Monday, July 14, 2008

Sunday, July 13, 2008

Need-Based Criticism

When the issues of “what comics needs” and “what kinds of criticism will help the art” surface online, I often want to respond; yet I find something a little odd about the way the questions are posed. I don’t really want to make pronouncements on behalf of an art form. And the “what comics needs” way of thinking often implies that criticism is the answer, and it gives critics more power/influence than they really have to diagnose the situation and bring about real change. But here goes anyway:

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Mod Gag

This is the inside front cover to The Modniks #1 (1967). I can come up with a few guesses about the gag, but I am not sure I get it. Is he offering to set their hair since they are not interested in getting it cut - what exactly would that entail? Do you have any explanations? The art looks like Lee Holley . . .

Saturday, July 5, 2008

POV and Autobiography

David Chelsea, a cartoonist who doesn’t get the kind of attention he deserves in art comics circles, has released a strong new minicomic from Top Shelf that includes two stories done in 2005 and 2007 as part of the 24-hour comic “movement.” The first story in 24x2 is particularly interesting to me because of claims that Chelsea makes about truth, autobiography, and cartooning strategies of representation.

Also: Chelsea’s comic is black and white and most of us experience the world in a vast collection of colors -- in Chelsea’s own terms then, black and white should also be “wrong.” The same can be said about the many panels in which the background disappears, focusing the reader on the character in the foreground -- this, too doesn’t quite happen in real life; though peripheral details can be out of focus, they still are visible. Another potential problem for “authenticity” is that subjective camera comics often feature a character who looks at the cartoonist and therefore appears to be looking directly at the reader:

This can create a jarring sensation (though an interesting one in many cases), like when an actor accidentally looks into the camera. So a strategy that avoids this situation might appear to be realistic/truthful to most readers, even though it rejects the primacy of the cartoonist’s perspective. In this way, readers might think that Crumb, for example, gets it right by not generally relying on this POV.

Of course, I'm not saying that there’s anything wrong with subjective camera, only with claims about its relationship to truth. Dan Clowes plays with the idea of objectivity in “Daniel G. Clowes in ‘Just Another Day,’” a story about autobiographical comics:

And Clowes has one of the great 1st person-cartoonist POV stories, The Stroll, which is not explicitly identified as autobiography, but appears to be so:


Despite my differences with Chelsea, I like the fact that he creates a strip about approaches to narration, something under-discussed in comics. I hope people will checkout 24x2.

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