Seeing Comics through Art History: Alternative Approaches to the Form (Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels) [1st ed. 2022] 9783030935061, 9783030935078, 303093506X

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS

SEEING COMICS THROUGH ART HISTORY Alternative Approaches to the Form Edited by Maggie Gray · Ian Horton

Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels Series Editor Roger Sabin University of the Arts London London, UK

This series concerns Comics Studies—with a capital “c” and a capital “s.” It feels good to write it that way. From emerging as a fringe interest within Literature and Media/Cultural Studies departments, to becoming a minor field, to maturing into the fastest growing field in the Humanities, to becoming a nascent discipline, the journey has been a hard but spectacular one. Those capital letters have been earned. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels covers all aspects of the comic strip, comic book, and graphic novel, explored through clear and informative texts offering expansive coverage and theoretical sophistication. It is international in scope and provides a space in which scholars from all backgrounds can present new thinking about politics, history, aesthetics, production, distribution, and reception as well as the digital realm. Books appear in one of two forms: traditional monographs of 60,000 to 90,000 words and shorter works (Palgrave Pivots) of 20,000 to 50,000 words. All are rigorously peerreviewed. Palgrave Pivots include new takes on theory, concise histories, and— not least—considered provocations. After all, Comics Studies may have come a long way, but it can’t progress without a little prodding. Series Editor Roger Sabin is Professor of Popular Culture at the University of the Arts London, UK. His books include Adult Comics: An Introduction and Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels, and he is part of the team that put together the Marie Duval Archive. He serves on the boards of key academic journals in the field, reviews graphic novels for international media, and consults on comics-­related projects for the BBC, Channel 4, Tate Gallery, The British Museum and The British Library. The ‘Sabin Award’ is given annually at the International Graphic Novels and Comics Conference. More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/14643

Maggie Gray  •  Ian Horton Editors

Seeing Comics through Art History Alternative Approaches to the Form

Editors Maggie Gray Kingston School of Art Kingston University London, UK

Ian Horton London College of Communication University of the Arts London London, UK

ISSN 2634-6370     ISSN 2634-6389 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels ISBN 978-3-030-93506-1    ISBN 978-3-030-93507-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Mark Beyer’s Duck-Rabbit / John Miers This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our commissioning editor and all-round legend Roger Sabin for his support and encouragement for this project and tireless support for comics scholarship in the UK and beyond. We also owe a great debt of thanks to our editor Camille Davies, and Jack Heeney, Immy Higgins and Liam MacLean at Palgrave Macmillan. We thank Jessica Bauwens-Sugimoto, Jaqueline Berndt, Felix Giesa and Christina Meyer organisers of the Comics|Histories conference 16–17 July 2021; Ian Hague and Hattie Kennedy organisers of the Comics Forum conference on Art and Design 7–8 November 2019; and the organisers of Storyworlds and Transmedia Universes, the Joint International Conference of Graphic Novels, Comics and Bande Dessinée 24–28 June 2019, where papers related to this project were delivered and insightful feedback received. For their feedback we thank our anonymous peer reviewers, and for their support and advice, Josh Rose, Guy Lawley for all matters about print, Jared Gardner and the Caricature, Cartooning and Comics 1620–1920 crew, and all the other members of the Comics Research Hub (CoRH!!). We also thank all those who submitted proposals for this volume we were unable to include. We would like to take this opportunity to express our sincere gratitude to all our contributors for their work and commitment, particularly in light of the extraordinary challenges of dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, and its impact on research and more importantly on everyday life, family, friends and communities. Maggie would like to thank Ian for being a joy to collaborate with and for putting up with her ropey Wi-Fi. And Ed for everything. Ian would like to thank Maggie for making editing such fun. And Bettina, Oscar and Sasha for putting up with the piles of comics and dusty art-historical tomes taking over our home.

v

Contents

Ways of Seeing Comics: Art-Historical Approaches to the Form 1 Maggie Gray and Ian-Horton Part I Old Skool Art History  11  The Lives of the Artists 13 Tobias J. Yu-Kiener  Connoisseurship, Attribution, and Comic Strip Art: The Case of Jack B. Yeats 33 Michael Connerty  Reading Comics with Aby Warburg: Collaging Memories 53 Maaheen Ahmed Part II Perception, Reception and Meaning  73 Psychologies of Perception: Stories of Depiction 75 John Miers  Aesthetics of Reception: Uncovering the Modes of Interaction in Comics 97 Nina Eckhoff-Heindl  Reading Richard Felton Outcault’s “Yellow Kid” Through Perception of the Image121 Christine Mugnolo

vii

viii 

CONTENTS

 Colour in Comics: Reading Lorenzo Mattotti Through the Lens of Art History141 Barbara Uhlig Part III The New and Newer Art Histories 161  Feminist Art History as an Approach to Research on Comics: Meta Reflections on Studies of Swedish Feminist Comics163 Margareta Wallin Wictorin and Anna Nordenstam  Towards Feminist Comics Studies: Feminist Art History and the Study of Women’s Comix in the 1970s in the United States185 Małgorzata Olsza Real Queer Bodies: Visual Weight and Imagined Gravity in Sport Manga207 Ylva Sommerland Part IV Comics for/Beyond Art History 223  Afrofuturism and Animism as Method: Art History and Decolonisation in Black Panther225 Danielle Becker  What Is an Image? Art History, Visual Culture Studies, and Comics Studies247 Jeanette Roan  From Giotto to Drnaso: The Common Well of Pictorial Schema in ‘High’ Art and ‘Low’ Comics269 Bruce Mutard VAST/O Exhibition (De)Construction: Exploring the Potentials of Augmented Abstract Comics and Animation Installations as a Method to Communicate Health Experiences289 Alexandra P. Alberda, João Carola, Carolina Martins, and Natalie Woolf  From Tableau to Sequence: Introducing Comics Theory Within Art History to Study the Photobook313 Michel Hardy-Vallée Index337

Notes on Contributors

Maaheen Ahmed  is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Ghent University, where she leads COMICS, a multi-researcher project on connections between children and comics funded by the European Research Council. She is author of Openness of Comics and Monstrous Imaginaries: The Legacy of Romanticism in Comics (2016 and 2020). Alexandra  P.  Alberda is the Curator of Indigenous Perspectives at the Manchester Museum (University of Manchester). Her doctoral thesis, Graphic Medicine Exhibited: Public Engagement with Comics in Curatorial Practice and Visitor Experience since 2010 (2021), explores the intersections of the comics medium, health and exhibition to understand potential methodological approaches and sociocultural values of these experiences. Her collaborative projects have explored such topics as public health, health exhibitions, data storytelling and visualisation, comics, and creative-led knowledge exchange. As a research illustrator, she has worked on a number of projects, such as The Data Storytelling Workbook (2020). Danielle Becker  is a South African art historian who is primarily interested in art historiography and the way in which the discourse has developed in relation to colonial, postcolonial and decolonial forces. Becker completed her Masters in Art History at the University of Manchester (2010) and her PhD at the University of Cape Town (2017) with a thesis titled South African Art History: The possibility of decolonizing a discourse. She has lectured at a number of South African institutions since 2010 and has most recently been a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Stellenbosch University and a postdoctoral fellow at Rhodes University. João Carola  graduated in Graphic Design at ESAD.cr, in Caldas da Rainha. Back in Lisbon, he completed the Comics and Illustration course at Ar.Co, school where he now teaches. He has collaborated with short comics and illustrations with a number of publications. The longest collaboration is with the anarchist newspaper A Batalha. In 2019 he co-edited with Dois Vês the ix

x 

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

collective All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace (Chili com Carne), which was nominated for the category of Alternative Comics at the Angoulême International Comics Festival. Michael Connerty  teaches film, animation and visual culture at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Dun Laoghaire, Dublin. His book The Comic Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) examines the work of that artist in the context of Victorian and Edwardian comics history. Nina  Eckhoff-Heindl is a MSCA-Fellow in the program “a.r.t.e.s. EUmanities” at the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities, University of Cologne (Horizon 2020: Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant No. 713600). She is doctoral candidate in art history at the University of Cologne (Germany) and the University of Zurich (Switzerland) with a project on aesthetic experience and the visual-tactile dimensions of comics. Her research as well as her publications focus on Modern and Contemporary Art, Image Theory, Aesthetics, Comic Studies, Disability Studies and Holocaust Studies. www.ninaheindl.com, [email protected] Maggie Gray  is a senior lecturer in Critical & Historical Studies at Kingston University with a specialism in comics, cartooning and visual narrative. She is author of Alan Moore, Out from the Underground: Cartooning, Performance and Dissent (2017) and sits on the organising committee of the Comics Forum conference and the editorial board of the journal Studies in Comics and is a member of the Comics & Performance Network and an associate member of the UAL Comics Research Hub (CoRH!!). With Nick White and John Miers, she co-runs the Kingston School of Art Comic Club. Michel Hardy-Vallée  holds a PhD in art history from Concordia University in Montréal. His main research interests include the history of Canadian photography in the twentieth century, the photographic book, visual narration, interdisciplinary artistic practices, aesthetics and the archive. He has advised on photographic prints acquisitions by museums and private collections and has taught the history of photography. He is adapting his doctoral dissertation about Canadian photographer John Max into a monograph and has contributed chapters to volumes about photographic narrative and graphic novels. His most recent article was published in the journal History of Photography. Ian  Horton  is Reader in Graphic Communication at London College of Communication. In 2014, along with Lydia Wysocki and John Swogger, he founded the Applied Comics Network. He is a founder member of the Comics Research Hub (CoRH!!) at the University of the Arts London, co-­editor of Contexts of Violence in Comics and Representing Acts of Violence in Comics and associate editor of the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. His book Hard Werken: One for All (Graphic Art & Design 1979–1994) (co-authored with

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

xi

Bettina Furnee) is the first academic study of this influential avant-garde Dutch graphic design studio and was published by Valiz in 2018. Carolina Martins  is a PhD student in the Doctoral Programme of Materialities of Literature (University of Coimbra) with the thesis Augmented Reading: spatial combinations in graphic narrative installations, which proposes an analysis of the potential of architectonic space as a narrative agent, as well as an analysis of the possibilities of interaction between that space and the spaces of the page and the screen for the development and unfolding of the narrative. She is also a cultural producer, working mainly in the field of contemporary dance. As an artist she expresses herself through writing, photography and collage. John Miers  recent comics work deals with his experience of living with multiple sclerosis. His first comic on this topic, So I Guess My Body Pretty Much Hates Me Now, was produced during a postdoctoral residency in University of the Arts London’s Archives and Special Collections Centre at London College of Communication and voted “Best One-Shot” in the 2020 Broken Frontier awards. He is lecturer in illustration at Kingston School of Art and associate lecturer at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art. Christine  Mugnolo  is Associate Professor of Studio Art at Antelope Valley College. She earned her doctorate in Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine, in 2021. Her dissertation titled The Adolescent in American Print and Comics focuses on the relationship between the invention of the newspaper comic strip, early twentieth-century humour and the experience of adolescence. Her studio practice seeks to combine figurative and narrative practices developed by modern comics, video games and Western painting and drawing traditions. Bruce Mutard  is a comics maker, publisher and researcher. His graphic novels include The Sacrifice, The Silence, A Mind of Love, The Bunker and Post Traumatic. His latest graphic novel Bully Me was published as Souffre Douleur in France in 2019. He completed his PhD at Edith Cowan University with his thesis The Erotics of Comics in 2021 and likes to make comics as scholarship. He is director of the Comic Arts Awards of Australia and editor/publisher of the Australian Comic Annual. He has been a curator and program director at the Perth Comic Arts Festival. Anna Nordenstam  is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her main research areas are feminist comics, children’s and YA-literature, and educational perspectives on literature. She is one of the editors of Comic art and feminism in the Baltic Sea region. Transnational perspectives. Routledge, 2021, edited by Kristy Beers Fägersten, Anna Nordenstam, Leena Romu and Margareta Wallin Wictorin.

xii 

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Małgorzata  Olsza  is an assistant professor at the Department of American Literature at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Her PhD thesis was devoted to the poetics of the contemporary American graphic novel. She also holds an MA in Art History. Her research interests include American graphic novels, comics and comix, contemporary American art and visual culture. She has published on different aspects of American comics and comix in Polish Journal for American Studies, Art Inquiry: Recherches Sur Les Arts, ImageText, and Image [&] Narrative. Jeanette  Roan  is an associate professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture Program and the Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies at California College of the Arts. She received her PhD in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester. She is the author of Envisioning Asia: On Location, Travel, and the Cinematic Geography of U.S. Orientalism (2010). Her work has also appeared in The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics and The Comics Journal, and she has presented at the International Comics Arts Forum and the Comics Studies Society annual conferences. Ylva Sommerland  is a librarian and a PhD in Art History and Visual Studies. Sommerland is working at the National Library of Sweden. Her areas of research are queer theory in art history and comics. Her fields of expertise as a librarian are national bibliographies, book art and metadata. Barbara  Uhlig studied protohistoric archaeology and art history at the Universities of Munich, Salzburg and Eichstaett. She has written several articles on colour and the comics of Lorenzo Mattotti. Since 2015 she has been contributing to The Complete Crepax, a 12-volume project by Fantagraphics that collects Guido Crepax’s oeuvre in English for the first time. Her main research interests lie in colour theory, subversive art, text-image relationships, protest movements and the development of Italian comics since the 1960s. Margareta Wallin Wictorin  is Reader in Art History and Visual Studies and Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at Karlstad University, Sweden. Her main research areas are feminist, educational and postcolonial perspectives on graphic art and comics. She is one of the editors of Comic art and feminism in the Baltic Sea region. Transnational perspectives. Routledge, 2021, edited by Kristy Beers Fägersten, Anna Nordenstam, Leena Romu and Margareta Wallin Wictorin. Natalie  Woolf  graduated in fine arts from Leeds Metropolitan University, subsequently setting up an applied surface design business, exhibiting internationally as an artist and designer. She holds a Doctorate in Design Products from the Royal College of Art (RCA) London, which then led to public arts commissions and consultancy work for councils and private developers across the UK.  Relocating to Portugal allowed more time for her own arts practice and growing interest in “expanded drawing” across different media.

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

xiii

She a professor in the Hybrid Spaces Animation Arts Masters course and the drawing programme curator for “DELLI” at Universidade Lusófona. Tobias  J.  Yu-Kiener  studied Art History and History at the University of Vienna and University College Dublin. For his PhD at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London (UAL), he has researched biographical graphic novels about iconic painters and their supporting national, international and transnational networks. He is a member of the Comics Research Hub (CoRH!!) at the London College of Communication and co-­ organiser of the longrunning Transitions comic symposium at Birkbeck College, University of London.

