A comparison between France and the United States can be extremely fruitful in terms of demonstrating the specificity of the legitimizing mechanisms of comics in the North American context, and can illustrate how the heteronomy of the comics field, clearly found in both cases, is stronger in Europe.
The new visibility that benefited comics in France in the 1960s originated from two complementary sources. First, in the wake of the arrival of American pop art in Europe, European intellectuals born in the 1920s and 1930s (such as Alain Resnais, Federico Fellini, Umberto Eco, and Edgar Morin) had a nostalgic taste for the comics that they read as children before the Second World War, a taste which was founded in an aesthetic disposition that was distanced from these American cultural products. Twenty years after the intelligentsia’s discovery of American hard-boiled novels, ten years after French film critics’ invention of the thematic/aesthetic category of film noir to designate the black-and-white Hollywood film depicting the contemporary urban universe,1 in 1967 the great humor and adventure comics of the Depression era and the 1940s were crowned with new prestige when the Musée des Arts Décoratifs honored them with an exhibition (anecdotally, comic books were excluded from this famous exhibition, which was narrowly focused on the “golden age” of the newspaper strip). In 1971, Hergé explained what American comics and cinema of the 1930s had given to him: “One of the essential qualities of the American comics, like the American cinema, seems to me to be its great clarity. In general, the Americans know how to tell a story, even if that story is twaddle. This is, I think, the important lesson that I took, at the time, from American comics and cinema.”2
Second, the news media’s recognition of the runaway success of the Astérix albums in the mid-1960s resulted in the assimilation of comics into the cultural practices of the French middle class. With Belgian production (whose crown jewel was Tintin) supervised by the Catholic Church since the late 1920s and, beginning in 1950, French production monitored by a Ministry of Justice review board established under the law of July 16, 1949, regulating publications destined for children, the creativity of Francophone comics authors was reined in by an imposed self-censorship that was, ironically, instrumental in laying the foundations of the “Franco-Belgian School.” This creative movement, whose implicit politics were those of the postwar Western European Christian democracy and its “clearly identifiable value system” geared toward a public no longer “addressed [by publishers] from an explicitly Catholic perspective,” epitomized an aesthetic defined by French cultural historian Pascal Ory:
The Belgian formal system synthesized this simplified realism, halfway between burlesque distortion, a current spawned by the tradition of caricature, whose French style was practically one of a kind until the 1930s, and the violent naturalism of the American graphic revolution. Thus fantasy, science fiction but also, in the comic vein, parody and irreverence were a priori excluded from the realm of comics. Through the clear line style (ligne claire) a universe of contained passions and regulated showdowns was depicted. The coherence of this graphic system/philosophy was proven a contrario by borderline works: Blake and Mortimer (verging on science-fiction) or Buck Danny (bordering on documentary realism) exemplified all the traits distinguishing them from the superficially similar series put together for Vaillant [the best-selling comic weekly published by the French Communist Party until the late 1960s] or featured in Donald [from 1947 to 1953 France’s leading weekly anthology comic containing reprints of high-profile American syndicated strips].3
In the beginning this stimulation by constraint was also found in modern French production embodied by the weekly Pilote under the editorial direction of René Goscinny.
This two-pronged process, which saw the intelligentsia and the middle class almost simultaneously elevate comics from the subordinate cultural position that they had long occupied (in France because of governmental authorities, in Belgium because of religious authorities), constituted the backdrop against which the creative effervescence took place in the second half of the 1960s. Aside from the Belgian school of Tintin and the French school of Pilote, there also existed, in a marginal position, anarchist inspired “adults only” publications like Hara-Kiri, which was to catalyze the new spirit of free expression in the years after May 1968. Even deeper in the margins of the legitimizing process were the periodicals based on American models, the récits complets4 and other petits formats5 favored by young and working-class readers. These last two formats failed to benefit from the general consecration of comics. In the French context their unsophisticated production values, similar to those of American four-color comic books, made them appear to be poor, vulgar relatives of the album, the format that allowed comics to become aligned commercially and culturally with the book market.
In the mid-1970s Luc Boltanski, a sociologist then working with Pierre Bourdieu, chose to examine comics as an example of “middlebrow art” (in a manner akin to photography, about which the pair had produced an insightful sociological study ten years earlier6). This study would allow him to demonstrate the pertinence of the theory of the market of symbolic goods outside of the context of the consecrated arts that interested Bourdieu.7 He analyzed the consecrating process of this form of expression since the 1960s, noting several specific social evolutions in the postwar period, importantly the general rise of education rates whose impact was felt on three levels:
• on the creators, most of whom came from the middle class, insufficiently prepared to share in the field of consecrated culture but finding in comics a space to take up the disposition of artists despite being self-taught or having studied in the least prestigious art schools (Arts Appliqués, night classes);
• on the public, for whom the attraction to comics grew, in part, from the democratization of education after the war, which had created a taste for reading more quickly than it had created a taste for classic works, and in another way, from a generational shift in which the parents of the postwar period were the first to have read comics themselves in their infancy and therefore regarded them with less suspicion than did previous generations;
• on the university system which, as a result of its enlargement in the 1950s in order to accommodate the larger postwar generations, needed to augment its teaching population and enlarge the areas of acceptable research to include more contemporary subjects (such as detective fiction, science fiction, and comics) in affinity with the cultural dispositions of the growing generation of new student-researchers, themselves the product of popular milieus (not initially equipped with the cultural capital which would have provided them with a long-standing familiarity with “the classics”) and responding also to the requirements of a larger university public that was less attracted toward the consecrated segments of traditional university curricula.
These factors, directly stemming from the democratization of education, opened the door for a process of respectabilization, of legitimization by multiplication and the conjunction of consecrating opportunities, in the tradition of the legitimate arts, including internal (fanzines) and external (the media, universities) critiques, collective celebrations (festivals), rites of distinction (prizes), and the development of hierarchies opposing academicism (the Franco-Belgian school of Tintin and Spirou) and the avant-garde (the young generation of Pilote contributors who would successively launch Écho des Savanes in 1972, and Métal hurlant and Fluide glacial in 1975). In the end, according to Boltanski, the signs and rituals of cultural consecration did not remove the “dominated” status of comics artists, not even for the “rebels” of the younger generation: “Among the majority of artists, the adoption of manners characterizing the relationship between the ‘artist’ and the work operate in a hesitant fashion, ashamed and anxious, as if the habitus resists the solicitations of the field and the temptation to adopt the representation of their work that the commentators arriving from the intellectual field have built around them” (54).
Boltanski’s analysis was carried out within the strict framework of the sociology of domination, whose intellectual zenith coincided with the publication, in 1979, of Bourdieu’s masterpiece, Distinction.8 Twenty years later, Éric Maigret, far less attached to Bourdieusian orthodoxy than was Boltanski in the 1970s, resumed the investigation of his predecessor in order to examine which evolutions the field had undergone and in what terms it was possible to report on the legitimation of comics in France at the end of the twentieth century.9 Here, where Boltanski, describing the constitution of the field, limited himself by orienting his study toward a homology with the literary field (which is, for Bourdieusians, the model of all artistic fields), Maigret was concerned to demonstrate that, despite the undeniable reality of the mechanisms of legitimation that appeared in the 1960s and which have always been present since, comics are still stigmatized because of their allegedly infantile and infantilizing character, from which the concept of “incomplete recognition” (reconnaissance en demi-teinte) is used to qualify the type of social legitimacy that comics enjoy. While Boltanski centered his comments largely (but not exclusively) on the social status of comics artists, Maigret surveyed other important actors within the field—readers, publishers, critics, politicians—and demonstrated that legitimation by way of academic discourse often proves to be a double-edged sword which simultaneously ennobles the object of study by the mere fact of addressing it, yet contributes to reinforcing the prejudices of legitimate culture against it (128–131). Boltanski’s article illustrated this tendency well. Despite the absence of condescension demonstrated by the author himself relative to his object of study, in the end he nonetheless arrived at a dominant position with respect to the readers, authors, and academic commentators, a position, according to him, similar to the specific tensions located within the constitution of the field of comics itself.
