The thirteenth issue of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, published in the summer of 2004, captures the precise moment that comics took over the world. The dust jacket (see fig. 3.2 pages 30–31), an elaborately structured comic written and drawn by guest editor Chris Ware, chronicles the tribulations of a lonely cartoonist who, under pressure to meet a looming deadline, decides his comic strip “doesn’t need a punchline at all! I mean . . . life doesn’t have a punchline, right? Maybe I should just stop, let it end where it is. . . .” Thanks to a timely divine intervention, the cartoonist follows through on his idea and soon his readers are praising the strip for its lifelike rhythms and its realistic lack of resolution. “Who woulda thought,” the cartoonist muses, “that in less than one week comic strips would supplant painting, sculpture, and movies as the world’s dominant artform?” In short order, the cartoonist is living in palatial surroundings, beloved by an adoring public and hounded by mobs of female admirers, all because he has introduced realism into his strip, now inventively titled “Life of the Seated Cartoonist” (see fig. 3.1).1
While Ware presents these developments with considerable irony (the seated cartoonist, dissatisfied with his overnight success, ponders painting still-life watercolors until he remembers that non-sequential art no longer holds any value in this parallel aesthetic universe), they are closely matched to the project of the anthology they envelop. By dedicating an issue of the influential, innovative literary quarterly to comics, Ware and McSweeney’s founder Dave Eggers advance the idea that comics are “increasingly recognized as the cutting edge of visual and literary culture”—perhaps not quite the world’s dominant art form, but closing in fast.2 And while the comics assembled within McSweeney’s 13 display a variety of styles from sardonic humor to grotesque horror, a majority of pieces strive for some form of realism, ranging from documentary journalism to psychological character study to confessional self-revelation. A later volume also edited by Ware, The Best American Comics 2007, is even more heavily weighted toward autobiography and realistic fiction. Ware may jokingly exaggerate the cultural impact of realistic comics on his dust jacket, but his anthologies—especially the introductory essays that outline his selection criteria and his vision of the medium of comics—promote realism to the exclusion of many other modes of comics writing. In so doing, they also sustain some of the hierarchies of literary and artistic value that have long marginalized comics. Ware’s fastidious avoidance of popular genres and his privileging of conventionally “literary” modes of writing perpetuate traditional, arbitrary divisions between high and low culture even as he seeks to position comics between the two. Ware’s groundbreaking anthologies are key participants in the construction of comics’ increasing cultural legitimacy, yet they consistently reinforce many of the same assumptions and values—favoring the literary, the textual, the realistic— that denied comics such legitimacy in the first place.3
Fig. 3.1. How realism saved comics. Chris Ware, “God,” detail. McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern 13 (San Francisco, McSweeney’s, 2004), dust jacket.
Ware’s preference for the realistic can be traced to his roots in the alternative comics movement of the 1980s and 1990s. This movement, as noted by Charles Hatfield in the eponymous Alternative Comics (2005), was inspired by the underground comix of the 1960s and 1970s and nourished by the comic book specialty market that emerged in the late 1970s. Unlike either the undergrounds or the mainstream superhero comics favored by the direct market, however, alternative comics renounced familiar genres in favor of formal experimentation, graphic and generic diversity, and the belief that comics could pursue the highest artistic ambitions.4 Aspirations to realism have always been an important part of those ambitions. Hatfield cites “the exploration of searchingly personal and at times boldly political themes” as one of the distinctive features of the movement and adds, “Autobiography, especially, has been central to alternative comics.”5 He traces this interest in autobiography to the work of Harvey Pekar, who “established a new mode in comics: the quotidian autobiographical series, focused on the events and textures of everyday existence.”6 Joseph Witek observes that this emphasis on the quotidian distinguishes Pekar’s comics from their predecessors in the undergrounds; he suggests Pekar’s style “is closer to the realists of prose literature than to anything that has appeared in comic books before.”7
Pages 30–31:
Fig. 3.2. Chris Ware, “God,” McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern 13 (San Francisco, McSweeney’s, 2004), dust jacket.