List of Figures

The Lives of the Artists Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4

[Uncredited] (a & w), “Leonardo Da Vinci”. Blue Ribbon Comics Vol. 1, No. 22 (March 1942), M. L. J. Magazines Inc., [p. 3], Leonardo da Vinci frees birds on a market [Uncredited] (a & w). “The Story of Painting [2]”. Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact Vol. 4, No. 14 (March 1949), Geo. A. Pflaum Publisher Inc., p. 13, Jan van Eyck invents oil painting Edmond Baudoin, Dalí (2012), SelfMadeHero, p. 108, Salvador Dalí inspired by and as successor of Jan Vermeer, Diego Velázquez, and Jan van Eyck Typex, Rembrandt (2013), SelfMadeHero, p. 127, Hendrickje doing household chores and attending to Rembrandt’s sexual needs to facilitate his artistic work

20 22 25 28

 onnoisseurship, Attribution, and Comic Strip Art: The Case C of Jack B. Yeats Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4 Fig. 5

Illustration from Morelli, Giovanni. 1883. Italian Masters in German Galleries, translated by Louise Richter. London: George Bell and Sons 36 Jack B. Yeats, “Chubblock Homes and His Little Dog Shirk in Quest of Porous Plaisters”, Comic Cuts, 29 June 1895 42 A selection of sketches based on Jack B. Yeats characters. (The author’s sketchbook)43 Jack B. Yeats “The Little Stowaways” (panel) 7 September 1907, Puck44 Jack B. Yeats, “Roly Poly’s Tour” (panel), Comic Cuts 7 August 1909 45

Reading Comics with Aby Warburg: Collaging Memories Fig. 1

Final page of the short story, “Concert en O mineur pour harpe et nitroglycérine”, Les Celtiques, p. 74

60

xv

xvi 

List of Figures

Fig. 2

Excerpts from the shadow theatre performance with an incredulous Merlin witnessing Viviane’s seduction by the American cat. Les Celtiques, “Burlesque entre Zuydcoote et Bray-Dunes”, Les Celtiques, p. 10062

Psychologies of Perception: Stories of Depiction Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4 Fig. 5 Fig. 6 Fig. 7

Rabbit or Duck? Anon (1892), Die Fliegende Blätter, October 23 76 The Duck-­Rabbit, from Wittgenstein (2009, p. 165) 77 John Miers (2019) So I Guess My Body Pretty Much Hates Me Now, p. 1 85 Ivan Brunetti (1994) Schizo #1, p. 4, panels 1–3. Fantagraphics 86 John Miers (2019) So I Guess My Body Pretty Much Hates Me Now, p. 15 88 John Miers (2019) So I Guess My Body Pretty Much Hates Me Now p. 3 89 John Miers (2020) Mark Beyer’s Duck-Rabbit92

 esthetics of Reception: Uncovering the Modes A of Interaction in Comics Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4 Fig. 5 Fig. 6

Miniature of the imprisonment of Jesus. Codex Egberti, Ms-Lat. 24, Fol 79v-80r (between 980 and 993 AD). (From Anderlik 2005) Chris Ware. Rusty Brown. Autumn. © Chris Ware 2022. (From Ware 2005, 60) Frank King. Gasoline Alley (Construction site). Chicago Tribune, April 22nd, 1934. (From Maresca 2007, n. p) Frank King. Gasoline Alley (Autumn walk). Chicago Tribune, December 5th, 1927. (From Maresca 2007, n. p) Chris Ware. I Just Want to Fall Asleep © Chris Ware 2022. (From Ware 2007, endpapers) Chris Ware. I Just Want to Fall Asleep, 2002. Ink, coloured pencil and white gouache on Bristol, 20 x 28 in © Chris Ware 2022. (From Ware 2017, 241)

102 104 106 108 110 112

 eading Richard Felton Outcault’s “Yellow Kid” Through R Perception of the Image Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3

Fig. 4

R. F. Outcault, “The Residents of Hogan’s Alley Visit Coney Island”, 24 May 1896, New York World. San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection, The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library 128 R. F. Outcault, “The War Scare in Hogan’s Alley”, 15 March 1896, New York World. San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection, The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library 132 R. F. Outcault, “The Day After the Glorious Fourth Down in Hogan’s Alley”, 7 July 1895, New York World. San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection, The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library134 R. F. Outcault, “A Wild Political Fight in Hogan’s Alley-Silver Against Gold”, 2 August 1896, New York World. San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection, The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library138

  List of Figures 

xvii

 olour in Comics: Reading Lorenzo Mattotti Through the Lens C of Art History Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3

Docteur Jekyll & Mr Hyde, Mattotti/Kramsky, © Casterman S.A. Pay attention to the reduced drawing style and the use of primary colours Docteur Jekyll & Mr Hyde, Mattotti/Kramsky, © Casterman S.A. The drawings are more fleshed out, the colours have shifted to green and orange. Criss-crossing lines appear Docteur Jekyll & Mr Hyde, Mattotti/Kramsky, © Casterman S.A. The drawings are overly detailed, almost grotesque. The colours are mixed with black

151 153

155

 eminist Art History as an Approach to Research on Comics: Meta F Reflections on Studies of Swedish Feminist Comics Fig. 1 Fig. 2

© Anne Lidén, “Lena i livet” [Lena’s life], Kvinnobulletinen 1 (1971), p. 10169 © Lotta Sjöberg, “Valfrihet” [Individual choice], Galago 1 2013, p. 61 176

 owards Feminist Comics Studies: Feminist Art History T and the Study of Women’s Comix in the 1970s in the United States Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4

Carole (artwork) and the It Ain’t Me Babe Collective, the two first pages of “Breaking Out” in It Ain’t Me Babe, 1970, Last Gasp Ecofunnies193 Lee Marrs, “So, ya wanna be an artist” in Wimmen’s Comix #2, 1973, Last Gasp Ecofunnies 195 Barbara “Willie” Mendes, the back cover of It Ain’t Me Babe, 1970, Last Gasp Ecofunnies 198 Joyce Sutton, the top row from “The menses is the massage” in Tits & Clits #1, 1972, Nanny Goats Productions 200

 eal Queer Bodies: Visual Weight and Imagined R Gravity in Sport Manga Fig. 1 Fig. 2

Inoue, Takehiko. 2008. Real. Vol. 1 San Francisco, CA: Viz Media, pp. 54–55216 Inoue, Takehiko. 2008. Real. Vol. 1 San Francisco, CA: Viz Media, pp. 42–43217

 frofuturism and Animism as Method: Art History A and Decolonisation in Black Panther Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3

Jonathan Maberry (writer), Phil Winslade (penciller). Captain America: Hail Hydra, Issue #3 (March 2011) Stan Lee (writer). Jack Kirby (penciller). Fantastic Four, Issue #53 (August 1966) Reginald Hudlin (writer), Ken Lashley (penciller). Black Panther: The Deadliest of the Species, Issue #6 (December 2009)

236 237 238

xviii  Fig. 4 Fig. 5 Fig. 6

List of Figures

Don McGregor (writer), Billy Graham (penciller). Jungle Action, issue #18 (November 1975). Showing the introduction of Madame Slay as a character240 Ta-Nehisi Coates (writer), Daniel Acuña (penciller). Black Panther, issue #5 (October 2018) 241 Ta-Nehisi Coates (writer), Brian Stelfreeze (penciller). Black Panther, issue #2 (May 2016) 242

 hat Is an Image? Art History, Visual Culture Studies, W and Comics Studies Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4

Lynda Barry, Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor (Drawn and Quarterly, 2014), p. 25 Lynda Barry, Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor (Drawn and Quarterly, 2014), page 30 Lynda Barry, What It Is (Drawn and Quarterly, 2008), p. 14 Lynda Barry, What It Is (Drawn and Quarterly, 2008), p. 149

256 257 260 263

 AST/O Exhibition (De)Construction: Exploring the Potentials V of Augmented Abstract Comics and Animation Installations as a Method to Communicate Health Experiences Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

Fig. 4

VAST/O installation layout, 2021. (Illustration by Alexandra P. Alberda and Photography by Alexandre Ramos). Note on illustration: grey lines indicate features that were behind walls that visitors could not see without moving in the space (made transparent here), the large arrow indicates the entry into the space, and the music notes represent the audio installation in the basement that played the sound of breathing. The fading music notes indicates the loudness of the sound and how it could faintly be heard at the top of the stairs as visitors descend. (Collaged images at the bottom show where the later examined works existed in the space) The Arrival montage, 2019. In collaboration with Carolina Martins: Wall installation art “Landscape-1-2-3-loop” by Natalie Woolf, pillar installation art “like glass” by João Carola. Landscape mural: brown paper glued on wall, white acrylic paint, and pencil markings; like glass pillar: alcohol-based pigmented paint on Crystal Acrylic Plates; Video/ Audio animation: projected hand painted animation on wall. (Photography by Alexandre Ramos) “Anxious Hands” by Natalie Woolf, 2019. Hand-drawn animation projected on floating translucent screens and walls behind Entrance. Photography by Alexandre Ramos. Note: this photograph is taken from behind the first screen. Visitors stood in the background of the image having the animation projected around and onto them Entrance—The “Domestic Set” and Transition montage, 2019. Water-based acrylic painted on walls. (Installation art by João Carola, Carolina Martins, and Natalie Woolf. Photography by Alexandre Ramos)

293

294

295

302

  List of Figures 

Fig. 5

The “like glass” art by João Carola and poetry by Carolina Martins, 2018–19. Alcohol-based pigment hand painted on Crystal Acrylic Plates. (Photography by Alexandre Ramos)

xix

304

 rom Tableau to Sequence: Introducing Comics Theory Within F Art History to Study the Photobook Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4

Spread 04 of John Max, Open Passport, Toronto: IMPRESSIONS special issue No. 6 and No. 7 1973. Offset lithography on paper, 28.5 × 22 cm. (Author’s collection) Spread 37 of John Max, Open Passport, 1973 Spreads 13 and 14 of John Max, Open Passport, 1973 Spreads 03 and 46 of John Max, Open Passport, 1973

322 323 325 328

Ways of Seeing Comics: Art-Historical Approaches to the Form Maggie Gray and Ian Horton

Abstract  This chapter introduces Art History’s distance from the development of comics scholarship as an interdisciplinary field and the impact this has had for Comics Studies, particularly in terms of the respective dominance of methods drawn from Literary Studies, Linguistics, narratology and semiology. It notes the ‘hidden history’ of art historians’ contributions to the foundations of comics scholarship, and what the range of art-historical methodologies offers Comics Studies in terms of addressing overlooked aspects of visual style and form, aesthetics, perception, materiality, visuality and the image. In addition to considering what Art History offers Comics Studies, including the questioning of some of its deep-rooted categories, concepts and procedures, it also appraises what comics and Comics Studies affords and asks of Art History. It outlines the structure and contents of the edited collection, and its focus, limitations and purpose. Keywords  Art-historical methodologies • Comics Studies and Art History • History of Comics Studies • Interdisciplinarity • Practice as research

M. Gray Kingston School of Art, Kingston University, London, UK I. Horton (*) London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Gray, I. Horton (eds.), Seeing Comics through Art History, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8_1

1

2 

M. GRAY AND I. HORTON

This book draws together the work of a range of scholars applying art-historical methodologies to the study of comics. In one way or another as well as being researchers, they are also practitioners—educators, artists, designers, curators, producers, librarians, editors, writers and combinations of these. Some undertake practice-based research, and these pages carry much evidence of the value of comics making as a mode of research itself. Among them are many trained art historians, but several come from, have migrated into or straddle other disciplines, such as Comparative Literature, American Literature, Cultural Studies, Visual Studies and a range of subjects within Art and Design practice. Of the methodologies they employ, many have not previously been used in Comics Studies. It is notable, given the interdisciplinarity of comics scholarship, that Art History has largely been aloof from its development. While it emerged from Cultural Studies, Popular Culture Studies, Education and Communications theory, in close dialogue with extramural practitioner and fan scholarship, and became more securely entrenched in academia in the 1990s via Literature departments, today the field includes voices from Law and Criminology, Medicine, Psychology, Anthropology, Sociology, History, Geography, the Digital Humanities and many more disciplines.1 The relative absence of art-­ historical work on comics is similarly remarkable given the expansion of Art History’s object of study to incorporate a broader range of media and material, firstly in response to the rise of Cultural Studies and Film Studies, and particularly in view of the challenge from—and under the auspices of—Bildwissenschaft, Visual Studies or Visual Culture Studies since the late 1990s. As Comics Studies sits on the threshold of securing institutionalisation as a discipline in itself, with a growing number of dedicated departments, undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, alongside well-established journals, book series and annual conferences, it arguably needs Art History. Frameworks of analysis and theories of comics’ form remain dominated by approaches drawn from Literary Studies, Linguistics, narratology and semiotics, with which the academic study of comics gained greater legitimacy. These methods became ensconced alongside the rise and celebration of the graphic novel, yet at the same moment a ‘turn to the visual’ was observed among comics creators, many of them art school trained (Beaty 2007, p. 7; Groensteen 2007, p. 163). While there are oversimplifications and misconstructions aplenty in debates about words and pictures, comics as a literary form and comics as visual art, comics scholarship has struggled to deal with aspects of image-making, graphic techniques, design and materiality, and the aesthetics, perception and interpretation of the visual.2 Chapters in this book demonstrate how art-historical approaches and methods can inform and develop understanding of neglected areas such as the effects of drawing style, colour and material processes. They also demonstrate how Art History can enhance knowledge of how comics are read as images; how we interact with and experience them as images; how they perform, move and disrupt as images and what images are and do. Applying art-historical

  WAYS OF SEEING COMICS: ART-HISTORICAL APPROACHES TO THE FORM 

3

methodologies also casts light on, and helps question, categories, concepts and procedures often taken for granted in Comics Studies—demanding critical reflection on models of authorship and intentionality, attribution and a growing emphasis on the authenticating mark; the exclusionary operations of the comics canon and archive; the essentialising of grid, gutter and page; and the social positioning of the researcher. The range of methodologies engaged in this volume further indicates the diversity of approaches within Art History, belying characterisations of it in Comics Studies that focus on its more conservative, traditional or formalist strands. Drawing Art History into comics scholarship involves acknowledging the intra-disciplinary divergences, points of contention and (often strident) debates over conceptual and methodological frameworks that can get flattened out in models of interdisciplinarity. The dissociation of Comics Studies and Art History has by no means been absolute. Research, writing, cataloguing and curation by art historians contributed to the formation of comics scholarship and provided several of its foundational texts in the 1960s and 1970s. Art historian Pierre Couperie played a key role in the organisation of the Bande Dessinée et Figuration Narrative exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris in 1967, and its catalogue which included some of the earliest attempts to identify a comics canon, the medium’s stylistic development and formal elements. Gérard Blanchard’s 1969 history of bande dessinée also sought to identify a comics canon and legitimise the form through examining its origins in earlier art practices by employing an iconographic approach. Writing by Ernst Gombrich on caricature and cartooning, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, influenced his PhD supervisee David Kunzle, whose History of the Comic Strip, published in two volumes in 1973 and 1990, remains a major work for comics scholars. While marginalised in the field, Art History has since shaped ongoing debates about comics’ origins, formal structures and relations to print cultures and movements in fine art. In the twenty-first century, art historians have become more prominent in Comics Studies, contributing, for instance, to the theorisation of abstract comics, and debates about the relationship between comics and visual art have drawn on art histories of the avant-garde, modernism and postmodernism. We examine this ‘hidden history’ of art-historical comics scholarship in the companion volume Art History for Comics: Past, Present and Potential Futures, in relation to the shifts that took place within Art History over this period, as traditional approaches of stylistic analysis and iconology were challenged by Cultural History and the social history of art. That book also moves on to explore how the approaches and frameworks underpinning these seminal works might be applied in contemporary Comics Studies in light of the developments and debates around them that have taken place within Art History in the intervening years. Both volumes are intended to prompt and provoke consideration of what seeing comics through Art History and its varied methodologies can offer the study of the medium, particularly in addressing some of the oversights of Comics Studies when it comes to questions of visuality, materiality and

