Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling 9780804781787

Citation preview

Projections

Florence Dore and Michael Szalay, Editors Post•45 Group, Series Board

Projections Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling

Jared Gardner

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. This book has been published with the assistance of Arts & Humanities, The Ohio State University. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gardner, Jared, author. Projections : comics and the history of twenty-first-century storytelling / Jared Gardner. pages cm. -- (Post 45) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8047-7146-7 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-8047-7147-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Comic books, strips, etc.--United States--History and criticism. 2. Motion pictures and comic books--United States. 3. Narration (Rhetoric) I. Title. II. Series: Post 45. PN6725.G36 2012 741.5'973--dc23 2011031184 Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/15 Minion

For Eli Gardner and Gideon Hewitt

Contents



1 2 3 4 5 6

Preface

ix

Fragments of Modernity, 1889–1920

1

Serial Pleasures, 1907–1938

29

Fan-Addicts and the Comic Book, 1938–1955

68

First-Person Graphic, 1959–2010

107

Archives and Collectors, 1990–2010 

149

Coda: Comics, Film, and the Future of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling

180

Notes

195

Index

215

Preface

The subject of this book—comics—is named on a false assumption: that comics themselves are necessarily comical or funny (thus, “the funnies”). And as a form, comics has been plagued by a series of critical misconceptions and misunderstandings that have only served to compound the error of the name: that they are directed primarily at juvenile audiences; that they are easy or transparent reading; that they are, if not beneath contempt, certainly not worth notice from those whose job it is to determine what is, indeed, worthy of notice. The effects of these misapprehensions of the comics form are clear. Until extremely recently, there were few serious attempts to study comics, either formally or historically. There have been periods when some comics creators experienced fame and even riches for their work (the 1920s and 1930s, for example), and there have been times (the first decade of the twentieth century, the late 1940s) when hysterical responses to comics prevailed. But for the most part, the art of sequential comics remained a culturally, critically, and commercially undervalued form throughout the first century of its existence. And while there have been periods when comics readers have been taken seriously (Hollywood’s recent engagement with comics fans is the most obvious example), those who have found unique readerly pleasures and communities around the comics form (in all its forms) have been largely treated with suspicion or derision by those who have accepted the premises that there is nothing worth looking at in comics. To be fair, there have been benefits to the cultural and scholarly neglect of comics. By only sporadically being profitable and almost never being respectable, comics has been left to develop its own language and its own unique relationship with readers, often for long periods, with few or no attempts to make the form respectable—to do for comics what Hollywood sought to do in the 1920s: “to kill the slum tradition in the movies” in order to create an “art” that would “meet the ideals of cultivated audiences.”1 As Gilbert Hernandez ix

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(Love and Rockets) put it in 2001 when asked whether he found comparisons to Gabriel García Márquez flattering: I’m on the fence about this one. . . . When we are old men, we want to see new, young comic artists whose work is taken as seriously as any novel. . . . On the other hand, the comic books are in their own neat, kitschy, junky world that is unique to comics. We like that too. We like that it’s outlaw. You can’t repair comics, you can’t hang them in a museum and say, “This belongs next to the Mona Lisa.” It’s the whole squirrelly factor, like early punk: There is the sense that this is bad, and we want it to be bad.2

Indeed, when students ask me if I see comics being accorded the same seriousness in the university as film or the novel (both formerly disparaged popular narrative forms), I respond in the negative. As Hernandez suggests, hanging a comic in a museum or bringing it into the university does not “repair” what is essentially unique about the form—qualities that, at least in part, work against all attempts to take the gutter out of comics and make of it a respectable form for respectable audiences. Of course, the fact that my students today even ask such questions, or that Hernandez can wrestle with being compared to García Márquez, or that the New York Times (which for over a century studiously ignored the phenomenon of the comic supplement) now reviews graphic novels with almost the same seriousness they accord to “proper books by proper writers”—all of this attests to how much has changed in recent years.3 Not that most comics creators are getting rich and famous (and in fact all signs point to the shrinking market for comics in the twenty-first century) or that comics readers are suddenly being taken seriously (aside from once a year at ComicCon in San Diego, when Holly­ wood takes them very seriously indeed). But suddenly comics are showing up in places—museum walls, academic and literary journals, classrooms and university presses—that would have been unimaginable even a generation ago (and a half-century ago would have been clearly read as a sign of the apocalypse). This book is in part an attempt to understand how things developed in this way, what it might mean, and what lessons there might be to learn from comics for the future of storytelling in the twenty-first century. But doing so necessarily requires doubling back to the beginnings and retracing a history of comics and their readers across several different forms—from illustrated magazines and news­paper comic supplements through graphic novels and web­comics, a story of more than a century of comics creating and reading that will necessarily be marked by gaps and omissions—gaps and omissions that other studies whose goal is to provide a comprehensive history of the various forms and mediums in which comics have operated can fill in masterfully.4

Preface

But this is a story about gaps and omissions, from beginning to end, and it seems only right, or at least inevitable, that it be told elliptically. Comics bring together different semantic systems (figural, textual, symbolic) into a crowded field where meaning is both collaborative and competitive—between images, between frames, and between reader and writer. One visible space where this always-uneasy negotiation takes place is in the gap between the panels, or the “gutter.” As Scott McCloud has influentially suggested, the reader must at every panel work actively to bring “closure” to the space between frames.5 Even in the most simplistic narratives, the reader imaginatively fills in this space with the “missing” action. Of course, the space between the panels is not the only place where readers are summoned to take on an active role in filling in gaps. Of all narrative forms, comics are in many respects the most inefficient, a form that depends as much on what is left out as on what is included—and a form that depends on an active and imaginative reader capable of filling in the gaps in time. As a form that works with traditionally incommensurate systems of meaning—text and image—to tell its story, it also requires its readers at every turn to make active decisions as to how to read the two in relationship to a larger narrative. As I will argue in what follows, we might take the comics out of the cultural gutter, but we will never take the gutter out of comics—both the literal formal element that marks the gaps and ellipses between panels and, as I will use the term more metaphorically throughout, the larger and often less formally explicit gaps that everywhere define how comics tell stories. Gaps and discontinuities are vital to other narrative forms as well, especially since modernist experiments in the novel and painting exploded the once ideal seamless plot or canvas. Certainly it is hard not to see intimate connections between the formal experiments with the novel by Joyce or Faulkner and the fragmentary, looping narratives of modernity that I will discuss in Chapter 1. But they are also fundamentally different, in at least one respect. Behind the modernist novel’s break with linear time, traditional plotting, and other conventions of the nineteenth-century realist novel is always the proto­ type of the realist novel itself. Just as modernist poetry’s breaking of the iamb required an iamb to break, so the experiments of the modernist novel are always a choice not to make use of available unities and coherences. Comics creators—while faced with an array of choices at every turn—have never had the possibility of developing tools and techniques that would allow them (as Hollywood cinema would do after 1920) to efface the gaps (the structural “gutters”), to suture the cuts and obscure the apparatus. Such acts of “suture” have never been available to comics.6

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In fact, the differences extend in ways that complicate any temptation to map too readily the formal properties of comics, a form which of course emerges, like modernism, with the turn to the twentieth century, to high modernism itself. After all, in many respects, we can understand that the novel is accorded the cultural prestige of an established art form only after the modernist turn and the embrace of gaps, discontinuities, and the visibility of the representational apparatus. These same characteristics have often been precisely what have marked comics—always bound by visible gaps, discontinuities, and apparatus—as all that is antithetical to art. Indeed, the qualifiers “comic book” and “cartoon” have become (and to a large degree remain) synonymous with everything that is opposed to the cultural prestige that the modernist novel achieved in the early decades of the last century. Forced to live in and with the gutter, comics must negotiate at every panel with the reader. Consider, for example, the dense apparatus with which Chris Ware opens his graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000). Despite a promise of “ease of use,” the “editorial” apparatus becomes increasingly conscious of just how uneasy is the relationship with the reader. In his “general instructions” to the reader, Ware feels compelled to rehearse “some basic premises,” “before attempting a thorough apprehension of the complete work.”7 We are given a “test” focusing on two images drawn from Ware’s earlier Quimby the Mouse series, featuring a sadistic mouse and a lovelorn cat head named Sparky. After identifying the basic shapes—mouse, hammer, cat head— the reader is then asked whether she sees “a) two mice and two cat heads in two boxes next to each other, one raising a hammer above his head, the other striking a cat head with a very similar hammer, or b) one mouse and one cat head, portrayed at two very similar points in time, the result of comparison being the impression of the same mouse striking the same cat head with the same hammer?” In asking the question, the “editor” must acknowledge that there is in fact no “narrative” between the images in the two frames save what the reader chooses to agree to assign to it. Ware’s complex apparatus is by no means entirely disingenuous, as any reader will attest who has struggled with the book’s intricate weave of melodrama, history, icons, and the fragments of daily life. Neither, however, is it a uniquely postmodern meditation on the form. As I will discuss in the final chapter of this book, Ware’s theories and practices derive in no small measure from his study of the radically new relationship that the first comic creators and filmmakers negotiated with their audiences, and the celebration of both the formal and cultural gutters out of which the comics began. Indeed, that is where we begin and where we end—with the intersections between film and sequential comics, two new narrative forms born together

Preface

at the end of the nineteenth century and increasingly bound together again in the early years of the twenty-first century. In between, Hollywood cinema will go its own way, while comics will continue to explore the unique affordances of a form that depends inevitably and irrevocably on a participatory relationship to its readers. However, as I argue (sometimes implicitly and other times quite explicitly), just as there are benefits to comics’ inability to escape the cultural gutter, as Hernandez suggests, so too benefits accrue from a century of ­comics’ artists living in and experimenting with the formal gutter, both literal and metaphorical, that defines the narrative apparatus. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the history of comics and its readers offers a treasure chest of experience, cautionary tales, and possibilities for engaging with new narrative media that, in ways simultaneously like and profoundly different from comics, will always depend on and privilege an audience not only projecting its own storytelling into the text but also always potentially picking up a pen (or the laptop or video camera) and creating the story themselves. This is the tale of how comics creators have engaged with their readers, how readers have responded to the demand that they project themselves actively into comics, and how this history helps us imagine the future of storytelling going forward. *

*

*

Before turning to what is a plausible scene of origins for the modern comic form (and, as it turns out, for film as well), I must pause to acknowledge the origins of this project and those who have nurtured it along the way. In many ways, this book began several years ago with an invitation from Michael Moon to share my nascent thoughts on comics and seriality, at Johns Hopkins University and then at the English Institute. The questions and suggestions I received at those two events—and most especially from my much-missed teacher Eve Sedgwick—encouraged me to imagine this book. In the intervening years, I returned to the world of comics that I had forced myself to turn away from in college. Fortunately I found myself teaching, starting in 1999, at the Ohio State University, home of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. Lucy Caswell, Jenny Robb, Susan Liberator, Marilyn Scott, and the rest of the remarkable staff there have supported my work from the beginning and have made the library feel in every way like a second home. When I first started serious work on this book I was tentative, for reasons this preface describes, about sharing my goals with my colleagues. From the start, however, the response has been supportive in ways I could have never imagined. My three chairs during the long gestation of this project—Jim Phelan, Valerie Lee, and Richard Dutton—have been unflagging in their support, including providing me with the funds to hire the research assistant of my

xiii

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dreams, Alexandra Jenkins, who guided me down paths I never thought to take. The College of Arts and Sciences at Ohio State provided me with a generous Seed Grant in the early years of the project and a Grant-in-Aid to support the book’s completion. And my wonderful colleagues in my home fields of American literature and film studies have never once grumbled at the time I was spending outside of those classrooms while teaching comics history, comics and film, and the graphic novel—classes that brought hundreds of new under­ graduate and graduate students into my lives, students whose insights and writing made me a more thoughtful and careful student of the form. Parts of Chapter 4 appeared in Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (Winter 2006): 787–806; and a part of Chapter 5 was published in Biography 31.1 (Winter 2008): 1–26. The Comics Journal provided me with an opportunity to work through the careers of F. M Howarth, Frederick Burr Opper, and Ed Wheelan (as well as others). And Margaret Marten at the Short North Gazette in Columbus has given me space to think about comics and film. I am also immensely fortunate in having had the opportunity to work with series editors Michael Szalay and Florence Dore, who have pushed me to answer some of the hardest questions surrounding this topic and have never let me take the easy way out. Many friends and colleagues have read some or all of this manuscript over the years, and many more have listened to me talk endlessly about my discoveries and frustrations along the way—too many for me to thank them all individually—including Frederick Aldama, David Brewer, Steven Fink, Ryan Friedman, Harvey Graff, Jonathan Kramnick, Sandra Macpherson, Rebecca Morton, Sean O’Sullivan, Rebecca Wanzo, Robyn Warhol, and Luke Wilson. I especially thank David Herman, whose generosity and support was unflagging over the course of the project. Perhaps the biggest surprise and pleasure of working in comics has been getting to know so many brilliant and remarkable creators working in the field, all of whom have been unstintingly generous with me as I bombarded them with questions, and even (fanboy that I am) requests for sketches. In my notes I thank several comics creators who were especially helpful—including Alison Bechdel, Kim Deitch, Phoebe Gloeckner, Ben Katchor, Jason Shiga, and the late, great Harvey Pekar. Countless others—over e-mail, Facebook, and at triennial Festivals of Cartoon Art here in Columbus—have contributed to my education and deserve credit for anything I get right in this book. To the community of comics scholars and historians—both within the academy and without—my immense gratitude for welcoming me, sharing drafts and archival finds with me, as well as the profound sense that a life spent studying this material is a life well spent indeed. And to my collaborators in the

Preface

comics blogosphere over the past six years at guttergeek, the Panelists, and The Comics Journal at tcj.com—Derik Badman, Isaac Cates, Michael Dean, Craig Fischer, Charles Hatfield, and most especially Alex Boney—thank you for helping me realize that meaningful and productive bridges could indeed be built from Web to print, and from public to academic criticism. Thanks to my parents, Susan Gardner, Bruce Brooks, Andrew Gardner, Trebbe Johnson, Myrna Hewitt, and John Hewitt, for letting me share my fascination with this form (and for not throwing out my comic books). Everything I do is indebted always to the lessons I learned early from my godparents, Natsu and Percy Ifill. That my family circle contains Michael Trask, Stephen Trask, Aman Garcha, and Danielle Demko is a miracle for which I never stop being grateful, and not just because of the food, drink, and gossip. They have seen me in pieces, have laughed off my most unforgivable lapses, and have never stopped being mine. Now, poor souls, they are stuck with me forever. As, of course, is Beth Hewitt, my partner in all things great and small, who has patiently watched her home consumed by my madness: what began as a couple of shelves in the study upstairs has grown over a decade such that the house now shows visible scars of its burden. Our shared office at Ohio State, so orderly when we moved in, is now piled high with boxes of comic strips, clippings, and scans. And still she accepts from me, without batting an eye, yet another draft, another attempt to get it right; and still she shows me how to make it better. May wonders never cease. Finally, to my dearest, Eli and Gideon, to whom this book is dedicated. Thank you for showing me that the only things worth doing are the things we do for love. No father on the planet is more proud of his children, or more grateful to them.

xv

Projections

1

Fragments of Modernity, 1889–1920

I In 1923, Walter Benjamin began work on the book that would help him chart his transition from traditional critic into something radically different—a reader of modern culture. A series of fragments celebrating the unfinished, the miscellaneous, One-Way Street (1928) announces the death of the Book as it has been known for centuries. As Benjamin writes in the first section, “Filling ­Station”: “Significant literary effectiveness can come into being only in a strict alternation between action and writing; it must nurture the inconspicuous forms that fit its influence in active communities better than does the pretentious, universal gesture of the book—in leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards. Only this prompt language shows itself actively equal to the moment.”1 Here Benjamin expresses little of his familiar ambivalence as he celebrates the new “prompt language” as fuel to power mankind forward into modernity. Now “only the more feeble and distracted [writers will] take an inimitable pleasure in closure,” while the “genius” “draws a charmed circle of fragments” around his workshop to ward off the Book of the past.2 Indeed, for Benjamin in the 1920s, “everything indicates that the book in this traditional form is nearing its end,” and it will be those writers who best incorporate the “graphic tensions of the advertisement in the printed page” who will provide the “true image” of the time. Not surprisingly, it is in the newspaper and the cinema that Benjamin sees the clearest evidence of this transformation, in what amounts for him to a kind of evolutionary return of the repressed in the lifecycle of writing: after centuries of being forced to “lie down” to “bed” in the printed book, writing in news­ papers and in film resumes its vertical position in daily life. Far from seeing this as inevitably a cause for despair for the life of the mind and the arts, Benjamin imagines a time, imminent, “when writing, advancing ever more deeply into the graphic regions of its new eccentric figurativeness,” will allow for the “founding of an international moving script,” one that will allow poets to “renew their authority in the life of peoples.”3

1

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Chapter 1

In the early years of the twentieth century, the newspapers and the cinema were indeed two spaces where a new moving script was being developed. As I will argue in what follows, however, the crux of this relationship lies in the sequential comic, which for the first decade of film history provided the model, the theory, and the material to begin tracing out a new “moving script” for camera and screen. That Benjamin, arguably the most astute and encyclopedic cultural critic of the twentieth century, largely missed the foundational importance of the comic form when looking at newspapers and cinema in the 1920s is not surprising. Even as Germany played a large role in the nineteenth-century origin of sequential comics, neither in Germany nor in the United States would the existence of comics register for the vast majority of cultural critics, except occasionally as a synonym for all that is ephemeral and disposable in mass culture. But at the turn of the century, comics scouted the frontiers of modernity and helped to educate audiences into new storytelling practices for the new century. In fact, the same experiments that led to the development of motion pictures also contributed directly to the development of sequential comics. In both film and comics, static images placed in sequence and separated by blank spaces combine to tell a story. What happens to those images and the spaces between them—how they are exhibited and consumed—mark them, for all their material similarities, as fundamentally different media, of course. But in their shared origins, comics and motion pictures also shared, at least in part, a mutual understanding of how new stories might be told in the new century. In 1824, Peter Roget, whose name would become synonymous with a complex taxonomy of the English language, got down in the gutter (quite literally) to study “a curious optical deception [that] takes place when a carriage wheel, rolling along the ground, is viewed through the intervals of a series of vertical bars.”4 This and related experiments in optics in the early decades of the century contributed directly to the development of optical toys and devices that would eventually lead to the development of film. Within a year of Roget’s observation, the newly invented thaumatrope was described as “founded upon that well-known optical principle, that an impression upon the eye lasts for a short interval after the object which produced it has been withdrawn.”5 By the end of the century, the theory had a name. In describing a new stereoscope, S­cientific American cited the “well known effects of the persistence of vision”; a few years later, at the first public exhibition of Edison’s kinetograph, “persistence of vision” described the ability to “blend successive images into one continuous ever-changing photographic picture.”6 Since the very beginnings of film, many have raised objections to the traditional account of “persistence of vision.” In 1915, for example, the psychologist

Fragments of Modernity, 1889–1920

Hugo Münsterberg challenged the “routine explanation,” offering in its place a more complex—and interactive—model: “The motion which [the spectator] sees appears to be a true motion, and yet is created by his own mind. The after­ images of the successive pictures are not sufficient to produce a substitute for the continuous outer stimulation; the essential condition is rather the inner mental activity which unites the separate phases in the idea of connected action.”7 Yet despite a century of attempts to more accurately define the complexity of the phenomenon—despite the fact that “virtually every . . . account of the perception of movement in film texts are wrong”—the notion of “persistence of vision” persists to this day.8 It is worth considering why. “Persistence of vision” is premised on a negative model of the capacity of the viewer, in which, unable to process the blankness between each of the twenty-four frames per second, our eyes instead provide us with the illusion of continuity, of one image seamlessly blending into the next. The serial nature of the individual filmstrip—and the gaps that leave spectators sitting in the dark for much of their time in the theater—are mechanically made to evaporate through the motion of the projector. As Joseph and Barbara Anderson put it, “The viewer implied by the Myth of Persistence of Vision is a passive viewer upon whose sluggish retina images pile up.”9 Despite early scientific skepticism about the theory and Münsterberg’s insistence that as viewers we furnish to the projected images “more than we receive” from them, the notion of the film spectator as well-tuned automaton remained fundamental to the classical model of film spectatorship for much of the last century.10 While film theory has increasingly acknowledged and even foregrounded the work of film audiences in making meaning and bringing their own perspective and fantasies to the film text, in 1915, as the Hollywood system was beginning to establish itself in earnest, the notion of the spectator as active agent, such as that proposed by Münsterberg, was not one that critics or producers had an interest in promoting.11 Jonathan Crary has influentially demonstrated an important shift in the nineteenth century from a “camera obscura” model of human perception as a transcription of an objective reality, to an account of perception that acknowledged the role of subjective input and the specificity of the individual eye. Suddenly, the objective world guaranteed by the camera obscura was called into question. Roget’s experiments were one relatively minor facet of what was a profound reorientation in the epistemology of vision—toward, as Crary puts it, “a description of a body with an innate capacity, one might even say a transcendental faculty, to misperceive.”12 Out of this crisis of perception emerges what Celia Lury has termed “prosthetic culture,” in which the photograph and especially the cinema, paradoxically, “restore perceptibility,” restoring the il-

3

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Chapter 1

lusion of transparent and indexical relation between image and “reality.”13 As Mary Ann Doane argues, cinema in collaboration with the concept of persistence of vision “acts both as prosthetic device, enhancing and expanding our vision, and as collaborator with the body’s own deficiencies.”14 For much of the twentieth century, film history devoted a great deal of energy to perpetuating the myths of the audiences of so-called “primitive” early film. Stories of audiences running from the arrival of Lumiere’s Train in 1896 or shooting back at Porter’s great train robber in 1903 confirm the comforting sense that film, from its inception, proved too powerful for mere mortals to resist.15 As Tom Gunning writes, this “spectator . . . still stalks the imagination of film theorists who envision audiences submitting passively to an alldominating apparatus, hypnotized and transfixed by its illusionist power.”16 In opposition to these accounts, Gunning recovers the early “cinema of attractions,” in which audiences understood cinema as a “series of visual shocks”; here, “rather than mistaking the image for reality, the spectator is astonished by its transformation through the new illusion of projected motion.”17 In fact, it is extremely implausible that early audiences arrived at film with anything like the naïveté emphasized by traditional film history.18 They had made their own thaumatropes in the 1830s, assembled Zoetropes from Milton Bradley in the 1870s, pulled the slides through magic lanterns—had, in truth, studied the mechanics of film far more closely than most students of cinema today (Figure 1).

Figure 1.  A zoetrope party. From Popular Pastimes for Field and Fireside (Springfield, Mass.: Milton Bradley, 1867), 230.

Fragments of Modernity, 1889–1920

The recovery of the visual experiences of early audiences is equally vital to understanding of the development of the other new media form that emerged at this time: comics. Arguably the first true mass-media form, comic characters were recognizable personalities and their creators highly paid celebrities a decade before a parallel star-system developed for film. During these first years the two new mass-mediated forms developed many of their conventions and expectations in dialogue with each other; by the 1920s, they would move in different directions, as we will see. Classical Hollywood would devote itself to “persistence of vision,” developing narrative conventions and technical practices that matched the suturing effects of the illusion of movement generated on the screen. The anarchic, fragmented “cinema of attractions” was relegated to the form’s primitive past, as were its audiences. Comics, always rooted in the narrative structure of shocks, fragments, and discontinuities, found itself increasingly defined as primitive and childish. Of course, not everyone thought this was the right direction for cinema to take. For some, the cinema of the 1920s was, as Kracauer writes in 1926, romanticizing a “unity that no longer exists”: “Rather than acknowledging the actual state of disintegration which such shows ought to represent, they glue the pieces back together after the fact and present them as organic creations.”19 Indeed, there is a strain in film theory has long maintained this sense of film’s road not taken, one potentially recoverable through a series of disruptions in the apparatus. For example, when Barthes attempts to account for the pleasures of film, he does so via an extended series of film stills from Eisenstein. Only by literally stopping film is Barthes able to recover what he calls “the third meaning”—the obtuse “supplement that my intellection cannot succeed in absorbing”—that is for him the essence of the filmic.20 Lyotard, imagining an “acinema” capable of redeeming classical film from its regulated “procreative” work, similarly fetishizes the still image—the tableau vivant—as a site through which the perverse, “sterile” pleasures of the film text might be recovered.21 For both, film’s potential lies in the fragment, the sequential image liberated from the illusion of motion. Neither of these visions is entirely dissimilar from ­Deleuze’s celebration of a new cinema as the “time-image,” in which “what counts is . . . the interstice between images, between two images: a spacing which means that each image is plucked from the void and falls back into it.”22 What these different accounts have in common is a shared investment in highlighting precisely what the theory of “persistence of vision” and its attendant myths tell us is impossible—the sequential image liberated for contemplation, the interstices between the film’s images opened up for perverse engagements. In many ways, these accounts seem to reimagine the supposedly “primitive” film

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Chapter 1

from which classical narrative “evolved.” But even more strikingly, these accounts all describe, even as they fail to acknowledge its existence, the comic form that developed alongside cinema to become the century’s other new media form.23 II Although Benjamin failed to engage the comic form, he was very attentive to cartoon animation. Esther Leslie opens her invaluable study of the relationship between modernist intellectuals and animation with Emile Cohl’s pioneering masterpiece Fantasmagorie (1908). While Cohl is primarily of interest to Leslie due to his affiliations with avant-garde modernism, there is another vital element to his career that is often ignored. Before turning to film, Cohl was a cartoonist for the illustrated weeklies that emerged in Europe and the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century; as the legend has it, he turned to film after he saw one of his comics adapted for the screen without his knowledge.24 In 1908 he began work on animations at Gaumont, inspired by the pioneering work of another former cartoonist, J. Stuart Blackton. Blackton, a cartoonist for the New York World and a quick-sketch artist on the vaudeville circuit, had begun experimenting with animation and stop-motion photography shortly after founding Vitagraph Studios. In The Enchanted Drawing (1900), Blackton first puts on display his skills as a lightning-sketch artist and cartoonist and seemingly interacts with what he has drawn: drinking the wine, sharing it with his cartoon gentleman, and stealing his gentleman’s cigar and hat (Figure 2). Figure 2.  J. Stuart Blackton in The Enchanted Drawing (Vitagraph, 1900).

Fragments of Modernity, 1889–1920

As Blackton’s role as studio chief proves, comics was intimately intertwined with the development of early film. Cohl himself would go on, after coming to America in 1911, to produce the first animated series, The Newlyweds, based on the popular comic strip by George McManus, following a decade of earlier liveaction films that had turned to comics to develop a grammar for the new medium. The comic form, like film, is intimately rooted in the sequential images of Zoetrope wheels, magic lantern slides, and praxinoscope ribbons, and thus it is not surprising that they shared many concerns and formal properties. But the drive behind comics from the start was not toward putting the images into continuous “motion”; instead, comics—the first and arguably most important of the new vernacular modernisms—was dedicated to diagramming the serial complexities of modern life and fixing the fragments of modernity on the page. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, two things happened to comics that would shape the development of the form. In illustrated humor magazines, multipanel, sequential graphic narrative emerged at the same time that developments in motion picture technology allowed photography to be projected forward in time. F. M. Howarth’s work is representative of the development of sequential graphic narrative during this period. Influenced by earlier sequential narratives of Wilhelm Busch in Germany and by artists such as Théophile Steinlen and Adolphe Willette in France, Howarth fractured the single panel that had previously dominated the form in the United States.25 For example, in an early experiment, The Reward of Enterprise (1890), Howarth’s comic describes the way a tramp secures a crowded park bench for his private enjoyment (Figure 3). In the previous decade, Howarth would have handled the subject in a single panel, the tramp luxuriating on the empty bench as its former occupants retreat in disgust. To preserve the “joke,” he would have also included explanatory text below the panel. Here, except for his slow movement from left to right across the frame, the tramp’s body and expression never change, and no words are exchanged as each of his neighbors retreats in disgust. The American comic, as Howarth’s example demonstrates, is especially interested in the repeated interaction of fixed and predictable “types” within the new urban environment, bounded by a crowded visual plane and within a limited narrative time. If Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey experimented with recording the movement of bodies in time and space, early American sequential comics sought to study the movement of social types. The architecture and crowded spaces of modern life shaped the vision of the comics from the start: city parks, trains, and especially apartment buildings. Indeed, we can trace in Howarth’s early comic work an increasing fascination with the new urban spaces that culminates in his turn to the sequential framed

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Figure 3.  F. M. Howarth, “The Reward of Enterprise,” Life, October 23, 1890. Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum.

narrative as his preferred narrative structure. It is the strange new facts of modern city life that are described in these cartoons, as in The Fifth-Floor Lodger and His Elevator (1890), where the cruel humor lies less in the trivial theft of the oranges than in the fact that the apartment building’s cohabitants are so much strangers to one another as to so joyously relish the crime (Figure 4). The amorality and randomness of modern city life is the favorite “joke” of the early sequential comic—often played to grim effect. In Howarth’s An Interrupted Elopement (1891), a valiant suitor from a more romantic era plummets to his death from a pulley “elevator” very similar to that devised by the “fifth-floor lodger”—in this case through the arrival of robbers at the most inopportune moment. Criminals and tramps are forever intruding in Howarth’s cartoons; unlike earlier European comics, which obeyed a strict code of punishment, they are often triumphant over their more respectable victims. For example,

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in A Nocturne in Black and White (1889), robbers break into a house and then watch, delighted, as the frightened tenant leaps from the second-storey window onto heads of the policemen below. Howarth’s city is one in which robbers are at every window, and the police cannot tell victim from thief. So crowded is the space of these early cartoon cities that someone or something is forever being squeezed, as if by sheer internal pressure, from an upper-story window.26 The tramp figure, whom Chaplin in the next generation will develop as the repository of romantic virtue in the unreal city of modernity, is Howarth’s deeply amoral trickster figure—the one who is able to take advantage of his own marginal relation to this crowded city, turning random events to his advantage or amusement. In The Reward of Virtue (1891), the tramp takes advantage of the inattention of a baby’s mother and nanny to push the carriage into the pond, allowing him to perform the rescue and claim his reward. The butt of the joke, here as elsewhere, is not the tramp’s amorality but the inattention of the baby’s caretakers, so easily distracted from their duty. On the eve of the modern comic supplement, Howarth’s work points out several key features that would shape the first generation of comics artists in the new century. In addition to their focus on the city, class conflict, the plight of the immigrant poor, and the serial development of specific types and “characters,” we must also attend to the aspect of these comics that perhaps catches modern readers most by surprise: they are in many respects remarkably unfunny. I mean this not in the way that so many contemporary comic strips are not funny—that is, because of inept corporate writing and toothless formulas. Instead, what is clear in looking at the late nineteenth-century work of Howarth and his colleagues is how uninterested they are in what we might take to be the conventions of Victorian comedy. Dead dogs, starving children, robbery, and urban violence—the stuff of the early cartoon was the same material that made up the sensational stories increasingly occupying the front pages of the news­papers and illustrated weeklies of the period. Such material is in fact the evidence that many critics point to when describing the overwhelming shock of modernity. Ben Singer, for example, sees in the “comic magazines” “a dystopian alarmism that . . . characterized much of the period’s discourse on modern life.”27 But while Singer’s characterization accurately describes the impact of the melodramatic images of modern death in turn-of-the-century news­papers and weeklies, the comic strips in these same periodicals in fact present a very different image of the same subjects. Whereas the illustrated press focused in its front pages on the perils of modern life—poverty, overcrowding, crime, and the crushing force of modern mechanization—epitomized by images of bodies crushed beneath out-of-control streetcars, the comic supplement celebrated the

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Figure 4.  F. M. Howarth, “The Fifth-Floor Lodger and His Elevator,” Life, January 9, 1890. Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum.

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modern body’s resilience in the face of these same forces, its ability to bounce back, to recover, and to find humor and humanity in the midst of these inhuman conditions. As the pioneering nineteenth-century illustrated magazine Puck commented wryly (and enviously) in 1910, about their successor, the Comic Supplement: Who fixes up the victim, And makes him good as new, When man and beast have kicked him, And stamped upon him, too? .  .  . And gives him back to us as if He’d never had a single biff?28

Indeed, the comics of the period as a whole offer a striking counterweight to the narrative of modernity’s traumas that has remained relatively intact from Simmel to Singer. For every man who finds his neck broken by the modern dynamo, like Henry Adams’s autobiographical self, there is a comic character who kicks back at the engine itself (Figure 5). And for each image of the “sharp discontinuity” of modern life and the dangers of breakdown, there is a corresponding comic image which sees these discontinuities as eliciting not anxiety but humor, comfort, and new pleasures (Figure 6). These latter representations in the early comics have been all but invisible in the archeology of graphic modernity, but in fact, the comic does not “depict . . . modern life as inherently unnatural and unhealthy,” nor is it primarily motivated by a criti-

Figure 5.  Detail from Frederick Burr Opper, And Her Name Was Maud! St. Louis Examiner, August 7, 1904. San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection, the Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum.

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Figure 6.  Detail from R. F. Outcault, Buster Brown, St. Louis Examiner, September 18, 1904. San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection, the Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum.

cism of “the degree to which the tempo of life has become more frenzied.”29 In fact, the comics supplement that emerges at the start of the new century was for the most part as free of such judgments as it was of the knee-slapping humor which we might imagine would be its primary goal. As Benjamin would later suggest, imagining into existence the comic form he never recognized, the new graphic writing was not a space for “convictions” but for facts of modern life represented in a “prompt language . . . actively equal to the moment.” The comics became the space where those facts were represented graphically and energetically, and where the humor and pleasure emerged in part from the lack of either clear convictions or hysterical arguments, and the promise that against all odds pleasures could be found and bodies rebound. Famously, it was R. F. Outcault who first translated many of the ingredients of the modern comic from illustrated magazine to the newspaper comic supplement, in the process making himself the first celebrity cartoonist of the new medium and his Yellow Kid the first national comic “character.”30 Outcault was the first to make the risky move from the middlebrow illustrated magazines to the uncertain new frontier of Sunday comic newspaper supplements, as well as the first effectively to exploit color printing and to incorporate text routinely into his crowded frames. But more important than these formal innovations, the newspapers brought with them the newly reimagined community created by syndication. Benedict Anderson’s “meanwhile time” of the realist novel was supplemented at the turn of the century by the new synchronicities of the syndicated newspaper, as “every Sunday Americans across the country could open their newspapers and read the same strips.”31 The modern comic strip, born of

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the study of the grim realities of modern urban life, allowed Americans, in the words of one of early comics’ few defenders, Gilbert Seldes, finally “to think nationally.”32 Fixed “types” reacting to fixed environments in predictable ways: ­comics seems at first glance to have everything to do with the visual logic of racial “science” and the rituals of the minstrel show: pageants of the “races” for the amusement and reassurance of middle-class white America. And indeed, throughout the early comics, racial and ethnic stereotypes were deployed for comic effect in ways that demonstrated the genealogical bonds between the comic strip and the hierarchical arrangement of the “types of man” through cartoons and illustration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.33 But, as I argue at length elsewhere, despite its strong filiations to these racialist traditions, the modern sequential comic—in part as a reflection of the real-life experiences of the modern city and in part as a result of the formal properties of the form itself—complicated these formulas, effectively destabilizing the types whose proper ordering was so essential to racialist fantasies.34 Serializing and syndicating stereotypes familiar types, a new kind of “personality” was born, a mass-mediated personality born out of serialized responses to repeated structures—narrative, environmental, social—responses that, over time and through the subtle variations that emerge with each new beginning of the same old routine, accord to the stereotype an identity (and a trademark). Consider the work of Frederick Opper, one of the pioneers who followed Outcault from the magazines to the newspaper comic strip. Originating in 1900, his Happy Hooligan is an Irish immigrant who tries, and repeatedly fails, to pull himself out of poverty and into the good life that is literally always just around the corner. Each day, his earnest attempts to do the right thing are foiled both by his own bad luck and by the police who are forever waiting for a chance to pound his skull. This is the unlikely material of the early comics. Clearly the pleasure of these early strips for their vast readership cannot be easily codified. But neither can the effect of the stereotypes deployed by the comics be reduced to its essentializing features. For example, while Happy displays the simian features long deployed in racist caricature, the “respectable” characters in the strip display nearly identical features. And while Happy speaks with a heavy dialect that displays his lack of formal education and ridicules his assimilationist aspirations, he articulates more meaningful ideals than do any of the figures of power forever thwarting his ambitions. Equally, however, it would be wrong to read the strip’s energies as subversive: after all, nothing is subverted within the narratives. Happy always ends up in jail for a crime he did not commit, prejudged as the “hooligan” his name and appearance promise him to be (Figure 7). And he

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Figure 7.  Detail from Frederick Burr Opper, Happy Hooligan, Chicago American, May 24, 1903. San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection, the Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum.

always returns, having learned precisely nothing from the previous adventure, ready to try yet again. Happy triumphs, then, not in any of the individual adventures that make up his thirty-odd-year run, but in the personality that emerges from these repeated episodes. The mass-mediated personality provides no resolution to the scenes of political and racial violence. But it does provide a space for the imaginative embrace—an embrace that could be literalized and commodified in the new phenomenon of licensed products—of the untouchable American, the “other” in our midst. The strip demonstrates the ways in which stereotype fails to capture the individual and yet succeeds in literally imprisoning him within the structures that forever limit his possibilities. The energy of these strips is therefore neither precisely comic nor explicitly political. They are not escapist or transcendent; they are not predictably entertaining nor are they conceived as fit objects for contemplation. They are instead experiments with mass-mediated personality—a personality that emerges through serial repetition. Extending Muybridge’s experiments with the moving human body to the social body, the hyperkinetic space and time of modernity can be broken down in terms of its repeated cycles, its patterned fragments. Consumed serially, within the newspapers that are the vehicle for the undigested “stuff ” of the new century, impersonal modernity is made accessible, personable, pleasurable. The fantasy engendered by the comic personality is that in thrusting ourselves repeatedly into the gears of the machine, we might, like Happy, emerge endowed with a new personality which no degree of force, oppression, or fragmentation could break down—a personality that would be welcome in any home on any given Sunday in America. Far from marking the comic personality’s deficiencies, it is in fact his lack of originality—the fact that nothing new ever really happens to him and that his

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actions are entirely knowable before the strip has even begun—that is the greatest mark of his accomplishment. After all, the same papers that daily featured the unflappable Happy rebounding from yet another head-on encounter with bullying cops and speeding cars were also describing in graphic detail scenes of streetcar accidents, urban unrest, labor agitation, and racist and anti-immigrant violence. Here the bodies failed to rebound, tempers did not stay in check, hope was not preserved.35 But closure—the culmination of the promise that Happy holds out for himself each week—is not what the strip’s readers seek in its ­panels: it is instead the perpetual return of the same, not despite the chaos of modern life, but because of it. As Robert Warshow put it in 1946, “The comic strip has no beginning and no end, only an eternal middle.”36 One comic from 1902 offers “a peep ahead” into the future, where Happy and his brother travel on rockets in a landscape defined by still greater speed, dangers, and possibilities. Despite the advances in technology, nothing in fact has changed: Happy ends up as he always does, as the reader is promised he will continue to do into the infinite future.37 Opper’s contemporary Jimmy Swinnerton, one of the most prolific members of Hearst’s original stable, specialized not in the urban violence that shaped Happy Hooligan’s world but in celebrating the new urban distractions that shaped the daily lives of many newspapers’ readers. Beginning in 1898 with Mr. Jack, a young rake forever led into dire straits by the beautiful young ladies he passes on the city’s streets, Swinnerton made the distracted protagonist his stock and trade. In 1904, he created his most famous character, Little Jimmy, a middle-class boy who is each week sent off on an urgent errand by his father only to become immediately overwhelmed by the city that unfolds before him. A street baseball game, a safe being hauled into an apartment building, a car crash, a costume ball (featuring a man dressed as Happy), and even the comics supplement itself (with Happy’s latest adventures)—all are sufficient to draw Jimmy from his appointed rounds. Each week he is punished for his waywardness and, like his hero, Happy, whose adventures he follows faithfully in the papers, he learns nothing from his experience. Jimmy’s sirens in the early strips are a couple of street kids who serve as his guides to a world larger than that which his middle-class parents care to know about. But he is likely to be drawn by other denizens of the bustling city as well. One January Sunday in 1905, for example, Jimmy is distracted on an errand to fetch his father’s coat by an African-American man singing while he shovels snow (Figure 8). Jimmy is entranced by the music, and as a result his father is forced to bear the company of an immigrant shopkeeper and eventually to borrow the man’s coat, culminating, as such episodes inevitably do, with Jimmy’s spanking. The beating that ensues is, of course, a small price to pay for the entertainment of the day. That

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Figure 8.  James Swinnerton, Little Jimmy, Chicago American, January 15, 1905. San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection, the Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum.

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same year Swinnerton also began a series entitled And Sam Laughed, in which an African-American man takes a new job each week, only to promptly lose his position as a result of finding the white people he encounters impossibly ridiculous: their names, the food they order, the clothes they wear, and the postures they assume. In the final panel of each week’s installment, Sam is booted out for his inappropriate laughter, and yet his mirth continues unabated (Figure 9). Like Jimmy, Sam never completes his appointed task, preferring the distractions and spontaneous pleasures of urban life to profitable employment. Early critics often pointed to the repetition and predictability of the comic supplements as a sign of degenerating times. And that degeneration was often associated with the racial and ethnic others who often served both as creators and as subject matter for these early comics, as well as with the new immigrant reader often assumed to be the primary audience of this lowly literature. Writing in the Atlantic in 1906, Ralph Bergengren identified a decline even in the lowest popular literature from the dime novel of the previous century to the “colored supplement” (swarming “like flies in summer”) of the new.38 Instead of teaching children to aspire to become Indian fighters and strike-breaking detectives, as the dime novel had done, the modern comic teaches, Bergengren writes, “no high ambition, but devotes itself to ‘mischief made easy.’”39 By 1908 critics were “sounding the doom of the ‘comics,’”40 as the arbiters of morality increasingly set their sights on the control of these forces invading our news­ papers and our Sunday homes. As the Evening Post piously declared, “Clownish, vulgar, idiotic the colored ‘comics’ of American Sunday newspapers undeniably are. It is a reproach to our civilization that they should have been allowed to swarm over the land.”41 The rhetoric here—highlighting the “colored” comics “swarming” over the land—calls attention to the ghetto origins that comics and film shared in the eyes of eugenically minded critics who were looking to the rising tide of immigration on one hand and the related flood of new media forms on the other with equal alarm. As one particularly hysterical critic put it in Lippincott’s in 1909, the comics are a “hypnotic moral poison,” a “national peril” that “students of juvenile crime can no longer ignore.”42 For the few early readers who would publicly defend the comics, however, these jeremiads missed the point. The point was the pleasure of the “chuckle spread[ing] from coast to coast” each Sunday, the pleasure of the pause in the familiar laugh, the shared joke, the invitation to “pause, and relax, and be silly, when we can.”43 For the millions of readers who turned to these comics each week, these pleasures— the shared and syndicated joke, the familiar personality, and the celebration of distraction—provided the base of the fastest growing field of popular culture during the first decade of the twentieth century.

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Figure 9.  James Swinnerton, And Sam Laughed, Chicago American, April 2, 1905. San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection, the Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum.

Fragments of Modernity, 1889–1920

III Despite the growing popularity of these anarchic, looping, and fragmentary comics narratives at this time, the familiar story is that after 1904 film began to turn toward the development of coherent, traditional, and increasingly “novel­istic” narratives because audiences had grown bored with the “novelty” of actualities and “trick” films and were demanding more “refined” entertainment. There is little evidence to support this claim, as audiences continued to embrace “nonnarrative” films, just as they embraced the “interminable sequence” of the comic, where narrative resolution, structure, and development were as alien as in the earliest cinema.44 Indeed, the criticism from the period suggests, random, accidental, and fragmentary movement, far from being perceived as a liability, was precisely what defined the accomplishment of the new medium.45 Early film and the early comic sought to break the experience of modernity into segments that could be repeatedly viewed and analyzed, even as the accidental and fragmentary nature of those films promised that the segment on the screen was always part of a continuous, if irrecoverable, larger “whole.” In these terms, it is not surprising that as the earliest filmmakers looked for models on which to structure their new medium, they turned to the visible success of the comics. Beginning in 1900, Blackton starred in and produced Hooligan Assists the Magician, the first of around two dozen Happy Hooligan films produced by Edison and its rival Biograph, a franchise on which several of the pioneers of the American film worked between 1900 and 1903, including Edwin S. Porter and G. W. Bitzer.46 The Edison catalog shows how quickly Happy had become a familiar celebrity: “This is a new adventure [for] our friend, Mr. Hooligan.” “The whole film,” the catalog continues, “forms a series of most startling and laughable effects.” Instead of narrative coherence, always devalued by the earliest criticism, what unifies the film is the personality of Happy himself—his ability to remain recognizable in the midst of pleasurable shocks and “startling . . . effects.”47 By 1903, the structure of Happy’s daily narrative has become so well known as to lead the catalog writer at Biograph to assume a winking familiarity in describing the resolution to Happy Hooligan Interferes: “Hooligan, of course, gets all the blame and is carried off to jail.”48 Interestingly, however, this is not what happens in the film (Figures 10–11). Instead, here Happy has an extremely rare last laugh, as the policeman heads into the house to confront the woman who soaked him. But this uncharacteristic ending is essentially invisible to the author of the catalog copy, so trained has he been by Happy’s serial misadventures to assume the ending he describes.49 Of course, in a sense, the

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Figure 10.  Happy Hooligan Interferes, directed by G. W. Bitzer (Biograph, 1903).

Figure 11.  Detail from Happy Hooligan, San Francisco Examiner, April 13, 1902. San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection, the Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum.

“ending” does not matter, and that is precisely the point. It does not reveal the catalog author’s “mistake” any more than it does the filmmakers’ misreading of their source: it reveals instead that the notions of beginning and endings we privilege in our understanding of modern film narrative were essentially as irrelevant to early filmmakers and their audiences as they were to the serial comics they were adapting. The startling effects of popular entertainment— the magician, the organ grinder—and the shocks of modern life (police, im-

Fragments of Modernity, 1889–1920

migrants, class conflict) are brought together in these comics and these films in precisely the terms Kracauer imagined: “Lack[ing] any authentic and materially motivated coherence . . . , [they] convey in a precise and undisguised manner to thousands of eyes and ears the disorder of society.”50 The man traditionally credited with bringing film out of its “primitive” past and into its “classical” narrative destiny, Edwin S. Porter, adapted comic strips by Opper, Outcault, and McCay at the same time he was making what would later be identified as his pioneering films. Although Charles Musser has definitively demonstrated that the seemingly groundbreaking parallel editing in Porter’s Life of an American Fireman (1903) had in fact been added much later by a well-intentioned curator to suture the film into its place in film history, Porter continues to serve in film history as the visionary who pointed film out of the hieroglyphic language of the first decade toward its twentieth-century destiny.51 However, these films are arguably more legible when reading Porter’s canonical work in light of his engagement with comics than when trying to affix them to the classical Hollywood narratology of Griffith and DeMille. The recursive seriality of the comic makes legible, for instance, the “impossible” final shot of The Great Train Robbery (1903), which violates two fundamental rules of classical Hollywood filmmaking: it returns the bandit from the dead and it has him directly confront the audience. The sequential static frames of the comic make legible the ellipses and spectacular gaps of Porter’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1903) more fully than does the stage tradition which is its most obvious source.52 Similarly the doubled narrative of American Fireman, in which the story of the rescue is shown twice in series (and not in parallel, as later edited), from two different perspectives, can be understood as drawing inspiration from the repetitive redundancy of comic narrative. After 1907, of course, filmmakers will begin to veer away from the comic form and the discontinuous serial narrative. But this was less a result of the inevitable triumph of canonical film narrative than it was the inability of the fledgling film industry to market and commodify the same serialized, ritualized disorder that comics had exploited so effectively. And this failure has less to do, ultimately, with the antimodernism that will come to define Hollywood filmmaking than with the unique pressures of production, distribution, and exhibition presented by film. The unregulated meanings opened up by comic fragments lead inexorably to unregulated audiences, and as film costs and competition mounted, regulation of every aspect of the industry increasingly became the dominant pressure. As the factory system of production began to be codified in Hollywood, a seamless system of narrative structure became the

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ideal. Filmmakers came to privilege causal relations over framed experiments in startling effects, as narrative episodes were deliberately transformed from charged fragments into agents in the interlocking chain of classical narrative. The industry trained audiences to privilege continuity, resolution, and closure—and to reject as “bad film” the fragments, the gaps, the illogical connections of early film. The gutter that film and comics shared for their first decade was dissolved, so that film might become a very different kind of product, one that offers more easily regulated pleasures. After 1910, with the exception of the newly emerging field of animation and the serial, American film moved increasingly from the logic of the comic strip serial in favor of the self-contained narrative, where the fragments are, in Lyotard’s terms, put to productive, “procreative” work.53 In his study of Emile Cohl, Donald Crafton offers an extended meditation on the relationship between comics and early film, the two media with which Cohl worked so brilliantly. Crafton takes issues with some of the conventional claims made about this relationship: that they were born “simultaneously” (as Crafton points out, in certain respects comics was a mature medium by the time film got started), that comics “taught” film editing conventions, or that it shared a romantic populist origin or social “final cause.”54 But in place of such “romanticized” claims for the relationship and the role of comics in the development of film, Crafton offers a very diminished role for comics: essentially preparing the way—and the public—for the arrival of film. In setting up comics as prophet to film’s messiah, as he suggests in his chapter “Graphic Humor and Early Cinema,” Crafton misses the opportunity to make the more meaningful connection to the subject of his final chapter, “Incoherent Cinema.” Cohl’s films are indeed “extraordinary in their outrageousness, their outlandishness, and, frequently, their incomprehensibility,” but these qualities and the possibilities for film narrative are ultimately less easily attributed to the brief career of the avant-garde Incoherents than to the “moving script” of the comics which provided the foundation of Cohl’s training and that of his primary cinematic influence, Blackton. An “incoherent cinema” is precisely what is opened up by the transmediation between early comics and film.55 To fully recognize how joyous these possibilities for early filmmakers were, it is helpful to reflect further on the work of Porter, to recognize the degree to which he continued to embrace those possibilities in comics that pulled him away from what we now recognize as the conventions of narrative cinema. Indeed, his output in the months and years surrounding The Great Train Robbery shows an increasing enthusiasm for the

Fragments of Modernity, 1889–1920

trick camera, animation, and cartoon tableaux that many of his contemporaries would soon begin to abandon. In addition to his work on the adaptations of Buster Brown, including one of Outcault himself sketching his famous character, Porter also worked to translate the comic strip energy into his films in other ways as well. In What Happened in the Tunnel (1903), for example, Porter uses what is essentially a four-panel structure to tell a version of a joke that was by this time standard fare in comic strips. As the Edison catalog summarizes the film, “She drops her handkerchief. Young man picks it up and hands it to her, and then begins to make love to her. As the train enters a tunnel he is last seen trying to put his arms around her. Upon emerging he is hugging and kissing the colored maid, the young lady having changed seats with her while in the tunnel, much to the young man’s disgust.” In 1905, Porter filmed perhaps his most “uncinematic” subject yet, the “Dam Family,” a cartoon family popularized in a series of picture postcards. In addition to capturing each of the family member’s unique “personalities” in tableaux and then setting them into motion with the “Dam Dog,” this film features one of Porter’s experiments with animation, as the dog is introduced first in animated form, with his segmented tail flying free from his body. And in 1906 Porter filmed one of his most technically challenging and demanding films of his career, an adaptation of an episode from Winsor McCay’s Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1904–13), a series in which a different protagonist each episode is laid low by the hallucinogenic properties of melted cheese (Figures 12–13). In all of these cases, we see Porter turn repeatedly to comics, not just for subject matter and inspiration, but for the absurd, serial “incoherence” that we find in Cohl’s work beginning in 1908. Comics provided much more than “shared milieu” and a proving ground for cinema. It explored possibilities outside of the novelistic tradition to which Griffith and DeMille would aggressively work to attach cinema. The pleasures of flying beds, of disparate social types colliding on trains, and of absurd “naughty” puns and grotesque comic caricatures were precisely the lowbrow delights from which these younger filmmakers believed film needed to be redeemed. Like the early critics of the comics, Griffith and DeMille saw such tendencies in film as a degenerate sign of the ghetto origins of modern mass media. But these were also the pleasures that provided a meaningful and productive link between the modernist avant-garde and the newly empowered mass audience of the new century. And during these early years, comics provided film with its best chance to become the cinema Siegfried Kracaeur and Benjamin imagined it could have been.

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Figure 12.  Edwin S. Porter, The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (New York: Edison, 1906).

Figure 13.  Winsor McCay, The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend, January 28, 1905. Author’s collection.

IV As comics and film began from 1910 through the 1920s to move in different directions, many of those working in comics more openly embraced its discontinuous seriality. This is perhaps best epitomized in the work of George Herriman, who pushed comics in the opposite direction from which American film was going during the same period. Responding to a fan’s enthusiastic interpretations of his work, Herriman once wrote, “I can’t add it up at all—It must be something you

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give to it.”56 Herriman is of course being overly modest here, but not entirely. Krazy Kat, the most critically acclaimed comic, is also perhaps the comic that most insists on the imaginative work of the reader to make it “funny.” After all, nothing new ever really happens: Ignatz Mouse’s brick finds Krazy’s head and Offica Pup takes Ignatz to jail. As Herriman’s philosophical tramp of Coconino County, Bum Bill Bee, puts it: “Everything is just nothing repeating itself.” Indeed it is hard to find a better formulation for the tradition Herriman inherited. Krazy Kat was born in 1910 in an earlier strip, The Family Upstairs, which chronicled the daily miseries of the Dingbat family, living out their frustrated lives in one of Howarth’s modern apartments, tortured by an upstairs neighbor they can never see, let alone thwart. But the title of the strip refers equally to another family. Early in the strip’s run, Herriman constructed another floor to the apartment, just below the Dingbats apartment, where a mouse began his thirtyodd-year career of hurtling a brick at the back of a cat’s head (Figure 14). The Dingbats are ultimately released from their hell when their apartment is torn down to make way for a new department store, and Krazy and Ignatz move out to a mythical southwestern landscape, where they will be joined by a motley cast of fellow émigrés (many of them from other early strips by Herriman). Like many of his contemporaries, Herriman usually worked on several series at once, and in 1916, alongside his work on Krazy Kat, he began work on

Figure 14.  Detail from George Herriman, The Family Upstairs, 1911. Author’s collection.