Witek’s claim that Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and other “masters of American realism” constitute “the wellsprings of [Pekar’s] homegrown aesthetic” should indicate the extent to which comics artists and critics alike have framed the realism of the alternative comics movement in literary rather than visual terms.8 Indeed, Witek acknowledges that the artwork in Pekar’s comics is often “crude,” unsophisticated, not “conventionally ‘realistic’”—with the stylistic descriptor placed in quotes, as if to signal that the comic’s realism lies in areas other than visual convention.9 This description highlights a tension within realism itself, between its ability to recreate the semblance of reality and its interest in exposing other truths that lie beyond mere appearance. W.J.T. Mitchell identifies this tension as a contrast between illusionism, the “simulation of the presence of objects, spaces, and actions,” and realism, the “capacity of pictures to show the truth about things [. . .] offering a transparent window onto reality, an embodiment of a socially authorized and credible ‘eyewitness’ perspective.”10 Mitchell’s use of “realism” muddies the distinction, however, as both “illusionism” and “realism” are important elements of the realist style in literature and the visual arts. According to art historian Linda Nochlin, this style seeks “to give a truthful, objective and impartial representation of the real world, based on meticulous observation of contemporary life.”11 Nochlin distinguishes between realism’s traditions of faithful simulation and honest observation, characterizing them as, respectively, verisimilitude and objectivity, sincerity, or authenticity.12 For many creators and critics of alternative comics, however, authenticity of observation takes precedence over verisimilitude in graphic representation— and, perhaps because comics are a visual medium, they tend to associate illusionism exclusively with visual representation, preferring to evaluate and praise their works’ realism in predominantly narrative and literary terms.
Ware, one of the foremost figures to emerge from the alternative comics movement, recapitulates this aesthetic in his anthologies, most notably in the introduction to Best American Comics 2007. Although he exalts comics for their capacity for mimetic representation, which he contrasts against the rise of conceptualism in the twentieth-century visual arts, Ware generally favors narrative authenticity over visual verisimilitude. He says the qualities he is “regularly looking for from art and literature” ultimately boil down to “telling the truth”; he defends the “preponderance of autobiographical work” in contemporary comics as “a necessity [. . .] both for the artists and the medium” if they are to learn “how to express real human emotion”; he argues that autobiographic self-expression “is a necessary step towards understanding what communicates and works in a medium”; and he claims the contributors to his volume have all developed individual styles “with the aim of getting at something new or, more precisely, real.”13 To accommodate the experimental, decidedly non-illusionistic work of Gary Panter, C. F. (Christopher Forgues), and the Paper Rad collective, Ware suggests these artists allow for “very strange yet oddly real associations and feelings.”14
With a sufficiently flexible definition, the realist label can be made to fit any artist, and Ware inevitably bestows it as a term of high praise. However, this label masks a series of uncritical and misleading elisions: Best American Comics 2007 conflates mimetic representation with quotidian realism, quotidian realism with autobiography, and both modes of writing with “telling the truth.” Autobiography poses a particular challenge in this regard; while it may appear to offer the most honest and authentic representations, in practice it can also prove the most deceptive. As Hatfield cautions, autobiographies depend as much on fabrication as on fact, and “what passes for frankness in comics must be a matter of both subjective vision and graphic artifice, a shotgun wedding of the untrustworthy and the unreal.”15 Nor is this equivocation unknown to comics artists. Hatfield cites comics by Daniel Clowes, R. Crumb, Gilbert Hernandez, and Harvey Pekar that subvert, exploit, or ridicule this inevitable slippage between truth and artifice; Ware’s own “Corrigenda” to the semi-autobiographical Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth acknowledges “the chasm which gapes between the ridiculous, artless, dumbfoundedly meaningless coincidence of ‘real’ life and my weak fiction— not to mention my inability at knitting them together.”16 Yet his anthologies equate autobiography, honesty, and realism without question.
He instead reserves his skepticism for visual verisimilitude and illusionism. In his introduction to McSweeney’s 13, Ware claims, “the more detailed and refined a cartoon, the less it seems to ‘work,’ and the more resistant to reading it becomes.”17 Ware elaborates on this judgment in comments to Daniel Raeburn: “Fundamentally you’re better off using ideograms rather than realistic drawings. [. . .] There’s a vulgarity to showing something as you really see it and experience it. It sets up an odd wall that blocks the reader’s empathy.”18 While these comments reveal much about Ware’s artistic decisions in his own comics, the McSweeney’s introduction extrapolates his stylistic preference for simplified icons and symbols into a general renunciation of realistic art. Raeburn makes this renunciation explicit with his own gloss on Ware’s comments, adding, “Realism is fine for telling tales about jut-jawed good guys in tights who sock dastards, but it is too explicit for anything emotional. It bullies the readers and their emotions, turning sentiment into sentimentality. Just as the old saw holds that in writing fiction you should show, not tell, in comics to show too much is to ‘tell’ too much.”19
Although Raeburn eschews “realism” as a whole, he only targets realism in art, contrasting it with the literary variety; writers of fiction are supposed to favor dramatization and detail over exposition and didacticism, but comics artists must avoid overburdening their images lest the images themselves become didactic. Acting as Ware’s interlocutor, Raeburn claims that realistic drawing and writing are antithetical, associating realistic pictures exclusively with the superhero adventures he and Ware decry. Ironically, some superhero boosters make the same association, though with approval rather than scorn; in The Silver Age of Comic Book Art (2003), Arlen Schumer reserves his highest praise for the naturalistic figure drawing of Neal Adams and his imitators.20 Whether laudatory or dismissive, such arguments tend to overlook the idealized and exaggerated anatomies, outré settings, and heroic subjects that would more than disqualify such comics from realism in the visual arts.21 The realism Raeburn derides is the illusionistic tradition of Neal Adams and Alex Ross, not the social observation of Alison Bechdel or Joe Sacco. While these traditions may be separated by their emphasis on different components of realism, the determining factor for Raeburn seems to be their occupation of different genres—superheroes versus autobiography, realistic fiction, and reportage—that aspire to different levels of authenticity and have traditionally commanded radically different kinds of cultural capital.
