Comic Art in Museums 1496828119, 9781496828118

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Comic Art in Museums

Comic Art in Museums Edited by Kim A. Munson Foreword by M. Thomas Inge

University Press of Mississippi • Jackson

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi. www.upress.state.ms.us Designed by Peter D. Halverson The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of University Presses. Copyright © 2020 by University Press of Mississippi All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America First printing 2020 ∞ Library of Congress Cataloging-in_Publication Data available LCCN 2020935726 Hardback ISBN 978-1-4968-2811-8 Trade paperback ISBN 978-1-4968-2807-1 Epub single ISBN 978-1-4968-2808-8 Epub institutional ISBN 978-1-4968-2809-5 PDF single ISBN 978-1-4968-2810-1 PDF institutional ISBN 978-1-4968-2806-4 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

Contents ix xi 3

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Acknowledgments Foreword M. Thomas Inge Introduction Kim A. Munson

FOUNDATIONS: COMIC ART IN MUSEUMS Comic Art in Museums: An Overview Denis Kitchen

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Substance and Shadow: The Art of the Cartoon Brian Walker

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Permanent Ink: Comic Book and Comic Strip Art as Aesthetic Object Andrei Molotiu

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PIONEERS: COMIC ART EXHIBITIONS, 1930–1967

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The Evolution of Comic Art Exhibitions, 1934–1951 Kim A. Munson

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Narrative Illustration: The Story of the Comics M. C. Gaines

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The First International: I Exposicao Internacional de Historias em Quadrinhos Alvaro de Moya

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Comics and Figurative Narration: What Pierre Couperie Contributed Antoine Sausverd

113 THE RENEWED FOCUS ON COMICS AS ART AFTER 1970 120

The Comic Stripped and Ash Canned: A Review Essay Albert Boime

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Exhibitions at the Museum of Cartoon Art: A Personal Recollection Brian Walker

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Contents

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Mort Walker, Historian Cullen Murphy

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Review/Art: Cartoon Masters—Cartoonists Finally Get Some Respect Kenneth Baker

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Comics, Community, and the ToonSeum: An Interview with Joe Wos Kim A. Munson

167 EXPANDING VIEWS OF COMIC ART: TOPICS AND DISPLAY 170

Northern Ink: Misfit Lit in Minneapolis

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Our Heroes: African American Artists and Images in the American Comic Book

Diana Green Dwayne McDuffie 178

Deviating from “Art”: Japanese Manga Exhibitions, 1990–2015 Jaqueline Berndt

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The Glimmering Glow of Comic Art amidst the Blinding Glitter of the United Arab Emirates John A. Lent

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Hypercomics: The Shape of Comics to Come Paul Gravett

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Sequential Titillation: Comics Stripped at the Museum of Sex, New York Craig Yoe

211 MASTERS OF HIGH AND LOW: EXHIBITIONS IN DIALOGUE 215

Comic Connoisseurs David Deitcher

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Comics as Art Criticism: The Cartoons of Jonah Kinigstein Karen Green and Kim A. Munson

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High Way Robbery Michael Dooley

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“High Art Lowdown”: This Review Is Not Sponsored by AT&T Art Spiegelman

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How Low Can You Go? John Carlin

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Cracking the Comics Canon Leslie Jones

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An Uneasy Accord: LA Museums Open Their Walls to Comics as True Works of Art Scott Timberg

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Here Are the Great Women Comic Artists of the United States Trina Robbins

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Remasters of American Comics: Sequential Art as New Media in the Transformative Museum Context Damian Duffy

289 PERSONAL STATEMENTS: EXHIBITIONS ABOUT

INDIVIDUAL ARTISTS 295

After Masters: Interview with Gary Panter Kim A. Munson

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Splashing Ink on Museum Walls: How Comic Art Is Conquering Galleries, Museums, and Public Spaces Rob Salkowitz

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In Our Own Image, After Our Likeness Charles Hatfield

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Showing Pages and Progress: Interview with Carol Tyler Kim A. Munson

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Curating Comics Canons: Daniel Clowes and Art Spiegelman’s Private Museums Benoit Crucifix

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Co-Mix and Exhibitions: Interview with Art Spiegelman Kim A. Munson

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Introduction to Comic Book Apocalypse: The Graphic World of Jack Kirby Charles Hatfield

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Jack Kirby at Cal State Northridge Doug Harvey

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Genius in a Box Alexi Worth

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Thirty Museums with Regular Comics Programming

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List of Contributors

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Index

Acknowledgments I would like to express my thanks and gratitude to all of the contributors to this book. Artists, writers, collectors, scholars, museum staff, and archivists, you all showed such interest in this topic that it constantly inspired me. Thanks to everyone who read my drafts. Your insights were very valuable. I especially thank my patient husband, Marc Greenberg, and Matthew Smith and Randy Duncan, who helped get me writing again after a drought.

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Figure 1. Will Eisner. 1985. Illustration for back cover of The American Comic Book exhibition catalog. The Ohio State University. Collection of Dr. M. Thomas Inge. Will Eisner artwork Copyright 2018 Will Eisner Studios, Inc. WILL EISNER, THE SPIRIT, and COMMISSIONER DOLAN are Registered Trademarks of Will Eisner Studios, Inc. Used with permission.

Foreword M. Thomas Inge

When I grew up in Richmond, Virginia, in the 1940s, one of the most popular cultural sites for school field trips was the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Opened in 1936, I recall that there was a controversy among the population and the press about the title of the institution and the kind of art it would preserve and display. Should the museum collect more recent artists, the ultimate value of whose work had yet to be proven, as well as established masters? The old guard wanted to emphasize and reemphasize the title with an affirmation on the “Fine Arts” in the name of the museum. Only proven and vetted paintings and pieces of sculpture were to be displayed in its sacred halls. Several decades later, after I returned to Richmond to teach at the newly established Virginia Commonwealth University, I was invited by the Virginia Museum to curate a traveling exhibition on “The American Comic Strip.” It was intended to define comics as a distinct art form through a display of original and printed material. It was 1978, and the museum still had “Fine Arts” in its title. So what had happened? There had been a major shift in the scholarly and intellectual understanding and appreciation of popular culture in general and comic art in particular, in the intervening years. Books like The Great Comic Book Heroes (1965) by Jules Feiffer and The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics (1977) compiled by Bill Blackbeard and Martin Williams became best sellers and threw light on an overlooked part of our cultural heritage. Stirred by nostalgia, fan groups began to organize around their favorite titles and characters, which prompted a lively market in the exchange and trade of rare comic book issues—now considered a significant area of investment. Encouraged by professional scholarly associations, like the Popular Culture Association, academics and critics began to subject the comics to the same sort of rigorous analysis to which literature and history had been subjected and found it rewarding. Soon the graphic novel, an outgrowth of the comic book, was holding a space in both bookstores and libraries, and being taught in colleges and universities.

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What has been left out of the above brief overview is the importance of the museum. Throughout this history, at first by tentative steps and ultimately by full embrace, museums have supported and encouraged exhibits focused on all aspects of the comics. There are still spats and unresolved questions—like whether or not the actual artifact is the black-and-white original drawing or the final colored printed page. But exhibition by exhibition few people question the appropriateness of speaking of “comic art” anymore. That is the engagement traced so deftly in the present volume organized by Kim A. Munson. It is the first major step in the direction of exploring and explaining the concerns, connections, and advantages of bringing “the funnies” into the hallways of “the fine arts.” It is the first book to lay bare the outlines of these problems and point the way for the discussions to come. It is a handbook comics scholars will want to keep nearby for decades to come. We are grateful for it.

Comic Art in Museums

Introduction Kim A. Munson

In 2008, when I proposed writing my master’s thesis on comics and museums, the art history department at my university (San Francisco State University) had no idea that serious scholarship on comics existed. I had to bring in enough scholarship to convince my committee that it was a topic worth discussing. Thanks to the catalog for Masters of American Comics (2005), Comics and Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics (2000), and the International Journal of Comic Art, I was able to make my case, beginning my exploration of how exhibitions and all the public commentary surrounding them have contributed to the growing respect for the comics art form. This book is the book I wish had been available to me in grad school; an introduction to the history and controversies that have shaped comics exhibitions, who the pioneers were, different ideas about comic art exhibits around the world, how the best practices for displaying comics have developed and why, and how artists and curators have found ways to display comics that break away from the “framed pages on the wall” format. To borrow a phrase from Theirry Groensteen, it’s the story of one way that comics have finally achieved “cultural legitimization” (2000). I’m happy to say that in the eighteen years since Groensteen asked why comics were still struggling for cultural legitimacy, the state of both scholarship and serious interest by exhibiting institutions has grown tremendously. Comics had been long dismissed as an inferior medium, blamed for everything from childhood illiteracy to juvenile delinquency. The drawings comics were built upon were considered a low-class remnant of the production process even by most of the artists creating them, not worth saving, and surely not for display in the hallowed halls of the major art museums. Over the last twenty years the growing diversity in content and artistic innovation in graphic novels, comic books, and web comics combined with the popularity of films based on comics material have made comic art newly attractive to curators, museums, and university galleries. More artists identified with comics are getting big budget retrospectives, collecting institutions are mounting rich historical shows, and 3

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Figure 2. Installation view of The Art of Rube Goldberg at The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco. 2018. Courtesy The Contemporary Jewish Museum; Photo: JKA Photography.

Figure 3. Exhibition view of George Herriman: Krazy Kat is Krazy Kat is Krazy Kat, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. 2017. Photo by David Walker. Courtesy of Brian Walker.

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exhibits capitalizing on the popularity of all types of comics are popping up around the world (see exhibit photos, figures 2, 3, 4, and 5). Many of these shows are supported by high-end publications and thoughtful scholarship. The importance of exhibitions has been recognized in academic books by authors like Bart Beaty (Comics versus Art, 2012), David Carrier (The Aesthetics of Comics, 2000), Thierry Groensteen (Comics and Narration, 2013), Paul Gravett (Comics Art, 2013), and several others.1 Fine arts magazines (such as Art in America, Art Forum, and ARTnews) and major news media have become increasingly interested in comics exhibits, assigning them to art critics that move past the typical “Bam, Biff, Pow! Comics aren’t just for kids” headlines to provide meaningful commentary about comics, comics artists, and the importance of popular culture. Analysis of exhibitions has also become a growing area within the art history discipline. Candidates for the gold standard in this genre include Mary Anne Staniszewski’s The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (1998), a painstakingly researched exhibition history that analyzes museum policy as seen through the Museum of Modern Art’s (MOMA) exhibition programming and design from 1929 through the 1990s, and Thinking about Exhibitions (1999), a thoughtful compilation of essays on history, themes, and trends edited by Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne. The importance of exhibition catalogs is a thread that will be discussed throughout this book, and among the best is the slick, metal-covered catalog for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s groundbreaking show Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy (2008), which is essential for the study of cosplay and identity. In Curationism: How Curating Took Over the Art World and Everything Else (2014), David Balzer discusses the history of curation and the challenges faced in a range of projects from major biennials to small nonprofits. He also investigates curation as a cultural phenomenon, with the curated selection as a “value added” to everything from playlists and music festivals to artisanal cheeses and fashion lines. This book itself is a curated selection of influential essays and reviews, combined in a social art history loosely influenced by authors like T. J. Clark and Albert Boime. Each entry is a bookmark in the story of how a specific group of exhibitions in fine arts museums and university galleries built on each other and helped expand the boundaries of acceptance of comic art in the art and museum world. As exhibitions based on pop culture, particularly comics, have become more common, it is through the public discussions found in reviews, catalogs, online communities, and academic essays that exhibition standards and a loose art historical canon of creators have been established. I have included a diverse range of voices; journalists, art critics, fans, international scholars, curators, and comics creators to reflect on how this active public discussion

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Figure 4. Installation view of Dr. Strange Mirror Room with costume from film and art by Steve Ditko as seen in Marvel: Universe of Superheroes at the Museum of Popular Culture, Seattle. 2017. Used with permission. © 2019 Marvel.

Figure 5. Installation view of Mangasia: Wonderlands of Asian Comics at Le Lieu Unique, Nantes, France. 2018. (Left to right): Details from front cover of “Yama to Umi” (Mountain & Sea) by Okamoto Ippei, 1926; “Take a ride on the spirit boat,” inflatable sculpture by Aya Takano, © 2014 Aya Takano/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved; and Dragon Mural by Kim Jung-gi. Photo: © Nicolas Joubard. Courtesy of Le Lieu Unique and Barbican International Enterprises.

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between fans, in the media, and in scholarship shapes our expectations of who is doing “museum-quality” art and how it should be seen. Where the public goes to see this work, however, is in a bit of a transition. Groundbreaking pioneers like the Museum of Cartoon Art (1974–2002) founded by Mort Walker and Kevin Eastman’s Words and Pictures Museum (1992–1999) are long gone. The current economy and gentrification in the urban centers of the United States have forced the closure of a few longtime independent institutions such as MOCCA in New York (2001–2012), the ToonSeum in Pittsburgh (2007–2018), and Geppi’s Entertainment Museum in Baltimore (2006–2018). San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum has been forced to move four times due to rent increases and has relaunched a new location. Other specialty museums, like the Charles M. Schulz Museum (Santa Rosa, California), the Norman Rockwell Museum (Stockbridge, Massachusetts), the Walt Disney Family Museum (San Francisco), the Society of Illustrators (New York), and small collector museums like Tom Gamill’s Bushmiller Museum and Library (Altadena, California) continue to shine. Collecting institutions and archives like the Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum and Library (The Ohio State University), the Butler Library (Columbia University), the library at Michigan State University, the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian are constantly acquiring new collections and mounting in-depth historical exhibitions. The Belgian Comic Strip Center (Brussels), la cité internationale de la bande dessinée et de l’image (Angoulême, France), the Cartoon Museum (London), the British Museum (London), the Ghibli Museum (Mitaka, Japan), and the Kyoto International Manga Museum (Kyoto, Japan) are just a few of the international museums and archives that have been showing incredible exhibits of comics. New institutions focused on comics and popular culture are on the horizon. The Museum of Popular Culture recently opened in Seattle, Washington. The newly announced San Diego Comic-Con Museum is mounting temporary shows in the former Hall of Champions in Balboa Park prior to an extensive remodel of the building and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is under construction in Los Angeles. I hope that this growing recognition of comics, animation, and manga will result in a visual feast for fans, curators, and scholars alike. Although this book will look at many of the events that have made the viability of these new institutions possible, I cannot do justice to every worthy museum, archive, and gallery that displays comic art. In recognition of this, I have included a list of selected institutions, their locations, and web addresses. I encourage the reader to explore these organizations and discover the many ways they are expanding our understanding of comic art. In this book, I am defining comic art as drawings and paintings that are usually the basis of a creative work like a comic strip, comic book, editorial or magazine cartoon, graphic novel, animated film, or web comic, including shows

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that experiment with using the gallery itself as a comic, such as Paul Gravett’s Hypercomics: The Shape of Comics to Come (reprinted in this book). Because of this focus, I have decided to put aside the string of exhibitions organized around the concept of fine art “influenced by comics” that followed the 1960s pop art movement, for example The Spirit of Comics (1969) at the University of Pennsylvania or Splat, Boom, Pow!: The Influence of Comics on Contemporary Art at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2003, toured ICA Boston, Wexner Center).2 These shows offer food for thought about class hierarchy, mirroring between genres in art and culture, the high-art/low-art dynamic, and the attempt to funnel collaborative arts like comics and animation into the fine art “lone genius” tradition. At the end of this string, the 2005 blockbuster Masters of American Comics at the Hammer and MOCA/LA signaled a new independence for comic art in museums. In its stated goal of establishing a formal canon of comics artists, the “lone genius” concept was central to the controversial curatorial decisions that led to fourteen white men and George Herriman being designated as “masters,” excluding comics by women and most people of color. The Masters show was a direct response to MOMA’s consequential 1990 exhibit High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture. In this book, I have included a separate section that contrasts these two influential shows and discusses their curatorial choices and the public response from different viewpoints. This book is divided into thematic sections that explore different aspects of the history, trends, and controversies surrounding comic art exhibitions from 1930 to the present. Each section includes a short contextual introduction. The first section, Foundations: Comic Art in Museums, provides an overview of the evolution and challenges in comics exhibitions, why they are important, who the most influential artists were, and how comic art functions as an art object when framed on the gallery wall instead of in the pages of a book. Pioneers: Comic Art Exhibitions, 1930–1967, explores influential but longforgotten episodes in exhibition history such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first acquisition of Disney animation art (New York, 1939), one of the earliest known exhibits to try to place comic art in art historical context that included examples from artistic ancestors like Mayan panels and Japanese scrolls (New York, 1942), the National Cartoonists Society’s (NCS) exhibit at the Met (New York, 1951), the first known exhibition to include an international comics conference I Exposicao Internacional de Historias em Quadrinhos (Brazil, 1951), and the groundbreaking Bande dessinée et figuration narrative exhibition organized in response to pop art and Roy Lichtenstein at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs (Paris, 1967). The Renewed Focus on Comics as Art after 1970 investigates the rediscovery of original comic art by art museums and university galleries following the pop art craze, breakthrough exhibits, and new publications. Comic art gained

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more critical recognition, exhibitions became more formalized, and a loose canon of artists was established. This period also saw the rise of independent comics museums like the Museum of Cartoon Art (1974) and the Cartoon Art Museum (1988). Expanding Views of Comic Art: Topics and Display considers how comics exhibitions moved into new territory once interest in the genre was reestablished, looking at underrepresented artists, experimenting with new display concepts, and celebrating previously taboo topics. The Western idea of displaying comics as art spread around the world, including to Japan and the Middle East. Masters of High and Low: Exhibitions in Dialogue is a case study of how one group of artists and curators felt compelled to advocate for comic art in response to MOMA’s controversial show High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture (1990), ultimately organizing the blockbuster show Masters of American Comics at the Hammer and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (2005). Personal Statements: Artist Retrospectives in Fine Art Museums looks at contemporary shows focused on the work of individual comic artists, how display standards have evolved, how these shows effect the valuation of the artist’s work, and how exhibits increase the audience’s understanding of the artist’s work and creative process. Notes 1. To my knowledge, there is not another book solely about comic art and exhibitions, although there are many exhibition catalogs that include contextual discussions related to their shows. Walter Herdeg and David Pascal’s 1972 book Comics: The Art of the Comic Strip contains a lot of analysis of comics as art and a bibliography of early shows (originally published in Graphis magazine). In recent books, Beaty talks about all aspects of comics as art, with a designated chapter on comics in museums. Groensteen ends his book with a chapter on comics as a branch of contemporary art which includes exhibits. Carrier’s book is one of the few by an art historian. He doesn’t write much about specific exhibits, but does talk about the problems of exhibition and categorization. Gravett is a prolific author and curator; in Comics Art he talks about the ways that different categories of comics work as art, and he dedicates a chapter to “gallery comics,” experimental shows using sequential drawings to navigate the viewer around the gallery. 2. One could argue that the well-known 1967 show Bande dessinée et figuration narrative in Paris was the forefather of this category, as the curators responded to pop art, particularly Lichtenstein, by photographically blowing up comics panels and displaying them like pop paintings. I would also include Homage to George Herriman, the 1997 show curated by Bill Berkson at San Francisco’s Campbell-Thiebaud Gallery that celebrated the influence of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat on Bay Area figurative artists like Joan Brown and Elmer Bischoff; The Comic Art Show, an exhibit organized by John Carlin and Sheena Wagstaff at the Whitney Downtown Gallery (1985) that looked at comic art and 1960s pop art as the foundations of the new wave of East Village pop art by artists like Keith Haring, Sheena Wagstaff ’s 1987 show Comic Iconoclasm at the ICA, London, and Comic Abstraction: Image-Breaking, Image-Making at MOMA, New York (2007).

Figure 6. Denis Kitchen points out the fine points of Will Eisner’s technique at the Will Eisner Centennial Exhibition at the Society of Illustrators. 2017. Photo by Stacey Pollard Kitchen. Courtesy of the Society of Illustrators.

FOUNDATIONS: COMIC ART IN MUSEUMS Artists and their creations are at the heart and soul of comic art exhibitions. Some artists, like Milton Caniff, Will Eisner, and Art Spiegelman, recognized the benefits of exhibits and advocated for them throughout their careers. Starting with his first known professional comics exhibit in 1948 (an NCS show in Nyack, New York, organized by Milton Caniff), Will Eisner was an enthusiastic participant in exhibitions; loaning work, speaking on panels, allowing reprints for promotions and catalogs, supporting scholarship, drawing catalog covers, and generally helping curators put on good shows. Eisner’s estate, chiefly through its agent and curator, Denis Kitchen, has continued to keep Eisner’s work alive and connected to new audiences through exhibitions, most recently the Will Eisner Centennial Celebration: 1917–2017, curated by Kitchen at le Musée de la Bande Dessinée (Angoulême, France) and at the Society of Illustrators (New York), curated by Kitchen and John Lind (exhibit photo, figure 6). Denis Kitchen, Eisner’s friend and publisher, has worked with museums for years as an artist, as an art agent loaning works to shows, and as a curator in his own right. His overview touches on many of the business and practical aspects of comic art exhibitions, as well as providing us with a first-person view of the rapid evolution of comics from early strips to today’s diverse range of award-winning graphic novels. Another artist who recognized the potential in exhibitions for promotion, recognition, and education was Mort Walker, creator of the syndicated comic strips Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois, and founder of the first museum dedicated to comics, the Museum of Cartoon Art (MCA) at the Mead Mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut (1974). In 2001, after several relocations, the MCA, then known as the International Museum of Cartoon Art, closed what would be its final location in Boca Raton, Florida, donating the entire Walker collection to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at The Ohio State University. Brian Walker, Mort’s son, wrote Substance and Shadow: The Art of the Cartoon (reprinted here) for the grand opening of the state-of-the-art Billy Ireland Cartoon Library at Sullivant Hall on the OSU campus (2013). 11

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Figure 7. Mark Staff Brandl. 2008. Carried Away. Sequential Painting-Installation (Exhibition Comic). Enamel and acrylic on canvas and wall, 31 painted cards in comic rack. Dimensions circa 12 ft. x 10 ft., site specific. Image courtesy of the artist.

Brian Walker was a founder and former director of the Museum of Cartoon Art, where he worked from 1974 to 1992, continuing afterward to curate many important shows. Among his many projects, he cocurated the groundbreaking Masters of American Comics (2005–2006, tour: Los Angeles, Milwaukee, New York/Newark) and the recent George Herriman: Krazy Kat is Krazy Kat is Krazy Kat at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (2017, exhibit photos: figures 3, 67). Since 1984, he has been part of the creative team that produces the comic strips Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois. Here he brings his experienced curator’s eye and lifelong knowledge of cartooning to the task of explaining the value of seeing original comic art and the techniques, idioms, and methods of storytelling used in comics from 1843 to the present. In 2006, around the time of the Masters show, the College Arts Association’s national conference (predominately serving art historians and studio art professors) included the panel “From the Page to the Wall: From Graphic Novels to Gallery Comics,” which focused on comics specifically created to be hung

Foundations: Comic Art in Museums

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and displayed in galleries. The participants were artists C Hill and Mark Staff Brandl (figure 7), and art historians Joanna Roche and Andrei Molotiu. Their conference papers were published as a “Symposium on Gallery Comics” in the fall 2007 issue of the International Journal of Comic Art. Molotiu’s contribution, “Permanent Ink: Comic Book and Comic Strip Originals as Aesthetic Object,” explores the formal characteristics of comic art and the fragmentation caused by showing framed pages that were originally created for publication and separated from their indigenous context, wondering if this separation is ultimately an act of creativity or an act of violence. Specifically for this book, Molotiu wrote an update, using the techniques he established in Permanent Ink to analyze Jack Kirby’s “Kamandi” on view in 2016 exhibit Comic Book Appocalypse: the Graphic World of Jack Kirby (CSU Northridge), and IDW Artist’s Edition books, such as David Mazzucchelli’s and Frank Miller’s Daredevil: Born Again (2012).

Comic Art in Museums: An Overview Denis Kitchen © 2017 Denis Kitchen.

I’m of an age to remember when comic books were considered by polite society to be the very lowest of the low among reading options. While I was avidly devouring comics as a youth in the 1950s parents, educators, and institutions viewed the medium contemptuously when acknowledging its existence at all. Psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s best-selling Seduction of the Innocent poured fuel on the fire, leading to a self-imposed emasculation of content in the mid’50s. Comic strips, as part of the respectable fare of daily newspapers (and thus edited for a general audience), were granted more toleration, but, with a few exceptions, even newspaper comics were still generally dismissed as “kid stuff.” The original art created for comic books and papers was also held in low esteem, such low esteem—even by those in the field—that for decades the originals often were routinely tossed by publishers, syndicates, and even some of the artists. Yet, only a generation or so after comics were widely reviled, I find myself regularly curating exhibits of original comic art for museums around the globe and contributing art from my personal collection to exhibits curated by others. The enormous chasm has been largely bridged between comic art’s once disreputable status and its growing cultural recognition. Some of us, with a certain wink, preferred the outlaw status, but champions of the hybrid art form now appreciate the broad public, intellectual, and institutional acceptance. There were indisputable geniuses in comic art more than a century ago and in the years before the current era. But part of the new cultural acceptance comes from the steady intellectual and artistic growth of the still-young medium: the proliferation of graphic novels into the book market, the critical acclaim and prestigious national awards achieved by some, and their growing use and study in university classrooms. Today’s comics have broken out of distribution dead ends and juvenile ghettos to access older and more educated readers. 14

Denis Kitchen

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Contemporary graphic novels by and large demonstrate a greater graphic sophistication and depth that contrast with the often-crude draftsmanship (and stories) typical of many early efforts in the development of comic strips and comic books. Today’s ambitious comic artists may sometimes be too selfconscious or self-indulgent, but they have an acute awareness—call it an assumption—of being artists. Their forebears in comics too often worked as industry drones in sweatshop assembly lines where the mere idea of being an “artist” may have seemed laughable. Today’s comics creators also reflect a far more diverse ethnic and gender base than the white males who thoroughly dominated the field for the better part of a century. Another element of the current cultural acceptance—to be frank—is based on financial considerations. Nothing impresses the fine art establishment, the general public, and the media more than eye-popping dollars when art is sold. Comic art, usually by recognized masters, has shown tremendous growth as an investment in a relatively short time span. Only a tiny number of aficionados thought to seek original comic art prior to the 1970s. Fans from the early part of the twentieth century into the 1960s who admired a cartoonist’s work and who had the temerity to ask would often be the recipient of a free strip or page now possibly worth tens of thousands of dollars. Syndicates often rewarded ardent fans with complimentary original strips taken from office inventory. Such gifts were easily dispensed because no value was ascribed to the art at the time. There are countless horror stories about the careless manner of storage and lack of respect shown to original art by both syndicates and comic book publishers. A friend of mine well known in the field once walked into the United Feature Syndicate offices in New York in the 1970s and noticed that a stack of Al Capp’s “Li’l Abner” Sundays was on the floor of a storage room. There were dirty footprints on the top drawing indicating that the pile had literally been used as a convenient footstool. Concluding quickly that the art was not held in high respect, my friend purchased the stack of Capp art from an employee “for a song.” Such transactions, not uncommon, may raise ethical questions in hindsight, but too often accumulations of strip and comic book art were simply tossed in the trash, even by cartoonists like Capp himself. Al Capp, though an early champion of comics as an art form and, in 1975, one of the first cartoonists with a gallery exhibit, ironically did not seem to prize his own originals. “It occurred to me that my work is being destroyed almost as soon as it is printed,” he once said in an interview. “One day it is being read; the next day someone’s wrapping fish in it. The American comic strip is as unique and as precious an art as jazz. I think it should be preserved.” Capp of course was describing the newspaper reproductions of his art. His actual “Li’l Abner” originals, including Sundays ghosted for a decade by Frank Frazetta, were often

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treated cavalierly, sometimes left on the studio floor to be walked upon, or abandoned at the syndicate office to be pilfered by opportunists. Meanwhile, his high-priced gallery “paintings” and silk screens, being touted as the real thing, were effectively just framed, larger, and more brightly colored versions of the reproductions used by the public for wrapping fish. As widely scattered comic book fans organized around fanzines and conventions in significant numbers in the late 1960s and early 1970s it became much easier for collectors during the pre-digital era to finally connect and have access to rare comic books and original art. Prices for each collectible category steadily climbed, but initially there was significantly more demand for the scarce comic books than for the unique original drawings. Even into the early 1980s desirable comic art, like classic E.C. covers or Frank Frazetta pages, could be had for no more than a couple of thousand dollars. Heads turned in collector circles in 1986 when director Steven Spielberg (no less) paid $15,500 for Harvey Kurtzman’s cover to Mad No. 1 at auction. That sale smashed all prior records for comic art. In the ensuing three decades escalating prices have continued to set new records with regularity. Most observers seem confident that prices will continue to climb as growing numbers of well-heeled collectors join the bidding. Most recently, drawings by Frank Miller and Todd McFarlane have brought mid-six figures at Heritage Auctions. As I write this short essay Robert Crumb’s Fritz the Cat cover just surpassed $700,000, a probably momentary record for American comic art. In Europe a single page from Herge’s Tin Tin, when available, brings in excess of a million dollars. I’ve personally brokered sales of Will Eisner art in the low seven figures. The trend line is dramatic. The escalating sales are not, by a large measure, Vincent Van Gogh or Jeff Koons numbers, but they are significant enough for prime comic art to rise out of the hobby ghetto it had long been mired in from the perspective of the fine art world. Simultaneously, whether in direct relation to dramatically growing values or simply its broader societal appreciation, museums worldwide are increasingly opening their doors to cartoonist retrospectives, broad comics histories, and group shows. Museum curators typically have specialty graduate or PhD degrees and are experts in particular aspects of art history. A good deal of ongoing research and publishing of articles usually augments their credentials. I never anticipated early on that I’d eventually curate exhibits and I certainly never trained to be a curator. For that matter, I never trained to be a cartoonist, publisher, author, agent, or any other professional hat I’ve worn. But my unusual combination of skills and professional experience have qualified me to be invited in recent years to guest curate or cocurate a dozen or so comic art exhibits in America, Europe, and South America.

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Figure 8. Catalog cover, Masters of American Comics (2005). Reprinted with permission of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

I attribute the curating opportunities in large part to the fact that traditional museum curators do not as yet have academic backgrounds with credentials that cover the popular arts like comics. That will presumably change. In the interim people like myself with expertise and organizational skills will fill the role. My writing, editing, and book packaging experience also help when there is a budget for an exhibit catalog (e.g., Underground Classics for Abrams, 2009; or Will Eisner: A Centennial Celebration for Kitchen Sink/Dark Horse, 2017). I was very impressed with the catalog from Yale University Press accompanying Masters of American Comics, the groundbreaking exhibit that crossed the states in 2005 (figure 8). It reproduced the originals as they actually appeared, showing white-out, paste-overs, marginal notes, smudges, etc. (see Will Eisner splash page, figure 9 for an example), instead of the sanitized versions always shown in prior books and even earlier art museum catalogs about comics. That set the general approach John Lind and I used for Underground Classics (figure 10) and the current Eisner Centennial catalog, though we prefer text that is less academic in approach and more broadly accessible. The importance of a strong catalog must be stressed. Thousands of individuals may see an exhibit

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Figure 9. Example of “warts and all” art reproduction. Will Eisner (1917–2005). The Spirit (“Il Duce’s Locket”). Pen-and-ink drawing for newspaper splash page, published May 25, 1947. Collection of Denis Kitchen, © Will Eisner Studios.

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Figure 10. Catalog cover, Underground Classics (2009) by Denis Kitchen and James Danky. Reprinted with permission of the authors.

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in person and enjoy the maximum experience, but years later all that is left long after the exhibit is over is the catalog and it must stand as the historic and educational tool. My primary motivation for pitching or agreeing to guest curate exhibits is to help keep alive and promote the legacy of important comic artists I admire, most notably thus far Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman. In each case I’ve sought to showcase their respective geniuses, to reflect their long, innovative, and varied careers, and, when possible, to show their influence on other creators. When an ample budget is provided, such as the Eisner Centennial exhibit at the Musée de la Bande Dessinée in Angoulême, France, on display for nearly ten months in 2017, the entire venue itself can be an artistic expression. The Eisner exhibit in France, involving Jean-Pierre Mercier and a team of dedicated artisans, presented a noir detective atmosphere in keeping with Eisner’s creation The Spirit: dramatic overhead and worm’s eye lighting, giant wooden dock crates (also acting as unconventional walls to display art), and stark shadows painted on the floors and walls, all reflecting recurrent visual themes in Eisner’s own pages. Custom music was even composed as a part of the total exhibit experience. Artists like Harvey Kurtzman and Will Eisner, giants during their lifetimes, left large bodies of important work and influences that are myriad. Their names are literally attached to the most prestigious annual awards for excellence in comics. But with each passing year their contemporary audiences slowly pass away and newer generations have no firsthand memories of these creators. It’s critical that exhibits continue to display examples of their mastery so that younger fans, creators, and critics can see the work up close and stimulate ongoing discussions. In curating theme shows around underground cartoonists, the generation immediately following Kurtzman, Eisner, and their colleagues, I’ve tried to stress the deep diversity of talent and content. In R. Crumb and the Underground, at the Kuntsmuseum in Lucerne, Switzerland, in 2013, the Crumb name headlined the show to draw crowds but it was important for cocurator James Danky and myself to show that Crumb was part of a larger art movement, not a singular figure working in a vacuum. We put the collective works in the context of a counterculture and antiwar movement in America, a convulsive period in which the freewheeling and creator-owned undergrounds separated themselves in every way from traditional newsstand comic books, a schism that permanently influenced the aesthetic direction and economics of the larger medium. In organizing exhibits in general I try to tell a compelling story about a single artist’s career or movement, a somewhat ironic goal given that individual pages hanging on the museum’s walls are typically self-contained stories or part of larger stories. The most obvious way to organize comic art is by chronology,

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but I usually break a cartoonist’s oeuvre or a movement into logical thematic segments. I try to mix black-and-white originals (by far the most common) with choice watercolors or paintings for visual variety. I also try to coordinate timely expert panels, the showing of relevant documentaries, and reach out to regional and trade press, all to maximize attention and coverage. It’s important to remember that comics, at their core, are a unique combination of words and pictures and so I make every effort to select pieces that demonstrate an artist’s strength in each cornerstone. A single page can sometimes be a story in itself but most often I find a sequence of consecutive pages that reveal self-contained mini-stories. I want to encapsulate an artist’s approach to storytelling, ideally via key segments from important work. These can range from as few as three pages to sometimes as many as ten or more. If a shorter sequence makes the same point as a longer one, I am likely to choose the shorter, or two shorter examples, knowing that many gallery viewers may not have the patience to read a longer sequence. Showing artistic virtuosity is a much simpler task: impactful “splash” pages and dramatic solo interior pages should speak for themselves. There will always be quibbling about aesthetics, but this task is perhaps the easiest part of curating a comic art show. Typically, art-for-art’s-sake selections perform the function without necessarily displaying storytelling elements. But sometimes there is an ideal combination: beautifully designed pages that are wordless but still tell a story, or a portion of a story, with purely visual elements alone. The key curating skill comes down to having the “eye”: the presumptive ability to identify and seek the very best surviving examples for a show, where available, from private collections, estates, and institutions. Sometimes, after establishing a “wish list,” one or more prospective lenders will not cooperate, regardless of assurances of security and adequate insurance, argued prestige, or the adding of distinction to provenance. This is where curators need thick skins. Fans, families, and critics are prone to second-guess final selections. Curating requires a striving to attain the ideal art selections and balance while accepting pragmatic alternatives when necessary. I’ve learned to be happy reaching for perfection while inevitably falling somewhat short. At this point in time we have crossed a certain threshold. I am confident that the best examples from the rapidly expanding world of comic art will continue to be in demand for one-person exhibits, group shows, and theme shows yet to be imagined. I’m also confident that museums will gradually be employing in-house curators who bring or acquire the expertise to stage exhibits of comic art without untrained outsiders like myself, though I’d hope that expert consultants would always be welcome. I’ve witnessed a tsunami of change from my comics-obsessed childhood to the present. Newspaper strips were once ascendant, attracting top talents and

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often-huge collective audiences. Newspaper cartoonists reigned as the royalty of the field for many decades. But, like their symbiotic newspapers, strips today, though still sometimes first rate, are in general retreat. Comic books, the once very lowly and distant cousins to the strips, have largely evolved into ambitious graphic novels across all genres and have become the medium’s current literary and artistic flag bearers. Their proliferation has been a sight to behold: so many comics and graphic novels are being produced that no individual can keep up. Like the larger art and literary realms from which comics initially sprang as a bastard child, a portion—a small portion—of the volume will be deserving of large or lasting recognition, including eventual participation in art exhibits. Comic creators are increasingly pushing boundaries in print and in digital formats. The best of this art has moved from trashcans to auction houses. More comic artists can live above the poverty level, and more graphic works will compete alongside traditional literature. I anticipate further permutations in the art form and expect to still witness evolving societal appreciation of the old, the contemporary, and the yet-to-be-seen. Current aesthetic favorites may fade in the comics’ pantheon while new faces inevitably become stars and from time to time now-forgotten talents are rediscovered and celebrated. This is what culture and art have always reflected. The difference is that the onetime guttersnipe loitering in an alley behind the art museum has now gained admittance.

Substance and Shadow: The Art of the Cartoon Brian Walker Reprinted by permission from the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum exhibition catalog, 2013, pages 45–63. Revised 2017. © 2013 Brian Walker.

The word “cartoon” is derived from the Italian “cartone” which in the Middle Ages referred to drawings done on heavy paper as preliminary designs for paintings, stained glass, or tapestries. For fresco paintings, the drawings were transferred to the plaster surface by making pinpricks on the lines and patting soot through the holes. With tapestries, cartoons were placed directly beneath the loom as a guide. Few of these patterns survived and Raphael’s seven large cartoons for the tapestries in the Sistine Chapel (1515–1516) are masterpieces in their own right and hang in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. “Cartoon, No. 1” published in Punch magazine on July 15, 1843, is widely considered to be the first modern use of the term (figure 11). Nine years after the Houses of Parliament in London were destroyed by fire in 1834, a competitive exhibition of preliminary design drawings (traditional cartoons) for the historical murals in the New Palace of Westminster was held as the construction concluded. Punch magazine, founded in 1841, satirized the competition by publishing its own submissions under the title “Mr. Punch’s cartoons.” The first of the series by John Leech, “Cartoon, No. 1,” contrasted the government’s lavish spending with the plight of its citizens. Accompanying the cartoon was the comment, “The poor ask for bread and the philanthropy of the state accords an exhibition.” Eventually all of the drawings published in the magazine came to be known as “Punch’s cartoons.” The use of the term spread when American humor magazines modeled after Punch, including Puck (1877), Judge (1881), and Life (1883), featured cartoons in their pages. “Substance and Shadow” refers to the dual meaning of Leech’s drawing but also describes the essence of cartoon art in general. Cartoons are substance

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Figure 11. John Leech (1817–1864). “CARTOON, No 1: Substance and Shadow,” Punch, July 1843. The Ohio State University, Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum.

and shadow, content and technique. Cartoonists are information providers who communicate their ideas graphically with bold lines and subtle shading. A cartoon is a combination of words and pictures that can tell a story, share a thought, articulate an emotion, promote a point of view, or make people laugh. Cartoonists have mastered an almost limitless vocabulary of graphic expression to entertain and enlighten a mass audience. In spite of the popularity of cartoons, the creative process that cartoonists use to conceive and produce their art still remains a mystery to most of the general public. The visual shorthand of cartoon communication has a long history. European artists first introduced speed lines and other special effects in cartoons during the nineteenth century. American newspaper cartoonists continued to add to this graphic language in the early years of the twentieth century. Rudolph Dirks pioneered visual devices such as motion lines, stars of pain, footprint trails, dotted eyesight lines, sweat beads, and dust clouds in The Katzenjammer Kids. Frederick Opper perfected the art of slapstick humor in Happy Hooligan, particularly the “flop,” as his characters were booted or tossed out of the panel frames, flipping head-over-heels in the air. Bud Fisher popularized many familiar graphic clichés in Mutt and Jeff—a log being sawed to denote sleep, a question-mark balloon over a character’s head and the dotted-line stare. In

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Figures 12 and 13. Mort Walker (1923–2018). Felt-tip pen illustrations from The Lexicon of Comicana, © 1980 Comicana, Inc. Images courtesy of the International Museum of Cartoon Art Collection, The Ohio State University, Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum.

Krazy Kat, George Herriman made effective use of “emoticons” such as hearts, sweat drops, musical notes and, of course, his ultimate symbol, the brick. Cliff Sterrett invented his own symbols for Polly and Her Pals that included starshaped sweat drops and amoeba-like clouds. In the early 1930s, Charles Rice, a humorist, attached names to certain cartoon devices, calling sweat drops “plewds” and dust clouds “briffits.” Rice’s article inspired Beetle Bailey creator Mort Walker to do some further research and, in 1964, he wrote a tongue-in-cheek article for the National Cartoonists Society newsletter titled, “Let’s Get Down to Grawlixes,” cataloging the symbols found in comic strips. This was expanded into a book, The Lexicon of Comicana, which was published in 1980 (figures 12 and 13). Many of the terms that Walker invented, including “hites,” “agitrons,” and “indotherms,” now crop up in articles and lectures about the art form and have been translated into other languages. Cartoonists today still use the old graphic tricks of their predecessors. They have also invented new visual devices of their own. A combination of symbols (*&%$#@!) can provide a substitute for language that is inappropriate on the comic pages and is particularly useful in our politically correct world. Other unique concepts, like the footprints in Family Circus and the presidential icons in Doonesbury, are permanently linked to the feature that introduced them. In fact, cartoon shorthand is now so ubiquitous that many cartoonists satirize the technique itself. In the days since Punch magazine “exhibited” John Leech’s “Cartoon, No. 1,” original cartoons have been displayed in galleries and museums around the world. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Musée du Louvre in Paris had important cartoon exhibitions in the 1960s, the Museum of Modern Art featured cartoons in the High and Low: Popular Art, Modern Culture

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show in 1990, and five museums showcased the groundbreaking Masters of American Comics exhibition in 2005 and 2006. There have been numerous institutions devoted exclusively to cartoon art including the Museum of Cartoon Art, Words and Pictures Museum, and the Dick Tracy Museum. Among the museums currently open to the public are the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, California, the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art at the Society of Illustrators in New York, the ToonSeum in Pittsburgh, the Belgian Center for Comic Art in Brussels, and the Centre National de la Bande Dessinée et de l’Image in Angoulême, France. The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at The Ohio State University, the Library of Congress, Boston University, Syracuse University, Yale University, and Michigan State University have major cartoon collections. The Walt Disney Archives and the Playboy Archives are important corporate repositories. In recent years, original cartoon artwork has been sold at venues ranging from comic conventions to prestigious auction houses like Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Prices skyrocketed in the 1980s, but have since leveled out. Museums are now actively purchasing cartoon art, which has increased values. Private individuals have also assembled major collections and cartoonists saved examples of their own work and acquired pieces from their professional peers. These collections have been sold in auction houses and donated to public institutions. The opportunity to view the one-of-a-kind, hand-drawn works that cartoonists create can help to develop a fuller appreciation for the art of the cartoon. “Originals,” as they are commonly known, are usually larger than the printed versions and are quite dramatic when seen in a gallery setting. They can provide insights into the various elements, methods, tools, and techniques that cartoonists utilize, including caricature, character design, sequential panels, speech balloons, page layout, animation, and storytelling. Since cartoons are drawn for reproduction, information about the production process can also be gained by looking at originals. In the early years of newspaper comics, artists would color a few panels to show printers the exact hues they wanted. Eventually color guides were done on vellum overlays or on photographic reproductions called silver prints. Some artists did rough sketches prior to inking using a non-photo blue pencil so the lines wouldn’t show up when their drawings were photographed and these lines often remain on the originals. White-out solution was applied to cover up mistakes and corrections were pasted over drawings that didn’t meet the cartoonist or editor’s standards. Instructions from cartoonists to printers can sometimes be seen in the margins of the drawings and copyright stickers, logos, registration marks, and engraving indications can also be found. On rare occasions, cartoonists would completely hand-color an original to give to a friend or admirer as a presentation piece.

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Originals come in a variety of sizes, shapes, and formats and reflect the unique demands of each medium. Magazine cartoonists often draw preliminary sketches, known as “roughs,” that they submit to editors for approval before they execute the finished version. There are many types of pieces that are used to make an animated film, including concept art, storyboards, model sheets, layouts, animation drawings, backgrounds, and cels. Scholars discover important information by examining original art. They can recognize the work of assistants and ghost artists who are not credited on the published cartoon. The contributions of specialists like inkers, colorists, and letterers can also be spotted. Animation experts compare notations they find on drawings to records from the studios to aid in the identification of artists who worked on specific scenes in a film. Connoisseurs of cartoon art look for elegant brushstrokes, intricate crosshatching, detailed backgrounds, and distinctive lettering in the originals that they admire. Cartoonists are always searching for a unique look that can distinguish them from their competitors but can also be influenced by their peers, which leads to “schools” of similar styles. The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum has more than 300,000 original cartoons in its collection representing all the major mediums—comic strip, comic book, political, magazine, illustration, caricature, sports, animation, and the graphic novel. These are available for researchers to study and visitors to enjoy. The mission of the institution is to develop a comprehensive collection documenting cartoon art, to organize the materials, and to provide access to these resources. Cartoonists create two-dimensional worlds on paper. These environments are populated with colorful characters and evocative scenery and can follow rules that often defy the laws of nature. Each is an extension of the artist’s vision. The analogy to theatrical and cinematic productions is frequently used. A cartoonist is a true auteur—scripting, casting, staging, costuming, and directing a unique graphic performance. Among the earliest forms of printed cartoons were the satirical prints and pamphlets published in Europe in the eighteenth century. William Hogarth, James Gillray, Honoré Daumier, and other pioneers mastered the art of caricature by exaggerating the facial features and visualizing the character traits of recognizable personalities from the ruling classes. In the nineteenth century, American cartoonists created iconic characters, including Uncle Sam, Santa Claus, the Democratic donkey, and the Republican elephant that became widely understood symbols. Iconography continued to be an essential element in the political cartoons published in Europe and America in the twentieth century. Caricature was also used to portray celebrities from the world of entertainment and politics in magazines and animated cartoons.

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Beginning in the nineteenth century, as printed periodicals were distributed to even larger audiences, fictional characters like Thomas Rowlandson’s Dr. Syntax, Palmer Cox’s Brownies, and Charles Ross and Marie Duval’s Alley Sloper, became familiar to millions of readers. They appeared in books and magazines and were used to sell merchandise. When newspaper comics were introduced in America in the 1890s, Richard Outcault’s Yellow Kid was the first superstar of the new medium. Throughout the twentieth century, cartoonists created many memorable characters. Newspaper readers identified with everyman types like Barney Google, Charlie Brown, and Hagar the Horrible, mischievous and precocious kids like Buster Brown, Dimples, and Nancy, heroes like Flash Gordon and Prince Valiant and heroines like Brenda Starr and Wonder Woman. In the 1930s, the comic book medium was launched with Superman and Batman leading the way, and the exploits of costumed crime-fighters continues to dominate the public’s imagination. Some of these popular cartoon stars were based on animals. From Gertie the Dinosaur to Garfield, anthropomorphic characters transcended race, creed, and ethnicity, displaying distinctively endearing human traits. They also have a remarkable talent for pitching products. Cartoon art endures because these characters have a universal, timeless appeal. Their regular appearances make them familiar to millions. Their triumphs make them heroic. Their struggles make them seem human. Cartoonists create friends for their readers. The idea is the first step in the creation of a cartoon and it is the most mysterious part of the process. “Where do you get your ideas?” is a question that cartoonists are often asked. There is no simple answer and the methods for finding inspiration vary from daydreaming and reading to exercising or soaking in a tub. Ernie Bushmiller got ideas for his Nancy comic strip by looking through the pages of a Sears Roebuck catalog. Fred Lasswell frequently said that whenever he had trouble coming up with ideas for Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, he would spread some unpaid bills across his drawing board. Each cartoonist has complete control over his or her allotted space on the printed page. Some respond to the limitless possibilities with imagination and innovation. Others face “white paper fever” in a never-ending struggle to “fill in the boxes.” The variety of ways in which cartoonists meet these challenges produces a fascinating spectrum of creative expression. Casting a comic feature is similar to auditioning actors for a play. Cartoonists will “try out” a variety of characters before choosing the performers for their pen-and-ink production. Some comics have a few main stars and many supporting players. Others have ensemble casts with characters that play roles of equal importance. In some cases, a cartoonist will discard a character after it has served its purpose. In other situations, the main star

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will appear in virtually every episode. The role that a character plays and how that part changes over time is determined by the creative path that the cartoonist chooses to follow. The personalities of different characters are revealed most strikingly by their interaction with other characters. Conflict is one of the main driving forces behind both dramatic and humorous character development in comics. From the simple camaraderie found in famous pairings like Mutt and Jeff and Calvin and Hobbes to the varied interactions of large casts in comic book series like The Justice League of America and The Avengers, the dynamics between characters is what keeps readers coming back for more. Popeye, Betty Boop, Bugs Bunny, Spider-Man, Alfred E. Neuman, and Fritz the Cat are among the thousands of characters that cartoonists have introduced to readers and viewers around the world. Each one of these cartoon stars has distinctive qualities that make them memorable. Personality traits, physical features, colorful costumes, and trademark sayings are just a few of the ways that cartoonists make their characters stand out from the crowd. When readers see their own trials and tribulations reflected in the changing fortunes of their favorite cartoon characters, immortality can be achieved. Cartoonists also create unique environments in which their characters live, work, and play. Many of these settings are inspired by real places. Among the most memorable locales in the comics are Li’l Abner’s Dogpatch, Krazy Kat’s Coconino County, Superman’s Metropolis, Batman’s Gotham City, Pogo’s Okefenokee Swamp, Beetle Bailey’s Camp Swampy, and Zippy’s Dingburg. After a cartoonist has an idea, a cast, and a setting, the tools and techniques to create the appropriate look are then selected. From traditional implements like pencils, pens, brushes, and India ink to digital tablets and sophisticated software programs, there are many commercial art supplies that can help to successfully execute the task. For many years most cartoonists used double-ply, plate-finish Strathmore board, #2 pencils, Gillotte, Speedball, and Hunt flexible pen nibs, Winsor and Newton brushes, and Higgins India ink. For shading, an adhesive overlay known as benday was cut out meticulously, often by assistants, and applied to the drawings. Some cartoonists also drew on chemically treated paper, called Craft-Tint or Duo-Shade, which yielded different patterns when a liquid was applied. Cartoons for color publications were tinted with watercolors, paints, dyes, and markers from a variety of manufacturers. The production process has changed considerably with the introduction of computer technology. Cartoonists now use digital tablets and monitors, like the Wacom Cintiq, and a pressure sensitive stylus to do their drawings. Custom-designed computer fonts have replaced hand lettering and coloring is done in Adobe Photoshop. For many artists, there are no “originals,” only the files on their computers.

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Cartoon drawing styles range from simplistic stick figures with minimal backgrounds to realistically rendered actors in dramatically shaded settings, but three general types are familiar to most cartoonists. The “big foot” approach, typical of humorous cartoons, features characters with oversized feet, noses, and heads. The “five-finger” method, common in adventure and romance stories, is distinguished by anatomically correct figures and photo-realistic backgrounds. The “semi-straight” school bridges the gap between the two and can have characters with large heads, realistic bodies, and big feet, as in Li’l Abner, or a homogenous blend of caricatured features, as in For Better or For Worse. Many cartoons do not fit neatly into any of these categories. Illustrative techniques vary from stark black-and-white linework to vibrant color compositions. In all cases, the style must complement the content. Cartoons are designed to fit in different formats. The single-panel approach is typical of most magazine and political cartoons. Each drawing is a carefully composed snapshot, a moment frozen in time that can suggest past events or future possibilities. Multiple-panel strips offer greater possibilities for storytelling by allowing the passage of time between frames. Like cinematographers, cartoonists can execute close-ups, long shots, cross cutting, pans, and zooms in their panel compositions. An avid film buff, Milton Caniff emulated the work of the movie directors he admired in his two creations, Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon. He used atmospheric lighting effects, dramatic perspective, and simulated tracking shots to enhance his stories. The newspaper comic strip can be a self-contained sequence consisting of one or more panels or a continuing series of multiple episodes. The “gag-aday” approach features a complete joke or observation in each installment. A “continuity” strip has plotlines that can last for days, weeks, or months. Many gag-a-day strips feature running themes and many continuity strips have punch lines—some cartoonists combine the two methods into what is called “narrative humor.” In the early days of the Sunday funnies, cartoonists had an entire newspaper page to display their graphic talents. Between 1905 and 1911, Winsor McCay experimented with different page layouts in Little Nemo in Slumberland, using tall panels to suggest height and panoramic panels to provide breadth. Comic strip formats became more restricted and standardized when daily strips were introduced, and syndicates began distributing their features to newspapers around the world and advertisers competed for space on the comic pages. In the comic book medium, artists had more freedom to compose their pages. Will Eisner pioneered the “splash page” in The Spirit and other artists introduced double-page spreads and other innovative layouts. Comic book writers could also do stories that extended far beyond what was possible in newspapers. Superhero sagas, which can last for multiple issues, have the potential to attain

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mythic proportions. Contemporary graphic novelists, while exploring challenging topics and storytelling techniques, still utilize the basic comic book format. In terms of content in cartoons, the possibilities are limitless. Among the many thematic genres identified in histories of newspaper comics and comic books are adventure, aviation, fantasy, science fiction, horror, war, western, detective, sports, romance, soap opera, humor, screwball, pantomime, animals, pets, kids, teens, families, and babies. The subject matter of magazine and political cartoons spans the scope of human experience. Cartoonists have a talent for dreaming up ideas that are outside of established genres. Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead is an example of a creation that defies categorization. A well-crafted cartoon can elicit a gasp of surprise, a sigh of regret, a smile of recognition, or a howl of laughter from a reader. Although often associated with humor, cartoons are one of the most effective mediums for serious commentary. Some of the most memorable cartoons are ones that make powerful social or political statements. “We have met the enemy and he is us,” a phrase introduced in Walt Kelly’s Pogo, became the unofficial slogan of the environmental movement in the 1970s. Contemporary cartoonists have broached such previously taboo topics as homosexuality, teen pregnancy, drug use, and cancer. In the modern era, the potential for comics to chronicle autobiographical experiences has been dramatically demonstrated. Among the most notable graphic novels have been ones that were based on the lives of their creators. The subject matter covered in these groundbreaking works is more thought provoking than the typical escapist entertainment offered by most newspaper comics and comic books from what is often referred to as the “golden age.” Cartoonists love to play with the art form. Self-referential comics, in which artists interact with their characters, and metacomics, in which characters are aware that they are in a cartoon, can be found in some of the earliest publications. George Herriman, Al Capp, Ernie Bushmiller, and Walt Kelly frequently experimented with “breaking the third wall” in their two-dimensional comics. In 1961, Mort Walker and Jerry Dumas introduced Sam’s Strip, about a character that owned and operated the strip he lived in. Sam and his assistant discussed the inner workings and hidden secrets of life within the panel borders, played with the basic elements of the cartoon format and were visited by famous characters from other strips. In more recent years, artists like Bill Griffith, Garry Trudeau, Berke Breathed, Garry Larson, Dan Piraro, and Stephan Pastis have continued to stretch the limits of cartoon creativity. Although Winsor McCay, Lionel Feininger, and many other pioneers experimented with surrealism in their strips, Bill Watterson took fantasy to a new level in Calvin and Hobbes. Cartoonists had previously used the medium to communicate the internal thoughts and emotions of their characters, but Watterson made this technique an essential element of his creation. Readers

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of Calvin and Hobbes became accustomed to interpreting images that shifted back and forth between the “real” world and Calvin’s daydreams. This visualization method is now used commonly in the comics and certain artists, most notably Pat Brady in Rose is Rose and Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman in Zits, have refined it even further. As the medium of cartoon animation developed, from traditional techniques to computer-generated imagery, the addition of motion, sound, and special effects expanded the potential for graphic expression. Writers, directors, and concept artists carefully planned their films with detailed storyboards, layout drawings, and character designs. Animators created the illusion of life with hand-drawn pencil sketches. The technical challenges of producing an animated film are complex and demanding but the success of these films still depends on the storytelling ability and graphic talents of the artists who conceive and design them. The masters of the art form created works that will last forever. Winsor McCay’s spectacular flights of fantasy, Peter Arno’s elegant New Yorker cartoons, Milton Caniff ’s globe-trotting tales of adventure, David Levine’s brilliant caricatures of political leaders and literary luminaries, Charles Schulz’s lovable Peanuts gang, Will Eisner’s graphic novels about life in the city, and Art Spiegelman’s epic story of his parents’ survival during the Holocaust are as important to our cultural legacy as the great works of literature and art. The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum provides a permanent repository and showcase for the best that cartoon art has to offer.

Permanent Ink: Comic Book and Comic Strip Art as Aesthetic Object Andrei Molotiu Reprinted with permission of Andrei Molotiu. First printed in the International Journal of Comic Art 9, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 24–42. The updated version reprinted here was posted in October 2010 as part of the “Sequential Erudition” series devoted to comics scholarship on the Hooded Utilitarian website.

While the aesthetics of comics have received increased scholarly attention over the last couple of decades, most of this attention has been paid to comics in their final, printed form, with little of it devoted to original comic art.1 At the same time, traditional drawings experts have shied away from art that is often seen not as an end in itself but as a tool in a creative process, the end of which is the printed comic. Of course, the lowly status of “popular” culture has also played a large role in this neglect. However, original comic art deserves significantly more study from comics scholars, art historians, museum curators, and even from critics and theorists. I would like to make the case for it by emphasizing the specificity of original art as aesthetic object, and by distinguishing between the aesthetics of the printed comic and those of the actual original-art object, as collected and displayed.

Comic Art Originals as Gallery Comics As this symposium is devoted to gallery comics, I would like to begin by exploring how my topic fits into this larger theme. Doing so will also highlight some of the principal characteristics of original comic art and the distinct kind of aesthetic appreciation it invites. A gallery comic, by definition, offers a hybrid of the visual experience of gallery art and of that of the comic book page. That is to say, it transcends the traditional identity of a comic as a (visual-verbal) text intended to be consumed for narrative information and replaces—or commingles—it with the 33

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experience of a two-dimensional artwork on a wall. As such, a gallery comic not only allows but appears to require a longer period of viewing than is usually necessary to get a page’s narrative gist, and ultimately offers a different experience of sequential art, one that goes beyond a comic’s immediately readable meaning toward what we might think of as its quality as object: the comic not simply as visual-verbal text but as text inseparable from its material support. Additionally, gallery comics seem to have a different relation with their “mechanical reproducibility,” as Walter Benjamin might say, than mainstream or even alternative comics. They are either hand-drawn or hand-painted by the artist, or appear as small-run prints.2 Gallery comics, of course, also tend to be larger in size than their printed cousins, befitting the visual experience of seeing a piece on a gallery wall, rather than reading it while holding it in one’s hand. Now, though the medium of gallery comics is still in its infancy, we of course already have had many works fitting the definition, though they may not necessarily have been intentionally created as such. Take for example the many museum and gallery shows devoted to comics in recent years, such as Masters of American Comics in Los Angeles, Milwaukee, and New York, Ivan Brunetti’s The Cartoonist’s Eye at Columbia College, Chicago—or the show, Comics as Art, that I organized with John Begley at the Belknap Gallery at the University of Louisville in the fall of 2005. These exhibitions tended to display both printed comics, in the shape of comic books, usually in a vitrine or a glass case and open to a particularly visually arresting spread, and pieces of original art. For many comic book readers who went to such shows, the experience of a book permanently frozen on a single double-page spread and whose leafs one could not turn to see what comes next was to some extent frustrating. Comic books are designed for a specific kind of viewing/reading experience, and we feel that, no matter how much we admire the few panels on view, we are getting only a partial experience of that specific artwork. Coming face-to-face with original comic art generates a different experience. Looking at an original comic page, even if it is a so-called inside page (that is, neither a splash page nor a cover), the plot and what happens in it past the few panels before us are usually far from our minds. What is intriguing, to begin with, is simply the beauty of the page itself, the quality of its draftsmanship. In the comics-reading experience, except in rare cases, the art is intended to have, at least partly, a utilitarian and eminently consumable function: namely, to carry the plot forward and get out of the way. Thus, the usual comics reader does not spend more time poring over the art than is necessary to comprehend the events depicted. When considering original art as an aesthetic object in its own right—an experience greatly facilitated by the act of displaying it in exhibitions, on gallery walls, or in private collections—this situation is turned on its head. Images meant to be consumed in the space of a minute or less demand, when

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exhibited, a different kind of attention, one that shifts away from the utilitarian aspects of the art to those that are not so easily consumed by narrative—to what might be called its non-logocentric qualities.3 This is true even in the case of single-strip or one-page gags, where the original art presents not a fragment of a larger narrative, but carries the entire gist of the printed piece: once we have gotten the joke, the materiality of the piece continues to confront us and does not allow our eyes to slide as easily to the next strip over as they would when reading, say, a newspaper comics page. Conveniently for gallery spaces, comic artists have traditionally drawn their originals at either “twice-up” or “half-up” size—that is, either twice or one and a half the size of the finished printed artwork.4 This difference in size between original art and printed comic was developed for purely practical reasons, to allow the artists more space in which to draw the smaller details, as well as to allow more sweeping hand gestures and therefore a more consistent and confident line quality. For the purposes of museum exhibition, however, this difference in size also helps the original art function better as an exhibit object, not only having a more impressive visual presence on the gallery wall but also displaying the drawn marks at the scale at which they were created, and thereby emphasizing the indexical relationship between the draftsmanship and the hand and body of the artist.5 Identifying the distinct qualities of original comic-art pages which set them apart from their appearance in printed form can help us elucidate the differences between the respective aesthetic attentions invited by comics in these two distinct guises. The great majority of scholarly studies that have so far addressed the aesthetics of comics—from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics to Thierry Groensteen’s The System of Comics, and many others—have naturally focused on the printed final product. In doing so, they have analyzed primarily the rhetorical, narrative, and generally meaning-making devices of the medium, such as types of panel-to-panel transitions, word-image interaction, or the semiotic interdependence of panels within each page’s layout. These elements can of course still be studied in the original art from which the printed comics were produced. However, a strange development occurs when we confront the original, hand-drawn boards: rhetorical devices, narrative techniques, and so on are lessened in importance proportionally with the de-emphasis of our attention to story and plot. The material support of the narrative sequence no longer presents itself as a (ideally) transparent medium, and the rhetorical, meaning-producing level of the text is revealed as belonging only to the most superficial layer of a thick palimpsest of brush and pen strokes, touches of white-out, blue-penciled editorial interventions, traces of penciling, marginal instructions from writer to inker, and so on. Furthermore, as plot fades into the background, so does our immediate tendency to scan the page in the same

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direction and order as any written text (left to right and top to bottom, in the Western tradition), which is replaced more with the perpendicular, centralized gaze of the viewer of paintings or drawings. Looking at a piece of original art hanging on a wall, the eye does not immediately go to the top left panel, nor does it feel compelled to follow the narrative sequentially, instead gaining a new freedom to skip across the overall surface of the board independently of the prescribed sequence. Such a redistribution of visual interest places more emphasis on the overall composition of the page, and the viewer’s attention, more easily than when reading the printed product, is able to focus on the semiotic and formal interplay between panels even when these panels are not sequentially continuous. Now, the moment that we display—and admire—comic art originals in gallery spaces, and that we begin considering their own aesthetic qualities separately from those of the printed comic, an objection may arise. In thus glorifying what might be thought of as just a tool in the comics-production process, and not the finished product itself, are we betraying the intention of the artist and falsifying the historical context of production and consumption of the image—as if we were admiring Goya’s copper plates, rather than the printed etchings of the Caprichos? This complex question alone could warrant a full study. However, within the scope of this article, let me just point out a few relevant facts. To begin with, the often-invoked original art/printmaking plate analogy has been forcefully countered by Richard V. West, in his afterword to Robert C. Harvey’s exhibition catalog, Children of the Yellow Kid. Seeing the printmaking plate as the “matrix from which a number of images are printed,” West argued that comic art originals do not fit into this category: In the case of comics, the original drawing can’t be considered the “matrix” for the printed version. The true matrix is the printing plate produced by photo-mechanical means from the artist’s drawing. Like many true matrices, the printing plate is normally discarded or recycled after it has served its purpose. Fortunately for us, the inked drawing is not destroyed (at least not intentionally) in the process of making the plate, and remains as a sort of “proto-matrix” from which, presumably, a new matrix could be made.6 Of course, a further difference between printmaking plates and comic art originals is that, while the former only record the image in sunken grooves or raised ridges on a metal plate or wooden block, and thus do not visually resemble the artist’s intent for the final product, original comic art usually features black shapes on a white ground, and thus is much closer to the final, published image, particularly in the case of black-and-white comics.

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Further justifying the attention paid here to comic art originals is the fact that many recent artists, such as Ivan Brunetti, Tony Millionaire, or Gary Panter clearly pay as much attention to the published end result as to the original art itself, which they intend to display in a gallery or sell. Therefore, they are creating not with one, but with at least two (overlapping) audiences in mind: the comic-reading public, and the gallery-goers and collectors of original art. For these artists and many others like them, original comic art is as much “gallery comics” as production tool. Similar attitudes could be found among comic artists of past generations, even when they were producing work for hire for mainstream companies, at a time when originals were routinely disposed of and long before a well-organized market for original art had developed.7 For example, a well-known story about Jack Kirby, told by his longtime assistant and biographer, Mark Evanier, reveals Kirby’s and his wife’s attitudes toward original art. Discussing a period in Kirby’s life when the artist’s strained relations with Marvel Comics led to a great amount of mental stress, Evanier writes: During the period of depression I just mentioned, he would occasionally finish an especially good full-pager for Thor and show it to his wife, who was equally unhappy with how Marvel was treating Jack. Roz would look at the page and say, “It’s too good for them.” Jack would say, “You’re right,” and instead of sending it in to Marvel, he’d give it to her. She’d put it in a little folder she kept as “her” Kirby Art Collection.8

Formal Characteristics of Comic Art Originals What mainly justifies this attention paid to original art, however, is the inherent visual qualities of the art itself. There are a good number of such qualities that viewers can see in a piece of original art but not in the printed comic. To begin with, even though many assume that a pure black-and-white image can be translated into a printed black-and-white comic or into the black lines of a color comic with minimum loss, this is hardly the case. As can be seen when comparing a panel from Jack Kirby’s and Mike Royer’s original art for a page in DC Comics’ Sandman no. 1 (1974) (figures 14, 15) to the printed product (figure 16), oftentimes the reproduction process thickens the inked lines, which lose some of the gracefulness they had in the original drawing. Additionally, for the sake of reproduction, printers increase the black-and-white contrast, which gives lines a somewhat raggedier appearance (the proximity of lines to the color screen-dots also emphasizes this visual degradation). We would expect that the use of more sophisticated imaging technology would have corrected this

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Figure 14. Jack Kirby (pencils), Mike Royer (inks), Joe Simon (script), original art for page 8 from The Sandman no. 1, DC Comics, 1974. Copyright DC Comics, 1974, 2007.

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Figure 15. Detail of The Sandman no. 1, page 8.

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Figure 16. Jack Kirby (pencils), Mike Royer (inks), Joe Simon (script), The Sandman no. 1, DC Comics, 1974, page 8, detail, as printed.

situation. Actually, if anything, it has made it worse. As can be seen by comparing the original and the printed versions of a panel from Ivan Brunetti’s Schizo 4 (figures 17, 18, 19), line thickness is significantly exaggerated in the printed version and so is the raggediness of the line edges.9 Now, of course, one might argue that the artists created their original pages advisedly, accounting for the later transformations, in the same way that painters in the eighteenth century knew to work a little too brightly, so that some of the brightness of their color might survive under the painting’s darkening protective glazes. Yet, the liveliness and confidence of the application of the lines that, in the originals, really draw out the abilities of comic artists such as Brunetti and Royer survive only partially in the reproduced images. A study of the original art on the level of the graphic marks also reveals a variety of visual qualities derived from the specific tools used, qualities which disappear in the printed version. As part of their “DC Showcase” series, DC Comics has recently reprinted a page of Metamorpho, from 1967, penciled by Sal Trapani and inked by Charles Paris, the original of which can be seen here (figures 20, 21). DC appears to have reproduced the page from the original negatives and using better printing techniques and paper, and thus managed to maintain the line quality of the original much better than in the original printing. Nevertheless, the reprinted version does not—and cannot—reveal the slightly more faded, grayish tint of the lines describing the outline of the character, the Thunderer, compared to the darker black of some of the other

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Figure 17. Ivan Brunetti, original art for page from Schizo no. 4, Fantagraphics Books, 2005. Copyright Ivan Brunetti, 2005.

Figure 18. Detail of Schizo no. 4.

Figure 19. Ivan Brunetti, Schizo no. 4, Fantagraphics Books, 2005, detail, as printed.

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Figure 20. Sal Trapani (pencils), Charles Paris (inks), Bob Haney (script), original art for page 22 of Metamorpho no. 14, DC Comics, 1967. Copyright DC Comics 1967, 2007.

Figure 21. Detail of Metamorpho no. 14, page 22.

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Figure 22. Dan de Carlo (pencils), original art for page 18 from Josie no. 36, Archie Comics, 1968. Copyright Archie Comics, 1968, 2007.

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Figure 23. Al Capp (ghost artist for Ham Fisher), panels from Joe Palooka newspaper strip, early 1930s.

lines, which also show a different edge quality. That is because the inker drew those outlines with a brush, and in this specific panel, most probably with a brush still containing some water, which somehow diluted the ink. In general, brushes apply thinner layers of ink than pens do, allowing the white of the paper to come through more. In contrast, Paris drew the three fine lines at the top of the character’s nose with a dip pen with a flexible nib, such as a crowquill. He most likely used the same pen to indicate the outline of the speech balloon, as can be seen in its inflected lines, thinning from the edge of the panel to the tail of the balloon. Finally, the borders of the panel were drawn with a technical pen, such as a Rapidograph, which lays down a line of consistent width. In some panels—and this is impossible to show in a reproduction—the ink line applied by a flexible dip pen is so thick as to be slightly in relief above the surface of the paper, giving a fascinatingly tactile quality to the image. Besides the manner in which the artist applied the ink, original boards, when studied closely, present an entire palimpsest of marks that do not show up on the printed image. In a 1968 splash page from the Archie comic Josie (figure 22), we can detect erased pencil lines, which indicate the freedom with which the inker departed from the penciler’s indications. The page was penciled by the great Archie artist Dan DeCarlo, creator of “Josie.” We do not know who the inker was, but clearly it was someone familiar enough with DeCarlo’s work to feel comfortable not to follow the pencils very tightly.10 In two panels from Ham Fisher’s newspaper strip Joe Palooka from 1931 to 1932 (figure 23), the hand throughout is Al Capp’s, who then worked as a ghost artist before launching his own very successful strip, Li’l Abner.11 The character of the young boy is a dead ringer for the later-created Abner. As can be seen iwn the original artwork (but as the newspaper and comic book readers could not), the boxer’s suit was

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Figure 24. Kelly Jarvis, original art for Tom and Jerry strip, 10/16, unknown year (probably early 1990s). Copyright Turner Entertainment Co., distributed by Editors Press Service, Inc.

originally intended to be checkered, only later to be covered up with ink and made entirely black. Erased pencil lines and double layers of ink have a certain intrinsic aesthetic appeal, adding to the visual interest of the page formal elements that are invisible in the printed version. Other marks that are visible only in the original artwork are traces of production manipulations and do not necessarily add anything on their own from an artistic point of view. However, they do contribute to a “thicker” experience of the original page, as well as to our understanding of the comics-making process. The same Joe Palooka panels, for example, bear blue-penciled color codes (“6A,” “6B”), indicating what tint should be added to each area of the drawing.12 This may indicate that the panels here originally came from a Sunday strip (the only newspaper strips that were printed in color); however, we cannot be certain of this, as the Joe Palooka newspaper strips were also later reused to make comic books, which were also in color. This later reuse also explains a couple more facts about the image: it is usually strange to find only a couple of panels, rather than an entire original board. However, when reformatted for comics, the original pages were simply cut up and then repasted in the shape of a comic book page—which also accounts for the panels’ acid yellowing, coming through from the glue on the back. Editorial intervention constitutes another type of visual evidence barred from readers of the printed comics, but discernible in originals. In a Tom and Jerry newspaper strip by Kelly Jarvis (figure 24), not only are the entire contents of the last two speech balloons pasted on, but the tail of the last balloon was moved to Jerry from his younger companion; clearly, the original joke was completely different. In a 1968 page from a story chronicling the adventures of the parody hero, Sooper Hippie (figure 25), we can see touches of whiteout consistently applied over the cleavage of the villainess, Mary Boppers— clearly indicating that Howie Post, the artist, had gone a bit far in indicating her charms, and that some censorship was in order. One can also see editorial

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Figure 25. Howie Post (pencils and inks), original art for page from “Sooper Hippie,” published in Bunny, The Queen of the In-Crowd no. 5, Harvey Comics, 1968.

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blue-pencil lines correcting the name of the hero to “Sooper Hippie,” suggesting that this name was arrived at quite late in the production process—after the penciling, but before the lettering. Touches of pro-white and blue pencil, ghostly pentimenti of erased penciling, marginal notations, brushstrokes that reveal their speed and their directionality, pen strokes that seem to be in relief due to the thickness of the ink deposited—all these marks emphasize not only the inescapable presence of the artwork (a presence, which, given the shift of attention I am here proposing, can be felt as strongly as the impasto brushwork in a painting by Van Gogh or the chisel marks in a late, unfinished Michelangelo), but also the comicscreating process. This process, in traditional mainstream comics as well as in most “alternative” product, has been generally repressed in favor of creating a nearly mechanical look of homogenous blacks (whether or not accompanied by coloring screens)—a look that facilitates ease of reading by de-emphasizing the image’s presence as image. It is exactly this presence of image as image that is highlighted when a piece of original art is framed and exhibited on the wall, akin to traditional fine art such as painting or drawing.

Fragmentation and Temporality in the Display of Original Comic Art As mentioned above, in such instances of display, the framing as well as the very circumstances of exhibition help place more importance on the overall formal qualities of the page. Furthermore, in the case of comic book art, the incidents depicted in the particular piece of original art are usually wrested out of a larger narrative continuum. Yet the shift of attention that takes places in the move from the book to the wall—toward form and materiality, away from story—does not completely negate the page’s narrative content, but reframes it. The narrative is fragmented, and the act of exhibiting a single page creates a sense of mystery as to the specific events portrayed, which is satisfying in its own way since it avoids the simple consummability, and therefore disposability, of a plot. For example, as a work of art, the page reproduced here from Kirby and Simon’s Sandman no. 1 (figure 14) is much more successful than the story from which it derives. The combination of the night-time setting and the sense of suspense suggested by the silence of the first five panels and by the buried creature’s open eyes makes for a powerful narrative episode, the impact of which, in the comic book, is diluted when we learn the too-mundane explanation for the creature’s existence.13 To a large extent, it may be that our ability to appreciate such fragmentariness as a positive aesthetic quality has developed out of pop art, and especially

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out of Roy Lichtenstein’s technique of isolating, scaling up, and exhibiting in gallery environments single panels—an instance of the little-studied influence of pop art on comics, rather than the other way around. More generally, however, it also seems to satisfy a certain modernist appreciation of incompleteness, at a time when the mainstream, as well as most of what we might call “alternative” culture, is as enthralled with notions of plot and narrative closure as any nineteenth-century novelist. If pieces of comic book original art undergo such an aesthetic transformation primarily when wrested out of the narrative continuum to which they belonged, could a similar transformation possibly be identified in the case of single-page strips? After all, since the originals contain the same amount of narrative information as the printed pages—in this case depicting a complete story, from beginning to end, or, perhaps more aptly put, an entire joke from setup to punch line—the issue of fragmentariness no longer applies. And yet, I would argue that their transition from printed page to “gallery comics” is accompanied by a parallel transformation in aesthetic effect: a subtler transformation, perhaps, but also one with even more fascinating results. Take the example of the Ivan Brunetti strip from Schizo 4 (figure 17) or of a 1967 strip from Archie’s Joke Book, possibly drawn by DeCarlo, but more likely by one of his close imitators (figure 26). In both cases the joke (word which probably should be in quotation marks for the Brunetti piece) is soon gotten. The narrative meaning being thus out of the way, we can pay attention to the nonlogocentric dimension of the piece. There is more to it, however. Temporally, we relate differently to a picture on a wall than to a page in a book. In the gallery or on one’s wall, the strip persists—longer, much longer than the time it would take us to read it then flip the page, long past the time required for its simple narrative effectiveness. In the time required to get the narrative point all we needed to do was engage in a regular top-to-bottom, left-to-right scanning of the page for content. However, as the displayed page continues to hail our attention (largely due to the “thicker” visual experience it provides, as discussed in the previous section, but also simply due to the fact of its display), such scanning becomes a continuous circling, in which the Van Gogh bunny goes on being disappointed in love and cutting off his own ear, in which Betty and Reggie keep dancing and Veronica keeps teasing Mr. Lodge forever. These characters attain perhaps the tragic eternity which the French phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas saw in statues: “The eternal duration of the interval in which a statue is immobilized differs radically from the eternity of a concept; it is the meanwhile, never finished, still enduring—something inhuman and monstrous.”14 Levinas wrote this in an early essay, “Reality and Its Shadow,” in which he attempted to apply his developing ethical philosophy to the field of aesthetics. For Levinas, representational art can only present a

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Figure 26. Unknown artist, original art for “Fuddy Duddy Daddy,” Archie’s Joke Book no. 110, 1967. Copyright Archie Comics, 1967, 2007.

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tragic parody of real life, inasmuch as the unboundedness of life, which allows individuals free will, is denied to characters confined within the (literal) frame of a painting, or the (temporal) frame of a novel: “The characters of a novel are beings that are shut up, prisoners. Their history is never finished, it still goes on, but makes no headway. A novel shuts beings up in a fate despite their freedom.”15 Sculpture, with its appearance of having frozen human beings in eternal, unchangeable poses, offered a particularly apt metaphor for this effect that, to the philosopher, every artwork had: “Every artwork is in the end a statue—a stoppage of time.”16 Such a stoppage is literalized in the temporal transformation that occurs when original comic art is used as gallery comics. It is particularly poignant, I feel, that this happens, especially in the Veronica joke, in the course of a transition from the pure disposability and ephemerality of a children’s comic book into the permanence of a gallery piece. In this case, it is not incompleteness that forms the primary rhetorical regime of the new aesthetic appreciation the piece requires, but repetition—another modernist aesthetic strategy that the move from the page to the wall, from horizontality to verticality, adds to, or perhaps discovers in, the original comic strip. We are already a long way from simply looking at brushstrokes and whiteout marks. These meditations on the singular phenomenological transformation that occurs when comic art originals—originally tools in the comics-creation process—are granted status as artworks in their own right and appreciated as such could be greatly expanded, particularly in some of the philosophical directions at which my last few paragraphs have hinted. For now, let me just conclude by emphasizing the aesthetic specificity of original art, which cannot simply be subsumed under, or subordinated to, the aesthetics of comics as we have known them so far. And let me leave you with one question: is the move from the page to the wall—especially in the case of pieces not originally intended for gallery display—simply an act of violence that, as proponents of the “printed book as intended and sole aesthetic object” view would have it, decontextualizes the original images, reframing them in a false context for which they were never intended—and in which they become yet another commodity for the art market to sell? Is it perhaps simply a creative act, in which those who effect the transition from one context to the other are responsible for adding aesthetic qualities that were never intended to be read into such pieces? Or—third possibility—is it rather a critical and even philosophical act, in which unknown or hidden energies, that nevertheless inherently lived in the piece, are released and valorized in the reframing? I am sure that, as the art world tendencies that this symposium is intended to explore continue, we will be confronted with such questions more and more, and the demand for finding an answer to them will become increasingly urgent.

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Afterthoughts on “Permanent Ink” (2018) 1. Since I first delivered an early version of “Permanent Ink” as a talk at the 2006 national conference of the College Art Association, then published it in the International Journal of Comic Art in 2007, the public visibility and appreciation of original comic art have grown by leaps and bounds. Exhibitions of comic art are now regularly held at a major New York City museum, the Society of Illustrators, prompted by the society’s 2012 acquisition of the assets of the small Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (originally founded in 2001). Other institutions that have or had regular exhibition programs are the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum in Columbus, Ohio (especially since the opening of its new location in 2013), the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco (reopened in 2017 after a two-year hiatus, the result of sky-high real-estate prices in the Bay Area), and the fledgling ToonSeum in Pittsburgh, closed as of 2018. Occasional exhibitions of comic art have also been popping up with regularity at many other locations, from seemingly impromptu shows of a local collector’s holdings (such as the unfortunately named—inasmuch as it invoked a cliché of the journalistic coverage of comics one might have thought had mercifully faded away—Bam! Pow! Swoosh! at the Midwest Museum of American Art in Elkhart, Indiana, in September 2018), to more focused exhibits (for example, The Best American Comics, Selections 2014–2017 at the South Bend Museum of Art in 2017, also accompanied by a show of newspaper comic originals). Increasingly, monographic exhibitions have also been organized, such as those dedicated to Jack Kirby (Comic Book Apocalypse, curated by Charles Hatfield, at California State University at Northridge in 2015) or R. Crumb (at the Frye Museum of Art in Seattle, in 2008, at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2009–2010, at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris in 2012, etc.). The reason I began the above litany with the Society of Illustrators, however, is that original comic art still seems to have made few inroads into the collections of major national museums. Just as it is hard to prove a negative, it seems idle to provide examples of one, but I know of no efforts by any museums not specializing in comics, such as the ones listed above, to acquire original comic art; even the Society of Illustrators, by confining its mission to illustration, is relegated to a field traditionally marginalized in the American and European fine art world, both in the museum and gallery world and in art education. The situation, presumably, will be improved somewhat with the upcoming opening (no date set yet) of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, one collecting specialty of which—or rather, of its founder, George Lucas—is

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original comic art; yet in that case, too, it seems apparent that comic art will be shown in an illustration context, unless the museum’s exhibition program extends back to history painting of the nineteenth century and earlier, which occupied the highest place in the hierarchy of genres and which was, after all, narrative art par excellence. We are then at a transitional moment within comic art’s acceptance in the art world; this transitional moment, however, threatens to stabilize into a status quo, further delaying the full appreciation of original comic art as art. My concern for this doesn’t simply have to do with the cultural status of comics, but also derives from practical considerations: there is a tremendous amount of original comic art in circulation, variously offered for sale on eBay, at auction houses such as Heritage Auctions, at dealers’ tables at many comic art conventions—foremost among which is still the San Diego Comic Con—or on such peer-to-peer sites as comicartfans.com. As anyone can tell who sees the piled stacks of comic art at conventions, or, worse, who notices the slow degradation of the same piece of art, unsold year after year yet handled by more and more prospective buyers, such circulation raises urgent conservation issues, many of which would be solved once the art entered a public collection. The current situation is also a researcher’s nightmare, inasmuch as important pieces show up here or there unannounced (on eBay for a week, at the San Diego Comic Con for four days) only to disappear again into the depths of some private collection, allowing nothing like the full or nearly full access to the entire oeuvre of an artist—say, Giorgione, Edouard Manet, or Jackson Pollock—that an art historian might have simply based on public-collection holdings. In terms of academic art history, with which the museum and gallery world forms an uneasy symbiosis, the situation is hardly better. I personally have been lucky enough to receive the full support of my department, the Department of Art History at Indiana University, Bloomington, in developing a regular course rotation of three undergraduate classes (on newspaper strips, comic books, and graphic novels, respectively), one joint undergraduate/graduate one (“Comics, Cartoons, and the Art World,” in which I discuss at length issues relating to original comic art and its exhibition), and a graduate seminar in comics studies, but I know of no similar efforts elsewhere beyond a stray course now and then; I hasten to add, this seems due not to lack of interest on the part of art historians, but more a result of institutional and especially inbuilt disciplinary resistance.17 Comics studies has made more inroads in other academic departments such as English or American studies, of course, but by the very nature of those disciplines, such courses are rarely concerned with original comic art and its materiality, nor do they offer as many collaborative opportunities with the museum world.

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2. Surprisingly, a major pathway for the developing appreciation of original comic art has formed outside of the institutions—museums, galleries, auction houses—traditionally concerned with original art as object. I am referring to the publishing programs of presses such as IDW and Graphitti Designs, along with further efforts by Fantagraphics, Abrams ComicArt, and others, to reproduce entire graphic novels or comic book or comic strip runs directly from the original art in facsimile, at the original size or close to it. (Given the proximity in time, I wonder whether such initiatives were prompted by some of the same developments as “Permanent Ink” was; namely, exhibitions such as Masters of American Comics of 2005–2006, which gave original comic art a much greater visibility than it had previously had in the US museum world. I can’t help but imagine that many visitors came out of the show newly converted to the beauty of comics originals.18) One of the first such publishing efforts was dedicated to what might seem a rather inconsequential comic. Dread and Superficiality: Woody Allen as Comic Strip (2009), from Abrams ComicArts, collected the best of Stuart Hample’s 1976–1984 Inside Woody Allen newspaper strip. Though reduced from their original size, all the strips in the book were reproduced photographically from the original art, which, to my surprise, made reading them significantly more enjoyable than doing so from the plain line art. (If I may put on my critic’s hat for a moment, given the strip’s overall quality—certainly professional, but by no means in the stratosphere of comics achievement—I doubt I would have purchased the book, let alone appreciated it as much, if it had featured more traditional reproduction.) The reasons for my enjoyment were reflected quite accurately in the book’s flap copy, in which the publishers justified their choice of reproduction: This compilation of over 300 of the best of the comic’s comics [sic], each photographed from the original art, reveals the nuances and details of process and pre-production, such as pencil roughs, paste-up corrections, printer marks, handwritten marginal notes, and the signs of age and wear. Presenting these comics as art, this collection offers a unique look at what was—until now—essentially regarded as a disposable medium, presented merely as black-and-white line art. Other such efforts in 2009—the zeitgeist moved fast—included Justin Green’s Binky Brown Meets the Virgin Mary, published by McSweeney’s, and Jerry Moriarty’s The Complete Jack Survives from Buenaventura Press. (It is

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possible that this idiosyncratic choice of titles resulted simply from the fact that the respective artists had held on to their original art, greatly facilitating the task of compiling it. Another consideration, of course, was the extent to which technological developments had made economically justifiable printing in full-color art originally intended to be printed in black and white.) In none of these cases did the publishers indicate that the art was reproduced not only photographically, without reduction to high-contrast black and white (which it clearly was), but also at the same size as the originals. Reproduction at the original size, however, was and remains one of the main selling points of IDW’s Artist’s Edition publishing program, begun in 2012 and which quickly became the leading such program in the field. Here is how IDW describes its program: An Artist’s Edition is an art book that mimics the experience of viewing original comic book art as closely as possible, and in complete story form. The goal is to create a book that is the next best thing to looking over an artist’s shoulder onto their drawing board. Pages are scanned at a high resolution in color (although the printed pages appear to be in black and white) so they capture all the nuances that make original art special and unique—blue pencil notations, tape, white-out, margin notes. All are visible in an Artist’s Edition. Additionally, each book is printed the same size as the original art.19 I like IDW’s usage of the word “mimics” here; it implies some—unintended?— truth in advertising. Elements of actually “viewing original comic book art” are definitely missing in a reader’s experience of an Artist’s Edition book: the thickness, texture, and even smell of the Bristol board, the encrustations of opaque white (a.k.a. correcting fluid, or simply white-out) that sometimes give a page a three-dimensional effect, or the way different layers of ink can still be distinguished, fifty or more years after they were applied, by the various ways they catch the light. Other elements, however, remain and are faithfully reproduced: first and foremost the size—which, as I wrote in “Permanent Ink,” by “displaying the drawn marks at the scale at which they were created . . . [emphasizes] the indexical relationship between the draftsmanship and the hand and body of the artist”—the fineness of the lines, and more. Furthermore, some aesthetic elements may be added that are not so immediately available when confronting the original art itself. To draw out these additions, I would like to compare the experience of reading an Artist’s Edition volume to that of reading, or attempting to read, an entire narrative from the original art.

