How Does Appropriation Work in Comics?

There is a long standing tradition of appropriating comic characters, both within comics itself and within fine art.

Within comics, the practice of appropriating characters is an instance of what I have elsewhere called cameo metafiction – a narrative work whose plot involves interaction with characters, locales, or other elements that are not in the same continuity, or whose plot involve parodying or spoofing other artworks of the same type. The first image provides some examples – four pin-ups (including the cover) from a French anthology titled Tribute to Popeye (Editions Charrette, 2010) by Thierry Martin, Aseyn, Lucrèce, and Olivier Frasier.

Trans-medium appropriations, involving the use of comics characters or tropes within other artforms, is an instance of what I have elsewhere (and not particularly originally) called intertextual metafiction – a narrative work whose content interacts with or references the content of some other text, artwork, or artform. The second and third images reproduce two such works: The second print in the Les Femmes Fatales portfolio by Icelandic artist Erró (referencing Johne Byrne’s classic Fantastic Four #275 cover) and a work by American artist Joe Brainard.

How Do We Talk About Animals That Talk?

The Silver Age is often defined by the ways in which comic book superheroes began to develop into increasingly complex figures who managed to right great wrongs in spite of their deep insecurities, imperfections, and strange idiosyncrasies. Some readers characterize them as anti-heroes with ambivalent souls and feet made of clay; others simply describe them as “more human.” Proudly eschewing idealized notions of heroism in the 1960s, Marvel championed the foibles of the Amazing Spider-Man: “the superhero would could be – you!”

But talking animals have long occupied the “more human” spaces on the comics page and the question I’d like to pose this week is part of my effort to understand their appeal.

How Good Are Comics?

[Guest Post by Aaron Meskin]

We all like different art forms and genres. I happen to like comics more than English folk music and crime comics more than funny animal comics. You might feel different. But let’s put aside our preferences for a moment and consider value. Not financial value…I’m talking about artistic value or quality. (And value isn’t just a matter of what you or I like. See Philosophy 101 for discussion.) So how good are comics; that is, how valuable an art form do they comprise? Can we legitimately say that comics really belong in the same category as painting, sculpture, theater and poetry? Is the art form of comics really the equal of those well-established and highly respected forms. Or do comics comprise a lesser, minor art form?

Guest Contributor!

This month we have another guest contributor: Aaron Meskin. Aaron, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Leeds, works on the philosophy of art, with an emphasis on popular art forms including film, videogames, photography, and (most important for our purposes!) comics. He was the first aesthetics editor for the online philosophy journal Philosophy Compass, and recently co-edited of The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). His writings on comics have appeared in a number of academic journals, including Philosophy Compass, the British Journal of Aesthetics, and The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, as well as in anthologies including The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics 3^rd ed. (Routledge, forthcoming), Watchmen and Philosophy: A Rorschach Test (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), and the aforementioned The Art Of Comics: A Philosophical Approach.

Tomorrow’s post will continue Meskin’s habit of asking the really hard questions about comics. The comics art form has, over the last few decades, worked hard to earn a reputation as a medium worthy of academic study in virtue of its potential for original and worthy works of art. Given this, Aaron asks why are there so few comics that have actually lived up to this potential – that is, why are there so few comics masterpieces?

Want more Meskin? Check out this interview (with Roy T Cook) promoting The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach at The Philosopher’s Eye!

What the $#@& is Happening to 1986?

1986 is sometimes touted as the annus mirabilis of comics, giving us:

• Maus I: My Father Bleeds History
• The Dark Knight Returns
• Watchmen

Of course, other years saw impressive achievements (see, e.g., the introduction to Best American Comics Criticism for an argument that 2000 – the year of Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan and Daniel Clowes’ David Boring – is more important). Nevertheless, 1986 marks a watershed in the history of modern comics. So why the $#@& does the comic industry seem committed to messing it up?

Over the past year, a number of works have appeared, or been announced, that connect in some way to these three seminal works. It began well enough, with Art Speigelman’s MetaMaus – a collection of interviews, essays, et cetera for the Maus-o-phile. MetaMaus isn’t perfect. It is marred by the inclusion of interviews with Speigelman’s kids which, while sometimes cute, are clearly filler, and more seriously by the general tone, which makes the reader (or me, at least) wish that Speigelman were a bit less aware of his own importance. Nevertheless, there is nothing genuinely bad here.

MetaMaus was followed by other works revisiting, directly or indirectly, The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen.

How Will We Manage the Alt Text?