Fig. 3.3. Ware satirizes postwar intellectuals’ disdain for comics. Chris Ware, “Comics: A History,” McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern 13 (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2004), 11.
Ware, too, misses no opportunity to distance the selections in his anthologies from superheroes and other popular genres traditionally associated with comics. This is a classic rhetorical strategy of the alternative comics movement, which has long defined itself against the fantasy, action, humor, and superhero genres that dominated the North American comics market at the time of the movement’s emergence in the early 1980s. Hatfield writes, “Rejection of the corporatist ‘mainstream’ gives the post-underground alternative scene everything: its raison d’être, its core readership, and its problematic, marginal, and self-marginalizing identity.”22 Witek incorporates this oppositional stance into his own arguments, with many of his claims for the value of nonfiction comics predicated on their evident departure from “brightly colored breakneck fight scenes between cosmos-spanning power figures with the fate of the universe at stake”; the hyperbolic description re-creates many alternative comics artists’ derision for the fantasies they reject.23 Although Ware frequently incorporates superhero characters into his own comics, such as “Thrilling Adventure Stories / I Guess” and The ACME Novelty Library, his anthologies cannot disavow them often enough. McSweeney’s 13 holds the commercial genres at arm’s length both in Ware’s comics contributions (one of the strips on his dust jacket is called “Adolescent Power Fantasy Man”; others poke fun at formulaic newspaper gag strips) and in his introduction, where he swears off any responsibility for those fellow contributors who refuse to follow suit: “none of the ‘words-only’ authors invited to contribute were asked to write about superheroes and their childhoods, though nearly all of them did.”24
Ware faces no such embarrassments in Best American Comics 2007, which excludes superhero comics not simply for their generic features but also for their most common mode of production. Ware claims: “The traditional, commercially established mode of ‘scripting’ a story and then simply illustrating it does not admit to the endemic potential in comics to literally imagine and see on the page, to say nothing of plumbing areas of imagination and memory that, I think, would otherwise be left inaccessible to words or single pictures alone.”25 Understandably, he privileges comics created by a single writer-artist, another key element of the alternative ethos that values comics as avenues for self-expression by a lone creator.26 He goes far beyond this prioritization, however, when he implies that prose, single images, and even comics created through the collaborative division of labor are all somehow less able to access certain “areas of imagination and memory” than comics produced by a single writer-artist. Ware extends the division of labor of commercial comics to extreme lengths, separating these comics into their component words and pictures as a means of denying them the same capacity for expression, meaning, and depth—if not excluding them from full consideration as comics.27
Having dismissed the commercial genres, Ware also separates his chosen milieu from the world of fine arts. This time, however, the separation is not entirely voluntary. The McSweeney’s introduction tallies the humiliating judgments Ware’s instructors at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago made about his decision to create comics; in the comic-strip history of comics that runs parallel to his prose introduction, and acts at times as a visual commentary on it, the same page shows a Benday-dotting Roy Lichtenstein type who boasts that he uses comics “as a symbol for the spiritual poverty of American culture” (see fig. 3.3).28 By the time of his Best American Comics introduction, however, Ware seems almost grateful for this expulsion, treating it as a fortunate fall that exempted comics from the abstractionist and conceptualist bent of twentieth-century art. In Ware’s telling, modernism and its successors “all but stomped out the idea of storytelling in pictures,” with comics the lone holdout; he even goes so far as to imply that the anti-comics crusade of the late 1940s and early 1950s was some kind of retribution for daring to tell lurid stories in an age of abstraction.29 He regards comics as a locus, if not a haven, for mimetic and narrative art “during a period that art historical naysayers and doomsdayers sometimes label as suffering a ‘crisis of representation.’”30 If the academy has rejected comics, it is the academy’s loss.