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Baron Bean, which told of the vagabond adventures of a fallen British aristocrat and his abused retainer, Grimes, as they struggle to maintain highborn pomp on pennies a day. In one sequence the Baron and Grimes decide to take a “vacation,” whereby for two weeks the strip records the declining fortunes of their purse and its ultimate restoration on the last day as a settlement for being victims to a falling flowerpot from a second-story window. Grimes declares, wonderingly, “Now I know that money circulates.”57 In the last panel the two vacationers return “home”—to the place from which their adventures begin, the newspaper’s art department. The economy of these strips is one that, like its characters, is always borrowing from itself, always recirculating its coin from one day to the next. In this way the seriality of the early comic narrative is notably different from that of the serial novel or the film serial, as we will discuss in detail in the next chapter. Closer here is the “serial” of “serial killer”—the compulsive, violent, and fragmented return to the scene of the crime. It is an economy, like that epitomized in Baron Bean, that simultaneously epitomizes and travesties the logic of consumer capitalism—an economy that celebrates its own sterility. This is the perverse economy of Krazy Kat, which Herriman used to construct alternatives to the dominant narrative structures of his day. Herriman was the first person of color to achieve success in comics, a medium that had long treated racial caricature as its bread and butter.58 Given his choice of profession, it is perhaps not surprising that he continued his parents’ practice of passing, famously wearing a hat indoors to disguise the hair that might provide an answer to the mystery of his “origins.”59 Nor is it surprising that Herriman delighted in other destabilizations of the identities increasingly policed and patrolled in the 1920s: his characters speak a range of shifting dialects, from Shakespearean English to the modern poetics of the new immigrant; his hero is n/either male n/or female; his settings transform from one panel to the next, desert to seascape, mesa to valley. Nothing is stable save the most essential features of the comic: Krazy loves Ignatz, Ignatz hates Krazy, Offica Pupp loves Krazy and hates Ignatz. In the end, even the seemingly unrecoverable distinction between love and hate is dissolved: after all, the same brick serves as both “missile” and “love letter” (Figure 15). In the gap between sender (Ignatz) and recipient (Krazy) the meaning of the missive changes entirely, and yet nothing changes. Fulfilling his own violent desires, Ignatz simultaneously fulfills Krazy’s desire to be loved. The gaps between the panels that the brick both represents and transcends are made meaningful, both sides fulfilled by a miscommunication that is also a perfect correspondence. In these terms it is Offica Pupp, the defender of law and order, who is the unfulfilled apex of this erotic triangle. Despite (or rather because of) his badge

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and nightstick, Offica Pupp is at a complete loss for how to impose meaning or order on the perverse passion play he witnesses each day. He is the normalizing reader, who would rid his county of sin, rescue his damsel from the clutches of the villain, make the narrative of his world seamless and coherent. Offica Pupp’s inability to share in Ignatz’s and Krazy’s perverse pleasures in the unproductive romance of Coconino County, his inability even to conceptualize that there might be pleasure outside the heteronormative plot of marriage of reproduction, leaves him isolated—at least in this world. Here the conventional “happy ending” would be unimaginable tragedy, epitomized by the sorry career of child bearer Joe Stork, whose thankless task it is to bring bundles of joy to customers who flee from his wares as from the plague. But the perverse economy of Herriman’s never-ending tale was becoming increasingly anomalous by the 1930s, as the comics pages began to shift, first gradually and then seismically, in the direction of the narrative structures of classical Hollywood film. Beginning with such early serial melodramas as The Gumps (1917–59), Gasoline Alley (1918– ), and Little Orphan Annie (1924–2010), the newspaper syndicates found audiences increasingly captivated by the threads of continuing narrative, sequential plotting, and conventional character development. As Al Capp wistfully described the transformation, “Out went the laugh, the guffaw, the chuckle, that were the end purpose of the oldtime comic strips—and in came . . . the sick feeling in the pit of the stomach that was the new end purpose of the new ‘Suspense Continuity’ comic strips.”60 As we will see in Chapter 2, the comics were soon dominated by these dramas and by the newer adventure serials that emerged shortly afterward: Buck ­Rogers (1929–67), Dick Tracy (1931– ), Terry and the Pirates (1934–73), and Prince ­Valiant (1937– ). The noncontinuous serial epitomized by Krazy Kat become increasingly illegible to a new generation of readers.61 But try as they might, comics could not make the discontinuities go away: in the passage from one frame to the next, the gutter intervenes, and the mes-

Figure 15.  From George Herriman, Krazy Kat, January 24, 1921. Author’s collection.

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sage is transformed in countless ways by the syndicated act of millions of readers filling in the gaps between. Throughout the century, comics creators have continued to work with the perverse machinery of the form, perhaps best epitomized by the spectacularly unproductive contraptions of Herriman’s contemporary, Rube Goldberg, whose celebrations of redundancy and inefficiency would reemerge, along with Herriman’s work, as an inspiration for the underground comix creators of the 1960s and 1970s. But as we will see in subsequent chapters, in the intervening decades—even as in many respects sequential comics can be seen as working to emulate the continuities and cause-and-effect logic of the Hollywood screenplay—comics would continue to open up spaces for very different ways of reading and modes of storytelling than that being projected on screen. Miriam Hansen has called on film history to unwire classical cinema’s “biologically hard-wired” model of perception by turning to “vernacular” modernisms that help us see other possibilities for making meaning with the emerging graphical languages of the early twentieth century—the “undercurrent of genres that thrive on something other than or, at the very least, oblique to the classical norm.”62 And following on the lead of Hansen, Anne Freidberg, and others, a range of critics have excavated the media culture of a century ago to make sense of the possibilities of the present moment. Comics, perhaps the most understudied of the vernacular modernisms of the twentieth century, offers arguably the richest vein to mine for this ongoing project. As Catherine Russell exhorts, “the most radical effect of parallax historiography may be an ultimate denial of the existence of classical cinema and its constitutive forms of spectatorship.”63 While ultimately it would be foolish (and indeed sad) to imagine a world in which classical cinema did not exist, we might take seriously such parallax historiography to envisions the possibility that in this digital age, when cinema is being forced to reinvent itself once again, the time might just be right for a return to the scene of origins with which sequential comics and film began to explore the twentieth century together.

2

Serial Pleasures, 1907–1938

I In 1924, the American critic Gilbert Seldes published an “open letter” to the movie “magnates” in which he decried the developments in film over the past decade in terms that might well surprise a modern reader. Instead of criticizing the increasing standardization or consumerism of Hollywood cinema, as many of his peers were doing at this time, Seldes bemoaned the industry’s attempts to transform film into what he terms a “bogus art.” In lecturing to the movie moguls who for Seldes have lost their way, he returns to an earlier moment when filmmakers were able to explore what was truly unique about their medium: “movement and light.” Ever since film started aspiring to become an “art,” ­Seldes argues, it has gone wrong, misled by those who love theater or ­novels more than movies into trying to make film mimic dead “arts.” It was not always this way, however. As Seldes continues, ten years ago “you did make a good beginning. . . . You relied on melodrama, which was the rightest thing you ever did,” especially the early serials like Perils of Pauline and Exploits of Elaine, which he describes as “thirty minutes of action closing in on an impossible and unresolved climax”: “infinitely better pictures than your version of Mr Joseph Conrad’s Victory, your Humoresque, your Should a Wife Forgive? They were extremely silly; they worked too close on a scheme: getting out of last week’s predicament and into next week’s. . . . But within their limitations they used the camera for all it was worth . . . you hadn’t heard of psychology, and drama, and art; you were developing the camera. . . . You were on the right road.”1 When thinking about serial film, we are likely to conjure images of Flash Gordon or the Lone Ranger—science fiction or western serials from the 1930s and 1940s, primarily directed to youngsters attending Saturday matinees. But the serials that Seldes is recalling in 1924 are in many ways a different thing altogether. The silent serial craze that began in 1912 and the “serial queens” who constituted the industry’s first stars have received little critical attention until

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fairly recently, for reasons pretty easy to gauge. In many ways, these films don’t fit into the standard history of the media during this transitional period when the classical Hollywood narrative structure and the studio system of production were first falling into place. As Seldes points out, these films were pushing in very different directions than the narrative film being institutionalized by Griffith and DeMille at this same time. Nonetheless, when looking at the catalogs and accounts of the early films, a word shows up with surprising frequency: series. And it is not only what we today might recognize as the first series films—the Happy Hooligan or Buster Brown films, for example—that are so labeled, but individual titles as well. The earliest motion pictures were in fact understood as a “series of pictures,” or a “series of scenes.” For instance, the San Francisco Call of 1904 announces that between the first and second act of a vaudeville show “there was presented a beautiful series of moving pictures entitled the ‘Wooing of Hiawatha.’”2 And a month later the Washington Times celebrates Porter’s Great Train Robbery as a “series of moving pictures [that] had proved a thriller in nearly all the larger cities of the United States.”3 While describing a single title as a “series” might sound strange to our ears, it is language that would have made sense to an early film-going audience much more aware of the fundamental properties of this new medium than generations of historians have given them credit for being. As we have seen, contrary to the myths of startled audiences running screaming from oncoming trains and gun-wielding bandits, early audiences knew that what they were looking at was, in fact, a “series of pictures,” “a series of scenes.”4 Additionally, of course, the exhibition of film during its first decade was itself a motley, serial affair, as exhibitors purchased their films by the foot and constructed their own programs—which they likewise defined as a “series,” further complicating the distinction between frame, scene, title, and event— promising a new “series” at regular intervals as a way of drawing repeat customers to their theaters. The most successful exhibitor was the one who could provide the most variety by editing the shorts into larger entertainments. For audiences, there is evidence that the fragmented, discontinuous state of the medium in these early years afforded unique pleasures and freedoms. As Barton Currie described the “nickel madness” in Harper’s Weekly in 1907, “You hear in some neighborhoods of nickelodeon theatre-parties. A party will set out on what might be called a moving-picture debauch, making the round of all the tawdry little show-places in the region between the hours of eight and eleven o’clock at night, at a total cost of, say, thirty cents each. They will tell you afterwards that they were not bored for an instant.”5 In 1907, there were as many as three hundred nickelodeons in Manhattan alone, allowing motion-picture

Serial Pleasures, 1907–1938

debauchers to bounce from theater to theater, editing their own programming from the vast array of choices the city had to offer. A few years later, in describing her own “moving-picture debauch” in the neighborhood theaters across the city, the labor activist and journalist Mary Heaton Vorse identified another benefit of this flexible, discontinuous model of film exhibition: the ability to openly (and collaboratively) interact with the films. Describing her “series of touching little adventures with the people who sit near you,” Vorse recounts listening to a woman in a Jewish neighborhood theater “so rapt and entranced with what was happening . . . that her voice accompanied all that happened”; then listening in on a group of young men in an Italian theater as they engage in ethical debates about the films they are watching.6 Vorse’s narrative reminds us that these silent films were always mediated in complex ways, not only by the theatrical apparatus of lecturers, musical accompaniment, and program notes, but more immediately by the interaction by the audience. These were audiences who took their films the way they consumed their Sunday comics supplements, dime novels, and story papers: they carried them about the city, shared their stories, speculated on outcomes, weaved them into their daily lives. By 1912, film had decidedly turned away from the comic form and the discontinuous serial narrative, as we saw in Chapter 1. However, the shift to the feature film was motivated at least as much by the desire on the part of p ­ roducers for market control and product differentiation as by any demands from audiences. Studios such as Pathé and Biograph had been working to “brand” their products, but they were struggling to convince exhibitors that the Pathé rooster or the circled “AB” represented enough of a difference in quality and guaranteed profits to justify differential pricing. The exchanges continued to sell film by the foot, and as far as both distributors and exhibitors were concerned, it was a system that was working just fine. The shift from shorts to “features” was therefore motivated initially not by audiences or by exhibitors, but by the desire of the producers to exercise greater control over the emerging economics of the industry. Beginning in 1909, Vita­ graph began experimenting with multiple-reel films, getting around the official ban on multiple-reel films by releasing the films serially, one week apart. As Eileen Bowser points out, while this may seem a bizarre practice from our perspective, it “was probably less strange to a public accustomed to the issuance of novels in weekly parts in periodicals.”7 But even five-reel “epics” like the 1910 Life of Moses remained for the most part tableau films, since they had to be intelligible to audiences who might see the reels serially in a first-run theater a week apart, but also adaptable to second-run theaters that might choose to

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run the reels together as a Sunday event, or break them up for scenes and short reels. These early narrative features, as Bowser has shown, were for the most part serial scenes, “variations on a repetitive theme,” such that “the film may be lengthened or shortened, without altering the narrative conception.”8 Even as producers began to push the feature, it remained very much a serial, remix culture; despite the visibility of multi-reel features in the new decade, single-reel productions remained dominant well into 1912. In fact, producers initially met with resistance when they began producing multi-reel films, forcing them to launch a campaign to convince exhibitors that it was in their best interest to go along with the shift. Eventually, however, the promises to exhibitors of Broadway ticket prices, five-week engagements, and, perhaps most powerfully, of transforming nickelodeons into “legitimate” theaters, proved very hard for most to resist. Nonetheless, conversion to the feature remained slow and uneven, in part because many spectators resented the submission required by the feature: no longer could they mix and match their films in a “moving-picture debauch”: the five-reel feature demanded synchronicity with exhibition schedules and a commitment of an evening to one film, one theater. Well past 1910, exhibitors complained that they had trouble keeping audiences in their seats for multi-reel features. After all, the majority of theaters still only had one projector, and so there was always a pause between reels, essentially redividing the text the producers wished to unify into serial units. Earlier, such gaps between reels had not been a problem, as live entertainment or illustrated songs could fill this space between titles. But in a film whose narrative continued over many reels, audiences were just as likely to walk away as to wait to see how the story came out. The producers reassured exhibitors that individual reels were edited using tricks learned from periodical serial fiction: “The scenes are curtailed always at a point of keenest interest in just such a manner as are the different portions of a serial story,” Motion Picture News promised in 1913, “just when the suspense is greatest and the imaginative system is keyed up to the highest, the vision is cut off, leaving the onlooker at a tension of irresistible curiosity.”9 Screenwriting manuals began to mandate this focus on the “crisis” at the end of each reel. One guide from 1914 insists that each reel must end “with the introduction of a new complication that necessitates an entirely new line of treatment. It is literally ‘continued in our next’”; for example, “the first reel ends with the climacteric situation showing our heroine really won heart and soul by the unprincipled villain,” thus providing “constructive foundation for another reel.”10 The fact that a second reel had to be justified is a reminder of how unnatural multi-reel films remained in 1914. As late as 1916 another screenwriting guide advises that

Serial Pleasures, 1907–1938

“each part of the story . . . should end on an acute crisis,” since “many houses run on a single machine and here the reels must be changed on one machine, necessitating a stop, and it is well to stop at a point where interest may be held through unsatisfied curiosity just as the ‘To be continued in our next’ always falls at the seemingly most irritating point.”11 That same year, a producer for Paramount was equally emphatic: “In writing a five-reel feature plot very much the same procedure might be employed as in planning a five-part magazine ­serial. Magazine editors and authors know the importance of the ‘curtain’ at the end of each installment—the dramatic scene split in two, followed by the usual ‘To Be Continued’ notice, which rouses the interest and curiosity of the reader to the extent of purchasing the next issue.”12 Even as these screenwriting manuals and producers were making repeated analogies to serial periodical fiction, however, they were also surely keenly aware of the fundamental differences. Unlike movie producers after 1912, authors and publishers of serial periodical fiction never imagined that they could lock down the reader’s attention (or body) between installments. Part of the messy pleasure of serial forms from The Pickwick Papers (1836) on was the kinds of interactions made possible by the gaps between episodes, by the overlapping serialized stories, and by the range of paratexts and intertexts that made periodical fiction so ideally suited to the transforming urban landscape of the nineteenth century. II Despite Seldes’s nostalgia for the first serial films that emerged after 1912, it is important to note that these films—what are often termed “adult serials,” to differentiate them from the Saturday matinee series of the 1930s and 1940s—are not so very different on a formal level than the multi-reel features being produced at the same time. They follow similar, increasingly codified models of editing, lighting, and cinematography, and on the level of scenic analysis one would be hard pressed to make clear distinctions between serials and feature films in 1914. But if both the long-form narrative cinema and the serial cinema that emerge at the same time share a certain genetic code, their differences become therefore more meaningful and help us get to the heart of serial storytelling in the new media of film and comics. The most obvious difference, and the one most often highlighted in studies of the silent serials, is the striking centrality of strong female protagonists to these films. Beginning with Edison’s What Happened to Mary? (1912) the “serial queen” was at the center of these films. And contrary to the popular image of heroines in melodrama, these women were resourceful, powerful, athletic, and

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smart. They often openly resist marriage, and they seek out thrills and dangers from which their male counterparts shrink. As Ben Singer puts it, “Few, if any, popular-­culture commodities in the early decades of the twentieth century showcased the novelty and dynamism of the New Woman as vividly as ‘the serialqueen melodrama.’”13 These films explicitly addressed female viewers at a time when cinema was aggressively courting men, and equally important, they were marketed to and consumed by working-class women at a time when producers were trying to transform film into a proper middle-class form of entertainment. The other feature of these serial films that distinguishes them from their feature-length cousin is, of course, their exploitation of the discontinuities of the serial form—discontinuities that features were actively working to close off. These serials are anti-“classical” texts in almost every way, foregrounding narrative discontinuity, intertextuality, antirealism, and the media apparatus required to turn these films into “events.” As Shelley Stamp puts it, “Serials promoted heterogeneous forms of consumption that contravened the most fundamental dictates of classical cinema, which stressed a closed text and a contemplative, isolated film-spectator relationship. Serials, on the contrary, offered multiple sites for consumption, most of which were located outside the space of the theater; and they encouraged viewers to see themselves as part of a community of fans . . . , rather than as isolated ‘spectators.’”14 The first serial, What Happened to Mary? is a good case in point. Here ­Edison Pictures teamed up with McClure’s working-woman’s magazine, ­Ladies World, to present and promote the serial across the two media. As with Edison’s borrowings from serial comics the previous decade, the alliance with ­serial magazines was an attempt by the fledgling industry to capitalize on serial massmedia audiences. The premise of this first serial was familiar to readers who had grown up with storypapers and other serialized magazine fiction of the previous generation: a young heiress is kidnapped at birth and raised by her kidnappers in the Chesapeake, ultimately escaping to New York, where her adventures begin in earnest. Perhaps less familiar to readers and viewers of Mary’s serial adventures, however, was the fact that Mary did not want to be rescued: in fact, she eagerly sought out new adventures and careers—actress, business woman, international spy, and detective. As she declares in the 1913 novelization of her adventures, “I want to sample all kinds of different life, and I want the biggest samples cut.”15 Such a promise for the predominantly working-class female audiences is what made the film a smash success: sampling as adventure. Even as producers were looking to make themselves increasingly autonomous in feature film, the serials openly encouraged audiences to move between media. The film adventures of Mary encouraged its audiences to read the in-

Serial Pleasures, 1907–1938

stallments in the Ladies World and the magazine illustrated its chapters with scenes from the most recent installment of the film. And for its audience, few of whom would have experienced Mary in precisely the same order as their friends, the complex work of putting the pieces together invited speculation and collaboration that the producers openly encouraged. Edison and the editors of Ladies World invited their shared audience to participate in the process, asking “What would you do?” and holding contests among readers for the best answer to the question of what will happen to Mary next. Like Happy Hooligan and Buster Brown in the previous decade, Mary became a true cross-media celebrity and Mary Fuller became one of the film industry’s first true “stars.” As Stamp puts it, “Encouraged to connect together various versions of the story available in print tie-ins and on screen, asked to sustain their engagement over multiple installments, and invited to enhance their enjoyment by cultivating an interest in the star’s private life, fans become the central catalyst in any serial narrative.”16 Even as narrative film was working to manufacture an increasingly captive audience, the serials were mobilizing an active audience to engage the narrative across multiple media, participating in the process of making meaning (and even plot) out of these serial pieces. Today we tend to think of the serials as the embarrassing relative of legitimate cinema, the products of Poverty Row studios and audiences too young or uneducated to know the difference. But in the silent era, serials were headline business and largely geared toward adult audiences. As McClure’s reported in November 1913, “Mary is a national character, and her adventures in search of fortune and honest relatives have been the cause of much increased heart action and many a stifled sob in magazine and cinematograph audiences from California to Maine.”17 The success of Mary inspired William Selig to negotiate with the Chicago Tribune to coordinate production of The Adventures of ­Kathlyn (1913), starring Kathlyn Williams, and a wave of similar partnerships between producers and publishers followed, most famously (largely because the serial has survived relatively intact) William Randolph Hearst’s collaboration with Pathé in making the Perils of Pauline. Shifting from monthly magazine to newspaper was a logical move: the newspapers offered the most powerful mass-media network at the time, epitomized by the Sunday supplements with their syndicated serial fiction and comic strip series. Further, motion picture producers had long been trying to change the attitudes of newspaper publishers toward the young film industry, which the press had rather pointedly ignored for its first decade. Following the success of the first several partnerships, newspapers began adding columns, even sections, devoted to covering the movie business and the emerging phenomenon of film celebrity—especially,

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of course, the serials themselves. Thus even as the film industry was courting a new middle-class national audience, it was ironically the serials that did more to bring film to a full national consciousness during the transitional period before the solidification of the studio system. For example, the New York Morning Telegraph’s pioneering film coverage from 1914 to 1915 devoted considerable attention to serial productions and marked no distinction in terms of prestige or importance between the feature and the serial productions. If anything, the column for January 10, 1915, seems to suggest that the serials were where the interest lay. A range of serials are discussed—Trey of Hearts (1914), the ongoing Master Key (1914), and the upcoming Black Box (1915)—offering us insight into the complications involved in coordinating print and film serializations: “As the story of the black box is to appear as a serial in the newspapers, it was necessary that the scenario writer and the author confer, as too often there is action in a story that could not possibly be adapted to the camera, and this is the first instance where the scenario is to be written first and the story afterward.”18 Such coordination, of course, was never exact, and in attempting to work together across media, serial filmmakers and publishers learned more about the unique properties of each medium. But in the gap between the two versions, as much as in the overlap, audiences were put to work, arguing over which version they liked better, filling in details for friends who had only seen only one version of the last installment, predicting how the current predicament would be differently resolved in film and print, and so on. What Vicki Callahan has termed the “mode of uncertainty” promoted by the silent serials—the anxiety, the interruptions, the long gaps of not knowing—were in fact one source of the pleasure audiences took in these texts, and they were empowered by the producers in the many competitions these ­serials generated to fill in those gaps with ideas of their own (Figure 16).19 As one University of Chicago undergraduate remembered his engagement with the serials a few years earlier, the serials were as much about the space in between as they were about the screen time: “We discussed pro and con all the probabilities of the manner in which the hero would escape the terrible predicament the villain plunged him into just before the ‘To Be Continued Next Week’ caption was flashed on the screen. We conjectured upon the identity of the ‘mysterious rider’ and prophesied the downfall of the villains.”20 And it was this energy that the producers sought to capitalize on, asking the audience for solutions to particular mysteries and producing entire serials based on scenarios generated by serial contests. Even the name of the first serial and its sequel—What Happened to Mary? and Who Will Marry Mary?—were open-ended questions inviting audiences to participate in the work of answering the overarching question.

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In fact almost all the promotions for the early serials were explicitly interactive, encouraging a blurring of the lines of identification not only between audience and star but between audience and writers and filmmakers. A giveaway for the occult serial Mysteries of Myra (1916), for example, offered a special mystical device that allowed users to ask their own questions of the spirit world, promising that “under the influence of certain people of particularly nervous temperament,” the device would be especially effective.21 The campaign for Pearl of the Army (1916) even went so far as to plant false news stories about an

Figure 16.  Washington Times, June 27, 1914.

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international spy and called on readers for information “regarding a man of foreign appearance” who had absconded with “a package of vitally important papers and documents.”22 But the blurring of fact and fiction, news and advertising, would have shocked no one growing up with a penny-press culture that had long taken pleasure in such promotional hoaxes, beginning with the New York Sun’s “Great Moon Hoax” in which the “discovery” of life on the moon was reported over the course of several days in 1835. And in truth, part of the pleasure of the serials was the pleasure of the event, of becoming part of the news, part of the story. Alongside the serialized adventures of Kathlyn, for example, the Tribune serialized the story of the audience itself, reporting on the swelling crowds, describing the inevitable heartbreak of readers who found themselves without an installment due to the high demand for the story. Beneath a still from the second installment of the serial showing Kathlyn “bound as human bait in a tiger trap” is a thrilling account of the tragic “enormous shortage of Sunday tribunes” and the “thousands of people . . . unable to get a copy.”23 The adventure of getting to the films, negotiating the crowds, tracking down the elusive copy, all works to make the audience part of the story: their success in getting the paper, waiting in line to see the film, correctly guessing the solution to the mystery, or proposing a sequel for the heroine’s adventures—all of this serves to make their identification with the heroine interactive and complex in ways that, say, Mary Pickford in Tess of the Storm Country (1914) did not. And like the serial queens themselves, audiences were aware that they too were always at risk of being “too late.” “You can’t afford not to read this enthralling story of love and wild adventure and intrigue,” the Tribune reported. “No man or woman can claim to keep pace with the times and not read this story.”24 Just as the papers published stills from the movie versions of the serialization, newspapers and other print media are everywhere inside the silent ­serials themselves. In Perils of Pauline, for example, as Pauline thwarts one after another of her evil guardian’s attempts to do away with her, she becomes a newspaper celebrity because of her exploits. More explicitly, we can see this foregrounding of the newspaper itself in the 1916 serial Beatrice Fairfax. Beatrice Fairfax (Marie Manning) was one of the true celebrities of turn-of-the-century newspaper culture, the pioneer of the “lonely hearts” advice column. The serial capitalized on the celebrity of this persona, but also on the serial form Manning had helped pioneer in her advice columns. In each episode of the serial, Beatrice receives a letter from one of the many lovelorn of the city; at the same time, in a seemingly disconnected plot, her friend Jimmy, a reporter for Hearst’s Evening Journal, is on assignment tracking down some notorious criminal. The two seemingly unrelated plot lines—“private” and “public”—inevitably converge, and part of

Serial Pleasures, 1907–1938

the pleasure of the series is guessing at the connections that will bring them together. For example, in the second episode, “Adventure of the Jealous Wife,” Beatrice receives a letter from a woman whose husband is sneaking out at all hours of the night and depleting their savings. Meanwhile, Jimmy has been assigned to investigate the Black Hand, a mysterious crime organization preying on immigrants and the poor, and the husband turns out to be one of the Black Hand’s victims. The Black Hand’s blackmail has isolated the husband even from his own family, while the wife’s letters to Beatrice Fairfax serve to reconnect her to the larger community, leading her to team up with Beatrice to rescue the husband and help bring the Black Hand to justice.25 The third episode, “Billy’s Romance,” makes perhaps the most explicit use of the serial fiction traditions from which these films descend. Here young Billy, employed by the telegraph company, is hopelessly in love with a judge’s daughter. Billy is also a devotee of the storypapers (this episode affords us with a rare opportunity to see the ways in which these serials were folded and carried out into the city), marking him as an unlikely match. But Billy’s storypapers and his dedication to Beatrice Fairfax’s column in the paper is also what inspires the daydreams by which he imaginatively accomplishes all that his social position would make impossible. Here again, crime and romance intersect, bringing the seemingly gendered worlds of the newspaper—front-page news and advice columns—into a union that is secured anew each episode. In this episode, young Billy teams up with Beatrice to rescue the judge’s daughter from a kidnapping attempt, in the process securing him the hero’s role about which he had previously only dreamed. The episode ends with an iris shot on Billy in the telegraph office, and we are teased into wondering if the whole adventure had only been a daydream like his earlier fantasy of rescuing his beloved from the Indians. But of course, by writing to Beatrice Fairfax, Billy’s daydreams are now realities, and like the audience who actively engaged with The Adventures of Kathlyn, Billy finds himself the hero of the story. This is the fantasy the serial encouraged: that by writing in you could be a collaborator in the production of the serial narratives, and by actively reading you could be a collaborator in the adventures themselves. And in the partnership between film studios and newspapers that was central to most of the serials produced in the silent era, numerous spaces were opened up for both the fantasy of collaboration and for a more meaningful role in the form of the numerous contests inviting readers to contribute ideas for a conclusion or a sequel. But as my description makes clear, Beatrice Fairfax was a series of relatively autonomous episodes. That is, one’s ability to enjoy and understand “Billy’s

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Romance” did not depend in any real measure on having seen the previous installment, “Adventure of the Jealous Wife.” If serial films like Beatrice Fairfax were essentially a series of self-contained episodes, like the dime novel of the late nineteenth century, films like What Happened to Mary? or Perils of Pauline were self-contained series, like the serialized novels of the nineteenth-century storypaper, in which the ability to understand what happened in one installment depended to a great degree on having seen or read the previous episode. At around this same time, however, in the pages of the very papers collaborating on these serial films, an entirely different model of seriality was emerging, one which would have a transformative impact on twentieth-century storytelling. III Comics had begun to experiment with long-form narrative as early as 1904, when Frederick Burr Opper sent Happy Hooligan on a European voyage that extended over several months. And in 1906, the fledgling Chicago Tribune comics section, eager to compete with the Hearst syndicate, published Lyonel Feininger’s Kin-der-Kids, which told the story of a motley group of kids on a journey around the world in a bathtub. But without question the most famous and influential of the early serial story strips was Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo, which began in 1905, telling the story of a boy who is transported each night to Slumberland. While each episode would be interrupted by poor Nemo falling out of bed and waking himself up, he would return the following night to his proper place in the ongoing narrative—the storyworld of Slumberland having paused, waiting for his return. With Nemo, McCay had stumbled onto something decidedly new. This was not a series or a conventionally serialized narrative with a logical terminus. Neither was it a series with self-contained narratives around a recurring set of characters. Unlike serial narratives like the round-the-world adventures of Happy, which primarily served to provide new backdrops for the familiar routines of Hooligan and his companions, there was no logical endpoint to the series. There was, in fact, no reason it need ever end nor any economic incentive for the series’ publishers (the New York Herald and, after 1911, Hearst’s New York American) to want it to do so. The difference is clearest when comparing Nemo to the strips McCay had created only one year earlier, Little Sammy Sneeze and Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend. Sammy Sneeze was a series typical for its day in terms of its content (though certainly not in terms of its graphic innovations): here the young protagonist causes mischief or destruction (even, famously, to the panels themselves) through his devastating sneeze. As with other gag cartoons which dominated

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the first decade of the comic strip, the fun lay in seeing how Sammy would get into trouble each time. Rarebit Fiend, on the other hand, experimented with a recurring scenario—the hallucinogenic effects of eating late-night Welsh rarebit (or other indulgences)—but with different characters in each installment. Nemo was the first strip to offer consistent characters in an ongoing, openended serial narrative. While vestiges of the gag formula of course remained in Nemo’s rude awakening at the end of each installment, here the gag was subservient to the serial narrative and served, in fact, to heighten the audience’s identification with Nemo. Like Nemo, the reader has to wait (for sleep in Nemo’s case, for the next Sunday supplement in the reader’s) to return to Slumberland to continue the adventures. One Sunday installment on October 7, 1906, for example, picked up the narrative of Nemo and the Princess’s seemingly endless and endlessly complicated trip to attend a royal carnival (Figure 17). Here the moment of awakening comes when the track on which they are hurtling comes to an abrupt end, leaving them careening out into open space. It is impossible not to note that the track on which the car races closely resembles a piece of coiled filmstrip, including the sprocket holes (which were often circular in 1906 before standardization of film stock). Clearly, McCay understood that his approach to storytelling in Nemo was doing something radically different, a difference he figures in relationship to film and the finite limitations of the media in 1906, especially when it came to the kind of serial narrative he was experimenting with here. Nonetheless, Nemo was not a tremendous success in its own day, and its formula would not be adapted widely for almost a decade. Part of the challenges facing Nemo, in fact, had to do with a fundamental temporal difference between character and reader. While Nemo was returning to Slumberland each

Figure 17.  From Little Nemo in Slumberland, New York Herald, October 7, 1906.

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night to continue his adventures, his readers had to wait a full week for the next Sunday installment. Although newspapers were themselves ongoing, openended serials published daily, the comic strip at this time remained relegated to the Sunday supplement. To take McCay’s narrative experiments further clearly required a comic strip that could more fully exploit the open-ended seriality of the daily newspaper. The first successful daily narrative strip was Bud Fisher’s A. Mutt (later Mutt and Jeff ), which launched in 1907, borrowing from a formula tried with little success by Clare Briggs a few years earlier in A. Piker Clerk. Fisher’s A. Mutt followed the daily fortunes of an unscrupulous (and frankly unlikable) racetrack junkie as he repeatedly invests his family’s meager fortunes on the track. The first strip begins with Mutt reading the San Francisco Chronicle and coming to the realization that he was “a bum for working for $10 a week. I see here where a guy copped a million on the track.” In the background of this first panel, a newsboy hawks the Chronicle. Reading the paper, Mutt then gets some “inside info[]” on the basis of which he invests his wife’s savings at the track. The final panel invites us to check in to “see what Mr. Mutt does for himself in tomorrow’s Chronicle.”26 While the premise of A. Mutt might not seem promising to a modern reader, the strip was a tremendous success almost immediately. A couple of facts help us see why. First, A. Mutt ran in the sports pages of the Chronicle, right alongside box scores, headlines, and, most relevantly, the official odds on the upcoming races at the track. The horses Mutt was betting on from day one were real horses running in actual races of that day. When Fisher invited his readers to come back tomorrow to see how it turned out, he was encouraging them to participate in the fictional ups-and-downs of his cartoon gambler, based on actual races whose results they could read about in the news the next day. Each day, Fisher would report the state of Mutt’s bankroll, magically replenishing his pot when he ran dry, and encouraging his readers to serve as Mutt’s co-conspirators, rooting for the horses he bets on, often for completely absurd reasons. The sports page therefore was not merely the site where the strip was published (to differentiate it from comics directed often toward family audiences in the Sunday supplements); it was integral to the strip’s meaning and to the reading experience of A. Mutt. For example, in the Chronicle on March 2, 1908, Mutt is descending from a previous adventure with the aid of an umbrella when he overhears a woman comment on his appearance as he falls: “He’s almost as big a tramp as ­Hooligan.” Grabbing his wife’s purse, he immediately makes a break for the track where he places “$20 each way on Hooligan.” Immediately below the strip can be

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seen “The ‘Chronicle’ Handicap” for the day’s races, including, in the fifth race, “Hooligan,” jockeyed by J. A. Armstrong and predicted to “finish strong at this distance” but not strong enough to beat the handicapper’s favorites. Reading the strip, therefore, involved the whole of the sports page (as well as a knowledge of the cartoon star of the rival Examiner, Happy Hooligan), and required a return the following day to find out how Mutt fared in his long-shot wager (not surprisingly, he lost). The play of the strip also depended on finding out how Mutt would make a connection between something said in the course of his day, often as an offhand remark, and the name of a horse who happened to be running in an upcoming race, as listed in the handicapping odds. As it happens, this particular strip was not by Bud Fisher at all, but by Russ Westover. Hearst, “stunned at the continuing jump in the Chronicle’s street sales and subscriptions,” had lured Fisher to the Examiner, and for a brief time each paper had A. Mutt running daily in their sports pages using identical formulas.27 There was of course nothing surprising in this; after all, a similar cartoon war had marked the emergence of the very first strip celebrity, as both Pulitzer and Hearst offered versions of the Yellow Kid in their New York papers in 1896. But Fisher had snuck a copyright notice into his last strip for the Chronicle, which the paper had unknowingly printed, ultimately securing to Fisher owner­ship of his strip with Hearst as part of his new contract. By June 1908, therefore, the Chronicle realized that it had been hoodwinked, and Westover ended his run on the strip by killing off Mutt in the Chronicle. Once Hearst had Mutt all to himself, he began looking for ways to get him off the local sports page and into national syndication. This was a challenge for a number of reasons. As an entirely local strip, A. Mutt had been able to focus on local issues and on the current day’s news (or more specifically, races). Syndication would require both a much longer lead in terms of writing the strips and the need to break away from local races (horse races and political races alike), which would not be of interest to readers in other cities. The trick, Fisher discovered, was to go from merely interacting with the news to actually being the news. In 1908, a manhunt was launched for Mutt for robbing $2.60 from a payphone (a crime that would eventually result in Mutt’s first meeting with his longtime companion, Jeff). Now the daily suspense of the strip lay not in finding out whether the horse Mutt had bet on would win but in following the headlines that splashed across the strip itself: “police are connecting mutt with other crimes. ­fugitive may be in akron, ohio.” Increasingly, the trials and adventures of Mutt would be reported in papers across the nation as if they were news. By 1910, Mutt and Jeff could be found in the daily paper, not only in the comic strips and the occasional news headline, but also in advertisements for

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the growing number of vaudeville shows and films based on the comic as well as local restaurants and vaudeville houses named in their honor (Biloxi, Mississippi, alone had two barber shops named after the pair). It was not uncommon for a paper to advertise the showing of the Mutt and Jeff films at a theater named the Mutt and Jeff, even on the same page of the paper featuring the latest installment of the Mutt and Jeff cartoon itself. Syndication thus made Mutt and Jeff simultaneously a national and a local feature of the news—not only in the naming of local landmarks and businesses after the cartoon celebrities, but in the comparison of local politicians and scandals to their serial adventures (the “state press seems to be trying to develop a Mutt and a Jeff out of the ­bilious condition of the state land board,” the Idaho Statesman mused in 1910).28 At the same time, fictional events in the comic strip were reported as news, as when papers across the country announced in March 1911, “It has been learned that A. Mutt and Little Jeff, two well-known characters who have been prominent the last few days in Mexican troubles, are safe.”29 Mutt and Jeff had come up with the brilliant idea of joining the Mexican Revolution in order to “get all we want to eat,” with the added benefit that “if they win we’ll get a fat government job.”30 Over the next several weeks, the strip chronicled their adventures—first in attempting to get to Mexico to join the revolution, and then in struggling to survive it. And the events recorded on the frontpage headlines began to intersect with the strip on the sports page. For example, the same day that the strip declared “Mutt and Jeff a Bit Sore on the Mexican Revolution” because the revolution was too “tame,” the front page headline declared: “Fear of Death of Diaz Cause of Army Movement. U.S. Believed to be Preparing for Intervention in Mexico.”31 In truth, American investment in Mexico had grown exponentially in the previous two decades, and no one was more invested than William Randolph Hearst, who owned roughly seven million acres at the outset of the revolution in 1910. It was surprising to no one when Hearst and his papers began calling for annexation.32 Nor was it surprising that Hearst comics would find themselves caught up in the fierce debate over the extent to which the United States should in fact get involved in Mexico to protect U.S. corporate interests and investments. The Los Angeles Herald had just a few months earlier ridiculed Hearst’s campaign for governor of New York by imagining a ticket with Mutt as secretary of state, Jeff as comptroller and Happy Hooligan as state treasurer.33 For many readers such a ticket might well have been an appealing one. Indeed, while the Herald’s satirical attack on Hearst was made by ridiculing the distinction between the mogul’s politics and the comic characters in his newspapers, the distinction between the front-page news and the comics was breaking down

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as never before, sometimes with rather alarming consequences, as when three teenagers absconded on an adventure to Mexico armed with their fathers’ revolvers in order to follow in Mutt and Jeff ’s footsteps: “Mutt and Jeff Lilliputians Armed to the Teeth,” the Macon Telegraph reported upon their recovery.34 And so the joke playing in the papers in March 1911 was in many ways a joke, not at the expense of Mutt and Jeff, but at the expense of saber rattling along the border: “There is a well founded rumor here that mobilization on American troops may have been decided on to protect these two distinguished American citizens,” the Macon Telegraph reported.35 Or, as the Idaho Statesman asked the question: “Will it transpire that President Taft sent all those soldiers to the Mexican border to save Mutt and Jeff?”36 To be clear, the confusion of comics and news was not a sign of the ignorance of the readers, any more than the tales of viewers running from the Lumières’ arriving train was evidence of their inability to distinguish cinematic locomotive from a real one. Yet the pleasure that readers took in engaging with their comic characters as if they were historical figures is in many ways unique to the serial comic strip that emerged after 1910 with Mutt and Jeff and to the daily newspaper in which it took place. Happy Hooligan was in every way a celebrity, and on anniversaries he might be celebrated at a banquet in his honor as if he were real, but these were always first and foremost honors for his creator, Frederick Burr Opper. But beginning with Mutt and Jeff and the daily comic serial, something began to change. Here the serial adventures of the characters became as much a subject of suspense and daily interest as the possibility of war with Mexico or the political scandals being covered on the front page. In the end, however, Fisher was not deeply interested in experimenting with the narrative possibilities opened up by such direct interactions with the front page of the daily paper, and within a short time after signing a lucrative deal with the Wheeler syndicate (a rare moment in which Hearst was scooped by a rival), Fisher seemed to lose interest in the strip, turning it over to ghosts and frequently relying on straightforward vaudeville gags and physical comedy to sustain the strip from day to day. But others had been paying close attention. Chief among these was Hearst’s rival, Joseph Medill Patterson, copublisher with his cousin Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune and, after 1919, the New York Daily News. IV As Robert C. Harvey puts it, “If he didn’t invent the story strip, Patterson certainly midwifed at its birth and nursed it into infancy.”37 Beginning with its first continuity comic, The Gumps, in 1917, Patterson’s Tribune would become home

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to the defining serial strips of this second generation of comics, including Gasoline Alley (1918), Harold Teen (1919), Moon Mullins (1923) Little Orphan Annie (1925), Dick Tracy (1931), and Terry and the Pirates (1934). As Michele Hilmes argues, “The role of newspapers, the Chicago Tribune in particular, as important innovators in comic, film, and radio serials is an overlooked topic in media history. . . . The newspaper is the original serial form: appearing daily, openended, and with many recurring features.”38 In working with Selig to serialize The Adventures of Kathlyn in early 1914, Patterson had seen firsthand the ways in which serial narrative was ideally suited to the newspaper. And unlike the filmmakers with whom the Tribune collaborated on Kathlyn and several other silent serials, Patterson’s paper had the ability not only to serialize the story but to make the serialization itself a major news story in the paper: “Crowds Besiege Kathlyn Shows,” a headline announced on January 17, “Police Called to Guard Crowds.”39 As the first major newspaper publisher to embrace the film serial, Patterson saw that the newspaper had something to offer audiences hungry for these kinds of stories that the movies could not: the ability to interact with the story, to ask questions, predict answers, offer opinions. He began opening more space to covering film gossip and correspondence from readers about celebrities and their favorite films—all of which provided further opportunity to promote Kathlyn. “Answers to Movie Fans,” “Gossip of Movie Plays and Players,” and other columns are all examples of this kind of transmedia conversation. And as we saw earlier, the newspaper opened other kinds of spaces for interaction, offering, for example, a ten-thousand-dollar prize to the reader who could provide the best solution to the Tribune’s next big serial, The Million Dollar Mystery (see Figure 16).40 That newspaper publishers understood seriality makes sense. After all, the newspaper was an open-ended serial form, as the pioneering publishers of the penny press had discovered in the previous century. Each day readers turned to the newspaper to find out what had happened next in the trial of the murderer, the campaign for high office, the brewing tensions between two imperial powers, and so on. The newspaper story was by definition one that never ended; but it was also a form that could guarantee no continuity, as stories were regularly dropped, threads lost in the cacophony of events and political upheavals. The serial promised a way to bring to the newspaper the continuities and structures that the media intrinsically lacked. But even as Patterson was developing new arrangements with movie studios, the limitations of movie serials also became clear. Movie serials, like the storypapers of the previous century, had to end; more urgently, movie serials depended on expensive collaborations with movie studios and flesh-and-blood celebrities like Kathlyn Williams. What

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Patterson and the Tribune cartoonists he fostered developed, therefore, was a means of combining the unique open-ended serial form of the daily paper with the focused narrative of the movie serial or serialized novel. It is hard, perhaps, for us to appreciate the innovation of the open-ended serial narrative, so ubiquitous did it become once it was adopted by radio and television later in the twentieth century. When it is acknowledged at all, openended seriality is most commonly associated with the soap opera in radio and especially in television. And yet it began in the newspaper comic strip, first with Mutt and Jeff, but then more fully developed in Sidney Smith’s The Gumps and the serial strips that followed at the Tribune. And, it must be reiterated, it is a form of storytelling that simply did not exist before the twentieth century and could not have existed without the daily audiences and publication schedule of the newspaper. Like several of the strips nurtured at the Tribune, the initial idea for The Gumps was Patterson’s. A man whose sensibilities were divided between his wealthy upbringing and his socialist politics, Patterson had what could best be described as a love-hate relationship with his readers, whom he often referred to as “gumps.” Smith’s assignment was to develop a strip for and about “gumps,” the ordinary folks who bought Patterson’s papers, wrote angry letters to the editor, waited in line to see The Adventures of Kathlyn, and wondered where the money for the next rent check was coming from.41 Introducing the Gumps in 1917, Smith described an ordinary family living in a very modest home. Andy is a chinless wonder, bearing a passing similarity to A. Mutt but, unlike Mutt, fiercely devoted to his family; his wife, Min, is a loving, strong woman trying to find a way to keep the family afloat despite ­Andy’s propensity for get-rich-quick schemes. For its first year, the strip focused on the everyday travails of raising a family, paying bills, the tedium of having beans for supper every night, and the challenges of trying to catch an elusive mouse. With the exception of some ongoing challenges—the aforementioned mouse, or the difficulties of hiring a housekeeper when all the candidates are wealthier than the Gumps—there is little in the first year of the strip to suggest the serial form that it would soon take. Actually, there was one early sign. In the first year, Smith began incorporating the Tribune’s celebrity columnist, Ring Lardner, into the strip by having Lardner move next door to the fictional Gumps. A recurring joke emerges, in which Lardner is regularly borrowing items from the Gumps and dumping his trash into their yard. When Smith begins needling Lardner in his strip, Lardner in turn begins poking fun at Smith in his own column, “In the Wake of the News.” While on one level this interaction between the two continued the kinds

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of interaction opened up by A. Mutt’s conversation with the racing news on the sports pages, it was also of a different order. Both Lardner’s column and Smith’s strip existed on the sports pages, and as in the earlier example from A. Mutt, the reader was encouraged to move back and forth between the two and to share in the fellowship and gentle ribbing. But unlike the Chronicle’s handicaps for the upcoming races, which of course could give no thought to what was happening in Fisher’s strip, Lardner’s column responded directly to the joke of making him a neighbor to the Gumps. The day after he is first introduced in The Gumps, for example, Lardner replies to Andy Gump’s complaint that “old Lardner’s been over here again borrowin’ things,” by insisting that “Lardner is not old.”42 Meanwhile, on the facing page, Andy is complaining to Min about her lack of economy while she tries to read an article in the day’s paper, inviting the reader to imagine that Min is in fact reading Lardner commenting on Andy’s comments about both his age and his tendency to borrow the Gumps out of house and home. In October, Smith again pokes at neighbor Lardner for being a slob and an ingrate; two days later, Lardner fires back, making fun of an episode of The Gumps in which Smith made recourse to a tired old vaudeville routine for his punchline. As Lardner sardonically imagines the scene following the publication of that strip: “Probably no cartoon of recent years caused as widespread discussion as yesterday morning’s Gumps. On every Loop street corner crowds gathered to talk it over and the traffic policemen frequently had to use force to clear the sidewalks.”43 And what these crowds are furiously debating, Lardner teases, is the identity of the original author of this old routine appropriated by Smith: Columbus? Nero? Cain? The intertextual play here is fairly complex, for all the relative simplicity of the banter. Lardner has been introduced as a character in the fictional universe of The Gumps; Lardner in turn has made “news” out of the Gumps in his column, “In the Wake of the News,” including fictional accounts of crowds gathered to debate what was an uncharacteristically weak installment in the early strip. Of course, by reporting on such “crowds” and the police required to hold them back, Lardner is also referencing the public hysteria regularly described in the Tribune surrounding the release of a new movie serial. In wryly imagining such crowds greeting Smith’s recourse to the decidedly un-serial asylum gag, Lardner is playfully pointing out how little the reader is engaged by the gaga-day format that had dominated the comic strip from its earliest day. Sidney Smith responded to the force of Lardner’s playful critique by suddenly beginning a radical shift in the direction of the strip away from the gag-a-day format of its first year to the structure that would come to define not only his series

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but the daily comic strip for the coming decades. Lardner’s joke about crowds gathering to debate an episode of The Gumps would very soon become a reality. Just a few weeks later, Smith introduces a new character, the mysterious Uncle Bim, and begins the strip’s first significant ongoing storyline. 1918 opens with the deepening mystery as to the true identity of Uncle Bim and the whereabouts of his rumored fortune. And as the story grows more complex, Smith starts ending many of his individual strips with “to be continued,” while beginning the next installment with a summary of the story so far. Whereas A. Mutt’s daily interaction with the racing form required readers to read the sports page intertextually from day to day, increasingly The Gumps makes even more rigorous demands on its readers, requiring them to keep track daily of ongoing plot developments, a complex roster of characters, and changing fortunes over the course of several weeks. Is Uncle Bim actually a forger, as a wanted poster seems to suggest? Is the nurse at the hospital where he is taken after being robbed of ten thousand dollars out to steal his hand and his fortune from under the Gumps’ very noses? What is in the mysterious satchel that is locked up in Uncle Bim’s room? Who is the man in black following Min? The questions pile up, day after day, and unlike situations in A. Mutt they remain maddeningly unresolved. But far from expressing anger at the sudden shift in The Gumps, readers begin to write in to offer theories or demand answers. One reader, for example, writes to Lardner on February 2 declaring himself “wild to know if Uncle Bim is really Uncle Bim and how the thing is going to turn out. I wish you would ascertain from Mr. Smith and tell me on the side.” Lardner, clearly delighted with Smith’s new direction for the strip, can only advise the reader to “Consult an alienist.”44 V “Put yourself in their place,” Smith advises his readers on February 7: For weeks, they have given practically their entire time to their eccentric uncle—­ catering to his every whim. They gave him the best room in their house, the best food, bought him over $100.00 worth of presents for Christmas and have waited on him hand and foot—and what has he done? He got held up one night while out cabareting and was robbed of $10,000. He claims he had $50,000 pinned to his inside vest pocket. He hasn’t given them one cent and they really haven’t seen him spend a dime since he came.45

“Do you know this man?” the strip asks a few days later, showing a shadowy portrait of the mysterious man in black. “Oh! Well! In a hundred years it’ll all be over.”46

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Figure 19.  Sidney Smith, The Gumps, Chicago Tribune, February 18, 1922.

Figure 18.  Sidney Smith, The Gumps, Chicago Tribune, January 13, 1922.