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All twenty original pages that went into the making of Jack Kirby and Mike Royer’s Kamandi nr. 14 (DC Comics, February 1974) were exhibited at the Comic Book Apocalypse show at CSU Northridge. (The issue can also be read in the IDW Artist’s Edition, Jack Kirby’s Kamandi vol. 2, published in 2016.) When I visited the exhibition, I found trying to read the story while standing in the gallery rather awkward. The pages didn’t draw me forward through the narrative; one could of course force oneself to progress through the book, yet doing so felt closer to a dutiful scholarly pursuit than to an aesthetically rewarding experience. For me, at least, the sideways, page-to-page impulse to read conflicted with, and was defeated by, the simple desire to see each image.20 At the same time, the joy in seeing the art was lessened by the duty one felt (granted, this may be a predicament only shared by other comics scholars) to keep reading: the presence of many pages detracted from the presence of each single one. If a similar tension between reading and seeing is experienced when perusing an Artist’s Edition book, the results, to me, seem radically different: rather than being mutually defeating, reading and seeing, in this case, enhance each other. To begin with, one soon realizes that one can indeed read the book, follow the story. Maybe this happens simply because we are preconditioned to read a book format as opposed to looking at an image on the wall. It may also be partly due to the intimacy one feels when holding a book in hand. On average, original comic art, though generally larger than the printed version, is still small for a museum piece, certainly compared to most paintings and drawings in contemporary art collections. Given the minimum distance a museumgoer is expected to keep from art on display, original art hung on a gallery wall is easier taken in as a gestalt than read. On the other hand, a book scaled to the size of original art feels massive. Whether we hold it in hand or, our arm muscles failing, we lay it down on a table or a lectern, our experience of it is immersive: the eye can float inside each of the panels as well as across the entire surface of the page. We are in it more than we can ever be inside the average-sized comic book. The sharpened aesthetic attention that such immersion entails is richly rewarded: looking at an Artist’s Edition, compared to reading the same comic in a regular publication, can feel like seeing a film on a movie screen versus one on an old-fashioned standard-definition television. I’d like to recall here my analysis, in “Permanent Ink,” of the way that the quality of the linework normally gets degraded from original art to printed object. Artist’s Editions, in their high-resolution scanning and subtle color treatment of supposedly black-and-white marks, reveal never previously seen gestures and traces, all the subtleties of the penciling and inking process. To continue this analysis, I would like to focus on what I believe is the most artistically successful Artist’s Edition that IDW has published; namely,

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their version of David Mazzucchelli’s and Frank Miller’s Daredevil: Born Again (2012). Born Again seems particularly well scanned, perhaps because, as revealed in a brief “About this Edition” note, the scans were all done by the artist himself.21 Once we open it, what do we see that was either invisible or hard to perceive in the story’s original comic book or trade-paperback publication? Or, to put it more simply, why do we need Artist’s Editions? Opaque white, used by Mazzucchelli not just for corrections but creatively, to render highlights, to suggest snow or reflections in glass lenses or windows, adds a painterly touch. A particularly good example of this is issue 228, page 27 (figure 27).22 Laid on top of Letraset dot screens, the white paint, which variously suggests bubbles rising from a sunken taxi, the foam of the water seeping into the car’s cab, or highlights on Matt Murdock’s shoulder and hair, attains a calligraphic, nearly abstract quality. Similarly, calligraphic dry brushwork, reminiscent of the “broken ink” style of Sumi-e (traditional Japanese brush-and-ink) painting, can be seen in the clouds on page 2 of issue 227. The construction beam, rendered as an accumulation of painterly ink strokes, that cuts across the bottom-left panel of issue 227, page 32, forms a harsh right angle, oblique to the orientation of the panel, reminiscent of a Franz Kline abstract expressionist composition. On page 28 of issue 32—a splash page—jagged dip-pen hatching and brushstrokes (the scanning is fine enough to help us differentiate between the darker pen marks and the thinner texture of ink applied with a brush) work together, in a textbook example of graphic bravura, to create a composition à la Alex Toth by way of Käthe Kollwitz. Mazzucchelli drew the first six pages (numbered 1–4, 6, and 8, due to the planned placement among them of two advertisement pages) of issue 229 on what looks like Craftint Doubletone, a no-longer-produced art paper which allowed the production of different shading tones through the application of different chemicals. He probably did so in order to give a distinct visual texture to the powerful sequence of Matt Murdock lying in the fetal position on Skid Row and recalling his origin story. The Craftint paper, now acidified, stands out with its warm brownish tones from the rest of the book, unifying that sequence graphically perhaps even more than intended by the artist. One can compare to its chemically produced dot screens the applied Letraset tone on the immediately following page 9, as well as the marvelous drawing, in pure opaque white, of two Rockefeller Plaza Christmas angels on top of that. Such examples could be multiplied a hundred-fold. The Born Again Artist’s Edition also reproduces occasional surprint pages, printed here on semitransparent foil so that we can see through it the page to which the surprint tones were meant to be added. There are also handwritten editorial and production notes, cut-off corners giving the pages a strangely off-kilter shape, acidified registration marks, and more.

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Figure 27. David Mazzucchelli (a), Frank Miller (w), Daredevil: Born Again, IDW Artist’s Edition, 2012, issue 28, p. 27.

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On a wall, as I described in “Permanent Ink,” we would be focusing only, or primarily, on these intentional or unintentional pictorial values, that seem to turn each page of original art into a palimpsest. In the book format of an Artist’s Edition, however, our perception of such values is copresent with the act of reading. We can still become absorbed in the story while being immersed into the size of the page. What the Born Again Artist’s Edition eminently provides is an enhanced experience of reading, one that could be dubbed “rich reading” by contrast to the reading for meaning only provided by most traditionally printed comic books or graphic novels. (By “reading for meaning only” I don’t mean reading only for story; reading for meaning can still note all the thematic, expressive, mood-setting, etc., clues built into the art.) We are constantly aware, in such rich reading, of the production process, of how narrative meaning was actively created and of the artistic labor underlying this creation. From this point of view Artist’s Editions are positively Brechtian, as we become aware not just of the narration, but of the artist’s active performance of it; yet, as opposed to Brecht’s conception, the ultimate aesthetic effect of this awareness is not to dissociate us from the story or to prevent emotional involvement or catharsis. To try to tease out positively what this ultimate aesthetic effect might be, let us approach a Born Again page from the opposite direction, as it were: not by first privileging the act of reading, only then to see how it is enriched by our perception of the materiality of the page, but starting from that materiality itself. Page 29 of issue 229, a wordless splash page, depicts Matt Murdock rescued by his mother, Maggie, now a nun (figure 28). The composition is modeled on that of a Renaissance pietà. The background, contrasting with the flat geometric shapes of the nun’s outfit, is a Pollockian construct of ink splashes. Across the page cut diagonal white beams of light rendered in painterly strokes of opaque white, some fully covering the ink shapes they overlie, some applied less thickly and therefore half-transparent. All these pictorial elements would of course be visible if we simply saw the page in a gallery. However, when we reach the page sequentially, narratively, its impact is greatly enhanced: the splashed-ink background echoes that of the top two panels on the previous page (page 27), which showed Matt’s lowest point and his collapse, from which Maggie will rescue him. The strokes of opaque white intrude upon this murky background like the beams of light, signifying hope and salvation, they are supposed to represent; yet in the Artist’s Edition this opposition of light and darkness is not simply representational: it is clearly formed from a dialectic of materials, from the brute stuff of artist’s pigments. This effect, simultaneously pictorial and sequential, is enhanced by the sheer size of the Artist’s Edition volume and the pictorial presence it lends to the pietà composition, and even by the very physical act of turning such large and thick pages to reach it.

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Figure 28. David Mazzucchelli (a), Frank Miller (w), Daredevil: Born Again, IDW Artist’s Edition, 2012, issue 29, p. 29.

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The rich reading offered by the Born Again Artist’s Edition, in which narrative and pictorial impact work additively and not subtractively (as in the experience of original comic art on a gallery wall), is hardly homogenous: some pages are drawn relatively simply, without particularly obvious pictorial effects, and those we may read more quickly; others, the materiality of which is more arresting, will slow us down, their pictorial qualities causing us to inspect them for significantly longer than we might in the traditionally printed comic. Seesawing relentlessly, narrative leads to pictorial contemplation then back to narrative, without either, however, being fully absent from the way we take in every page.

3. Artist’s Edition books, then, are neither simple simulacra of the original art they reproduce, nor are they just fancy graphic novels with a few bells and whistles: they present a third way of experiencing a comic, one which, in 2006, when I was writing “Permanent Ink” and the first such publications were still three years in the future, I had not yet been able to envision. Clearly, I find their aesthetic effect, which I tried to encompass under the term “rich reading,” powerful and rewarding. Sadly, however, IDW’s publishing program seems as of this writing to have been discontinued or significantly scaled down: if ten Artist’s Edition volumes appeared in 2015, nine in 2016, and eight in 2017, only one has come out so far in 2018, as of November. (At least three others were announced for this year, but don’t seem to have actually been published.) Copycat programs at other publishers also seem to have a hit a high point in the mid-2010s, only to have slowed down or been discontinued recently: Dark Horse Comics Gallery Editions published seven titles between 2013 and 2016 and none since; Graphitti Designs published seven DC Comics Gallery Editions titles between 2014 and 2016, with another announced for 2017 which doesn’t appear ever to have come out; and so on.23 Has, then, this brief episode in the story of our evolving appreciation of original comic art come to a close? Can we pair such a downturn with the perceived stagnation in the art world’s embrace of original comic art that I described toward the end of part 1 of this essay, to reach some rather melancholy conclusions? It is, of course, too early to tell, and I’m an art historian, not a futurologist. But even if this particular moment has faded out or is in the process of doing so, significant gains have been made in our understanding and aesthetic valuation of original comic art, gains upon which both the art and

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the comics world will no doubt build in years to come. Personally, I’m holding out for a Kirby retrospective at the Met; when that happens, we will be able to say that our cause has finally won. Notes 1. I am using the term “original” here in its most empirical sense, to refer to the drawings created by cartoonists with the intention of having them reproduced for publication; this is a term of art used in the comics industry as well as commercially; for example, in the section “Original Comic Art” on eBay.com. No further metaphysical claims of “originality” are implied. 2. In such cases gallery comics fit within the artisanal world of minicomics—many of which have recently borrowed more and more of their aesthetics from the “high art” world, and primarily from artist’s books. 3. The term “logocentric” derives of course from the work of Jacques Derrida, particularly his book Of Grammatology (1967), and denotes not simply the quality of being word- or speechcentered, but more generally that of being centered upon (intentional, verbalizable) meaning. 4. The entire industry shifted from the former to the latter size sometime around the mid1960s, largely for reasons of economy. 5. I should add that most pieces of original comic art, even when intended for color, tend to be in black and white, which in itself constitutes a specific aesthetic quality. Traditionally, the color in comic books was added in the printing process. In the few instances in which one finds a handcolored piece of original art, that color was added after the art had already been photographed for printing, returned to the artist, then probably given as a gift, for which purpose the artist aesthetically enhanced it. In recent years, despite changes in production and printing methods, many artists have tended to hold to much of the same formula, hand-drawing a piece of art in black and white, scanning it in, then coloring it on the computer. 6. Richard V. West, “Comics as ‘Ding an Sich’: A Note on Means and Media,” in Children of the Yellow Kid: The Evolution of the American Comic Strip, ed. Robert C. Harvey, 170 (Seattle: Frye Art Museum and University of Washington Press, 1998). 7. See, for example, the pulping of much original art at DC from the forties to the sixties, or the stories of editors at Marvel in the sixties and seventies freely giving away original boards to visitors. 8. Mark Evanier, “Jack F.A.Q.s,” The Jack Kirby Collector 12, no. 43 (Summer 2005): 14. 9. This variation generally results from converting the original comic page into a strictly black-and-white bitmap image with such digital tools as Photoshop (using features such as Levels and Threshold). 10. [Note, 2018: the inker was, most likely, Rudy Lapick.] 11. I have not been able to find their original publication date, but they clearly date from the time Al Capp worked for Fisher. 12. In the aforementioned 1968 splash page from the Archie comic Josie (see figure 9), a similar editorial color comment at the bottom tells the colorist to put “Orange hair on Clyde” and suggests it should match the hue of “Archie or Little Orphan Annie.” Additionally, the title word, “Josie,” which had to be reproduced at the beginning of each chapter, is a pasted-on photostat. 13. When I posted an image of this page on the Comics Journal message boards, the California artist and illustrator Coop responded tellingly to it: “What is that weird doll/statue/creature, and why is that dude burying it? I love how creepy and surreal this page is, taken out of context. It’s more of a headscratcher than twenty issues of Kramer’s Ergot.” Another poster, Art Baxter, responded by emphasizing the value of that single page over the overall issue: “The rest of the

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issue is late Simon/Kirby disposable nuttiness that includes a Japanese Kamikaze pilot named ‘General Electric’ who survived his crash and now has an electronic brain. He is making the dolls to . . . oh who cares. That silent page is the best part of the issue.” http://www.tcj.com/messboard/ viewtopic.php?t=2046&start=20, posted June 2, 2007. 14. Emmanuel Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” in The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 141. 15. Levinas, 139. [Note, 2010: I have recently found a parallel to, and confirmation of, Levinas’s thesis in an unexpected place—Mo Willems’s most recent installment in his highly successful series of “Elephant and Piggie” children’s books, We Are in a Book (New York: Hyperion Books for Children, 2010). There, the two anthropomorphic protagonists realize that they are characters in a book, and are saddened by the prospect of the book ending. Then they come up with a solution—asking the reader, on the last page, to read the book again. Probably because I already knew the Levinas essay, I found this particularly—though, perhaps, unintentionally—poignant when I heard my son read the book aloud for the first time.] 16. Levinas, 137. 17. Trying to sort out the reasons for such inbuilt resistance would take us too far afield in this context. It is, however, a conversation highly worth having, and one which was begun at the “Learning to Look: The State of Art History and Comics Scholarship” panel, organized by Josh Rose, at the first conference of the Comics Studies Society, August 9–11, 2018, at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The panel, I should add, confirmed my impression, as stated here, of the state of comics-studies courses in art-history departments. 18. To be precise, the text of “Permanent Ink,” as delivered at the CAA national conference in February 2006, was written before I had seen Masters of American Comics, which only came to Milwaukee, where I saw it, in the summer of that year. While I revised some parts of the talk for publication, I did not change the examples of original art I discussed, which consisted exclusively of art I had had firsthand access to by 2005. Therefore “Permanent Ink” does not register the full effect that Masters of American Comics had on me. 19. “What is an artist’s edition?” https://www.idwpublishing.com/artists-editions/what-is-an -artists-edition/. Accessed October 21, 2018. 20. At the risk of seeming simply to confirm the conclusions I had reached in 2006, I’d like to quote what I wrote in “Permanent Ink” about the lessening of our interest in narrative when confronting original comic art: “ . . . as plot fades into the background, so does our immediate tendency to scan the page in the same direction and order as any written text (left to right, and top to bottom, in the Western tradition), which is replaced more with the perpendicular, centralized gaze of the viewer of paintings or drawings.” It is that perpendicularity I am here opposing to the sideways drift of page-to-page reading. 21. Unfortunately, not all Artist’s Edition books have the same extraordinary quality; there are, for example, some less than ideally scanned pages in the Basil Wolverton or the Jack Kirby’s New Gods volumes. 22. The pages in the book are not numbered, but their original comic book numbering can be found, handwritten, at the top of each reproduced art board, a standard procedure in comic book production. 23. The data in this paragraph was taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist%27s_Edi tion, and confirmed independently on the various publishers’ websites and on amazon.com.

PIONEERS: COMIC ART EXHIBITIONS, 1930–1967 Although shows of comic art have been organized in galleries and museums in the United States since at least 1930, the art world’s interest in them has waxed and waned. Comic art exhibits of the 1930s and 1940s were short-lived and low budget, with original drawings often tacked on the walls unframed on display only for a week or two. These exhibits traveled widely, circulated by networks of museums and by the newspaper syndicates. As a crucial form of mass communication, comics were a popular subject of exhibitions in the 1940s during and following WWII. These exhibits were always popular, with visitors crowding galleries to see original pages drawn by the artists that were an important part of their lives. Political cartoons and magazine cartoons (New Yorker, Saturday Evening Post, etc.) were the type of work most frequently shown. In 1939, Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates, Steve Canyon) was the focus of an exhibition at his hometown art museum, the Dayton Art Center, followed by an exhibition in a high-end New York gallery which drew national press coverage. Caniff was thrilled by this recognition and the potential benefits of the publicity exhibits could generate. Starting in 1944, he organized touring exhibits for himself, and later for the newly formed National Cartoonists Society (NCS). This connection eventually led to shows at the Library of Congress (1949), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1951), the New York World’s Fair (1964), the Smithsonian (1966), and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (1967). In my essay about comics and museums from 1930 to 1951, I rediscover a thread of influential but long-forgotten exhibits and what the art critics said about them at the time. Much of this is based on archival research found in Milton Caniff ’s papers at the Billy Ireland, the archives of the Metropolitan Museum and of the Met’s Prints Department, the Minnesota Historical Society, the archives of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, and the New York Historical Society, whom I thank for their assistance in my quest. One focus of my investigation was the 1942 exhibit The Comic Strip: Its Ancient and Honorable Lineage and Present Significance at the National Arts Club (New York) which was the subject of an extensive article by the publisher M. C. Gaines in Print magazine (reprinted in this book). This exhibit 63

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is the earliest known attempt to show the history of comics within a large art historical framework that displayed a wide array of comics and comic books side by side with museum quality examples of early narrative arts like Japanese scrolls and Mayan panels. The show was organized by Jessie Gillispie Willing, a female magazine illustrator. After a national tour for US Savings Bonds that included NCS exhibits at the Library of Congress (1949) and the NCS show American Cartooning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1951), comic exhibits at major art museums went through a long dry spell throughout the 1950s. In the shift of the art world’s focus to nonrepresentational abstract art, comics and other forms of industrial art were dismissed by influential art critics like Clement Greenberg, who thought them as kitsch that distracted people from more intellectual pursuits. This attitude was exacerbated by the decency campaign against comic books, which resulted in hearings before the US Congress in 1954. Fearing public campaigns that claimed comic books lead to juvenile delinquency, a decade of self censorship followed that strangled the comic book industry. Newspaper comics escaped this fate by convincing Congress that the artists, editors, and syndicates were already held to high standards of decency by their agreements with family newspapers, but they faced increased competition from television. While comics struggled with legitimacy at home in the United States, intellectuals in France and Brazil blazed the trail for serious comics scholarship and exhibition. The French loved American comics, and collections of them were highly valued when they were banned during World War II. They surged in popularity after the war, only to be banned again by the Law of July 1949, which was partially an effort to break the domination of US comics and grow the French comics industry. While US comics were suppressed in France during the war and then into the 1950s, the US comics industry discovered an important secondary market in Brazil. In the face of a Brazilian decency campaign against comics, a persistent group of intellectuals seriously studied comics, exploring the connections between literature, cinema, and comics. One of the founders of the group, Alvardo de Moya, wrote to several well-known US cartoonists asking for original drawings with the promise of an exhibit in a Brazilian fine art museum. His promise came true with I Exposicao Internacional de Historias em Quadrinhos in San Paulo, Brazil (1951), the first known international exhibition and conference on comic art. I am honored to include the last essay Professor de Moya wrote on this show and his efforts to advocate for the comics art form in Brazil before he was lost to us in 2017. By 1960, the rules on the content of comics in France relaxed, and there was a new surge of American comics. In Paris, another group of serious comics fans formed SOCERLID (Société civile d’études et de recherches des littératures

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dessinées) to advance comics as “the ninth art” and to celebrate the art form they had loved since childhood. The founders of the group, Claude Moliterni (one of the founders of the Angoulême Festival) and Professor Pierre Couperie, were joined by key members such as David Pascal (the bridge between SOCERLID and the NCS), Édouard François, Proto Destefanis, the author/historian Maurice Horn, filmmaker Alain Resnais (Last Year in Marienbad), press tycoons Pierre Lazareff and Paul Winkler, and Asterix creator René Goscinny.1 The group published two journals, Giff-Whiff and Phenix, and produced several exhibitions at the French Society of Photography and the American Information Center. The breakthrough show they are best known for is Bande dessinée et figuration narrative at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (a part of the Louvre), which was both a celebration of the comic art form and a response to the use of comics imagery and idioms in pop art, such as the works of Roy Lichtenstein. Included here is Antoine Sausverd’s analysis of the papers of Pierre Couperie collected at Angoulême, including the formation of SOCERLID, details about the organization of Bande dessinée et figuration narrative and its influential catalog, and Couperie’s disdain for the art of Lichtenstein. Note 1. Maurice Horn lists these and other members in my essay “How the French Kickstarted the Acceptance of Comics as an Art Form in the US: The Books and Exhibitions of Maurice Horn” in the Fall/Winter 2016 International Journal of Comic Art. I recommend Drawing France: French Comics and the Republic by Joel E. Vessels (2010, University Press of Mississippi) for an overview of SOCERLID in the context of French art history.

The Evolution of Comics Art Exhibitions in the United States, 1930–1951 Kim A. Munson

Before the late 1960s and 1970s, it was rare for comics drawings to be shown the way we expect to see them in exhibits now, neatly framed and hung in a line at eye level in a minimalist setting. In these early shows, comics drawings (as well as other art) were often simply tacked up with pins, some mounted on mat board and some not. Sometimes the art was laminated to help it survive a long tour, as we can see in this photo from a 1946 Milton Caniff exhibit at the Society of Illustrators in New York (figure 29). Curators tried to be respectful and creative, but to the modern eye these shows seem chaotic. Time was also a factor, as exhibits were up for a weekend event or a two-week run, not on display for three to six months as they often are now. The one thing that has remained constant is that comics shows have always been popular with the public, who were pleased to see the authentic originals of cartoons that have played an important role in their daily lives, despite any negative commentary from art critics. The content was also a bit different. Now we are accustomed to seeing shows based on a diverse range of graphic novels, thematic group shows, and retrospectives by elder statesmen; in the period explored in this essay, 1930–1951, shows fell into four categories: editorial/political cartoons, magazine cartoons (one-panel cartoons for publications like the New Yorker or the Saturday Evening Post), comic strip art, and shows exploring comics history (a new concept at the time). Political and magazine cartoons dominated the available literature about comics, like William Murrell’s 1938 A History of American Graphic Humor (published by the Whitney Museum) and Thomas Craven’s 1943 Cartoon Cavalcade.

The 1930s Shows I’ve studied from the early 1930s tended to be small displays culled from an individual’s collection or thematic group shows. The Whitney Museum of American Art, for example, displayed cartoons by Thomas Nast along with 66

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Figures 29 and 30. Exhibition view and invitation for the Terminal Exhibition of Original Drawings by Milton Caniff. 1946. Milton Caniff Collection, Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. Courtesy of the Society of Illustrators.

other drawings and paintings from their permanent collection in an exhibition, March 8–30, 1932.1 In a New York Times review of The Art of the Cartoon (May 1933), a show of political cartoons at the Museum of the City of New York, Elizabeth Luther Cary wrote: Caricature and the art of the cartoon have long been honored in this country for their contributions to history. The more ardent admirers have made notable collections marking, step by step, the rise of our political parties and their fall, the changes in government, the reactions of the people, the storms over favorites, the manners of society, the subterfuges of enforced economy, the excesses of wealth, games, dances, social errors. The country, the city, pass before us, and we see as in a mirror the likeness

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of our national childhood. We read the “news” of long-past decades as industrious students collected it and, giving it the stamp of personal interpretation, turned it into pictorial records. Nevertheless, there has been little attention paid to cartoons and caricatures as art. Certainly many of them deserve oblivion on that score, but others could hang unashamed beside [Jean-Louis] Forain and [Paul] Gavarni and even beside [Honoré] Daumier, to all of whom have been given the French benediction of praise for esthetic achievement. The “notable collections” the reviewer is referring to could be referencing the popular hobby of collecting comics in scrapbooks in addition to original artwork. It is unclear from the review if scrapbooks, individual cartoons, original drawings, or a combination were shown in this exhibition. Still, we look on the history and culture shown in political cartoons with the same fascination today, and marvel that some things may change, but many things cycle over and over again (corrupt politicians, etc.). Earlier in 1933 (January–February), the Cleveland Museum of Art presented Contemporary Work by Cartoonists and Caricaturists. In the museum’s Bulletin, an author credited only as H.S.F. refers to the “astonishing growth of periodical and newspaper literature in the last twenty-five years” and explains the museum’s goal of showing a representative selection of this output (1933, 26–27). The museum showed work in five categories: newspaper cartoons by Rollin Kirby and (Ding) Darling; comic strips by Fontaine Fox, Bud Fisher, and Cliff Sterrett; humorous drawings by Thurber, Gluyas Williams, and Dr. Seuss; character drawings by Covarrubias, Alajálov, and Herman Post; and caricatures by painters John Sloan, Grosz, Dehn, Peggy Bacon, Reginald Marsh, and Diego Rivera. The text shows a growing awareness of comics history with references to earlier artists like Hogarth and Daumier, but it seems that only contemporary work was included in the exhibit.2 Many shows were drawn from the collections of individuals, such as Contemporary Cartoons: An exhibition of Original Drawings at the Huntington Library (1937, San Marino, California) an exhibition marking Isabel Simeral Johnson’s donation to the library of her large collection of political cartoons from 1815 to the New Deal era. Johnson, who had a degree from the University of Chicago and a PhD from Columbia, wrote about comics history for several publications, including the Huntington’s exhibit brochure, touching on cave art, Egypt, and Pompeii as ancestors of the comics in her essay (1937, 5). In 1934, the Saint Paul (Minnesota) Library hosted a group show focused on cartoonists who were published by the Saint Paul Dispatch, which had an influence beyond anything the organizers could have anticipated. In Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography, David Michaelis recounts a story told by Charles Schulz

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in a 1992 speech at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, where he told the audience about his mother taking him to this Saint Paul comics exhibit when he was eleven years old and how influential it was in his creative development (2008, 78–83). He spoke of the frustration he felt when he was beginning, trying to learn cartooning by meticulously copying the comic strips he saw in the Dispatch and knowing that he was not quite getting it right. He was terrified of making mistakes, and the drawings looked stiff and unprofessional to him. Dena, his mother, was eager to help her son succeed. When she noticed an announcement in the Dispatch about a one-week show of original comic art organized by the Saint Paul editorial cartoonist Stan Asch, she decided the family should go. In the February 5, 1934, issue of the Saint Paul Dispatch, Dena Schulz would have seen headlines about a successful raid that netted 5,512 gallons of denatured alcohol originally destined to become bootleg whiskey and a spectacular auto show with “26 attractive manikins” and a light show. Young Charles would have closely read the comics page, which included the strips Bringing Up Father (McManus), Joe Palooka (Fisher), Polly and Her Pals (Sterrett), Skippy (Crosby), Tailspin Tommy (Chaffin and Forrest), Bobby Thatcher (Storm), and Hairbreadth Harry (Kahles). The exhibit announcement, “Noted Comic Artists to Show Work Here,” describes a show of original drawings by the same Dispatch cartoonists Charles was faithfully copying from the comics page, plus cartoons by J. N. (Ding) Darling, Gilbert Bundy, and John T. McCutcheon. Sweetening the pot further, the article sincerely informed the reader that “John Barrymore and Gary Cooper, motion picture stars who draw as a hobby, are expected to submit some of their work” (1934, 18). Regardless of the contributions of Barrymore and Cooper, for Charles the cartoonists were the real stars. He was able to scrutinize original drawings of strips he had recently seen and possibly tried to copy, taking in the confident brushwork and all of the blots, blue-pencil notes, and other remnants of the editorial process. When he got home, he compared his own tentative drawings with the professional art he had just seen, and tore up his old drawings, identifying the spark of passion he lacked and determined to start over. In this case, the opportunity to see the “warts and all” drawings by his heroes provided a breakthrough in his artistic development. Small institutions like the Saint Paul Library were not the only arts organizations beginning to pay attention to the art of comics and animation. According to Frank S. Nugent of the New York Times, in 1939 the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased their first piece of animation art, a production painting created for a scene in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which they credited to Walt Disney. It was a close-up of two vultures craning their necks to watch as the wicked witch approaches Snow White with the poisoned apple outside of

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the frame, waiting to pounce on Snow White when she falls. The work was a composite (often known as a cel setup); a painted animation cel with an original background piece behind it. It hung with the other new acquisitions in the left wing of the museum “between a couple of sylvans, in oil, and a glass cabinet filled with bronze and iron fittings from an Etruscan chariot of about 600 B.C.” (Nugent 1939). When Nugent asked Disney about his definition of “art,” Disney said, “Art? You birds write about it, maybe you can tell me. I looked up the definition once, but I’ve forgotten what it was. I’m no art lover.” Disney went on to explain that although the drawing is credited to “Walt Disney,” it is the end result of work by many skilled craftsmen and women who all contributed to the making of Snow White. Drawings like this sold in art galleries for around $200. Disney assigned people who were between tasks at the studio to assemble these composites so he would not have to lay them off between projects. In response to Disney’s self-deprecating remarks, the museum defended its decision. “Whether Disney appreciates it or not,” stated Harry B. Welhe, the museum’s curator of painting, “his animals have become part of the literature of our age . . . this painting is a splendid moment of arrested motion” (Nugent 1939). After describing the moment of peril in Snow White represented in this painting, Nugent explains: The quality that makes it art is the circumstance that we know what the vultures are looking at and what they are thinking about . . . That is the real Disney art. It isn’t the kind of art a museum can put on its wall. The painting has about the value of an old theatre program: it’s a souvenir, a reminder. Without the memory of Snow White to accompany it, it’s just a drawing . . . good craftsmanship, but not art. (Nugent 1939) The museum took a larger view of the labor represented in this painting, comparing the coordinated workmanship on Snow White to paintings created by the workshops of masters like “Rubens, Rembrandt, and Cranach” who added a few strokes and signed their names to paintings that were chiefly made by other artists in their studio. Taking the discussion to its conclusion, Nugent observes, “to the question ‘It’s Disney, but is it art?’ the museum has answered ‘yes,’ and by and large, the nation has added its pleased assent” (Nugent 1939). The Dayton Art Institute (Ohio) also focused on comics as art in 1939, presenting an exhibit that celebrated the art of their hometown hero Milton Caniff, the creator of Terry and the Pirates (and later Steve Canyon). Terry was one of the most successful strips in the United States, and Caniff was riding a tide of public popularity. In his epic Caniff biography Meanwhile, Robert C. Harvey explains how this show came about:

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Dwight Young, the publisher of the Dayton Journal-Herald, took an almost paternal pleasure in running Terry and the Pirates. He was pleased by Caniff ’s showering his journalistic alma mater with special drawings for community projects, and he also noticed the evolution of the cartoonist’s graphic style. As the shadows deepened in Terry’s panels, it seemed to Young that the strip had crossed the line from cartoon drawings to representational art . . . Some of the individual panels were virtually paintings in black and white. As a director of the Dayton Art Institute, Young arranged for the Institute to mount a special exhibit of the work of Dayton’s now famous hometown boy. (2007, 323) Caniff threw himself into the project, thrilled to have this kind of artistic recognition and the opportunity to celebrate his success with his parents, with whom he remained close. He was also eager to promote Terry and recognized the positive publicity an exhibition could bring. Ultimately, he provided more work than the expected selection of original strips, including “preliminary studies for drawings in the strip, as well as several oil paintings of Mongol tribesmen and other Oriental subjects” (Harvey 2007, 324). The show was a great success on all fronts. Caniff was gratified by the serious recognition of his work, and he also realized the incredible potential of art exhibits as a promotional tool. These ideas would quickly propel Caniff into becoming one of the pioneers of comic art exhibits, making him a ubiquitous presence as both an organizer and as a featured artist.

The 1940s: Interest in Comics Expands during WW2 Milton Caniff ’s interest in exhibitions seemed to solidify in 1940, when he was featured in a solo show over the Christmas holidays at the upscale Julien Levy Gallery at 15 East 57th Street in New York. The gallery sold modern art and photography, with a specialization in surrealist paintings. According to Ingrid Schaffner, who wrote a historical account of the gallery, Levy “enlivened his gallery by mixing high art and low, culture and entertainment, putting movies and comics alongside the ballet on his program” (1998, 106–7). A Harvard classmate of Alfred Barr Jr. and a passionate collector of Surrealist paintings, Levy was inspired to take a serious look at comic art by The 7 Lively Arts, a widely read book by Gilbert Seldes published in 1924, which advocated the elevation of popular media like comics, musicals, films, and popular songs to high art. Prior to Levy’s exhibit of Caniff ’s drawings, he became one of the first to show animation art in a commercial gallery with a 1938 exhibit of art from

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Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which may have been where the Met acquired their $200 vulture cel/painting. He also persuaded the Museum of Modern Art to include four frames from the Disney short “Three Little Wolves” in their 1936 exhibit Fantastic Art, Dada. Levy’s show of Caniff ’s drawings attracted quite a bit of attention from the press. A full-page feature review in Newsweek described the Levy show as “22 Caniff sketches and eight comic strips heralded as representative of a genuine creative talent in the field of modern Americana” (1940, 48).3 This was quickly followed by a three-page photo spread in the January 6, 1941, issue of Life magazine that included photos of Caniff working with a model, his studio, and some of the props in his reference collection. “Few of the 20,000,000 fans who follow the cartoon adventures of Terry and the Pirates in 135 newspapers know or care whether it is good art,” the Life article begins. Those readers may be more concerned with the story, but based on the Julien Levy show “those who worry more about art than pirates say that it really is art” (1941, 34, 37–38). Another jolt of encouragement appeared when Caniff was voted the Audience Favorite by visitors of the important exhibition The Comic Strip: Its Ancient and Honorable Lineage and Present Significance, which was one of the first-known attempts to put comics in a scholarly art historical context that included museum-quality examples of earlier narrative art as ancestors (figure 31). It opened in the spring of 1942 at the National Arts Club in New York, organized for the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) by Jessie Gillespie Willing, with the curatorial assistance of Gerald McDonald, who was the head of the rare books room at the New York Public Library. After claiming to be “the first exhibit of comic strips ever assembled,” the April 1942 AIGA News-Letter describes the contents of the show, which included Picture sequences of the Egyptians and North American Indians, as well as the Mayans. The early material was followed by mediaeval manuscripts, block books, broadsides, and popular illustrations; 18th century and 19th century pictures by Töpffer, Doré, and Wilhelm Busch, the men who popularized the comic strip in this country at the turn of the century, were represented by a large collection of original drawings, and the most popular of our modern strips filled a considerable section of the show. The use of comics for advertising and propaganda was shown, as well as the rapid development of the comic book. An interesting section was devoted to our comics as they are published in South America. (AIGA, 1942) Jessie Gillespie Willing (JGW), the organizer of the exhibit, was an active AIGA member who worked as a magazine and book illustrator drawing silhouette illustrations for publications like Life and the Ladies Home Journal.

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Figure 31. Program cover, The Comic Strip: Its Ancient and Honorable Lineage and Present Significance (1942). Cover drawing: Fred Cooper. Image courtesy of the AIGA Design Archives. AIGA, the professional association for design, 233 Broadway, Suite 1740, New York, NY 10279. www. aiga.org.

Her father, J. Thomson Willing, an AIGA gold medalist, was the art editor of the Associated Sunday Magazines. JGW received a gold medal and lifetime membership from the National Arts Club in 1963 (New York Times, 1972). In the 1942 News-Letter story, JGW explained that she was inspired by “an early Mayan treatise on child training reproduced in a medical journal,” which she had been reading as a reference resource for a project nearly ten years before organizing

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the AIGA exhibition. She was impressed by the way that this ancient document could effectively “use picture sequences to present information” (AIGA, 1942). In her correspondence, she seemed to have developed a warm working relationship with Caniff, who was on the advisory board for the show, thanking him for his help in arranging the loan of three Mayan panels for the exhibition (JGW, 1942).4 I have not found a formal checklist of the art in this show, but detailed contemporary descriptions characterize all of the historical works as authentic museum-quality pieces and not reproductions. The publisher M. C. Gaines, who was an adviser to the exhibit, went into great detail about these pieces and their relationship to comics in his Print magazine article “Narrative Illustration: The Story of the Comics” (reprinted elsewhere in this volume). In the May 1942 issue of the neighborhood newspaper the Grammercy Graphic, Gerald McDonald, who curated the “ancient art” section of the show, wrote of his selections and their significance:

In the early pictures which foreshadowed the modern comic strip, some actually presented a recognizable story in a sequence; some were merely single scenes in which the comic spirit overflowed, while some used the symbols or mechanical devices which the modern comic strip artist employs. In an early Mayan painting, for instance, the exaggeration of racial characteristics may be recognized as a typical element of the comic strips which were popular in the early part of this century. Slapstick scenes are found in drawings from the walls of Egyptian tombs. In some of the medieval manuscripts nature is endowed with human qualities and animals are personified. In block books of the fifteenth century the “balloon” was used to carry words of conversation or explanation while the pictures were often arranged in squared sequences . . . Their similarity to the comic magazine is sometimes startling. They came at a time when books were directed almost entirely toward the scholar and they undoubtedly appealed to the layman in much the same manner as do More Fun, True Comics or Superman. Without too great a strain on the plausibility of the theme, such artists of the past as Bruegel, Holbein, Cranach, and Hogarth found a place in the show. The work of the English caricaturists Gillray, Rowlandson and Cruikshank, and of such Continental artists as Töepffer, Doré and Wilhelm Busch were also important to the family tree of the comic strip. In fact Busch’s enfans terribles were taken over bodily into the comic strip and continue to this day as the Katzenjammer Kids. Another ancestral strain developed through penny sheets, images populaires, Bilderbogen, and the comic sequences in popular magazines which immediately preceded the birth of the newspaper comic. (1942, 10)

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In his article, McDonald calls comics “a new folklore” and “Americana,” terms that will be used by art critics and academics for decades as they wrestle with the best way to name and categorize comics as a unique art form. Unlike McDonald, religious groups and conservative parents’ organizations had no problem categorizing comics as a serious threat, perceiving them as having a negative effect on children and literacy. The lead speaker at the opening event for the show, Dr. Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt of Columbia University, acknowledged the “disapproval of comic strips, long-lived and widespread” and that a public burning of comic books had recently occurred in Atlantic City. He said he felt he was “officiating at the graduation” of the enfant terrible of the graphic arts by “pinning a sheepskin on a bad boy” (AIGA, 1942). Other speakers included Gilbert Seldes, the director of television programs at Columbia Broadcasting Company, cartoonist and gadfly Fred Cooper, and Dr. Emanuel Winternitz of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibit gave visitors an opportunity to judge comic books on their own merits, as this was the first known show to display them, including Funnies on Parade, Famous Funnies, Skippy, Fun, Picture Stories from the Bible, Superman in Action Comics, and Wonder Woman (#1, Summer Issue). Aside from magazines and newspapers, the show received a lot of publicity in other media. Milt Caniff, Jerry Siegel, Fred Cooper, and Billy DeBeck did a radio interview about the show on the NBC station WJZ, while Cooper and Lehmann-Haupt joined Gilbert Seldes on a TV talk show, where they talked about the ancestors of the comics and the earlier generation of strips like Sterrett’s Polly and Her Pals, Wilhelm Busch’s Max and Moritz, Knerr’s Katzenjammer Kids, Schultze’s Foxy Grandpa, and McCay’s Little Nemo. After the exhibit closed in New York, it toured to eighteen other cities around the United States, but the tour was halted and its planned European tour canceled because of transportation difficulties due to the war.5 Other institutions recognized the importance of comics during the WW2 era. The Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design had an exhibit of over seven hundred original comics drawings and watercolors from newspapers and magazines like Esquire and the New Yorker in 1940 (Life, 71–74). A Life magazine article promoting this show does not mention its name or dates, but it does include single-panel cartoons from twelve of the thirty-nine artists: Richard Taylor, Gluyas Williams, Helen Hokinson, James Thurber, Mary Petty, Peter Arno, Charles Addams, Otto Soglow, George Price, Barbara Shermund, Robert Day, and Daniel Alain. Many of these same artists appeared at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, who frequently included comics and political cartoons in their exhibition schedule during the WWII era. Cartoons of the Day (1942) explored the war from multiple points of view through fifty-six cartoons by artists such

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as Charles Addams, Gregory d’Alessio, Otto Soglow, and Arthur Szyk (Jewell). Speak Their Language: British and American Cartoons, a 1943 show of comics meant to educate the public about the misunderstandings that happened between British and American troops even though everyone was speaking English, featured well-known cartoonists like Frank O. King, Hal Foster, Harold Knerr, Barbara Shermund, and William Stieg.6 The Met’s shows were often picked up by organizations like the Western Association of Museums (a coalition of about one hundred museums west of the Mississippi), which kept them on the road for months, staying in each location about two weeks.

The Mid-1940s: Milton Caniff and The Art of Terry and the Pirates By 1944, Milton Caniff had been included in at least ten shows, including appearances at the Chicago Art Institute and at the Met.7 He developed The Art of Terry and the Pirates, a very popular show that toured the United States and Canada from 1944 through 1946, when he moved on to Steve Canyon and other projects. Terry began as a small show about the printing process used to create a Sunday strip, beginning with his original drawing and following the process through sixteen color plates to the final printed full-color version. This was accompanied by a short descriptive panel, a few reference drawings, and character sketches. The artwork was tacked up unframed at each location, and then quickly shipped off to the next venue. The shows were usually sponsored and promoted by local newspapers that carried the Terry strip (Caniff only charged a fee to cover shipping). As the show traveled, Caniff received letters from interested curators at the museums, advising him on ways to present the show better and about damaged or missing artwork. Caniff learned. He added more artwork and explanatory wall labels. He created a detailed inventory checklist and asked the museums to help fix the frayed edges of artwork that had been displayed over and over again. By the time Caniff decided to wrap up the Art of Terry tour in 1946, the show consisted of five sections: (1) the eighteen-step process of engraving a Sunday page; (2) a selection of daily and Sunday strips; (3) art done for the US military (recruitment, charity, Male Call strips, etc.); (4) studies of Chinese subjects; and (5) color prints of his famous characters. Curators on the road reported that the print of Dragon Lady was stolen several times. Caniff said goodbye to Terry with two exhibits; a glittering New York farewell at the Society of Illustrators on October 6, 1946 (opening reception photo and invite, figures 29, 30), and a heartfelt charity show at the Old S. P. Scott Home in his hometown of Hillsboro, Ohio. Throughout the Terry tour, Caniff ’s ability to communicate and adapt

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to new information taught him how to organize complex exhibits and events, a skill he used to help build the reputation of the newly formed National Cartoonists Society, from its founding in 1946 to the 1964 World’s Fair and beyond.

The Late 1940s: The National Cartoonists Society on Tour The National Cartoonists Society (NCS) was established in 1946 (first meeting on March 1, 1946). Caniff was the first treasurer of the NCS and soon became the chairman of the exhibit committee, using his experience with the Terry tour to organize group shows for his fellow cartoonists. The first NCS show was at the Rockland Foundation Gallery, Nyack, New York, in December of 1947. This first show was limited to cartoonists who had strips in the Nyack Journal-News, but most shows after that were open to all members and averaged around fiftyfive pieces. Caniff organized these shows concurrent with his own exhibits of work from his new strip, Steve Canyon (which debuted in 1947). After a few successful shows around the East Coast and a lot of publicity, the NCS was anxious to bring their show back to New York, organizing an exhibit of the work of 192 artists at the Town Hall Club on West 43rd Street in August 1948. Following this, the NCS took on the most ambitious project of its young existence, a nationwide publicity tour and traveling exhibit to promote savings bonds for the US Treasury Department. Over the course of two months, October and November 1949, over fifty NCS members traveled to twenty-one major cities in the United States. They spoke at large civic events, sketched local luminaries, gave chalk talks at schools, appeared in local media, and drew special strips to promote US savings bonds, traveling in a special cartoon-covered “dreamliner” plane provided by United Airlines. A specially designed sixteenpage comic book promoted savings bonds and functioned as a souvenir of the tour. Caniff was the NCS president at this time, and he was often the keynote speaker at gala events. The tour included a large traveling exhibit, 20,000 Years of Comics, which more or less followed the same curatorial plan as the 1942 AIGA show, beginning with prehistoric drawings, then progressing through the centuries to the cartoonists seen in the daily newspapers. I have not seen a formal checklist, but from descriptions of the display written by Mary B. Brewster of the New York State Library (Albany), I suspect that they borrowed many of the same historical works shown in the AIGA show: a drawing copied from a rock shelter in Cogul, Spain, a Japanese scroll with animals, Egyptian and Mayan paintings, and block books from the fifteenth century (20,000 Years, 1949).8 The NCS kicked off the tour in Washington, DC, on October 4, 1949, with thirteen NCS members sketching President Harry Truman at the White House.

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The 20,000 Years exhibit launched with a gala event and three-day exhibit at the Library of Congress. The tour worked its way cross country from Boston to Los Angeles, ultimately circling back to finish at home in New York at the end of November.9

1951: The Gate Crashers invade the Metropolitan Museum of Art Building on the success of the savings bond tour, the NCS expanded their horizons even further with the 1951 exhibit American Cartooning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. With the goal of presenting an overview of the art of cartooning in the United States, the Met collaborated with the NCS to display the work of over two hundred comic strip artists, animators, and political cartoonists which were arranged unframed in a grid layout. The majority of the work was by NCS members, with the addition of a few pieces from the Met’s collection and some prewar classics loaned by Stephen Douglas. The January 1951 NCS Newsletter announced to the members that the Met had committed to an exhibit opening on May 11 of that year to run through the summer. Members submitted three to four pieces, from which one would be selected by a joint committee from both organizations. Representing the NCS were Otto Soglow, chairman of the exhibit committee, NCS president Alex Raymond, honorary president Rube Goldberg, and secretary Gregory D’Alessio. Representing the Met were curator of prints A. Hyatt Major, manager of public relations Floyd D. Rodgers Jr., Dr. Emanuel Winternitz (who had spoken at the 1942 AIGA show), and various staff members.10 Ultimately, the exhibit would only be shown for one month, from May 11 to June 10 due to a large remodeling project that expanded into those galleries and caused many logistical problems at the museum. In terms of the exhibit design for this show, the Met may have been struggling to do something more modern looking that would still allow them to display a large volume of material. In a letter, NCS secretary Greg d’Alessio said the “layouts are on the order of Mondrian” (d’Alessio, 1951). It could be that the curators specifically took Mondrian’s grids as a model. The Met’s staff sorted everything by size, sliding the drawings into thin grooved strips of molding on the walls. They used light-gray mat board if they needed to fill a blank spot, or to give the eye a rest. Two or three lines of drawings would be stacked one above the other in a grid. These “bands of comics” ringed the walls of two and a half small galleries, except for a display on the animation process for Disney’s new feature Alice in Wonderland, which was still shown in a band/sequence. It must have seemed overwhelming to see 265 drawings packed together like

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that. I don’t know if the Met used this grooved molding method in other displays of drawings, but it probably reinforced the low-art feel of it to see all of these drawings stacked on top of each other almost as they would appear in the newspaper. By 1951, newspapers were facing stiff competition from the burgeoning appeal of television for their audience’s eyeballs. One way the industry reluctantly acquiesced to this new dynamic was a wave of short-lived comic strips based on popular TV shows like Hopalong Cassidy and Howdy Doody. These strips didn’t last long, as Brian Walker points out in his history, The Comics since 1945, because the syndicates were more successful with original material like soap opera, gag-a-day, and adventure strips. Many of these romance and adventure strips were influenced by the work of Milton Caniff and Alex Raymond, blending “the cinematic composition of Caniff with the elegant line work of Raymond to create a modern hybrid.” Walker’s chapter on the era includes a 1950 Time magazine poll, which listed the top five newspaper strips that year as Little Orphan Annie, Dick Tracy, Joe Palooka, Li’l Abner, and Blondie (2008, 404–12). I shared the checklist for this Met show with Walker to get his opinion on the committee’s selection, and he said: It looks like a comprehensive exhibit of cartoonists from that era. Many of the big names are included—Raymond, Foster, Caniff, Capp, etc. Walt Kelly and Charles Schulz aren’t on the list, but 1951 was early for their strips. The inclusion of art on loan from Stephen Douglas—McCay, Herriman, Opper, etc.—is important. There are certainly some journeymen on the list but as the reviewer said, the exhibit was organized by the NCS and they wanted to include all their members. (Walker 2017)11 The fact that this show was presented at a major art museum in 1951 was remarkable for a number of reasons. Although the 1949 savings bond tour made a big splash, and Caniff as an individual and the NCS as a group had produced many successful shows at smaller institutions, the postwar fine art world was generally arrayed against taking comics seriously. Conservatives in religious and patriotic organizations strongly disapproved of comics as a violent and vulgar medium that encouraged illiteracy and bad behavior. Alex Raymond, president of the NCS, addressed this in an interview about the Met exhibit with a reporter from the Richmond (VA) Times-Dispatch right before the show opened: Raymond said he thinks that cartoonists have made a lot of progress in the last six years toward winning serious acceptance of their work as an art form and social force. The Met invitation, he added, resulted largely

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from the caricaturists’ self control. “We have encouraged cartoonists to put more clothes on their women in the strips that are popular with the kids,” he explained. “We’ve censored ourselves.” (1951) This same line of thinking formed the basis of Walt Kelly and Caniff ’s successful defense of comic strips before the United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency in 1954. They were able to argue that comic strips were already held to a high standard of decency by the demands of the syndicates, editors, and the good judgment of the cartoonists themselves. Because of their “self-control,” comic strips were able to avoid the fate of comic books, whose exciting and sometimes lurid romance and horror books were drained of life by self-censoring entities like the Comics Code Authority, ultimately strangling the entire comic book industry. In the art world specifically, influential art critics like Clement Greenberg not only looked down on comics (and other commercial arts and illustration) as “kitsch,” but representational art of all kinds fell out of favor. Modernism in architecture, design, and art had become a symbol of progress and America’s economic dominance as the art world’s focus shifted from war-torn Paris to vibrant postwar New York. Abstract expressionists like Pollack, de Kooning, and Rothko had settled into their mature styles, and an entire support system of museums, galleries, art publications, and critics grew up around them, with the Museum of Modern Art at its epicenter. The Metropolitan, with its enormous collection of Old Master paintings, Renaissance drawings, and objects from antiquity, was thought of as the old gray lady of New York museums. The response to the show from the press was mixed. Most of the substantial reviews, by critics that saw shows of drawings and prints at the Met fairly often, had their favorites but were disappointed in the show overall, feeling that it was a case of quantity over quality. The NCS wanted to neutrally represent any members who wanted to participate and the critics expected the Met’s curators to take more of a hand in the final selection. The headlines of reviews and announcements grabbed the reader’s attention by contrasting low-art comics and the austere/staid art museum. One of the best of these took the form of a poem called “The Gate Crashers” in the Chicago Tribune column “Rimes and Remnants” by D.A. which includes the stanza “Strange guests the Metropolitan / Has welcomed in the distant past / But we confess we never dreamed / Moon Mullins would be there at last” (D.A. 1951). Several of these articles included a cartoon version of a famous painting next to a portrait of a popular character. There was a claim by Frank Farrell in the New York World-Telegram that this was the “first time in its artful history” the Met had shown comics (Farrell 1951) and an allusion by George Combs of the Orlando Sentinel to the Met as the

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gray lady: “staging an exhibition of comic art . . . it’s a little like your spinster aunt’s discovering the analgesic effect of Alexander cocktails and kicking up her high-buttoned shoes” (Combs 1951). Out of all the reviews I read, there were five from respected art critics that really stood out. Although they had differing opinions on the larger question of comics as a unique art form, they paid close attention to the drawings themselves, and they all wished that the museum had taken more control over the selection. They felt that many of the strips in the show were derivative of other cartoonists, or just plain badly drawn. They wanted more balance, feeling that the strips dominated the other types of cartoons in the show. For example, Aline B. Louchheim of the New York Times writes: The burden of the show is contemporary, and more than half of it consists of comic strips. It is cross-sectional in the worst sense of the word, for it includes indiscriminately the most stereotyped and almost vulgar drawings with examples which are inventive, imaginative and noteworthy for fine draftsmanship. It would appear that the Metropolitan’s current disposition to “win friends” rather than “influencing people” in esthetic terms reaches its peak in this show. Cartooning represents our most popular art form. Surely the Metropolitan’s prestige could have been better served had the Museum been willing to make a qualitative selection rather than give its imprimatur to this exhibition. (Louchheim 1951) A. L. Chanin, in his Daily Compass (New York) column “World of Art” echoed this quantity vs. quality argument. In a column comparing two shows of “commercial art” (the other was the thirtieth annual show of advertising art presented by the Art Directors Club of New York at the Grand Central Terminal galleries), Chanin points out the power of commercial art to form or change taste and values in art, then goes on to say: For every individual who sees a Titian or a Cezanne canvas, millions see comic strips. At the Metropolitan Museum, a flock of these cartoons are in an exhibition less than an arm’s length from paintings by Goya, Manet and Daumier. The cartoons are presented in coordination with the National Cartoonists Society, and from the evidence shown, the Society should skulk off with the bulk of these pictures to the nearest fire rather than expose them to the light of day . . . These cartoons prostitute the lively art of cartooning, which is based on the love of irreverent laughter, the bite of satire, the human delight in inventive, imaginative visions; they are mechanically ground out images, with all the ability to delight

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and entertain which might be found in a two hour compendium of TV commercials . . . The Metropolitan should be embarrassed in accepting for exhibition this tasteless mess of banal drawings supplemented by trivial texts. (Chanin 1951) Ending on a more positive note he encouraged the Met to “survey only quality cartoons, past and present” to get the public used to work by good graphic artists. Chanin was generally more upbeat about the Art Directors show, saying that for all the limitations artists working in advertising have to take into consideration, a “high level of taste” was maintained throughout the exhibit. Emily Genauer, writer of the “Art and Artists” column for the New York Herald, also picked up the theme of bland texts supported by weak drawings, beginning her review with a reminiscence of a period when Mayor LaGuardia would read the Sunday comics out loud as part of his weekly radio broadcast. “The American cartoon,” she observes, “whose family tree extends all the way back to the work of such renowned artists as Durer, Brueghel, Goya, and Daumier, had reached the sorry state where it didn’t need to be seen at all. One could know everything it had to say by hearing its accompanying text read aloud” (Genauer 1951). Genauer pleads for artistic quality, saying that a medium that touches millions of people every day could have an incalculable influence in the development of good taste. Alas, she does not see quality production from this group of cartoonists: In the majority of them [cartoons on display] the drawing is not only academic but downright bad. Even where the accompanying text is full of blood and thunder, the drawings are usually static. Rarely does line itself convey action, clarify an issue, express an emotion, dramatize a situation . . . Very few reveal inventiveness . . . Rather are they static and vulgar illustrations of melodramatic text, done in the manner of cheap movies. (Genauer 1951) Like the other critics, Genauer does not hate everything, and provides us with a list of cartoonists that get her approval: Milt Gross, Frank Fogarty, Rube Goldberg, Bill Holman, Otto Soglow, Ernie Bushmiller, Gardner Rea, Barney Tobey, Carl Anderson, “old-timers” McCay and Herriman, and the political cartoonist Rollin Kirby. Mr. Harper’s review of the show for the “After Hours” column in Harper’s Magazine first takes us on a tour of the surrounding galleries, stopping to admire the linework in a landscape painting by Ruysdael in the Altman Collection,

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and then passing through a room of “Very Important Furniture” to the galleries that hold the cartooning exhibit. About the cartoon show, he opines: In that room and in two subsequent galleries there were hundreds of drawings. It was as though every boy in the eighth grade had been asked to submit his stamp collection and the teacher decided she had to exhibit all of them or some boy’s feelings would be hurt. This exhibition was “representative”: quality had nothing to do with it . . . It seems to me that there is no greater disservice that the museums can do the current popular modes of visual entertainment than to enshrine them as “art” . . . For the spectator and the man who makes it, the question in both of their minds ceases to be “Is it a good movie or a good cartoon?” and becomes “Is it art?” Why befog the spectator’s pleasure in mists of aesthetic verbiage and distract the moviemaker or the cartoonist from his main job, which is nothing less than the communication of ideas? (Harper 1951) If the cartoonist’s ideas and technique are good enough, Harper pronounces, it may be art, but he is happy with the comics in the funny pages where they belong, thank you very much. The last review that merits attention was written by Manny Farber, a painter and well-known film critic, who wrote for many arts publications and was the art critic for the Nation from 1949 to 1954. He begins with a critical comparison of linear, representational art and the dominant styles of modern painting: Top comic-strip artists like Al Capp, Chet Gould, and Milt Caniff are the last in a great tradition of linear composers that started with Giotto and continued unbroken though Ingres. Until the Impressionists blurred the outlines of objects and diffused the near, middle, and far distance into a smog of light and dark, design had been realized in terms of outline and the weight of the enclosed shape. Today the only linear surgeons carrying on the practice—except for some rear-guard opportunists like Shahn— are the pow-bam-sock cartoonists, whose masterful use of a dashing pen line goes virtually unnoticed in the fine art world. (Once in a lifetime a curator takes time off from Klee, Disney, and Dadaism to throw up a slipshod retrospective like the recent show American Cartooning at the Metropolitan.) The rococo, squiggling composition of the average comic strip is too intricate, difficult, and unorthodox for cultured eyes grown lazy on the flaccid drawing-with-color technique and the pillow-like form of modern painting. (Farber 1951)

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Farber seems to imply that critics and curators have been lulled into a stupor by art like Rothko’s color field paintings and are not up to analyzing the energetic linework in comics. Unlike the other reviewers, Farber rises to the defense of the working cartoonist, whom he describes as “a funereal-faced craftsman who draws with his hat on and looks like an ex-saxophone playing Republican.” He points out the pressure to produce creative work while facing “over four hundred deadlines a year”; harsh criticism from “moral do-gooders” and “psychiatrists like Wertham”; the shrinking size of newspaper strips and growth of competition; and being criticized for not being “funny” when the medium has its roots in biting satire. He goes into detail about the best qualities of work by Knerr, Capp, McManus, and DeBeck. In his “review,” Farber does not discuss the Met show so much as he ruminates on the current state of cartooning, finally concluding that the comics “satisfy a demand for inventiveness, energetic drawing, and a roughneck enthusiasm for life that other plastic arts cannot meet.” The Met’s records are silent on the opinion of the curators. In an April NCS Newsletter, NCS president Alex Raymond was also upset about the quantity of work in the show. He wanted more! Paraphrased in the somewhat sarcastic style of the Newsletter editor Dick Wingert, Raymond sounds unhappy with the level of participation of the members in general, and in the Met show in particular: The matter of the Metropolitan show was discussed. This important show, which was voted on and agreed to by the membership as a group, has not had the proper response. Too many members have failed to send in their work. This is just one of those mystifying reversals that often follows such a decision and it makes the committee’s work a pain in the —. There are too few members willing to work, and too many willing to sit back and gripe, and too many that just sit . . . But if things like the Metropolitan Show fall flat, we might as well buy a moth-eaten pool table and rent a broken down shack with the Treasury capital and forget it. (Wingert 1951) The leaders of the NCS were anxious to include anyone that wanted to participate in the Met show as a representation of the society’s membership. When the Met show closed on June 10, the museum was obligated to send the work back, and eager to do so as the remodeling project had begun to eat up more and more space. In the meantime, the NCS secretary Gregory d’Alessio began working with the American Federation of Arts to organize a national tour of the work in the Met show. The Met set a deadline, requiring written approval assigning the work to the NCS for the tour. d’Alessio sent out a form with an impassioned plea to the members. It seems that they did not hear from enough of the members in time: the Met returned the artwork to the members and the idea of touring this show died. Following this, the NCS organized a

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tour of current strips called Cartoons USA that toured bank lobbies, shopping malls, and small institutions around the country through the 1950s. The NCS continued to build on this with two large exhibits at the 1964 World’s Fair (New York), at the Smithsonian (1966), and ultimately found a stable repository for their collections at the Museum of Cartoon Art, founded by cartoonist Mort Walker (1974). Over this period, 1930s to 1951, we have seen comics gradually become more accepted as a unique art form, with consistently bigger and more popular exhibitions. While receiving harsh criticism from some circles, comics did get attention from serious art critics, whose ideas helped shape the future of exhibits and comics scholarship. Exhibits of comics appeared in fits and starts through the ’50s and early ’60s, having a big comeback in the late 1960s and 1970s in university galleries and small institutions, eventually blossoming into large-scale art museum shows of groups and individuals. This is a success story to be continued another time . . . Notes 1. This is the first show listed in the Whitney’s online exhibition history; An Exhibition of Provincial Paintings of the 19th Century: Audubon Prints, Colored Lithographs, Thomas Nast Cartoons Selected From The Permanent Collection 1931–1934, March 8–30, 1932. I have long wondered if the Whitney’s 1938 reissue of William Murrell’s A History of American Graphic Humor was connected to an exhibit, but I can find no specific reference to comics in that year. 2. Thank you, Carol Tilley, for sending this on to me. 3. The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum has a set of pen-and-ink drawings from this show, twelve pieces that explain the steps in comic strip production, character drawings, backgrounds, and prop studies. A study of Chinese characters still has a label on the back that says, “Julien Levy Gallery, 15 East 57th Street, New York; Milton Caniff, 1940; Paintings, Photography, Drawings.” (Map-case AC B4 1–12). 4. Jessie Gillespie Willing’s handwritten letter to Caniff (March 17, 1942) is very warm and chatty, filling him in on developments leading up to the opening on March 26 and what appearances were expected from him at the club and with the press (he saved the letter in his papers at OSU). Other advisers were J. V. Connolly (King Features Syndicate), Fred Cooper (illustrator, provided poster art for show), Josette Frank (Child Study Association of America), M. C. Gaines and Dagmar Norgord (president and educational director, All American Comics), Dr. George Gallup (director of American Institute of Public Opinion), George Hech (president, Parents Magazine Press), Phillip Hofer (Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Harvard College Library), Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt (professor of book arts, Columbia University), Gerald McDonald (head, reserve room, New York Public Library), William Reydel (Newell-Emmett Company), and Gilbert Seldes (director television programs, Columbia Broadcasting Company). The opening event also included a dinner where the speakers included Fred Cooper (MC), Arthur “Bugs” Baer, Billy DeBeck, Milton Caniff, C. D. Russell, Robert Brinckerhoff, Otto Soglow, Paul Robinson, Wallace Morgan, Robert Winsor McCay Jr., Tom MacNamera, Rube Goldberg, and Vernon Greene. 5. This information was collected from a series of AIGA News-Letters found in the Archives of the AIGA in New York, the newsletter of the National Arts Club in the Smithsonian Institution’s

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Archive of American Art repository at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, and Milton Caniff ’s papers at the Billy Ireland. I thank Art Cloos for his assistance finding The Grammercy Graphic at the New York Historical Society, and Joanne Johnston for her genealogical research on JGW (1888–1972) and J. Thomson Willing (1860–1947). Some of JGW’s illustrations can be seen in the Dowd article listed in the bibliography, although they erroneously claim she died in 1926. Comics dealer Robert Beerbohm told me that the M. C. Gaines Print article was reproduced as a brochure handed out at the exhibit, but I have not seen one. He mentions this 1942 show in his history of Töpffer (because of the inclusion of Töpffer in the exhibit). 6. This show toured extensively around the United States. The exhibit checklist I’m referencing here was posted by the Dallas Museum of Art, who hosted Speak Their Language in 1944. 7. Caniff claimed that he showed Terry at the Met in 1943. I have seen nothing in the Met’s exhibition list or archives. In Meanwhile, on page 718, R. C. Harvey includes Jerry Robinson’s account of showing his portfolio to Caniff after a speaking engagement at the Met in the midforties while Robinson was a student at Columbia University. This could have been a display that accompanied his presentation that the Met would not have counted as an official exhibition. The claim that Caniff exhibited at the Met is listed without description in most of his publicity from 1944 to 1949. When I was looking at Caniff ’s papers at the Billy Ireland, I was struck by the amount of art references he had saved from mailings and brochures from the Met. He loved to study the old masters there, and in his papers there was a member bulletin magazine from an old masters show there that looked like he had thumbed through it a thousand times. He was a longtime member, and I suspect from looking at his papers that a show of comics at the Met was one of his lifetime goals. 8. Brewster wrote descriptions that were used as wall panels in the exhibit that explained the significance of the contents of each display case. Her descriptions are historically contextual and do not go into great detail as to the names and dates of the work on display, but her texts do have a lot of similarities with the descriptions of items Gaines and McDonald wrote about. The original Print magazine article by Gaines is lavishly illustrated and it includes a few of these works. This show came together quickly, and it makes sense that the organizers (Caniff particularly) would return to items that had successfully told this story before. 9. This information is compiled from Caniff ’s papers at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum: “NCS Exhibition Correspondence 1949,” MAC. P91 Folders 4, 5, & 6. 10. Attendees listed in Interdepartmental Memorandum to Mr. Remington from P.R., January 25, 1951, Exhibitions—1951—American cartoons, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives, New York. I suspect, given the high profile of the cartoonists, and the close involvement of the PR department throughout the project, that this show might have been partially conceived as a “thank you” for the Herculean effort the NCS made on the savings bond tour. 11. Please see the list of artists’ names posted on my website/blog at http://www.neuroticraven .com/blog/2018/1/22/american-cartooning-artist-list, including a clipping with photo. The reviewer Walker is referring to is Mr. Harper, whose review for Harper’s “After Hours” is discussed later in this section.

References Cary, Elizabeth Luther. 1933. “The Art of the Cartoon: National Panorama in the Exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York” (exhibit review). New York Times, May 14. Chanin. A. L. 1951. “The World of Art: Art and Man’s Desire to Peddle His Merchandise.” Daily Compass (NYC), May 22, 12.

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Combs, George H., Jr. 1951. “It’s All New York: Window Dressing Now in Open.” Orlando (FL) Sentinel, March 23, 1. “Comic Strips and Their Ancestors.” 1942. National Arts Broadcast, August, 11. “Comic Strips Soon Will Find Their Way into Said Metropolitan Museum of Art.” 1951. Richmond (VA) Times-Dispatch, April 15, 12. Contemporary Cartoons: An Exhibition of Original Drawings of American Artists at the Huntington Library March–April (exhibit brochure). 1937. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library. D.A. 1951. “Rimes and Remnants: The Gate Crashers.” Chicago Tribune, May 24, 6. d’Alessio, Gregory. 1951. “Letter to Annemarie Henle Pope of the American Federation of Arts.” Milton Caniff Collection, Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, MAC P227, Box 12, Folder 18. May 29. Dowd, D. B. 2015. “Studio Notes: Writing on Illustration, Jessie Gillespie (1888–1926) American Illustrator.” D.B. Dowd Studio Notes [online], November 13. http://www.dbdowd.com/ illustration-history/2015/11/13/jessie-gillespie. Accessed January 21, 2018. Farber, Manny. 1951, reprint 2004. “Comic Strips.” Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium, edited by Jett Heer and Kent Worchester, 91–93. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Farrell, Frank. 1951. “Mr. Churchill Abstains.” New York World-Telegram. February 13, 2. “Flowering of Cartoon Art is Hailed at Rhode Island Museum.” 1940. Life, 71–74. “Fourth Estate: Terry and the Pirates Storm New York Gallery in New Adventure.” 1940. Newsweek, 48. Gaines, M. C. 1942. “Narrative Illustration: The Story of the Comics.” Print: A Quarterly Journal of the Graphic Arts 3 (2): 25–38. Genauer, Emily. 1951. “Art and Artists: Cartoon Display at Metropolitan, Like Berard, Proves Disappointing.” New York Herald Tribune, May 13, 17. Harper, Mr. 1951. “After Hours: Pooh to Art.” Harper’s Magazine, August, 14. Harvey, Robert C. 2007. Meanwhile: A Biography of Milton Caniff. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books. H.S.F. 1933. “Contemporary Work by Cartoonists and Caricaturists.” Cleveland Museum of Art Bulletin 20, no. 2, Part 1 (February): 26–28. “Jessie G. Willing” (Obit). 1972. New York Times, August 3. Jewell, Edward Alden. 1942. “Cartoons on View at Art Museum.” New York Times, May 2. Louchheim, Aline B. 1951. “Comic Strips Put on Display Here: Metropolitan Museum Shows Variety of Cartoons Created for American Press.” New York Times, May 11, 7. McDonald, Gerard. 1942. “National Arts Shows Comic Strip” The Grammercy Graphic, May, 10, 16. “Meeting Notes.” 1951. National Cartoonists Society Newsletter. Dick Wingert, ed. April 20, 3. Michaelis, David. 2008. Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography. New York: Harper Perennial. 78–83. “Noted Comic Artists to Show Work Here.” 1934. Saint Paul Dispatch, February 5, 18. Nugent, Frank S. 1939. “Disney Is Now Art—but He Wonders: That Picture in the Museum Is not All His, He Reveals.” New York Times, February 26. Schaffener, Ingrid, and Lisa Jacobs, eds. 1998. Julien Levy: Portrait of an Art Gallery. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Speak Their Language: Exhibition of British and American Cartoons. 1944. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art (checklist for tour). [online] https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/ metapth225386/. Accessed November 11, 2017. Walker, Brian. 2017. E-mail with author, November 12. Walker, Brian. 2008. The Comics: The Complete Collection. New York: Abrams. Weston, Richard. 1996. Modernism. London: Phaidon. Willing, Jessie Gillespie. 1942. Letter to Milton Caniff. Milton Caniff Collection. Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, Box MAC, P86, Folder 20, March 17.

Narrative Illustration: The Story of the Comics M. C. Gaines Reprinted from Print 3, no. 2, Summer 1942.

It seems that Little Orphan Annie isn’t an orphan after all. Her ancestors include Sumerian army men whose exploits are celebrated in tablets long buried under desert sands, and Nile women of far-off centuries whose daily lives are enshrined in ancient picture tale. When man climbed down from trees, straightened his back, and looked around the world, he started getting ideas. For a time, he was able to convey these ideas with a few grunts and a stone ax. But, though this method of enforcing ideas still persists, its limitations were early recognized. A refinement of ideas needed a refinement of expression. And while still sitting around a fire on his haunches and gnawing at the under-done leg of the animal he had just brought in from the hunt, the caveman was moved to tell about that extraordinary hunt. So, with stones and vegetable coloring, he scratched and painted the record on the walls of his cave home, and led the way to Barney Google and Terry and the Pirates, Superman, and Wonder Woman. This was man’s first attempt to depict a story, to tell it for the record, in a vivid and permanent fashion. It was the first illustration of an idea-story, the beginning of both writing and painting and the forerunner of today’s comic strip. Man has developed many means of communication: writing and printing, dancing, music, radio, motion pictures. But down through the ages, he has continued to use the picture-story as one of the most eloquent mediums of expression. It is a natural form, for man thinks in images, just as the child draws a story before he can write. The chieftains and kings used narrative art to make their honorable records endure. To give permanence to life after death, the ancients inscribed everyday scenes in pictures on the walls of their tombs. The ease with which the idea could be conveyed through the picture-story has been discovered and rediscovered at each step of human progress. When it was unknown or forgotten 88

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by a race or nation, it reappeared as a natural and inevitable invention in the development of civilization. It was used to record religious rituals, historical events, and sacred myths. It was employed for propaganda, vanity, or just for the sake of laughter. The simple, direct drawing also lent itself to satire and caricature and became an important political weapon. Raphael made cartoons, large preparatory sketches, to assist him in painting his frescos. The word cartoon comes from the French carton and the Italian cartone, from the Latin charta, meaning paper. The word caricature means to charge, to overload, or to exaggerate, and invention of mock-portraiture is attributed to Annibale Carracci (1560–1609), who was a master of classical painting and founder of an academy. Thus evolved a group of artists who, through line sketches, were quickly able to convey an idea and tell a story. When political pressure became heavy and the prison awaited the man who wrote what he thought of a ruler, these facile artists found they could easily overload a line drawing with the character of the subject. Not a word was said, but a story was told. This story has been documented in an exhibition by the American Institute of Graphic Arts, now touring the country. Assembled under the direction of Miss Jessie Gillespie Willing, program chairman of the institute, the exhibition sets forth for the first time a history of narrative art from the first recorded picture-story to the comic book of the twentieth century. Earliest samples of comic strip lineage to be seen in the institute’s exhibition is a drawing copied from a rock shelter in Cogul, Spain. This graphic representation was made before the beginnings of recorded history. Similar wall scratchings have been found by anthropologists in other parts of Western Europe and in Africa. Gerald McDonald of the New York Public Library, advisory board member in charge of the ancient section of the exhibit, says, “In this panel showing a buffalo hunt and people celebrating, I believe the artist probably wanted to say: ‘Here we are on a hunt. Here are the big animals we killed. And here is the big dance we had in celebration.’ The pictures are not unlike a page from a snapshot album where the proud fisherman is photographed with his catch.” It is curious to note the similarity between the prehistoric paintings and the paintings of the American Indians done in comparatively recent times, such as that of the life of the famous Sioux Indian, Sitting Bull, drawn on muslin and now preserved in the New York Public Library. Early mosaics in shells, lapis lazuli, and pink limestone, from Ur, dated 3500 BC, tell the story of the Sumerian army at war, and show the royal family at a feast. Scenes from daily life in ancient Egypt, taken from the tomb of Menna, show two girls engaged in a hair-pulling contest as another girl removes a thorn from her foot. Most of the art of ancient civilizations pictures the heroic

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or the sacred, but in Egyptian tombs there can be found records of more commonplace events, and scenes which are essentially comic. In a ninth-century Carolingian manuscript, known as the Bamberg Bible, nature is an actor in the picture-story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The tree shelters and comforts Adam and Eve at first, then in a later scene points an accusing finger-branch, much as Disney’s trees in the Snow White forest scene, or Art Young’s gnarled and knotted arboreal fantasies. An early use of animals to satirize humans is found in the Japanese Kôzanji scrolls by Toba Sôjô (1053–1140), which show hares and frogs in humorous archery tournaments. In other sequences of the scroll they are shown in aquatic sports and wrestling matches, while a monkey in the garb of a priest officiates at a Buddhist ceremony. In Western Europe religious stories were mainly the early subjects, as exemplified by the Joshua Scroll of the tenth century. A picture-scroll, illustrating the story of the book of Joshua, it is presumably a copy of a scroll originally made many centuries earlier. With the initial developments of printing appeared the fifteenth-century blockbooks. Among those bearing a remarkable resemblance to the modern comic book are the Biblia Pauperum, a sort of harmony of the gospels done in pictorial form, Apocalypsis Sancti Johannis, Das Buch von dem Entkrist, and Defensorium Immaculatae Verginitatis. The blockbooks tried to tell their stories without words, and when words were used, it was with a scroll-like balloon. They mark an early attempt to reach a popular audience, as prior to their appearance books had been directed almost entirely to scholars and church dignitaries. Martin Luther used the picture form to popularize his religious ideas. In 1521 he published his Passional Christi und Antichristi, showing the humility of Christ in contrast to the pomp and pride of the churchmen. Hans Cranach was the artist and the idea behind his work stems, it would seem, from one of the fifteenth-century blockbooks, Das Buch von dem Entkrist. Hieronymus Bosch, Peter Brueghel the Elder, and the illustrator of Brandt’s Ship of Fools were noted in this period for the striking power of their satire. Hans Holbein the Younger, too, was interested in both comic art and the idea of picture sequences as is shown by his marginal drawings for Erasmus’s Encomium Moriae, 1515, and his illustrations of the Dance of Death in Imagines Mortis. With the introduction of new methods of printing, engraving, and the like, opportunities for wider circulation arrived. William Hogarth’s (1697–1764) stinging social comment in such works as The Rake’s Progress gave caricature a new impulse. The great caricaturists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were skilled in the use of the sequence of panels, just as in the modern comic strip.

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James Gillray (1757–1815), master of political broadsides, satirized the country squire in his hunting series. Others of this rich period were Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827), who used enclosed ballrooms, and the great George Cruikshank (1792–1878), who sharpened his pen on prince, court, and people. In France and in Germany, as well as in England, the artists were turning out picture-tales for the people. Among them were Honoré Daumier (1808–1879) with his cartoons, The Labors of Hercules by Gustave Doré, published in Paris in 1847 when Doré was fifteen, and Les Amours de M. Vieux Bois, by Rodolphe Töpffer, 1860. The incomparable drawings of Wilhelm Busch, master of the line drawing, are found in his Sketch Book, as well as in his famous book about two naughty boys, Max and Moritz. Besides the picture books and the varied influences which have been mentioned, three other forces were at work in the nineteenth century which were to set the pattern of the comic strip before it finally emerged as a feature of the modern American newspaper. One was the popular penny sheet, known in France as the “image populaire” and in Germany as Bilderbogen. In them and in the comic sequence of European and American periodicals the basic features of the comic strip were so fully developed that the newspaper strip was full grown at the time of its birth. It was only necessary to adapt it to newspaper readers. The third force may have been less tangible. But the magic lantern slide, with its series of pictures which were often humorous, stirred the imagination of the comic artist just as it did the men who were involved at the end of the nineteenth century in experiments with another closely related art, that of the motion picture. The 1890s saw the development of the first comic cartoons in sequence in American newspapers. In 1894, R. F. Outcault, a staff artist on the New York World, did a series on a clown and a dog at a picnic. The World had obtained a color printing press, with the original intention of using it for fashion pictures. Outcault was asked to do a weekly page using the characters he had drawn to illustrate a story called “McFadden’s Row of Flats” by E. W. Townsend. Taking these tough kid characters, he wove them into a weekly picture-story, first called “Hogan’s Alley,” then “The Kid.” Later, when Outcault went to the Journal, the colorist painted the “Kid’s” shirt yellow, and the strip came to be known as “The Yellow Kid.” There were many protests from parents who thought the “Kid” was too vulgar, and to mollify them, Outcault lengthened the shirt the “Kid” wore. Immediately after Outcault’s first sally into comic continuity, a number of other strips were started. Artists of the day included Fredrick Burr Opper of Happy Hooligan fame, and T. S. Sullivant, whose animal pictures, with their lugubrious and expressive faces, were masterpieces of drawing. The story is told of the painstaking care with which Sullivant drew. When given an assignment to do a donkey sitting in a chair, he worked for hours and hours. Finally,

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complaining bitterly, he unburdened himself to Opper, who laughed away his problem, picked up a pencil, and swiftly drew the comical donkey, over Sullivant’s protests that no animal could assume such a position. Opper was one of the most prolific of the early artists. In 1897, Rudolph Dirks was asked to build up a series of stories along the lines of Wilhelm Busch’s Max und Moritz. He called it the Katzenjammer Kids.” Mr. Dirks still draws his strip under the title of “The Captain and the Kids” for United Feature Syndicate, for when he left the Journal in 1914 to go to the World, he found he could not take the title with him. H. H. Knerr was hired to continue the “Katzenjammer Kids,” which he does to this day for King Features Syndicate. The color printing of the first comics was often comical in its results. For some time, the register of the colors was rather weird. The first artists furnished a black line drawing, from which a wet plate negative was made. From this, four prints were made on zinc plates, one of which was etched for the black key plate. The artist then colored his black sketch, and from this the platemaker laid in by hand the red, yellow, and blue on the other three plates, using Ben Day films to get the desired color effects. This system was finally perfected and is used today on all comic products printed from relief plates. The Ben Day process was used exclusively on color plates up to about 1923, when experiments proved that four-color process plates could also be printed successfully on rotary four-color newsprint presses. Not only in New York, but in Chicago and San Francisco, artists were called upon to create new characters for comic pages. James Swinnerton, a fine stylist and the creator of “Mr. Jack” and “Little Jimmy,” says in an interview reported in Editor and Publisher, July 1934: “Some forty years ago, we artists of the newspapers were a badly driven lot. The ‘zincograph’ cuts had just replaced the old chalk plate, and in the change, there was a rush to do great stuff with the new process which gave more latitude and speed in reproduction of pen and ink drawings. “The artist of that date had to go to all sorts of happenings that are now covered by the staff photographers, as photographs were not yet produced successfully on news pages. A typical day was spent covering, say, a flower show or trial in the morning, a baseball game in the afternoon, with, maybe, an art opening, and a murder or two at night. “One had to be able to draw anything at a moment’s notice. Those of us who had a comic turn in our work would try to crowd a comic drawing in whenever we could, and, in so doing, our editor began to find out that a good cartoon, or comic drawing, drew more notice from the readers; and in that way, the comic drawing in the newspaper world gradually came into its own. “In those days, we swore by Zimmerman and Opper and others of the grotesque school who illustrated and printed jokes. It was not the fashion to have

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balloons showing what the characters were saying, as that was supposed to have been buried with the English Cruikshank, but along came the comic supplements, and with Dick Outcault’s Yellow Kid, the balloons came back and literally filled the comic sky. “They have stayed with us ever since. The style of our comic subjects which appeal to the public has changed at least three times in forty years. The old grotesque stuff would not be successful now, and the family happening, so popular today, would have been considered tame and silly then.” The daily strip did not appear until after the turn of the century when Winsor McCay, who had been doing Little Nemo and Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend, did the latter as a daily strip to go across the top of the page. Under the pseudonym of Silas, he turned out A Pilgrim’s Progress, Hungry Henrietta, and several other strips. During the first ten years of the century, Sunday comic supplements appeared all over the country. Outcault evolved Buster Brown, whose tricks invariably got him into trouble. The last panel usually showed Buster Brown with a pillow tied behind him, writing an impertinent moral. This was the first character to inspire clothes trends. Buster Brown collars, shoes, and hats were to be found in most every child’s wardrobe. Carl Schultz, big and blustering, brought Foxy Grandpa to New York, and in the years it ran, the two young imps were never able to outwit the cagey old man. Here again were Wilhelm Busch’s Max and Moritz, now thwarted at each turn by someone who could beat them at their own game. E. D. Kemble was another early artist in the field of the comic strip. He had published, as had most of these pioneers, in Puck. He originated “Black Berries,” colored comic characters, for the World in 1897. The Monkeyshines of Marseleen by Norman E. Jennett, The Kid by F. M. Follett, and Uncle Munn by Fred Nankivel are among the early strips, no longer seen, which are in the exhibition. Other creations by Opper are also included: Alphonse and Gaston, Maude the Mule, Mr. Dubb and Mr. Dough, and Our Antediluvian Ancestors. The strip entered its golden period around 1910 and continued until 1930, as distinctly “comic” in content as well as form. At the opening of the exhibition, however, Gilbert Seldes said that the real golden age of comic strips would always be the time when each person first discovered them for himself—when they became a part of his life. Bringing Up Father, by George McManus, started thirty-one years ago. It now appears in seventy-one countries and twenty-seven languages and has been adapted to stage, motion pictures, and radio. Even a tapestry was woven about Jiggs and Maggie in Persia. Undoubtedly, it is the universality of the henpecked husband that accounts for the international appeal of these characters.

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George Herriman first started with such strips as The Dingbats and The Family Upstairs. His style was unique, his humor eloquent. Both have inspired other artists. He started a sub-strip under The Family Upstairs. It was a story about a cat that was in love with a mouse. This strip finally matured into Krazy Kat. Herriman was noted for the fine detail and non sequitur backgrounds in his strip. Krazy Kat, long a favorite of intellectuals, has inspired a symphony. The exhibition brings together many other strips of historical significance. The first girl strip, still running, was originated by Cliff Sterrett, a distinct stylist and master of pantomime. This strip is Polly and Her Pals. Before Sidney Smith drew The Grumps, he had a strip called Buck Nix, which is on exhibition. One of the greatest newspaper cartoonists was T. A. (Tad) Dorgan. He affected the work of many to follow and originated such expressions as “Thanks for the Buggy Ride,” “Hot Dog,” and “Yes, We Have No Bananas.” Bud Fisher, the creator of “Mutt and Jeff,” first worked on the San Francisco Examiner for $15 a week. He first drew Mutt and later added Jeff to the strip. Recently these two characters celebrated their thirty-fifth anniversary. The picture of the period would not be complete without Wallace Morgan’s Fluffy Ruffles. When first assigned to this task, Mr. Morgan had to cull the Paris fashion magazines for styles in which to clothe his beautiful character. Fluffy Ruffles shoes and suits were the rage before World War 1. Tom Powers, the great stylist, worked primarily in the political cartoon medium, but will never be forgotten for his famous Joy and Gloom series. Another famous stylist, who not only has influenced artists by example, but has been a friend and adviser to young cartoonists for years, is Fred Cooper, a member of the advisory board for the exhibition and designer of its invitation. In the late twenties, one of the most quoted artists was Milt Gross. His He Done Her Wrong is a wordless novel in cartoons and is rated among American masterpieces of humor. Not many artists have been able to achieve the fine dog drawings of Edwina, one of the few women to gain success in the field of the comic strip. During the twenties, Harry Hershfield’s Abe Kabibble was very popular. Hershfield was a master of melodrama and rapid action. Clare Briggs was the first outstanding artist of the human-interest school, with his When A Feller Needs A Friend, Life’s Little Tragedies, and Mr. & Mrs. He was closely followed by H. T. Webster, whose The Timid Soul is a present favorite. Rube Goldberg, famous for his Crazy Inventions, was a mining engineer and applies many scientific laws to his side-splitting fantasies. In 1920, Billy DeBeck originated Barney Google and this superb character, done with the masterful touch of a Dickens, has remained among the ten most

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popular strips for twenty years. As well as being a notable stylist, DeBeck gave the English language such phrases as “Banana Oil,” “Horsefeathers,” “Sweet Mamma,” “Hotsy Totsy,” “Heebie Jeebies,” and “Tetched in the Haid.” The exhibition includes samples of all popular strips today. To name a few: Fritzi Ritz, Ernie Bushmiller; Li’l Abner, Al Capp; Smitty, Walter Berndt; Dick Tracy, Chester Gould; Betty, C. A. Voight; Winnie Winkle, Martin Branner; Joe Palooka, Ham Fisher; Gasoline Alley, Frank King; Skippy, Percy Crosby; Prince Valiant, Harold E. Foster, considered one of the greatest artists; Thimble Theatre, starring Popeye, Elzie Crisler Segar; Buck Rogers, Dick Calkins; Moon Mullins, Frank Willard; Wash Tubbs, Roy Crane; Tillie the Toiler, Russ Westover; Blondie, a real ambassador in South America, Chic Young; Henry, Carl Anderson, who when he was over seventy, originated this strip; and The Little King, Otto Soglow. In particular, one should mention Milton Caniff, whose strip, Terry and the Pirates, is rapidly becoming one of America’s top favorites. Caniff is the idol of the young developing cartoonists today. He practically uses a motion-picture technique, getting odd angle shots and developing his story so that he can use his characters in pantomime, without balloons. His strip was voted the favorite by visitors who came to the comic strip exhibition while it was on view at the National Arts Club. In was in the early thirties that many of the strips turned from the comic to the adventure motif. Illustrative of this trend are Little Orphan Annie, Dick Tracy, and Caniff ’s Terry and the Pirates. If James Swinnerton is right in saying that the subject appeal of the comics has had three major phases in forty years, the grotesqueries and the farces of family life being two, the adventure story is obviously the third. In 1933, the first comic book, in its present form, made its appearance. It was called Funnies on Parade and contained reprints of Sunday comic pages. This book and the next to develop—Famous Funnies—and then a complete book about Skippy (both of which also contained reprints of Sunday pages) were sold to large companies as advertising premiums. Famous Funnies was used also as the title of the first book to be put on sale to the general public, marketed, at first, through chain stores and later on newsstands. Its success very soon inspired a number of new magazines, employing the same general format and using reprints of Sunday comic pages. In 1935, the first original artwork appeared in a magazine called Fun. The use of original material for comic books did not achieve its majority until after the advent of “Superman” in 1938. “Superman,” the creation of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, was turned down by practically every comic syndicate until the writer brought it to the attention of the publishers of Action Comics. It was an immediate success and the superhero was launched. Such characters as Batman, Flash, Green Lantern, Doc

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Savage, Captain America, Captain Marvel, and Wonder Woman were inspired by Superman. The comic magazine had become a picture book of adventure stories. Today there are approximately one hundred comic books put out by about twenty publishers. They have a monthly sale of about fifteen million copies and reach an estimated audience of between fifty and sixty million. Within the last several months an experiment has been made in the use of stories from the Bible, using the comic book colored continuity technique. A series of ten ran in a New England paper, and responses indicated such wide acceptance that a ten-cent, sixty-four-page book, Picture Stories from the Bible, has lately gone on sale. One of these stories is inserted with this article. Another insert shows a similar use to help sell war bonds and stamps to young Americans. Some parents have viewed with alarm the high circulation figures of the comic books, and educators and psychiatrists have set themselves to a serious study of this new influence on children. Is it harmful? Does it stunt the reading ability of children, or kill their appreciation for traditional literature? Does it give them bad dreams? The answers to some of the questions are summed up in an article in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry by Drs. Lauretta Bender and Reginald S. Laurie, who say, “Normal, well-adjusted children with active minds, given sufficient outlets or in whom natural drives for adventure are curbed, will demand satisfaction in the form of some excitement. Their desire for blood and thunder is a desire to solve the problems of the threats of blood and thunder against themselves or those they love, as well as the problem of their own impulses to retaliate and punish in like form. The comics may be said to offer the same type of mental catharsis to its readers that Aristotle claimed was an attribute of the drama. This effect of the comic book in normal children is comparable to the therapeutic effect in the emotionally disturbed child. Well-balanced children are not upset by even the more horrible scenes in the comics as long as the reason for the threat of torture is clear and the issues are well stated.” James Swinnerton, from another point of view, aptly describes the role of the comic strip artist in society: “As I look at the work of lots of my boys (I’ve brought quite a few into the game) and the other fellow’s boys, I am glad, and yes, proud, to have been able to start some in the game that, in a clearly humorous way, brings a smile to a too serious mouth, and helps many to forget the blue hour. “This fact was forcibly brought to my notice on a subway trip after the close of a New York working-day. I saw the tired passengers, still with their business cares and worries weighing them down, seat themselves (maybe) and unfold their evening papers, just scanning the big headlines, then going generally to the sports pages, and then to the page of comics.