The earlier McSweeney’s introduction draws subtler distinctions between painting and comics art. After he argues that excessive visual detail hampers our ability to read comics, Ware states that “the real art resides” in “the tactility of an experience told in pictures outside the boundaries of words, and the rhythm of how these drawings ‘feel’ when read”; he further claims the comics artist’s style is “expressed in how their characters move, how time is sculpted.”31 Although he relies heavily on figurative, analogic descriptions borrowed from music and the plastic arts, his emphasis on rhythm, motion, and time suggests that, much like Scott McCloud, Ware believes the art of comics inheres in its ability to represent time through the juxtaposition and arrangement of multiple images. This complicates his Best American Comics dichotomy of referentiality and conceptualism, indicating that comics are different not simply for representing the world mimetically but for representing it through multiple images that combine to form a unified narrative, a major difference of form as well as content.32 Ware, in positioning alternative comics between popular culture and the fine arts, has also raised, however indirectly, the intriguing possibility that comics could occupy a middle space between representation and abstraction—or a space that lies outside this binary entirely, neither beholden to referentiality nor bound to reject it.
Unfortunately, Best American Comics 2007 devotes more energy to situating alternative comics between the popular and the elite and condemning both, a maneuver strikingly reminiscent of the postwar middlebrow critics of mass culture as described by Leslie Fiedler in “The Middle against Both Ends” (1955). Fiedler notes that these critics were as suspicious of modernist literature as they were of the comics, leading him to conclude, “The middlebrow reacts with equal fury to an art that baffles his understanding and to one which refuses to aspire to his level. The first reminds him that he has not yet, after all, arrived (and, indeed, may never make it); the second suggests to him a condition to which he might easily relapse [. . . and] even suggests what his state may appear like to those a notch above.”33 The middlebrow critics are not a perfect match for Ware: modernist and postmodernist art can hardly be said to baffle his understanding, and he does not reject “the intolerable notion of a hierarchy of taste, a hierarchy of values” as Fiedler maintains the anti-comics crusaders did.34 Quite the opposite, his anthologies reinforce the same hierarchies and stereotypes that denied comics any cultural capital in the past and caused Ware so much grief at art school.
In McSweeney’s, Ware laments that “the associations of childhood and puerility are still hard to shake” for many cartoonists—but he hastens to add, “Not that the art itself shouldn’t be blamed” for creating these associations, since “the accumulated world-dump of comics is piled high with nonsense.”35 Both his dust jacket strips and his introductory history of comics portray comics as a crass, despised, ephemeral, hopelessly commercialized medium; even God himself proclaims that cartoonists “sure got shafted.”36 Daniel Worden has observed how this sense of shame at comics’ vulgar history permeates the anthology, providing a common aesthetic for the contributors and defining the book’s audience.37 It is also so common to Ware’s own work that, in his preface, Ware’s friend Ira Glass quips, “Comic book artists often seem to think of themselves as marginal figures. I’m sure somewhere in this issue of McSweeney’s Chris Ware is bemoaning how no one pays attention to comics, how they’re not taken seriously, how they’re seen as children’s art.”38 One page later, Ware is doing just that. His issue of McSweeney’s presents comics as an abject, shameful art form even as he castigates the art world for viewing it the same way.
Best American Comics 2007 is even more equivocal in its simultaneous defense and defensive belittlement of comics. Ware justifies the preponderance of autobiography in alternative comics (and in his anthology) by announcing that “comics have entered their late adolescence as art/literature” and by declaring autobiography “the most facile and immediate way” for novice artists to learn to write emotions.39 Some context might help illuminate these curiously backhanded arguments: Ware is defending autobiographical comics against a perceived slight in a New York Times review by John Hodgman, who writes, “For all the admirable effort to allow comics to tell different types of stories, there is also a creeping sameness to many of these comics: black-and-white, semi- or wholly autobiographical sketches of drifting daily life and its quiet epiphanies [. . . and] sometimes the epiphanies are so quiet as to be inaudible.”40 Hodgman’s criticisms, although delivered with considerable sympathy, suggest some alternative comics have settled into a monotony that contravenes their own ethos; a movement that, according to Hatfield, prides itself on generic diversity has reached the point where “the appearance of bracing ‘honesty’ runs the risk of hardening into a self-serving, repetitive shtick.”41
Perhaps the worst sting, however, is landed when Hodgman, after summarizing one particularly inert story by Jonathan Bennett (reprinted in Best American Comics 2007), yawns, “This is when I tend to reach for the pile of superhero comics.”42 Hodgman, tongue firmly in cheek, refuses to respect the hierarchies of taste maintained in Ware’s introductions and in the world of North American alternative comics in general; the fact that these comics do not feature superheroes is no longer sufficient reason for Hodgman to ignore his feeling that many (though by no means all) of these epiphanic comics are “kind of boring.”43 Ware’s response is not to refute the charge but to reassert the hierarchy. He reanimates the dismissals of his art school years with his claims that comics have entered their late adolescence—perhaps a marginal improvement over childhood, which Ware associates with superhero and humor comics—and that they have focused on autobiography out of convenience and a lack of any better ability to express emotion. If these defenses seem patronizing, even counterproductive, at least the hierarchy of taste they maintain places Ware’s alternative comics in the middle: Hodgman’s superhero comics are sent back to the bottom of the pile.