With two decades’ hindsight, Maigret noted, first of all, that the countercultural potential that seemed to be contained in the comics form in the 1960s and 1970s (to which Boltanski dedicated the final quarter of his study) had given way to an “ambiguous additive role in the superior cultural practices” burdened by the reappraisal of “classic” culture (118). The gradual entry of comics into the “literary” universe followed the attainment of respectability but also led to a banalization of the form and a neutralization of its oppositional potential. In this process it lost a considerable part of its attraction for young people, especially the lower-middle class—once they were captured by video games, reading Tintin or Astérix became, with the generational change, an adult pastime, almost as off-putting as required school readings! A supplementary sign of this evolution is that certain authors who entered the market after the long-term failure of the counter-cultural project have adopted the conservative identity of popular storytellers, while the most consecrated of the preceding generation (Moebius, Philippe Druillet, and Enki Bilal, for example) have made frequent movements between comics and “inferior compartments of the more legitimated fields” (film, sculpture, graphic arts).10 But, contrary to the naive idea often encountered in the media, the use of comics artists in non-comics undertakings does not assure the promotion of the form, “instead it signifies the secondment of these authors from that universe” (123). In spite of everything, there remains a “literary resistance” to comics which will not be dispelled by occasional incursions by recognized authors onto talk shows or by the (relative) thunderbolt that resulted from the selection, by the magazine Lire, of Enki Bilal’s Frond équateur (Dargaud, 1992) as the “best book of 1992.” These “symbolic takeovers” (coups de force symboliques), to borrow an expression dear to Pierre Bourdieu, epitomize processes of superficial legitimation and tokenism. For all intents and purposes they are analogous to the French government’s belated recognition of “comic art” following the election of socialist president François Mitterrand in 1981. Beyond symbolic gestures like the creation of the Centre National de la Bande Dessinée et de l’Image in Angoulême, this official acknowledgment did not lead to the enshrining of comic art within national cultural policy—unlike the French film industry, which has enjoyed governmental economic support since the late 1940s. As with rap music and graffiti art, it led instead to the instrumentalization of comics, as a component of a hazily defined “youth culture” in which the medium tends to dissolve and lose its hard-won “authenticity.”
Maigret emphasizes that artistic consecration is constantly subjected to the reappearance of factors that recall the infantile and commercial characteristics of the form, that is, the heteronomy of the field, at the expense of its autonomy, including:
• the “youth” of comics (which is, in fact, the youth of its legitimating discourse, the expressive form itself having appeared in the first half of the nineteenth century, more than sixty years before cinema);
• the (actual) youth of its public;
• the hybridity of its techniques which has made the emergence of legitimate critiques difficult (contrary to what took place at the beginning of the twentieth-century in less than thirty years for cinema);
• the frequent confusion, in the public and in the media, that perceives comics as a “genre” (similar to science fiction, fantasy, crime) and not as a form of expression, due to the preponderance of young people among the readers;
• the incapability of benefiting, more than superficially, from the legitimacy of the plastic arts or literary creation;
• the subordinate, that is, commercial, relationship to other media that can be seen in the adoption in comics of characters originating in television or video games, but also the whitewashing of comics concepts from the moment that they are adapted (to television, to film, to video games) and “sell out” by becoming lucrative.
If the discourse on the social noxiousness of comics has witnessed a considerable decline (corresponding to the permanent regression of the political role of the surveillance commission instituted by the law of July 16, 1949), it nonetheless remains a tool favored by the advocates of classical culture. For example, in an essay published at the end of the 1980s, a philosopher skilled in the rhetoric of cultural extremism defined “youth culture” in terms of rigid antitheses including “the casualness of jeans vs. dress codes, comics vs. literature, rock music vs. verbal expression” and offered his opinion of the harmful effects of cultural relativism in his opinion: “If it carries the signature of a great designer, a pair of boots is worth as much as Shakespeare’s works. And so on: a comic book that combines a thrilling intrigue with beautiful images is worth as much as a novel by Nabokov.”11 As a result of the persistence of these clichés, the legitimacy of comics as a “scientific” object of study remains debatable within the academy. In the final analysis, even if cultural status of comics can be shown to have undergone an elevation in the second half of the twentieth century, a detailed examination of the cultural field still demonstrates that comics are “engaged in a complex process of recognition and denial, constantly oscillating between artistic and artisanal acceptations” (124). In sum, it “may appear as an art, but it is a subordinate one” (125).
Although describing the French case, the analyses provided by Boltanski and Maigret highlight several specific structural problems pertaining to the cultural status of comics in Western societies. The nuanced image painted by these two texts strongly contrasts with the image that American artists and critics in the comics field have of European comics in general and French comics in particular, as is systematically demonstrated in the reports made by North Americans of the Festival International de la Bande Dessinée in Angoulême. The Old World is, from the point of view of American comics readers, a paradise where the form is recognized as an art, where its artists are treated with respect, or exist at an elevated level. During a round table organized at a convention in Dallas in 1987, Harvey Kurtzman did not hesitate to tell a public largely unfamiliar with foreign comics:
It’s almost as if the talent in Europe is of a higher caliber…. The adult public respects European comics—comics get a respect in Europe that we in the US don’t accord to them…. In France, more high-level talent has emerged than here…. When I look at the French cartoons, when I look at something by Moebius or Goossens, I’ll say, “How did he do it? How could he possibly make this drawing? How could a human being, a living human being, possibly draw like this?” Then I get that magical feeling that I’m looking at art.12
Even if the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, this perception of the “high” status of European comics is the product of fundamental differences between the social and cultural values attached to comics on each side of the Atlantic. However incomplete the recognition of the form may be in France, it is part of a social and cultural legitimating process that is much more advanced than it is in the United States and Canada. If comics are condemned to remain a medium “still in the process of legitimation,”13 they have nonetheless traveled further down the road in France than they have in North America.
Since the late nineteenth century, American comics have shared a close relationship with the daily press that considerably delayed their connection to the world of the book. While Franco-Belgian comics developed over the course of the twentieth century in the framework of a long transition from the “children’s press” (a convenient, if imprecise, term that designates a tremendous range of texts) to the “album,” which ultimately supplanted its precursor in the decades that followed the end of the Second World War, comics in the United States followed a very different trajectory. Taking root in the Sunday pages of newspapers at the beginning of the 1890s, they became involved with the daily press at the turn of the century. The mid-1930s saw the birth of illustrated periodicals, comic books, which underwent a development that was autonomous and largely independent of the comic strip. Each of these two forms followed a parallel development that was only marginally inflected by the occasional contact between the two. Until recent times (the last two decades of the twentieth century) the development of comics had two speeds, with legitimation more frequently applied to newspaper comic strips than to comic books.