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“Each one selected his favorite, and if it suited him, he smiled or showed a deep interest. In either event he had forgotten his trouble, and a new mood was on him. Who could say he was not delivered to his home in better humor and a more companionable mood by the lowly comic strip? That influence in millions of homes must be a powerful force for mass happiness.” Swinnerton sees the social aspect of the comic strip; educators study its psychological implications. The comic strip and the comic book lend themselves peculiarly to such examination. But what of their influence on the graphic arts? And what of the influence of the graphic arts on them? Certainly as an exercise in mass production, the experience of their publishers has been instructive. These books are printed in enormous editions for which production must be gauged in terms of millions. Their appeal to the consumer is also of profound significance and their method of approach has been recognized and adapted to purposes of propaganda and advertising. Many of their artists have ingenuity imagination, and an unerring control of the pen in communicating ideas. Perhaps the next chapter in their history will record how beauty, in layout and design, was heightened without estranging the people who loved them as they were.

The First International: I Exposicao Internacional de Historias em Quadrinhos Alvaro de Moya This article is a revision and expansion on the essay “Pioneering in Brazilian Quadrinhos, as a Cartoonist and Researcher,” previously published in the International Journal of Comic Art, Spring 2002.

On June 18, 1951, an exhibition was mounted at the Centro Cultura e Progresso in São Paulo . . . Little did we know that while we labored in what we thought was a barren field of appreciation, a courageous group of artists and writers in Brazil [were developing an exhibition] based on an intellectual evaluation of the comics place in the world of art and literature. —Will Eisner, Foreword, Anos 50 /50 Anos (2001)

Before I learned to read Portuguese, I started to read histórias em quadrinhos. My elder brother bought an Alex Raymond Flash Gordon on the Planet Mongo album (48 x 34 cm), beginning with the first adventure, January 7, 1934, through 1935. I was hypnotized. While he was in school, I went to his bedroom and “read” and copied those artworks. Then, I left the album exactly the way he had left it, before he returned from school. One day, he brought a friend to visit us, and said, “My brother is an artist, he draws very well. Show him!” Then, I realized he knew all the while what I was doing. But what amazed me was he said that I drew very well! Sometime later, a neighbor from Santana, north of the city of São Paulo, had a professional cartoonist brother and introduced me to him. I began to ink drawings and work as his assistant. I think I was seventeen years old then. A fellow from the group a few of us formed, Syllas Roberg, was a writer, but working in a bank. When his payday arrived, we were at the door of the bank and spent all his salary buying books: Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hemingway, London, Stevenson, Balzac, Stendhal, Sartre, Conrad, Gogol, etc. We knew that, in order to do comics, we had to read because we were dealing with writing. 98

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We also went to the movies to see pictures with subtitles: Mr. Verdoux, Brute Force, Crossfire, The Fugitive, The Gangster, Thunderhoof, The Set-up, Citizen Kane (later), Lady from Shanghai, Laura, Le Diable aux Corps, Le Silence Est d’Or, Nicholas Nickleby, Le Terra Treme, Ladri di Bicicleta, Roshomon, etc. We went to the Cinemateca to see the classics. We got in touch with movie critics from the newspapers. We knew that comics were literature, and that they had the same shots as in the cinema. But quadrinhos has something special, in-between. In those days, there were no theories of mass communication, so we called that “expression,” coming from the German expressionist films, especially because we saw a similarity between Fritz Lang’s movies and Will Eisner’s The Spirit. We met the artist Jayme Cortez, a master who came from Portugal. He discovered a printing worker, Miguel Penteado, who was an artist himself. Later, at Editora La Selva, we met the editor and graphic producer Reinaldo de Olveira. The group was then complete. We became friends of the Radio Tupi producers, and later the same professionals started in television. They invited me to do the letterings of the opening show the night of September 18, 1950. They invited me to work in TV, but I wanted to draw comics. Since July 1950, I had been working in the daily newspaper O Tempa. I was the youngest of the group, the most daring. I had the idea of writing to American artists to ask them to send us originals so we could see how they worked, the paper, the brush, the size, etc. In order to have that, I wrote that we were working on a comics exhibit. We wrote to Raymond, Foster, Caniff, Capp, Eisner, and others. One of them, I don’t remember who, wrote back saying that it was the first time someone asked him for an original to hang on the wall. We realized that were doing, for the first time in the world, a comics exhibit. We called it l Exposição Internacional de Histórias em Qudrinhos (figures 32, 33, 34). When we had the marvelous originals of Prince Valiant, Flash Gordon, Steve Canyon, Li’l Abner, Johnny Hazard, Terry and the Pirates, and Krazy Kat in hand, we offered them to the most important art museum in Brazil, the Museu de Arte de S. Paulo, but they were against comics. So, we had an exhibition, but no place to show it. A friend of ours offered the Centro Cultura e Progresso, in the Jewish neighborhood. They accepted the idea and on June 18, 1951, for the first time on the planet, we did it! It was not just an exhibition of cartoons done by cartoonists. No. We related the comics to Orson Welles, Dorothy Parker, Thomas Mann, and John Steinbeck. We analyzed a Will Eisner “Foul Play” sequence from The Spirit, the same sequence that Eisner later analyzed in his 1985 book Comics and Sequential Art.

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Figure 32. Exhibition announcement in the Tribuna de Imprensa, Rio de Janeiro. Image courtesy of the Alvaro de Moya Collection.

When I wrote about our pioneering show, one person that viewed the exhibit wrote that two other exhibitions were done before 1951 in the United States and in France. My research found these results. In the United States, William Randolph Hearst created King Features Syndicate, distributing press material all over the world. King Features created a presentation exhibiting his services as a sales offer for his syndicate: news, photos, articles, sports, Hollywood films, gossips, and, of course, daily comics, Sunday color pages. Later, King Features created printed material, called Blue Books, to be sent to newspapers. So, it was a commercial exhibit created by the sales department. In those days, nobody recognized comics as art. The French exhibition used comics as propaganda, criticizing the American way of life. Claude Moliterni, founder of the Angoulême Festival, wrote that our pioneering 1951 exhibition was a didactic one, proving why comics should be considered art. Since we were journalists, we had a fuss at the press and radio. I was interviewed live on TV. Rio newspapers brought out stories on our work, etc. But . . . there’s a but, the center was a left wing of the Jewish youth, related to the Brazilian Communist Party. The owners of newspapers and comics book editors thought we wanted to ban the US comics and replace them with Brazilian quadrinhos. Of course, we wanted space in the market, but not nationalistic laws. We wanted to say that comics were an art and the Brazilian culture must be shown in the newspapers and magazines. On the other side, the communists were disturbed that we hailed the US artists. One of them wrote in his review that we were “young innocent fantoches of the decadent imperialist American culture.” So, we were caught between two sides of the battle.

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Figure 33. Penteado and Jayme Cortez at the exhibition. Photo by Tito Silveira, courtesy of the Alvaro de Moya Collection.

Figure 34. Example of wall display about the work of Milton Caniff. Photo by Tito Silveira, courtesy of the Alvaro de Moya Collection.

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Also, in those days, comics were under attack in the States, with the Senate hearings on crime and comics were considered a school of crime. In Brazil, the schools, the teachers, the church, the priests, and the parents were attacking the quadrinho as a product that made children lack reading and studying. We were persecuted for that exhibition. We lost our jobs in the cartoon field. I was a Disney “ghost” drawing the covers of Editora Abril’s Donald Duck and Mickey. Then, we disbursed. Reinaldo went to graphic production, Cortez to advertising, Penteado to printing jobs, and Syllas and I went to television. But we opened the doors to a new generation. Mauricio de Sousa and Ziraldo started their successful careers in 1959. I was very successful in television. I was immediately given a direction position. People thought it was strange that a comics artist went so far in TV. Then, I realized that my experience in front of a blank page creating a comic story was the same as creating a live TV show. When videotape came to our country, I saw my live show on tape and I realized that I had a previous videotape in my mind and I compared it to the final product. It was a plus that I had over other TV producers; I had imagination coming from comics. I worked for CBS Television in New York in 1958. Since I was a journalist I proposed to send interviews to Folha de S. Paulo. So, I interviewed Milton Caniff, Al Capp, Herblock, Rod Serling, Paddy Chayefsky, Sidney Lument, John Frankenheimer, and Stanley Kubrick. Marilyn Monroe opened the door when I interviewed her husband, Arthur Miller. Years later when I attended a comics convention in New York City, I joined a group of French authors and researchers who had respectfully surrounded the master Milton Caniff. Addressing their questions, Caniff said (more or less): “Many years before you Europeans and French researchers said these things, this Brazilian (pointing me out in the crowd) was here with me, and said all the things you now repeat.” To which the French scholars in attendance replied: “Ah, Oui! Les Bresiliens, ils sont terrible!” (“Ah yes! The Brazilians, they are terrible!”). While I directed TV Excelsior, the first nationwide network—from the experience I had in the States—I read in the newspaper that Alain Resnais and others had created the society “Amis de la Bande Dessinée,” in Paris. Then the Biennale Art de S. Paulo bought the Bordighera exhibition. I was asked to collaborate. When Professor Romano Calise knew that we were pioneers, he invited us to go to Lucca. Jayme Cortez, Mauricio de Sousa, and I went to Italy. I was elected vice-president—together with Fellini, Cesare Lavatzini, and others—of “Amis de la Bande Dessinée,” under the presidency of Alain Renais. From then on, I was head of the Brazilian delegation in New York, Buenos Aires, Paris, etc. I did speeches all over the world, including the Louvre Museum in Paris. I wrote Shazam! in 1970, then História da História em Quadrinhos, O Mundo de Disney, and Anos 50/50 Anos, as well as articles in newspapers,

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magazines, and encyclopedias all over the world. The accomplishments of the 1951 exhibit were recognized in many publications. The bibliography of exhibitions by Walter Herdeg and David Pascal in issue #127 of the Swiss arts magazine Graphis listed it as “First International Exhibition of Comics” (1972). Comics historian Maurice Horn wrote of the significance of the show in his 1976 World Encyclopedia of Comics:

In 1951 (Jayme) Cortez, along with Syllas Roberg, Miguel Penteado, Reynaldo de Oliveira and Álvaro de Moya, organized the first international exhibition of comics; rare originals by George Herriman, Milton Canniff, Alex Raymond, Hal Foster, and other American cartoonists were displayed alongside the work of Brazilian and European artists. Cortez was inspiration for a whole generation of Brazilian cartoonists, especially Mauricio de Sousa. Quadrinhos ’51 was an exhibition celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the 1951 show, opening in March 2001 at the Museum of Fine Arts in São Paulo. In the foreword to the 2001 exhibition catalog Anos 50/50 Anos, the cartoonist and historian Jerry Robinson spoke warmly of the exhibit and my contribution to scholarship: This exhibition is another milestone in the appreciation of comic art. It is a reprise of a pioneer 1951 International Exhibition of Comics in Sao Paulo, curated by Alvaro de Moya and his colleagues. De Moya is one of the world’s most respected comics historians. His writings have been influential in establishing comic art as an important cultural phenomenon. I have been happy to help advance the comics art form over my long career. Aside from my books, I was a professor at Universidade de S. Paulo, from 1970 to 1991, and then retired. I left television to come back to my beloved quadrinhos, now as a scholar, and not an artist. References Herdeg, Walter, and David Pascal. 1972. Comics: The Art of the Comic Strip. Zűrich: Graphis Press. Horn, Maurice, ed. 1976. The World Encyclopedia of Comics. New York: Chelsea House. de Moya, Alvaro. 2001. Anos 50/50 Anos, São Paulo, SP: Opera Graphica. de Moya, Alvaro, ed. 1993. Historia da Historia em Quadrinhos. São Paulo, SP: Brasiliense. de Moya, Alvaro. 1996. O Mundo de Disney, São Paulo, SP: Geração Editorial. de Moya, Alvaro, ed. 1970. Shazam! São Paulo, SP: Perspectiva. de Moya, Alvaro, ed. 2003. Vapt Vupt. São Paulo, SP: Clemente & Gramani. “Quadrinhos51.” 2001. Quadrinhos51 blog. https://quadrinhos51.wordpress.com/about/. Accessed May 14, 2017.

Comics and Figurative Narration: What Pierre Couperie Contributed Antoine Sausverd “Bande dessinée et figuration narrative: la contribution de Pierre Couperie” reprinted from NeuviemeArt 2.0, March 20, 2014, with permission of Antoine Sausverd and Thierry Groensteen. http://neuviemeart.citebd.org/spip.php?article752. Translated from French by Dr. Ann Miller.

In 1967, Pierre Couperie was thirty-seven. In parallel with his post as head of department at the École pratique des Hautes Études, the prestigious research university in Paris, he occupied the position of vice president of the Society for the Study and Research into Drawn Literatures (SOCERLID), founded in 1964. Members of this society for comics lovers also included Claude Moliterni, its president, a reference librarian at Hachette as well as an author of detective novels and radio plays; Édouard François, a French teacher from Châlonssur-Marne; Proto Destefanis, who worked in the construction industry; and Maurice Horn, who was resident in the United States. The aim of SOCERLID was to increase awareness of comics and achieve recognition of the medium as an art form, deploying resources and techniques that were specific to it. The society’s favored mode of intervention was through exhibitions, beginning with three that were organized at the Gallery of the French Photography Society, devoted respectively to American comic strip (a retrospective under the title “10 Million Images”) and to the artists Burne Hogarth and Milton Caniff in 1965 and 1966. SOCERLID then aimed higher. It made contact with François Mathey, director of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris, and put forward a project for an exhibition based on comics. A few months later, the exhibition Comics and Narrative Figuration was inaugurated in the museum, which occupies a wing of the Louvre (figure 35). It opened in April 1967, and had an extended run until June of the same year, attracting large numbers of visitors and considerable media coverage. The organizers’ gamble paid off: this was a decisive event in the recognition of comics as an art form in its own right. 104

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Figure 35. Promotional poster for Bande Dessinée et Figuration Narrative at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, 1967. Image courtesy of Maurice Horn.

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Today, with hindsight, the full story of this exhibition has been traced and analyzed.1 Thierry Groensteen, in particular, has identified ambiguities in the exhibition, and questioned the views expressed in the “catalogue.”2 The exhibition and its “catalogue” (its authors use the word “book”) do indeed strongly bear the imprint of the firm beliefs of its chief organizers, most notably their marked preference for the American comic strip, a taste left over from their childhood. The members of SOCERLID belonged to a generation that had grown up with magazines like Le Journal de Mickey, Robinson, or Jumbo, whose pages were full of comics imported from across the Atlantic. The Pierre Couperie collection that is preserved in the comics museum in Angoulême includes a dossier concerning the Comics and Narrative Figuration exhibition. The documents contained in it enlighten us a little further about the central role played by Couperie in the conception of the event and the eponymous book that accompanied it.

“Figurative Narrative Art” The project as it was originally conceived was more substantial and was meant to be devoted to what Pierre Couperie called “Figurative Narrative Art,” extending from its origins until the 1960s, from Egyptian reliefs to comics “which [would] have an important place” in it.3 The letter that he sent to the director of the Museum of Decorative Art to present the exhibition proposal details his thinking.4 Couperie believes in “an ancient, very widespread and completely overlooked tendency within the evolution of art” which is to be found in narrative Egyptian, Roman, and Assyrian reliefs but also in medieval art (from the Bayeux tapestry to Uccello’s Miracle of the Desecrated Host). These works that are made up of a “combination of images” had never been studied “as a form of narration with its techniques and its syntax.” The same applies to the twentieth century: “This phenomenon has been even more neglected in its current manifestations, whose sociological, and perhaps aesthetic importance, is nonetheless enormous: we are referring essentially, but not exclusively, to cinema and comics.” The first part of the exhibition was intended to be devoted to the history of this figurative narrative art, by making visible “the reality of the problem, the antiquity and the intermittent resurgence of tendencies whose links can be established within a very long-term perspective”; a second part proposed to “address quite openly the phenomenon that everyone pretends not to see, comics,” by treating it as “an object in its own right, of widely varying levels of quality, and not as an inferior by-product of drawing and literature.”

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It is worth noting that an approach to the “prehistory” of comics had already been suggested a few years previously by François Caradec, who tackled the subject in the chapter “Storia e preistoria” of the international anthology of comics called I Primi Eroi, published in Italy by Garzanti in December 1965.5 Caradec, an enthusiast for early comics, had already produced a biography in 1956, published by Grasset, of Christophe, the creator of La Famille Fenouillard. But he was a maverick who never belonged to any clubs or societies for comics lovers and had no desire to become a propagandist for the recognition of the comics medium. Couperie’s interest in the prehistory of comics was a more complex matter. He had been trained as a historian, and was particularly interested in iconography in all its manifestations, and, in particular, had written a dissertation on the representation of landscape in Pre-Hellenic and Greek art. Over and above his nostalgia for childhood reading, he had turned his attention to comics because it “constituted the most prodigious iconographical field ever created by any civilization,” and was worthy of study.6 However, the section of the exhibition that was meant to be devoted to the earliest roots of this “figurative narrative art” is also indicative of a desire to inscribe its contemporary manifestation, comics, into art history by conferring upon it a distinguished iconographic genealogy, with the objective of achieving artistic recognition and legitimacy by descent. And this noble lineage could also guarantee the cultural respectability that would open the doors of the museum. In fact, it was a different kind of cultural guarantor that would be imposed on SOCERLID as a condition for entering the Museum of Decorative Arts.

Forced Marriage The director was enthusiastic in welcoming SOCERLID’s exhibition project, but the board of trustees was reluctant to let comics into a wing of the Louvre. The director then advised SOCERLID to get into contact with the art critic Gérald Gassiot-Talabot, who had theorized and collected under the title “Narrative Figuration” the work of young artists from the 1960s, such as Valerio Adami, Gilles Aillaud, Eduardo Arroyo, Peter Klasen, Hervé Télémaque, and Jan Ross. These artists had drawn the techniques and subjects of their work from the mythologies of their own time: photography, cinema, crime fiction, but also comics. As a reaction against pop art and the American art of the period, these painters wanted to make art an instrument of social change. The revised project for a comics exhibition, now enhanced by a section in which comics-related paintings would be displayed, was accepted by the

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board of trustees. The two parts of the exhibition constituted two heterogeneous projects that had been brought together for the occasion. But it was with considerable disappointment—which would be a source of continuing resentment—that the comics lovers accepted this forced marriage, particularly given their aversion to painting inspired by comics. If SOCERLID was set up with the aim of achieving recognition for comics as an art form in its own right, this was partly as a reaction against pop art in general and Roy Lichtenstein in particular. As Pierre Couperie recalls: “In those days comics were only visible through Lichtenstein’s perception of it. He had demonstrated its vapidity and inanity . . . by taking the most mediocre images and blowing them up out of all proportion. We wanted to show that comics were something different, that it had aesthetic values that were specific to it.”7 Couperie was exasperated to see pop art taking center stage by exploiting comics with no awareness of its expressive qualities. Lichtenstein was thought to have unjustly usurped his success. Comics lovers felt that they had been dispossessed and deprived of the recognition that should have been accorded primarily to comics.8 Even if the Narrative Figuration artists deployed the specific graphic and narrative resources of comics, the comics lovers were not convinced by this tendency. They could not tolerate the wholesale appropriation practiced by these painters who copied comics characters line for line or mimicked the style of comics artists. Initially, the part of the exhibition given over to Gassiot-Talabot was downplayed by SOCERLID, who envisaged it as “the influence of comics on advertising, Pop Art, and Narrative Figuration.”9 But in the end they had to sacrifice a number of rooms in the museum to contemporary art, space that would no longer be available for the display of comics. The original project therefore had to be cut down. The first part, which was supposed to trace the “history of figurative narration,” was therefore excluded from the exhibition, and from the book. All that remained, in the Decorative Arts rooms, was an anteroom presenting a rapid panorama of the forerunners of comics. Enlarged facsimiles were attached to the walls, displaying reproductions of the Bayeux Tapestry and Trajan’s column, next to the work of more recent precursors such as Rodolphe Töpffer.

Narrative Technique and Scenography The new project concentrated on “narrative technique and the problems that it posed in the organization and combination of images.”10 The different sections and scenography of the exhibition were conceived and designed to address this issue.

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Like the previous exhibitions organized by SOCERLID, Comics and Narrative Figuration did not include any original comics pages or publications, or collector’s items, but it displayed Ektachromes and photographic enlargements, mounted in various ways. After the anteroom referred to above, the first room contained cubic structures, whose faces had enlarged comics panels attached to them. These panels offered examples of the formal vocabulary and the codes of comics (the frame and its varying shapes, the speech balloon and its conventional signs). The theme of the second section was the narrative structure of the image considered in isolation. The room was organized like a labyrinth of boards covered in orange tulle, on which were hung single comics panels, one per board. The third section showed narrative techniques produced by the deployment of the specific resources of comics in varying combinations. One room contained hanging boards to which were affixed blown-up panels, series of panels, or entire pages, also enlarged. Finally, in a room that was plunged into darkness, there were spotlighted Ektachromes of documents of a similar type, but in color. The principle of the exhibition was, then, to display only photographic enlargements, as the catalog explains: “Because of the quality of the paper, and the sharpness of the blacks and whites, photographic enlargement can release comics from the small format that stifles it, and can reveal it by translating it into the usual formats of works of art familiar to the public.”11 Enlargement had the educational aim of attracting the public’s attention to comics images that it would habitually read without seeing. But also of converting comics into the formats associated with works of art, bringing them into direct competition with the paintings presented by Gassiot-Talabot. For SOCERLID, “the works of certain artists can withstand radical enlargement (15 cm images brought up to over 2 meters) without loss of quality.” Having had to relinquish a proportion of the hanging space in the museum to Narrative Figuration, the comics lovers had to renounce spectacular effects, like the project, preserved in the Couperie archive, of blowing a Buz Sawyer panel by Roy Crane up to three meters by five.12

The Catalog The Comics and Narrative Figuration exhibition was accompanied by an important eponymous text, which ran to over 250 pages. This book is not really a catalog, but offers ambitious content, addressing, for the first time in French, comics from a wide-ranging perspective. The writing of the catalog was the combined work of different members of SOCERLID, particularly the chapters devoted to the history and evolution of

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comics, from its origins up to the 1960s. Pierre Couperie was responsible for the chapter on German and English comics, Maurice Horn took on the American output, Édouard François the French contribution, and Proto Destefanis the works in Italian. Claude Moliterni wrote the chapter devoted to “narrative technique” and a final chapter concerning Figurative Narration was allocated to Gérald Gassiot-Talbot. The real mastermind behind the work was Pierre Couperie, as is indicated by the contents page, which attributes its “conception” to him.13 Documents from his archives include a detailed summary of what it was meant to contain. For example, even the collectively written historical chapters seem to have followed a plan predetermined by him. Having written almost half of the entire work, Couperie was also its chief editor.14 In addition to his contribution to the historical chapters, he wrote five other chapters, as well as all the marginal notes.15 The book was produced in the brief space of a few months. Fortunately, Pierre Couperie had worked on a similar project that had not come to fruition and that thus provided a draft: “I had a detailed project going back to two or three years previously: Planète had been planning to publish a book on comics. The collection editor, Monsieur Philippe, was a director of study at the Centre for Research into Social History, a department of the École pratique des Hautes Études, and he knew me (and my involvement in the Comics Club16) well, so he asked me to put forward a project. In the end, Planète decided instead to bring out an anthology of reproductions” (Les Chefs d’œuvre de la bande dessinée [Comics Masterpieces], Planète, 1967).17 Couperie did not conceive of the catalog as a simple historical overview of comics, but as a history linked to various sociological, economic, and aesthetic contexts. Shorn of its chapter on the origins of figurative narrative art, the work begins with an introduction, immediately followed by the historical sections. Couperie refers to a number of developments that provided fertile ground for the appearance of comics, such as reproduction techniques enabling the text and the image to appear together, from fifteenth-century wood engraving to the photoengraving in illustrated magazines at the end of the nineteenth century. In the other chapters, Couperie sets about covering every other component of comics. For example, chapter 7, “Production and Distribution,” describes the system that regulates the creation of American comics: the principles behind syndicates and how they operate, the working methods of artists, techniques of creation, means of distribution, and censorship. The two following chapters are based on American sociological studies, for want of any European or French equivalent. The author nonetheless introduces a few French and European examples by way of comparison, but these are limited. They include studies of “the readership of comics,” and “the world of comics,” in which Couperie concerns himself with typologies and themes of American works. The final

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chapter written by Couperie, “Aesthetics and Meaning,” poses questions about the influences from graphic arts, stylistic currents and artistic movements that have inspired comics—or more accurately the comic strip, from Winsor McCay to Charles Schulz. Right at the end of this last chapter, Pierre Couperie refers, as if seeking to conclude on a vengeful note, to the abandonment of the “working hypothesis” concerning the existence of an art form “with a narrative tendency,” dating from the time of the Pharaohs to the end of the nineteenth century. As the brains behind SOCERLID, Pierre Couperie put his erudition in the service of this exhibition and its catalog. Billed prominently as an academic authority—the contents page affirms his institutional affiliation to the École pratique des Hautes Études—he writes in a clear and accessible style for a wide readership, in keeping with the educational aim of the exhibition scenography. As Harry Morgan and Manuel Hirtz have noted, the catalog is “enjoyable reading on account of its critical stance, its enthusiasm, and, in some cases, its vigorous partisanship.”18 Even if his arguments have now become dated, the quality of Pierre Couperie’s writing and his unique intellect have left their mark on the history of comics. Notes 1. See Antoine Sausverd, Bande dessinée et figuration narrative [Comics and Narrative Figuration] (unpublished master’s thesis, Université de Bourgogne, 1999); Thierry Groensteen, Un objet culturel non identifié [An Unidentified cultural object] (Angoulême: Éditions de l’An 2, 2006), 155–60; Pierre-Laurent Daures, Enjeux et stratégie de l’exposition de bande dessinée [Issues and strategies in comics exhibitions], unpublished master’s thesis (École Européenne Supérieure de l’Image, Université de Poitiers, 2011). 2. Thierry Groensteen, Un objet culturel non identifié, op. cit. 3. Preliminary project, handwritten note by Pierre Couperie [1966]. Cité internationale de la bande dessinée et de l’image, Pierre Couperie collection, dossier on “Comics and Narrative Figuration” exhibition. 4. Copy of the letter from Pierre Couperie to François Mathey presenting the exhibition proposal (undated, 1966). Pierre Couperie collection. The following quotations are taken from the same letter. [Available online with the original article.] 5. This Italian project could not find a publisher for a French translation. See “Bandes dessinées en prose” [Comics in prose], a conversation between François Caradec and Jean-Christophe Menu, September 26, 2005, L’Éprouvette 1 (January 2006): 41–49. 6. “Autour du mouvement bédéphile, entretien avec Pierre Couperie” [Concerning the comics lovers’ movement, conversation with Pierre Couperie], interview with Nicolas Gaillard, Contrechamp 1 (1997): 131–32. 7. Ibid., 137–38. 8. Even after the Comics and Narrative Figuration exhibition, Pierre Couperie was never reconciled with the use of comics by pop artists. He later took satisfaction in an article by Max Wykes-Joyce in the July 1970 Herald Tribune, after the exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in New York, which cast suspicion on pop art as possibly “the biggest fraud of the century.” 9. Undated working notes, Pierre Couperie collection.

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10. Undated working notes, Pierre Couperie collection. 11. Catalog from Comics and Narrative Figuration (Museum of Decorative Arts, 1967), 145. 12. Note by Pierre Couperie, 1998. Author’s archives. 13. Catalog from “Comics and Narrative Figuration” (Museum of Decorative Arts, 1967), 256. 14. According to a 1967 document supplied to the author by Couperie, the catalog is made up of 314,000 letters (not including the chapter on Narrative Figuration). The exact proportion of the number of characters written by each collaborator is as follows: Couperie: 46.8%; Horn: 33.1%; François: 11.1%; Moliterni: 7%; Destefanis: 1.9%. Author’s archives. 15. In writing the marginal notes, Couperie drew upon the multivolume art history works published by Planète, on which he had worked as a ghostwriter. Realizing that they could provide a more detailed treatment of certain areas included in a generalizing essay, he reused them for the catalog. 16. The Club des Bandes Dessinées was the forerunner of SOCERLID. Trans. 17. Note by Pierre Couperie, 1998. Author’s archives. 18. Harry Morgan and Manuel Hirtz, Le Petit Critique illustré [The Short Illustrated Critique] (Montrouge: PLG, 2005), 18.

THE RENEWED FOCUS ON COMICS AS ART AFTER 1970 From the mid-1960s into the 1970s, there was a renewed interest in displaying original comic art in museums and galleries. This happened for many reasons. As discussed in the previous section, some shows, like Bande dessinée et figuration narrative (Paris, 1967) were organized in response to the famous pop art paintings of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, as a way to get credit and recognition for the comic artists who created the drawings those paintings were based upon and to establish comics as a unique art form. Work by cartoonists identified with the underground comix movement also became a focus of attention. Popular with college students and known for uncensored, sometimes autobiographical work, the undergrounds attracted critics and curators who thought they brought new intellectual energy into comics. Important new publications arrived, notably The Great Comic Book Heroes by Jules Feiffer (1965) and the widely read English translation of the Bande dessinée et figuration narrative catalog A History of the Comic Strip by Couperie and Horn (1968). Partially inspired by the intellectual framework presented in A History of the Comic Strip, a plethora of large survey shows exploring comic art shared their bounty with gallery visitors. Unlike the more casual display techniques we saw in shows before 1960 (see Caniff at the Society of Illustrators 1946, figure 29), these shows presented comic art drawings like any other gallery art, neatly framed and hung at in a line at eye level in a gallery with minimal distractions (see figure 36, the Muller Collection at the Bowers Museum, 1976). Some notable US shows opened in the 1960s. In 1966 the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) exhibited Two Fantastic Draftsmen, featuring Winsor McCay drawings, tear sheets, and color proofs from the collections of Ray W. Moniz (McCay’s grandson), Woodrow Gelman, and Irving A. Mendelson, alongside drawings by Herbert Crowley from the museum’s collection, organized by A. Hyatt Major, the museum’s curator of prints. In a rave review for the New York Times, art critic John Canaday writes:

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It took us a long time to discover jazz as important music and the movies as important as theatre, and the only thing we have done with the comic strip is to take it at its worst and further cheapen it by adaptation to the second-rate, giggling pseudo-estheticism of pop art . . . As it is, I would give you about 39 out of any 40 current gallery exhibitions during a typical week on Madison Avenue, and take Little Nemo instead as a work of art that had a reason for being and fulfilled it. (1966) The National Cartoonists Society (NCS) had an active exhibition schedule in the 1960s. In 1963, they launched Cavalcade of Comics, a combination of laminated tear sheets, original strips, and character drawings that were displayed in the RCA building at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. In 1965, NCS members had their own response to pop art, spoofing their own work in pop-art-style paintings for Comic Art Goes Pop!, a gala benefit for the USO. In a booklet about the project, exhibit chairman Alfred Andriola observed: The pop artists realized the significance of the comic strip and they glorified it as they did the flag, the soup can, and the movie star. They capitalized on the dramatic image, the unique language, and the simplicity and symbols that the cartoonists created. Now, in this exhibit the newspaper comic strip artists have painted their well-known characters in the pop medium. They have used their own gifts of satire, humor and realism— and finally pop art has come full circle. (1965) After the auction, the NCS “pop art” pieces were displayed in the Top of the Fair restaurant at the World’s Fair. After the fair, Cavalcade continued to tour, appearing at the Smithsonian in 1966, at Lever House (New York) in 1971, and then touring the United States into the 1980s. Bhob Stewart organized the first museum show of underground comix, The Phonus Balonus Show of Really Heavy Stuff at the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s Dupont Circle location in 1969, featuring art by Vaughn Bode, Robert Crumb, Kim Deitch, Larry Hama, Jay Lynch, Spain Rodriguez, Gilbert Shelton, Art Spiegelman, John Thompson, and Skip Williamson. Many of these artists joined Jack Kirby’s New Gods in their first international appearance, Aaargh! A Celebration of Comics, a show of original comic art at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London (1970). Bande dessinée et figuration narrative continued to tour 1967–1971 (Musée des Arts Décoratifs; Maiso de la Culture de Nevers; Stadtbibliothek d’Anvers; Musees Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire, Bruxelles; Puteaux; Akademie der Kunte, Berlin; Theatre de l’Ouest Parisien; Pentre de Rencontre de Chateuvallon; and Andersonin Taidemuseo Helsinki) and comics

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exhibits were organized in Canada, France, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Sweden, Belgium, Germany, Argentina, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Japan.1 Back in the United States, there was a wave of survey shows. The 1970 exhibition The Comics as an Art Form was organized by Peter L. Myer for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, which included a closing-day symposium with Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Charles Schulz, and Harvey Kurtzman (toured to Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center). Maurice Horn, a participant in Bande dessinée et figuration narrative, curated his own show 75 Years of the Comics at the New York Cultural Center in 1971. Cartoonist and collector Jerry Robinson displayed the jewels of his collection at the Graham Gallery in New York (1972). One of the best reviewed shows of this wave was Judith O’Sullivan’s The Art of the Comic Strip at the University of Maryland (1971), which was circulated by the Smithsonian. John Canaday of the New York Times and the Nation’s art critic Lawrence Alloway both praised it, and it received serious scholarly attention from UCLA professor Albert Boime, who published a lengthy defense of comics as an equal to high art in the College Art Association’s prestigious Art Journal. Boime was a respected and prolific art historian best known for his four-volume Social History of Modern Art (1990–2007, University of Chicago Press), in this book, I have included his review of O’Sullivan’s show and his explaination of the multiple overlapping threads between comics, fine art, and magazine illustration. It was around this time that artists and collectors moved to the forefront of comics advocacy, supporting and curating exhibitions and working toward the establishment of dedicated institutions. Collectors like Richard Marschall made many of these projects possible with loans of one-of-a-kind historical pieces that served as the backbone for exhibitions. One ambitious dealer/collector from Southern California, Jerome K. Muller, assembled two hundred pieces from his collection into a very professional-looking exhibit that toured midsized museums and university galleries from 1972 to 1979 (see figure 36). The tour included a catalog with an introduction by Ray Bradbury, historical essay by Muller, and a checklist, which was updated every year with a different drawing featured on the cover and the names of the museums (usually two) hosting the exhibit that year listed on the title page. The categories included syndicated features, comic book pages, magazine cartoons, animation art, and a spotlight on artists that lived or worked in California.2 Brian Walker told me in conversation that Muller claimed that his storefront display in Santa Ana, California, was the first comic art museum, but that honor must be bestowed upon the Museum of Cartoon Art founded by the cartoonist Mort Walker in 1974, the first institution solely dedicated to comics and animation with a schedule of programming, active members, a collection, events, and an education program.

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Figure 36. Exhibition view of The Cartoon Show: Collection of Jerome K. Muller at the Bowers Museum, Santa Ana, California. 1976. Courtesy of the Bowers Museum.

In 1966, after Cavalcade of Comics was shown at the Smithsonian, an NCS committee headed by Al Smith began meetings with the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities to establish a permanent cartoon museum at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. As negotiations dragged on, Mort Walker was inspired to renovate the old Mead Mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut, to house his huge collection of comic art. Brian Walker, Mort’s son, started out painting the building and became the museum director. Brian’s essay about the evolution of the museum from 1974 to 1992 tells us about many of the first-time retrospectives of legendary artists the museum organized, and he also includes honest insights into the perils and strategies involved in keeping a small museum afloat. Because many of MCA’s shows were the first of their kind, I am including an exhibition history. The list continues past Brian’s involvement, when the museum was renamed the International Museum of Cartoon Art and relocated to Boca Raton, Florida. After the Florida museum closed due to financial problems, there was an effort to reopen it in the Empire State Building in New York.

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Figure 37. The Cartoon Art Museum at 655 Mission Street, San Francisco (currently at 781 Beach Street). 2015. Photo by Kim Munson.

That was ultimately unsuccessful and Mort Walker donated his entire collection to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at OSU. Sadly, Mort Walker was lost to us in 2017 as I was assembling this publication. I am including here a short tribute to him by Cullen Murphy, published first in the New York Times. Across the United States in San Francisco, another group of determined collectors and comics creators, led by Troubadour Press publisher Malcolm Whyte, founded the Cartoon Art Museum (figure 37), now the longest-running independent comic art museum on the West Coast. The board organized a touring exhibit called A Graphic Record of Life: 1895–1987, which they rented to banks, the San Francisco International Airport, and museums as a fund-raiser. These

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rental fees, plus a large contribution by Charles Schulz, allowed the museum to open at their first location in the Print Center building at 665 Third Street in 1988. They had their formal opening in May 1988 while the NCS was in San Francisco for their annual meeting and the Reuben Awards. Kenneth Baker, the longtime art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, reviewed the museum’s first official exhibit, Drawn to Excellence: Masters of Cartoon Art, sharing insightful commentary on comics and their place in the larger art world. In 2007, another determined collector, Mazetoons cartoonist Joe Wos, launched the ToonSeum at the Children’s Museum in Pittsburgh. It soon expanded into a storefront in Pittsburgh’s arts district, where it survived until the museum closed in February 2018 (some board members are still working to reopen the museum in the future). In an interview with me, Wos talks about how he made the ToonSeum an important part of the Pittsburgh community and his annual artist’s residency at the Charles M. Schulz Museum. Projecting through the lens of his experience as a cartoonist and former museum director, he also speculates on the cartoon art museum of the future. Notes 1. Herdeg’s The Art of the Comic Strip has a very detailed bibliography of shows up to their publication in 1972. There is a separate section for each of the countries I listed. With contributions from Moliterni and Couperie, this book is sort of a follow-up to the Bande dessinée et figuration narrative catalog. 2. The Cartoon Show first opened at the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, California, in 1972. It toured later to the Mary Livingston Gallery, Santa Ana, California (1973); School of Fine Arts Gallery, University of California, Irvine (1974); Bowers Museum, Santa Ana (1976); Scottsdale Center for the Arts (1977); Salt Lake Art Center (1977); Boise Gallery of Art (1977); EB Crocker Gallery, Sacramento (1977); Indianapolis Museum of Art (1977); Macnider Art Gallery, Mason City, Iowa (1978); Clemson University, South Carolina (1978); University of Minnesota (1978); Taft University, Denver, Colorado (1978); Everson College, Syracuse, New York (1978); Kalamazoo Art Gallery, Michigan (1978); Montgomery University (1978); South Bend University, Indiana (1979); University of Rochester Memorial Art Gallery, New York (1979). Muller had two other touring shows in the 1980s, the American Comic Strip and The Moving Image (drawn from the collection of Mike Gladd). In 1988, Muller had a company called Museum Graphics based in Costa Mesa, California.

References “AAARGH! Bumper Souvenir Catalogue.” 2009. Bear Alley Books blog. http:bearalley.blogspot .com/2009/07/aaargh-bumper-souvenir-catalogue.html. Accessed October 16, 2018. Andriola, Alfred. 1965. Comic Art Goes Pop! (exhibition booklet: May 18–29, World House Gallery). Canaday, John. 1966. “Little Nemo at the Met.” New York Times, February 13. Cavalcade of American Comics (newsprint program). 1963. New York: Newspaper Comics Council. Couperie, Pierre, and Maurice Horn. 1968. A History of the Comic Strip. New York: Crown Publishers. Herdeg, Walter, and David Pascal. 1972. Art of the Comic Strip. Zürich: Graphis Press.

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Horn, Maurice. 1971. 75 Years of the Comics (exhibition catalog: September 8–November 7, New York Cultural Center). Boston: Boston Book & Art Publisher. Metropolitan Museum Exhibits Drawings for Pre-World War II Comic Strips (press release). 1966. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. February 14. Muller, Jerome K. 1976. The Cartoon Show: Original Works by 100 Outstanding American Cartoonists selected for the Jerome K. Muller Collection (exhibition booklet: Bowers Museum, Santa Ana, CA, February 28–April 4). Myer, Peter L., ed. 1970. The Comics as an Art Form (exhibition booklet: March 29–April 24), Las Vegas: University of Nevada Art Gallery. O’Sullivan, Judith. 1971. The Art of the Comic Strip (exhibition catalog: April 1–May 9). College Park: University of Maryland Art Gallery. Solomon, Charles. 1988. “He Trades on Fantasies of Others: A Dealer in Comic, Animated Art.” Los Angeles Times, January 14. Stewart, Bohb. 1969. The Phonus Balonus Show of Some Really Heavy Stuff (exhibition catalog: Corcoran Gallery of Art on Dupont Circle, May 20–June 15). https://archive.org/details/The PhonusBalonusShowOfSomeReallyHeavyStuff/page/n0. Accessed October 16, 2018. Whyte, Malcolm, ed. 1988. Drawn to Excellence: Masters of Cartoon Art (exhibition catalog: August 25–November 19). San Francisco: Cartoon Art Museum.

The Comic Stripped and Ash Canned: A Review Essay Albert Boime Reprinted with permission of Mrs. Myra Boime, first published by the College Arts Association in Art Journal 32, no. 1 (Autumn 1972): 21–25, 30.

The University of Maryland’s ninth exhibition, “The Art of the Comic Strip,” is yet another healthy testimony to the imaginative use of the University’s Art Gallery and Museum Training Program. Judith O’Sullivan’s delightful essay for the catalog demonstrates the program’s effective channeling of the creative and scholarly potential of students into productive outlets. By dividing her essay into several broad sections like “The Comic Strip and the Newspaper,” “Freedom of Style and Technique,” and “The Reader of the Comics,” and then ingeniously characterizing the separate categories of comics by concentrating on a few typical representatives of each specialty, she is able not only to digest an enormous quantity of material but to provide many illuminating insights on specific problems as well. Her suggested relationship between Krazy Kat’s dialogue and the black folk art of “rappin’” and discussion of the art nouveau influence on the strips of Windsor McCay and George McManus should open fresh avenues of exploration into this beguiling but often unyielding medium. Indeed, my own ideas on the subject—and even occasional disagreements with O’Sullivan—have been facilitated by her clear and sensitive exposition of the problems. First, I consider the controversy over the comic strip’s status within the realm of the visual arts a largely meaningless one. Since I define art as the activity of human beings engaged in shaping their thoughts and feelings I make no distinction between “high” and “low” art. Blondie and Superman are in this sense no less deserving of our scrutiny than the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and Chartres Cathedral. This is totally independent of judicial criticism: while the spectator is free to evaluate such activity in terms of some canon or aesthetic form of reference, the individual “shaper”—his own best spectator—needs no audience to satisfy the conditions of his experience. Comic strip artists, cabinet 120

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makers, plumbers, and mathematicians are essentially no different from “old masters” when viewed from this perspective. Even in normative terms, however, the comic strip is integral to the history of art and merits equal recognition with other branches of the fine arts. Essentially an American idiom, it is not only intimately associated with the development of modern art in the United States but with the avant-garde art of the entire Western world. As a graphic medium, the American comic strip quite naturally shares many features with antecedent European forms, but its origin and definitive character derive from an indigenous set of conditions. O’Sullivan, who is sensitive to art nouveau’s influence on the early comics, overlooks (along with most scholars in the field) the authentic connection between the comic strip and the evolution of American art at the turn of the century. While comics attained their maturity in the United States as a result of newspaper growth and mass circulation, this unfoldment did not occur in isolation from other forms of journalistic art. It is related to the general evolution of illustrated journalism in America just prior to the Civil War, when publications like Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and Harper’s Weekly hired reportorial artists to perform the work now done by the tabloid photographer. This practice quickly consolidated itself during the Civil War and the art department soon became a necessary adjunct to most newspapers. These art departments offered aspiring young artists their primary professional outlet. Unsupported by government patronage as in France and lacking the rich resources of an English Royal Academy, would-be American artists frequently took jobs with the burgeoning illustrated newspapers. Like the Academies, newspapers legitimized the artist’s profession in the eyes of middle-class parents (George McManus’s father himself arranged an interview with the art editor of the St. Louis Republic when he discovered his son’s talent), and offered a kind of “graduate” program by virtue of its technical training. The dream of every art student was to see his work “in print”—the equivalent distinction of a Prix-de-Rome winner in France. Winslow Homer, Elihu Vedder, Thomas Nast, Thomas Hart Benton, and a host of others commenced their professional careers as graphic journalists. Indeed, this tradition etched itself deeply into American life, and Dreiser’s use of it as the backdrop for his novel The Genius parallels Zola’s use of the French academic and official institutions in L’Oeuvre. As pictorial journalism developed, artists experimented with techniques appropriate to the newsprint medium. Most of the periodical illustration after mid-century was done in “white-line” wood engraving, which attempted to reproduce subtle tones and values. The most that could be achieved was a monotonous flatness and grayness. But newspaper draftsmen began playing around with a black-line medium, preferring to build form by line rather than by tone. The raw power of strong outlines and sharp tonal contrasts were

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exactly suited to the special character of graphic journalism. It was at this time that the modern editorial cartoon emerged, and not fortuitously, America’s first major political cartoonist, Thomas Nast, began his career as a pictorial reporter. Experiments with the new techniques were dramatically advanced in the hands of the editorial cartoonists. Newspapers encouraged these experiments when their owners observed the impact they made on readers. For the first time in American history, editorial cartoonists and feature artists began building audiences and enjoying a sustained influence over the public. Newspaper publishers not only increased sales but also discovered that they could promote their editorial viewpoint in this fashion as a kind of bonus premium. The discovery of the growing potentialities of the medium and the growing emphasis on crispness and immediacy induced graphic journalists to produce shorthand techniques close in spirit to European caricatural trends. Out of this tradition the modern comic strip was born. Comic strips are in fact the final manifestation of old-fashioned illustrated journalism, and their origin is thus related less to technological advances than is generally claimed. Almost all the pioneer comic strip artists did political cartooning in their formative years, and some, like Winsor McCay and George Luks, could practice it throughout their careers. Frederick Burr Opper, the inventor of Alphonse and Gaston and Happy Hooligan, was as well known for his editorial cartoons as for his comics. Robert Carr quit his popular strip Coffee and Sinkers to become one of the First World War’s outstanding editorial cartoonists. Rube Goldberg shifted back and forth from sports cartoons and comics to political cartoons. Frank King, creator of Gasoline Alley, ran the entire evolutionary gamut, beginning as a reportorial artist, then going on to do political cartoons and ultimately his famous comic strip. Walt Kelly is a modern who continued this tradition, and he not only drew pure political cartoons but couched his popular Pogo in contemporary political allegory. Even Jules Feiffer and the underground cartoonists sustain the ancestry of the American comic strip in their primarily political viewpoint. Indeed, the list of editorial cartoonists who progressed to comic strips is endless, and includes Jimmy Hatlo (They’ll Do It Every Time), Billy DeBeck (Barney Google), Carl Ed (Harold Teen), Frank Willard (Moon Mullins), Sidney Smith (The Gumps), Jimmy Murphy (Toots and Casper), Ham Fisher (Joe Palooka), Russ Westover (Tillie the Toiler), Charles Winner (Elmer), and Dick Calkins (Buck Rogers). What related such early strips as Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley, McKay’s Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend, and Opper’s Alphonse and Gaston to editorial cartoons was their topical character. The newspaper illustrators not only transferred to the comics their reflections on contemporary life but filled them with the vernacular and settings of urban America. In their infancy comics consisted of a few large panels on a single page and displayed few daily continuities, thus fulfilling

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a similar role as the Sunday feature supplements of modern newspapers. Cartoonists attempted to express breezy commentaries in the editorial style. Not subject to the taboos that plagued later comic strips, the early cartoonists felt free to satirize religious and ethnic groups and to lampoon the seamy side of American life. Not fortuitously, the crystallization of the comics coincides with the formation of America’s first modern movement in painting, the Ash Can School. Its pioneers, associates, and heirs sprang from the same roots as the cartoonists and even contributed directly to the development of the comic strip. Almost all began their careers as reportorial artists and cartoonists, including John Sloan, William Glackens, Everett Shinn, George Bellows, George Luks, Edward Davis (art editor of the Philadelphia Press) and his son Stuart, Art Young, and Reginald Marsh. At one point Sloan, who did periodic comic strip illustrations, and Robert Henri, the original founder of the group, deliberated doing a joint comic strip. But despite their recognition of the mass appeal and commercial potential of comics, they abandoned the scheme for want of a satisfactory theme. George Luks took over the drawing of America’s first comic strip, The Yellow Kid, which portrayed the delinquents of tenement and slum areas in a sprawling urban setting. The language and gestures of The Yellow Kid were as hard and biting as Ash Can realism, and while Luks did not originate the strip it reflected a state of mind like that of The Eight. When Luks turned to painting, he continued to depict the derelicts and urchins of the slum environment represented in The Yellow Kid. Later, Stuart Davis, Art Young, and Reginald Marsh did editorial cartoons, as well as the original Ash Can members, who revitalized the medium when Sloan became art editor of The Masses. The relationship of graphic journalism to both the development of the comic strip and the Ash Can School is essentially based on their abiding concern with the actual quality of American life. Beyond their immediate link with the development of contemporary American painting, however, editorial and comic strip cartoons participate in a larger sense in the mainstream of Western art history. The editorial cartoon and its progeny stand at the crossroads of neoclassicism and modern art. Emerging in the late eighteenth century, the modern political cartoon is cast in a neoclassical mode, sharing with the art of Mortimer, Blake, and David (all of whom did caricatures and cartoons) strong outlines and a moralizing content expressed in allegorical forms. The pronounced topical allusions of much neoclassical painting which identify the past in terms of the present, relate it to editorial cartooning, which likewise exploits anachronism and allegorical devices to convey the idea that all epochs are basically the same. Thomas Nast, who had a clear grasp of this relationship, incorporated in his cartoons the compositions of such later academic neoclassicists as Delaroche, Meissonier, Gérôme, and Cabanel.

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This relationship is applicable to the comic strip as well. If it seems to contradict the idea of the comics as an index to contemporary life, it must be recalled that the cartoon, by its very definition, is a radical reduction of reality and presents its case in generalized images or types. The comic strip artist, like the editorial cartoonist, has to embody a general idea in a characteristic physiognomy. One often hears the complaint that the comic strip artist vulgarizes reality by condensing it to a set of visual clichés, thus forcing his audience to accept the crass devices for their natural equivalent. To a large extent this vulgarization is imposed on the artist by the repetitious character of the medium—a sequential format viewed daily—and the need to convey simple ideas. The artist has to convince his audience that it is always seeing the same character in each panel, and to facilitate this task—and his assistants who may one day replace him—he exploits features like pupilless eyes, lipless mouths, angular chins, and ovoid heads which can easily be depicted from all angles. Summarily drawn figures and standardized forms are thus crucial to the effectiveness of the strip’s communication. Eventually these forms and the personality they project assume an allegorical guise: Mickey Mouse, Superman, Dick Tracy, and Li’l Abner culminate as abstract personifications like Justice, Charity, Valor, and War. This is why Flaxman, Blake, and Girodet (in his Anacreon illustrations, for example) bear strong affinities with Windsor McCay, George McManus, and Charles Schulz. The drawing of neoclassicists and comic strippers reveals the same purity of outline and controlled precision, and not uncommonly, the former make use of as many stylistic clichés as the latter. Both groups endeavor to represent a rational style appropriate to the communication of simple ethical ideas. If the propagandistic content of comics is not always evident, the simple homilies and chauvinistic content preserve the relationship with neoclassicism. Most comic strip cartoonists, however, are unreserved moralists: AI Capp (Li’l Abner), Harold Gray (Little Orphan Annie), Walt Kelly (Pogo), Chester Gould (Dick Tracy), Brant Parker (Wizard of Id), Johnny Hart (B.C.), Charles Schulz (Peanuts), George Herriman (Krazy Kat), Otto Soglow (The Little King), and Jules Feiffer spring to mind almost immediately. The majority of these, as mentioned previously, preserve the link to editorial cartooning through their political allusions. But cartoonists of every specialty generally have to moralize since the majority of their ideas and story continuities are strictly based on medieval categories of Good and Evil. This “block-book” mentality has ironically intensified since the early days of the comics, when the acerbic, vulgar satire appeared as immoral at best, amoral at worst. In the course of the comic strip’s evolution, however, the artists became limited by their very effectiveness in increasing newspaper circulation. The expansion of circulation led to a proportionate increase in the number of restrictions imposed on the artists by calculating syndicates. Syndicates, trying to reach as broad an audience as

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possible, forced comic strippers to subscribe to innumerable taboos. O’Sullivan quotes Walt Kelly as saying that “good cartoonists are subversive,” and then rightly observes that he stands as a rare exception. The majority of comic strip artists have been content to work within the prohibitions imposed upon them. But in the process of coping with these taboos—which surpassed even those of Hollywood, whose monopoly assured it a measure of autonomy—the comic artists forfeited the earlier advantages of contemporary social involvement. Except for the underground artists who attempt to recapture the spirit of the first comics, the comic strip has projected an appeal based on neoclassical and medieval moral values. Yet despite the connection of the comic ethos to neoclassicism, it is evident that caricature and cartoons also contained the elements of contemporary art. This is not only reflected in the fact that we count among our great artists caricaturists like George Grosz and Saul Steinberg, as well as painters like Klee, Picasso, Dufy, Miro, and Chagall whose styles are often indistinguishable from that of cartoons, but in the sanctification of pop art as a seminal direction in the art of the sixties and in the increasing number of clubs and shows given over to the subject. This change in the status of the cartoon is linked to the revolution which began in Europe in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when an international group of artists attempted to transcend what they felt to be the limitations of an outworn classicism and a dissolute naturalism by turning to caricatural forms for new solutions. Degas and Van Gogh—both of whom deeply admired cartoonists—and a vanguard including Seurat, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Munch, Ensor, Hodler, Klinger, and Stuck (who began his career as a cartoonist for the Fliegenden Blätter) all veered toward popular imagery to express a fresh vision of the world. Curiously, their ultimate achievement derived in large part from synthesizing the academic and naturalist traditions under the impact of popular illustration. Their forms were expressed in outline, their themes were socially or psychologically oriented, and with the exception of Stuck their pictorial content was drawn from everyday life. If in the use of distortion for effect— the fundamental contribution of caricature to modern art—the young artists differed radically from the conservatives, like the original neoclassicists they used a distinct linear emphasis and psychological content to avoid prettiness and superficiality. Thus they shared the common heritage of the comic strip, which likewise absorbed the neoclassical and naturalist tendencies late in the century under the influence of journalistic illustration. It should therefore not be surprising to find that the fortunes of con-temporary art and the comic strip ultimately overlapped. Yet the relationship of modern art to caricature and comics is nonetheless impressive. Picasso, who admired The Katzenjammer Kids, shows the influence

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of American comic strips in The Dream and Lie of Franco and in certain characteristic distortions such as the anatomy of the central figure of Night Fishing at Antibes, where the debt to Alley Oop is unmistakable. More significantly, Cubism may have been generally influenced by the fragmentation and distortions of the comics, and the introduction of floating textual signs in the pictorial space was foreshadowed by the cartoonist’s insertion of free-floating letters and pictographic symbols into the image area. Nor is it fortuitous that, when looking at a Cubist papier collé with its combination of caricatural elements and newspaper fragments, the configuration of a comic strip seems to emerge. Juan Gris, a leading figure in the Cubist movement, actually began his career as a cartoonist, and his early Cubist works display in their heavy linearism and exaggerated physiognomies a distinctly caricatural effect. Metzinger and Léger (especially in his later years) also seemed to have been influenced by caricature and comics. It is probably no coincidence that Lyonel Feininger, the first artist in Germany to understand Cubism’s importance, began his career as a periodical cartoonist and comic strip illustrator. A native American of German descent who settled in Europe, Feininger’s early development shows the typical American proclivity for pictorial journalism, when he contributed both regular illustrations and editorial cartoons to German, American, and French periodicals. In the period 1906–1907, Feininger created two comic strips for the Chicago Tribune, “The Kin-der-Kids” and “Wee Willie Winkie’s World.” The angular settings, mechanized objects, animation of landscape phenomena, and delicate linework of these comics anticipate his painting style, as do the thematic confrontations between architecture, nature, and the elements that mark his mature production. Klee and Kandinsky, Feininger’s colleagues at the Bauhaus, similarly disclose a fascination with caricatural features, perhaps as an outgrowth of their study with Franz von Stuck, who started out as a professional cartoonist. While the impact of cartoons is most conspicuous in the work of Klee, Kandinsky’s distorted settings in the early landscapes, the character of motion in his images of riders, and the exaggerated use of black lines are reminiscent of early comic strips. The Futurists’ search for forms that would express the dynamic quality of modern life undoubtedly led them to contemplate the comic strip, where visual suggestions of speed and action are generally the most common ingredient. The Futurists’ notorious “lines of force” are none other than the “speed lines” dear to all practitioners of the comics and date from the earliest of the strips. Duchamp exploits these same speed lines around the lower portion of the Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. Indeed, it would be difficult to conceive of either Dada- or surreal-ism apart from the humorous illustrators of the last century who served as their immediate forerunners or the contemporary comic strip

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artists and cartoonists whom their protagonists admired. Not only did Duchamp (following in the footsteps of brother Villon) begin as a cartoonist, but in his review New York Dada, Duchamp published the work of the American comic strip artist Rube Goldberg, whose weird machines and lunatic inventions may very well have inspired some of the pictorial contraptions of the Dadaists. Goldberg’s contribution was not neglected in Barr’s pioneering show of 1936, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism. Victor Brauner, Max Ernst, and René Magritte subdivided several of their pictures into multiple compartments like comic strips, and such a work as Magritte’s Man Reading a Newspaper—often mistakenly associated with film technique—parodies the sequential format of the daily “gag” strip and its “punch line.” Much later, Kurt Schwitters introduced the fragment of a comic strip into one of his collages, and thus forged a direct link between the Dadaists and neo-Dadaists—the pop artists who systematically exploited the comics. Jasper Johns made a painting in 1959 with a sequence of Alley Oop attached to it, and not long afterward Warhol and Lichtenstein began singling out cartoon characters as subjects. Also germane to the evolution of pop art is the work of Stuart Davis, who, as a pupil of Henri, represents an intermediary between the Ash Can view of American life and the pop vision. Having begun his career as a pictorial reporter and cartoonist—roughly analogous to pop artists who started out as commercial illustrators—Davis allowed this training to express itself in his development as a painter. His stylistic freedom clearly exhibits the marks of a rich experience in graphic media. Davis’s powerful compositional sense evolved from the practice of creating concise layouts for full- or half-page reproduction. The works of his mature period reveal the playful linearism, flat patterns of loud hues, and frenetic energy of Sunday comics, and in his painting of the late thirties and early forties, when he quits a previous emphasis on perpendiculars for an interpenetrating jumble of details, he approaches the chaotic character of Dudley Fisher’s comic strip “Right Around Home.” There are other instances of the impact of comics on contemporary art, but they are often less easily identified. Mondrian’s grids echo the layout of fullpage Sunday comics, while Rothko’s parallel rectangles and Newman’s fields also bear the impress of the comic strip format. Newman’s horizontal compositions resemble the classic divisions of earth and sky in the comics and even his vertical bands suggest the separations between panels. Franz Kline dreamed of a career in cartooning and his definitive work reflects the stark power of the daily black-and-white strip. Philip Guston’s recent figurative painting, which introduces a cast of hooded knaves, draws heavily on the imagery of early comics and animated cartoons to reveal relationships between contemporary social madness and our fantasy life. O’Sullivan, brilliantly noting the similarity between certain forms in a Krazy Kat sequence and the bursts of Adolph

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Gottlieb, could have extended her analysis even further. Both Gottlieb and Krazy Kat’s creator George Herriman drew upon the imagery and landscape of the American Southwest for inspiration, and both share a love of sparse fields and the uncluttered horizon of desert scenery. His obsession with pictographic forms mirrors the comic strip artist’s fascination with onomatopoetic sounds. Gottlieb’s bursts and discs resemble such graphically rendered sounds as POW! SPLAT! #@!%!, and their accompanying explosive effects. Finally, for a spooky déjà vu sensation, I recommend the “Krazy Kat” sequence in the color section of the New York Journal American, December 11, 1938 (reproduced in C. Waugh, The Comics, New York. 1947, plate 2), which displays an opening panel resembling a Newman and a closing one remarkably akin to a Gottlieb, where a Navajo blanket with a brick woven into its empty field and a quotation-mark-like moon hovering in an empty sky eerily combine to convey Gottlieb’s imagery. Even a sculptor like Brancusi was not exempt from the influence of the comics: his White Negress and Chieftain parody the early comic strip presentation of cannibals, while his Newborn is like the bawling brat of domestic cartoons. Alexander Calder, who began his artistic career as a cartoonist for the National Police Gazette, transferred the influence of the humorous linework of contemporary comic strips to his early sculpture and ultimately to his mobiles as well. But if the pervasive importance of comic imagery in the twentieth century can never be fully documented, it is to the credit of pop art that it openly declared this source of contemporary art. Pop artists not only employed the comics as subject matter, but asserted the significance of comic strips in the development of the modern sensibility. Lichtenstein’s ingenious interpretations of Picasso and Mondrian in the style of the comic strip comes off for the very reason that these artists were nurtured by its visual development and even absorbed some of its mannerisms. The comic strip has merited equal status with Picasso and Mondrian, and in projecting it in easel painting format the pop artists achieved for it the status of “high” art while simultaneously demoting “high” art to the conventional level of the comic strip. Despite this contribution to the evolution of modern art, however, the comic strip remains more faithful than ever before to its neoclassicistic origins. Comic strippers have been bound by so many interdictions that they have been forced to project an immaculate, impersonal world, wholly efficient and barely sullied by human frailty. Ideas have had to be conveyed through symbolic and allegorical types, even while retaining the outward participation in the contemporary world. There is an endless repetition of theme and character with the inevitable “moral” ending. Perversely, the highly generalized appeal and proscription of reality culminated in the depiction of the dream world of Americans, just as the neoclassicists’ cult of antiquity stimulated reveries of an Arcadian paradise. And this is why I must take issue with O’Sullivan, who, while recognizing the

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strip’s successful communication, insists that “what it has communicated is simply a celebration of the lives of average men” and that it is “useless to look to the strip for social or moral criticism.” On the contrary, what the comics have communicated since the First World War are the fantasies of “average men,” and this removes it from the sphere of the mundane. Most strips are not about ‘‘average” human beings because their characters function in an entirely unreal universe, as remote from life as Hollywood musicals of a generation ago. In a world without sex, birth, death, religion, where foreigners are depicted either as villains or buffoons, where blacks until very recently had the look of simians, where intellectuals are represented as “mad scientists,” where the American government comes off as a charity organization, where the Vietnam War is barely mentioned, where there are no work stoppages or strikes to be settled, no unfair phone bills to pay, where a cape or a can of spinach are sufficient to compensate for the shortcomings of American society and the average protagonist puts everything right by socking someone in the jaw, the only “average” feature is the number of times the hero loses. Not coincidentally, the majority of the popular adventure strips emerged during the Depression and became firmly entrenched during World War II. The public was led to identify with some single all-powerful character who dominates everyone about him and for whom the major problems of society are nonexistent. Americans, noted for their apathy and hero-worshipping, could easily accept a superman-messiah capable of overcoming the limitations of space and time and defending the “good” from the machinations of the “wicked.” O’Sullivan observes the family strips have to a large extent replaced adventure strips. Yet even here we are in a remote realm of experience: Peanuts, Miss Peach, Luther, and Hi and Lois exhibit infant prodigies who play on the daydreams of anxious parents in an IQ-oriented society, while comics like Judge Parker, Rex Morgan, M.D., and Brenda Starr project hero-types in glamorous vocations like the old soap operas. Rather than reflect reality, they personify the fantasy-ideals of the American majority. The underground cartoonists have deliberately violated all syndicate taboos to expose the underbelly of these fantasies. Scatological references, explicit sexual imagery, and profanity abound in the underground comics. Violence is not merely suggested but aggressively portrayed by the exposure of intestines and amputated limbs. Yet within this context there are constant allusions to the conventional comics and their characters, who themselves often engage unexpectedly in fornication and profanity. The antiestablishment intent of the underground comics is thus obvious, for artists like Crumb, Shelton, Beck, Wilson, Buck, and a host of others are as determined to ridicule the conventional comic strip as much as they are to outrage restrictions on content. To accomplish this, they have revived some of the old techniques of the comics,

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thus declaring their allegiance to the social concerns of the first comic strips. The topicality of the underground comics—influenced largely by the example of Mad comics and Jules Feiffer—as well as their biting content, restores the comic strip’s integrity by disclosing the repressed cravings behind the conventional ideal in appropriate graphic images. Ironically, then, the material of the underground comics complements the conventional strips openly exposing the latent fantasy behind the superheroes. A comic star is provided super-sexual equipment to complement his physical prowess or blows super farts, while another in mild-mannered disguise is unable to change into his super counterpart because the zipper of his fly is stuck or the compartments in the men’s room are all occupied. This is not simply a debunking process but a logical one which draws all the implications of a “super” existence to the point of commonplace actions and biological functions. The underground cartoonist graphically portrays semen, excrement, body hair, and nasal mucous until at last the whole fantasy is exploded. The immaculate, hygienic characters of the legitimate press suddenly become extensions of their bodily needs, and consequently divested of both their propagandistic value and sensationalism. Violence is not glorified by ingeniously being deflected onto a specific villain, but shown in its arbitrary monstrosity. One example shows a passerby happening upon an elderly couple lying in the street and then stomping them with a gigantic foot. In other words, the comic fantasies are simply carried to their logical extreme—free from taboos and restrictions—and their underlying dynamics are abruptly brought to the surface. In allowing us to peer into the tights of a superhero we are able to catch an insight into the wellsprings of the repressed American psyche. Pornography thus plays a conspicuous role in the underground comics, and here underground artists have an immediate precursor. Adolescents on the West Coast often come into the possession of pocket-size pornographic booklets known as “Mexican Bibles” or “Tijuana Bibles,” in which conventional comic characters are shown fornicating with either their female counterpart or an attractive heroine from another strip. This type of pornography dates from the thirties and forties, and examples include Li’l Abner and Popeye displaying extraordinary sexual organs and copulating with Daisy Mae and Tillie the Toiler. While the Mexican Bibles lack the satirical intent of the underground comics, they similarly expose (more directly, perhaps) the latent fantasy behind the comic heroes. Undoubtedly, the use of the comic heroes in a pornographic context satisfied the secret cravings of the artists as much as it stimulated the sexual fantasies of their audience. The underground cartoonists are far more sophisticated, but their debt to the artists of the Mexican Bibles is profound, and it is probably no coincidence that most underground comics originate on the West Coast.

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Despite the brave incursions and innovations of the underground artists, there is as yet no genuine left-wing strip. While it may be argued that the deliberate desecration of the conventional comics’ “good taste” is only incidental to the radical ideals of the underground artists, the majority of them behave like frustrated rejectees of King Features Syndicate. Parody and nihilism are their major weapons of assault; like members of the New Left they offer no alternatives to the system they “wish to demolish.” Nevertheless, they hold out the only promise of a radical comic strip that might present not only the repressed side of conventional comics but an alternative political ideology as well. At present, the only conventional strip affected by the underground artists is Trudeau’s Doonesbury, but Trudeau—although developing rapidly, has yet to transcend his collegiate aspirations. Jules Feiffer, who promised more than he delivered, contented himself with pointing out the defects of the system and this is why he was tolerated by the overground press. What is desperately needed is a genuine leftist viewpoint presented in the stylistic trappings of the underground press. Perhaps the time is now ripe. Until now, the popular comics have been a vehicle for laissez-faire capitalism and the American Way. Often, the blatant chauvinism is painfully embarrassing, as is the false picture of a harmonious society. Yet it can hardly escape anyone’s notice that this very naive optimism expressed in the comics lies behind the energetic transformation of contemporary American society. Blondie anticipated the suburban development, Buck Rogers and Superman the mastery of matter and space. It is as if the fantasies projected by the comics have been realized in fact, but with all their attendant implications of repression. The real shortcomings of American life consist in the very elements normally tabooed by the syndicates and have as yet to be solved in actuality. While the fantasies have been acted out, the reality of everyday existence continues to be ignored, precisely as it has been proscribed by the popular press. To what extent individuals are influenced by comics (and films and television as well) is disputable, but the religious fidelity of comic strip readers (presently minimized by television) cannot easily be disregarded. Because of their powerful visual appeal and elementary text, comics are among the items read earliest in childhood. If the question of the strip’s potential for stimulating aggressive behavior is as unanswerable as that of its potential to provide safe release for aggressive impulses, the fact remains that comics play a formative role in developing the child’s imagination. Not that comics contribute to immediate delinquent behavior, but that they provide a long-range influence by shaping the imaginative life. Most American adults are carrying around an imaginative background inculcated by the comics, and live out fantasies fed by the “super” antics of comic strip heroes. When one considers that these antics

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have been performed in the service of a completely dishonest universe and a hopelessly outdated set of beliefs, then one can only imagine the worst as to the shape of the national character. Considering further who owns the major newspapers and syndicates it becomes difficult to believe that all this has been unintentional. Far from being a “low” form of art, comics have been developed into a sophisticated instrument for reaching mass audiences and creating a chauvinistic sensibility that identifies with capitalistic “he-men.” Li’l Abner personifies the innocent American who nevertheless is the equal of the most scheming adversary; and if he seems to take swipes at Big Business, more often than not his plot assumes the form of a Horatio Alger epic in which he sets forth to “New Yawk” to master the intricacies of finance capital with more brawn than brains. His egregious “All-Americanism,” moreover, may be equated with the type of Nordic hero once exemplified in Der Stürmer, while his adversaries eerily dovetail with the Semitic-Alien type. Li’l Abner’s success is grounded in the fantasy of a nation of immigrants, looking to the hillbilly as the embodiment of indigenous American culture. Related to this phenomenon is the fact that foreigners are often ridiculed or depicted as villains: they remind Americans of the past from which they have attempted to escape. The fanciful Anglo-Saxon names of comic heroes—which fairly caricature the English upper classes—also support the American ideal: Kerry Drake, Don Winslow, Rip Kirby, Brick Bradford, Buzz Sawyer, Clark Kent (like Kenneth Clark), Dick Tracy, Rex Morgan. Vic Jordan and Steve Canyon are not nearly as representative of American society as the names of the authors of these strips. Only Joe Palooka caught the immigrant flavor, but in comportment, looks, and ideals he belonged more to the general class. Several years ago, the City of New York ran a subway ad in its effort to recruit police officers. Milton Caniff was commissioned to do the artwork—a Steve Canyon–type clad in police attire, his square-jaw physiognomy directly addressing the rider. Apparently conceived of by the ad-men as a persuasive image, Caniff ’s character suddenly became the hero-emblem of “New York’s Finest.” The potential rookie could identify with one of America’s favorite comic heroes—an invincible “good guy” on the side of right. This is not the place to go into an extensive analysis of violence in American comics or their potential to stimulate crime, a theme treated in perverse detail by Frederick Wertham in Seduction of the Innocent, but Wertham overlooked two items of significance in his study: namely, that violence occurs in the most seemingly benign strip, and that it is not only the latent criminal who might be stimulated by fantasies of violence, but his counterpart in the civic and military realms as well. I name the sadism of The Katzenjammer Kids (itself an outgrowth of the gruesome Max and Moritz by Wilhelm Busch from whence it derived), the prankishness of Lucy vis-à-vis Charlie Brown (especially the football trick),

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the inevitable brick which Ignatz hurled at Krazy Kat, Dagwood’s alarming practice of slamming the door on someone’s leg or arm, as evidence of violence as much as its more overt forms in the illustrational adventure strips. Evidently, American comics can barely manage without some form of artful violence or brutality, and here again the underground cartoonists have brought into the open the hidden wishes expressed conventionally by comics as a form of smoldering voyeurism. As in the case of the relationship of Renaissance imagery to classical forms, the underground stripsters have reintegrated the undisguised comic theme and the comic form, exactly as it was in the time of The Yellow Kid. “Violence” is rationalized as “action” in the cartoon media. The formula for both the comic strip and its close relative the animated cartoon is to maintain a swift pace from beginning to end. The animated cartoon is perhaps the sickest of the graphic media, its action and gags perennially of the biff-bang variety. But in the comics and animated cartoons no one gets injured permanently— exemplified by the poor battered coyote in the repugnant Road Runner series. Brutality becomes a form of sado-masochistic pleasure in which the victim keeps coming back for more. It is simply taken for granted that the character will rise up in the very next picture or sequence, just as in children’s games the “dead” soldiers, cops and robbers are expected to pick themselves up after the fight and resume playing. The repetitiousness of the “mock” violence has inured us to violence’s actual effects: we threaten to “break someone’s head” or “knock a block off,” as if our opponent is an object slipping from our control and needs to be hammered into position. People have been transformed into toy-like objects without feeling, like the comic strip characters who always return for more. This is the tragedy of the war in Vietnam. As powerful and invincible as a superhero, we are also inured to the groans of the Vietnamese. We continue to “knock their block off ” as they continue to pop up into action again. The “enemy” (in itself a vicious term, which in this case has an absurd comic ring) is the stereotyped villain (read “foreigner”) and we the mighty heroes. Those who waged war on the “cartoon” characters were themselves fulfilling roles they had absorbed from the comics. They bullied and swaggered like their adventure heroes, trying to “behave” like “the greatest power in the world.” Ironically, while McNamara, Rostow, the Bundys, Taylor, Johnson, McNaughton, Medina, Calley, and now Nixon envisioned themselves as Don Winslow, Li’l Abner, Steve Canyon, and Superman, they were actually transforming themselves into the Anyfaces, Dr. Savannas, Jokers, and Penguins. This is the way they will be recorded in Vietnamese history, as “mad scientists” and ghoulish demons perhaps too fiendish even to grace the pages of Tales from the Crypt. The Vietnam War is a tragic realization of the comic strip ethos.

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Perhaps this is another reason for the current decline in the popularity of the comic strip, and why strips are destined to survive primarily in published collections and anthologies. Everyday reality has usurped the comic fantasies and real-life people have become more grotesque than caricatures. The comic strip thus has every right to be embraced in the history of art. As a reflection of the cultural and intellectual development in the United States it belongs to the history of ideas, and as an art form it must be studied under the rubrics of neoclassicism and modern art. Finally, just as one can perceive aesthetically “the rocket’s red glare,” so the comic strip can be regarded by the spectator as “high” art. Art is in itself neither good nor bad in an ethical sense; and it may become a force for either without the least bit diminishing itself as art. Here it is not simply a question of the despotic patronage of popes and syndicates, but of the final product as well.

Exhibitions at the Museum of Cartoon Art: A Personal Recollection Brian Walker First published as “Drawings on the Walls: Exhibitions at the Museum of Cartoon Art and International Museum of Cartoon Art” from the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum exhibition catalog Celebrating the International Museum of Cartoon Art Collection, 2009, pages 22–67, revised 2017. © 2009 Brian Walker.

It started for me in the spring of 1974. I had just graduated from Tufts University, where I designed my own major in East African studies. I was painting houses, trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life. My father, Mort Walker, asked me if I would like to come along with him and Joe Tangelo, the president of King Features Syndicate, to look at a house around the corner from our family home in Greenwich, Connecticut. They were hoping to rent the seventy-five-year-old Mead mansion for a proposed cartoon museum. After we walked through the vacant, neglected white elephant, Mort asked if I would be willing to round up a few friends to help clean the place up and paint the interior rooms (figure 38). I had no idea that this was the beginning of a great adventure that would last more than three decades. I am often asked what it was like growing up as the son of a famous cartoonist. During my younger years, my father worked on the third floor of our house. We weren’t supposed to disturb him while he was in his studio, but I often poked around after hours, playing with his pens, examining the partially finished strips on his drawing board, and flipping through the cartoon books in his reference library. His assistant, Jerry Dumas, worked three or four days a week, and there were also frequent visits from Dik Browne, John Cullen Murphy, John Fischetti, and other local cartoonists. It all seemed pretty normal to me. On the walls of our downstairs den were framed original drawings that my father had collected since he was an aspiring cartoonist in Kansas City. I was fascinated with the precise black-and-white lines and quirky characters in these cartoons. I remember a large panel by H. T. Webster of Mr. Milquetoast, 135

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Figure 38. Brian Walker standing outside of the Mead Mansion, the first home of the Museum of Cartoon Art, 1974. Photo by Robert Stewart. Image courtesy of Brian Walker.

still wearing his rubber boots in the bathroom, two weeks after he had broken a glass. A Moon Mullins strip from the 1930s was inscribed to my father: “Say Morton, those drawings you sent me were swell. I’ll bet you’ll be big shot cartoonist some day.—Willard.” I wanted to know more about these cartoons and the artists who had drawn them. Years later, during my senior year at college, I wrote a research paper entitled, “The Comic Strip as a Communicative Art Form.” I interviewed my father, Dik Browne, Garry Trudeau, and Jack Murphy. I read about the rich history of American newspaper comics and the great cartoonists of the past. I developed a deeper appreciation for what my father and his contemporaries did in their studios. This was my background when I started working at the museum in 1974. After we finished painting the first-floor rooms in the Mead mansion, my father announced, “Now we have to start putting up the exhibits.” I had never worked in a museum or a gallery and knew nothing about displaying artwork or designing shows. No other cartoon museums existed, so there weren’t any guidelines to follow. We came up with a system for mounting the original cartoon art on mat board with photo corners and protecting it with a layer of Plexiglas. We decided to leave the originals “as is” without removing or covering

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up margin notations, underlying pencil lines, erasures, paste-overs, copyright stickers, and registration marks. We bought a used Photostat camera to make signs and captions. There were collectors who pitched in. Mort took some of the cartoons off his den wall and gave them to the museum. Rick Marschall showed up with a portfolio under his arm and asked, “How can I help?” A number of the cartoons we borrowed from him that day were on display at the museum for eighteen years. Bill Crouch served as an unofficial guest curator on a few of the early exhibits. Mark Hanerfeld filled gaps in our comic book displays with original pages from his collection. Jack Tippit went to visit ninety-year-old cartoonist Harry Hershfield at his Manhattan apartment and returned with original, hand-colored Yellow Kid and Buster Brown pages by Richard Outcault as gifts to the collection. Jack, the first director of the museum, was a US Air Force combat veteran, a former president of the National Cartoonists Society, and a working cartoonist (Amy and Henry). Chuck Green, an old high school friend of mine and a recent graduate of Haverford College, joined us and we became assistant curators. Chuck and I soon put the generational and political differences we had with Jack behind us and the three of us formed a close-knit team. During downtime we tried to scare each other by jumping out of the closets in the spooky old house and amused ourselves with an endless cycle of practical jokes. The Museum of Cartoon Art opened its doors to the public on August 11, 1974. Press coverage, from local newspapers and the national media, helped spread the word. Although some visitors didn’t know what to expect when they came in, most left with a smile on their face and a promise to return. We soon had to expand the parking lot to accommodate the crowds. In the first issue of the museum’s newsletter, Inklings, Mort wrote, “We feel the Museum is a living, breathing, bustling entity. It isn’t a place where people walk in, look at drawings on the wall and walk out. There are slide shows, animated cartoons, life-sized sculpture and activity of all kinds.”1 Permanent displays featured examples from the museum’s growing collection, representing all of the major genres—comic strips, newspaper panels, comic books, editorial cartoons, magazine cartoons, sports cartoons, illustration, caricature, and animation. Three one-man shows, A Retrospective of Walt Kelly and Pogo, The Hal Foster Exhibit, and Jack Kirby—Comic Book Pioneer were featured in 1975. [See the appendix for a complete list of museum exhibitions.] These temporary exhibits included artwork that was on loan from private family collections, as well as from public institutions, such as Syracuse University, which owned many of Hal Foster’s early Prince Valiant pages. That same year, a jury of eleven distinguished experts in the field of cartooning elected the first fourteen cartoonists to the Hall of Fame [see the complete

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list of Hall of Fame members following this essay]. In subsequent years seventeen cartoonists were added to this distinguished group. One of the more popular attractions at the museum was the animated film program, which offered continuous, rear-projection screenings in our modest theater. Among the cartoons in the rapidly expanding collection were the debut appearances of Mickey Mouse, Popeye, Bugs Bunny, Superman, Woody Woodpecker, and Mighty Mouse. I still have the soundtracks from these 16mm films buried in my subconscious, after years of working with the music playing in the background. The museum also sponsored animated film festivals at Greenwich Library and Yale University. The Celebrity Cartoonist Program, which featured a guest lecturer on the first Sunday of each month, gave the public a chance to meet their heroes up close and personal. Milton Caniff, Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, Jules Feiffer, Neal Adams, Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, and Art Spiegelman were among the many cartoonists who made appearances in this program over the years. A mini-exhibit of each artist’s work was displayed during the month of their demonstration. After the lectures, a group of cartoonists would often retire to the kitchen and exchange shoptalk over a bottle of scotch. During the summer of 1976, the museum offered its first cartoon course, which was accredited by Emerson College in Boston. The class had to be divided into two groups to accommodate all of the students that signed up. Among the guest lecturers were Dik Browne, John Cullen Murphy, and Curt Swan. In addition to these programs, the museum also hosted other popular activities. The first Children’s Cartoon Contest was held in the spring of 1978 and became an annual tradition. Almost one thousand submissions were received and the finalists in four age categories (eight, eleven, fourteen, and seventeen and over) were exhibited at the museum. In 1987, one of our former contestants, Paul Taylor of Norwich, Connecticut, wrote us this letter: “You probably don’t remember me but I placed in your annual cartooning contest several times. I’m happy to tell you that Yale University was as happy to hear that as I was. An admission officer sent me a note complimenting me on the samples I sent, and I think your Museum fostered an ability of mine that was instrumental in my gaining admission to Yale. Thanks for establishing a museum that honors and encourages cartoonists.”2 Many types of special events were held at the museum. The Newspaper Comics Council had their fall meeting at the Mead house in 1974 and the National Cartoonists Society installed its new officers at a gathering in May 1977. Private parties such as weddings, birthdays, and corporate retirements also brought in much-needed income. The museum’s first traveling exhibit was sponsored by the Greenwich Arts Council and was displayed in a large trailer at two locations during the summer

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of 1975. In constant demand, it was subsequently shown in corporation lobbies, banks, shopping malls, art galleries, college art centers, and museums across the country. In 1983, the New York State Newspaper Foundation awarded the museum $2,000 to refurbish the show. Masters of Cartoon Art was comprised of forty-seven works in forty-two oak frames and included artists ranging from Honoré Daumier and Thomas Nast to Garry Trudeau and Jim Davis. This exhibit appeared at numerous venues, including the Council for the Arts in Westchester’s “Night at the Comics” fund-raiser in 1984 and the “Kings of Comics” tribute to Dean Young, Bil Keane, Hank Ketcham, and Mort Walker at the World Financial Center in 1990. The bicentennial year featured the museum’s most ambitious exhibit to date. The Story of America in Cartoons was funded by a grant from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts and included eighty display panels, representing the work of more than one hundred cartoonists. I traveled to New Haven and Washington, DC, and searched through the collections of Yale University and the Library of Congress to find cartoons that powerfully illustrated the social history of our nation. More than one hundred seventy cartoons made the cut, covering topics from “Settling the Land” to “Great American Pastimes.” These cartoons were reproduced in the 116-page booklet that accompanied the exhibit. The collection was growing by leaps and bounds. King Features Syndicate and the Chicago Tribune–New York News Syndicate sent truckloads of originals, which were recorded by volunteers and stacked on shelves in our thirdfloor archive room. Hal Foster bequeathed hundreds of Prince Valiant pages, as well as proofs, scrapbooks, and other personal items from his long, distinguished career. Milton Caniff donated two hundred eighty originals, many of which had been given to him by other artists, including Alex Raymond, Chester Gould, and Roy Crane. After two years, Jack Tippit estimated in his “State of the Museum” report that we had accumulated close to 30,000 originals, representing more than eight hundred artists.3 After this period of phenomenal growth and success, it was quite a shock when our landlord, John Mead, informed us that he had no intention of renewing our two-year lease on the building. He worried that the crowds were putting too much wear and tear on his family estate and he didn’t want to expand the parking lot again. We had worked tirelessly to tell the world where we were and now we had to find a new home. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise. After a frustrating year of looking at private homes and public buildings in the area, we finally stumbled on an ideal location. The old Ward’s Castle, perched atop a steep hill straddling the New York/Connecticut border, was for sale. The real estate agent who took us on our first tour of the house told us to bring flashlights. When she opened the doors, my father and I were greeted with a cloud of dust and the smell of mold. There were collapsed ceilings,

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broken windows, piles of rubble, moth-eaten carpets, ice frozen on the floors, and dead animals in the basement. The heat and electricity had been off for years. Rotting mattresses and discarded papers littered the rooms. It was very discouraging. How could we ever come up with the money and manpower to fix this place up? When I got home the gears started to turn. What if we were able buy this neglected home for next to nothing? Amid the dust and rubble, I had seen beautiful woodwork, marble floors, and crystal chandeliers. Maybe we shouldn’t give up so easily. I picked up the phone and before I could dial my father’s number, I heard his voice. He had been thinking the same thing and was calling me. We agreed to take another look. After a few months of negotiations, the Ward family finally accepted our offer of $70,000. Ward’s Castle, which was completed in 1876, is the first house in the world built of reinforced concrete (figure 39). William E. Ward, who owned a nuts and bolts factory in nearby Port Chester, allegedly promised his mother, who was afraid of fire, that he would build her a house that was completely fireproof. It been placed on the National Register of Historic Places in December 1976 and, due to this distinction, we eventually received a $30,000 acquisition grant from the National Parks Service. After the real estate closing in July 1977, we asked three building contractors to give us estimates on the renovation. Only one came back with a figure, which was almost double the purchase price. Instead, we hired independent electricians, plumbers, roofers, and pavers to do the jobs that required professional expertise. The rest was done by a dedicated and creatively inspired crew of volunteers, college dropouts, starving artists, and old friends. My father informed me that he was planning a fund-raising gala for opening night on November 12. We worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week, for thirteen weeks, to make the deadline. On the day of the “castle warming” my father stopped by the renovation site and saw painters on ladders and tarps covering the ceilings. “Are we going to make it?” he asked me. “Don’t worry, it’s under control,” I answered nervously. He went home, put on his tuxedo, and when he drove up the driveway that evening, he saw yellow cartoon banners fluttering on the castle turret, which was lit with a powerful spotlight. Inside, caterers and bartenders, some of whom looked remarkably similar to the painters and plasterers he had seen earlier, were serving the guests. The gala was a huge success, raising $28,000, half the cost of the renovation, and it was featured in a photo spread in People magazine. As soon as the party was over, the job of moving began. It took twenty truckloads and an army of volunteers to transport the museum’s collection and furnishings the 3.4 miles to the new location. When the museum opened to the public on December 11, 1977, the gift shop, front hall, theater room, and

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Figure 39. John Cullen Murphy (1919–2004). Pen-and-ink drawing of Ward’s Castle, the second home of the Museum of Cartoon Art. Image courtesy of Brian Walker.

two exhibit rooms had been renovated. By the spring of 1978, two more exhibit rooms, an office, and a library on the second floor were added. We now had more than double the space of the original location and were able to install permanent display fixtures on the walls, since we owned the building. In the main exhibit room on the first floor, the Historical Collection featured close to three hundred artists representing all of the major cartoon genres. We eventually doubled the number of artists by adding two heavy-duty flip rack displays. When the second floor Contemporary Collection opened, the total number of cartoons on view in the museum was close to one thousand. The Hall of Fame, which was adjacent to the main exhibit room, included a superlative example of each member’s work and a handsome brass plaque engraved with a self-caricature and short biography. What was formerly the dining room served as our theater with a rear-projection film booth and a stage for live performances. Showcases were later added in the adjacent sunroom for the Celebrity Cartoonist mini-exhibits and Sales Gallery. Cartoons were mounted on the staircase landing and the upstairs hallway, cartoon videos were shown on a television in the second-floor library, and toys were displayed in antique glass bookcases. Less than a year after we purchased Ward’s Castle, the museum featured its first special exhibition, TAD—A Collection of Cartoons by Thomas Aloysius Dorgan. Chuck Green and I spent days reading and laughing at more than a thousand TAD panels from the 1920s which had been donated by King Features Syndicate. We compiled a “Dictionary of Dorganisms” that included such classic

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TAD slang terms as “ball and chain” (a wife), “cake eater” (a ladies’ man), and “sun dodger” (a lazy person). This list, which was part of the exhibition catalog, has been reprinted in countless publications since.4 The first of the museum’s outdoor family events, “Marvel Day,” was held on September 30, 1978. Spider-Man, the Hulk, Ms. Marvel, and Captain America made personal appearances, and Marvel artists drew at easels on the front porch. Inside, there was an exhibit of original comic books pages, an animated film program, and comic books for sale in the gift shop. “Garfield vs. Heathcliff—The Heavyweight Cat Fight of the Century” was the main event at Community Awareness Day on May 15, 1982. The exhibit Great Comic Cats, which was based on a book by Malcolm Whyte and Bill Blackbeard, also opened that day. United Feature Syndicate sent a trained actor to wear the Garfield costume but McNaught Syndicate told us that we had to find someone to wear the Heathcliff suit. My wife, Abby, who had been a dance major at Sarah Lawrence College, volunteered. She took her role seriously and upstaged her opponent by sparring like a pro. The crowd loved it and she was the clear winner. A representative of United later told me that they never would have allowed their fat cat to appear if they knew that a competing syndicate’s feline was also on the bill. After five years of serving as director, Jack Tippit retired in June 1979 and Chuck Green and I became codirectors. The staff reorganized again in June 1983, when Chuck became executive director and I became exhibit director. Beginning in the late 1970s and continuing until the museum moved out of Ward’s Castle in 1992, the special exhibitions became increasingly more ambitious, eventually utilizing most of the second-floor gallery space. We developed a seasonal strategy for scheduling shows that proved remarkably successful. During the winter months, when visitation was at its lowest, we offered exhibits that were historically and artistically important. Some of these were the first retrospectives ever mounted of major masters and pivotal periods in the history of the art form. The Winsor McCay Exhibit was done with the cooperation of Ray Moniz, the grandson of Winsor McCay, and included original Little Nemo in Slumberland pages and political cartoons from the family collection. The Yellow Kid—America’s First Comic Star told the story of the birth of the comics with thirty rare newspaper pages on loan from the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art and all five of the Yellow Kid originals known to exist at that time. The Krazy Kat Retrospective was the most comprehensive exhibit ever mounted of George Herriman’s work and included more than fifty original pages on loan from his granddaughter, Dee Cox. Masters of Pen and Ink explored the fine line between comics and illustration and included masterpieces by over sixty artists ranging from Heinrich Kley to David Levine, on loan from the Society of Illustrators and Illustration House.