4 

M. GRAY AND I. HORTON

aesthetics. At the same time, they aim to examine what Comics Studies offers art historians. Chapters in this book explore overlooked intersections of the histories of art and comics, from the dialogue between women’s underground comix and feminist fine art to the relationship between the schemata evident in Western narrative painting, caricature, cartooning and comics stretching back to Giotto’s fresco cycles. They also open up resonant questions about the relationship between words and images in art-historical texts, connections between academic and popular writing about art, and the interactions of Art History and the museum in canonical feedback loops and systems of knowledge production. Furthermore, they intervene in urgent critical debates within Art History about decolonising the discipline, queering the archive, and how Art History can be a form of activism, particularly through curatorial practice and collaboration. They offer art historians models of how comics theory can be applied to the study of series, sequences and space, as well as ways to approach serialisation and media memories, humour, the narrative effects of depiction, the tactile experience of images and the benefits of thinking with and through rather than at them. To support the further application of art-historical approaches to the study of comics, each chapter has a similar structure. They introduce and contextualise the methodology or methodologies at hand, providing references to, and critically evaluating, key theorists and texts. They then examine how these approaches have been applied to comics in recent research projects and/or use them to analyse a specific comics corpus, and finally reflect on the benefits and challenges of these approaches for Comics Studies more broadly. The comics under consideration cover a range of genres, formats, historical periods and cultural traditions. They include work from nineteenth-century American newspapers and British comics magazines, 1940s educational comic books and 1960s and 1970s Marvel titles, 1970s bande-dessinée adventure series and underground comix, 1990s alternative comics and twenty-first-­ century graphic novels, superhero comics and sport manga. They also include feminist comics and cartoons in journals, anthologies, albums and on social media, comics biographies and autobiographies, literary adaptations and comics derived from and used in arts education. They examine work that pushes the boundaries of comics, most prominently in the form of augmented abstract comics and animation installation, as well as work in other media, notably photography, but also illustration, painting, sculpture, ceramics, film. This speaks to the way seeing comics through Art History opens up opportunities to examine coextensive, interacting fields and forms of visual art and image-making. Chapters are grouped together in sections that roughly align with the development of Western Art History. We start with ‘Old Skool Art History’ and some of the discipline’s earliest approaches. Tobias Yu-Kiener examines art-­ historical traditions of life writing stretching back to Pliny the Elder, and particularly inaugurated during the Renaissance by Giorgio Vasari and Carel van Mander, in relation to the artist’s biography genre in comics, tracing the influence of, and challenges to, the art-historical canon, biographical anecdote and

  WAYS OF SEEING COMICS: ART-HISTORICAL APPROACHES TO THE FORM 

5

life-and-work model. Michael Connerty focuses on methodologies of art connoisseurship, and particularly the approach of Giovanni Morelli in the nineteenth century, as a means of identifying and cataloguing an artist’s work—in this case the strips Irish painter and cartoonist Jack B.  Yeats produced for British comics magazines in a context in which comics were rarely signed. While these approaches have fallen out of favour in Art History, the final chapter in this section turns to a figure whose work has received renewed interest, Aby Warburg. Maaheen Ahmed adopts Warburg’s Mnemosyne picture atlas as a guide to reading comics as collages, and combines his mapping of cultural interchanges with ideas of how media remember each other to examine comics both fictional (Hugo Pratt’s Corto Maltese: Les Celtiques) and non-fictional (Manu Larcenet’s autobiographical Le Combat Ordinaire). Warburg’s work can be seen to mark a turning point in Art History whereby in the twentieth century it became more influenced by psychology, sociology and anthropology. The following section ‘Perception, Reception and Meaning’ explores methodologies developed by art historians increasingly preoccupied by questions of how images are perceived, experienced and interpreted. John Miers deploys work on psychologies of perception, including Gombrich’s collaboration with psychoanalyst Ernst Kris on caricature, as well as the writings of psychologist Rudolf Arnheim and philosophers Richard Wollheim and Kendall Walton on visual perception, to attend to the effects of drawing style with reference to his own autobiographical comic, So I Guess My Body Pretty Much Hates Me Now. Nina Eckhoff-Heindl engages with the aesthetics of reception approach advanced in the 1970s and 1980s by Wolfgang Kemp, Max Imdahl and Gottfried Boehm to examine how viewers interact with artworks, to explore the reception of Chris Ware’s Rusty Brown, Autumn by its ‘reading-­ viewers’. Christine Mugnolo draws on the work of Hans Belting and Svetlana Alpers that challenged how art historians considered the relationship between images and audiences in terms of agency, embodiment and affect, to appraise how Richard Felton Outcault’s Yellow Kid engaged his readers. Finally in this section Barbara Uhlig applies art-historical work by Ernst Strauss, Lorenz Dittman and John Gage to one of most overlooked aspects of comics—colour, in a hermeneutical analysis of Lorenzo Mattotti and Jerry Kramsky’s Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. From the 1970s onwards Art History faced substantial upheaval in the wake of Marxist and feminist approaches that challenged many of its deep-rooted frameworks, categories and assumptions, and institutional and ideological agendas. This was followed by strands of queer and postcolonial Art History, strongly influenced by structuralism, post-structuralism and deconstruction, resulting in a set of approaches that themselves became institutionalised under the umbrella term ‘the New Art History’. The next section ‘The New and Newer Art Histories’ turns to some of these methodologies. Margareta Wallin Wictorin and Anna Nordenstam analyse what lessons the feminist Art History of Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker, and particularly Pollock’s discussion of various strategic positions from which to address the

6 

M. GRAY AND I. HORTON

canon, holds for a multidisciplinary, feminist Comics Studies. This is grounded in extensive research into Swedish feminist comics, from strips and cartoons in second-wave feminist journals to contemporary comics using embroidery and collage both reproduced in print and shared on Instagram. Małgorzata Olsza’s chapter also takes cues from Nochlin, Pollock and Parker, alongside critic Lucy Lippard, to contest the historiography of underground comix, and processes of canon formation and models of authorship in Comics Studies. At the same time, her examination of continuities between American women’s underground comix, and feminist art, art criticism and Art History, enables titles like It Ain’t Me Babe, Wimmen’s Comix and Tits & Clits to ‘break in’ to a more expansive understanding of feminist art practice in the 1970s. Ylva Sommerland turns to queer Art History and cultural theory to queer the art-historical archive by opening it up to the non-normative cyborg bodies of Takehiko Inoue’s sport manga Real, drawing on Arnheim’s concept of visual weight and Roger Callois’ theory of play to analyse how the performance of bodies resisting gravity is visually presented, and how players both lose and find themselves in transition in the game and the ‘free unreality’ of comics. Chapters in the final section of this volume ‘Comics for/Beyond Art History’ are less concerned with what art-historical approaches offer and ask of Comics Studies, than what the methods, frameworks and theories of comics and comics scholarship propose for art historians. Danielle Becker examines Afrofuturism and animism as methods for the decolonisation of Art History as a discipline, particularly with regard to African art, through an analysis of the Marvel superhero Black Panther. Jeanette Roan revisits the history of Visual Culture Studies’ relationship to Art History, arguing it better accommodates comics as an object of study and, as an interdiscipline, provides a productive methodological model for Comics Studies. At the same time, in drawing comics and Visual Studies together, she argues that Lynda Barry’s pedagogically oriented comics What It Is and Syllabus constitute image theory themselves. In a tradition of producing and communicating knowledge through the making of comics, Bruce Mutard presents a history of narrative pictures from Giotto’s frescoes to Nick Drnaso’s graphic novel Sabrina as the development of what critic and curator Susan Vogel calls the ‘Western Eye’, also drawing on Michael Baxandall’s concept of the Period Eye and Gombrich’s idea of schema. A chapter by the artists and researchers Alexandra P. Alberda, João Carola, Carolina Martins and Natalie Woolf, who collaborate on the graphic medicine project VAST/O, reflects on how an activist art-historical methodology, as articulated by Astrid von Rosen, can be developed in the gallery. Analysing the way their immersive augmented abstract comics and animation installation affectively engages viewers with lived mental health experience, they pull on recent scholarship on gallery comics, space, affect and abstraction, alongside the work of Rosalind Krauss, in deconstructing the grid and gutter. The last chapter of the book by Michel Hardy-Vallée contends that comics scholarship fills gaps in art-­ historical interpretations of narrative pictures and pictorial sequences, particularly in attending to the situation of images in space and image-to-image syntax,

  WAYS OF SEEING COMICS: ART-HISTORICAL APPROACHES TO THE FORM 

7

inverting the structure of other chapters to apply the comics theory of Thierry Groensteen in an analysis of the photobook Open Passport by Canadian photographer John Max. While there are affinities between the chapters grouped into these sections, there are also many resonances and points of dialogue across sections. Figures like Warburg, Gombrich, Arnheim, Boehm, Nochlin, Pollock, Alpers and Belting traverse chapters, as do themes of interdisciplinarity, visual culture, the canon, the archive, the body, performance, humour, narrative, drawing and caricature. We have included internal references to suggest such points of correspondence between chapters, and readers can also use the index to follow connections. As much as there are links and interrelationships, there are also margins, gaps and blind spots. This book is by no means comprehensive in its coverage of the range of methodologies developed within Art History, past or present. While chapters engage with postcolonial Art History, specifically Becker’s, and address race, class, disability, gender and sexuality, there is scope for much more work drawing on Art History in these areas, particularly Critical Race Art History, and examining their intersections. Also evident is the absence of more emergent art-historical approaches engaging migratory, network and planetary aesthetics, biopolitics and ecocriticism. It should be noted that while aesthetic theories are referenced, and there are many crossovers, the focus is more on Art History than the philosophy of art. This book is also partial in terms of the comics analysed, most hail from the epicentres of production— North America, Western Europe and Japan—which have dominated scholarship, although this has been challenged by work on Latin American, African, Middle Eastern, Eastern European, South and South East Asian comics and comics from other areas of East Asia. This is not the first attempt to examine the history and possibilities of art-­ historical approaches to comics. A key forerunner is the special issue of the Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History ‘Writing Comics into Art History and Art History into Comics Research’ edited by Ylva Sommerland and Margareta Wallin Wictorin, both of whom we are delighted have contributed to this volume.3 Like them we believe “there is huge potential for interesting comics research based on a variety of perspectives and methods from art history” (Sommerland and Wallin Wictorin 2017, p. 4), as demonstrated by the chapters in this book. We hope the avenues opened up for future research applying art-historical methodologies to the study of comics, and drawing approaches from comics scholarship into Art History, including practices of making comics as a means of art-historical inquiry, will be pursued.

Notes 1. On the roots and foundational works of comics scholarship, as well as its subsequent development, see Smith and Duncan 2017. This edited collection concerning The Secret Origins of Comics Studies includes a chapter by Ian Horton on The Historians of the Art Form.

8 

M. GRAY AND I. HORTON

2. See, for example, Jared Gardner’s discussion of the challenges of the line and drawing style to narrative theory and narratological analysis (Gardner 2011). On the exclusion of comics from Art History, and antagonisms between the art world and the comics world, see Beaty 2012 (although more focused on art criticism than Art History). See also Roeder 2008. On the relevance and value of Art History for comics studies, see Sommerland and Wallin Wictorin 2017, and Miodrag 2013 (particularly Chapter 8 Style, Expressivity and Impressionistic Evaluation, pp. 197–220). We should stress we do not disregard the value of narratological, semiotic, literary or linguistic approaches to comics, nor seek to efface comics’ non-visual aspects—chapters in this volume engage with questions of narration, semiosis and language, and with the multisensory experience of comics. 3. Important conference interventions should also be mentioned, notably the ‘Art History considers Manga’ symposium at the 1998 Japan Art Society conference (see Watanabe 1998), the two panels on ‘Comics in Art History’ organised by Patricia Mainardi and Andrei Molotiu at the 2010 College Art Association conference, and the roundtable ‘Learning To Look: The State Of Art History And Comics Scholarship’ at the 2018 Comics Studies Society conference organised by Josh Rose.

References Beaty, Bart. 2007. Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press. ———. 2012. Comics versus Art. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press. Blanchard, Gérard, 1969. La Bande Dessinée: Histoire des Histoires en images de la préhistoires à nos jours [La Bande Dessinées: The Story of Stories in Pictures from Prehistory to Today] Verviers: Marabout Universite. Couperie, Pierre. 1968. A History of the Comic Strip. Trans. Eileen B.  Hennessy. New York: Crown Publishers. Gardner, Jared. 2011. Storylines. Substance 124, pp. 53-69. Groensteen, Thierry. 2007. The System of Comics. Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Horton, Ian. 2017. The Historians of the Art Form. In The Secret Origins of Comics Studies, eds. Matthew J.  Smith and Randy Duncan, pp.  56–66. New  York and London: Routledge. Kunzle, David. 1973. History of the Comic Strip. Volume 1: The early comic strip: narrative strips and picture stories in the European broadsheet from c.1450 to 1825. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. ——— 1990. History of the Comic Strip. Volume 2: the nineteenth century. Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press. Miodrag, Hannah. 2013. Comics and Language: Reimagining Critical Discourse on the Form. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Roeder, Katherine. 2008. Looking High and Low at Comic Art. American Art. 22:1, pp. 2–9. Smith, Matthew J., and Duncan, Randy. eds. 2017. The Secret Origins of Comics Studies. New York and London: Routledge.

  WAYS OF SEEING COMICS: ART-HISTORICAL APPROACHES TO THE FORM 

9

Sommerland, Ylva, and Wallin Wictorin, Margareta. 2017. Writing Comics into Art History and Art History into Comics Research. Konsthistorisk tidskrift / Journal of Art History 86:1, pp. 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1080/00233609.2016.1272629. Watanabe, Toshio. 1998. Art History and Comics. The Art Book 5:4, pp. 18–19.

