Cabo – is also a dandy (but not, apparently, homosexual): the two Kids trade fashion notes before the Rawhide Kid guns Cabo down. Given this, it is hard to read this newer story in the same, positive way outlined by Frank in “The Confluence of Heroism…”

Given the serial, and continuity-driven, nature of mainstream comics, we must in some sense interpret The Sensational Seven in light of Slap Leather, and vice versa. So the question is this: How does the (theoretically and socially) less interesting portrayal of the Rawhide Kid in the more recent miniseries affect our interpretation in the earlier series, and vice versa?

Is including several panels from a comic one is discussing into an essay the same as quoting? Certainly, it is providing visual evidence for the analysis and reading one is giving: If I am interpreting panels in a comic in a certain way, I will incorporate those panels for my readers, so they can decide whether they agree with me or not. Due to the visual nature of the comics panels, they do not blend into the textual fabric of an essay in the way a verbal quote would, nor do we place these panels in quotation marks. They set themselves apart from the flow of our argument by their very form, and don’t need the punctuation marks to flag them as sources. When we quote text from comics, we transcribe the words into our own text, this time using quotation marks: the visual aspect of the text in comics is abandoned, since we don’t quote that text within its speech balloon or caption. Sometimes the practice of transcribing from speech balloons offers its own problems: should I keep the all caps font of the source text? Do I retain the bolded words or the multiple exclamation marks?

So while we probably all agree that it is important to include images-as-quotes from the comics we’re discussing, the practice of quoting from comics in comics scholarship is somewhat ad hoc, as we improvise citation formatting and Works Cited information as seems appropriate. Art history or film studies may offer models, but are not the same as including material from comics. One question I often struggle with is how much context to include: will I use a single panel to illustrate my point, or the tier the panel comes from, or even the entire page? In part the answer depends on the point I am making: when discussing sequentiality, a series of actions—then the tier or the page would be a better choice. But if our writing is for publication, then the choice between a panel or a page will often be determined by other considerations as well: will the publisher be willing to include illustrations? Will they want permission for using the panels from the artists who drew them or the copyright holders? How likely are the copyright holders to give permission for the use of a panel as opposed to a page, and will they charge a fee?

There are longstanding traditions for quoting text within academic discourse. So far, there has been no question of having to ask permission for such use, or to pay for it. Of course you quote Toni Morrison in an essay about her novels, and of course you quote Žižek if you engage his ideas. Perhaps such citing is free because the practice predates copyright laws, but then, copyright laws also specifically address and protect this kind of usage through their “fair use” clauses. A problem with comics scholarship is that many of us, and more specifically our publishers, are leery of exercising that right, for fear we might be sued. Thus, at the request of my publisher, I wrote to the cartoonists I discuss and quote, and asked for permission to reprint from their comics, in some cases a single panel and in others a full page. I had many nice exchanges with the artists. Sometimes they were flattered I was discussing their work or they were interested in my study. In other cases they seemed annoyed that I bothered them over such a trifle. And that last reaction stuck with me, because even when we were having a nice correspondence, I did feel that I was wasting these cartoonists’ time (as well as my own): under fair use, I did not need their permission to use a few of their panels. In fact, by asking for that permission, perhaps I was even eroding the right of fair use itself.

In publishing on comics, should the decision about quoting or not be dependent on whether we can get permission for the images?

Pencilpanelpage is thrilled to welcome back Barbara Postema for her third guest post. Barbara’s book Narrative Structure in Comics: Making Sense of Fragments will be coming out with RIT Cary Graphic Arts Press in Spring 2013. She completed her dissertation on comics theory at Michigan State University in 2010 and has presented on comics at numerous conferences, published several articles in the International Journal of Comic Art and teaches literature at Ryerson University in Toronto.

Can an image take your breath away? 

Here are a few that have taken mine:

One silent, lovely double-page spread in Mariko Tamiko and Jillian Tamiko’s Skim:  unmoored, unspoken, unassimilated, unpunished.   With it, the narrative flow of the work arrests, and stutters…(S)Kim, the protagonist, has disavowed this romance several pages previously (“Technically nothing has happened”), and yet, here it is, surprising us on pp. 40-41 (hardcover edition) with its candor, its loveliness, and its wildness.  