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In the summer we would feature family friendly crowd-pleasers, many of which also provided a theme for outdoor events. The Art of Marvel Comics had original comic book pages by Silver Age greats Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko and emerging talents Walt Simonson, Bill Sienkiewicz, and Mary Wilshire. Archie— America’s Favorite Teenager was done with the cooperation of Peg Bertholet, the widow of Archie’s creator, and included many of Bob Montana’s early sketches, comic book pages, and comic strips. Bugs Bunny—A Fifty Year Retrospective was the most popular show ever presented at the museum, and incorporated animation drawings by Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, and Chuck Jones, as well as cels, backgrounds, and storyboards from the Warner Bros. Studio. The fall exhibitions usually tied in with sponsorship for the museum’s annual fund-raiser. Popeye’s 50th Anniversary was celebrated with an exhibit that included illustrations from the book, Popeye: The First Fifty Years, by Bud Sagendorf, as well as original strips by Popeye’s creator, E. C. Segar. Little Orphan Annie was timed to capitalize on the success of the stage and movie adaptations of Harold Gray’s creation and featured historic episodes borrowed from Boston University. The Superman Exhibit was sponsored by DC Comics and included two rare covers from 1941 by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster on loan from Jerry Robinson. The Cartoons of Playboy showcased seventy-five original color cartoons from the magazine’s vaults in Chicago and added a touch of glamour to the annual gala dinner. Milton Caniff—Rembrandt of the Comics was organized with the cooperation of Lucy Shelton Caswell, curator of the Cartoon Research Library at Ohio State University, and marked the fiftieth anniversary of the debut of Terry and the Pirates. Among the many highlights of The Art of Walt Disney Studios were concept sketches, animation drawings and backgrounds from the Walt Disney Archives, and cel setups from the Mike and Jeanne Glad Collection. Two of Disney’s “Nine Old Men,” Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, were guests at the fund-raiser that year. The Fleischer Studio Retrospective provided the backdrop for Mae Questel, the voice of Betty Boop, who sang at the annual dinner. Batman—Fifty Years of the Dark Knight opened in conjunction with the Batman feature film and included the costume worn by Michael Keaton in the movie. The Dick Tracy Exhibit combined life-size replicas of the villains in Warren Beatty’s adaptation with fifty original strips from the collection of Matt Masterson. The challenge with presenting blockbuster exhibitions like these was to go beyond the current pop culture tie-in by offering a scholarly presentation, which demonstrated how these cartoon characters were created in their original form. The Batman exhibit, for instance, revealed the many varied interpretations of the Caped Crusader with two hundred original pages by fifty different artists, ranging from Jerry Robinson’s 1940s covers to Frank Miller’s 1980s Dark Knight stories. The museum benefited from the increased media coverage and crowds

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that came to see these exhibits. The visitors, in turn, were able to enhance their appreciation for the characters they had seen in the live-action movies. In some cases, the availability of artwork determined the theme for an exhibition. That’s Not All Folks—The History of the Warner Bros. Studio showcased drawings, storyboards, character designs, model sheets, and cels from the animation archives of Steven Schneider. The History of Uncle Sam told the story of this legendary character with sixty comic strips and political cartoons on loan from Murray Harris. The Peanuts Retrospective, which celebrated thirty-five years of Charles Schulz’s creation, and Artists of the New Yorker both featured artwork from the James Heineman Collection. The Art of Fantasia, the last major exhibition at the museum, was comprised entirely of pieces from the Mike and Jeanne Glad Collection. The Glads contributed artwork to eight exhibitions at the museum from 1987 to 2000. Many of the one-man shows were made possible by the cooperation of the artist’s families. Public institutions like Syracuse University, Boston University, Ohio State University, and the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art were also valuable resources. Although the museum never had the funds to hire outside consultants, on a few occasions qualified individuals generously offered their services. Women and the Comics was based on the book by Trina Robbins, who was also the guest curator. This historically important exhibit featured artwork by more than fifty notable women cartoonists including pioneers Rose O’Neill, Nell Brinkley, and Dale Messick. The Art of Will Eisner, a tribute to one of the legendary innovators of the art form, was organized with the help of Cat Yronwode. Kendra Krienke volunteered to serve as curator for Childhood Enchantments–Illustrations for Children’s Literature—1880 to 1940, which included works by Johnny Gruelle, Palmer Cox, and Jessie Wilcox Smith. Timing was a key element in other shows. The Doonesbury Retrospective filled the gap when Garry Trudeau went on sabbatical in 1983. The Art of Tron explored early computer animation and Comics Next Generation—European Graphic Novels provided a glimpse into the future of the art form. The Cartoon History of Presidential Elections looked at a century of political contests through the eyes of American cartoonists and was on view in the months leading up to Election Day 1984. Comic Relief came to the museum on February 22, 1986, when fifty cartoonists attended the opening of an exhibit of artwork from the 1985 Thanksgiving Hunger Project in which one hundred seventy-five cartoonists coordinated their strips to focus attention on world hunger. In a four-hour session that night, these artists drew their characters holding hands on a fifty-foot mural to help promote “Hands Across America,” a nationwide fund-raising event scheduled for May 25, 1986. More than one hundred other cartoonists from around the country also sent in drawings to add to this chain, which was reproduced in the June 1986 issue of Life magazine.

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Some exhibits happened spontaneously. Shortly after delivering an entertaining lecture to a capacity crowd at the museum in 1979, Chuck Jones came out of the men’s room with a mischievous grin on his face. We soon discovered that he had left behind a drawing of the Road Runner dashing across the bathroom wall, which he signed and dated. At a subsequent gathering, Dik Browne decided to leave his mark with a drawing of Hagar the Horrible contemplating the toilet bowl. Other contributors were Bill Gallo, Curt Swan, Johnny Hart, and Will Eisner. We eventually had to put up a sign requesting that graffiti be added by “professionals only.” In 1984, Trina Robbins, Wendy Pini, and Mary Wilshire started a competing exhibit on the walls of the women’s room. Media coverage of the museum’s exhibits and programs was extensive and most of the reviews were positive. A reporter for the New York Times, writing about The New Yorker Art of Peter Arno, described the museum as “an upstart institution that is trying to broaden the definition of art suitable for collection, display and criticism.”5 We took that as a compliment. Colorful feature articles about the museum appeared in national magazines such as Museum, Smithsonian, Diversion, Town and Country, National Geographic Traveler, and American Way. Our galleries served as the backdrop for numerous television documentaries, including “Camera Three” (CBS), Lee was vacant and the opening was covered with a piece of plywood. In 1980, Muppet Mendelson’s “Fabulous Funnies,” “Funny Business—The Art in Cartooning” (PBS), “Humor in Sports” hosted by Bob Costas (ABC), and “The Adult Cartoon Show” starring Chuck Green. High above the central staircase of Ward’s Castle was a skylight. The window below this had been broken when the house cartoonists Guy and Brad Gilchrist made a stained-glass window to fit this space that featured seventeen characters created by Hall of Fame cartoonists, including Little Nemo, Krazy Kat, the Yellow Kid, and Pogo. This unique piece of handicraft was unveiled at a party held to celebrate Beetle Bailey’s thirtieth anniversary on September 6, 1980, and became a permanent fixture at the museum. There had always been a widespread misperception that, since the museum was founded by Mort Walker and initially funded by King Features Syndicate, it was primarily devoted to newspaper comics. We tried to disprove this false assumption by presenting exhibits, which featured comic book, magazine, illustration, animation, and political cartoon art, but the idea still persisted that we were not equally dedicated to all the genres of cartooning. In 1987, I decided to organize an exhibition that highlighted outstanding contemporary work being done in a wide range of genres and, at the same time, acquire examples of these for our permanent collection. I made up a list that included cartoonists such as Garry Trudeau in comic strips, John Byrne in comic books, Tony Auth in editorial cartooning, Don Bluth in animation, B. Kliban in magazines,

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Robert Crumb in underground comix, and Art Spiegelman in graphic novels. I wrote letters to seventy-five cartoonists asking them to contribute a piece to the exhibition, Cartoons: The State of the Art, and offered them the option of donating their submission to the museum’s collection. All but a few agreed to do so. The acquisition of this new artwork strengthened the quality and diversity of the museum’s archives, as many of the pieces were from artists who had never been represented. I repeated this successful formula two more times with The New Breed—An Exhibit of Contemporary Cartoonists in 1989 and Cartoons: The State of the Art 2 in 1992. The collection was augmented in other significant ways. Dick Tracy—The Art of Chester Gould, the first major retrospective at the Ward’s Castle in 1978, inspired Gould to bequeath more than 7,000 Dick Tracy strips to the museum, which arrived seven years later, after his death. In 1982, Mildred Berndt donated her husband Walter’s Reuben Award, as well as 103 of his Smitty strips. Al Andriola left all of his Kerry Drake originals when he passed away in 1983. The Smithsonian Institution transferred 576 editorial cartoons by 113 artists and the National Cartoonists Society gave 2,310 originals, which had been used in their Reuben Award displays for more than thirty-five years. A second phase of renovations on the castle began in December 1979. The New York State Office of Parks and Recreation approved a $90,000 plan to repair the exterior roofs and gutters to stop the leaking which was causing damage to the ornate plaster ceilings on the interior. Paul Giampetro, a master sheet-metal worker, came out of retirement to supervise the process of lining all the gutters and seams with lead-coated copper. In 1987, a third stage of repairs was completed to stabilize the deterioration of the Castle’s main tower at a cost of $30,000. After thirteen years of dedicated service, Chuck Green left the museum to pursue a career in advertising and marketing. In his retirement announcement he wrote, “I was grateful for the opportunity to work with a group of professionals who became virtually like a family to me.”6 He was succeeded as executive director by Robert Kinsman in 1987 and Barbara Hammond in 1989. Peter Ciccone, Ellen Armstrong, Benjy Rubin, Lorraine Schilling, Ashley Hunt, Carolyn Mayo, Ona Ziegler, and Skip Alsdorf were among the staff members who made significant contributions to the museum’s success during the Ward’s Castle years. Many family members and friends also helped out, including my brothers Greg and Neal. In 1989, Sherman Krisher, an employee of the museum since 1982, confessed to stealing more than a hundred original cartoons from the collection and selling them to two local comic shop dealers. About half of this artwork was later recovered after a successful sting operation orchestrated by Westchester County assistant district attorney Tony Berk. A second theft occurred on March

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3, 1991, when five pieces of animation art were taken from a third-floor workroom while the installation of The Art of Fantasia was underway. These were devastating blows. During the 1980s, prices for original cartoon art soared and major auction houses like Sotheby’s and Christie’s reported new records after almost every sale. At the same time, the museum presented more ambitious exhibitions, featuring rare and valuable artwork from private collections. When the Fantasia show was over, I decided not to borrow any more artwork until the museum’s security was upgraded. After more than a decade in Ward’s Castle, we were becoming increasingly aware of its limitations. The building continued to deteriorate and we did not have the funds for ongoing restorations. The neighbors, who had built new homes on the 6.5 acres surrounding the castle, which was originally part of the Ward estate, were complaining about the crowds that were flocking to the museum. Although we were in the New York metropolitan area, we knew we could get even more traffic and press coverage if we were in an urban location. On January 4, 1989, the nearby city of Stamford, Connecticut, announced that they were planning to create a museum in the Old Town Hall, which had been vacant for many years. My father thought we should consider moving there. We looked at the building, which needed extensive repairs, and started talking to town officials. Other groups, including the Stamford Historical Society, also expressed interest in using this space. Word leaked out about our negotiations and we were soon approached by the city of Norwalk, Connecticut. They were seeking a public institution to take over an old warehouse next to the Maritime Center in South Norwalk, which was struggling to attract visitors. They thought the museum might be the answer to their problems. Not long after meetings were held to investigate the possibility of moving to Norwalk, one of the museum’s members called from Florida. He told us that Palm Beach County was anxious to attract cultural institutions to the area. A contingent of museum representatives took a trip to Florida to look at sites in Palm Beach Gardens and Boca Raton. Mort officially announced the board of directors’ decision to move the museum to Florida in January 1991. The site that was chosen, Mizner Park in Boca Raton, was a multiuse development that included upscale shops, restaurants, a movie theater, a bookstore, offices, and condominiums. An acre of land at the south end of the palm-lined esplanade was leased to the museum for $1 a year. The new building, which would be built in the style of architect Addison Mizner with pink stucco walls and a red tile roof, would be 30,000 square feet with room for a 10,000-foot expansion, at an estimated cost of $3 million. The doors to Ward’s Castle closed to the public on June 30, 1992. Rich Kreiner, a writer for the Comics Journal, had visited the museum that spring. In his article, “Estates of the Art,” which was published in November 1992, he wrote:

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“One frets about the fate of the Museum of Cartoon Art and the inevitable upheaval caused by its move. Already it is known that several of the Museum personnel and staff, including Brian Walker, did not accompany the Museum south. From a practical standpoint, the industry has lost an impressive showcase so close to New York City. Still, given the track record of the Museum and Mort Walker, one has hope that the institution will survive and prosper down in Attractionland.”7 Notes 1. Mort Walker, “News,” Inklings, Issue #1, Fall 1975, page 3. The Museum of Cartoon Art published twelve issues of Inklings between fall 1975 and summer 1978. They were edited by Greg Walker, who majored in journalism at Syracuse University. 2. “Museum of Cartoon Art News,” Cartoonist PROfiles, Issue #76, December 1987, page 52. The museum newsletter was published as part of Cartoonist PROfiles beginning with Issue #40, December 1978, and continuing until Issue #93, March 1992. 3. Jack Tippit, “Curator’s Corner,” Inklings, Issue #4, Summer 1976, page 1. 4. “A Dictionary of Dorganisms,” A Collection of Cartoons by Thomas Aloysius Dorgan 1877– 1929, published by the Museum of Cartoon Art, June 1978. 5. Matthew L. Wald, “Cartoon Museum Salutes Peter Arno,” New York Times, September 19, 1980, page C1. 6. Charles Green, “Museum of Cartoon Art Announcement,” Cartoonist PROfiles, Issue #76, December 1987, page 50. 7. Rich Kreiner, “Estates of the Art,” Comics Journal, Issue #154, November 1992, page 118.

List of MCA/IMCA Exhibitions and Museum of Cartoon Art; Hall of Fame Museum of Cartoon Art exhibitions (1975 to 1992) Title

Dates

A Retrospective of Walt Kelly and Pogo

Mar. 2 to Apr. 30, 1975

Reuben Award Nominees

Apr. 15 to June 7, 1975

The Hal Foster Exhibit

June 8 to Aug. 31, 1975

Jack Kirby—Comic Book Pioneer

Sept. 15 to Dec. 31, 1975

The Story of America in Cartoons

Jan. 24 to July 30, 1976

Thomas Nast—The Father of American Political Cartooning

Aug. 22 to Nov. 30, 1976

A Cartoon Christmas

Dec. 1 to Jan. 10, 1977

TAD—A Collection of Cartoons by Thomas Aloysius Dorgan

June 11 to Sept. 30, 1978

The Sunday Funnies

Sept. 8 to Sept. 30, 1978

Dick Tracy—The Art of Chester Gould

Oct. 4 to Dec. 30, 1978

The Jeff MacNelly Exhibit

Jan. 14 to Mar. 11, 1979

Cartoons in Advertising

Mar. 25 to Apr. 29, 1979

The Best Editorial Cartoons of 1978

May 13 to July 15, 1979

Popeye’s 50th Birthday

July 29 to Nov. 30, 1979

Exhibit of English Cartoons

Oct. 16 to Nov. 30, 1979

Brian Walker

That’s Not All Folks—The History of the Warner Bros. Studio

Dec. 2 to Jan. 11, 1980

Limited Edition Comics Art

Jan. 27 to Mar. 31, 1980

Dogpatch U.S.A.—The Art of Al Capp

Apr. 8 to July 31, 1980

The New Yorker Art of Peter Arno

Sept. 21 to Nov. 30, 1980

Little Orphan Annie

Nov. 8 to Jan. 31, 1981

The Artists of MAD Magazine

Mar. 1 to May 31, 1981

Willard Mullin—The Dean of Sports Cartoonists

June 7 to Sept. 15, 1981

The Art of the Muppets

Sept. 27 to Dec. 30, 1981

Winsor McCay Retrospective

Jan. 24 to Apr. 30, 1982

Great Comic Cats

May 16 to Aug. 30, 1982

The Superman Exhibit

Sept. 19 to Dec. 30, 1982

The Yellow Kid—America’s First Comic Star

Jan. 23 to Mar. 27, 1983

The Art of Tron—Computer Graphics

Feb. 1 to Apr. 24, 1983

The Doonesbury Retrospective

Mar. 30 to July 3, 1983

Comics Next Generation—European Graphic Novels

Aug. 13 to Oct. 25, 1983

The Cartoons of Playboy

Nov. 12 to Jan. 31, 1984

The Cartoon Game Exhibit

Dec. 1 to Dec. 31, 1983

Krazy Kat Retrospective

Feb. 14 to Apr. 30, 1984

Women and the Comics

May 19 to Aug. 12, 1984

The Cartoon History of Presidential Elections

Aug. 26 to Nov. 6, 1984

Milton Caniff—Rembrandt of the Comic Strips

Nov. 3 to Feb. 10, 1985

Masters of Pen and Ink

Mar. 17 to June 16, 1985

The Art of Marvel Comics

July 7 to Oct. 13, 1985

The Peanuts Retrospective

Nov. 16 to Feb. 16, 1986

Comic Relief Exhibit

Feb. 22 to Mar. 15, 1986

The History of Uncle Sam

Mar. 23 to July 13, 1986

Defenders of the Earth

July 27 to Oct. 26, 1986

The Art of Walt Disney Studio

Nov. 15 to Feb. 15, 1987

Cartoons: The State of the Art

Mar. 15 to Oct. 30, 1987

The Fleischer Studio Retrospective

Nov. 14 to Feb. 28, 1988

The Art of Will Eisner

Mar. 27 to June 28, 1988

Archie—America’s Favorite Teenager

July 10 to Oct. 30, 1988

Artists of The New Yorker

Nov. 12 to Feb. 26, 1989

Childhood Enchantments—Illustrations for Children

Apr. 2 to June 25, 1989

The New Breed—An Exhibit of Contemporary Cartoonists

July 15 to Oct. 15, 1989

Batman—Fifty Years of the Dark Knight

Nov. 4 to Feb. 25, 1990

The Art of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy

Apr. 1 to June 24, 1990

Bugs Bunny—A Fifty-Year Retrospective

July 15 to Oct. 14, 1990

The Dick Tracy Exhibit

Nov. 10 to Feb. 24, 1991

The Art of Fantasia

Mar. 10 to June 16, 1991

Cartoons: The State of the Art 2

Sept. 8, 1991 to June 1, 1992

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International Museum of Cartoon Art exhibitions (1996 to 2001) Title

Dates

The Art of Dumbo

Mar. 10 to Oct. 1996

Ze’ev—Eyewitness with a Smile

Mar. 10 to Oct. 1996

Disney at 25

Nov. 1996 to May 1997

Line of Fire: Morin at the Herald

Oct. 1996 to Jan. 1997

Super-Heroes of Marvel

Feb. to Sept. 1997

24 Frames a Second: The Story of Animation

June 7 to Sept. 14, 1997

Dogs, Cats and Other Talking Animals

Sept. 27 to Oct. 31, 1997

Cartoons Go to War

Nov. 8, 1997 to Jan. 18, 1998

Superman and Other Comic Book Legends

Feb. 14 to Apr. 26, 1998

40 Years of B.C.: The Art & Humor of Johnny Hart

May 1 to June 12, 1998

Garfield: 20 Years and Still Kicking

June 19 to Aug. 31, 1998

Holiday Cartoon Celebration

Nov. 13, 1998 to Jan. 17, 1999

In Line with Al Hirschfeld

Jan. 23 to May 9, 1999

Tarzan: From Burroughs to Disney

May 22 to Sept. 19, 1999

Off the Wall Street Journal: 50 Years of Funny Business

Nov. 20, 1999 to Apr. 2, 2000

50 Years of Peanuts—The Art of Charles Schulz

Oct. 2, 1999 to Jan. 30, 2000

Oscars and Animation

Apr. 14 to July 23, 2000

The Legacy of Mort Walker—50 Years of Beetle Bailey

Nov. 11, 2000 to Feb. 25, 2001

Reuben Award Winners

April 7 to May 31, 2001

Dennis the Menace—The Boy Next Door

May 26 to Aug. 26, 2001

Museum of Cartoon Art Hall of Fame (with date of induction) Peter Arno (1997) Carl Barks (1997) Dik Browne (1989) Milton Caniff (1982) Al Capp (1980) Roy Crane (1977) Billy DeBeck (1975) Rudolph Dirks (1975) Walt Disney (1977) Will Eisner (1989) Bud Fisher (1975) Hal Foster (1977) Charles Dana Gibson (1975) Rube Goldberg (1975) Chester Gould (1982)

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Harold Gray (1986) Herblock (1997) George Herriman (1975) Lynn Johnston (1997) Chuck Jones (1997) Walt Kelly (1975) Winsor McCay (1975) George McManus (1975) Thomas Nast (1975) Frederick Opper (1975) Richard Outcault (1975) Alex Raymond (1975) Charles Schulz (1986) E. C. Segar (1977) James Swinnerton (1975) Mort Walker (1989) Chic Young (1980)

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Mort Walker, Historian Cullen Murphy Reprinted with permission of Cullen Murphy. This essay first appeared in print on page SR2 of the February 4, 2018, New York edition of the New York Times with the headline: “Mort Walker, Historian.”

There’s a moment in Mort Walker’s Beetle Bailey, from decades ago, when the innocent Zero asks the intellectual Plato why he owns so many books. Plato explains proudly that “all the wisdom of the ages” can be found between their covers. Zero responds, “What happens if a couple of pages get stuck together?” Mort’s own answer might have been, “Well, we’ll always have comic strips.” Millions of people knew Mort, who died last week at the age of ninety-four, as one of the preeminent cartoonists of his era—and one of the central figures among the remarkable group of artists (my father, John Cullen Murphy, the longtime illustrator of Prince Valiant, was another) who populated southwestern Connecticut in the peak years of the American century. But in his way, and without putting on airs, Mort was also a historian. Beetle Bailey, the strip for which he was most widely known—though he created several others, including Hi and Lois—was slyly but gently subversive, in a manner that wears well in America. Beetle was built around a cast of misfits at a military base, Camp Swampy, and army humor, as Mort often said, writes itself. He told me once that when he was stationed in occupied Italy during World War II, he was ordered to run over watches, radios, and other equipment with a tank in order to avoid the paperwork that would have been required to send the stuff back home. He was a funny man. But a historian? In his golf sweater and khakis, Mort looked like the dad in a ’50s sitcom. Still, there was a quirkily thoughtful dimension to his mind that I’ve found to be virtually the rule among cartoonists. He explained to me on one occasion that the idea of having Trixie—the baby in Hi and Lois—convey her innocent but often searing observations exclusively by means of thought balloons, came to him after observing how Sinclair Lewis had handled interior dialogue. 152

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Figure 40. Mort Walker (1923–2018). Beetle Bailey limited-edition print, part of a series produced by Harry N. Abrams in collaboration with the Newspaper Comics Council. © 1978 King Features Syndicate, Inc. Courtesy of the International Museum of Cartoon Art Collection, The Ohio State University, Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum.

Mort recognized very early that comic strips—a form of creative expression with a predominantly American center of gravity—flash-froze the national psyche at any given moment. The immigrant experience at the turn of the last century. Disparities of wealth and poverty. The changing roles of men and women. The effects of war, technology, bureaucracy, prejudice. All of this was captured, by means of humor or drama or commentary, every day of the year by hundreds of cartoonists—and had been since the 1890s. The strips or cartoons were penciled and inked on sheets of stiff Bristol board, sent to the syndicates and then printed in newspapers that were thrown away within hours—lining the bottoms of bird cages or wrapping up greasy leftovers. Comic strips came to epitomize what was meant by the term “ephemera.” Which is exactly what they aren’t, as Mort Walker understood. I suspect that Mort was initially drawn to collect comic art by the sheer skill of the creators. Look closely at the Art Deco draftsmanship of an original “Bringing Up Father,” by George McManus; or at the confidently noirish line, with a hint of a twinkle, in a strip like Alex Raymond’s Rip Kirby; or at the elegant economy of Dik Browne’s Hagar the Horrible. Mort began to collect comic art casually, and then very seriously. He was appalled by the disregard often accorded to this work. One catalyzing moment:

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finding original Krazy Kat strips, by the masterly George Herriman, being used to plug a leak in a ceiling at a newspaper syndicate. With the help of like-minded cartoonists and some farsighted university professors, Mort became a vocal force for preservation. Founded in 1974, his Museum of Cartoon Art—he always referred to it, with strains of his native Missouri, as “the mu-zimm”—grew into a major repository. (All of this original work was eventually turned over to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at The Ohio State University.) But it wasn’t just the craftsmanship that Mort sought to preserve. It was also the history—the picture of ordinary life that comic strips capture in ink. Imagine the insights we might glean from a year of Beetle Bailey created in some lonely Roman outpost on Hadrian’s Wall. Or a year of Family Circus from a medieval quill in Aquitaine. A year of Pogo as the trauma of the Reformation unfolded. A year of Blondie from riotous Tudor England. A year of Doonesbury from the time of the American Revolution. As scholars have come to acknowledge, these are the sorts of perspectives we actually do have, from comic strips, for all of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Graphic novels carry on and amplify the tradition. I last saw Mort Walker a few months ago at an event for my book about the circle of cartoonists he embodied and helped hold together. He was wearing his baggy pants and his golf sweater. He ambled about in athletic shoes. “I’m just about the last one of the group still alive,” he told me. “I’m almost part of history. I never thought of myself as being part of history.” He was being disingenuous. He knew it all along.

Review/Art: Cartoon Masters—Cartoonists Finally Get Some Respect Kenneth Baker Reprinted with permission of the San Francisco Chronicle from “Review/Art: Cartoon Masters—Cartoonists Finally Get Some Respect,” September 25, 1988, pages 12–13; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.

Describing a painting or drawing as a cartoon (except in the technical sense of a full-scale fresco sketch) used to be a way of belittling or dismissing it. But that seems to be changing. Cartoon imagery has wormed its way into contemporary painting at various points, in the work of Bay Area painter Barbara Bell Smith at the Dorothy Weiss Gallery, 256 Sutter Street (through October 1), for example. Meanwhile, the august Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco are playing host to The Art of the New Yorker: A 60 Year Retrospective (through November 20) in which cartoons predominate. Concurrent with the New Yorker show is the inaugural exhibition of the new Cartoon Art Museum in downtown San Francisco. Anyone who enjoys either show will want to see the other. From the perspective of the art world, it looks like a sign of postmodernist times that cartoon art is taken more seriously these days than it used to be. Willingness to value “high” and “low” art equally is supposed to be one of the hallmarks of postmodernist sensibility. So is a taste for digressive, playful forms as opposed to strict, canonical ones. Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein brought comic-strip art into the art world big time during the early 1960s, adapting images and technical licks freely from Sunday newspaper strips. The Bay Area artist who goes by the name of Jess anticipated them by almost a decade when he cut up and reassembled Dick Tracy comics to make his hilarious, surrealistic Tricky Cad collages. And when one-time expressionist Philip Guston let imagery back into his work in the late 1960s, critics derided his style as “cartoonish,” although he has since been acknowledged one of the greatest modern American painters and a major influence on the art of the past decade. 155

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A younger generation of artists quotes cartoon images occasionally in the process of “appropriating” material from mass media to lay bare its manipulative intent. The big irony is that so many young art world artists today feel that their work can justify itself only by having some social content and impact. Yet it is the cartoonists—often disdained by the art world, though not by their fellow artists—whose work is really a social force. The most famous American cartoonist of them all, Thomas Nast (1840– 1902), was responsible for the downfall of the notorious “Boss” Tweed, New York’s most flagrantly corrupt politician. “I don’t care what they print about me,” Tweed is supposed to have said to his henchmen, “most of my constituents can’t read anyway—but stop them damn pictures.” He dispatched a minion to offer Nast $100,000 to get out of New York and study art in Europe. Nast bid him up to a half million—a fortune at the time—before announcing that he wouldn’t rest until Tweed was brought down. In the 1970s, cartoons were a key vehicle of radical politics. And a new generation of comic book artists has come up with characters like Ranxerox, a sort of nihilist demi-superhero whose exploits assault the pretensions and abuses of corporate and government power. What would the Chronicle be without Phil Frank, mastermind of the daily strip Farley, and editorial cartoonist Tom Meyer? (Little better than your average afternoon paper.) How do they manage to have such funny ideas—on deadline, no less—so often? I count on them to replenish the air of sanity, of contact with reality, that dissipates whenever I read the news or the business pages. The news instills the notion that the world is a cruel, interminable joke at which nobody is permitted to laugh (lest they be sued, say). Only the cartoonists—at the price of having what they do laughed off—get to rub the truth in our eyes, be it trivial or profound. More than that—as the present show demonstrates—cartoons are performances of drawing with felicities peculiar to them. They are a distinct mode of making ideas and points of view public. It is an irony of our culture that so much of the common truth about our lives and feelings can be given public expression only by people we are not supposed to take seriously as artists. The Cartoon Art Museum, like its unaffiliated East Coast counterpart in Connecticut, aims to change all that. One reason cartoonists are not given their due is that their work is made for reproduction, like advertising illustration and poster art. Until recently, there were few collectors of original comic strip art, and so, little incentive for its preservation.

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I’ve seen enough of the art business to know that the need to create yet another tier of commerce lies behind some of the fresh attention being paid to original cartoon and comic strip art. But whatever the reasons for it, I’m glad to see this neglected art form coming into its own, not least because cartoonists’ drawings contain valuable lessons in observation and visual invention that can enhance anyone’s grasp of “high” art. The show at the Cartoon Art Museum collects examples of original art by an impressive array of people from William Hogarth and George Cruikshank to Nast, Winsor McCay, George Herriman, Milt Caniff, Walt Kelly, David Levine, and Robert Crumb. It is not an exhaustive survey—this museum doesn’t have the space to mount one—but it contains some very fine work. Original cartoon art is revealing. It enables us to see how reproduction removes hesitations and underdrawing from some people’s work and how others seem to have been able to turn out full-blown images in ink with an unwavering hand. The show and its catalog attempt to order and analyze the material on view in terms of style (“realistic,” “semi-realistic,” “expressionistic,” and “abstract”) and four other qualities common to the cartoon art: format, timing, design, and theme. This approach may be useful to people who have never before stopped to look at the way a comic strip or a cartoon is composed. But those accustomed to dealing with visual art are liable to feel, as I do, that the catalog’s categories seem like a slightly defensive effort to render a neglected subject respectable. What matters in this show is the wealth of good drawing and narrative ingenuity there is to see. The strips grouped under “Realistic” style, such as Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon and Burne Hogarth’s Tarzan, are undeniably impressive. They aim to render an almost cinematic experience in static frames. Hogarth particularly seems to have composed his panels as though he were setting up shots for a camera. The opening battle scene of the Tarzan strip in this show are drawings of amazing complexity and design skill. Raymond had a drawing style that looks almost like an imitation of wood engraving. He defined just about everything he drew with parallel or radiating ink strokes that make everything appear to be bursting with energy. The Hal Foster Prince Valiant strip is so detailed and so thoroughly imagined that it really does seem to let us look into a far-off world. One panel looks like a quotation of Albrecht Duerer’s famous engraving Knight, Death and Devil (1508). More impressive to me though, are the highly stylized strips by people like George Herriman, Cliff Sterrett, Walt Kelly, and Crumb that let us look into a

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far-out mind, if not also into a far-off world. (I’d put Frank’s strip in this category too, although he’s not represented here.) The Walt Kelly Pogo strip here bears traces of underdrawing in photoblue pencil, letting us see how he revised certain decisions about the size and placement of details. But what is most striking about the strip is the way the humor teeters back and forth from topical silliness to a kind of modernist self-consciousness about the processes of inventing and reading a comic strip. What you see here are paths of thought that probably could not be taken in any other medium. Herriman, creator of Krazy Kat, is one of the cartoonists most admired by artists of every stripe. The strips collected here—and the single rare gouache— show why. Sterrett, however, is one of the neglected greats. His full-page strip, Polly and Her Pals, from 1943, is one of the highlights of the show and a good reason to buy the catalog, which reproduces it whole. The drawing and the humor are equally stylized in Sterrett’s strip. He plays off reiterated postures against advancing dialogue and designs each frame to the last detail without arresting the flow of the strip. His style is one of the most art-conscious in the whole show. In fact, it is like a show in itself.

Comics, Community, and the ToonSeum: An Interview with Joe Wos Kim A. Munson

In 2007, Mazetoons cartoonist Joe Wos founded the ToonSeum on two walls of the Children’s Museum in Pittsburgh. The museum moved into a storefront space at 945 Liberty Avenue in the downtown Pittsburgh arts district in 2009, which was expanded later with a second gallery in the storefront next door (see figures 41, 42). After Wos left the museum in 2014, the museum survived another four years, closing on February 24, 2018. Wos has also been the visiting resident cartoonist of the Charles M. Schulz Museum for the past seventeen years. In the following conversation, we talk about what the ToonSeum was like, how the museum built community, and the challenges of maintaining a career as a working cartoonist and performer while working as the founder/ executive director of a small arts organization. Kim A. Munson: When the ToonSeum moved from the Children’s Museum to the Liberty Street location, did you have to make adjustments to the type of material you were showing? Was it a different audience (demographically)? Are there regional favorites beloved by people in Pittsburgh? Joe Wos: When ToonSeum was located in the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh we had to self censor. We couldn’t do anything political and we had to make sure any art was “family friendly.” The tiniest thing could set off a complaint! I remember we did a Zippy the Pinhead exhibit which I went through several times to make sure there was nothing that could be regarded as even remotely offensive. The word burlesque appeared in one of the strips and sure enough that garnered a complaint from an angry parent. Once we moved to Liberty Avenue we had a greater freedom to display whatever we wanted. We were still sensitive to our family audience but once we expanded to the second gallery we could make certain areas “adult only” if needed. 159

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Figure 41. Joe Wos at The Overlook Bar in New York, with a mural decorated by members of the National Cartoonists Society. 2018. Courtesy of Joe Wos.

As for favorites, Pittsburgh is a very self-centric city. Pittsburghers love Pittsburgh. So any comics that reference the city itself were always popular, that was one of the reasons we did the Zippy exhibit. There were many references to Pittsburgh in Zippy. One of our most popular exhibits was Pittsburgh is Gotham, which celebrated Pittsburgh’s many connections to Batman in comics and film. KM: I see the museum had its own beer, Illustration Ale. How did that happen? JW: We were always looking for ways to market the ToonSeum that set us apart. We had a hotel room we decorated, we did quirky public events, and we had a beer. The beer was a collaboration between East End Brewing and ToonSeum. At the time, board member and cartoonist Wayno had a good relationship with them having done a few labels. So I approached him with the idea to pitch to East End. Everyone was on board and loved the idea. Local cartoonists illustrated the labels and it was very successful for all involved. KM: In a 2011 promotional video for the ToonSeum, you talk about the importance of including all of “geek culture,” movies, toys, etc. Some fans of comic art say that paying attention to the films and the rest of pop culture shoves comic art to the back of the bus. Others say that one can’t live without the other. With the popularity of the films, this has become an important issue. What do you think? JW: I am a firm believer that the films and television provide an opportunity to introduce new audiences to the source material. I would often ask people

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Figure 42. Exhibition view of Superheroes: Icons and Origins at the ToonSeum. Summer, 2011. Courtesy of Joe Wos.

what kind of movies they liked as a way of introducing them to comic books they might enjoy. “Geek culture” should be all inviting and all encompassing. It’s an opportunity to grow the audience and the community. Anything that gets people in the door to view the art on the walls is good and if it takes a connection to the Batman movie to get them to see the amazing art of the comics then I am all for it. I had a philosophy at the museum called “broccoli with cheese.” You can get kids to eat something good for them if you put enough cheese on it. We would often have an exhibit we knew the people wanted to see paired with an exhibit we felt they SHOULD see. Get them through the door and then you can educate them. KM: Let’s talk for a minute about exhibitions. What show were you especially proud of? Was there something you always wanted to show, but never could? Was there anything you would consider an innovation? Something that was never done anywhere else?

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JW: I was very proud of the Wonder Women show, which focused on not just the character but women artists. But I was also proud that we didn’t make that our “okay we did that now back to the men” show! We made a concerted effort to feature women in every show we could. Showcasing diversity across the board was very important to me and our staff. I was proud of all the exhibits though. We never did a show that I thought to myself “ugh, not this, I’m selling out!” I love the art form and all aspects of it. Our greatest innovation though was probably not in the exhibits but in the building of a community. We had events every week. From live drawing, to beer tastings, to movie nights. We started the local chapter of the National Cartoonists Society and not only got the convention to Pittsburgh but created a public street festival around it, a first for NCS! That sense of being a community center was our greatest achievement. We had regulars who would just stop in to talk about the latest cartoons. Another innovation I was proud of was the “discretionary presents” box. It’s such a minor thing but was so important. There was a box of comics, toys, plush, etc., that we had at the front desk. If ever a kid looked longingly in our window while waiting at the bus stop, the staff could take a toy out to that kid to have free of charge. If ever someone was caught stealing we would say “hey, you don’t need to do that. I want you to have this.” Sometimes those kids would become avid comic readers and visit us often. Those relationships we built were really what I enjoyed the most about ToonSeum. There were a lot of shows I wanted to do but never got to. For every great exhibit we did there were probably five that just didn’t make the cut. Most of the time it came down to funding issues. KM: Did you get to meet any of your art heroes? JW: They were filming The Dark Knight Rises in front of the ToonSeum and we had brought in Jerry Robinson to speak that evening. We were closed up for the day setting up, when a knock came at the door and Christopher Nolan came to the door asking if he could come in and say hi to Jerry Robinson! That was a pretty cool day. So many great artists came through our doors. Probably my favorite was Lou Scheimer. I grew up on Filmation Studios shows. Lou was from Pittsburgh but lived in LA. We named a gallery after him and he became a good friend. KM: Cartoon art museums are popular with the public, but they never seem to survive. The ToonSeum closed, the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco has moved several times, and MOCCA in New York was absorbed by the Society of Illustrators. Rent in urban centers is a major factor, I know. What else contributes to this problem?

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JW: America doesn’t get it. They are interested in the finished product, the cartoons, the movies, the comics, but have no interest in the process and cartoon art museums are about process. Most museums are showing the finished work, a painting or a sculpture, etc. Cartoon art museums are showing 1/12th of a second of a film in the form of a cel. We are showing a black-and-white page that appeared in full color in a comic. I think Europeans have a greater appreciation for the process involved and the craft of creating art. Americans have a faster pace, we just want to see the finished product and then move on. Also, Americans are not taught how to appreciate entertainment as art. KM: You’ve done an artist residency at the Charles Schulz Museum for years. What does that entail? Have you seen changes in the museum over all that time? What do you love about that museum? JW: I have been the visiting resident cartoonist at the Charles M. Schulz Museum for the past seventeen years. (Since they opened!) It is probably the greatest honor of my life. I love every aspect of it. It is the home of my hero. The reason I became a cartoonist! While I’m there, I do performances in the theater where I draw stories as I tell them. Between performances I do short mini workshops in the classroom. During the summer months I do a weeklong residency of cartooning classes during the week and performances on the weekend. The Schulz museum is like a holy pilgrimage for many people. It’s hallowed ground. The joy that it brings to people is truly magical. Over the past few years they have really transformed from just art on the walls (which was amazing) to themed exhibits with props, settings, artifacts, etc. It’s been an amazing addition to the museum and has really enhanced the exhibits a lot. Of course the greatest thing about the museum is the people. I have always said a museum has to be more than just art on the walls, it’s an experience and the people are a big part of that experience. There is no one on earth like Jeannie Schulz, she is a visionary, and I don’t know if she even appreciates just how remarkable she is. I cherish our friendship, and that came out of my time at the museum. The place is an inspiration to me on so many levels. KM: Although running a small museum can be a 24/7 gig, did your involvement in the museum enhance your storytelling skills and cartooning? Exhibitions can sometimes be a different kind of storytelling. Did you use your performance skills in educational or promotional programming? JW: I used a lot of my storytelling skills to create exhibits. I viewed every exhibit as telling a story. There was an arc, a beginning, middle, and an end. I tried to find the emotional hook in every exhibit. How could I help people connect

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with the art or artist on a deeper level? Being able to teach a class or perform on a moment’s notice was a nice addition to the ToonSeum’s programs. If we had a group show up I was always ready for them. But it ultimately didn’t help me as a cartoonist. I put too much of my time and effort into the museum and sacrificed my own career to do it. I was putting in seventy-hour weeks every week. There was no time for anything else. KM: As a working cartoonist, do you think exhibitions are helpful to an artist’s career? JW: I think being able to see the process is important. I think being able to look at an artist’s originals and see the lines, the “mistakes,” the brushstrokes, all of that has educational value for an artist. Being in the presence of a Schulz original or Bob Kane, or any of your heroes, is also a very spiritual experience too. It feeds our ambitions. It recharges our batteries and makes us ready to give it another try. There is a lot to be said for that inspiration. KM: In 2015, you wrote a humorous piece for Trib Live called “Death of the Art Museum,” where you talk about the need for museums to adapt to younger generations and cellphone/selfie culture. You wonder if art museums are still necessary, because anyone can see anything at anytime on the Internet, and zoom in on any detail they want. I feel there is still satisfaction in seeing the original done in the artist’s hand, an aura of authenticity. Some works need to be experienced. We’ve all seen a million reproductions of Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, for example, but it is still breathtaking in person. What do you think? Are museums getting better at this? JW: I’ve been really torn lately about the necessity of art museums. I think we can draw inspiration from them in ways that we can’t from works online. But I also personally find most museums boring. In an era where you can view anything and learn anything online, the main appeal of “real life” is that it is tangible, but most museums are strictly hands off. That is changing. Museums are becoming more about experiences than just the art on the walls and that is what is needed. Programming, events, immersive art are all important to the survival and evolution of museums. KM: What do you think the comics museum of the future would be like? JW: I don’t think they will exist in the US. I love Belgium and their deep appreciation for the art form of comics. But I don’t think the US will ever see the value enough to support a cartoon art museum in every major city the way they

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do other museums. I think we will have a few maybe. But I also think we will see cartoon art integrated much more into existing museums and pop culture museums. I think that is likely the future. A wider acceptance of cartoon art might actually be a bad thing for cartoon art museums! If MOMA starts displaying Calvin and Hobbes, people won’t see the need for niche museums of comics. I do think there will be a place for focused museums of individual artists like Schulz, or genres like children’s book illustration. But I think cartoon and comic art may be too broad, and focused superhero museums or inclusion in pop culture museums will be the only way to sustain interest and funding.

EXPANDING VIEWS OF COMIC ART: TOPICS AND DISPLAY After comic art became reestablished in art museums and university galleries and in independent institutions dedicated to comics during the 1970s and 1980s, artists and curators began to move past general survey shows into new territory. The survey shows established a rough canon of artists of historical interest, freeing up curators to explore narrower topics in depth, such as artists that had been underrepresented due to race, gender, or culture and new themes that may have seemed complicated or risky before. A loose descendant of the underground comix exhibitions of the 1970s, the 1991 show Misfit Lit was organized by Fantagraphics for the Center on Contemporary Art in Seattle (COCA; tour: Minneapolis, Los Angeles). Inspired by gallery exhibits in Seattle and the design and aesthetic of Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman’s Raw magazine, Larry Reid of COCA pressed Gary Groth to produce the show when he saw Love and Rockets and American Splendor and knew immediately that he wanted to show those works in a gallery setting. Misfit Lit included forty-nine alternative art figures like the Hernandez Brothers, Robert Crumb, Spain, S. Clay Wilson, Gary Panter, Stan Sakai, Dan Clowes, Burne Hogarth, and many others. I was particularly happy to see works by women in this version of the show, including Julie Doucet, Carol Lay, Mary Fleener, Carol Tyler, Lynda Barry, and Aline Kominsky-Crumb. Rob Rodi, in his catalog essay Why Comics Are Art, and Why You Never Thought So Before, explains that the direct sales model that began with underground comix made small publishers and alternative comics financially possible, allowing for a larger range of artistic expression. He contrasts popular comics with their “standard plots, settings, devices, and character types of the most mundane and simplistic genres,” with independent work that is “outside of the blockbuster-or-die mentality” and then states: What I’m saying is this: despite this exhibit’s well-intentioned attempt to get you to see comics as art, you should instead recognize them as art precisely because they are so widely regarded as the opposite. The cartoonists on exhibit here have not yet been leashed in by convention, by the tyranny 167

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of profit-and-loss statements, by dependence on the whim of the public, or by the fatuity and self-importance that inevitably follow success and critical acclaim. They are not pop-culture icons; they are not interviewed in glossy magazines; they do not even have a TV awards show. They are on the edge of artistic endeavor, with nothing to prove and nothing to lose. You might even call them dangerous, in the way that true artists are always dangerous. Yes, yes, yes, comics are art. I strongly encourage you to experience them now, before everyone finds out. (1991, 7) The artists included in the show varied somewhat from location to location, as the organizers tried to add other artists that were regionally popular, sometimes with controversial results. Here, scholar Diana Green shares her memories of the opening night of Misfit Lit in Minneapolis. In 1992, the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco organized three backto-back shows of work that was rarely seen in the Bay Area, Broad Humor (a large survey of comics by women), Visions of the Floating World (an extensive survey of manga), and Black Ink: African American Cartoonist Showcase, which toured to the San Francisco International Airport (93) and to the International Museum of Cartoon Art in Boca Raton, Florida (94). Black Ink was a survey show curated by Rochon Perry, featuring work by over fifty African American cartoonists with a spotlight on Jackie Ormes’s comic Torchy Brown. In a catalog essay, the late comics and television writer Dwayne McDuffie (Ben 10, Justice League Unlimited, Milestone Media) shared a heartfelt childhood story of his discovery of the world of Black Panther and the citizens of Wakanda, and the importance of racial representation both in life and in art. As comics exhibits expanded and diversified in the United States and in Europe, the Western way of exhibiting comic art became influential internationally. In Japan, people considered manga to be a strictly literary genre, not a form of art. They went to the manga museum to read, not to look at displays of drawings. In her essay, manga scholar Jaqueline Berndt analyzes a series of influential Japanese exhibitions at institutions like the Kyoto International Manga Museum and the Kawasaki City Museum, as well as shows by individual artists, to demonstrate how exhibits of manga evolved over a ten-year period, and how Japanese curators adapted the Western idea of exhibitions to provide viewers with the best reading and viewing experience. Throughout this book, we have seen the cold shadow of censorship haunting comics in the United States, France, Brazil, and Japan, but none as strict as the countries of the Middle East. In the less repressive United Arab Emirates, a group of young people with faith in comics as an essential form of art and communication have nurtured a small cartoon art museum and an active comics community among the glittering skyscrapers of Dubai. Dubai, according

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to comics studies pioneer John A. Lent, is home to the Middle East Film and Comic Con (the largest regional convention), Comicave (the largest comicsrelated store in the region), and Majid, the most popular comics series (published since 1979). In 2016, Lent visited the museum, talking with the founder Melvin Mathew about their exhibition style and sense of community. While the Cartoon Art Gallery in Dubai has found ways to flourish within the rules that dominate their country, in the United Kingdom curator Paul Gravett has stretched the rules of comics as far as possible, experimenting with the basic elements of sequential art itself. A variation on “gallery comics” (comics created specifically for gallery display), Gravett’s Hypercomics broke comics out of the “page” format and played with the concepts of multilinear narrative and self-guided navigation. Taking its cue from the digital devices that are dominating our attention, Gravett wonders if this style of show might be the future of comics and comics exhibitions. In 2011, publisher/collector Craig Yoe and Sarah Forbes curated Comics Stripped at the Museum of Sex in New York, a show that would have probably gotten them arrested in a more conservative era. This section ends with comments from Yoe about how this extensive examination of sexual taboos and other naughty bits came about, as well as his thoughts about sharing his collection and the public response to the show. References “Black Ink: Black Cartoonist Showcase” (exhibition catalog: February 5–May 16). 1992. San Francisco: Cartoon Art Museum. Boyd, Robert, ed. 1991. Misfit Lit (exhibition catalog: March 15–May 4). Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books. Gravett, Paul. 2013. Comics Art. London: Tate Publishing. Khouri, Andy. 2011. “Comics Stripped at the Museum of Sex.” Comics Alliance website. http:// comicsalliance.com/comics-stripped-at-the-museum-of-sex/. Accessed November 8, 2018. Spurgeon, Tom, and Michael Dean, eds. 2016. We Told You So: Comics as Art. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books.

Northern Ink: Misfit Lit in Minneapolis Diana Green

In the early 1990s, Minneapolis had a particularly vibrant and diverse gallery scene. As art critic Mary Abbe noted in her retirement column: At its peak in the late 1980s, there were more than two dozen art galleries within two blocks of 4th Street and 1st Avenue N. Hundreds of artists lived and worked in former industrial warehouses and lofts in the area and hung out at trendy restaurants. With the advent of the Target Center arena in 1990, sports bars began to displace the art crowd. Facing tougher economic times, galleries soon closed or scattered farther north or south to Lyn-Lake. No similar concentration of galleries ever coalesced.1The early 1990s were also a heyday for devotees of the comic art form. Between the zine explosion, the aftermath of mainstream acceptance of Maus, and Marvel’s brief, if chaotic, foray into speculation and the stock market, it appeared comics were finally getting their due. Those of us who had championed comics as an art form felt a measure of vindication. In March 1991, Gary Groth curated an exhibit of comic art in his native Seattle, also home to Fantagraphics, Groth’s employer and publisher of the Comics Journal. Staged at Seattle’s Center for Contemporary Art, the show ran from March 15, 1991 to May 4, 1992. Titled Misfit Lit: Contemporary Comic Art, the exhibit was planned as a touring show, and ran in March 1992 at LACE gallery in Los Angeles; in July 1991 at Vancouver’s Smash Gallery; and at ACE Art in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in June 1992 (catalog cover, figure 43).2 Many of the local stops on the exhibition’s tour included slightly different works by some of the key creators, due to overlaps with exhibition dates in other venues, and most also included work by local comic creators of note. In the exhibition catalog, copublisher Kim Thompson notes that there are reasons for a gallery show as opposed to a museum exhibition: 170

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Figure 43. Dan Clowes. 1991. Catalog cover for Misfit Lit. Image © Dan Clowes, published by Fantagraphics Books. Used with permission.

First, because there is an exciting quality to original comics pages that transcends the requirements of the basic reading experience; second, because cartoonists often indulge themselves in graphic work less suited (or intended) for reproduction and more for individual viewing, and third, because the show itself, with its striking variety, startling juxtapositions, and sheer scale makes perhaps the most cogent and persuasive brief for comics-as-art yet devised.3

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Misfit Lit had a one weekend showing at Artifex Alternative Arts Museum, 400 North 4th Street, Minneapolis, from December 7, 1991, to January 25, 1992, curated by Larry Reid, program director for the touring exhibition. During this show, works were included by local creators including Reed Waller and Kate Worley, creators of Omaha the Cat Dancer, local editorial cartoonist Pete Wagner, illustrator and cartoonist Jackie Urbanovic, Larry Beck, and Timothy Fay. Artifex was a small but vibrant gallery on Minneapolis’s north side, just outside of downtown in Minneapolis’s warehouse district. To enter the gallery, one walked up an unevenly lit staircase with a loose hand railing. The works were well displayed, but the lighting was harsh and uneven. Artifex had an earnest yet urgent atmosphere. While this sounds unpleasant, it was not. The sense that one got while in this gallery was that the Minneapolis art scene was an outlaw cachet, and that gallery attendees were welcome collaborators in the endeavor. During an interview with local editorial cartoonist Pete Waggner, Reid said, “Logistically, it was difficult assembling all this work, but we have it all in one place and it’s a rock and roll tour now.”4 Reid’s remark echoed the sentiment of comic lovers who attended. The core of the touring exhibit included work by comic traditionalists Burne Hogarth, Bernard Krigstein, Harvey Kurtzman, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, Charles Schulz, John Stanley, and Basil Wolverton. The works of Howard Cruse, Shary Fleniknen, Justin Green, Roberta Gregory, Bill Griffith, Jack Jackson (“Jaxon”), Gilbert Shelton, Frank Stack, and S. Clay Wilson represented the 1960s–1970s underground. Cutting-edge artists were also represented. Chester Brown, Charles Burns, Peter Kuper, William Messner-Loebs, and Jim Woodring had significant works in the show. Lynda Barry’s entry in Misfit Lit was compelling and unnerving. A large canvas, at least 36” x 48”, it is not specifically listed in the exhibition catalog. It depicts a woman sitting in solitude, full figure, engaged in self-recrimination over the end of an abusive relationship. When I was privileged to meet Ms. Barry at the 2008 San Diego Comic Con, I mentioned how much I liked her large painting. She replied, “I’ve never done any large paintings!” After a description of the piece and mention of the Misfit Lit show, she remembered the specific painting. She said she had to work at that size on that subject for personal reasons, but declined to go into detail.5 The Barry anecdote raises a salient point. In her review of the LACE gallery (Los Angeles) exhibition of the tour (February 2–March 3, 1992), Amy Gerstler laments, “This show, like many others, would not have been harmed by a larger selection of (sigh) women cartoonists.”6 While I do not have access to the full exhibitor list from the LACE engagement, an overview of the catalog shows ten women out of approximately sixty-three artists in the core exhibition. While

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this is hardly 1:1 parity, it’s a more than reasonable level of representation of female cartoonists whose work was known and available at the time. The opening weekend culminated with a panel discussion including Jackie Urbanovic, Pete Waggner, Reed Waller, Kate Worley, Gilbert Hernandez, and S. Clay Wilson. During the discussion, the topic of censorship, which was one of the themes of contemporary comic art in the exhibition, was addressed. Reed Waller told the story of an early encounter with a printer. “I can’t print this,” he said. “Is it all the sex?” “No, it’s all the black!”7 Wilson offered insights into early censorship in undergrounds, while Worley discussed having books with no sex in them banned due to the theme of the book she cocreated with Waller, Omaha the Cat Dancer (a book about the life of a feline stripper). There was discussion from all of censorship from both the right and the left. The exhibition was well received by local press, despite a slight tendency to evoke the tired “comics aren’t just for kids any more” cliché.8 Minnesota has a deep history of comic creation and fandom. This has evolved from C. C. Beck and Charles Schulz originating in Minnesota to the creation of one of the first formal collegiate art education programs in comic book illustration, the BFA in Comic Book Illustration begun in 1995 at Minneapolis College of Art and Design. For many, including this writer, the Misfit Lit show was a catharsis in understanding the scope and possibilities of the comic art form. Notes 1. Mary Abbe, “How Twin Cities Art Scene Has Grown over 32 Years: A Critic Bids Farewell,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, September 13, 2016. 2. “Monthly Archives: Misfit Lit: The Comix Show.” http://www.aceart.org/1992/06, accessed April 6, 2017. 3. Robert Boyd, ed., Misfit Lit: Contemporary Comic Art: Curated by Gary Groth. Exhibition Catalogue. Seattle, WA. March 1991: First Fantagraphics Edition. 4. Alternative Comic Artists Panel Discussion 1 of 11, posted by Brain Trust (Pete Waggner). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4O3TEC5cWmY&t=12s. Uploaded November 5, 2006, accessed March 30, 2017. 5. Lynda Barry, conversation with author, San Diego Comic Con, July 26, 2008. 6. Amy Gerstler, “Misfit Lit: Contemporary Comic Art at LACE,” Artforum (May 1992): 126. 7. Alternative Comic Artists Panel Discussion 5 of 11, posted by Brain Trust (Pete Waggner). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvMxZOQFMhc. Uploaded November 5, 2006, accessed March 30, 2017. 8. Jeff Strickler and Dennis Hunt, “Hot Topics: Metro Edition,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, December 6, 1991.

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References Abbe, Mary. 2016. “How Twin Cities Art Scene Has Grown Over 32 Years: A Critic Bids Farewell.” Minneapolis Star Tribune, September 13. “Alternative Comic Artists Panel Discussion” (1 of 11), posted by Brain Trust (Pete Waggner). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4O3TEC5cWmY&t=12s. Uploaded November 5, 2006, accessed March 30, 2017. “Alternative Comic Artists Panel Discussion” (5 of 11), posted by Brain Trust (Pete Waggner). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvMxZOQFMhc. Uploaded November 5, 2006, accessed March 30, 2017. Barry, Lynda. 2008. Conversation with author, San Diego Comic Con. July 26. Boyd, Robert, ed. 1991. Misfit Lit: Contemporary Comic Art: Curated by Gary Groth [Exhibition Catalogue]. Seattle: Fantagraphics. Gerstler, Amy. 1992. “Misfit Lit: Contemporary Comic Art at LACE,” Artforum, May, 126. “Monthly Archives: Misfit Lit: The Comix Show.” Ace Art Inc. [online] http://www.aceart .org/1992/06, accessed April 6, 2017. Strickler, Jeff, and Dennis Hunt. 1991. “Hot Topics: Metro Edition.” Minneapolis Star Tribune, December 6.

Our Heroes: African American Artists and Images in the American Comic Book Dwayne McDuffie Reprinted with permission of Charlotte (Fullerton) McDuffie, first published as the introduction to the exhibition catalog Black Ink: African American Cartoonists Showcase, Cartoon Art Museum San Francisco (February 5–May 16, 1992).

Alan Thompkins interrupted my one-on-none backyard basketball game with some important news. “The Hulk is gonna fight Thor. It’s supposed to be out already.” If Alan said so, it must be true. He knew more about comic books than anybody in the whole neighborhood. Even though my interest in the subject was a good less fanatical than Alan’s, this was definitely worth checking out. Much of our rapidly dwindling summer vacation had been spent in heated arguments over who would emerge victorious from such a contest. I was quite certain the Incredible Hulk would have no problem waxing a little guy who wore a cape and feathers in his hat. Alan, however, favored Thor, citing the Asgardian’s mighty hammer and mystical control over the weather as decisive factors. Maybe so, but then, Alan also preferred Joe Frazier to Muhammad Ali. In any case, the solution to our debate was suddenly at hand. Only one obstacle remained in our way. Lindsay Drugs, the “good comic store,” was over three miles from my house and I was expressly forbidden from going there. I concocted a clever story to cover my illicit tracks, “I’m going over to Alan’s, okay?” Mom went for it. Alan and I hopped on our bikes and made the long ride. It was 1973. We were both eleven years old. We ran into the drugstore and scanned the comic racks. The Hulk vs. Thor comic was nowhere to be found. We were greatly disappointed. Alan consoled himself with a bag of “Gold Rush” bubble gum. I had twenty cents burning a hole in my pocket and was determined to buy a comic book. I’m very glad I did. 175

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The comic book was Jungle Action #7, featuring a superhero I’d never heard of called the Black Panther, but then, I’d never heard of the Black Panther political party either. And the irony of a black character being the lead in a book called Jungle Action escaped me completely. What didn’t escape me was the powerful sense of dignity that the characters in this book possessed. I was instantly and hopelessly hooked. It wasn’t that the Black Panther was the first black character I’d seen in comics. Blacks had occasionally appeared in crowd scenes and as supporting characters long before (the Panther himself first appeared as a supporting character in The Fantastic Four). One black character even had his own book. Marvel’s Luke Cage, Hero for Hire had been running for over a year when I first discovered the Panther. But I never connected with Cage, a super-strong “angry black man” who wore chains around his waist, didn’t seem particularly bright, and spoke in a bizarre version of “street slang” that didn’t even remotely resemble the speech of any black people I knew. Spider-Man made sense to me. Cage? I just couldn’t relate. In those days, when black people weren’t busy being angry, they appeared either as faithful sidekicks, or worse, helpless victims who begged the white superheroes to rescue them. The Black Panther was nobody’s sidekick and if there was any rescuing to do, he’d take care of it himself, thank you. Moreover, the Black Panther was king of a mythical African country where black people were visible in every position in society, soldier, doctor, philosopher, street sweeper, ambassador—suddenly everything was possible. In the space of fifteen pages, black people moved from invisible to inevitable. In 1972, there were very few black people involved in the creation of the black images that occasionally graced the pages of comic books. In those days, we were dependent on white creators to represent us. As noted above, some of them did remarkably well. Most did not. Today, the responsibility for African American images lies with us. If there’s any rescuing to do, we’ll take care of it ourselves, thank you. As African American artists enter the industry in ever-increasing numbers, our dependence on whites for how we are depicted diminishes accordingly. The relatively new phenomenon of creator-owned and self-published comics further consolidates our control over how we will be portrayed. Nor is our output limited merely to African American images. We’ve demonstrated our ability to communicate artistically concerning the whole of human experience. When I talk about “Our Heroes,” I don’t mean The Black Panther, Brotherman, and Deathlok. Our Heroes are the growing numbers of African American comic book creators who, each in their own way, open our eyes to the multiplicity of the African American experience.

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Our Heroes appearing in the Black Ink exhibit include Gil Ashby (The Laziest Secretary in the World, Hellraiser); Reggie Byers (Robotech, Shuriken, Jam Quacky); Denys Cowan (Deathlok, Punisher: War Zone, Batman, The Question, Prince, The Spook); Michael Davis-Lawrence (ETC, The Freedom Project, Shado); Matt Baker (Hooks Devlin); Grass Green (The Devil You Say); Shepherd Hendrix (Mile Up, Swamp Thing); Seitu Hayden (Tales from the Heart, the Marion Berry Game); Roland Laird (MC Squared); Milton Knight (Slug ’n Ginger, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles); Turtel Onli (NOG, Future Funk); David, Guy, and Jason Sims (Brotherman); Dwayne Turner (Black Panther). The Black Ink exhibit barely skims the surface of the deep pool of African American talent in the comic industry today. The artists who are included represent merely a small sampling of the staggering breadth and ability of African American contributors to the form.

Deviating from “Art”: Japanese Manga Exhibitions, 1990–2015 Jaqueline Berndt Revised and updated from the essay “Permeability and Othering: The Relevance of ‘Art’ in Contemporary Japanese Manga Discourse” published in Critical Perspectives on Twentieth Century Japanese Thought, edited by Livia Monnet. Les Presses de l’Universite de Monreal (2001).

Japan has seen an increasing number of comics exhibitions since the 1990s, held in commercial spaces, public art galleries, and also specialized manga museums. This article looks back upon a major shift in the public sector from leaning on the authority of fine art to deviating from that institutional crutch in favor of manga as media culture, and recently a return to aestheticization in a technical rather than conceptual sense. Taking as its example three representative exhibitions in public museums held in 1990, 1998, and 2008, respectively, the article looks at which notion of manga manifested in each, and how this notion materialized in presentation techniques. All three exhibitions featured graphic narratives, or story-manga, that is, primarily entertaining fiction for younger readers that had come to dominate the domain of Japanese comics since the late 1950s with the spread of the manga magazine format and its gendered genres. Yet, magazine manga is not easily displayed. Initially produced as throwaway reading material, its monochrome visuals on acidic paper look much less attractive than eye-catching covers, colored supplements, or merchandising goods. In addition, this kind of manga consists usually of lengthy serialized narratives that are inclined to facilitate reader participation rather than authorly self-expression. While crucial characteristics of commercial manga such as the collaborative mode of production, the importance of imitative copying, and the possibility of sharing due to conventions seemed to work against gallery exhibitions, in recent years, the alleged shortcoming is being turned into a strength: Domestic manga exhibitions in public institutions are increasingly oriented at the broader community of readers. 178

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Leaning on “Art” Similar to other countries around the world, in Japan exhibitions in public art galleries have played a significant role in raising the cultural status of comics. Beginning at the end of the 1960s with the tiny museum for cartoonist Kitazawa Rakuten1 (1876–1955; today Saitama manga kaikan, lit.: Manga Hall, Saitama), this trend gained momentum in the 1990s, making not only newspaper cartoons but also magazine-based graphic narratives socially acceptable. The first major attempt was the posthumous Tezuka Osamu retrospective held at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo in 1990. Unfamiliar with exhibiting reading matter in the gallery space and simply overwhelmed by the amount of drawings, “the narrative nature of [Tezuka’s] manga” posed the biggest challenge, according to chief curator Iwasaki Yoshikazu (1990, 12). As it seemed technically impossible to pay tribute to that nature, the organizers decided to highlight Tezuka’s “originality in technique and his manga’s visual appeal” (ibid.). This orientation was innovative at the time, as the following dismissal of Tezuka’s manga by critic Iizawa Tadashi, longstanding member of the jury for the Bungei Shunjū Cartoon Award, evinces: In terms of the pictorial, there is nothing new here [ . . . ], as one cannot sense the unique personal touch indispensable for an artist. [ . . . ] The brushstroke and the freely changing tension of the line, to which traditional Japanese painting attached great importance, cannot be found; in short, his picture planes are without life. [ . . . ] After all, the Tezuka fan is indifferent to the picture-plane, putting emphasis rather on the story. (Iizawa 1989, 7) To Iizawa, manga qualified as “art, as a type of painting,” which employed vivid strokes. He defined the man in manga as “ideas, esprit, laughter,” and the ga as a picture rendered with brush and ink, foregrounding a notion that as a rule formed the core of calligraphy and monochrome ink-painting, but also applied more to caricature and cartoon than story-manga as pioneered in postwar Japan by Tezuka. In contrast to Iizawa’s depreciation, Reading Manga (Manga no yomikata, 1995), the first systematic attempt to illuminate the grammar of story-manga, regarded Tezuka’s “lifeless line” as an achievement. According to Takekuma Kentarō, Tezuka’s use of uniform lines with little variance in weight suggested an ideal of modern dynamics controlled by reason, and it also met perfectly the requirements for relief printing: “If brush and pencil had been the mainstream, the mass-distribution of manga we know today would not have happened”

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(Inoue, ed., 1995, 41). Although not specifically with respect to the line, Scott McCloud, too, acknowledged Tezuka’s achievements, foregrounding panel transition and his conception of comics as a system of highly codified signs that correlates the visual and the verbal for the purpose of storytelling. Famously, Tezuka himself defined his visuals as hieroglyphics: I realized that I am not aiming at drawing pictures. This isn’t my profession anyway, right? I’ve never done sketching, my drawing is completely self-taught. That’s why, as an instrument of expression, as a tool for telling stories, I draw something like pictures, but as I really came to think recently, these aren’t pictures to me. [ . . . ] They are something like hieroglyphs. (1979, 43) Like Tezuka, many creators of narrative manga draw from the reservoir of patterns and ciphers in their head that they have acquired through copying the style of their favorite manga artist as if doing writing exercises. Taking this into consideration, Takekuma has suggested that to understand manga, one must think of it in terms of script rather than visual art (Takekuma and Yamamoto 2006, 9–10). Historically, this suggestion can be supported by considering the transition from brush to pen and the decreasing relevance of academic painting skills. While early manga professionals like Okamoto Ippei were “fluent in pen drawings, ink brush paintings, Japanese color paintings” (Tezuka cited in Onoda Power 2009, 26), from Tezuka onward the assumption that such skills formed a necessary basis for creating manga, had, at least in the realm of storymanga, been dismissed (Inoue, ed. 1995, 64). Tezuka’s preference for the pen—and a specific pen at that (namely, the kabura, or turnip, pen nib)—was, admittedly, motivated by his actual lack of academic painting skills, but likewise by his focus on storytelling, initially aiming at Disney-like animated films. Naturally, this implied a distance toward fine art, and this distance seems to resurface in contemporary manga fans’ deeply held distrust against high culture, an affect that distinguishes the situation in Japan not only from Europe and America but also neighboring Asian countries such as the Republic of Korea (cf. Yamanaka 2011). The fans’ skepticism is not uncommon and can be traced back to Japan’s particular modernization, which included the state-driven implementation of Western concepts and institutions. The concept of fine art was one of these. Under the neologism of “painting” (kaiga), it united reconstituted forms of traditional art (renamed nihonga, Japanese-style painting) with Western oil painting (yōga). Turned into cartoon, manga was categorized as a lower kind of “painting” (cf. Miyamoto 2002). During the first decades of the twentieth century the institution of fine art with “painting” as its core was mainly focused on “the demonstration of

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national prowess” (Satō 2014, 343). As such it served as a vehicle both for claiming cultural parity with Euroamerica and emphasizing Japanese particularism. Against this historical backdrop sociologists have explained fans’ skepticism by allocating the institution of the art museum to “the West” and manga to “indigenous Japanese culture” (Murata 2009, 166; Yamanaka 2013, 45). Apart from the fact that both manga and museum are cultural hybrids, the “spatialization” of West vs. East does not hold historically, either. Most importantly, it overlooks differences between prewar and postwar Japan, in particular the shift from state-nationalism to democracy and internationality (Satō 2014, 349), which for manga meant to loosen its prewar ties to “Japanese art” as epitomized in brush painting. Tezuka’s preference for the pen implied not only distance toward the authority of painting, but also toward the emphasis on brush painting’s cultural particularity. With an eye on American (animated) film and European novels, Tezuka opted for internationality instead. This is worth remembering in view of recent manga exhibitions targeted at nonJapanese audiences,2 which all too often promote particularly Japanese traditions and suggest a continuity with premodern visual art, such as Manga Now: Three Generations (curated by Nicole Rousmaniere for the British Museum, 2015); Edo Giga: Great Manga History: Traces from Edo Toba-e, Punch, Manga (Edo kara tadoru dai manga-shi ten: Toba-e, ponchi, manga, curated by Shimizu Isao for the Kyoto International Manga Museum, 2015–2016); and Hokusai x Manga: Japanese Pop Culture since 1680 (Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe [MKG] Hamburg, 2016, curated by Nora von Achenbach and Simon Klingler). Whenever manga is ascribed a role similar to “painting” a century ago, visual (instead of narrative) achievements, original drawings (instead of printed matter), and individual authorship (instead of shared conventions) come to the fore. Within Japan, this inclination became evident through the Tezuka exhibition. It surely raised appreciation for manga as extended imagetext and had a significant social impact, but it did not contribute to an aesthetic conceptualization of comics that could have wielded influence on critical scholarship.

Foregrounding Media Culture The 1990s saw a shift of focus from outstanding artists to the media as a whole and, relatedly, from visuals to narratives, which manifested in the preference for copied pages over original drawings. This culminated in The Manga Age (Manga no jidai) exhibition. Shown first in the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo in 1998 and subsequently in the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, it was the largest ever of its kind with 380 manga works by more than 250 artists presented in twenty-seven sections. As the subtitle and the images on

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the poster made abundantly clear, the “manga age” was to be understood as the age of graphic narratives ranging from Tezuka’s Astro Boy (1950s) to Ayanami Rei as pictured in Sadamoto Yoshiyuki’s manga version of the mid-1990s TV anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion. The exhibition seemed to resist the conventions of the art museum in that it focused on manga as media. This showed, first of all, in the exhibits and their material display. Unlike its predecessors, which had favored original drawings framed and put behind glass, The Manga Age exhibition pinned slightly enlarged monochrome copies of whole pages or double-page spreads to the wall (and it offered the visitor an audio-guide with explanations by a voice actress, acknowledging manga’s ties to anime). Following the conventional periodization still predominant in manga criticism at the time, the exhibition took its historical departure from Tezuka’s New Treasure Island (Shin Takarajima, 1947),3 leaving the scenarist Sakai Shichima as well as the Donald Duck inspiration unmentioned (cf. Holmberg 2012). Then it proceeded to present four parts in chronological order—the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s, and “Since the 1980s”—in which certain themes were repeated: “Humor, Gag, Nonsense,” “SF and Fantasy,” “Genealogy of Heroes and Heroines,” “Manga for Youth,” and “The World of Horror and Occultism.” The integration of the latter appeared especially innovative, as it pointed to subcultures within manga. Clearly, the curators did not keep to the established industrial genres, gendered as they were. Female productions, for example, were foregrounded only in section 10, “The Golden Age of Girls’ Manga.” But precisely this deviation from the industry’s genres allowed for a different, cross-genre approach, for example, with respect to representations of violence (primarily under the heading “The Expanding Body” and unconnected to social and political issues, though) as well as nudity, male and female. It goes without saying that the ero-gekiga of the 1970s, which in its treatment of sexuality can be compared to American Underground Comix, and the yaoi production initially centered around the magazine JUNE (1978–2012) had to be left out to accommodate the administration.4 At least a page showing a male-male couple from Ozaki Minami’s boys’ love manga BRONZE was included. Fan-made dōjinshi did not surface at all. In general, the emphasis was on serialized graphic narratives targeted at noninfant readers (and as such in line with the usual museum visitor). In order to avoid the impression of manga as “art,” the organizers raised the issue “What Is Manga? Its Expression and Grammar” in an extra section (No. 25), and they commissioned catalog essays not from the authors of Reading Manga, but from the critic Murakami Tomohiko and from anthropologist Yamaguchi Masao. The privileging of story-manga did not connect to an actual reading experience

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though. What could be seen on the walls were single pages or double-page spreads, not longer sequences, and there were no reading areas. Instead of highlighting specific narratives, the exhibition presented a meta-narrative: manga as culture in the twofold sense of a purely Japanese culture and a community of kindred spirits, who share the same media memory. Apart from section 26 “Between Art and Manga,” which featured alternative comics, for example, by Takano Fumiko, Matsumoto Taiyō, and Hatanaka Jun, manga and fine art were neatly segregated: Section 27 presented Roy Lichtenstein’s Girl with Hair Ribbon (1965), a 6-million-dollar splurge purchased to commemorate the opening of the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo in 1995; a 1970 paneled oil painting by Tiger Tateishi (1941–1988),5 a DOB balloon by Murakami Takashi, paintings by Nara Yoshitomo and Tarō Chiezō, as well as a project by female artist Nishiyama Minako. With The Manga Age exhibition, a deviation from “art” loomed that has grown since. Besides the fact that a younger, manga-accustomed generation had entered the curatorial departments, the shrinking authority of public art galleries in the age of neoliberalist economization has been most instrumental in that regard. At present, public museums have to justify their expenditure of taxpayer money primarily by means of visitor numbers. In Japan, funding authorities expect manga museums—and exhibitions in other facilities as well—to emphasize the local community’s identity and industry, not individual acquisition of knowledge or societal communication (Yamanaka 2013, 32). Occasionally, this is extended from the local to the national. In April 2017, regional revitalization minister Yamamoto Kōzō made headlines when he called museum curators “the biggest cancer” for not engaging enough in the tourism industry and, in extension, the nation’s economy. Although an official apology was issued shortly after, the remark as such is highly symptomatic of the present situation in Japan. As for manga, the decreased relevance of art museums as venues for manga exhibitions (Kanazawa 2011, 127) has in part been compensated by an increase in specialized museums, approximately fifty in total (Masuda 2013, 208–9; Murata 2009, 182–83). Most of those related to comics in a stricter sense are dedicated to single artists and run by local municipalities. A national manga museum, or archive, does not exist. One of the few comprehensive facilities aimed to focus on manga in all its facets is the Kyoto International Manga Museum (abbr. MM, 2006–), equaled only by the Kawasaki City Museum (which was the first to employ two full-time curators in its manga department when it opened in 1988) and the Kitakyūshū Manga Museum (opened 2012). The Yonezawa Yoshihiro Memorial Library of Manga and Subculture, established in 2009 by Meiji University Tokyo,6 could become the fourth player, if the long-announced establishment of a bigger

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facility actually manifests. In regard to manga exhibitions, the Kawasaki City Museum advanced the field in the 1990s and early 2000s, while the MM has come up with several spectacular exhibitions in the 2010s, mainly curated by Itō Yū. The MM is based on a public-private partnership between the City of Kyoto, Kyoto Seika University, a private art college founded in 1968,7 and a local civic association.8 Ninety percent of the museum’s start-up funds were provided by a five-year subsidy called Open Research Center, which Seika had received from the MEXT (the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology). As is typical in these situations, the city shifted management responsibility for the museum from its board of education to the Bureau of Industry Promotion in 2010. Like The Manga Age exhibition, the MM concentrates on printed matter instead of original drawings, that is, on manga as it arrives at the reader’s hands. Its collection of 300,000 items is composed of 30,000 magazine issues and 250,000 tankōbon volumes (mostly book editions of magazine series). At the heart of the museum is the so-called manga wall, consisting of shelves in the hallways which make a total of 50,000 tankōbon available to the visitor. On the ground floor, the “wall” contains foreign comics, translated manga and boys’ manga, on the first floor, girls’ and women’s manga, and on the second floor, manga for youth and adults. Visitors do read while standing or sitting on the floor, the stairs, or the wooden deck and the artificial lawn outside. Thus, the MM may give the impression of a library, but it is not registered as one and lacks the function of lending. Also not library-like is the constantly running background music. Composed by Seika professor Komatsu Masafumi, this soundscape seems to perform two interrelated functions: It relieves Japanese visitors of the requirement of socializing, while saving them from the feeling of social isolation. Highlighting manga as media is evident not only from the “manga wall” and the reading visitors, but also the bilingual introductory exhibition in the main gallery installed in 2010. Instead of beginning with the medieval Chōjū giga scrolls of frolicking animals and humans, the historical survey starts with printed material of the late nineteenth century. As crucial as printed material may be for critics, most domestic visitors expect to see originals. This demand, however, does not necessarily indicate an inclination toward fine art. On the contrary, the majority of domestic fans tend to presume that the institution of the museum—as distinct from commercially motivated manga exhibitions increasingly held by media corporations as part of their marketing campaigns—benefits from showcasing manga, which helps to increase visitor numbers (whether displaying original drawings or not), while not offering much in return (cf. Murata et al. 2010).

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Resorting to Design The narrative nature of manga forms one of the major obstacles for museum exhibitions, conceptually as well as technically. Precisely because of this, the show Inoue Takehiko: The Last Manga Exhibition appeared to have broken new ground when it opened in Tokyo in 2008. Conceived exclusively for the Ueno Royal Museum, a public art exhibition space without its own collection, it toured from there to the Contemporary Art Museum Kumamoto, the Suntory Museum Tenpozan, Osaka, and Sendai Mediatheque in 2009–2010. For the first time, a manga artist had been invited to curate his own exhibition in a museum space, and when the critic Fujimoto Yukari pointed out that Inoue had made a successful effort to “change our notion of a ‘manga show’ completely” (2008, 68), she meant first and foremost the reading experience that the exhibition provided. Instead of printed pages, the gallery space itself served as the support for a newly created episode of Inoue’s famous manga VAGABOND (serialized in Morning 1998–2014, 37 vols. in total). Doorways attained the role of manga frames, while pictures of varying size, hung on the wall in different height, guided the visitor forward, sometimes across zigzag partitions, sometimes through darker rooms, and exhibited were not only sequentially arranged hand-drawn paneled pages in A3 format, but also large ink paintings on Japanese paper. This arrangement put the visitor in the position of both reader and viewer, prompting them to follow the flow of the narrative and admire the artist’s brushstroke at the same time. Art historian Yamashita Yūji, who specializes in Japanese ink painting (sumi-e), spoke highly of Inoue’s mastery of the brush, maintaining that “no one in contemporary nihonga [modern Japanese-style painting] excels him” (cited in Akiyama 2008). More than any neatly framed original drawings, the brushwork’s evoked the impression of fine art painting and accomplished precisely what Iizawa had missed in Tezuka’s manga almost two decades earlier. The gallery-specific aura was further enhanced by the fact that the artist presented an episode that was not available in print, not to mention the fact that photographs were strictly prohibited. But while the latter has been traditionally motivated by commercial concerns, especially in manga shows, Inoue did not engage in the exhibition project in order to raise his own market value; at the expense of having his regular magazine work affected, he aimed at “transcending the usual limits, becoming free” (cited in Murata 2009, 144). The layout of the exhibition space, the strong sensory appeal, and the presentation of manga as hand-drawn narrative elicited fulsome praise, including the assertion that Inoue accomplished this only because he was unimpeded by museum conventions (Murata 2009, 141). The disregard toward such conventions

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led to a stance that was refreshingly unaffected by status claims, but it also made Inoue’s exhibition stay within the conventional frame of both museum and manga. The drawings did not spill over to the walls of the White Cube. And as a whole the exhibition did not raise any questions about the possibilities and limitations of the museum by virtue of manga, or reversely, raise questions about manga. Apparently, it was a technical issue that took center stage, namely, how a manga narrative could be presented within a large three-dimensional space. The narrative itself, however, and the visual style in which it appeared gave a rather conservative impression. The exhibited narrative related how the manga’s protagonist, the swordsman Miyamoto Musashi (1584?–1645), spends his old days recalling the people he met, dreaming of past friends and rivals, and trying to come to terms with his (already deceased) father. Ultimately, he resorts to being an infant in his mother’s arms, before he vanishes into the horizon, rejuvenated, together with his lifelong rival Kojirō. The return to the mother took the form of seven monumental Madonna paintings. Placed near the end of the exhibit, in the largest room with the highest ceiling, they provided an emotional climax, and many visitors shed tears in front of these images, which oscillated between being comics panels, and as such narratively interrelated with each other, and self-contained autonomous paintings. Insofar as they deployed ink, brush, and Japanese paper, they invoked East Asian painting traditions. But not only did Inoue create these pictures standing, as if in the tradition of Western easel painting; the body of the mother-like figure was rendered in a manner close to traditions of European academism. Undressed, she would have only remotely looked Asian, not to mention her cheekbones. In Japan’s modernization, mastering Western academic painting was part of mastering Western civilization, and what looked conservative from a European avant-garde perspective appeared to be highly innovative in the domestic context. Until the postwar period, when the first public museums for modern art finally opened, the social role of painting was defined by its service to the modern nation, or empire, to be precise. As art-historian John Clark has demonstrated in his discussion of “world art,” in the twentieth century “the nationstate both naturalizes its domination over the inheritances of the past as well as creates hermeneutic hegemony over how this domination is to be expressed in various social representations” throughout Asia. “Art is thus not an autonomous domain of discourse which may criticize reality” (2008, 410). Although resting on different cultural bonds, that is, not national, but fan-cultural ones, the similarity is striking. Affirming positive values instead of raising critical awareness characterizes Inoue’s Madonna images as much as Chinese (or even North Korean) “social-realist” paintings. Eventually it matched the exhibition’s general promotion of manga as a postcritical art form. The confirmation of

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one’s relation to an already familiar protagonist and thereby a huge taste community of kindred spirits eclipsed any discussion of the presented narrative’s closure. But the very fact that the somehow politically correct antiviolence theme—“Musashi’s trajectory from solitary brute to thoughtful hermit” (Kosaka 2017)—led to the immersion into a comforting mother readily evoked, for example, the discourse of “maternal society” (bosei shakai) prevalent in Japan before the burst of the bubble economy (cf. Yoda 2000). Whatever the specific position held by the participating critics, ranging from regrets about the “loss of masculinity” to accounts of gender segregation in corporate Japan, social power and individual agency were at issue. The exhibition, however, invited neither reflection on such issues nor the representation of violence in manga. In consideration of the above, Inoue Takehiko: The Last Manga Exhibition was groundbreaking less with respect to foregrounding manga’s narrativity but rather spatiality, and in this way the gallery space was organized to provide an astonishing aesthetic experience. In retrospect, it appears to have set off a whole new current in gallery exhibitions of manga, a trend that evinces a heightened awareness of display, replacing earlier aspirations toward fine art (and its ideology) by an embrace of design that foregoes any conceptual meta-narrative, for example, related to what manga is and could be. Especially impressive with regard to “unflattening” manga in the gallery space were three exhibitions. Manga Realities: Exploring the Art of Japanese Comics Today, curated by Takahashi Mizuki for the Japan Foundation (2010–2011), literally spatialized one manga story-world in each room: In the case of Igarashi Daisuke’s Children of the Sea (2006–2011), the visitor was invited to “dive” into an installation with a maritime soundscape and semitransparent drapes, and then read a long sequence of original manga pages, placed on a curved table (figure 44). Less noticed but noteworthy was the reversion of word and image in the one-room exhibit of Sasou Akira’s manga short-story Fujisan (2001, available in French translation): Curator Lee Hyunja attached part of the manga’s narration in enlarged vertical lines of Japanese script to the walls and inserted small manga panels into it (figure 45).9 Itō Yū’s 18,000 Original Manga Drawings by Tsuchida Seiki (MM, 2014) “provided its visitors [ . . . ] with the unique experience of walking over original drawings placed under acrylic plates” (Natsume 2016, 3, figure 46).

Conclusion Manga exhibitions call for the consideration of a multitude of aspects, including funding, venue, availability of exhibits, target audience, and so on. While the actual organizers tend to get caught up in practical issues, academic criticism, especially if informed by cultural studies, is inclined to foreground concepts,

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Figure 44. Manga Realities: Exploring the Art of Japanese Comics Today (2010). Installation view at Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito. Photo by Ken Kato. Courtesy of Contemporary Art Center, Art Tower Mito.

Figure 45. Jason Akira’s “Fujisan” as seen in the Five Stars exhibition, 2011. Photo courtesy of the Kyoto Seika University International Manga Research Center, Kyoto International Manga Museum.

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Figure 46. Installation view of 18,000 Original Drawings by Tsuchida Seiki, 2014. Photo courtesy of the Kyoto Seika University International Manga Research Center, Kyoto International Manga Museum.

so far mainly related to manga’s legitimization and representation of either national or fan culture or social minorities. In its recapitulation of three major exhibitions held over the last fifteen years, this article has focused on how setting, structure, and display became conceptual themselves and not only in regard to representation but also the notion of manga. Deliberating what manga is and could be seems to be vital at a time when this media has passed its commercial and policy-related peak. Regardless of whether manga exhibitions can bolster up the cultural industry or art galleries, they are certainly a site of exploring “manga” for a general public. The three exhibitions reviewed in this article suggest a course from artist-centrism (Tezuka) to artist-centrism (Inoue), and from displaying originals to displaying originals with a brief detour via presenting an overview by means of copies. Even if this course is to be representative (given all the other things happening in parallel), it is not a mere return from the “cultural” to the “aesthetic,” as the meaning of the latter has changed: Whereas the early 1990s saw attempts at adjusting manga to “art” as an institution, by now it is, if not art as such, the gallery or museum that gets adjusted to manga. In other words, a shift from “what” to “how” has taken place, which also holds the potential to reconceive “art” as a medium of societal communication and manga as part of it. To unfold this potential, however, conceptual efforts are vital.

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Notes 1. Japanese names are indicated in the Japanese order, surname preceding first name without separation by comma, except in the references. 2. For a detailed discussion, cf. Berndt (2019). 3. Tezuka was not the sole originator of story-manga, but previous entertaining narratives had fallen into oblivion due to discontinuation for wartime austerity reasons and lack of paper. 4. Against the backdrop of the Japanese penal code, up-to-date, public art museums do not hold exhibitions with erotic representations. For example, a thematic exhibition on yaoi, or boys’ love, manga is still impossible. The first exhibition of so-called spring pictures (shunga, 18–19 cent.) was held at a privately run museum in 2015. 5. Finally honored with a representative exhibition in 2016. The world is strange! The manga and paintings of Tiger Tateishi and Yūichi Yokoyama (Sekai ga myō da! Tateishi Tiger and Yokoyama Yūichi no manga to kaiga), Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art. 6. Yonezawa Yoshihiro (1953–2006), one of the founders of the now biggest convention for fanzines and fan art (komike, abbr. for Comic Market) in 1975 and its longtime representative (cf. Berndt 2017). 7. Kyoto Seika University was the first to introduce a manga class into its design curriculum in 1973, but the notion of manga was limited to caricature and newspaper strips until 2000, when a story-manga program was established, first within the Department of Fine Art and 2006 as a stand-alone Manga Department. 8. Local citizens had established this school prior to the Imperial Rescript on Education (1890). The association still owns the ground and the building of the former Tatsuike Elementary School (1869–1995). 9. Five Stars: Seika’s Manga Universe/Gonin goshoku ten, MM, 2011, featured also manga by Takemiya Keiko, Itahashi Shufo, BELNE, and Tsuru Daisaku.