Although a large number of examples in the French press can be cited, the daily delivery of comics never caught on in a significant fashion in France, particularly in contrast to the United States where daily newspapers that do not offer comics to their readers are a tiny minority. This North American specificity (which is not really a particularity relative to the way that comic strips have developed around the world, as the “album” of the Franco-Belgian type has, for a long time, been more an exception than the rule) has, since the beginning, had a contradictory effect on the cultural status of the form. On the one hand, comics have been perceived as a component of the daily press rather than an autonomous object existing beyond the pages of the newspapers that publish them. On the other hand, comic strips benefited from the social legitimacy of the daily paper, the family media par excellence, introduced into the home by parents, subdivided into sections that allow adults the ability to give children only certain contents, and burnished by the democratic values of the First Amendment that protects free expression. Recall that the voices raised against the stigmatizing and harmful effects of the funnies before the First World War found only the faintest of echoes.14 Comics have therefore initially benefited from a social rather than a cultural recognition, which was related to the image of their authors. The great artists of the beginning of the twentieth century were shaped by editorial cartooning and attempted to position themselves close to the pole of journalism than to the profession of illustration. In this respect, the exception that proves the rule is Winsor McCay, the creator of Little Nemo in Slumberland. Before the First World War, he was simultaneously a newspaper cartoonist, a vaudeville performer, and a creator of animated cartoons. McCay’s professional versatility was resented by his boss, William R. Hearst, who thought that his overly busy employee was not earning his keep.15
The cultural recognition of comic strips was very slow if one takes the interest expressed by actors outside the field of comics as a principal criteria. Still, it is necessary to consider the word “interest” in this context. The enthusiasm that, according to Gertrude Stein, Picasso had for the Sunday pages of American newspapers, or the gesture made by the artist Stuart Davis, who reproduced a Tad Dorgan drawing in his painting Lucky Strike (1924), does not indicate a cultural recognition of comics so much as it signals the posture of modernist artists who were fascinated by the mass culture of the early twentieth century. In an analogous manner, after the Second World War, pop art appropriated not the singular expressivity of comics but those aspects that signified its standardization (like the banalities of war comics and of sentimental romance).16
The first example of interest in comics shown by an actor from the field of art came in 1924, the year in which Gilbert Seldes wrote about comics in his essay collection The 7 Lively Arts:
Of all the lively arts the Comic Strip is the most despised, and with the exception of the movies it is the most popular. Some twenty million people follow with interest, curiosity, and amusement the daily fortunes of five or ten heroes of the comic strip, and that they do this is considered by all those who have any pretentions to taste and culture as a symptom of crass vulgarity, of dullness, and, for all I know, of defeated and inhibited lives. I need hardly add that those who feel so about the comic strip only infrequently regard the object of their distaste.
… [T]he comic strip is an exceptionally supple medium, giving play to a variety of talents, to the use of many methods, and it adapts itself to almost any theme. The enormous circulation it achieves imposes certain limitations: it cannot be too local, since it is syndicated throughout the country; it must avoid political and social questions because the same strip appears in papers of divergent editorial opinions; there is no room in it for acute racial caricature, although no group is immune from its mockery. These and other restrictions have gradually made of the comic strip a changing picture of the average American life—and by compensation it provides us with the freest American fantasy.17
Taking a position that is the direct opposite of the cultural elitism professed in Civilization in the United States (1922), a book in which Harold E. Stearns had criticized the grotesqueries and vulgarities of Bringing Up Father,18 Seldes took it upon himself to briefly trace the appearance of comics in the daily press and inventoried the most notable series and their qualities, providing an entire chapter for George Herriman’s Krazy Kat:
It happens that in America irony and fantasy are practiced in the major arts by only one or two men, producing high-class trash; and Mr. Herriman, working in a despised medium, without an atom of pretentiousness, is day after day producing something essentially fine. It is the result of a naïve sensibility rather like that of the douanier Rousseau; it does not lack intelligence, because it is a thought-out, constructed piece of work. In the second order of the world’s art it is superbly first rate—and a delight.19
The reference to Douanier Rousseau was not gratuitous. For Seldes, Herriman’s comics constituted a success among the “second order” of arts, which occupied the same inferior position with respect to other forms of artistic expression that naive art held in the field of painting, that of a genre which, for the aesthete, draws its legitimacy from the proximity to “art brut” where the absence of “pretension” secures its authenticity without obscuring the know-how that demonstrates the stages of “reflection” and “construction” in a work.20 Seldes’s emphasis on Krazy Kat was not the result of a random choice: Herriman’s strip was in no way a typical representative of the daily comics. Situated in the minimalist desert of Coconino, the adventures enacted by the feminized Krazy Kat, Ignatz the mouse, and the canine police officer, Offissa Pupp, gathered characteristics that recalled surrealism more than it did other comic strips. A “cultural democrat” like Seldes brought to Herriman an interest that was inversely proportional to the popular success that the strip never enjoyed.21 Krazy Kat owed its longevity to William R. Hearst who, in his admiration, continued the publication of this fundamentally anticommercial product until the death of its creator.
No matter what Seldes affirmed in refuting the received idea of the a priori vulgarity of comics, his panegyric about Krazy Kat did not promote the medium as a whole. At the time, this particular strip occupied the place of restricted production in the field almost completely by itself. To be convinced, if that is even necessary, it is sufficient to recall that Krazy Kat was later the first comic strip to benefit from the celebratory mechanism of a posthumous anthology preceded by a laudatory introductory text. In 1946, two years after Herriman’s death, a collection of strips soberly titled George Herriman’s Krazy Kat appeared with an introduction by the celebrated avant-gardist poet e. e. cummings, a former fellow student of Seldes’s at Harvard.22
Seldes and Cummings contributed much more to the consecration of this individual work than they did to the medium. Despite (or perhaps because of) his own experience as an artist and painter, the poet, caught up in a dense celebratory text that was akin to his poetry, what he called a “meteoric burlesk melodrama,” never mentions the form used by Herriman. In this era, praise for comics could only apply through analogy to the consecrated arts. Thus, in 1950 a Newsweek journalist wrote of Milton Caniff that he was the “Alexandre Dumas from Ohio.”23 The same phenomenon occurred in 1953 with the publication of The World of Li’l Abner, released with an introduction by John Steinbeck and a foreword by Charles Chaplin.24 The writer praised the cartoonist Al Capp for his facilities with linguistic invention, while the filmmaker admired his satiric imagination. Each offered a fragment of the artistic credibility held by their respective domains to Capp, but neither spoke of comics. The incomprehension of European interviewers amused Steinbeck when he would tell them that, in his opinion, the author of Li’l Abner was the greatest contemporary American writer. Paradoxically, the most intense praise of Capp did not come from these artists but from a Time magazine article extract reproduced on the flyleaf of the paperback edition:
Capp fills a niche in comics comparable to Gershwin’s in jazz, or D. W. Griffith’s in the movies…. Some of Capp’s admirers go even further, and vow that he has not only created a genuine 20th-Century folk tale, but told it through a new kind of writing—a mixture of prose and hieroglyphics which simultaneously stings the mind of the intellectual and reduces the simple subway rider to coarse guffaws. The faithful number him among the great men of U.S. art & letters.