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Over the course of the next several years, Smith will explore just how very much he can get his readers to invest in a narrative that has at least the potential to take “a hundred years” to tell. And he will invite his readers to take up the role that Ring Lardner initially assumed in commenting on and even critiquing his strips directly. For example, when he introduces yet another mysterious face at the window and offers a “signed picture in colors of the Gump family—to the first reader who sends in a correct solution of this mystery,”47 one reader writes in to complain about the recycling of the device: “Every time you get a little short of material—you write a lot of dry rot about the veiled face. Why the dickens don’t you write interesting things about it or tell the mystery or crack a joke for a change? There is such a thing as carrying a thing too far.” To which Smith replies: “Have patience gentle reader—a mystery—a mystery remains a mystery until it is solved. We can’t force these things—don’t blame me—I’d like to know what it is myself. I offered a prize to anybody that would tell me. . . . Come on and get to work,” Smith calls on his readers. Increasingly, Smith makes more space within his own strip for correspondence from his readers, most spectacularly in the debate surrounding the engagement of Uncle Bim with the scheming Widow Zander in 1922. Early in the year, Smith reprints a letter from a “bunch of girls in a Club,” who write asking to “let us see Uncle Bim and Mrs. Zander get married soon. Not only us but thousands who have a good laugh every day are waiting for the same thing.” Of course, not everyone is waiting for the same thing, and when Smith asks “the Burning question—Shall Uncle Bim Marry or Shall He Not?” readers are quick to offer their various opinions. One reader writes, “If you don’t have the fight between Andy and Mrs Zander come out in favor of Andy we will quit taking it.” To which Smith playfully replies, “If you can patch up the fight between the Gumps and Mrs. Zander so that Andy will get the best of it more power to you— We just print the news from the front as we get it.” Over the course of the next several weeks, letters from readers become more and more central to the strip itself (Figures 18–19). The notion that Smith is merely reporting the “news” is a joke, of course, but one at the heart of the emerging open-ended seriality he is exploring here. Robyn Warhol usefully describes several features of serial forms that come to be especially highlighted in twentieth-century turns to the form: (1) Serial form defies the dominant “marriage plot” governing so much of popular fiction. Due to its structurally mandated impulse to defer ending indefinitely, serialized domestic fiction has always tended to undermine the heterocentric marriage plot by unraveling instances of closure that turn out to be only provisional and

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temporary. (2) Serial form infiltrates domestic space, blurring the boundaries between “public” and “private” discourse. By its structuring of readers’ time and its daily, habitual nature, serialized domestic fiction renders it fictional materials ordinary, quotidian. . . . (3) Serial form interacts with events in “real time.” Serialized domestic fiction bears the marks of historical changes that happen during the period of composition; hence, narrative teleologies shift as the material circumstances of the producers and consumers of texts change over time.48

The open-ended serial form that the newspaper comic strip is pioneering here is the first to fully exploit all the characteristics Warhol catalogs. First, there are two versions of the “marriage plot” in serial comics, neither of which fits the conventional model: either the endless courtship which by definition cannot resolve into marriage or, as in the case of The Gumps or George Mc­Manus’s Bringing Up Father (1913), the story of what happens after marriage—that is, the story that explicitly violates the notion that marriage is the “end” (and always the happy end) of the story. If Western narrative forms had traditionally relied on marriage or death to provide closure to their novels or plays (depending on whether they were comedies or tragedies), the twentieth-century openended serial explicitly eschewed both. Warhol’s second characteristic—the blurring of the distinction between public and private—was of course fundamental to the newspaper form itself: newspapers reported on public events and brought them into the domestic space, and at the same time, especially after the rise of the penny press with its growing focus on crime and scandal, private lives were made public. However, a strip like The Gumps takes this interpenetration one step further, making the private lives of fictional characters the stuff of public news and real headlines. This bending of categories between public and private and news and fiction was aggressively exploited by Smith with The Gumps, leading us to the third of Warhol’s categories: the interaction with serialized events in “real time.” For example, on the day of the wedding, Bim was a no-show; Smith had his readers in such agitation that The Gumps had become, literally, front-page news. The Columbus Enquirer-Sun asked in a front-page headline, “What Has Become of Uncle Bim?”49 Trade was suspended at the Minneapolis board of trade while newsboys hawked their wares, giving the answer readers had long been waiting for: “Uncle Bim—no marriage!”50 As the Tribune comics chief, Arthur Crawford, described the phenomenon: “Rotary clubs passed resolutions and sent telegrams; newspapers carried eight-column heads on the news of the day’s strip; newspapers shouted the latest developments and millions of families fought to be first at the paper.” For Crawford the willingness to invest in the Gumps and

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their drama as headline news was a sign that people were tired of having news be only about “real people of the newspaper they cannot see.” Instead, he argued in 1928, people now prefer to read about “imaginary people they can see.”51 Crawford is, I suspect, onto something important here. Especially when the emergence of globalism became spectacularly visible to all with the outbreak of World War I, the sense that the forces shaping the modern world were growing too numerous to count and too distant to know was deeply felt. As with Mutt and Jeff ’s engagement with the Mexican Revolution, comic characters—visible and intimate—made world events (increasingly shaped by the artificial “person” of global capitalism) more visible and intimate. For a publisher like Hearst, himself the head of one of these vast global corporations with decided interests in the outcome in Mexico, such intimacy generated by the cartoon “­celebrity” could and was used to shape public opinion, to encourage his readers to take certain attitudes favorable to the interests of the paper’s corporate owners. But as Smith and his readers explored at length, this attachment to “imaginary people they can see” could be used in much more open-ended ways as well. Until his death in a car accident in 1935, Smith would delight in coming up with new storylines to get his readers writing back and his editors bringing the Gumps to the front page. From the breach-of-promise trial in 1922 to the case of Uncle Bim’s stolen diamond in 1930, readers would be given opportunities to write in with solutions, opinions, and theories. Perhaps Smith’s greatest achievement in this regard came in 1929, as Mary Gold, a regular and beloved character, slowly wasted away on her sickbed while her fiancé was in jail for a crime he did not commit. While few imagined Smith would allow Mary to die, assuming their right to intervene on behalf of a beloved character, readers nonetheless wrote pleading for her recovery and for her reunion with the unjustly imprisoned Tom Carr. On February 28, Mississippi Governor Bilbo even went so far as to grant Carr a full pardon, which he promptly sent on to Smith. But it was too late, as Mary died just before Tom could make it to her side (Figure 20). The Tribune was deluged with calls and letters—not only of protest but of grief. Readers inquired where to send the flowers, or when the funeral service would be held.52 Many local papers reported flowers and cards arriving at their offices; the Hagerstown Morning Herald, for example, described how “some sympathizing reader of the Herald’s comic page has sent a bouquet of pink and white paper sweet peas with a card attached, ‘For Mary Gold’s funeral.’ The flowers will be forwarded to Sid Smith, Mary Gold’s creator, with the grief of the unknown sender.”53 “Mary Gold died Monday night,” one Tennessee paper reported. “She was a creation of the imagination. . . . Yet, strangely enough, she

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Figure 20.  Sidney Smith, The Gumps, Chicago Tribune, April 30, 1929.

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seemed more real to hundreds of thousands of readers of ‘The Gumps’ than those persons whom they were wont to meet in the every day walks of life.”54 Suddenly the fun of playing along with Smith’s interactive dramas—legislatures passing resolutions on behalf of a particular character, governors pardoning a fictional criminal—seemed not quite so fun, and the papers paused to wonder whether Smith in fact had the “right” to do this to them. A week after her death, papers continued to report demands from readers that Smith “please find some way to have her come alive.”55 That the avalanche of outraged and grief-struck response from his readers did not shake Smith’s confidence in his experiment is more than evident in a publicity photo of him luxuriating in the mail he received following Mary’s death (Figure 21). In many ways, of course, the killing of Mary Gold was a gesture of authorial control after a decade of winning readers to the idea that they had a voice in the outcome of the story—that they were, in a sense, collaborators as well as writers. By giving the readers not only precisely what they did not want but also what they least expected, Smith can be seen as reasserting his authority, giving the lie to the trappings of collaboration. And yet, as the editorials noted, the most striking thing about Mary Gold’s collective wake was the depth of real feeling—of shared grief and the profound sense that all had lost a valued friend. The outpouring of emotion—grief, anger, denial—was in fact “more real” than many had experienced for “real” people who had passed in their “real” lives.

Figure 21.  Publicity photo of Sidney Smith and his mail following the death of Mary Gold, 1929.

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How do we make sense of the impact of the open-ended seriality deployed by The Gumps? How, in particular, does it differ from the ways in which readers identified with characters in novels—shedding tears, for example, over the death of Little Nell in Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop in 1841 or of Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin ten years later? Like The Gumps, both of these novels were themselves serialized, suggesting that serialization itself plays some role in the kind of collective mourning for fictional characters inspired by Mary Gold, as serialization’s shared deferrals open up space for collaborative reading and interpretation.56 From The Old Curiosity Shop in 1841 through Sherlock Holmes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, readers had become attached to serialized fictional characters and had contributed through collective investment in bringing these characters to life. The willingness, and even eagerness, of readers to treat their fictional characters as real, to seek out their fashions, their tombstones, and the spots they visited in their “lives,” gives us a sense of the force of these strange investments. But we should not read the nature of these investments as a sign of the naïveté or gullibility of earlier readers. Those who wrote letters to Sherlock Holmes most often did so with full awareness that Holmes was, in fact, a fictional character; indeed, many of the letters addressed to him acknowledge that fact at the outset.57 The decision to treat Holmes as a real-life person who might solve individual problems was not dissimilar from the choice of countless readers to write for advice to “Beatrice Fairfax,” herself a fictional persona originally created by Marie Manning but, after 1905, adopted by a variety of anonymous correspondents. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, weeping over Little Nell or writing to Sherlock Holmes had become increasingly understood as a sign of a bad form of reading produced by “popular literature.” By the time The Hidden Hand was published in book form, almost thirty years after its initial serialization, E. D. E. N. Southworth—arguably the most popular American writer of the nineteenth century—had been essentially excommunicated, her books removed from libraries and held up with disdain by critics as the sign of every­thing wrong with popular literature.58 Yet the critics and librarians deriding The Hidden Hand and its readers were critiquing—as flat, simplistic, sensationalistic—a text that few of her late-nineteenth century readers had experienced in its original form. The vast majority of Southworth’s readers throughout the middle decades of the century had read her novels in a serial storypaper, the New York Ledger, a site of reading that is complex in myriad ways. As Christopher Looby has argued, these complications—including the fact that each reader experiences the temporality of the serial form differently,

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each reads the serial installments in conjunction with other elements of the serial publication in an order that cannot be predicted or standardized, filling in the gaps between the installments based on individual experience and communal interpretation—have led modern critics, beginning in the late nineteenth century, to discount the serial in favor of the codex: the Book.59 Richard Walsh’s discussion of the late nineteenth-century repudiation of the emotional responses of Dickens’s first readers to the death of Nell is especially helpful to our understanding here.60 By the end of the century, laughing as opposed to weeping at Nell’s death was a sign of sophistication, as Oscar Wilde’s famous quip makes clear.61 Nell, it was now understood, was too flat and underdeveloped a character to justify the emotional attachment of Dickens’s first readers: that people did respond in this way therefore was a sign of Dickens’s use of the parlor tricks of melodrama and of the naïve manipulability of his early readers. That the emotional attachment brought to bear on the flatness of Little Nell could be a product of the readers’ collaborative energies was not conceivable within a critical model that presumed that only psychologically complex, rounded characters could justify readerly attachment. As Walsh suggests, the inaccessibility of Nell’s emotional power to modern readers is a consequence, beyond the cultural remoteness of the sentiments themselves, of the subsequent collusion between realist literary agendas and critical assumptions about character and representation.62 Pushing a bit harder on his recuperation of Dickens’s rhetorical achievement in Old Curiosity Shop, I would suggest that we might also need to rethink our assumptions about “flat” characters, who offer, necessarily, different opportunities than are presented by mimetic characters. Nell, Eva, and Capitola are indeed flat characters, yet they garnered deep and varied attachments on the part of a vast and varied readership. That is, it is not only—and perhaps not even primarily—because of the rhetorical work of the author, as Walsh would have it. Instead, we need to understand the frantic eleventh-hour letters to Dickens to show mercy on Little Nell— letters from readers who knew what was coming in the next installment (like those to Sidney Smith begging him to bring back Mary Gold from the grave)— as claims of shared authorship. It is not surprising that it is often the flattest of characters in serial literature that produced the greatest emotional response on the part of readers: after all, flat characters require an active readership to “bring to life,” and serial publication provides the space in which such a readership has (enforced) time to collaborate. Even as literature was increasingly moving in the early years of the twentieth century toward mimetic characterization and psychological complexity, and serialized fiction was on the wane both culturally and economically, the

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serial comic strip offered a space where a different kind of investment could take place, an investment made possible by (and not despite) the iconic, flat nature of the characterization. When readers wrote to Dickens in the 1840s or to Smith in the 1920s expressing their opinions as to what should happen to the characters in their stories, they did so not because they thought the characters were real but because they understood themselves to have a role to play in the characters’ development. In the case of Dickens, of course, the letters were little more than a plea: Dickens’s control over the final destiny of Nell was understood, and all that could be hoped for on the part of the readers was an opportunity to take advantage of the serial nature of the publication (and, it was presumed, the production) of the story to attempt an intervention on behalf of their beloved character. In the case of the open-ended serial of the twentieth century, as epitomized by The Gumps, as we have seen readers were explicitly encouraged to see themselves as collaborators in a story whose ending had not yet been written. By the 1920s, of course, such overinvestment was shorthand for bad reading. For example, Baird Leonard’s popular series in Life, “Mrs. Pep’s Diary”—the fictional journal of a flighty society woman—on March 27, 1929, shares the news that “I was rejoiced to find that the wedding of Mary Gold had been stopped in The Gumps, albeit I did not admit the same to my husband, he considering my interest in such a series a lamentary comment on my taste and intelligence.”63 Presumably, many of Leonard’s more “highbrow” readers would have shared the sentiment of Mr. Pep. That said, for the most part the enthusiasm for The Gumps on the part of the emerging mass audience did not seem to overly concern the literary establishment. As a comic strip in the daily papers, it was a form that was by definition beneath notice of cultural gatekeepers. Despite Gilbert Seldes’s appeal in 1924 that it was high time we start taking seriously a form whose characters have “entered into our existence as definitely as Roosevelt and more deeply than Pickwick,” the critical establishment was content to acknowledge the phenomenal popularity of The Gumps solely as symptomatic of the intellectual laziness of modern American readers.64 The serial culture of the nineteenth century moved into the daily newspaper in the twentieth, much like the ghettoization of unruly audiences from other cultural forms in the late nineteenth century, as the gulf between “high” and “low” began to be more actively defined and policed.65 As Paul DiMaggio has demonstrated, “The distinction between high and popular culture, in its American version, emerged in the period between 1850 and 1900 out of the efforts of urban elites to build organizations that, first, isolated high culture and, second, differentiated it from popular culture.”66 While DiMaggio’s study

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focuses on the work of the Boston elite to create a space apart for a cultural preserve defined as “high” (monumentalized in the Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston Symphony Orchestra), what he is describing is parallel to what Lawrence Levine describes in his study of the transformation of “Shakespeare” in America at precisely the same time—from a shared and boisterously interactive culture to a sacrosanct and inviolable performance requiring new disciplines—both physical and aesthetic. By the end of this period and with the emergence of a meaningful distinction between high and low, “with important exceptions—particularly in the areas of sports and religion—audiences in America had become less interactive, less of a public and more of a group of mute receptors.”67 If theater and music halls had to be transformed from rowdy spaces where audiences carried on social existences and demanded responsiveness from performers, literature was effectively transformed from a space that had been dominated throughout the nineteenth century by sentimental attachments and the serial investments. Ultimately coalescing into the New Critical insistence on treating all texts as self-contained and on stridently rejecting the “affective fallacy,” from the late nineteenth century on the professional institutions of literature both in and outside of the academy have worked to reify a notion of the literary as that which, like the ideal of art in the Museum of Fine Arts and music in the Boston Symphony Orchestra, requires disciplined responses on the part of readers. No tears, no letters to the author, no spontaneous tombstones or fashion trends inspired by fictional characters. And just as Levine describes how earlier audiences who found their responses no longer tolerated within the theater moved to vaudeville and the sports arena where older practices of interactivity were still privileged, so too, from 1910 through the 1920s, did serial narrative move into the daily media of the newspaper (which had economic motivations to encourage such interactivity and the sense of shared ownership it generated in its readers), as an extension of practices that had increasingly become identified as a mark of “low” cultural status when directed to literary texts. Nonetheless, something is different in the mourning surrounding Mary Gold, and indeed in the serial investment in the serial misadventures of The Gumps. While The Gumps shares with its predecessors the serial form, unlike Old Curiosity Shop or Uncle Tom’s Cabin (both serialized weekly), The Gumps was experienced in the daily rhythms of the newspaper, and in a medium whose paratexts are multiplied exponentially beyond those found in the magazine or storypaper of the previous century. Further, in distinction from any nineteenth-century predecessor, The Gumps and the numerous strips that fol-

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lowed were open-ended narratives. Finally, again unlike its predecessors, the ­serial comic strip explicitly encouraged the reader’s sense, not only of investment, but of ownership. As one commentator wrote in 1922: Forty million readers follow the Gumps. That is, they are supposed to follow them. About eighty-two per cent of them try to keep a jump ahead of that merry family in their various exploits. And because so many are forecasting and predicting developments in this family, I’ll whisper that Sid Smith has started something he has to run like the dickens to keep up with. If I could prove it I would say there are exactly 16,847,915¾ people writing to Sidney Smith, care of the Chicago Tribune, with suggestions as to what he should do with the Gumps next. And inasmuch as most of us take the Gumps seriously and expect to have our suggestions followed, the problem of these suggestions is a real one, after all.68

By the next decade, with the serial comic strip at its greatest popularity, this sense of interactive production between creator and reader became increasingly integral to the form. For example, Jennifer Hayward notes the readers’ relationship to Milton Caniff ’s Terry and the Pirates, and the strong sense that “their voices are important and that they will be heard.”69 Caniff, in turn, regularly drew on reader’s suggestions, turning to many of his readers as unofficial experts on various topics covered in the far-flung adventures of his stories. A particularly rich example can be found in a strip that is largely forgotten today, Minute Movies (1921–35), by Ed Wheelan. Starting out as a staff cartoonist on Hearst’s American, Wheelan early on began experimenting with a series of strips running along the bottom of the paper parodying the emerging conventions of Hollywood filmmaking. These first strips were self-contained “movies,” complete with sprockets along the upper and lower frame to represent the filmstrip. Originally, Wheelan ran his as-yet-unnamed strip across eight columns of the paper in a single strip, but he eventually he settled on a two-tier strip, which first took on the title Midget Movies in April 1918. The original Midget Movies featured a “daily change of program” with occasional serial continuity, focusing on satire and very short subjects. The strip caught readers’ attention in part because of its unique format and satirical edge. But it took off largely due to its subject matter. While some earlier strips had played with the shared conventions of comics and film to satirize moving pictures—most prominently Carl Anderson’s turn-of-the-century strip, Kinetoscope—Wheelan’s movie-satire comic was especially well timed. By 1917, the young film industry had matured into one of the fastest growing industries in the United States, with the relocation to Hollywood and the emergence of the factory system of production that would generate the film genres Wheelan

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would exploit for the next two decades. Hollywood stars and conventions were suddenly everywhere, a level of saturation that inevitably generated an appetite for the very satire that Wheelan concocted. A year later, Wheelan broke with Hearst and joined a small syndicate, where he began to produce what would be his work for the remainder of his career. In 1921, Whelan’s strip was relaunched as Minute Movies, while Hearst attempted to duplicate Wheelan’s success after his departure with Elzie Segar’s Thimble Theatre (1919) and then with Chester Gould in Fillum Fables (1924). Neither Segar nor Gould had much interest in the formula, however, and both soon moved in other directions—resulting in Popeye and Dick Tracy. Wheelan, however, continued to expand and update his formula. While maintaining the playfulness and satire of his earlier Midget Movies, Wheelan began developing a coherent set of characters—a “studio,” complete with actors, director (Art Hokum), and a “producer,” Wheelan himself. While he continued his practice of satirizing Hollywood genres and conventions, Wheelan devoted equal energy to parodying the celebrity culture that was unleashed in the early 1920s. In the pages of Minute Movies, Wheelan’s readers were given regular doses of backstage gossip, contract negotiations, and peeks into the “private lives” of his cartoon “stars” (Figure 22). So effective was Wheelan with this new formula, that fairly soon the comic “films” became the thing itself, as the “actors” in Wheelan’s studio began to develop a fan base of their own and the serials—initially produced to ridicule Hollywood storytelling conventions—became a genuine source of pleasure and engagement for readers. Fans began writing in increasing numbers, asking for autographs, photographs, fan-club information and for missing installments for their scrapbooks—writing as many as a hundred thousand fan letters during the run of the strip. Far from being disappointed by this response, Wheelan embraced it fully, expanding his “studio” and the length of his serials throughout the 1920s. And quickly the fans themselves became part of the strip, as Old Man Experience responded to letters from the readers in a regular feature, while Wheelan incorporated ideas from his readers for his regular “animated” short, “The Inkling Kid.” Within a short time, the strip changed from satire of Hollywood to an idealized comic version of Hollywood, one where the “stars” wrote back and actually cared what their fans thought, where the studio executives responded to their fans’ commands, and where a genuine intimacy and interactivity between “studio” and fans could be imagined. Wheelan asked his fans, for example, to determine whether child star Herbert Honey’s contract should be renewed; when the response was tepid, the child star was shown the door (Figure 23). Hazel

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Figure 23.  The fate of young Herbert Honey’s career is left to the Minute Movies fans. Author’s collection.

Figure 22.  “Behind the Screens” and similar features detailing the private lives of the cartoon studio’s stars were a regular part of Ed Wheelan’s Minute Movies. Author’s collection.

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Dearie called on her fans to determine her next hairstyle, and contests were held to provide stage names for new members of the studio’s stable. Soon many readers, wishing to become cartoonists or scenarists themselves, began sending in their work to Wheelan’s “studio,” hoping for input, advice, and even jobs. It is hard to think of another comic strip from the period that was as interactive as Wheelan’s Minute Movies. But such openness to readers brought with it certain pressures and risks. The first sign of potential danger for Wheelan emerged shortly after the film industry converted to sound in 1928. Wheelan’s serials had been growing longer and more ponderous for several years, increasingly turning to historical and literary subjects. Longtime fans began writing to express their desire for a return to the comedy and satire of the earlier strip. In response, other, newer fans wrote demanding still longer adventure serials. Wheelan pleaded with his divided readership to provide guidance as to the future direction of the strip. Attempting to please the majority of his readers, however, made Wheelan increasingly insecure, desperate for contact and affirmation from his audience. He finally determined that the majority of his fans wanted Minute Movies to continue to move in the direction of serious “films”: “As far as we have been able, director Art Hokum and myself have endeavored to meet the wishes of the majority of our fans in the production of ‘Minute Movies’—Our policy has been one of change and experiment, but we believe now that most of our fans wish our serials to be exciting and interesting rather than humorous, hence we have given up satire and slap-stick except in our news reels, travelogues, comedies and other short features” (February 18, 1929). But almost immediately, doubt as to the wishes of the audience again emerges as Art Hokum takes to the airwaves of the studio’s radio station, WMMS, and appeals directly to his fans: “This change you yourself are responsible for— hundreds and hundreds of letters from fans have requested it—however, our fan mail has fallen off lately and we wish to know why, and if our fans are still satisfied!!!” (February 26, 1929). Two months later, Wheelan has what he hopes is his answer from his readers, announcing: “The fans evidently did not care for satire in our serials and so that’s out!” (April 15, 1929). As Minute Movies progressed into the 1930s, the change in direction, already long in evidence, became still more pronounced, as longer “prestige” serials dominated the strip, beginning with a twenty-four-part adaptation of Hamlet. Other classics adapted in Minute Movies included Treasure Island and Ivanhoe (which ran fifty-nine episodes), and Wheelan was delighted by the response of schools to what were essentially forerunners of the “classics illustrated” comics of the next generation. Minute Movies had long been celebrated, and justly, as “appealing to children and grownups alike.” However, even as Wheelan was

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working to appeal to and educate the younger readers who had embraced his illustrated classics, he was losing his adult readers in growing numbers, as quotes from the letters—now almost entirely dominated by young fans—reveal. All would have still been well for the strip, however, except for an inexplicable failure on the part of Wheelan’s syndicate to capitalize on the growing demands for reprint volumes of the Minute Movies serials. Repeatedly, Wheelan is forced to remind his readers that he cannot comply with their desire for back issues, expressing his hopes that the strips will soon be collected into book form. The obsessive scrapbooking of Wheelan’s strip must have surely demonstrated the market that existed for these collections, as fans wrote in every week asking Wheelan to broker deals for missing numbers of older Minute Movie strips. From the earliest days of the comic strip, reprint editions began to appear in a variety of formats. With the rise of continuity strips, the demand for collections increased markedly. Mutt and Jeff, for example, was collected in several inexpensive editions beginning in 1910, and Bringing Up Father, The Gumps, and others followed in comic book editions in the 1920s. In 1922 George McManus and Rudolph Block, Jr., the son of Hearst’s comics editor, launched the first regular newsstand comic, Comic Monthly, entirely populated by collected daily strips from the previous year. While Comic Monthly would only last a year, McManus and Block were rightly reading the appetite for a more permanent repository of the serial strip than the newspaper could provide. The failure of Wheelan and his syndicate to respond to the growing demand for these comic books surely contributed toMinute Movies’ cancelation in 1935. The open-ended serial, in fact, seemed to create contradictory demands. On the one hand, the attachments, space for interaction, and interpretation thrived, as we have seen, in the ephemeral and cacophonous media of the daily newspaper. On the other hand, it was precisely those attachments, that sense of collaboration and shared ownership, that made readers want to own it, to revisit and share the stories beyond their initial newspaper publication. In the beginning of the 1930s, experiments with using comic books as promotional giveaways proved so successful that several publishers began to negotiate with newspaper syndicates for a regular newsstand series, and the first successful monthly comics began to be produced. The mid-1930s also saw the beginnings of the modern comic book industry, as publishers began to realize that it was cheaper to hire amateurs to produce original material than to pay the syndicates for reprint rights. Born out of the serial energy of the daily newspaper comic strip, the fledgling comic book industry quickly split off—largely due to its dismissal by the syndicate heads themselves—and became something else entirely, as we will discuss in the next chapter. And while the late 1930s and

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1940s would see the emergence of several successful and long-running openended series strips, the days when the comic strip would be front-page news were fast becoming history. The late 1930s found Ed Wheelan unemployed and bitter. There is some evidence he made a trip out to Hollywood in search of work as a scenarist, but scores of East Coast writers flushed out by the Depression had beaten him there. Back in New York, some good news finally came, from an unlikely source: the fledgling comic book industry. Wheelan’s Minute Movies had already been reappearing in the new medium, uncredited, in Centaur’s Little Giant Movie Funnies in 1938. Detective Comics’ young editor, Sheldon Mayer, it turned out, was a longtime reader of Minute Movies, and he hired Wheelan to bring the strip back (in color) for Flash Comics. The final new Minute Movie episodes (originally retitled Flash Funnies) appeared under Mayer’s sponsorship as filler material for the original Flash superhero comics. In fact, Wheelan seems to have been ideally suited for the comic book format, and it is clear that his career would have benefited greatly had they come along a few years earlier. In Minute Movies he had helped to pioneer many aspects of the modern form that would be central to the evolution of the comic book in the coming decades, including the serial adventure, letters from the readers, and the illustrated classics. But by the 1940s, despite the high quality of the work Wheelan provided for Mayer at Detective Comics (DC), he seemed to his colleagues and readers to be a throwback to an earlier age of comics. Irwin Hasen recalls Wheelan as a living symbol of what seemed to him Mayer’s nostalgic love of old comic strips, and the young men who were building the new comic book industry saw little in Wheelan’s work to suggest that he represented the future. Nonetheless, Wheelan continued to work for Flash until 1944, meanwhile developing a couple of side projects at both DC and Harvey, including Ed Wheelan’s Joke Book Featuring Fat and Slat (1944). When Max Gaines left DC to start a new company, Educational Comics (EC), he offered Wheelan his own regular title. Wheelan settled on Fat and Slat, featuring the long-running vaudeville team from Minute Movies. Given Wheelan’s talents with serial adventure, it was a strange choice to focus on the gag format in a comic book. The bulk of the book was dominated by Wheelan’s oldest characters, including Johnny Hope and Old Man Experience who dated back to 1915. His one new creation for the book, however, shows much keener instincts for this new medium (and, as we will see, prescience for the challenges EC would face in the near future): “Comics” McCormick is an obsessive ­comics fan who gets lost in elaborate, all-consuming daydreams about his favorite ­heroes with exciting and comic results (Figure 24).

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Figure 24.  From Fat and Slat 1 (EC, 1947), “Comics” McCormick, Wheelan’s last original creation.

VI Writing in the Independent in 1920, Edwin E. Slosson developed an extended analogy to describe what he perceived to be a fundamental division in human nature: “Some walk to get somewhere; others walk for the walk. The former fix their eyes on their goal and steam ahead by the straight route. The others stop on the way to look into the shop windows—or to pick flowers, as the case may be—and may even make a detour into inviting by-paths.” Similarly, he continues, There are two sorts of readers. Some read to see how the story will come out. They rush thru the volume as tho it were a race course with a prize at the end, impatient of any delaying incidents, keeping close hold of the clue to the plot. . . . Others read for the joy of reading. They know that life is not modeled after the “well-made play”. . . . In real life there is no denouement, no simultaneous untying of all knots, no final harmonizing of all discords: there is no concluding curtain, only individual exits. Life just runs right on like an interminable motion picture film with more or less exciting episodes but no apparent plot. The person who loves reality in life and fiction will read the serial he finds in any stray copy of a magazine with the same interest that he watches the episodes he may observe on the street or in his circle of friends. If he gets the next chapter, so much the better, but if not, he is content with what he has already. On the other hand, the reader whose interest lies at the end of the book is invariably disappointed because when he reaches the end he finds only a blank page before him.70

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As the factory system of production began to be codified in Hollywood, a seamless system of narrative structure became the ideal. Filmmakers began to privilege causal relations over framed experiments in startling effects, as narrative episodes were deliberately transformed from charged fragments into agents in the interlocking chain of classical narrative. I quote Slosson at length because he reminds us, in different terms than did Seldes at the beginning of this chapter, that the focused “reader,” the straight “walker” defined by the film industry after 1914 as the proper reader, was not the only kind of reader out there. In choosing to build the industry around one kind of “walker,” one kind of “reader,” the pleasures and perspectives of another class of readers was closed off—not because it was not profitable (the remarkable success of the early ­serials proved how profitable it could be) but because it was messy, inefficient, open, unclassical. By the early 1920s, the audiences of such films had come to be defined as “primitive,” but they found a long and productive outlet in the openended seriality of the newspaper comics of the 1920s and 1930s. In many ways the comic book as it emerged in the 1940s can be understood as itself an attempt to reel in the more unruly aspects of serial comics, to create consistent markets independent of the newspaper syndicates with reliable readers whose appetites for the material could be satisfied in monthly installments in self-contained comics stories. Certainly the formula proved successful, giving rise to a new industry and capturing a new youth market just then coming into its own. But even without the messiness inherent in the open-ended, multimodal daily newspaper comic strip, the new industry would discover that readers of the new comic book would prove no less unruly—even, with the rising tide of Cold War hysteria, quite dangerous.

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Fan-Addicts and the Comic Book, 1938–1955

I In the early years of the twentieth century, an emerging class of popular illustrated magazines known as “pulps” expanded the role of the serial reader— most prominently among readers of what publisher Hugo Gernsback first termed “scientifiction.” Beginning with the earliest science fiction pulps in the 1920s, these magazines opened up space for readerly interaction in many ways unprecedented in periodical culture. Gernsback’s Amazing Stories (1926), for example, included a ballot asking readers to send in a list of the best and worst stories. A rival publication, Astounding Stories (1929), featured not just a letters page but an entire “department.” In these pages, heated exchanges were featured about individual stories, editorial decisions, and general thoughts about the future of science fiction and fandom. These readers understood themselves as expert critics, collaborators in the editorial process, and they expressed their opinions about all issues with confidence and authority. The columns were also used to share information about new clubs and organizations devoted to “science fiction enthusiasts.” As the editor of Astounding Stories described the establishment of the Readers’ Corner, “Within twenty-four hours of the time that Astounding Stories was released for sale, letters . . . began pouring into our offices”; “This new department . . . from now on will be an informal meeting place for all readers of Astounding Stories.” The readers’ pages were thus explicitly set up as a virtual community, a space where isolated readers could come together and indulge in the conversation that their physical communities most likely did not afford. And throughout, these early science fiction magazines make explicit the notion of collaborative editorship: “This department is all yours, and the job of running it and making it interesting is largely up to you.”1 As Gerard Jones has shown, this was the culture in which Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of the first comic book superhero, came of age, corresponding with fellow science fiction fans in and through the pages of these magazines.2 Siegel’s first ambition was to publish stories in Gernsback’s ­Amazing

Fan-Addicts and the Comic Book, 1938–1955

Stories, and he is often credited with establishing the first “fanzine,” entitled Cosmic Stories, which Siegel promoted in the back pages of Gernsback’s second science fiction magazine, Science Wonder Stories (1929). The amateur fanzine was a natural outgrowth of the science fiction pulps of the 1920s and 1930s, magazines that had already devoted substantial sections of their pages to letters and input from fans. Don Wollheim, one of the pioneers of the form, described this history in a 1940s pamphlet directed at new recruits to “science fiction fandom”: “Essentially, the history of Science Fiction Fandom is the story of the struggle for organization. . . . When Hugo Gernsback added a letter department to his experimental Amazing Stories, he was adding an organization, although a simple, elementary one. But because this was not enough, the letters in that department all through 1927, 1928, and 1929 began urging the formation of an independent correspondence club.”3 Out of that “struggle for organization” and communication, Wollheim writes, the first amateur fanzines were born. In the same pamphlet, Milton A. Rothman preaches to new science fiction fans about the rewards of active “fandom”: “The real-dyed-in-the-wool Fans are never satisfied just to watch. They have to jump in the middle of things, and start something themselves. So, if you have the demon inside you, it’s not long before you get an itching on the tips of your fingers, right where they hit the typewriter keys. You read so many fan magazines you can’t stand it any longer. The inevitable result—you start writing for them yourself.”4 Both Wollheim and Rothman would go on to become published science fiction writers themselves, and the same is true for many of the founding generation of science fiction fans: from writing back to the editors and to each other, writing and publishing their own original stories was a natural outgrowth. As Wollheim explains, almost immediately the interactive nature of science fiction pulps produced a demand for space within the pulps, and then for more space than the pulps themselves could provide. These early letter departments served as the foundation of a national network of fans, as people collected names and addresses and began corresponding with each other directly, planning meetings and publications. By the 1930s, this new active fandom had networked itself nationally, so that fans at the end of the decade were describing the pleasures of being able to arrive in any city in America with a list of contacts from the vast network of fans. The fans developed their own language, speaking in a jargon that must surely have sounded ominous to outsiders in the 1940s. For example: “slan shacks,” as defined in What Is Science Fiction Fandom? were “semi-cooperative dwellings inhabited exclusive by Fans,” which, along with the secret language, the national networking, and the amateur nature of the publications, clearly marked fandom as something simultaneously bound to mass culture but also

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profoundly different from the capitalist infrastructure out of which commercial science fiction pulps had emerged. As the first full-length study of the fanzine in 1973 put it, these amateur publications “function outside the market and outside the profit motive. Publishing them is not a business but an avocation. Sensationalism for the sake of sales, which big mass publication media sometimes indulge in, is foreign to them.”5 The author of this 1973 study knew something about the “sensationalism” of “big mass publication media.” Twenty-five years earlier the same man, Fredric Wertham, already a widely respected psychologist and frequent expert witness in juvenile crime cases, had risen to national prominence through his writings and lectures warning of the threat to the nation’s youth posed by the new media form of the comic book. In Seduction of the Innocent (1954), Wertham made the case that comics effectively poisoned the minds especially of its younger, impressionable readers, identifying a direct connection between the explosion of comic books on the nation’s newsstands and the rise of juvenile crime and violence so widely reported in the postwar period. So persuasive was Wertham—or, perhaps better put, so neatly did his findings in Seduction of the Innocent corroborate sentiments that had been mounting since the late 1940s—that the comic book industry, itself only twenty years old at the time, was forced to institute a system of self-censorship to prevent the very real threat of government censorship. In the history of comics today, Wertham is largely remembered as a McCarthyite paranoid, a self-promoting would-be censor, or a latter-day Puritan. As Bart Beaty has effectively demonstrated in his important study of Wertham’s career, however, Wertham’s politics and beliefs were far more complex than such conventional portraits suggest.6 Here, I am not interested in rescuing Wertham’s legacy so much as in exploring an understudied aspect of his anxieties about comics in the postwar period. What he feared most in comics, I will argue, was paradoxically also what he would come to admire in the fanzines produced by many of the same dedicated comics readers he worried over in Seduction of the Innocent. Comics, for Wertham—and indeed for many of those who both lauded and attacked the medium during this period—were a uniquely powerful storytelling form, relying on a distillation of images and words that seemed to maintain a magnetic hold on the imaginations of younger readers. Seduction of the Innocent was Wertham’s nightmare vision of a nation of isolated, “seduced” children living out their lives in the grips of pathological fantasy and out of meaningful and productive communication with society—driven there by mass-media corporations deliberately damaging children’s minds so as to gain control of an emerging youth consumer. Wertham’s last book, The World of Fanzines, on the other hand, highlighted a utopian vision of a world of networked readers transforming

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their fantasies into new productions that connected, empowered, and pointed to progressive possibilities outside of the control of those same mass-media corporations—or what Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer in 1947 influentially termed “the culture industry,” in opposition to the more common term used in debates of the period, “mass culture.”7 Indeed, Seduction of the Innocent reveals connections between Wertham’s postwar critique of mass culture and that of the Frankfurt school, while his 1970s study of fanzines suggests a potential conversation with then-current Birmingham school models of popular-culture analysis. Despite meaningful changes in Wertham’s outlook, both his 1950s fears and his 1970s fantasies were born from his recognition of the power of this new form to activate readers’ imaginations and from his keen sense, as both a student of popular culture and a Freudian analyst, of the power of images to do much more than simply “display.” Of course Wertham was by no means alone in his preoccupation with the power of images during this period. This is, after all, the generation that made Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders (1957) a bestseller. Packard’s exposé of the methods used by “symbol manipulators” to script Americans’ “daydreams, misty hidden yearnings, guilt complexes, irrational emotional blockages,” was ultimately meant to be a diagnosis of a nation of vulnerable “image lovers given to impulsive and compulsive acts.”8 And for many observers, the powerful new forces on Madison Avenue were by no means the most serious threat to an increasingly vulnerable nation of “image lovers.” With the Korean War came terrifying accounts of seemingly healthy and patriotic young soldiers supposedly succumbing to new Chinese brainwashing techniques. As Edward Hunter put it in Brainwashing in Red China (1951), “Our age of gadgets and electronics had discovered the brain, and we were learning how to manipulate it. This was something drastically new, like the splitting of the atom, that had come upon this earth in the middle of the twentieth century.”9 A few years later Eugene Kinkaid detailed the brainwashing of American youth by the communists as a symptom of the failure of American culture.10 Kinkaid’s account of the successful brainwashing of captured GIs served as a primary source for Richard Condon’s 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate, which provided the postwar period’s most potent representation of the insidious power of these “hidden persuaders” and the complicity of the American home (and especially the mother) in allowing “our boys” to fall easy prey to this unseen enemy. The connections between communist brainwashing techniques described by Kinkaid or Condon and the capitalist brainwashing techniques described by Packard were not lost on commentators at the time; as Newsweek made the association, “Can American servicemen be ‘immunized’ against brainwashing? Can consumers be psychologically ‘inoculated’ against the outlandish claims

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of . . . advertising?”11 In the end, they both had the same source: the vulnerability of young American minds to the mysterious power of images and symbols. Both for those who feared communist brainwashing and for those who saw the greatest danger to the nation’s future as lying in the manipulations of massmedia corporations, the sudden explosion of comic books in the 1940s—with their garish colors and sudden ubiquity—must have seemed something wholly new and potentially terrifying. Since there was, for most adult observers, nothing inherently engaging in the comic book, their immense popularity and especially the devotion of their younger readers suggested a darker threat buried behind the seemingly transparent and childlike images-just as the symbol of the Queen of Diamonds in The Manchurian Candidate served to control the behavior of the brainwashed soldier, comics came to be understood as a trigger to unlock dark recesses in the minds of America’s youth. II As Marshall McLuhan put it in 1954, “If there is a truism in the history of human communication it is that any innovation in the external means of communication brings in its train shock on shock of social change.”12 A decade later, Richard Hofstadter characterized the response to such shocks throughout American history as traditionally articulated in what he termed the “paranoid style.”13 We see both McLuan’s shock and Hofstadter’s paranoia, for example, in the response to the rise of the new media of the novel in the late eighteenth century: the sudden influx of a new and seemingly captivating narrative mode accessible to those who had long been denied access to literature and literacy, and the concomitant visions of a generation of readers so deeply immersed in a world of novelistic fantasy that they can no longer distinguish fiction from reality, rake from worthy suitor, con man from trusty steward. A little more than a century later, a similar pattern emerges in the response to the rise of cinema and the new audiences and producers who crowded into the nickelodeons of the early twentieth century, anxieties about moving pictures and their tendency to dazzle spectators (into submission or sin) with a technologically empowered illusion of motion and realism. In both cases, the popularity and accessibility of the new media was of course central to the anxieties it inspired. And in both cases as well, the anxiety often centered on concerns about how “weaker” and more impressionable minds (children, women, immigrants) would handle the (to use an anachronistic but apt term) “virtual reality” generated by the new narrative media. Given this recurring history of shock and paranoia in response to “innovation in the external means of communication,” it was to be expected that the unprecedented rise of the comic book—both in terms of speed and quan-

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tity—would follow a similar pattern. After all, the comic book seemed to have literally appeared overnight, particularly after the return of soldiers from World War II who brought their habit of reading comics home from the front, where comics had often been the most accessible reading material.14 Still a relatively small industry at the outbreak of the war, by its conclusion the comic book was the most widely consumed reading material in the United States. As opposed to responses to the rise of the novel in 1809 or cinema in 1909, in 1949 the anxiety about comic books was definitely not that they produced a dangerously illusory alternative reality. The danger was never that comics were too immersive, but that they were not immersive enough. No one can read a comic book, no matter how well executed (as only a select few were in those early days of the comic book industry, which relied heavily on a sweatshop system of production), and forget that these are made things: someone drew the comic, someone lettered it, and so on. Where the early novel marketed itself as offering the “truth” (often in the form of “found” documents) and the early films focused on actualities and relished in popularizing stories of audiences so mesmerized by their projections as to shoot back at the screen or, like the country bumpkin in Uncle Josh Goes to the Motion Picture Show (1902), compelled to fight an onscreen villain, comic books from the start necessarily foregrounded their madeness. For example, the inside cover of the inaugural issue of Action Comics, in which Superman made his first appearance, featured an open invitation to readers of the comic to pick up a brush and try it themselves (Figure 25). Figure 25.  Detail from the inside cover of Action Comics 1 (1938). © DC.

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Similar contests, as we have seen, go back to the serial forms of the previous generation and would have been familiar to readers. But such invitations in a comic book describe a very different relationship to the constructed story-world being presented. Since comics could not pretend they were not drawn, written, colored, they highlighted the work of producing comics and promised that readers would soon be making comics of their own (“This is a cinch!” the young artist announces in Action Comics). Whereas the dominant narrative conventions of U.S. narrative cinema in the 1930s strove to achieve the classical Hollywood “styleless style”—the camera’s agency as “narrator” creating the illusion of voyeuristic access in an unfolding event—comic books from the start explicitly called attention to their creators. We see this for instance in the first issue of Superman, which presents a portrait of the two young men at work, with Siegel “at his typewriter, thinking up his next thrilling adventure” and Shuster “at his drawing board about to start the new superman episode” (Figure 26). As these brief biographies made clear, if the Hollywood dream was that anyone could be discovered at the soda fountain and become a “star,” the dream that comics sold from the start is that anyone could write back to the comics’ authors and become a “creator.” From early on, it seems, readers did respond to the invitation. The illustrations accompanying a 1943 account of comics and their readers in the New York Times, for example, provides an interesting view of how some young readers at the time were interacting with these materials (Figure 27).15 In the first image we see children buying the comics from the newsstand, reading them on the street, communicating with each other about the contents of the latest issue. In the second image, the children are portrayed as actively engaged in making and sharing their own comics: a pigtailed girl holds up a three-panel comics describing a violent crime, while the boy at the easel invents a new superhero. In fact, several of the earliest studies and portraits of the comic book phenomenon seemed to support the narrative represented in these illustrations. For example, a 1941 account by Paul Witty, an education researcher at Northwestern, focuses on the tendency of comic books to inspire in their readers a desire to “make original comics” of their own; his survey results reveal that the majority of comics readers also produced—and often traded and even sold—their own comics.16 Witty describes a visit to one school, for instance, where he is approached by a student asking him if he would like to “rent a book” that he and his friends had made—and even offering for a slightly larger sum to produce “a special limited edition, designed and tailored to suit my personality.”17 Witty and other researchers discovered gray markets in schoolyards and clubhouses where comics were traded, resold, and original comics were circulated and “rented.”

Figure 26.  Creators’ biographies from Superman 1 (1939). © DC.

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Figure 27.  Illustrations accompanying “Children and the Comics,” New York Times, July 11, 1943.

For Witty and for Mackenzie, the author of “Children and the Comics” in the New York Times, the scenes described were by and large positive, or at least harmless. But it is easy to see how they might also have sparked anxiety for many parents. To see the children at the newsstand making their own choices as consumers (negotiating with an older man in the background) was one thing, but to see them not only reading the comics but actively creating their own would cause concerns, especially as postwar comic books began to abandon superheroes in favor of stories about criminals and monsters. And in the un­ official markets for trading and “renting,” some critics surely saw children not merely as consumers but also as producers and distributors. The notion that comics might well be the “marijuana of the nursery,” as the critic John Mason Brown put it in 1948, seemed to many to be a credible concern.18 Throughout the 1940s, the evidence seemed to be mounting in the press that the drug analogy was more than apt. Just as the 1936 cautionary film Tell Your Children described a hard-wired connection between marijuana use and juvenile delinquency, headlines in the 1940s began tracing a similar outcome for

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young comics readers. In 1947, a Pittsburgh boy’s hanging death was blamed, in a story that circulated nationally, on his being an inveterate reader of comics: as his mother reported to the coroner, “her son was an incessant reader of comic books and may have accidentally hanged himself in re-enacting a scene from one of them.”19 The next year the headlines told of the torture of a minister’s son by a group of boys who “got their inspiration for the torturing from reading comic books.”20 In 1949, the papers told of another juvenile murderer, Howard Lang, who was similarly devoted to “comicbooks and sensational movies” before murdering a young playmate.21 The judge in that case would ultimately refuse to convict Lang because he was convinced by the defense argument that comic books were largely to blame; and a widely circulated AP photo offered a portrait of the murderer as a comic book junkie (Figure 28). A short time late later, still another sensational case made the headlines, this time a thirteenyear-old girl named Diana Allen, also an inveterate reader of comic books, who murdered a seven-year-old playmate, offering as explanation only her sudden and unaccountable “urge” to kill.22 Into the early 1950s when comic book sales skyrocketed to as many as 100 million copies sold every month and new statistics seemed to support fears of an escalating rate of juvenile delinquency, the connection between comics readFigure 28.  Howard Lang, thirteen, and his attorney, Samuel J. Andalman, pose with Lang’s comics after entering a guilty plea, claiming that his addiction to comic books contributed to his crime, April 2, 1948. © Associated Press.

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ing and crime for many anxious observers and their elected officials began to seem too overwhelmingly obvious to ignore.23 Despite the mounting concerns in the newspapers and among concerned citizen groups at that time, however, it is worth reiterating that, at least until Wertham directly joined the fight, few academic studies—especially in psychiatry and the social sciences—arrived at conclusions that supported these mounting concerns. In fact, if anything, perhaps the most remarkable fact about the scholarly literature from the period is how consistently it refutes the claims in the mainstream press. A 1941 Science News-Letter, for example, tells the story of Tess, a troubled girl under treatment at Bellevue following the suicide of her father: “Tessie was an omnivorous reader of comics and imagined herself in the plot of her favorite characters.”24 Here the “constant reading of comic books” was reported by hospital officials as helping to break the patient’s compulsive belief that she must follow her father’s tragic fate. That same year, an educator reported on his own findings of the positive benefits of allowing comics into his otherwise traditional classroom.25 The arguments tended to focus on similar claims about the potential benefits of comics: their status as modern folklore; their role in providing salutary narratives of overcoming great odds in an overwhelming modern world; their role as a vehicle for “mental catharsis”; and their potential as tools for improving basic literacy.26 John R. Cavanagh, a naval psychologist, for example, argued that a young reader engaging deeply with comics is “merely projecting himself into the story and releasing his aggression in the realm of phantasy.”27 And Josette Frank, a senior researcher for the Child Study Association of America, insisted that by “identifying themselves with the hero or the villain,” “children may find release for their pent-up feelings of hate, anger, fear, and aggression.”28 The prominent psychologist Lauretta Bender went so far as to describe the “psychology of children’s reading and the comics” as a natural fit, one that should be encouraged even if it is not yet completely understood: Children’s spontaneous art work always appears to be incomplete; they seem to produce only fragments when left to themselves and not urged by some adult to make a complete picture. Their art work is a projection of their inner fantasy life which is a vital, active, continuous process, never in itself complete. . . . . . . The experimental features of the comic strips are highly significant to the child for the same reason; the facility for depicting successive numbers, the opportunity for infinite repetition with minor differences, for infinite continuity, all kinds of spatial relations, and the different postures and motilities of the body. These things may not always be beautiful or they may not succeed experimentally but they are psychologically important to the child.29

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In fact, the academic study of comics in the 1940s was for the most part unified across a range of disciplines—psychology, sociology, education, and criminology—in finding little significant “danger” in comics to a reader’s mental development, literacy, school performance, or likelihood to turn to crime. But, as Cavanagh put it in 1949, “Emotionalism sells better than intellectualism, and makes better copy,” and thus the media continued to highlight sensational accounts of comics as the “marijuana of the nursery.”30 In truth, however, those who saw potential benefits in the comic book and its powerful hold on the nation’s readers (and according to many surveys a full third of these readers were adults) were not that far apart from those who looked to the same phenomenon with increasing anxiety. The ability of the graphic narrative form to inspire projection, identification, and fantasy is at the center of both defenses and critiques of comic books in the 1940s. The defenders of the comic book focused on the form’s power to liberate children’s imagination through imaginative play and creative identification. For the critics, however, the seemingly compulsive attention devoted to these comics suggested the possibility that the attachments and fantasies they were generating in young readers were unhealthy at best. In many ways, what both sides had in common was the recognition that something different was involved with the process of reading ­comics—something not explicitly spelled out in the text itself, something that seemed to involve readers intimately, even obsessively, in engaging with and rereading seemingly simplistic images and stories. Whether those studying the phenomenon saw good or evil in it had to do with whether they believed that what was being activated on the part of the reader was something liberating or creative; or whether, like Wertham, they saw in comics the key to a Pandora’s box of dark and primitive fantasies that needed to be contained if society were to survive. While the majority of studies from the social sciences and psychiatry attempted to defuse the mounting concern over any direct connection between comics and crime, it is by no means accurate to suggest that all academics saw the rising influence of the comics as fundamentally benign. Comic books came on the scene in the midst of a major sea change in the fundamental understanding of aesthetics and especially of the professional labor of those who made aesthetic judgments. Within the humanities, the rising tide of four-color comic books was inevitably perceived as a travesty to the model of aesthetics on which the academic professional increasingly staked his identity. As Wendy Steiner puts it, “The chasm between high- and middle-brow taste yawned in 1950s America,” a chasm increasingly, in her analysis, focused around the privileging of “feminine beauty and allure” which “flourished in the popular arts,” while “high art more ferociously than ever shunned such nonaesthetic ‘­interest.’”31

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Framed somewhat more broadly, as the distinction between high and low widened and hardened in the postwar period, the body and its affects became identified increasingly with the “nonaesthetic” while the style and taste apportioned to high culture was that which liberated the viewer from bodily affects to an “objective” relationship with the art object itself. While we tend to focus in the stories we tell about postwar anticomics anxiety on the content of the material, it is their status as aesthetic objects that was perhaps most disturbing to many observers—especially in their capacity to engender bodily and affective responses that humanities criticism was working to relegate to a primitive past and a degenerate present. As Michael Trask describes it: Whereas the fin-de-siècle account of the aesthetic (Oscar Wilde’s, say) understood it as an immersion in experience, the mid-century account of the aesthetic (Clement Greenberg’s, say) emphasized art’s self-distancing and its detachment from experience. . . . For Wilde, aesthetic autonomy meant the freedom to give oneself over to the sensory realm irrespective of legislated morals. The aesthetic was its own justification. For Greenberg, by contrast, aesthetic autonomy meant not just the separation of forms but the separation of the art object and its viewer from the sensate particularities of any given body.32

Within postwar art criticism, the emerging aesthetic ideal privileged the work of art as complete, autonomous from the viewer’s gaze, appealing to the ­viewer’s logic and not to bodily experience or personal emotions. Any work of art that “depends upon the beholder, is incomplete without him,” as Michael Fried argued in Art and Objecthood (1967), and any such work becomes necessarily predatory, waiting in the dark for the viewer: “And once he is in the room the work refuses, obstinately, to let him alone.”33 The comic, with its formal and inescapable demands for active completion by the reader, is therefore necessarily a most predatory aesthetic objects. If art criticism of the postwar period was especially concerned with protecting the viewer from the degenerate art object that clings to the viewer for its completion, postwar literary criticism—epitomized by the New Criticism—focused on the degenerate reader imposing his fantasies on the text. In the new “science of objective evaluation,” both the “origins” of a literary work (its author) and its “results” (the emotional response of its readers) must be excluded from the field of analysis.34 Only when liberated from the critical fallacies of the past, as Wimsatt and Beardsley argued in the 1940s, can the systematic reader (freed from his own feelings) finally see and study the text itself (freed from the biographical and biological facts of the author). As René Wellek’s put it in an

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influential 1941 English Institute lecture that would serve as a call to arms for many postwar critics, for too long criticism has been “purely emotive: it judges works of art in terms of their emotional effect on the reader or spectator and describes this effect by exclamations, suggested moods or scene, and so forth. However disguised, much criticism amounts to the labeling of works of art by emotional terms like ‘joyful,’ ‘gay,’ ‘melancholy,’ and so forth.” In place of the Wildean deep immersion in the aesthetic experience, New Criticism promised a method of reading that liberated the text from the personality of the author and the emotive response of the reader, from having to resort to words “like ‘joyful,’ ‘gay,’ ‘melancholy,’ and so forth.”35 The search for a systematic and objective criticism purged of “false sentiment” and taint of the personal and particular was of course motivated in part by a broader anxiety in postwar humanities disciplines about the status (professional, but also gendered) of critics. All of which goes a long way to explain the apparent disconnect in the responses to comics in the period from scholars in the social sciences and those coming out of the humanities. In truth, of course, with few exceptions, the New Critics did not openly address the specifics of comic books, far and away the most popular reading material of their age. “Comic book” instead became for them shorthand for all that was degraded and degenerate about contemporary mass culture. As Allen Tate put it, for example, the function of the critic is to resist all attempts to “foist a comic book culture on us, as would-be Grand Inquisitors romp over the freedom of our thinking.”36 For the New Critics, “comic book” became an adjective to describe not only the lowest of the lowbrow but also the threat to individual thought and expression posed by mass culture in general. The popularity of the comic book certainly suggested some kind of mass mind-control, which the well-made poem and the well-tuned critic stood ready to resist. If the comic book could not be addressed directly, the “comic book culture” it served could be held up as that which conspired to prevent the development of the powers that New Criticism sought to extend to a postwar generation of readers with unprecedented access to higher education. Eschewing the encyclopedic demands of allusion, intertextuality, literary history, and biography, the New Critics privileged instead a quality of mind and a disciplined attention to the form of the text itself. These were mental and aesthetic disciplines that could be taught, disciplines that did not require a privileged background or education. The comic, on the other hand, was necessarily intertextual and inevitably incomplete, requiring the reader to insert his feelings and interpretations actively into the text itself. It was captivating, affective, and relished in both the personality of the author and the emotive response of the reader.