Luke Pearson scatters these –again, unremarked, unassimilated – two-headed baby skeletons throughout his spare, sunset-colored meditation on loss and obliviousness, Everything we Miss, but it is the lighting that breaks my heart. Here, most likely, car headlights momentarily illuminate the strange creature, but the unbroken Doppler shift of light shows that the driver saw nothing and passed quickly.

Craig Thompson taught me through Blankets that penwork can be suffused with eros.  His lovers are traced with rare compassion, his settings as well.  Ground reaches toward figures; figures reach back.  Being in love with a person becomes—no surprise—an ocular feast, as elements of the world (snow, tree branches in winter) suddenly emerge as radiant, present, conspiratorial:

.

Finally, scenes from my beloved Mushi-shi anime, (based on Yuki Urushibara’s equally sensuous black and white manga series).  Ginko (sic), the Mushi master, moves through Japanese history as easily as he passes through its landscapes, and each tree, each breath of the wind, each snow-touched mountain calls to us as insistently as it does to Ginko himself.  With Mushi-shi, it’s not one image that takes my breath away, it’s most of them.  Try this anime on a tablet or phone in bed before going to sleep.  Mesmerizing.

I have also been thinking about depression lately since the long-awaited second installment of Hyperbole and a Half‘s depression saga was posted just last week and I recently finished Ann Cvetkovich’s hybrid study/memoir, Depression: A Public Feeling. There is a lot to love about this book but I especially loved its reflections on academic life, which “breeds particular forms of panic and anxiety leading to what gets called depression.” Working against the reductive psychiatric approach depression (which favors swift treatment at the expense of reflection on the broad spectrum of causes) Cvetkovich advocates an understanding of depression as a cultural and political phenomenon. She also calls for new forms of writing about depression that counter the mainstream depression memoir and challenge the status quo medical model. It made me wonder what forms of writing about depression have existed in comics.

Some examples that come to mind are comics oeuvres like those of Daniel Clowes, Julie Doucet, and Adrian Tomine whose works are generally suffused with a depressive/melancholic atmosphere. But I can’t recall depression ever being addressed directly anywhere in their works. (Please correct me if I’m mistaken). Some more personal treatments of depression in comics include Elaine Will’s Look Straight Ahead and Allie Brosh’s (of Hyperbole and a Half) Adventures in Depression, both incidentally web comics. In French there is Gil & Gaston’s Ma Toute petite déprime et moi [My tiny depression and me] and Eléonore Zuber’s Lorsque je suis déprimée [When I'm depressed] both of which approach the subject from a humorous angle. One might reserve a special category for comics that feature depressed but heroic protagonists: Moebius’s Chasseur Déprime [Depressed Hunter, but also a play on the term chasseur de prix, bounty hunter] and Steven Struble’s Li’l Depressed Boy.

Many artists struggle with depression and find ways to reflect their struggle in their art. For some it almost seems to be part of the creative process, a period of being stuck, cocooned, indifferent, asleep, before movement and creation can begin. One apparent difficulty inherent in writing about depression is that a pathologically depressed artist is unable to create, so the artistic representation of depression must always occur after the fact and from a different position, often a position that requires one to forget the depression ever occurred in order to remain functional in the world. However, the creative process involved in representing depression is also often imagined as necessary to the therapeutic process. Allie Brosh’s Adventures in Depression brings this dynamic into relief through its webcomic format; her readers only became aware of the seriousness of her depression in the wake of a six-month period of silence and non-productivity that took place between the first and second installments.

In what ways is the comics medium equipped to represent the experience of depression and what are the comics you’ve read that approach the subject of depression in an interesting way?

Artists Joe Orlando and Wally Wood

*

This year’s International Comic Arts Forum will include a roundtable discussion on collaboration in comics that considers the way academics and industry professionals approach the dialogic qualities of creation in the industry (look for a panel of original papers addressing this topic at MLA 2014 as well). The discussion grows out of a concern that comics scholars too often privilege the authorship of a lone gifted writer, potentially “ignoring the historical importance and artistic potential of multi-authored comics.”