PART I

Old Skool Art History

The Lives of the Artists Tobias J. Yu-Kiener

Abstract  Art-historical writing traditions and narrative tools have influenced the artist’s biography comic genre since its first appearance in the 1940s. This chapter identifies and traces the history of three main elements of the traditional artist’s biography, namely, the canon of Art History as well as the anecdote and the life-and-work model as narrative devices. Further, it outlines and analyses the influence of Pliny the Elder, Giorgio Vasari, Carel van Mander, and the nineteenth-century artist’s monograph on biographical comic strips about artists from the 1940s and respective graphic novels from the 2010s, using two corpora. Moreover, it establishes how anecdotes about Leonardo da Vinci’s life turned into genre-specific tropes that have been used in comics for 80 years. Finally, the challenges the artist’s biography comic genre faces after this period dominated by Art History are defined, such as an apparent difficulty to overcome established art-historical traditions of life-writing and a liminal position between art-historical text and leisure reading. However, the genre also holds the power to question, negate, and even correct the established art-­ historical  canon. In including non-canonical artists and exploiting the full potential of the comic medium, it can provide new approaches beyond the current art-historical frame and possibly develop new genre-specific tropes and narrative devices. Keywords  Artist’s biography • Anecdote • Life-and-work model • Pliny the Elder • Giorgio Vasari • Carel van Mander

T. J. Yu-Kiener (*) Central St. Martins, University of the Arts London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Gray, I. Horton (eds.), Seeing Comics through Art History, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8_2

13

14 

T. J. YU-KIENER

This chapter analyses art-historical writing traditions’ influences on the artist’s biography comic genre since its first appearance in March 1942. It first traces the creation and development of the canon of Art History and the main traditions of art-historical biographies. Then, in analysing first-century Pliny the Elder, sixteenth-century Italian Renaissance author Giorgio Vasari and his seventeenth-­century North European successor Carel van Mander, the use of the anecdote as an essential narrative tool is established. Subsequently, the nineteenth-century artist’s monograph and its life-and-work model is explored. Two corpora showcase the prevalence of these art-historical traditions in the artist’s biography comic genre. Corpus One analyses biographical comic strips from the 1940s, demonstrating how anecdotes about Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci’s life turned into genre-specific tropes. Further, one particular narrative, “The Story of Painting”, reveals the author used Pliny, Vasari, and van Mander as sources. Corpus Two comprises two biographical graphic novels from the 2010s, about Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dalí and Dutch Old Master Rembrandt van Rijn. It assesses the continuous impact of Art History’s biographical traditions and the genre-specific tropes. A concluding section discusses the challenges and the opportunities for the artist’s biography comic genre, how it might overcome or influence art-­ historical life-writing traditions.

Art-Historical Traditions For centuries, artist’s biographies have been dependent on three main elements: the established canonical artists, the use of anecdotes, and the life-and-­ work model. The canon has determined who was considered important enough to write about, while the anecdotes and the life-and-work model have defined how an artist’s life was narrativised. Pliny the Elder recorded the first European canon in his Historia Naturalis in the first-century CE. According to Pliny, fifth-century BCE Greek sculptor Polykleitos of Sikyon “made the statue which [fellow] sculptors call the ‘canon,’ referring to it as to a standard from which they can learn the first rules of their art” (1968, pp.  42–3). Ever since Polykleitos, the artistic canon has been extended, re-defined, and scrutinised, evolving and developing into more regional and national canons under the umbrella of the Western canon of art. On the one hand, for artists to be(come) canonical has meant “to be [deemed] indisputable in [artistic] quality” (Perry 1999, p. 12). On the other hand, and more pragmatically, canonical individuals have been chosen for their “enduring popularity [with the general public as well as professionals] and continuing economic and aesthetic value which their works are seen to hold” (Perry 1999, p. 15). A small number of stakeholders have decided on the canon’s makeup and subsequently publicised, and thus enshrined it. Artists have tried to insert themselves in the canon by referencing canonical predecessors. In this context, Antiquity’s artistic schools (Pliny 1968, Liber XXXV, Fig. A, B), the Medieval

  THE LIVES OF THE ARTISTS 

15

guild system, and the Renaissance’s academies were important possible “canonical entry point”.1 The increasing institutionalisation of an artist’s training made it easier for artists to establish themselves as successors of canonical masters. However, it also constituted a selection process, as not every individual would be accepted into such an exclusive place of artistic training. Another crucial factor in the canonisation of individuals were commissioners and collectors, often linked to such places of learning. Latest since the Renaissance, with its new patronage system, producing early court artists, rulers and wealthy individuals have decided whose work they commission and include in their collections. With the opening of public museums in the late eighteenth century, aiming to educate the public, these art-historical institutions became “guardians of the canon” through curatorial choices. Similarly, art and cultural historians, together with publishers, have determined the canonical status of individuals and artworks. For example, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), Carl Jacob Christoph Burckhardt (1818–1897), and Bernard Berenson (1865–1959), through their respective works, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums [The History of Art in Antiquity] (1764), Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien [The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy] (1860), and The Drawings of the Florentine Painters (1903), shaped the perception of specific artistic periods, and hence the canon. Further, developments in print technology, allowing for cheaper reproduction and distribution of artworks, led to familiarisation, thus canonisation by repetition through affordable art books for mass audiences (Silver 2019, pp. 3, 11). In drawing from while simultaneously contributing to the canon, consequently reproducing, reconfirming, and strengthening its composition, those stakeholders have created canonical feedback loops. This canon of art is grounded in European notions of greatness and aesthetic quality derived from Greek Antiquity. It is fundamentally Eurocentric— religiously, culturally, and artistically—and dominated by white men as critics and artists. Conversely, it inevitably has marginalised (if not excluded) women and non-European artists and art, as highlighted by social and feminist art historians, such as Linda Nochlin (1973) and Griselda Pollock (1999, 2003). Nochlin (1973, p. 199) argues that the lack of access to the necessary artistic training, education, and reward had been a significant cause of the disadvantages faced by non-white and non-male individuals. Pollock (1999) points out that the canon is “selective in its inclusion and … political in its pattern of exclusion” and ultimately a “mode of worship of the artist” (1999, pp. 6, 13).2 The anecdote, a short narrative about a particular event or details of an individual’s life, revealing part of their personality or extraordinary skill, has long featured in writings about artists. It already appears in fourth-century BCE Duris of Samos’ Lives of Painters and Sculptors—“inaugurat[ing] the biographical literature on artists” (Wittkower and Wittkower 1969, pp.  3–4). Nevertheless, the oldest, extensive, and most importantly, complete record of artists’ lives is Pliny the Elder’s Historia Naturalis (first-century CE), Liber XXXIII-XXXVI [Natural History, Books 33–35]. Most likely inspired by

16 

T. J. YU-KIENER

Duris, one of his primary sources, Pliny uses the anecdote as a narrative device when recording important visual artists from previous centuries, combining his own accounts with historical sources. Typical anecdotes from Antiquity follow a specific pattern and cover particular aspects of an artist’s life: (1) the artist’s origin, youth, and predestination; (2) the person’s artistic skill, speed, and superiority; (3) the individual’s character and personality. As a subject-specific narrative tool, such anecdotes about different artists are often strikingly similar, even identical. It is thus crucial to stay sceptical of their truthfulness. Artistic skill is usually discussed in talking about an artwork so well executed that it allows the artists to fool animals, people, or—most prestigious—fellow artists. Such stories link directly into anecdotes of artistic competition. Perhaps the most famous artistic rivalry in Antiquity is between Zeuxis of Herakleia and Parrhasios of Ephesos, with the former believing a curtain, painted by the latter, real (Pliny 1968, pp. 108–111). Interestingly, the artist-genius motif already appears in anecdotes from Antiquity, with divine inspiration and artistic revelation—the marks of a genius—being the result of an ascetic and abstentious life (Kris and Kurz 1980, p. 145). Such devotion for art is recorded for Protogenes, living on “lupins steeped in water” that “satisfied at once his hunger and his thirst” to not waste any time away from work (Pliny 1968, pp. 136–139). Throughout the Middle Ages, ancient biographical traditions and the use of anecdotes were continued in hagiographies, the life stories of Christian saints (Sousslouff 1997, p. 38; Kris and Kurz 1980, pp. 57–58). Only with Tuscan Renaissance biographers, most prominently by Giorgio Vasari in Le Vite De Piu Eccellenti Pittori, Sculptori E Architettori [The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects] (1550 and 1568), the anecdote was revived as a narrative device to record artists’ lives. According to Catherine Sousslouff, such biographical narratives depended on only two aspects: anecdotes about the artist’s life and descriptions of their artworks (1997, p. 26). Further, the artist’s autochthony—an innate ability, skill, or talent based on a person’s place of birth or upbringing—became highly important (pp.  44–56). It served a political function in promoting notions of patriotism and nationalism. Despite earlier texts, the Vasarian model influenced biographers the most.3 Vasari discusses an artist’s entire life, using empirical data from archival research, historical documents, oral history and earlier written records, in situ inspection and critique of artworks, and personal encounters. However, critiquing his sources only inconsistently led to mistakes, oversights, and misinterpretations (Guerico 2006, pp. 26–28; Kisters 2017, p. 27). Sandra Kisters argues that “a large number” of artists had died already or were not personally known to Vasari, who also writes “about several artworks without having seen them himself”, and “uses anecdotes told or written to him by others” (2017, p.  26). Nevertheless, Vasari was the first to consult written documents to narrate an artist’s life. Furthermore, he matched the artworks with their creator’s

  THE LIVES OF THE ARTISTS 

17

personality, revealing an underlying idea that the latter portrays himself in the former, thus constituting an early version of a life-and-work model.4 Inspired by Vasari, Carel van Mander created Het Schilder-Boeck [The Book of Painting] (1604 and 1618), focussing on Dutch, Flemish, and German artists. The “Dutch Vasari”, as he is sometimes called, stresses “the standard of craftsmanship of his fifteenth-century predecessors and the value of training, experience, and hard work above genius and scholarship” (Woods 1999, pp. 126–7) but uses anecdotes extensively to narrate artists’ lives. One of the most popular anecdotes from the Renaissance concerns a close relationship, even friendship, between artist and client, such as in the biographies of Giotto di Bondone, Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, and Hans Holbein, expressing the fame and individual glory of, and respect given to the portrayed artists (Vasari 1998, pp. 27, 298; van Mander 1969, pp. 37, 87–88). Some artists are even godly, such as Leonardo da Vinci, who “is so divine that he leaves behind all other men and clearly makes himself known as a genius endowed by God” (Vasari 1998, p. 284), Michelangelo Buonarotti, who “the most benevolent Ruler of Heaven … sent to earth” (Vasari 1998, p. 414), and Holbein, born under a “fortunate celestial influence” (van Mander 1969, p. 83). During the late eighteenth century, books focussing on a single artist were published, such as The Life of the Celebrated Painter Masaccio (Thomas Patch 1770), Testimonies to the Genius and Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds (Samuel Felton 1792), and Some Anecdotes of the Life of Julio Bonasoni (George Cumberland and Luigi Majno 1793). Then, the term monograph referred to a treatise focussing on a single defined topic, usually in Natural History (Guerico 2006, p.  3). It was first used for an artist’s biography by Ludwig Schorn in 1819, reviewing Adam Weise’s Albrecht Dürer und sein Zeitalter [Albrecht Dürer and his Epoch] (1819) (Guerico 2006, pp. 3–4). Regardless of terminology, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, the artist’s monograph was widely adopted in Europe as a form of writing, introducing the life-and-work model to artist’s biographies (Guerico 2006, p.5). It was heavily influenced by and dependent on the Vasarian biographical model, and the notion of a linked, thus reciprocally explanatory, artist’s work and life. It combined biography and literary fiction, utilising documents and sources concerning the artist’s story, and critically evaluated artworks and their attribution, compiling comprehensive lists of works (Guerico 2006, pp. 4–5). During the first half of the nineteenth century, connoisseurship, aiming to verify originals and create a complete list of an individual’s works, the catalogue raisonné, was a distinguishing feature of the artist’s monograph (Guerico 2006, p. 40). The oeuvre was seen as a “multidimensional whole”, holding and revealing information about the development of the artist’s personality and artistic practice (Guerico 2006, pp.  80, 91–96). In the second half of the century, biographical aspects became more important again, eventually being placed above (Art) History and connoisseurship. Gabriele Guerico observes that “the study of the oeuvre required specialised means, and therefore found its warmest reception among art historians and connoisseurs. In contrast, the study of

18 

T. J. YU-KIENER

biography verged on the novelistic and reached a much broader audience” (2006, p. 149).5 The field of Art History quickly adopted the artist’s monograph as one of its essential sources and products (Sousslouff 1997, pp. 38, 77–88). Despite some scholarly criticism, the nineteenth- and twentieth-century conceptions of an artist were based on the Vasarian model and its fourteenth- and fifteenth-­ century predecessors, depicting artists as heroes (Sousslouff 1997, p.  93). From the 1880s onwards, several multi-volume series on Renaissance and Modern artists introduced numerous artists’ lives and works to a wide readership.6 With the dawn of the twentieth century, art-historical scholars explored the artist’s role in society and culture more broadly. Also, more concepts of artists appeared, such as the clinically mad genius, the unappreciated, the loner, the revolutionary, the nobleman, the bohemian. Positioning artists “ideal and absolute” and their biographies “isolated from other kinds of biographies” textualised artists “differently from other human beings”, creating a mythical, legendary, and heroic status for them, a situation that remained unchanged until the mid-twentieth century (1997, pp. 101, 109, 111–112). Thus, like their predecessors, the artist’s monograph created a canonical feedback loop, confirming and enshrining the individual’s position and status. Consequently, those publications became crucial in the commodification of artists by the art market (Kisters 2017, pp.  9–15; Salas 2007, p.47). Using eulogy and novelistic devices, monographs (re-)confirmed canonical status, uniqueness, importance, and economic value while also pushing for the (re) discovery of neglected individuals (Guerico 2006, pp. 236–237). For centuries, the core elements of art-historical biographies, the canon, the anecdote, and the life-and-work model, have prevailed. When examining the artist’s biography comic genre, one immediately recognises apparent parallels to those long-established biographical traditions in Art History. Their continuous use in the comic medium is explored here using two corpora.

Corpus One: Biographical Comics of the 1940s In March 1942, the new artist’s biography comic genre was instigated by the American publisher M. L. J. Magazines, Inc., releasing a comic narrative on Leonardo da Vinci in Blue Ribbon Comics Vol. 1, No.  22. It inaugurated a publishing boom of at least 25 biographical comic strips about canonical visual artists, released between 1942 and 1949  in educational youth magazines in America. Leonardo da Vinci was portrayed most often, appearing in at least four graphic narratives, a choice heavily influenced by the established Western artistic canon and its fascination with creative Renaissance individuals. Indeed, almost one in two biographical comic strips about canonical artists featured a Renaissance artist. In drawing from while also contributing to the canon of Art History, those narratives about Leonardo da Vinci participated in a canonical feedback loop enshrining his position further. As the first of a new kind of

  THE LIVES OF THE ARTISTS 

19

comic genre and featuring the most popular subject of the decade, they also qualify as fitting representatives of the early form of the artist’s biography comic genre. The narratives “Leonardo da Vinci” (Blue Ribbon Comics Vol. 1, No. 22, March 1942), “Leonardo da Vinci: Painter and Scientist. Pioneer in Engineering” (Real Life Comics Vol. 3, No. 2, November 1942), and “500 Years Too Soon!” (True Comics No. 58, March 1947), frequently employ the anecdote as a narrative tool and confirm the popular image of the artist as a genius, likely inspired by Vasari’s biography. The comparison reveals multiple anecdotes already found in the sixteenth-century biography. For example, Leonardo da Vinci surpassing his master Andrea Verrocchio at an early age, constituting the motif of artistic destiny, is mentioned twice by Vasari: “Leonardo da Vinci, then a young boy and Andrea’s pupil, assisted him in this work, painting an angel by himself, which was much better than the other details” (1998, p.  236); and “This was the reason why Andrea would never touch colours again, angered that a young boy understood them better than he did” (p. 287). Directly linked to artistic destiny are stories about genius, expressed through exceptionally high levels of versatility and the ability to excel in many fields. In addition to representing him as a painter, sculptor, and draughtsman, comic strips about Leonardo da Vinci show him as a botanist, biologist, anatomist, physiognomist, inventor, musician, astronomer, city planner, and landscape designer as well as military, civil, aerial, and naval engineer. Vasari describes how Leonardo da Vinci also revolutionised these fields with his contributions: a genius endowed by God …a very fine geometrician …not only work[ing] in sculpture but in architecture [… making] many drawings of both ground-plans and other structures …discuss[ing] to make the River Arno a canal from Pisa to Florence [… who] drew plans for mills, fulling machines, and implements that could be driven by water-power …construct[ing] models and designs showing how to excavate and bore through mountains …and [who] with the use of levers, winches, and hoists, showed how to lift and pull heavy weights, as well as methods of emptying out harbours and pumps for removing water from great depth [… giving humankind] a more perfect understanding of the anatomy of horses and of men. (1998, pp. 284–6, 298)

Furthermore, the comic strips feature anecdotes about Leonardo da Vinci’s powerful clients and friends, such as Francis I of France, already favoured by Vasari (1998, pp.  293, 298). The narrative “500 Years Too Soon!” (1947) shows Leonardo da Vinci living a hermit-like life, starting work even before the monks rise and refusing to eat to not pause his work—a clear reminiscence to Protogenes’ asceticism described by Pliny (1968, pp. 136–139). Leonardo da Vinci’s obsession with flight is another crucial element of the comic strips, depicting the artist building and testing his flying machine, risking his own or his assistant’s life. The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci in two

20 

T. J. YU-KIENER

volumes (Edward MacCurdy 1938) and Leonardo Da Vinci. The Tragic Pursuit Of Perfection (Antonina Vallentin 1938), published in Toronto and New York, respectively, and featuring writings on flight and sketches of flying machines, might have contributed to the corresponding focus. However, Vasari apparently inspired scenes showing Leonardo da Vinci releasing birds on the market, as in “Leonardo da Vinci” (1942) (Fig. 1) and “500 Years Too Soon!” (1947). [W]hen passing by the place where birds being sold, he [Leonardo da Vinci] would often take them out of their cages with his own hands, and after paying the seller the price that was asked of him, he would set them free in the air, restoring to them the liberty they had lost (Vasari 1998, p. 286).