This opinion reduces the function of comics as a democratic art capable of transcending social differences to epigraph form. It is inscribed in a strong continuity with the perspective articulated by Seldes thirty years earlier, at best, perpetuating a perception of comics—in fact, of certain comics—as a middlebrow art whose legitimation is always in progress, chronologically following the more advanced forms of cinema and jazz. This vision has remained durable until this time, at least insofar as it concerns the comic strip. Since the 1950s the number of book collections featuring prepublished comic strips has multiplied in the wake of the enormous popularity encountered first by Walt Kelly’s Pogo and then by Charles Schulz’s Peanuts. Since Cummings and Steinbeck, it has not been necessary to call upon consecrated authors to make apologies on behalf of comic strip collections, perhaps simply because the evolution of mass culture toward electronic images has conferred respectability on the images that still remain in the world of the written word, like comic strips.
Another missed appointment was that with modern art.25 In the first half of the 1960s, the painter Roy Lichtenstein produced dozens of works that “copied,” in an enlarged form and with meticulously calculated modifications, panels extracted from romance and war comics published by DC, including Girls’ Romances, Secret Hearts, and All-American Men of War. Preferring the drawings of Tony Abruzzo, Bernard Sachs, Russ Heath, and Irv Novick (who had been his superior in the army),26 he became attached to depicting anonymous characters, the impersonal and interchangeable clichés and stereotypes used in comic book imagery. Although Lichtenstein’s best-known works are comic book panels, one should not forget that he also drew upon advertising images (Girl With Ball, 1961) and images of celebrities (George Washington, 1962)—the American equivalent of religious iconography. All of his subjects were reassessed by the artist, to provide no sense other than that of the cliché proclaimed in a vocal manner, as representations of cheap reproductions inserted into a cultural movement modeled on mass printing. The central theme explored by Lichtenstein in all of his work, and of which comic books formed the best illustration, was the industrialization of emotion. The distressed young women of Eddie Diptych (1962), Drowning Girl (1963), or I Know How You Must Feel, Brad (1963) perfectly incarnate this tension. Frozen, immobilized, they recall the representational mode not only through their affective situation (thwarted passion as a storytelling commonplace), but also through the necessarily stereotyped representations that have been produced. An analogous, but more disturbing, distance separates the war scenes, like Takka Takka (1962) or Whaam (1963), from what they depict. Indeed, it is death that is the ultimate consequence of these clichés and their industrial representation completely obscures that fact.27
Contrary to the impression provided by printed reproductions of his paintings, Lichtenstein manually created all of the mechanical printing effects of the comic book frames. It was his skill in reproducing the texture, and even the weft of the printed page, that contributed to his fame, and which later became his “shtick,” imitated in thousands of pastiches. It took him several years to come up with the stencil technique that would allow him to reproduce the vast colored surfaces composed of Ben Day dots. At the time of their creation, the artist encountered resistance by presenting as art objects artifacts that were simultaneously art and not art. They were art insofar as they were large-sized works; they were not art because their subjects were antithetical to the values of art, in the institutional acceptance of these two terms. Even as he painted works representing conventional comic book panels that testified to an intentional and ambiguous organization and to a deliberate resistance to the definitions and limitations of art in the period, this strategy did nothing to contribute to the cultural recognition of comic books themselves.28
In M. Night Shyamalan’s film Unbreakable (2000), Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), a character tortured by the fact that his skeleton is as fragile as glass, runs a strange art gallery that sells nothing but pages of original art from superhero comic books. This market actually does exist (even if its merchants little resemble the character from the film) and it constitutes an important contact point between mass cultural production and artistic creation. Indeed, it privileges a type of object that was originally a unique creation and basis for mass (re)production, and is now seen as the tangible manifestation of individual expression. In the technical and economic process that leads to the sale of comic books, the original page is the only artifact, the only step, that maintains a sense of “aura” in Walter Benjamin’s sense of the term.29 If it is the drawings that are the first element of the cultural capital of comic books, the art nonetheless undergoes a denaturation in mass reproduction. For more than a half century, until the widespread adoption of offset printing in the 1990s, printing limited the sharpness of the artist’s line, often flattening it, while the garish colors would frequently drift in relation to the black lines. Comic book images also incarnated a paradox: their definition was coarse in the extreme while their goal was to appear finished. While the printing quality of comic books has greatly improved over time, the mechanical processes of inexpensive mass reproduction remain largely unreliable: they ape the creative and expressive process without attaining its level. Mass-produced and serialized, the comic book lacks any aura for the external observer who does not share the logic of the pamphlet as a part of a larger collection.
This is why the original comics art page is the “negative” of the printed comic book page. The creative process shines through in all of its layers and temporal textures. Perfectly clear, the ink lines on a page are often accompanied by the traces of blue pencil, and hesitations betray retouches or editing, illustrating the stages in the progression that led to the finished page. However, all this is, by definition, absent. The original page is a comic book page that has not been created by the mechanical processes that obliterate the aura of the original drawing while creating the reproduction. Paradoxically, it is the printed page, the result of infinite mechanical reproducibility that, for readers, constitutes the true finished page. Only the original page contains the traces of the creator’s hand that remind us, even in the medium most typical of the culture industry, that the individual intervenes in advance of the machine. It might seem paradoxical that the commercialized object could be an imperfect double of a creation whose public takes little notice of this fact. However, fetishization applies to the object much more than to its contents (if not, the market for old comic books would not have such a large apparatus for assessing their value). More than sketches and commissioned drawings produced in the bustle of conventions, original pages contain a genuine aesthetic potential. It is necessary to take care not to confuse or to identify this with the logic of Roy Lichtenstein, which was used to reproduce a dehumanized representation. Original pages can bring out everything that was anterior to that. They allow, in addition to a true evaluation of the work of artists, an aesthetic pleasure that is often absent from the consumption of the pages of a comic book itself.
The market for original comic book pages is relatively old. It developed without much noise in the wake of the market for science fiction book and magazine illustrations, itself a marginal segment of the activities at science fiction conventions.30 At first, giving someone a cover or an original illustration was a form of public relations for a publisher or artist, or a friendly gesture, while selling them constituted a less than common financial practice. In the 1940s, sales at auction generated pathetic sums because the demand was so limited. When the first comic book conventions were organized in the 1960s, in the wake of science fiction conventions, original art was one of the unusual objects that could be found there. But in this era, which had few comic book collectors, connoisseurs of original drawings were rare.
The market remained very marginal until the 1970s. In this decade, it took on greater importance as a result of several isolated initiatives. The first was the launch, by Russ Cochran in 1973, of Graphic Gallery, a periodic catalog offering auctions of original pages. The second was the series of auctions organized by Collector’s Book Store in Hollywood, starting in 1977. The third, and the most important because it attracted a large number of important collectors of comic books to the world of original art, was the announcement, made by William Gaines in 1979, of the sale (under the direction of Cochran) of all of the published pages that had been printed in EC comics a quarter century earlier.31 The sales supervised by Cochran took on an added importance insofar as they attracted the attention of actors in the art market. Here these individuals discovered a field that was interesting for two reasons: on the one hand, the unique character of original pages helped assimilate them into the art world and made them interesting to collectors of contemporary art; on the other hand, even the elevated prices that pages attained were infinitely more affordable than those of the art market, which made them attractive merchandise in a recessionary period.32 This is the reason that the established New York auction houses turned their attention to this new market. Sotheby’s and Christie’s ran, each year beginning in 1991, at least annual one sale of original art, old comics, and animation cels,33 producing deluxe catalogs which themselves ultimately became collector’s items. Since the second half of the 1990s, the market has been “democratized” as a result of online auction sites like eBay. These have provided a growing number of buyers an unprecedented access to pages, and a rapid rise in the prices for the most coveted pieces.