Ware’s anthologies reinforce this hierarchy through their selection and categorization of comics artists. Both volumes skew heavily toward various forms of literary realism or life writing: epiphanic fiction, autobiography, diary comics, dream journals. These genres account for anywhere from one-third to one-half of the comics in McSweeney’s 13 (depending on how border cases like Daniel Clowes’s aggressively, ironically mundane “The Darlington Sundays” are classified).44 The trend is even more pronounced in Best American Comics 2007; with the absence of historical comics artists like Rodolphe Töpffer, George Herriman, or Charles Schulz (all featured in McSweeney’s), well over half of the artists have produced autobiographic or realistic comics, and autobiographies alone account for more than a third of the collection. Ware further calls attention to this narrow range by grouping his selections together by genre and style, exacerbating the impression that his collections are governed by only a few modes of writing.
Nowhere is Ware’s tendency to promote autobiographical comics—and to pigeonhole alternative comics artists in a handful of genres—more apparent than in his handling of women artists. Of the thirty-two comics artists included in Best American Comics 2007, just nine are women. (Two are the wife and daughter of underground comix legend R. Crumb.) McSweeney’s 13 is even less inclusive, with women accounting for only three out of thirty-seven artists. In response to complaints about this lack of representation, Ware wraps up his Best American Comics introduction with a rather prickly defense of his selection process, stating, “I am not of the cut of the cloth to check an artist’s genitalia at the door,” and dismissing “those who still feel compelled to tally points for one or another chromosome”—typical reversals that seek to shift the blame onto anyone who wants to address issues of gender exclusion, based on the old fallacy that acknowledging gender difference is itself a form of discrimination. He adds, “Nor in the case of this book did I go out in search of a couple of hermaphrodites to even out the score,” further trivializing any objections to the scarcity of women in his collections. Ware confronts charges of exclusion more directly when he says he chose to include “work that [he] found to be the most interesting, honest, and revealing to be published in the past year, and that collection, as it turned out, included comics from the pens of both sexes.”45 The detached posture and passive language (“as it turned out”) imply that Ware and then series editor Anne Elizabeth Moore were truly gender blind in their selections and pleasantly surprised with the equitable result.46
A look at the contents of Best American Comics 2007 tells another story. Of the nine women Ware included, eight are grouped together, consecutively, in the autobiography section, even though Lynda Barry’s strip Ernie Pook’s Comeek is not autobiographical. The ninth woman, Miriam Katin, also works in autobiography but is wedged between two other Jewish comics artists, Sammy Harkham and Ben Katchor, in a different but equally claustrophobic category. The selections barely acknowledge that women create comics in other genres beyond autobiography. Moore’s appended list of the “100 Distinguished Comics” published during the eligibility period includes history, biography, fantasy, fiction, and experimental comics by women such as Andrice Arp, Megan Kelso, Linda Medley, Danica Novgorodoff, and Becca Taylor, among several others, yet none of them made the cut in a collection that nevertheless has room for four David Heatley comics, three Ivan Brunetti strips, and the entire Crumb family.47 While the small number of women may reflect the relative paucity of female creators in North American comics as a whole, this stark gender segregation is Ware’s handiwork—most likely an unintended consequence of his disproportionate emphasis on autobiography, which remains the genre of comics with the most prominent and prevalent work by women. Ware and Moore’s ostensibly gender-blind selection process only perpetuates this ghettoization. The partitioning need not be malicious or deliberate, merely the most extreme example of a foreshortened vision of comics that focuses on “honest and revealing” work above all else—and naïvely equates those characteristics with their most obvious forms of expression in autobiography and quotidian realism.
Ware offers a different explanation of his aesthetic preferences in Best American Comics 2007. Contrasting the recent boom in comics with the rising popularity of prose fiction in “an increasingly urban and industrial nineteenth century,” he contends that in the past, “as geography, communication, and society became more tight-knit, individual perceptions and expression began to standardize.”48 Ware summarizes a complex but widely accepted argument that the technological and social innovations of modernity and the second industrial revolution instituted universalized, ever-shrinking scales of time and space, providing the world, for the first time, with a common frame of reference.49 Ware then makes his boldest claim when he asserts that this process of universalization “is more or less exactly the inverse of what’s been happening in comics for the last few years [. . . and] even a casual flip-through of the pages of this book will demonstrate a highly individual approach by each and every artist.”50 He positions alternative comics as running counter to modernity itself.