The above observations reveal that many anecdotes, already used by Vasari, reappeared in biographical comics about Leonardo da Vinci in the 1940s. At least seven motifs can be identified: Artistic Destiny, Genius, Revolutionising an Art-Form, Powerful Clients, Obsession, Risk-Taking, and a Hermit-like Life. Naturally, the lines between them are at times blurred. Between 1942 and 1972, these motifs, at least partly deriving from Vasari, were not only used to tell Leonardo da Vinci’s life but the lives of other artists too. While some were also painters, such as Winslow Homer, many worked in different media, such as the architect and city planner Christopher Wren, the engineer and architect Alexander Gustave Eiffel, the inventor of photography Louis Daguerre, the illustrator John James Audubon, and the sculptresses Malvina Hoffman and Vinnie Ream. Thus, by featuring no longer in one specific artist’s life story but biographical graphic narratives about visual artists in

Fig. 1  [Uncredited] (a & w), “Leonardo Da Vinci”. Blue Ribbon Comics Vol. 1, No. 22 (March 1942), M. L. J. Magazines Inc., [p. 3], Leonardo da Vinci frees birds on a market

  THE LIVES OF THE ARTISTS 

21

general, those themes turned into genre-specific tropes of the artist’s biography comic. One narrative of the 1940s merits special attention in the context of art-­ historical biography writing traditions being employed in the comic medium. The two-episode series “The Story of Painting” (Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact Vol. 3, No. 13–14, February–March 1949) is remarkable, featuring several canonical painters and citing numerous anecdotes already found in the writings of Pliny, Vasari and van Mander. The 12-page narrative briefly discusses the origins of painting before featuring anecdotes about artists, such as Apollodorus, Zeuxis, and Apelles. Nevertheless, the story confuses the anecdote about Zeuxis painting grapes. The story runs that Parrhasios and Zeuxis entered into a competition, Zeuxis exhibited a picture of some grapes, so true that birds flew up to the wall of the stage […] After this we learn that Zeuxis painted a boy carrying grapes, and when the birds flew down to settle on them, he was vexed with his own work. (Pliny 1968, pp. 110–1)

However, the comic strip credits Apollodorus with painting the fruits, while Zeuxis is depicted dying from laughter, looking at one of his works.7 A scene showing Apelles discussing with Alexander the Great an equestrian portrait and letting the horse judge its quality is a combination of several anecdotes. The charm of his [Apelles’] manner had won him the regard of Alexander the Great, who was a frequent visitor to the studio … but when the king happened to discourse at length in the studio upon things he knew nothing about, Apelles would pleasantly advise him to be silent …It were vain to enumerate the number of times he painted Alexander and Philip …A horse also exists, or did exist, painted for a competition, … when he saw that his rivals were likely to be placed above him through intrigue, he caused some horses to be brought in and showed them each picture in turn; they neighed only at the horse of Apelles …He also painted … a portrait of Antigonos in amour advancing with his horse. (Pliny 1968, pp. 124–5, 128–31)

After a discussion of Medieval painting, the section on the Renaissance features further anecdotes. For example, Giotto di Bondone is depicted painting a kneeling man drinking water who appears remarkably lifelike, constituting a new artistic quality and authenticity, and drawing a perfect circle without using a compass. Vasari described both episodes in almost identical wording: And among these scenes, an especially beautiful one concerns a thirsty man whose desire to drink is clearly evident and who drinks from a spring kneeling down upon the ground with such great and truly marvellous emotion that it almost seems as if he is a real person drinking …Giotto …took a sheet of paper and a brush dipped in red, pressed his arm to the side to make a compass of it, and with

22 

T. J. YU-KIENER

a turn of his hand made a circle so even in its shape and outline that it was a marvel to behold. (1998, pp. 19, 22)

The narrative then traces the evolution of Renaissance painting before singling out Michelangelo Buonarotti as particularly important, showing the artist working on the Sistine Chapel, designing the scaffolding and a unique hat allowing him to work at night. Once again, Vasari seems to have inspired the scenes: And so Michelangelo ordered scaffolding built on poles which did not touch the wall, the method for fitting out vaults he later taught to Bramante and others …His sobriety made him very restless and he rarely slept, and very often during the night he would rise, being unable to sleep, and would work with his chisel, having fashioned a helmet made of pasteboard holding a candle over the middle of his head which shed light where he was working without tying his hands. (1998, pp. 439–40, 475)

Briefly mentioning Leonardo da Vinci, the narrative also features an anecdote about the Van Eyck brothers inventing oil painting (Fig. 2), told by Carel van Mander with remarkably similar wording: Johannes [Jan van Eyck] had painted a panel on which he had spent much time … he varnished the finished panel … and placed it in the sunlight to dry. The parts of the panel may not have been joined or glued sufficiently, or the heat of the sun may have been too strong; the panel burst at the joints and fell apart. Johannes … took a resolve that the sun should not damage his work ever again […] He had already examined many oils and other similar materials supplied by nature, and had found that that linseed oil and nut oil had the best drying ability of them all

Fig. 2  [Uncredited] (a & w). “The Story of Painting [2]”. Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact Vol. 4, No. 14 (March 1949), Geo. A. Pflaum Publisher Inc., p. 13, Jan van Eyck invents oil painting

  THE LIVES OF THE ARTISTS 

23

[…] So Johannes found, after many experiments, that colors mixed with these oils could be handled easily, that they dried well, became hard, and, once dry, could resist water. (1969, p.5)

In its summarising verdict, “The Story of Painting” (1949) closely follows Vasari in arguing that Giotto di Bondone and Michelangelo Buonarotti deserve extra remembering for their extraordinary artistic achievements. This first corpus shows that the comic strips of the 1940s featuring canonical artists continued multiple established art-historical traditions of the artist’s biographies. In portraying confirmed members of the Western artistic canon, the narratives strengthened and enforced the canonical status of those artists and their artworks, creating canonical feedback loops. Frequently, the comic strips use the anecdote as a narrative device, while often strikingly similarly worded episodes indicate Pliny, Vasari and van Mander as the sources. However, limitations regarding length, complexity, and artistic quality, with the drawings lacking depth and details and poor-quality printing, prevented these early biographical comic strips from employing the life-and-work model. The popularity of Renaissance artists reveals the influence of twentieth-­ century art-historical perceptions on the artist’s biography comic genre during the 1940s. The graphic narratives about Leonardo da Vinci demonstrate how anecdotes from the artist’s life, many inspired by Vasari’s Lives, have turned into several genre-specific tropes.

Corpus II: Biographical Graphic Novels of the 2010s After its establishment in the 1940s in educational US youth magazines, the artist’s biography comic genre evolved throughout the second half of the twentieth century, incorporating longer and more complex narratives, often no longer suitable for juveniles due to explicit content. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, another publishing boom began, comprising at least 200 biographical graphic novels about canonical visual artists, released between 2000 and 2019.8 Two such publications, Dalí (2012) by French comic artist Edmond Baudoin and Rembrandt (2013) by Dutch illustrator Typex (Raymond Koot), are chosen to demonstrate the continuous use of art-­ historical life-writing traditions in contemporary comic production and the prevailing of genre-specific tropes. However, the narratives’ length and complexity aim for a more mature readership than their 1940s predecessors and allow for a more in-depth, personal and critical engagement with the artists and their works, and the use of the life-and-work model. In 2012 the Centre Pompidou in Paris commissioned the seasoned graphic novelist Edmond Baudoin to create a graphic novel about the Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dalí. The 136-page narrative about the artist’s life and art took only 18 months to complete and features a 20-page appendix including a biography and bibliography. In its approach, Dalí is very similar to an art-historical artist’s monograph, covering the individual’s entire life, employing the life-and-work

24 

T. J. YU-KIENER

model and creating a list of the most famous artworks. Also, it relies on traditional anecdotes to trace the artist’s life, including his training, and the creation of artworks. For example, Dalí befriends the Surrealist Federico Garcia Lorca and Luis Buñuel in Madrid, with the three being in almost constant competition (Baudoin 2012, pp. 45–46). Also, he becomes increasingly eccentric due to his growing fame and wealth, leading to substantial conflicts with his clients, such as the New  York department store Bonwit Teller (Baudoin 2012, pp. 87–88). Pliny already recorded the eccentricity of Zeuxis and Parrhasios (1968, pp.  106–107, 114–115), as Vasari did for Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarotti (1998, pp.  288, 296, 427, 438, 466). Also, the theme of the uncompromising artist who has conflicts with (potential) clients has a long tradition. Furthermore, Dalí contains several genre-specific tropes of artist’s biography comics. For example, showing Dalí drawing and painting at a very young age constitutes the trope of artistic destiny (Baudoin 2012, pp. 32, 37). Dalí also features the trope of a powerful client in a commission by Pope Pius XII (Baudoin 2012, p.  114). Unsurprisingly, the graphic novel depicts Dalí obsessed with his art and his wife Gala, and himself and his own immortality (Baudoin 2012, pp. 75, 115, 118–119). Taking personal, artistic, and financial risks to pursue various obsessions is another trope featured in Dalí (Baudoin 2012, p. 88, 125). The narrative establishes an emotional link between the artist’s life and work, following the life-and-work model of the artist’s monograph. Indeed, as Dalí’s art was autobiographical, the approach seems only natural. For example, after falling out with his sister Anna Maria due to her book on their shared childhood, Dalí painted Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity (1954) and disowned her (Baudoin 2012, p.  116–117). Also, the graphic novel first explains Dalí’s symbolism behind the crutches, the tower, and more (Baudoin 2012, pp.  26–37, 100). It then refers back to them throughout the narrative, presenting the artworks as expressions of crucial emotional and psychological topics in the artist’s life. Finally, in its entirety, the graphic novel introduces and discusses a large proportion of the artist’s oeuvre, listing the works in the appendix and mirroring a traditional artist’s monograph. The life-and-work model, an essential narrative device of traditional art-­ historical biographies, links an artist’s story and artistic output on an emotional level. Baudoin uses the principle, “reverse-engineering” Dalí’s famous paranoiac-­critical method: The Spanish Surrealist based his artworks on his dreams, interpreting the latter with the former. Baudoin turns the process around, trying to guess, illustrate, and interpret Dalí’s original dreams that had inspired the paintings, calling it “the paranoiac-critical method of [Dalí’s] paranoiac-­critical method” (2017). This approach resembles the core idea of the life-and-work model, trying to understand an artist through their artworks and comprehending the latter by knowing the former. Further, in showing Salvador Dalí placing himself in the lineage of canonical painters (Fig. 3), Dalí visualises an essential element of the canon of Art History: referring to

  THE LIVES OF THE ARTISTS 

25

canonical predecessors and their art, trying to gain status as their canonical successor. In contrast to traditional art-historical writings, Baudoin inserts himself into his narrative in an autobiographical manner. First, he tries to keep his distance, using proxy narrators. However, later, Baudoin shows himself working on and narrating Dalí, talking to a fictional character, comparing his and Dalí’s life, and explaining his approaches. The use of several parallel voices, narrating differing aspects of Dalí’s story simultaneously, constitutes another difference to Art History’s biographical traditions. The second example of this corpus was commissioned by the national museum of the Netherlands, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, asking Typex to

Fig. 3  Edmond Baudoin, Dalí (2012), SelfMadeHero, p. 108, Salvador Dalí inspired by and as successor of Jan Vermeer, Diego Velázquez, and Jan van Eyck

26 

T. J. YU-KIENER

create a graphic novel about the Old Master Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, whose artworks are the highlights of the museum. In April 2013, the massive 238-page semi-fictional graphic novel Rembrandt was published. Each of the 11 chapters is named after either a person (Elsje, Jan, Saskia, Geertje, Hendrickje, Cornelia, Titus, Rembrandt) or an animal (Hansken, Conus Marmoreus, Rattus Rattus) significant for the respective episode and to Rembrandt, examining a close relationship or a critical moment in the artist’s life. The narrative omits the artist’s childhood almost entirely, diverging from the traditional art-historical biographical model. On the one hand, the book is essentially an anthology of anecdotal episodes grouped into chapters. On the other hand, the narrative features several traditional anecdotes from art-historical biographies and contains multiple genre-­ specific tropes of the artist’s biography comic. For example, the motif of competing artists features more than once. Rembrandt’s rivalry with his lifelong artist-friend Jan Lievens and his apprentice Govert Flinck is depicted, with Flinck fooling his master by painting a guilder on the floor that the latter attempts to pick up (Typex 2013, pp. 57, 91)—which is obviously reminiscent of Zeuxis attempting to pull aside a curtain painted by Parrhasios (Pliny 1968, pp. 110–111). Further, when Rembrandt continues working rather than drinking with his friend Lievens, paints while his wife Saskia is dying, and does not attend his long-term partner Hendrickje’s funeral, he is depicted as hermit-like and obsessed with his art (Typex 2013, pp. 53, 92–93, 181). Typex’s portrays Rembrandt as arrogant, eccentric, and stubborn, which leads the artist to take significant personal and financial risks in declining profitable business opportunities, rejecting work and losing (potential) commissions due to his temper (Typex 2013, pp. 226–230). As mentioned above, such motifs have a long tradition in artists’ biographies. The graphic novel does not draw an emotional connection between the artist’s personal story and creative output, avoiding the life-and-work model. However, this was not the case during the research phase. Typex (2017) studied the numerous self-portraits in preparation for the commission, as “the only way to get really close to Rembrandt is to look at his self-portraits”. Panel borders designed like mirror frames and a large actual mirror, featuring throughout the book, are subtle reminders of the importance of self-portraits for Typex’s understanding of Rembrandt as an artist and human being (Typex 2013, pp. 17, 94, 142–143, 160, 222, 237). This notion that understanding an artist’s work equals understanding his personality and innermost feelings is the quintessential idea of the life-and-work model but does not explicitly feature in the publication. Typex shares with Vasari the utilisation of their own experiences as artists when writing about a colleague. Identifying with his subjects, for Typex (2017) “the life of an artist in Amsterdam” formed an autobiographical “starting point”, while he also “was bankrupt just like Rembrandt” exclusively working Rembrandt over three years. Besides, he included his family and friends when