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There was one fascinating moment where comics and New Criticism collided fairly directly—an unlikely exchange in the pages of the American Scholar between William Moulton Marston, a psychiatrist and the creator of Wonder Woman, and Cleanth Brooks, one of the young stars of the New Criticism. Like other psychiatrists, Marston had first become aware of comic books because of concerns over the influence of this new media on young readers. Unlike most who would follow in the 1940s, however, Marston saw a career opportunity in a growth industry. In what amounted to a job application, in a 1940 article in Family Circle Marston provided the first psychological endorsement of the power of comics and a reassurance to middle-class parents that the fantasies they encouraged were healthy and productive, earning him an invitation from Max Gaines to serve as a professional consultant for the fledgling industry. Once in the door, Marston (writing under the penname Charles Moulton) developed Wonder Woman—as he described it in the American Scholar in 1943, a female superhero designed to counterbalance the one fault he saw in comic books. “It seemed to me, from a psychological angle, that the comics’ worst offense was their blood-curdling masculinity,” he argued, and Wonder Woman was to provide what his research, professional and personal, had convinced him was the true desire of every man: to be dominated by a loving and strong woman (Figure 29). “Give them an alluring woman stronger than themselves to submit to and they’ll be proud to become her willing slaves!”37 Figure 29.  Illustration of Wonder Woman dominating her editor accompanying “Why 100,000,000 Americans Read Comics.” Reprinted from the American Scholar 13.1 (Winter 1943–44): 35–44. Copyright © 1944 by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

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The title of Marston’s article was “Why 100,000,000 Americans Read Comics,” and his professional answer to the question (as both comics professional and professional analyst) was that the comic book format was a powerful and salutary “mental vitamin” that allowed readers to work through their deepest and most repressed fantasies, fantasies (such as the desire of male readers to submit to “an alluring woman stronger than themselves”) that could literally save the world from its own worst instincts, including war.38 For Marston, the phenomenal rise of the comic book represented the culmination of American literature, now arriving at a “zenith of popularity never before achieved in world history by any form of reading matter.”39 In the next issue of American Scholar, Cleanth Brooks and his Louisiana State colleague Robert Heilman responded with a long, facetious account of their sudden conversion to Marston’s philosophy in their literature classes, claiming that they now will even employ models dressed as Wonder Woman to help illustrate their lectures and demonstrate female superiority. Brooks and Heilman maintain their deadpan approach throughout their letter, expressing their gratitude to Marston for inspiring their “conversion” to comics over traditional literature, and they conclude by calling on Marston and the editors of the American Scholar “to tell us more about the comics by means of comics”—even offering to furnish the editors with the zinc plates necessary to transform the journal into a comic book: “We are sure that there are literally thousands of Phi Beta Kappas who will happily contribute their keys, if need be, to bring the power of the ‘visual image’ to the aid of puny reason in the great fight to save the humanities to which we are all committed.”40 However, when they turn to the excesses of Marston’s fanciful prose style (for example, his praise of comics for “amortizing to apoplexy the ossified arteries of routine thought”), they can no longer maintain the role of “converts.” “Brother Marston is a daring poet, and like all daring poets he needs an imaginative reader to meet him halfway,” they scoff, in what for a New Critic is a most damning assessment of any “poet.”41 For Brooks, especially, as for the New Critical lions with which he is most closely associated, Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, any text that required the reader to meet it “halfway” was by definition not poetry. This point might in fact be dismissed as an offhand quip was not Brooks at this very moment hard at work on a lengthy response to a direct attack on his methods and aesthetics, also published in the American Scholar just a couple of issues earlier. In “Intellectual Criticism,” Darrel Abel had accused Brooks and his fellow New Critics of studiously working “to define poetry as intellectual exercise and to deny that its value consists in its appeal to the feelings.”42 In the

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issue following his sardonic response to Marston, Brooks went directly on the attack against the critics of the methods and goals of the New Criticism. And what he attacked in his critics was in effect precisely what he found distasteful in Marston’s defense of comics. While accepting that, as A. E. Housman had suggested, “the skin may bristle so as to defeat the razor when a man is confronted with true poetry,” nonetheless, Brooks argued, “skin-bristling is not criticism.”43 As Brooks argues, clearly responding here to Abel and Marston at once: “In a civilization in which we are fast losing our ability to read even expository prose, in which our characteristic study of literature turns, more and more, into history, and in which the majority of the adult population, we are assured on good authority, turns for its emotional satisfaction to the comic strips—in such a civilization there may be something to be said for ‘intellectual’ criticism after all.”44 New Criticism in many ways was brought into contact with the tension between its ideals and reality by the rise of the comic book. On the one hand, the New Criticism was motivated by a democratizing impulse, seeking to bring discrimination through critical discipline to a new generation of readers. On the other hand, its methods dramatically widened the gulf between how people actually read and how the critics were now telling them they should read. It was not just “good” reading material versus “bad”: at the heart of the New Criticism and the postwar humanities in general was the teaching of right ways to read versus proscribed and even pathologized reading methods. Bad readers read for emotions, for feelings, for chills and tears and other bodily responses (“skin-bristling”): their reading methods, like the reading materials themselves, were fundamentally pornographic, even masturbatory as suggested in the illustration accompanying an article about the comics scare in Kiplinger’s Personal Finance (Figure 30). Good readers, on the other hand, read for ideas, liberated of individuated emotions and individual bodies: their reading methods, even more than their materials, are cultivated, as Trask puts it, “against a mass culture that is understood, on the one hand, to wallow in its own emotional excess and, on the other hand, to feign its sincerest values.”45 We are unlikely today to associate the New Criticism with the Cold War coalition that was gathering evidence and burning books (often not in that order), a coalition made up of what might reasonably be called the usual suspects: children’s authors such as Sterling North, horrified at the comics’ “hyperdermic injection of sex and murder”;46 religious leaders like Reverend Thomas F. Doyle who worried over the ways in which superheroes destroy the foundations of modern religion by encouraging something akin to pagan idolatry;47 or anticommunist committees in search of evidence of socialist propaganda in

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Figure 30.  Illustration accompanying “The Dirt and Trash that Kids Are Reading: And What Can Be Done About It,” Kiplinger’s Personal Finance (November 1954): 25. © 1954 Kiplinger’s Personal Finance. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

the newsstand comics mesmerizing young readers. And yet it is important to recognize that the aesthetic ideal and reading practices championed by the New Critics and the postwar humanities in general created the conditions for the pathologization of dangerous books and bad readers. Fredric Wertham arrived on the scene to provide an official scientific medical diagnosis to the pathology—although, as we will see, it was not exactly the one that many anticomics crusaders would have scripted themselves. III “The psychiatric defenders of the comic-book industry maintain that this kind of thing helps Junior with his emotional self-expression. And the educational defenders of the industry claim it helps him with his literary expression.”48 Such scholars, Wertham scoffed, make their claims without even studying what they claim to be judging, and worse, without even getting to know the children for whom they purport to be speaking. In truth, to an extent unrivaled among both those who praised comics and those who burned them, Wertham studied comic books and talked to their readers about how and why they read them. The vast majority of what he learned was through his work at the Lafargue Clinic in Harlem, the first institution dedicated to providing free psychiatric care to African-Americans. Working with often severely disadvantaged children, many referred to his practice by the juvenile courts, Wertham discovered comics not through the headlines or outraged parents, but from his young patients themselves, who brought increasing numbers of comics with them into the clinic

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and into their conversations with the psychiatrists at Lafargue. Since his patients were taking comics seriously, Wertham did as well, and what he found when he sat down to read them alarmed him profoundly. In the end, the problem for Wertham was less that people were not taking comics seriously; rather, it was that they were not taking the minds of the young readers seriously (48). Wertham’s crusade against comics was, for him, a crusade for the mental health of a generation facing a threat of truly monumental proportions. ­Comics were dangerous because the fundamental nature of the medium—the use of powerful iconic images, sequential patterns, and suggestive, elliptical narration—was a key to inner recesses of the mind meant to be carefully guarded. After all, similar tools were used for both diagnostic and therapeutic purposes by Wertham and many of his colleagues during this period. Psychiatrists were increasingly using a variety of visual tests asking patients to produce meanings from images—the Rorschach Test, for example, of which Wertham was one of the first champions in the United States—or to arrange images so as to make them meaningful—for example, the Mosaic Test developed by Wertham himself. The most widely used such tool, and one still used today in modified form, was the Bender-Gestalt Test, developed in 1938 by Lauretta Bender at Bellevue. Bender’s test provided patients with nine images, asks the subject “to copy them in any way he sees fit. . . . His behavior throughout the testing period is observed and recorded inconspicuously. When the subject has completed the drawings, the figure reproductions are evaluated for such perceptually meaningful factors as size, rotation of the drawing on the test paper, closure of the figures, manner of organizing the drawings on the pages,” and so on.49 The Mosaic Test, as Wertham describes it in Seduction, presents the subject with a large number of mosaic tiles of different colors and shapes, asking him “to put them on a tray and make any design he pleases” (57). In both cases, Bender and Wertham saw the way in which images were constructed, combined and interpreted as a powerful lens into the inner recesses of the mind. For Bender, the insights gleaned from the analysis of children’s reading and copying of comics was related to what could be learned from the Bender-Gestalt Test: “In the course of these studies, we encountered, time and again, the projection of the child’s fantasy upon the characters and stories of the comic books.”50 Both provided a way to analyze and evaluate the inner life of the subject’s mind. For Wertham, however, there was a profound difference between what children produced when responding to psychiatric visual tests and their response to comics; and this difference ultimately explains how these two prominent psychiatrists ended up on opposite sides of the comic book wars despite their shared sense of the power of images to unlock the unfolding mysteries of the mind.

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Among the earliest evidence that Wertham cites in Seduction of the Innocent for his findings of the pernicious effects of comics on children’s minds is his patients’ response to another visual tool, the Rorschach Test. Wertham rightly claims that he is one of the first in the United States to publish research on the effectiveness of the test, but as he argues in Seduction, he had come to have serious concerns as to the ways in which the diagnostic tool was being interpreted in recent years, “interpreted with the bias of a purely biological determination, leaving out all social influence” (56). Interpreted without attention to environmental factors, Wertham argues, the Rorschach Test has been used “to bolster the conception of more or less fixed psychological-biological phases of childhood development,” or more urgently, used to blame children for the violence being imprinted on them by social forces. Thus, when Wertham finds his young subjects able to “see forms that adults usually do not see,” he refuses to attribute this to either a hard-wired stage of childhood development or to a pathology in the individual child. Instead, Wertham argues, his investigations demonstrate that the unique visions these young people derive from the ­Rorschach inkblots turn out to be related to what they have seen in comic books. For Wertham, far from giving insight into fears and fantasies natural to the inner life of the child, the comics were literally imprinting themselves—silently but permanently—on children’s minds. Seduction assured parents that these fantasies were unnatural, imposed from without by a culture industry determined to profit at the expense of their children’s mental hygiene. For Wertham the mind of the ideal young reader is innocent of the horrors, lusts, and cruelties parents had been reading about in the sensational accounts of juvenile crime. These actions had been scripted by the comic book industry and their collaborators in psychiatry and education, “an exact parallel to the blunting of sensibilities in the direction of cruelty that has characterized a whole generation of central European youth fed on the ­Nietzsche-Nazi myth.”51 Wertham’s goal is to liberate young readers from the “locust plague” that “had settled” in their otherwise “innocent” minds. Returned to this state of innocence, these readers would then be capable of responding to texts in the terms the New Critics prescribed, capable of eschewing the “emotional satisfaction” of “skin-bristling”—able to prevent the predatory text from violating the inner recesses of their minds. As Wertham put it in his introduction to a collection of “fiction illuminating neuroses of our time,” “science and art, psychiatry and literature” should collaborate together to realize “visions of a time when, as Freud put it, ‘culture will not crush any more.’”52 Seduction of the Innocent was part of a larger struggle that Wertham had been waging for the previous decade with what he perceived to be a culture that

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did crush—and with a psychiatric profession he saw as collaborating with the culture industries who profited from crushing. In many ways, his critique has clear links to that of the Frankfurt school, fellow German expatriates in postwar America. But unlike Adorno, Wertham does not decry comic books because they privilege “distraction and inattention” over art’s traditional function of providing occasion for concentration and focus. For Wertham, in fact, the danger of comics was that they did demand concentration and often inspired obsessive focus. As Wertham explains, while the readers only casually familiar with comic books often conceive of these texts as a whirlwind of “continuous fast action,” in actuality, “when the stories come to details of a delinquency or depiction of brutality, the action slows noticeably” (19). He offers as a “typical example” an account of select panels from the first issue of Crime Smashers (1950):



1. The girl walking along with a dark figure, his arm stretched out toward her, lurking behind. 2. The girl falling over, her breast prominent, her skirt thrown up to reveal black net panties, the “attacker” a black, shadowed figure leaning over her. 3. He “drags her into the gloom,” holding his hand over her mouth and tearing off her coat. 4. He has her on the ground behind some bushes. 5. A girl, murdered, and presumably raped, is shown on the ground with her clothes disordered and torn. 6. Another girl being choked from behind. Screams: “ai—eeek!!” 7. “The Strangler” locks her in a warehouse, saying: “I’ll kill you just like I did the others—Then I’ll crawl down the trap door and get away under the dock—ha! ha!” (20)

Wertham does not reproduce in Seduction the story he is paraphrasing here, but the source does show that his description is accurate in its broad strokes and attentive in some of its details (Figure 31). For Wertham, it is the tendency of comics to slow down the reader forcing them to focus on details such as undergarments and prominent breasts, on one hand, and to imagine the details of the violent attack, on the other, that makes these texts so dangerous. And for this reason, looking more closely at the story in question is informative. The woman we see being attacked in the opening pages of the story turns out to be “Sally the Sleuth,” a recurring character in the issues to come, and one who might have been familiar to any readers of the 1930s pulp Spicy Detective Stories. The average reader of this first issue of Crime Smashers would likely not know this in these opening panels, but by page 3 Sally’s identity as a detective

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working undercover to bring a serial murderer to justice is spelled out as she and her colleagues regroup after their unsuccessful first attempt to bring the criminal to justice—a scene that is every bit as “slow” in its narration as that of the attack itself (Figure 32). Here Sally and her colleagues discuss the case, planning their next move; the strap of Sally’s dress, presumably torn in the struggle represented on the previous page, is magically mended in the second panel; the Chief retrieves Sally’s handbag (whose strap is also broken) and Sally prepares to head home for some much-needed rest after her adventure. My point here is obviously not to accuse Wertham of reading this comic badly. After all, Wertham is actually on to something important in describing the ways in which comics slow down the reading process, simultaneously opening up space for the reader’s imaginative attention to both notice and fill in details. But while Wertham is right that there is something in reading comics that slows us down, where he goes wrong is in imagining that all readers slow down for the same panels and fill them in in precisely the same ways. After all, Wertham’s analysis says as much about what he slows down for (the imagined glimpse of undergarments as opposed to the details of police procedural, for

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Figure 31.  The first two pages of Crime Smashers 1 (Trojan Magazines, 1950).

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Figure 32.  Detail from Crime Smashers 1 (Trojan Magazines, 1950).

example) as it does about the scene in question. We should further note that items 5–7 from his summary of key panels marshaled in support of his reading occur later in the story, and any reasonably attentive reader would easily identify the “girl” in 6–7 as the same Sally from the opening sequence, the sleuth who we know by this point is going to survive and bring her would-be attacker to justice. Again, I bring this up not to accuse Wertham of selectively cherry picking his evidence: after all, he is accurate when he suggests that fully one-third of the images in the story can be said to describe sexual violence. Instead, what Wertham’s readings throughout Seduction demonstrate perhaps better than any other early study of the form is how much the comic form leaves blank, suggestive, to be filled in by the imagination of the reader. Wertham himself slows down and focuses on certain elements and fails to fill in ­others; his summary makes logical narrative connections of various panels while eliding or forgetting other extended (and very slow) passages and ignoring or missing key narrative information—for example, failing to recognize that “the girl” being

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attacked at the end of the story is the undercover detective from the beginning. Wertham reads (and writes), in effect, his own story. But in doing so, he is committing no great sin of omission or commission. As we have seen, this is what comics encourage and even require, bound by the gaps and ellipses that demand the reader concentrate imaginatively on making the connections that will allow him to fill in what can only be partially, if at all, represented (like the “black net panties” Wertham highlights, a detail that requires more than a little imagination on the part of the reader to fill in). The slowing down that Wertham worries over, therefore, is one intrinsic to the form. While there are certain deliberate strategies that creators can use to decelerate narrative—often referred to in contemporary comics as “decompression”—slowing down happens all the time in comics as a necessary part of the process of collaborative meaning-making. Where Wertham gets it wrong is in his embrace of a comic book version of the “intentional fallacy,” imagining that this process is controlled by producers determined to dictate specific pathological responses. For Wertham, a corrupt and manipulative comic book industry is “seducing” the “innocent”; his idealized innocent young reader leaves him unable to acknowledge the agency of individual readers in bringing meaning to the text. But if he failed to see his readers in the act of reading, in making his case, Wertham nonetheless stared harder at comics than any other critic of his generation and in the process laid the groundwork for theorizing the unique nature of the form. Wertham’s analysis of comics and mass culture was fairly quickly dismissed by his academic peers (upon whom, as we have seen, he declared open warfare in Seduction), and he has all but vanished from popular culture studies except as the villain of numerous histories of postwar comics. In fairness, however, we must acknowledge Wertham as the first to attempt a detailed exploration of the unique reading experience of comics and the first to take the interpretations of comics readers themselves seriously—even if in doing so he often confused the interpretations of his readers (and himself) with the intention of the creators. Take, for example, the passages for which Wertham is most often cited (and derided) today: his account of Batman and Robin as representing a “wish dream of two homosexuals living together” (190). While Wertham’s analysis of Batman and Robin is tortured by his own (and his profession’s) assumptions about homosexuality, it also provides us with a remarkable insight into the ways in which some young homosexuals in postwar America (brought to Wertham for the “crime” of being gay) did in fact use of the space opened up by the gutters and ellipses of comics to write themselves into a mass culture that

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otherwise studiously worked to erase or pathologize them. Wertham quotes one “young homosexual” at length: He pointed out a picture of “The Home of Bruce and Dick,” a house beautifully landscaped, warmly lighted and showing the devoted pair side by side, looking out of a picture window. When he was eight this boy realized from fantasies about comic-book pictures that he was aroused by men. At the age of ten or eleven, “I found my liking, my sexual desires, in comic books. I think I put myself in the position of Robin. I did want to have relations with Batman. The only suggestion of homosexuality may be that they seem to be so close to each other. I remember the first time I came across the page mentioning the “secret bat cave.” The thought of Batman and Robin living together and possibly having sex relations came to my mind. You can almost connect yourself with the people. (192)

As Andy Medhurst points out, while Wertham tells this story to “impel us to tear the pages of Detective away before little Tommy grows up and moves to Greenwich Village,” we can clearly recognize in the reading practices the young man describes the “bricolage which Richard Dyer has identified as a characteristic reading strategy of gay audiences.”53 Within the pages of the comic book, gay teens were able to identify and project themselves into scenes that promised what no other corner of postwar mass media did: a happy and loving domestic relationship between two men. This is not to say, of course, that the comics industry was more progressive in terms of issues of homosexuality than, say, television. In the years that have followed the publication of Wertham’s analysis, Batman’s creators and owners would scramble to foreclose such readings by insisting on their decidedly “straight” intentions. And in fact film and even television have until recently been in advance of comic books in their positive representations of homosexuals. What made Batman queer was not the intentions of the creators but what the “slowing down” of comics reading invited Wertham’s brilliant young patient to project into the panels and read in the space between them (Figure 33). Of course, it was precisely such queer reading practices that made the comics so potent and terrifying to Wertham and his colleagues. The reality is that all comic book readers are liable to be queer readers, in the sense that such reading mobilizes the overinvestment, the hyperidentification, or the melodramatic gullibility that Wertham and his contemporaries diagnosed as symptoms of male homosexuality. And painting comics readers as queer in the negative sense (deluded or diseased) allowed Wertham to defuse the threat of their being queer in the unruly or subversive sense. It is in the latter sense that all readers of comics are queer readers, and it is this prospect that Wertham

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Figure 33.  A peek into Batman and Robin’s domestic life, from the story “The Joker’s Aces!” in World’s Finest Comics 59 (1952).

finds so terrifying—more even than the specter of Batman or Wonder Woman converting teenagers to a deviant lifestyle—that he cannot grant it any foundation in his analysis. Of course, Wertham’s biggest error as an analyst is also what makes the book such an invaluable resource for understanding comic reading practices during the period: his primary authorities throughout are the readings of his young patients whose creative agency Wertham himself fails to acknowledge. Guided by his young patients, Wertham is persuaded to read the comic books the way they do; but without any faith in the ability of “innocent” readers to produce such complex and imaginative readings on their own he can only assume that the messages they draw from these books were deliberately inscribed there by not-so-innocent adults. For example, in the illustrations in the center of Seduction, Wertham reproduces an image of a bound woman being menaced by a thug with a poker (Figure 34). “Children told me what the man was going to do with the red-hot poker,” Wertham’s caption explains. Guided by Wertham (as he in turn was guided by his native informants), we quickly understand the unspoken horror of what he suggests will happen next. But looking back at the image itself (from Crime Reporter, no. 2, 1948), there is clearly as much or more visual evidence to suggest that the threatened site of the violence will be the woman’s foot, bound and elevated to the box over which the thug gesticulates. Of course, one gruesome reading is not more “right” than the other; but for Wertham what the young readers tell him “the man was going to do” is what will happen—and, more urgently, what was intended by the creators. A more mystifying example of Wertham’s decoding of the secret meanings of comic book images is found in another panel he includes among his illustrations (Figure 35). “In ordinary comic books,” the caption tells us, “there are

Figures 34–35.  In the tipped-in images in his book, Wertham offered his graphic evidence for his case against comic books. From Frederic Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent (New York: Rinehart, 1954).

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pictures within pictures for children who know how to look.” The image of a man’s shoulder (from Jungle Comics, no. 98, 1948), Wertham explains elsewhere in the book, clearly “shows a girl’s nude body. This is so clear that it can induce the immature reader to look for such things and stir him up sexually” (185). The notion that the artist of this story, Maurice Whitman, had artfully concealed an image of female genitalia in the shoulder of the hero of the story, Tabu, might well seem laughable. But Wertham was convinced, his own eyes trained by his knowing readers in how and where to look for such encoded eroticism. For Wertham far more threatening than the possibility represented by Batman and Wonder Woman that young readers were being recruited through secret signs to homosexuality was the palpable sense that comic books were converting “innocent” into “knowing”—and active—readers. Despite Wertham’s claims that, unlike the industry dupes who defended comics, he was going to be the first to take the minds of children seriously, in the end he failed to acknowledge the agency of the readers of comics in producing and sharing the meanings they arrived at. Ten years earlier, his professional rival Lauretta Bender had come closest to describing the ways in which the fragmentary and unfinished nature of comics was an invitation to experiment and storytelling.54 But, following one last indirect sparring match with Wertham in front of Congress in 1954, Bender had largely moved on from her research with comic books. By the 1960s, Bender’s work focused increasingly on studying the potential use of LSD in the treatment of schizophrenia, experiments that would contribute indirectly—as we will see in Chapter 4—to the emergence of a very different kind of comic book at the end of the decade. Because Wertham’s critique of the comics was picked up and embraced by a mainstream media eager to find academic backing for the mounting hysteria directed against comic books (and by a newspaper industry eager to fan the flames against the growing economic influence of an industry that was increasingly recognized as a competitor), his arguments have been too easily conflated with those of the moral crusaders and McCarthyite conservatives. And Wertham seems to have encouraged such a conflation by filling his book with seemingly sensational accounts of juvenile crimes and courting the media attention that followed. But ultimately, for all their differences, Wertham’s critique is closer to that of the Frankfurt school, whose analysis of mass culture was decidedly not embraced by mainstream media. Wertham cites his overwhelming examples of dangerous comics and the dangerous reading they inspire, not to indict any individual representation as contributing directly to the rise of juvenile crime, but to demonstrate their sheer overwhelming (and in his analysis, psychologically overpowering) mass. As Adorno writes the same

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year as the publication of Seduction of the Innocent, the “atmosphere of the normality of crime” in mass media is created not by the moral message of any individual texts—in which crime is always, ultimately, punished—but “by the overwhelming wealth of material.”55 For both Wertham and Adorno, this was the culture that crushes (although what is crushed in the process is of course different for each). Indeed, although he left Germany well before Adorno, Wertham and many of his colleagues shared both a background and a larger outlook on mass culture. In a 1948 symposium that Wertham organized early in his work with comic books, most of the participants, like Wertham himself, were Jews—some, like Hilde Mosse, having escaped the Nazis and brought with them a deep interest in the national psychopathology that allowed for the rise of fascism in Germany. And for almost all of the participants in Wertham’s symposium, the parallels were clear; as Gershon Legman put it, “comic books have succeeded . . . in giving every American child a complete course in paranoid megalomania such as no German child ever had, a total conviction of the morality of force such as no Nazi could even aspire to.”56 Like Adorno and the expatriates of the Frankfurt school, Wertham and his associates could not help but see the connection with American popular culture and the fascism that had overtaken Europe a little more than a decade earlier. But whereas for Adorno, mass culture industries conspired to keep Americans in a state of perpetual childishness, unable to act and organize on their own behalf, for Wertham mass culture was determined to make American youth grow up too quickly, turning them into “knowing” readers by stimulating and feeding dormant appetites. IV The comic book—arguably more than any other form in the postwar period— epitomized the new power of an emerging youth consumer no longer easily regulated within the household.57 Clearly, however, it was not only parents and self-appointed cultural gatekeepers who were made nervous by this power: comic book publishers themselves worked to limit the agency of their readers. As we have seen, pulps from at least as early as the 1920s encouraged active correspondence from readers, and with the rise of the comic book in the late 1930s readers continued to write in with questions, ideas, challenges, just as they had earlier to Amazing Stories or The Gumps.58 Yet in the pages of the comic books from the period, virtually none of these letters are to be found. And there were good reasons why the comic book publishers should have wanted to print such letters. First, the postal codes required two pages of printed

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text each issue, a mandate that could have easily been addressed by printing the free content provided by readers. Instead, the early publishers demanded short stories from their staff writers in each issue. More urgently, readers expected in the comic book a continuation of a serial culture they had long known—an interactive, collaborative space that would seem to have been ideally suited to the new form. It is worth recalling, after all, that Siegel and Shuster did not set out to create the first superhero comic book: their goal from the start was to create a newspaper comic strip. As we saw in Chapter 2, the comic strip as they knew it in the 1930s was a dynamic, interactive space, sharing many properties with the science fiction pulp culture they loved but offering visible models of celebrity and fortune in successful cartoonists such as Sidney Smith, the size of whose contract was matched only by the volume of his mail. The publishers, many of them crossing over from pulps or newspaper syndicates, knew that they shared readers with these other interactive serial forms. It appears likely that, at least initially, the new comic book publishers desired to keep readers from declaring the kind of ownership in their comic books that they had in earlier serial forms. In refusing to open that space up in the new comic book, the publishers evidenced their own anxieties about unruly readers, anxieties not so very different from those of the critics of the comic book to follow. There were a couple of publishers in the 1940s that did include letters pages and attempted to generate the same sense of community and interaction that readers found in the pulps. Most important of these was Novelty Press, credited with introducing the first letters page in 1940. An imprint of the publisher of the Saturday Evening Post and the Ladies’ Home Journal (which in 1953 would publish a sensationally illustrated preview of Wertham’s book), Novelty Press was one of the first forays by a mainstream periodical company into the relatively lawless frontier of the burgeoning comic book industry.59 Bringing their experience with weekly periodicals to comic book publishing, it made sense that Novelty would experiment with letters pages for their two flagship titles, Target and Blue Bolt. Paying one dollar for each letter published, Novelty titled their letters page Ye Editors’ Page, inviting the letter writers to see themselves as “editors” of the comic books. A 1941 letters page, for example, discusses “a few interesting facts garnered from the many hundreds of excellent letters received from you, Ye Editors,” including requests for specific stories, criticism of particular artists, and an ongoing debate as to whether Target should feature more serial narratives: “We have tried to satisfy all by making most stories in each issue a complete episode of a continued story.”60 Of all the early publishers, only Novelty fostered the interactions and sense of shared ownership that was part of the serial comic strips of the 1920s and 1930s. As a

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result, when criticism of comic books began to escalate at the end of the 1940s, they could appeal directly to their readers for support: “Have you shown your target comics to your parents, so that they may see what type of magazine you are reading?” the editors ask. “If you haven’t please do. . . . They can’t help but come to the conclusion that target is not only relaxing but educational as well.”61 A few months later, however, the anticomics crusade was threatening to impact the core business of the Curtis Publishing Company, and Novelty closed up shop. It was against the backdrop of this mounting anticomics crusade that letters pages began to appear regularly in other comic books in the early 1950s. Chief among the publishers that made use of the letters page was EC Comics, which had served as the final comics resting place of Ed Wheelan after it was established by Max Gaines in 1944. Following his father’s death in 1947, William Gaines, reluctant heir to the company’s fortunes, announced a bold shift in direction for the company. Gaines redefined the company from “Educational Comics” to “Entertaining Comics,” launching the “New Trend” line and using the letters pages to appeal directly to the reader to join the raucous community of misfits. Mad, the one EC title that would survive the anticomics backlash, took its title from a phrase William Gaines used regularly in the letters pages of his horror titles: “EC’s Mad Mag.” In the early 1950s, under Gaines and editor Al Feldstein, EC encouraged readers to share their opinions but also their ideas—for example, inviting them to contribute suggestions for the twist endings which were EC’s trademark. EC created a self-referential community, winking at inside jokes and speaking with their readers in a slang likely to mystify new readers. The strategy worked, creating a loyalty to the publisher, especially among young adult readers, and the sense that EC was something apart from the standard fare blanketing the newsstands. The first fanzine specifically devoted to comic books was The EC Fan Bulletin, founded by Bhob Stewart in 1953, and Gaines liked the title so much he adapted it for his own promotional newsletter, The EC Fan-Addict Bulletin. For Gaines, encouraging his readers to invest in the company and its product was a smart business decision; focused on short science fiction and horror stories emerging out of the pulp tradition, EC’s “New Trend” titles had no continuing characters aside from the ghoulish narrators of the flagship books. And so it was to the Crypt Keeper or the Old Witch that readers addressed their letters, striving to outdo each other (and the editors) in subtle wit or grossout humor: “Dear V.K.,” one Carol Plumb of Richmond, New York, writes, “Your latest issue was the epitome of repulsiveness. I’ve never enjoyed retching more!”62 EC readers regularly wrote in with ghoulish poems, riddles, and

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macabre puns, rewarded by their monstrous “editors” for their creativity with publication and praise. Nonetheless, EC was surprisingly slow to realize fully the dangers the industry faced in the early 1950s, and indeed it was not until 1954 that Gaines realized that his best ally in the political fight was in fact his network of readers. First in the EC Fan-Addict Bulletin and then a few months later in the pages of his comic books themselves, Gaines appealed to his readers for a massive letter-writing campaign to the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency then deliberating the fate of comic books and the potential role of government censors in controlling content: “this is an emergency bulletin! This is an appeal for action!”63 But by the time Gaines finally mobilized his loyal readers to write directly to the forces calling for his head, it was too late. Gaines himself appeared before the Senate subcommittee on April 21, 1954, testifying immediately following Fredric Wertham’s testimony, in which Wertham used several covers from recent EC comics to illustrate his case against comic books. Gaines had begun well enough in his prepared statement, arguing while “those who want to prohibit comic magazines . . . see dirty, sneaky, perverted monsters,” in fact “our American children are for the most part normal children . . . bright children.”64 But his prepared testimony had little impact on a committee that had already identified EC as, if not the most egregious, certainly the most visible of the offending publishers. Holding up various examples from his comics, the committee asked Gaines whether he thought the images were in “good taste.” Each time Gaines answered “yes,” hastening to add that questions of “taste” needed to be applied to the genre in question: what is in good taste for a horror story is a very different thing than what is appropriate to romance or comedy. But the senators had heard enough: here was confirmation that this man who circulated millions of horror comics to a devoted audience believed that images like the cover of Crime SuspenStories, number 22, depicting a man with an axe in one hand and a woman’s decapitated head in the other, was in “good taste.”65 Gaines’s attempts to defend his readers from the charge that they are “so evil, simple minded, that it takes but a story of murder to set them to murder” were trumped by clear evidence that the man who was peddling this trash could define such images as being in “good taste.” The day following Gaines’s testimony, Lauretta Bender was called to testify. Earlier Bender had watched as the director of the Child Study Association of America was skewered by the committee for the consulting roles that some members of his board had taken within the comics industry. Herself a consultant for DC Comics, Bender was determined not to be treated similarly. Bender described how in her clinical work at Bellevue she early found comic books

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“one of the most valuable means of carrying on examinations,” which led to her pioneering studies of the impact of comics in 1940. And she puts her own professional credentials up against those of the committee’s star witness: I have written many articles. I too, have a book in press which has at least a chapter on this subject, . . . and in general it is my opinion that the comics, as I have known them and worked with them through these years and the kind of emotionally disturbed children that I have known and worked with, and my own three normal children show a remarkable capacity to select from the comics material they need and can use, a capacity which should not be underrated and it is one of the specific characteristics of the comics that this kind of a selection can be used on the comics where it cannot be used, for example, in a movie.66

When pressed by the committee, Bender describes her theory of “selection” as including comic book collecting and the capacity to discriminate between one comic title over another, but also the active choice as to which images the readers will focus on in detail. For Bender, the comic is all about choice and selection, choices that she argues other mass-media forms—particularly film—do not allow. Repeatedly the committee tries to pin Bender down on some of the specific EC stories that had come up in earlier testimony, including a story from Shock SuspenStories, number 14, in which a daughter kills her parents in order to establish for herself a new life (Figure 36). The committee had grilled Gaines about this story the previous day, and he had defended it on formal grounds for its “O. Henry finish.” Bender, however, refuses to grant the premise of the committee’s argument: Mr. Beaser. In the final shot they showed the child getting away with the three murders. Do you think that a child would identify himself or herself with the little girl? Dr. Bender. No. Mr. Beaser. Would the child identify . . . Dr. Bender. The child would only identify itself with such a child who had committed these 3 murders if there had been 3 murders in the child’s family, for which people were looking suspiciously at this child. In that case the child with horror would throw the comics out of the window. Mr. Beaser. Would the child identify its mother—or its father, with the mother and father in the story comic? Dr. Bender. Not unless their mother and father were like that mother and father. Mr. Beaser. Since delinquency does appear in broken homes as well as others,

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Figure 36.  Final pages from “The Orphan,” Al Feldstein (script) and Jack Kamen (pencils), Shock SuspenStories 14 (1954).

­assuming this is a broken home and they depicted a broken home, would the child identify his own mother and father with the pictures in the comic book? Dr. Bender. If he would so identify himself, then it would be his tendency again to discard the comic book or go into a panic. I have seen children in panics, as I say, not over comics usually because they are easily rejected, but over movies.67

Repeatedly, Bender returns to her point that comics provide children the opportunity to exercise “selection”—to reject harmful comics or images in favor of those they can put to “use.” Movies, in particular, trouble Bender precisely because she sees them as offering no such choice. But as the senators continued to stare at these particular images blown up as evidence over the course of the two days of testimony, it is clear their own interpretations have been increasingly fixed. The acts of “selection” by young readers, the ways they use particular stories or images as a “way of solving [their] problems,” sounded necessarily abstract and theoretical compared to the clear connection Wertham had traced between images such as these and juvenile crime. Bender’s account of good comic book reading did not, in effect, make for good reading; Wertham’s account, on the other hand, made for a very good horror story, one that would be played out on the screen in a short film produced by CBS for congressional

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hearings the following year, and then aired as part of the investigative journalism show Confidential File (Figure 37). Thus it was inevitable that, while Wertham would be cited approvingly in the story the committee told in their interim report in 1955, Bender’s testimony was not mentioned once. By 1955, the Comics Code Authority (CCA) had been established to defend the principles in the Comics Code of October 1954. The Code itself was a rather Figure 37.  Two screen captures from Confidential File (KTTV/CBS), October 9, 1955. In the first scene we see a gang of kids gathered in the woods for an orgy of comic book reading. In the second, we see the inevitable consequences. © CBS

Fan-Addicts and the Comic Book, 1938–1955

unremarkable document, primarily adapted from the Motion Picture Production Code of 1934 and specifically designed to eliminate crime and horror comics from the market (in this respect, the Code was an unqualified success). Despite Gaines’s attempt to earn his company a clean slate by discontinuing his New Trend line, as far as the CCA was concerned, Gaines, having publically testified as to his moral and aesthetic failings, could not be trusted to make decisions on his own. Charles F. Murphy, the chief censor appointed to implement the new code, reviewed each of EC’s titles personally. Gaines attempted to earn some breathing room with a new line of titles like Psychoanalysis and Extra! valorizing the professionals that had testified against him in Congress and in the court of public opinion. Only one title, Incredible Science Fiction, bore any structural resemblance to the New Trend titles of 1950–55, and Murphy watched this one especially closely. When Murphy rejected a story for Incredible Science Fiction on the eve of a press deadline, Gaines had to scramble to replace it with an earlier story, “Judgment Day” (originally published in Weird Fantasy, no. 18, 1953). “Judgment Day” tells the story of an inspection tour of a planet of sentient robots by a representative of Earth, sent to determine whether they have advanced sufficiently to be given unlimited access to human knowledge. In the end the human astronaut determines that they are not yet ready, after he learns of systematic discrimination against blue robots. Here the “O. Henry finish” occurs (as it often does in an EC comic) in the final panel, when the human inspector removes his helmet and reveals he is African-American. When he originally published this story in 1953, Gaines was justly proud of the response. As he reported in the letters page of Weird Fantasy, number 20, the story “precipitated an unusual amount of mail, and we’d like to devote the column to publishing excerpts from as many letters as possible. We’re very happy to report we received only one critical letter, which . . . as customary . . . we present first.”68 Those reading “Judgment Day” as it was reprinted in 1955 in Incredible Science Fiction, however, would never have a chance to write in with their thoughts on the story, as this was the last comic book EC would publish. After first insisting that the inspector could not be African-American, Murphy revised his demand, requiring instead a seemingly minor cut: the “beads of perspiration” must be removed from the astronaut’s brow. As his final act as a comic book publisher, Gaines ignored Murphy and published the story intact before shutting down operations once and for all. Of course, the cut Murphy called for was not minor. Nothing in the Code demanded that perspiration be censored, but Murphy was certainly right in interpreting the crusade to reform comics as having everything to do with perspiring

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skin, with the “skin-bristling” responses to texts generated by comics and most especially by EC’s twisted tales and twist endings. Murphy had first tried to remove the racialized body from the comic, and when he was unable to defend his reasoning for that cut he focused on sweat. The correspondence following the original publication of “Judgment Day” testifies to the visceral, bodily responses the story generated in its readers: “The story stirred me inside,” Kaye Campbell wrote; “I was thrilled beyond words,” another reader declared. Whatever Murphy’s personal opinions about the antiracist message in the story might have been, he saw it as his job to prevent such responses to comics, whether it be a “shocking document of justice” as one reader declared “Judgment Day” to be, or a “shocking” cover like that of Crime SuspenStories, number 22. As far as Murphy and his censors were concerned, comics were no longer to focus on bodies or to generate bodily responses in their readers. Of course, as we will see in Chapter 4, bodies of all kinds and in all states of excitement would reemerge the following decade in the comic book form despite—and in part because of—the attempts to sanitize the comics under the control of the Comics Code. V When recently the letters pages began disappearing from the pages of mainstream comic books, many fans greeted the occasion with varying degrees of nostalgia for the days when “letterhacks” wrote in to their favorite comics. In eliminating the letters pages the major comics companies argued that these pages had become increasingly anachronistic in the age of the Internet, which provided virtually limitless opportunities for readers to write to and about their favorite comics, no longer constrained by page limits. Commentators generally accepted this argument, even as they mourned the passing of a “golden age” when the letters page was an integral part of comic book culture. As the Washington Post put it in describing the demise of the letters page in 2002, “Beginning about 45 years ago, hard-core fans started to send in letters on sheets of notebook paper,” allowing “geekdom” to at last become a less lonely existence.69 Now, the argument goes, the “geek” has been technologically liberated from his loneliness, as the Internet connects fans along infinite numbers of axes and comics publishers need not devote precious real estate to publishing the input from a few. As we have seen, however, the image of the comics reader as lonely and isolated is itself largely a product of the postwar anxiety about the rising popularity of the comic book form, a form that openly inspired not isolation but collaboration, community, and communication. Shortly before his untimely death, the pioneering film and cultural critic Robert Warshow wrote a review essay for Commentary that addressed Wer-

Fan-Addicts and the Comic Book, 1938–1955

tham’s Seduction of the Innocent. Along with his friends and fellow public intellectuals Irving Howe and Lionel Trilling, Warshow remained skeptical throughout this short career of the rising influence of mass culture on his society. Unlike most of his colleagues, however, Warshow attempted to take popular culture seriously, examining it in its own terms and on its own merits. ­Warshow’s son Paul, who spent far more time with comic books than his father would have liked, brought this ambivalence to an inevitably personal place, especially as the din of anticomics hysteria was coming to a crescendo in the spring of 1954. Paul was a devoted member of the EC Fan-Addict Club, even actively recruiting new members from among his friends. As Warshow reports, “He keeps closely aware of dates of publication and watches the newsstands from day to day and from corner to corner if possible; when a comic book he is concerned with is late in appearing, he is likely to get in touch with the publisher to find out what has caused the delay.”70 He wrote to his favorite cartoonists regularly, offering opinions and seeking out original art for his collection. He could debate eloquently with his father on the qualities that made some comics—and some creators—better than others. Anxious about the impact of comics on his son’s taste and development, Warshow takes solace in these displays of active involvement: “I think that Paul’s desire to put himself directly in touch with the processes by which the comic books are produced may be the expression of a fundamental detachment which helps to protect him from them; the comic books are not a ‘universe’ to him, but simply objects produced for his entertainment.”71 Of course, as we have seen, Paul was by no means unique among his fellow devotees of comic books, either in his “discrimination” or in his direct involvement in the processes by which comic books are made. The playful relationship to his own “addiction” to comics that Paul demonstrated—a playfulness Warshow interpreted hopefully as a sign that comic books would soon be behind him—was precisely what EC encouraged in its readers, an ironic declaration of “citizenship” in a society of freaks and ghouls that senators, psychiatrists, and armies of parents were lining up to identify as alien and hostile. While Warshow would not get his guilty wish that “Senator Kefauver and Dr. Wertham could find some way to make it impossible for Paul to get any comic books,” without Paul “get[ing] the idea that I had anything to do with it,” within a short time EC and countless other pre–Comics Code publishers would be out of business and the comic books that followed, published under the watchful gaze of the Comics Code Authority, would be of a very different order. The EC “fan-addict” clubs, the crowds of young readers swarming the newsstands, the

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anxious headlines—all of it would seem a quaint memory of a hysterical past by the end of the decade, as the surviving companies refocused their energies on superheroes (and on making sure those superheroes wore their “normalcy” as openly as their capes and masks). But the readers did not disappear. Young men and women like Robert Crumb, Spain Rodriguez, Art Spiegelman, Trina Robbins, Gilbert Shelton, Justin Green, Frank Stack, Aline Kominsky, and Harvey Pekar (all, like Paul Warshow, between seven and seventeen when EC closed up shop) carried their engagement with comics, fandom, and comics into the 1960s. And as Milton Rothman had promised would be the case for all “active” fans, after collecting and sharing pre-Code comics and making fanzines in their memory, it was inevitable that they would soon start making comics for themselves.

4

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I It is something of a truism that much of the best work of Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s can be credited, however reluctantly, to the Motion Picture Production Code of 1934. By forcing writers and directors to find new ways to get adult topics past the scissors of Joe Breen, screenwriting and cinematography inevitably became cleverer and subtler, winking at a knowing audience while smiling blandly to younger viewers and middle-age censors. However much film historians may fetishize the precode films of the early sound era, it is undeniable that the overall quality of Hollywood sound cinema got better after 1934. Some of this is attributable to technological advances, of course—sound editing and recording technologies advanced dramatically in the 1930s, while new lenses made possible deep-focus cinematography—but at least some of it was due to the code itself. As Thomas Doherty has demonstrated in Hollywood’s Censor, “Breen’s legacy rests not in what he tore out of but in what he wove into the fabric of Hollywood cinema.”1 A similar claim cannot easily be made for the impact of Comics Code Authority, which went into effect the same year Breen retired from the Production Code Administration (PCA). While Breen’s PCA worked with the film industry and always kept in mind the reality of an audience made up of both children and adults, the Comics Code Authority—taking its mission quite literally from the pages of Wertham’s Seduction—focused entirely on protecting the “innocent” from a comics industry (and a form) presumed to be predatory and corrupting. And with the departure of EC and others from the field came the end of crime and horror comics and the resurgence of superhero stories, now safely inoculated against the kind of reading practices that Wertham’s homosexual patients had shared with him. The average age of the comics reader began to decline steadily, as did the overall audience for comics. Hollywood meanwhile had belatedly discovered youth culture, television had invaded American 107

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homes at a rate unprecedented by any new media technology up to this point, and rock and roll had exploded across the radio. By the late 1950s, the comics industry was in a severe economic collapse and smaller publishers were beginning to fold—only the publishers who had been historically dedicated to targeting the youngest readers (Dell, Harvey) were in a strong position—while DC was scrambling to return to its roots by introducing (and in many cases reintroducing) costumed superheroes to a new generation of readers. One publisher that found itself teetering on the brink of collapse at the end of the 1950s was Timely Comics. Founded in 1939 by Martin Goodman, publisher of pulp magazines such as Marvel Science Stories, Timely had had several early successes during the height of the superhero craze, including the Human Torch and Sub-Mariner, both introduced in 1939, and Captain America, created by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon in 1941. But with the declining interest in superheroes in the postwar period Timely had followed the “new trend” into crime, horror, westerns, and romance, canceling the series devoted to its costumed heroes by 1950 and relaunching itself as Atlas (named after Goodman’s distribution company) in 1951. The new Atlas devoted itself to imitating the successes of other companies, especially EC, and generated little original or dynamic work. When the comics industry collapsed after 1954 and most of the topics that Atlas had focused on since 1949 were suddenly banned under the new code, the only thing that kept the company from going under was that, unlike most of its rivals, it had its own distributor. Nonetheless, by the end of the 1950s, the company was on the verge of bankruptcy, finding few new trends worth following. By this time, Stan Lee had been Goodman’s editor (and uncredited chief writer) at Timely/Atlas for two decades, a long career in a fledgling industry, and especially given that it was all at one company. He had little interest in the kind of superhero comics that DC was producing, and was already planning his exit from what was obviously a failing industry when the new marching orders came down. The only thing that kept him from abandoning ship immediately was the renewed pleasure he was taking in making comics, now that artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko had brought their talents to Atlas. With Kirby and Ditko, Lee had found a way to bring back some of the energy of the EC mystery and horror comics into titles such as Tales to Astonish (1959), Tales of Suspense (1959), and Amazing Fantasy (1961). Together they found that, without having to violate the code, they could create stories that explored complex emotions and anxieties, playing alternately off of Kirby’s ability to evoke raw physicality and anger or the strangely ethereal, fragile quality that made Ditko’s characters seem vulnerable, even disturbed.

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So when Goodman asked Lee to chase after one last trend by producing a superhero team in imitation of DCs Justice League (1960), Lee was willing to give it a shot, despite his boredom with costumed heroes. Kirby and Lee developed the Fantastic Four, a team of astronauts transformed by cosmic radiation into an unconventional and neurotic family of superheroes, including a mutated creature who names himself the Thing to describe his rage at the tragedy that has befallen him. Shortly after, Kirby and Lee would team up again to create another monstrous hero born of an accidental encounter with radiation, the Hulk, whose transformations from brainy scientist to monstrous force of nature are brought on by emotions he cannot control. In both cases, the heroes were reluctant, angry, alienated, and capable of expressing their frustrations with devastating effect on a world that saw them only as freaks. At the same time, Ditko and Lee went in a very different direction in developing Spider-Man. Like the Thing and the Hulk, Spider-Man is a victim of yet another accidental encounter with radiation. But unlike the his predecessors at Goodman’s comic book company—now renamed Marvel Comics, after Goodman’s first pulp venture—Spider-Man was not an astronaut or a nuclear scientist, but an average, scrawny and lonely teenager. And the comic that followed focused as much on the daily dramas of everyday high school life as on his encounters with the many villains who lined up to take their shots at him. Perhaps equally important, Spider-Man was significantly less than all-powerful, taking as many beatings as he delivered and always on the brink of humiliating defeat. The very first issue of Spider-Man, in 1963, represents the hero pinned behind glass, seemingly at the mercy of his adversaries, the Fantastic Four. Although his words promise that he is about to reveal to them and the world surprising talents—“They don’t suspect my real power!”—a survey of the covers for the next several years reveals that vulnerability might well have been the hero’s most distinguishing characteristic. In fact, in the first two years of the series, the majority of Ditko’s covers present the hero as prone, bound, or cowering in fear (see Figures 38–39). This vulnerable and masochistic superhero defined comics for the generation that would provide the seeds for the adult “underground” comix at the end of the decade and the first wave of the new adult “alternative” comics of the 1980s. While the earliest manifestations of Superman and Batman did indeed have dark and even perverse aspects to their characters, by the mid-1940s and especially after the institution of the Comics Code in 1954, the heroes of the DC universe had become increasingly static and one-dimensional. As Bradford W. Wright points out, the classic DC superhero “reacted to situations in the same predictable manner. They were always in control, rarely impulsive, and never

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Figures 38–39.  Steve Ditko, covers for Amazing Spider-Man 12 and 18 (Marvel, 1964). Spider-Man(tm) and © Marvel Entertainment, LLC. Used with permission.