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Inoue, Manabu, ed. 1995. Manga no yomikata [Reading manga]. Tokyo: Takarajimasha, 1995. Itō, Yū. 2016. “Practical Manga Research: Difficulties and Possibilities of Manga Exhibitions and Manga Museums.” Proceedings Comicology—Global Manga Studies. Kyoto International Manga Research Center. 4pp. http://imrc.jp/images/upload/lecture/data/Ito_ENG.pdf. Itō, Yū, Ryūichi Tanigawa, Mariko Murata, and Chie Yamanaka. 2014. Manga myūjiamu e ikō [Let’s go to the Manga Museum]. Tokyo: Iwanami junior shinsho. Iwasaki, Yoshikazu. 1990. “The Osamu Tezuka Exhibition within the context of museum activity.” Tezuka Osamu ten [Tezuka Osamu Exhibition] (cat.), 12–13. Tokyo: National Museum of Modern Art. Kanazawa, Kodama. 2009. “Manga x bijutsukan” [Manga x art museum; Jap.], in Omote, Tomoyuki; id.; Murata, Mariko, Manga to museum ga deau toki. Kyoto: Rinsen shoten. 79–137. Kosaka, Kris. 2017. “Vagabond: An Epic Manga Based on the Life of a 17th Century Samurai.” Japan Times, January 7. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2017/01/07/books/book-reviews/ vagabond-epic-manga-based-life-17th-century-samurai/#.WSlvg8aB3sE. Masuda, Nozomi. 2013. “Manga kanren museum” [Manga-Related Museums]. In Popular bunka museum: bunka no shūshū, kyōyū, shōhi [Popular-culture Museums: Collecting, Sharing, and Consuming Culture], edited by Ishita Saeko, Murata Mariko, Chie Yamanaka, 187–216. Kyoto: Minerva shobō. Miyamoto, Hirohito. 2002. “The Formation of an Impure Genre: On the Origins of Manga.” Review of Japanese Culture and Society, translated by Jennifer Prough. Jōsai University, Tokyo, XIV: 39–48. Murata, Mariko. 2009. “Museum ni manga ga yatte kita!” [Manga has come to the museum!]. In Manga to museum ga deau toki [When manga and museum meet], edited by Omote Tomoyuki, Kanazawa Kodama et al., 139–230. Kyoto: Rinsen shoten. Murata, Mariko, Chie Yamanaka, Ryūichi Tanigawa, and Yū Itō. 2010. “Kyōto Kokusai Manga Museum ni okeru raikansha chōsa” [Investigation on visitors to the Kyoto International Manga Museum]. Kyōto Seika Daigaku kiyō [Journal of Kyoto Seika University] 37: 78–92. Natsume, Fusanosuke. 2016. “Manga Exhibitions Shaking the Concept of Japanese Comics.” Proceedings Comicology—Global Manga Studies, Kyoto International Manga Research Center, 3pp. http://imrc.jp/images/upload/lecture/data/Natsume_ENG.pdf. Onoda Power, Natsu. 2009. God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post–World War II Manga. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Satō, Dōshin. 2014. “From Art and Identity: For Whom, for What? The ‘Present’ upon the ‘Contemporary.’” Review of Japanese Culture and Society, translated by Sarah Allen, 26: 341–61. Takekuma, Kentarō, and Kōji Yamamura. 2006. “Animation no sōzōryoku” [The imaginative power of animation]. Wochikochi, The Japan Foundation 13: 8–17. http://www.wochikochi.jp/ pdf/data/wk13_008–017.pdf. Tezuka, Osamu. 1979. “Kōhi to kōcha to shin’ya made” [With coffee and tea until late at night] . . . Interview by Kazuki Chiseko]. Pafu 5 (9): 34–73. Yamanaka, Chie. 2011. “Dare no tame no museum?” [Whose museum?; Jap.], paper given at The 3rd imrc Conference, Bucheon; http://imrc.jp/lecture/2011/10/3.html. Yamanaka, Chie. 2013. “Popular bunka kara kangaeru” [Thinking from the perspective of popular culture]. In Popular bunka museum: bunka no shūshū, kyōyū, shōhi [Popular-culture Museums: Collecting, Sharing, and Consuming Culture], edited by Saeko Ishita and Mariko Murata et al., 31–48. Kyoto: Minerva shobō. Yoda, Tomiko. 2000. “The Rise and Fall of Maternal Society: Gender, Labor, and Capital in Contemporary Japan.” South Atlantic Quarterly 99 (4): 865–902.

The Glimmering Glow of Comic Art amidst the Blinding Glitter of the United Arab Emirates John A. Lent Reprinted with the permission of John A. Lent. This is a revision of the essay “The Glimmering Glow of Comic Art amidst the Blinding Glitter of the United Arab Emirates,” which was first published in the International Journal of Comic Art 17, no. 2, Fall/Winter 2015.

Tucked unobtrusively among all of Dubai’s showy extravagance (e.g., a sevenstar hotel, the world’s largest mall and tallest building, an indoor ski slope, and a proposed man-made rainforest in the midst of a desert) is the Middle East’s only cartoon gallery, simply named Cartoon Art Gallery (CAG). At first thought, it seems out of place in a sheikh-ruled, Islamic country known for its importance as a commercial and trade hub for the region. But, that notion (especially that Arabs and Muslims lack humor and shy away from visual culture) is quickly dispelled in the United Arab Emirates. Comic art definitely has a presence in the country that has its own gallery (CAG), annual comic-con, comic arts award, comic books, animation academy, and comics shops. In line with Dubai’s propensity to describe itself only with the loftiest superlatives, the city is home to “perhaps the most high-profile pop culture event in the region” (Adams 2015), the Middle East Film and Comic Con; the selfadvertised “world’s largest comics and collectibles superstore,” Comicave; “the most famous Arabic cartoon character” (Sager 2010), Majid; and, of course, the region’s one-of-a-kind Cartoon Art Gallery. The Cartoon Art Gallery promises to be the center and cultivator of comic art in the UAE. It was founded in 2011 by Indian-born artist Melvin Mathew, with strong financial support from his father, owner of “about 46” restaurants and franchises (e.g., Arby’s, Bennigan’s, Caravan, etc.) in Qatar and the Emirates (figure 47). Upon returning from the United States where he studied animation at the San Francisco School of the Arts, Mathew wondered why an Emerati had not opened a cartoon gallery up to that point and decided to take on the task. 192

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Figure 47. Melvin Mathew, founder of Cartoon Art Gallery, and Chitra Sudhakaran, gallery manager, in front of Matthew’s displayed works. June 2015. Photo by and courtesy of John A. Lent.

CAG’s first manager (2011–2014) Noura Masri (interview 2015) recalled the genesis of the gallery: Mel (Mathew) said to me that UAE had no place for cartooning, that all the galleries were for fine arts only. He said he wanted to start a place and would I be the manager. We started from scratch in 2011, with no planning or whatever. We worked as a team, and I had to shift from art to management and business. We did not want the gallery to be too formal as most of them here are, not very stiff. The two-story building housing CAG near “gallery alley” of Dubai’s AL Quoz 1 area, is indeed an informal, yet functional, space, with first-floor motifs that show that Mathew did not “leave his heart in San Francisco,” as the Tony Bennett song laments. The small café area is designed similarly to the roof of his San Francisco apartment, while part of a wall displays the exterior façade of that apartment, complete with a caricature of his American neighbor and his cat peering out a window. At the time of my visit, much of the first and part of the second floor exhibited Mathew’s works, including a huge painting of the Joker, another of a man as a monster addicted to coffee with little demons running up and down his arms, and drawings of families depicted as animals. The upper floor is reserved for workshops, lectures, festivals, and private

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exhibitions and is equipped with light tables, storyboard notice-boards, and other production gear. The mission statement of CAG is to highlight and develop the talent of regional as well as international cartoonists to the public and provide them with an opportunity to express themselves in a casual atmosphere. The gallery is also an abode that offers workshops to provide the fundamentals of cartooning, animation, storytelling and concept drawing to the society. (Cartoon Art Gallery brochure)

CAG elsewhere advertises itself as a “multi-generational mix of regional and international artists” with the mission to “bring illustrators, cartoonists, animators and more to communicate cultural diversity of cartoon [sic] from round the world in the fields of comics, animation, children’s book illustration, concept art and caricatures” (http://www.cartoonartgallery.org). Though comic art figures prominently in CAG’s program, exhibitions, competitions, lectures, and workshops dealing with other art forms are held regularly. For example, in a two-month schedule in 2017, there was a Soulful Hues Art Exhibition, a UAE Wild Trails Exhibition, two coloring and painting competitions, and a watercolor workshop. Founder Melvin Mathew sees the primary goals of CAG as becoming selfsustaining and serving as a collective meeting place for local cartoonists. CAG and its exhibitions and other events are not sponsored by the royal government or corporations, as are most UAE cultural and art institutions and activities, “making it difficult to compete,” Mathew said (interview 2015). Gallery manager Chitra Sudhakaran (interview 2015), also India-born and US-educated (at Cal Arts), gave four ways that CAG raises funds: • We generate income from selling original artwork obtained from dealers in the U.S. and England, at the annual comic con. Also anime posters, etc. • We offer space for a fee on the first floor for children’s birthday parties with a cartoon theme. • There are two or three a week. • We rent space to non-political art shows. • We also conduct workshops, though it is difficult to find cartoonist and animator participants as Dubai is a floating population—people come and go. • Of course, for the time being, much of the funding continues to be given by Mathew and his family.

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• The year CAG was founded (2011) also spawned both the Middle East Film and Comic Con (MEFCC) and the Cartoon Network Studios Arabia (CNSA). • The Middle East Film and Comic Con, started by the Middle East– based communications agency ExtraCake PRA, is multigenre, showcasing comic books, manga, web comics, anime, and animation, as well as science fiction, film, television, novels, video games, and toys. Though American and Japanese popular culture dominate the con, space also is devoted to regional content. Held every April in the Dubai World Trade Centre, the event draws 70,000 attendees and about 250 exhibitors, artists, and celebrities. At the 2017 MEFCC, consumers spent five million AED (1,361,248 USD). Also in 2011, the American Turner Broadcasting Systems Arabia launched Cartoon Network Studios Arabia in agreement with twofour54 Abu Dhabi, a main purpose of which is to “support local talent from across the Middle East” (Arrant 2011). The Cartoon Network and twofour54 jointly started the Cartoon Network Animation Academy, opened in Abu Dhabi in 2010. That same year, twofour54 released the award-winning children’s animation, Driver Dan’s Story Train. The goal of CNSA and the academy is to produce local content in collaboration with local artists to be marketed throughout the region and hopefully globally. The academy’s syllabus is split among four terms, culminating in a final project on which all of the students work to finish a short film. Only twelve students are accepted each session (Al Bustani 2013). From the first batch of graduates in 2012, three were chosen to join Cartoon Network Studios Arabia where they worked on two series planned to be aired on the studio’s Arabiclanguage network throughout the Middle East and North Africa (Lord 2012). A recent graduate of the academy, Sajeda Saleh (interview 2015) (figure 48), described the program as intensive: eighteen months long, five days a week, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. While a student, she wrote a 2-D animation, Tubby Dance, on which she was also art director, animator, character designer, and story-board creator. Her vision is to develop stories that will instill Arabic pride in children. Saleh (interview 2015) said, “Arabs are not proud of themselves. For example, Arab girls want to be blonde; I’d like kids to be proud of their culture.” Development of the comics and animation industries of the Middle East has piqued the interest of some entrepreneurs. UAE conglomerate Al Ahli Holding Group (AAHG), for instance, built the Comicave, a 17,000-squarefoot emporium in the Dubai Outlet Mall, containing more than five thousand comics and manga, as well as merchandise.

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Figure 48. Sajeda Sateh with her animation work, Dubai, June 14, 2015. Photo by and courtesy of John A. Lent.

Similarly, locally originated animation companies have increased in number, as the industry has “exploded” since the early 2010s (Nouri Masri, interview 2015). Among them are Lammtara, Moving Reflection, and Fanar Production. UAE artist Mohd. Saeed Harib founded Lammtara as an animation and merchandising house, which created the first UAE animated series, Freej, in 2006. A sarcastic and witty story, Freej is about four Bedouin grandmothers adjusting to the changes to their Dubai neighborhood. A new series of Freej is brought out each Ramadan. Moving Reflection in Dubai is the creation of Khaled bin Hamad, also a graphic artist, whose latest graphic work is Nasser’s Secrets, the Prologue. The studio produces both animation and comics. Fanar Production, started in Dubai in 2008, released that year an adult TV series, Shaabiat al Cartoon. CAG being an exception, some comic art in UAE receives support from different government and corporate entities. Abu Dhabi Music and Art Foundation, in partnership with Mubadala, initiated the ADMAF Comic Arts Award in 2015, hoping to “nurture artistic expression in the comic field and celebrate the power of the comic arts as a creative and cultural tool” (Emirites News Agency 2014). Open to UAE citizens aged eighteen and above, the prize includes an all-expenses-paid trip to New York to enroll in a New York Film Academy, four-week, 3-D animation course. ADMAF began its interest in comic art in

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2007 and since then has staged comics festivals, workshops, and lectures. The founder of ADMAF, H. E. Itoda Al Khamis-Kanoo, showed his support, saying, “The comic arts is establishing a firm foothold in the UAE with educational institutions, creative initiatives and professional practitioners all helping to develop the industry” (Media Centre 2015). Partner Mubadala encourages comic art in other ways; for example, supporting Mansour, an Emirati cartoon that emphasizes the importance of Arabic language in keeping cultural identity and the value of a strong education and healthy lifestyle. Despite these important achievements in a short time, UAE cartooning does face some challenges. Besides the floating population issue already mentioned, other problems and limitations were identified in interviews with Dubai cartoon personnel with connections to the Cartoon Art Gallery. CAG founder Mathew (interview 2015) said it is “hard to make money in cartooning and Dubai is an expensive place to live”; additionally, cartooning is “considered a low profession, especially print.” Television cartooning carries “more weight because it is a show type of thing,” according to Mathew. The inability to make a living by cartooning is a common complaint among UAE cartoonists (interviews, Saleh 2015; Masri 2015), as are the public’s perception of cartooning as unimportant and only for children (interview, Masri 2015; Al Ali 2015; Alireza 2015) and the limitations on the freedom to express oneself culturally and politically (interviews, Saleh 2015; Masri 2015; Al Ali 2015; Adham 2015; Alireza 2015). Masri (interview 2015), in listing problems cartoonists experience in UAE, likely summarized for others interviewed, saying, The problems are we can’t make a living by doing cartoons; there is a lack of education, awareness, no teaching on how to draw. The Cartoon Network Animation Academy in Abu Dhabi teaches, but it is inconvenient to get there. There is no focus on art and sports in schools here; it is a cultural thing; it has no relationship to Islam. Art is not taken seriously here; the thinking is, get a job and do art on the side. A colonial mentality exists and plagiarism and copying is common; cartoonists need to break out of their boxes. A lack of freedom to express is an issue; you can paint anything you want but you must be careful. Comparatively speaking, UAE appears to give cartoonists more leeway than other regional countries where they have been tortured and imprisoned (Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Iran, Palestine, Syria); however, the UAE does not seem to have many locally drawn political cartoons, the genre that is usually the root of censorship and banning. Sudhakaran (interview, 2015) agreed that local political cartoons are scarce, explaining, “A number of Emirates newspaper cartoons are not from Dubai cartoonists. In some cases, Arabic-language captions and

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internal identifiers are put into cartoons that appeared elsewhere in European languages.” Maha Al Ali (interview 2015) expressed dismay about a double standard she observes: “The Japanese, American, and German comics here can get away with things that we can’t.” One source provided a case of close scrutiny by government censors: at the annual comic con, government personnel go to each of the exhibition tables and if they see comics that are political or otherwise inappropriate, they put the works under the table, out of view. Despite these hindrances, UAE artists continue to work fervently on comic book and graphic novel projects, which, according to Mathew (interview 2015), the creation of has become a fad in the country. Better known among these artists is Mohd. Ashnaf Ghori, who came from India with his parents at age two. Having since found success as a comic book artist, filmmaker, and entrepreneur, his professional career began as an illustrator for the English-language newspaper Khaleej Times and its magazines in the late 1980s, and Young Times from 1989 to 2001. Ashraf Ghori also drew for US comics companies but he is best known for writing, directing, and producing UAE’s first CGI-animated, science fiction film Levity Xero Error Minus, which was recognized at the 63rd Cannes Film Festival. Ever an innovator, Ashraf Ghori is founder and CEO of the digital design agency Xpanse CGI, creator of the Web comic FOBcity, a biting satire about immigrant and expatriate life in a foreign country (most likely, UAE, where 80 percent of the population is nonnative), and collaborator in a mixed-media (rap music, comics, video) project World War Free New (Adams 2015). Another comic artist of note is Jalal Luqman, who created one of UAE’s first graphic novels in 2015, Armagondas, an epic fantasy story. The oldest comic book and children’s magazine in the Emirates, read widely in most Arab countries, is Majid, started in February 1979 in Abu Dhabi. A weekly published by the Abu Dhabi Media Company, Majid has had a large circulation (170,000 in 2005). In 2010, the magazine entered the augmented reality realm via a game whereby the reader can hold a “special page which, when held up to a webcam, will overlay the users’ real world surroundings with computer generated imagery, creating an interactive ‘mixed reality’ environment” (Sager 2010). Some of the contemporary UAE comics are created by teams. Working together under the name of Party Poopers, Khadija Al Saeedi (writer and artist) and Shihab Aldeen (colorist) produced a sixteen-page comic, 1991, promoted with a teaser on the front inside cover that read: What Happened in 1991? Discover how time travel ruined Meythem’s planned adventure and introduced him to the girl from the future, Ran. He doesn’t know it yet, but meeting Ran is gonna flip his life around, and take him into an unexpected journey, to the post-apocalyptic dark future.

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Figure 49. Yasser Alireza (left) and Zaid Adham with art from WAYL. Cartoon Art Gallery, Dubai, June 14, 2015. Photo by and courtesy of John A. Lent.

The backside cover reads: Discover how depression drives Ran to travel to the past just to get a Padadol pill for her dying father in spite of the alien zombie invasion. Right in the middle of that struggle, A [sic] not-so-bad-looking guy pops up in the way and just ruins the mission. The first half of 1991 ends with one character’s suspenseful query, “Who— Who are you?” followed by a full-page image of Ran, who instructs the readers that, “If you wanna know, close this book and start reading it from right to left.” Another team, Artbots, recently brought out a hard cover, forty-four-page book introducing themselves and their artwork. In their introduction, the team (Naka Isurita, Joumana Ismail, Trixia Quinzon, Ahmad Manar Laham, Ibrahem Swaid) described themselves as a “community and a hub for artists in the city [Dubai] to come and share their work and experiences and sit and sketch together.” Zaid Adham, originally from Jordan, and Saudi Arabian Yasser Alireza met while rummaging in a Dubai comics store (figure 49). At the time, Zaid Adham was struggling to find a colorist and letterer for a forty-page comic book (WAYL) he was doing. Finding out Yasser Alireza’s background (studies in

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Rhode Island and California, publishing in Saudi Arabia), Zaid recruited him to join the venture as the artist (Yasser Alireza 2015). Zaid’s forté is writing prose, poetry, music, and comics. After ten years as a TV host and director, he wanted to return to storytelling. In the early 2000s, Jordan provided an opportune moment as it began to develop itself as a hub of creativity, and, in 2011, Zaid started creating a Jordanian superhero with the ability to harness electrical power (Zaid Adham, interview 2015). The setting for WAYL is Jordan’s capital, Amman, which Zaid said has a “soul of its own,” a city “people can relate to” and defend, asking the question, “How dare you show our city as dystopic?” (Zaid Adham, interview 2015). Some budding comics creators use help from United Arab Emirates Board on Books for Young People (UAEBBY) to conceptualize and produce comic books. Maha Al Ali (interview 2015), who has written four comic books using a minimalistic drawing style, said she attended a UAEBBY one-week workshop where she was taught by a German artist, after which she was told by UAEBBY personnel that, “They will support me if I do comic books and will introduce me to a publisher, acting like an agent, and also help me with marketing.” The workshop she attended had eight participants (all girls), all expected to turn a personal experience into a comic book. Maha Al Ali (interview 2015) said her topic “was personality disorders, depression, a subject not discussed in the region. Other girls did humor stories, and one developed a comic around an orphan who wanted love but only got fake love.” Participants in the UAEBBY (and Goethe-Institute Gulf Region- ) sponsored workshops must be eighteen years old and Emirati (see, “Books—Made in UAE . . . ,” 2014–2015). UAEBBY differs from two other organizations that are into training, Tashkeel and Ductuc, both of which teach drawing manga. Most comic books produced in the Emirates are English-language; exceptions are Gold Ring, written in Arabic by Qais Sedqi (Noura Masri, interview 2015), and, of course, Majid. From the small sample of comics I looked at, they were in full color, printed on quality paper, with firm covers and bindings. Comic art in UAE is on an upswing, according to cartoonists with whom I talked. But, a key question they continue to seek answers to is, how can we create a viable comics industry here from which we can make a decent living? References Abu Dhabi Music and Art Foundation. 2014. “Abu Dhabi Music & Arts Foundation in Association with Mubadala Announce ‘The ADMAF Comic Arts Award 2014.” Emirates News Agency. October 22. http://wam.ae/en/details/1395271243859. Accessed December 8, 2019. Adams, Gaar. 2015. “Sci-Fi City.” Slate. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/roads /2015/05/middle_east_film_comic_con_dubai_the_world_s_most_science_fictional_city .html. Accessed September 11, 2015. Adham, Zaid. 2015. Interview with John A. Lent, Dubai, UAE, June 14.

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Al Ali, Maha. 2015. Interview with John A. Lent, Dubai, UAE, June 14. Al Bustani, Hareth. 2013. “UAE Artists Who Are Drawn to Animation.” The National UAE, October 13. http://www.thenational.ae/uae/uae-artists-who-are-drawn-to-animation. Accessed September 11, 2015. Alireza, Yasser. 2015. Interview with John A. Lent, Dubai, UAE, June 14. Arrant, Chris. 2011. “Cartoon Network Launches Animation Development Studio in Abu Dhabi.” Cartoon Brew, June 30. http://www.cartoonbrew.com/biz/cartoon-network-launches-anima tion-development-studio-in-abu-dhabi-45440.html. Accessed September 11, 2015. Lord, Christopher. 2012. “Animation Talent Is on the Rise in Abu Dhabi.” The National UAE. January 31. Accessed September 11, 2015. Masri, Noura. 2015. Interview with John A. Lent, Dubai, UAE, June 14. Mathew, Melvin. 2015. Interviews with John A. Lent, Dubai, UAE, June 9, 14. “Middle East Film and Comic Con.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East_Film_ and_Comic_Con. Accessed September 11, 2015. Sager, Gaith. 2010. “‘Majeed,’ the Most Famous Arabic Cartoon Character to Enter the Augmented Reality World.” Arab Crunch. February 23. http://arabcrunch.com/2010/02/% E2%80%9Cmajed%E2%80%9D-the-most-famous-arabic-cartoon-character-to-enter-theaug mented-reality-world.html. Accessed September 11, 2015. Saleh, Sajeda. 2015. Interview with John A. Lent, Dubai, UAE, June 14. Sudhakaran, Chitra. 2015. Interviews with John A. Lent, Dubai, UAE, June 9, 14. UAEBBY. “Books Made in UAE1. 100% Emirati Children’s Books.” http://uaebby.org.ae/ widget .php?id=195&n=Books_Made_In_UAE_1&lang=1. Accessed September 11, 2015.

Hypercomics: The Shape of Comics to Come Paul Gravett Reprinted with permission of Paul Gravett from paulgravett.com, posted September 5, 2010. © 2010 Paul Gravett.

A hypercomic can be thought of as a webcomic with a multi-cursal narrative structure. In a hypercomic the choices made by the reader may influence the sequence of events, the outcome of events or the point of view through which events are seen . . . it’s that element of reader choice and interaction that makes a hypercomic a hypercomic. This is British comics experimenter supreme Daniel Merlin Goodbrey’s definition of hypercomics which helped to inspire and underpin the exhibition I have curated about them for the Pump House Gallery in London’s Battersea Park, continuing until September 26. I will be giving an illustrated talk there about the show and its concepts on Wednesday, September 15, 7 p.m., as part of the SW11 Literary Festival, entitled More Than Words Can Say: The Future Is Graphic. For me, the key to hypercomics is their ability to branch off into multilinear yet interrelated storylines and push against the traditional constraints of the page format, reading order, or panel layouts we’re used to. Comics have been defined for so long by their print incarnations, and even now most webcomics conform to individual “pages” within the standard rectangular computer screen. Hypercomics explore where the medium might be heading next, especially with the growth of iPhones, iPads, and other readers and the scope of greater interactivity. I’m convinced that there’s massive potential still to be unlocked in how we create and experience “the shapes of comics to come.” So how did this project come about? Exhibitions officer at Pump House Nick Kaplony knew about the Comica Festival and contacted me about a year ago to start developing a comics-related show. From a long list of candidates, the four artists were selected to create contrasting content. To secure the funding, at least one of the four had to come from exhibiting in the contemporary art gallery scene, so that was one criterion that brought in Adam Dant. I was aware of 202

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Dave McKean’s and Warren Pleece’s previous gallery-orientated projects along these lines—Dave’s Coast Road show in Rye and Warren’s Montague Terrace digital media show in Brighton—and thought they would be ideal. And from the outset I wanted Daniel Merlin Goodbrey as the UK’s true techno-wizard of rigorous comics experimentation. Daniel was closely involved back in 2003 at the start of Comica with the still-remarkable collaborative PoCom or Potential Comics wall that was shown in the ICA Concourse Gallery. I was already aware of the Pump House Gallery as a unique location, a hidden gem, a quirky four-floor tower tucked away in Battersea Park. In fact, it really was a huge tall pump house built in 1861, 250 years ago next year. The location came first and I saw it as defining the exhibition, as both a space and a setting. I asked all four artists to respond in some way to it in their pieces, imagining their stories around it, creating an alternative existence, past, present, or future, for the building. The other proviso behind the Hypercomics exhibition was to encourage the artists to explore different forms and formats of comics. During their print incarnation, comics have conformed to the page and book, but their origins go right back to the very first art galleries, caves. What happens when we liberate comics from the confines of the standardized uniform page and the system of reading only one, singular story from beginning to middle to end? Hypercomics taps into yet another evolution of comics as “Gallery Comics,” an artworld trend that is seeing artists conceive comics from the outset and sometimes exclusively to be shown and experienced in a gallery setting. This too offers exciting opportunities to immerse the reader/viewer within the comics and use 3D objects and props and other devices to engage and communicate. Clearly gaming, from role-playing multiple choice to the access to different levels and lives, has also been a huge influence on many creators and readers of comics, above all by allowing the reader/viewer/player to interact and drive the story, and offering a variety of different outcomes, not just one reading and one ending. Out of all these trends, hypercomics is emerging as the term for experimental comics that present stories with multiple branches or pathways, creating echoes and resonances between them, or several different perspectives on the same character or event, and at more than one moment or time period. Comics has always been a peculiar medium, in that it lets us see past, present, and future all at once, from panel to panel, page to page, unlike the pictureless prose novel or a time-locked, durational, image-by-image ephemeral movie, TV show, or play. With comics, we can grasp the whole and explore and move about within it, looking back, looking ahead. Hypercomics allow comics to expand on this property and transform visual/verbal storytelling yet again for the twenty-first century.

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The Pump House Gallery plays a part in the narrative of the story, three floors and a mezzanine on top, converted from a Victorian pump house next to a boating lake in London’s mostly sublime Battersea Park. So as curator I wanted each artist to use the venue as a setting for their stories, a springboard for ideas. Warren Pleece has imagined the building as the first stage of a conversion into a huge apartment block, Montague Terrace. He has even designed an advert for the sandwich board outside the gallery inviting visitors to view the first phase of the “deluxe, moderne apartments” on show inside. Meanwhile, Daniel Merlin Goodbrey transforms the building into an archive of a glam-rock-star-turned-world-dictator. Dave McKean’s “The Rut” responds to the setting itself and the views from the Pump House itself to extrapolate an assault in the park and relate this to the former deer enclosure nearby (exhibit photo, figure 50). Adam Dant converts his top-floor “attic” into urban magician Dr. London’s late Tudor library of arcane books. Personally, I enjoy how distinctly different each artist’s contribution has turned out and yet how they subtly interrelate. In each case, the audience can interact with the hypercomics and follow different narrative paths. Pleece invites the public to press a door buzzer and spy on one of four bizarre tenants in his block of flats, while becoming a tenant themselves sitting on a sofa in a fifth flat. Goodbrey presents three grids of multinodal diaries about the work, play, and dreams of a lone archivist. McKean unfolds an assault from the viewpoints of perpetrator, victim, and witness, their stories branching off literally around the gallery, and then asks visitors to look through three masks at the story again, revisited in later life as the truth becomes distorted and ambiguous. Dant displays Dr. London’s historic map of London overlaid with the outlines of a fetal body, the city’s streets as arteries. Visitors can then relate different parts of the capital with their corresponding parts of the body, which are the subjects of a series of bookcases painted in oils with trompe l’oeil spines and their surreal titles. In a final exhibit outside the gallery, comic artists Sean Azzopardi, Joe Decie, John Cei Douglas, Ellen Lindner, Douglas Noble, and Paul O’Connell have taken over the Boating Shelter nearby to paste up eight different short comic strips about a fictional 1974 gig supposedly held at Battersea Park’s bandstand by Goodbrey’s megastar Hieronymus Pop. These are printed large like rock concert posters and, pasted up on the eight sides of the shelter, can be read in any order. Hypercomics is very much a physical “Hi-Touch” experience of site-specific comics you have to see in person, in situ, in context. In addition, in the zine tradition, there’s also a limited-edition photocopied compilation of all of the Hieronymus Pop strips, plus four unexhibited extras, available from the gallery, and instead of the usual rather dull A5 exhibition flyer produced in-house, Hypercomics is being promoted through a free twelve-page newspaper “comic,”

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Figure 50. Dave McKean. 2010. Installation view of “The Rut” as seen in Hypercomics: The Shape of Comics to Come at the Pump House Gallery, London. Photo by Dave McKean. Courtesy of Paul Gravett.

an artists’ commission drawn and designed by the collective Le Gun. That said, we are also developing with the artists some related virtual offshoots; for example, on a special hypercomics website where the public can submit their own responses to the four exhibits to expand aspects of each storyline. The fourth glass wall of Daniel Merlin Goodbrey’s gallery consists of simply a link to his website where throughout the show he is adding new entries about the life of Hieronymus Pop. Also we are working with a design team to produce introductory apps for the iPad as free promotions to present the four artists’ branching storylines and to investigate the iPad’s potential as a vehicle for hypercomics. Still, for all these newfangled technical advances, there will always be something special and covetable about the printed or physical object of the comic that can’t be experienced digitally. The comic appeals as tactile art object, with the feel of paper, the aroma of ink, the ease of flipping through pages, something

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to hold, all of this remains very special. So McKean’s “The Rut” will reappear in the second volume of his short comics compendium, Pictures That Tick, while both Goodbrey’s and Pleece’s works are intended for eventual print publication. The book has always been wonderfully interactive. Far from replacing print, the Internet seems to be leading to more beautifully designed and produced books, and notably graphic novels; for example, those by Chris Ware or Seth. Even where entire comics are available for free online, many people still want to own the same content in printed form. This Hypercomics exhibition hopes to suggest new avenues for the comics medium and how it can relate stories and creators with consumers, and vice versa. I think more and more people realize that there is a far broader spectrum of content and art styles to comics than the Beano or Batman, not that there’s anything wrong with either of those. The problem is that many comics end up looking and reading almost exactly the same—whether it’s superheroes, zombies, or Sherlock Holmes—because many people like these familiar tales, good vs. evil, boy meets girl, hero defeats villain, stories as old as time, genres as rituals and comfort zones. While these tropes can give us an amazingly rich foundation of storytelling, comics use pictures, and pictures and words, offering such a vast range of text and images to draw upon when creating graphic narratives. With Hypercomics I wanted to see what happens when we let comics escape overfamiliar, well-worn yarns and chart fresh territories. I hope it gives some ideas of what lies out there, where this still evanescent, ever-nascent medium is heading. Take time and I hope you’ll find this content-rich show surprising and rewarding.

Sequential Titillation: Comics Stripped at the Museum of Sex, New York Craig Yoe

In 2011, Comics Stripped, a show exploring sexual situations, political taboos, and other risqué topics was organized at the Museum of Sex in New York by the comics historian/publisher/collector/entrepreneur Craig Yoe (figures 51, 52). Covering the decades between the Great Depression to the present, the show featured art by Joe Shuster, R. Crumb, Wally Wood, Jack Cole, Tom of Finland, and many others. Topics included Tijuana Bibles (“The People’s Pornography”), 1950s men’s magazines, censorship crusades, the underground comix revolution, fetish art by Joe Shuster (as featured in Yoe’s book Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-Creator Joe Shuster) and Eric Stanton, cartoon porn, same-sex comics, and international comics. The following are Craig Yoe’s comments about the show, sharing his collection, and the public response. The main reason I’m involved in comics, since day one (i.e., when I was six years old and discovered Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories), is because they’re fun! I make no apologies about that. So, reading them, collecting them, writing, designing, and publishing books about comic books with Yoe Books, I do primarily for fun. Lending original comic art from my archives to museums is an extension of that. It’s fun to share! Though I’ve heard some other people’s horror stories about lost or even stolen art I have never had anything but a good—yes, fun—experience. I will say the good times are slightly diminished when I do worry sometimes about the art not coming home safe and sound, but I never had a whit of trouble. I have been honored to lend art and helped with exhibits for the MOMA, the Morgan Library, MOCCA, the Hammer Museum, and the Charles Schulz Museum. I was proud to have been on the board of the ToonSeum and, of course, lent them some of my treasures. My collection of original art from my book The Art of Mickey Mouse (which was composed of artists from around the world 207

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Figure 51. Exhibition view of Comics Stripped featuring a giant reproduction of Wally Wood’s “Disney Memorial Orgy,” originally published in Paul Krasner’s The Realist in 1967. 2001. Courtesy of the Museum of Sex.

Figure 52. Exhibition view of Comics Stripped featuring a large panel by R. Crumb in a display of underground comix. 2001. Courtesy of the Museum of Sex.

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doing their interpretation of the world’s most famous rodent) toured museums in seven cities in Japan, and I was flown there to be interviewed on TV—fun! The wonderful Society of Illustrators did a whole show of my favorite one hundred pieces from my collection that gave a whole overview of the high points of comic history from the Yellow Kid to King Kirby and Robert Crumb. But, totally zeroing in on the fun aspect, the most fun exhibit I was a part of was the Comics Stripped show at the Museum of Sex in New York City. I had pitched by phone a show to the Museum of Sex about my book Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-Creator Joe Shuster. The timing wasn’t good for the museum and they politely turned me down, but they did have me give a well-attended talk on Shuster’s erotica. We got to know each other and hit it off through that and they came back later with a proposal to do a whole museum-wide show on sex and comics. That sounded like fun! Comics Stripped was cocurated by myself and Sarah Forbes of the Museum of Sex; Sarah and the whole staff were a great pleasure to work with. Sarah gave me early advice to not choose too much mild work in the exhibit. The museum’s expectant patrons, Sarah assured me, would be vastly disappointed if a good portion of the art didn’t include, in Sarah’s word’s, “fucking and sucking.” Sounded good to me. I did have a slight reluctance, not about the content but about the presentation of it as previous exhibits I had seen at the museum were fascinating, but as a designer I thought they could have been slicker. On opening night I was floored. The designers did a stellar job; it was stunningly beautiful (as are other exhibits I’ve seen there since). The designers did take my suggestion to do a full wall blow-up of Wally Wood’s Disneyland Memorial Orgy and it was visually arresting though no one was arrested by New York’s Finest by a call from Disney’s lawyers, thank God! Actually, if I went to jail, Sarah again reassuringly told me, it would be great publicity for the show! The opening night of Comics Stripped had a ton of press people from ABCTV to the Village Voice to comics bloggers and news sites like Comics Alliance. The crowd was underground and above-ground cartoonists and collector-type lenders who contributed art and artifacts to the show. There were sex workers, art lovers, museum geeks, historians, party animals, pin-up models, celebs of different sorts, cool young hipsters, and dirty old men and women. After the kick-off, the museum’s audience for the exhibit at first was a big crowd of comics fans—it opened right after a New York Comic Con and there

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were plenty of comics lovers in town. But mostly the show was seen by tourists from all over the world who are the Museum of Sex’s usual attendees (adult’s only!—even my newborn son was not permitted entrance by the museum staff when my relatives took the show in). The show had a very long run; it was held over three times, it was so popular. I guess people found it fun. A museum show about comics and sex: the most fun you can have with your clothes on!

MASTERS OF HIGH AND LOW: EXHIBITIONS IN DIALOGUE Controversy often spurs change. High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture (MOMA, 1990) and Masters of American Comics (Hammer/MOCA LA, 2005–2006) are probably the two highest profile shows involving comics to date. Both were very controversial, generating a flood of national media and fan debate, changing people’s attitudes about comic art and pushing comics exhibitions into new territory in the process. The story of these two shows begins in 1983, with The Comic Art Show, an ambitious exhibit at the Whitney’s Downtown Gallery on Wall Street in New York. The show was a celebration of the new wave of pop art exploding from the streets and subways of the East Village, which was displayed with comic art, 1960s pop art, graffiti, and animation. It was curated by John Carlin and Sheena Wagstaff, who were graduate students in the Whitney’s Independent Study Program. This show is notable for the group of comics advocates it brought together: Carlin, Wagstaff, Art Spiegelman, and Brian Walker. Ann Philbin, who saw this show as a grad student, would bring Carlin, Spiegelman, and Walker back together to organize Masters of American Comics in 2005 after she was named director of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Carlin, who in 1983 was working on his PHD at Yale, was denied the opportunity to write his thesis on popular culture, so he poured his ideas about comics and aesthetics into catalog essays for The Comic Art Show instead. Art historian David Deitcher responded to Carlin in a strongly critical review of this show and catalog in a 1984 review in Art in America. Deicher’s review is emblematic of the transition the New York art world was undergoing in the ’80s, with one foot in postmodernism and the other still firmly planted in the modernist theory that dominated the museums, university art programs, influential critics, and galleries. Throughout the 1980s, the New York museums, particularly MOMA, came under increasing pressure to become more inclusive; to pay attention to how their curatorial and collecting choices privileged the selected works, and to spread that attention around to a more diverse group. Essays in art magazines pointed out issues of colonialism, classism, and gender inequality. The letters 211

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sections of mainstream artist magazines like Art Digest printed many letters from traditional figurative artists wondering if galleries and museums would ever be open to them again. Some artists took to the streets, like the Guerrilla Girls, who famously pointed to the lack of work by women artists on display at the Metropolitan Museum and jokingly asked if women “had to be naked” to be exhibited there. Mounting his own protest was Jonah Kinigstein, a classically trained artist who drew acidic satirical cartoons of the art world denizens he blamed for his misery, which he pasted up on any available wall in SoHo. Kinigstein, an overnight success decades in the making, was recently rediscovered by Gary Groth of Fantagraphics and the subject of a 2015 exhibit at the Society of Illustrators (SOI) in New York. Of his cartoons, R. Crumb said: Kinigstein is such a negative artist. This obsession with putting down modern art—he’s just jealous because his work looks like something out of 1810. Obviously he is going to be ignored by all the critics in New York. His cup of bitterness is filled up to the brim because they all prefer Andy Warhol and Cy Twombly over his archaic cartoons. It’s an act of charity that Fantagraphics has chosen to finally give this ancient old crank some recognition for a lifetime devoted to raving in the wilderness about the sins of the art establishment of Babylon. Surely there are a few readers out there who will derive a chuckle or two from these quaint grotesqueries of Mr. Kinigstein’s. I for one will want a copy for my library, alongside the works of other mad artists from the fringes, whom I must confess, as a born contrarian myself, I do have a warm spot for. So let us raise a toast to old Kinigstein, and wish him yet more years of righteous indignation at the flim flammeries of the fine art world. Now that “outsider art” is the thing, perhaps his time has finally come. (2014) For this book, Karen Green, curator for comics and cartoons at Columbia’s Butler Library, visited Kinigstein at his studio to discuss his cartoons and his SOI exhibition. MOMA’s 1990 exhibition High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture (Tour: Chicago, Los Angeles) was the first show organized by MOMA’s new director of painting and sculpture Kirk Varnedoe and New Yorker art critic Adam Gopnik. Designed to turn a new page and break MOMA out of the strict modernist straitjacket it had worn for decades, it focused on the artistic interplay between modern art and popular culture (specifically comics, caricature, graffiti, and advertising). This new direction was controversial as soon as the show was announced. Critics felt that the show went too far in the move away from modernism (Hilton Kramer) or not far enough by focusing on such a limited sample of popular culture (Arthur Danto). Comics advocates felt the

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curatorial choices and the exhibit design still dismissed comics as source material for pop art. The heated debate over this exhibit, the curatorial choices, and the long-term mission of MOMA reverberated for years to follow. In his thought-provoking, detailed essay on comics in the High and Low catalog, Adam Gopnik observed that “Pop Art saved comics.” Some may disagree with his opinion that Marvel reinvigorated its branding after a decade of strangulation by the Comics Code Authority by appropriating some of the idioms of pop art, but he was right if you are thinking about comics and exhibitions. It’s not that pop art directly did comics any favors, but the opposing response to it galvanized cartoonists and comics supporters, prodding them to move comics to the next level of recognition. The High and Low exhibition design undercut Gopnik’s insightful catalog essay by primarily showing comics as source material for the modernist masterpieces in MOMA’s collection. Here we have a trio of influential essays on High and Low: graphics journalist Michael Dooley’s 1990 assessment for Print magazine, with a new afterword about the legacy of the show; Art Spiegelman’s biting 1990 Artforum review; and criticism from cultural entrepreneur John Carlin, who would curate the Masters show fifteen years later with Brian Walker as cocurator and Spiegelman as a special consultant. Ann Philbin became director of the Drawing Center in New York and invited Carlin and Spiegelman to curate comics shows there. When she became the director of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, she invited Carlin, Spiegelman, and Walker to organize the comics show they had always dreamed of. Masters of American Comics, shown jointly at the Hammer and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (2005–2006, tour: Milwaukee, New York/ Newark), was designed as a reply to MOMA’s High and Low show. Masters featured the best-known examples of artwork by fifteen renowned cartoonists in individual mini-galleries. The show was split between two influential fine art museums, with the evolution of the comic strip at the Hammer Museum, and the evolution of the comic book at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. With the stated goal of creating a canon, the curators of this elegant production, Carlin, Spiegelman, and Walker courted controversy by picking fourteen white men and George Herriman, who was African American, as the celebrated geniuses, excluding women or other people of color. Whether this provocation was intentional or not, the resulting national debate as artists, critics, and fans insistently argued for their favorites helped define what we expect from exhibitions of comics art and who was widely thought to be doing museum-quality work. Ending this section are four articles related to the Masters show. First, an interview conducted by Leslie Jones of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art with curator John Carlin about his criteria for selecting the artists, followed by

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cultural journalist Scott Timberg, who looked at Masters from every angle for the Los Angeles Times. Trina Robbins, collector and comics herstorian, called the curator’s bluff by speaking about deserving women cartoonists at both the Hammer and at the Jewish Museum (New York). In New York, Robbins organized She Draws Comics, an exhibition of all women cartoonists at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in rebuttal to the all-male Masters show. This essay is the text of her presentation at the Hammer. Academic and curator Damian Duffy looks at the challenges of fitting comics into a fine art framework in Masters and in Splat, Boom, Pow! (2003, Contemporary Art Museum Houston, tour: ICA Boston, Wexner in Columbus), emphasizing diversity and suggesting how comics could be better presented using new media.

Comic Connoisseurs David Deitcher Reprinted with permission of David Deitcher. Originally published in Art in America, February 1984, pages 101–7, courtesy Art Media AIA, LLC.

Last August, The Comic Art Show surveyed the relationship between comic art, from its emergence at the turn of the century as a “strip,” and painting, which has been affected by this development in any number of ways. Organized for the downtown branch of the Whitney Museum by Helena Rubinstein fellows John Carlin and Sheena Wagstaff, the exhibition intermingled comic art and paintings on the same gallery walls: Roy Lichtenstein’s I can see the whole room . . . (1961) appeared alongside comics like Winsor McCay’s Little Sammy Sneeze (1905), Stuart Davis’s Lucky Strike (1924), and Jasper Johns’s Alley Oop (1958) juxtaposed with a Hopi Indian painted-wood rendition of Mickey Mouse (ca. 1950). In this way the curators acted intentionally to suspend the distinction between “high” and “low” culture. But a closer examination of The Comic Art Show and its critical reception suggests that this distinction is a deeply entrenched one and will not disappear simply by curatorial decree. The terms by which privilege operates in our culture may seem momentarily to have been displaced, but they come rushing back with a vengeance—often when and where we least expect them. The exhibition attracted a good deal of publicity, if not too much serious critical discussion. All of the standard New York venues (plus Newsweek) published articles about The Comic Art Show, but none of them chose to address the fact that cartoons and “museum” art were getting the same treatment at the same time and place. Although he actually said nothing about it at all, John Russell revealed the stubbornness of the high/low distinction by dividing his review in the New York Times into two parts: one for the comic art and another for just plain art. Other critics expressed a nationalistic enthusiasm for so “wholly American” a form of cultural expression; there were also a few scatterbrained attempts to assess the comics’ “social function”: for example, how Little Orphan Annie “plucked up” the sagging spirits of Depression-era 215

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America. By and large, however, reviewers simply paid homage to the “genius” of the long-established pantheon of comic art or expressed surprise and pleasure at seeing some remarkable images by Davis, Johns, Warhol, and others. The most stinging criticism of the show centered on the absence of Philip Guston. All of this suggests that twenty years after the heyday of pop art, the distinction between high and low culture may not have been “smudged” or “eroded.”1 The installation was “framed” by a catalog containing seven essays, several of which refer to French poststructuralist theory. Thus, Carlin and Wagstaff write, “The combination of painting and comics emphasizes the omnipresent role of the sign in our society while simultaneously establishing its critique.”2 However, it is unlikely that Eduardo Paolozzi’s Bunk collages, executed in 1947 in London, “deconstructed American pop culture from a Dadaist perspective,” as they claim. For the magazine covers, advertising logos, and popular postcards that went into these amusing works were more likely regarded, in a depressing postwar context utterly depleted of flashy commodities and ads, as exotic and diverting rather than as mind-controlling and in need of “deconstruction.” A number of structuralist and poststructuralist writers—Roland Barthes, in particular—themselves turned to mass culture in an attempt to escape the hermeticism of their own literary theory. In an ironic twist, Carlin and Wagstaff use the same body of literary theory to aestheticize the comics. In their desire to see comics as art, they have transformed the comics into art. For example, in his essay “In Praise of Folly: The Early Development of Comics in Art,” Carlin speculates intelligently about the mythopoetic function of comics in modern society: they exorcise “hidden impulses in a seemingly innocent fashion . . . like dreams, whose distortions and displacement of everyday life make social integration possible.” Yet this observation occurs in the midst of a gloss on the history of the “comics in art” which begins with the cave art of Paleolithic man, in which, Carlin tells us, “the technique was that of the cartoon.” We then advance to Egyptian hieroglyphics (“the real development of a grammatical relationship between images”); skip millennia to medieval manuscripts, Gothic stained-glass windows, and Leonardo’s notebooks (cited for their “linking of text and image”); then, to make a short version of a very long story even shorter, push onward inexorably to the “surreal” landscapes of Krazy Kat. What this comic history reveals is a strong impulse on the part of its author to valorize the comics by treating them according to a methodology derived from mainstream art history. Surely an individual sufficiently familiar with Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive project to quote from it should have examined his own compulsion to colonize the history of images in this way and to disregard the differences that distinguish one type of images from another.

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In the absence of that kind of critical self-consciousness, the comics are uncomfortably inscribed into art history, and the complex, often antagonistic relationships between comics and art throughout the twentieth century are never illuminated. The curators’ tendency to see comics through the distorting lens of aesthetics encouraged viewers to interpret the comic strip’s often playful relation to visual codes as a trace of modernist “self-reflexivity.” In this context, the play on the status of ink as coffee (or vice versa) in Harvey Kurtzman’s Silver Linings brought to mind Magritte’s The Wind and the Song. But when, in Winsor McCay’s Little Sammy Sneeze, the kid’s sneeze shatters the frames separating each panel, can we justifiably claim this constitutes a “shattering of the plane,” as Roberta Smith did in her review of the show in the Village Voice?3 Here—and again when she claims that the protagonists in Gasoline Alley “walk through the abstract patterns similar to Frank Stella’s ‘Protractor’ paintings”—Smith follows the curators’ lead and submits comic art to the modernist paradigm. Whereas a genuinely critical enterprise would have used comic art to question that paradigm. At times, this tendency to aestheticize the comics itself reached comic proportions—nowhere more so than in comic historian and collector Richard Marschall’s paean to “The Golden Age: Origins and Early Masters.” (Marschall is also a major lender to the show.) In this, the catalog’s longest essay, Marschall describes Cliff Sterrett’s Polly and Her Pals (1929): “The resultant rhythm gives Polly an abstract harmony which perfectly syncopates the elements of the static comic strip into a masterly rendering of movement and music (Sterrett’s abstract strips bring him close to Kandinsky’s Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk).” This “Wagnerian” strip shows, in the reflection of a frozen pond, how “Paw,” on skates, mistakes “someone for his wife” and suffers the “consequences of his ensuing affectionate shove.” Marschall neglects to add, however, that this “someone” is in fact an obese black woman depicted according to racial stereotype, as interpreted by this particular comic “master”—a fact which was undoubtedly the source of the strip’s humor for people in its day (and still, alas, in ours). Baudelaire’s remark, in his essay “On the Essence of Laughter,” on the link between the comic and a will to mastery seems relevant here: “As the comic is a sign of superiority, or of a belief in one’s own superiority, it is natural to hold that . . . the nations of the world will see a multiplication of comic themes in proportion as their superiority increases.”4 Although a quote from the same Baudelaire essay (to the effect that some comic images “contain a mysterious, lasting, eternal element which recommends them to the attention of artists”) is used as the epigraph for Carlin and Wagstaff ’s catalog, they do not mention the remark quoted above. Which is

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hardly surprising, since it reminds us that comic strips are vehicles of ideology—an “ugly” fact that is made to disappear almost entirely from The Comic Art Show. The will to transform comics into art, and thereby to isolate them from ideology, is hardly limited to the work of these curators. Over the past two decades in the United States the academic institutionalization of the comics has kept pace with their ever-increasing desirability as “collectables.” When in their introduction Carlin and Wagstaff define the comic strip—“The salient feature of the comic strip . . . is its integral use of image and text within a narrative sequence, employing a continuing cast of characters”—they omit one important detail. The twentieth-century comic strip (or, for that matter, the caricature or broadside of earlier times) exist as a mass-produced and mass-disseminated image. Its format and formal qualities—economy and easy legibility, the particular effectiveness with which it integrates image and text, the fact that it offers a continuing cast of characters—are all related to its economic function: comics were meant to—and did—sell newspapers. The comic artist as “master” is only part of the story; it is only at the intersection of artist, newspaper, and reader— and all the conditions imposed on comic art by each of these categories—that the comic strip acquires its identity as part of popular or mass culture. During the same twenty years which have seen the academization and fetishization of the comics in the United States, writers in Europe and the Third World—Umberto Eco, Armand Mattelart, David Kunzle, Pierre FresnaultDeruelle, Michel Serres—have also discussed comic strips, but from a semiological point of view that foregrounds the functioning of ideology in popular culture. It is significant that these contributions to the study of comic art are never cited by the curators of The Comic Art Show. In their decision to emphasize the aesthetic “mastery” of individual comic artists, to read modernism into selected comic strips, to historicize comic art as if it occupied a single art historical continuum running from Lascaux to Lee Quinones, Carlin and Wagstaff have indeed “smudged” the hierarchical distinction between high and low culture, but hardly in a way that would indicate a major cultural shift. For in this exhibition the only real shift that has taken place is that now the comics have moved under the discerning eye of a new breed of connoisseur-specialist—a comic connoisseur who applies an old set of critical terms to popular culture, discriminating it into familiar domains of superiority and inferiority. As a result, only history is eroded, and the comics cease to amuse. Notes 1. These terms are used by Dick Hebdige in his article “In Poor Taste: Notes on Pop,” Block 8 (1983). Here Hebdige calls for a reappraisal of both English and American pop art, specifically of

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its radical and generally successful assault on the distinction between “high” and “low” culture—a distinction according to which cultural institutions such as museums “valorize certain objects, certain forms of expression, certain voices to the exclusion of other objects, other forms, other voices” (p. 60). By blurring this distinction, Hebdige argues, pop simultaneously undermined the elitist category of high culture and signaled the efflorescence of vital “subcultural” forms of expression: rock music, popular graphics, “collage dressing,” etc. 2. John Carlin and Sheena Wagstaff, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Comic Quotation in Contemporary American Painting,” The Comic Art Show, New York, Whitney Museum, 1983, p. 56. 3. Roberta Smith, “Comics Stripped,” Village Voice, August 23, 1983, 94. 4. Charles Baudelaire, “On the Essence of Laughter and, in General, on the Comic in the Plastic Arts,” The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1965), 154.

Comics as Art Criticism: The Cartoons of Jonah Kinigstein Karen Green and Kim A. Munson

In 2015, the Society of Illustrators (New York) mounted The Emperor’s New Clothes: The Tower of Babel in the “Art” World, an exhibition of the satirical cartoons and original paintings of Coney Island native Jonah Kinigstein (1923–). A classically trained figurative artist who venerated the old master paintings that populated the walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Kinigstein was angered by the rigid New York art establishment of galleries, critics, collectors, and museums that grew up around modernist genres like abstraction, pop art, and minimalism and their rejection of all forms of traditional arts and figuration. Trying to protect their lucrative turf, these gatekeepers of art blocked more traditional artists from success and recognition. Taking inspiration from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cartoonists James Gillray, George Cruikshank, and Joseph Keppler, Kinigstein vented his rage by drawing vicious and grotesque cartoons of his enemies and pasting them up on the streets of SoHo during the early 1990s. In a narrow second-floor hallway at the Society of Illustrators, Kinigstein’s art world monsters writhe on the glossy, bright red walls, a hellscape of feverishly detailed drawings pulsing with sharp humor and scathing criticism. His anger at the perceived lack of talent and integrity of his victims vibrates off the walls. In these tight quarters, the viewer is thrust face first into the art world of Kinigstein’s imagination, where influential New York art critics like Clement Greenberg labor over the Frankenstein monster of contemporary art and wild orgies happen between bug-eyed artist/demons at the Cedar Tavern. The Laocoön and his sons, representing the traditional figurative arts, are assaulted on all sides by demons representing the critics, museums, galleries, and concepts that bedeviled them (see figure 53). Kinigstein’s show was a sign of the growing acceptance of comic art in galleries. Not just because his bitter, highly critical cartoons were being shown just a few blocks from the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney, the very institutions he was mocking, but because the Society of Illustrators itself had returned 220

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Figure 53. Jonah Kinigstein. 2000. The Myth Recycled. Courtesy of the artist.

to accepting comic art as a form of drawing worth celebrating. Founded in 1901 to recognize the art of illustration (see figure 54), which was itself disdained by the art world elite as “too commercial,” the society took a dim view of comics, which were perceived as being even further down the totem pole. The society resisted the inclusion of comics and cartoons for several decades, despite the early membership of legends of the medium such as Ernie Bushmiller and Rube Goldberg. This changed in 2012 when the society acquired the assets of the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art and made a new commitment to the inclusion and display of comics. Comics have driven two of the society’s most successful shows in the past decade—exhibitions of the art of R. Crumb and the artists behind Spider-Man—and the second-floor gallery at the society is devoted to comics and cartoons. Kinigstein, as a fine artist, a former commercial artist, and a cartoonist, embodied the perfect choice to exhibit in the “new” society. Comics on the wall of a museum or gallery, of course, is scarcely new. There were many publicly popular exhibitions of comic art, mainly editorial or magazine comics and comic strip art, during the World War II era. Like most of the mass media of the era, comics were drafted into the war effort as a prime means of communication to maintain support with the civilians back home. Kinigstein was drafted into the war, too, using his trained artistic eye as part of the photo-topography unit, which enhanced aerial photos of enemy territory, serving in Louisiana, Saipan, and Tinian. In 1948 after his discharge from the military, a war buddy convinced him to move to Paris, where he studied at the

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Figure 54. Exterior view of the Society of Illustrators building at 128 East 63rd Street, New York. 2010. Courtesy of the Society of Illustrators.

Académie de la Grande Chaumière and was exhibited in a number of salons. He received a Fulbright scholarship in 1955, which financed a year’s study at La Schola di Belles Artes in Rome. On return to New York he was mostly ignored, as it was abstract expressionist art, not traditional figurative art that was the signifier of postwar progress and the obsession of the New York art world. Faced with the relentless momentum of modernism, Kinigstein turned his focus to commercial art and illustration. As symbols of the art world establishment, the major New York art museums came under attack on several fronts. Criticism appeared in the 1940s and 1950s in the “Art Comics” of Ad Reinhardt, whose elaborate collages poked fun at the art world from the pages of ARTnews and other publications. Tom Wolfe’s

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savagely funny take on the art scene, The Painted World (1975), questioned the popularity and authenticity of the whole modernist movement. By the 1980s, the geist of fine art had moved on from those uptown gatekeepers, manifesting downtown in the art of Keith Haring and the new generation of pop artists exploding from the streets, galleries, and subways of the East Village. The museums came under serious pressure to become more inclusive. MOMA’s 1985 blockbuster exhibit “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern was strongly attacked with claims that the show smacked of colonialism, demanding that the museum rethink the way it displayed the art of different cultures. In the late 1980s, while Kinigstein was out wheat-pasting copies of his cartoons on the streets of SoHo and getting in fights with patrons in front of the Whitney Museum, the Guerrilla Girls launched their billboard campaign pointing out the lack of women artists on display at the Met and the other major museums. In 1990, with the retirement of longtime director William S. Rubin, MOMA bowed to this pressure, attempting to shake off the mantle of connoisseurship and embrace a more expansive concept of art history. The exhibition that symbolized this relaunch was High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture, cocurated by Kirk Varnedoe, the new director of its Department of Painting and Sculpture, and Adam Gopnik, the art critic for the New Yorker. High and Low, in the words of its press release, “addresse[d] the relationship between modern art and popular and commercial culture” through four themes: graffiti, caricature, comics, and advertising. It sought to establish lineages: from Picasso to Joseph Cornell to pop art to Jenny Holzer; from Marcel Duchamp to Claes Oldenburg to Jeff Koons. Inevitably, it included Roy Lichtenstein, a darling of modern art who has been excoriated by many in the comics community, who saw him raking in millions off the work of poorly paid and unacknowledged comics artists such as Russ Heath. The artists on the walls were, in some cases, championed by the taste-makers of the art world whom Kinigstein harpooned in his cartoons: gallerists Leo Castelli and Mary Boone, art critic Clement Greenberg, art dealer Arne Glimcher. In his New York Times review, Michael Kimmelman could have been channeling Kinigstein himself when he wondered how the exhibition would deal “with the flood tide of art produced in the last decade or so that has drawn inspiration from popular culture, much of which represents an attack on the sort of formalist vision of art history—a vision committed to the pre-eminence of style—and on the pantheon of great artists with which the Modern has long been associated?” The answer to that question differed, depending on whether one spoke to the art critics or to the public; as a headline in the Times observed on December 3, 1990, “Despite a Thrashing by Critics, Art Show Is Proving Popular.”

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The great artists MOMA has long been associated are, in many cases, also targets of Kinigstein’s caustic cartoon wit. Having fallen in love with the Old Masters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he pursued figurative art just as abstract expressionism was on the ascendant. Abstract expressionism rejected the figure entirely, interested more in color or the action of brushstrokes. Drip painters like Jackson Pollock and color field painters like Mark Rothko made works in which, in the words of Clement Greenberg, “the expression matter[ed] more than what is being expressed.” The elite understood and appreciated the avant-garde, while the masses preferred what Greenberg called “kitsch,” a synthetic art that imitates life, rather than creating something entirely new. Art for art’s sake, at all costs or as Greenberg said“subject matter or content becomes something to be avoided like a plague.”1 By the time Kinigstein was ready to exhibit his work, abstract expressionism reigned supreme. Kinigstein’s work is expressive, indeed, but without sacrificing subject matter or content. His intricate and crowded lines evoke the pointed political cartoons of masters from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: James Gillray (c. 1756– 1815), a particular hero of Kinigstein’s, and George Cruikshank (1792–1878). Often, he draws upon well-known works of art to make his points: “‘The Raft of the Medusa’ of Our Time” (Kinigstein, The Emperor’s New Clothes, page 11) parodies Théodore Géricault’s 1819 Romantic painting of the fifteen survivors of the wrecked French ship Méduse; after nearly two weeks adrift on a raft, their clothes are ragged, their bodies gaunt. In Kinigstein’s rendering, the raft’s sail reads “The Few Real Artists Left”; the desperate men, many clutching artist’s palettes, are being menaced by sharks labeled “Paula Cooper Gallery,” “Castelli Gallery,” “Sonnabend Gallery,” and so on. One man, rather than clutching the raft’s mast, holds onto an artist’s easel. In the distance are two battleships aiming torpedoes at the survivors; their flags read “MOMA” and “Critics.” Another example parodies Rembrandt’s 1632 work, “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp.” Titled “The Anatomy Lesson of Professor Tulp Recycled, or The Quacks Operate on 20th Century Art” (TENC, 9), Kinigstein’s cartoon depicts an eviscerated corpse labeled “Figurative Art,” being thoroughly dismantled by dubious doctors, labeled “Gallery Dealers,” “Critics,” “Educators,” “Curators,” and “Auction Houses.” Hanging on the wall is a scroll marked “Diagnosis”: (1) Chronic Imagery, (2) Too Much Narrative, (3) Social Conscious Interest, (4) Expressionist Tendencies, (5) Exaggerated “Schmertzin” (possibly “Schmerzen,” German for “pain”), (6) Visual Coherence, (7) Not Vague Enough for Critics to Show Their Erudition, (8) Pathogenic Contamination of Kierkegaardian Gestaltism, and (9) Do Not Resuscitate Patient Artificially, signed Dr. Tom B. Hess, Dr. Caligari—the latter referring to New York magazine art critic Thomas B. Hess, and the mysterious doctor at the center of the masterpiece of German expressionist film, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.

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But Kinigstein often relies on his own inventions, frequently set at the Cedar Tavern, where Robert Motherwell presided over a weekly artists’ salon in the 1950s. In “Maximizing Your Minimalism” (TENC, 56), set at the “Restaurant des Artistes,” John Q. Public mournfully complains to the Castelli Gallery, the O. K. Harris Gallery, and MOMA: “I asked for a gazpacho soup, a green salad, a shrimp cocktail, a two-inch steak smothered with onions and those little brown potatoes, peas, plus apple pie and chocolate ice cream—NOT this bouillon cube.” “But it’s all in there, sir!” insists Castelli the waiter, while MOMA the cook says, “Give the man the bill for the 8-course meal he ordered. It’s clear the man has no taste, and let’s not get into a discussion about what he thinks he didn’t get”—clearly evoking Greenberg’s contempt for the masses and their love of kitsch. All of these drawings and more are reproduced in The Emperor’s New Clothes: The Tower of Babel in the “Art” World, which was published by Fantagraphics in 2015. As was the case with his artwork, Kinigstein’s path to this publication was also circuitous. He sent a packet of his cartoons to the Fantagraphics office in the early 2010s, where it sat, unopened, in publisher Gary Groth’s office for nearly five years. Once Groth became curious and opened the packet, his attention was riveted; he visited Kinigstein in his Brooklyn home, and quickly consulted with the society’s executive director, Anelle Miller, about an exhibition. Happily, this nonagenarian painter and cartoonist is experiencing an “overnight” success, only fitting in a time when comic art no longer seems out of place on museum walls. In the following interview with Jonah Kinigstein (studio photo, figure 55), Karen drew out his feelings about the Society of Illustrators’ exhibition of his work, his own art background, and the genesis and “distribution” of his cartoons criticizing the art world of the 1980s. His endeavor represented a fascinating interplay of high and low: cartoons attacking the gallery scene, using the streets of the city as the walls of his museum, at last hanging on an actual museum wall (conversation edited for length and clarity). Karen Green: How did the society show come about? Whose idea was it? JK: I think it was two people; it was Anelle Miller [executive director of the Society of Illustrators] and the publisher, Gary Groth. KLG: Did Gary approach Anelle and say— JK: Well, that we don’t know. But I think, if anything, it might have been Gary Groth.

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Figure 55. Jonah Kinigstein at his studio with one of his recent paintings, inspired by the film Cabaret. 2014. Courtesy of the Society of Illustrators.

KLG: Did you think, when you had a show at the society it would be cartoons and not paintings? JK: No, as a matter of fact, I didn’t even know that the society existed. I was never there. The thing that reminded me of the society . . . I don’t think they have anything to do with it. There used to be an Illustrators something-or-other in SoHo— KLG: Illustration House? JK: Illustration House, yeah. And I would go there once in a while, just to look for what was doing. But other than that, I never went to see illustration. When I finally went to the [Society of] Illustrators, I realized they’d been around a long time.

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KLG: So, you didn’t know it existed until the show was proposed to you. And then did you go to check it out? To see what the space was going to be like? JK: Yeah, I did. As a matter of fact I didn’t know where the show was going to take place; whether it would be downstairs or upstairs. Turns out it was upstairs. KLG: Did you like that space? JK: Well, I could have chosen a better space; a larger space. It had my paintings in it, too. KLG: Did you like the red walls? JK: Well, I wasn’t really nuts about that. I prefer it to be neutral. KLG: When Kim [Munson] and I were talking about it, we were talking about how visceral your cartoons are, and how being in this long, narrow, red space actually enhanced it, in a certain way; it felt like you were actually in viscera. JK: Meanwhile, you’ve got a place downstairs that’s twice, three times the size, and I could have filled it up easily. KLG: After you saw it all installed, did you like the show; were you happy with it? JK: Well, yeah. I never had a show of cartoons. I’d had shows of paintings, but never the cartoons. Except when I glued them up in SoHo, a long time ago. KLG: Did you feel “seen” or validated by that show? JK: Yeah, I did. Of course. I mean, I’ve been putting them up—I almost had fights in SoHo. Some people just wanted to get a cartoon that I hadn’t pasted up, that I was going to paste up, because they wanted it without all the wet glue on it. But I had other people . . . I guess I was pasting it in the wrong place for them, you know, maybe on a window or something. I got a few people who called me on the show; maybe some older people, from high school. KLG: If you could have a show of your work anywhere, anywhere in the world, where would it be? JK: Let’s see now, that’s a good question. Not the Museum of Modern Art.

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KLG: No; that would be ironic in the extreme. JK: I’d want it at the Metropolitan [Museum of Art]. KLG: The hometown museum. Nice. Robert Crumb, in his blurb on your book, said, “now that ‘outsider art’ is the thing, maybe his time has come.” Do you see yourself as an outsider artist? JK: That’s funny. An outsider. I’m an insider! I’m from way back! But yeah, I’m an insider outsider. Because I believe in the past. I mean, James Gillray: nobody came up to that guy. KLG: Do you consider yourself a political cartoonist? JK: Not particularly, no. Now I’m doing more political cartoons, but just about Trump; I didn’t choose anybody else. KLG: That’s pretty meaty territory. JK: Well, you know, each day he’s in power, I could make a cartoon. KLG: I was listening to your podcast with Gil [Roth], and you talked about discovering the Old Masters and what a revelation that was, Rembrandt and Goya and Titian, and you also talked about [James] Gillray as an early cartoonist exemplar. When I look at your work, I see Gillray and I see [George] Cruikshank and I see [R.] Crumb, but I also see George Grosz, Otto Dix . . . JK: Oh yeah. KLG: . . . and at what point did you discover people like Grosz and Dix? JK: Oh, a long time ago, a long time ago. I knew [them] when I was in high school. KLG: And how did you come across them; just through reading, museums? JK: Well, first of all, we were taught a lot of things in my high school, but I was curious about the thing; I looked for it, you know, at the bookstalls and things. Yeah, I knew George Grosz’s work a long time ago . . . KLG: What high school did you go to?

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JK: James Monroe. Bronx. KLG: And it wasn’t specially geared toward art . . . ? JK: No, it was just an ordinary high school, you know. Not like [the High School of] Music and Art or anything. KLG: I didn’t learn about Dix until [the Glitter and Doom exhibition at the Met]. JK: (looking at Glitter and Doom catalog) Oh yeah. I think I got this book. This guy was the last time art meant anything. German expressionists. They had something to say, you know? And since then, the figure has dropped out of painting. KLG: When you say “they had something to say,” are you talking about the response to social pressures, to the postwar collapse, to the decadence of their society? What is it you see them responding to? JK: All that. All that. You saved me a lot of time, you know what I mean? All of it. I mean, the guy had something to say about the society—and it’s not just political, it was just something that was ingrained in that society, you know; they were what they were, and they said something. And I don’t find people interested even in that; as a matter of fact, it’s anathema. For anyone to do anything political, anything that has to do with society—they’re interested in putting little squares of orange and yellow and blue together, and gluing them on a piece of paper. KLG: I really enjoyed what you had to say about abstract expressionism and minimalism; kind of, modern art in general. I’m a medievalist, so obviously my passion is for figural art that has embedded symbolism, embedded messages, and to me when I look at modern art what I see are in-jokes—a constantly self-reflexive joke about the process of making art itself. And I don’t understand how the public is supposed to respond to that, when it’s artists making commentary for other artists. JK: Well, don’t think that the government was not involved in it somehow. Way back when, after the ’50s sometime, when Russia sent paintings over for us to look at, exhibitions, we always saw political things in it, we always saw someone signing a contract, Stalin, so forth and so on, and this was painting for them.

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KLG: Propaganda. JK: Propaganda, exactly. In order to show that we don’t have that in our country, that we can do anything we want, that’s where it started, for us. It didn’t start that way in Europe, because they already had a lot of people—they had Russians doing some pretty wild stuff in the ’20s and ’30s, in Germany. But we took it where it would be lucrative, so when everybody caught onto that, “Hey, they’re not even taking my work; I got a political message!”—they’re not gonna send that to Russia. In fact, it was anathema. A guy like Jack Levine couldn’t get it off the ground, because he was political. Not 100%, but he was. They refused his paintings when they sent it to— “We don’t want to show ’em these things. These things are bland . . . a square . . . a circle.” So if we had a show in Russia we were gonna say, hey, we don’t do things like that; we do things like this. KLG: So, I know how you feel about abstract expressionism; how do you feel about impressionism? JK: I like impressionism. Yeah, I like Renoir, Degas, in spite of the fact that he was an anti-Semite. I like all of those guys. And I love Van Gogh. I like Renoir! He made a lot of nice things. Open up the [laptop]—that is my interpretation of one of the Renoirs. This is from a cartoon of mine, “The luncheon at the boat party”; you know this thing? I’ve got the cartoon, you know? It’s not in my book. I took it and I painted different people at the boat party: I got James Joyce, I got Van Gogh and Picasso; all of them, sitting around. KLG: So . . . so you go to France . . . well, you discovered a lot of these people in high school, but you go to France, you’re in school, you’re going to the museums, you’re immersing yourself in the Old Masters, you’re painting—when do you start the cartoons? JK: Oh. Much later. Oh yeah, much later. KLG: When and why? JK: Well, I was always drawing different things, you know, but at some point— let’s see now, this must have been the late ’80s, I started to make these cartoons about painting, you know, the way I felt. And I didn’t even think about what I’m going to do with them, you know, there was no one really—there was no one out there that was going to print these things. So I decided I’ll print them myself. And I’ll glue them up in SoHo—when SoHo was SoHo. And as soon as

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I put ’em on a wall, I had some people taking it off. And I saw them take ’em off! Not to keep, always. But some people really wanted them. KLG: You were attacking some sacred cows. JK: Some people wanted to fight with me. I had to fight with people—’cause I put them on at night, I think they were fewer people walking around, you know? And I did that in the late ’80s. KLG: So, did anyone from the art world ever respond to these cartoons, when you were putting them up in the ’80s? Did Castelli or Boone . . . ? JK: I got a few people who stopped me and spoke to me, and we had some kind of a letter connection for a couple of weeks, and that was the end of it. It didn’t go further than that. But actually, let’s see, no, I think that Tom Wolfe saw one. KLG: He wrote [The Painted Word], about the art world. JK: Yeah, and he also wrote me a recommendation on my book, too. I corresponded with him; it was nice of him to write me. I wrote him—at the time, my book wasn’t out yet—so I sent him some cartoons I’d printed out and he sent me a thank-you note. He said I was going into a very dangerous territory, and he wished me well, but that it was almost a waste of time to fight the odds. KLG: I can understand why he might think it was a waste of time, but why “dangerous?” JK: Well, he might not have used that word. KLG: So, Castelli himself followed a progression from figural modern art into minimalism, right? I mean, he started collecting people whom you might have admired as well, and then his journey took him into minimalism. JK: Maybe because of who he married, you know? I think she knew more about art, probably, than he did. He was a haberdasher, I think, in the beginning, wasn’t he? KLG: Yeah. This was a hobby. JK: A hobby. Yeah. Well, anyways, he seemed to be corruptible, somehow.

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KLG: So, when you were wheat-pasting up your cartoons, was there something that was just the last straw? Some event that made you decide to do this? JK: Well, you see, all of those were about painting, and how it had deteriorated for me. It really did deteriorate. And I stopped even going to the academy. I stopped going to those meetings. When I saw what they were putting up on the walls, I said, “I don’t know these people, and I don’t want to know these people.” I was very sad about it, and to this day it’s gotten so I don’t go to meetings any more. There’s no one around anymore who I felt anything for; maybe a handful. But they’d have to be older people, you know? KLG: I understand completely the general frustration and distaste for what was going on in the art world at the time, but was there one trigger that made you say, “You know what? I’m going to start putting these on the walls down in SoHo?” JK: There was a lot. When I saw a funnel of paint, pouring, I thought, “This must be for Benjamin Moore paint!” I was disgusted. Then I saw blank canvases with a line across it. Then I saw sculpture—I mean it looked like the guy began something, but he just threw his hands up! Badly constructed armatures, with a little putty on them, and they considered this . . . I said, “I don’t belong here”; it gave me a feeling of I don’t like what’s going on. And I’ve changed very little in my point of view. As a matter of fact, I think that anything that doesn’t show some figuration, and just stays in an abstract field, for a cartoonist—every cartoonist must hate what happened. Because, looking at a cartoon, you’ve got to have figures. You can’t have just lines, and then say something funny under it. KLG: You’ve mentioned getting into the fight outside the Whitney; were you ever harassed when you were doing the pasting-up in SoHo? JK: Yes. I did. KLG: Can you give me an example? JK: A guy would come up to me and would say, “You know, this stuff is going to get ripped off, as soon as you leave from here!” And I told him, “Then rip it off.” And I got into a big argument with the guy—and I think the same thing would happen now. Even more so. It’s going in that direction. KLG: Did you feel energized by this protest? Did you feel. . . ?

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JK: I wanted to feel that way. I wanted to get revenge somehow. It was a vengeful thing for me to do that, but I didn’t have too many . . . where I had a lot of friends was in France, in Paris, because the Americans, they stuck together. And at the time, this is a period when [Jackson] Pollack is really making it. I remember—he wasn’t a friend of mine, exactly, but Paul George, he was living on, right on the Seine, in really the best neighborhood right there, and instead of having one hotel room—where everybody painted, in a hotel room—he took TWO hotel rooms; one, so he could throw the paint around, like Jackson Pollack, you know, and then, he didn’t want to get it on his own bedroom, which was next door. KLG: The hotel must have loved that. JK: So I remember that happening; it was a time that, everybody that I knew before that was figurative, or trying to be figurative, and they moved a little to the left of figuration, but it was always about something, and you couldn’t fail to know what they were trying to say. This was a different time altogether. KLG: How did you choose where you were going to paste up your cartoons? JK: Well, I picked the one place they were having shows; it was SoHo, you know? KLG: That’s the neighborhood, but what about the specific buildings? JK: Well, let’s say there was an empty store, or a place where they were making a building; I’d put ’em outside, on the construction place. I’d put ’em on garbage cans; I’d put ’em on mailboxes; I’d put ’em on all kinds of places where you could read ’em, maybe, and they won’t tear them down. KLG: Was there any one cartoon that you felt was particularly effective, out of all the ones you pasted up? JK: I liked the one I made a postcard out of. It was [Marcel] Duchamp; he started it, in a way—well, he didn’t really start it, it was a lot of people, but there are certain people that stand out. KLG: Essentially, you created an area for yourself, because nobody was really doing—I mean, these cartoons are just—nobody does stuff like this anymore. There’s political cartoons, and there’s— JK: Gillray did some.

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KLG: But I’m talking about now. So when you started doing these kinds of cartoons, did you go straight to this level of detail? JK: Yeah, they were. I’ll show you some that are very early. Has it got all of them in here? This is a very early one: this was a condemnation of the whole idea of art, and what they were doing at the time, and still doing. KLG: Well, it’s not just art . . . kind of, the elevation of abstract expressionism, but it’s also against art as industry, as business. [“The Ugly Beast That Drives the Art World,” TENC 19; see also “Adoration of the Magi,” p. 65] JK: Everything, you know? The advertisements, you know—well, I got ’em all lined up here, all these people, I condemn them; they’re all guilty, you know? And this one comes from an old William Hogarth. [“History Repeats Itself in the ‘Rake’s Progress,’” TENC 66; see also, “A Midnight Visit for the Old Alchemist Leo Castelli,” TENC 62, based on Hogarth’s “Hudibras Beats Sidrophel”] But when I started to make these, like this one here—again, this is one of the earliest ones . . . again, these are early, here, at the openings of the Whitney. I distributed them one time in front of the Whitney at one of the openings, and I had all kinds of people coming up to me, telling me I’m a Republican and starting to argue with me. KLG: What did political views have to do with your work? JK: Well, that’s just it. They connected up: if I’m not doing modern painting, you know, then I must be some communist or something, you know? Eileen: I had the car running . . . KLG: Oh, like the getaway car? [laughter] That’s interesting, because it seems like people who are conservative politically are often the ones who are resentful of modern art, and saying things like, “My child could do that.” So I guess these are more like New York Republicans, the moneyed people who can support the Leo Castellis and the Mary Boones and the Sonnabends. JK: These two are early ones that I put up. KLG: And is the blind-leading-the-blind evoking a work of art [“How to Get 904/803 Vision from your Normal 20/20 at Dr Castelli,” TENC 23], or is this your own construction? You know, like the Tulp is taking on an actual work of art . . .

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JK: Well, you know, this thing—first of all, I’m an anti-religious guy, so I picked the pope up, and all these—art became, like, there’s a pope and there’s all these little figures around him, who are saying “no” to this and “no” to that . . . this is a very early one, and then I called it “The saints come marching in.” [TENC 50] KLG: And are these names supposed to be like the gravestones on the floor of a cathedral? JK: Yeah, they’re buried here. In the ground. This one, with Pollock, is more recent. [untitled, TENC 54] KLG: Pollock and the fortune-teller. It looks like you’re going for a looser line in the more recent ones. JK: Yeah, that’s right, I am. I’m speaking like Ed Sorel now. You know Ed Sorel? I don’t know him, but he’s my kind of guy. And when Ed Sorel said this—and this is an important thing; he was being interviewed by Gary Groth—he said, “I found, after a while, that my sketches that I begin—you know, start to do the cartoon that I want—the end product turns out to be not as good as my sketches.” And I understood exactly what he said, because it was happening to me—because the freshness, the exactness, the feeling when you’re copying your own work, when you lay a tissue over, that was very important. Nobody spoke about it like he did, I tell you, he brought it right to the fore: these things are not as fresh as the other ones. The feeling of the artist doing it is not there; you’re copying your own work very carefully, and you’re losing your own passion in doing it. So some of the later ones have a lot more easy—like this one, easier. [Compare two versions of “J’Accuse, or the Triumph of Justice Over the True Criminals of the Art World,” TENC 52–53] KLG: But there’s a vibrancy to them; it feels more immediate. So, when did you discover people like Crumb? JK: Late. KLG: How late? JK: It was probably . . . 1995; very late, as a matter of fact, but I liked his work. KLG: How did you come across it?

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JK: I guess I just came across it, and then maybe I picked it up, like a book, or a cartoon. I felt there was something—first of all, he’s funny. He’s very funny, and he’s right down to the bone, you know—sometimes I feel, this guy wasn’t arrested for this thing? KLG: He has no . . . I don’t want to say shame, it’s not shame— JK: Inhibitions. KLG: He has no inhibitions. No filter. He has no feeling that there’s any reason to be ashamed of anything that he is. He’s going to bleed himself right out onto his paper. And a lot of people, I think, find it very off-putting, because not everyone wants to know what’s inside everyone’s head, especially someone who has as many things going on as Robert Crumb. JK: Yeah, a lot of people have these same feelings, but they don’t produce the art like he does. He really puts it out— KLG: So you were already drawing your cartoons before you ever saw Crumb’s work? JK: Oh, I was always drawing, but he stood out. And the other guy who stood out was [S.] Clay Wilson. Wilson I felt was a painter somewhere. I think he painted some, because there’s a lot of modern work in there that I recognize. I mean, I’m sure he didn’t hate George Grosz, that’s for sure. [Wilson] had other things—modern clichés, you know? And he put them in his work, and I liked them. Although some of the things he said were practically anti-Semitic. I don’t know if you’ve seen any cartoons like that, what he had against the Muslim grocery store, maybe. But I spoke to Gary [Groth] about the guy, and I said, Is he still making? and he said, No, he’s not doing anything anymore. KLG: So you discovered these underground cartoonists: is this something you stumbled upon on your own? Did someone hand you some comics? JK: Yeah, I stumbled on—I stumbled on a lot of things like that. They were exciting when I saw them, but I was more . . . I’m a painter, essentially. This [cartoons] thing I started because I was literally ignored by the painting people. I was in galleries, yeah—still am—but they don’t pay attention when you put figures into your work; they just don’t pay attention. And that’s what bugged me the most: it’s passé, you know?

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KLG: It’s funny, because the way that you describe going to art school, and wanting to be a figurative painter at a time when abstract expressionism was king, reflects a lot of what I’ve heard from cartoonists who went to art school, wanting to do cartooning, and then being pushed into illustration, because cartooning was not looked at as—I mean, even illustration was figurative, but cartooning was looked at as this kind of vulgar, low-class, lowbrow art form. And it’s only recently that you’ve got people really teaching cartooning in art schools. JK: You say illustration—that’s a whole different thing, though. You know, a lot of the cartoonists today are what I call “bubble people.” Their figures are bubbles, the nose becomes a bubble, the head is a bubble, fingers are bubbles—you know, it’s like the Disney kind of a thing. And it was easy to do that when you had to. But you see people who are like Gillray—the man knew how to draw figures, and very powerful figures, too. And he “cartooned” them; I mean, he disfigured them, he did everything you want to do, like he was working with clay. That’s why when we went to hear this [symposium], with [Cynthia Roman] from [The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University], she showed these figures, but she never said if there was anybody who might have learned something from these guys. She didn’t speak about that at all; she just spoke about these figures and what they had to say. KLG: So do you see other people who are out there now, or have been out there in the last fifty, sixty years, as having been influenced by the Cruikshanks and the Gillrays? Do you see anybody else working in their tradition? JK: They all have a little bit of it. But they don’t have his power. And, also, take [Bill Bramhall] in the [New York] Daily News. Now, he gets a good cartoon once in a while, he gets the point across—he doesn’t work too hard on the idea, but that’s pretty hard: every day, every day, doing that. As I understand it, those guys make more than one cartoon a day, because they’re trying to find the best way to say it. So I mean it’s really hard work to keep up with the politics, with what’s going on every day, you gotta give ’em credit for that. You know I have a cartoon that I did recently, I sent it in to the Society of Illustrators [Annual Exhibition]—They asked for a certain political cartoon, and I put this one in: it’s a man on a cross, crucified, and in his hands, where he’s crucified, there’re pen points. And I’ve got him crucified because he represented [Charlie Hebdo]. And I had two guys, two Muslims on both sides, with ammunition belts, you know, hammering these pen nibs. You know what? They never even mentioned this one. I think it was a terrific cartoon. [Eileen opines that it might have been “too much.”]

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KLG: So, are there people making art today whom you do admire? JK: When I think of that, I have to go back a few years. If they’re still alive, you know? I liked Hyman Bloom, Jack Levine. I liked Rico Lebrun. Do you know his work? I like [Leonard] Baskin. I liked a lot of people who were figurative. [ . . . ] But I’ll tell you something, there’s no one that’s young that I really like. It’s not because they’re young. You know, a guy like Al Held, you know who I’m talking about? I think he was in Paris when I was there. He’s not alive anymore. But what this man was into . . . when I go to the Museum of Modern Art, on a certain floor, I think it’s the third or fourth floor, and they’ve got the people selling the books outside, and then they have the place to go into [the gallery]: first, I gotta close my eyes, because there’s something on the wall that looks like something that makes you blink. Little squares, that are done over and over and over again, black and white, and they’re going to show me something after that? You blinded me already! It’s like a moiré. [Eileen mentions Raoul Middleman.] JK: Raoul Middleman, do you know his work? There are a few left, that are still alive; the rest of them, you know what I mean? They’re not even interested. I’m in the academy, right? But if I tried again, I’d never get in. KLG: Why do you think that? JK: Because they’re not interested in people who do figurative work. I just got in because there were other people around who were doing figurative work. KLG: You hid in the crowd! JK: I saw things in there that were ridiculous, you know? If I had it, I’d throw it out immediately in the garbage. I see things like that all the time. And guys are giving it all kinds of reviews that are great. This is the sort of thing that Jerry Price—when I see the kind of pictures he chose for this year, we should go see, there wasn’t one thing in there that I could feel anything for. KLG: So, since this book came out, and since you’ve become a kind of lightning rod for this kind of reaction against modern art, have you been contacted by young artists who are interested in figurative art? JK: No.

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KLG: You haven’t become like the banner . . . JK: No, no, I haven’t, because that book, it was a limited edition. I don’t know if he had one hundred books out, you know? KLG: Tell me, have you seen Ad Reinhardt’s cartoons? JK: Yes, I saw them. I know his work. I think he’s a strange case, because what he was trying to do was make fun of all the moderns, but he’s as guilty as all the people he was making fun of! These canvases of one color, or two colors, like Rothko, are ridiculous. He’s making fun of them? Excuse me! [See “How to Look at Modern Art in America” by Ad Reinhardt, 1961.] KLG: Why do you think he was making fun of them, then, if he was playing the same game? JK: Well, he didn’t think so. He thought that he had it, you know; somehow, he was smarter, better, more sensitive than anybody—but he was in the same game. . . . He cut everything out of engravings that were important—or not important—in the 1900s. KLG: [shows Reinhardt’s cartoon of Abstract Art saving Art on the railroad tracks] JK: Yeah, well, this is a cutout; he glued it together. What’s the difference? You know, these pictures make more sense to me than what the hell he was doing. KLG: Okay, tell me about the rats. There’re lots of rats. JK: Well, rats are a thing I could draw in and it represented things that were disgusting, to have in the house of any place, but they seem to appear in the galleries, in my drawings. This is one—do you know this painting? [“The Anatomy Lesson of Professor Tulp,” p. 9] KLG: I do indeed know that painting! I found it interesting that some of your earlier work took as its inspiration those Old Masters paintings. JK: Yeah, I’ve got one at the very end, too. KLG: But you don’t do that so much anymore?