The market for original art is more than a mere fad. It participates in the slow process of cultural legitimation of comics and comic books in North America, by conferring upon the products of this form an aesthetic and historical dimension. This phenomenon appeared as a just reward. Until the beginning of the 1960s, comic book artists did not ask to have their original art returned and these works became the property of the publishers. Immediately following the fabrication of the printing plates, most pages were destroyed, thrown into the garbage, or even used to clean the floors. However, certain publishers kept them in large quantities in order to use them as gifts, or to resell them. It is because this last practice became generalized over time that, during the 1960s, a growing number of creators demanded the right to regain their work, to profit themselves from the additional revenue stream that had been previously reserved for publishers. This demand directly contributed to the increase in the market for original pages, since more and more artists began to sell their work at conventions.
In returning to the art market, original pages benefited from the legitimation of objects that could be found exhibited in the home or in museums. The uniquely personal step in a creative process otherwise entirely standardized, the original page—framed, on sale, or auctioned—reintroduced the concept of an author to North American comics, a role that had been obscured for a long time by the comic book industry. Indeed, even if the underground movement and the magazines that descended from it placed a new emphasis on the creator, they were unable to overcome the essential cheapness of the medium (newsprint) and its mode of reproduction. As for high-end collections, offset printed on archival paper, their “too good” reproduction has often, paradoxically, drawn attention to the vacuousness of the stories, drawings, and logics that underpin them. Let us not be mistaken, however: a large number of original pages carry little more interest than the printed pages to which they gave birth. But there are many others that in their plenitude allow the artisan’s, if not the artist’s, gestures to shine through where the printed page allowed only a glimpse. These are the ones that materialize the long work of historiographical construction.
While it was necessary to wait practically until the 1970s for the first books about comic books to be published, comic strips received their first praise much earlier, during the 1940s, in forms that demonstrated the multiple cultural memberships of the form and its gradual differentiation from the world of the editorial cartoon. In this way it is possible to isolate two steps. Art critics concerned with the “consecration” of cartoons, principally humorous ones, assisted the first period. In A History of American Graphic Humor, 1865–1938, art historian William Murrell began a project retracing the history of humorous drawings since Independence. In 1943, Cartoon Cavalcade purported to be the first history of cartoons since the nineteenth century under the three headings of news drawings, humorous drawings, and comic strips. Edited by Thomas Craven, the outspoken critic associated with the antimodernist “American Scene” art movement, known for his hostile opinions about the avant-garde but in favor of an “American” art accessible to all, this work was more interested in the accumulation of reproductions illustrating his point of view than in research on comic strip artists and their works, which were not given equal attention relative to news and humor drawings.34
At the same time, comics were assisted in a logic of recognition (it was too early to speak of “legitimation”) originating from the journalistic field. Published in 1942, Classic Comics and Their Creators was the work of journalist Martin Sheridan, whose book combined short biographies and interviews with the important newspaper cartoonists.35 The historical project pertaining to comics did not begin until 1947 with The Comics, the first book exclusively dedicated to the history of comic strips from the Yellow Kid onward.36 This study, which with its qualities and its (numerous) faults provides the origin of all subsequent historiography, was written by Coulton Waugh, the writer-artist responsible for Dickie Dare, a strip on which he succeeded Milton Caniff in 1934. The fruit of a personal knowledge of the milieu of artists and of research undertaken at the municipal library in New York, where he examined hundreds of old newspapers, Waugh’s study was the first to take on the double project of historical and aesthetic analysis in isolating the comic strip from the neighboring forms from which it originated, thereby constituting it as an autonomous mode of expression. Waugh’s thinking demonstrated that in the middle of the twentieth century, comic strips already functioned as a field, with its own history, “classics” of the form, and specific aesthetic criteria giving rise to the numerous illustrations reproduced in the work and to the author’s commentaries on the style of each artist.
In a bizarre manner, Waugh also created, from all the pieces of American comics “history,” the suggestion that the form originated at the end of the nineteenth century with Richard F. Outcault and the Yellow Kid. This had two principal consequences. First, he based the legitimation of comics on the symbiosis of the daily newspaper, to the exclusion of other media such as the comic book, relegating the latter to the last chapter of his book and treating it with an ambiguous point of view mixing open contempt and condescending sympathy. In that, he nonetheless offered a greater perspective than did Thomas Craven who, in Comics Cavalcade, dedicated only three paragraphs to comic books, focusing on their harmful effect on children!37 Second, Waugh oriented a current in the historiography that, lasting a quarter century, largely obscured the foreign origins of American comics, born as they were with the pirated translations of Töpffer in the Jacksonian period, and overlooked the examples of the form that existed long before Outcault.38 Despite Waugh’s narrowness, his definition of comics, aimed at circumscribing comics as a twentieth-century American phenomenon, constituted an avant-gardist vision of comics as an aesthetic form, but it was difficult to convince the public of this at a time when anguished articles on the harmful effects of mass culture on youth regularly appeared.
The evidence indicates that America at the end of the 1940s was not ready to accept a limited definition of comics. In the context of the first campaign against comics (which would be concluded with the publication, in the 1950s, of a Senate report exonerating comics of the flaws ascribed to them by their detractors), the Library of New York State in Albany organized, in the summer of 1949, an exhibition titled “Twenty Thousand Years of Comics.” Presenting twelve hundred objects ranging from prehistoric sculptures to contemporary comic books, and passing through wood engraving, caricature, children’s literature from the colonial period, and post–Civil War dime novels, “comics” were conceived of as a potpourri of pictorial narration, illustrated stories, popular literature and, almost as an accessory, comics! The avowed goal of the exposition was, by illustrating the long history of the phenomenon, to defuse the hysteria that had crystallized around the mode of expression. The insertion of comics at one end of a long cultural and aesthetic continuity allowed it to gain the respectability that it lost in specificity. Thus, on the day of the opening, the Republican lieutenant-governor of the state of New York, the venerable Joe R. Hanley, aged seventy-three years, could declare to the New York Times that he had never seen the pernicious influence of comics, and that as a child he had hidden in the haystacks to read the adventures of Nick Carter.39 The importance of Waugh found its confirmation in the fact that the histories of comics written after his all adopted the Yellow Kid as their point of origin, generally preceded by superficial pages on the historical and aesthetic antecedents: Lascaux, hieroglyphics, the Bayeux Tapestry, and many other artifacts.40
As restrictive as it was, Waugh’s perspective had the merit of definitively differentiating comics (the comic strip) from press illustration (cartoon), sacrificing historical exactitude for the identity-shaping discourse destined for actors in the field. Moreover, the postwar period witnessed a semantic displacement in the terms used to describe comics. There are two revealing examples of the bridge in the 1960s. First, in 1959, the subtitle of Stephen Becker’s book Comic Art in America was “A Social History of the Funnies, the Political Cartoons, Magazine Humor, Sporting Cartoons, and Animated Cartoons,”41 which illustrated the shift from “cartoon” to “comic” to designate newspaper drawings in their entirety, that is, a corpus similar to what Craven presented in Cartoon Cavalcade. Second, the title of Becker’s book testifies to the resurgence of the term “funnies,” already dated in this period, to designate comics in the strict sense, as could be seen four years later in the work of David M. White and Roger Abel in their collection of journalistic and academic essays dedicated to the topic of comic strips, The Funnies: An American Idiom.42
The recession of the term “cartoon” to the benefit of the term “comic” can perhaps be explained as a cultural optical illusion. The considerable place occupied in the nineteenth-century press by illustrations of all types (humor and news) had undergone, since the First World War, a permanent decline because of the rise of photography. At the same time, drawings, otherwise present on several pages of the newspapers, were slowly relegated to the newly specialized daily comics pages and Sunday color supplements, and thus became the comics while news and humorous drawings that were not strips became increasingly less common in the papers. The comics, the drawings most easily identifiable and best identified with the press, passed on by metonymy the name designating the part of the newspaper where the generic form of expression first appeared, namely press illustration. In this way it reproduced, three centuries later, the mechanism which, in the seventeenth century, saw the cartone give its name (cartoon) to the preparatory sketches that precede the painting, designating the image drawn beneath. Out of necessity, speaking specifically of comics at the start of the 1960s, the term “funnies,” a word lacking ambiguity but whose outmoded tone implicitly confers the added value of age (in the way that patina generates authenticity for an old building), was a non-negligible factor in the process of artistic and cultural legitimation. A last point that merits attention is the reappearance of an older phrase to designate a mode of expression inscribed in the cultural context of the cold war, providing a national specificity for the form (called “a national idiom” in the title of White and Abel’s book). The cultural nationalism of the period prolonged the conception of comics as a democratic art, an idea that had been constantly reformulated since the first writings of Gilbert Seldes in the 1920s.