  THE LIVES OF THE ARTISTS 

27

the original characters’ appearance was not well enough known (Typex 2013, pp. 25, 185, 198). Naturally, there are differences to a traditional art-historical biography, with the semi-fictional nature of the publication being the most obvious one. Neither the museum nor the graphic novelist were aiming for an accurate book. Consequently, Typex (2017) freely combines and rearranges various events and dates from Rembrandt’s life, making the narrative paramount and not wanting the “facts to get into the way of the story”. Another dissimilarity is the focus on the role of the people around Rembrandt. In particular, women, such as his wife Saskia, his long-term partner Hendrickje, and his daughter Cornelia, receive considerable attention. Thus, the life of the Old Master is being told through their eyes (Fig. 4). The graphic novels of the 2010s, represented by Dalí (2012) and Rembrandt (2013), make use of the life-and-work model, with the former linking the artist’s emotional state and artistic output explicitly. However, both comic artists used the life-and-work model for their research, trying to understand their respective subjects through their art. The two case studies feature many art-historical anecdotes, such as the competition between artists, conflicts with clients, and eccentricity. In addition, they employ several genre-specific tropes of the artist’s biography comic, such as artistic destiny, powerful clients, obsession, and risk-taking, confirming the tropes’ prevalence and importance. Both graphic narratives draw from the established canon of Art History for their subjects while contributing to the same canon in confirming and enforcing Salvador Dalí and Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn’s canonical status and the canon’s significance in general. Consequently, the biographical graphic novels of the 2010s, just as the biographical comic strips of the 1940s, create canonical feedback loops. Further, Dalí explicitly depicts the referencing of canonical artists and their work to gain canonical status, a critical element of the canon and its history. It creates a lineage of canonical, hence legitimate and artistically valuable, artistic practice and practitioners, increasing the economic value of predecessor and successor as well as their art.

Conclusion The main aspects of biographical life-writings about artists, namely, the canon of Art History, the anecdote, and the life-and-work model, have since 1942 found a new home in the artist’s biography comic genre. However, the 80-year-­ old genre faces multiple challenges. It has somewhat emancipated itself from the art-historical traditions but remains predominantly reliant on these norms. Firstly, the portrayed artists still mirror established Art History in depicting canonical white male artists and marginalising women and non-white artists. Also, just like traditional art-historical writings, the graphic narratives create canonical feedback loops.

28 

T. J. YU-KIENER

Fig. 4  Typex, Rembrandt (2013), SelfMadeHero, p. 127, Hendrickje doing household chores and attending to Rembrandt’s sexual needs to facilitate his artistic work

Secondly, the graphic novels of the 2010s do attempt to take a new angle on an individual but eventually fall back on established narrative devices already in use for centuries, such as the anecdote and the life-and-work model. Further, the genre-specific tropes, still in use in the twenty-first century, result from a standardisation process during the 1940s, which relied on Renaissance authors inspired by anecdotes from Antiquity. These first two points prove that

  THE LIVES OF THE ARTISTS 

29

respective comic narratives have been following the same outdated patterns for 80 years, no longer befitting a twenty-first-century publication. Thirdly, neither a straightforward art-historical text nor a clear-cut, purely entertaining leisure reading, the genre is still searching for its place in the book market. The former would require an academic level of research and execution, including a bibliography and referencing. However, mainly considering a publication’s economics, the latter would oppose lengthy research periods and higher printing costs due to appendices. Both examples from the 2010s are of substantial length, with Dalí including a bibliography and a summarising biography, and were commissioned by major art institutions. On the one hand, it shows that graphic novelists engage in-depth with the portrayed artists for the reader’s benefit. On the other hand, it proves that the art and museum field is willing to engage with the medium and the genre. However, without support from art museums, such comprehensive publications pose a financial risk for all stakeholders. Simultaneously, if graphic novels about artists are bound to institutions often regarded as the guardians of Art History, they will remain tied to art-historical traditions of biography writing. The challenges faced by the artist’s biography comic genre boil down to the simple questions, “What does it want to be?” and “Whom does it want to talk to?” However, the artist’s biography comic genre holds much potential as well. In being intrinsically graphic, comics are possibly the most suitable medium to talk about visual artists. Traditional art-historical writings attempt to describe an artistic output in a literary medium, relying on verbal descriptions of artworks or photographic reproduction, often standing separate from the text. In contrast, graphic narratives offer a unique way to explore and explain an individual’s artistic oeuvre in being able to depict it. Comics can show the various steps in the creation of an artwork, and describe and interpret an artist’s life far more immersive than purely literary approaches. Finally, as a popular medium, graphic narratives can engage audiences otherwise not interested in visual artists’ biographies and art-historical topics. Nevertheless, possibly the genre’s most significant advantage lies in the fact that it is not art-historical writing. Although it has been the case for 80 years, there is no obligation to continue following the art-historical traditions and using respective narrative devices. If the genre frees itself from these conventions, it could advocate for a more inclusive art world. Indeed, it has already started to do so as graphic novel biographies about comic artists, such as Wilhelm Busch, Joe Shuster, Winsor McCay, and Shotaro Ishinomori (石ノ森 章太郎), treat their subjects just like canonical artists.9 Firstly, when no longer relying on the canon of Art History when choosing a subject, biographical graphic novels can provide a stage for less well-known or less established artists, including comic artists. Consequently, such publications would no longer create canonical feedback loops. On the contrary, they would question, negate, and possibly correct the established canon, thus breaking the perpetual canonical confirmation cycle.

30 

T. J. YU-KIENER

Secondly, leaving the traditional art-historical anecdote behind would allow the genre to create something entirely new. This assessment is particularly evident when considering that the genre-specific tropes developed out of anecdotes about Leonardo da Vinci’s life and have since been applied to hundreds of artists. Consequently, each of those graphic narratives has—in a way—been telling the story of Leonardo da Vinci. Therefore, the Renaissance artist has become the twentieth-century comics standard to identify and measure an artist—not unlike Polykleitos’ statue setting an example in sculpture some 2500 years earlier. Here the artist’s biography comic genre could change the public perception of what defines an artist in developing new tropes and possibly new narrative devices. Typex’s Rembrandt is an excellent example of such a novel approach. The book does not explore the Old Master in a traditional way. Instead, it primarily tells the subject’s story through the eyes and experiences of the people, mostly women, around Rembrandt. Rembrandt highlights less the painter and printmaker’s successes but others’ sacrifices that allowed them to happen. Thus, it does not negate the former’s artistic achievements but gives credit to the latter, who have far too often remained unmentioned in the canon. Such new approaches of the artist’s biography comic genre, potentially leading to new genre-specific tropes, hold power to change the definition and perception of past and present artists fundamentally, thus possibly revolutionising the art-historical canon itself.

Notes 1. The first academy, the Academia del Disegno, founded in Florence in 1563, followed by academies in Perugia (1573), Bologna (1582) and Rome (1593) (Barker, Webb, and Woods, 1999, pp. 14–16). 2. For further detail on these feminist art historians, cf. Wallin Wictorin and Nordenstam, chapter “Feminist Art History as an Approach to Research on Comics: Meta Reflections on Studies of Swedish Feminist Comics”, and Olsza, chapter “Towards Feminist Comics Studies: Feminist Art History and the Study of Women’s Comix in the 1970s in the United States”. 3. Earlier biographies include Filippo Villani’s Cronica or Storia Fiorentina [Florentine History] (1380s), featuring famous Florentine artists including Giotto di Bondone, Gianlorenzo Ghiberti’s I Commentarii [The Commentaries] (1440s), featuring the lives of some artists and himself, and Antonio Manetti’s The Life of Brunelleschi (c.1480). 4. For further detail on Vasari, cf. Mutard, Chapter “From Giotto to Drnaso: The Common Well of Pictorial Schema in ‘High’ Art and ‘Low’ Comics”. 5. For further detail on connoisseurship, cf. Connerty, chapter “Connoisseurship, Attribution, and Comic Strip Art: The Case of Jack B. Yeats”. 6. Examples included the Illustrated Biographies of the Great Artists series (1879–95), the Librairie de l’Art series (1886–1906), the Künstler Monographien series (1894–1941), and the Great Masters in Painting and Sculpture series (1899–1910).

  THE LIVES OF THE ARTISTS 

31

7. Frequently mentioned, the legendary death of Zeuxis, is unfortunately never supported by any source: When painting Aphrodite, the old lady who had commissioned the painting insisted on modelling for it. The discrepancy between the Goddess’ supposed divine and youthful beauty and the wrinkled old lady made the artist laugh so hard he died. 8. For an extensive discussion of twenty-first century publishing booms of biographical graphic novels about iconic visual artists, and their origin in respective comics strips of the 1940s and art-historical traditions of biography writing, see Tobias Yu-Kiener, “European Biographical Graphic Novels about Canonical Painters: An Analysis of Form and Function in the Context of Art Museums” (PhD thesis, University of the Arts London, 2021). 9. Thierry Smolderen & Jean-Philippe Bramanti (2000, 2002, 2004, 2006), McCay Vol. 1–4; Sugar Sato (2012), Shotaro Ishinomori; Willi Bloess (2016), Wilhelm Busch lässt es krachen [Whilem Busch lets it rip]; Julian Voloj & Thomas Campi (2018), Truth, Justice and The American Way: The Joe Shuster Story.

References Barker, Emma, Nick Webb & Kim Woods. 1999. Historical Introduction: The Idea of the Artist. In The Changing Status of the Artist. ed. Emma Barker, Nick Webb & Kim Woods, pp. 7–25. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Baudoin, Edmond. 2012. Dalí. Marcinelle: Éditions Dupuis. Baudoin, Edmond. Interview by Tobias J. Yu-Kiener, interpretation by Laetitia Forst. November 15, 2017. Groensteen, Thierry. 2018. Biographies of famous painters in comics. What becomes of the painting? ImageText. 9:2. https://imagetextjournal.com/biographies-­of-­ famous-­painters-­in-­comics-­what-­becomes-­of-­the-­paintings/. Accessed 25 November 2021. Guerico, Gabriele. 2006. Art as Existence. The Artist’s Monograph and Its Project. Massachusetts/London: The MIT Press. Kisters, Sandra. 2017. The Lure of the Biographical. On the (Self-)Representation of Modern Artists. Amsterdam: Valiz. Kris, Ernst and Otto Kurz. 1980. Die Legende vom Künstler. Ein Geschichtlicher Versuch. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. van Mander, Carel. 1969. Dutch and Flemish Painters, Carel van Mander. Translation and Introduction Constant van de Wall. 1936. Reprint, New York, N.Y.: Arno Press. Mansfield, J.  Carroll. 1944. Highlights of History. The Man Who Had Everything. Famous Funnies. 114 (January 1944). New  York, N.Y.: Famous Funnies Inc.: [p.51] no page Nochlin, Linda. 1973. Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?. In Art and Sexual Politics, ed. Thomas B. Hess and Elizabeth Baker, pp. 194–205. New York, N.Y.: Collier Books. Perry, Gill. 1999. Preface. In Academies, Museums and Canons of Art, ed. Gill Perry and Colin Cunningham, pp. 6–17. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Pliny [the Elder]. 1968. The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art. Ed. and translated by K. Jex-Blake, with commentary and historical introduction by E. Sellers and additional notes by H.  L. Urlichs, preface and bibliography by R.  V. Schoders, Chicago, Ill.: Argonaut, Inc. Publishers.

32 

T. J. YU-KIENER

Pollock, Griselda. 1999. Differencing the Canon. Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art Histories. London/New York, N.Y.: Routledge. Pollock, Griselda. 2003. Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art. London: Routledge. Salas, Charles G. 2007. Introduction: The Essential Myth?. In The Life & The Work. Art and Biography, ed. Charles G. Salas, pp. 1–27. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute. Silver, Larry. 2019. Introduction. Canons in World Perspective—Definitions, Deformations, and Discourses. In Canons and Values. Ancient to Modern, ed. Larry Silver and Kevin Terraciano, pp. 1–21. Los Angeles, Calif.: Getty Publications. Sousslouff, Catherine M. 1997. The Absolute Artist. A Historiography of a Concept. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press. Typex. 2013. Rembrandt. Amsterdam: Oog & Blik. Typex. Interview by Tobias J. Yu-Kiener. October 30, 2017. [Uncredited] (a & w). 1942a. Leonardo Da Vinci. Blue Ribbon Comics. 1:22 (March 1942), St. Louis, Mo./New York, N.Y.: M. L. J. Magazines, Inc.: pp. [52–57,] 1–6. [Uncredited] (a & w). 1942b. Leonardo da Vinci: Painter And Scientist. Pioneer in Engineering. Real Life Comics. 3:2 [No.8] (November 1942), New  York, N.Y.: Nedor Publishing: [pp. 62–66] no page. [Uncredited] (a & w). 1947. 500 Years Too Soon! True Comics. 58 (March 1947), Chicago, Ill./New York, N.Y.: True Comics Inc. (a subsidiary of the publishers of Parents’ Magazine) [The Parents’ Magazine Press, Division of The Parental Institute, Inc.]: [pp. 3–10] no page. [Uncredited] (a & w). 1949a. The Story Of Painting [1]. Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact. 4:13 (February 1949), Dayton, Ohio: George A.  Pflaum Publisher, Inc.: pp. 20–27. [Uncredited] (a & w). 1949b. The Story Of Painting [2]. Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact. 4:14 (March 1949), Dayton, Ohio: George A. Pflaum Publisher, Inc.: pp. 9–13. Vasari, Giorgio. 1998. Giorgio Vasari. The Lives of the Artists. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella. 1991. Reprint, Oxford/New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press. Wittkower, Rudolf and Margot Wittkower. 1969. Born Under Saturn. The Character and Conduct of Artists: A Documented History from Antiquity to the French Revolution. London/New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton & Company. Woods, Kim. 1999. The status of the artist in Northern Europe in the sixteenth century. In The Changing Status of the Artist ed. Emma Barker, Nick Webb & Kim Woods, pp. 109–128. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Yu-Kiener, Tobias. 2021. European Biographical Graphic Novels about Canonical Painters: An Analysis of Form and Function in the Context of Art Museums. (PhD thesis, University of the Arts London, 2021).