Ware’s thesis is admirable for its ambition, its scope, and its neat encapsulation of the changes wrought by modernity, but it also prompts a few immediate objections. First, modernity is hardly as exclusively homogenizing as Ware suggests; the same period in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that saw the attempted regularization of time and space also produced modernism’s highly personalized, idiosyncratic, fragmented modes of perception and artistic representation.51 Second, and more important to understanding Ware’s aesthetic criteria, his claim that “each and every artist” in his anthology has a “highly individual approach” is belied by the comparatively narrow range of genres and art styles he has selected for inclusion. Although plenty of exceptions exist, too many of the Best American Comics contributors present diaries, autobiographies, or quotidian realistic fiction, or draw in the same loose, deliberately unpolished do-it-yourself aesthetic, for Ware’s claim of universal individuality to be more than hyperbole.52 The majority of his contributors work within a set of generic and stylistic conventions as well defined as the commercial narrative techniques he rejects.
He may nevertheless be onto something when he locates his contributors within an aesthetic of the individual. Some of the selections, such as Sammy Harkham’s imagination of life in a nineteenth-century shtetl or Dan Zettwoch’s record of the 1937 Louisville flood, sketch entire communities while others, like the free-associative experiments of C. F. and Paper Rad, abandon realistic narrative entirely. Most of the stories in Best American Comics 2007, however, are stories of individual dilemmas, individual epiphanies (or the lack thereof), individual artists or their surrogates lost in their own individual perceptions. Ware is not incorrect to place this emphasis on individual experience in opposition to the more social focus of nineteenth-century fiction, but he seems unaware that it is hardly limited to comics. Christopher Lasch bemoaned the popularity of confessional literature in The Culture of Narcissism (1978), excoriating it for its self-indulgence.53 Contemporary realistic fiction has prompted similar critiques: George Packer notes, “Recent American literature reflects this triumph of private life. The writing that has had the greatest influence in the past two decades [. . .] is a breakfast-table realism, focused inward on marital complaints, childhood troubles, alcohol, sex, general self-loathing and dissatisfaction.”54 By way of example, Packer cites Ware and Moore’s sister series, Best American Short Stories; had he written this passage seven years later, he could just as easily have cited Best American Comics 2007. The stories Ware and Moore have selected do cultivate an individual approach, not in their shared styles but through their common retreat into interior life; and Ware’s introduction does hint at the privatizing aesthetic at work in these comics even if he does not acknowledge that such an aesthetic exists. This undercuts many of his claims for comics’ revolutionary break from prevailing aesthetic standards—for while they may challenge the postwar visual arts’ focus on abstraction and conceptualism, his selections fall perfectly in line with postwar American literature’s taste for the confessional and quotidian. Ware has simply exchanged one set of canonical standards for another.
He is hardly the only writer to impose the literary world’s preferences for realism and autobiography onto comics. The practice is perhaps best exemplified by Charles McGrath’s New York Times Magazine article on graphic novels. Published almost simultaneously with McSweeney’s 13, the article both recognizes and enables comics’ newfound respectability, yet it also conflates a single mode of writing with an entire medium as McGrath evaluates the graphic novel in the narrowest of literary terms. After quickly dismissing popular genre fiction from consideration, McGrath asserts that the “better” graphic novels—“the comic book[s] with a brain”—inhabit “a place of longing, loss, sexual frustration, loneliness and alienation—a landscape very similar, in other words, to that of so much prose fiction.”55 Ignoring the diversity of his own interviewees, who range from comics journalist Joe Sacco to superhero auteur Alan Moore, McGrath celebrates anomic alternative comics precisely because they conform to the generic preferences of contemporary literary fiction—preferences for realism, interiority, self-reflection, and, above all, autobiography. He also reduces all autobiographical and semi-autobiographical comics to a single “ur-narrative, which upon examination proves to be, with small variations, the real life story of almost everyone who goes into this line of work.”56 This is a story of obsession, social ostracism, “usually excessive masturbation,” “rage and depression and thwarted energy,” a story so formulaic that by article’s end McGrath has boiled it down to formula twice more and used it to sum up the lives of Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware: “broken home, comics obsession, friendless, dateless adolescence.”57 While lauding these stories as the most literate, artistic, intelligent style of comics, McGrath confines them to a single plotline as predictable and trite as anything produced by the superhero factories of DC or Marvel Comics. His article exceeds even Ware’s Best American Comics introduction in its penchant for reinforcing the value judgments of the same cultural establishment he claims graphic novels are supplanting, beginning in the second paragraph when he states, “If the highbrows are right, [comics are] a form perfectly suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit.”58
Ironically, those judgments no longer hold the same sway over much of the literary world. Authors of considerable skill and acclaim were challenging the privileged position of memoir, autobiography, and realistic, epiphanic fiction well before McGrath and Ware attempted to translate that privilege over to comics. Colson Whitehead dissected the formulaic repetitions, pandering metaphors, and always-muted epiphanies of the “Well-Crafted Short Story” in a 2002 New York Times book review; just a few weeks earlier Michael Chabon, writing the introduction to a volume of McSweeney’s devoted to popular genre fiction, described his exhaustion with “the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story” in brutally Darwinian terms, lamenting the generic dominance of “the moment-of-truth story that, like homo sapiens, appeared relatively late on the scene but has worked very quickly to wipe out its rivals.”59 Chabon and Whitehead both observe that quotidian realism is a genre like any other, with as much potential for rigid formulas and tired conventions as any of the popular genres Ware and McGrath dismiss. If literary fiction is, in fact, on the wane, as McGrath speculates in his first paragraph, already on its way to becoming a niche genre for a shrinking audience, it seems counterintuitive that he and Ware should promote comics that adopt the standards and the genres that reign over its decline.