If it is reasonable to maintain that the newspaper comic strip benefited from a more positive image over the course of the two decades following the war, notably thanks to the popularity of strips like Pogo and Peanuts, quickly generated numerous paperback collected editions, a new phase debuted in the collective consideration of the form over the course of the 1960s in two parallel but related phenomena: the opening up of European comics and the growing scholarly interest in comics. From 1966 to 1972, Dorothy McGreal published The World of Comic Art, a magazine primarily destined for school and university libraries that touched on all aspects of the field, from comic strips to comic books, from the old to the recent, from American to foreign productions.43 At the end of the 1960s, works acknowledging the richness of foreign comics constituted a radical innovation within a field that had only known national productions.44 Despite the preponderance that they give to American comics, books from Britain (The Penguin Book of Comics, 1967), France (A History of the Comic Strip, 1968), and Germany (Comics: Anatomy of a Mass Medium, 1972) imported a less American-centric view of comics to the United States. While leaving a considerable place for American comics, these books presented European production at least to the restricted public that was interested in the form itself.45 This enlarged perspective was touched upon in the exposition “75 Years of the Comics,” organized in New York in 1971, which retraced the history of comics back to 1896, the departure point established by Coulton Waugh, but also including French, British, and Italian comics. In 1975 the World Encyclopedia of Comics appeared. Setting aside its numerous errors and omissions, this monumental work offered a “global” survey of comics (in fact, the majority of the comics treated were North American or European46). These two works were produced by Maurice Horn, a Franco-American journalist who had participated in the organization of the exhibition “Bande dessinée et figuration narrative” in Paris in 1967.
If the recognition of foreign production had a limited impact on the legitimation of comics in the United States, the emergence in American universities of a new area of study termed “popular culture” had a more profound effect. Directly resulting from the postwar debates around elite and mass culture, the movement for the study of mass culture grew rapidly in the 1950s under the impetus of researchers like Carl Bode and Russel B. Nye, and was definitively installed in the academy with the creation of the Journal of Popular Culture in 1967 at Bowling Green State University (Ohio) and of the Popular Culture Association, which was created in 1971 at the initiative of Ray Browne (Bowling Green State University) and Russel Nye (Michigan State University).47 Comics were one of the objects of study that directly benefited.
The first doctoral thesis on comics, titled “Culture and the Comic Strips,” was submitted by Sol M. Davidson to New York University in 1958, but was not published in any other form.48 Among academics, it has been sociologists who have most frequently written on comics. Marshall McLuhan wrote several very pertinent pages about well-known comic strips in The Mechanical Bride in 1951, and an entire chapter on the magazine Mad in Understanding Media (1964). David Riesman evoked them in their role as objects of consumption destined for children in The Lonely Crowd (1953). Reuel Denney dedicated a chapter to them in The Astonished Muse (1957).49 But these authors only invoked comics as illustrations of the larger problematics that they were studying. A turning point came in 1970 with the chapter that Russel B. Nye devoted to the history of the form in The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America, a work that proposed to establish academic legitimation of the popular arts for themselves, in the manner of Seldes a half century before.50 The era was favorable for this project for three reasons: 1) the transformations that had affected the university sector since the war: because of the rising number of students that were produced by the intersection of the baby boom and the legacy of the G.I. Bill of 1944, there was a growth of university faculty and a parallel enlargement of research fields embraced by universities; 2) the Batman television series encountered a considerable success, and this conferred a new visibility upon comic books; 3) a countercultural spirit seized American youth in the period and ushered in the underground comics movement, which very quickly established a visibility quite different from that of the traditional comics.