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JK: No, I could do it, if I could find another one like that. There are some that stand out, like that thing, the Renoir stands out. Besides, it was really a good painting, I thought. KLG: I was looking for . . . this one (“Butcher,” TENC 5) reminded me of a painting that I had seen, I couldn’t remember who the artist was, and I was looking for it online, describing it, and I found something else entirely that was a similar painting, which is this: it was Kaiser Wilhelm as a butcher, in front of a butcher shop full of human body parts— [“Butchers!” by Alberto Martini] JK: I don’t know this cartoon. It’s good, though. This cartoon is good! There’s no question about it. Who did this? KLG: It’s an Italian . . . JK: Well, of course, it’s good. KLG: It’s Alberto Martini. JK: Well, I think it’s terrific, this cartoon, I’ll tell you the truth. It’s really good. I love it. [ . . . ] There’s nobody doing this sort of thing today. KLG: Well, there’s a certain amount—do you know Sue Coe? Do you know her work? JK: Oh, yeah; I know Sue Coe’s work. I like her work. She was the first one I ever saw who spoke up for the animals, animal rights, and so forth and so on. Yeah, I like her work. She did a lot of that engraving, etching, whatever it is. KLG: Do you know Lynd Ward’s work? JK: [Lynd Ward] was very famous, back when I was going to school. KLG: So you knew his work back then? JK: Oh, yeah. My teacher told us to look at his work. KLG: So how did you discover art?

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JK: I don’t know—I guess, drawing, chalk drawings on the ground with my friends, around the corner, you know? That’s it: they liked the chalk drawings, that’s how you make friends. KLG: That’s a long comics tradition. Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, started drawing chalk drawings on sidewalks. JK: Oh yeah? Is that right? Well, anyhow, I did have a talent for it. Maybe my mother—my mother used to make ducks and things, little drawings . . . I don’t know, but certainly no one encouraged me. But once I was in it, they used to say, Hey, you know, when I helped my father painting a house, Oh, this is my son, hey! you know what, he’s a real painter! So that’s it. That’s as far as it went. KLG: So, you managed to make a life with art, but not as an artist per se, right? You were doing window design . . . JK: Oh, no, I was already a painter. I did painting. When I went to Paris, it was in the late ’40s, like ’47, ’48, and I was already painting. KLG: No, no, I’m talking about as your career— JK: As my career? I knew that was going to be my career. KLG: —to pay the bills. JK: Oh, in order to pay the bills, I wanted to do something commercial, commercial art was the way. And so when I went to Cooper Union, I took that course—I had a choice of taking fine art or—so, I said, fine art, forget about it! KLG: You figured that out on your own! JK: I could figure that out on my own. Right. I mean, I don’t see anybody telling me anything great. So I mean I did need to know all the technical words and so forth, the typefaces, etc., and how to set up a small sketch for an art director, and so on. You know I had a job to do from Ralph Steadman once. You know Ralph Steadman? I saw a show of his a long time ago. I didn’t know who he was. I just went up there to get a job; he was an art director. He wasn’t an art director for long, I can tell you. He’ll admit that. I don’t even know where it was, but it was for Astronomy magazine, and I went up there and I asked him—I showed him what I do, and he said, Oh, well maybe you could do this: all the

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astronomy figures in a row, growing out of a tree. So I made that, came out on a cover of the magazine, he said, That’s fine. But I remember him. Now, that’s strange, because I remember going up to this guy, and his feet were on his desk, but not only his feet: he was wearing cowboy boots. You don’t forget a thing like that. I didn’t even know him as an artist at all; much later, years later, had a show on 45th Street, in a strange place to have a show, right in the middle of the Theatre District. So I went down there, it was a show where he had the word “gonzo” in it, because he was big on “gonzo.” And a lot of it was splatter paintings. I recognized the name, it struck a chord, but this was clearly his work. It was much later that I realized that he also did cartoons. And I bought a book of his, about Einstein, a terrific book. I really loved it. I’ve still got it. And I thought he was great when he did it. But then, you know, he went into just splatters! Now, that’s a case in point, where, if you spoke to him, Surely, you didn’t copy a thing over or trace it, did you? He’d look at me like I was some man from the moon. Are you crazy? He was the original guy to do that. KLG: His work is crude and dynamic— JK: Yeah, well, first shot, you know, you have the passion. Note 1. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review, 1939.

References Guerrilla Girls. 1998. The Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art. New York: Penguin Books. Kinigstein, Jonah. 2014. The Emperor’s New Clothes: The Tower of Babel in the “Art” World. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books. Wolfe, Tom. 1975. The Painted Word. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Zwirner, David. 2013. How to Look: Ad Reinhardt Art Comics. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag.

High Way Robbery Michael Dooley “High Way Robbery,” reprinted with permission from Michael Dooley, was originally published in Print, September/October 1991. © 1991 Michael Dooley.

MOMA’s recent High and Low show was touted as a meaningful exchange between equals—fine art and popular culture. It was no such thing, owing to knee-jerk curatorial condescension. Too bad. Kirk Varnedoe, director of the painting and sculpture department at New York’s Museum of Modern Art . . . his picture has been popping up lately. Now, why does he look familiar? Ah, yes. A Barney’s clothing store ad a few years ago. He was photographed by celebrity portraitist Annie Leibovitz in an Ermenegildo Zegna suit. He made quite an impressive model, too. With his trendy good looks, he probably could have an Amaretto named after him. Hmmm . . . Makes you wonder about the relationship between art and advertising, doesn’t it? Apparently, Varnedoe’s been wondering, too. Last year, in collaboration with Adam Gopnik, art critic of the New Yorker, he organized High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture, a major MOMA exhibition that later went on to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (see exhibit photos, figures 56, 57). This is the show that set out to demonstrate how popular culture—specifically advertising, comics, graffiti, and caricature—is worthy of serious analysis in charting the evolution of this century’s fine art. You may remember it better as the show everyone loved to hate. Even before it opened, it received both a high and a low browbeating on principle alone. Hip theorists viewed the museum’s divisions of high and low as elitist. Conservative critics saw the anticipated invasion of society’s detritus into MOMA’s hallowed spaces as heralding the total breakdown of aesthetic standards, which could only lead to design magazines publishing art reviews. Or worse. 243

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Figures 56 and 57. Installation views of the exhibition High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture. October 7, 1990–January 15, 1991. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Photo: Mali Olatunji. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York.

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Then, after the show opened amid all the hoopla, visitors looked at various kinds of work which had some obvious visual similarities and wondered just what the big deal was. The big deal—the show’s premise as put forth in its promotion material— was that, yes, there are boundaries between high and low art forms, and yet, across these boundaries, a rich and meaningful dialogue has been taking place. In this dialogue, each side appropriates from, and consequently transforms, the other. Moreover, this dialogue has earned humble display ads and cheaply printed funny papers a place alongside the Dubuffets and the Duchamps. Print readers, who are used to articles about the contributions artists and art movements have made to design’s graphic vocabulary, might wonder why it took a museum so long to get around to such a show. Ditto the art world, for which this issue has become a central concern since the Warhol ’60s. A large number of today’s artists view the mass media with mixed emotions: hatred of its mediocrity and envy of its powerful influence over people’s lives. If they aren’t busy trying to sabotage it by deconstructing its covert messages, they’re hustling to become a part of it. Museum curators, however, seem to float in an ethereal formaldehyde mist, with attitudes about pop culture, particularly advertising, ranging from ignorance to condescension, and usually encompassing both. But wait. Varnedoe . . . he was part of a print campaign that went on to feature comedian Sandra Bernhard, director Spike Lee, and the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir. So we would imagine he’d do a thorough, lively job. And we would be disappointed. The show failed, and not simply by the standards of right- and left-wing axe-grinders. More importantly, and sadder still, it failed on its own terms. The show’s attendees never arrived at an interchange; instead, they were stuck on a one-way drive up the high road. The curators could have challenged and enlightened those who view advertising as capable of nothing better than pasting Mona Lisa’s portrait onto pasta products (figure 58). They could have used A. M. Cassandre, whose posters from the 1920s and 1930s skillfully integrated aspects of Futurism, Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, and practically every other notable art movement of his time. Or PushPin Studios, April Greiman, Paul Rand, and even Herbert Matter, for that matter. Or caricaturists like Ralph Steadman or cartoonists like Art Spiegelman and other Raw magazine contributors. They could have even used real graffiti! Plenty of writers and crews would have relished the opportunity to bomb and tag MOMA’s venerable but virgin white walls.

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Figure 58. The Mona Lisa is frequently used in ads; here she is in an ad designed by Prodigious Norge, Oslo, Norway for Nescafe coffee. 2014.

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They could have, but they didn’t. Instead they used a smattering of ads, comics, caricature journals, and postcards (postcards?) antiseptically quarantined in little vitrines, solely to promote the greater glory of museum culture, the low came off as kind of a stylistic spice whose purpose was to serve the greater glory of its meat. And so MOMA’s spaces remained hallowed, and Varnedoe’s designer suit stayed free of spray paint and newsprint smudges. Fortunately for us, fine artists are a lot less effete about street life than curators are. The exhibition’s forty-plus major artists were the show’s saving grace, compensating for its one-sidedness and weak representation of the low. Most of their works, over 250 in all, had a vitality which not only captured the spirit of popular art forms but which spread beyond neat, curatorially prescribed slots. For example, the precious, poignant box constructions Joseph Cornell built during the 1940s and 1950s conveyed some of the flavor of old-fashioned store window displays, but they also resembled altars of mystic fetishism. The thickly impasted, lacerated surfaces executed by Jean Dubuffet in the late ’40s suggested not only caricature and graffiti but a post-Holocaust cry of anger and anguish as well. High and Low’s largest section, on advertising, began with a young Picasso, before he became the father of a jewelry and cosmetics entrepreneur, along with Georges Braque and Juan Gris. A corny kiosk and a clunky wall display of newspaper pages, with sections in relief, set MOMA’s stage: we were being transported back to Paris’s bourgeoning boulevard life, circa 1913. This was the newsstand where our Cubists bought their papers, and these were the pieces that they excerpted into their works. One of the wall’s projected sections showed part of a Samarataine clothing store advertisement. It was just a schlocky, unpretentious little retail ad with amateurish line art and bland lettering stuck in the midst of a cluttered page; nothing like the tasteful, high-style Barney’s layout. Nevertheless, it attracted Picasso’s mighty eyes. He clipped and pasted this fragment onto cardboard, along with other items such as a competing store’s logo and scraps of patterned paper, and voilà! He had created Au Bon Marché, an exquisitely evocative little scene of a canopied storefront, with the Samarataine lady coquettishly peering out the second-floor window in her chemise, her price floating beside her. Sex in advertising preoccupied several other artists in the show. Marcel Duchamp made minimal alterations to an innocuous tin plaque promoting paint enamel in his 1917 Readymade Girl with Bedstead to expose its latent eroticism. The seductiveness was not so subliminal in the protruding Dagmars of the vulgar Cadillac ad (figure 59) upon which Richard Hamilton based his 1958 abstract pornographic painting Hers Is a Lush Situation. With all the namebrand clutter—particularly the near-naked muscleman gripping his oversize Tootsie Pop—in Hamilton’s campy 1956 collage Just What Is It That Makes

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Figure 59. Advertisement for Cadillac cars, 1957.

Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?, the answer to the title wasn’t too hard to figure out. And headline hyperbole took on an eerie literalness with the phallic stovepipe figures in Max Ernst’s 1920 collage The Hat Makes the Man. For a straightforward appreciation of advertising at face value, the show gave us Fernand Léger. His unreserved admiration for the medium comes across strongly in The Siphon from 1924, a painting in which he elevated a seltzer bottle from a Campari ad into an icon with a nobility completely absent from the original illustration.

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We could see in the comics area of the exhibit that, like the Campari awing, the early 1960s romance and war comic books that Roy Lichtenstein “swiped” for his über-comic paintings were dull and workmanlike. But Lichtenstein’s interpretation of his material was closer to Ernst than Léger in its dehumanized vision of twentieth-century man. Intentionally or not, the commercial illustrators (figure 60) who parrot Lichtenstein’s style are bringing his irony back full circle; his work is, among several other things, a harsh indictment of the mass-production process. The stark, enormous, benday-spotted characters who inhabit his canvas look as if their lives have been mechanistically drained of all substance and crushed flat. They’ve been turned into . . . well, perhaps into the yuppies who thrill to the art of Jeff Koons. As one of the show’s representatives of contemporary art, Koons’s work was all impact and no resonance. After we’d already absorbed Andy Warhol’s cynical commentaries on commodity fetishism in an earlier part of the show, it was difficult to be impressed—for even the requisite fifteen minutes—by Koons’s gleaming stainless-steel Rabbit, modeled after a cheap plastic inflatable toy. His bunny bugs people. It’s meant to. It’s a gimmick. Koons has built an art world reputation based on skillful media-manipulation techniques. His true talents are best revealed in the self-promotion campaign he ran in various art magazines in 1988, Greg Gorman photos which looked for all the world like a series of garish rock album covers. Although these ads weren’t part of the show, they do have a great time playing with established attitudes about kitsch, merchandising, and art. Typically, advertising for serious art is the most blandly boring imaginable. To give such ads sales punch would be like . . . like an esteemed curator giving a product endorsement: It just isn’t done. Koons’s ads, though, are goofy, witty portraits of the artist as a young celebrity. Not all the artists in the contemporary section were novelty acts, though. Elizabeth Murray came across as a painter of exceptional depth and intelligence. The biomorphic forms of her large, sensuously shaped canvases created a fascinating, intricate interplay between Mutt-and-Jeff literalness and Joan Miró abstraction. Tomorrow, from 1988, with exhaust pipe legs jutting into huge bigfoot shoes with holes and noose laces was at once tender and awkward, anxious and comforting. A couple of other “bigfoot” picture makers were represented in the show as well. During the ’70s, one-time abstract expressionist Philip Guston and perennial underground cartoonist Robert Crumb had been separately sharing strikingly similar pictorial sensibilities. And thanks to the miracle of modern art museums, the funky black-comedy visions of both artists finally got to inhabit the same room: Guston’s on the wall, Crumb’s under glass. The LA installation, although more cramped than New York’s, at least provided a reading area with collections of Crumb comics. Not available for

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Figure 60. Ad spoofing the pop-art style of Roy Lichtenstein. Robert Dale. Scoresby Scotch: The Secret’s Out, 1990.

perusal, unfortunately, were the contents of the 1950s Mad comics, whose covers shared vitrine space, and anarchic attitude, with Crumb. If the curators had had a good sense of humor about themselves, they would’ve found a way for pop culture’s precursor to postmodernism, Mad editor/writer Harvey Kurtzman, to put in his two cents’ worth. His 1955 “Art” issue turned the high-low conundrum

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into a topsy-turvy farce, spinning the saga of Bill Elder, who overcame such serious “obstacles” as being able to paint like Picasso and Leonardo da Vinci, and was able to work himself up from sidewalk graffitist and advertising illustrator to become the grand master of the pinnacle of artistic achievement: a comic book pro! It’s not just the curators who could use a dose of Kurtzman’s chicken-fat humor; it’s also those postmodern egos who compensate for their failure to match the standards of past masters by claiming they’re dissolving the boundaries between high and low. Sure: ads, comics, and other aspects of everyday culture continue to become more sophisticated. And sure: fine art, as practiced by the likes of Koons, can become trivialized. But every generation believes it’s witnessing the breakdown between fine and applied art. What actually happens, though, is that the boundaries are continually being redefined. To its credit, High and Low gave us an opportunity to contemplate these boundaries. Two port-surreal high points of the lively arts, George Herriman’s giddily poetic Krazy Kat—a strip that ran from the 1910s to the 1940s—and Winsor McCay’s entrancing Little Nemo in Slumberland—from the early 1900s—were presented in their original and their printed newspaper formats. Side by side, we were able to see that the reproduction process strengthens their visual and narrative magic. Comics—as well as advertising and caricature and graffiti—are designed with the glance, the quick scan, firmly in mind. Conversely, the power of painting and sculpture can only be diminished in the mass media. The physical presence of fine art is necessary for our eyes to be seduced and our minds and spirit to be fully engaged. This becomes dramatically apparent when we stand before Jacques de la Villeglé’s raw, monumental 1960s torn poster décollages, which at one time dominated entire walls in urban Europe, or Claes Oldenburg’s sad plaster fragments of city life, small enough for us to nestle in our hand. The nuances of form and texture in a Rauschenberg assemblage, the subtleties of touch and color in Murray’s brushwork, encourage us to linger as the works slowly reveal themselves to us. The categorization of high and low is an extremely complex issue, particularly when we realize how many artists have straddled both sides of the cultural divide. Just What Is It . . . wasn’t even considered fine art at first: Hamilton created it as part of an exhibition poster for the Independent Group at Britain’s Institute of Contemporary Art. Lyonel Feininger’s 1910 painting Uprising shared a lighthearted whimsy with his Kin-der-Kids strip from four years earlier. Kurt Schwitters’s 1920s graphic design was a tidy, simplified version of his tiny, delicate collage work. And revolutionary Soviet painter-sculptorphotographer-applied artist Aleksandr Rodchenko in real-life approximation of Mad’s Bill Elder, actually gave up fine art to proudly design biscuit packages and ads for lightbulbs.

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Rodchenko, Rodchenko . . . now where have we seen his style recently? Of course! The cover for the catalog that accompanied the show! Finally, an example of high-to-low, albeit a perverse one: Steven Schoenfelder’s clever design co-opts 1920s Russian anticapitalist art to promote an AT&T-sponsored event. Another strange twist: an art catalog is supposed to serve as a supplement to an exhibition, but in this case High and Low the show serves better as a footnote to High and Low the book. And what a book! Chockablock with ideas and references, the formidable, amply illustrated 450-page telephone directory-size tome exhaustively—and often exhaustingly—presents the high-low dialogue in intricate detail. Varnedoe and Gopnik are given room to validate and expand on their thoughts as to how and why this exchange operates as it does. Their minutely detailed treatment of low art provides proof that the show’s neglect of its achievements was a failure of nerve rather than of knowledge. In the first chapter, we discover who postulated the whole concept of the high and low pas de deux in the first place: legendary Vogue art director M. F. Agha. In 1931, Agha wrote a magazine article noting how he and other designers adapted typography from European and Russian avant-garde art, art which had picked up its letterforms from earlier vernacular sources. He described this cultural flux as a giant wheel. Advertising’s triumphs and transgressions are given a more detailed, evenhanded treatment in the book. The art nouveau graphics of Jules Chéret, the acclaimed father of the modern poster, provide a crucial link between Rococo painter Antoine Watteau and postimpressionist Georges Seurat. And besides Agha, CBS’s William Golden, DDB’s Bill Bernbach, and other art directors are credited for their crafts’ contributions. The book’s atmosphere is not as snooty as we would expect from the fallout of the curatorial ether. The graffiti chapter investigates profanities inscribed on Pompeii’s walls as well as anatomical scrawls in toilet stalls. The caricature section mixes da Vinci, Edvard Munch, Miguel Corvarrubias, and Saul Steinberg. And the comics section treats such figures as Art Spiegelman, Mutt and Jeff’s Bud Fisher, and Dick Tracy’s Chester Gould with due respect. The book’s formal acknowledgments contain lengthy self-congratulations for thorough research. There are a few errors, though, mostly in the sections attributed to cowriter Gopnik. Freed from New Yorker fact-checkers, he refers to Walter Keane, kitsch painter of bug-eyed waifs, as Charles. He also confuses 1950s Dondi comic strip creators Gus Edson and Irwin Hasen with 1970s underground cartoonist Vaughn Bodé and 1980s subway tagger Dondi. Overall, though, the book is scholarly to a fault. It’s a fault that’s shared with the show as well: Varnedoe and Gopnik don’t seem to feel for popular culture so much as “appreciate” it from a distance. They assiduously cite the title of a Picasso

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collage as deriving from the refrain of a pop tune, yet they discuss Murray’s swirling and swooping 96 Tears painting without seeming to be aware that the title was also the name of a 1967 hit for ? and the Mysterians, the song’s lyrics chronicling the highs and lows of a broken romance. Ultimately it remains for other curators, unafraid of the sneers of their peers, to shed their pricey Italian jackets and fling themselves wholeheartedly into the sometimes sleek and sexy, sometimes smelly and sweaty embrace of low culture. It’s certainly a job worth doing right: after all, Agha’s wheel keeps on turning. Take the true-life saga of fine artist Ed Ruscha. We might recognize him as the cool dude who posed with his son for Herb Ritts in a Gap campaign ad. When he was a graphic design student, Ruscha switched careers after seeing a Jasper Johns reproduction in Print. Then in 1967, when he was creating the cool word-and-image canvases included in High and Low, he got the jump on Koons by over two decades with his own Artforum “personality” advertisement. More recently, his Absolut ad cuts right to the heart of liquor consumption with its murky, haunting, DTs vision of a lone wolf howling at the wilderness. And, not so coincidentally, his painting career is still going strong. Meanwhile, that Peugeot “beyond the obvious” campaign, with its bevelededge letters floating in front of brooding, shadowy images . . . it looks very familiar. In fact, it looks a whole lot like Ruscha’s recent work! Makes you wonder.

My Way along the High Way (2017) The war is over. It’s the war that began in 1990, and the battlefield was the Museum of Modern Art. Kirk Varnedoe, a New York art historian—who’d been seen in a Barney’s ad two years earlier, darkly brooding while modeling a very dark suit—set off a revolutionary bombshell, announced with a large, Rodchenko-red exclamation-pointed banner. That particular skirmish was titled High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture, and it united previously opposing ideologies, liberal and conservative, in resistance. Art Spiegelman returned the first volley, firing a witty, one-page cartoon brickbat in Artforum (figure 61). He then proceeded to recruit art/culture allies like Ann Philbin, then director of New York’s Drawing Center. To make a long years of conflict short, Philbin retrenched to Los Angeles where she became the Hammer Museum’s director. There she developed Masters of American Comics, which opened in 2005. And Boom!, borders were blasted to bits and the field of combat was leveled. Strict divisions between fine art and comics began to realign as subtle gradations on a continuum. Philbin’s show is now recognized a celebratory “canon” fire of victory.

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I’ve never really cared whether others want to insist that comics are high art; I have no mutt—or jeff—in that fight. And as a neutral observer—a conscientious non-objector, you might say—I had the extreme pleasure of witnessing the clashes and struggles that played out over those fifteen years—and beyond, from those cultural soldiers who hadn’t gotten the text memo—from start to finish, and from a variety of strategic vantage points. I’ve been exploring the dynamics between art and comics—and graphic design, my chosen profession—since my first Amazing Heroes feature, way back in ’88. “Bad Taste: Schlock, Camp, Kitsch, and Funk” was my deep delve into the many facets, pleasures, and pitfalls of vulgarity in art and comics. I branded DC story editor Mort Weisinger an uber-schlockmeister. I contrasted Marcel Duchamp’s mustachioed and hot-bottomed Mona Lisa—a deliberately campy wink at Leonardo da Vinci’s homosexuality—with Batman’s Dick. I ridiculed Jim Steranko for the kitsch surrealism of his Nick Fury and Captain America tableaus, clichéd pastiches of classic Dali, Magritte, and Ernst. And I concluded with a celebration of Funk Art. That survey ranged from the Bay Area’s Bruce Conner—who helped give the movement its name and embraced Barney Google, Toonerville Trolley, and Smokey Stover as prime examples of newspaper strip funk—to Gilbert Shelton, with his unabashed gross-out Wonder Wart-Hog antihero. And I had a rollicking good time in the process. I immediately followed up with “Superman Framed,” exploring various interpretations of one of fine art’s most frequently referenced comics figures, by everyone from Andy Warhol and Philip Pearlstein to Sigmar Polke and Susan Pitt. I then jumped up to the Comics Journal, debuting with “Comic Iconoclasm,” an examination of London’s Institute of Contemporary Art exhibition. Then in 1990 I asked Print if I could review the High and Low exhibition catalog. Instead, they had me flying from LA to New York for a full-feature analysis which I called High Way Robbery. That’s the one you’ll find in this volume. I was soon promoted to contributing editor, a title I’ve maintained for the past seventeen years. I did Ed Words: Ruscha in Print, a profile of one of the High and Low artists. I’ve covered a wide variety of design, art, photography, and comics shows, at galleries and museums such as the J. Paul Getty and LACMA, and all simultaneous with my ongoing coverage of West Coast comics conventions. My pieces now number in the hundreds, including those posted at Print’s online edition, which is where I continue to write a regular column. Oh, and I was also hired to conceive, organize, and participate in programming events for the above-mentioned Masters of American Comics show, which was so large that half of it was displayed at the Museum of Contemporary Art. My book, The Education of a Comics Artist, coedited with Steven Heller, had also been published that year. The book had sixty-plus essays by, and interviews, with everyone from Masters’ artists Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, and

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Gary Panter to experts like Tom Spurgeon, Todd Hignite, Dan Nadel, and Bart Beaty. It also included my “lowbrow art” conversation with Robert Williams, who’d become notorious when he was featured in MOCA’s 1992 Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s exhibition. So when I put together a Hammer panel I was moderating on three generations of “Masters of L.A.’s Underground Comics,” of course I included Williams, along with Carol Lay and the Hernandez Brothers. And naturally, I was delighted to see that so many of the cartoonists I’d trumpeted in “High Way Robbery”—from Feininger, Herriman, Gould, and McCay to Spiegelman, Kurtzman, and Crumb—were now among “Masters”’ star attractions. I also felt as if it’d brought my involvement with High and Low full circle. Looking back, I’m satisfied, overall. Of course, I’d shift the blame for those pathetic paintings of faux-Käthe Kollwitz children of the damned with goo-goo-googly eyes from Walter Keane to wife, Margaret. And my feelings for Jeff Koons have softened a bit. I still believe practically everything I wrote about him. Indeed, his megalomaniacal self-marketing has only skyrocketed since then. And I still love his artist-as-superstar advertisements, heirs to the “Ed Ruscha says goodbye to college joys” mock wedding announcement that ran in a 1967 Artforum. But after years of reflecting on Koons’s balloon rabbit—which always relentlessly, defiantly reflects back— I’ve discovered more humor and pleasure in its features: mysteriously opaque, deceptively and eternally carrot-stick erect, and with a disturbing, stainlessly steel sensuality. Now if only I can connect with Robert Crumb’s sexual attraction to Bugs Bunny. Moving forward, I’m retrospectively grateful that my Print feature’s first page included both Varnedoe’s Barneys ad and Spiegelman’s “High Art Lowdown” (figure 61). Sure, I have a few issues with Art’s strip, starting with its blinkered vision toward Roy Lichtenstein. And in his “missing” section, he accuses High and Low of having no WPA artists, obviously having missed the fact that Philip Guston, Fernand Léger, and Stuart Davis had been prominently represented. He also fails to acknowledge that plenty other names on his thematically random hodge-podge of a personal want list—Kurtzman, Sherman, Kruger, Scharf, Haring, Haacke, Lautrec, Grosz, Paolozzi, Mutt, Jeff, Art himself, etc.—were given due attention in the High and Low catalog. But considering it was that sort of self-righteous indignation that drove Spiegelman to help drive Philbin to create Masters—which liberated more avenues of recognition and respect for the medium I’ve dearly cherished for an entire lifetime—then I declare that all’s fair in war. And in love.

“High Art Lowdown”: This Review Is Not Sponsored by AT&T Art Spiegelman

Figure 61. Artforum, December 1990. Copyright © 1990 by Art Spiegelman, displayed with permission of the Wiley Agency LLC.

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How Low Can You Go? John Carlin Reprinted with permission of John Carlin, originally published in Paper, September 1990. © 1990 John Carlin.

Undoubtedly the big buzz in the art world this fall will be about the exhibition curated by Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik at the Museum of Modern Art High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture (opening October 7). So. Before the barrage of media descends upon us, here are a few tips to navigate the muddy waters of what is pop and what is not. 1. Pop culture is the primitivism from within. Along with African masks and other tribal images. African-American pop music helped influence the syncopated visual style we identify with modern art. Unfortunately museums by and large do not deal with non-visual influences in art, so jazz and rock don’t fit into their high/low equation. 2. Pop culture cannot truly be understood in a museum context. Bumping mass art against fine art is a stacked deck. Art is made to look good on the wall; pop culture is environmental. Its social context defines its meaning as much as its intrinsic formal values. I suggest you bring some comic books, a few toys and a Watchman to remind you that pop culture is landscape, not just a source of influence in fine art. 3. Pop culture does not deserve to be used merely as illustration. Not only does the High/Low exhibition omit the most important mass media (music, film, and video), but the curators fail to demonstrate any relation between these modules. Comics in particular have a history of independence from absolute commercial control. Their saving grace is that in the margins of popular features from Buster Brown through Peanuts, eccentrics like Herriman’s Krazy Kat through Mark Beyer’s Tony Target exist, and they deserve to be judged as art and not commercial illustration.

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4. Pop culture cannot be tamed. It cannot be collected, domesticated, bought or sold. It is. Furthermore, “bad” pop culture is typically better and more valuable than “good” pop culture. Therefore, there are layers of high and low within popular art that often reverse and confuse parallel concepts in fine art. 5. Pop culture cannot be discussed accurately in the mass media or in art journals. The media has too great a vested interest in the subject. In reading reviews of the High/Low show, be wary of the writer’s interest, including my own. This is an exhibition virtually everyone wishes they could have curated. It also is an impossible show to curate. Consequently, it will be more useful to gripe and debate than to feel satisfied that a crucial chapter in the evolution of art has been put to bed. 6. Pop culture is not low art. Someday pop will be in the forefront, not the margins, of art history. Ironically, high art has become overly controlled by the forces it is valued for resisting. All too often blue-chip art reflects the dominant ideology while pop culture chips away at the status quo. Fine art has become too satisfied with its own self-awareness while ignoring the real problems of the society in which it exists. 7. Pop culture is ugly, rude, sexist, racist and politically naive. Fine art is obscure, elitist, misogynist and has no politics. Obviously they were made for each other. 8. Pop culture and high art meet on every level of our daily life. If the MOMA show is successful, it should make us more aware of these confluent forces. Yet, by avoiding the issue of high/low as a contemporary matter, the show fails to force us to ponder the relationship as it exists in everyday life. The Keith Haring retrospective concurrently at the Queens Museum (it couldn’t make it to Manhattan precisely because of the “low” associations) does a better job of pushing our faces into the feces of schlockadelica that we all wallow in while awaiting enlightenment. Better yet, visit Ian Schrager’s newest monument to hype, the Paramount Hotel on 46th Street, where the ultra-hip style of Philippe Starck is turned on its head by Gary Panter’s eye-popping playroom for kids. Outside the hotel at night, Panter’s cotton candy Barnett Newman zips and cubistic Sylvester throne stand out like the proverbial sore thumb fighting the forces of chic and stark decorum. 9. Popular culture is both personal and public. It is the ritualistic activity that defines our individuality and fuses our collective identity. In contemporary America, we are what we watch.

Popular culture is waiting to be taken over by our generation. Let’s go remake it rather than just bumping it up against art in a museum.

Cracking the Comics Canon Leslie Jones Reprinted with permission of Leslie Jones, first published in Art on Paper (November/ December 2005): 44–49.

This winter UCLA’s Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles will jointly host Masters of American Comics (November 20, 2005, through March 12, 2006), featuring more than five hundred objects by fifteen artists who, according to the press release, “shaped the development of the American comic strip and comic book during the past century” (catalog cover figure 8, exhibit photos, figures 62, 63, 64). Now, if you are the reader that I presume you to be—that is, a paper-loving artist, art historian, curator, dealer, or collector involved in the postmodern world of “fine arts”—you may have mentally stumbled over a couple of red herrings in what I just wrote. Yes, it’s true: not one, but two “fine arts” museums have opened their hallowed halls to artists and a medium whose associations with popular culture and mass media have, art historically, relegated them to a sort of creative ghetto. Even more surprising is that they have done so without the comparative (and often belittling) apparatus of “high versus low.” Look at the list of artists: Winsor McCay, Lyonel Feininger, George Herriman, E. C. Segar, Frank King, Chester Gould, Milton Caniff, Charles Schulz, Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Harvey Kurtzman, R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Gary Panter, and Chris Ware. There are no Warhols or Lichtensteins or Koons included to “redeem” comics via appropriation and ironic gesture. Instead, explains cocurator Brian Walker, the exhibition “respects these comic artists as unique artists and not as some kind of footnote to modern art.” You might also be befuddled by the use of the term “master” in the exhibition title. Rendered nearly obsolete with postmodernism, “master” is now only used when preceded by “old” and, as with Leonardo or Rembrandt, generally applies to dead white guys. While four of the fifteen “masters of American comics” are still alive and kicking (and drawing), almost all are white (the exception is George Herriman, who was African American), and all are male.

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Figures 62, 63, and 64. Masters of American Comics. Installation view at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. November 20, 2005–March 12, 2006. Photo by Brian Forest, courtesy of the Hammer Museum.

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According to scholar of American popular culture and cocurator John Carlin, “this is an old-fashioned type of art exhibition that I would never organize or curate if I were working in the art field. . . . I really felt that the canon hadn’t been established in a coherent way. This attempts to do that and to create something that people can then criticize and move beyond.” In this first go-around, emphasis was given to the work of artists “whose visual presentation was dominant.” This self-consciously postmodern approach to defining a particular trajectory of comic art—one set up to be taken apart—is described as a “cracked canon” by comic artist and advocate Art Spiegelman, who, as a consultant, worked with the curators to select the fifteen “masters.” To be designated a “master” for the purposes of this show “you really had to combine two things,” explained Carlin. “One was the highest level of craftsmanship and technical mastery. . . . [T]he other was a kind of formal innovation that added something to the medium so that everybody that comes after him, whether they imitate him or not, has to pay homage to his work.” For example, Harvey Kurtzman’s satirical approach to mass media imagery has greatly influenced subsequent artists. “Everybody who makes an ironic shrug these days in their work—right behind him is the copyright ‘Harvey Kurtzman,’” explains Spiegelman. “That particular conscious shrug of both helplessness and awareness of how the media shapes your perception—it’s a Mad Magazine invention.” Many of the artists’ names may be new to those unfamiliar with the history of comics, but their creations surely are not. Little Nemo, Krazy Kat, and Captain America, for example, owe their existence to Winsor McCay, George Herriman, and Jack Kirby, respectively. “This exhibition brings the artists to the fore,” says the Hammer’s coordinating curator Cynthia Burlingham, and thereby gives credit to those whose work “has been so much a part of our culture and our lives.” To this same end, the show has been conceived as fifteen mini-retrospectives, rather than as a survey or thematic presentation, in order for the artists’ work to be presented in depth. The exhibition includes original drawings and progressive proofs, as well as the final printed Sunday pages and comic books. The original drawings reveal the artists’ dexterity and individual approach, as in the case of Chester Gould, who often abraded the surface of his drawings, giving them a textured, raw quality that paralleled the tough and seamy underworld he portrayed in Dick Tracy. Also apparent on the original drawings are traces of correction fluid and annotations such as “RUSH, EVENING EDITION” that remind us of the works’ ultimate purpose—to be reproduced—and raise the question of what an “original” comics art work is exactly. As Spiegelman points out, “The original drawing is a great artifact, but it’s not exactly what the person was making . . . Globs of white that won’t show in reproduction are not put there with the same intent as a glob by Jasper Johns.” Yet, early in the twentieth century, when

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newspaper publishers often demanded inordinate control, the final printed work could differ radically in character from the artist’s original drawing. In this exhibition, side-by-side comparisons offer the rare opportunity to evaluate the craft of comics as one of both draftsmanship and printmaking. Assembling five hundred works—described by the curators as “top-notch” and “superlative”—was no easy task. While some examples come from institutions (such as the Library of Congress and the International Cartoon Museum), the best belong to private collectors who, like the medium itself, tend to operate beyond the parameters of the art world. Tracking down original drawings for artists working up until the 1960s was particularly challenging, since, at the time, they were more or less considered to be mechanical drawings and often thrown away. Walker, who has organized many comics-art exhibitions, most notably as founder and former director of the Museum of Cartoon Art, has heard all kinds of stories, including the one about the cartoon syndicate using old drawings as doormats on a rainy day. The role of the comic artist changed dramatically over the course of the century. To exemplify an early attitude, Walker quotes Milton Caniff, creator of Terry and the Pirates, as saying, “Yea[h? ok], I’m just a newsboy, selling newspapers . . . that’s my job.” While salability remains a factor of success, beginning in the 1960s comics artists sought out alternative means of distribution in order to maintain creative integrity and control. According to Chris Ware, “We young cartoonists really owe our artistic debt first to these early cartoonists who developed and codified the cartooning language, and then, secondarily, to the so-called ‘underground’ cartoonists like Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman, who took those structures and imbued them with all of the self-doubt and experience of real life after World War II.” Gary Panter also acknowledges the opening of comics to subjective expression during the era of the “hippie comics,” when they “got the id back,” and describes cartooning today as more like writing poetry or a play. Indeed, when Spiegelman won the Pulitzer Prize for Maus in 1992 and had his books and original drawings exhibited at MOMA, the comics genre took an apparent turn toward both the literary and artistic high road. Yet, when MOMA wanted to buy drawings by Spiegelman several years later, he refused, believing they would never be shown. “There was no context for it,” he explained, “and there’s no fate for an artist worse than being in the basement of MOMA.” Spiegelman’s notions of a context for comics eventually became the subject of a lecture that he delivered to a roomful of curators from numerous East Coast museums. In the audience was Ann Philbin, then director of the Drawing Center in New York, and now of the Hammer Museum. The idea for an exhibition was born at that time.

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As a first attempt to evaluate comic art on its own terms, Masters of American Comics promises to be both enlightening and thought-provoking. Much of the work will be new to those of us who frequent “fine art” museum exhibitions and will surely delight in the “discovery” of Winsor McCay’s modernist sensibility or R. Crumb’s deft and perceptive use of line. Yet, as has been the case since postmodern revisionism took hold, the “cracks” in the canon tend to stand out and, despite curatorial disclaimers, will inevitably lead to pointed questions: Where are the women artists? Why isn’t Mexican American Gus Arriola included? or Lynn Johnston? or Al Capp? Why are mainly comic book and not comic strip artists from the second half of the century included in the show? Such questions will be addressed in exhibition programming and, hopefully, will inspire future studies and exhibitions. What also remains to be seen is how (or if) the exhibition will inspire art museum curators to begin acquiring comics art for their collections. For the curators of Masters of American Comics, there is no question of their cultural and artistic importance. “At the end of the day,” says Carlin, “comics are just as complex, philosophical, and conceptual [as other art forms], but they invite people in, in a more democratic way. The front door is open.”

An Uneasy Accord: LA Museums Open Their Walls to Comics as True Works of Art Scott Timberg Reprinted with permission. Copyright © 2005 The Los Angeles Times. This article first appeared in print on page E-33 in the Los Angeles Times Home edition, Sunday Calendar section, Sunday, October 23, 2005 with the headline: “An Uneasy Accord: LA Museums Open Their Walls to Comics as True Works of Art. Is it Long Overdue, Still an Odd Mix or Simply Inviting Cartoonists to a Party They May Not Want to Attend?”

Last year, one of Canada’s most prestigious museums approached the cartoonist Seth, whose work combines realistic, character-based storytelling with a muted, nostalgic visual style reminiscent of Edward Hopper, about a show of contemporary artists who use pop imagery. Seth’s comics would be included as part of the “pop” category—an example of the kind of ore a fine artist could crush into diamonds.

A Big Break for the Cartoonist? “I pretty much immediately told him I didn’t think this was a good idea,” Seth recalls of his talk with the curator. “A lot of cartoonists, myself included, are pretty negative about that kind of art, work that treats comics as some kind of pop culture junk. I’ve always kind of hated that—using comics the same way you’d use soup can labels.” The art world, since World War I, has invited all kinds of objects and imagery into gallery and museum spaces, from Marcel Duchamp’s urinal to Andy Warhol’s soup cans and Brillo boxes to Mike Kelley’s stuffed animals. Over the last few years, comics have been among them, often transformed by artists such as Roy Lichtenstein or Philip Guston or ironically “appropriated” alongside advertising or handbills. A big, joint exhibition that arrives next month at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art and the Hammer Museum, Masters of American Comics is 264

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a step beyond the earlier shows that saw comics as a kind of raw material still awaiting transformation. It’s hardly comics’ maiden voyage into the art world, but it’s the first major museum show to trace the history of the medium as an art form in itself. As such, it serves as a window onto the awkward—at times loving, at times strained, at times merely opportunistic—relationship between these two worlds. “I think it’s been happening in fits and starts over the last 20 years or so,” Scott McCloud, the author of the seminal Understanding Comics, says of the growing connections between comics and the art world. What’s new is the attitude toward comics: Until recently treated like cultural artifacts, they’re increasingly regarded as the output of capital-A artists with worldviews, life stories, individual styles, and a host of idiosyncrasies. “For years, if comics received recognition from cultural institutions or the academy, it was as an anonymous cultural phenomenon,” McCloud says. “Authorless and raw, like an Alan Lomax field recording. The literary world would look at the Archie comics of the ’50s as an indicator of the culture that gave birth to them, but you wouldn’t pay attention to the person who wrote or drew it.” The Masters show takes a different point of view. John Carlin, one of the exhibition’s curators, says it’s part of “Americans coming to grips with their own culture. American classical music is jazz, so why wouldn’t American classical visual expression be comics? And if you’re serious about that, then you’d have to establish a canon. Who are the masters?” Many cartoonists, and comics fans, feel pride for the recognition. Others are conflicted. Carlin spoke with cartoonist Art Spiegelman, whose Pulitzer Prize for Maus in 1992 helped earn the form mainstream respect and who helped inspire the show. “He said being in a museum,” Carlin reports, “was like having a notary seal put on the pact he made with the devil.”

Growing among Grown-ups Book reviews offer respectful coverage of new graphic novels; publishers sell hundreds of thousands of copies; awards committees consider them alongside Philip Roth. Filmmakers, in recent years, have tackled not only superhero comics but more realistic graphic novels, with David Cronenberg’s grim A History of Violence being only the latest example. Between Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (itself a Pulitzer winner), the film for Daniel Clowes’s alienated Ghost World, and Marjane Satrapi’s Iranian-set Persepolis books, it’s hard to imagine a culturally attuned American who’s unaware of comics’ growing adult audience.

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“The reason the mainstream culture hasn’t resisted is that comics fans spend money,” says Fred Van Lente, a curator and board member at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in New York’s SoHo. “We’ve gone from growing up hiding comics when we were 16 or 17 so the other kids wouldn’t find out, to seeing Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 explode at the box office.” Add the fact that people who grew up viewing comics as a serious, collectible medium are moving into jobs with publishers, universities, and museums. It seems inevitable, then, that even a slow-moving beast like the art world would take notice. Others point to the generation of Robert Crumb, who came of age in the ’60s. “Those were the first cartoonists to see themselves consciously as artists, doing purely personal work, not making concessions to mainstream conventions,” says Ivan Brunetti, a cartoonist who curated The Cartoonist’s Eye, a well-received recent group show at Columbia College Chicago’s A+D Gallery. The shift from craftsman to artist among Crumb’s generation, and those who emulated him, has made a rendezvous with fine arts a natural. At the same time, says curator Carlin, comics enthusiasts have rethought their history. “It’s like the late ’50s, when the French critics started to look at popular Hollywood filmmakers and saw authorship. So Hitchcock and John Ford, and others who were making entertainment and weren’t art-film people, got this kind of glow. That’s what happened to the George Herrimans and Chester Goulds of the world,” he says, naming the creators of Krazy Kat and Dick Tracy. To others, the explanation is more straightforward. “Why are galleries and museums starting to notice comics?” asks McCloud. “I think, simply, the work’s better. The best of them today are just better than the best in the ’80s. Chris Ware,” McCloud says, naming the author of the intricate Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. “There’s your answer: He just took comics to a different level.”

A “Lower-Class” Genre Those who think comics have been a rich and complex art form since Winsor McCay, whose Little Nemo drawings from a century ago bridged art nouveau and surrealism, wonder why a show like Masters has taken so long to appear. Some answer that snobbery—class-based and otherwise—is to blame. “It was a lower-class art form,” says Rod Gilchrist, director of San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum, who points out that comics were typically published in workingmen’s newspapers. “The language was the language of the Irish immigrant, the German immigrant. And the stories were the concerns of everyday people,” he

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says. Civic and religious groups talked papers into canceling strips, considered threats to young people. These days, he says, as comics have become what he calls “the soup du jour of academia,” that kind of opposition seems anachronistic. “Once Warhol exhibited the Brillo boxes, the distinction between high and low was broken forever,” Gilchrist says, adding that many people in contemporary art now have a working knowledge of comics. Still, he says, “When I took my job here in 1998, a lot of my art world friends said, ‘What are you doing?’ And my New York friends said, ‘This will be the end of your career.’” Ann Philbin, director of the Hammer, admits that museums have been slow to acknowledge comic art. “Artists themselves have been much more open about recognizing it than institutions, perhaps because they have nothing to lose and can see the work for what it is.” Some of the problems with a museum show have more to do with the material itself. Comics drawings are not created with a gallery space in mind: Even the curators of Masters concede that newspaper pages don’t look quite at home on museum walls, in part because comics are a narrative as much as a visual medium. The show combines original drawings, most of them pen and ink, with mass-produced images from books and periodicals. “Early on, the museums had a lot of trouble with this exhibition,” says Carlin, “because the majority of it is essentially worthless printed pages of newspaper.” Carlin originally approached the Whitney Museum of American Art (where Chris Ware was later included in the Whitney Biennial) as a home for the show. “They said, ‘We think this is interesting—we know there’s something going on in this area—but we just don’t think it would make a good exhibition. Prove to us that this will work on the walls of a museum.’ And I think to some degree they were right, and to some degree they were wrong.” Museums have a built-in institutional drag in addressing new pop phenomena, says Tyler Stallings, chief curator at the Laguna Art Museum and a veteran of shows on surf culture and skateboard imagery. “For collecting institutions,” he says, “your changing exhibitions usually complement your mission. Most likely you wouldn’t have anything in your permanent collection that has much to do with comics.” Nor would your donors or the board of directors, who sometimes drive museum exhibitions, typically have personal comics collections. Carlin thinks the delay has largely been economic. “To maintain the value of a work of art—which is essentially what the gallery system does—you have to create these boundaries of value and then reinforce them.” Galleries have assigned value to paintings, sculptures, and installations, but because newspaper pages are mass produced they don’t accrue value as easily as an original work.

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There’s also the issue of scale, says Carlin. “The gallery system we now see evolved in the ’40s and ’50s to manage large-scale heroic works of art, rather than intimate narrative work. Some things look better at museums and galleries, and they tend to sell at higher prices, which reinforces the system. While an artist who has an ironic relationship to pop culture, like Warhol or Jeff Koons, is still producing objects that fuel the system. Whereas comics are scraps.” Each generation of cartoonists seems to have its own reason for being uncomfortable with a gallery setting, though some have done quite well financially from the arrangement. Charles M. Schulz, who was from the generation of craftsmen and entertainers, used to say that hanging cartoons in a museum was pretentious. “As an art form comics do not need museum validation,” punk-inspired comics artist Raymond Pettibon writes in an essay in the Masters of American Comics catalog. “Comics are a book medium. . . . They aren’t hung right unless they are framed by thumbs on either side.” For artists who came out of the counterculture, entering the museum can be akin to selling out. Talk to a true believer—a comics scholar, a serious fan, a comics artist—and you’ll probably end up discussing High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture, a 1990 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that looked at comics, as well as advertising and graffiti, alongside work by Picasso, Lichtenstein, and others. (MOMA, which has offered animation shows since the 1930s, will open Pixar: 20 Years of Animation on December 14; fall 2006 will see Comic Abstraction, a show about the influence of comics on contemporary artists.) Brian Walker, a curator of the Masters show, the son of cartoonist Mort Walker and part of the team that now produces Hi and Lois and Beetle Bailey, still recalls visiting High and Low and seeing a comics-inspired piece by Guston. “They had his big paintings on the wall, and then here’s this little case with a couple of Crumb comic books in them. ‘This is where he found the stuff that he turned into modern art.’ It basically denigrated comics.” Walker, who in 1974 cofounded the Museum of Cartoon Art in Connecticut (which has since closed but may open in the Empire State Building next year), says he’s gotten familiar with the idea that comics aren’t really art. “I ran into that so many times—I’m basically numb to it at this point.” The antagonism, though, has come as often from the other direction: Many cartoonists have an early, formative experience with the art world that leads to a lifetime of disdain. Often the tension starts in a college art class or at art school. Clowes, for instance, earned a BFA from the Pratt Institute in New York and turned the experience into a four-page strip called Art School Confidential. The comic, being expanded into a Terry Zwigoff film for release next year, shows art

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education as dominated by pretentious trust-fund kids, nonsense-spouting professors, and “self-obsessed neurotic art-girls who make their own clothes.” And this pathetic bunch considers cartooning, Clowes writes, “mindless and contemptible.” His experience is not unique: Ware dropped out of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Adrian Tomine (Optic Nerve) still tells scorching stories about the UC Berkeley art class that drove him to study literature instead. “I find a great deal of contemporary art is disingenuous,” says Seth, another art school dropout. “It’s like academia: a small world where everyone is performing for each other, and where there are certain rules you have to follow. It seems kind of lazy to me.” This disenchantment with contemporary art is not limited to cartoonists. Carlin, tellingly, rethought some of his assumptions about art while a curator in New York’s East Village in the early ’80s. “I felt that there was something missing from my generation of artists—a respect for craft, and a work ethic,” he says. “I started to get a real respect for the craft of drawing, even though it wasn’t really something that the art world valued in the late 20th century. “And then I started to hang out with cartoonists, and I realized that most of them had been precocious—but they had also worked harder at it than anybody I knew. They would really draw for six hours a day, every day of their lives. There’s really no replacement for that. I grew up in this very conceptual art world where it was all about ‘strategies.’” Says Seth: “Weirdly, I think that’s one of the things that’s kept comics from being taken seriously since the ’60s—that it’s too concerned with conventional drawing and telling a story, two things the fine arts world sort of looks down on. Getting into the depths of characterization is too earnest; it makes you suspect.” He speculates that the recent interest in comics from the fine arts world may have to do with the resurgent value of beauty and draftsmanship. “I’ve found a lot of young artists are interested in drawing again.”

Reaching toward the Highbrow These days, despite the sniping and condescension, cartoonists and contemporary artists are closer together than they’ve ever been. Comics have largely ceased to be actual popular culture—despite growing acclaim, comic books sell a fraction of what they did in the ’40s and ’50s—which may be why they seem more at home as the object of contemplation, scholarship, and highbrow “influence.” All kinds of contemporary artists, from Americans of the “lowbrow” movement to Japanese Superflat artists such as Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara, are drawing from comics.

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“It’s funny—when I do studio visits I’m finding a real interest on the part of artists,” says MOCA curator Michael Darling. “I’m finding Krazy Kat catalogs on their shelves, or the influence of Winsor McCay on their work.” So far, most of the controversy over the Masters exhibition has not been dismay that a museum is displaying cartoons but the choice of who’s included and who’s not. In a time when motorcycles, Armani fashion designs, and dead sharks are inside museum walls, comics almost seem traditional, quaint. “This is by no means radical territory,” says David Moos, contemporary curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Canadian museum that just closed a solo show of Seth’s drawings and sculpture. Moos looks at the cartoonist’s works in a context of Canadian landscape painters and for its ability to solve formal problems. “Why wouldn’t you expect a museum to be engaged with this material?” The future of comics in the museum may have to do with something the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art has become familiar with: quarrels over the proportion of superhero cartoons and independent comics, of one era over another. “We get more internal fighting,” says curator Van Lente, “than resistance from the outside.”

Here Are the Great Women Comic Artists of the United States Trina Robbins Reprinted with permission of Trina Robbins. First published in the International Journal of Comic Art 10, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 95–100.

In 1896, Rose O’Neill drew what was possibly the first comic by a woman, for Truth magazine. In 1909, she created the Kewpies, which ran in three women’s magazines in a kind of proto-comic form, with continuity, but without panels or speech balloons, a style of comic sometimes used by early twentieth-century cartoonists. By the 1930s, her Kewpies were appearing in more traditional comic form in newspapers across the country, and they had become an icon, still produced today as dolls, figurines, tea towels, crockery, candy, suspenders, you name it. Grace Drayton’s first comics hit America’s newspapers in 1903 and continued until her death in 1946. The prolific cartoonist drew roly-poly kids with names like Toodles, Dimples, Dolly Drake, Dolly Dimples, Dolly Dingle, and Dottie Darling, and they all looked like the Campbell Kids. Which was no surprise, because she created the Campbell Kids in 1906. Her almost unbearably cute kids appeared in books, as dolls, paper dolls, figurines, on silver babies’ cups, on everything, and like Rose O’Neill’s Kewpies, are still produced today. Nell Brinkley came to New York from Colorado in 1907, to draw comics for the Hearst syndicate. It took only a year for her beautiful women, known as the “Brinkley Girls,” to become so popular that Florenz Zeigfeld started including a “Brinkley Girls” skit in his annual Zeigfeld Follies. At least three popular songs were written about her. You could buy Nell Brinkley hair curlers for 10 cents a card. Her fans, especially young girls, cut out and colored her elegant drawings and pasted them into scrapbooks, a form in which much of her work can be found today. With varying degrees of skill, they made pencil copies of her art. In 1940, Tarpe Mills drew the first woman costumed action hero, Miss Fury, in a dashing filme noire style, and sold millions of comics. Her heroine, who looked amazingly like her creator, became a World War II pinup. Squadrons 271

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Figure 65. Postcard design for She Draws Comics: 100 Years of America’s Women Cartoonists. Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, New York (now part of the Society of Illustrators). May 20–November 2006.

painted her on their planes’ nose cones and named their bombers after her. She made headlines when she donated her cat to the war effort, lending him out as mascot to a warship. Also in 1940, in a desperate effort to sell her strip, Dalia Messick changed her name to the sexually ambiguous Dale, but couldn’t disguise the fact that she “drew like a girl.” Joseph Patterson, owner of the Chicago Tribune syndicate, rejected her strip because “he had tried a woman once and she hadn’t worked out.” His girl Friday talked him into reconsidering. Women loved the romantic adventures of Brenda Starr, girl reporter, which finally ended in 2011. As they had with Nell Brinkley, girls copied her into their schoolbooks. When a newspaper tried to cancel the strip in 1973, the editor received hundreds of angry letters and phone calls, mostly from women. Brenda became a postage stamp. And did I mention the dolls, paper dolls, coloring books, the book, the serialized movie? WHY? From November 2005 through March 2006, the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles presented a major exhibit called Masters of American Comics. Of the fifteen cartoonists represented, the above pronouns were completely missing. There was not one woman in the show (promotional graphic for Robbins’s concurrent all women show, figure 65). The Denver comic convention in June 2015 included a panel called Women in the Comics. There was not one woman on the panel. When asked why this was so, the moderator replied that he couldn’t find any women to invite. Yet, in

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response, writer Crystal Skillman hosted a panel that included six women, and that was only a fraction of the professional women at the convention. In January 2016, the prestigious French comic convention at Angoulême announced its nominees for the annual Angoulême Grand Prix. Out of thirty international nominees, there was not one woman listed. The reason given by the festival’s executive officer, Franck Bondoux, was that “Unfortunately there are few women in the history of comics. It’s a reality.” Since the Grand Prix was first awarded in 1974, only one woman was ever given that honor. The San Diego Comic-Con, showing that it is at least a wee bit more aware than its French counterpart, has inducted exactly four women into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame since its beginning in 1987. Why? Why Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, with its grotesque villains, and not Dale Messick’s Brenda Starr, with her grotesque villains? Why Milton Caniff ’s filme noiresque Terry and the Pirates, and not Tarpe Mills’s film noiresque Miss Fury? Why Lionel Feininger, who drew the Kin-der-Kids for less than a year, and not Nell Brinkley, who drew her strips for thirty years, or Edwina Dumm, who drew Tippy for forty-eight years? ARTnews magazine ran a cover article about the exclusion in American Masters of Comic Art of half the population, asking the question, “Where Are the Great Women Comic-Book Artists?” (hence my title). Unfortunately, the article was written by someone completely clueless about the history of women in comics. She quotes museum curator Laura Hoptman, who obviously knows as little about comics history as she does, saying, “Great women comics artists emerged in the 1960s,” and she quotes Jessica Abel saying, “There were women comics artists, but they were not as important.” How could someone say that? I couldn’t possibly explain this better than Ursula LeGuin. In her foreword to She’s Fantastical, an anthology of Australian women’s speculative fiction, she writes: Men ran the publishing houses and all the machinery of evaluation and criticism. Editors seldom print and critics seldom praise a work outside the conventions they uphold . . . Writing “for women” was a subliterature, trivial by definition . . . All you have to do is change “writing” to “drawing.” LeGuin goes on to describe some of what makes women’s work different from men’s: “Heroism is redefined,” she writes, “violence is not assumed to be of compelling inherent interest.” LeGuin thinks the differences are a case of nurture rather than nature. I disagree. In her book, The Female Brain, neuropsychologist Louann Brizendine

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writes that the hippocampus, site of emotions and memory formation, is larger in women, while men have larger brain centers for action and aggression. So, is there a plot, a kind of Protocol of the Elders of Comics, to leave out women? I doubt if our exclusion is a conscious act. Rather, there are signs to be found in comics done by women that are a kind of code letting men know this work is by women, and therefore, as LeGuin writes, “trivial.” 1. Romance. (Remember the hippocampus?) Brenda Starr simply oozed romance, and Messick’s male contemporary cartoonists hated the strip. As a 1960 Saturday Evening Post article delicately puts it, “There are differences of opinions about her artistic talents.” In one of her strips, Brenda’s Mystery Man tells her, “Oh my darling, I love you so!” Can you imagine any male saying that in his comic? In real life? 2. Cute. Grace Drayton’s adorable chubbycheeked toddlers! Show a guy Cute and he immediately wheels out Irony in self-defense. “Like Tolstoy,” writes LeGuin, “they flee in horror from the nursery.” 3. Pretty. Another word for “drawing like a girl.” No one drew prettier than Nell Brinkley. 4. Fashion. In the 1940s and 1950s, while most male cartoonists were dressing their female characters in featureless knee-length red dresses, the heroines drawn by women had wardrobes that could serve as illustrations for a book on fashion history. Dale Messick and Tarpe Mills included paper dolls with their comics—a sure sign that these were comics read by girls and women, as boys are not inclined to cut out and dress dolls. The outfits on the Brinkley Girls are exquisite. Hilda Terry, who drew the teen comic, Teena, started her career as a fashion illustrator, and the girls in her strip dress in chic clothing of the times. And Gladys Parker, who drew the long-running strip, Mopsy, actually was a very successful fashion designer, who was written up in popular magazines of her day. In 1971, Linda Nochlin wrote an article called “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” You can find it all over the Internet, and the ARTnews article quotes her. In it, she concludes: “It is certainly not realistic to hope that a majority of men in the arts or in any other field, will soon see the light and find that it is in their own self-interest to grant complete equality to women . . .” Ursula LeGuin quotes a poet who told her, “The smaller the territory, the oftener you have to spray the boundaries.” There’s room in the litter box for all of us.

Remasters of American Comics: Sequential Art as New Media in the Transformative Museum Context Damian Duffy Reprinted with permission of Damian Duffy, first published November 2009 by SCAN: Journal of Media Arts Culture (project of the Media Department at Macquarie University, Sydney).

Along with the recent wave of recognition and respectability for graphic novels in American culture, comics art has been displayed in museums with increasing frequency. However, the context of aesthetic display in museum and gallery settings is far different from the printed book arts format most comics art is created for, and the resulting clash of intentions can lead to a discomfiture between the medium of the work and the space of display. Via a critique of the 2003 Contemporary Art Museum Houston exhibition Splat, Boom, Pow! and the 2005 UCLA Hammer Museum and Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition Masters of American Comics I seek to highlight curatorial philosophies that avoid confronting the conceptual challenge of bringing the medium to the museum by attempting to fit comics, to one extent or another, into traditional fine art frameworks. Looking at other instances of comics in art museums, such as Comic Release! from Carnegie Mellon University, I will point to inroads into more theoretically productive comics curatorial philosophies. Adding these analyses to examples from my own curatorial work in partnership with John Jennings on the exhibitions Other Heroes: African American Comics Creators, Characters, and Archetypes at Jackson State University I suggest new media curation as a useful theoretical framework in comics art exhibition curation. New media curatorial theory, in concert with the emergent work of gallery comics creators, helps to indicate that the museum need not completely change the context of the comics, nor must the comics completely change the context of the museum. Rather, a collaborative alteration of both respective contexts to better serve the future of museums and comics should be the ultimate goal.

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When Worlds Collide The presence of comics in bookstores and libraries has grown exponentially in the United States in recent years, mainly in the form of manga and graphic novels, and the number and frequency of film adaptations of comics has followed suit. The number of academic art institutions that offer courses in the arts of comics creation and scholarship is similarly increasing: for example, the School of Visual Arts, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and the Savannah College of Art and Design all have bachelors of fine arts programs in comics, with the latter also offering a master’s degree. Comics scholarship is emerging as a field of study as evidenced by the annual International Comic Arts Forum, currently in its thirteenth year, and peer-reviewed journals like the International Journal of Comic Art and ImageTexT. In short, the conception of comics as a culturally legitimate form of expression has become more widespread in America, catching up to the longer-held French and Japanese views of comics as an art form capable of portraying many different kinds of content. However, when comics art is taken from the book and put on a wall, there persists a perception of conflict between two opposed cultural worlds. In discussions of comics art in the museum setting there is a recurring perception of two worlds colliding, worlds irreconcilably different in aesthetics and socioeconomic cultures. For example, in the Masters of American Comics catalog, Raymond Pettibon (2005) states: “For fans of comics the Museum of Arts is as foreboding and scary a place as the Comics Convention is for lovers of art” (p. 248). Pettibon further declares, “As an art form, comics do not need museum validation . . .” and characterizes comic books as separate but equal from fine art (p. 252). Richard Corliss (2007) places museums and comics in opposition as well: “Be a kid again, discovering the low thrills and high art of old Comics Books. You don’t need a museum to tell you that this stuff is great.” Comics creator and scholar Mark Newgarden is even more emphatically against comics in museums: “I am saddened by the current cultural climate that takes for granted that comics must somehow be aligned with both the art world and the novel to develop to their full potential. I think that misguided melding has more to do with cartoonists’ egos and the dissipation of those institutions than any advancement of the comics medium” (quoted in Gravett 2007). What is noteworthy in these statements is not that they establish comics and museum art as dichotomous, but rather that they do so at the expense of the museum and in veneration of comics. Historically, sentiments surrounding the separation of comics and museum art have worked the other way around, with museology treating comics as “little more than anonymous, generic, massproduced ‘found objects’” (Gravett 2007). Indeed, this was how the pop art

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movement interacted with the museum setting, bringing alien artifacts from an outside world of popular culture and consumer mass media into the rarified realm of fine art exhibition as a provocation of high/low cultural distinctions. Two separate worlds, one characterized as an ephemeral and disposable commercial endeavor appealing to the lowest common denominator, the other unique, enduring, elitist, appealing to the specialized intellectual sensibilities of the patron and the critic. Moreover, pop art effectively called attention to the gulf between the forms of visual expression, hyperarticulating the idea of comics as not-art, something foreign requiring translation or transfiguration to be fit for the museum wall. “Comics inspired Andy Warhol and Lichtenstein, but that was about all they were good for” (Harvey 2007, 182). Sabin (2003) calls comics and fine art “uneasy bedfellows,” and, again, “. . . two worlds . . . locked in a creative embrace . . . never on equal footing” (p. 11).

Splat, Boom, Pow!: A Case Study in Comics as Non-Art Sabin’s assessment of cultural dichotomy comes from his essay in the catalog for the 2003 Contemporary Art Museum Houston exhibition Splat, Boom, Pow!: The Influence of Cartoons in Contemporary Art, which featured Lichtenstein, Warhol, Basquiat, and Masters catalog essayist Raymond Pettibon. The curatorial philosophy of Splat, Boom, Pow!, as represented in its catalog, shows a measure of respect for comics and cartoons. For example, Sabin’s essay focuses on comics as much as the artworks included in the exhibition, and a “Cartoon timeline” in the middle of the book grants comics and cartoons a place of importance in the history of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Curator Valerie Cassel writes of comics and cartoons as liberating to artists, stating, “the system of visual language enabled by the idiom of comics has provided artists with permission to speak, [and] . . . a means to do so” (p. 21). However, despite the joining of comics and art suggested in these examples, the curatorial philosophy of Splat, Boom, Pow! nonetheless strongly reinforces their separation. Throughout the essay, Cassel (2003) variously and repeatedly refers to “the idiom of comics,” “the system of visual language,” and “the cartoon genre within contemporary art” as something that informs art. She offers that this “genre” in contemporary art “serves to extend the dialogue between art and the greater social landscape” (p. 29). In this conception, art can make use of comics, it can include stylistic elements of comics, and this appropriation can constitute a contemporary art genre, but comics is viewed as a product of the “social landscape” in dialogue with, and thus dialogically separate from the fine art world.

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Roche (2007) asserts that it is a clash of economic models caused by comics’ commerciality that has left the medium unrecognized by the fine art world: “given that mass production works counter to the canon of modernist ‘originality,’ the driving force behind the art market” (p. 22). Cassel exemplifies this conception of comics as synonymous solely with mass commerciality in her description of the rationale for including an abstract piece by Sigmar Polke in Splat, Boom, Pow!: Although closely aligned to Lichtenstein’s unflinching appropriation of techniques from the comic strip because of his use of Benday dots, German painter Sigmar Polke was never a part of pop art in the 1960s. His photo-based paintings, however, embrace commercial production to criticize social consumption. (2003, 23) In Cassel’s view, the reference to commercialism in Polke’s work via the Benday dot motif is sufficient to mark it as an example of comics-influenced contemporary art, despite the lack of any of the formal characteristics that define comics as a medium (e.g., sequentiality, hybridity of image, and text). As Witek (1992) notes, “American cultural attitudes towards comics . . . have been profoundly affected by long-standing commercial considerations and the formal attributes of comics as physical and cultural artifacts” (p. 75). Much like Splat, Boom, Pow!, two MOMA exhibitions, High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture in 1990–91 and Comic Abstractions in 2007, display the effect Witek describes. Like the Contemporary Art Museum Houston show, these two exhibitions display a curatorial philosophy that either explicitly or implicitly maintains the gap between comics and fine art. The pieces in these exhibitions are to a great degree works of recognized visual fine art forms (e.g., painting), included because they somehow quote an aesthetic, style, or character associated with comics or animation production, often as a comment on mass culture. Such aesthetic cooption is curatorially remarkable because the artwork includes something other, something not-art. These exhibits reinforce once again the conception of comics as found objects and not art itself, thus denying the conception of comics as a medium of artistic expression.

Masters of American Comics: Forcing Comics into Fine Art Traditions MOMA’s High and Low incensed Pulitzer Prize–winning graphic novelist Art Spiegelman to such an extent that he created a comic strip critique of the exhibition, published in the December 1990 issue of Artforum (see figure 61).

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Although High and Low included comics work from a few comics artists, Winsor McCay, George Herriman, Lyonel Feininger, and R. Crumb, Spiegelman found these artists to be overly safe choices, “ not daring the risks that come with a ‘risky’ topic!” (Spiegelman 1990). A few years later, Spiegelman lobbied the fine arts world to exhibit more art from actual comics (Harvey 2007). This cause came to fruition a decade later with the UCLA Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 2005 exhibition Masters of American Comics. As an art historical canonization of the fifteen American masters selected for the exhibit, it could not help but be exclusionary. Indeed Masters cocurator John Carlin said he was cognizant of the lack of women and minority artists, but felt there needed to be a canon to be challenged (Berwick 2007). Also, in interviews, both Carlin and cocurator Brian Walker were adamant that they were not saying there were no other masters than the fifteen chosen (see, e.g., Pinkard et al. 2005; Hignite 2006). Nevertheless, this lack of women and minority artists established a severely limited history of the medium, reinforcing misconceptions that only white men were involved in the creation of comics during its formative years in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see, e.g., Boxer 2006; Budick 2006). In one sense, this is a frustrating continuation of the stereotype that people historically condemned to subservient social roles were uninvolved in cultural production. In fact, feminist comics scholar Trina Robbins took Spiegelman, the senior consultant on the Masters exhibition, personally to task for his inaccurate assertion that women were not creating comics in the early 1900s in her 1995 essay, “Women and Children First.” In addition to these stubbornly myopic traditions of comics historical scholarship, the underrepresentation of women and minority artists in Masters of American Comics also mirrors the creation of history that takes place in museums, an underlying “ideological apparatus” that speaks to “the relation among power, representation, and cultural identity . . . of whose history is voiced and whose silenced” (Corrin, 1). Robertson (2003) identifies art historical canons as traditionally “a story told almost entirely from the perspective of New York City . . . and white male artists” (p. 9). Viewed from this perspective, the underrepresentation on display in Masters becomes a characteristic of the exhibition’s attempt to fit comics into a traditional fine art exhibition mold. Spiegelman (1990) opens “High Art Lowdown,” his reaction-in-comics-form to the High and Low exhibition, with a Lichtenstein parody who laments, “Oh, Roy, your dead High Art is built on Dead Low Art! . . . The REAL Political, Sexual and Formal energy in Living Popular Culture passes you by. Maybe THAT’S—sob—why you’re championed by museums!” (see figure 61). It seems as though the use of canons in museum curation is a major characteristic of the cultural stultification within the institutions of art to which Spiegelman refers:

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. . . the reliance on historical canons results in the neglect of questions about the meaning and connection of the arts to life . . . canonical histories underplay the meaning and function of artworks and artistic practices for the artists and their cultures, while emphasizing technical issues of form, style, and technique. These emphases play into the identity interests of the historians, since they reflect the issues that historians of the arts have learned to regard as important during their training, and the continued attention to which tends to bring them professional approval. (Detels 1998, 38–39) So, insofar as Masters of American Comics grew out of Spiegelman’s reaction against the subjective cultural categorizations of the High and Low exhibition, the use of the canon as a curatorial framework in Masters is somewhat ironic in that it attempts to phrase a refutation of traditional cultural distinctions of high and low art in a museological form that reinforces those traditions. When my research partner John Jennings and I saw the exhibition of Masters at the Milwaukee Art Museum in 2006 we were both struck by the simpleto-the-point-of-bland wooden frames around most of the pieces. The color of unstained lumber and the staid confines of these frames clashed with the messy and experimental artwork, stylistically assured lines of ink atop scribbles of blue non-repro pencil and careful lines of white-out. In these frames, behind glass, the kinetic rowdy energy of the popular art was muted to an art museum climate-controlled hush, and the works felt more like historical artifacts than comics. The widespread conception that sequential and fine art are worlds apart was, in our view, seemingly confirmed by an uncomfortable feeling that something was being lost in translation and that the work was being viewed in the incorrect context. The exhibition elicits similar reactions from others. Eye Magazine (2006), in its exhibition review “Investigating the Canon of US Comics,” wrote that artists like Charles Schulz and Chester Gould, “would be a lot more comfortable in their natural home: on the printed page.” Publishers Weekly reviewer Sunyoung Lee (2005) states, “The difference between reading and seeing a comic becomes painfully obvious when trying to read one hung behind glass on a wall or in a display case.” Raymond Pettibon anticipates these reactions in his Masters catalog essay, asserting that comics “aren’t hung right unless they are framed by thumbs on either side” (p. 252). Speaking on the specific content of the Masters exhibition, Corliss (2007) concurs that “the way to appreciate comic book art is by reading them, in book form.” Somewhat in contrast, in his review of the exhibition for the Wall Street Journal, Tom L. Freudenheim found that “the side-by-side interplay between original drawings and their printed comic versions provides ample opportunity

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for understanding how carefully conceived ideas, and the nuanced characterizations and tonality we associate with old master drawings, become neutralized by the heavy hand of the mechanical press” (2007, D10). Nonetheless, even as he expresses the value of the Masters exhibition, Freudenheim still perceives a conflict or discomfiture between galleries and books: “A part of me wants to see only these drawings, for the pleasure of getting close to the creative process; but the impulse to follow the many story lines—presumably what the artist intended—keeps suggesting that I might plop down comfortably and read the full version, rather than the museums’ frustrating Reader’s Digest editing” (2007, D10).

Taking the Book out of Comics Art: Communication vs. Contemplation Whether included in fine art as commentary on commercial culture or enshrined as historical artifacts of master illustration, comics in museum exhibitions like those described above present a tension between content and context caused by a clash of intentions. For one, there is the difference in the intended audience of comics and museum art, as intimated by the traditional dichotomies of low and high culture, of commercial and fine art. Paralleling these socioeconomic dichotomies are the modes of meaning making intended by the work. Cassel (2003) points to the distinction of comics as communicative and fine art as contemplative (p. 21). Comics are stereotypically an explicit narrative medium while the narratives of fine art are notoriously implicit, particularly in the pervasive abstractions of modernist art. “For the comic to work, it must be understandable . . . However . . . intelligibility in art is usually interpreted as trivial kitsch” (Laaniste 2002, 81). Comics are made to be read curled up in a comfy chair, art meant to be inspected at a distance standing on a hardwood floor. But is the explicitly narrative intention of the formats of comic books and graphic novels necessarily the intention of comics as a medium? The work of gallery comics, installation comics, and/or abstract comics artists like C. Hill, Mark Staff Brandl, and Andrei Molotiu suggests otherwise [discussed in the section Foundations: Comic Art in Museums]. A bridge between the historically divergent worlds of sequential and fine art, gallery and/or installation comics are works that use sequential images, combination of text and image, and other primarily formal aspects of sequential art to create works that are designed specifically for a museum setting. Although some of these elements have been used in gallery art before, gallery comics is unique in “the intentional gathering of such a preponderance of comic art elements in ‘made-for-the-wall’ art

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so that audiences instantly sensed the kinship of gallery comics to traditional comics” (Hill 2007, 9). Thus, gallery comics is “a challenging new form of art lying between book-based sequential comics and the spacial / wall situation of fine art . . . a sequential, or quasi-sequential work which both can be read like a book and comfortably viewed as a gallery/museum work” (Brandl 2006). These works combine formal attributes of comics with styles and forms associated with the fine art world in a manner different from the majority of works included in shows like Comic Abstractions or Splat, Boom, Pow! in part because gallery comics exhibit a marked awareness of the distinction between comics culture and the comics medium. Pop and abstract art that appropriates elements from comics typically focuses on stylistic aspects (e.g., thick ink outlines, halftone patterns, speech balloons, and cartoony renderings), or co-opts famous cartoon or comics characters. The works never display knowledge that the medium is not the content. Gallery comics, on the other hand, draw their content and style as much from other artistic disciplines and transplant primarily formal elements of the comics medium to the gallery wall. For example, abstract comics creator Andrei Molotiu places organic and curvilinear abstract illustrations of a fine art tradition into a rigid panel structure in the style of a traditional comics layout, thereby producing a sense of narrativity despite the lack of recognizable representations of the physical world. In so doing Molotiu’s work draws attention to the workings of the medium as, to paraphrase Scott McCloud (1993), juxtaposed images in sequence. Creating this new or hybrid form of comics is one way of dealing with the effects of the museum context on the artwork: simply make comics directly for that setting. But this is more a sidestep than a confrontation of the question of art from print comics in a fine art space presented by exhibitions like Masters of American Comics. Is there a place for traditional comics art, art originally created for mass publication with explicit communicative intent, on the walls of so-called high culture? Emerging curatorial theory and practice surrounding new media art suggests that there can be.

Comics as New Media Art New media in the museological sense generally refers to artwork that makes use of emergent media technologies like computers, video screens, or virtual reality. Schacht (2002) describes new media artists as those who “continue to challenge and advance the intersection of art and technology” (p. 578). But new media, like any useful category of art, is a debatable concept. Writing on new media theory, filmmaker Gordon Winiemko (2006) abandons use of emergent technology as the defining characteristic of new media art. Instead,

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he argues that new media is characterized by its commitment to diegesis, to “the time-based experiential process of telling,” which stands in sharp contrast with the museum’s veneration of the mimetic, “image-objects that are to be shown” (p. 49). Thus, Winiemko’s comparison of new media art to traditional fine art parallels Cassel’s distinction of comics as communicative and fine art as contemplative, implying a similarity between comics and new media art. This characterization of new media art as communicative is echoed by curator Sarah Cook (2003), who notes that “some curators have taken to thinking of new media art as non-medium art . . . they acknowledge that artists will always find new ways and hence new mediums for the creation of art, and so they are largely concerned with, above all else, the new concepts emerging from these technologically based practices” (p. 176). Similarly, Diamond (2003) calls new media “practices that investigate the next generation of expression, both in concept and medium” (p. 142). Comics as new media is seemingly oxymoronic. A medium well over a century old (or as old as cave paintings depending on how loosely sequential art is defined) could hardly be considered an emergent technology. But comics is a strong communicative medium which, if it doesn’t fit in the same museological category as new media, is certainly related. For example, Gardner (2006) suggests comics work as a sort of temporal reciprocation of new media: “New media technologies (the database, internet, hypertext, etc.) are ideally suited for making sense of the present in relation to the future . . . But it is the comic form that might be best suited to articulating the complex demands of the present new media age in relation to the media of the past” (p. 803). Also, while comics is not an emergent medium per se, it is emergent in terms of the American perception of it as a credible means of artistic expression, its capabilities for conceptual and narrative depth “new” in that the medium is only recently becoming more widely recognized within academic and fine art worlds. At any rate, the theory surrounding new media curation points in a useful direction when considering the role of sequential art in the museum. New media art curation puts forth the idea of curating a work based on its concept, not its medium. The 2002 Carnegie Mellon exhibition Comic Release!: Negotiating Identity for a New Generation and an art show I cocurated with John Jennings for Jackson State University in 2007, Other Heroes: African American Comics Creators and Characters, integrate this curatorial philosophy somewhat into nonetheless comics-focused shows by incorporating both comics art and art in non-comics media inspired by comics stylistically or formally, in the service of an overarching thematic concept. In the case of Comic Release!, this unifying theme is identity politics; in Other Heroes the theme is racial representation. As Comic Release! curator Vicky A. Clark (2002) states, in combining different

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mediums in the exhibition there is implied “an equality among all of the producers, whether they are writers, illustrators, artists, or some combination thereof ” (p. 39). While new media curation leads toward less-restricted views of which media are viable means of artistic expression, at the same time it recommends curators become knowledgeable in different media, or at least adept in preparing for their myriad spatial, exhibitional, technological, and conceptual requirements (Cook 2003). In the case of comics, the technology is the medium’s inherent narrativity and the uniquely interactive modes of meaning making it inspires, as well as the cultural heritage of comics as a populist and communicative form. Other Heroes might also be considered a new media art exhibition due to its extensive use of prints made from digital files, a practice which, among other benefits, allows the curator control of the size of a work. Magnifying comics as a means of transforming them for the museum setting is hardly a new comics display technique, but it is important to consider the effect of that size on the inherent narrative of the work. For example, we chose to magnify cartoonist Keith Knight’s comic strips The K Chronicles and (Th)ink as large as possible (approximately 24” x 32”) since Knight’s art style and lettering are drawn with a brash kineticism that fills the space of the image in an already outsized fashion. Making the pieces bigger heightens the active motion of Knight’s thick cartoony line, as well as the blunt and righteous outrage of his social satire. In other cases the work is printed small to interact with events within the narrative, as in a sequence from M. Rasheed’s comic Monsters 101 that featured characters trapped in a claustrophobic cave. Also useful to the discussion of sequential art curation is the role of new media in recontextualizing the museum space, what Halbreich (2000) characterizes as the transformation of “the metaphor for a museum from temple to town square” (p. 76). If, as Jones (2006) suggests, new media art represents “a movement beyond the old genre categories” (p. 51), it also represents a corresponding movement beyond the old cultural categories of high and low. To these ends, we designed display methods in Other Heroes that purposefully referred to the culture of comics collectors. Display tables were built out of comic boxes and art was hung in clear plastic bags referential of (or identical to) the bags collectors use to store and preserve their comic books. In this manner we sought to affirm that the historical culture of comics cannot be divorced from comics as an art form just because that art is on display in a gallery setting. At the same time, we repurposed the artifacts of comics culture in a manner unobtrusive to contemplative consideration of the art on the part of the viewer. The cultural history of comics was present in the gallery, but in such a way that it did not overshadow the art or imply that the art was solely an artifact of popular culture. This is because the references to comics culture were used

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in a manner in keeping with the gallery aesthetic, as tools by which to display art. Thus the artwork was allowed to act as a bridge between the two worlds of comics and fine art, divorced from neither but open to both communicative and contemplative consideration. Simultaneously, traditionally contemplative fine art media such as photography, illustration, and painting were included in the exhibition for a communicative purpose. These non-comics works discussed issues of racial representation via iconography emblematic of the archetypes commonly associated with American comics, such as the superhero and the minstrelized racial caricature. These works were put on display side by side with original comics art and digital prints of a single magnified comics panels. The comics art ran the gamut in content and genre, from political and editorial cartooning to science fiction to romantic comedy. Nonpolitical works by African American authors hung next to criticisms of racism by white creators. The diversity of media, content, authorial voice, and display design tied in to the overarching theme of diversity of racial representation, or rather the historical lack thereof, within the comics medium and, by extension, in society. What I hope to suggest about comics in the museum is a synthesis of new media curatorial philosophy with the idea of gallery comics: An adjustment of the view of museums to fit with what is, to the fine art world, an emergent medium, and an adjustment of the view of the medium to make it better suited to the representational and thematic rigors of the museum. This is the idea not of the gallery comic, but of the exhibition comic, an exhibition design that considers the gallery not as a wall but as a gutter space. The term “gutter” refers to the blank spaces between comics panels. In comics scholar Scott McCloud’s conception of “closure” the reader’s imagination is engaged by the gutter to mentally insert what the printed static images excerpt from the visual representation of the scene (McCloud 1993, 68). McCloud believes that narrative time in comics is propelled by what he terms “closure,” a form of cognition that takes places as the reader’s eye moves from panel to panel (p. 100). Transplanting this layout design to a museum exhibition space, each piece becomes a “panel” in the single large-scale “comic” of the exhibition taken as a whole. The disparate artwork is remixed into a (in a loose sense) narrative that echoes the thematic context of the exhibition. Incorporating new media concepts such as remixing and the curator-ascontext-provider informed the exhibition design of Out of Sequence: Underrepresented Voices in American Comics, which Jennings and I curated for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Krannert Art Museum. In order to display the sheer diversity of authorial voice, content, and form that exists in comics, the exhibition included 214 pieces from female creators, minority creators, small press and independent creators, webcomics creators, abstract

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comics, gallery comics, virtual reality comics, reproductions of single panels and whole pages, projects, and original art. This narrative comics-inspired exhibition design also provides new possibilities for participatory pedagogy in the museum setting (see Duffy, forthcoming). The narrative we sought to contextualize was one of myriad untapped possibilities, of a medium that can help make sense of both past and future in relation to the present, and an art that has its place in the museum, in popular culture, in print, and all points and all gutters in between. References Berwick, C. 2005. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Comic-Book Artists?” ARTnews, November. . Accessed October 10, 2008. Boxer, S. 2006. “Masters of American Comics.” Artforum 44(8): 239–40. Brandl, M. S. 2006. “Two New Art Terms, a New Artistic Development: Gallery Comics and a New Compositional Form: Iconosequentiality.” Sharkforum, May 8. http://sharkforum.org/ archives/2006/05/ two_new_art_terms_a_new_artist.html. Accessed October 10, 2008. Budick, A. 2006. “It’s Funny, but Comics Are Now High Art.” Newsday, September 19. http://www .newsday.com/entertainment/arts/ny-etcomics4896577sep19,0,6646973.story?coll=ny-arts -headlines. Accessed November 12, 2008. Cassel, V. 2003. “Between a Bedrock and a Nuclear Power Plant.” In Splat, Boom, Pow!: The Influence of Cartoons in Contemporary Art, edited by V. Cassel, 17–29. Houston: Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Clark, V. A. 2002. “The Power of Suggestion . . . and the Suggestion of Power.” In Comic Release!: Negotiating Identity for a New Generation, edited by V. A. Clark and B. Bloemink, 26–42. New York: Distributed Art Publishers. Cook, S. 2003. “Toward a Theory of the Practice of Curating New Media.” In Beyond the Box: Diverging Curatorial Practices, edited by M. Townsend, 169–82. Banff, AB: Banff Centre Press. Corliss, R. 2007. “Does Mad Need a Museum?” Time, February 3. http://www.time.com/time/arts/ article/0,8599,1585726,00.html. Accessed October 10, 2008. Corrin, L. G., ed. 1994. Mining the Museum: An Installation of Fred Wilson. New York: New Press. Detels, C. 1998. “History, Philosophy, and the Canons of the Arts.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 32 (3): 33–51. Diamond, S. 2003. “Silicon to Carbon: Thought Chips.” In Beyond the Box: Diverging Curatorial Practices, edited M. Townsend, 141–68. Banff, AB: Banff Centre Press. Duffy, D. 2009. “Learning from Comics on the Wall: Sequential Art Narrative Design in Museology and Multimodal Education.” Visual Arts Research, 35. Eye Magazine. 2006. “Investigating the Canon of US Comics.” Eye Magazine, 60. http://www .eyemagazine.com/review.php?id=131&rid=650&set=715. Accessed October 10, 2008. Freudenheim, T. L. 2007. “A Show That Takes the Funnies Seriously.” Wall Street Journal, January 10, D10. Gardner, J. 2006. “Archives, Collectors and the New Media Work of Comics.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 52(4): 787–806. Gravett, P. 2007. “Masters of American Comics: Comic Art Comes in from the Cold.” March 23, 2007. http://www.paulgravett.com/articles/050_masters/050_masters.htm. Accessed October 10, 2008.

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Halbreich, K. 2000. “Inventing New Models for the Museum and its Audiences.” In Curating Now: Imaginative Practice/Public Responsibility, edited by P. Marincola, 67–80. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative. Harvey, R. C. 1996. The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Harvey, R. C. 2007. “Masters of American Comics: Put This in Your Canon and Shoot It Off.” Comics Journal 282: 178–85. Hill, C. 2007. “Gallery Comics: The Beginnings.” International Journal of Comic Art 9(2): 6–12. Jones, C. A. 2006. “Sensorium: New Media Complexities for Embodied Experience.” Parachute 121: 80–97. Laaniste, M. 2002. “The Relationship between Art and Comic Strip.” Kunst.ee, 1, 81. Lee, S. 2005. “Art for Comics Sake: L.A.’s Masters of American Comics Exhibition.” Publishers Weekly, November 29. http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6287293.html. Accessed October 10, 2008. McCloud, S. 1993. Understanding Comics. Northhampton, MA: Tundra. Pettibon, R. 2005. “Eisner by Pettibon.” In Masters of American Comics, edited by J. Carlin, P. Karasik and B. Walker, 247–56. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Pinkard, S., A. Adams, N. Robertson, J. Smith, and T. Weinberg. (Producers). 2005. John Carlin: “Masters of American Comics.” The Diane Rhem Show [Radio Program], December 20. Washington, DC: WAMU. http://www.wamu.org/programs/dr/05/12/20.php. Accessed November 12, 2008. Rhode, M. 2007. Conference discussion at International Arts Forum, October 19, James Madison Building, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Robbins, T. 1995. “Women and Children First.” Inks: Cartoon and Comic Art Studies 2(3): 68–70. Robertson, B. 2003. “Museum Collecting and the Canon.” American Art 17(3): 2–11. Roche, J. 2007. “Gallery Comics: Contemporary Contexts.” International Journal of Comic Art 9(2): 13–23. Sabin, R. 2003. “Quote and Be Damned . . . ?” In Splat, Boom, Pow!: The Influence of Cartoons in Contemporary Art, edited by V. Cassel, 11–15. Houston: Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Schacht, R. 2002. “Collaborative Curatorial Culmination.” Leonardo 35(5): 577–78. Spiegelman, A. 1990 “High Art Lowdown.” Artforum 30(4): 115. Winiemko, G. 2006. “Let Me Tell You Something: Why I Like Movies Better than Art.” Media-N: The Online Journal of the New Media Caucus 2(3): 48–50. http://www.newmediacaucus.org/ media-n/2006/v02/n03. Accessed October 10, 2008. Witek, J. 1992. “From Genre to Medium: Comics and Contemporary American Culture.” In Rejuvenating the Humanities, edited by R. B. Browne and M. W. Fishwich. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.