For all that Ware positions himself, in comics and in print, against art instructors, book reviewers, and other cultural gatekeepers, his anthologies are less interested in exploding the gatekeepers’ hierarchies of taste than they are in ascending within those hierarchies, both by duplicating the conventions of more legitimized art forms and by distancing themselves from the kinds of comics that once earned the highbrows’ scorn. Ware situates the alternative comics in his anthologies as a new middlebrow, fleeing from the demotic excesses of superheroes and funny animals while razzing the ossified conventions of the visual arts (and, simultaneously, recreating the ossified conventions of literary fiction). Like Fiedler’s middlebrow, Ware’s anthologies rail against both high and low culture, but they do so in the interest of recycling rather than denying the culture’s value judgments. They also advocate limited ranges of aesthetic ambition and generic production for mature, sophisticated, culturally legitimated comics.60 With their claustrophobic categories, their recirculated hierarchies, and their renunciation of both the fine arts and popular culture in favor of a homogenous and derivative middle ground, Best American Comics 2007 and McSweeney’s 13 do not reflect the full diversity and potential of comics; they only affirm that Ware’s vision of alternative comics no longer offers much of an alternative.
1. Chris Ware, “God,” in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern 13 (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2004), dust jacket.
2. Daniel Worden, “The Shameful Art: McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Comics, and the Politics of Affect,” Modern Fiction Studies 52 (2006): 892.
3. Thierry Groensteen discusses the assumptions that have delegitimized comics, including, notably, fears of “the corrupting power of the image,” suspicion of fantasy or escapism, especially when it is presented visually, and a mistrust of comics’ hybrid nature, which violates Western culture’s long-standing separation of text and image. Thierry Groensteen, “Why Are Comics Still in Search of Cultural Legitimization?” trans. Shirley Smolderen, in Comics & Culture, ed. Anne Magnussen and Hans-Christian Christiansen (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2000), 35–36.
4. Charles Hatfield, Alternative Comics (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), ix–x.
5. Ibid., x.
6. Ibid., 109.
7. Joseph Witek, Comic Books as History (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), 128, 132.
8. Ibid., 132.
9. Ibid., 126.
10. W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 325.
11. Linda Nochlin, Realism (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1971), 13.
12. Ibid., 19–21, 31–40. Nochlin also argues that realism, contrary to its claims of objectivity, does not and cannot offer a transparent window onto reality (14–15).
13. Chris Ware, “Introduction,” in The Best American Comics 2007 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), xvii–xviii, xxi.
14. Ibid., xxi.
15. Hatfield, Alternative Comics, 114.
16. Chris Ware, “Corrigenda,” in Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (New York: Pantheon, 2000), endpapers.
17. Ware, “Introduction,” McSweeney’s 11 (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2003).
18. Chris Ware, quoted in Daniel Raeburn, Chris Ware (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 18. Ware is far from the only comics artist to claim that iconically simplified art increases reader empathy and identification; Scott McCloud makes a similar argument in chapter 2 of Understanding Comics (Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink, 1993); and Art Spiegelman describes Maus in similar terms in Joshua Brown, “Of Mice and Memory,” Oral History Review 16.1 (1988): 91–109. However, some scholars have challenged this association, arguing that iconic style does not determine reader involvement: see Jonathan Frome, “Identification in Comics,” The Comics Journal 211 (1999): 82–86.
19. Raeburn, Chris Ware, 19.
20. Schumer also makes the questionable argument that Adams’s expressive anatomical realism was a necessary precursor for superhero comics to tackle more complex and realistic subjects, quite the opposite of Ware’s and Raeburn’s separation of the two. Arlen Schumer, The Silver Age of Comic Book Art (Portland, OR: Collector’s Press, 2003).