Alas, even if comics found themselves admitted onto campus, they did not give rise to remarkable scholarly works. The chapter on comics from The Unembarrassed Muse, for example, betrayed the great distance that separated the author from his object of study, insofar as it was filled with errors and inexactitudes, despite an enormous amount of time spent examining primary sources undertaken on a collection of six thousand comics (which became the basis of the Comic Art Collection at Michigan State University in East Lansing, today the most important academic archive in the world). These failings illustrate the problem inherent in the quick construction of an academic field that is as diverse, multifaceted, and as largely unexplored as was “popular culture.” Resulting less from a shift in research paradigms than from the evolution of the American academy, which needed to increase its number of fields of specialization in order to welcome the growing population of students/researchers necessary for the development of mass education, it gave rise to intellectual productions that were of a generally uneven quality. The study of comics quickly became a niche that swallowed up researchers who were not inspired to go elsewhere, such as Arthur Asa Berger, professor of popular culture at San Francisco State College and author of two books that developed an academic approach to comics: Li’l Abner: A Study in American Satire (1970), a version of his doctoral thesis, and The Comics-Stripped American (1973), a collection of wide-ranging essays that demonstrated the very marginal position of comics within the academic field, incapable as they were of mobilizing the interest of rigorous scholars.51 In this respect, the publication in 1977 of The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics, a superb anthology with a limited critical apparatus, did less to translate an intellectual legitimacy conferred by the prestigious name of the Washington-based institute to comic strips, than to situate the acceptance of comics within the cultural heritage of the United States. It also illustrates the vitality of works undertaken by journalists (and enlightened fans) like Bill Blackbeard and Ron Goulart (The Adventurous Decade: Comic Strips in the Thirties, 1975), and also of individuals in the midst of the comics field like artist Jerry Robinson (The Comics: An Illustrated History of Comic Strip Art, 1972). The place occupied by the form illustrated one of the characteristics of American “cultural democracy,” where a cultural object can derive legitimacy from its simple participation in the construction of a collective national identity (as an incontrovertible element of the American way of life) without necessarily sharing the added value that is accorded to an elevated position in the cultural hierarchy.52
This also helps explain why comics, in failing to become an object of academic analysis in the 1970s, did not acquire the “aura” that would have made it a promising field for researchers by generating symbolic and professional profits. A minor object relative to the consecrated arts, comics occupied a subaltern position in the galaxy of “popular culture.” Witness, for example, the restricted production of articles—not more than 5 percent—dedicated to comics in the Journal of Popular Culture since its creation, particularly in relation to its infinitely better represented rivals like music and television, or the absence from the catalog of Bowling Green State University Press of any works on comics. It is important not to judge this inequality as a matter of intellectual prejudices among those responsible for the journal but as an index of the much stronger positions occupied in the subfield of popular culture studies by other entertainment media. In this case, the intellectual relations of force reflect the economic relations of force.53
The historiography of American comics has been made even more difficult because, for the sake of completeness, works on the topic had to take account of two distinct realities, comic strips and comic books. Throughout the 1940s, the latter were treated as, at best, the subproducts of comic strips, never as distinct objects. The first work to talk about comics books themselves without any reference to comic strips was a small book published in 1947. A half century before Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics appeared, Secrets Behind the Comics was presented as a comic book with text by Stan Lee and illustrations by Ken Bald. Ostensibly published for the benefit of budding writers and artists (for whom Lee offered to provide an in-depth critique if they sent him their work and a dollar), the book superficially, but methodically, exposed the steps in the creation of a comic book. Prefiguring the image of Marvel’s “Mr. Loyal” that he developed in the 1960s, the author presented portraits of several collaborators and described their functions at the publishing house: including the scenarist Ed Jurist, the letterer Mario Acquaviva, the inker Violet Barclay, and the writer-penciler-inker Morris Weiss, among others. The book contained a detailed script for a “Blonde Phantom” story that young readers could attempt to illustrate in the four pages where nothing but blank panels appeared, and then could compare the result of their efforts against the work of professional artist Syd Shores (Marvel would reuse this concept much later with the Official Marvel Try-Out Book, published in 1983 and reprinted in 2000, which allowed aspiring creators to produce samples corresponding to the expectations of the publisher). Secrets Behind the Comics constituted, in its own way a unique glimpse at the practical aspects of the comic book industry just after the Second World War, and also of the daily operation of publishers during this period. However, as it was self-published and self-distributed by Lee, and also because it was expensive for children, it had a very limited distribution—after all, a dollar was the equivalent of ten comic books.54
Just as paradoxical is the fact that the first book intended for adults that presented comic books independently from comic strips was Fredric Wertham’s incendiary Seduction of the Innocent, published in April 1954.55 The negative discourse about comic books to which Wertham contributed found a genuine resonance with the public after the war, but it began to dissipate in the second half of the 1950s for three principal reasons: 1) the adoption of a self-regulating code, which sterilized the content of the illustrations; 2) the decline of neighborhood newsstands that were the traditional locations for the purchase of comic books, and, above all, 3) the growing role of television in the daily lives of young Americans. At the same time, a dense but informal network was established of comic book collectors and enthusiasts who sought out old comics magazines published before the war at used bookstores and, by way of fanzines, created a milieu of comic book fans cognizant of the existence of a market and of a community of individuals sharing the same interests. Little by little this market was crystallized alongside a nostalgia for old magazines. Justifying the economic investment that they had begun to make, the members of this community began to provide the discursive basis of the consecration of comic books as objects distinct from newspaper comic strips.
In autumn 1965 The Great Comic Book Heroes was published. The book jacket sported the subtitle: “The Origins and Early Adventures of the Classic Super-Heroes of the Comic Books—In Glorious Color.” This deluxe volume contained reprints of several stories depicting the great superheroes of the prewar period, framed by a long, and largely autobiographical, introduction and epilogue written by the cartoonist Jules Feiffer. The author’s career had followed an unusual trajectory: after having debuted as an assistant to Will Eisner on The Spirit at the end of the 1940s, he had then succeeded in developing, beginning in 1956, minimalist strips depicting anonymous contemporary characters revealing their neuroses through monologues or dialogues in “cultural” magazines like the Village Voice and Pageant. Hugh Hefner noted these strips and hired Feiffer to draw for Playboy starting in 1958. Dominating, in a certain way, the domain of magazine humor about which Stephen Becker wrote in Comic Art in America, Feiffer’s career played out in magazines purchased by readers equipped with a cultural capital that was clearly more elevated than that of the young readers of comic books or the very large readership of daily comic strips and which can be seen as the origin of the first strips that could be described as “intellectual.” This atypical trajectory for a strip author opened the doors of the New York intelligentsia to him, where he rubbed elbows with literary personalities like Norman Mailer, William Styron, Philip Roth, and Terry Southern.56 In the midst of the 1960s, Feiffer was considered one of the Jewish New York intellectual humorists par excellence, at a time when Woody Allen had not yet made his name. Recognized at the time by cultivated New York circles, as well as by and professionals in the comics field, he occupied an extremely privileged position that conferred upon him the unique credibility to develop an “artistic” discourse about old comic books that could make balance the growing interest that was developing at the same time around the new generation of superheroes on college campuses. In Feiffer’s case, nostalgia rested on the autobiographical story of a childish passion converted into a professional career, allowing him to construct a discourse that was distanced from the kitsch artistic sensibility in which comic books existed: “Comic books, first of all, are junk … Junk is a second-class citizen of the arts; a status of which we and it are constantly aware…. Junk, like the drunk at the wedding, can get away with doing or saying anything because, by its very large appearance, it is already in disgrace. It has no one’s respect to lose; no image to endanger.”57 The nostalgic register, nuanced by a rejoicing irony, allowed Feiffer to practice appreciation without advocating consecration (contrary to what Stan Lee did each month in his editorials in Marvel comics).58 The Great Comic Book Heroes enjoyed an exceptional reception; it was the subject of two ecstatic reviews in the New York Times fifteen days apart.59
In his anthology, Feiffer writes of the past. But in the mid-1960s the public identified comics with the phenomenon, discussed increasingly more frequently in the media, of collectors of old comics and, moreover, of the high prices that they were willing to pay for magazines whose natural destiny, in the memory of those who were children in the 1940s, was to be quickly tossed in the garbage. Then, between 1966 and 1968, the television series Batman became an unanticipated hit that highlighted the idea formulated by Feiffer, that superheroes, and, by extension, the magazines that gave birth to them and allowed them to prosper, could aspire to no cultural horizon higher than kitsch. Diverse factors, including the development of a collector’s scene, the effect of the style maintained by Stan Lee with regard to the Marvel superheroes, and also the emergence of underground comic books, contributed to modifying the demographic center of gravity of comics readership and increased the proportion of individuals who continued to read comic books beyond adolescence. Given this change, in the first half of the 1970s several works were published that aimed at establishing the legitimacy of comics as an artistic tradition and cultural practice distinct from comic strips, thereby inaugurating a new pathway toward the general recognition of comics after the Second World War.