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irrational.”2 Lee and his collaborators, who had been working under the influence of horror and suspense comics for the better part of the previous decade, returned to superheroes in the early 1960s by creating characters who were impulsive, often irrational, and wracked with the fears and frustrations endemic to adolescence and the atomic age. As one reader appreciatively wrote in 1965, “Spider-Man is not the most human Marvel hero! Peter Parker is! . . . Peter has the same old problem that two billion people have: how to get people to like them.”3 Borrowing in part from the cues provided by Mad’s parodies of the “golden age” superheroes in the 1950s, Marvel created complicated antiheroes, freaks and geeks who found that superpowers made the impossible conditions of life in Cold War America still more complicated. Or as Harvey Kurtzman and Wally Wood put it in Mad’s parody, “Superduperman,” in 1953: “Once a creep, always a creep.”4 The phenomenal success of these Marvel titles suggests that Lee tapped into a broader distrust on the part of Cold War comic book readers of Manichaean distinctions between good and evil, hero and villain. Lee moved quickly to secure the market of teen and college readers that had once been the core “fanaddicts” of EC. At the end of 1961, he changed the title of Amazing Adventures to Amazing Adult Fantasy (subtitled, “the magazine that respects your intelligence”), and he began actively recruiting a more “discriminating” and mature reader to his titles. A few issues later, responding to “your many interesting and provocative letters and comments,” Amazing Adult Fantasy reintroduced the letters department that had been largely nonexistent in comic books since the end of EC.5 Here readers were invited to hang out with the Marvel gang, “relax, let our hair down and say what we think!” And, as Gaines had done at EC in the early 1950s, Lee encouraged the sense, articulated by several of the correspondents, that what Marvel was doing was “over most other people’s heads.” As one reader opined, “It’s a shame, but the general public will never dig it. It’s too good!”6 Marvel offered its readers access to an identity—“Marvelites”—and a “Universe.” And Marvel had certain advantages over its predecessor: unlike EC, Marvel had serially recurring characters and ongoing storylines, allowing the promise of special rewards for readers who engaged with stories across Marvel’s growing roster of titles. In 1964, Marvel launched its own fan club in imitation of the EC Fan-Addicts, the Merry Marvel Marching Society, whose membership kit included a record, The Voices of Marvel, in which Stan Lee and his team talked directly to their fans. Nor was it only the artists, like Jack Kirby, who participated in the recording. Letterers Artie Simek and Sam Rosen, inkers Chic Stone and Dick Ayers, colorist Stan Goldberg—roles that had previously

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been uncredited and anonymous in comic books—all joined Lee in welcoming the new “Marvelous Merry Marchers” to the “bullpen.” And overseeing the whole event, alongside Lee, was Marvel’s corresponding secretary, Flo Steinberg, responsible for handling and editing the voluminous correspondence with the company; she greeted the fans, “I feel as if I know most of you from your letters.”7 As the recording worked to underscore, this was not a factory but a “bullpen,” a team of colleagues with whom the readers were invited to collaborate in the increasing pages of letters in each of Marvel’s ongoing series in the mid1960s. In the “Merry Marvel Bullpen Page,” names of new “Merry Marchers” were listed each issue, and in the two-page letter section Lee argued with his readers over various changes to the “Marvel Universe.” Instead of neatly defined stories covering an issue or two, as DC had maintained for the previous generation, Marvel created a serial “world” in which their characters overlapped, collided, and competed. So complex were the serialized narratives, extending across several different series and making reference to a growing library of past adventures of insider secrets, that Marvel came up with a new grammatical device for comics: the editorial note. In their earliest instances, these notes merely referred the “uninitiated” back to previous issues to clarify allusions and fill in backstories. But soon the notes traced out more complicated patterns, referring readers to other titles or to events that happened in an entirely different narrative context. This trope of the editorial note was embraced and highlighted with the appearance of a regular editorial column. By 1967, “Stan’s Soapbox” made the editorial intrusion even more central to Marvel comics, as Lee regularly expounded on “Marvel Philosophy” with both high seriousness and playful irony. The figure of the Editor became perhaps the most recognizable hero at Marvel, and every issue worked to foreground that personality as the overarching force holding the otherwise anarchic Marvel Universe together.8 If the story-arcs still directed themselves toward a younger audience, many readers did not take their pleasures in the individual plots. Instead, they took them in the mixed characters of the Marvel Universe, in the complexity of intersecting narratives and storylines, and in the sense of readerly privilege that came from inhabiting this “universe” and learning to read its secret language, to expound upon its “philosophy,” and to inhabit its ironic distance from itself and the surrounding world. At a certain point the question would become inevitable: did we even need the costumes at all? While more and more of their pages were devoted to the stories of their heroes in civilian life, Marvel was not prepared to take the logic so far as to leave aside capes and masks altogether. That experiment would emerge from another branch of the family tree

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of comics history, one that similarly traces some of its founding energies to EC and Mad but which, unlike Marvel, evolved entirely outside of the industry in which Lee and Kirby had worked since its earliest days. II When Gaines closed up shop at EC there were already several fanzines devoted to the company and its comics, and new ones continued to start up long after the demise of the comic book company.9 Like the science fiction fanzines of the 1930s, many of the EC fanzines of the 1950s and 1960s blurred the line between fan magazine and amateur comic book. While Squa Tront, for example, was a traditional fanzine, devoted to profiles, interviews, and sketches from former EC artists, Weirdom, founded in 1965 by Dennis Cunningham, combined “informative facts and oddities on the greatest of all comic book publishing companies” with amateur comics in the EC vein, often with twist endings and hosted by a glamorous version of EC’s old witch.10 In addition to homages to Gaines’s and Feldstein’s classic horror and suspense stories, Weirdom also featured satire— for example, in issue 12, a photograph of Cunningham taking a meat cleaver to a copy of Seduction of the Innocent and, in the same issue, a send-up of the Fantastic Four in the vein of Kurtzman’s “Superduperman” in Mad. Founded in 1952, Mad had been Harvey Kurtzman’s baby. William Gaines had given it to him in an effort to maintain the peace between Kurtzman and the increasingly influential Al Feldstein at EC (when Mad became a hit, Gaines—always eager to please his team—gave Feldstein a Mad knock-off, Panic). In 1955 Kurtzman convinced Gaines to allow him to transform Mad from a comic book to a magazine, hoping to expand the range of satirical targets and to encourage the participation of a broader range of contributors and readers. A few months later, following a contract dispute with Gaines, Kurtzman left EC and Mad, allowing the magazine to serve as a life raft for the artists and writers at EC as the comic industry collapsed around them. In magazine format, Mad remained EC’s only property outside the control of the Comics Code Authority, and its most successful years—at least as measured in terms of sales and visibility—lay ahead. For many loyal readers, however, the departure of Kurtzman from Mad felt like the end of an era. If Feldstein emerged as the most influential voice in Gaines’s ear, it was Kurtzman who had developed the most loyal and intense following among EC’s readers, as the Kurtzman-inspired fanzines that followed his departure testify. Indeed, Kurtzman’s career after leaving Gaines became both an inspiration and a cautionary tale for a generation of young cartoonists. If the failure of EC had represented the martyrdom of comics to the forces

First-Person Graphic, 1959–2010

of censorship, the failure of Kurtzman’s career after EC came to represent the martyrdom of comics to the bottom line of commercial capitalism. As Kurtman playfully summed up his own 1950s career: 1953—We started mad magazine for a comic-book publisher and we did some pretty good satire and it sold very well. 1956—We started trump magazine . . . and we worked much harder and we did much better satire and we sold much worse. 1957—We started humbug magazine and we worked hardest of all and turned out the very best satire of all, which of course now sells the very worst of all.11 This history appeared in what would be the last issue of Humbug in 1958, which folded after only eleven issues. Undaunted, Kurtzman and his team— many of whom had followed him from EC in 1955—started Help! for publisher James Warren. Kurtzman pushed this new magazine in the direction he had been working toward since moving Mad to magazine format in 1955, including fumetti (photo comics) and political satire highlighting topical issues, including the mounting civil rights movement. At Help! Kurtzman was working with few resources, relying initially on reprints of classic stories and comic strips to help fill out his issue. His straitened circumstances, however, forced him to develop what became arguably the most exciting feature of the magazine, “Help’s Public Gallery,” made up of material from college humor magazines and contributions from readers. The “Public Gallery” brought work from obscure amateur and college magazines to the attention of a national audience. More importantly, for young cartoonists who had been following Kurtzman since his days at EC, the “Public Gallery” provided an opportunity to participate in his magazine. As Jay Lynch put it, “For a lot of the original underground artists, the first national magazine they got stuff in was Help!, so in a sense it was probably the first underground comic.”12 Many of those who submitted some of their early work to Kurtzman would go on to be the leading figures in the underground comix movement in the second half of the 1960s: Crumb, Lynch, Skip Williamson, Gilbert Shelton, Denis Kitchen, Art Spiegelman. And most of these had their own amateur publishing experience in creating fanzines devoted to EC or Kurtzman. One such small fanzine was Foo, produced by Robert Crumb and his older brother Charles in 1958. The comic was an homage to the horror and satire comics of EC, offering horror stories like “My Encounter with Dracula!” (issue 2) and Mad-style satires such as a send-up of Jack Webb’s failed television series Noah’s Ark (issue 3). Although he would not do so again for several years, the teen-aged Crumb

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often portrayed himself as a character in the comics in Foo—for example, as a reporter visiting the Brussels world fair of 1958, or as Dracula’s not-so-reluctant victim in “My Encounter with Dracula.” While Foo was a “failure” in terms of the brothers’ efforts to sell it locally, for the retiring Crumb, at the time a high school student in Delaware, it brought him into contact with a larger world of fellow fanzine publishers (such as Marty Pahls, editor of Fanfare) and amateur cartoonists. As Crumb would later recall, “Discovering comic fandom broke us out of the isolation of our own little world of comics and changed our lives.”13 For Crumb and for his peers, the fanzine was not a means to financial rewards, but to connections, recognition, a community such as that represented in the pages of Trump or Humbug. And as Kurtzman’s productions began to look less polished in Help! increasingly relying on amateur work and crude fumetti, the production values separating his professional periodical and the work that these amateur fans were producing at the same time also began to diminish dramatically—especially with newly available access to cheap offset printing in the early 1960s. All of this served to encourage young cartoonists not only to send in their work to Help! but to bring themselves to New York to visit Kurtzman’s office in search of jobs, advice, and community—including Crumb, who arrived to take up a position with Help! just as it folded in 1965. The last issue of Help! (no. 26) gives a sense of the magazine (and the community) that was drawing people like Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman into its orbit. The cover presents a fumetti showing a white couple sitting to relax in the sun, and ends with the man—now heavily tanned from the noonday sun— being dragged away by the Ku Klux Klan while his girlfriend looks on in shock. The issue opens with a “public service brochure,” illustrated by Terry Gilliam, offering detailed advice as to how to become a white supremacist, followed by a five-page adventure of Gilbert Shelton’s “Wonder Wart-hog,” a super­hero satire that was quickly evolving in the pages of Help! into one of the first iconic characters of the underground comix movement. Shelton had been part of an early underground comix scene in Austin, one that included two of the pioneers of the movement, Frank Stack (who had self-published arguably the first underground comic in The Adventures of Jesus (1962–63) and Jack Jackson (Jaxon), who developed his own sacrilegious take on divinity in God Nose (1964). Both Adventures of Jesus and God Nose were modeled in large measure on the satire magazines of Kurtzman, but liberated from the need to please any publisher or national marketplace, they were able to push the satire beyond the limits of what Kurtzman could afford. Help! had come under attack following Kurtzman’s publication of “The First Golden Book of God” in 1964, and the subscrip-

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tions of the magazine fell of precipitously as a result of the negative attention, contributing to the magazine’s demise a year later. Along with his fellow Texan, Shelton, Jackson also found his way into this final issue of Help! participating in a photo comic entitled “Thigh of the Beholder,” portraying the misadventures of a cocky young man determined to conquer a Greenwich Village party. Shot at the apartment of one of the editors, the party goers included Jackson, Robert Crumb, Shelton’s friend and collaborator Joe E. Brown, and Dave Crossley, another ex-Texan who had been fired from the University of Texas humor magazine for sneaking obscenities into a published cover.14 “Thigh of the Beholder” is a silly story, but the party scene represented the fantasy that had brought so many young cartoonists to Help! in the first place (see Figure 40). The “Public Gallery” that followed in this final rounded out the roster of fledgling underground cartoonists, with appearances by Joel Beck, Skip Williamson, Lynch, and Spain Rodriguez. Thus it was that when Help! folded in the fall of 1965 a large number of cartoonists found themselves already connected through their shared association with the late magazine, just as one of the pioneering underground newspapers, the East Village Other (or EVO), started publishing. Following the lead of the Los Angeles Free Press and EVO, within a couple of years a host of similar underground papers began to appear in cities and college towns across the country, and by 1967 the Underground Press Syndicate (UPS) had formed, allowing the papers to share images and news more efficiently. But these papers remained very much local affairs, focusing on rallies, local controversies, calls to action, and celebrations. For cartoonists on the West Coast, many of whom

Figure 40.  Panel from “Thigh of the Beholder,” Help! 26 (1965): 24. Robert Crumb is on the right.

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had gotten their start earlier in the decade in amateur surf publications, the underground papers represented freedom from the burden of having to print and distribute work and even provided a modest income. For those in New York, EVO provided a chance to get work published regularly and often syndicated across the country through the UPS. Like Help! the underground newspapers of the late 1960s used fumetti, satire, and comics, and depended on a participant community. In many ways we can see the underground press as an extension of the do-it-yourself news of the serial comic strips of the 1920s and 1930s (and indeed many underground cartoonists would identify with the comic strips of the previous generation over the comic books of their own youth). The underground press made its own news: those reporting on the news were not objective journalists but participants of the very protests and rallies being covered, and what they reported often bled, either inevitably or deliberately, into autobiography. For example, following a serious confrontation between hippies and police in Tompkins Square Park in 1967, EVO covered the story over the course of the next several weeks, printing eyewitness reports and opening up the letters pages to corrections or objections to its initial coverage. Meanwhile, the rest of the paper responded indirectly to the events unfolding during that charged summer, as tensions mounted between the police and the hippie community. It was in EVO that Kim Deitch began his career in comics by publishing “Sunshine Girl,” a psychedelic serial comic about a cosmic superhero who increasingly finds herself despairing of any hope of saving the world, especially after EVO itself turns out to be, unwittingly, collaborating with her archenemy, Zoroaster. As the news in EVO grows more grim, Sunshine Girl eventually decides to abandon Earth—“This world is obviously beyond my help”—forcing Deitch to discontinue the strip “until such time as Sunshine Girl returns.” All hope is not lost, however, as he includes a coupon which readers can send in to show their support for Sunshine Girl and “the ideals of love and fair play.” Later, responding to the appeal from her readers, Sunshine Girl begins a slow and frequently interrupted journey back to earth, and Deitch invites his readers to help him decide what happens next. “Should Sunshine listen to the winged stranger?” he asks after one episode. “Or could there be something sinister afoot? What about it gang? Write in to tell me what you think.”15 As we will see in Chapter 5, Deitch was, perhaps more than any of the other pioneers of the underground comix movement, especially interested in the collaborative spaces opened up by serial comic strips from the previous generation. “Sunshine Girl” was an attempt to translate that dynamic into the new medium of the underground newspaper. Deitch’s appeal to his readers goes beyond merely

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asking for plot advice regarding his characters, as he asserts that he, his comic heroine, and his audience are all together making real news in the pages of the East Village Other. At this same time Crumb also began contributing to the underground newspapers, experimenting with comics that explored what he perceived to be the larger struggles between repression—both societal and individual—and new insights into creativity and personal freedom that had been revealed to him after his first experiences with LSD in 1965. The underground press gave Crumb opportunities to explore these issues at length in some of his first published longer comics narratives, beginning with “The Trip,” in the first issue of Yarrowstalks, which describes the adventures of “Novice Kosher,” one of several semiautobiographical stand-ins Crumb created during this period as he wrestled to transition from what he perceived to be the neurotic, repressive life he had been born into and the new horizons that art and the drug counterculture had opened up for him. Here a buttoned-up Novice sets out on a carnival ride into the “House of Fun and Thrills,” a “trip” that quickly runs off the rails and into some very scary territory, leaving him naked and, finally, transformed into a giant phallus penetrating space itself. Many of Crumb’s comics during this period follow a similar narrative pattern; providing very little text (aside from Novice’s exclamations of surprise early in the narrative—“Geepers!” “Ye Gods!”—“The Trip” is entirely wordless), these strips focus on individuals struggling to arrive at an answer to a question that can’t be formulated in words. For example, in “Big Freakout on Detroit Ave.” (Yarrowstalks, no. 3), another Crumb avatar, Edgar Crump, is given a magic pill by a mysterious stranger, resulting in a journey both terrifying and divine. Crump narrates the forces that array against him on the city streets—artillery, a Nazi storm trooper, “an evil midget disguised as a child”— ultimately resulting in his release from this mortal coil and his rebirth in a new world, where Crump at last does not “have any more second thoughts. . . . Now that I’m here I’m glad I got it over with.”16 Likewise, in “Life Among the Constipated,” Crumb describes the world he is leaving behind in a series of panels showing how straight society sublimates its fundamental desires into an endless series of consumerist appetites that ultimately leave humanity permanently constipated, both physically and spiritually.17 At the time Crumb was publishing his comics in Yarrowstalks and the East Village Other, he was also beginning work on what would be recognized as the official beginnings of the underground comix movement, Zap Comix. His earliest work for Zap in 1967 includes a fantasy of random encounters with a mystical meatball which has the power to unfetter individuals it blesses from their dime-

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store reality and nuclear age anxieties. As the meatball phenomenon grows, soon “people in all walks of life were getting hit,” and all attempts by the government and media to crush the meatball “plot” prove fruitless. This starry-eyed fantasy of a wide open West, where LSD-fueled enlightenment rained down from the heavens, contrasted starkly with Crumb’s representation of an oppressive and dangerous New York City in a semiautobiographical story from Zap (no. 0), “Ducks Ya Yas.” The underground newspaper scene had opened Crumb up to new possibilities for his work, and his publication in EVO especially had provided him for the first time with a national audience. But the real-world political focus of the underground newspapers and the internal politics that swirled around their offices was ultimately not where Crumb’s interests lay. Instead, as he would explore in his San Francisco Zap Comix, now working in close collaboration with S. Clay Wilson and others, the goal of comix was to “uncensor yourself.” As he described it to the Berkeley Barb in 1968, “There’s a lot of weird shit in everybody’s head. Anybody could be a cartoonist if they could draw. The whole value of a cartoonist is to be able to bring it all out in the open.”18 That Crumb and his generation would conceive of comics as a tool for personal and unfettered expression was certainly not what Wertham or the authors of the Comics Code imagined, but in many ways it was a logical consequence of the anticomics hysteria with which Crumb and his contemporaries had grown up. For Crumb’s generation, Wertham and his allies were scared of comics precisely because they had the potential to open minds, to allow strange visions to emerge, fantasies unauthorized by “constipated society.” Reclaiming comics as “comix,” now distributed not on newsstands but in head shops and record stores free from the Comics Code Authority (although not, of course, from antipornography raids from local police), the underground comix movement sought to take the comic form as far as it could go in exploring and representing everything Congress and the doctor did not want them to see. Comics, with its emphasis on the nonverbal and its openness to non­linear storytelling, was also latched on to as the ideal medium to tell the unique and uniquely untranslatable experience of taking LSD. Talking to the New York Times in 1972, Crumb told his LSD story: “I started taking acid in Cleveland, in June of ‘65. That changed my head around.”19 Shortly after his first experience with LSD, Crumb had a famously bad LSD experience that left him in a “fugue state” for an extended period, during which many of the characters and tropes that would be central to his underground comix in the years to come were developed. By the time he had emerged from this tumultuous period— both psychologically and creatively—Crumb felt he had arrived at a new clarity about his art and himself. For Crumb and for many of his colleagues, the only

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story worth telling now was about the inner recesses of the mind—a story that necessarily required a new language, a new medium. It is perhaps hard for those who did not experience the late 1960s in cities like San Francisco or New York to conceive today of just how ubiquitous the drug became, and how quickly—especially in the months leading up to its official classification as an illegal substance in October 1968. LSD had first been introduced into the United States through experiments in the postwar period, part of the CIA’s search for a miracle drug that would allow it to meet the challenge of advanced mind-control techniques supposedly being developed on the far side of the Iron Curtain. LSD, it was hoped, would “chemically bypass the mind’s censor and turn the psyche inside out, unleashing a profusion of buried secrets.”20 The two figures who would become most closely associated with proselytizing for the virtues of LSD in the late 1960s—Timothy Leary in New York and Ken Kesey in California—both first experienced the drug through their involvement with government-sanctioned research (Leary as a Harvard psychologist and Kesey as a test subject at a Veterans Hospital). As Tom Wolfe tells the story in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), through LSD Kesey was for the first time able to realize a vision he had been nurturing since the 1950s, and one he had been trying to explain to his classmates at Stanford, of a new generation of “Superkids,” tapping into the modern myths of “Superman, Captain Marvel, Plastic Man, The Flash—but of course!” “Billy Batson said Shazam! and turned into Captain Marvel. Jay Garrick inhaled an experimental gas in the research lab” and turned into the Flash; and so when he was invited to the VA hospital for a different kind of experiment, Kesey was prepared for his own transformation into the Superkid he knew he was meant to be—not leaping out of windows as comic book opponents warned but soaring beyond the ego and the mundane world it had erected to protect it from the forces of the unconscious.21 Psychedelic was a term coined by the British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, who began been researching the therapeutic effects of LSD in the late 1950s. Osmond argued that the drug had the effect of “enlarging the vision” and of bringing to the surface unconscious images, symbols, and visions.22 While the postwar Freudianism to which Wertham belonged, however ambivalently, sought to strengthen ego defenses against the ravages of the unconscious, LSD seemed for many to lend support to a completely opposite approach, one that saw the ego not as something to be protected but as a barrier to be torn down so that the unconscious mind might at last be released to its true potential. Such approaches were of course not new to the 1960s: Wilhelm Reich, for example, came under attack from the Freudians in Vienna and later in the United States

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for arguing that sexual liberation—and especially the orgasm—was the solution to all human problems, individual and global. Reich had begun as a student of Freud in Vienna but ended his life in 1957, in prison in the United States, for marketing devices that claimed to capture a new energy Reich identified as “orgone”—libidinal energy in its cosmic form. In 1957, the year Reich died in prison, Leary, a rising young researcher at Harvard University and the author of the Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality, first read about psychedelics and began shifting from his earlier work on personality types to explorations of what lay behind the personalities erected by the ego. By 1963, Leary had been expelled from Harvard by some of the same people who had launched the study of LSD’s potential military use in the previous decade. As the government began shutting down research in the 1960s on what they now understood to be a very unpredictable drug, Leary took his research outside the academy, establishing an experimental community (sponsored by Mellon money) in Upstate New York. Leary suggested that Harvard had in fact done the right thing in expelling scientists who were no longer playing by the university’s rules: “Harvard had a verbal game, and we’ve got a non-verbal game. Obviously, we had to find our own field.”23 Similarly, when Wolfe asked Kesey in 1967 why he had stopped writing, Kesey responded that he was now seeking new nontextual modes of communication, “in which there would be no separation between himself and the audience.”24 This characterization was typical of both official and unofficial LSD research, which frequently described the inability to put the experience with the drug into words. This was, after all, what made the drug so profoundly useless as a “truth serum.” What the experience of LSD seemed to produce instead was an almost incommunicable sense of having a new perspective on the ego and reality. Writing for Paul Krassner’s The Realist in 1964, Robert Anton Wilson reported on a visit to Leary’s Millbrook community, explaining that even as the effects faded and reality had restored its order, something fundamental had changed such that “you are never again able to believe that this social ‘reality’ is all of reality or that your ego is all of you.”25 A few months later, in April 1965, Krassner himself headed up to Millbrook and reported to The Realist about his own first experience with LSD. Krassner had founded The Realist—a hybrid between the satirical publications of Kurtzman and the underground newspapers of the late 1960s—in 1958, originally working out of the offices of Mad magazine, where Krassner was an occasional writer. Like Kurtzman, Krassner was attempting to create an illustrated political satire magazine for adults; but before 1965, The Realist was light on both satire and illustrations and often very heavy on politics. After his first experience with LSD, however, The Realist seemed to change. Krassner described a profound

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revelation of the “oneness of tragedy and absurdity,” one in which his “lunar self ” advises him to assure his readers that, “no matter how serious anything in the Realist may ever appear, you will always be there between the lines saying it’s very funny!”26 And the revelation had its effect on The Realist almost immediately, as in the same issue in which Krassner shares his LSD experience the paper publishes a seven-page comic by Dick Guindon describing in gruesome detail the myriad ways in which society discards the elderly. The oneness of “tragedy and absurdity” becomes increasingly central to The Realist, perhaps best epitomized by an infamous 1967 issue that published supposedly expurgated excerpts from a recent book on the assassination of Kennedy, including an account of Johnson engaging in necrophilia with the recently deceased president and a lavish centerfold drawn by Krassner’s former colleague from Mad, Wally Wood (now editing his own periodical, Witzend, which Krassner describes favorably as a fanzine “done by professionals”), representing Disney cartoon characters engaged in an intricate orgy. That same year, in Wally Wood’s Witzend (no. 3), Art Spiegelman published one of his first longer pieces, a twinned narrative. The first part of the story tells of “Little Harold Sunshine” as a serial strip, describing the “picaresque path” of our hero in which each episode may be summarized: “Last time, as you may remember, nothing happened. Nothing ever does.” Like Deitch, Spiegelman (at this time only nineteen years old) had a fondness for the serial comic strips of the past that would continue throughout his career, and “Harold Sunshine” was his attempt to tell a version of the acid-trip narrative in a serial-strip form (see Figure 41). Like the comic strips described in the first two chapters, Harold’s adventures take him precisely nowhere, even as they take him on a seemingly endless quest in search the “king” whom, we know, he will never find. Meanwhile, in the second narrative, we get the story of an unnamed “pilgrim,” who heads off on a very different “trip” with the aid of a special pill. The juxtaposition could not be more stark: the earnest young Harold Sunshine in pursuit of

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Figure 41.  Detail from Art Spiegelman, “Little Harold Sunshine,” Witzend 3 (1967).

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a king to serve will perpetually never arrive, while our “pillgrim” arrives immediately, experiencing a “botanical brainwave” that allows him effortlessly to articulate the “truth” that seems ever to elude Mr. Natural’s neurotic disciple, Flakey Foont: “Play with your cells . . . and become your own food!” The juxtaposition between the two narratives in Spiegelman’s Witzend story is worth pausing over. While the Harold Sunshine story is presented as a fragment of a potentially endless comic strip series, the Pillgrim story has a clear beginning (Pillgrim takes the pill), middle (he arrives “here”), and end (he has his revelation). The tension between the two lays bare the profound differences between the unique pleasures of, on one hand, the endless serial journey to nowhere that defined Little Nemo or Happy Hooligan, and, on the other, the truths toward which the spiritual journey of LSD and underground comix was supposed to lead. The ability to become one’s own food by “play[ing] with your cells” is at the heart of the fantasy of LSD and underground comix—a fantasy of turning inward and exploring the self. It is also, of course, an apt description for the solipsism at the heart of underground comix. Indeed, while on one level we are clearly supposed to read the relationship between the Pillgrim and Harold Sunshine (described, after all, as “blind”) as equivalent to that between Crumb’s liberated visionaries and his terminally constipated society, on another level—and particularly for a cartoonist so invested in the history and theory of the form—it is also clear that Spiegelman’s own heart remains with serial Harold and his never-ending journey. For a cartoonist, Harold is the more engaging character, and his is the better story, the one that opens up possibilities for collaboration and shared surprise between creator and reader. In the end, acid trips don’t often make for the best comics precisely because they reinscribe conventional narrative structure and—perhaps most importantly— leave little if any room for readerly participation. The LSD comix stories of the late 1960s almost exclusively follow the plot of Spiegelman’s Pillgrim, increasingly after 1968, turning to nonverbal narratives, emphasizing the radical connections between seemingly disconnected visions, often produced collectively or in anthology format to counteract the isolation inherent in the psychedelic experience. With titles like Kingdom of Heaven Within You (1969) and Illuminations (1971), these works moved increasingly away from text and from linear narrative to seek new ways of telling stories that resemble the psychedelic journeys of the acid trip itself. Illuminations, for example, was organized around a long story by Willy Mendes about progressive enlightenment and spiritual powers, which is punctuated throughout by pages from various other cartoonists. The juxtaposition between Mendes’s central story, with its focus on family and procreation, and the contributions from

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Mendes’s male colleagues is telling. Spain Rodriguez, for example, provides a picture of an orgy in a honky-tonk bar; Deitch has a one-page vision of a future world circa 2002 where aging heads try to scam the salesgirl at the reefer deli; Wilson presents “The 137th Dream of Lester Gass,” a frenetic scene of men getting hacked to pieces by giant ax-bearing amazon women. The only exceptions are the contributions to the issue from Trina Robbins. Robbins and Mendes were among a very small handful of women working in underground comix at the time, and the two had collaborated a few months earlier on the first all-women’s comic, It Ain’t Me, Babe (1970). Robbins had been involved with underground comix from the very beginning, working at EVO as an editor and contributing cartoonist. Along with her then-husband Kim Deitch, she had joined the wagon train of cartoonists to San Francisco in 1969, a little ahead of her EVO colleague, Rodriguez. As she described her experience, however, unlike for many of her male colleagues, San Francisco did not provide the utopian fantasy that had been promised back east. Following the lead of Crumb, many of her male contemporaries were “uncensoring” themselves by exploring misogynist and racist fantasies in their comics, and Robbins began to question the value of a personal liberation through comics that seemed to come at the expense of the bodies of the disenfranchised. Perhaps more immediately, but no less urgently for working cartoonists, Robbins and Mendes began to notice that they were being left out of many of the anthology comix and comics “jams” happening at the time, a further reminder that their voices were not of interest to the male fantasies dominating underground comix. Crumb’s work indeed had come increasingly to focus on personal liberation through expressing in comix what was explicitly taboo: the glorification of incest and rape, openly racist “jokes” about canned “nigger hearts” and insatiable black women, and sex fantasies that left little room for possibilities outside of conventional male-dominated heteronormative sex. For example, one of Crumb’s recurring characters from the period was “Whiteman,” essentially a superhero version of the “constipated” people that were a recurring object of his satire. As we meet him in the first issue of Zap, Whiteman is struggling to contain his repressed savagery through the performance of his whiteness, his Americanness, his manliness. But no sooner does he celebrate his restored composure than he confronts a parade entirely constituted by blackface caricatures of African-Americans, who pull down Whiteman’s pants and pronounce him a “nigger like evva body else!” The celebrants then try and encourage Whiteman to join in the parade, to discover the “music in yo’ soul,” and the story ends with Whiteman paralyzed with indecision while the narrator asks: “Will Whiteman join the parade? Oh, eventually!”

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As is often the case with Crumb’s recurring characters, he cannot leave Whiteman in his state of purgatory for too long. One of Crumb’s longest stories to date, “Whiteman Meets Bigfoot” (Homegrown Funnies, no. 1) tells how, on a camping trip, Whiteman is kidnapped from his RV by the yeti of his dreams, an experience from which he never returns. Needless to say, this is no tragedy, as Whiteman’s indulgence of his bestial appetites and passions with Bigfoot sever almost instantly his attachments to civilized society into one of the “happiest” endings in any Crumb story from this period (see Figure 42). Of course, this is a fantasy of release into primal maleness—the abandonment of wife and kids for the primitive woman (preverbal and hypersexualized), freedom to express the uninhibited sexuality he must keep buttoned up in polite society, and a laughing off of the consequences of this denouement for the wife and children left behind. Crumb’s comix especially, but underground comix more broadly, underscore the degree to which the liberated self at the center of the stories being told was almost inevitably white, male, and straight—a liberation that often came explicitly, in the images on the page, at the expense of blacks, women, and homosexuals. Establishing in 1972 the Wimmen’s Comix collective, Robbins and her collaborators called for a new approach to personal comix narrative, one that explored the ways in which collective identities were forged through personal autobiography and the ways in which personal self-exploration was strengthened through collective creativity. And while the self continued to emerge as the primary focus for many of the underground comix after 1972, increasingly the form shifted from LSD narratives and self-justifying iconoclasm to an emerging form that would ultimately outlive the underground comix movement and would profoundly influence the direction of the next generation of comics. Figure 42.  R. Crumb, “Whiteman Meets Bigfoot,” Home Grown Funnies 1 (1971).

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III As is perhaps inevitable, the exuberant energy that propelled the early underground comix began to lose steam in the early 1970s. The market had become oversaturated by second-rate work and mainstream imitations (by 1974, even Marvel Comics had an “underground” title), and many of those who had been experimenting with the possibilities of the form since the mid-1960s began to grow tired of repeated themes and images. Iconoclasm’s hangover was very much in the air when Justin Green addressed the question: after the idols have all been smashed, what then? In fact Green’s pioneering graphic memoir, Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (1972) begins its story with a literal act of iconoclasm as young Binky’s twisted compulsions are set in motion by the accidental shattering of a statuette of the Virgin Mary. By most accounts, Green’s Binky Brown was the first extended autobiographical comic to emerge from the underground comix scene. As always, such claims to “firsts” are problematic. As we have seen, others had been experimenting with autobiographical stories earlier, including Rodriguez, Deitch, and Crumb, and many of these earliest autobiographical comix were mixtures of life and fantasy, often recounting acid trips or dreams and deliberately blurring the lines as to where “real life” ended and the fantasy took over. But the drive in the earliest autobiographical comix remained more about shock value than about exposing the self. For example, “The Confessions of R. Crumb” (1972) begins by promising access to Crumb’s artistic psyche but ends up with an extended fantasy about a retreat to his mother’s womb (after having sex with her and being confronted by the father, returned from the war).27 Green’s autobiographical comic was a different thing entirely, and it was recognized as such by his contemporaries who encountered it for the first time even as he was working on it in 1971. Art Spiegelman credits his encounters with Binky Brown for his own ambitions to do work in autobiographical comix: “without Binky Brown there would be no maus.”28 “Justin turned comic book boxes into intimate secular confession booths,” Spiegelman declares, and he and others began to consider how they could explore their own individual experiences in this form—no longer just the extraordinary spiritual visions of the LSD autobiography or the articulation of unspeakable fantasies, but the very real-world struggles of ordinary individuals.29 As we will see, if the autobiographical turn after 1972 can be understood as transforming comics “into intimate secular confession booths,” it was a transformation that necessarily severely limited the space for the kind of audience participation that defined the previous generations of comics history. Of course, it was also a transformation that would bring to comics the cultural and academic respect that had long

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been denied, and it is undeniable that these two transformations have everything to do with each other. Green opens his Binky Brown with an extended “Confession to my Readers,” featuring the author himself hogtied over an inverted sword of Damocles, forced to listen to “Ave Maria” while penning his memoirs with his mouth (Figure 43). This overwrought image emerges directly out of the underground comix, but it is also, for all of its shock value and gross-out humor, a fitting image for the graphic autobiographer—or, to borrow the term from Gillian Whitlock, the autographer. The image of Green bound and gagged yet nonetheless finding a way, despite tortures and humiliations, to tell his story is one that can in many ways serve to emblematize the catch-22 by which those who work in comics autobiography will find themselves. Emerging as it does from the underground comix movement, it also serves as a counter to the image of comix as absolute and radical release from all social fetters—a reminder that such fantasies of complete and effortless freedom are by no means equally accessible to all who work in the form. Green begins by reminding the readers that his comic, although written in a form historically associated with children’s entertainment, is not “intended solely for your entertainment, but also to purge myself of the compulsive neurosis which I have served since I officially left Catholicism on Halloween, 1958.”30 To entertain others and to purge oneself: as these two goals are set sideby-side against the backdrop of Green’s naked and trussed body, it is hard to see how either goal will be met. Bound, literally, from head to toe, there seems little possibility that his body (or brain, which is also bound in a thick bandage) will be able to purge anything at all. And the sight of his tortured body promises little in the way of entertainment. As if recognizing the absurdity of these promises to himself and his reader, he changes his justification for the autographical act: “My justification for undertaking this task is that many others are slaves to their neuroses. Maybe if they read about one neurotic’s dilemma in easy-to-­understand comic-book format these tormented folks will no longer see themselves as mere food-tubes living in isolation. If all we neurotics were tied together we would entwine the globe many times over in a vast chain of common suffering.”31 While the root cause of Green’s neuroses may well be societal, in the end he is not concerned here with etiology but with testimony. Unlike earlier underground comix, however, there is no fantasy here that testimony alone will set him free. The function of testimony, both traditional and secular, is to create common bonds of understanding and humanity, and in both contexts there is an explicit or implicit faith in an ultimate universal understanding to which the testimony contributes, whether it is universal

Figure 43.  From Justin Green, Binky Brown (San Francisco: Last Gasp, 1972).

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s­ alvation or universal human rights. And Green starts to work himself toward this new ideal, imagining a world in which the neurotic sufferers are bound together by their shared experience as opposed to being locked in isolation by their inner demons and conviction of their own freakishness. But even this fantasy of release becomes yet another image of binding, as it is now the world, as opposed to the individual body of the autographer, which is described as being “entwine[d] . . . many times over in a vast chain of common suffering.” As if realizing the irony of this fantasy of a common chain in the face of the demands of the “aspiring revolutionaries” of his generation, Green concludes, “Please don’t think I’m an asshole, Amen.” But of course common chains can be powerful mediums of communication and even release—as, for example, Toni Morrison’s Beloved reminds us. When Paul D is left to drown in the rising mud, chained in a wooden box, the chain that binds him to others is what ultimately saves them all, allowing the imprisoned slaves to communicate a message one to the other that brings them through the flood and to safety. That which bound the men is transformed into a telegraph wire, thrumming with messages that released them—if not from their chains, at least from their isolation. The question for the tradition of autography has long been, and remains, not whether the act of graphic memoir will set the autobiographical subject free (Green makes it very clear that it will not), but whether it will release him into a chain of common suffering and whether that chain can be made to communicate and bind one to the other. Release and imprisonment, communication and solipsism, pleasure and pain. These are just some of the contradictory pressures under which Brown finds himself bound, paradoxical demands common to much autobiography. But this one panel also describes some of the contradictory pulls unique to the act of autobiography in the comics form. His hands bound, Green writes with his mouth—an apt description for the comics creator’s craft of combining words and images. But this image of merger is not triumphant, and the cost of the labor is represented both physically (the suffering body) and in terms of the accuracy of the utterance itself. Toward the very end of the book, and just as Binky has arrived at the crucial self-revelation that his visions were in fact “all up here!” we return briefly to the scene of autography. As Green struggles to draw and speak the final panels, he is also desperate to set himself free from the act of self-revelation. “Almesh fineshk!” he mumbles. The pen-in-mouth that represents the word-image that is the autographer’s medium inevitably hampers the accuracy (and legibility) of both image and text. It is a truism of autobiography studies (and of course of narrative theory more generally) that the narrator and subject are not one and the same; but in

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no form is this more graphically clear than in graphic memoir. Within prose narrative, the “I” can remain (in the mind’s eye of both author and reader) identical to the author, allowing for extended moments of forgetting (or effacing) the distance between narrator and subject, a collapse encouraged by what Leigh Gilmore has described as the juridical pressure on autobiography to speak an authentic and verifiable truth: “Telling the story of one’s life suggests a conversion of trauma’s morbid contents into speech, and thereby, the prospect of working through trauma’s hold on the subject. Yet, autobiography’s impediments to such working through consist of its almost legalistic definition of truth-telling, its anxiety about invention, and its preference for the literal and verifiable, even in the presence of some ambivalence about those criteria.”32 The comics form, conversely, explicitly surrenders the juridical advantages of other autobiographical testimony, whether in print or in film.33 The compressed, mediated, and iconic nature of the testimony (both text and image) in comics denies any collapse between autobiography and autobiographical subject (the frequent use of pseudonyms or caricatures only reinforces the split), and stylized comic art refuses any claims to the “having-been-there” truth, even (or especially) on the part of those who really were. The split between autographer and subject is etched on every page, the handcrafted nature of the images and the “autobifictional” (to borrow the term from Lynda Barry) nature of the narrative is undeniable. It is important that this split is not a casualty or regrettable cost of the autobiographer’s chosen form, but is instead precisely what motivates the drive to tell the self in comics form. As Green said in an interview, the curse and gift of his obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) was to endow him with a “split vision, being both the slave to the compulsion and the detached observer.”34 Comics autobiography, beginning with Green and the work coming out of the end of the underground movement, highlights that split and puts it to productive use, allowing the autographer to be both victim of the trauma and its detached observer. And it forces a similar split upon its readers, complicating the fantasies of authentic and unmediated truth facilitated by traditional autobiographical texts. Even as Green’s work is oriented toward the conventional goal of the autobiography as self-revelation, we see that his choice of comics as vehicle translates the autobiography into a profoundly communal enterprise. Green suggested this imperative shortly after the publication of Binky Brown, characterizing the unique laughter that the autobiographical comic seeks to release, one common to many of the underground comix from the start: “the laughter of sudden discovery that you’re above or beyond a conflict that once blocked you in.”35 What made this “laughter of freedom,” as Green terms it, transforma-

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tive, was the response of others—the laughter of recognition. Green recalls that “it wasn’t until I did Binky Brown that I felt a strong energy return from [the] faceless audience that I’d been working for up until then.”36 This was perhaps the greatest surprise of the first comics autobiographers: not only their outrageous fantasies or wild psychedelic experiences but even their most personal histories could forge meaningful connections with others, opening up a dialogue with audiences and a sense of communal experience and release. At the end of “Coming Out Story,” her own early experiment inautography, twenty years after Binky Brown, Alison Bechdel describes it as her “own humble contribution to that epic tale of collective self-revelation that my sisters and brothers have been telling for generations,” concluding by inviting her readers to “come out again”: to share their own stories and add to the larger chain-letter they are forging together.37 But twenty years earlier, the notion that an act of autography about the most personal of experiences (OCD, Catholic guilt, sexuality) could be part of an act of “collective self-revelation” was a surprise to Green, and to his readers. “While you may think [Binky’s] victory is a puny one,” Green concludes, “don’t forget that just such desperate leaps as his were taken by our brave ancestors the fish.”38 Green recognized at the time that what he was doing in Binky Brown had the potential to serve as an “evolutionary” leap forward in the development of the medium. But like all such moments, it cannot be reduced to a single individual’s agency. In 1972, autography, which had occurred to ­comics creators in the United States only sporadically in earlier decades, suddenly seemed not only obvious but urgent. And as a tool for the “working through” of childhood trauma, Green’s example opened up the graphic narrative medium to a powerful wave of autography, one that would be mined and developed over the coming decades. IV Like Spiegelman, Aline Kominsky credited Binky Brown with helping to galvanize her own rethinking of the comics medium.39 Of course, equally important to Kominsky’s first autobiographical comics was Robbins’s Wimmen’s Comix collective, which published its first issue in November 1972 (and Kominksy’s first autobiographical comic), just a few months after Binky Brown. For Kominsky, the determination to tell her daily experiences of neuroses, body issues, and sexuality was going very much against the grain of the underground comix of the time, which remained dominated by a macho culture of rape fantasies and power trips. The Wimmen’s Comix collective would develop over the next several years into a place where a new generation of autobiographical comics

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creators—including, later, Phoebe Gloeckner and Alison Bechdel—would find a place to tell its most personal stories. In addition to being the first autobiographical comic by a woman cartoonist, “Goldie” is revolutionary in another respect as well. Whereas Green addressed childhood trauma, Kominsky is the first to focus on the more mundane, messy neuroses of an ordinary life. There is no glamour; but neither is there any shame: the open, even prideful honesty of this work would become an inspiration for a new generation of cartoonists and would shape changes in the work of Crumb as well (Kominsky and Crumb were married in 1978). Perhaps more than any other cartoonist of the period, Kominsky’s early autobiographical “Goldie” stories opened up a new subgenre of diarists and chroniclers of the everyday. And in doing so, Kominsky deflated the macho mystique of her male counterparts. For example in her second contribution to Wimmen’s Comix, “Hard Work and No Fun,” she describes the fantasies of a horny Goldie dreaming about the various men in her orbit, ending up in bed with a particularly self-important important hippie who turns out to have precious little to offer between the sheets (see Figure 44). For Kominsky, however, writing about her sexuality, neuroses, and everyday experiences was an end in itself, not part of a larger political project against

Figure 44.  From Aline Kominsky, “Hard Work and No Fun,” Wimmen’s Comix 2 (1973).

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either the patriarchy at large or male chauvinist cartoonists in particular. This was not the case for all the women involved in the collective, by any means. In the first issue of Wimmen’s Comix, for example, Trina Robbins published “Sandy Comes Out,” the first comics coming-out narrative, telling the story of Crumb’s sister, who shared Trina’s growing sense that Crumb’s success was bad for women generally and for women cartoonists in particular. As the underground comix movement began to fracture in the mid-1970s, Kominsky found herself increasingly estranged from the Wimmen’s Comix collective, uninterested in developing her work along the lines that Robbins and her colleagues were advocating. Shortly after, in 1976, Kominsky collaborated with Diane Noonin to start Twisted Sisters Comics. As the cover for the first issue makes very clear, this was not a place to come either for erotic confessions or for heroic feminist role models: here Kominsky represents herself sitting on the toilet bemoaning her reflection in a hand-held mirror while worrying about the calorie count of a cheese enchilada. Kominsky had also begun collaborating with Robert Crumb on Dirty Laundry in 1974, a mash-up of Crumb’s sex fantasies and Kominsky’s neurotic confessions in which the two cartoonists each drew themselves in their own distinct styles (see Figure 45). The collaboration with Kominsky inspired Crumb to take on a very different kind of collaboration in the early 1980s, Weirdo, an anthology comic that was in many ways an explicit homage to Kurtzman’s Help! of 1959, including in its use of fumetti. Over the next several years, Crumb’s Weirdo would publish several important new autobiographical comics, including Kominksy, Dori Seda, Lynda Barry, Debbie Dreschler, and Phoebe Gloeckner. The autobiographical turn in late-underground comix also provided the occasion for collaboration with another would-be comics autobiographer whom Crumb had first met in Cleveland the previous decade when he was working for American Greetings. Unlike Crumb, Harvey Pekar had never made the great pilgrimage to San Francisco, never been in a position to drop out of society and give up his nine-to-five job. The stories Pekar had to tell were of a different order altogether: none of the exploration of sexual appetites of Kominsky or the wild neurotic visions of Green, and certainly none of the free love or LSD narratives of the bulk of underground cartooning. Pekar’s were stories about being a file clerk, about the way the smell of fresh bread can make even a dreary Cleveland day bearable, about the frustrations of being stuck behind old Jewish ladies in the grocery store. And in part because of the very different inward turns that Green and Kominsky had pioneered in 1972, when Crumb visited Cleveland that year he was receptive to Pekar’s suggestion that they collaborate

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to tell stories that would push the boundaries of comics not only past super­ heroes but also beyond supertrips and far-out freakouts toward the poetry (and misery) of everyday life. Encouraged by Crumb’s response, Pekar began working on his comics, selfpublishing his first issue of his autobiographical comic, American Splendor, in 1976. If Kominsky’s work opened up the medium of bringing everyday confessions to autobiographical comics, Pekar’s experiments in some sense take the idea even further—or perhaps better put, much closer to home. Kominsky was, after all, a member of the bohemian movement in San Francisco, living with the godfather of the underground movement, and a founding member of the Wimmen’s Comix collective. Collectives, movements, and celebrities were a luxury Pekar could not afford, bound to the daily grind of working-class life in middle America. His determination to use the comics medium to express the daily experiences of a “working stiff,” to fully explore the complexities of “ordinary life,” was in many ways as revolutionary as the iconoclasm of Crumb and his colleagues on the West Coast. From the daily headaches of a dead-end

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Figure 45.  From R. Crumb and Aline Kominsky, Dirty Laundry Comics 1 (1974).

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job and failed relationships to bouts of crippling depression and self-doubt, no topic was too private or too mundane for Pekar to explore. Perhaps even more revolutionary was the unique approach Pekar took to his autobiographical comics, inviting—initially with the mediation of Crumb—different artists to represent him and illustrate his stories. In the very first issue of American Splendor four different artists (including Crumb) draw Pekar, and each of them has a decidedly different vision of their subject, muddying from the start any claims to the “authenticity” of the autobiographical speaker. Further complicating matters, Pekar changes his autobiographical stand-in with almost every story for the first few issues: he is “Harvey,” “­Herbie,” “Marv”; he is an aggressive manipulator, a passive depressive, a street hustler, a social outcast. The stories move in time within individual issues from adolescent memories to contemporary diary entries. And several of the stories in the early issues of American Splendor describe what is by the late 1970s becoming an increasingly distant memory of the idealism and energy of the 1960s, events (especially the free love) that Pekar often found himself watching from the outside. Within a short time, the representations of Pekar in the comics have proliferated across so many different hands that when his soon-to-be wife, Joyce Brabner, arrives in Cleveland to meet him for the first time, she has a rolodex of images of the man dancing before her (Figure 46). “Who is Harvey Pekar?” Crumb’s Pekar asks early in the run of the series. The answer might seem to be easy and uninteresting: a Jewish working-class kid from Cleveland, a file clerk at the local Veterans Hospital. But Pekar’s project is to prove that there is nothing simple to the act of narrating the self, as even the most prosaic life refracts Figure 46.  From “Wedding Album,” by Harvey Pekar, with pencils by Val Mayerik, American Splendor 10 (1985).

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in the telling, presenting infinite variations, renderings, and representations that never quite add up to a coherent whole. Harvey Pekar’s favorite word to describe his subject matter is quotidian—a fancy word for the everyday life we all inhabit, the life we work hard not to think about, because it is often exhausting, or painful, or dull—but mostly because it stars ourselves. And we are not Stars. In telling his own quotidian story in a form dominated by tales of the most Super of Superstars, the comic book superhero, Pekar offered a roadmap to a new generation of comics diarists and memoirists to address their everyday with the same microscopic attention that the mainstream media directs to its celebrities and public figures. From Jim Valentino’s autobiographical comics in the 1980s through Gabrielle Bell’s ongoing diary comics today, the tradition of the quotidian that Pekar’s example inspired remains one of the most vibrant subgenres within autobiographical comics. It was, however, Art Spiegelman’s response to the possibility of autobiographical comics and his own unique approach to collective autobiography that would be most influential in shaping the reception of the form in the decades to come. It is hard to overstate the significance of Art Spiegelman’s Maus in lending cultural legitimacy to this gutter form, from its Pulitzer prize in 1992 to the dozens of critical essays that have secured a place for comics studies within the halls of academia. And yet like the other works we have been discussing, Spiegelman’s epic Maus traces its origins back to 1972, and Spiegel­ man’s own career begins similarly with a love of Mad and Kurtzman that led him to Help! and EVO and ultimately to the center of the San Francisco underground scene. Shortly after moving to San Francisco, Spiegelman got a chance to see Green’s Binky Brown in its earliest stages. Soon after, his own work began to take a more autobiographical turn, writing about dreams and his personal life, often using an autobiographical persona, “Skeeter Grant.” In the first issue of Short Order Comix (1973), for example, “Skeeter Grant” tells of a dream he had in 1973, in which he found himself a comic character, “just like Happy Hooligan,” complete with speech balloons and gutters between which he disappears as he moves from panel to panel. In the dream, he begins to panic, until another character walks into his panel and says, “Relax buddy boy. . . . It’s just the style you’re drawn in!” As an early meditation on autography, this short comic is particularly meaningful, reminding us that dreams and reality, past and present, representation and the thing itself, are forever muddled in the graphic memoir form. In this same issue, Spiegelman offers another more deeply personal story, this one in a heavy German expressionist style, describing (this time without the cover of a persona) his mother’s recent suicide and his ongoing struggles with mental illness. This story, “Prisoner on the Hell

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Figure 47.  From “Maus,” by Art Spiegelman, Funny Aminals 1 (1972).

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Planet” (1972), would later be reprinted (and play a crucial role) in the first volume of Maus (1986). In fact, although it would not be completed for almost twenty years, that same year Maus began to take shape in his first version of the story, “Maus,” published in the first (and only) issue of Funny Aminals (1972). Here the father mouse tells his son an unlikely bedtime story, about the rise of the Nazis (represented, as they would be in Maus, as cats) and the tragedy of the death camps. But at the point where the father comes to tell of the entrance into “Mauschwitz,” he “can tell . . . no more.” “It’s time to go to sleep,” he insists, and the child complies (Figure 47). But the stories, of course, will not go to sleep, and Mickey will awaken as the adult Art and this time not let his father off the hook so easily, with painful consequences for both father and son. Much has been written about Spiegelman’s masterpiece, and the work has been especially of interest to scholars of the Holocaust, life writing, trauma, and narrative theory. In all cases, what is recognized as especially challenging is Spiegelman’s complex approach to narrative address, to time and framing, to the ways in which he simultaneously validates his father’s memories and firsthand experience as authentic even as he recounts the costs and the fictions—for both father and son—required to record those memories. Simultaneously, Spiegelman manages to challenge the authenticity of any memory even as he insists on the vital truth of the story Vladek tells, and which he recounts. If, as Robert S. Leventhal suggests, “Maus bears witness to the process of bearing witness, and the technical and technological requirement of writing and tape-recording in order to produce a narrative of the trauma and thereby

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alleviate the symptomology of depression and withdrawal that is the danger of a past left to fester as an unhealed wound,” we should be wary of any attempts to seek out closure or healing in Spiegelman’s work.40 Graphic autobiography explicitly does not release the autographer from the “unhealed wound” of the past trauma, as Spiegelman demonstrates repeatedly, including in his early “­Prisoner on the Hell Planet.” That early autobiographical story ends with our narrator in prison, condemned for life by the traumas of his own and his family’s past (as in Binky Brown, autography does not guarantee freedom). Five years after finishing Maus, Spiegelman portrayed himself in another short autobiographical piece, “Mein Kampf / My Struggle” (1996), now hounded by “a 5,000 pound mouse breathing down my neck.”41 In place of ideals of freedom from or ownership of the past, Maus offers the seemingly meager recompense of a full accounting of all the obstacles that stand in the way of healing and recovery: lost diaries, lost mothers, conflicting testimony. Spiegelman once discussed his attraction to the comics frame as being in part inherited from his father, who like other survivors was a compulsive packer, teaching his son how to stuff as much as possible into the suitcase—or the frame.42 But Maus is equally about what can’t be put in, what can’t be told, most powerfully represented by the mother’s missing voice and lost diary, which Art’s father destroyed in a fit of depression. As Hillary Chute points out in describing the complex bleedings of past and present to which the comics medium is ideally suited, Maus is motivated by a desire “for continuousness rather than a closure,” one “which resists the teleological and the epitaphic.”43 Narrating life and its traumas makes the past continuous with the present, bleeding its wounds into our daily life. This is not the failure of a proper externalization or “working through” of the past, but is in fact the desired (the only desirable) goal of the blending of fact and fiction, image, and text, a blending that allows the past to be productively continuous with the past. This bleeding through of history, of course, is not unique to graphic memoir. Traditional prose autobiography likewise opens wounds of the past and produces moments that forge a temporary (and problematic) collapse of autobiographer and subject. For example, in his first autobiography, Frederick Douglass describes the ways in which recalling the wounds of the past inevitably reopens them: “the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes,” he writes of one memory of such childhood trauma.44 This moment of collapse between writing self and child self is a complicated but telling one, as many commentators have noted: Douglass records the distance between his adult self and the boy named Fred Bailey, even as the record also makes a connection to

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those who brought violence to the child he once was. Douglass’s attempt to describe his wounds leads to a collapse not only of present and past, but of image (wound) and text (the pen with which he is writing), as if reaching out in 1845 for a formal expressive synthesis not yet available, imaginable. In graphic memoir, such moments of collapse are everywhere, and all of them play on precisely the tensions invoked by Douglass’s example. For example, in Phoebe Gloeckner’s account of her traumatic childhood in San Francisco (one punctured by physical and sexual abuse, drugs, abandonment), there is an arresting image of her child alter-ego, eight year old Minnie, about to engage in an open-mouthed kiss with an older woman (Figure 48). On closer examination, we realize that the older woman is in fact Gloeckner herself, as an adult. On one hand, as with Douglass’s image of the pen and the wound, this makes the traumatic lost childhood continuous with the present and offers an image of bonding, suturing that which the act of childhood trauma works to fragment. But on the other hand, again like Douglass, the image also aligns the adult autobiographer with the work of those who inflicted the trauma. In Douglass’s case, his pen re-etches the wounds on the child self inflicted by slavery. In Gloeckner’s case, the passionate kiss links the autobiographer with the predatory adults who Figure 48.  Double self-portrait, from Phoebe Gloeckner, A Child’s Life (Berkeley, Calif.: Frog, 2000), 32. Used with permission.