PERSONAL STATEMENTS: EXHIBITIONS ABOUT INDIVIDUAL ARTISTS Following the success of Masters of American Comics, fine arts museums and curators have shown a new interest in exhibitions by individual artists primarily identified with comics and graphic novels. This is not meant to imply that there are not astonishing historical group shows constantly being organized by collecting institutions. As I write these words in the fall of 2018, three outstanding shows are on view: Artistically MAD: Seven Decades of Satire at the Billy Ireland, Drawn to Purpose: American Women Illustrators and Cartoonists at the Library of Congress, and Sense of Humor at the National Gallery in Washington. For the purposes of this book, I am focusing here on shows following Masters that continue the fine art “lone genius” thread that was so strongly emphasized in that show. At the beginning of this section, I discuss this trend with Gary Panter, who was included as one of the “Masters,” and has been closely watching the museum and comics scene for decades. The number and popularity of museums has exploded since the 1990s. Half temple to culture, half shopping mall, art museums are on a constant quest to satisfy their members, attract new visitors, and to fill their restaurants and gift shops. Blockbuster exhibits have become essential to the museum’s bottom line. Light years away from those hasty, tacked-up shows mounted in the 1930s, today’s exhibitions have become big investments in terms of planning, design, staffing, staging, technology, and promotion. Museums invest heavily in a few shows a year, and large institutions are especially dependant on blockbuster shows that will bring in a big audience and new members. In the 1997 New York Times article “Art: Glory Days for the Art Museum,” art journalist Judith L. Dobrzynski describes two shows that inspired the blockbuster trend: Back in what might be described as the dark ages for museums, they were places in which the halls literally were dark, designed for contemplation and existing primarily for elite visitors. Nothing changed that as much as the blockbuster, which brought ordinary people into museums. In popular lore, the blockbuster was fathered by the King Tutankhamen 289

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exhibition in 1977, and midwifed by Thomas Hoving, who during his time as director of the Metropolitan arranged a steady stream of them. As Mr. Kamen [Michael G. Kamen, a Pulitzer Prize–winning professor of American history and culture at Cornell] pointed out, a lady by the name of Mona Lisa single-handedly gave birth to the blockbuster some years earlier. Leonardo’s smiling, enigmatic masterpiece was lent by the Louvre for a brief visit to the National Gallery of Art in Washington and to the Metropolitan. She was mobbed. In New York alone, more than a million people stood in line between February 7 and March 4 [1963], waiting hours to file past the painting. It was largest crowd ever for a single painting at the Met and one of the largest crowds ever at the museum, period. Museum directors took note. (1997) Dobrzynski goes on with a description of the spectacle of the King Tut phenomenon of 1977, which spun off lucrative lines of merchandise and attracted hoards of new visitors at every museum the King visited. She spoke with John R. Lane, the former director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, who had a theory that there were two distinct audiences that were attracted to these big shows: One group comes to the museum “because it wants to be challenged and to see something new,” he said. “And there’s another audience, a much bigger one, that is seeking a cultural experience and doesn’t want to make a mistake. It won’t go to the Museum of Modern Art to see a Projects show for a new artist, but it will go to MOMA to see a Picasso show.” (1997) Most comics-related shows, even Masters, may not be getting King Tut numbers, but they have always been popular with the public, perhaps because comics are such a familiar part of the visitor’s everyday lives. But it still took art museums a long time to accept that comic artists were worth risking a spot on their all-important exhibition schedule. As I’ve discussed in earlier sections of this book, there were class issues and conflicting trends in art, but another key to comics’ spotty relationship with museums was the valuation of the artwork itself. Collecting original comic art used to be a fringe activity, saving artwork from the trash; now work by popular artists like Crumb and Kirby are setting sales records. In his essay, Forbes cultural journalist Rob Salkowitz explains how exhibitions contribute to the valuation of an artist’s work while comic art continues its march to cultural legitimacy through exhibitions. Salkowitz begins his essay by sharing his memories of the 2016 Seattle Art Museum exhibition Graphic Masters: Dürer, Rembrandt, Hogarth, Goya, Picasso, R. Crumb, which was centered around The Bible Illuminated: R. Crumb’s Book

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Figure 66. Exhibition view of the Will Eisner Centennial Exhibition at the Society of Illustrators, featuring a page of Eisner’s brushstrokes and ink washes. 2017. Courtesy of the Society of Illustrators.

of Genesis (tour: Los Angeles; Portland, Oregon; Columbus, Ohio; Brunswick, Maine; San Jose, California; Seattle; Paris; and the 55th Venice Biennale). Comics scholar Charles Hatfield discusses his own experience viewing Genesis and the issues of narrative (and exhaustion) that come up when confronted with every page of a two-hundred-page book on the walls of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. On a smaller scale, the very personal art installations created by Carol Tyler combine comics about her family relationships and her quest to understand the trauma caused by herfather’s service in Europe in WWI using memorabilia, hand-made props, and sculptures that give the viewer insight into her mind and process. In her University of Cincinnati DAAP galleries exhibit, drawings from her award-winning You’ll Never Know trilogy wave from a clothesline, while visitors can literally walk into her head through a door cut through a large self-portrait. Another important trend in comics exhibits has been renewed interest in retrospectives of the work of influential elder statesmen like Will Eisner, Rube Goldberg, or George Herriman. Often filled with source materials and examples from the twists and turns of a long and wide-ranging career, these in-depth shows provide inspiration to the generations of artists following them. Impressive shows in 2017 and 2018 include a pair of centennial shows celebrating the work of Will Eisner at the Society of Illustrators, New York (figures 6, 66), and

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Figure 67. Exhibition view of George Herriman: Krazy Kat is Krazy Kat is Krazy Kat, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. 2017. Photo by David Walker. Courtesy of Brian Walker.

at le Musée de la Bande Desssinée, George Herriman: Krazy Kat is Krazy Kat is Krazy Kat (figures 3, 67) at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, and The Art of Rube Goldberg at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco (figures 2, 68),1 which ran concurrently with an exhibit of artist’s “contraptions.” An interesting variation on this idea is the artist-curated show celebrating their own comics heroes and influences. In this section, Belgian comics scholar Benoit Crucifix examines two shows of this type curated by artists Dan Clowes and Art Spiegelman. Eye of the Cartoonist: Daniel Clowes’s Selections from Comics History was shown at the Wexner Center in collaboration with the Billy Ireland (2014). Le Musée prive d’Art Spiegelman, a selection from Spiegelman’s own collection, accompanied Co-Mix, a major retrospective of his work at the 2012 Angoulême International Comics Festival (tour: Paris, Cologne, Vancouver, New York, Toronto). Co-Mix, as displayed in Paris, New York, and Toronto, was also the main topic of a conversation in a telephone interview, included here, that I had with Spiegelman in 2016. Several recent exhibitions have explored the influential work of the “King of Comics” Jack Kirby, such as Jack Kirby: The Super Creator at the Angoulême International Comics Festival (2015), Marvel Universe of Superheroes at the Museum of Popular Culture (Seattle, 2018), What Nerve! Alternate Figures in American Art (RISD, 2015), and Masters of American Comics (tour: LA,

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Figure 68. Installation view of The Art of Rube Goldberg at The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco. 2018. Courtesy The Contemporary Jewish Museum; Photo: JKA Photography.

Milwaukee, New York, Newark). The most complete of these is Comic Book Apocalypse: The Graphic World of Jack Kirby, an impressive 2015 retrospective curated by Kirby expert Charles Hatfield at California State University Northridge (CSUN). While all of these shows celebrated Kirby’s characters, distinctive drawing style, and his influence, the CSUN show also displayed the originals for an entire issue of Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth (#14, 1974) and a large selection of rarely seen collages. Ending this section is a trio of articles on the CSUN show. First, Hatfield, the author of Hand of Fire: The Comic Art of Jack Kirby (2011, University Press of Mississippi), explains his motivations and curatorial process. Los Angeles–based writer and artist Doug Harvey takes us on a tour of the exhibit in his review for the Comics Journal. Artist and art critic Alexi Worth’s review for Art in America brings us back to the relationship between comics and pop art, discussing the use of Kirby’s cover for Young Romance #26 in Richard Hamilton’s groundbreaking pop art collage Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing (1956) and Kirby’s place in art history. Note 1. The Art of Rube Goldberg was conceived by Creighton Michael; developed in cooperation with Heirs of Rube Goldberg, LLC, New York, New York; and curated by Max Weintraub. The tour was organized by International Arts and Artists, Washington, DC.

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References Artistically MAD: Seven Decades of Satire (exhibition: May 5–October 21, 2018). Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. https://cartoons.osu.edu/events/artistically-mad/. Accessed October 15, 2018. “The Art of Rube Goldberg” (exhibition: March 15, 2018–July 8, 2018). Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco. https://www.thecjm.org/exhibitions/99. Accessed October 26, 2018. Carlin, John, Paul Karasik, and Brian Walker, eds. 2005. Masters of American Comics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Crumb. R. 2009. The Book of Genesis Illustrated. New York: Norton Books. Dobrzynski, Judith H. 1997. “Art; Glory Days for the Museum.” New York Times, October 5. Drawn to Purpose: American Women Illustrators and Cartoonists (exhibition November 18, 2017–October 20, 2018). Library of Congress, Washington, DC. https://www.loc.gov/item/ prn-17-165/library-to-open-drawn-to-purpose-american-women-illustrators-and-cartoon ists/2017–10–27/. Accessed October 14, 2018. George Herriman: Krazy Kat is Krazy Kat is Krazy Kat (exhibition: October 18, 2017–February 26, 2018). Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. https://www.museoreinasofia.es/ en/exhibitions/george-herriman. Accessed October 26, 2018. Hatfield, Charles, and Ben Saunders, eds. 2015. Comic Book Apocalypse: The Graphic World of Jack Kirby (exhibition: September, Mike Curb College of Arts, Media and Communication, California State University Northridge). San Diego: IDW Publishing. Jack Kirby: The Super Creator (exhibition: February 1–29, 2015). 42th festival international de la bande dessinée d’Angoulême. http://www.bdangouleme.com/557,jack-kirby-le-super-createur. Accessed October 14, 2018 (in French). Lind, John, ed. Will Eisner: The Centennial Celebration, 1917–2017 (exhibition catalog: Angoulême, January 26–October 15, 1917; Society of Illustrators, March 1–June 3, 2017). Milwaukie, OR: Kitchen Sink Press/Dark Horse. Marvel Universe of Superheroes (exhibition: April 21, 2018–January 6, 2019). Museum of Popular Culture, Seattle, WA. http://www.mopop.org/marvel. Accessed October 14, 2018. Nadel, Dan. What Nerve! Alternate Figures in American Art 1960—the Present (exhibition: September 19, 2014–January 4, 2015). Providence, RI: Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design. Sense of Humor (exhibition: July 15, 2018–January 6, 2019). National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. https://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2018/sense-of-humor.html. Accessed October 14, 2018. Spiegelman, Art. 2012. Co-Mix: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics, and Scraps. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly Publishers. Tyler, Carol. 2015. Soldier’s Heart: The Campaign to Understand My WWII Veteran Father—a Daughter’s Memoir. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books.

After Masters: Interview with Gary Panter Kim A. Munson

Gary Panter is a prolific and multifaceted artist who is constantly experimenting and moving his art into new mediums. Building on his work in comics (Jimbo, Raw, Dal Tokyo), paintings, and design for television (Pee Wee’s Playhouse), Panter has branched out into other media like light shows, puppetry, design, printmaking, sculpture, and rock music. He has also reinterpreted the classics in a series of graphic novels; his latest book from Fantagraphics, Songy of Paradise (2017), takes on Milton’s Paradise Regained. As he’s a veteran of enumerable exhibitions both in the United States and internationally, I was curious about his thoughts about how shows of comic art are evolving in major art museums. These comments are from a Facebook conversation we had in 2014, which have been edited for length and clarity. Kim A. Munson: I’ve been chatting with various people about Masters of American Comics and trends in exhibitions of comics in general. One issue I’m wrestling with is why there hasn’t been another blockbuster group comic art show by the major art museums, which seem to be focused now on individuals. I asked Jeet Heer, and he said: “I think the Masters show represented the culmination and end of a way of thinking about comics history (as a story of linear progress from McCay to Ware that has now been exhausted), postMasters there is much more interest in looking at individual cartoonists as their own thing or part of a scene—the grand narrative of comics history seems so large. As artists like Ware, Spiegelman, and Crumb get canonized, they are seen as their own thing and divorced from their comics context. So, shows like Masters, which provide context, are less valued.” You’ve been in more group shows than I can imagine. What do you think of this? I see his point. Individual artists are easier for the museums to explain and promote. On the other hand, we don’t stop doing shows about the Impressionists as a group because we are interested in Monet as an individual. There are many eras and movements to be explored in comics and pop culture.

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Gary Panter: I think that that is correct that the Masters show was an introduction to the art world of comics, another introduction. I am sure that John [Carlin] and Art [Spiegelman] would say and have said that there should be more shows along these lines. Each of us would make a different list and a different list on different days. Institutional support and curiosity is really all that is wanted, but because of the specialized nature of comic and the multifaceted nature of genre, intent, financial influence, etc., that it is outside of the comfort level of the people in institutions who have studied an area of art history or philosophical art theory or fund-raising and operations and is confusing and risky area to venture into. Who is an expert at comics from what end of comics? Media studies and theory have encompassed comics—museums know there is heat there, but little assurance of canon and category. The cuteness, the adolescent angst antisocial violence and cheap medium nature of comics can also make comic as a medium look trivial. Look at the San Diego Comic Con. How in the heck do you parse that? The sheer number of artists working these days, which is exciting, will make the historian’s job daunting. So people that do get to curate shows make lists of what they like, what they can procure, and what they can insure and transport, etc. The money in comics is in superhero dreck (to me) and that will exert an unwanted lobby and confusion. Comics are for kids, so kid friendliness will be an issue with programmers. Art and John made pretty great choices given the number of artists they chose and I was lucky to be inserted into that show by two friends who believe in me very much for some reason. Charles Burns, Dan Clowes, Jay Lynch, Bill Griffith, VT Hamlin, Harold Gray, George Opper, Jesse Marsh would’ve been on my personal list. The answer is for curators to read a lot of comics and comic histories and develop their own intelligent and persuasive lists and do small shows then bigger shows and get those shows out of the comic ghetto, though the museum in Columbus is a dedicated museum that looks like a museum and not a kid ride.

Splashing Ink on Museum Walls: How Comic Art Is Conquering Galleries, Museums, and Public Spaces Rob Salkowitz Reprinted with permission of Rob Salkowitz from issue #2 of Full Bleed: The Comics and Culture Quarterly (IDW, 2018).

In June 2016, visitors flocked to the Seattle Art Museum for a special exhibition called Graphic Masters. The lineup was a veritable Mount Rushmore of Western art from the past five hundred years: intricate etchings by Rembrandt, Dürer, and Hogarth; politically charged prints by Goya; nearly a hundred drawings from the hand of Pablo Picasso. But it was the grand finale that left art enthusiasts speechless. Strung through three gigantic galleries were the nearly two hundred original pages representing the complete Book of Genesis as depicted by Robert Crumb. Yes, cartoonist R. Crumb (see Genesis installed at the Hammer Museum, figure 69). Seeing the work of Crumb hanging in museum shows isn’t new and unprecedented; he’s enjoyed an elite reputation among art critics for the past several decades and been the subject of many large exhibits in the United States and overseas, particularly in Europe, where the status of comics as art is much more firmly established. And the market is catching up: a Crumb-drawn cover hammered at $717,000 at a Heritage Auction in May, setting a new record for a comic art original in the United States. Still, it’s a big deal for any living artist to be exhibited side by side with the greatest names in the Western canon in a major American museum, much less a mere comic book artist still best known to the wider culture as the “Keep on Truckin’!” guy or, perhaps, the creator of Fritz the Cat. For those who have appreciated comics for decades, it’s hard to suppress a cheer when looking at that marquee. Let’s face it: comics in the United States have always had an inferiority complex. While newspaper strips were mass media and their creators celebrated, the comic book industry was founded by gangsters and other disreputable figures. 297

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Figure 69. The Bible Illuminated: R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis. Installation view at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. October 24, 2009–February 7, 2010. Photo by Brian Forrest, courtesy of the Hammer Museum.

The first generation of creators were mostly those who couldn’t get a foothold in more prestigious arenas of art and literature. Stanley Lieber famously adopted the pen name of “Stan Lee” so his career in comics wouldn’t ruin his reputation when he wrote his great American novel. The medium suffered under censorship in the 1950s that bleached it of mature, ambitious content. The juvenile pablum that survived became fodder for the Camp and pop art movements of the 1960s, and the ridicule that comics endured lives on in the “Zap! Bam! Pow!” headlines that seem to accompany its every cultural advance. Museums, galleries, and public art exhibitions are in many ways arbitrary gatekeepers: insular, elitist, in the thrall of canons steeped in a very male, very white version of the past. But for better or worse, they represent validation for the art form and its creators whose cultural legitimacy, at least in the United States, is still not entirely settled. Consequently, comics creators and those who appreciate the art find themselves torn between what they know to be true about the integrity of the work regardless of elite opinion, and craving the status conferred by the embrace of the art world. “I was always attracted by the accessibility of comics,” says artist Bill Sienkiewicz. “Comics are immediate. You can follow them month by month. You don’t need to get dressed in a tuxedo to enjoy the art.” At the same time, Sienkiewicz acknowledges there is something ennobling about seeing the originals behind glass in a fine art setting. “Putting

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it on a wall in a frame—the ceremony, the procedure—elevates it. It invites attention, validity, celebration. It says that it’s worth being taken in as a work of art, not just a page in the story.” Shows like Graphic Masters are the most visible manifestation of the growing acceptance of comic art within the traditional bastions of elite culture. That process that has been percolating under the surface for decades, extending along a front that includes museums, high-end galleries, institutional exhibition spaces, and public art installations. As it breaks through in more and more places, it is not only deepening appreciation for the American art form of comics, but also changing the way art thinks about itself.

Up from Kitsch Comic fans in the twenty-first century have become accustomed to seeing the objects of their enthusiasm move from the geeky corners of the culture to its center. Comic-themed movies dominate the box office; comic properties are ubiquitous on apparel and licensed merchandise; graphic novels climb the bestseller charts and get respectful reviews in mainstream publications. Mass acceptance in the world of commercial entertainment is, on a certain level, unsurprising. Comics are a popular art form and a potent storytelling platform. In the hands of savvy businesses with access to big media channels, they have reached a global audience hungry for larger-than-life characters and complex story worlds. But all that and a lapel pin won’t get comics admission to a fancy museum where old distinctions between “high” and “low” art are still policed by snobbish tastemakers. In this world, “fine art” often rejects representation and narrative— at least narrative that does not require a PhD in art history or a cryptic artist’s statement to shed light on it. “Serious work” celebrates an ironic or critical take on popular culture, not a fervent embrace of it. Roy Lichtenstein’s famous comic-derived canvases of the 1960s were a sensation because they used comics iconography to comment on our culture of mass production. The originals that inspired him were dismissed as the disposable works of anonymous craftsmen. Even illustration, the branch of art devoted to representation and narrative in a commercial context, initially looked down on cartooning, even as the world of fine art looked down on illustration. Now those lines are blurring, the gates are opening, and big piles of money are changing hands. The new celebration of comics art is good news for fans, artists, collectors, and dealers. It’s also creating a host of issues for institutions and markets that are not accustomed to the peculiarities of the comics medium and comics culture.

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The Long March to the Cultural Citadel Scholar Kim A. Munson has been studying the integration of comics into the art world since the early 2000s. Her book on the subject, Comic Art in Museums, is due out from University Press of Mississippi in 2020. She has chronicled the history of comic art exhibitions from 1934 to the present, including a landmark show at the Louvre in Paris in 1967 that first focused European attention on comics as a serious art (see figure 35). Munson cites the Masters of American Comics exhibit from 2005 as a real turning point, at least in America, where appreciation for the art form has lagged behind Europe. Masters featured original artwork by fifteen artists who helped form the visual vocabulary of American comics, including Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, Milton Caniff, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, and Jack Kirby. It displayed their work in a traditional retrospective context at the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (see figures 8, 62–64). “Masters got widespread press and attention,” says Munson. “It was controversial because it attempted to pick a canon, which is certain to start debates.” That canon, she pointed out, was all male and all white with the exception of George Harriman, leading to alternative exhibits featuring women, people of color, and others left out of the conversation. “Years later, people are still arguing, so I guess the strategy worked,” she says. Brian Walker, who managed the first comic art museum in America—the Museum of Cartoon Art founded by his father, cartoonist Mort Walker—was one of the organizers of the Masters show. Walker says Masters came about as a reaction to a pop art exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York in the early ’90s, which depicted comics and cartoons as primitive and unsophisticated relative to contemporary art that employed the same imagery (exhibit photos, see figures 56, 57). “Art [Spiegelman] was enraged at how the High/Low show disparaged comics as an art form (see figure 61). He wanted to provide the missing context, the storyline that threads through the history of comics, both comic strips and comic books.” One person receptive to Spiegelman’s message was Ann Philbin, at the time head of the Drawing Center in New York. In 1999, she became director of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and began working with Walker, cocurator John Carlin, Spiegelman, and others to give the great figures in comics art history a proper showcase in a serious fine art setting. The result was a massive exhibit of more than eight hundred pieces, spread across two major museums, that eventually made its way east to Milwaukee, Newark, and New York.

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The show was a huge hit wherever it landed. It turns out people like comics, and when you put comics in a museum, people who don’t ordinarily come to museums will turn up. “Younger curators don’t see the popularity of comics as something you need to shy away from,” says John Lind, a creative director and exhibit curator who has worked extensively on comics exhibitions and museum catalogs since the mid-1990s. “We’ve been building to a point where it’s accepted, where you don’t have to preface shows by saying, ‘well, it’s comic art, but . . . ’ Cartoonists aren’t sneaking in the back door anymore. They’re welcome.” Lind says shows like the Will Eisner Centennial Retrospective exhibit showing concurrently at la Cité internationale de la bande dessinée et de l’image in Angoulême, France, and at the Society of Illustrators (SOI) in New York (exhibit photos, see figures 6, 66) signify a growing consensus that the premier practitioners of comics art are among the most important artists of their eras, irrespective of the medium they were working in. “Eisner is a no-brainer,” he says. “People say, ‘is he still relevant now?’ That’s like asking if Picasso is still relevant. There’s a grouping of masters of this form, and he’s one of them.” SOI is one of several museums around the United States that routinely mounts exhibits focused on comics art and includes it in the permanent collection. It has hosted exhibits of Eisner’s work as well as shows featuring Crumb, Harvey Kurtzman, Drew Friedman, and a group show of work by alternative weekly comics. Though some artists say the institution was not always welcoming of cartoonists, SOI moved to fully embrace the artform after acquiring the Museum of Cartoon and Comic Art (MOCCA) in 2012. “All illustration, including comics, is fine art, although not all fine art is illustration,” explained SOI executive director Anelle Miller, making a point that might seem matter-of-fact today, but actually represents a triumph in a century-long struggle for legitimacy. “All the creators are artists.” Miller says that displaying the work in a gallery space is illuminating, especially pieces that were originally created for publication. “Reproduction is better now, but in the old days, it wasn’t great. The paper was bad, the printing was cheap. When you see the [original] work up close, you see the hand of the artist, the craftsmanship. It’s amazing. Some of it is timeless.” Show me the money. There’s an old joke that when rich people get together, they talk about art, but when artists get together, they talk about money. And it’s true: the subjects are closely connected. It’s difficult to understand the whole story of comics’ growing status as artwork without following the money. There has been a collectors’ market for original comic art for decades, running roughly parallel to the comic book back-issue trade, and susceptible to

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the same general market trends. Buyers are generally motivated by nostalgic affection for the subject matter, the popularity of the main characters, and the dynamic depiction of action on the page. The prices in this market reflect the priorities and interests of this specialized group of collectors, and can look very odd to people who lack the knowledge and attachment of longtime comic fans. For example, up until the Crumb sale in May, the auction record for a single piece of comics art in the United States was held by a panel page from a mid’70s issue of The Incredible Hulk drawn by journeymen Herb Trimpe and Jack Abel, which had sold for $657,250 in May 2014. Fans of course know that was not just any page: it was page 32 of Hulk #180, featuring the first published appearance of the character Wolverine. In this case, the identity of the artists and the aesthetic quality of the work make absolutely no difference in terms of its significance, which is not how the art market usually works. The difference in valuation makes this arena challenging for mainstream galleries; so do more practical considerations of form and medium. General art collectors tend to value paintings more than drawings and larger works more than smaller ones; most comic originals are pen and ink on paper at roughly 11” x 17”—sometimes decorated with registration marks and other artifacts of the production process. A well-heeled non-comics art collector prepared to pay $50,000 for a canvas by a contemporary painter would likely balk at acquiring a cover by Silver Age comic artist Gil Kane (largely unknown outside of fandom) for that same price, although that is the going rate. That’s why most sales of comic art take place at auctions, online, or in transactions at conventions and other gatherings of comic fans, not in the wineand-cheese world of fancy galleries where other kinds of art compete for the attention of buyers and critics. Typically, people who want comics art know where to find it. But that model is starting to change. One dealer who has successfully incorporated comic artwork into a traditional gallery framework is Adam Baumgold, whose gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side has offered comics work alongside other contemporary and twentieth-century art for over twenty-three years. Baumgold says he curates work that he likes and has been important to the comics world, regardless of specific style, under the belief that a good drawing will hold up in both book form and on gallery walls. “Many so-called fine artists are basically comic artists to some extent,” says Baumgold, citing contemporary artists Raymond Pettibon, Jim Shaw, and others. “The division between ‘comic artists’ and ‘fine artists’ is narrowing, and I guess that is being reflected in the marketplace.” Perhaps, but that doesn’t always translate to mainstream art fans flocking to galleries to buy original comic art. Scott Eder, a lifetime comic art fan who

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says he started dealing artwork to support his collecting habit, also maintained a gallery space in New York, in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn, from 2008 to 2017 before relocating to Jersey City over the summer. Eder specializes in critically lauded alternative and underground comics from around the world, including some of the leading figures in European comics whose work can be difficult to find in America. Despite mounting three or four shows per year featuring creators with strong cult followings like Jim Woodring, Tony Millionaire, and Denis Kitchen, as well as old masters like Caniff, Kurtzman, and Eisner, Eder says he never really got the full benefit of being a “New York gallery” in terms of media coverage or foot traffic. “I’d put a lot of effort into framing the pieces, promoting the show, doing a gallery event,” says Eder. “And then almost all the sales would come through the usual collector channels. People would show up, but they wouldn’t buy. Media coverage was spotty. That would discourage anyone.” “Gallery owners are running into as much of a learning curve as the artists themselves,” says Bill Sienkiewicz, who has exhibited his comic work in galleries and museums since the late 1980s. “Every iteration of comics is being seen through the prism of respectability.” That doesn’t always work out, because of the basic differences that still exist between selling work intended for exhibition and display, and work that was created in the first instance for storytelling and publication. There’s also the gap in taste between what fans desire for their own reasons, and what gallery owners think is strong artistically. That creates problems for both the gallery and the artist. “The difference between desirable and undesirable always bugged me,” says Sienkiewicz. “When you’re putting comic artwork on the wall, unless people take everything, you’re left with stuff without the main characters,” even if the remaining pieces are stylistically strong in other ways. For artists working in a medium that rarely got any attention from galleries a generation ago, it’s a nice problem to have.

The Eye of the Beholder Beyond the difficulties of trying to apply the traditional art market model to comics, there’s another disjunction between comic art and other types of artwork exhibited in galleries and museums. Like illustration, but unlike most contemporary fine art, comics tell a story. And while a great illustrator like Norman Rockwell can imply that entire story in a single, wordless image, comics are sequential and often include text as an integral element. If you are just looking

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at original comic art as an object in a frame without reading the pictures as story, you are missing the vast majority of the artist’s intention. That can be a problem for institutions whose mission is to promote appreciation of art and artists in context, but are not physically set up to deal with a narrative medium. “Original comic-book artwork represents some of the most beautiful marks on paper made in the last century, but it’s so much more than that,” says Arlen Schumer, a comics scholar whose book, The Silver Age of Comic Book Art, places the work of artists like Jack Kirby, Carmine Infantino, and Jim Steranko in the context of the larger trends in design, advertising, fine art, and culture of the 1960s. “It’s a storytelling medium. For non-fans to get what’s great about comics, you have to sit down and read them. You can’t just hang the original comics art. That doesn’t get across the greatness of comics. You need big reproductions [and other ways to replicate the story experience].” Traditional gallery spaces are not set up for people to experience art in this way, and some of the early pioneers of comic art museums had to come up with creative solutions to the problem. Walker, who estimates he has curated hundreds of exhibits worldwide, says the right approach depends on the intentions and the audience for the exhibit. “Masters was very austere and traditional in how they presented the work because they wanted it to be a serious show,” he says. “Other museums take a more family-friendly approach. They’ll display the art and the comics, of course, but also tchotchkes like merchandise and ephemera in glass cases.” In the early 1990s, Kevin Eastman, cocreator of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, inspired by Walker’s example and his own enthusiasm for comics art, invested a big pile of Turtle-bucks into his own project, the Words and Pictures Museum in Northampton, Massachusetts. The four-story museum displayed hundreds of works from Eastman’s collection, and tried to strike a balance between art and story. “Whenever possible, we would display all the artwork for a particular story so viewers could see how the artists applied storytelling techniques,” he says. In some cases, the museum design itself was part of the story: viewers entered through a “cave” that showed the evolution of pictorial storytelling from cave paintings and hieroglyphics to illuminated manuscripts and editorial illustrations. The Words and Pictures Museum closed after several years, but Eastman maintained his interest in presenting comic art in a gallery environment. In 2015, he was brought in to manage IDW’s San Diego Comic Art Gallery, an exhibit space adjacent to IDW’s offices in the historic Liberty Station complex. One of the permanent features of the gallery is a replica of Eastman’s studio including his drawing board and supplies as well as various books, posters, and memorabilia that inspire him.

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“A lot of people think of comic art as something that’s stamped out overseas in a factory somewhere,” he says. “We want to show that there’s a real person, an artist, actually sitting at a drafting table drawing pictures on paper.” Balancing the spectacular quality of comic art with the personal act of creation is also a challenge that faced comics scholar Charles Hatfield when he mounted an ambitious exhibit of work by Jack Kirby at the gallery space at California State University at Northridge in 2015, in collaboration with the gallery director Jim Sweeters (exhibit photos, see figures 80, 81). Kirby’s work combines visual imagination and masterful story pacing. To offer visitors a true picture of Kirby’s genius, Hatfield had to find a way to represent both within the confines of the traditional white cube of the gallery. He solved this by “supercharging” the space with bright colors, oversized images, and comic-style lettering. “It was crucial that we enliven the environment using lettering and color treatments,” says Hatfield. “We wanted to create visual depth and see into the depth as people walked into the gallery.” Hatfield’s exhibit combined single images, complete stories, collages, production artwork, and other pieces from Kirby’s varied career to try to translate the experience of reading Kirby’s comics to a live installation. “You have to think like a natural-history museum curator,” says Hatfield. “Provide stuff in the corners to enliven and educate.” Another strategy for museums and galleries seeking to highlight the skills of a specific cartoonist without taking artwork meant for storytelling and reproduction out of its original context is to commission the artist to create new works specifically for an exhibition. Cartoonist Jim Woodring, best known for his surreal, dream-based work like Frank, has been featured in solo and group shows in Europe and America, including a 2017 exhibit at the Frye Museum in Seattle. For the Frye show, rather than display existing story pages, Woodring created new work using a giant six-foot nib pen of his own design. “I devoted a lot of time to those and ate into my savings in the hope that it would be worth my while,” Woodring says. He says that the notoriety afforded by these kinds of exhibits helps him make ends meet by selling his work to private collectors and doing commissions, since drawing for publication doesn’t pay the bills. Graphic novelist Ellen Forney (Marbles), who has used a cartooning approach to various non-comics illustration projects for decades, received an opportunity for a cartoonist even more unusual than a museum show: a commission to create massive permanent works of public artwork to adorn the light rail station in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. “I didn’t do comics, but I borrowed the aesthetic forms of comics—the lines, the brushstrokes, the bold colors,” she explained. “The meaning comes from the gesture. It’s not a sequence, but it’s meant to remind people of that relationship to stories.”

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Behind the Velvet Rope at Last The Graphic Masters show at Seattle Art Museum (SAM) demonstrates that, at least in some corners of the institutional museum world, minds are opening. Chiyo Ishikawa is the Susan Brotman deputy director for art and curator of European painting and sculpture at SAM. Faced with an unexpected opening in the exhibit calendar, she decided to run with a long-held idea of presenting graphic works—engravings, prints, and drawings that are rarely featured in big museum shows—as a way to introduce more general art enthusiasts to this specialized area. She says she had recently seen Crumb’s Genesis on display in Venice and realized the connection between that work and other pieces she was curating from Dürer, Rembrandt, and Goya. “His work was a funny and freshly imagined take on an old story,” says Ishikawa. “I thought, would it be outrageous to include him in the show?” After testing the idea with colleagues, the answer came back as an emphatic affirmation of her instincts. “Our education team didn’t think it could be a successful show without Crumb,” she says. At one point, Ishikawa had to approach the curator at the Met in New York, which has rarely displayed comic art, to arrange for the loan of the Dürer prints for the exhibit, and mentioned that she was considering finishing with Crumb. “She thought it would be a great idea,” Ishikawa says. “After that, it was a much easier conversation with other institutions.” Ishikawa reached out to Larry Reid, a fixture in the Seattle arts scene who curated one of the first fine art gallery shows of comic art in the United States at Seattle’s Center on Contemporary Art (COCA) in 1989 and now works for independent publisher Fantagraphics. Reid noted that Crumb cited all of the classical artists involved in the Graphics show as direct influences, and enthusiastically assisted in developing ideas to support and promote the event, including an opening-day festival where local cartoonists exhibited and sold their work in the SAM lobby. SAM solved some of the issues inherent in displaying sequential narrative art in a few ways. They displayed all 200+ pages in order in the galleries, encouraging viewers to spend time reading the text and taking in the story. They also displayed the book in final form (it was for sale in the gift shop), along with various developmental sketches and reference materials that Crumb used. Finally, SAM engaged Ellen Forney, herself an accomplished cartoonist and educator, to provide commentary for the audio guide. “She was able to explain techniques Crumb used on different pages and panels so viewers could appreciate what Crumb was doing as a storyteller,” says Ishikawa.

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Ishikawa counts the experience as a positive. Attendance was strong, and because the quantity and detail of the works on display was so overwhelming, it drove a higher-than-average number of people to buy museum memberships so they could come back and see it again and spend more time on parts they had missed. It also helped the art museum reach a younger generation. “They’ve heard of Crumb,” says Ishikawa, “so presenting a show like this is a good way to demonstrate the continued relevance of the older artists who they may not have heard of.” Is the argument settled? Longtime proponents seem to think so. “There’s so much artistry and craftsmanship in comics,” says Eastman. “Someone has to draw everything you see on the page. It’s a true American art form, and by presenting it in a museum environment, we want to get people to look at it seriously.” “The great comic artists are our Renaissance masters of the human figure,” says Schumer. “Of course it belongs in museums if that’s where art is meant to be shown. The fine-art world is now catching up to what we’ve always known. Because of the bias against comic art [as popular culture], it’s taken us that long. In the end, popular art becomes fine art. It gets recognized, like Shakespeare. From Crumb to Kirby, comic art will outlast most contemporary art being produced right now.”

In Our Own Image, After Our Likeness Charles Hatfield Reprinted with permission of Charles Hatfield. This essay was previously published on the Thought Balloonists blog, February 27, 2010.

R. Crumb’s original pages for The Book of Genesis—all of them, all 201 pages of comics plus the covers and other interior images—were exhibited recently at UCLA’s Hammer Museum in west Los Angeles (exhibit photo, see figure 69). On Saturday, February 7, the night before the exhibit’s final day, my wife, Michele, and I paid a visit and spent the better part of two hours among those pages (having already gone to the very well-attended Crumb/Françoise Mouly talk at UCLA’s Royce Hall back on October 29). Crumb’s introduction to Genesis describes the project as “a straight illustration job,” as if to head off expectations that his treatment might be a radical adaptation or satirical hatchet job. Bear in mind that readers outside the orbit of comics may not know of Crumb’s reputation for dutiful adaptations of found texts (Boswell, Sartre, Kafka, etc.) and may expect comix hijinx served up with a subversive wink-nudge; I bet Crumb wanted to foreclose that kind of reading right off the bat. But saying that his Genesis is “straight illustration” is misleading. It’s right insofar as Crumb faithfully sought to subserve the text, observe its details, and bring it to life, but it’s wrong because it soft-pedals the role that Crumb’s own tics, preoccupations, and imaginative graphic input play in the project. It is still an R. Crumb comic, after all. Before talking about the exhibition, I have to say that Crumb’s Genesis impresses me most as a prodigious feat of illustration, in the sense of imaginative entry into and patient unraveling and interpretation of the source text (I should say texts plural, though Crumb’s main source is Robert Alter’s translation, Genesis, published by Norton in 1996). Crumb obviously took exquisite care with the text, and made himself entirely submissive to it, or rather to his interpretation of it, which clearly he entered into with an attitude of respectful curiosity. I have to say that his envisionment of the Old Testament world does not strike me as original, but rather as a distillation of popular, even clichéd, 308

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visualizations, down to his stern, white-bearded God the father. I’ve thought this ever since seeing the book previewed in the New Yorker (June 8–15, 2009). Crumb’s Genesis is, characteristically, an interpretation of interpretations. After all, his art has always riffed on, or warped, received imagery, often to unsettling effect: the cuteness of greeting cards, the shamelessness of advertising, the archive of half-remembered cartoon and comics characters from the past. If nostalgia was and is a big part of underground and alternative comics, a queasy anti-nostalgia has long been Crumb’s beat. I’m reminded of an observation once made by Don Ault, passed on to me by Rusty Witek: Crumb’s style has nostalgia for itself. I think that’s spot-on. So I shouldn’t have been surprised by Crumb’s Genesis, then; anyway, I was expecting not comix hijinx but a sober illustration job, along the lines of Crumb’s Kraft-Ebbing or Philip K. Dick. I have to admit, though, that my first response to that New Yorker teaser was one of mingled admiration for Crumb’s technical skill and disappointment over the conventionality of his choices. It was only delving further into the book and reading it for long periods that brought me around to, one, being immersed in Crumb’s visual world, and, two, digging the telltale signs of Crumb; for example, the blunt intimacy and unembarrassed sensuality, which keep surfacing over the long haul despite, or perhaps because, of his fidelity to the text. In this sense Crumb’s Genesis does what I want great illustrators to do: it suffuses the source with the artist’s own sensibility even while trying to be self-effacing. And it was this sensibility that leapt out of Crumb’s originals as I walked back and forth across the exhibit, visiting and revisiting certain pages, watching other visitors respond to the pages, and trying to pick up, for want of a better word, a vibe that exceeded and pulled together those 200-plus boards. Now, it wasn’t possible for me to reread large portions of the book in sequence at the exhibition. Not only were there too many other visitors (attendance was healthy when we got there and a hindrance to movement by the time we left), but also the work is dense and fairly begs for a deep reading, not just gazing, experience. Truth to tell, my feet often begin to hurt in museum exhibits, not from walking but from standing still, so I have to circulate pretty constantly, and step forward and back and around the items on view, if I want to get an up-close, personal, and sustained take on the work. I try to reconcile what might look like roving physical restlessness with careful attention to the art; in other words, I do spend a long time in exhibits that interest me but I usually don’t stay in one spot for more than a minute. I prowl. What this means is that the terms of my attention are continually shifting: for example, I go from ignoring other attendees entirely to observing them closely. I did look at a lot of Crumb’s pages over other lookers’ shoulders, so to speak. I should say that I got to gaze at dozens of Crumb’s pages and did get to reread carefully some of them, maybe as many as a score. The pages were

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traditional inked originals on Bristol board, maybe (I’m guesstimating) not quite half again as large as their printed counterparts, so minute attention was needed. I was able to seek out marks of correction, or adjustment, in the inking: for instance, Crumb’s subtle use of white-out, sometimes for texturing, sometimes because he apparently changed his mind about minute elements of the text. Evidence of “mistakes” or second-guessing was pretty minimal, though; Crumb’s facility and focus remain mind-blowing. The underdrawing was completely hidden by his tight inks, and the hypnotic textures of the rendering were, well, just that. What I particularly enjoyed was seeing other viewers—ones unversed in Crumb’s work, or so I inferred from their sotto voce comments—confronting the pages in all their stubborn individuality, marveling at their strangeness, and often trying faithfully to read them in their entirety, one after another, until, in most cases, they gave up from the sheer surfeit. I heard more than one visitor remark on the impossibility of taking it all in. There isn’t much to say about the design of the exhibitry as such, that is, the organization and mounting of the show. After all, this was not a show defined by a curatorial vision: it did not bring together like or unlike pieces by various artists in the search for a higher unity, did not represent a fresh way of seeing disparate objects, did not trace a movement or document a scene or anatomize a genre, and did not have an explicit cultural or ideological through-line. It was simply Crumb’s Genesis, and little else. For those curious about the physical details of the exhibition, the following couple of paragraphs may serve as a kind of virtual walk-through: Upon entering, the visitor was greeted by wall-sized blowups of Crumb’s hand-lettered Introduction and the opening splash page (God conjuring creation out of, aptly enough, a swirling pool of ink). Observant visitors would have noted the framed original of the book’s dedication page, reading simply “for Aline,” off to one side (again, the entire book was there, but for the indicia and Crumb’s typeset textual commentaries). A turn to the left revealed the first of many walls displaying Crumb’s pages, this one starting with the original of the opening splash—dig that painterly white-out—followed clockwise by many, many identical framed pages, all on the same plane, all at roughly eye-level, one after another after another, the gutters between them narrow, the pages all in reading sequence. The sequence continued beyond that wall to the next, neatly rounding the corner without interruption, eventually going all the way around the squarish room. But that wasn’t all there was to it, for inside the room was another room, or walled chamber rather, circular in shape, perhaps twenty-five to thirty feet in diameter, its wall going up to about two-thirds ceiling height and forming a not-quite-enclosed yet still separate space within the larger exhibition: a circle

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inside the square, so to speak, taking up most of what otherwise might have been bare floor, so that the main exhibit space ended up being pretty narrow, like a corridor squeezed between outer and inner walls. Once you got all the way around the outer or “square” walls—that is, to page 130 and nearly back to where you came in—Crumb’s pages continued in reverse direction, counterclockwise, around the inner or circular wall (131–201), which was only a step away. This transition occasioned momentary confusion for me (and evidently other viewers, too) because the pages wrapped all the way around the circle like a snake swallowing its own tail, so that page 201 and page 131 were very close to each other, with only the phrase “The End” (hand-painted in Crumbian style on the wall) to signal the divide between start and finish. In other words, the synapse between pages 130 and 131, or between square reading path and circular reading path, was a bit confusing: the one bump in the otherwise intuitive reading order of the exhibit. In all, the show’s design seemed to have been the result of simply trying to fit all of Crumb’s pages into a tight space while preserving their readability, and for the most part it did a good, spartan job of that, giving the viewer an easy trail to follow but for that one break. I would guess that comics aficionados and traditional museumgoers were both well represented in the crowds of people Mich and I navigated through that evening (as had been the case at the UCLA talk, where I was surprised by the signs of gentrification all around me). The most interesting attendees, of course, were those who seemed non-comics-oriented and had come to encounter the work of a talked-about artist. Maybe some of these people were impressed; maybe some were just bewildered or mildly amused. Most seemed rapt. It was fascinating to see people apparently treating Crumb as a destination stop for the first time, that is, having their first sustained, deliberate, selfconscious “experience” of his work. Whereas my own response to the work, unavoidably, partook of that proprietary sense of affection that comix fans have for the very idea of Crumb, the Crumb style, and the Crumb persona, and I must admit I chuckled occasionally over elements in the work that had in-joke value (why do the strong women generally look like Aline?), the sober or bemused responses of other museumgoers gave me a new window on the work and left me thinking about the newfound cultural mobility of comic art. I was also delighted by the fact that Crumb’s untrammeled eccentricity asserted itself even in this context. That eccentricity was especially obvious in the center or inner chamber of the exhibit, inside the circle, which displayed some of Crumb’s research, that is, his visual references. This inner space was basically a resting and reading spot (offering a sofa, chairs, and many copies of the printed Genesis) that also displayed Crumb’s originals for the title pages and jacket art, including an

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alternate, and I thought better, cover depicting Eve and Adam in close two-shot, huddled guiltily as if hiding from God. Most interesting were several vitrines filled with reference material, including magazine clippings, scholarly journal or reference book articles, movie stills, drawings of artifacts, and prior illustrated books and even comics depicting the Old Testament world. Yellow folders and cursory notes that appeared to be in Crumb’s own hand suggested a ragtag and idiosyncratic reference library. Stills from Cecile B. DeMille and B-movies revealed the twice-removed or predigested nature of much of Crumb’s reference. So did The Picture Bible, shown in the Chariot Books edition of 1998 (though research reveals that the work, originally serialized in the weekly Sunday school paper PIX, actually dates to 1959 and was first collected c. 1978). This perennial Bible comic, still in print today, was here presented as an anonymous, unsourced “found” object; artist André LeBlanc and scripter Iva Hoth were not credited. This was a cheat and a shame, since LeBlanc’s work on The Picture Bible is accomplished and its visual details were reportedly informed by much research. I’d like to read more of this. (As an aside, my fellow blogger Rodrigo Baeza pointed out to me that this page was likely lettered by the great Ben Oda, which has piqued my curiosity, once again, about the man’s career.) Certainly, LeBlanc’s scenic details are impressive. I noted, by the way, a bookmark in the exhibited copy of The Picture Bible bearing a note, good clothing motifs, written in Crumb’s hand. Also on view, open to the Jacob and Esau story from chapter 25 of Genesis, was M. C. Gaines’s brainchild Picture Stories from the Bible: Complete Old Testament Edition, in essence a graphic novel compilation of the Picture Stories from the Bible comic books, which were in fact the germ of Gaines’s company Educational Comics (EC) in the mid-forties. Whether this edition of the Complete Old Testament would have been nominally published by EC or by DC I couldn’t tell (the Grand Comics Database lists five printings under “DC” between 1943 and 1945, then subsequent printings under “EC”; WorldCat, though, gives the original publisher as “J.R. Pub. Co.,” which was apparently another name for Gaines’s All-American Comics outfit). In any case, once again the creators, this time scripter Montgomery Mulford and artist Don Cameron (an All-American regular), went uncredited. No historical context was provided. I couldn’t see much of this book, of course, but to my eyes it appeared nowhere near as enticing as LeBlanc; still, I would have liked to see it, and its important place in comic book history, more fully acknowledged and contextualized. I note that Crumb’s back jacket illustration echoes the back cover of the Gaines (in the same way that, say, his XYZ Comics riffs on Little Lulu, Mad, and Humbug). Suffice to say that, from a historian’s POV, documentation in this section of the exhibit was distressingly scant. Provenance was sketchy, artists, writers, and

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filmmakers (but for DeMille) were unnamed, and the materials were treated rather like the kind of cultural detritus one might find in Rauschenberg’s “combines.” That is, they were presented as anonymous. One source of likely inspiration for Crumb, decidedly not anonymous, was nowhere shown or mentioned in the exhibit—namely, Basil Wolverton’s illustrations for The Bible Story, commissioned by the Worldwide Church of God (WCG) and first serialized between 1958 and 1972. Wolverton, known for his serious and lasting influence on Crumb’s style, illustrated stories from Genesis between 1954 and 1959 (they were published in the WCG’s Plain Truth magazine, then collected in book form in the sixties). The go-to source for this material is Fantagraphics’ excellent volume The Wolverton Bible, edited by Monte Wolverton and published in 2009. Comparison of the imagery in that book and in Crumb’s Genesis turns up some striking similarities, not only because Wolverton’s intricate, obsessive manner of hatching and stippling informs Crumb’s, but also because the latter’s specific compositional choices often echo the former’s. Whether this is because Crumb owes a specific unacknowledged debt to Wolverton, or because both artists are indebted to antecedent illustrators, is not a question I know the answer to, but, in a spirit of celebration rather than accusation, I present a couple of side-by-side examples here (figures 70, 71). I don’t bring all this up to diminish Crumb’s achievement with Genesis, which is remarkable. I’m simply pointing out that there is a long history of adapting the Bible to comics, and Genesis comes as a culmination of that, one that perhaps ought to send us back to others—to Wolverton, to LeBlanc et al.—to better appreciate what we’ve been overlooking. Finally, what Crumb’s Genesis became for me during our visit to the exhibit was an anthology of images, some from Crumb’s pages, some mental snapshots of other people looking at Crumb’s pages. Since I couldn’t take it all in sequentially—thankfully I have the book for that, otherwise my feet would still be killing me—I found myself focusing on moments of special power in the book: cruxes of interpretation, or places where Crumb’s gifts seemed particularly to shine. There are many of these. Some are subtle, as when Abraham leads Isaac to the site of sacrifice (chapter 22); or when the Lord God walks alongside Abraham, wondering to himself, in a thought balloon no less, what he should do (chapter 18); or the numerous genealogy pages, all those lists of begettings and clans and chieftains, in which every person seems to have distinctly different features (I call these the “yearbook pages”). Some are unsubtle and in your face, as when Adam tackles Eve in sheer, guiltless joy (chapter 2); or when we see the depravity of the fallen world before the Flood (chapter 6); or when Lot’s daughters “lie with him” so that they may conceive (chapter 19); or when Jacob and Esau are born (chapter 25); or when, at last, in a kind of tearful melodrama, Joseph is reunited with and revealed to his

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Figure 70. Basil Wolverton. Jacob has a vision of God. The Wolverton Bible. Fantagraphics. 2009.

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Figure 71. Robert Crumb. Jacob has a vision of God. The Book of Genesis illustrated. Norton. 2009.

brothers (chapter 45). Crumb’s complete sympathy with the characters, his utter confidence in rendering, and his ability to balance subtle insinuation against shirt-rending, sweatdrop-splashing pantomime make his Genesis, for all its indulgence of the clichéd and familiar, a breathtaking wayside monument. I’m glad to have seen it out in the world. Note Thanks to Michele Hatfield, Rodrigo Baeza, and Rusty Witek for help with this one!

Showing Pages and Progress: Interview with Carol Tyler Kim A. Munson

When I first agreed to assemble the book you are reading now, one of the first artists that came to mind was Carol Tyler and very tactile, personal art installations she created based on her multi-Eisner-nominated You’ll Never Know graphic novel trilogy, and Soldier’s Heart: The Campaign to Understand My WWII Veteran Father: A Daughter’s Memoir (Fantagraphics), the 2015 book that collects them all together. Her quest to make sense of life’s challenges and her family relationships (parents, husband, and daughter) is both intensely personal and universal for anyone who has ever tried to figure out a difficult relationship. Many shows by artists known for comics have become “museumified,” with everything perfectly framed and starkly presented in the Alfred Barr Jr./Museum of Modern Art tradition. Tyler’s installations are very different, distinctly apart from the antiseptic feeling of the white cube. Her graphic style, crammed with detail and drawn in a limited palette of warm tones, is reflected in the design of the exhibition. She invites us to look at the flotsam of her life and art. Her down-to-earth midwestern qualities are reflected in a room of drawings fluttering gently on a clothesline, and a second gallery filled with objects like her father’s woodworking tools, toys, memorabilia, and other props that Tyler crafted herself as signs of her process and emotional state. In my own quest to understand, I’ve asked Tyler a series of questions about two of her recent exhibitions. This first group of questions is about her show Pages and Progress (January–March 2016) at the Meyers Gallery, University of Cincinnati. Kim A. Munson: You told me on Facebook that you worked as an installer/ designer for a history museum, so you hated all the matting and framing, leading to the idea of the clothesline [exhibit photo, figure 72]. Carol Tyler: Let me clarify. Early on, my go-to job when I needed money had always been picture framing. Clean work requiring some skill that paid OK. 316

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Figure 72. Exhibition view of Carol Tyler: Pages and Progress, January–March 2016 at the Meyers Gallery, University of Cincinnati. Photo by and courtesy of Carol Tyler.

Once I landed my first big job with benefits, it was at this history museum. Thankfully there was a budget to subcontract the framing! I can’t remember exactly when I started using clotheslines to display my pages, but it wasn’t because of the museum. It’s more of a personal thing: good memories from childhood, symbol of domestic space, and energy saver. You’ll see plenty of clotheslines around and outside my house, and drawn into scenes on my pages. For this exhibition, there were lots more reasons to hang up all the pages from Soldier’s Heart on clotheslines: It made the installation relatively simple. Plus, clotheslines can allow for sequential reading. Also, it shifts the relationship beyond a “reading” platform to a kinetic encounter: the air in the space moves the translucent pages around ever so gently. It’s like they’re waving hello. So cool. KM: Could you talk a bit about narrative in the exhibition? Why was it important to have the entire book? CT: As I toured around the country talking about Soldier’s Heart, what emerged was the bigness of it as reflected in the numbers: ten years to complete, thirty

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hours a page, three hundred sixty-four pages, eleven Eisner nominations, fiftythree colors, thousands of corrections, ten thousand pen points, stacks of notes and scripts, many awards, etc. Add that to my compulsion for people to know I work hard (I always feel that I don’t do enough). It’s impressive to think about and see all in one place at once. Another reason was, having the book Soldier’s Heart originally come out as three individual books ended up confusing people, even me. The original series was called You’ll Never Know. Then, when the books were combined, all three became Soldier’s Heart, which was the subtitle of YNK Book III. So a lot of people go out and order YNK III Soldier’s Heart thinking it’s Soldier’s Heart the complete volume. The title change decision was not mine—publisher and distributor logic. My thing now is to clarify that whenever I can. All pages, big, in one exhibit, is a good way. KM: In a detailed discussion on Comics Reporter about the written dialogue in Soldier’s Heart, you told Tom Spurgeon, “I’m glad you brought that up about the words. I’m very concerned with the writing and the language and how it reads. I do obsess more over that. I’m equally obsessed about how the picture looks within the panel and how the panel works within the page, so that the whole thing has a sense of being something that works, that leads to the next page and come from the page before” (2012). One exhibit review I saw said that you organized the pages of the book into sections, for example, all of the pages of your dad’s war story all together. Is this true? How did you work out the transitions in a way that worked for yourself and the reader in the gallery? CT: Soldier’s Heart weaves many storylines and timelines together. There’s real time, where I’m dealing with my fragile teen, elderly parents, and broken marriage. Then there’s Dad’s Tour of Duty from WWII in his words. “The Hannah Story” from 1994 was included in SH (pages 197–229). Then there’s also my looking back at the past, trying to reconcile the root of my problems from childhood with the outcomes I faced as an adult. All while trying to resolve my issues with Dad, who was forever stuck in his war damage. It’s incorrect to label this a WWII book, as if it’s just that, although the firstperson account is historically accurate. All of it is. But mostly, it’s a “reaching for reconciliation” book. It’s about trying to heal damage. For the display, all the army tour pages (Dad’s first-person account) were hung together. It was nice. They have a different page orientation, and they were displayed nicely on a clothesline against a wall. The rest of the book was high up above, not in sequence. It worked. By that I mean there were places where you could get your nose right in there and see text and details up close, but then

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look up and there were so many more pages flying the same aesthetic. People do not come to a gallery to read a graphic novel. There were many copies of the book for them to thumb through and purchase if they wanted. “The Hannah Story” was on the wall, matted, in the same mats from when it was exhibited at the California State Fair back in 1995. That story was named on Comics Journal’s list of Top 100 Comics of the 20th Century. I insisted it be presented in sequential order. KM: When you watched people in the gallery, how do you think they responded to the text? How much do you think they were able to read? You told me about one Vet that came that read the whole thing. CT: As stated above, it’s impossible to get the whole book in the installation experience, but you could certainly get up close to parts of it. People seem awed and amused. People wipe tears after the Hannah Story. Some people sit down and read the whole book at reading stations I made available. It’s hard to know what people think when they see my work. All I can do is put it out there and hope it resonates. KM: I think it definitely does! Moving on to the “Carol’s Head” part of the installation [figure 73], I was amazed by the amount of personal items you showed, and about the imaginative ways you crafted things to symbolize intangible feelings. I’m thinking here about the “Tears Processor” and the “Egometer.” In his New York Times book review, Douglas Wolk said, “It’s easy to see echoes of her father’s dedication and grudging optimism, as well as his capacity for sublimating painful feeling in endless craft and construction projects . . .” Can you talk a bit about your process of building these objects? CT: Ever since I finished the book, I’ve been fooling around with making narratives that are not necessarily on paper. The theme is loss. Consistently—loss. I’m sure you are aware that in a very short period of two years, I lost four family members, my best friend, my editor, and two close neighbors. Sadness, grief, and reflection have informed my days. Then, the reality of mortality got my brain to hopping and popping. Why am I not expressing my feelings specifically on paper? I don’t know. Drawing is hard for me. It’s not my greatest pleasure. Making stuff is. I mean I like to draw, but I really like the engineering thought process and the steps involved in making physical stuff. Problem solving. Fiddling around with stuff and rearranging it helps me process my sadness. I put stories on glass shards, used hack-saw blades, strips from a delaminated tabletop, the clumps of my

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Figure 73. Exhibition view of Carol Tyler: Pages and Progress, January–March 2016 at the Meyers Gallery, University of Cincinnati. Photo by and courtesy of Carol Tyler.

hair (cut off in solidarity when my sister had to do chemo), shop stuff, and other items. All kinds of random objects have become substrates for stories. I love finding the ways to make stuff a vehicle for talk. At the installation, “theme areas” emerged. Grief Art. Inspiration. Distractions. Dad’s Stuff. Contemplation. These areas became clusters that represented my mental state. And then I wrote about everything directly on the walls of the gallery. So, one example, you could watch the “Spirit of the Woodsman” doll rotating (attached to an upright rotisserie spit found in the clutter bomb known as the Tyler estate) with an explanation about what this thing is (local talisman), where it came from (Tupper Lake, New York), why the hell it exists (some festival my sister went to), and to maybe just enjoy it (but it makes me sad because I miss her), yet it’s so weird, so I write a note to myself on the wall behind it (“If you want to survive, you’ve got to quit asking so many goddamn existential questions!”). The doll is next to a set of bed springs with a sparkle Christmas tree rotating color thing from the ’60s perched proudly in front of it. It’s from my best friend Rose’s awesome collection of weird stuff. Her family discarded all of her beloved, funky collectibles. I love weird stuff like that even more when nobody wants it.

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KM: Toward the end of the Pages and Progress video posted on-line, Robert Probst compares your work to a combination of poetry, literature, psychology, art, and drawing. Then he says, “I feel like the joy that she had doing this book is expressed in this exhibit.” Exhibitions are a very different type of expression than a book. Was there joy in assembling all the stuff and welcoming people into your head and process? CT: Hard work. Installations are exhausting, but exhilarating. I had a lot of help from Aaron Cowan and his student helpers, and of course Justin [Green]. It was great to put this together. I was just wrapping up processing the Tyler estate, and so everything was emotionally charged. It helped to see everything pulled into a new configuration. Although I say this often to anyone who will listen. I am about a fourth of an inch away from falling apart at any moment. Making art helps—a lot. KM: I’m moving on now to a more recent show, Cincinnati Five, January 2017. While you were first organizing this show, you told me you were calling it “Chicken Stuff” and said that theme was “pain is at the heart of everything.” Was that the actual title? Where and when was it exactly? CT: I was invited to participate in a group show put together by an art collaborative. I think the show was called “Cincinnati Five” because there were five of us. Each year, it happens in a space about to be occupied or recently vacated. It varies. This was an old parking garage turned empty office, storing fifty ferns. (?!) Very strange. I made three drawings specifically for my small, “all the ferns” area with hanging thingies above. My personal theme title was “Pain is at the Heart of it All.” People had to wade through this chest-high greenery to see the drawings. Originally, I called it “Chicken Stuff ” because out at my ten-acre farm, after I bought the place (a recent purchase), I found evidence of serious animal misery that the previous owners had inflicted on both poultry and dogs. A huge cock-fighting operation. Very bad vibes. “Chicken Stuff ” was what the former owner called her husband’s illegal activity. As she described it, you’d think it was a simple hen house. But once I got back there, deep into the acreage, I found over fifty funkily crafted cages, engineered to make the roosters mean. In the dead center of the ten acres, there is a magnificent, thorny, honey locust tree. You can’t help but be awed by it. When I first saw the tree, I realized that it was a metaphor: an exquisitely pained, strong center core, surrounded by artifacts of misery, wrapped in the miraculous beauty of the country. So I saw myself impaled there, stuck like Velcro.

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Figure 74. Self-portrait and thorn sculpture on view at the exhibit Cincinnati Five, January 2017. Photo by and courtesy of Carol Tyler.

KM: In the photos I’ve seen, the “impossible trident” and thorns seem to play a big role [self-portrait, figure 74]. The thorns seem almost biblical to me (as in the torment of the crown of thorns). In the text written on one of the selfportraits, you say, “But for me, illusions are mental forms that fill my head. Without illusions, I don’t recognize my life. I’m very attached to my precious illusions, but attachments are the root of suffering, and so it goes.” You included small sculptures of the trident and hangings with thorns. Could you talk a bit about what these symbols mean to you? CT: Sure. At the time, I was teaching my students (comics class) about the Mad magazine era, so of course the trident came up. That idiotic thing cracks me up. Mad used it a lot. So when I was working on the drawings, it seemed like the most potent symbol of the conundrum of illusions and my attachment to them. I mean, I was working these self-portraits of sadness and I needed to work in something kinda not so damned depressing as a counterweight. Then I started seeing the trident like a tattoo on wood trash. You see, we had torn out old, mildewed kitchen cabinets at the farm, and over time, they fell apart out there on the burn heap. Some of the pieces spoke to me, asking for these illusion tattoos. What can I say? So I combined thorns from the honey locust, tridents, and this crappy wood, to make beautiful little meaningless

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hanging objects. They gently twirl and sway. Adorable, difficult reminders. Want one? KM: Pages and Progress was built around the enormous narrative of your book. Did it feel different to do an exhibition exploring all these intense emotions without the buffer of the work and the story? CT: No. I had a specific site to fill up and so I designed it as such. It’s an extension of the installation for Pages and Progress. I guess you could call it “Progress, continued.” KM: Your newest book, Fab4 Mania: A Beatles Obsession and the Concert of a Lifetime (Fantagraphics), also mines your past, but is on a happier theme. CT: When I was thirteen years old, I had the presence of mind to write down my thoughts about the Beatles concert, before, during, and after it happened. I made it into a booklet and carried it around with me for fifty years. Then after Soldier’s Heart, the sadness of losing everyone was tripping me out, so—seeing how it was the fiftieth anniversary of the Ed Sullivan appearance, I got out my booklet, summoned my inner thirteen-year-old-girl self and created a backstory. Posted some of it on a blog at first, then I decided it really should be a book. Two hundred sixty-four pages of pure eighth grade girl, circa 1965. It’s really sweet yet feels current, not nostalgic. KM: Thank you, Carol. I look forward to what you will do next. Note A video tour and color photos of Tyler’s installations can be seen on my blog at http://www .neuroticraven.com/blog/2018/1/22/carol-tylers-pages-progress.

Curating Comics Canons: Daniel Clowes and Art Spiegelman’s Private Museums Benoit Crucifix

Le Musée privé d’Art Spiegelman (Art Spiegelman’s Private Museum), organized in 2012 at the Musée de la bande dessinée in Angoulême, and Eye of the Cartoonist: Daniel Clowes’s Selections from Comics History, which took place in Columbus, Ohio, in 2014 at the Wexner Center for the Arts in collaboration with the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, offer two fascinating examples of a specific kind of comics exhibition where cartoonists are explicitly invited to act as curators, providing “their” own vision of comics history. This curatorial framework moreover functions as a valorization of the comics archives that are treasured within the institutions involved with both exhibitions: the cartoonist-as-curator makes a selection from the archive, from the larger memory of comics, reactivating its materials within the display space of the museum. This chapter looks at these cartoonists-curated exhibitions of comics history through the lens of the relationship between canon and archive, arguing that these exhibitions move away from an overt attempt to establish a canon but ground this act of canonization within cartoonists’ own idiosyncratic look at comics history, emphasizing the individuality of these authorial canons. Examining the distinct strategies and layout choices, the comparison between both exhibitions further highlights a different relationship to a canon of comics and the way it is framed within the space of the museum.

Cartoonists as Curators Curating has become today part of the “practice of everyday (media) life” (Manovich 2009) expanding beyond the confined art world institutions and permeating all areas of consumer culture, as users are increasingly invited to select, share, and reframe cultural items and build their own lists and archives. As David Balzer argues, “[i]f curators began to dominate the art world in the 1990s, they began to dominate everything else in the 2000s” (Balzer 2014, 121). 324

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This expansion of the curatorial to everyday life in the twenty-first century has given rise to a widespread “curatorial culture” transforming various media and cultural industries, from music (Reynolds 2011) to literature (Collins 2010) or TV (Robinson 2017), questioning the authority of cultural mediators and redefining traditional forms of connoisseurship. Situated at the margins of “official” culture and presented as a “delinquent reading” (Pizzino 2015), more often prescribed against than for, comics have largely relied on their readers and fans to act as “curators” of its history, collecting its fragments in scrapbooks, folders, and long boxes. The cultural memory of comics was long excluded from the preserve of institutions and museums, leaving the archival and curatorial work to amateur archivists, fans, collectors, hoarders. Among these vernacular archivists, cartoonists play no small part as they are often themselves obsessive collectors. As Jared Gardner argues, “[a]rchives are everywhere in the contemporary graphic novel, although almost inevitably not the ordered collections of the academic library or a law firm. These are archives in the loosest, messiest sense of the word—archives of the forgotten artifacts and ephemera of American popular culture, items that were never meant to be collected” (2012, 150). Embracing the ephemeral and exploring the inextricable links between past and present, contemporary cartoonists are attuned to the past of comics and committed to its archive, curating its history both through their own private collections and through their creative practice. Even though, as Gardner indicates, cartoonists’ curatorial engagement with the past in comics form is distinctly suited to the “database logic” of new media, this curatorial culture is not only linked to the emergence of digital technologies. In fact, by contrast with the de-institutionalization of high culture, the place of curation in the context of comics has perhaps been most profoundly changed by its institutionalization and the growing role played by “high” cultural mediators, the “newfound sociability” of comics as Erin La Cour and Rik Spanjers (2016) have put it. This process has provided “a context in which the most powerful legitimizing institutions in the traditional art world have been able to incorporate comics, albeit in frequently vexed and vexatious fashions, into their work” (Beaty 2012, 13). This institutionalization of comics has gone hand in hand with a curatorial process of selecting “masters” of the form, in an act of canon-formation that has been a capital bone of contention between comics and museums: “[t]he question of what, who, and how of commemoration processes has loomed large when major art galleries have mounted shows featuring comics and their history” (Baetens and Frey 2015, 225). The Masters of American Comics show, held in 2005 at the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, coalesced the tensions and debates surrounding the appropriation of comics by art world institutions (see figures 8, 62–64). The show was an explicit attempt to “define a canon of

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comic artists in the traditional art historical manner,” as rigorously documented by Kim A. Munson (2017, 235–37). The show thus reflected a growing trend in art historical and museological discourse, which has tended to specialize its canons according to specific subfields, “requir[ing] its own organization and hierarchy in order to convert information into usable knowledge and create a historic understanding of a particular tradition” (Brzyski 2007, 3): integrating comics into art history and establishing its canon thus appeared as a necessary preliminary step. Accompanied by a lavishly illustrated catalog, the Masters of American Comics exhibition relied on a narrow selection of fifteen (white, male) cartoonists elevated to the status of creative geniuses in a clear act of canon formation. Bart Beaty has underlined the ambivalences and tensions in the curatorial choices for Masters of Americans Comics, questioning not only its decision to establish a canon of individual artists, but also its exhibition layout, which “assents to the formal biases of its museum setting, displaying frustratingly partial stories in the midst of the white cube museum space as if they were paintings” (Beaty 2012, 198). Yet, the Masters of American Comics show and its explicit discourse of canon-formation, if momentous, has had few follow-ups. As Jeet Heer has suggested, “Post-Masters there is much more interest in looking at individual cartoonists as their own thing or part of a scene—the grand narrative of comics history seems too large. As artists like Ware, Spiegelman, and Crumb get canonized, they are seen as their own thing and divorced from their comics contexts” (Heer quoted in Munson 2017, 242). This observation tends to confirm Beaty’s critical analysis of the complex processes of legitimization and canonization, as both Beaty and Heer further suggest that the art world’s interest in comics is strongly selective, often uprooting a few canonical figures from their local anchorage in comics traditions to recontextualize them within art history.1 In this context, it is important to pay attention to the larger framework of the two exhibitions, which is tightly linked to the canonical positions of both Art Spiegelman and Daniel Clowes. In both cases, their comics history exhibits were connected to larger retrospective shows devoted to Clowes and Spiegelman’s own work. Modern Cartoonist: The Art of Daniel Clowes, originally curated by Susan Miller and René de Guzman for the Oakland Museum of California, was hosted in Columbus in 2014 at the Wexner Center for the Arts, providing the opportunity for a collaboration with its neighboring institution the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum to set up Eye of the Cartoonist. Similarly, Le Musée privé d’Art Spiegelman was organized for the 2012 International Comics Festival in Angoulême alongside the Co-Mix retrospective, following the graphic novelist’s Grand Prix award. While Le Musée privé d’Art Spiegelman was a one-shot tied to the specific context of the Musée de la bande dessinée in Angoulême, the Co-Mix retrospective subsequently toured at several prestigious

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institutions like the Pompidou Center in Paris or the Jewish Museum in New York City. In both cases, there is a manifest status discrepancy between the retrospectives and the comics history exhibitions, as the former clearly occupy the dominant position in terms of circulation and visibility. While the retrospectives are ambitious shows touring at various fine arts centers and art world museums, accompanied by lavish art books (Buenaventura 2012; Spiegelman 2012), the comics history exhibitions are more modest one-shots that are more closely associated with specific institutions of comics memory. This distinction approximately runs along the dividing lines of the “comics world” and “art world” (Beaty 2012), showing the different visibility pull that each type of exhibition is akin to set forth, as the comics history exhibitions function, to some extent, as peripheral sections complementing the “main” retrospective exhibits by showcasing the authors’ influences. It is undoubtedly the canonical position of Clowes and Spiegelman that gives “their” histories a particular weight. In framing their own perspectives on the memory of comics, comics and art museums back up their role as historians and mediators of their chosen medium. As Henry Jenkins reminds us, “within the realm of comics, few exercise the amount of cultural capital Spiegelman commands, and thus, few have his capacity to transform yesterday’s ‘trash’ into the contents of a ‘treasury,’ archive or canon” (Jenkins 2013). In other words, some cartoonists’ histories of comics will fare better than others depending on the cultural capital of the individual as well as on the larger standards of greatness and criteria of value active in the field at a certain time (Beaty and Woo 2016). And so, in a sort of feedback loop, the museum both benefits from and relays the comics artists’ canonical status, while simultaneously putting the mechanism of canonization into the authors’ hand by inviting them to act as curators. Le Musée privé d’Art Spiegelman and Eye of the Cartoonist thus hold a particular relationship to canonicity, based on its traditional principles of “selection, curation, and distinction” (Beaty and Woo 2016, 94–95) while affirming its subjectivity and contingency. Without catalogs, and thus relatively few public traces documenting them, the comics history exhibitions offer a “personal canon” of comics that is all the more contingent given the ephemerality of its exhibition, contrasting with the canonizing effect and higher cultural impact of the retrospective shows. In this way, they contrast with the kind of topdown act of canon formation reflected in the curatorial decisions of Masters of American Comics. Rather than attempting to build “the” canon, such exhibitions conspicuously emphasize the plurality and subjectivity of canons while backing up the institutions’ own memory-making role. Indeed, this specific curatorial approach is not a radical rejection of canonization as it also serves to valorize the heritage work performed by the Musée de la bande dessinée and the

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Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. Rooted in the comics world, both institutions have developed what Jean-Matthieu Méon has called a “comicsspecific museum approach,” privileging “exhibitions that are not meant to be substitutive but complementary and explanatory of the comic works” (2015, 454). This discursive dimension reinforces the scientific and patrimonial function of these museums, which are specifically dedicated to the preservation of comics as cultural heritage and have grown to be among the largest archives of comics. Clowes and Spiegelman’s selections from these archives acknowledge this memory work, while proposing to activate its materials through the lens of their own pantheons. Both exhibitions thus negotiate the relationship between canon and archive that, according to Aleida Assmann, embody two modalities for the presence, function, and usage of cultural memory: the canon, as the “actively circulated memory that keeps the past present,” and the archive, as “the passively stored memory that preserves the past past” (2010, 98).2 This distinction is not a rigid one and what matters most is the dynamics it sets in motion: “the active and the passive realms of cultural memory are anchored in institutions that are not closed against each other but allow for mutual influx and reshuffling” (Assmann 2010, 106). Such reorganization of the comics canon is precisely what animates the two exhibitions under scrutiny, which, by showcasing comics creators’ perspectives on the history of comics, explicitly highlight how the past of comics functions as a “cultural working memory” (Assmann 2010, 101) for contemporary graphic novelists. In the case of the two exhibitions under scrutiny, this reshuffling of the “storage memory” of comics happens in the space of the museum, activating it in a particular way. As the title of Spiegelman’s comics exhibit makes clear, these exhibitions suggest to turn the museum into a “private museum,” emphasizing the double nature of their engagement with comics history—at once subjective and collective, personal and collaborative. Furthermore, the phrase coalesces the curatorial logics at work in the exhibitions, pointing to two different “ways of curating” (Obrist 2014): it positions the cartoonist in between the traditional museum curator, as a caretaker of the heritage preserved in the institution, and the curator as exhibition-maker, following the redefinition, in the 1980s and 1990s, of curating around the individualized “curatorial gesture” as creative work (see also Balzer 2014; O’Neill 2007). These two curatorial logics emphasize the growing contrast between the museum as a somewhat rigid institutional space, strongly regulated by traditional art history, and the temporary exhibition as a potentially freer play with those art-historical conventions (Damisch 2007). In the same way, while Clowes and Spiegelman’s “private museums” evoke the authoritative framework of the museum as a guardian of memory, their “privateness” cues an idiosyncratic and thus contingent perspective on

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comics history. While helped by the institutions’ own professional curators for the material and practical organization as well as the designs, Clowes and Spiegelman are invited to act as curators in order to frame their own comics canons.3 By enrolling artists as curators and inviting them to operate a selection from their archives, the institutions thus demonstrate their own role as sites of the cultural memory of comics while simultaneously encouraging an active engagement with this memory through creative practice. In doing so, they shed light on the role that cartoonists themselves play in the transmission of comics heritage. Reclaiming these cartoonists’ perspectives to motivate a dynamic appropriation of comics heritage, the exhibitions themselves frame those histories in quite specific ways, relative to their material and institutional contexts. In what follows, I will thus examine more closely how institutional contexts, design strategies, and (para)texts participate in shaping the mutual relationships between canon and archive in both exhibitions, as these elements give different inflections to the cartoonist’s personal histories of comics.

Art Spiegelman’s Private Museum Le Musée privé d’Art Spiegelman is based on a very specific appropriation of the museum space that is aptly described by the author in the introductory video screened at the very entrance of the exhibition: “it seems that I have been allowed to highjack the Centre of Bande dessinée Museum [sic] to replace what is primarily the Francophone patrimony of comics with my own perverse and private map of what comics are. [ . . . ] So this is the alternate universe, Bizzaro version of a patrimony.” This statement directly emphasizes Spiegelman’s idiosyncratic look on the history of comics and presents how the author was invited to take over the curatorial organization of the museum and “replace” its contents with his own selections. While his own oeuvre was meant to become the object of a major retrospective during the International Comics Festival of Angoulême in 2012, after having received the Grand Prix award the year before, Spiegelman manifested early on his interest in showcasing more than just his own work and to be able to collaborate with the Musée de la bande dessinée.4 Constrained by the available space, the proposition of its curators was to offer Spiegelman a carte blanche to refashion the permanent exhibit of the museum.5 Hence, Le Musée privé d’Art Spiegelman invested the space that is otherwise used for its permanent exhibition on the history of comics: Spiegelman’s “perverse and private map” proposes to question and redistribute the otherwise “official” version of comics history presented in the vitrines of the museum, which had only took its contemporary format since its reopening in 2009.

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While the origins of the Musée de la bande dessinée can be traced back to 1983 and subsequently to its first inauguration in 1990, it went through a major transformation and was reopened in 2009 in buildings renovated for that purpose. This transformation accompanied a profound museographical reflection and a redefined patrimonial project, fine-tuning its comics-specific museum approach and strengthening its historiographic discourse (Moine 2013, 164). The main part of the museum accommodates the “Musée d’histoire de la bande dessinée” (the comics history museum) in one large room divided in four chronological sequences, featuring both European, American and, to a lesser extent, Japanese comics, organized according to periodizing criteria: the origins of comics from 1833 to 1920, the “golden age” from 1920 to 1955, the emergence of “adult comics” from 1955 to 1980, and lastly contemporary “alternative” comics and manga since 1980 (see Moine 2013, 141–42). In the exhibition space, this history of comics is not only made visible through a selection of original art, but systematically combines original pages with the related books, albums, periodicals, and other print artifacts, as well as derived products and other transmedial exploitations of comics, hence drawing attention to the variety of comics formats. This narrative of comics history is further echoed and documented by the companion volume La Bande dessinée: son histoire et ses maîtres (2009) written by Thierry Groensteen and richly illustrated with original art from the museum’s archive. Driven by a state-funded patrimonial mission and backed up by authoritative comics historians as Groensteen and Jean-Pierre Mercier, the Musée de la bande dessinée in Angoulême presents in many ways the official history of comics—and so the background against which Spiegelman’s appropriation of the space becomes alternative and subjective. The architecture of the Musée de la bande dessinée indeed orients and constrains the exhibition design of Le Musée privé d’Art Spiegelman, which, to a large extent, adopts and replicates its material presentation. Following the spatial organization of the museum, the exhibition is divided in six segments that, similarly to the permanent exhibit, leads the visitor chronologically through a history of comics divided in periods. Cocurated by Thierry Groensteen, who organized the spatial disposition of Spiegelman’s selections,6 the exhibition follows a periodization that runs relatively parallel to that of the permanent exhibit, but that is more closely aligned with the history of American comics. The four sequences that segment the central room are split into four periods corresponding with pregnant moments for different formats: “Comics and Caricature, from 1830 to 1914” goes back to the “origins” of comics from Rodolphe Töpffer to the Yellow Kid, with a particular emphasis on European caricature periodicals as L’Assiette au Beurre or Simplicissimus. “The Golden Age of American Comic Strips” mostly covers the first half of the twentieth century with canonical figures as Winsor McCay, George

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Herriman, Chester Gould, or Harold Gray, as well as lesser-known cartoonists such as Charles Forbell and Harry J. Tuthill. It also includes postwar newspaper strips as Schulz’s Peanuts, Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, and Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead. “The Origins of Comic Books and E.C. Comics” focuses on a variety of comic books, from funny animals to horror comics with only a few references to the superhero genre. It gives a distinct place to Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad and its collaborators, stressing its oft-cited influence on Spiegelman. “Underground and Post-Underground” catches up with Spiegelman’s own beginnings on the underground scene in the 1970s but foregrounds its transnational circulation by including many European underground comics magazines, such as the Dutch Tante Leny presenteert or the Spanish El Víbora. These four segments build up toward more recent developments that have shaped the emergence of the graphic novel with which Spiegelman’s work is narrowly intertwined. The two additional rooms that make up the permanent collection of the museum are less used to present periods in comics history than objects with a particular place in Spiegelman’s career: “RAW, or the Assertion of an International Avant-Garde” displays the cartoonists that Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman published in their groundbreaking magazine and features a video interview of Mouly to cast light on its editorial history. The selection represents both a variety of now-canonical figures such as Chris Ware or Charles Burns, but also emphasizes Raw’s role in translating European comics for US readers. “The Binky Brown Revelation” displays the forty original pages that made up Justin Green’s 1972 autobiographical comic book Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary. It stresses the eye-opening influence that the book had on Spiegelman as an unprecedented exploration of the potential for life-writing in comics. The press release of the exhibition presents Binky Brown as a necessary step for Spiegelman’s Maus in a section tellingly entitled “The Justin Green Revolution: From Binky Brown to Maus.” Moreover, the fact that all original pages are exhibited indirectly echoes Spiegelman’s Co-Mix retrospective, simultaneously on show during the Angoulême comics festival, where the original pages for the complete Maus were being shown. Le Musée privé d’Art Spiegelman, then, follows a relatively linear progression organized along periodical and material criteria, where the presentation of Spiegelman’s selections adopts the usual display used for the permanent collection of the Musée de la bande dessinée. The alternative cartography of comics history that Spiegelman presents is not exactly a kind of “Bizarro” historiography in the sense of an alternative history-writing: the museum design shapes his selections into a historical pattern that aligns with its usual layout, following the “official” historiographic model developed by the institution and as mirrored

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in Groensteen’s La Bande dessinée: son histoire et ses maîtres (2009). Rather, Spiegelman is given a carte blanche to replace the contents of the permanent exhibition so that it reflects his own perception of the past of comics, giving it an American yet transnational twist and spotlighting his personal canon of great comics artists. Spiegelman’s “highjacking” of the museum, however, does not only go through the imposition of his own pantheon of “greats” but also requires to import comic art otherwise unavailable in the holdings of the CIBDI. While the local archive furnished a significant part of the displayed material, the author’s primary affinities with North American comics required to gather and bring over many items from other collections, from the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum (for newspaper comics) as well as from a handful of collectors, such as Glenn Bray (for underground comix), Thierry Smolderen (for nineteenth-century cartoonists), and the Spiegelmans themselves.7 In this way, by bringing in new material into the space of the Musée de la bande dessinée, the exhibition spotlighted some of its inevitable blind spots and showcased comics otherwise absent from the museum. By extensively relying on the collections of Bill Blackbeard and Glenn Bray, Le Musée privé d’Art Spiegelman furthermore paid homage to the crucial role played by fans and collectors in preserving the memory of a medium that historically did not have an institution like the Musée de la bande dessinée. The exhibition features a display case specifically dedicated to the archival work performed by “obsessive collectors,” containing Spiegelman’s short essay on collecting, “In Praise of Pathology,” as well as his obituary comics page in homage of Bill Blackbeard, “the collector who rescued the comics” (Robb 2009) by salvaging newspapers that libraries were throwing away in favor of microfilm and whose vast collection is now hosted at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. In his introductory video, Spiegelman further declares his admiration for Blackbeard, presenting his “private museum” not only as a homage to the history of comics but also to the passionate collectors who made that very historiographic discourse possible. While the exhibition celebrates the memory work of these collectors, Spiegelman simultaneously distances himself from the perspective on comics history fronted by the first generations of organized comics fandom. In the same introductory video, he states that his own canon is neither the one dominant in the United States, nor that of the French bédéphiles of the 1960s and 1970s, who held a particular fascination for 1930s adventure comics artists like Burne Hogarth, Alex Raymond, Milton Caniff, Lee Falk, or Hal Foster—names that represented a “golden age” of comics for both European and American fans.8 While they are well represented in the archive holdings of the Musée de la bande dessinée, they are strikingly absent from Le Musée privé d’Art Spiegelman, except for a single Caniff original. Similarly, the superhero genre is explicitly

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and deliberately kept at bay, save for a few representative examples and the exceptional place given to Jack Cole—for whom Spiegelman’s fascination was already made clear in his long essay on the creator of Plastic Man (Spiegelman and Kidd 2001). Featuring more than a hundred cartoonists, the exhibition reconfigures the museum following Spiegelman’s personal canon, giving particular weight to certain “masters” of the form. The selection directly followed from Spiegelman’s version of comics history as he has been refining it since the very beginning of his career. The cartoonist has indeed contributed significant essays on comics history, notably his appraisal of Bernard Krigstein’s “Master Race” (Benson, Kasakove, and Spiegelman 1975), and has reprinted “old” comics from Winsor McCay to Basil Wolverton in the post-underground comics magazines he coedited (Arcade and Raw). From 1979 to 1987, Spiegelman lectured a class on the history of comics at the School of Visual Arts in New York and recapped that material into a key article published in Print tellingly titled “Commix: An Idiosyncratic Historical and Aesthetic Overview” (Spiegelman 1988). Condensing Spiegelman’s interest for the past of comics in a few pages, this panoramic essay retraces a chronological but fragmentary history of the medium, as shaped by a pantheon of great cartoonists caught “in the crossfire” between the “demands of Profit” and the “demands of Art” (Spiegelman 1998, 78). Alongside this overview piece, Spiegelman would further pen numerous prefatory essays on individual cartoonists, often for reprint volumes: these essays have been collected in Comix, Essays, Graphics and Scraps and, taken together, offer a kaleidoscopic history of comics (Spiegelman 1998). Focusing on individual cartoonists with highly personalized styles, Spiegelman’s comics history privileges, as Beaty and Woo (2016, 94–95) would put it, the “exceptional” over the “typical.” As Spiegelman said about his lectures, “in teaching this thing I’m teaching supposedly the history of comics, but I’m primarily dealing with the aberrations in the history of comics” (Bergdoll 2007, 17). What emerges from this engagement with the past of comics is thus a personal canon that is aligned on Spiegelman’s aesthetic interests and understanding of what comics are. Le Musée privé d’Art Spiegelman directly draws on the artist’s essays by making them available in French through an e-book version released as exhibition catalog. In turn, the works that Spiegelman spotlights in these essays are given a privileged place within the exhibition by singling them out in specific vitrines, reproducing complete short stories, and adding detailed video commentaries (exhibit photo, figure 75). Shot in the author’s studio in New York, the videos portray him in his usual appearance—black vest and cigarette at hand—surrounded by his collection of framed original art, displayed objects, and overloaded bookshelves, alternating with pans of the comics he comments on and décor shots of New York City.9 Guiding the visitors throughout the exhibition,

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Figure 75. Installation view of Le Musée privé d’Art Spiegelman showing display of reference books and video. Musée de la bande dessinée, Angoulême, 2012. Photo by Caroline Janvier, Cité International de la Bande Dessinée et de l’Image.

these videos intertwine this historiographic discourse with a process of selfexposure through which Spiegelman discloses his explicit curatorial choices and the role that certain comics have played in his own life and work, thus giving a certain relief to his version of comics history. While the entire exhibition features an impressive breadth of cartoonists from various traditions, a handful of cartoonists are also given a privileged place, thus spotlighting Spiegelman’s personal pantheon. Lyonel Feininger’s The Kin-der-Kids and George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, for instance, not only get a dedicated spot, but their individual position and their place in Spiegelman’s canon is further made clear in short videos screened next to the vitrines, in which the graphic novelist use their works to illustrate the tug-of-war between commerce and art that, to him, has been essential to comics. The display of complete (short) stories, such as Harvey Kurtzman’s 1952 war story Corpse on the Imjin and Justin Green’s early autobiographical comic Binky Brown, has a different canonizing effect in that it pinpoints individual comics as masterpieces that can be read by the visitor in the exhibition context: this follows from one of the main concerns of the Musée de la bande dessinée, which has always tried to respond to the narrative challenges of exhibiting comics. The screened videos further guide the visitors in their reading by showing Spiegelman not only give context for the creation of these works, but also performing short close-readings, for instance when he details the intersection of content, affect, and form in Kurtzman’s Corpse on the Imjin by describing how its vertical and horizontal lines give it a distinct rhythm and visual power. Adapting comics to the museum context, the exhibition simultaneously underlines their visual, literary, and narrative dimensions, which allows Spiegelman not only to

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place an individual short story like Kurtzman’s within its historical context but also to demonstrate and signal its continued relevance for today. Le Musée privé d’Art Spiegelman demonstrates its author’s second career as a comics historian and consistently couples this historiography with Spiegelman’s own authorial image and posture. Following on In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), which enmeshes Spiegelman’s double career as graphic novelist and comics historian by offering a “comic supplement” of early twentieth-century Sunday pages alongside Spiegelman’s own pages (see Chute 2007; Jenkins 2013), Le Musée privé d’Art Spiegelman further highlights the breadth of Spiegelman’s “canons”: if it remains idiosyncratic and personal, the framework of the Musée de la bande dessinée doubles it as a patrimonial gesture. More than a strictly “private” history of comics, the canonical position of Spiegelman himself has given “his” history a particular resonance, given his “capacity to influence” (Grennan 2016) beyond the comics world. Considering Spiegelman’s engagement with the archive of comics, Henry Jenkins has shown how the author’s own understanding of comics history has helped stabilizing a certain narrative articulated around a few great cartoonists: “[a]s a critic, editor, and curator, he has been instrumental in shaping the emerging canon of his medium” (2013, 304). If Spiegelman’s version of comics history is further adopted by cultural arbiters, Le Musée privé d’Art Spiegelman both relays this version but also stresses its subjectivity by conspicuously associating it with the author himself.