So I thought I would bring the question to PPP readers as well.  Why don’t we give the collaborative aspects of comics more serious attention? What are the risks and/or advantages that come from talking about these texts as a medley of complementary, diverging, or competing interests rather than a single creative vision?

The issue has become especially important to my own research over the last few years. When I initially ventured into comics studies as a literary critic, I often found myself attributing primary “ownership” of the narrative to the writer with the penciller, inker, colorist, letterer and editorial staff receiving only a mention. Much of the academic comics scholarship that I encountered reinforced this view, as do the prestigious awards and “best of” lists that often champion the single artist/writer. (No wonder Eddie Campbell is under the misconception that “the literaries” ignore the narrative drawings in comics and consider only the plot.) In my work on the 1980s Swamp Thing run, however, I found that this approach did not suit me well and I tried to do my best to be more attentive to the role of collaboration between Alan Moore, Stephen Bissette, and John Totleben in the finished product.

Now in my current research, I am particularly fascinated by the way EC’s comics were developed during the 1950s. It was a frantic, nearly assembly-line construction that nevertheless strived to maintain the individuality of the creative professionals. Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein often described how they worked with a team of freelancers to produce four stories a week, churning out springboards and lettered pages for illustration.  In an interview for The Monster Times in 1972, Gaines and Feldstein commented upon the process:

Al: Now this was something that hadn’t been done too much in the comics either. There was imitation of styles. And books were sterile and really had no character. We encouraged each artist to develop his own style, actually wrote and tailored the stories based on the artist’s ability and style. Graham always did the Old Witch and the kind of gothicy stuff. And a finished neat artist like Jack Kamen did the modern, triangle stories with a husband and wife living in the suburbs behind a picket fence, because his style lent himself to that.

Bill: I thought it was more than that. When we sat down to write a story, we were writing the story for a particular artist. So one day we sat down to write a story I would say to Al: “Today we have a seven page story for Graham Ingels to write.” We would think in that direction…

Regardless of how we might feel about EC taking credit for starting this particular editorial trend, their comics certainly demonstrate a dynamic range of collaborative efforts. A quick glance at the title page and signature of any EC story would give regular readers stylistic clues about what the narrative had in store.

(Indeed, when it comes to EC, it’s the writers – not the artists – who often play second fiddle. Readers forget that the stories were almost all completely written or adapted by Gaines, Feldstein or Kurtzman. Even recent reprints from IDW and Fantagraphics reinforce a view that continues to privilege the single artist as creator.)

So how do you approach collaboration in comics? What other questions about collaboration should I bring to the panel?

And if you live in or near Portland, I hope you’ll join us at this year’s ICAF from May 23-25 in the White Stag Building at 70 NW Couch Street!

What is the relationship between the graphic novel and war and affect? And how do panels render the tricky dynamic between remembering, feeling, and archiving? These questions were elicited by my encounter with The Photographer, the masterly 1986 illustrated-photographic record of Didier Lefevre’s journey with Doctors with Borders in order to establish a hospital in an Afghanistan torn by war with Soviet Union.

The 2008 edition of The Photographer has an introduction which contextualizes the work with 9/11 and the US’s subsequent War with Afghanistan. As many have noted, the comics-photograph supplementation enables the book to fold together an event (the 1986 war in Afghanistan), experience (Lefevre’s personal and representational struggles adjusting to the warzone), and multi-dimensional currents of affect released by the junctures of image-text. The photos offer an ethnographic look at Afghanistan, presented through peoples, tribes, landscapes. The comic panels shade in affective tenor of situations, interactions, responses.

For instance, there a sequence where Lefevre is stranded in the Kalotac Pass with his horse, as a snowstorm engulfs the dangerous terrain. The snow temporarily alleviates the danger of bombing raids conducted by Soviet planes over the area. As the snow fills the pass, the abject figure of the man and his horse, the figures are slowly shaded into black silhouettes engulfed within a backdrop of grey-olive green. The tight panels constrict around the silhouettes so as to capture the immediacy of Lefevre’s bodily struggles in the snowstorm, blending together human and animal—suddenly, this breaks into a double page spread of a single photograph of the spectacular valley, shaded by snow and storm clouds.

