Comix

So Status Quo has been accused of always playing the same three chords for long enough that they themselves can take the mickey out of it.Meanwhile, over in comics land, Tim O’Neil thought his dismissal of Doonesbury would not be controversial, because really, who still follows Doonesbury:

The best that can be said about Trudeau is that for a brief period of time he was an important cartoonist, and the worst that can be said is that he contributed materially to the development of his generation’s completely unironic self-fixation. Alex Doonesbury alludes to this fact in the 07/30 strip when she refers to the “aging hippie vibe” that permeates the proceedings. It should go without saying that the hippies are no longer “aging,” the hippies are officially “aged,” and the very idea that they get to officially “pass the torch” to succeeding generations is laughable. I would say that Doonesbury exists to cater to the self-regard of its audience, but I don’t really feel comfortable making any kind of pronouncements about the kind of people who follow the strip, if such people actually exist. The only people who pay attention to Doonesbury with any consistency are the newspaper editors who have to read it in order to make sure that this week’s sequence doesn’t offend the 70-year old Tea Partiers who comprise the main audience for all printed media these days.

Quite a lot of people, it turns out. (frex.) Now we could make this all about the difference between the critic and the audience and, depending on writer and their agenda, either scold the latter for their low taste or the former for their elitism and ivory tower eggheadism. But that would be dull. Let’s just take as our assumption that what a critic will look for, needs to look for in any work of art, will always be different from what the general audience will look for.

Certainly Tim wasn’t wrong about the deficiencies of Doonesbury as a comic. The art has never been anything but servicable and over the decades has had any trace of individuality leeched out of it. Storywise there hasn’t been much originality either, with plotting remaining the same mixture of (gentle) satire, soap opera and political commentary that Trudeau had down pat in the early seventies.

And yet…

Doonesbury‘s real qualities never lay with its art and in fact an argument could be made that better art, more personal art, would distract from those qualities. For Trudeau to get his messages through, the art must not be distracting, must be smooth and easily digestible. The same goes, to a lesser extent, for the storytelling.

Because what Doonesbury has done well over the decades is to stay relevant. Far from the baby boomer hippiefest Tim paints it as . it has constantly stayed angry. Only recently there was the abortion storyline, with several newspapers dropping these strips, while in the past decade he has of course spent a lot of time on Iraq, Afghanistan and the treatment of veterans of these wars.

These are not really comix virtues, so if you judge Doonesbury just on its comix merits, especially its art, you’ll miss why it is still such an important strip and why so many people, not just aging boomers are attached to it.

Alan David Doane responds to my dismissal of EC comics:

My thought is that yes, the writing in most of the EC horror and SF stories was rote hackwork, but Kurtzman’s Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat, as well as Krigstein’s “Master Race” are without question among the best comics ever created, words and pictures both. Not only are they not, as Wisse asserts, examples of comics where “the story doesn’t matter,” but rather, they represent absolute perfection in their melding of image with text, something Kurtzman and Krigstein (geniuses both) were obsessed with. I don’t care if I never read a Jack Kamen cuckolded husband story again, but the thought of not being able to pull out Master Race or a Kurtzman war comic from time to time, to remind myself how good comics can be, fills me with despair. Krigstein and Kurtzman alone make EC a line worth the respect and awe it generates in informed comics readers.

Obviously he’s right to question my blanket dismissal; there was good stuff being done by EC, comics that combined excellent art with good writing. Most of them were written by Kurtzman, who was indeed a genius and a cartoonist, not just a writer, which shows in every script he had his hand in. The same goes for Krigstein and “Master Race” is indeed a great short story.

Yet Master Race‘s genius lies in pictures, not the story itself. Without the artistic choices Krigstein made as a cartoonist, it would only be just another surprise twist ending story. A man goes to take the subway, sees a stranger he recognises from his days in a nazi death camp, he flashes back to his time there and at the end of it it’s revealed he was the camp commander, not a victim (du-duh-duuuh!) and he’s so agitated he flees away from his silent accuser, slips and falls down the platform in front of an oncoming train.

What gives that story its real punch is the art, Krigstein’s figures, his layout. Those narrowing panels at the top right, the cutting between the oncoming train coming closer and the protagonist slipping, the sheer visual overload of the metro moving past the platform contrasted with the static pose of the man in black, the way the man moves back from the light of the platform into the darkness, turning away from the scene, the way it all fits together on the page. It’s brilliantly done and it’s been rarely equalled.

That’s the genius of comics; this is more than a story being gussied up with pretty art, this is where a so-so story is transformed through the choices the cartoonist made to tell the story. Which is different from the vast majority of EC comics, even those drawn by people like Wally Wood or All Williamson or John Severin, where those sort of choices where not made.

I was a bit trollish in my earlier post (no, really? — Ed.) and I never meant all EC stories were bad, just that there is a case to be made that EC as a whole is overrated, partially because we’ve always been more focused on the visual than the textual as comics readers, partially because earlier generations of fans and comics historians have made so much of them, while we’ve missed the context in which they were published, all the other good comics that came out in the fifties from other publishers who didn’t have these sort of cheerleaders.

Back in the mid-nineties, when Gemstone comics had the licence to reprint EC comics, they printed annuals of the various titles by bundling five-six issues together as a new collection. These must have been incredibly overprinted, as the local remaindered bookstore still have dozens and dozens of them for sale. I bought a couple of them on Saturday while waiting for my parents to finish clothes shopping and while reading them over the weekend, I realised something.

These comics are crap.

Not the art of course, which for the most part is of a very high standard indeed, but the stories. The best of them barely rise above tedious O. Henry stuff and it’s no wonder the ovrrated sentimentality of Ray Bradbury made such an impression when first adapted here, compared to what it appeared next to. It’s just not very good at all, certainly not that much better than what was being published at other companies, yet EC has become a symbol of the best of American comics, so why is that?

Well, comics fans have always been more interested in art than story and good art will always win out over bad storytelling, but not the other way around, and it has been fans who’ve been writing the history books until recently. Through uncritical repetition EC’s reputation has become reified fact. This is helped by the simple fact that for decades EC comics were almost the only comics from that era that were in print. Worse, when the first fan histories were written, even they were out of print and hard to get if hadn’t bought them from the newsstands when new. Which means both that newer generations of EC readers (like me) miss the context in which they were published, it also meant that quite often we’d come to them through the fan histories and slick artbooks which of course told us how great these comics were before we had a chance to judge them for ourselves.

All of which wouldn’t be that bad, if not for the bad example EC has set for the American comic field. If those are the best comics the US comics industry has produced, with excellent art but mediocre stories, is it any wonder that so many later comics projects have followed the same route, with glitzy arts but no content, that so many underground and “alternative” comics ultimately dissappoint once you get past the visuals?

Or would that have been the case without EC too?

(Post inspired by this: “Sure, EC was important to 1960s-70s underground comics as a liberating influence, but was equally a weight to get out from under”. I think we’re still struggling to get out from under the EC comics legacy, from the idea that comics are good enough if the visuals are great and story doesn’t matter.)