Connoisseurship, Attribution, and Comic Strip Art: The Case of Jack B. Yeats Michael Connerty

Abstract  This chapter examines the relevance for comics historians of certain methodologies traditionally associated with art connoisseurship. The main focus is on the approach employed in the nineteenth century by Giovanni Morelli, which emphasized the importance of minor and unconsciously rendered details that offer clues regarding the identity of the artist. In the case of comic strips produced in the UK in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there is often no signature or other indication of authorship, and attribution, particularly of long-neglected work, can be challenging. The author uses his own experience researching the overlooked corpus of Irish painter and cartoonist Jack B. Yeats as a case study of the application of this methodology in identifying and cataloguing the work of an individual artist. There is also consideration given to the various ways that comics have increasingly been framed as art, consumed, collected, and assessed in ways more conventionally associated with the fine art world. Keywords  Connoisseurship • comic strips • Jack B. Yeats • Victorian comics • Giovanni Morelli

M. Connerty (*) Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dublin, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Gray, I. Horton (eds.), Seeing Comics through Art History, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8_3

33

34 

M. CONNERTY

For many the figure of the ar.t connoisseur conjures up unpleasant connotations of elitist gatekeeping and market-oriented materialism. The various “two-­ dimensional caricatures of the bogeyman connoisseur” (Opperman 1990, p. 10) emphasize different, sometimes contradictory, characteristics, but all are arguably rooted in the common suspicion of a powerful individual who can, apparently on a whim, dramatically reduce the monetary value of artworks being sold at auction, or irreparably damage institutional reputations by rubbishing claims regarding the authenticity of their collections. There is also a class dimension to the caricature of course, owing to historical conceptions of connoisseurship as a suitable activity for a “gentleman” (Freedberg 2006, p. 31), and its relationship to collecting, with all the hierarchies of taste and cultural condescension that might suggest. One of the chief criticisms aimed at connoisseurship in general, and individual experts in particular, is that, as practitioners of an inexact science, heavily reliant on personal intuition, connoisseurs are open to various institutional and commercial pressures in making their determinations, prompting one commentator to suggest that “the science of art could be taken in hand seriously only after all works of art had become public property” (Friedlander 1960, p. 180). While there may well be some historical factuality underlying these familiar characterizations, this is no basis on which to disregard the very real value of the activity itself, or to diminish the utility of many of its methods. Claims to authority with regard to matters of taste and aesthetics have not helped, but the connoisseurial skills of identification and attribution involve a specific form of expertise that is as indispensable to the production of comics histories as it is to the wider field of Art History. In what follows, as well as examining the relevance of connoisseurship for comics scholarship and for comics culture more generally, the principal focus will be on the methodology of attribution devised by perhaps the best-known connoisseur of the nineteenth century, Giovanni Morelli. The Morellian method offers an empirical approach to attribution that is of practical value in the cataloguing of a corpus of work by an individual artist, particularly so where a creator has been critically neglected or side-lined by established histories of the medium, as has been the case with Jack B. Yeats, a prolific contributor to various British comics between 1892 and 1917, and a central focus of this chapter.1 Yeats is best known as a painter, particularly in Ireland where he is a national figure, regarded as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. Historicization of a comic strip or an artwork is achieved through the construction of contextual networks that may be social, political, cultural, aesthetic, and so on, and different weightings and emphases may be accorded to any of these in the assessment and appraisal of individual works, or of groupings of works, but attribution remains a central activity for scholarship, for curation, for dissemination and reprinting, and for archiving. The work of the connoisseur in ensuring that a work of art meets the claims that are being made for it in the marketplace is important for all kinds of legal as well as ethical reasons, while curators and museums have an obligation not to mislead visitors regarding the details of attribution and dating (O’Connor 2004, p. 5). It is

  CONNOISSEURSHIP, ATTRIBUTION, AND COMIC STRIP ART: THE CASE… 

35

equally important to the scholar seeking to construct histories of artistic activity, of the relationships of artists to systems of patronage, the market, and each other, that they should present reliable, verifiable information regarding the origins of works of art. Clare Diamond argues that it is not possible to disentangle “the development of fine art as a discrete category of creative expression [from] the concurrent emergence of art as a market commodity” (2015, p. 26). She suggests that the art market has evolved, not as a result of some recent degeneration into crass commercialism, but that the consumerist function of art emerged in the eighteenth century, at the same time as the valorization of its autographic aspects, and associated concepts like authenticity and originality, all of which lend individual works their monetary value. In the case of comics, one notes that the recent accommodation of the medium within the academy is concurrent with its increasing commodification within the fine art world, and the increasing economic value placed on original artwork and rare publications. Following conventions in the literary and visual arts, artist identity and authorship are key considerations in the trade in this material, as much as they are in the scholarly assessment and historicization of it, though this emphasis was not always applied by the publishers who originally commissioned and distributed the work. Indeed, as Bart Beaty has pointed out, the concept of the comics “artist” is itself a relatively new one (2012, p. 74). Interestingly, from the perspective of Comics Studies, Diamond locates many of the legal and commercial changes to the commodification of art, and the conferring of rights in relation to the copying of works of art, to the lobbying of legislators pursued by William Hogarth in the early 1700s (2015, p. 34). Hogarth was arguing for the recognition of intellectual property rights for engravers, in response to the perennial problem of bootlegging, the profiting from imitation, or reproduction without permission, of work by others. He was as concerned by the risk to professional and artistic reputation owing to inferior craftsmanship in copies bearing the original engraver’s name as he was by any financial losses incurred, though this was certainly a consideration. The legislation that followed Hogarth’s protests enshrined a link between authenticity and monetary value, which would become central to the connoisseur’s profession in later years (Fyfe 1985). Art connoisseurship has a long history that can be traced from classical antiquity through the Renaissance, and figures like Giorgio Vasari, to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when an increase in collecting and art commerce also saw the publication of a number of theoretical works on authentication and attribution by writers like Filippo Baldinucci and André Félibien (Scallen 2003, p.  27). By the nineteenth century, there was a well-­ established culture of connoisseurship that saw experts building their reputations via the publication of catalogues raisonnées and the curation of exhibitions focused on the work of individual artists or schools. Advances in travel presented greater opportunities to visit various key galleries, religious sites, and so on, in order to engage directly with works of art. In the 1870s Giovanni Morelli visited the best-known collections in Europe and reevaluated the attributions

36 

M. CONNERTY

that were the foundation of many displays in galleries and museums. The novelty of his method resided in his insistence on the importance of the micro-­ elements of a work of art in reaching conclusions regarding identification. Rather than relying on the overall impression, he insisted on paying close attention to the rendering of, for example, eyes, ears, hands, or small details of clothing. Morelli made careful sketches in his notebooks in order to compare specificities in the rendering of ears by, for example, Mantegna and Botticelli (see Fig. 1). To quote a typical example in which he is reattributing to Michele the authorship of an altar painting in the Church of St. Anastasia in Verona: “This painter is more pointed in the foldings of his draperies, as well as in the fingers of his hands, which are always rather stumpy in Cavazzola” (Morelli 1883, p. 54). Rather than recurring themes and subject matter, Morelli focused on minute, apparently trivial, details, which he considered to be habitual, and unconscious, and the more uniquely revealing of the artist’s identity for those

Fig. 1  Illustration from Morelli, Giovanni. 1883. Italian Masters in German Galleries, translated by Louise Richter. London: George Bell and Sons

  CONNOISSEURSHIP, ATTRIBUTION, AND COMIC STRIP ART: THE CASE… 

37

reasons. These details, because they are relatively inconsequential, are not executed with the same degree of deliberation as the more immediately striking elements of a picture and are therefore less likely to be picked up and copied by pupils, followers, or other imitators, thus offering a more reliable means of attribution. There is an important sense in which this aspect of connoisseurship cannot be “taught” according to generally applicable rules but is based on a knowledge of idiosyncrasies and specificities that can only be acquired over time and through exposure to as great a sample of work as possible. Morelli regarded immersion in the work of a particular artist to the point of intimate familiarity as central to the activity of connoisseurship, and it would be difficult to argue that this is not the key factor in the ability to distinguish work by individual comics artists also. The Morellian method was most famously taken up by Bernard Berenson, who did acknowledge that documentary materials relating to history and tradition might help to confirm an attribution, though this was, for him, always supplementary to an identification based on style. He singled out his own preferred features of paintings as being more likely to be characteristic, for example, looking at the rendering of hair rather than of eyes, which he felt to be too central a component as to elude imitators. He insisted on an understanding of “the works of art themselves as information, and evidence, in a word, as material in the study of art” (1902, p. 119). Berenson’s insistence on the irrelevance of such factors as pictorial symbolism or historical context is one of the chief reasons why Morellian analysis, and his development of it, fell out of critical favour over the second half of the twentieth century, when such considerations became more central for art historians. He claimed not to be interested in Art History per se and focused on the aesthetic enjoyment of the individual work of art, arguing that everything one might need to know inhered in the work itself, through which one might discover the “sense of being in the presence of a given artistic personality” (1927, p. 83). In his time, Berenson exerted a substantial influence on the purchases made by American galleries in the building of their European collections during the first half of the twentieth century. Although Morelli’s approach has been criticized as being unscientific—his rival Wilhelm von Bode referred to him as a “quack doctor” (Bode 1891; quoted in Scallen 2003, p.  98)—his particular method, and connoisseurial attribution generally, can be compared to other professional activities that are accorded the status of a science. Handwriting analysis, for example, produces conclusions regarding the authorship of a given signature or page of written text that are regarded as irrefutable in courts of law, and such conclusions are based on a similar engagement with the formal properties of graphic material (O’Connor 2004, p. 7). Other commentators have also presented arguments in favour of connoisseurship based on analogy, one of the most convincing, and most often cited, being Ginzburg’s discussion of Morellian attribution as a deductive pursuit, comparable in many respects to the methodologies of both psychoanalysis (a relationship that Freud himself acknowledged) and criminal detection, as personified by Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional character, Sherlock

38 

M. CONNERTY

Holmes. Ginzburg situates Morelli within a “conjectural paradigm” that includes these and other late nineteenth-century developments in the sciences (Ginzburg 1980). Morelli himself had been trained in medicine initially, and the practice of hypothesizing from symptoms to their causes was a factor in the development of his theories in relation to art attribution. One of the more obvious parallels with criminal detection is that the connoisseur is working with the visible traces of activity, left behind inadvertently, and builds from these towards the identification of a specific person responsible for them—a murderous fiend in one case, a previously unrecognized artist in another. The link is made explicit by Doyle in a story titled “The Cardboard Box”, originally published in The Strand in 1892, in which Holmes engages in what Ginzburg describes as “morellizing” when he examines a box full of severed ears (Ginzburg 1980, p. 8). Somewhat similarly, Richard Neer compares connoisseurship to archaeology, insofar as both are concerned with the evidence of style in placing artefacts in the context of specific time periods, though of course the archaeologist is less interested in individual identity than in differences between societies and cultures (2005, p. 7). Nonetheless, both activities are based on the premise that style itself constitutes a form of evidence—a “clue” in the sense outlined by Ginzburg. Berenson himself was at pains to emphasize the scientific underpinnings of his own approach, which was premised on “the isolation of the characteristics of the known and their confrontation with the unknown” (1902, p. 123). Many of the cartoons and strips that appeared in British publications like Comic Cuts, Illustrated Chips, and The Funny Wonder during the 1890s were not signed, with no indication given regarding the identity of the artists, and, of course, as in the fine art world, the writing of history and the building of archives favour work to which a name can be assigned. There are various reasons why an individual comic strip might be unattributed in the original publication in which it appears. One, quite common during this early period, is that this was not, perhaps, the original publication in which it appeared, and the name was removed as part of an attempt to disguise its origins, no permission having been sought for the republishing. There may have been financial, contractual, or other professional reasons that obliged artists to keep their contributions to one publication hidden from the editors of another to which they also contributed. It may well have been that they sought anonymity because they aspired to work in a more respectable area of the fine art world, as a painter, for example, and feared that any association with the apparently superficial and ephemeral form of the comic strip might have negatively impacted such ambitions. This seems likely to have been a key factor in Yeats’ own withdrawal into anonymity and, in some cases, pseudonymity as a cartoonist, when he began to actively pursue recognition as a painter in both London and Dublin during the first decade of the 1900s. Anonymity presents difficulties for the historian however, as a name offers the possibility of additional context in the form of biographical detail (Konstantinos 2017, p. 5). Is there anything about the artist’s national,

  CONNOISSEURSHIP, ATTRIBUTION, AND COMIC STRIP ART: THE CASE… 

39

ethnic, or religious background that might offer perspectives on the work? Did she receive technical training and where? (I use the feminine article here, but of course gender is another one of the elements elided by this anonymity). What other publications did the artist contribute to? Did she enjoy a long career as a comic strip artist? Or belong to a social network or professional community? Of course, these are all useful questions, and it is one of the scholarly frustrations of this period that they must often be left unanswered—even in cases where we do know the identity of the artist. Anonymous comic strip art can be, and has been, categorized in various ways—national origin, style, technical elements, thematic content, subject matter, and so on—though the canon of comic strip art remains very much a canon of attributed work. It is certainly the case that many fine examples of the medium fail to get the scholarly or critical attention that they deserve, as a direct result of their status as unattributed works. Undoubtedly certain types of cartoonists were held in higher esteem than others, and, for much of its history the comic strip seems to have been regarded as a debased form relative to the editorial newspaper cartoon, for example, or to the kind of material that appeared in the more celebrated Punch and other humour periodicals. A telling article titled “Style in Comic Art” published in The Strand in 1909 focuses on the work of “Mr. George Morrow”, “Mr. Heath Robinson”, “Mr. John Hassall,” and others—great cartoonists all, but none of them comic strip artists. There is not the space here to go into the well-rehearsed history of critical condescension towards the comic strip, which would prevail throughout most of the twentieth century, but it is worth noting here as a factor in the relegation of many names to relative obscurity, or, frustratingly for the scholarly researcher, irretrievable anonymity. At the time of original publication, there was no sense of the value of this material for posterity. The comics, like the early tabloid newspapers which they resembled in many respects, were entirely ephemeral—tomorrow’s fish and chip wrappers—and there appears to have been little attempt to archive original art or to preserve records that might tell us more about the contributing artists, the work they produced, or the nature of their professional relationships with the various publishers of the time. We can compare this with the practice of record keeping that characterized Punch magazine during the same period. Punch at the end of the nineteenth century was already an established institution within British political and cultural life and was reasonably self-conscious about this. It made practical use of its carefully curated archive, representing much of its graphic material in the form of annuals and themed books, and, importantly, making celebrities out of many of its artists, particularly those who earned the title of “principal cartoonist”, such as John Leech and John Tenniel. Thus, it is now far easier for scholars to build a picture of the professional activities of these cartoonists and the industrial context within which they operated (Scully 2018).