The Photographer is full of such unquiet moments—the unquiet disjuncture between visual testimony to stunning terrains or to interpersonal intimacies across ethnic and national borders, and the taxing act of witnessing with one’s body what its like to live in a warzone. Lefevre documents his painful illnesses, the boils that break over his body, or his physical responses to the wounds suffered by Afghans. And yet, we know that witnessing can be compulsive. When Lefevre in Pakistan prepares for his flight back to France, riding buses while listening to French jazz singer Michel Jonasz and promising to see his friends his Paris, he thinks to himself: “I feel like going back [to Afghanistan]”.

As Sontag and Barthes have noted, the photograph is intimately tied to the act of mourning. So are comics, as Maus so eminently proves. Sontag also establishes the link between the photograph and affect, in its indeterminacy as icon: “They drift between shores of perception, between sign and image, without ever approaching either . . . In this glum desert, suddenly a specific photograph reaches me; it animates me, and I animate it” (On Photography 20). At the end of The Photographer, we are reminded of this yet again, as Lefevre visits a British cemetery in Pakistan before his flight to France. The photo-comic-graphic rendering of the graveyard taps the affective charge of the in-between spaces of representation and experience, pointing backwards to the process of signifying and forwards to prophecy—Lefevre would eventually die in 2007 of complications from health problems he contracted in Afghan warzone. “I find this cemetery very moving,” reads the panel next to his portrait photo, “I come back in the following days.” If iconicity in war is compulsive, it is because it is prolific in the face of foreclosure, where there is no movement except that of returning.

The faculty at the University of Lisbon are not alone in their quest to understand how people respond to these crises. After the events of September 11, 2001, Jewel James decided to create a series of healing poles as a gift to the people of the United States. Barbara Robins, a friend and colleague of mine, is a scholar of Native American literature and culture, and she has interviewed James as part of her ongoing research about healing through art. You can get an article by Robins here. When the poles were finished, James, a Lummi artist, had the poles transported as a traveling exhibit across the United States. Visit the website at the National Library of Medicine blog for more information and to see images of the poles.

My question for this blog entry has to do with the way that editorial cartoons, for example after the Boston Marathon bombings, offer readers a way of healing after tragedy. For Boston, some cartoons express rage, some express sorrow, and some express frustration and confusion. This piece, by Jerry Holbert , relies on readers’ knowledge of the figure of Justice. Holbert has retained some of the traditional elements here: the figure’s eyes are covered, and she holds a sword. However, the figure doesn’t hold a balance in her other hand. Instead, she grips the sword with both hands, seemingly ready to strike.

The caption uses the words ‘wounded,’ ‘bruised,’ and ‘bleed,’ words which no doubt will resonate with Boston residents, especially at this time. The last sentence of the caption expresses a kind of resolution to readers, that justice will be done. It assures readers that even though the community has been harmed, something will be done in response to the tragedy. Further, interaction between the image and the language suggests something else: it issues a warning to the people who committed the atrocity, an implied promise that they will not go unpunished.

In light of the Boston bombings and through my participation at the conference, I had time to reflect on 9/11, and I remembered that the image below made a strong impact on me. There’s a short article at Wired.com about it. It takes patriotic symbols, like the Statue of Liberty and the U.S. flag, and repurposes them. The Liberty statue very clearly becomes a mother figure, but instead of holding aloft a torch she holds a gun. The U.S. flag, which is often raised on a flagpole to fly in the wind, is instead wrapped around a baby. These visual discourses of motherhood, safety, and violence coalesce into a statement: a response from the nation. The linguistic caption reinforces the visual message by using the lexemes dangerous, mother, and children all in the same sentence.

I do not wish to claim here that editorial cartoonists have the intent of offering some kind of healing to their readers. I think it’s much more complex than that. After all, artists in this situation might be expressing their own anger and confusion, so they may not be thinking about healing when they create their cartoons. However, some readers may find elements of healing in those cartoons, even when the cartoons are at the same time expressing anger, disgust, frustration, and confusion: an array of reactions to tragedy.

Can readers find healing in these kinds of cartoons? Even if the cartoonist does not intend the message of healing, even if the cartoonist expresses something more akin to anger, perhaps these kinds of cartoons begin to create a space for readers to begin the process of healing.