My interest in comics from an academic standpoint is how language codes function. Mostly I examine how dialogue is structured and how characters build their relationships and identities through their talk. This approach blends tenets of conversation analysis, discourse analysis, and pragmatics. (For an example of this kind of research, see my article on The Rawhide Kid in the journal ImageTexT.)

One methodological concern for analysts who do similar work is this: how is the language in the comic best prepared for analysis? To analyze dialogue, we can create a transcript to account for typical features of conversation. For grammatical analysis, we can track the relative distribution of features–for example, comparing simple past tense verbs with past perfect verbs (‘walked’ vs ‘had walked’). In most cases, linguists need to examine 100% of the language in the comic to make sure that whatever analysis they’re doing is complete. In some cases, only a sample of the language is needed, but that requires asking the right research question and setting parameters effectively.

Web comics present an interesting challenge. Some web comics, like Penny Arcade, are structured in a familiar three-panel or four-panel strip.  All the language is present: it is visible, it is easily accessed. However, many web comics feature alt text, language that pops up when the reader mouses over the image.

Does the Shelf on Which a Comic Appears Affect How We Read It?

Yang's American Born Chinese

In college I worked at Waldenbooks around the time when the company began shelving African American literature in its own section. This was in the early 1990s, shortly after Terry McMillan’s novel, Waiting to Exhale, and Invisible Life by E. Lynn Harris, were topping bestseller lists.  All kinds of readers flocked to the bookstore looking for black popular fiction then, and every once in a while, after browsing the section, they would leave the store with a new and unexpected mystery, science fiction, or literary title by a black author. We sold a LOT more books by Walter Mosley, Octavia Butler, and Toni Morrison during those early years.

A similar pattern has occurred with comics in bookstores and libraries. The surge in trade paperback comics, graphic novels, and the popularity of manga titles, have led stores to clear new spaces and endcaps. Online bookstores don’t have shelves of course, but they do engage in classification systems that are intended to guide and market to readers’ interests. Browsing the graphic novel section one afternoon was how I discovered one of my favorite comics, a short stocky book that didn’t quite sit right on the shelf.

When Are Two Comics The Same Comic? (Part III)

(See Part I and Part II here and here).

In the previous two posts in this three-part series, I examined how we determined whether two instances of comics art were, or were not, instances of the same comic type. In Part I, I examined panel layout (with the help of Calvin and Hobbes) and in Part II, I examined coloring (with the help of the 1988 and 2008 editions of The Killing Joke).

Here I look at a case I take to be particularly difficult (and one that also illustrates the tragedy that can result from haphazard archiving of comic art). The second volume of Fantagraphics’ amazing series of Peanuts reprint volumes (edited and designed by Canadian comic artist Seth) contains a short note at the end regarding the status of the May 3, 1953 Sunday strip. After bemoaning the sorry state of newspaper comic strip preservation, the note notes that:

“… one strip has proven at least partly ‘lost’”.

Does Mooch the Cat speak French?

In the 1990s, I lived in Athens, Georgia, where I was a doctoral student in linguistics. I read the newspaper almost every day, and I started reading a comic strip called Mutts, by Patrick McDonnell. I loved the strip — the sweetness and good intentions of the dog, Earl, was paired with the slightly self-centered cat, Mooch, who also happened to be not quite as smart as Earl in many ways. These two characters are neighbors who live in an urban area that is best characterized as a city in the northeastern United States.

In the series that this strip comes from, Earl is on a leash waiting to be taken for a walk, but his human, Ozzie, gets distracted for a moment. In walks Mooch, who decides to pick up the leash and take Earl for his walk. Not knowing exactly where to go, Mooch decides to see Paris, and of course Earl tags along. After walking for an unspecified period of time, which Earl calls FOR-EVER, the pair decide to stop and ask whether they’ve made it to Paris.

In his best “French,” Mooch makes the first conversational move. Getting an answer from Fifi, the French poodle, satisfies Mooch, of course, who celebrates their arrival in “Paris.”

 

Could Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif” Be Made Into a Comic?

Earlier this week, in a review of African American Classics, the latest volume from the Graphic Classics series, I made this claim about comics adaptations of African American literature:

These “graphic” adaptations elevate the visual field of representation in ways that should remind us that literary expressions of African American experience have always been deeply entrenched in the realm of social perception, spectacle, and visibility. The works were originally written to counter claims that the entire character of a people could be arbitrarily determined by what is seen, from skin color to physiognomy to a so-called drop of Negro-stained blood. African American Classics, then, returns the counter-argument of its featured stories to their visual origins and exposes the absurdity of race prejudice in a way that only a comic can.