The historiography of comic books took shape in the 1970s but it was born, in a somewhat clandestine manner, with the first fanzines. Among the first publications derived from this tradition were the essay collections edited by Dick Lupoff and Don Thompson, All In Color For A Dime (1970) and The Comic-Book Book (1973).60 The first was composed in large part of articles originally published in the science fiction fanzine Xero between 1960 and 1963, that is, before Feiffer’s book, and signed by authors most often born before the war, who took advantage of the springboard of the world of science fiction fans to pay homage to the work that they read as children. The two volumes wished to be simultaneously “nostalgic, historic and critical” (The Comic-Book Book, 11). The introduction to the second recorded the evolution of a general interest in comic books at the beginning of the 1970s. The authors celebrated the publication of an important new tool for book dealers and collectors, Robert Overstreet’s Comic Book Price Guide61 and the proliferation of general histories of comic books without naming either of the first two works of this type. These are The Steranko History of Comics, projected at six volumes by the artists James Steranko, only two of which were published, and Comix: A History of Comic Books in America by Les Daniels, a rock musician with a master’s degree in English literature. Born in 1938, like Superman, Steranko produced an erudite collector’s work: after having established in the first book (which opens with a foreword by Federico Fellini) the double filiation of comic books with comic strips and the popular literature of the pulps of the interwar years, he methodically examines all of the most notable characters and authors of the period, developing what would become the canon of the Golden Age. The incomplete study by Steranko did not move past the 1940s, in contrast to that of Daniels, whose book was the first true attempt at a general history of comic books, from their origins to the end of the 1960s. Written in a more scholarly spirit than the books by Steranko, Daniels’s book was the first to allow the author to speak of the comic book as a consistent cultural form that manifested itself in such diverse forms as the superhero, horror, war and love stories, children’s stories (such as Archie and funny animals), but also works “for adults,” from the Tijuana Bibles of the prewar period to underground magazines, passing through the satiric humor and social criticism of Harvey Kurtzman. The underground movement was touched on later, although in an impressionistic manner, in A History of Underground Comics (1974), drawn from the doctoral thesis of Mark James Estren.62
These works, which established the historiographical basis of the study of comic books, were complemented by more specialized works. The first was Who’s Who of American Comic Books, a monumental census of all the individuals who had worked in the comic book industry since the beginning, self-published by Jerry Bails and Hames Ware in 1973. The second was Crawford’s Encyclopedia of Comic Books (1978), another ambitious work, though not very reliable, which, despite its name, was composed of chapters dedicated to every publishing house. The decade concluded with the publication of the Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics (1981), a second book in which the prestigious Smithsonian Institution, again at the initiative of Martin Williams, sanctioned the most historically despised segment of comics as a legitimate part of America’s cultural heritage.63
The multiplication of works on comics during the 1970s testified less to the emergence of a durable interest on the part of the public and the academy than to a fad effect in the wake of the counterculture. Moreover, it demonstrates the arrival into adulthood for the first generation of Americans who had grown up with comic books, and of the capacity of fans to produce a legitimate historiographical discourse. But only other fans echoed this discourse. With the exception of All In Color For A Dime, none of these works were republished in paperback format and only Estren’s book on the underground movement had several successive printings. The majority of the works cited in the preceding paragraphs were out of print by the 1990s, and books on the history of comic books published beginning in the 1980s met the same fate, including the series of thematic monographs published by the journalist Mike Benton at the beginning of the 1990s.64 The last decade of the twentieth century saw a notable growth in works written by academics who bracketed their fannish enthusiasms in order to produce rigorous studies. One could cite: The Many Lives of the Batman, a collective anthology edited by R. Pearson and W. Uricchio, which demonstrated in 1991 how a single comics character could give rise to multiple approaches; Amy K. Nyberg’s Seal of Approval (1998), which reevaluated the censorship campaign against comic books of the postwar period and the role of Fredric Wertham; Bradford W. Wright’s book Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (2001), a work that laid the groundwork for a cultural history of comic books; Jeffrey Brown’s Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans (2001), an ethnographic study on the social usage that fans made of comic books.65 It is necessary to note, the important role played by University Press of Mississippi, when, in the 1990s, it created a series under the editorship of M. Thomas Inge that welcomes the study of comics.
The evolution of these works demonstrate the possibility of a “scientific” discourse on comics that is detached from the stigma of fannish subjectivity and accepted in the circles of academic publishing, even in a bastion as elitist as the Johns Hopkins University Press (which published B. W. Wright’s study). However, the existence of a scientific discourse has not yet led to its institutionalization in the form of textbooks. What has taken place in the occasional course on comic books offered in various universities around North America has been the use of books by artists that are particularly lucid about their form of expression, such as those by Scott McCloud and Will Eisner;66 in comparison, film or journalism courses rely primarily on works by academic scholars, not by filmmakers or journalists. Umberto Eco’s great texts on American comics assembled in Apocalitticci e integrati (1964) took more than ten years to cross the Atlantic and even now are better known because of their author’s intellectual charisma than because of any demand for substantial intellectual work on comics.67
At the same time, specialized conferences on comics are few. If we set aside the workshops on comics held at the annual congress of the Popular Culture Association, the most important academic gatherings number only two. Organized annually since 1992, the Comic Art Conference has taken place each year since 1998 within the framework of the San Diego Comic Convention (originally it alternated between San Diego and Chicago), an academic event that is unique in its genre among the dozens of panels and round tables targeted partially to professionals and predominantly to fans. The second significant event is the International Comic Art Festival, which has taken place close to Washington, DC, every September since 1997.68
Another index is the limited presence of comics in university courses. In the first semester of 2004, the Web site of the National Association of Comics Art Educators, organized to promote the teaching of comics in post-secondary education, listed six schools offering courses on comics and only three offering degree programs: at the BFA level, the School of Visual Arts in New York and the College of Art and Design in Minneapolis (Minnesota); at the MFA level, the Savannah College of Art and Design (Georgia). In Canada there exists a BA in Art and Design with a Concentration in Comics offered by the Université du Québec en Outaouais.69
These courses aim at training artists, not “specialists” in comics. All of this occurs as if the university discourse on comics is detached from professional aims, and that it never fully liberated itself from the cultural ghetto in which fans circulate, so as to capture its autonomy. Academics who study comics are “marginalized” simultaneously from the field of comics, where they are ignored, and in the university field where, at this time, their best hope is to carve out a career in departments of communication, cinema, popular culture, or English literature (particularly as specialists in children’s literature). It is impossible, therefore, to affirm that a strong intellectual field has been erected that constitutes, in a concrete way, “comics studies” as a field of knowledge within normal scholastic and academic institutional frameworks, constituting a “pure” specialization that could lead to the formation of departments, or even programs within multidisciplinary departments.
In the United States, comics do not enjoy a degree of cultural legitimation that is comparable to the other “middlebrow arts” that appeared in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (photography, film, and video). Even if the construction of a substantial historiography and the penetration of comics into the academy have made undeniable progress since the 1960s, they have not been sufficient to allow the comics to be recognized as an academic niche that is a distinct generator of publications in specialized journals such as those that have served film studies, photography studies, and even television studies. The multiplication, since the publication of Maus in the second half of the 1980s, of graphic novels whose graphic and narrative characteristics are radically different from the mainstream products published by Marvel and DC had encouraged the emergence of a canonical corpus of works that provide the basis for a diversified critical discourse, but the unfailing links that, for the public, continue to link comics to the sphere of entertainment and mass culture threaten to undermine this form’s ascension to a legitimacy on par with what cinema and photography achieved in the twentieth century.