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violated the child’s body and trust. Spiegelman makes a similar point at several points in Maus, linking his own interrogation of his father with the acts of violence inflicted on his father a generation earlier; and it is a connection underscored by the title of his 1996 autobiographical sketch, “Mein Kampf.” V In a recent interview, Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), says, “I always felt like there was something inherently autobiographical about cartooning. . . . I still believe that. I haven’t exactly worked out my theory of why, but it does feel like it almost demands people to write autobiographies.”45 While it would be easy to point to the broader history of the medium to refute the claim—after all, the vast majority of those working in the field never turned to autobiographical forms—in 1972 it was as if someone suddenly turned on the tap, releasing a torrent of autobiographical memoirs within the comics form, to the extent that today one can identify subgenres and historical movements within autobiographical comics. Bechdel’s Fun Home is in a way a culmination of this trend, at once a personal narrative about the coming into both a sexual and a creative identity, and the struggles—including, like Green, with OCD, and like Pekar, with the oppressiveness of everyday life in middle America—that had to be waged along the way. Like Maus, Fun Home is also profoundly a book about history, Bechdel’s father’s but also the history of the 1970s—and of the freedoms and possibilities that her father never had a chance (or never allowed himself) to explore. Bechdel’s memoir tells the story of the author’s childhood in an ironically named “fun home,” a site of repression, refinement, isolation, and death, both because of her father’s work as a mortician and because of her father’s own death, which haunts the book and prompts its overarching (and ­unanswerable) question: did he kill himself or was his death accidental? This unanswerable question ultimately leads to other questions, histories, archives and theories that seek to reconnect the past (death) with the present (art). How would her father’s life have been different had he been able to come to terms with his own homosexuality? How was Bechdel’s relationship to her own sexuality shaped by her father’s repression? How was her art and implausible choice of career determined by the “fun home” in which she grew up? What role does geographic destiny, historical coincidence and even one’s course of reading play in the shaping of our identities? Against these large and abstract questions, Bechdel reconstructs an array of concrete references: literary works (Joyce, Colette), historical events (Watergate, Stonewall), maps, genealogies, diaries, architectural details. If the early 1970s is the moment when comics discovered autobiography, this same period looms

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large in Bechdel’s own portrait of the artist as a young obsessive-compulsive as she describes the onset of her OCD. The rituals, repetitions and incantations, familiar to OCD sufferers, were in many ways amplified in the “fun home,” which Bechdel describes as a “mildly autistic colony.”46 It was at this time that young Alison began her first diary, a corporate souvenir from a burial vault company from 1970, which her father had given to her in hopes it would help discipline her mounting compulsions and anxieties. “Just write down what’s happening,” he said. Simple enough, it would seem, and Alison tackles the charge with the due diligence of the obsessive-compulsive. But within a short time the seemingly simple and concrete task of recording in words “what’s happening” becomes fraught with perils and doubts. As she describes it: “It was a sort of epistemological crisis. How did I know that the things I was writing there were absolutely, objectively true? All I could speak for was my own perceptions, and perhaps not even those. My simple, declarative sentences began to strike me as hubristic at best, utter lies at worst” (141). Against the backdrop of increasing problems at home—her father’s arrest for drinking with underage boys—and, nationally, the Watergate tapes, “truth” and “facts” were especially fraught topics for the young cartoonist in 1972. ­Alison’s first solution to this “epistemological crisis” is to qualify each declarative statement with an inserted “I think”; but soon even these words prove inadequate to the widening gulf between signified and signifier. Alison begins to transform the qualifying words “I think” into abstract blots and symbols, which begin to make their appearance in the daily diary right around the time that Alison begins menstruating. Even this biological fact of life cannot be recorded “straight,” requiring instead an algebraic variable n, one that will later serve to describe other changes and discoveries, including masturbation and sexuality. Thus we are shown in painful detail how the struggle to tell “what happened” results in increasingly complex and abstract set of panels, combining word and images, fact and doubt, history and theory. Read from a clinical perspective, the diary records an unsettling but familiar portrait of the rapid acceleration of OCD. But this is also a portrait of an autographer as a young woman, who will grow up to tell her story in an always uneasy combination of words and images, facts and fictions, in discrete panels and boxes (much like the calendars and day planners with which she began in 1971). It is important that the discovery in her first act of autobiography of the limitation of words to describe the truth does not result in a rejection of language in favor of images. Images (postcards, Polaroids) are no more trustworthy in the truths they share. Instead, what develops over the course of her diary, as Bechdel records it in Fun Home, is an increasing sense that text and image are

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each alone inadequate to the task, and some merger of the two is required to tell the story of the truth, and the truth of the story. Bechdel describes her first addition of image to text in her diaries as a “curvy circumflex”—like the caret used over a variable as an estimator (used in statistics to represent the unknown); or, more familiar to writers, like the proofreading symbol indicating where additional text should be inserted. As an estimator or a placeholder for facts yet unrecorded, the sprawling caret symbol became for the young Alison “a sort of amulet, warding off evil from my subjects” and soon from the entries as a whole—simultaneously keeping her entries open to further revision and protecting her stories against the failings of memory and the violations of time. It is after her father shows her the body of a dead cousin on his table that the carets take on a life of their own, “almost completely obscur[ing]” the text itself, as if the two—image and text—are at war for the page and its memories of the dead boy. But beneath this entry is the first figural drawing that appears in Alison’s dairies: a pathetic smiley face, untouched by text or circumflex. If it is death that sparks this first burst of cartooning in her diary, it is sexuality that fuels its further development, as we see in her postpubescent diary entries, where image and text share the work of telling the day’s events (Figure 49). As she tells the story of her own realization of her sexual orientation when she was in college, shortly before her father’s death, Bechdel describes the discovery as appropriately mediated by the discovery of a book: Word Is Out (1978). But it is not just any book, it is a text that combines words and images (as she highlights in the early version of this “Coming Out Story” published in 1993 in Howard Cruse’s Gay Comics). Indeed, in both versions of the story, Bechdel focuses on the images on the cover of Word Is Out as a series of ­panels, like a comic. As she describes this discovery in Fun Home, what results is the unique grammar of the comics form: the dialogue balloon articulating a giant, hand-lettered exclamation point (Figure 50). This symbol (one familiar to many LSD autobiographies from the previous generation) is neither text nor image, nor can it be accurately translated into one or the other: it transcribes the moment of revelation that is likewise neither word nor image—a scene of self-knowledge that is both at once and reducible to neither. From this moment on, despite having been a star literature student earlier in her academic career, Bechdel describes the traditional study of literature as increasingly irrelevant to her. As her English professor drones about catechistic symbology in Ulysses, Alison illustrates the pages of the novel with a drawing of Bloom/father, leaving the candle in the doorframe for Stephen/ Alison—an image of the “Ithaca moment” she has longed for and never quite

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Figures 49–50.  Panels from Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 148, 203.

achieved with her father (222). But neither does she find her future in traditional visual arts. The act of self-discovery and self-representation for Bechdel has become forever bound in the strange alchemy of word and image that is represented by the “curvy circumflex” or the impossibility of the spoken exclamation point. It is important, however, that this alchemical combination does not promise the gold of Absolute Truth that remained the elusive ideal of many of the participants in the underground comix movements in the 1960s. Instead, what it does provide, at least here, is a release from childhood compulsion, from the crippling doubt and fear that words alone might betray her and that images might atomize her. If text and image alone fail to ameliorate her compulsions, together they

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do point a way out of the vicious cycle. But this does not mean that comics autobiography makes greater truth claims than does traditional autobiography. In fact, it almost always makes fewer such claims than either prose or image alone have traditionally made. The comics form necessarily and inevitably calls attention through its formal properties to its limitations as juridical evidence—to the compressions and gaps of its narrative (represented graphically by the gutter­ space between the panels) and to the iconic distillations of its art. The kinds of truth claims that are fought over in the courts of both law and public opinion with text-based autobiography are never exactly at issue in graphic autobiography. The losses and glosses of memory and subjectivity are foregrounded in graphic memoir in a way they never can be in traditional autobiography. “Is it autobiography if parts of it are not true?” Lynda Barry asks in the introduction to One Hundred Demons.47 “Is it fiction if parts of it are?” Barry’s solution to these questions is to term her book “autobifictionalography.” Indeed the hybrid term could be said to apply to all autobiography, but it is the graphic memoir that foregrounds in its very form the ways in which the power of memory must always share the act of self-representation with the devices of fiction. Barry offers an image that usefully describes this tension, picturing herself as a child looking through the panes of a window on which are inscribed the seemingly incommensurate statements: “Can’t remember” / “Can’t forget.”48 The two statements are laid on separate panes, like the panels of a comic: the demand placed on both author and reader is how to read across the gutter, how to make these two truths speak simultaneously. As the story, entitled “Resilience,” goes on to describe, trauma fragments the child, teaching them how to “exist in pieces”—what Barry calls the “horrible resilience that makes adults believe children forget trauma.”49 It is the discovery of comics’ unique ability to represent the impossible demands of trauma, memory and narration that has made it increasingly a dynamic and even urgent medium for life writing. Marianne Hirsch has suggested usefully that the comics form offers a vital model for the “visual-verbal literacy” necessary to “respond to the needs of the present moment.”50 I will argue in the next chapter that the rise of comics in the new media age is due in part to the fact that the form is ideally suited for exploring the present as an archive, and the past as a living text. But the rise of graphic memoir responds to a more particular need of the present moment, seeking as it does to move autobiography—the testimony of the self to another—beyond the dead-end of concerns over authenticity in which it has been cornered and contained for a generation. In Alternative Comics, Charles Hatfield rightly suggests that the “problem of authenticity” in autobiographical comics is, in fact, no problem of all.51

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But what is at stake here is not simply “ironic authentication”—a postmodern ironization of all claims to truth and authenticity—but the insistence that the either/or dilemma by which autobiography is traditionally judged and sentenced, as Gilmore and Amy Hungerford have both usefully described, can (and should) be replaced by both/and.52 In their overview of autobiography’s changing, “rumpled” forms in the new media age, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson usefully identify Dave Egger’s memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), as an example of recent autobiographies that “undermine expectations of sincerity, authenticity, intimacy, and completeness long hailed by both critics and readers as essential to the autobiographical pact.”53 In A Heartbreaking Work, Eggers provides complex and playful instructions as to how the reader is to “use” his text, including the suggestion that those who are unhappy with the book should exchange it with the publisher for a floppy-disk version, one which will provide increased interactivity: “This can be about you! You and your pals!”54 Smith and Watson are of course right to see this (and much of the framing to his memoir) as a “send-up of autobiographical self-interest” (and, I would add, of the ideal of “interactivity” that has dominated media discourses in recent decades).55 Of course, there is also something quite serious here in Egger’s meditation: the realization that the readerly self-interest of fiction and the authorial self-interest of autobiography are fundamentally in a state of tension. It is a tension that Eggers seeks to put to productive political work in What Is the What (2006), the autobiography/novel of the life of Valentino Achak Deng, a “lost boy” from Sudan now living in the United States. In this seemingly impossible hybrid form, the competing demands of autobiography and fiction are allowed to articulate themselves simultaneously: the claims of truth and authenticity (and the demands of those claims on the reader’s faith and respectful distance) exist equally and collaborate productively with the invitations of fiction to enter into the life and mind of another (suspending disbelief but never erasing it, and collapsing all respectful distances). In telling Valentino’s story in this hybrid, multimodal form, therefore, Eggers at once (via autobiography) commands the respect and attention of the reader to the story of an other, even as he (through fiction) invites the American reader to inhabit this life, such that the alien landscape of southern Sudan or the refugee camps of Ethiopia might become not alien but “home.” Fiction is, for Eggers, “interactive” (with or without floppy disk), encouraging the reader’s narcissism; autobiography is auratic, performing the autobiographer’s narcissism and commanding the reader’s attention.56 I use the awkward term auratic advisedly here, to suggest the parallels between the distance (still) commanded by autobiography and the effects that

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Benjamin details as emerging from the “aura” of the traditional work of art before mechanical reproduction. In fact, it could be argued that it is in autobiography alone that the “aura” has continued to maintain itself in the twenty-first century—although it is an aura always vulnerable to charges of “fictionality,” charges that threaten to thrust it immediately from its privileged but precarious perch back to the common ground of mediation and “interactivity.” But for those working in the form, and most especially for the tradition of comics autobiographers who have been reinventing it for a new century, the auratic nature of autobiographical truth is worth defending—indeed it must be defended—even as the fictional mediations of that truth must be simultaneously acknowledged—not as a fall from grace but as a paradoxical but equally valid “truth.” It is the graphic memoir that best allows for this simultaneous claim of autobiography and fiction, and for the simultaneous demand on the reader for both distance and identification. If fiction is an ideal form for identification and affective attachment and autobiography is an ideal form for auratic distance and contemplation (including the transformative silences of testimony), autography is the narrative form that allows both to share the frame. As Gillian Whitlock writes, “the unique vocabulary and grammar of comics and cartoon drawing might produce an imaginative and ethical engagement with the proximity of the other,” mapping possibilities for new “affective engagements and recognition across cultures.”57 In comics form, respect and awe for the alterity of the other can and must exist simultaneously with the “interactive” invitation of fiction to assume the lives of others. The dangers of the traditional separations in terms of our ethical responses to the fundamental problem of other people have perhaps never been so clear or so urgent than at present. Elaine Scarry’s truism about the problem of other people’s pain—“To have pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt”—might easily be scaled to describe the problem of other people themselves.58 The public acceptance of torture as national policy, drone attacks on civilian targets as strategic practice, wiretapping of private citizens as necessary for national security, and child slavery and the exploitation of immigrants as economic policy point to how well those in power have learned the lessons of 1972—learned especially how to exploit media and mediation so as to foster paralyzing doubt as to the authenticity or humanity of other people. Graphic autobiography, as it has emerged out of the hothouse of LSD culture in the 1960s, might well be one of the most enduring and powerful legacies of a period that ultimately devolved into the solipsism of the “Me” decade. Using the multimodal and multimediated form of graphic narrative, as Green suggested in Binky Brown, the graphic autobiographer is able to “entwine the

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globe many times over in a vast chain of common suffering.” Only by allowing past to bleed into history, fact into fiction, image into text, might we begin to allow our own pain to bleed into the other and, more urgently, the pain of the other to bleed into ourselves. This “vast chain of common suffering” might not be the image Green’s “aspiring revolutionaries” saw themselves fighting for in 1972. But forty years later the need to learn our own lessons from 1972—­lessons very different from those that our governments and media conglomerates would teach—suggests that this might well be the highest goal toward which we have to struggle in this new century. If so, there is no body of work that is better suited to the task than that of graphic memoir, which began telling its own multimodal “autobifictionalographies” a generation ago.

5

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I As we have seen, the comics form was born in the late nineteenth century of several ingredients, including accelerating urbanization and modernization, a changing epistemology of perception and concomitant developments of optical toys and ultimately the ability to project “moving” images, and of course changes in printing technology and the new media of the newspaper syndicate. As comics began its second century, new transformations were changing the world perhaps even more dramatically than those which contributed to the rise of sequential comics in the first place: the dramatic acceleration of globalization, the spread of the Internet and personal computing, and all the related phenomenon loosely embraced under the concept of “digital revolution.” In many ways, of course, the comics form is ideally suited to this “revolution.” If the digital age has dramatically diminished the divide between producers and consumers, creators and readers, from their beginnings comics have required active engagement by readers and often encouraged appropriation and remixing. While in the twenty-first century the tools to produce, edit, and distribute video narrative are increasingly accessible and affordable, comics readers have been making and distributing their own comics—in the form of ’zines, fanart, and now webcomics—for generations. And if the digital age is marked by a shift toward the open-ended combinations of the database over traditional narrative, as Lev Manovich and others have argued, comics has necessarily foregrounded the activities of selection, combination, and navigation from its origins. Indeed, as we will consider at length in this chapter, it is the structural affinities of the comics form with the “database aesthetic” that has contributed to the increasing visibility and relevance of the comics form in the twenty-first century. And yet there are many ways in which the first new narrative form of the twentieth century remains fundamentally analog well into the second decade of

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the twenty-first: often handmade, still fundamentally linked to the printed page and the discrete panel, the comic reminds us always of the scene of its physical creation, of the human hand responsible for the lines on the page.1 This apparent paradox—whereby comics at once resists (at least for the moment) the effective transmutation into digital formats and markets that have already overtaken film and other twentieth-century media even as the genre has been exploring many of the characteristics of new media texts for over a century— frames the consideration of comics in the digital age in these final chapters. Archives 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. Indeed, it is their ephemeral nature, their quality as waste products of modern mass media and consumer culture, that constitutes the perverse pleasures for those who collect, organize, and fetishize them. These are collections organized by invisible grids, by individual desires, by the accident of geography or inheritance. And yet, these archives are far from the random gleanings of the packrat or hoarder. Their exploration and the disciplines and skills required lie somewhere between “data mining” and “dumpster diving,” between analysis and scavenging. Beginning especially in the 1990s, the graphic narrative has found a recurring theme in this subject. For example, Seth’s It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken (1996) describes a quixotic search for lost fragments of a forgotten comic artist, while his more recent Wimbledon Green (2005) celebrates the collector as superhero. The eponymous hero of Daniel Clowes’s David ­Boring (2000) attempts to understand his place in the universe by reassembling fragments of old comics associated with his lost father, and collectors and archivists figure in many of Clowes’s works, from Ghost World (1997) to Ice Haven (2005). Art Spiegel­man’s In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) chronicles the author’s attempts to come to grips with September 11 through an immersion in the archives of the earliest comic strips: Yellow Kid, Happy Hooligan, The ­Kin-der-Kids, Krazy Kat. Returning to an earlier moment when the world was ending—in this case the turn of the century, with the assassination of Mc­Kinley and the ongoing crush of modernity—Spiegelman finds, as he cannot in his present moment, a way of making sense of the madness of the world around him. “Right after 9/11/01, while waiting for the other terrorist shoe to drop, many found comfort in poetry. Others searched for solace in old newspaper comics.”2 In what follows, I will focus on three comics creators, Ben Katchor, Kim Deitch, and Chris Ware, in order to consider how their engagement with

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these concerns might help us understand the forces shaping and motivating the historical turn in the contemporary graphic narrative.3 •

•

•

The work of Ben Katchor perhaps best exemplifies the drives of the urban archeologist of the “contemporary past.” For more than twenty years, Katchor has relentlessly surveyed his (real and imagined) city’s present as it drifts inexorably into the past. Where, at the end of the nineteenth century, Opper, Howarth, and the first generation of sequential cartoonists embraced the new city and its unprecedented verticality as epitomized by the new skyscraper, at the end of the twentieth century Katchor is the city’s archeologist, digging down deep into the ruins in search of all that has been buried in the intervening decades. As he put it to Alexander Theroux in 2004, “The layers of history I see walking the streets of Manhattan are deep enough so that there’s always a stratum that feels like it’s about to disappear.”4 Katchor and his characters seem at first glance to be motivated primarily by nostalgia for a bygone time. But the characters who wander his cityscapes are far from paralyzed by the past. In many ways, they are closer to Walter Benjamin’s archivist of the arcades or, even more accurately, his “chronicler” of history who “recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones” “in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history.”5 As Benjamin writes in “Theses on the Philosophy of History”: “The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.”6 It is in such terms that we need to read Katchor’s long-running character Julius Knipl, the “real estate photographer” who captures images not of properties for sale but of unprofitable artifacts, monuments to redundancy, or (as in the efforts of one of Knipl’s kindred spirits, the archivist of underthe-table notations) “footnotes to an unwritten history of social unrest and domestic tragedy.”7 These are the “true historians,” who seek to force the present to recognize “as one of its own concerns” each isolated image at the precise moment in which it flashes in and out of existence.8 Benjamin insisted throughout his career that the emergence of new media in the twentieth century demanded that authors develop a new language to record the present as it moves into the past. He called for a new way of writing to replace the purely textual, one that would capture the “graphic tensions of the advertisement in the printed page” in order to provide a “true image” of time in modernity, which is always already past at the very moment of its articulation. Motion pictures, the most popular and spectacular of the new media forms of his time, would not be the medium to handle this charge. Like Adorno,

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­ enjamin was troubled by film’s inability to open up a space for reflection. In B “The Author as Producer,” Benjamin calls on writers to pick up the camera, not of film but of stills: only the writer with a camera (or the artist with a typewriter) can hope to break down the crippling “barrier between writing and image.”9 Without knowing its name, the writing Benjamin is calling for in the 1930s is clearly the comic—especially as the form has been reimagined in the current generation by Katchor and his contemporaries. Born in the 1950s and raised in New York by committed Yiddish communists, Ben Katchor grew up in an environment where the concerns of Benjamin and the Frankfurt school were especially relevant. Indeed, it is hard not to see in Katchor’s career a model for the “artist as producer” for whom Benjamin was calling, or to see his characters as Benjamin’s ideal “historians.” Like Benjamin, Katchor has dedicated himself to the principle that the division between text and image is fundamentally reactionary and destructive: “I strongly feel the need for a new kind of ‘picture-writing.’ The educational system’s division of text from image has done irreparable damage to the culture. . . . The full spectrum of meaning, from the concrete image to the abstract word, has been truncated in prose fiction and painting.” Comics are the one medium, he suggests, capable of “heal[ing] the rupture between text and image,” a “healing” that requires a rejection of traditional academic distinctions between literature and art.10 This healing, it must be added, is not a suturing or a fusion of the two systems of representation. The tension between text and image is not one to be neutralized (indeed, it cannot be neutralized); instead it is the task of the comics creator to put this tension to productive use. In Katchor’s Julius Knipl stories—where he makes a distinction between his main character, Knipl, and his narrator—we can see the division between text and image at work. As he said in an interview in 2000, “The narrator and him are two different things. [Knipl] doesn’t really pay attention to things, doesn’t know what’s going on. . . . He just goes along.”11 In these terms, Katchor aligns his protagonist with the image, and, by extension, with the present tense. Knipl is an observer, a Whitmanian wanderer, who we rarely see at rest in the many years of his ongoing serial. He lifts up drop ceilings, pokes into forgotten recesses, explores dusty warehouses, but he does not seek systematically to understand what he sees. He records and moves on. Knipl is the man of the “eternal present,” like the Image with which he is identified, propelled forward by the need to see and record.12 In his wake, he leaves the narrator and many of the individuals he encounters to contextualize in time and space what has been seen: to narrate what has been shown. The narrator’s responsibility is to contextualize or explain the strange images and sightings that Knipl records along

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the way. We “know” the narrator only through his text, in the hand-lettering captioning found in the panels of the comic. Katchor’s stories themselves hover somewhere between these two voices, between image/present and text/past. It is only in their overlay, in their difficult overlapping dialogue, that meaning can potentially be derived. It is the gray space between past and present, between text and image, that Katchor’s work seeks to excavate. The grayness figures temporally in the twilight setting that serves as backdrop to many of his stories. This grayness is displayed more dramatically on the page in the gray ink wash, which defines Katchor’s unique graphic style—a smudged newsprint effect that makes his work seem to be always well circulated, belonging to yesterday’s paper. Katchor is relatively unique among contemporary cartoonists who have been embraced by the ­neologism of “graphic novelists” in publishing much of his work in newspapers (the New York Press and the Daily Forward) before expanding his narratives into book form (his fellow ephemeralist, Chris Ware, also has remained faithful to the weekly newspaper form which gave him his start). But in addition to providing a publishing venue for his stories, the newspaper is vital to Katchor’s work as the medium that most explicitly reminds us of the alreadypast nature of our present “news.” In a “diary” written for Slate in 1997, Katchor fantasizes about a newspaper shop where “days-old papers are randomly intermingled on a rack . . . with the current editions.”13 This fantasy newsstand is a perfect image for the visual effect of his work: the sense of double exposure, as if yesterday’s comic had somehow been overprinted on today’s edition. This newsstand where yesterday and today’s “news” blend and coexist is the world that Katchor’s protagonists are forever trying to navigate. His characters live delicately (often painfully) poised between yesterday and today, between history and the experience, attempting to serve as emissaries of soon-to-be-lost truths, beachcombers of the gray sands between past and present. Beginning with Cheap Novelities: The Pleasure of Urban Decay (1991), the first volume of stories in which Knipl is a character, Katchor’s unlikely urban archeologists set off into delis, abandoned warehouses, lost neighborhoods, and dusty storerooms. Knipl wanders the streets of the city (a shadowy, alternate New York) taking photos of forgotten businesses and lost monuments, searching for secrets buried beneath the flow of modern commerce, signs of the perverse pleasures that bind the city together. In a 1997 lecture, Katchor described his lifelong fascination with old phonebooks, with their promise of access to the “secret logic to the arrangement of stores along any avenue,” or to the “strange brotherhoods of competing businessmen cluster[ed] in certain areas of the city—the linoleum district, the bad sportswear district.”14 As he will

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in his subsequent Knipl volumes, Katchor ends Cheap Novelties with a longer story, “The Cheap Merchandise District,” which focuses on a range of characters brought together in part by accident, but mostly by their shared fascination with or investment in the low-end artifacts of urban decay. As the title of the volume suggests, the detritus of popular and “cheap” culture is taken very seriously here. These “cheap novelties” are each a secret message, an almost illegible sign from another culture or era, which we just happen to be living in even as it fades away. One of the central characters of “The Cheap Merchandise District” is Moish Nustril, the editor of a failing old magazine, Sexual Progress, whom we encounter as he writes a jeremiad about these lost “messages,” one that seems to come as close as anything in the volume to a manifesto on Katchor’s larger project: “Living, as we do, in a state of chronic overstimulation, there is usually no one home to receive these urgent messages and make sense of them. They accumulate, unopened and unread, on the threshold of our consciousness. . . . If we were able to read, at our leisure, those countless telegrams from the outside world, perhaps, things would be different.”15 Of course the comic form has not historically been understood as a space for “contemplation.” Finding its origins, as we have seen, in newspaper supplements, four-panel gags, and throwaway adventure stories, the comic has historically been associated with those forces conspiring to destroy aesthetic contemplation. But unlike the motion picture, the medium that grew up alongside comics, comics does open up (inevitably and necessarily) a space for the reader to pause, between the panels, and make meaning out of what she sees and reads. As Katchor’s work has implicitly argued throughout, the solution to Nustril’s modernist lament is not a return to the scholastic ideal of Leavis, nor is it a desensitized embrace of the “cult of distractions” that (for Adorno) necessarily defines the modern condition. Rather, what is required are new skills of absorption and attention that would allow one to see (and understand) the “countless telegrams” circulating through the ether. Katchor concludes his second Knipl volume, Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photo­ grapher: Stories (1996), with another long story dedicated to those who would reimagine society so as to make such new readings possible. Set “in that wordless twilight—between the final disappearance of the day’s late editions and the midnight debut of tomorrow’s paper,” the story tells of a unique newspaper, The Evening Combinator, which faithfully chronicles the city’s diverse, sordid, and often profoundly poetic dream life.16 One visionary who captures the journalistic attention of this dream-paper is the architect Selladore, who stands on the verge of building his grand project, Carfare City, a revolutionary community that would dissolve the traditional notions of “home,” allowing individuals

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to “live in a condition of transportational flux, traveling between ‘home’ and the ‘world’ but never having to reach either end point.”17 As with all of Katchor’s visionaries, Selladore’s plans to imagine a world of perpetual twilight—a city where the distinctions that divide public and private, home and away, past and present would blur into meaninglessness—will not be realized. But if the city is not yet ready to be rebuilt to facilitate radically new ways of communicating and reading, then at least the scattered newsprint of The Evening Combinator remains as a vital archive (circulating endlessly through the city’s streets and subways) by which the foundations for the future might be laid, ready to be discovered by future ephemeral archivists. In his 1998 graphic novel, The Jew of New York, Katchor searches out a kind of origin story for his urban visionaries and their navigation of the flotsam and jetsam of modern capitalism and popular culture, setting his narrative in early nineteenth-century New York. As with the Knipl stories, Katchor’s characters in this work also wander the streets feverishly cataloging, hoarding, collecting, remixing. As one reviewer put it, “Here everything trashed, misplaced, or perished has its user, its collector, its redeemer.”18 The early nineteenth-­century New York that Katchor describes is not very different from its twentieth-­ century descendant: it is a city always devouring its own tail, consuming its past as fuel for its present. Katchor’s Jew in early New York serves as the quintessential twilight man—the wanderer, like Selladore’s ideal citizen, never quite at home, never truly away, living between old and new world, present and past, the image and the word.19 In truth, the 1830s is as plausible a birthdate as any for American popular culture (as well as the period in which the earliest sequential comics were created by Rodolphe Töpffer in Switzerland). At this time, fifty years after the founding of the United States, the nation was being unmoored from its own revolutionary past with the death of the last of the founding fathers, Jefferson and Adams, in 1826. It was set adrift—with the birth of the penny press, lithography, and steam-powered printing—in a sea of text and images recounting countless visionary projects all determined to reorient the young nation. The characters in Jew of New York respond differently to the images and broadsides scattered like ash across this volcanic landscape. Ketzelbourd, a beaver trapper in Upstate New York, becomes morbidly obsessed with images of Miss Patella, a famous actress from the popular stage; he constructs an elaborate shrine out of the publicity photos and newspaper clippings that are forever blowing through his woodland camp. Vervel Kunzo, a German Jew in a rubber suit, wanders relentlessly around the margins of the city attempting to locate evidence that Indians are, in fact, one of the lost tribes of Israel. Like Ketzelbourd, his research is conducted al-

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most entirely from found pamphlets, and like Ketzelbourd, Kunzo remains disconnected from the living city (as well as the living Jews and Indians) all around him (an isolation symbolized by his India rubber suit). Yosl Feinbroyt, on the other hand, is deeply connected to the city and its denizens, as he endlessly researches and transcribes new “words” derived from the processes of digestion. In transcribing the sounds—“zhaloup,” “choup”—into letters on the page, Feinbroyt is carried away into ecstatic trances wherein he enters a world built entirely out of the “words” he has discovered in his researches, a landscape in which word and image are merged into one divine (Figure 51).20

Figure 51.  Detail from Ben Katchor, The Jew of New York (New York: Pantheon, 1998), 33.

At first glance, Feinbroyt’s visions looks remarkably like those of the LSD auto­biographers from the underground comix of the late 1960s. But unlike those visionary narratives, Feinbroyt’s emerges not through his withdrawal from the everyday appetites of other people, but from their intense study—from attempting to transcribe them on the page. This work is thick with such visionaries, all of them seeking to forge connections that seem lost and impossible: between past and present, old world and new. All of these projects are ultimately unsuccessful, of course, because they cannot be translated or communicated. And yet, far from criticizing the visionaries, Katchor suggests the failure may well lie with their contemporaries, those who failed to understand or even failed to attempt to understand the significance contained in these strange archives and the juxtapositions they enable. Indeed, Katchor’s remains one of the most notoriously “difficult” of graphic novels, a difficulty that challenges modern readers to somehow receive the meanings that the nineteenth-century New Yorkers could not comprehend. And in many ways, it is Feinbroyt’s absurd project that

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most clearly resembles Katchor’s own. Seeking to capture on paper the most invisible and most immaterial by-products of everyday consumption, Feinbroyt’s work represents nothing so much as a comic. After all, comics are, as Scott McCloud has influentially defined them, “the invisible art”—a title the form earns in part for its cultural invisibility, but equally for its unique ability to invent new “language,” new “words” for that which is invisible, inaudible, ephemeral: smell or dizziness, fear or dreaming. Like Feinbroyt, the cartoonist is engaged in every panel in the invention of a new vocabulary, and like Feinbroyt the comic creator risks with every turn making meaning for no one but oneself.21 In fact, many of the visionaries in The Jew of New York can be understood as stand-ins for certain aspects of the project of making comic narratives: ­Francis Oriole’s ambitious desire to link the city in a vast circulatory system; ­Gergel’s elaborate cardboard stage sets which seek to bring humanity to the racist imagination of the script he must “illustrate”; Feinbroyt’s nonverbal speech balloons; Ketzelbourd’s complex storyboards of Miss Patella’s career. While we are invited to laugh at the absurdity of their failed projects (a pleasure Katchor generously extends to the reader who would meet him halfway), we are also given the tools for the hard work of imagining how past and present, text and image might be brought into meaningful and lasting communication through the formal properties inherent to (and the unique skill sets required by) the comic form. It is in these terms that we can understand Katchor’s masterpiece, The Jew of New York, as an archive of archivists, providing an alternative universe of American inventors, artists, and visionaries who, like Katchor himself, sought out the means by which the archives of daily life might be made to surrender their secret messages. II In accounting for his turn to the popular-culture archive in the wake of September 11, Art Spiegelman writes: “The only cultural artifacts that could get past my defenses to flood my eyes and brain with something other than images of burning towers were old comic strips; vital, unpretentious ephemera from the optimistic dawn of the 20th century. That they were made with so much skill and verve but never intended to last past the day they appeared in the newspaper gave them poignancy; they were just right for an end-of-the-world moment.”22 Spiegelman’s interest in the early history of comics of course was not new: we see the fascination with the serial comic strip in “Little Harold Sunshine” (1967), and his identification with Happy Hooligan is explicitly articulated in Short Order Comix (1973). And here in the wake of 9/11, it is his connection with the earliest history of the form that allows him, however briefly, to

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Figure 52.  Detail from Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers (New York: Pantheon, 2004).

Chapter 5

imagine a resolution whereby everything (for a moment, until the serial installation of the next disaster) will be okay (Figure 52). Perhaps more consistently and for longer than any contemporary comics creator, Spiegelman’s colleague at the East Village Other in 1967, Kim Deitch, has been working through the archives of early twentieth-century popular cultural forms: film, comics, vaudeville, and animation. Deitch’s relationship to these archives is longstanding, having grown up a “cartoon brat” in an animation studio and surrounded by a family that took popular culture and its audiences very seriously, including his father, the celebrated animator and cartoonist Gene Deitch.23 And Deitch himself is an inveterate collector and comber of the popular-culture archives, a creator who has worked in all of his work to find a way of narrating an existence that is simultaneously both present and past, as well as fact and fiction.24 Boulevard of Broken Dreams (2002) tells the story of the earliest years of animation as it was transformed from a rowdy, experimental, and even avantgarde medium to an industry fully domesticated by corporate culture in the 1930s. The graphic novel begins in 1927, as Winsor Newton (modeled on an aging Winsor McCay) is being toasted by the animation industry, hosted by Fred Fontaine (modeled on Max Fleischer). Disgusted by his audience’s disregard for the medium he created, Newton turns on them for their failures to live up to the potential of the art. Only one person in attendance is able to hear what Newton is trying to convey, to feel the possibilities of “this thrilling young art of ours”: a talented young alcoholic named Ted Mishkin. He inherits Newton’s vision, but he also is cursed (and blessed) by a vision of his own: an “imaginary” and entirely disreputable black cat named Waldo (Figure 53). Ted brings Waldo with him to Fontaine studios, translating him to the storyboards and bringing Fontaine’s talking fables its first animated franchise. But by the time we pick up the story in 1933, the Disneyfication of animation is well under way, and the bank threatens to pull its financing if Fontaine doesn’t find a way to capture the Disney “look” (and the Disney audience). Following the changes brought about by the new corporate interests, Waldo is “neutered”— domesticated from hellcat to cuddly kitty. Horrified by his own new image on the screen, Waldo takes his anger out of Ted, who suffers a major breakdown. Waldo has been a running character in Deitch’s work for over thirty years, making his first appearance in the late 1960s, in the underground comix where Deitch got his start, and appearing on and off throughout Deitch’s long career. As Deitch points out in the introduction to Boulevard, the “true” Waldo is an amalgam of a range of black-cat figures who have served vital roles in popular-culture history: crossbred from Krazy Kat, Felix the Cat, Waffles the

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Cat (from Paul Terry’s Aesop’s Fables), Julius (from Disney’s silent-era “Alice in Cartoonland” series), and of course Crumb’s 1960s icon Fritz the Cat. Waldo is the hypersexualized imp of the perverse in the “rational” machinery of modern mass-media entertainment, the force that cannot be sanitized, censored, or made respectable. Waldo is visible only to those (creators, readers) who hover on the edge of reason, those who are capable of great (pop) cultural visions. Even the tired and broken founder of Fontaine studios, for example, is blessed at last with a vision of Waldo, suddenly overcome by a glorious vision of a Waldo theme park (unfortunately Disney is there to steal the idea before it can be realized in Waldo’s name). Waldo is a force of destruction (alcoholic, selfindulgent, megalomaniacal, unpredictable, and even violent); but he is also the

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Figure 53.  From Kim Deitch, Boulevard of Broken Dreams (New York: Pantheon, 2002).

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spirit of the creative energy within early popular culture that is ultimately irrepressible, even by the overwhelming forces of corporate capitalism. In a sense, however, Waldo is one manifestation of a larger theme that runs throughout Deitch’s work, especially since the late 1980s. Repeatedly Deitch has considered the ways in which popular-culture forms—despite being designed to be disposable, dissolved in the moment of consumption—are often haunted by the excess that cannot be buried or co-opted. In Hollywoodland (1987), for example, where Deitch offers his first extended exploration of his own fascination with early cinema, he tells the story of a sleepwalking aging star of the silent screen and his adventures in modern Hollywood. The “Hollywoodland” of the title refers to an old dime museum from the 1940s displaying artifacts recovered from the La Brea Tar Pits—bones, fossils, artifacts—alongside relics from early Hollywood history. More than any other city in America, Hollywood is the one that literally consumes its own past, and Deitch describes in the after­ word his own obsessive attempts to scour the city for signs of the ongoing life of early silent-film culture. But within this magical museum, the past is not only preserved, but brought back to life despite earnest and even violent attempts to bury it. In fact all of Deitch’s increasingly complex archival adventures—blending “real” popular-culture history with a self-referential encyclopedia of all the characters and stories Deitch himself has created over the course of forty-five years of cartooning—describe the ways in which the past continues to haunt the present across generations. The Boulevard of Broken Dreams concludes with Ted’s nephew Nathan inheriting the gift, the curse of being able to see Waldo; but it also begins with the story of how Deitch himself inherited the ability, receiving a strange pipe that produced the visions that first inspired Ted’s career as an artist. The stories from the 1980s collected in Shadowland (2006) catalog an endless series of convoluted inheritances from the early history of American popular entertainment—dime museums, freak shows, carnivals, and vaudeville—as stuffed pigs, pickled corpses, death masks, and old movie reels are hoarded and passed on, along with all the history (much of it dark and some of it demonic) that comes with it. In the lead story in Pictorama (2008), Deitch’s collaborative volume with his brothers Simon and Seth, Deitch even brings Sunshine Girl, his first regular comic character, into his contemporary universe of mass culture and the strange collectors who seek out its magic. Here Deitch tells how Sunshine Girl was licensed in 1969 to a very short-lived soda company, and the bottle cap featuring her likeness is now the “queen” of all finds in the competitive and overwrought world of bottle cap collectors. Not surprisingly, given its origins,

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Sunshine Girl Soda was laced with LSD and the company was raided by the FBI before they could begin distributing. For the protagonist of the story, Ellie Whately, the obsession with bottle caps ultimately leads to a series of bizarre inheritances for all involved: a spiritual rebirth for her through the bequest of an extremely rare set of Stations of the Cross holy-water caps; a spiritual rebirth of a very different kind for her uncle, who discovered the secret stash of Sunshine Girl soda and its long-lost inventor; the title of “crown cap king” for her brother; and the mummified corpse of the inventor of Sunshine Girl Soda for all, including Deitch himself. In The Search for Smilin’ Ed (1997–98), Deitch set out on another adventure in search of the gothic mysteries of popular-culture history, this time attempting to find out about the fate of Smilin’ Ed McConnell, one of the pioneers of radio in the 1920s and of television a generation later. Ultimately, Deitch’s investigations are unsuccessful, his access to the answers barred by an army of demons guarding the long-abandoned museum dedicated to McConnell’s sponsor, Buster Brown, that promises to provide answers to the ultimate fate of Smilin’ Ed. Of course, this proves no obstacle for Waldo, who enters the museum and learns that McConnell has taken up a new life in a vast “massive underground archive of popular culture that honeycombed the earth’s interior . . . curated by twelve mysterious little men known as the grey ones.”25 From his new home with Smilin’ Ed, Waldo sends back to Deitch over the Internet stories and slivers of an archive so vast and complete that it can never be absorbed in a single lifetime, a kind of pop-culture heaven (Figure 54). In The Stuff of Dreams! (2002–5) Deitch most rigorously explores the dangers and pleasure of receiving the gifts of the buried pasts of popular culture.26 Published in three serial installments, The Stuff of Dreams! tells a labyrinthine story of Deitch and his wife, Pamela, who compulsively scour flea markets and online auctions for new items for their collections. Deitch seeks out stills and prints from early film history, while Pamela specializes in antique stuffed black cats. In describing his own obsessive search for various missing items, Deitch even opens up a direct line of communication with his readers in hopes of completing his own collections, appealing for information about missing items and lost reels just as in 1967 he had appealed to his readers in the East Village Other for input as to the future adventures of Sunshine Girl. The “fourth wall,” however, is not the only thing dissolved by this remarkable archival energy. The couple’s foray into one flea market reveals an exciting find: a stuffed doll with uncanny resemblance to Waldo, a character Deitch thought he had invented in 1966. The vendor who owns the doll will not part with him for less than one thousand dollars, and to justify his extravagant price,

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Figure 54.  From Kim Deitch, The Search for Smilin’ Ed (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2010), 120.

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he tells the couple a wild story—complete with tropical island, natives, and of course Waldo arriving to mess everything up in his endless quest for power and making mischief. But when the couple returns with the money, the doll and its owner are gone. The first installment of the story ends with what amounts to a classified ad for the doll, offering the readers a thousand dollars (“no questions asked”) for the mythical stuffed Waldo doll. The second part of Stuff of Dreams describes the consequences of the search for the lost Waldo doll launched with the previous installment. In their research, they uncover a seemingly unconnected lead: a costume for a black cat. Despite being “decidedly ‘non Waldo,’” they purchase the costume on a whim. But in Deitch’s world, all archival threads are connected, and all eventually lead one back to Waldo, the imp of pop-culture past. Deitch discovers the costume featured in an ad in a 1915 issue of Moving Picture World, and he learns that it was originally used in a serial filmed in New Jersey entitled Alias the Cat! The film reels are long lost, but Deitch’s research reveals that the film was simultaneously serialized in comic form in a local New Jersey paper at the time and he tracks down the historical newspapers through eBay. With every turn in his archival adventure, Deitch uncovers a new dizzying set of coincidences. He “reprints” the serialized comic of Alias the Cat! in the lower half of the page, commenting on his discoveries in the top half, and immediately the reader is struck by the similarity between the style of the 1915 comic and Deitch’s own contemporary work. The strange coincidence that his style closely resembles that of the creator of Alias the Cat! Moll Barkely, is later explained when he discovers that Barkely directly influenced his own style through her work on an odd promotional comic Tiny Town Bakers, which Deitch had read avidly as a child. But the coincidences do not stop there, and as Deitch continues to study the comics he notices increasing mention of a “mysterious stranger” with “short stature,” “blue skin,” and a name that begins with “W.” Further research soon reveals that in the very same newspaper in which Alias the Cat! is serialized, a parallel “real life” drama is unfolding on the front pages. The pleasures and dangers of this archival research lead Kim closer, with each connected thread, to an elusive truth (about Waldo? about his own art?) but further and further from reason. The archive soon becomes a source of madness, as each media form (film, newspapers, tapes, magazines, antique phonebooks, etc.) leads him deeper and deeper into a labyrinth from which he seems unlikely to emerge. The third part of the story considers the consequences of this mad adventure. Kim discovers Moll Barkeley is still alive, and through Moll’s daughter learns more about the real “Alias the Cat” and his strange assistant, “W.” Instead

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of Waldo, as Kim suspected, the assistant proves to be a denizen of a forgotten town called Midgetville, a small fiefdom of midgets controlled by Moll’s late husband, Bakendorf, owner of the Tiny Town Bakers. Having found his way to the source of Alias the Cat! however, Deitch cannot let go his strong belief that Waldo is somewhere behind everything he has uncovered. Although he began his research with his wife, Pam has had enough and leaves him to his own devices when Deitch decides he must take up residence in what remains of Midget­ville in order to put together the final pieces of the puzzle. Once Deitch has severed his last tie with the “real world,” it is only a matter of time before he encounters Waldo himself, who has also made Midgetville his home. Once he has met Waldo face to face for the first time, like Ted Mishkin before him, Deitch ends up in the asylum, trying vainly to convince the world that Waldo exists. Waldo asks “why any of this, which is totally irrelevant to anything going on in the world today, should make any difference whatsoever.” “You’re in the twenty-first fucking century, asshole!” Waldo shouts. “Wake up and smell the coffee.”27 In this case, Kim at least has a twenty-first-century excuse to justify his homeland insecurity: Waldo, we learn, has sold a stock of explosives cached in Midgetville to a group of domestic terrorists, and Kim must convince the authorities of the imminent threat. His attempts prove unsuccessful, but fortunately the would-be terrorists likewise fail, and as the narrative concludes, Kim settles back into his old routines. Indeed, he returns to his comics work rejuvenated by his archival adventures. He now has the answer to Waldo’s question; he knows why he needs to know about the Waldo doll and Alias the Cat, just as he also now understands the forces that propel him into flea markets and online auctions in search of missing silent serials and old movie magazines. They are identical to the same madness that compels him to create comic stories in the first place. “The wild beauty of this comics thing,” he realizes, is that despite facing a “large sized case of the 21st century blues,” he can return to his own recovered popular-culture archive in his apartment and “re-create the world my way! Half remembered, half imagined. A wonderful place! Where midgets make bread softer than the pillow you lay your weary head on at night . . . and deliver comic books once a month to all the kids in the neighborhood.”28 The final page of The Stuff of Dreams realizes this fantasy, as the artist’s hand recreates the vision of the past he knew all along he would find. III Like Kim Deitch and Ben Katchor, Chris Ware long has been obsessed with ephemera and particularly with the early twentieth-century story of the twinned birth of comics and motion pictures with which our study began. Much of

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Ware’s initial work explicitly recycled the narrative economies of the early comic strip, particularly that of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat and the unproductive machinery of Goldberg, both of which he channeled in his “Quimby the Mouse” series, first published in the University of Texas student paper in 1990–91 and then worked into the early issues of his ongoing serial, The Acme Novelty Library, a few years later. But as with Deitch and Katchor, Ware’s project has never been motivated simply by nostalgia or by the historian’s impulse to recover the past. From his earliest Quimby stories on, Ware has been meditating on ephemeral history (whether the history of individuals or of the entertainments they create to distract themselves from their misery) and the history of the comics form as a way of experimenting with new modes of telling stories about time that allow for the past and present, the monumental and the ephemeral, to speak to each other across seemingly irrevocable divides. One of the salient features of comics narrative is the ability to see past, present, and future simultaneously—that is, literally, to be forced to attend (however peripherally and however hard one tries to limit one’s focus) to the panel that precedes and the panel that will follow the one being read in the “present.” For Katchor, Deitch, and Ware, as for many others who in the years leading up to the turn of the millennium focused their attention on the form of history, this aspect of comics has made it invaluable for investigating new modes for narrating history and memory. As we discussed at the beginning of Chapter 1, Ware began his most complete investigation of historical memory, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, with a meditation on the fundamental principles of the comics form using two panels in which we see Quimby the Mouse take a hammer to Sparky. Even these two seemingly simple panels have the potential, Ware insists, to raise questions about their relationship in time and space: for example, are they two mice and two different cat heads, or the same mouse and cat head in different moments in time? Even once we accept the conventions that tell us how to read the panels sequentially, new questions arise, outlined on the facing page by a byzantine diagram of the myriad histories that must be imagined to even begin to “read” these two panels (Figure 55). As the diagram details, the demands upon the reader’s ability to project the static frames in time are not confined to filling the space between the two panels. First we must learn to read Quimby as symbolic meld of “man” and “mouse.” Significantly harder, we are asked extend our imagined projection of the two static images back and forth in time to contemplate where in the larger histories of the individual mouse and the cat head this particular action takes place—and more cosmically where in the history of the evolution of all mice, cats, and humans this little drama occurs.

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Figure 55.  Detail from Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (New York: Pantheon, 2000).

As extravagant as such demands on the reader’s attention and historical imagination might seem, we would be wrong to assume that Ware is entirely joking, as the book jacket itself makes clear. The origami-like cover unfolds into a large map presenting a global historical context for the story we are about to read, focusing on moments in family and national history not described directly in the main narrative: the emigration of the first Jimmy Corrigan from Ireland in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the son’s move to Chicago after the Great Fire, where he makes a small fortune rebuilding the city, the death in childbirth of his wife, and so on. But alongside this family saga are two other sequential narratives not at all obviously connected to the history of the Corrigans. In one, a man who we will shortly recognize as Jimmy Corrigan IV, our modern-day protagonist and the great-great grandson of that Irish patri-

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arch, is meticulous cataloging his comic book collection, archiving an issue of Superman in a “3 ml poly bag.” In another set of images, a slave ship departs from West Africa for North Carolina, where a man is placed on the auction block. In the subsequent panels we learn he and another slave have a daughter who will grow up in late nineteenth-century Chicago, working as a maid in the house of William, son of the first Jimmy Corrigan. Jimmy Corrigan weaves together a complex history of the present’s relation to the 1890s, when comics and film were born and when the Corrigan family went horribly wrong—with the abandonment first of the William Corrigan’s illegitimate black daughter and then of his neglected white son. In the tangled genealogy of three generations of dead and deadbeat parents, the same kind of cosmic/comic coincidence that is found everywhere in Katchor’s and Deitch’s work brings our modern-day descendants of this “founding” moment together for a brief moment as the brother and sister that they are, at least in theory, meant to be. The story that follows is, on the surface, all about loss, missed opportunities, and the irreparable damage that families inflict on themselves over time. And the one serious attempt to recover what had been lost—Jimmy’s awkward reunion with his long-lost father—ends tragically with the father’s death in a car accident. To derive any meaning from this narrative other than the inevitable failure of all human relations and the ongoing decline of both the Corrigan family and the American landscape requires the reader to work imaginatively to put pieces back together across time and against the grain of the visual evidence on the surface of the page. But even as the apparatus points us toward this difficult work, many other aspects of the work invite us to take recourse instead to easy irony. The very title of the work screams out for such treatment: Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. The stammering, shy, and blank-eyed Jimmy we get to know does not seem endowed with any gifts likely to earn him claim to the title. When he finally meets the sister he never knew he had, Amy, he can only write her into his well-worn adolescent sexual fantasies. And when he briefly tries to imagine inhabiting a larger family which includes both Amy and himself, he can’t do it: “Too many moms dads too many! Wouldn’t work won’t.” Of course, by the time we are done, we will have come to know two Jimmys, our modern Jimmy and his grandfather, whose childhood abandonment at the Chicago World’s Fair by his father, William Corrigan, is told over a long central section of the book. This older Jimmy seems potentially a more likely candidate for the title, as we seemingly hear him articulately narrate the story of his childhood losses, including the death of his grandmother, his indoctrination into prejudice when he is beaten for befriending an Italian family, and finally

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his abandonment by his father in the White City in 1893 shortly after watching an exhibition of Muybridge’s early experiments with projected film. When we learn at the end of this turn-of-the-century narrative that the grandfather has been telling this story in the 1970s to Amy for a school project, our initial impulse might be to think we have finally found our “smartest kid on earth.” But subsequent events reveal that despite a century of experience, Jimmy II has learned all too well the lessons his father beat into him, and his prejudice and emotional deadness suggests that he cannot possibly be the narrator of the story we have just heard. The narratological structure of that story only complicates any attempt to identify a central narrator who might help us hold it all together, as we shift between an omniscient narrator, a literate first-person autobiographer, and a child’s voice in the traumatic present tense. Ware himself seems the obvious candidate for the honor, but he goes to great lengths in the “Apology” at the end of the book to deny the role, claiming that the whole narrative was originally planned as “an improvisatory exercise . . . to hopefully provide a semi-autobiographical setting in which I could ‘work out’ some of the more embarrassing problems of confidence and emotional truthfulness I was experiencing.” Ware’s typically self-effacing claims are in part disingenuous, but only in part. The overarching narrator, or editor, whom Ware mimics in his thick apparatus, remains incomplete because the answers at which he gestures remain necessarily collaborative. This book—like all comics—necessarily leaves its “novel” in pieces for the reader to finish piecing together—in terms of both the space between the frames and the space between the stories and histories that define Jimmy Corrigan as the “smartest kid on earth.” Thus it is that, despite the surface of the narrative itself, we emerge from the book with a desire to begin making sense of the “clues” scattered throughout the narrative—family photos; receipts; and most tempting of all, the family tree of Amy’s own biological and adopted family, whose intersections (biological and adopted) with the Corrigan family are now revealed. In doing so, we are brought back to the inside cover of the book, with its diagramming of the work involved in making sense of Quimby’s assault on Sparky—and the superhuman acts of imagination that we are asked to undertake to read even these two simple panels. The sardonic tone of the editorial apparatus articulates a deeply felt skepticism regarding both the efficacy of the instructions and the ability and/or willingness of the reader to follow them. The more instructions the “editors” provide to make Jimmy Corrigan available to us, the more apparatus manufactured to guide the reader through the narrative, the more visible and troubling become the gaps between the panels, the narratives, the words, and the images. One can either abandon the book, as many readers have done, as “unreadable” or “dully

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brutal,” or one can match the author’s obsessive relation to his text, helping to transform Jimmy from creepiest loser into the “smartest kid on earth.”29 As Ware knows, many of his readers are those who, like Jimmy, compulsively store their libraries in protective poly bags. In a rare moment when Jimmy finally opens up to Amy, what comes out is an account of his passionate relationship to comics, followed by predictably embarrassed claims that he doesn’t really read them. What Jimmy is looking for is clear: a lost father to carry him away, as a paunchy Superman does in the final image in the book. But the book charges its readers to look for something beyond such boyhood trauma, to read the book (and all the readers’ comics) more historically—not in search of the coherent narratives, narratives that inevitably lead to the kinds of genealogical violence and genocidal histories portrayed on the family tree of the Corrigan family. It is the gaps in the narrative that open up possibilities for new ways of reading, for new models of family, identity, and history. In these terms, then, we can make sense of Corrigan’s obsessive interest with the conjunction between early comics and early motion picture devices. Inviting his readers to build their own mutoscopes and magic lantern slides from the pages of his book (Figure 56), Ware opens up a space for starting over, for recovering

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Figure 56.  Do-it-yourself zoetrope from Jimmy Corrigan.

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the ways of seeing through the gaps, reading out of the gutter, that comics and early film once shared. Like Deitch, Ware has continued to explore these issues in his recent ongoing serialized work, “Rusty Brown” (about a particularly unpleasant man obsessively amassing action figures and pop-culture ephemera in an effort to compensate for his failures to confront his own failings) and “Building ­Stories,” both currently being serialized in Acme Novelty Library and elsewhere. “Building Stories” extends the meditations on the relationship between architectural and human history explored in Jimmy Corrigan and in Lost Buildings, a multi­media collaboration with Ira Glass from 2004. Lost Buildings tells the true story of a man devoted since childhood to the architectural past of Chicago, especially to the modern skyscraper invented by Louis Sullivan, whose ornate turn-of-the-century towers have been demolished to make way for more “efficient” structures. As he watches the city of the past being torn down around them, he develops something of a superpower, as Glass’s narration describes it, the ability to see the present and the past simultaneously, and even to imaginatively inhabit the building that is long lost (Figure 57). Like the protagonists of Katchor’s and Deitch’s work (and like the cartoonists themselves), the real life protagonist of Lost Buildings sees in the buildings the layers of history buried beneath decades of cheap varnish, drop ceilings, and stucco facades.

Figure 57.  Screen capture from Lost Buildings (This American Life, 2004).

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In “Building Stories,” Ware imagines the turn-of-the-century building itself as historian, able to tell its own stories, not of “lost buildings” but of “lost people,” the individuals whose lives take place, however briefly, in the reasonably priced apartments. The pages serialized in the New York Times Magazine in 2005–6 are framed by the meditations of a building that has become increasingly aware of its own mortality, its own obsolescence, and it struggles to find a way to appreciate the time remaining in the lives of the tenants living out lonely lives on each of its three stories. Going through its rooms, it can tally the repeated occurrences in each: 886 screams, 106,323 breakfasts, 4 criminals, 22 pregnancies, 21,779 toenail clippings, and so on.30 And like the subject of Lost Buildings, the building has itself a kind of superpower: “Not to brag, but we buildings are able to—how might you say it?—grope our way around the future a bit, but only insofar as any current occupant inhabits us.”31 It is a superpower, of course, that depends on attending to people, just as the superpower of being able to see—as Ware describes repeatedly in his work—layers of architectural history in a single glance depends on attending to buildings, to the lived spaces we so often take for granted. Ware traces some of his own understanding of the ability of comics to describe not only time and space but the history of a space, to the story “Here” by Richard McGuire, published in Art Spiegelman’s magazine raw in 1989 (Ware would have his first major publication in the same magazine one issue later). McGuire tells the story of one corner of a room, as Ware puts it, “spanning the years 500,957,406,073 b.c. and 2033 a.d., told in six pages of six panels each” (Figure 58): As soon as [the] fifth panel is reached, with the “1922” surrounding it, we have to look back, re reread—and before we know it we’ve gone back in time, both narratively and of our own volition. By the second page, we will likely have already flipped back and forth a good number of times, recognizing certain characters suddenly aged, then youthful, then aged again, yet all held in frame by the simple idea Figure 58.  Detail from Richard McGuire, “Here,” in RAW 2.1 (1989): 69.

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that this is all happening (or has happened, or will happen) in one corner of the same space, or “here.”32

For Ware, the revelation of McGuire’s story was that comics could shift tense between panels, within a panel—could tell history in ways that aligned more fully with the workings of memory than other narrative forms. In the process, new juxtapositions between seemingly disconnected events or objects open up, and with them new potential meanings that never would have been legible within a chronological narrative. As Ware, himself an historian of the form, points out, there are precedents for “Here” in the underground comics of the previous generation, especially in the work of Spiegelman and Crumb, but it was McGuire who most efficiently revealed the new narrative possibilities in terms of the kind of cosmic imaginative history Ware would explore in his “instructions” for reading the seemingly transparent panels representing a mouse, a hammer, and a cat head. As Ware has extended those explorations, comics’ ability to visualize and reactivate history in unique ways has become a central preoccupation for a new generation of cartoonists in the twenty-first century.

IV It is hard to think of contemporary comics creators working in this form who are as different artistically as are Katchor, Deitch, and Ware, and different in terms of the kinds of stories they tell. As opposed to the gray washes and rough pencil lines of Katchor’s panels, we have the immaculate hatching of Deitch’s line and the baroque psychedelia of his compositions, or the almost mechanical precision of Ware’s designs and the emotional subtleties of his palette. Against the almost mystical lyricism of Katchor’s stories, we have Deitch’s playful and frenetic riffs on classical Hollywood genres (melodrama, serial adventures, slapstick, etc.), or Ware’s multiply narrated stories of emotional injury and personal loss. And yet for all their differences, these artists share a vital commitment to the understanding of the work of comics as forging a new archive and schooling readers into modes of collecting and navigating the everyday “stuff of dreams.” For all three, comic writing is the only medium capable of a unique archival work, the only one capable of allowing the shades of the past to overlap with and speak to the impulses of the present—and to allow us to read both simultaneously. In many contemporary graphic novels, the adventures of superheroes and their villainous counterparts have been replaced with the seemingly more mundane tales of collectors, the compulsive combers of archives, warehouses, and dumpsters. In fact, Seth’s recent Wimbledon Green: The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World (2005) goes so far as to playfully imagine the collector and the

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superhero as one and the same. Not surprisingly, perhaps, many of those working in the form today are themselves compulsive collectors: Chris Ware collects historical paper ephemera and archives ragtime history (and he publishes The Ragtime Ephemeralist, devoted to this pursuit). In one episode of “Rusty Brown” he even briefly introduces himself as a character in a flea market transaction, represented as the “moron” who “bought that entire box of Edison rolls for fifty bucks,” money which is put to use by Rusty and Chalky in their search for a Battlestar Gallactica action figure from 1979.33 Daniel Clowes collects “sleazy ’50s and ’60s sex paperbacks”;34 Harvey Pekar and Robert Crumb (on whom Clowes loosely modeled the character of Seymour in Ghost World) famously collected old 78 phonograph records; and the celebrated alternative cartoonist, Ivan Brunetti, collects old postcards. Clowes describes himself, “liv[ing] in my own little sanctum/sanatorium with all my books covered with Mylar.” In fact, of those working with the theme, only ­Katchor denies being a collector.35 Of course, readers of comics are themselves (not always unfairly) stereotyped as obsessive collectors. The desire to possess comics—to hunt down every stray work by a favorite creator, to contain and reassemble the scattered pieces of a fragmentary comics universe—is a familiar one for many readers (and one that has little, if anything, to do with fantasies about market value). It is the compulsive need to fill in the gaps, to make connections between issues (the serial gap inherent to comic production, mirroring and complicating the gaps between the frames themselves) that drives the collector in search of missing issues. Indeed, the archival drive that has been a vital aspect of comic book culture since the 1980s can be read as a metaphor for the (always uneasy) collaboration between reader and writer that is central to the comics form. As McCloud has influentially described the formal demands of comics, the reader must always bring “closure” to the space between frames. Even in the most simplistic narratives, the reader is required to fill in the space between the frames with the “missing” action. All comics are necessarily collaborative texts between the imagination of the author/artist and that of the reader who must “complete” the narrative. It is this collaborative work on the part of the reader that accounts, at least in part, for the deeply personal, prideful relationship that many “collectors” have for the comics in their possession—and the desperate longing they have for those pieces that remain forever out of their grasp. These are not simply artifacts they “own” but texts they have helped to make meaningful— missing fragments, like the one which eludes Clowes’s David Boring, which need to be put in place. It is interesting but telling that comics by and about collectors and archivists of popular-culture history, such as the work of Seth, Deitch, and Ware, all

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seems explicitly designed in different ways to both encourage and frustrate the collector response in their readers. Deitch’s comics have woven an increasingly complex alternate popular-culture history, one that includes both historical figures and entirely fictional ones and that keeps promising (like Barthes’ endlessly deferred striptease) one more installment of the story will finally give us access to the complete picture, the heavenly archive that Waldo has found in The Search for Smilin’ Ed. Seth’s story of Clyde Fans remains seemingly forever in progress, with only the first part collected in book form, the subsequent installments continuing in Seth’s serial comic Palookaville, its conclusion tantalizingly deferred. And Chris Ware’s ongoing serials are published in confounding sequence in Acme Novelty Library, Ware’s irregularly published serial comic, but also in myriad other sources sending collectors scrambling across the Internet in search of missing pieces of a promised whole that, like Deitch’s and Seth’s ongoing storyworlds, has the potential to be endlessly deferred. As David M. Ball writes, “Ware’s publications simultaneously seek to fascinate and infuriate collectors with their variable sizes, editions, serialized iterations, and cut-out dioramas that encourage readers to alternately destroy and preserve . . . the text and subsequently show them in their own personal floor display.”36 The sort of madness that these creators inspire in their readers is of course one they know themselves quite well. In his serial comic Peepshow Joe Matt routinely describes a fierce rivalry between himself and Seth over various collections: viewmaster reels, obscure Canadian cartoonists, Gasoline Alley Sunday pages (Figure 59). Ivan Brunetti explicitly describes the connection between his own impulse to make comics and what drives him as a collector: I tend not to draw things immediately—generally years will go by, and I like that process, of having a mountain of things to sift through, and finding the gem. That’s kind of what collecting is about for me—this process of gradually coming into focus. When I figure out what it’s about, I stop collecting. As soon as I discovered that my favorite postcards were made by a certain company during a certain period Figure 59.  Joe Matt, Peepshow 13 (Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2002).

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and that there were a finite number of them, I lost interest in them. . . . Then it’s anticlimactic—I know exactly what I’m looking for. . . . I’d just be going through the motions.37

As Brunetti describes it, what motivates the true collector is the desire to follow the perverse impulse as far as it will take you into the past in order to learn something about oneself. It is also about inefficiency, as Brunetti puts it, the “strange energy” that comes from “wasting lots and lots of time obsessing over something.”38 Seth similarly describes the buildings and landscapes that populate his sketchbooks as “part of a collecting urge.”39 The vision of collecting Brunetti describes is also one that his friend and fellow Chicagoan Ware explicitly endorses. Unlike Rusty Brown, who is motivated by market values, fantasies of completism and of mastering his competitors, the “true” collector is motivated by perverse impulses, unknown holy grails, and the strange energy that derives from the spectacular inefficiency of collecting—or making comics. Barthes describes the traditional historian as “not so much a collector of facts as a collector and relater of signifiers; that is to say, he organizes them with the purpose of establishing positive meaning and filling the vacuum of pure, meaningless series.”40 The kind of collecting modeled by the comics historians since the 1990s necessarily refuses the completism, the efficiency, the truth claims of traditional objective history, making of all history a necessarily subjective—simultaneously introspective and collaborative—affair. As the title of Ware’s collector’s journal, The Ragtime Ephemeralist, suggests and as the work of Katchor, Deitch, and Ware differently exemplifies, the goal here is not to make money, tell an efficient narrative, fill in the gaps, or recovery a unitary truth. To be an ephemeralist is to accept history (including the history of the self) as ephemeral. The comics historian turns to the history of ephemera, of precisely that which is designed to burn up in the harsh light of everyday life, leaving behind the deep tracks of what will later be traced as history. The collector of postcards or other turn-of-the-century ephemera attempts to tap into the living and lived energy of the past and to hear its pulse beating in a present that does not even acknowledge that such detritus continues to inhabit the land. And to tell such histories in comics form—a medium that is at once marked as the epitome of the ephemeral and as the least efficient of narrative modes—is explicitly to embrace the “vacuum of pure, meaningless series” as the only story worth telling. Perhaps the most developed self-portrait of the artist as a young collector can be found in Seth’s It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken (1996), in which the

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autobiographical narrator meditates on the fears and fantasies that propel him into basement bookstores in vain pursuit of “Kalo,” an obscure minor (and fictional) cartoonist from the 1950s. As the narrator meditates, “The bits and pieces of that time still lingering around today seem like remnants of some ghost world—a vanished world.”41 The figure of the collector-­archeologist of these “ghost worlds” is central to all of Seth’s work, including his ongoing narrative Clyde Fans, which features a lonely and disturbed collector of novelty postcards. As Seth describes it: “I have tried to keep this tendency in check when writing, but as time passes I am beginning to embrace the idea that all my characters might very well be collectors. The things people own and why they want to possess things say a lot about them as people. Also, searching for things is such a direct metaphor for searching for meaning . . . and that is just so clearly what most of my stories (most stories, in general, really) are about.”42 In these terms, we can see collection itself as fundamentally an autobiographical narrative, one told by the arrangement of texts and images from the past to tell a story to the present. It is not only that the archival and the autobiographical are intimately connected in many of these works, but, as I have suggested, the comic form is an ideal space for precisely this kind of collaborative archival work. Comics chronicle the twilight world, the liminal space between past and present, text and image, creator and reader. The comic frame is necessarily a space where these binaries overlap, collaborate, and compete for attention and meaning. Indeed, the inextricability of various binaries in the comics form has been often noted in recent comics scholarship. The ways in which Spiegelman’s Maus, for example, brings past and present into an uneasy shared field has been widely commented upon; as Erin McGlothlin writes, “The comic images of Maus, rather than clearly marking off the past from the present, contribute to a problem in which the present and the past are intimately interconnected and difficult to separate from one another, for the past is revealed as constitutive of the present, and the present makes demands on the ways in which the past is represented.”43 And the inextricability of text and image is a recurring theme in many of the valuable essays collected in The Language of Comics: Word and Image (2001); as Gene Kannenberg writes, Chris Ware “asks readers to reconsider the binary opposition between word and image by blurring distinctions between the two,” making his human figures “cold and dead, like typography” and his lettering expressive and “alive.”44 But in privileging one binary interplay, or in identifying the existence of this tension as a unique feature of one individual work, comics scholarship has largely neglected the reality that all comics necessarily leave their binary ten-

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sions unresolved. It is at heart a bifocal form, requiring double vision on the part of reader and creator alike. It is this feature that marks comics as closer to the archive than to traditional narrative forms. Like the archive, the comics form retains that which cannot be reconciled to linear narrative—the excess that refuses cause-and-effect argument, the trace which threatens to unsettle the present’s narrative of its own past (and thereby of itself). The comics form is forever troubled by that which cannot be reconciled, synthesized, unified, contained within the frame; but it is in being so troubled that the form defines itself. The excess data—the remains of the everyday—is always left behind (even as the narrative progresses forward in time), a visual archive for the ­reader’s necessary work of rereading, resorting, and reframing. Comics scholarship remains, it seems, forever surprised by the sin of not choosing, but it is precisely the inability or refusal to choose (between text and image, past and present, graphic and novel, popular culture and art/literature, etc.) that draws creators to this form in the first place. And similarly, I would suggest, it is our growing appetite for texts that choose not to choose that has led to the expanding cultural influence of the form in recent years.45 V That the contemporary graphic novel came of age in the late 1980s and 1990s in America, at precisely the same time as the rise of the personal computer, is no coincidence. Suddenly, the need to be able to read and navigate sequential text/ image fields is more pressing (and less culturally devalued) than at any time in modern history. The comic, because of the unique way in which it brings together different signs (figural, textual, symbolic) into a crowded field where meaning is both collaborative and competitive (among different semiotic systems, between frames, between reader and writer) emerged as a preeminent form for those interested in developing and interrogating theories and methods of reading the everyday world. And yet the need for tools by which to navigate these text/image archives has taken on especial urgency in recent years. As Lev Manovich and others have argued, we are in the midst of a major sea change in the ways in which our culture represents itself to itself, moving from the traditional, linear, cause-and-effect narrative (the realist novel by which Benedict Anderson’s imagined community came to understand itself as a nation) and toward the database (multilayered, nonhierarchical navigable archives). The new database “narratives” by which we will imagine ourselves and our communities in the next century require new skills in navigating and processing visual and textual information. For Manovich and his collaborators, the database “narratives” will be new media texts, consumed on computers or their descendants.

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But the comics form has been navigating the database of modernity for over a century, and there are reasons to suspect that the growing attention to this form in recent years as well as the remarkable concentration of talented creators and important works that have emerged all suggests that the comic form has a significant role to play in this twenty-first-century transformation. What Benjamin argued in the 1930s is all the more clearly the case today. The traditional notion that visual and text languages cannot or should not be combined meaningfully is belied by daily experience—by advertising, by film and television, and most spectacularly and significantly by the Internet, which has flooded us with image/text fields (framed by the dimensions of our computer screens). Indeed, to compete in this growing marketplace for image/text combinations, television programming (beginning with the twenty-four-hour news channels but rapidly spreading to other programming as well) has begun running text “crawls” below their primary images, usually offering a completely different narrative than that conveyed by the sound/visual image on the screen. It is not surprising that just as the birth of the comic strip coincides with the emergence of the mass-media empires of Hearst and Pulitzer at the turn of the century, so does the “renaissance” of comics in the 1990s coincide with the development of the Internet.46 Like the early years of the twentieth century, this is a time when the connection between the words and images that we encounter in our daily lives is as frenetic, jumbled, and potentially disconnected as it ever has been. The need for a new graphical language to describe the present in relation to the past is arguably more pressing than ever. New media technologies (the data­ base, Internet, hypertext, etc.) are ideally suited for making sense of the present in relation to the future (the “database” texts of Manovich’s imagination). 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. Perhaps ironically, given the avowed antipathy of many comics creators to new media technologies, the comic form is ideally suited to carrying on the vital work Benjamin called for generations earlier: making the present aware of its own “archive,” the past that it is always in the process of becoming. In Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World a mysterious hand repeatedly defaces public and private property with the words ghost world. This phrase stands in many ways as fairly easy commentary on the story being told: two girls in between childhood and adulthood, in a twilit town—a space they are simultaneously exploring and saying goodbye to. But the graffiti perhaps more importantly serves as a potent symbol of the graphical writing we call “comics”: simultaneously image and text (not to mention vandalism and art). The mysterious

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graffiti has somehow always been there (the girls cannot find a record of Enid’s garage, for example, from a time when it was not already so marked), but it is also always freshly painted, always new.47 The phrase ghost world is used by both Clowes and Seth, and as we have seen it applies equally well to the work of Katchor and Deitch. But it is important to note that there is nothing gothic, nothing uncanny, in these scenes of “haunting.” Nothing is unsettled by the coexistence of past and present, text and image. Here the double vision that allows present and past to coexist is not uncanny, but “natural,” inevitable, and responsible. These are not the lost souls of the forgotten past, but to the soonto-be-past traces of the living present. In the hundred-year history of the form, we have never been in greater need of its unique tools for collecting, navigating, and responding to the “ghost world” that is—for better and worse—home.

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If comics and film were born together a little over a century ago, as we have seen, they spent considerably more energy for much of the last century exploring the many differences in their affordances. In the twenty-first century that has changed markedly. When the first wave of comics-based movies began appearing toward the end of the 1990s, many critics and practitioners in both film and comics assumed (and often openly hoped) that it was only a trend. After all, Hollywood cycles through genres at the speed of light, and even some of those best remembered today (the gangster of the 1930s, film noir in the 1940s) lasted only a few short years. Beginning somewhat quietly with The Crow (1994) and Men In Black (1997), and then accelerating at the start of the new century, Hollywood’s fascination with comics is now (2011) well over a decade old and shows no signs of abating. In fact, 2011 saw the most comics-based releases of any year in film history since the earliest years of the medium, and there are currently dozens of comics-related “properties” in some stage of development in Hollywood. While only a fraction of those will ever see the light of day, the investments demonstrate the growing interdependence between the two industries. The annual Comic-Con in San Diego, an event that grew out of the comics fanzine and collector cultures discussed in previous chapters, is increasingly woven into the development circuit of Hollywood, as producers, stars, and agents work the crowd for the next big deal.1 For aficionados of both film and comics, this increasingly intimate relationship is at best a mixed blessing—and often a source of deep concern about the future of both media. For many film critics, the “comic book movie” is another nail in the coffin of film art, the ultimate triumph of style over substance, spectacle over story and character. And while one might imagine that comics fans and critics would delight in the greater exposure film gives to their historically neglected medium, many in the world of comics worry that the increasing partnerships with the film industry have doomed every new comic to being

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essentially a Hollywood pitch.2 In both cases, what is feared is that comics are becoming more like film and movies more like comics. While many critics assume that the pursuit of comics properties is a sign of a creative vacuum in Hollywood, as we have seen, there is a longer and more complex history at work here. In fact, what we are witnessing today might be understood as something like a return to origins for both film and comics, or perhaps better put, a twenty-first-century recovery of a road-not-taken at the beginning of the twentieth century. Far from being an aberration or dilution of their “true” formal properties, the convergence of film and comics can be understood as an embrace of the genetic links that once bound film and comics together when they emerged as the new media modes of storytelling in the early years of the twentieth century. As film completes its ongoing translation into digital media—the push for three-dimensional exhibition epitomizing this final stage in the process, as exhibition joins production and editing in digital formats— comics are suddenly increasingly relevant once again to the work of making movies. That the two largest comics companies, DC and Marvel, are both now owned by movie companies, Warner Brothers and Disney, suggests that in the twenty-first century the film and comics will remain deeply intertwined. As we saw in Chapter 1, the first explicit adaptation of a comic was the 1903 film Happy Hooligan Interferes, a direct adaptation of Frederick Burr Opper’s Happy Hooligan—one of the smash hits of the brand-new newspaper comics supplement. These earliest partnerships between comics and film remind us that film wasn’t born telling stories that followed classical Hollywood rules— those rules had to be developed (largely imported and adapted from earlier storytelling modes, such as the novel and theater), codified, and policed. The earliest films were something else entirely, what Tom Gunning has influentially identified as a “cinema of attractions”—a cinema of display as opposed to narrative, exhibition as opposed to voyeurism. Perhaps most important for our purposes, it was a cinema that directly courted audience attention and interaction.3 In other words, these early films were very much like comics—or like new media texts in the twenty-first century. A hundred years later, movies are learning how to be like comics all over again. Of course, on one level this change had little to do with comics. This shift has been the result of a series of technological developments that transformed the ways in which films are consumed. Beginning in the early 1980s with the proliferation of home video (VHS), for the first time, the average person could watch a film on his or her own schedule, no longer dependent on the schedules of distributors and exhibitors.4 More importantly, viewers could now rewind, fast-forward, pause, and start over, no longer restricted by the disciplines of

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projector and movie theater. It is a change in viewing behaviors we now so fully take for granted that it is indeed hard for those born after 1980 to fully grasp a time before. Out of VHS culture emerged a new generation of directors (probably best epitomized by Quentin Tarantino) who translated their new viewing freedoms, and the encyclopedic knowledge of world cinema it enabled, into a new aesthetic of pastiche and allusion, homage and travesty.5 Of course, the impact of the VCR was relatively minimal compared to the changes brought about by the introduction of the DVD at the end of the 1990s (not coincidentally at precisely the same time as we also see the first wave of comics-based movies). Now, not only could movies be watched on one’s own schedule, but individual frames can be frozen and zoomed for infinite dissections; films can be broken down for frame-by-frame analyses; movies can be ripped, reedited, watched out of order, remixed, and (most terrifying of all for the film industry) recirculated. Once coupled with high-definition home theaters and with the powerful home video-editing software that is increasingly standard on the home computer, many of the rules of film viewing that had been assumed by film producers and scholars for generations have become obsolete. While exact figures are notoriously hard to come by (due to a highly secretive accounting system employed by the major studios), by most accounts traditional theatrical film viewership now accounts for less (likely far less) than 20 percent of total revenue (compared to close to 100 percent in the golden age of the Hollywood studio system before its breakup in 1948).6 Many film students today visit theaters rarely, if at all, instead preferring to watch films on laptops, on TV screens, iPads, and so on. They chat (in person, online) about them with their friends while they are watching them; they analyze them in painstaking detail on blogs; they loop them again and again on various screens and in various contexts, many of which have nothing to do with the film itself. In other words, in some important respects, film has returned to the world it left behind more than a century ago: the DVD, the iPod, and the home theater are like twenty-first-century versions of the Mutoscope, the praxinoscope, the nickelodeon. Film studies as an academic discipline is still catching up to this fact, struggling to rethink basic assumptions about spectatorship and apparatus as well as devising new methods for teaching film to a student body that is often now making, editing, and distributing movies itself (students are increasingly behaving, that is, like the first generation of film audiences). Hollywood, meanwhile, has turned to comics. Hollywood is an industry, it must be recalled, that has survived everything from the transition to sound, the rise of television, and the court-ordered breakup of the studio system. And yet engaging comics readers as they have been

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doing aggressively in recent years seems at first glance to make little business sense. After all, for comic books a “best seller” just a few years ago was one that sold two hundred thousand copies; in 2011 few titles sell more than a hundred thousand an issue. Unlike during the early 1940s, when sales of upward of one million copies were not unheard of, current comics sales provide nowhere near the number of readers needed to guarantee a successful return on even a smallbudget motion picture. However, what Hollywood is after is not comics readers’ dollars (although they are more than happy to accept them) but an under­ standing of the ways in which comics readers read. The DVD and the digital age has made us all comics readers now, even if we never pick up a comic book. With the power to pause, to rewind, to zoom in, we increasingly seek out texts that allow us to put our newfound powers to use. Thus we have seen the emergence of what Graeme Harper has termed the “new cinema of complexity”: films designed to be digitally mediated, offering inducements for close readings, rewindings, and transmedia tangents that traditional viewing regimes long made impossible.7 We see as well the rise of a new serial cinema, both in film and the new long-form television, which relishes in open-ended questions, uncertain motivations, deferred resolutions, and a complex weave of connections among characters across numerous texts—qualities that Hollywood screenwriting rules militated against for almost a century. This new seriality in cinema is perhaps best represented by the increasingly complex interconnections across films in the Marvel Comics adaptations leading up to a planned 2012 Avengers film. Increasingly, we see a return to spectacle, to a modern-day cinema of attraction—what Andrew Darley identifies as “a shift at the visual aesthetic level to formal preoccupations and excitations . . . the elevation to prominence within mainstream visual cultural practices of formal attributes in and for themselves: the prevalence of technique and image over content and meaning.”8 Together all of these aspects of cinema represent for many film scholars dire evidence of apocalypse or, as Wheeler Winston Dixon somewhat playfully put it, “reasons why it’s all over”; but such evidence equally suggests that we might seek out reasons why it is all starting over.9 So, for the first time in many decades—for better or worse—film is returning to a kind of origins even as it embraces new technologies and media unimagined a century ago when cinema and comics were beginning their experiments together. Today for the first time in many decades, film is looking to learn from comics once again. Here I am referring not only to specific adaptations but to filmmakers (often without being conscious of comics as an influence) whose ambitions to reinvent cinema push their work closer to the comic form. The digital painting and discontinuities of Richard Linkletter’s

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Waking Life (2001); the multiple panels and storylines of Figgis’s Timecode (2000); the foregrounding of the archive and the use of multiple frames in Peter Greenaway’s recent films (especially the Tulse Luper trilogy [2003–4]): all evidence a cinematic drive toward the comic form. When Greenaway suggests, “In my search to find new ways of inventing cinema I was fascinated by . . . hieroglyphics, which manage to be both image and text at the same time,” he is of course not “inventing” but recovering early film’s hieroglyphic nature—the ability of the image/text to convey information and emotion that is dilated and diluted in the long forms of prose fiction or the novelistic film.10 Writing in 1922, the poet Vachel Lindsay pronounced that “American civilization grows more hieroglyphic every day,” and Lindsay believed that film, along with comics and advertising, represented the fulfillment of the nation’s cultural independence.11 At the very time Lindsay was writing, film was moving rapidly in the other direction, toward the structures and rules of traditional narrative. Nonetheless, comics creators never lost their sense of themselves as engaged in creating what Frank Miller also referred to as a 20th-century hieroglyphics. Before the classical Hollywood narrative became the rule, what filmmakers took from the earliest comics was not story but personality. In Happy Hooligan, for example, they found an image of the body under constant assault from the forces of modern life (automobiles, urban life, racist cops) yet constantly able to rebound. This plastic personality became arguably the first mass-mediated celebrity of the twentieth century in part because he assuaged a mounting anxiety that modernity would either fragment us, or make us numb. Happy Hooligan and his peers were neither crushed nor hardened by modern life. With each loop of the serial comic strip, their bodies recovered from another act of violence, ready to do it all again the next day. A century later our daily experience of modernity is arguably less traumatic, but anxieties about speed and overload are if anything more pronounced. Thus in the contemporary cinema of attractions we have seen reborn the fantasy of the plastic body that can withstand any assault and come back for more. But this is not an indexical, realist body—not the body of traditional cinema— but a cartoon body, one whose strength and resilience derives from the iconic ­powers of representation. This helps at least partly explain the rise of the superhero adaptations in a post-9/11 United States, despite the declining number of potential moviegoers likely to have a knowledge of the characters from comic books. Repeatedly these superhero movies put on display digitally sculpted bodies that are tortured, shot, burned, and even atomized and yet are able time and again to recover, to return, to be reborn.

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The pleasures of the digital, superpowered body is perhaps most self-consciously on display in a movie that is based not on a superhero comic but on Frank Miller’s neo-noir Sin City series. Robert Rodriguez’s 2005 adaptation painstakingly translates Miller’s protagonists to the screen, where we encounter them as something like ultraviolent recastings of Happy Hooligan and the earliest serial comic strips. Miller’s heroes, Marv and Hardigan, absorb bullets, hangings, hit-and-runs, and continually return for more. That neither is precisely a superhero is part of their appeal: they are motivated, as was Happy a century earlier, by the quest to do right in a profoundly unjust world—and it is this naïve, romantic premodernity that is the key to their power. That the bodies in the film Sin City are literally plastic—layered in prosthetics and digital effects—is of course relevant. Rodriguez and his team use the digital tools at their disposal to transform their actors into graphic icons, capable of absorbing bullets and the anxieties of their audience—icons that pretend to disguise the celebrities beneath the digital makeup. I say “pretend” because, of course, we don’t forget—and nor does the film want us to—that we are looking at A-list celebrities on the screen (Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Benicio del Toro). For all the freedoms Rodriguez sought out in making this film outside of Hollywood (surrendering his Director’s Guild card, filming and editing at his own home studio), this remains a film deeply imbricated by the system, and especially by the celebrity culture which has from the start served to discipline the voyeuristic relationship between audience and film. Thus, even as we recognize the ways in which contemporary comics adaptations seek out many of the pleasures and possibilities of the earliest comics (and film), it is important to recognize that this is far from a wholesale surrender of all the institutional and ideological tools that narrative cinema has used to organize its productions and audiences in the twentieth century. Similarly, we might identify another aspect of new media filmmaking that traces its origins back to the earliest days of comics and film: the loop. While cinema was understood to have matured when it left behind the loop for the linear narrative, serial comics have long embraced the loop as a meaningful structure. Krazy Kat’s adventures are not linear, nor even properly narrative. Like the new media object of the twenty-first century, Herriman’s erotic, neurotic triangle, once programmed, loops daily—each installment a return to the beginning, a replaying with only the smallest difference from the version that preceded it. Of course, it is in this difference that pleasure and meaning lies for the early comics. Whereas for The Matrix—a film deeply conflicted about the new media it was both exploiting and critiquing—the loop is the sign of something gone terribly wrong, a sign of sinister manipulation of the signs of

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external reality, Sin City celebrates the loop. Rodriguez and Miller make no attempt to hide the fact that each version of the story they tell is essentially the same story: frame-up, chivalry, revenge, rebirth, martyrdom. And the stories themselves are an assemblage of clippings and allusions to the generic pulp of Miller’s childhood: Spillane, crime comics, film noir. Like so many hardboiled detectives before him, early in his narration, Marv tells us that he “was always good at jigsaw puzzles.” And over and again, the stories that follow play with the idea of puzzle pieces and fragments. But here the pieces are all prefabricated, the solutions identical. In a new media world of standardization where all the pieces are ultimately reducible to identical 0s and 1s, the true interest lies not in how the pieces are interlocked across time and space as in traditional narrative. The payoff for the new media noir is instead in putting things together—how the pieces are layered to make new shapes, new puzzles. Even as Marv is “spreading out the puzzle pieces one more time . . . looking for some hint of the big picture,” the images are pulling in another direction. Against Marv’s monologue, a surreal horizontal rain carves the frame up into a thousand shards and splinters, tending toward greater and greater abstraction. The name of the puzzle master ultimately tells him nothing we haven’t heard since people started telling stories about power and corruption. The image on the page, however, represents something new: fragmented and slivered to the verge of abstraction (Figures 60–61). Of course, reusing the same basic elements in new combinations is, in a sense, the art of comics. Rodriguez adds his own subtle but meaningful gesture in this direction when he reuses fundamental visual elements in a way that declares his own independence from conventional attitudes about narrative continuity. Visually, perhaps the most striking aspect of the film—especially in one so etched by violence—is its remarkable stillness. The dedication to Miller’s framing becomes for Rodriguez an excuse to move away from the kinetic drive from frame to frame (whose force is to erase the frame), focusing on the static image, the graphic. For all its kinetic energy and ultraviolent action, the film comes as close as any other to translating onto the screen the effect of the gutter, of the frame, of the plastic icon. Sin City of course is a film produced with the direct involvement of the comics creator. The more recent adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen (2009) is in a sense a very different affair, a big-budget Hollywood film produced over the strenuous objections of its writer. Yet, if Sin City represents the tendency toward a new cinema of spectacle, Watchmen serves as a useful example of a film that represents the move toward the “new cinema of complexity” as well as, somewhat more elliptically, an example of a new se-

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Figure 60.  Panel from Frank Miller, Sin City (Milwaukie, Oreg.: Dark Horse, 1993).

Figure 61.  Screen capture from Sin City, directed by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller (Dimension/ Troublemaker Studios, 2005).

rial cinema whose viewing experience pushes beyond the traditional theatrical time and space. Moore and Gibbons’s Watchmen (1986) is famously one of the more complex comics narratives, deliberately written in many ways to celebrate the power and history of comics in terms that could not be adapted to other media. Each panel is densely packed with visual information, much of which makes little narrative sense the first time through, requiring the reader to double back, often several times, to pull all the strands of the story together into a larger whole. Additionally, Moore included at the end of each serial installment of Watchmen paratexts that add further layers to the history he constructed in this book: pages from an alternate history in which EC comics survive the 1950s to enjoy complete domination over the comic book market; an excerpt from an exposé of real-life superheroes; psychiatric reports; a rightwing newspaper; pages from an ornithological journal. Finally, central aspects

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of the story are told through a complex overlapping narrative in which The Black Freighter, a pirate comic being read by a young man at a newsstand, is woven into the debates on the streets (and, ultimately, the apocalypse itself) unfolding around him. The paratexts, the pirate comic, and the complex verbal/visual puns were designed in part to be explicitly untranslatable, unadaptable; as would, perhaps more importantly, the book’s central meditations on time, history, and responsibility, represented by Dr. Manhattan, a man transformed by radiation into a being capable of seeing (and inhabiting) simultaneously the past, the present, and the future. However, as we see in the opening panels of chapter 4, in which the increasingly posthuman Dr. Manhattan struggles to determine whether he must now sever his last connection to earth (and with it, earth’s last hope of avoiding nuclear annihilation), his experience of time looks strangely familiar (Figure 62). Dr. Manhattan is capable of taking in past, present, and future in a glance, of moving back and forward between them effortlessly, even of making choices in the gaps between slivers of time that might impact if not the conclusion at least its ultimate meaning. Dr. Manhattan, that is, sees time like a comic reader—in ways all but identical to what Richard McGuire, for example, portrays in “Here” (1989). If there was ever a comic book that could not be adapted to film, it was surely this one. In 1986, that was indeed true: cinema as it existed then could not have found a way to address many of these aspects beyond the murder mystery and grand conspiracy at the core of the story. In many ways, the theatrical release of Zack Snyder’s film adaptation in 2009 itself engaged little beyond the core plot, dropping The Black Freighter comic narrative and the paratexts, translating the absurdly complex conspiracy (involving a weaponized giant psychic squid) into an infinitely more simple conspiracy. Aside from the special effects and some remarkable digital design work, the film we saw in the theaters could have been made in 1986. But, of course, the theatrical release of the film was not the final text: perhaps for the first time, the filmmakers from the start did not conceive of the theatrical release as their primary text. Alex McDowell, one of the pioneers of the new techniques in digital previsualization that have transformed filmmaking in recent years, describes the pleasures of designing layers in depth for film viewers who, he knows, will be watching the film repeatedly, remote in hand, able to pick out the kinds of details from packed frames that Gibbons and Moore brought to the original comic, details that would be largely missed in a traditional theatrical viewing environment.12 As he put it in an interview while still in production: “We’ve probably spent more time with the news Easter eggs,

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all of the headlines that are just going by, blowing by in the gutter or on posters in the background. . . . I think if this film works it will be because you have to see it ten times to really get all of that layering.”13 Like Katchor’s Julius Knipl, the audience of The Watchmen is invited to excavate the layers through multiple viewings using its new powers (like Dr. Manhattan) to stop time, to study a film frame by frame, byte by byte—­powers consequent to the DVD. Along with the original theatrical release, Snyder released a DVD containing The Black Freighter story as a stand-alone thirtyminute animated film, and a TV “documentary,” Under the Hood, based on the

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Figure 62.  Detail from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (Vertigo/DC, 1986).

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Figure 63.  Screen capture of DVD menu for Sin City: Recut, Extended, Unrated (Miramax/ Lionsgate, 2005).

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tell-all narrative by Hollis Mason, reproduced in part in the paratexts of the original Watchmen. From the start, Snyder and his team planned to assemble these paratexts into a longer DVD, ultimately realized in a five-disc “Ultimate Cut,” with the “Black Freighter” narrative woven into the storyline along the lines suggested by Moore’s script. But at over three and a half hours just for the film, this is no longer a movie that could be screened in a commercial theater. Instead it is one designed to be watched at home, serialized by the viewer, read in many ways with techniques and disciplines (and powers) once unique to the comic form. In addition, the “Ultimate Cut” provides the other kinds of paratexts that have become increasingly central to the DVD: documentaries about the filmmaking, explanations of the techniques used to create specific effects, commentaries from the filmmakers—in short, myriad texts that remind the viewer of the made-ness of the cinematic text, precisely what Hollywood had worked for so many years to obscure. In 2005, Sin City was also released in a “Recut, Extended, Unrated” DVD edition, which, in addition to offering a longer version of the film than could be shown in the theaters, offers a detailed study of how the film was created almost entirely using green screen filming and digital scene painting. Finally, and perhaps most surprisingly for any film student over the age of thirty, the DVD offers the option of essentially remixing the film as the viewer sees fit, providing a menu that allows you to watch the individual stories—which are, as mentioned earlier, all versions of the same story—in any order (Figure 63).

Coda

No longer depending on the notion of the “director’s cut” or the privileged text of the theatrical release, increasingly we see film in the DVD age merging with practices and interactions that have long been central to comics culture. Of course, there are strong reasons to question how much “power” is truly granted to the audiences of these films—when access often requires the purchase of multiple versions of the DVD, when the viewing experience is increasingly private and isolated, and when the narratives in question remain largely formulaic and generic despite the gestures at interactivity and audience agency. In truth, the increasingly intimate reunion between comics and film has everything to do with Hollywood seeking out ways of engaging an increasingly unruly spectator without ultimately surrendering much, if anything, in the way of meaningful power. Comics are sought out in the twenty-first century by global media corporations, not because comics are understood as transgressive, but precisely because they are largely perceived as unthreatening, safe access to a different kind of storytelling that is increasingly in demand. Fansites, blogs, fan edits, and fan fiction provide perhaps the most visible evidence of a newly empowered and cacophonous film audience, whose reception of cinema texts is neither passive nor uniform. Hollywood wrongly imagines that digital media has created the unruly spectator, but in truth, as Gunning reminds us, the “cinema of attractions” and its audiences never went away, they just went underground—or, as we have seen, they went to other narrative media, particularly comics. And even in a cinema that has presumed viewer passivity in the womblike conditions and enforced silences of the traditional film theater, the film spectator has never been, as Judith Mayne has effectively demonstrated, “the passive, manipulated (and inevitably white and heterosexual) spectator, but rather the contradictory, divided and fragmentary subject.”14 In turning to what it imagines to be a “safe” “old media” form for a way of co-opting a perceived new audience with new media demands, Hollywood may well be biting off more than it can chew without ultimately becoming something else entirely. Much depends on what comics do next—and here there is cause for concern. Even as the two largest comic book companies have been fully absorbed by two of the largest multinational entertainment conglomerates, we also see newspaper comics reaching what appears to be a final chapter, with the rapid decline of print newspapers and an unclear place for the conventional comic strip on the Internet, where very few have succeeded in making comics profitable. Declining sales in serial comic books suggest that here too a chapter in the history of the form might be coming to an end, and the turn to book form—the trade comic or the graphic novel—must contend with the decline of print sales

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because of electronic books and digital distribution. In the end, it is clear that the future of comics will not be with the newspaper comics supplement, the comic book, the underground comic or the graphic novel. The next chapter will take place on screens. And it is here that comics has reason to be wary of the renewed attentions of Hollywood. It is impossible not to find attractive Henry Jenkins vision of “convergence culture” as “a move from medium-specific content toward content that flows across multiple media channels, toward the increased interdependence of communications systems, toward multiple ways of accessing content, and toward ever more complex relationships between top-down corporate media and bottom-up participatory culture.”15 But as media converge, there is Figure 64.  Operating instructions for the original webcomic of Jason Shiga’s Meanwhile (2000), www.shigabooks. com/interactive/ meanwhile/01.html (accessed May 11, 2011). Used with permission.

also the very real possibility that old corporate structures and exhausted narrative media will dictate terms to those with the best possibility of exploiting the affordances of digital media along the lines Jenkins imagines. Indeed, this is why, I strongly suspect, of all the popular-culture media of the twentieth century the one that has resisted complete digital translation most studiously remains comics. But it is a translation that cannot be long deferred if the form is to help script the narrative possibilities for the new century. Increasingly we are seeing some examples of webcomics that point

Coda

comics in new directions, building on the history of the form and the new possibilities presented by the digital interface. Jason Shiga, for example, has been making interactive webcomics since the late 1990s (Figure 64), while also teaching others via YouTube how to make their own interactive comics using paper and pen.16 Within a generation (or perhaps two), many of the comics media forms that I describe in this book will seem quaint, even obsolete. But the reading experience of comics whose history I have attempted to trace in this book will remain, whatever its next media form might be. If not—if, that is, the reader is no longer given space within the comics page to make choices, to make connections, and to make her own comics—it will no longer be comics, no matter what it might look like.17 Comics, in the end, is defined less by its formal properties—speech balloons, gutters, even sequential images—than by its invitation to the reader to project herself into the narrative and to project the narrative beyond the page. The kinds of projections invited and allowed may change depending on the unique affordances of the particular media, the choices of the creators, and the cultural and historical contexts in which these are presented to the reader. But from the beginning of the form, comics in the United States has found a way to open up new possibilities for creative interaction with its readers across numerous media and changing industrial and social conditions. The future of storytelling in the twenty-first century lies in the history of comics and its audiences. It is in everyone’s interest that we nurture this unique narrative medium—and attend to its history—as it helps us imagine what comes next.

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Notes

Preface 1.  The first quote belongs to Adolph Zukor, founder of Paramount and himself a son of the Jewish ghetto; the second belongs to D. W. Griffith, director of Birth of a Nation, and most definitely not comfortable associating with any ghetto cultures whatsoever. Both are quoted in Miram Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 64. 2.  Quoted in Amy Benfer, “Los Bros Hernandez Duet, with Kissing,” Salon, February 20, 2001, http://archive.salon.com/mwt/feature/2001/02/20/kiss_and_tell (accessed May 11, 2011). 3.  Nick Hornby, “Draw What You Know,” New York Times Book Review, December 22, 2002. 4.  In fact, few books have attempted to tell a comprehensive history of comics from the nineteenth century through today, but along the way I will reference the many comics historians who together have written something like a collective history of the different eras and media forms. Two historians deserve especial attention up front, however, for their ambition in attempting to connect the pieces so often treated as discrete institutions. Jean-Paul Gabilliet’s Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books (2005; rpt., Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2010) covers the 1930s up through the end of the twentieth century; and together Robert C. Harvey’s The Art of the Funnies: An Aesthetic History (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994) and The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1996) remain among the most useful overviews of the development of the form from newspaper comic strip through the rise and reinvention of the comic book. 5.  Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: Harper­ Perennial, 1994), chap. 3. 6.  My use of the term suture here follows Linda Williams—“the normal sense of surgically joining the opening of a wound” (Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992], 203)—as opposed to Kaja Silverman’s Lacanian concept of suture outlined in The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 194–246. 7.  Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (New York: Pantheon, 2000), inside front cover. Because the book does employ use page numbers, all further references will be to this volume without pages cited.

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Chapter 1: Fragments of Modernity 1.  Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, edited by Marcus Paul Bullock and Michael William Jennings, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 1: 444. 2.  Ibid., 1: 446. 3.  Ibid., 1: 456–57. 4.  Peter Mark Roget, “Explanation of an Optical Deception in the Appearance of the Spokes of a Wheel Seen Through Vertical Apertures,” Annals of Philosophy, n.s., 10 (July–December 1824): 107–12; 107. 5.  “The Thaumatrope,” Albion: A Journal of News, Politics, and Literature, May 14, 1825, 383. 6.  A. Stroh, “A New Form of Stereoscope,” Scientific American, May 29, 1886, 340; “First Public Exhibition of Edison’s Kinetograph,” Scientific American, May 20, 1893, 310. 7.  Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916; rpt., New York: Dover, 1970), 29–30. 8.  Bill Nichols and Susan J. Lederman, “Flicker and Motion in Film,” in The Cinematic Apparatus, edited by Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (New York: St. Martin’s, 1980), 96; see also, Joseph Anderson and Barbara Anderson, “Motion Perception in Motion Pictures,” in The Cinematic Apparatus, 76–95. 9.  Joseph Anderson and Barbara Anderson, “The Myth of Persistence of Vision Revisited,” Journal of Film and Video 45 (Spring 1993): 3–12. 10.  For a useful and detailed contemporary account of the processes involved in the perception of motion, see Jacques Aumont, The Image (London: BFI, 1994), 28–32. As Aumont writes of the theory of “persistence of vision,” “The perpetuation of this, inherently absurd, explanation is due to intellectual inertia. It cannot be stressed too much that, although retinal persistence does exist, it does not exist in the cinema’s production of the impression of continuity” (32). 11.  Only in recent years has the active work of the film audience in making meaning and bringing their own vision, fantasies, and acts of closure to the necessarily incomplete text begun to be addressed in earnest; see Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (New York: Routledge, 1993); and Janet Staiger, Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception (New York: New York University Press, 2000). 12.  Jonathan Crary, “Modernizing Vision,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, edited by Linda Williams (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 31. See also, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999). 13.  Celia Lury, Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory, and Identity (London: Routledge: 1998), 138. 14.  Mary Ann Doane, “Technology’s Body: Cinematic Vision in Modernity,” in A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, edited by Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 534. 15.  In fact, several early films describe the country “rube” having precisely the kind of cinematic experience the conventional history of early film projects back on this period. Edwin S. Porter’s Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1902) is a classic example. But the existence of such early comic films belies the myth: the “joke” of the film lies in

Notes to Chapter 1

the naïveté of the spectator-within-the-film, one from whom the film’s viewer is necessarily at a great distance. 16.  Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous Spectator,” in Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 6th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 863. 17.  Ibid., 866 (my emphasis). 18.  Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archeology of the Cinema, translated by Richard Crangle (Exeter, Eng.: University of Exeter Press, 2000). 19.  Siegfried Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces” (1926), New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987): 95. 20.  Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills,” in Image-Music-Text, translated by Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 54. Raymond Bellour offers a useful analysis of the conditional fantasy work of Barthes’s “Third Meaning,” which distinguishes the utopian “filmic” from the historical film object: “Barthes seems to aim for a utopian state of cinema of which Eisenstein offers for him . . . the exemplary image: an art of the discontinuous and an art of “reading,” by its very nature mediate between the animated image and the immobile image” (“‘. . . rait’: Sign of Utopia,” Yale Journal of Criticism 14 [2001]: 480–81). As Robert Ray writes, “With its insistence on perverse readings that ignore, and indeed refuse, intended or contextually obvious significances, the third-meaning disposition clearly descends from surrealist tactics designed to reassert the autonomy and ambiguity of images.” Robert B. Ray, “Snapshots: The Beginnings of Photography,” in The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography, edited by Dudley Andrew (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), 302. 21.  Jean François Lyotard, “Acinema,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 349–59. 22.  Giles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone, 1989), 179. 23.  Barthes suggests in passing that the comic might “present a new signifier (related to the obtuse meaning)”: “There may thus be a future . . . truth in these derisory, vulgar, foolish, dialogical forms of consumer subculture” (Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” 66). But aside from such gestures, rigorous engagement with the comic form and its “truths” have remained few and far between. As Esther Leslie has demonstrated, animated cartoons were a source of fascination to Benjamin and other modernist thinkers and artists from fairly early in the century: “All sorts of anti-academic and experimenting artists found that cartoons touched on many things that they too wished to explore: abstraction, forceful outlines, geometric forms and flatness, questioning of space and time and logic—that is to say, a consciousness of space that is not geographical but graphic, and time as non-linear but convoluted” (Esther Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory, and the Avant-Garde [London: Verso, 2002], 18–19). This is especially true in the early years of the form, before Disney transformed his anarchic rat into a white-gloved schoolboy, and handed down to anarchic narrative spaces the animated code of natural law. Leslie charts in the various drafts and version of the Benjamin’s Artwork essay an increasing

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distance from “Mickey Mouse” and the utopian possibilities of animated film, as Disney and fascism moved into more intimate circles of influence (80–122). See also Miriam Hansen, “Of Mice and Ducks: Benjamin and Adorno on Disney,” South Atlantic Quarterly 92 (Winter 1993): 27–61. 24.  Donald Crafton, Emile Cohl, Caricature, and Film (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 92–93. Crafton writes, “It is strange that Cohl’s comic-strip art has not been discussed in any of his biographgical sketches because it was his most important artistic activity in the years just before he entered the cinema” (67). 25.  See David Kunzle, “The Voices of Silence: Willette, Steinlen, and the Introduction of the Silent Strip in Chat Noir, with a German Coda,” in The Language of Comics: Word and Image, edited by Robin Varnum and Christina T. Gibbons (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2001), 3–18. As Kunzle points out, along with the turn toward more complicated silent graphic narratives, in the 1880s we also see an increasing ironizing of the traditional moral of Busch and the German cartoonists, or a highlighting of moral ambiguity itself—good is not always (even usually) rewarded, and evil is rarely sufficiently punished (18). This, as much as the visual grammar of these strips, would be highly influential on the work of Howarth and others working in America at the turn of the century. I do not mean to suggest here that Howarth is singly responsible for the development of the comic grammar. Other important and influential cartoonists in the illustrated weeklies were working with sequential narrative comics, including Eugene “Zim” Zimmerman at Puck and Judge, and F. P. W. “Chip” Bellew in Life. But Howarth, more than Zim and Chip, brought the grammar of the modern comic together with the thematic concerns that would motivate the form into the new century. 26.  When they are not, they are instead becoming mixed up in someone else’s dirty laundry—as in A Terrible Mistake (1890), where the husband picks up a stranger’s suitcase on his return home resulting in a fatal misunderstanding with his wife and the collapse of his formerly respectable life. 27.  Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts, Film, and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 67. See also, “Modernity, Hyperstimulus, and the Rise of Popular Sensationalism,” in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, edited by Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 75. 28.  Hamilton Pope Galt, “Comic Supplement Mysteries,” Puck, February 9, 1910. 29.  Singer, Melodrama and Modernity, 67. 30.  For an account of Woolf ’s influence on Outcault, see Bill Blackbeard, “The Yellow Kid, the Yellow Decade,” in R. F. Outcault’s the Yellow Kid: A Centennial Celebration of the Kid Who Started Comics (Northampton, Mass.: Kitchen Sink, 1995), chap. 1; and Ian Gordon, Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890–1945 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), 24–26. 31.  Gordon, Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 41. 32.  Gilbert Seldes, The Seven Lively Arts (New York: Harper, 1924), 216. 33.  I address the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century racial science and its exploitation of such images, in Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787–1845 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).

Notes to Chapter 1

34.  “Same Difference: Graphic Alterity in the Work of Gene Luen Yang, Adrian Tomine, and Derek Kirk Kim,” in Approaches to Multicultural Comics: From Zap! to Blue Beetle, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama (University of Texas Press, 2010). 35.  This formula played out in comics featuring middle-class protagonists as well. For example, toward the end of his own moderately successful move to newspaper comics, Howarth created a series entitled, “E. Z. Mark” which featured a bumbling middleclass husband who is forever falling victim to the seemingly innumerable conmen and grifters that populate the city. Despite his vows to eternal vigilance and the watchful eye of his wife, each strip ends with Mark exclaiming in agony, “Buncoed again!” 36.  Quoted in David Carrier, The Aesthetics of Comics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 69. 37.  Chicago American, May 25, 1902. 38.  Ralph Bergengren, “The Humor of the Colored Supplement,” Atlantic, August 1906, 269. 39.  Ibid., 272. 40.  “Sounding the Doom of the ‘Comics,’” Current Literature 45 (December 1908): 630–33. 41.  Quoted in “Sounding the Doom of the ‘Comics,’” Literature and Art, December 1908, 630. 42.  Herman Scheffaeur, “The Comic Supplement,” Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, March 1909, 382. 43.  Edwin L. Sabin, “The Comic Supplement,” Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, November 1909, 639. 44.  Elizabeth Robins Pennell, “Our Tragic Comics,” North American Review, February 1920, 251. As James Lastra writes of the reception of the early cinema, “These fragmentary images, lacking the typical gestures of well-made pictures, could nevertheless be understood by spectators; they were simply taken to be a different kind of image— i.e., their fragmentary character could be thought of as signifying something” (“From the Captured Moment to the Cinematic Image: A Transformation in Pictorial Order,” in The Image in Dispute, 271). 45.  Lastra, “From the Captured Moment,” 273. 46.  This first Happy Hooligan film was only nominally based on the comic, with the title likely added after production to capitalize on the popularity of the new strip. 47.  Edison Films Catalog, no. 105, July 1901, 60. 48.  Kemp R. Niver, ed., Biograph Bulletins, 1896–1908 (Los Angeles: Locare Research Group, 1971), 192. 49.  This film is based on a Happy Hooligan strip from the previous year, subtitled, “Yes, it’s True! He Wins out this time, but his friend the cop catches it by the bucketful” (Chicago American, April 13, 1902). In the last panel, as the drenched cop charges into the house, Happy beams: “Dis must be a dream.” Throughout the series, Happy would occasionally “triumph” for a day, succeeding in securing the gratitude of his beneficiary instead of their blows, only to return to the familiar pattern the following week. 50.  Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction,” 94–95. 51.  Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 230–34. See also, André

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Gaudreault, “Temporality and Narrativity in Early Cinema (1895–1908),” in which he suggests that Porter’s Fireman was originally filmed to emphasize precisely what the later reediting worked to efface: repetition, multiple perspective, conscious embrace of discontinuities (temporal and spatial), and so on. In Cinema, 1900–1906, edited by Roger Holman, 2 vols. (Brussels: Fédération Internationale du Film, 1982), 1: 205–6. 52.  For a useful reassessment of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, see Noël Burch, “Porter, or Ambivalence,” in Cinema, 1900–1906, 1: 104–6. 53.  As Robert B. Ray puts it, “To the extent that the continuity rules circumscribed the movies’ images, regulated their meaning in terms of a single narrative, and vastly reduced their potential complexity, they became . . . a means of policing” the image (“Snapshots: The Beginnings of Photography,” in The Image in Dispute, 302; emphasis in original). Or Lastra: “Sacrificing the specificity of the individual fragment and the identity of the individual image, suppressing a material discontinuity, allowed for the production of continuity at the level of classical narrative” (“From the Captured Moment,” 287). 54.  Donald Crafton, Emile Cohl, Caricature, and Film (Princeton, N.J.: University of Princeton Press, 1990). 55.  Among those to constructively consider the relationship between early comics and film, see Tom Gunning, “The Non-Continuous Style of Early Film”: “Film’s borrowings from comic strips embrace both form and content. . . . It also seems likely that film borrowed certain basic narrative ideas from the comic strip. Although certain comicstrips during this period were evolving a great sophistication in portraying continuity of action, the idea of resolving narrative action into a series of status panels may have influenced the ‘non-continuous style’” (Cinema, 1900–1906, 1:220–21); and Noël Burch, Life to Those Shadows, translated by Ben Brewster (London: BFI, 1990), 163. 56.  Quoted in Patrick McDonnell, Kevin O’Connell, and Georgia Riley de Havenon, Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman (New York: Abradale, 1986), 25. 57.  Here Herriman is paying explicit homage to Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff, the first regular daily strip, which began in 1907 keeping rigorous tally of the state of Mutt’s purse as he pursued his compulsive career at the racetrack. 58.  As Robert C. Harvey writes, “Herriman’s race would be of no particular interest were it not for the peculiar manifestation he created for love in his strip: Krazy chooses to take an injury (a brick to the head) as symbolic of Ignatz’s love from him/her, and Krazy is a black cat” (The Art of the Funnies: An Aesthetic History [Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994], 179). 59.  Throughout his career, Herriman was identified as “the Greek,” a name bestowed on him by fellow Journal cartoonist Tad Dorgan, who claims to have given him the name because “we didn’t know what he was” (quoted in Krazy Kat, 40). 60.  Quoted in Harvey, Art of the Funnies, 71. 61.  Famously, at the time of his death in 1944, Herriman’s strip was running in only a few dozen papers, kept alive by the devotion of Hearst himself. 62.  Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” in Reinventing Film Studies, edited by Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (London: Arnold, 2000), 334.

Notes to Chapters 1 and 2

63.  Catherine Russell, “Parallax Historiography: The Flâneuse as Cyberfeminist,” in Feminist Reader, 556. Chapter 2: Serial Pleasures 1.  Gilbert Seldes, The Seven Lively Arts (New York: Harper, 1924), 327–28. 2.  “Improved Red Men,” San Francisco Call, May 22, 1904. 3.  “Thrilling Train Robberies Are Manufactured to Your Order,” Washington Times, May 29, 1904. 4.  This understanding of movies as a “series” of pictures was institutionalized by copyright law, which did not cover films as a unified whole until 1912. Instead, producers were required to file paper copies of the individual frames, each of which would be granted individual copyright. One important legacy of this legal understanding of motion pictures as a series of individual pictures and not a unified text is that we have over three thousand films from the first generation of cinema that would have otherwise been lost thanks to their meticulous reproduction in paper prints at the copyright office. 5.  Barton W. Currie, “The Nickel Madness,” Harper’s Weekly, August 24, 1907, 1247. 6.  Mary Heaton Vorse, “Some Picture Show Audiences,” Outlook, June 24, 1911, 442–43. 7.  Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 195. 8.  Ibid., 56. 9.  Quoted in David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Janet Staiger, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 133. 10.  Henry Albert Phillips, The Photodrama (Larchmont, N.Y.: Stanhope-Dodge, 1914), 190–91. 11.  Epes Winthrop Sargent, Technique of the Photoplay, 3rd ed. (New York: Moving Picture World, 1916), 289–90. 12.  Leslie T. Peacocke, Hints on Photoplay Writing (Chicago: Photoplay, 1916), 107. 13.  Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 221. 14.  Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture After the Nickelodeon (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 115. 15.  Bob Brown, What Happened to Mary: A Novelization from the Play and the Stories Appearing in the Ladies’ World (New York: Edward J. Clode, 1913), 146. 16.  Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls, 103. 17.  McClure’s, November 1913, 236. 18.  Morning Telegraph, January 10, 1915. 19.  Vicki Callahan, Zones of Anxiety: Movement, Musidora, and the Crime Serials of Louis Feuillade (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 4. 20.  Quoted in Kathryn H. Fuller, At the Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Press, 1996), 180. 21.  Quoted in Quoted in Katon C. Lahue, Bound and Gagged: The Story of the Silent Serials (New York: Barnes, 1968), 125.

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22.  Lahue, Bound and Gagged, 126. 23.  Chicago Tribune, January 10, 1914. 24.  Chicago Tribune, January 17, 1914. 25.  One interesting detail in this episode is a poster for D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation on the exterior wall outside of the Black Hand’s headquarters. Birth of a Nation was, of course, the film that most explicitly signaled the shift to the feature film. It is hard not to read the rising tide of bricks covering the poster as a statement on the part of the producers of Beatrice Fairfax—linking Griffith and the Black Hand together in opposition to the serial energies of Beatrice and the Evening Journal. In the end, if the filmmakers did intend a statement it likely had more to do with the antagonisms of small independent studios like the Wharton Brothers toward the highly capitalized Griffith. Nonetheless, it is tempting to see the fate of Birth of a Nation in this film as fantasy that their model of serial storytelling—brick by endless brick—might triumph over even the example of Griffith’s “masterpiece,” as surely as Beatrice and Jimmy triumph over the seemingly omnipotent Black Hand. 26.  “A. Mutt,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 15, 1907. 27.  Bill Blackbeard, introduction to “A. Mutt”: A Complete Compilation, 1907–1908 (Westport, Conn.: Hyperion, 1977), ix. 28.  Idaho Statesman, May 4, 1910. 29.  Macon Telegraph, March 10, 1911. 30.  Mutt and Jeff, February 13, 1911. 31.  Fort Worth Star-Telegram, March 9, 1911. 32.  John Mason Hart, Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 283. 33.  Los Angeles Herald, October 27, 1910. 34.  Macon Telegraph, March 24, 1911. 35.  Macon Telegraph, March 10, 1911. 36.  Idaho Statesman, March 22, 1911. 37.  Robert C. Harvey, The Art of the Funnies (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994), 62. For the authoritative discussion of Patterson’s role in the development of the serial comic strip at the Tribune syndicate, see Chapter 6. 38.  Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 82. 39.  “Crowds Besiege Kathlyn Shows,” Chicago Tribune, January 17, 1914. 40.  Chicago Tribune, June 26, 1914. 41.  Patterson likely inherited his understanding of the meaning of gumps from his grandfather, the paper’s founder. In 1880 in the Tribune a fairly explicit definition of the term is offered: “Gumps are persons slow of comprehension and narrow of mental scope, who are plodding through the world in a dull way unenlivened by any little spice of unique variety; who expect the rest of the world to plod along in the same manner, and if any one step out of the beaten, prescribed highways,—be it to seek a higher or a lower footpath,—are ready to raises voices in horrified remonstrance” (“Gumps: Some Facts Concerning Them,” Chicago Tribune, February 21, 1880). 42.  Ring Lardner, “In the Wake of the News,” Chicago Tribune, July 7, 1917.

Notes to Chapter 2

43.  Lardner, “In the Wake of the News,” Chicago Tribune, October 19, 1917. 44.  Lardner, “In the Wake of the News,” Chicago Tribune, February 2, 1918. 45.  Sidney Smith, “The Gumps,” Chicago Tribune, February 7, 1918. 46.  Smith, “The Gumps,” Chicago Tribune, February 11, 1918. 47.  Smith, “The Gumps,” Chicago Tribune, February 4, 1920. 48.  Robyn Warhol, “Queering the Marriage Plot: How Serial Form Works in Maupin’s Tale of the City,” in Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames, edited by Brian Richardson (Ohio State University Press, 2002), 232; emphases in original. 49.  “What Has Become of Uncle Bim? He Left Widow Zander ‘Waiting at the Church,’ but Where Is He?” Columbus Enquirer-Sun, April 13, 1922. 50.  Neil M. Clark, “Sidney Smith and His ‘Gumps,’” American Magazine (March 1923): 19. 51.  Arthur Crawford, April 1928, in Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum (Columbus, Ohio), biographical file for Sidney Smith (BIO.3441). Later that same year Andy Gump made what would be the first of many runs for public office on the part of newspaper cartoon characters. Throughout the election season, local newspapers participated in the joke, interviewing local candidates about the potential impact of Gump’s run. “Gump’s entry into congressional run gives rise to riot,” the Ohio State Journal reported on October 15. “A large wave, assuming almost the proportions of a tidal one, marred the previously calm surface of the Franklin County political sea last week, when Andy Gump entered the congressional race on an independent ticket.” 52.  “Tom Carr Set Free, So Look Out Ausstinn!” Chicago Tribune, March 1, 1929; “Gump Fans Grieve at the Death of Mary,” Chicago Tribune, May 1, 1929. 53.  Hagerstown Morning Herald, May 4, 1929. 54.  Kingsport Times, May 1, 1929. 55.  Brownsville Herald, May 8, 1929. 56.  Of course, several earlier, nonserial examples exist, such as Susanna Rowson’s novel, Charlotte Temple (1791), whose tragic heroine shares a graveyard at Trinity Church with Alexander Hamilton, or the transatlantic phenomenon of copy-cat suicides following the publication of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). In a similar vein, Dydia DeLyser describes the pilgrimages to sites associated with the life and death of Ramona, the heroine of Helen Hunt Jackson’s eponymous 1884 novel as providing a vital beginning to the California tourism industry (Ramona Memories: Tourism and the Shaping of Southern California [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2005]); and the fictional heroine of Longfellow’s Evangeline (1847) is memorialized by a grave in Louisiana. 57.  See Richard Lancelyn Green, Letters to Sherlock Holmes (Penguin, 1985). 58.  See Linda Naranjo-Huebl, “The Road to Perdition: E. D. E. N. Southworth and the Critics,” American Periodicals 16.2 (2006): 123–50. 59.  Christopher Looby, “Southworth and Seriality,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 59.2 (September 2004): 186. 60.  Richard Walsh, The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007), chap. 8. 61.  Wilde is reported to have said, “One must have a heart of stone to read the death

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of Little Nell without laughing” (quoted in Richard Ellman, Oscar Wilde [London: H. Hamilton, 1987], 441). 62.  Walsh, Rhetoric of Fictionality, 168. 63.  Baird Leonard, “Mrs. Pep’s Diary,” Life, April 19, 1929, 18. 64.  Seldes, Seven Lively Arts, 213. 65.  See Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), chap. 1. 66.  Paul DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America,” Media, Culture, and Society 4.1 (January 1982): 33. 67.  Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 195. 68.  William Fleming French, “Look Who’s Here: Sidney Smith,” Illustrated World, July 1922, 665. 69.  Jennifer Hayward, Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1997), 114. 70.  Edwin E Slosson, “Two Kinds of Walking,” Independent, September 18, 1920, 348. Chapter 3: Fan-Addicts and the Comic Book 1.  “Readers’ Corner,” Astounding Stories of Super Science, April 1930, 127. 2.  Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book (New York: Basic Books, 2005), chap. 2. 3.  Don Wollheim, in What Is Science Fiction Fandom? (Boston: National Fantasy Fan Federation, c. 1944), 4. 4.  Milton A. Rothman, in What Is Science Fiction Fandom? 38. 5.  Fredric Wertham, The World of Fanzines: A Special Form of Communication (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), 74. 6.  Bart Beaty, Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005). 7.  Theodor Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” in The Culture Industry: ­Selected Essays on Mass Culture (New York: Routledge, 2001), 98. 8.  Vance Packard, The Image Makers (New York: McKay, 1957), 7. 9.  Edward Hunter, Brainwashing in Red China: The Calculated Destruction of Men’s Minds (New York: Vanguard, 1951), 11. 10.  Eugene Kinkaid, In Every War But One (New York: Norton, 1959). 11.  “Pre-Washing Brains,” Newsweek, August 3, 1959, 68. 12.  Marshall McLuhan, “Sight, Sound, and the Fury,” Commonweal 60 (1954): 10. 13.  Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Harper’s, November 1964, 77–86. 14.  See Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), chap. 2, for a useful history of the popularity of comics among U.S. soldiers and the growth of the new industry during the war. 15.  Catherine Mackenzie, “Children and the Comics,” New York Times, July 11, 1943.

Notes to Chapter 3

16.  Paul Witty, “Children’s Interest in Reading the Comics,” Journal of Experimental Education 10.2 (1941): 100–104. 17.  Ibid., 100. 18.  John Mason Brown, As They Appear (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1952), 143. 19.  Tucson Daily Citizen, September 15, 1947. 20.  “Boys Admit They Plan Regular Torture Meets,” San Antonio Express, August 19, 1948. 21.  “Lang on Stand Can’t Recall Slaying Story,” Chicago Tribune, March 30, 1949. 22.  “Another Child Killing,” Chicago Tribune, May 10, 1949. 23.  “The Dirt and Trash That Kids Are Reading: And What Can Be Done About It?” Kiplinger Magazine, November 1954, 26. 24.  “Let Children Read Comics: Science Gives Its Approval,” Science News-Letter, August 23, 1941, 124–25. 25.  Irving R. Friedman, “Toward Bigger and Better ‘Comic Mags’: I Let My Pupils Bring Funny Books to Class,” Clearing House 16 (November 1941): 166–68. 26.  Ruth Strang, “Why Children Read the Comics,” Elementary School Journal 43 (February 1943): 336. 27.  John R. Cavanagh, “The Comics War,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 40 (May–June 1949): 33. 28.  Josette Frank, Comics, Radio, Movies—and Children (New York: Public Affairs Committee, 1949), 5. 29.  Lauretta Bender, “The Psychology of Children’s Reading and the Comics,” Journal of Educational Sociology 18 (December 1944): 229. 30.  Cavanagh, “The Comics War,” 29. 31.  Wendy Steiner, Venus in Exile: the Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 112. 32.  From chapter 5 of his “Camp Stories: School Culture, Mass Culture, and the New Social Movements” (book manuscript in progress). 33.  Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood (1967; rpt., Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1998), 163. 34.  W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and M. C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” Sewanee Review 54.3 (1946): 476. 35.  René Wellek, “The Parallelism Between Literature and the Arts,” in Literary Criticism: Idea and Act; The English Institute, 1939–1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 57. 36.  Quoted in Arts in Society 1–2 (1957): 64. 37.  William Moulton Marston, “Why 100,000,000 Americans Read Comics,” American Scholar 13.1 (Winter 1943–44): 42, 43. 38.  Ibid., 44. 39.  Ibid., 35. 40.  Letters, American Scholar 13.2 (1943–44): 252. 41.  Ibid. 42.  Darrel Abel, “Intellectual Criticism,” American Scholar 12.4 (1942–43): 414. 43.  Cleanth Brooks, “The New Criticism: A Brief for the Defense,” American Scholar 13.3 (1943–44): 294.

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44.  Ibid., 295. 45.  Michael Trask, “In the Bathroom with Mary McCarthy: Theatricality, Deviance, and the Postwar Commitment to Realism,” Criticism 49 (Winter 2007): 10. 46.  Sterling North, “A National Disgrace (and a Challenge to American Parents),” Chicago Daily News, May 8, 1940. 47.  “What’s Wrong with the ‘Comics’” (1943), quoted in Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America (New York: MacMillan, 2009), 81. 48.  Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent (New York: Rinehart, 1954), 43. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically in the body of the text. 49.  Fred Y. Billingslea, “The Bender-Gestalt: An Objective Scoring Method and Validating Data,” Journal of Clinical Psychology 4 (January 1948): 3. 50.  Bender, “Psychology of Children’s Reading,” 226. 51.  Indeed, this “exact parallel” weighed heavily on both critics of comics such as Wertham, who saw the comic book as essentially producing an American-born version of the Nazi youth of the previous decade, and defenders, who saw those who would demonize and destroy comic books as continuous with the forces that led to mass book burnings in Nazi Germany. 52.  Fredric Wertham, “The Dreams That Heal,” introduction to The World Within: Fiction Illuminating Neuroses of Our Time, edited by Mary Louise Aswell (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1947), xxiv. 53.  Andy Medhurst, “Batman, Deviance, and Camp,” in The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and his Media, edited by Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 152–53. 54.  Bender, “Psychology of Children’s Reading,” 229. 55.  Theodor Adorno, “How to Look at Television” Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television 8.3 (Spring 1954): 170. 56.  Gershon Legman, “The Comics Books and the Public,” American Journal of Psychotherapy 2.3 (July 1948): 475. 57.  See Jed Rasula, “Nietzsche in the Nursery: Naïve Classics and Surrogate Parents in Postwar American Cultural Debates,” Representations 29 (Winter 1990): 50–77. 58.  We have a smattering of this vast correspondence available in the Gardner Fox archives at the University of Oregon, dating back to the early 1940s. 59.  Fredrick Wertham, “What Parents Don’t Know About Comic Books,” Ladies’ Home Journal, November 1953, 50–53, 214–20. 60.  “Ye Editors’ Page,” Target Comics 2.2 (1941): inside front cover. 61.  “Target Hits and Misses,” Target Comics 9.11 (1949): inside front cover. 62.  “The Vault-Keeper’s Corner,” Vault of Horror 30 (1953). 63.  The National EC Fan-Addict Club Bulletin 3 (June 1954): 1. 64.  Hearings Before the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee of the Judiciary, United State Senate . . . April 21, 22, and June 4, 1954 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1954), 98. 65.  Ibid., 103. 66.  Ibid., 152. 67.  Ibid., 153. 68.  “Cosmic Correspondence,” Weird Fantasy 20 (1953).

Notes to Chapters 3 and 4

69.  Hank Stuever, “A Dead-Letters Day: Comic Books End Printed Mail Columns As Fans Turn to Web,” Washington Post, December 10, 2002. 70.  Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre, and Other Aspects of Popular Culture (1962; rpt., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 56. 71.  Ibid., 57. Chapter 4: First-Person Graphic 1.  Thomas Doherty, Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 9. 2.  Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation, 185. 3.  “The Spider’s Web,” Amazing Spider-Man 27 (August 1965). 4.  Mad Magazine 4 (1953): 8. 5.  “Coming Attractions,” Amazing Adult Fantasy 11 (December 1961). 6.  “Fan Page,” Amazing Adult Fantasy 12 (May 1962). 7.  From a promotion record issued by Marvel in 1965 entitled “The Voices of Marvel,” distributed to members of their official fan club. 8.  See Matthew Pustz, Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1999), 48–50. 9.  Ibid., 181–82. 10.  Weirdom 12 (March 1968). 11.  Humbug 11 (1958): 1. 12.  Quoted in Dez Skinn, Comix: The Underground Revolution (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2004), 17. 13.  Quoted in Patrick Rosenkranz, Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution, 1963–1975 (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2002), 24. 14.  Richard A. Holland, ed., The Texas Book: Profiles, History, and Reminiscences of the University (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 228. 15.  Kim Deitch, “Sunshine Girl,” East Village Other, October 1, 1967, 19. 16.  R. Crumb, “Big Freakout on Detroit Ave.,” Yarrowstalks 3 (1967). 17.  R. Crumb, “Life Among the Constipated,” Yarrowstalks 3 (1967). 18.  D. K. Holm, ed., R. Crumb: Conversations (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2004), 4–5. 19.  Ibid., 31. 20.  Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the Sixties Rebellion (New York: Grove, 1985), 10. 21.  Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968; rpt., New York: Bantam, 1999), 39. 22.  Quoted in Lee and Schlain, Acid Dreams, 55. 23.  Robert Anton Wilson, “Timothy Leary and His Psychological H-Bomb,” Realist 52 (August 1964): 17. 24.  Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 8. 25.  Wilson, “Timothy Leary,” 17. 26.  Paul Krassner, “Paul Krassner on LSD,” Realist 60 (June 1965): 2. 27.  R. Crumb, “The Confessions of R. Crumb,” People’s Comics (1972): 3–6.

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28.  Art Spiegelman, “Symptoms of Disorder/Signs of Genius,” introduction to Justin Green’s Binky Brown Sampler (San Francisco: Last Gasp, 1995), 4. 29.  Ibid. 30.  Justin Green, Justin Green’s Binky Brown Sampler (San Francisco: Last Gasp, 1995), 10. 31.  Ibid. 32.  Leigh Gilmore, “Limit-Cases: Trauma, Self-Representation, and the Jurisdictions of Identity,” Biography 24.1 (2001): 129. 33.  Autographers often meditate on the nature of photographic evidence, as we saw earlier with Bechdel’s Fun Home. Toward the very end of the second volume of Maus, Spiegelman inserts a photograph of the father he had been drawing for hundreds of pages as a mouse. The effect is jarring, calling into question, as photographic evidence inevitably does, the authenticity of Spiegelman’s entire project. But even as the photograph of the “real” Vladek threatens the governing logic of the story Spiegelman has been telling, we are reminded of the dangers of such testimony: the image, after all, is of Vladek dressed in the uniform of the deathcamp he has only recently escaped, but it is a souvenir uniform—clean and crisp and in every way inauthentic. 34.  Jon Randall, “The Goblin Meets Binky Brown Who Met the Holy Virgin Mary,” Goblin Magazine Archives, www.sonic.net/%7Egoblin/Just.html (accessed May 8, 2011). 35.  Quoted in Rosenkranz, Rebel Visions, 188. 36.  Quoted in ibid., 189. 37.  Alison Bechdel, “Coming Out Story,” Gay Comics #19 (1993). 38.  Green, Binky Brown, 60. 39.  Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Need More Love: A Graphic Memoir (London: MQ, 2007), 126. 40.  Robert S. Leventhal, “Art Spiegelman’s maus: Working-Through the Trauma of the Holocaust” (1995), Responses to the Holocaust: A Hypermedia Sourcebook for the Humanities, Department of German, University of Virginia, www3.iath.virginia.edu/ holocaust/spiegelman.html (accessed May 11, 2011). 41.  Art Spiegelman, “Mein Kampf - My Struggle,” New York Times Magazine, May 12, 1996, 36. 42.  David D’Arcy, interviewer, NPR Weekend Edition, June 7, 2003, www.npr.org/ templates/story/story.php?storyId=1290481 (accessed June 20, 2011). 43.  Hillary Chute, “The Shadow of a Past Time: History and Graphic Representation in Maus,” Twentieth Century 52.2 (Summer 2006): 220. 44.  Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (New York: Penguin, 1982), 72. 45.  “The Alison Bechdel Interview,” Comics Journal 282 (April 2007): 37. 46.  Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 139. All further references will be cited parenthetically in the text. 47.  Lynda Barry, introduction to One Hundred Demons (Seattle: Sasquatch, 2002), 7. 48.  Ibid., 62. 49.  Ibid., 70. 50.  Marianne Hirsch, “Collateral Damage,” PMLA 119.5 (October 2004): 1212. 51.  Charles Hatfield, “‘I Made the Whole Thing Up!’: The Problem of Authenticity

Notes to Chapters 4 and 5

in Autobiographical Comics,” in Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005), 108–27. Along with Hatfield’s extremely important work on this topic, I am also indebted to the pioneering work of Joseph Witek on the first generation of autobiographical cartoonists (see Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar [Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1989]). More recently, and filling in a largely neglected history of women autographers, I have benefited immensely from Hillary Chute’s work, especially Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 52.  Gilmore, “Limit-Cases”; Amy Hungerford, “Memorizing Memory,” Yale Journal of Criticism 14.1 (2001): 67–92. 53.  Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, “The Rumpled Bed of Autobiography: Extravagant Lives, Extravagant Questions,” Biography (Winter 2001): 2, 5. 54.  Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), xxii. 55.  Smith and Watson, “The Rumpled Bed of Autobiography,” 8. 56.  Thinking about Eggers reminds us of the always imbricated pulls and demands of fiction and autobiography at the heart of his major work, concerns that are highlighted, as we have seen, by the unique formal mixings of comics. Eggers himself has long been fascinated by comics, including as a practitioner (one of his earliest works was a comic strip in the San Francisco Weekly) but more importantly as a champion of the form, as critic, editor and publisher. As Eggers wrote in 2000 in an omnibus review for the New York Times, the best work in graphic narrative needs to be reconceived “not as literary fiction’s half-wit cousin but as, more accurately, the mutant sister who can often do everything fiction can, and, just as often, more” (“After Wham! Pow! Shazam!” New York Times, November 26, 2000). Complaints about the narcissism of autobiographical comics has been a running refrain in comics criticism for some time. See, for example, A. David Lewis, “I’m Sick of You,” Publisher’s Weekly, August 14, 2007. 57.  Gillian Whitlock, “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of the Comics,” Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (Winter 2006): 978. 58.  Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 13. Chapter 5: Archives and Collectors 1.  I discuss this aspect of comics at length in “Storylines,” SubStance 40.1 (2011): 53–69. 2.  Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers (New York: Pantheon, 2004), broadsheet 10. 3.  Archives and their navigation are important to non-U.S. comics creators as well. For instance, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell (1998) is an extended and profoundly complicated archival search for the “truth” about Jack the Ripper and his victims, and Moore frames the work with an extended appendix in which he describes at length the pleasures and perils of this gruesome archive. And another contemporary U.K. creator, Posy Simmonds, organizes her Gemma Bovary (1999) around a complicated presentation of archival evidence (diaries, letters, photographs, maps, etc.), in an

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attempt to make sense of the untimely death of its protagonist. In fact, the archive has been a subject of great interest for contemporary fiction more generally (see Suzanne Keen, Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001]). But there is, as I will argue in what follows, an intrinsic connection between the comics form and the engagement with archival research, and equally is there something unique to contemporary U.S.-based graphic novelists in their obsession with the irrecoverable archive of early popular culture. It is this archive and its navigation by a form that is, formally, archival, that I wish to explore in this chapter. 4.  Alexander Theroux, “Ben Katchor,” Bomb 88 (Summer 2004): 30–35. 5.  Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken, 1969), 254. 6.  Ibid., 257. 7.  Ben Katchor, Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District (New York: Pantheon, 2000), 48. 8.  Benjamin, “Theses,” 255. 9.  Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, pt. 2, 1931–34, edited by Michael W. Jennings et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 775. 10.  Ben Katchor, e-mail correspondence with author, March 3, 2006. 11.  Catherine McWeeney, “Conversation with Ben Katchor,” boldtype 4.4 (August 2000), www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0800/katchor/interview.html (accessed June 20, 2011). 12.  Robbe-Grillet wrote in 1962 that “the essential characteristic of the image is its presentness.” There are of course many reasons to complicate this familiar alignment of the image with the “eternal present”: see, for example, Sarah Cardwell, “About Time: Theorizing Adaptation, Temporality and Tense,” Literature/Film Quarterly 31 (2003): 82– 92. It remains, however, a meaningful starting point for those working with the formal tensions inherent in image/text media. 13.  Ben Katchor, “Diary,” Slate, July 9, 1997, www.slate.com/id/3733 (accessed May 11, 2011). 14.  Ben Katchor, “Urban Delight,” Harper’s, May 1997, 28. Harvey Pekar, himself an inveterate collector of 78 records and early jazz history, similarly meditates on the impossible connections forged by phonebooks in one of his earliest collaborations with Robert Crumb, “The Harvey Pekar Name Story” (American Splendor 2 [1977]). 15.  Ben Katchor, Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay, with Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer (New York: Penguin, 1991), no. 91. 16.  Ben Katchor, Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories (New York: Little, Brown, 1996), 90. 17.  Ibid., 98. 18.  Hillel Halkin, “Nothing Is Lost,” New Republic, February 1, 1999, 36. 19.  On the Jew as “rootless cosmopolitan,” see also Spiegelman, “Looney Tunes, Zion­ism, and the Jewish Question,” in Comix, Essays, Graphics, and Scraps (Rome: ­Sellerio Editore-La Centrale dell’Arte, 1999), 14. 20.  Ben Katchor, The Jew of New York (New York: Pantheon, 1998), 33. 21.  On the grammar of visual sound effects in comics, see Catherine Khordoc, “The

Notes to Chapter 5

Comic Book’s Soundtrack: Visual Sound Effects in Asterix,” The Language of Comics: Word and Image, edited by Robin Varnum and Christina T. Gibbons (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2001), 173. 22.  Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers, n.p. 23.  Kim Deitch, “Presentation,” ImageText 1.1 (Spring 2004) http://web.english.ufl. edu/imagetext/archives/volume1/issue1/deitch (accessed May 10, 2011). 24.  Deitch accounts for his archival drives as motivated in part by “the gnawing feeling I’ve always had that I was born too late and missed out on all the really good stuff, the fact that I have always been inexplicably drawn to cultural entities that came in eras before I was born” (e-mail correspondence with author, March 19, 2006). 25.  Kim Deitch, The Search for Smilin’ Ed! (1997–98; rpt., Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2010), 119–21. 26.  The series grew out of a three-page assignment from Time Out New York to describe the old flea markets of the city, and quickly grew into three comics for Fantagraphics, published in 2002, 2004, and 2005. References will be cited by issue. 27.  Deitch, The Stuff of Dreams! 3 (2005): 22. 28.  The Stuff of Dreams! 3 (2005): 47, inside back cover. 29.  The quotations in this paragraph are from reviews blurbed on the book itself. 30.  Chris Ware, “Building Stories, Part 3,” New York Times Magazine, October 2, 2005. 31.  “Building Stories, Part 29,” New York Times Magazine, April 9, 2006. 32.  Chris Ware, “Richard McGuire and ‘Here’: A Grateful Appreciation,” Comic Art 8 (Summer 2006): 5–6. 33.  “Rusty Brown,” Acme Novelty Library 15 (2001): n.p.; reprinted in Acme Novelty Library (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2005), 87. 34.  Rex Doane, “A Conversation with Terry Zwigoff and Daniel Clowes,” Salon, July 27, 2001, http://archive.salon.com/people/conv/2001/07/27/zwigoff_clowes/print.html (accessed May 11, 2011). 35.  Clowes quote from ibid.; see Theroux, “Ben Katchor.” 36.  David M. Ball, “Chris Ware’s Failures,” in The Comics of Chris Ware, edited by David M. Ball and Martha B. Kuhlman (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2010), 50. 37.  Todd Hignite, In the Studio: Visits with Contemporary Cartoonists (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), 292. 38.  Ibid., 291. 39.  Ibid., 202. 40.  Roland Barthes, “The Discourse of History,” Comparative Criticism: A Yearbook 3 (1981): 16. 41.  Seth, It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken (Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 1997), 45. 42.  Bryan Miller, “An Interview with Seth,” Bookslut, June 2004, www.bookslut. com/features/2004_06_002650.php (accessed May 11, 2011). 43.  Erin McGlothlin, “No Time Like the Present: Narrative and Time in Art Spiegelman’s Maus,” Narrative 11.2 (May 2003): 178. 44.  Gene Kannenberg, Jr., “The Comics of Chris Ware: Text, Image, and Visual Narrative Strategies,” in Language of Comics, 177, 180. 45.  See Marianne Hirsch, “Collateral Damage,” PMLA 119.5 (October 2004), for a

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powerful call for the development of new strategies of “visual-verbal literacy” to “respond to the needs of the present moment” (1212). 46.  For an extensive discussion of the relationship between modern comics and the Internet, see McCloud, Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form (New York: Harper Perennial, 2000). 47.  Daniel Clowes, Ghost World (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 1997), 53. Chapter 6: Coda 1.  There is talk that the convention will move in the near future to Los Angeles, bringing it closer still to Hollywood. 2.  Further, there is little evidence in the last decade that even successful comicsbased movies increase retail sales for comic books themselves. 3.  Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” Wide Angle 8.3–4 (1986): 70. 4.  For helpful overviews of the impact of new technologies of consumption on film practices and theory, see Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); and Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009). 5.  For a useful account of the impact of the VCR, see Anne Friedberg’s influential essay “The End of Cinema: Multi-media and Technological Change,” in Re-inventing Film Studies, edited by Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (London: Arnold, 2000), 438–52. 6.  Edward Jay Epstein, The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood (New York: Random House, 2005), offers a valuable insight into the “black-box accounting” methods utilized by contemporary Hollywood. 7.  See Graeme Harper, “DVD and the Cinema of Complexity,” in New Punk Cinema, edited by Nicholas Rombes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 89–101. 8.  Andrew Darley, Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres (Routledge, 2000), 102. See also Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska, Screenplay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces (London: Wallflower, 2002). 9.  Wheeler Winston Dixon, “Twenty-five Reasons Why It’s All Over,” in The End of Cinema As We Know It: American Film in the Nineties, edited by Jon Lewis (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 356–66. 10.  I can’t resist mentioning here that one of the inventors of the protocinematic magic lantern, the seventeenth-century German scholar Athanasius Kircher, was also one of the earliest scholars of Egyptian hieroglyphs. 11.  Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture, 2nd ed. (New York: McMillan, 1922), xxxvi. 12.  Conversation with author, Columbus, Ohio, April 7, 2009. 13.  “Alex McDowell Talks Watchmen,” WatchmenComicMovie.com, www.watchmencomicmovie.com/021909-watchmen-alex-mcdowell-interview.php (accessed May 11, 2011). The interview was originally conducted in January 2008. 14.  Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1993), 100.

Notes to Chapter 6

15.  Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 243. 16.  See for example the 2000 webcomic version of Shiga’s Meanwhile (expanded in book form in 2010), at www.shigabooks.com/interactive/meanwhile/01.html (accessed May 11, 2011). Other examples of Shiga’s interactive comics can be found at his Web site: shigabooks.com. Shiga’s “how-to” video, “How to Make Your Own Interactive Comic,” can be found at www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9Er7kmcPcI (accessed May 11, 2011). 17.  It is for this reason, I would argue, that the experiments with so-called “motion comics”—that is, setting in motion the action within the panel of the comics—are pushing away from the comics form itself.

213

Index

Abel, Darrel, 83–84 Action Comics, 73–74 Adorno, Theodor, 71, 88, 95–96, 151, 154 Adventures of Kathlyn, The, 35, 38–39, 46–47 Allen, Diana, 77 Amazing Stories, 68–69, 96 American Scholar, The, 82–84 American Splendor, 135–37 Anderson, Benedict, 12, 177 Anderson, Joseph & Barbara, 3 Animation, 6, 22, 23, 158 Archives, 145, 150, 155–58, 161–64, 172–74, 177 Art criticism, 80 Astounding Stories, 68 Atlas Comics. See Marvel Comics Aumont, Jacques, 196 Autobiographical comics, 126–48 Avengers, The, 183 Ayers, Dick, 112

Bell, Gabrielle, 137 Bellew, F. P. W. “Chip”, 198 Bellour, Raymond, 19 Bender, Lauretta, 78, 86, 95, 99–102 Benjamin, Walter, 1–2, 6, 12, 23, 147, 151–52, 178 Bergengren, Ralph, 17 Biograph Studios, 19–20, 31 Bitzer, G. W., 19–20 Blackton, J. Stuart, 6–7, 19, 22 Bowser, Eileen, 31–32 Brabner, Joyce, 136 Brainwashing, 71–72, 121 Breen, Joe, 107 Briggs, Clare, 42 Brooks, Cleanth, 82–84 Brown, Joe E., 117 Brown, John Mason, 76 Brunetti, Ivan, 173–75 Buck Rogers, 27 Busch, Wilhelm, 7

Ball, David M., 174 Barry, Lynda, 131, 134, 145 Barthes, Roland, 5, 174–175, 197 Batman, 91–93, 95, 109 Beardsley, M. C., 80 Beatrice Fairfax, 38–40, 56, 202 Beaty, Bart, 70 Bechdel, Alison, 132–133, 141–44 Fun Home, 141–44 Beck, Joel, 117

Callahan, Vicki, 36 Campbell, Eddie, 209 Caniff, Milton Terry and the Pirates, 27, 46, 60 Capp, Al, 27 Cavanagh, John R., 78, 79 Censorship, 103–104 Chaplin, Charles, 9 Chicago Tribune, 35, 38, 40, 45–47, 53 Chute, Hillary, 139, 209 215

216

Index

Cities, 7–9, 13, 15 Clowes, Daniel, 150, 178–79 Ghost World, 178–79 Cohl, Emile, 6–7, 22 Collectors, 64, 100, 105, 150, 155, 160–61, 267 172–76 Comic book industry, 65, 82, 85, 91, 96 Comic books, 64, 66–68, 70–84, 87–114, 192 Comic-Con, x, 180 Comics Code Authority (CCA), 102–107, 109, 114, 120 Comics scare, 17, 76–79, 86 Comics supplements, 9, 11–12 , 15, 17, 31, 35, 42, 181, 192 Comics, definitions of, ix-xii Condon, Richard, 71 The Manchurian Candidate, 71–72 Confidential File, 102 Correspondence from readers, 39, 47, 51–53, 55–58, 61, 63–65, 68–69, 96–99, 103–104, 112–13, 118 Crafton, Donald, 22, 198 Crary, Jonathan, 3 Crawford, Arthur, 52–53 Crime comics, 88–90, 93, 99–103, 107–108, 186 Crossley, Dave, 117 Crow, The, 180 Crumb, Charles, 115 Crumb, Robert, 106, 115–20, 124–26, 133–36, 159, 172–73 Cruse, Howard, 143 Cultural Capital, 58–59, 79, 80–81 Cunningham, Dennis, 114 Currie, Barton, 30 Darley, Andrew, 183 DC, 65, 99, 108–109, 113, 181 Deitch, Kim, 118, 123, 125, 150, 158–65, 167, 170, 172–75, 179, 211 Boulevard of Broken Dreams, 158–60 Del Toro, Benicio, 185 Deleuze, Gilles, 5 Dell Comics, 108

DeMille, Cecil B., 21, 23, 30 Deng, Valentino Achak, 146 Detective Comics. See DC Dickens, Charles, 33, 56–58 Old Curiosity Shop, 56–57, 59 DiMaggio, Paul, 58 Dime novels, 17, 31, 40 Dirty Laundry Comics, 134–35 Disney, 123, 181 Ditko, Steve, 108–11 Dixon, Wheeler Winston, 183 Doane, Mary Ann, 4 Doherty, Thomas, 107 Dorgan, Tad, 200 Douglass, Frederick, 139–40 Doyle, Thomas F., 84 Dreschler, Debbie, 134 DVD, 182–83, 188–91 Dyer, Richard, 92 East Village Other, 117–19, 125, 137, 158, 161 EC, 65, 98–108, 112, 114–15, 187 Edison Studios, 19, 33, 35 Eggers, Dave, 146, 209 Eisenstein, Sergei, 5 Electronic books, 192 EVO. See East Village Other Fandom, 68–70, 106, 112 Fantastic Four, The, 109, 114 Fanzines, 70, 98, 114–16, 180 Faulkner, William, xi Feature films, 31–33 Feininger, Lyonel, 40 Feldstein, Al, 98, 114 Feminist comics, 125–26, 132 Figgis, Mike, 184 Film, ix-x, xii-xiii, 1–5, 19–22, 27–29, 41, 60–63, 67, 72–74, 101, 107, 151, 172, 180–81, 185–91 adaptations of comics, 19–21, 23–24, 180–81, 185–91 Fisher, Bud, 42–45, 200 Mutt and Jeff (A. Mutt), 42–45, 48–49, 53, 64

Index

Flash, The, 65, 121 Fleischer, Max, 158 Foster, Hal Prince Valiant, 27 Frank, Josette, 78 Frankfurt School, 88, 95–96, 152 Freud, Sigfried, 121–22 Fried, Michael, 80 Friedberg, Anne, 28, 212 Fun Home, See Bechdel, Alison Gabilliet, Jean-Paul, 195 Gaines, Max, 65, 82, 98 Gaines, William, 98–100, 103, 112, 114 Gaudreault, André, 200 Gernsback, Hugo, 68–69 Gibbon, Dave, 186–89 Gilliam, Terry, 116 Gilmore, Leigh, 131, 146 Glass, Ira, 170 Gloeckner, Phoebe, 133–34, 140 Goldberg, Rube, 28, 165 Goldberg, Stan, 112 Goodman, Martin, 108–109 Gould, Chester, 61 Dick Tracy, 27, 46, 61 Gray, Harold Little Orphan Annie, 27, 46 Green, Justin, 106, 127–34, 137, 141, 147–48 Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, 127–32, 137, 139, 147 Greenaway, Peter, 184 Greenberg, Clement, 80 Griffith, D. W., 21, 23, 30, 195, 202 Guindon, Dick, 123 Gumps, The, See Smith, Sidney Gunning, Tom, 4, 181, 191, 200 Hansen, Miriam, 28, 195 Happy Hooligan, See Opper, Frederick Burr Harper, Graeme, 183 Harvey Comics, 108 Harvey, Robert C., 45, 195, 200 Hasen, Irwin, 65

Hatfield, Charles, 145, 209 Hayward, Jennifer, 60 Hearst, William Randolph, 15, 35, 40, 43–45, 53, 60–61, 178, 200 Heilman, Robert, 83 Help!, 115–118, 134, 137 Hernandez, Gilbert, ix-x, xiii Herriman, George, 24–28, 165, 185, 200 Baron Bean, 26 Family Upstairs, The, 25 Krazy Kat, 25–27, 150, 158, 165, 185 Highbrow. See Cultural Capital Hilmes, Michele, 46 Hirsch, Marianne, 145, 211 Hofstadter, Richard, 72 Homosexuality and comics, 91–93, 95, 107, 132, 141–43 Horkheimer, Max, 71 Horror comics, 98–99, 103, 107–108, 114–15 Housman, A. E., 84 Howarth, F. M., 7–10, 151, 198–99 Howe, Irving, 105 Hulk, The, 109 Human Torch, The, 108 Hungerford, Amy, 146 Hunter, Edward, 71 Illustrated magazines, 6–9, 11–12, 34–35 Internet, 104, 149, 174, 178, 191 Jackson, Jack (Jaxon), 116–17 Jenkins, Henry, 192 Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth, See Ware, Chris Jones, Gerard, 68 Joyce, James, xi, 143 Justice League, 109 Kannenberg, Gene, 176 Katchor, Ben, 150–57, 164–65, 167, 170, 172–73, 175, 179, 189 Jew of New York, The, 155–57 Julius Knipl, 153–55 Keen, Suzanne, 210 Kesey, Ken, 121–22

217

218

Index

King, Frank Gasoline Alley, 27, 46, 174 Kinkaid, Eugene, 71 Kirby, Jack, 108–109, 112, 114 Kitchen, Denis, 115 Kominsky, Aline, 106, 132–35 Korean War, 71 Kracauer, Sigfried, 5, 21, 23 Krassner, Paul, 122–23 Krazy Kat, See Herriman, George Kunzle, David, 198 Kurtzman, Harvey, 112, 114–16, 122, 134, 137 Lang, Howard, 77 Lardner, Ring, 47–49, 51 Lastra, James, 199 Leary, Timothy, 121–22 Leavis, F. R., 154 Lee, Stan, 108–109, 112–14 Leonard, Baird, 58 Leslie, Esther, 6, 197 Leventhal, Robert S., 138 Levine, Lawrence, 59 Lindsay, Vachel, 184 Linkletter, Richard, 183–84 Looby, Christopher, 56 Lowbrow. See Cultural Capital LSD, 95, 119, 120–24, 126–27, 134, 143, 147, 156, 161 Lumière brothers, 4, 45 Lury, Celia, 3 Lynch, Jay, 115, 117 Lyotard, Jean-François, 5, 22 Mackenzie, Catherine, 74, 76 Mad, 98, 112, 114–15, 122–23, 137 Manning, Marie, 38, 56 (See also Beatrice Fairfax) Manovich, Lev, 149, 177 Marey, Étienne-Jules, 7 Marvel Comics, 108–114, 127, 181, 183 Matrix, The, 185 Matt, Joe, 174 Maus, See Spiegelman, Art

Mayer, Sheldon, 65 Mayne, Judith, 191 McCay, Winsor, 21–24, 40–41, 158 Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, 23, 24, 40–41 Little Nemo in Slumberland, 40–41, 124 McCloud, Scott, xi, 157, 173 McConnell, Ed, 161 McDowell, Alex, 188–89 McGlothlin, Erin, 176 McGuire, Richard, 171–72, 188 McLuhan, Marshall, 72 McManus, George, 7, 64 Bringing Up Father, 64 Medhurst, Andy, 92 Men in Black, 180 Mendes, Willy, 124–25 Mexican Revolution, 44–45, 53 Miller, Frank, 184–87 Modernism, xi, xii, 23 Moore, Alan, 186–90, 209 Morrison, Toni, 130 Moss, Hilde, 96 Motion comics, 213 Motion Picture Production Code, 103, 107 Münsterberg, Hugo, 3 Murphy, Charles F., 103–04 Musser, Charles, 21 Mutt and Jeff, See Fisher, Mutt Muybridge, Eadweard, 7, 14 New Criticism, 80–84, 87 New Media, xiii, 28, 149–50, 178, 181–87 New York Times, The, x, 74, 76, 120, 171 Newspapers, 1–2, 9, 12–14, 17, 35, 38–39, 42, 45–47, 52–53, 69, 64, 67, 97, 192 Nickelodeons, 30–32, 182 Noonin, Diane, 134 North, Sterling, 84 Novels, x-xii, 12, 56–56, 72–73 Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), 131, 141–44

Index

Opper, Frederick Burr, 11–15, 21, 40, 45, 151, 181 Happy Hooligan, 13–15, 19–20, 30, 35, 40, 43–45, 124, 137, 150, 157, 181, 184–185, 199 Osmond, Humphrey, 121 Outcault, R. F., 12–13, 21, 23 Buster Brown, 30, 35, 161 Yellow Kid, The, 12, 43, 150 Packard, Vance, 71 Pahls, Marty, 116 Pathé, 31, 35 Patterson, Joseph Medill, 45, 46, 47, 202 Pekar, Harvey, 106, 134, 135, 136, 137, 141, 173, 210 Perils of Pauline, The, 29, 35, 38, 40 Persistence of vision, 2–5 Personal computers, 177 Porter, Edwin S., 4, 19, 21–24, 30 Great Train Robbery, The, 4, 22, 30 Puck, 11, 198 Pulitzer, Joseph, 43, 178 Pulps, 68–70, 96–97 Racial caricature, 13–17, 26 Radio, 46–47 Ransom, John Crowe, 83 RAW, 171 Ray, Robert, 197 Realist, The, 122–23 Reich, Wilhelm, 121–22 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 210 Robbins, Trina, 106, 125–26, 132, 134 Rodriguez, Robert, 185–87 Rodriguez, Spain, 106, 117, 125 Roget, Peter, 2–3 Rorschach Test, 86–87 Rosen, Sam, 112 Rothman, Milton A., 69, 106 Rourke, Mickey, 185 Russell, Catherine, 28 Scarry, Elaine, 147 Science fiction, 68–70, 97–98, 114

Seda, Dori, 134 Seduction of the Innocent, See Wertham, Fredric Segar, Elzie Thimble Theatre, 61 Seldes, Gilbert, 13, 29, 30, 33, 58, 67 Selig, William, 35, 46 Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, 99–101, 105 Serial film, 29, 33–40, 48, 163, 183 Seriality, 3, 7, 9, 13–14, 21–22, 26–33, 37–41, 46–47 Open-ended, 42–67, 124 Seth, 150, 172–76, 179 Shelton, Gilbert, 106, 115–17 Sherlock Holmes, 56 Shiga, Jason, 192–93, 213 Shuster, Joe, 68, 74–75, 97 Siegel, Jerry, 68,-69, 74–75, 97 Simek, Artie, 112 Simmel, Georg, 11 Simmonds, Posy, 209 Simon, Joe, 108 Sin City, 185–87, 190 Singer, Ben, 9, 11, 34 Slosson, Edwin S., 66, 67 Smith, Sidney, 47–55, 57, 97 The Gumps, 27, 45–59, 64, 96, 203 Smith, Sidonie, 146 Snyder, Zack, 188–90 Southworth, E. D. E. N., 56 Spectator theory, 3, 191 Spider-Man, 109–112 Spiegelman, Art, 106, 115–16, 123–24, 127, 132, 137–41, 150, 157–58, 171–72, 176, 208 “Prisoner on the Hell Planet”, 137–39 In the Shadow of No Towers, 150, 157–58 Maus, 137–41, 176, 208 Squa Tront, 114 Stack, Frank, 106, 116 Stamp, Shelley, 34–35 Steinberg, Flo, 113 Steiner, Wendy, 79

219

220

Index

Steinlen, Théophile, 7 Stewart, Bhob, 98 Stone, Chic, 112 Story papers, 31, 40, 56, 59 Stowe, Harriet Beecher Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 56, 59 Sub-Mariner, 108 Sullivan, Louis, 170 Superman, 74–75, 109, 121, 167, 169 Superhero comics, 65, 68, 82, 84, 97, 107–114 Swinnerton, James, 15–18 Syndication, 12–13, 17, 44, 64 Tarantino, Quentin, 182 Tate, Allen, 81, 83 Television, 47, 107, 182 Thaumatrope, 2, 4 Theroux, Alexander, 151 Timely Comics. See Marvel Comics Trask, Michael, 80, 84 Trilling, Lionel, 105 Twisted Sisters Comics, 134 Underground comix, 28, 106, 115, 126, 138, 158, 192 Underground press, 117–20 Underground Press Syndicate (UPS), 117–18 Valentino, Jim, 137 Video (VHS), 181, 182 Vitagraph Studios, 6, 31 Vorse, Mary Heaton, 31 Walsh, Richard, 57 Ware, Chris, xii, 150, 153, 164–76 Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth, xii, 165–70 Quimby the Mouse, xii, 165–66 Warhol, Robyn, 51–52 Warner Brothers, 181 Warren, James, 115 Warshow, Paul, 105

Warshow, Robert, 15, 104–05 Watchmen, 186–90 Watson, Julia, 146 Webcomics, 149, 192–93 Weirdom, 114 Wellek, René, 80 Wertham, Fredric, 70–71, 78, 85–94, 96–97, 99, 101–102, 104, 105, 107, 120–21, 206 Seduction of the Innocent, 70–71, 87–94, 97, 105, 107 Westover, Russ, 43 What Happened to Mary?, 33–36, 40 Wheelan, Ed, 60–66, 98 Minute Movies, 60–65 Whitlock, Gillian, 128, 147 Whitman, Maurice, 95 Wilde, Oscar, 57, 80, 203 Willette, Adolphe, 7 Williams, Linda, 195 Williamson, Skip, 115, 117 Willis, Bruce, 185 Wilson, Robert Anton, 122 Wilson, S. Clay, 120, 125 Wimmen’s Comix, 126, 132–34 Wimsatt, Jr., W. K., 80 Witek, Joseph, 209 Witty, Paul, 74, 76 Witzend, 123–24 Wolfe, Tom, 121–22 Wollheim, Don, 69 Wonder Woman, 82–83, 93, 95 Wood, Wally, 112, 123 Woolf, Michael Angelo, 198 World War II, 73 Wright, Bradford W., 109, 204 YouTube, 193 Zap Comix, 119–20, 125 (See also Crumb, Robert) Zimmerman, Eugene “Zim”, 198 Zoetrope, 4, 7, 169 Zukor, Adolph, 195

Announcing a new series: Post•45 Florence Dore and Michael Szalay, Editors Post•45 Group, Series Board Post•45 publishes groundbreaking work on U. S. culture after the Second World War. Our goal is to question rather than reproduce critical orthodoxies—to ask basic questions about how to read and categorize American writing since 1945. Though the series will gravitate toward literature, we welcome writing on a wide range of popular and avantgarde culture, including film, drama, music, graphic arts, and computer-based forms. Jerome Christensen America’s Corporate Art: The Studio Authorship of Hollywood Motion Pictures