Through Daniel Clowes’s Eye While sharing the same basic idea of inviting a cartoonist to act as curator to showcase his “own” history of comics, Eye of the Cartoonist: Daniel Clowes’s Selections from Comics History took place in a very different institutional context, that of a fine-arts center collaborating with a comics museum and library, which made for a contrasting appropriation not only of the museum space but also of the archive. While Spiegelman transformed the Musée de la bande dessinée by bringing in material from outside of its collections, Clowes selects material from a single archive, the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, in order to curate an exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts in parallel with the Modern Cartoonist retrospective on Clowes’s own artwork. The setup for the exhibition is made explicit at the very entrance to the exhibition room, which welcomes the visitors with the following text: The Wexner Center’s proximity to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum—the world’s largest repository of original cartoon art—presented us with a wonderful opportunity. We invited American cartoonist

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Daniel Clowes (b. 1961) to curate a personal reflection on the history of the art form with examples culled from the library’s one-of-a-kind collection, giving visitors an even deeper appreciation of his work. [ . . . ] The exhibition is not an exhaustive overview of comics history by any means, but it is a quite personal curatorial gesture that reflects both Clowes’s tastes and his refined eye as a cartoon artist. These lines delineate the specific institutional context that frames Clowes’s perspective on the history of comics, situating his “personal curatorial gesture” in the cartoonist’s experience, his taste, skill, and vision. Disavowing any pretense to an “exhaustive overview of comics history,” the Eye of the Cartoonist exhibition does not primarily present Clowes as a historian but rather as a cartoonist with a distinct eye for the history of comics as visual culture. The exhibition leaflet similarly emphasizes the visual process of choosing and selecting the pages from the archive by including a large-size “behind the scenes” picture featuring Daniel Clowes sifting through original pages in the stacks of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library, assisted by exhibition organizers David Filipi and Caitlin McGurk. The photograph and the description text give insight into the Billy Ireland as a key institution for the patrimony of comics and frame the exhibition as a way to valorize the archive. Recalling Assmann’s description of the dynamic relationship between storage memory and active, living memory, Clowes’s selections from the stacks of the Billy Ireland draw out a kind of personal canon and thus animate the archive in a particular way. As Filipi and Jenny Robb remark in the leaflet: “enlisting an artist, one with a cartoonist’s expert eye and appreciation for the medium’s history is an illustrative and enriching way of activating a selection of the archive’s holdings. This is one artist’s quite personal take on comics history” (Filipi and Robb 2014). The archive necessarily shapes and frames this activation, as does the exhibition context: the specific focus of the Billy Ireland on cartoons and newspaper comic strips reflects in the selection of original art, which emphasizes short comics forms that rely on narrative compression and brevity that thus adapt well to the “white cube” of the Wexner Center for the Arts (figure 76). As the exhibition title already suggests, Clowes’s curatorial gesture lies not simply in the act of selection, but in a selection primarily oriented by the skilled eye of the cartoonist. It emphasizes looking at comics, immediately underlining an understanding of comics as visual objects. From the start, then, the exhibition subscribes to the idea, aptly worded by Svetlana Alpers, that the “museum effect [ . . . ] is a way of seeing” (1991, 27). The space of the museum repurposes its objects for an aesthetic of the visual and Clowes’s choices follow this logic by foregrounding the visual and design elements of the comics he selects. The items are indeed chosen according to their capacity to “hold the wall,” following

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Figure 76. Installation view of Eye of the Cartoonist: Daniel Clowes’s Selections from Comics History. Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University, 2014. Photo by Mark Steele Photography, courtesy of the Wexner Center for the Arts.

the thoughts of the French comics critic Christian Rosset (2009) it’s important to choose comics that can visually work when hanging on the walls instead of being held at arm’s length. Along similar lines, Clowes follows Spiegelman’s suggestion that “art museums won’t necessarily want to hang the same works that might be studied in lit departments. It is not the same work that will live happily on a wall and in a book” (Mitchell and Spiegelman 2014, 30). Adopting to the space of the white cube, the cartoonist’s two-day process of sifting through a large quantity of original art and comics tearsheets pulled out from the archives was oriented toward “what strikes the eye,” as Clowes described it: “looking for pages that had either an X-factor quality—something that would point out an odd specificity in the artist’s work in an immediate, eye-catching way—or those that were perfectly emblematic of their best (or most visually interesting) work.”10 Prioritizing its visual dimension, the exhibition does not display the same kind of historiographic ambition as Le Musée privé d’Art Spiegelman, which was aligned with the tenets of comics historiography upheld by the Musée de la bande dessinée. By contrast with Spiegelman, who often acts as “the face of comics to the cultural establishment” (Beaty and Woo 2016, 23), Daniel Clowes comes across as a different type of comics historian, whose mediation of the past appears less cohesive and more ambiguous. Although his work displays a keen understanding and obsessive fascination for the past of comics, he has

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often voiced his relationship to that heritage in ironical terms, harboring a cynical relationship toward comics criticism. In his preface to a reprint collection of Bushmiller’s Nancy strips, Clowes marks his distance toward both academic and fan discourse when he writes: “while I fully support even the most thorny-headed discourse on Sluggo and the Male Gaze, I have no such offerings to that vigorous body of thought, nor do I possess any ‘interesting information’ or ‘useful knowledge’ about “The Great Man” (Clowes 2012). The preface demonstrates a disinterestedness in the academic (poststructuralist) and fan-historiographic discourse and instead focuses on Clowes’s personal history with the strip, its minimalist drawing style and continued relevance for contemporary readers. We could also think of the comic book critic Harry Naybors appearing in Clowes’s Ice Haven (2005), whose pompous discourse is half-serious, half-nonsense, and further ridiculed by his graphic representation. Clowes’s own text on comics history in the pamphlet-like Modern Cartoonist (1997) adopts a similar discursive style, putting forward bold claims about comics history as driven by recursive fifteen-year cycles of innovation while stressing the ambiguities of the cultural recognition of comics. His ironical position appears as an example of what Christopher Pizzino has termed “autoclasm,” designating “the illegitimacy of comics not as a theme that can be safely contained, but as a reality inside which the comics creator must struggle” (2016, 4). This autoclastic tendency in Clowes’s discourse on the history of comics transpires through the systematic “self-breaking” of his own legitimacy. Accordingly, Eye of the Cartoonist gives less room to extended commentaries on the history of comics than Le Musée privé d’Art Spiegelman and does not mobilize an overt critical apparatus. The exhibition design leaves out a direct juxtaposition of the author’s comments and the exhibited artworks: instead, Clowes’s reflections are neatly laid out as a fold-out of the exhibition leaflet (figure 77), which includes short comments on each artist alongside a fragment of the exhibited item. The snippets reflect the curatorial focus on visually striking images, often praising the drawing, the line, or the design elements of the page. Quite tellingly, even when including pages from the suspenseful adventure strip Terry and the Pirates, Clowes insists on Milton Caniff ’s chiaroscuro mastery: “I’m not so interested in these stories I must confess, but no one ever made more thrilling use of black ink on white paper.” Furthermore, he frequently refers to the very process of selecting the pages, as when he writes: “The Little Nemo original in this show is one of those holy grail pages of comic art that you can’t forget once you’ve seen it. I almost passed out when I opened the drawer and found it sitting there.” Just as the fold-out spreads the featured artists regardless of schools or periods, the exhibition setting similarly eschews the organization of its elements into a chronological sequence. Rather, it clusters the work of each artist and

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Figure 77. Eye of the Cartoonist: Daniel Clowes’s Selections from Comics History, exhibition pamphlet featuring material from the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. Designed by Mike Greenler, 2014. Image courtesy of the Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University.

juxtaposes these clusters next to each other, unrelated of period or artistic affinities: the early twentieth-century cartoonist T. S. Sullivant, for instance, stands alongside a Buck Rogers Sunday page from 1937 and original art from the 1960s by Henning Mikkelsen (Ferd’nand) and Gus Arriola (Gordo). Each frame is placed at a relative distance from the others, but the exhibition nonetheless favors a comparative experience of Clowes’s “selections from comics history,” offering a kaleidoscopic view that does not add up into a narrative development. Neither the exhibition layout nor Clowes’s comments emphasize the situatedness of these cartoonists and works within a linear narrative of comics history and repeatedly appeal to their transtemporal value: Clowes calls Otto Soglow’s strips “timeless, eternally truthful, and just as funny today as the day they were first printed,” presents Al Hirschfield “the best caricaturist of all time,” and states about Lyonel Feininger’s Kin-der-Kids that “these have to number among the most beautiful printed pages of all time.” These shorthand notices speak out Clowes’s fascination and attachment for these “old” comic strips while simultaneously affirming their continued relevance today. Invoking the canon logic of curation, selection, and duration, Daniel Clowes draws attention to what speaks to his own practice in the past of comics in order to present what amounts to a personal canon.

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Despite this canonizing logic and the highly legitimate setting of the museum, there is also an “autoclastic” tendency subtly at work in Clowes’s curatorial choices: albeit never short of praising and celebrating the artists, the exhibition never monumentalizes their works, and the curator’s comments consistently suggest what is worth remembering and why in only a few lines. Among the vast amounts of Winsor McCay originals in the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library, Clowes surprisingly selects only one Little Nemo page and includes five of his later cartoons, drawn toward the end of his career after his venture in animation was flailing. An unusual curatorial choice, Clowes explains that it is precisely the contrast between McCay’s art and the specific situations they are supposed to humorously illustrate: “I love his political cartoons, somewhat for the wrong reasons, but mostly because of how the absurdly inelegant and overt ‘gag’ ideas match up to the all-time world-class drawing in a way that makes them seem like intentionally ironic, well-concocted parodies.” Similarly, Clowes’s choices also foreground the works of lesser-known artists, such as Henning Mikkelsen’s “unjustly neglected masterpieces of wordless storytelling” or Gus Arriola’s “really crazy, experimental (and often brilliant and beautiful) graphics,” in that they demonstrate the mastery of formal elements within the constrained context of the newspaper. As Clowes further writes of Arriola: “It almost feels as though he thought nobody was actually reading the strip, so he felt free to amuse himself.” In fact, Clowes repeatedly connects the exhibited images with the craft, work, and skill of their cartoonists, sometimes further connecting it to his own practice of cartooning: in this way, Eye of the Cartoonist not only showcases his interests and tastes for comics history but also demonstrates how Clowes is profoundly embedded in a tradition of drawing comics that is also a history of its métier, of its production and reception. Quite telling in this regard are the two drawings he includes by Elzie Segar and Wally Wood, which are not “proper” works, comics, or cartoons, but doodles quickly brushed for fan readers: in his comments, Clowes thus emphasizes the act of drawing as something that extends to a specific relationship to the readers. These references to the culture of comics work and the constraints of commercial art counteract the problematic importation of “old” comics, as visual culture, within the white cube of the contemporary arts exhibition. A vitrine of comic books—from Virgil Partch and R. O. Blechman’s cartoon books to DC Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane comic books as well as the underground comix of Jay Lynch and Robert Crumb—remind visitors that comics are readable objects, even compulsively read as their deteriorated covers suggest. Ultimately, the exhibition also leads the visitors back to Clowes’s own works which, just as the museum room allows for transtemporal juxtapositions, often mix dissonant styles drawn from the history of comics: Ice Haven (2004) and

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Wilson (2010), in particular, offer a compilation of various graphic styles that are more or less direct references to certain cartoonists. Yet, the exhibition also refrains from making those juxtapositions too evident for the visitor, allowing for Clowes’s personal selections from the history of comics to work beyond their simple function as influences. Quite on the contrary, Eye of the Cartoonist invites the visitors to look at the history of comics with a new eye, uncovering new ways of looking and reading those familiar and less-familiar works.

Exhibiting Personal Canons Both exhibitions thus manifest different ways of exploiting the complex dynamic between canon and archive, showing the importance of the institutional context and the “curatorial gesture” of the cartoonist. The canon that emerges from these exhibitions is not the “official” canon, be it the literary-oriented canon of comics studies (Beaty and Woo 2016) or the art-historical one defended by the Masters of American Comics show (Carlin et al. 2005), but one that is presented as idiosyncratic and subjective. Both exhibitions deliberately seek to present “personal” canons. Distinguishing between “memory as background” and “memory as force,” Judith Schlanger puts forward the notion of a personal canon that crystallizes a subjective, creative living memory by contrast with the official canon: “Personal affinities subvert the didactic canon, which would be the representative list of great books to teach and transmit, in favor of a personal canon polarized by admiration, a canon that is above all inspirational” (Schlanger 2014, 209; my translation). Along similar lines, reminding us that “there are many ways to constitute a canon (whether personal or collective) in the margins of the traditional ‘official’ methods of literary historiography,” Jan Baetens and Ben de Bruyn (2014, §26) further argue for shifting attention from “the” canon, conceptualized as a list of great works single-handedly enforced by a dominant system and its hierarchy of values, toward canonization as a heterogenous and diffuse phenomenon that involves various actors and crystallizes complex temporalities. The case of cartoonists-curated exhibitions provides insight into these mechanisms of canonization as they negotiate the relationship between the contingent, personal canon of the individual cartoonist as a subjective take on the comics history and the institutional framework of museums as guardians of memory. Enrolling cartoonists as curators, these institutions avoid the pitfalls of a top-down canon formation, as heavily debated for the Masters of American Comics show, and in the process propose a more flexible, relative act of canonization linked to the practice of individual graphic novelists. Instead of a didactic canon, the museums present “personal canons” that tap into a

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living memory of the medium and help to draw connections between the past of comics and its present. Going back to Art Spiegelman’s homage to Bill Blackbeard, featured in Le Musée privé d’Art Spiegelman, we can draw a parallel between the collector’s activities as comics historian and Spiegelman and Clowes’s roles as curators. Spiegelman presents Blackbeard dressed up as the Yellow Kid, with scissors in one hand, his anthology The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics (Blackbeard and Williams 1977), and newspaper tearsheets spread on the floor. The caption reads: “His vast archive of newspaper strips [ . . . ] has given us a usable past—and since the future of comics is in the past—has provided the medium with a future.” Spiegelman intertwines the importance of the archive—the vast collection assembled by Blackbeard and which now lays in the stacks of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library—with that of the canon—Blackbeard’s scissors clipping through the newspapers, not only to preserve the comics, but also and most importantly to compose his seminal anthology. The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics was a major influence on generations of cartoonists like Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, and Daniel Clowes (Heer 2010, 7): more importantly than pledging for the cultural recognition of comics, canonization has to allow the past to become usable for comics to have a future. Since Blackbeard’s anthology, comics have come a long way and now that they have libraries and museums dedicated to the preservation and transmission of their memories, Clowes and Spiegelman’s curatorial acts might offer a comparable step in turning the past of comics into something usable for younger generations. Acknowledgments

Research for this chapter was carried out during a stay at The Ohio State University and Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, generously supported by an FNRS doctoral fellowship and a travel grant from the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles. With thanks to the OSU/Billy Ireland team (Jared Gardner, Susan Liberator, Caitlin McGurk, Jenny Robb), David Filipi at the Wexner Center for the Arts, and last but not least Thierry Groensteen and Catherine Terniaux at the Cité internationale de la bande dessinée in Angoulême. Notes 1. It should be noted that Art Spiegelman acted as a consultant for the Masters of American Comics show but precisely refused to be further involved and credited as curator so as not to take on the explicit role of canon-maker: “I didn’t want to be a curator per se, to decide who should live and who should die in that context” (Spiegelman 2011, 205). 2. This dynamic is itself a subpart of the tension between remembering and forgetting. Processes of forgetting, of course, limit the idea of the archive as a total storage memory; since the archival turn of the 1990s, it is well known that archives are not unmediated and inflect our

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interpretations of the past (see De Kosnik 2016 and Giannachi 2016 for a comprehensive state of the art on archive theory). 3. The cartoonists’ appropriation of the museum space and selections from the archive also echoes the “archival turn” in the contemporary art world (see, for instance, Giannachi 2016; Van Alphen 2014); however, the exhibitions here are not claimed or perceived as artworks or texts on their own and certainly have a peripheral status in the cartoonists’ oeuvre. 4. The Co-Mix retrospective of Spiegelman’s own work was organized separately, managed by different organizers and curators. It took place in the exhibition space of the Vaisseau Mœbius, facing the CIBDI across the Charente River. 5. Interview with Thierry Groensteen, January 23, 2017, Angoulême. 6. Interview with Thierry Groensteen, January 23, 2017, Angoulême. 7. The breadth of choice from the CIBDI’s archive was further constrained by the strict conservation policy they abide to, which entails that each item that is displayed for three months needs to “rest” in the archive for three years. 8. The canonical position that these cartoonists occupy in fan histories of comics still guide the editorial line of patrimonial collections as IDW’s Library of American Comics. 9. The videos were shot, directed, and edited by the Canadian comics scholar Jacques Samson (Lux Pictoria, Montreal). 10. Personal e-mail correspondence, September 12, 2016.

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Clowes, Daniel. 2005. Ice Haven. New York: Pantheon. Clowes, Daniel. 2012. Introduction. In Ernie Bushmiller, Nancy is Happy. Seattle: Fantagraphics. Clowes, Daniel. 2010. Wilson. New York: Pantheon. Collins, Jim. 2010. Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture. Durham: Duke University Press. Damisch, Hubert. 2007. L’Amour m’expose. Paris: Klincksieck. De Kosnik, Abigail. 2016. Rogue Archives. Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom. Cambridge: MIT Press. Filipi, David, and Jenny Robb. 2014. “Through the Eyes of the Cartoonist.” Leaflet for Eye of the Cartoonist: Daniel Clowes’s Selections from Comics History and Modern Cartoonist: The Art of Daniel Clowes, Wexner Center for the Arts, May 17–August 3. Gardner, Jared. 2012. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First Century Storytelling. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Giannachi, Gabriella. 2016. Archive Everything: Mapping the Everyday. Cambridge: MIT Press. Grennan, Simon. 2016. “Misrecognizing Misrecognition: The Capacity to Influence in the Milieux of Comics and Fine Art.” Image [&] Narrative 17(4): 5–15. Groensteen, Thierry. 2009. La Bande dessinée: son histoire et ses maîtres. Paris / Angoulême: Skira Flammarion / Cité internationale de la bande dessinée et de l’image. Heer, Jeet. 2010. “Inventing Cartooning Ancestors: Ware and the Comics Canon.” In The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing Is a Way of Thinking, edited by David M. Ball and Martha B. Kuhlman, 3–13. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Jenkins, Henry. 2013. “Archival, Ephemeral, and Residual: The Functions of Early Comics in Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers.” In From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narratives, edited by Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon, 301–22. Berlin: De Gruyter. La Cour, Erin, and Rik Spanjers. 2016. “Ingratiation, Appropriation, Rebellion: Comics’ Sociability in the Milieux of Art and Literature.” Image [&] Narrative 17(4): 1–4. Manovich, Lev. 2009. “The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life: From Mass Cultural Consumption to Mass Cultural Production?” Critical Inquiry 35(2): 319–31. Méon, Jean-Matthieu. 2015. “Comics Exhibitions in Contemporary France: Diversity and Symbolic Ambivalence.” International Journal of Comic Art 17(1): 446–64. Mitchell, W. J. T., and Art Spiegelman. 2014. “Public Conversation: What the %$#! Happened to Comics?” Critical Inquiry 40(3): 20–35. Moine, Florian. 2013. “Bande dessinée et patrimoine. Histoire du Musée de la bande dessinée d’Angoulême (1983–2010).” Unpublished thesis (MA), Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Munson, Kim. 2017. “Forming a Visual Canon: Comics in Museums.” In The Secret Origins of Comics Studies, edited by Randy Duncan and Matthew Smith, 226–45. New York: Routledge. Obrist, Hans Ulrich. 2014. Ways of Curating. London: Penguin. O’Neill, Paul. 2007. “The Curatorial Turn: From Practice to Discourse.” In Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance, edited by Judith Rugg and Michèle Sedgwick, 13–28. Bristol: Intellect. Pizzino, Christopher. 2015. “The Doctor versus the Dagger: Comics Reading and Cultural Memory.” PMLA 130(3): 631–47. Pizzino, Christopher. Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. Reynolds, Simon. 2011. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. London: Faber & Faber. Robb, Jenny E. 2009. “Bill Blackbeard: The Collector Who Rescued the Comics.” Journal of American Culture 32(3): 244–56.

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Robinson, MJ. 2017. Television on Demand: Curatorial Culture and the Transformation of TV. London: Bloomsbury. Rosset, Christian. 2009. “Tenir le mur.” Neuvième Art 15: 166–75. Schlanger, Judith. 2014. Le Neuf, le different et le déjà-là: une exploration de l’influence. Paris: Hermann. Spiegelman, Art. 1970. “Noble Efforts: A Miscellaneous Selection of Comic Strips by Artists Better Known for Other Works.” Nostalgia Comics 1(1): 30–35. Spiegelman, Art. 1988. “Commix: An Idiosyncratic Historical and Aesthetic Overview.” Print 42(6): 61–96. Spiegelman, Art. 1991. Maus. New York: Pantheon. Spiegelman, Art. 1998. Comix, Graphics, Essays & Scraps: From Maus to Now to Maus to Now. New York: RAW Books/Sellerio. Spiegelman, Art. 2004. In the Shadow of No Towers. New York: Pantheon. Spiegelman, Art. 2011. MetaMaus. New York: Pantheon. Spiegelman, Art. 2012. Co-Mix: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics, and Scraps. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly. Van Alphen, Ernst. 2014. Staging the Archive: Art and Photography in the Age of New Media. London: Reaktion.

Co-Mix and Exhibitions: Interview with Art Spiegelman Kim A. Munson Interview copyright © 2017 Art Spiegelman, displayed with permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.

For much of his career, Art Spiegelman has fought to drag comic art from the low-art scrap heap to high-art museums and galleries, helping it gain its current status as a unique art form worthy of display, scholarship, and respect. “If the shock of seeing comics displayed in the rarefied realm of so-called serious art is well and truly a thing of the past (it is), then we have Spiegelman, largely, to thank,” Murray Whyte observes in his review of Spiegelman’s retrospective Co-Mix for the Toronto Star (2014). Spiegelman has an acute awareness of the relationship between comics and other types of contemporary art, as well as the context of comics within the larger story of art history. He began incorporating references to modern art and art theory in early works like “Ace Hole Midget Detective” (1977), “Nervous Rex: The Malpractice Suite” (1977), both in Breakdowns, and in the pages of Raw, the groundbreaking art magazine he coproduced with his wife, Françoise Mouly, in the 1980s. These drawings, along with other early works in underground comix, a display of artwork from Topps Garbage Pail Kids, and a rich selection of covers and other work from Raw formed the introduction to Spiegelman’s touring exhibition Co-Mix: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics and Scraps. This show was organized by the Festival International de la Bande Dessinée in Angoulême in 2012, touring afterward to Paris, France (2012), Cologne, Germany (2013), Vancouver, Canada (2013), and the Jewish Museum in New York City (2014). I saw this show myself shortly after it opened at its last stop, the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto, Canada (December 2014–March 2015). Through his writings, interviews, and past exhibitions, Spiegelman has been outspoken about how his work is displayed and contextualized, so I was curious about how his retrospective would be presented. I found the selections in

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the Toronto show quite satisfying, with a wide range of new and lesser-known works presented more or less chronologically along a backbone formed by Raw, his Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece Maus, and his iconic covers for the New Yorker magazine (exhibit photos, see figures 78 and 79). Spiegelman’s complete Maus (every page, plus preparatory sketches and reference materials) was presented sequentially in a giant brightly lit showcase, making a dynamic centerpiece, where it was both the heart of the exhibit and a presence unto itself. Lured past Maus by the New Yorker covers (bright color against gray walls), I entered a gallery of new works like It Was Today, Only Yesterday (a series of stained-glass windows for the New York High School of Art and Design), a video promoting his Wordless lecture tour, Lead Pipe Sunday, drawings from Toon Books, The Shadow of No Towers, and other projects. The exhibit included a large reading area near the exit. I was able to discuss the exhibition design of Co-Mix, other exhibits of interest, and general trends in an April 2016 phone interview. Some of Mr. Spiegelman’s comments have been edited for length and clarity. Kim A. Munson: Let’s talk about your Co-Mix retrospective, which I saw at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto right after it opened there. It was a great experience and I enjoyed looking at the whole range of the work that was selected. I loved the layout and thought it showcased your work really well. In his review of the show, you told Murray Whyte of the Toronto Star, “The idea of high and low is over, I think. It’s all low now. We won” (2014). What did you think of that? Art Spiegelman: Well, I don’t know what I said in that article, but I agree with you that in terms of this layout, the show, especially in its penultimate iteration at the Jewish Museum (New York), was the most jewel-like presentation of my work, or any other comics work, I’ve ever seen. Because without any tricks, large weird blowups, or mechanical robots lumbering through the show, it was hard to draw attention to work on the walls that required standing fairly close and reading, as well as looking. It was all done on a very high level by Rina Zavagi-Mattotti of the Gallery Martel. That last bit at the Jewish Museum was a bit of curatorial magic. It wasn’t really AGO’s fault that it looked a little different. The ceilings were lower in New York and they were able to light it more precisely. KM: I thought the floor plan was really good at AGO, the way you entered through Raw and the undergrounds, then that impressive showcase of Maus, and the New Yorker covers.

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Figures 78 and 79. Exhibition views of Spiegelman’s Co-Mix retrospective featuring Raw and Maus at Art Gallery of Ontario. Toronto. 2015. Photo by Kim Munson. See a photo tour of this show on my blog at http://www.neuroticraven.com/blog/2018/1/22/art-spiegelmans-co-mix-in-toronto.

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AS: One of the first suggestions from someone at the Jewish Museum that didn’t really know any better was “I just saw a show with pistachio walls and it was really beautiful, can we color the walls pistachio for your show?” I went, “I think I’m taking my work home.” It was a five-part show and everything about the framing reinforced that. I knew I didn’t want imposing frames. The comic art is not exactly meant for a wall and things that looked more like a matte than a frame would be the appropriate way to show it without any pomposity. And then those matte frames were getting beaten up because it had already been in four venues. They had to be remade. After pistachio and some other suggestions, we went with “Fifty Shades of Gray,” which worked so well because it was either light gray walls with dark gray mattes or dark gray walls with light gray mattes and the result of that in a low-hung, well-lit room was it put all the attention on what was inside the frames so they could be looked at in a way they hadn’t been seen before. It seemed like a light-box at the airport or something. It just attracted eyeballs because it’s about 5,000 more lumens than anything around it and it made the lighter black-and-white work come forward and certainly made the color works pop out. I was just really impressed beyond anything that I expected. The show was so coherently organized to begin with. KM: Well, the display of Maus was really breathtaking. Because the colors of the New Yorker covers really jumped out against that gray, it really drew you into the next part of the exhibit and the newer work. It was sort of like you got past Maus and wow! It’s a whole new day. That was really, really effective, I thought. AS: I went into the show kicking and screaming, even the first iteration, because I had already finished retrospecting, thank you. I had done two “retrospectives,” a new edition of Breakdowns and Meta Maus, and I was really done. I was really done. But I felt kind of cornered by a call saying please call Francois Mitterrand, the minister of culture at 4 o’clock tomorrow where he will announce that you are the grand Pooh-Bah of Angoulême. And that came with the obligation of a retrospective, and I said, “but I’m not capable of doing that,” but there was nobody to talk to about it. So, I had to say “yes,” rather than “you cheese-eating surrender monkeys, I want nothing to do with you” and figure out how to back out afterward. At this state, they can be such big productions and I can’t really get involved. Then it expanded to allow for two things. One was if anybody is going to touch the artwork and figure it out, somebody I can trust wholeheartedly, is Rina Mattotti. So, you’re going to have to convince her to be the curator. And the second thing was it would have to be able to travel because otherwise, it’s an insane amount of disruption to put something like this together.

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Eventually they got back to me and said, “How do you feel about the Pompidou?” I said, “Ulp! Well, okay, I guess that qualifies.” Then later on, I got to read the small print, which explained that it’s in the library (Bibliothèque publique d’information du Centre Pompidou) and it’s about twenty feet long. It had been arranged by the same mastermind who organized last year’s fiasco at Angoulême. But it was a way of getting me to agree. Fortunately, the new director of the library of the Pompidou was very receptive to doing a much more impressive show. So, it grew in scale and I’m very pleased that it did. So, it all ended really swell because they were able to take it and move it to Germany and to Vancouver. KM: Last time I spoke with you, we talked about Masters of American Comics (2006) and the conflict you had with the Jewish Museum when the show moved to New York. You actually withdrew your work from the show. How did you feel about going back there with this show? Was it okay? AS: Yeah, no problem. My problem with the Jewish Museum was it undid a very carefully thought through exhibit by dividing it up for no good reason in ways that didn’t make sense with Maus clearly destined to play a specific role in a museum called the Jewish Museum. KM: Right, Masters was in two museums (the UCLA Hammer and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles). One covered the evolution of the comic strip and the other covered the evolution of the comic book. They wanted to cherry pick which artists they showed, with a view toward getting yours in particular. AS: Well, in LA the comic strips were in one building and down in a whole other museum was the comic book work. Here they were doing the same thing but with two museums that didn’t have any likelihood of getting cross-fertilized. So, out in Newark you have a show called comic strips for whoever could make it out there and in Manhattan you have a comic book show. And especially at the Jewish Museum, the narrative about Jews and comic books, which wasn’t a big story for comic strips but obviously loomed larger in comic books, and within that, Maus would have a peculiar relationship with that work that would take a lot of difficult and careful thinking about what would be shown and how. Curator John Carlin and I suggested “why don’t we have two microcosm shows and just hang it differently.” Like they’d have strips and comic book art intermixed in both shows and just have half the comic strip and comic book artists in one show and half in the other, or a smaller representation of each

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artist’s work in each show. Then I was proposing that we take the Maus work and we put it in the Newark Museum. It just becomes a different thing, and there was also the idea that one could then show the influences of an earlier cartoonist on a contemporary one. For instance, I don’t know, how about Chris Ware and George Herriman and Gasoline Alley all hanging together? I’ll be happy to hang anywhere near Harvey Kurtzman or Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy. We used a lot of brain cells arranging a way to accommodate these two separate museums. One of the ways it was pitched was we could get you a lot of attention out in Newark because people from New York will come, which I don’t believe happened at all to any significant degree. KM: I remember you joking that putting part of the show in Newark was like putting it in the witness protection program. I was just curious because it sounded like such an intense situation at the time and I wondered how you made peace with it. AS: I made peace with it but I also was trying to promote the Jewish Museum show. Once I pulled out, I did a walk through with Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times so he could understand the work more efficiently and better. And then we went out to the one in New Jersey as well and talked about the original conception of the Masters show. The Times had a piece on it that was quite informed. And I didn’t come out very publicly saying don’t go see this show. I had to withdraw from something that seemed like a very open secret. KM: Let’s get back to your retrospective. One of the themes that always comes up in exhibitions of comics is the idea of narrative. Showing all the pages of Maus, you were presenting the viewer with a lot to read. I saw Crumb’s Genesis when it toured to San Jose. As you know, it’s literally the whole book of Genesis on the wall. So, it was interesting watching people at these exhibits and their response to the material. With Genesis, for example, that first sequence is so amazing, the Adam and Eve sequence, and people would read it really, really closely and study it and everything. In San Jose, that part was by itself in a gallery, sort of as an introduction. People would finish it and look around the corner, and there was the rest of it stretching on as far as you could see. I often heard an audible gasp at the sight of it. My observation was that people would read a little bit and then they’d stop and they would rest a little bit and they would read a little bit and kind of cherry pick their way through it. I wondered how people responded to seeing your whole Maus displayed together in that showcase. Did people try to read it?

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AS: I don’t think I expected anybody to read all of Maus in the Jewish Museum. Career retrospectives have a lot of different stuff and within any period I worked on a number of different pieces. I didn’t expect anybody to be able to unpack the whole show in one visit necessarily and I certainly didn’t expect somebody to read Maus in the museum rather than in a book. In some of the museums, we had a bunch of books hanging from the walls. Maus was presented in a compact way, with preliminary sketches, that allowed the process of making that work visible. KM: In Toronto, they had a long bench in front of the showcase and on each end of the bench they had a copy of Maus. Then when you went around into the section of newer work, they set up a small reading area with a computer and some soft chairs, where people could rest and see a selection of your books and videos. AS: I think at the Jewish Museum, we had lecterns with books attached to them so people could read instead of looking at the wall. Because the difficulty with exhibiting comics is it’s not the ideal way to read. But even if you put up a manuscript of Faulkner’s in a museum library, nobody’s really going to read something in an exhibition space, walking around walls. There’s no reason why it should be up because this work was really meant to be read. So, the best is to give some good examples—Crumb has an amazing array of work over many, many decades and this specific work probably didn’t need to have every page shown as a way of letting one understand his virtuosity. KM: Yeah. It was pretty impressive to see the whole thing from beginning to end. AS: Yeah, I saw that as well. Yeah, it was but it also showed me this was not the way to go. There are other things to do that actually encourage a different kind of looking from the kind you have in a book, and that a book is a great thing that shouldn’t be ignored. That’s what the work was made for in many of the instances we’re talking about. So, I don’t know. . . . The same way there was a revolution for comic art in bookstores, libraries, and universities, it’s not as fully resolved in art world museums and gallery contexts. I think that one thing that has begun to happen is people who are not influenced only by pop art will be making work designed to be originals that are narratively based in time with drawn or painted components may come together. And there’s a different aesthetic and a different way of being approached that will be closer to the way that one approaches paintings now in museums.

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And that seems like it would eventually and inevitably come to pass. And it’s looking at what I try to emphasize in my show’s process—it’s the physicality of something. I’m actually doing something with Si Lewen, a totally obscure ninety-seven-year-old painter, who fled Germany when he was fifteen. He did an important work called Parade that I included in my presentation with the jazz orchestra. KM: I saw your Wordless show at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley. AS: Oh, you did. So, you know what I’m talking about, you know the end of the show where it’s about the perpetual cycle of war and destruction and then the kids are raised for another generation of being cannon fodder? That work is being published in the fall by Abrams in a very cool format. It will be a very long accordion fold book of the original artwork with a few drawings edited because there were some outtakes that should have been shown. And I did that with Si’s help. And then—on the verso side of the accordion fold book—is Si’s backstory, which shows a number of other really ambitious and important bits of work that he did in his very prolific life as a painter. The design of Parade came out of his childhood notion the paintings at the museums his parents took him to in Berlin should be set close together so they could talk to each other. That’s what his vision was. So, he decided to become all the painters and they could talk to each other. It’s a long, long, long series. One with hundreds of paintings. It’s called The Procession and the paintings are sort of analog to edited film sequences that intercut with other sequences. But they’re not comics. KM: Oh, that sounds amazing. AS: I think it’s amazing. I think it’s like a harbinger because recently I’ve been looking at some shows of contemporary painters—Keith Mayerson had a show at the Whitney and gallery shows and he has clearly done some comics work— but his installations are very densely hung and they’re meant to be paintings hanging close enough to talk. And there’s this guy you probably know—he’s out on your coast—named Jim Shaw. KM: Yeah, right. I saw his big show The End Is Near at the New Museum (New York) in January. AS: Yeah, me too. It blew me away. And part of it is the notion that—the idea of paintings as inspirations is very much in the air, I would say. At that point, why not have comics turn the walls into installations?

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KM: Do you know about Paul Gravett’s concept of hypercomics? AS: Yeah, sure. KM: They are kind of experimental exhibits; he calls them “gallery comics.” He designs a show where the white cube of the gallery itself functions as the book, and the viewer navigates through comics in various directions to make up a narrative. AS: I’ve never seen any of that—I just don’t get to London that often. KM: He explains it really well in his Tate book Comics Art in the last chapter. One of the most frustrating things about researching exhibits is not being able to see everything. AS: Exactly. One thing I did see in London was the original Marriage A-laMode paintings by Hogarth on the wall [Hogarth, Tate Britain, 2007]. There were about eight of them, it took up an entire large gallery. I was knocked out because you really are reading a novel in eight paintings or so. And it’s much easier to read as large paintings made for walls than it is relatively small engravings, or certainly in book reproductions, which are even smaller than that. There are all these clues embedded in these life-size figures, where you can read a letter on a mantelpiece and it gives you a clue as how the narrative unfolds. It seemed like a very straightforward precursor to comics and maybe a hint of how comics (a medium that traffics in time) might develop as wall art. And the kinds of things where it’s more obliquely narrative, like some of the Jim Shaw pieces, that are dependent on juxtapositions to make themselves told, that seems to me like a pretty natural progression—now that “we won,” as you quoted me saying. There’s no reason not to let all of this stuff mix together to its most fruitful possible end. KM: Around the same time as the Jim Shaw show, MOMA had a show that was kind of about the flattening of art history [The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, 2006]. It wasn’t a big show. It was upstairs next to their blockbuster exhibit of Matisse cut-outs. I guess this is the same concept you were talking about when you said, “All art is low now. We won.” They were showing a group of conceptual painters that were taking art historical references off the net and then abstracting them and meshing them all together. AS: That makes sense. That’s actually my new hobby horse while I’m running around museums looking around. One thing that’s occurred to me is I always

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enjoyed Tom Wolfe’s book, The Painted Word, do you know that book? It’s about how the auteur in art now is not the painter but the critic, so that all of those abstract expressionist fathers were just illustrators, they were illustrating things by Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg that are provocative and half bland and half very incisive. Now I think the equivalent is that the curator is the auteur because we’re living totally in the age of collage and sampling and therefore one of the best shows in New York right now—for me the best—is this thing called Unfinished at the Met Breuer [Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016]. Did you see that? KM: No, I haven’t. I read a lot about it. The director of the Met came out to San Francisco and did a presentation on the show and their plans for reopening the Breuer building as a fund-raiser for out-of-town members. I was curious how they would remodel that space after it had been occupied by the Whitney for so long. AS: It’s so shocking to see an eighteenth-century painting at the Whitney for one thing. But also, speaking of common denominator themes and putting it together in ways where the theme comes forward as much as any individual painting, you could call it a kind of arrogance. But it’s interesting in terms of reframing and being concerned with what you’re looking at as a way of going about things and this was just one of the better examples. It wasn’t that complex of an idea but it was a fruitful one and one you can see across centuries. Wrestling with the canvas to make something happen consciously or unconsciously—its art synapses works well. And that’s—so like if they didn’t get—I don’t know—paintings of Picasso, they might have gotten other paintings by Picasso or other artists from that modernist moment that were as engaged with showing the rawness of the canvas and the process and made themselves into their image. So that the collage elements are important in and of themselves, so is the interstitial way it’s all knitted together. KM: I’m sure this is a trend that will continue. Thank you!

Introduction to Comic Book Apocalypse: The Graphic World of Jack Kirby Charles Hatfield Reprinted with permission of John Morrow. First published in The Kirby Collector #67, Spring 2016, as the introduction to the article “CSUN Kirby Panel.”

The exhibition Comic Book Apocalypse: The Graphic World of Jack Kirby ran from August 24 through October 10, 2015, at the California State University, Northridge Art Galleries in Los Angeles (exhibit photos, figures 80, 81). This show, the largest solo Kirby exhibition yet mounted in the United States, incorporated 107 originals and filled the main gallery space, which consists of three rooms, about 3,000 square feet, and 300 linear wall feet. Comic Book Apocalypse has the distinction of being the best-attended art exhibition in the history of CSU Northridge, drawing some 6,200 visitors in its seven weeks. The opening reception, on Saturday, August 29, drew more than 600 people; the gallery talk on the following Monday morning, featuring Mark Evanier, was filled to capacity at about 150; and the show’s last big public event, a panel discussion and catalog signing on Saturday, September 26, drew an additional 350-plus. On its final afternoon, Saturday, October 10—a period of just four hours—the show drew an additional 350-plus. The gallery led a record number of tours through the exhibition (more than forty, totaling about 1,350 people). I cannot count the number of times I found myself in the gallery, serving as de facto docent or hearing stories full of love and admiration from fans, friends, and colleagues of Jack Kirby—and from people who had never looked at his art before! I’m not surprised by any of this, or, rather, I’m surprised and proud that I was able to do my part, but not at all surprised by the sheer enthusiasm for Kirby’s art and the big numbers racked up at the gallery. I think the gallery team may have been surprised, and that many of my CSUN colleagues were surprised, but to me the idea that people should want to come see a hundred-plus Kirby originals is a no-brainer. For me, curating this show fulfilled a lifelong dream, that of acknowledging publicly, somehow, my fascination with, and never-repayable imaginative debt 356

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Figures 80 and 81. Installation view of Comic Book Apocalypse: The Graphic World of Jack Kirby featuring Silver Surfer “selfie wall” by Louis Solis and a New Gods mural by Geoff Grogan. California State University Northridge Art Galleries. August 24–October 10, 2015. Courtesy of Jim Sweeters, CSUN Art Galleries.

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to, the art of Kirby. Ten-year-old me and fifty-year-old professorial me were arm-in-arm on this one, and delirious with joy to be doing it. Comic Book Apocalypse was an idea whose time was already due. During my preparation for the show, I talked or exchanged e-mails with several other scholars who also wanted to do Kirby shows at their institutions. I got lucky. On the heels of my book, Hand of Fire: The Comic Art of Jack Kirby (2011), I got the opportunity to be the first person to curate a Kirby show at a university. This all came about because CSUN galleries director Jim Sweeters—a savvy, interested, and generous man—invited me to do it. What happened was that Jim and I met during the gallery’s big Robert Williams exhibition about six years ago. On the night that Williams—of Zap Comix and Juxtapoz fame—did the Hans Burkhardt Lecture (named for the abstract expressionist painter and former CSUN teacher) and a signing in the gallery, I was somehow introduced to Jim. That event got me into the gallery after too many years away—I should have come long before—and that’s how we began to strike up a conversation about doing a comic art show. For the record, that was on March 10, 2010. And then, five days later, incredibly, I ran into Jim again at Pasadena City College, where esteemed artist (and Kirbyphile) Gary Panter was doing a weeklong residency, facilitated by my colleague, PCC gallery director Brian Tucker. Serendipity! From then on Jim and I were talking seriously about a comics exhibition. I waffled for a while about what theme to do—Los Angeles cartoonists? Alternative comics? Fantasy comics?—but when Hand of Fire bowed at the end of 2011 to good reviews, I allowed myself, finally, to see the obvious: What I really want to do is a full-on Kirby show. Jim said yes, and that’s when our roughly three years of concerted work really began. It turned out that we had bit off a lot. For a first-time main gallery show devoted to original comic art—and a first-time curatorial effort by yours truly, an English prof—we aimed high. How high, I didn’t realize until I began seeking out and courting collectors of the original art. The world of comic art collecting is a culture unto itself, and back then I was not very familiar with it, despite having studied comics as reading matter for a good chunk of my life. Fortunately, certain collectors, such as Glen David Gold and Mark Evanier, and certain colleagues, such as my friend Ben Saunders (an experienced curator himself), could act as my Virgils in this underworld, so that I could eventually feel at home. What I’ve learned about collectors and about the history of comic art during this experience, I can’t possibly tell in just a few paragraphs, but suffice to say that gathering the works for this show was a prolonged, sometimes suspenseful, and ultimately very social process. I asked for a lot of work because I could not overcome my worry that many of the works we asked for would not materialize. But I was wrong: we got a great many works, a trove really, and then in summer 2015, with just weeks left until our opening, Jim and

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I set about figuring out how to put all those works into the framework I had envisioned long, long ago. It was then that I learned that one’s existing ideas and arguments must inevitably yield to the sheer visual power of the artworks once you have them—so many of them, in house, in hand, and clamoring for space. Certain ideas I loved and pushed for almost from the start, such as creating a reading corner with books in it to stress the readability of comic art, got pushed aside due to the challenge of showing so much Kirby work to advantage in a space that people, we hoped, would enjoy moving through. To take my interests and make them work within a space that visitors could navigate—to make a livelier, more interactive space—that was the trick. Comic Book Apocalypse benefited a great deal from the help of the Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center, which provided us many images and several crucial design elements, including interactive iPad displays. Thanks to the museum’s leaders, Tom Kraft and Rand Hoppe, our show became much stronger. We also owe many thanks to designer Louis Solis, who adapted a vintage Kirby/ Herb Trimpe splash (from Silver Surfer #18, 1970) to create the show’s branding image, which became the template for the design of the whole space; to David Folkman, for the many wonderful photos; and to mural designer Geoff Grogan, a wonderful comics artist and teacher, whose staggering “New Gods” mural inspired me to rethink just where and how many of the works were going to go into the space. Also, the CSUN galleries team, including exhibition coordinator Michelle Giacopuzzi and assistants Jack Castellanos and Janet Solval, did a tremendous amount of work to get the art on the walls, matted and framed, shown to advantage, and properly documented. Sixteen lenders—a far cry from the mere handful I originally promised Jim—made the show possible. Without them, we would have had nothing. It was Jim himself, though, who taught me the way to do things in the gallery world, even as I taught him about Kirby. Jim understood the challenge of enlivening a space filled with many objects of nearly the same size and shape, of bringing in color to energize the scene, of taking an intimate form known for its hand feel, the comic book, and blowing it up to gallery scale. Jim’s hands-on creativity helped make the show spectacular. It’s one thing to sit in your study and spin out arguments about an artist on your laptop; it’s quite another to build arguments in three dimensions while making sure not to get in the way of the viewer’s pleasure. Having learned so much through this experience, I’m frankly dying to do more shows. You’ll see in the accompanying transcript of our September 26 panel that the status of comic art as readable, handheld art, as opposed to spectacular gallery art, was one of my abiding concerns when it came to putting on this show. I wanted story to be highlighted as well as art. Fortunately, we were able to fulfill

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one of my earliest ambitions for the show by displaying all of the originals for a whole issue of Kamandi (#14, 1973) in one of the rear galleries, alongside Tom Kraft’s brilliant pencils-to-inks iPad display of this same issue: moreover, we were able to display all the originals for Thor #155 (1968) in an adjoining gallery. This one-two punch turned out even better than I had hoped, because the differences in style and production between the Kamandi, inked and lettered by Mike Royer, and the Thor, largely inked by Vince Colletta and lettered by Artie Simek, proved to be very instructive to gallery visitors. To show one story edited by Kirby himself, and another edited by Stan Lee, and to highlight certain features of the original boards that were artifacts of the production process, turned out to be a real coup, for which I am very grateful. In fact, “grateful” describes my entire experience of curating the show and coediting, with Ben Saunders, its accompanying catalog (copublished by CSUN and IDW under the supervision of Scott Dunbier). To have done these things— to have had the opportunity, and seen the joy that the results brought to so many—fills me with thanks and wonder. I only hope it won’t be long before the next big Kirby exhibition in the States. We need more, and there is so much to show.

Jack Kirby at Cal State Northridge Doug Harvey Reprinted with permission from Doug Harvey. First published by the Comics Journal (online), October 5, 2015.

Assembling and mounting the first serious institutional retrospective exhibition in America examining the art of Jack Kirby is a task fraught with contradictions. On the one hand, Kirby is universally recognized within the comics community as one of the greatest innovators of the medium, the first comic book artist to achieve celebrity status, and the primary architect of the superhero mythology at the very center of contemporary human culture. As far as comic book aficionados go, you’re preaching to the choir. If, on the other hand, you are a normal person, chances are you’ve never heard of Kirby. If I were writing this review for a mainstream magazine—even one devoted to the visual arts—I would be obliged to devote several paragraphs explaining the long and complex arc of Kirby’s career and its reflection in the evolution of the medium and industry—particularly his iconic role in the struggle for creative autonomy and artists’ intellectual property rights. I would also have to flesh out the scope of Kirby’s vast output—the few people who could identify Kirby as the cocreator of the Marvel Universe would have no idea about his Golden Age collaborations with Joe Simon, their invention of the romance comic genre, or his wildly inventive post-Marvel tenure at DC. “Kamandi? What the hell’s a Kamandi?!” Just in case any normals have wandered across the screen of the Comics Journal, Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth was probably the most high profile of the plethora of titles spawned by Kirby in the wake of his fizzled magnum opus—the “Fourth World” series, consisting of three completely new titles interwoven with a radically revamped “Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen.” The series was an artistic triumph, but a commercial disappointment, and Kirby was tasked with delivering a new title tapping into the dystopian postapocalyptic world of “Planet of the Apes.” 361

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Kamandi ran for fifty-nine issues from 1972 to 1978 (though Kirby dropped out after #40) and one of the centerpieces of the first serious institutional retrospective exhibition in America examining the art of Jack Kirby consists of the original artwork for an entire issue from its heyday—issue #14, featuring the weirdly heartrending depiction of the death of Kamandi’s faithful giant grasshopper mount, Kliklik, in human gladiatorial games at Hialeah racetrack in Florida, now run by a giant sentient snake/postapoc department store magnate named Mr. Sacker. The story has particular resonance for exhibition curator Charles Hatfield, who cut his Kirby teeth on Kamandi as an adolescent, and went on to pen the 2012 Eisner Award–winning Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby, the first full-length academic tome devoted to Kirby (and subject of a TCJ roundtable in which I participated). The success of that book led to the organization of Comic Book Apocalypse: The Graphic World of Jack Kirby at the unusually supportive Cal State Northridge, where Hatfield teaches a “Comics and Graphic Novels” course. There’s not a lot you can do with vintage original comic art to make it seem comfortable in a white-cube-style gallery setting—it is what it is: commercially produced camera-ready fragments of narrative sequences aimed at teenage boys. Albeit—in the case of this show’s focus period—teenage boys who were dropping acid, engaging in free love, protesting the Vietnam War, and preparing for the anarcho-syndicalist utopia that would surely arrive no later than the mid-’70s. That context and Kirby’s full-throttle content—both in terms of his remarkable draftsmanship and literary bent—is what sets this exhibit apart from your run-of-the-mill comics-in-the-museum junkets. But rather than praise the particular idiosyncratic genius of mid-to-late Kirby or rehash the congenital defects of books-on-the-wall curatorial projects—both of which should be selfevident to anyone with even a passing interest in comic art—I’ll limit myself to specifics of Comic Book Apocalypse. As indicated above, the show focuses on Kirby’s late 1960s to mid-1970s period, when the artist was constantly breaking new ground aesthetically and politically (in terms of comic creator autonomy), but it includes examples of work from every period in his lengthy career, touching on genre forays into romance, war, occult, westerns, espionage, autobiography, and science fiction. Lots of science fiction. In addition to the full Kamandi story, there’s original art for a complete Marvel Thor story (#155, Now Ends the Universe!, 1968), which allows for fruitful comparison of the textual and inking contributions of Vince Colletta and Stan Lee, respectively, as opposed to Kirby’s own distinctive literary voice and Mike Royer’s faithful renditions of Kirby’s pencils.

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Figure 82. Jack Kirby. Dream Machine. 1975. Ink and watercolor on board. Collection of Glen David Gold. Courtesy Glen David Gold and the Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center.

This latter is particularly evident due to the fact that by the Kamandi era, Kirby was making thermofax copies of his original art, which have been preserved and scanned by the Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center. A couple of actual-size printed scans are included, but—most ingeniously—the entire story has been loaded onto a digital tablet with an interface that allows you to morph between the penciled and inked versions of each page. With commercial comic book art, a constant paradox is the fact that the trace of the artist’s hand is almost always covered over by another, lesser craftsman’s translation. In this case, the evidence reassures the faithful of what was already evident about the high fidelity of Royer’s inks. The rest of the show is arranged in thematic clusters: “Gods, Demigods, Demons”—collecting pages from Thor, Mr. Miracle, Silver Surfer, Demon, etc.; “The World That’s Coming”—OMAC, Kamandi, Silver Star; “Kirbytech”— more Fourth World, Fantastic Four, S.H.I.E.L.D; “Future Primitives”—Toxl the World Killer [?!], 2001, and Devil Dinosaur, which is represented by an astounding two-page spread from 1978’s Object from the Sky, which ripples with “Kirby krackle”—the artist’s signature multipurpose energy patterning—and hovers somewhere between art nouveau decorative abstraction and medieval manuscript illumination. Such examples of Kirby’s phenomenal artistry abound, and are brought to the forefront with the inclusion of a large nonfigurative 1975 ink and watercolor painting called Dream Machine (figure 82) in which the Kirbytech has finally engulfed the entire picture plane, and a small but potent selection of his idiosyncratic collage work, which he regularly tried to incorporate into his published narrative work. These works are possibly the most convincing regarding Kirby’s authenticity as a visionary artist—clotted with the same horror vacuii density of information as his best splashes (or an initial page from The Book of Kells), they regularly repurpose images through spectacular shifts of scale, conjuring planets from micrographs of crystals: infinity in a grain of sand.

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Charles Hatfield’s and Cal State Northridge’s mounting of this marvelous, long-overdue exhibition is an infinitely more significant art historical event than billionaire Eli Broad’s entire new Los Angeles contemporary art museum, which opened at the same time and has garnered headlines around the world, which kind of raises the question of whether the institutional authority of an art museum actually has any real legitimacy to bestow on comics that they haven’t earned by their own blood, sweat, and tears in the street and in the marketplace. But I hope in that respect as well that I’m preaching to the choir. PS: Buy the limited-edition catalog, which includes a reprint of my 2000 essay on Kirby’s Fourth World, as well as contributions from Howard Chaykin, Andrei Molotiu, Dan Nadel, Ben Saunders, and more.

Genius in a Box Alexi Worth Reprinted with permission of Alexi Worth. This essay is a 2017 revision of “Genius in a Box,” first published in Art in America, January 2016. Courtesy Art Media AIA, LLC.

Beyond the bodybuilder with his oversized Tootsie Pop, near the center of Richard Hamilton’s famous 1956 collage, Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing, a small framed comic book hangs on the wall. It’s an ad for Young Romance Number 26, drawn by Jacob Kurtzberg, better known as Jack Kirby. We don’t know whether Kirby ever saw his own comic nestled inside what is arguably the first pop artwork, but the company he worked for eventually made the larger connection explicit, rebranding itself in 1965 as “Marvel Pop Art Productions.” And it was then, in the emboldening wake of Pop, that Kirby transformed not just his field but himself, morphing from a gifted illustrator into something greater and more puzzling. At his peak in the later sixties and early seventies, Kirby earned the freedom to draw and script the way he wanted. His panels got weirder, leaner, and less naturalistic. His genius grew ever more striking and unmistakable. And yet Kirby had no interest in being an adult artist. His terrain was kid stuff: superhero and science fiction stories, even the raucous but innocent adventures of boy gangs like “The Dingbats of Danger Street.” It must have seemed to fans as they grew older that this kind of material couldn’t have much of a shelf life. Today, that shelf life doesn’t look so short. Over the last six decades, the characters and images Kirby created have spawned a veritable universe of subsequent comics, TV shows, branded merchandise, fanzines, trade fairs, and billion-dollar movies. Kirby himself has been the subject of lucid commentaries and fiction by the likes of Jonathan Lethem, Geoff Dyer, and Michael Chabon. Online, there is a vast trove of disputatious Kirbyana, with legions of fans happily rehashing arguments about escapism, violence, Jewishness, and of course the perfidy of Stan Lee. And yet at the heart of Kirby’s achievement are his drawings themselves. What made their style so singular, so influential?

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Thinking especially about the work from Kirby’s peak years, roughly 1965–1975, what can we say about the drawings as drawings? Recently, two museum exhibitions have helped make headway toward appreciating Kirby’s artwork on its own complicated terms. In California, Charles Hatfield curated the artist’s first US retrospective,1 championing Kirby as “a crucial figure in American visual culture.” A few months earlier, for a group exhibition of “Alternative Figures in American Art” at the RISD museum, Dan Nadel praised Kirby as a visionary, someone who has never received his proper due “as an American artist.”2 Opening less than a year apart on opposite coasts, the two shows were complements. Hatfield showcased Kirby’s later work in depth, while Nadel broadened its context, exhibiting Kirby alongside established (if still unorthodox) fine art figures like Jim Nutt and Elizabeth Murray. Both curators acknowledge that importing Kirby into the museum world is a tricky proposition. Like all comics artists, Kirby worked for reproduction. His penciled pages were overdrawn by inkers, letterers, and colorists, so what survives today are preliminary sketches, or the products of commercial teamwork. Worse, Kirby was as Hatfield delicately puts it “a consummate jobber,” in other words, a hack. His lifetime output—an estimated 35,000 pages—makes Kirby possibly the most prolific draftsman in the history of the species. The statistic isn’t necessarily a compliment. Many of those pages are visibly rushed, and it’s fair to wonder whether his lean, impatient style reflects the looming deadlines that governed his week. Some of the basic things we expect from artists—autograph touch, creative freedom, fevered concentration on single images: none are true of Kirby. One obvious solution is to focus on the few occasions when Kirby didn’t have a paycheck in mind. In the 1970s, for example, he painted a scroll-like watercolor panorama of psychedelic machinery called Dream Machine (figure 82), which he kept in his office for the rest of his life. With its easel size and bright color, Dream Machine holds the wall in a way that smaller comic book boards just cannot do. Not surprisingly, both Hatfield and Nadel included it in their respective shows. Nadel exhibited several other rare examples of selfassigned, self-colored paintings and collages, works that are closer to fine art expectations. But focusing on these exceptions doesn’t exactly make the broader case for Kirby’s achievement. One way to do so might be to think of Kirby not as an outsider, visionary, or fine artist manqué, but as a happy prisoner of his medium: someone who thrived within the constraints of commercial production, and whose innovations were truly medium-specific. The “Picasso of Comics” really was a kind of Picasso: a protean field-dominating genius. But he worked in a virtual sandbox—a disprized, semi-preadolescent field. In short, he was a major artist in a

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minor medium. He adapted his talents in remarkable ways to its constraints, creating an art that is fascinating for being parallel to yet independent from the mainstream visual art of his time. Kirby’s conscious relation to that art remains mysterious. He never finished high school, let alone art school, and had a gruff reluctance to talk about highbrow subjects. When asked if he considered his work art, he sidestepped the question, preferring to call himself a “storyteller.” But he lived most of his life in the nation’s art capital, and was an eager reader of magazines. He must have had some general awareness of contemporary painting. In particular, Kirby must have noticed the way Roy Lichtenstein simplified comics panels, including Kirby’s own. Kirby’s coarser late style may have reflected that awareness, implying a ricochet of re-influence, from comics to painting and back to comics. But “influence” in an overall, pejorative sense—the suspicion that Kirby was some kind of wannabe avante-gardist—doesn’t seem remotely justified. After all, Kirby’s style was bold and coarse long before Lichtenstein. More important, Kirby’s simplicity was necessary for an overcommitted penciler of action comics. The example of fine art may have peripherally encouraged him, but hyperproductivity and subject matter together drove Kirby’s style. From early on, friends and colleagues had marveled at Kirby’s decisiveness. He would start at the top of a page and proceed continuously, without hesitation or erasure. In the 1960s, though, the increasing demands of Marvel’s production schedule—and the breakneck pace of his own plots—conspired to accelerate Kirby’s hand. The result was a dramatically brusque fusion of linework and choreography. Kirby’s contours came to resemble curving speedlines, as if they were stretching to match the trajectories they depicted. With this new speed came an increasingly odd vision of human anatomy. “I just never liked the way he drew knees,” Jonathan Lethem recalls a comics friend complaining.3 And it wasn’t just knees: perhaps not since William Blake has there been such a forcefully inaccurate stylization of the body. Virtually every Marvel artist was trained to imitate Kirby, but as his peculiarities grew more pronounced, frictions multiplied. In 1970, Kirby was commissioned to draw a set of posters. Someone at Marvel evidently decided that Kirby’s Hulk poster was too eccentric. Another artist, Herb Trimpe, was assigned to lightly deKirbify the poster, giving the Hulk ordinary knuckles, fingernails, pectorals, and feet. To compare the two Hulks is to be struck by just how far inside his own head Kirby was. It’s clear that he drew exclusively from some interior conception, a mental manikin with calligraphic, striated musculature, resembling nothing in any previous figure tradition. That in itself—reinventing human musculature—is no mean achievement. Kirby’s anatomy was also unprecedentedly dynamic. Though Trimpe dutifully normalized various

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small details, he knew better than to interfere with what only Kirby could have conceived: a surging, assaultive leap into the viewer’s space. The effect of that leap is ecstatic and disastrous—the viewpoint of a quarterback being sacked, a combatant before a bone-shattering collision. Launching himself toward us, Kirby’s Hulk embodies a wild, impact-hungry, primordial drive. Taking images like this seriously means acknowledging their singularity and force. If art is (to paraphrase Oscar Wilde) intensified individualism, how can this help but qualify? There’s nothing like it, neither in nor outside the world of comics. And while he had lackluster days, every figure Kirby drew, down to the skimpiest passerby, is immediately recognizable as his own. In being so relentlessly himself, Kirby generated the classic innovator’s reception: angry protests (“Kirby can’t draw”) and widespread imitation. To this day, echoes of Kirbyesque bodies are widespread in comics. But while Kirby’s figure drawing is the most idiosyncratic element of his style, his architectural settings and mechanical landscapes, what fans call “Kirbytech,” are less unprecedented. Dream Machine is the most obvious and magnificent example of Kirbytech. It’s also, more or less clearly, an abstract painting. Formally, it recalls Leger’s machine abstractions of the 1920s, and Steve Wheeler’s Indian Space works of the 1940s. And yet, the more closely one looks, the more oblique these resemblances seem. The real issue is that it pales slightly in comparison, not necessarily to MOMA-style modernism, but to Kirby’s comics. The headlong momentum of his ordinary pages isn’t there. Without it, the watercolor’s pageantry seems uncharacteristically static. Dream Machine, in other words, suggests Kirby’s general awareness of painting precedents—and his independence from them. Above all, it confirms how deeply Kirby belonged to his own medium. The basic task of that medium is to transform neat rows of boxes into heterogeneous flow. In his peak years, Kirby did that with a brilliance that remains hard to explain. He was, like all comics professionals, a deeply conventional artist. But his conventions were entirely his own. He dispensed not just with standard anatomy, but with hatching or shading, and most indications of light. There is little volume in Kirby’s world, little shadow.4 On the other hand, color, unobstructed, was allowed to play a greater role, even if the actual color choices were made by others. Kirby’s toolkit was essentially line, closed shape, and his own ad-hoc version of linear perspective. From these simple elements he created an idiom of dynamism and flat depth, paradoxically graphic and vertiginous. It’s is a wholly peculiar way of drawing, a side-channel within pictorial modernism. If we want to understand that idiom better, it makes sense to juxtapose Kirby not just with comics-inflected painters like Leger or Murray, but with a full range of pictorial innovators. Peak Kirby panels have affinities with Frank Stella’s exclamatory reliefs, with Al Held’s perspectival

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fantasies; and even with the painterly improvisations of Willem de Kooning. No doubt, these kinds of comparisons beg disclaimers. Perhaps the rhyme between Mr. Fantastic’s long rubbery arms and the sinuous blue brushstrokes of de Kooning’s Untitled XII (1982) is partly adventitious. But the two kinds of images share something essential: an infectious, off-balance mobility, and a feeling of clean, bright, aerated excitement that might arguably be the essence of pictorial modernism. Direct comparisons like this, however flattering, are not entirely fair to Kirby. Not just because he had such imperfect control over his time and resources, but also because his pictures were conceived as sequences. Continuity was their aim. And that continuity was built around the panel architecture of each page. When a furious Thor swings back his hammer, preparing to destroy a wall, he seems to be aiming his blow at the narrow white border that contains him—the very same border that, in the adjacent panel, frames the satisfying impact of his blow. When the Human Torch flies across the skies of Europe, zooming left, then right, then looping playfully around a quartet of missiles, his progress models the reader’s own zigzagging progress through the page’s quadrants. These are exhilarating sequences, not overpowering single images. That’s their point. For better or worse, much of the beauty of Kirby’s art is mobile, suspended in the eager forward motion of the reader’s attention: a flight path, not an icon. And yet, couldn’t we say almost the same thing about de Kooning? That his paintings avoid fixed compositions (icons), in favor of a multiplicity of hinted alternatives (flight paths)? Of course, de Kooning’s medium was different: oil paint registers nuances that newsprint cannot. But artworks are not just physical experiences. Strong artists create a rhetoric that we redeploy intuitively, as a ghostly flock of possible de Koonings, possible Kirbys. And in the end, we judge that rhetoric by what it captures and intensifies—in Kirby’s case, a vision of joyful speed and athleticism, of furious violence, and of awe. In a panel from Fantastic Four #76 (1967), three superhero protagonists are shown seated in their Fantasticar, as it plummets into subatomic space. They are voyager-spectators, dazzled by a narrowing corridor of molecules ahead of them. Technically, the panel is an extreme example of one-point perspective—it may be the only drawing where the idea of a “vanishing point” is made entirely literal. At the same time, it exemplifies something Kirby probably didn’t know by name, a compositional format art historians call Rückenfigur—in which figures seen from behind dramatize the act of looking. By folding both pictorial strategies together, Kirby got what he habitually aimed for, maximum clarity, maximum impact. I can’t think of any image that more beautifully distills the eager optimism of action comics—and also, not coincidentally, the optimism

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of Kirby’s American generation, which had lived from world war to the amazing apogee of atomic science and spaceflight. Fifty years later, it’s easy to see how drawings like this, in belonging so clearly to its medium, also distilled something of the spirit of its time. What do we call something that distills its medium and its time? Though Kirby demurred about acknowledging it, the answer is simple: Art. Notes 1. Comic Book Apocalypse: The Graphic World of Jack Kirby curated by Hatfield with consultant Ben Saunders, appeared at California State University, Northridge Art Galleries, August 24– October 10, 2015; What Nerve! Alternative Figure in American Art, 1960 to the Present appeared at Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, September 19, 2014–January 4, 2015. Together with Paul Gravett, Nadel also curated an earlier Kirby retrospective, “The House That Jack Built,” in Lucerne, Switzerland, in 2010. 2. Dan Nadel, What Nerve! exhibition catalog, New York, D.A.P., p. 184. 3. “The way he drew knees,” Jonathan Lethem, “The Return of the King,” collected in Give My Regards to Atomsmashers, edited by Sean Howe (Pantheon, 2004), 22. 4. Early inkers, most controversially Vince Coletta, sometimes added the missing hatching and shading. Later, more faithful ones, like Mike Royer and D. Bruce Berry, did not.

Thirty Museums with Regular Comics Programming United States Historical Geppi’s Entertainment Museum, Baltimore, MD (2006–2018) Collection donated to the Swann Foundation at the Library of Congress International Museum of Cartoon Art, Boca Raton, FL (1974–2002) Papers and Collection donated to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, New York, NY (2001–2012) Absorbed by the Society of Illustrators ToonSeum, Pittsburgh, PA (2000–2018). http://toonseum.org/ Words and Pictures, Northhampton, MA (1992–1999). http://www.wordsandpictures.org/index .html

Ongoing Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH http:// cartoons.osu.edu/ Butler Library, Columbia University Libraries, New York, NY https://library.columbia.edu/loca tions/butler.html Cartoon Art Museum, San Francisco, CA. https://www.cartoonart.org Charles M. Schulz Museum, Santa Rosa, CA. https://schulzmuseum.org/ Comic Con Museum, San Diego, CA. https://comic-conmuseum.org/ The Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, MA. https://www.nrm.org/ Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Caroline and Erwin Swann Foundation for Caricature and Cartoon. https://www.loc.gov/rr/ print/swann/ 371

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The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles, CA. https://lucasmuseum.org/ Michigan State University Libraries Special Collections, Comic Art Collection, Lansing, MI. https://lib.msu.edu/comics/ Museum of Popular Culture, Seattle, WA. http://www.mopop.org Society of Illustrators, New York, NY. https://www.societyillustrators.org/ The Walt Disney Family Museum, San Francisco, CA. https://www.waltdisney.org/

Europe The Belgian Comic Strip Center, Brussels, Belgium. https://www.comicscenter.net/en/home Cartoon Museum, Basel, Switzerland. http://www.cartoonmuseum.ch/ The Cartoon Museum, London, UK. http://www.cartoonmuseum.org/ Karikatur Museum Krems, Krems, Austria. https://www.karikaturmuseum.at/de la cité internationale de la bande dessinée et de l’image, Angoulême, France. http://www.citebd.org/ Moomin Museum, Tampere, Finland. https://muumimuseo.fi/en/ Musée Hergé, Brussels, Belgium. http://www.museeherge.com Museum of Caricature and Cartoon Art (Muzeum Karykatury), Warsaw, Poland. http://muzeum karykatury.pl Wilhelm Busch—The German Museum for Caricature and the Art of Drawing (Wilhelm Busch— Deutsches Museum für Karikatur & Zeichenkunst), Hannover, Germany. https://www.karikatur -museum.de/en/

Asia Comics Home Base, Hong Kong Arts Center, Hong Kong. https://hkac.org.hk Ghibli Museum, Mitaka, Japan. http://www.ghibli-museum.jp/en/ Israeli Cartoon Museum, Holon, Israel. http://www.cartoon.org.il Kyoto International Manga Museum, Kyoto, Japan. https://www.kyotomm.jp/en/ Tezuka Osamu Manga Museum, Takarazuka, Hyog, Japan. https://tezukaosamu.net/en/

Contributors Kenneth Baker was the art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1985 to 2015. A native of the Boston area, he served as art critic for the Boston Phoenix between 1972 and 1985. He has contributed on a freelance basis to art magazines internationally and was a contributing editor of Artforum from 1985 through 1992. He continues to review fiction and nonfiction books for the Chronicle, in addition to reporting on all aspects of the visual arts regionally and, on occasion, nationally and internationally. Jaqueline Berndt is professor of Japanese language and culture at Stockholm University. Before that she served as professor of comics theory at the Graduate School of Manga, Kyoto Seika University, Japan, and worked for the Kyoto International Manga Museum. In addition to manga she has been engaged in research on modern Japanese art, visual culture, and anime aesthetics. For the Japan Foundation she directed the world-traveling exhibition Manga Hokusai Manga: Approaching the Master’s Compendium from the Perspective of Contemporary Comics (2016–). Her publications include the coedited Manga’s Cultural Crossroads (2013) and the monograph Manga: Medium, Art and Material (2015). Albert Boime (1933–2008) was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He received a BA degree from UCLA, and an MA degree and a PhD from Columbia University. He was a UCLA faculty member for thirty years beginning in 1978, teaching the social history of modern art. Professor Boime was the author of over 140 books and articles, totaling over 9,000 pages, and he lectured at many museums and universities around the world. He was best known for the four-volume series A Social History of Modern Art, published by the University of Chicago Press between 1987 and 2007. Over the past twenty-five years John Carlin has been a leader in social, cultural, and technological innovation through the work of two companies he started— Red Hot, a nonprofit production company that produces albums, videos, and digital projects to raise awareness and money to fight AIDS and related health issues (http://www.redhot.org); and Funny Garbage, one of the first digital 373

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design studios, where he designed and created landmark websites for Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, VH-1, Nickelodeon, the Smithsonian, the City of New York, and many others as well as pioneering online content, applications, communities, and casual gaming (http://www.funnygarbage.com). Carlin sold Funny Garbage and is currently focused on a new company DIYdoc, centered around a mobile app he created that lets people make polished films with their phones. Carlin has also been active in curating important museum exhibitions (such as Masters of American Comics at LA MOCA and Hammer), creating documentaries (such as Imagining America, which aired nationally on PBS) as well as writing on a variety of social and cultural topics. He has a PhD from Yale University and a BA and JD from Columbia University. Benoit Crucifix is a PhD candidate at the University of Liège and UCLouvain, under the support of a F.R.S.-FNRS fellowship (Aspirant). Within the framework of the ACME Comics Research Group, he is writing a thesis that focuses on cartoonists’ histories of comics and more specifically analyzes how contemporary graphic novelists mediate and reframe the heritage of comics through a variety of practices. Born in Montreal, Canada, David Deitcher is a writer, art historian, and critic whose essays have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Parkett, the Village Voice, and other periodicals, as well as in numerous anthologies and monographs on such artists as Sherrie Levine, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Isaac Julien, and Wolfgang Tillmans. He is the author of Stone’s Throw (2016); Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together, 1840–1918 (2001), and curator of its accompanying exhibition at the International Center of Photography in New York; The Question of Equality: Lesbian and Gay Politics in America since Stonewall (1995). He is the recipient of two Canda Council for the Arts, Independent Critics and Curators Grants (2006, 2004), and of a Creative Capital/ Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant (2011). Since 2003, he has been core faculty at the International Center of Photography/Bard College Program in Advanced Photographic Studies. He lives in New York City. Michael Dooley is a Los Angeles–based designer, author, professor, and photographer. He’s a contributing editor to Print, the graphic design magazine, where he’s been writing features, interviews, essays, and reviews on design and comics since 1990. He teaches history of design, comics, and animation at Art Center College of Design and Loyola Marymount University. He created programs and hosted events as part of LA’s Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art’s historic Masters of American Comics 2005–2006 exhibition.

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Prior to Print, he wrote for Amazing Heroes and the Comics Journal. His books include The Education of a Comics Artist, with original contributions from more than sixty professionals, educators, and critics. printmag.com/ author/michaeldooley/ Damian Duffy is a cartoonist, scholar, writer, curator, lecturer, teacher, and Glyph Comics Award–winning graphic novelist. He holds a MS and PhD in library and information sciences from the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, where he teaches courses on computers, culture, social media, and global change. His many publications range from academic essays (in comics form) on new media and learning, to art books about underrepresentation in comics culture, to editorial comics, to the #1 New York Times best seller Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation, created with frequent collaborator John Jennings. Damian has given talks and lead workshops about comics, art, and education internationally. M. C. Gaines (September 21, 1894–August 20, 1947) is considered by many to be one of the founding fathers of American comic books. In 1933 the idea came to Gaines that perhaps people might be willing to spend 10 cents on a collection of reprinted comic strips from the newspaper. That effort, Famous Funnies, was an instant sellout and launched the saddle-stitched, four-color newsprint format adopted by comics thereafter. In 1939 Gaines noticed the popularity of original comic stories being created by such companies as National Allied Publishing (later DC Comics) and decided to start his own company, All-American Comics. All-American enjoyed success with such legendary fictional characters as Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, and Hawkman. In 1944, Gaines sold his interest in All-American to Harry Donnefeld and Jack Liebowitz of National Allied Publishing. He returned to comic publishing later that same year when he founded EC Comics.Tragically, Gaines was killed in a boating accident in Lake Placid, New York, on August 20, 1947. Hailed by the Times of London as “the greatest historian of the comics and graphic novel form in this country,” Paul Gravett was the director of Comica, London’s premier international comics festival, founded in 2003. A curator of exhibitions of comics art, he is the author of several books on the subject, including Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics (2004), Graphic Novels: Stories to Change Your Life (2005), and Comics Art (2013). He was the editor and coauthor of 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die (2011) and Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK (2014). He is the curator of Mangasia: Wonderlands of Asian Comics (2017), which is touring internationally, and the author of the accompanying book.

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Contributors

Diana Green holds a BFA in comic book illustration from Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD) and an MA-liberal studies from Hamline University. She teaches writing, history of comic art, readings in the graphic novel, history of underground comix, and history of rock and roll at MCAD. She has presented academic work at the Schoolgirls and Mobilesuits Manga Conference in Minneapolis, local and national Popular Culture Association conferences, and at the Comic Scholars Conferences at San Diego and San Francisco. Her previous publications include articles in Comics Books and the Cold War (2012), The End Will Be Graphic (2012), and The Encyclopedia of Comics and Graphic Novels (2010). She continues a studio practice in comics. She loves her cat and plays decent guitar. Karen Green is the curator for comics and cartoons at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University, where she also initiated and maintained the graphic novels collection. She has hosted numerous comics events at Columbia and elsewhere, has served as a judge for the Will Eisner Comics Industry Awards and a juror for the Pulitzer Prize in Editorial Cartooning, wrote the “Comic Adventures in Academia” column for ComiXology (2007–2012), coproduced the documentary She Makes Comics, and teaches a summer course on comics as literature. Doug Harvey, artist, writer, critic, curator, and educator, lives and works in Los Angeles. Since earning his MFA in painting from UCLA (1994), he has written about the LA and international art scenes and other aspects of popular culture, primarily as the lead art critic for LA Weekly for thirteen years. He has curated gallery and museum exhibitions, compilations of sound art, experimental radio, programs of found and experimental films, artists’ zines and comic books, and a solo gallery exhibit determined by a raffle. He maintains an active art career, exhibiting locally and internationally. His activities may be followed at www.dougharvey.blogspot.com and www.dougharvey.la. Charles Hatfield, professor of English at California State University, Northridge, is author of Alternative Comics (2005), Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby (2012), and many articles and book chapters; coeditor of The Superhero Reader (2013); coeditor of Comic Book Apocalypse: The Graphic World of Jack Kirby (2015); and founding president of the Comics Studies Society. He has been active in comics studies since the mid-1990s, presenting papers, moderating panels, and organizing events for the Popular Culture Association, the Comic Arts Conference, the International Comic Arts Forum, the Modern Language Association, and other conferences.

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M. Thomas Inge is the Blackwell Professor of Humanities at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia, where he writes and teaches about American humor, animation, graphic narrative, Southern culture, Walt Disney, and William Faulkner. His latest book is The Dixie Limited: Writers on William Faulkner and His Influence. Inge serves as a general editor of two series of books from the University Press of Mississippi: Great Comic Artists and Conversations with Comic Artists. Leslie Jones is curator of prints and drawings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She has curated numerous exhibitions at LACMA including Tony Smith: Smoke (2017), Ed Moses: Drawings from the 1960s and ’70s (2015), Drawing Surrealism (2012), and John Baldessari: Pure Beauty (2010). Previously she worked at the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum. She also participated in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in 1993–1994 and received her PhD from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts in 2003 with a dissertation on the ink drawings of Henri Michaux. Jonah Kinigstein (artist’s statement): “For me art has always been figurative, by this I mean a point of departure that is recognizable in the painting or sculpture proper. Without this the artwork reduces itself, at best, to interesting texture or patches of color or shapes. The art world has become a baseball game played with brooms and cabbages and nobody is keeping score. We are all in the outfield and no one has even reached first base. At one time there used to be a nucleus of the avant-garde walking in front of an army of painters. Today, we have an army of ‘avant-garde’ striding in front of a handful of real artists.” Denis Kitchen began his career as a pioneer “underground” cartoonist. He founded Kitchen Sink Press in 1969, publishing works by legendary creators Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, Robert Crumb, Al Capp, Milton Caniff, Charles Burns, Howard Cruse, Trina Robbins, Mark Schultz, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, and many others. Kitchen’s books about comics include a biography of Al Capp with Michael Schumacher, The Art of Harvey Kurtzman and Underground Classics, and a graphic biography of Dr. Seuss for Masterful Marks. He and business partner John Lind assemble books for their Kitchen Sink Books imprint at Dark Horse Comics. Kitchen regularly curates cartoon art exhibits, most recently Will Eisner centennial shows in 2017 for Le Musée de la Bande Dessinée in Angoulême (France), the Amador BD Festival (Portugal), and Society of Illustrators (NYC), with an accompanying catalog. Solo exhibits of Kitchen’s artwork were held most recently in Brooklyn (2017) and Munich (2017). In 2010 Dark Horse Books published a monograph, The Oddly Compelling Art of

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Denis Kitchen. He was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters in 2012 and was a first ballot selection for the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 2015. John A. Lent taught at the college/university level from 1960 to 2011 including stints in the Philippines as a Fulbright scholar; Malaysia, where he started the country’s first mass communication program; Canada, as Rogers Distinguished Professor; China, as visiting professor at four universities, and the United States. Professor Lent pioneered in the study of mass communication and popular culture in Asia (since 1964) and the Caribbean (since 1968), comic art and animation, and development communication. He has authored or edited eighty-two books, published and edited International Journal of Comic Art (1999–), Asian Cinema (1994–2012), and Berita (1975–2001), chaired Asian Popular Culture (PCA, 1996–), Asian Cinema Studies Society (1994–2012), Comic Art Working Group (IAMCR, 1984–2016), Asian-Pacific Animation and Comics Association (2008–), Asian Research Center for Animation and Comics Art (2005–), and Malaysia/Singapore/Brunei Studies Group of the Association for Asian Studies (1976–1983), all of which he founded. Dwayne McDuffie (1962–2011) was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. He earned undergraduate degrees in both English and physics, as well as a graduate degree in physics from the University of Michigan. He later studied filmmaking at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He worked as an editor at Marvel Comics on titles like Deathlok and Damage Control. McDuffie cofounded Milestone Comics, the first African American–owned comic book company in the United States. As a writer, he contributed stories to best-selling titles like Justice League of America, Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight, Captain Marvel, Avengers Spotlight, Hellraiser, Ultraman, The Tick, and Back to the Future. He shifted into animation, working as a producer, story editor, and writer on Justice League, Justice League Unlimited, Teen Titans, and What’s New Scooby-Doo? He was cocreator of the long-running BEN-10 franchise and wrote the animated features Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths, All-Star Superman, and Justice League: Doom. McDuffie won three Eisner Awards, the 2009 Inkpot Award, and in 2011, the Writers Guild of America’s Animation Writing Award, the first African American in history to be so honored. Andrei Molotiu is Senior Lecturer in the Art History Department at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he has developed a four-course undergraduate comics-studies curriculum along with graduate courses in the field. He is the author of Fragonard’s Allegories of Love (2007), Abstract Comics: The

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379

Anthology (2009), and of numerous articles on comics, on topics ranging from the work of Jack Kirby to avant-garde art comics. He also publishes on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French painting. As an exhibiting artist, he has explored the intersection between abstract and sequential art and helped define the genre of abstract comics; some of his own comics were collected in Nautilus (2009). Alvaro de Moya (1930–August 14, 2017) was a Brazilian cartoonist, journalist, TV producer, professor at the University of São Paulo, and one of his country’s foremost comics scholars. He was one of the organizers of the Exposição Internacional de Histórias em Quadrinhos in São Paulo (1951), the first exposition of international comic art in Brazil, and one of the first worldwide. His books include Shazam! (1970), História da História em Quadrinhos (1993), O Mundo de Walt Disney (1996), Anos 50—50 Anos (2001), Vapt Vupt (2002), Gloria in excelsior (2004), and A Reinvenção dos Quadrinhos (2012). Kim A. Munson (MA San Francisco State University) is an artist and art historian focused on works on paper and popular culture, such as comics art, labor graphics, and pop art. She is the author of Dual Views: Labor Landmarks of San Francisco and On Reflection: The Art of Margaret Harrison and a contributor to many publications. She and her husband, Marc H. Greenberg, live in the San Francisco Bay Area in an ocean-side home crammed with books, art, and action figures. Cullen Murphy, editor at large of Vanity Fair, is the author of Cartoon County: My Father and His Friends in the Golden Age of Make-Believe and a former writer of Prince Valiant. Gary Panter was born in Durant, Oklahoma. He studied painting at East Texas State University and moved to Los Angeles in 1976 where his comic Jimbo was first published in SLASH magazine. In 1985, he moved to Brooklyn where he continues to live and work. His paintings have been shown in New York at Gracie Mansion, Sandra Gering, Clementine, and presently with Fredericks and Freiser Contemporary Art. He has been honored in museum shows and surveys including a solo show at the Aldrich Museum and the traveling Masters of American Comics that originated at MOCCA and the Hammer Museum in LA. Panter collaborated with Joshua White on a museum installation of light and music art at MOCAD Detroit. He makes music with Devin Gary & Ross and Twigs of Sister Tomorrow. He has received a Chrysler Design Award for design innovation, a Pollack Krasner award in support of his painting, a Cullman Center research fellow, and NYFA grants supporting his comic work.

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Contributors

In 1970, Trina Robbins produced the very first all-woman comic book, It Ain’t Me, Babe. In 1972, she was one of the founding mothers of Wimmin’s Comix, the longest-lasting women’s anthology comic book (1972–1992). In the mid-1980s, tired of hearing publishers and editors say that girls don’t read comics and that women had never drawn comics, she cowrote (with catherine yronwood) Women and the Comics, the first of what would become a series of histories of women cartoonists. She has been responsible for rediscovering previously forgotten early women cartoonists like Nell Brinkley, Tarpe Mills, and Lily Renee. In 2013, Trina was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame. Rob Salkowitz is an author, consultant, and educator focused on the business of popular culture and the future of storytelling. He is author of Comic-Con and the Business of Pop Culture (2012) and several other books, a contributor to Forbes, and a writer for other publications including Publishers Weekly and ICv2. He teaches in the Communication Leadership Graduate Program at the University of Washington and runs a strategic consulting and storytelling practice. He and his wife, Eunice Verstegen, live and work in Seattle, Washington. Antoine Sausverd has published articles in  the journals  Le Magasin du XIXe siècle [The 19th Century Magazine], La Crypte Tonique [The Dynamic Crypt], L’Éprouvette [The Test Tube], Le Collectionneur de bandes dessinées [The Comics Collector], and the website Neuvième art 2.0 [Ninth Art 2.0]. He has also contributed to the volumes Benjamin Rabier: Gédéon, La Vache qui Rit et Cie [Benjamin Rabier: Gédéon the Duck, the Laughing Cow and Others] (2009), 100 cases de maîtres [100 Panels by Virtuosi] (2010), Gustave Doré Ogre et génie [Gustave Doré, Monster and Genius] (2014), L’esprit des bêtes [The Wit of Animals] (2015), Les étoiles souterraines, Pajak, Mix & Remix, Noyau [Underground Stars, Pajak, Mix & Remix, Nucleus] (2015) and wrote the introduction to Jochen Gerner’s Panorama du Feu (2009). He runs the website Töpfferiana, dedicated to nineteenth-century comics: www.töpfferiana.fr. Art Spiegelman is the creator of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. The two-volume work has been translated into more than twenty languages. In 1980 he and his wife, Françiose Mouly, cofounded Raw, an acclaimed and influential magazine of avant-garde comics and graphics, which they coedited until 1991. From 1992 to 2002 he was a staff artist and writer for the New Yorker. His drawings and prints have been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the world. His most recent book is Si Lewen’s Parade: An Artist’s Odyssey, published in 2016.

Contributors

381

Scott Timberg, a former arts reporter for the Los Angeles Times, writes on music and culture and contributes to Salon and the New York Times. Over the past six years he has been an award-winning journalist, a blogger on West Coast culture, and an adjunct writing professor. He runs ArtsJournal’s “Culture Clash” blog and lives in Los Angeles. Carol Tyler is an award-winning autobiographical cartoonist and genre pioneer. After getting an MFA in painting from Syracuse University in 1983, Tyler moved to San Francisco. Her work soon appeared in Wimmen’s Comix and R. Crumb’s Weirdo. In 1988, she won the Dori Seda Memorial Award for Best New Female Cartoonist presented by Last Gasp Press at Comic Con. Two solo collections of her early work are The Job Thing (1993) and Late Bloomer (2005). From 2009 to 2012, she produced a trilogy of books about war trauma entitled You’ll Never Know, which eventually became a singular volume entitled Soldier’s Heart: The Campaign to Understand My WWII Veteran Father, a Daughter’s Memoir (2015). For this work, she received eleven Eisner Award nominations, the slate.com Comics Studio Prize, the Gold Medal of Excellence from the Society of Illustrators, the Ohio Arts Council Award of Excellence, was twice named an LA Book Prize finalist, and received the Master Cartoonist award by CXC at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at The Ohio State University. Her brilliant “The Hannah Story” made the Comics Journal’s list of the best 100 comics works of the twentieth century. Carol’s latest book is called Fab4 Mania: A Beatles Obsession and the Concert of a Lifetime (June 2018). Like all her books, it will be published by Fantagraphics of Seattle. Professor Tyler teaches comics, graphic novels, and sequential art at the University of Cincinnati DAAP School of Art. Brian Walker has a diverse background in professional cartooning and cartoon scholarship. He is a founder and former director of the Museum of Cartoon Art, where he worked from 1974 to 1992. Since 1984, he has been part of the creative team that produces the comic strips, Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois. He has written, edited, or contributed to forty books on cartoon art, including the definitive history, The Comics: The Complete Collection, as well as numerous exhibition catalogs and magazine articles. He taught a course in cartoon history at the School of Visual Arts from 1995 to 1996. He has served as curator for seventy cartoon exhibitions including three major retrospectives, The Sunday Funnies: 100 Years of Comics in American Life at the Barnum Museum in Bridgeport, Connecticut; 100 Years of American Comics at the Belgian Center for Comic Art in Brussels; and Masters of American Comics at the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. He was editor-in-chief of

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Contributors

Collectors’ Showcase magazine from 1997 to 2000 and was the chairman of the Connecticut Chapter of the National Cartoonists Society from 1993 to 2015. Alexi Worth is a painter and critic who learned to draw by copying Kirby panels. He has written about contemporary art for the New Yorker, Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, Cabinet, and T magazine. His painting has received awards from the Guggenheim and Tiffany Foundations, and is represented by the DC Moore Gallery in New York. Worth lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the architect Erika Belsey, and their two teenage sons. Joe Wos has been a professional cartoonist since the age of fourteen. His career path over the past thirty years has taken as many twists and turns as one of his mazes, as he finds new and innovative ways to pursue his passion for the cartoon arts. Some highlights include spending twenty-five years touring nationwide as a performer, illustrating stories live as he told them; founding and running a cartoon art museum in Pittsburgh; illustrating symphony performances live with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra; and exhibiting his art in museums worldwide. Joe has also been the visiting resident cartoonist of the Charles M. Schulz Museum for the past sixteen years. With MazeToons—a unique hybrid illustration that is part cartoon and part puzzle—Joe has fulfilled a lifelong dream to appear in the funny pages. In 2012, he created the world’s largest hand-drawn maze. Measuring at 140 square feet, it features more than one hundred illustrations. The maze garnered international attention with articles in the Wall Street Journal and the Huffington Post and media coverage throughout Europe. One of his mural-sized mazes is on permanent display at StarKist’s international headquarters. With great delight, he has heard every variation of the phrase “A-maze-ing.” Vice magazine has called Craig Yoe the “Indiana Jones of comics historians.” Publisher Weekly says he’s the “archivist of the ridiculous and the sublime” and calls his work “brilliant.” The Onion calls him “the celebrated designer,” the Library Journal, “a comics guru.” BoingBoing hails him as “a fine cartoonist and a comic book historian of the first order.” Yoe was creative director/vice president/general manager of Jim Henson’s Muppets, and a creative director at Nickelodeon and Disney. He has won an Eisner Award and the Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators.