You Like Comic Books?

Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art is an attempt to explain the medium. If McCloud is right, then not only should you stop despising the form, you really ought to embrace the form and be excited for what is coming. It’s a fun book, full of historical tidbits and philosophical ruminations. It is also a comic book.

Why the disdain for comic books? I was talking with a student not too long ago about this. I noted that she thought it was perfectly fine to like Novels and other written texts and it is perfectly fine to like Paintings and other forms of visual art. So, why, I asked, is it impossible to imagine combining words and pictures and creating something amazing? Her answer, completely unbeknownst to her, was straight out of McCloud’s book:

Traditional thinking has long held that truly Great works of art and literature are only possible when the two are kept at arm’s length. Words and Pictures Together are considered at best a diversion for the Masses, at worst a product of crass commercialism.

This is true about how people think. Think of a Great Book, any Great Book; the book you thought about almost certainly was all words. Now think of a Great Work of Art; that art almost certainly has no words. McCloud:

By the early 1800s, Western Art and Writing had drifted about as far apart as was possible. One was obsessed with resemblance, light and color, all things visible…the other rich in invisible treasures, sense, emotions, spirituality, philosophy.

But, are these things logically separated? Obviously not. Indeed, figuring out how to effectively combine these two disparate worlds into one could surely produce something amazing. That thing which would be produced would be…a comic book.

The bulk of McCloud’s book is devoted to analyzing the form and structure of the comic book. What is the difference between a panel in which the words are influenced by the art and a panel in which the art is influenced by the words? What is the taxonomy of ways that the words and the art can influence each other? How does the shape of a panel affect the way we read it? What is the effect of changing the space between the panels, removing the border from a panel, or having the art reach to the end of the page? What is the effect of color?

In other words this is a technical book about Comics. Chances are, unless you already appreciate the form, you find the idea of reading a technical discussion about the structure of a comic book to be just about as silly as reading comic book. Why do you think like that? Because of your upbringing.

As children, our first books had pictures galore and very few words because that was easier. Then, as we grew, we were expected to graduate to books with much More text and only occasional pictures—and Finally to arrive at “Real” books—those with no pictures at all. Or perhaps, as is sadly the case these days, to no Books at all.

Because this is the way we were all raised, the comic book market has long been associated with people who have not yet learned to read “real” books. For a long time, that was the only large scale market for comic books, and so they achieved their status as things adults didn’t read. I remember as a kid wondering why my local library had no comic books. They were expensive to buy, so I would have liked to have been able to get them from the library. Now I realize why they didn’t have them. The arbiters of taste knew that I was better off reading books with no pictures. Perhaps my intellectual development would have been stunted if I had been able to read more about Batman when I was a kid. (Watching him on a TV show was apparently OK as long as I didn’t ever read a Batman story.)

While the reputation of comic books remains static, the world of comic books has changed. Since 1986, it is hard to justify the argument that there is not a realm where comic books are exploring the possibility of becoming Great Books. That year saw a remarkable trio of books. Spiegelman’s Maus, Moore’s Watchmen, Miller’s, The Dark Knight Returns. All three are extraordinary, doing things that could not be done in any other medium. And all three are written for adults. Maus has made the furthest inroads into educational culture; it is, after all, a very compelling account of the Holocaust. Moore’s book made Time magazine’s list of the 100 best books (not comic books, books!) of the 20^th century. Miller’s was the genesis of the most successful of all superhero movie trilogies.

Since then, there has been a steady stream of comic books which move far beyond the antics of Superman and Spider-Man. Most of them are not very good. But, recall: most books without pictures and most pictures without books are also not very good. That isn’t the question. The question is whether a decent comic book is inherently worse than a decent novel with no pictures. The question is why so many people can’t imagine that a future Great Books list will include some books with pictures.

Learning to read is truly one of the most amazing things we learn to do. But, it is a tragedy that we associate learning to read as meaning learning to read when there is no art on the page.