21. Charles Hatfield, review of The Silver Age of Comic Art, International Journal of Comic Art 6.1 (2004): 352.
22. Hatfield, Alternative Comics, 111.
23. Witek, Comic Books as History, 127.
24. Ware, McSweeney’s 12 (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2003).
25. Ware, Best American, xix.
26. Hatfield, Alternative Comics, 16, 18.
27. Ware’s logic cannot support his own preferences: if he applied this principle across all genres of comics, then the work of critically reviled superhero writer-artists such as Todd MacFarlane and Rob Liefeld would possess more of comics’ “endemic potential” than that of alternative comics pioneer Harvey Pekar, who never illustrates his own scripts and always collaborates with an artist.
28. Ware, McSweeney’s 11.
29. Ware, Best American, xix–xx.
30. Ibid., xxii.
31. Ware, McSweeney’s 11.
32. The Best American introduction does note that the pre-modernist narrative art of altarpieces and tapestries was frequently sequential. Ware, Best American, xix.
33. Leslie Fiedler, “The Middle against Both Ends,” Encounter (August 1955), rpt. in The Collected Essays of Leslie Fiedler, vol. 2 (New York: Stein and Day, 1971), 428.
34. Ibid., 428.
35. Ware, McSweeney’s 11.
36. Ibid., dust jacket.
37. Worden, “The Shameful Art,” 893–94.
38. Ira Glass, “Preface,” in McSweeney’s 7 (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2001).
39. Ware, Best American, xviii.
40. John Hodgman, “Comics Chronicle,” New York Times Book Review, June 4, 2006, 18. Ware does not cite Hodgman by name, but he refers to “a June 2006 roundup of various recent comics” and quotes Hodgman’s review. He also neglects to mention that Hodgman praises several comics in the epiphanic style, including two by C. Tyler and Kevin Huizenga that are excerpted in Best American Comics 2007.
41. Hatfield, Alternative Comics, 114.
42. Hodgman, “Comics Chronicle,” 18.
43. Ibid.
44. Worden notes that the anthology’s thematic range is also “remarkably homogenous,” with most of the selections drawing on “a common tradition in comics that centers on intimacy, shame, and masculine melancholia.” Worden, “The Shameful Art,” 892, 893.
45. Ware, Best American, xxiii.
46. David Foster Wallace explains the selection process for the Best American series in his “Introduction” to The Best American Essays 2007, ed. David Foster Wallace (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007). The series editor—in the case of Best American Comics 2007, Anne Elizabeth Moore—culls the submissions down to roughly 100 finalists. The guest editor—in this case, Ware—chooses which pieces will be published in the anthology.
47. Anne Elizabeth Moore, “100 Distinguished Comics from August 31, 2005, to September 1, 2006,” in Ware, Best American, 328–30.
48. Ware, Best American, xx, xxi.
49. See, for example, Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 11–15; and David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, UK: Blackwell, 1990), 260–83.
50. Ware, Best American, xxi.
51. See Kern, The Culture of Time and Space; and Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity. Brad Prager has observed that Ware himself works in a modernist mode. Brad Prager, “Modernism in the Contemporary Graphic Novel: Chris Ware and the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” International Journal of Comic Art. 5.1 (2003): 195–213.
52. Dave Eggers identifies many of the hallmarks of this style, currently ascendant in alternative comics, in his catalogue for a 2008 gallery show of such works. He cites their lighthearted tone, scrawled writing, uncorrected spelling, “casual, even sloppy” drawings, “loose draftsmanship,” and their “intimate and disarming” ethos. Unfortunately, he declines to give a name to this affected unaffectedness, choosing (in a fitting example of the style) to title his exhibition and catalogue “Lots of Things Like This.” Dave Eggers, “Lots of Things Like This,” in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern 27 (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2008), n.p.
53. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Norton, 1978), 16–21. Hatfield has observed how Lasch’s arguments underwrite many common critiques of autobiographical comics. Hatfield, Alternative Comics, 129–30.
54. George Packer, Blood of the Liberals (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 390.
55. Charles McGrath, “Not Funnies,” New York Times Magazine, July 11, 2004, 30.
56. Ibid., 30.
57. Ibid., 30, 33.
58. Ibid., 24.
59. Colson Whitehead, “The End of the Affair,” New York Times Book Review, March 3, 2002, 8; Michael Chabon, “The Editor’s Notebook,” in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern 10 (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2002), 7.
60. Other anthologists do not prescribe Ware’s realist aesthetic; The Best American Comics 2008 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), assembled by Ware’s friend Lynda Barry and new series editors Jessica Abel and Matt Madden, displays a very different mix of styles and a marked predilection for humor, fable, and fantasy.