40 

M. CONNERTY

The Identification of the Yeats Corpus Yeats is an unusual case in comics-research terms because, as a renowned and successful painter, he has already been subject to connoisseurial scrutiny from a fine art perspective, while his substantial contributions to British comics during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods have received scant attention. Hilary Pyle, who had been the custodian of the Yeats Archive at the National Gallery in Ireland, produced an extensive catalogue raisonnée, as well as various biographical and critical texts dealing with Yeats’ work. One of these texts, The Different Worlds of Jack B. Yeats (Pyle 1994), is effectively a supplement to the catalogue raisonnée itself and focuses on Yeats’ work in print and illustration. Given that we are here concerned with the application of art-historical methodologies to the study of comics, it is interesting to note that there is a substantial lacuna at the centre of Pyle’s otherwise exhaustive catalogue of Yeats’s work for print media, in that beyond a brief allusion to his work for the comics, and the reproduction of two strips, there is no attempt to engage with or catalogue the many hundreds of strips that were published, between 1892 and 1917. In relying on earlier texts, particularly, as in this case, those associated with Art History, the researcher should be wary of repeating mistakes of attribution and analysis contained therein, which are often rooted in basic misunderstandings of the nature of comics production and reception, and the historical contingency of both. Pyle’s (I must stress, excellent) volume was written at a time before she would have been able to draw on the substantial body of Comics Studies literature that might have nudged Yeats’ strips to a less peripheral position relative to his painting, and before comics might have been widely considered an acceptable form for accommodation within the purview of Art History. Pyle’s text is not at all unusual in minimizing the importance of Yeats’ comic strip work—indeed the majority of art-historical accounts fail to acknowledge the material at all. Much of the work of connoisseurship and attribution, in this case, is to be found in the non-scholarly output of cartoonist, collector, and enthusiast Denis Gifford (Gifford 1975). This kind of archival work and canon-­ building by independent researchers and practitioners has been an important feature of comics historiography more generally, and Gifford’s catalogues are indispensable sources for anybody interested in the period. Attribution and identification were central to my own research into the comic strip work of Jack Yeats because not only had the material not been fully catalogued and assessed up to this point, but it had in fact been overlooked, neglected, and, to some degree, swept under the carpet, over the intervening century. My search for material took place for the most part in non-specialist archives and library collections, such as the British Library and The Bodleian in Oxford, where the comics featuring Yeats’ work were contained in hefty, collected volumes, covering a year at a time. I was able to use Gifford’s catalogues as a partial guide initially, and thus, following Morelli and Berenson, was in a position to compare previously identified work with unattributed examples, gradually learning to identify the specific idiosyncrasies that might offer

  CONNOISSEURSHIP, ATTRIBUTION, AND COMIC STRIP ART: THE CASE… 

41

confirmation. Much of the work of attribution is concerned with comparison of unsigned works with those that have been signed, and the signature itself is an important indicator of authorship in comics as it is in fine art. Even where it is present, the signature of a comic strip artist might not be consistent throughout their career, and Yeats used several at different times. Some strips and cartoons are straightforwardly signed Jack B. Yeats, others are signed Jack B. or Jack Bee, and others again are signed with the word Jack accompanied by a small drawing of a bee. However, his strips and cartoons were as likely to contain no such indicators of authorship. The work for Punch magazine, most of which was executed after his time with the comics, came mainly in the form of single-panel cartoons and were all signed pseudonymously as W. Bird. In the comics, the inclusion of a small bird somewhere within a panel, while not quite qualifying as a signature, is a recurring motif that may have been deliberately intended to denote a common, if not identifiable, authorship—and serves as a useful clue for the researcher for this reason. In the case of some of his early, single-panel cartoons, for example, those contributed to Ariel, a topical humour magazine that ran for a year from January 1891, the text is often written in Yeats’ own hand, and forms an important element of the overall image. This text is often necessarily brief—a snappy phrase rather than an exchange of dialogue or lengthy descriptive passage. It also means that, in contrast to the cartoons with type-set captions, we can identify Yeats as the author of the text, effectively on the basis of handwriting analysis, by noting consistencies with examples in the authorized archive. Whether or not we agree with Bill Blackbeard’s positing of the recurring character as itself an essential feature of the form (Blackbeard 1974, p. 41: qtd. in Groensteen 2007, p.  125), a perhaps obviously helpful feature from the researcher’s perspective is the requirement of comic strip series that any central protagonists should be instantly recognizable. Yeats achieves this, for example, with his use of spot black in depicting the overcoat of his character Chubblock Homes, drawing the viewer’s eye in every panel in which he appears (Fig. 2). Repetition is a key feature of the medium, particularly as it operated in the context of the busy pages of weekly comics in the 1890s. The recurring protagonist needs to be familiar, and convincing to the reader as the same character who was last encountered in the previous week’s issue. Comics artists strove for continuity, duplication, and consistency in their rendering of characters from week to week, and this applied to secondary figures, environment, and overall tone too. So, while an artist might deviate quite dramatically from the style that typified a particular series, it was important that a specific look and feel should be retained within the context of the series itself. This tends to mean that once an artist has been identified as the author of a series, one can assume that each instalment of that series can be attributed to them. However, there are some exceptions to this, in the case of a small number of his Chubblock Homes strips being executed by other artists, for example, and there are numerous cases, during this period, of artists replacing each other for long periods of time. Of course, these transitions would later become a commonplace with

42 

M. CONNERTY

Fig. 2  Jack B. Yeats, “Chubblock Homes and His Little Dog Shirk in Quest of Porous Plaisters”, Comic Cuts, 29 June 1895

regard to, for example, syndicated newspaper cartoons and long-running popular comic book characters. With Yeats the greatest difficulties relate to the identification of strips (and also single-panel cartoons, and humorous illustrations) that were not part of series and did not include recurring characters, and there were a great many of these. Here style provides one of the very few clues. A practice that I found useful as part of my own research was to copy examples of what I considered to be typical Yeats panels. The act of imitative drawing involved a form of experiential “learning by doing” that I would credit as providing a central foundation for my archival searches (Fig. 3). The practice itself necessitated a high degree of attention to detail, the kinds of detail that Morelli would have singled out in relation to the identification of personal style in the drawings and paintings of the Renaissance. In the case of Yeats

  CONNOISSEURSHIP, ATTRIBUTION, AND COMIC STRIP ART: THE CASE… 

43

Fig. 3  A selection of sketches based on Jack B.  Yeats characters. (The author’s sketchbook)

specifically, there is a distinctive way of rendering eyes that, in my experience, is unique in the context of British comics of this period. Though I am not remotely qualified as a draughtsman or cartoonist, I nonetheless found that the process of actively engaging with Yeats’ character designs, and considering, for example, the relative positioning of facial components, physical proportions, the rendering of dynamic action, and quality/thickness of line, fostered a familiarity with his style that I could not otherwise have achieved. Importantly, and thankfully, this is regardless of the success or otherwise of my drawings as objectively convincing facsimiles. Yeats has a very idiosyncratic way of rendering eyes whereby he emphasizes lines to the side of the eye rather than the more conventional above and below, or, more common still, the full circle surrounding the pupil: he favours an open “c” shape, as well as lines that slant diagonally from the centre of the brow towards the cheek, lines that are more often employed by cartoonists to suggest sadness or anxiety (Fig.  4). Yeats’ combining of these kinds of shapes and lines with, for example, an upturned mouth, produces a very distinctive effect. In the thousands of individual cartoon faces produced by him over the course of his career, he certainly does not always employ these stylistic tics, but they are present in enough of them for

44 

M. CONNERTY

Fig. 4  Jack B. Yeats “The Little Stowaways” (panel) 7 September 1907, Puck

this to have been a valuable identificatory feature, and one that I gained a more intimate familiarity with through repeated attempts at mimicry in my notebook. It is important to note a negative corollary of this. I became more aware of what Yeats did not tend to do, stylistically speaking, and more adept at recognizing some work as having been produced by not-Yeats. There are time constraints affecting every researcher, practical limits to how many hours can be spent looking at material from a given era. An examination of all the comics published in the UK in 1900, for example, would entail looking at well over 10,000 individual pages, many of which would have contained multiple strips and cartoons. Morelli’s methodology claims to offer a way to differentiate between artists working within the conventions of the same iconographic traditions—Florentine altarpiece painting, for example—and the specifically chirpy style and form of the British comic strip was established from very early on, with many artists drawing from a common pool of cartooning and graphic expression. Adherence to these stylistic approaches was presumably encouraged, demanded even, at editorial level, meaning that strips executed by different artists share many characteristics. I did find it useful therefore to also familiarize myself with the work of some of Yeats’ contemporaries, again by making careful copies of their work, particularly the variations in facial characteristics. Not all of the work I thus copied was attributable to particular artists, though this was less important as I was seeking to establish for myself some of the broad stylistic conventions of the period, against which I could set the recognizable differences in aspects of Yeats’ work. To depart a little from the Morellian focus on “trifling” details, the minor anatomical features that function as “tells” for the researcher, there are other

  CONNOISSEURSHIP, ATTRIBUTION, AND COMIC STRIP ART: THE CASE… 

45

components of artworks that have offered identificatory clues to connoisseurs where they occur regularly throughout an artist’s oeuvre. Idiosyncratic approaches to framing and composition may suggest the style of a particular artist. For example, in Yeats’ case, particularly in his series “Signor McCoy the Circus Hoss” (Big Budget, June 1897–January 1899), but in many other strips focused on dynamic action, there is a tendency to avoid the left-to-right, single-­ plane staginess of many of his contemporaries, favouring background-to-­ foreground action that lends a dimensionality to the image. Formal habits of design, such as Yeats’ predilection for circular inserts to present either simultaneous or asynchronous action (Fig. 5), can draw the eye to a particular artist, even on a double-page spread stuffed with competing strips. There is such compositional homogeneity in the strips of this era that it can be difficult to differentiate between artists on that basis—the majority of panels, for example, show the full figures of the protagonists, with very rare instances of cropping, or use of “close-ups”. However, different artists will tend more or less towards sparseness in the rendering of backgrounds or the use of negative space; some are more interested than others in location and architectural detail. Artists have individual approaches to the way they approach the various expressive components of comics—distinctive ways of rendering shock, fear, confusion, elation, and so on in the facial expressions of their characters. They will often have recourse to specific physical gestures and will present the dynamics of bodily movement in recognizable ways. Different artists exhibit preferences for the use of particular emanata; some don’t rely on these graphic indicators at all.

Fig. 5  Jack B. Yeats, “Roly Poly’s Tour” (panel), Comic Cuts 7 August 1909

46 

M. CONNERTY

Artists have different ways of employing speech balloons, will position them differently, and will fill them with more or less dialogue. During the period under discussion, the presence or not of speech balloons can, of itself, help to date a strip. There are some examples of their use in the 1890s, but they would become far more prevalent during the first decade of the new century, following the influx of reprints of American material by artists like Frederick Opper, who popularized their use in the newspaper comics of the time.2 Morelli intended that his method allowed for the inevitable stylistic fluctuations and evolving preoccupations that occur over the course of an artist’s career, and penetrated through them, identifying habitual idiosyncrasies that were retained, he felt, irrespective of broader changes in artistic approach. This is quite a bold claim to make, particularly were we to apply it to a cartoonist who produced many hundreds of drawings for different types of publication, satisfying different editorial and readership demands, over more than 40 years that saw substantial changes in the conventional tone, form, and mode of presentation of cartoons and comic strips in the UK. In respect of much of his cartooning, illustrative, and comic strip work, it could be said of Yeats that the Morellian approach is only effective within discrete areas of his practice—that we might not expect to find the same idiosyncrasies of style and facture appearing across the totality of the corpus, in examples ranging from his single panel gag cartoons to the late expressionist oils. However, within a specific context, his contributions to the comics published between 1892 and 1917 by Alfred Harmsworth and C.  Arthur Pearson, for example, the guiding principles of Morellian attribution, are extremely effective. Not all of Yeats’ strips are executed to the same degree of quality or finish. Regardless of the reasons for this, it means that strips executed a short time apart might exhibit quite different features in terms of figurative rendering or adherence to Yeats’ own character design specifications. The subtle differences between these examples should certainly not be taken as indicators of a different hand. The ability to recognize rushed or sloppy work is a feature of the kind of familiarity associated with the connoisseur’s engagement with a particular artist. It is perhaps especially relevant in the examination of comic strip work, contributed on a weekly basis over many years, and one should be open to lapses in consistency and, again, we must be wary of how style may be adapted to meet the demands of different genres, publications, and readerships. Yeats himself produced cartoons in a variety of modes that range from the more or less naturalistic, heavily worked style associated with the humour periodicals of the 1870s and 1880s, to the minimalist cartoonishness of the new comics that emerged during the 1890s. The vast majority of Yeats’ cartoons were published in black and white, something that is also largely true for his contemporaries. However, a number of strips, for example, those published in Puck in the early years of the twentieth century, appeared in colour—some using three-colour printing processes, some featuring only one additional colour, usually red. It is unlikely that Yeats would have played any part in the assigning of these colour elements to particular portions of his drawings, and those decisions would have been

  CONNOISSEURSHIP, ATTRIBUTION, AND COMIC STRIP ART: THE CASE… 

47

undertaken by the engravers who made the printing plates. There are cases, particularly later on, where cartoonists would have provided colour guides with their artwork, but this was not the norm at the time we are discussing. Therefore, the application of colour is not suggestive of anything characteristic of the artist, and thus problematizes our conception of “authorship” in these cases, as well as complicating the business of attribution from a practical perspective. The same is true of the use of Ben Day patterns, the grids of dots that can be used to introduce shading and tonal variety to comic strip images, which were likewise applied subsequent to the submission of the artist’s work, and by a different hand.3 Imperfections in printing processes can of course also affect the fidelity of the published image. Ink and paper quality are additional elements, particularly given the deterioration of both over time, a factor exacerbated in the case of the comics published by Harmsworth’s Amalgamated Press, which were produced using the cheapest available materials. All of these factors are inconsequential relative to the degree of mediation that pertained to the reproduction of cartoonists’ work only a short number of years earlier, when it was commonplace for engravers and others involved in the process to quite dramatically alter the appearance of what made it onto the published page. The dating of material is, often, closely related to its attribution, indeed one will often confirm the other, and is another one of the traditional preoccupations of the connoisseur. Confirmation of the year in which a work of art, or a comic strip, was produced will impact substantially on the assessment of that work from a scholarly perspective. As we have seen, the prevalence of bootlegging meant that one could not always be certain as to the date of initial publication. Is the cartoon or strip anachronistic, outmoded or passé in the context of the publication in which it appears or, rather, highly innovative and well ahead of its time? The precise dating of any example allows us to consider the social and political, as well as cultural and artistic, context in which it was produced. This is a pressing issue with regard to much of the material that appeared in British comics during the 1890s, for example. So much of it was reprinted from earlier sources—often derived from other national contexts—and it is important to be able to recognise the difference between the contemporary material and that which had already appeared elsewhere, not least to gain an understanding of how artists were responding to the specific reader demands and editorial imperatives of their time (Connerty 2017). Our understanding of issues related to racial and ethnic representation, of changing attitudes towards women, of class demographics and readerships, and of the various ways that comics were responding to contemporary social and political conditions, are all predicated on the specific temporalities of examples being analysed. Another major difference between comics and the fine art with regard to connoisseurship derives from the prominent role played by text in the majority of strips and cartoons produced during this era. In the case of British comics, this text appeared in the form of captions below the panels to which they refer, something that was also true of single-panel cartoons, which additionally included a brief, often punning, title above the image. The style in which this

48 

M. CONNERTY

text was written was arguably more formulaic and governed by convention than were the images themselves. There is very little to differentiate the accompanying text in an episode of Tom Browne’s “Squashington Flats” in Comic Cuts from that attached to an example of Frank Holland’s “Chokee Bill the Burglar” in Illustrated Chips, both of which are written in a lightly comedic, uncomplicated, and accessible manner consistent with the overall tone of the publications in which they appeared. Attempting to locate any such differences that might exist would require the mobilization of a different mode of analysis entirely, responding to literary rather than visual cues. This is a not insignificant problem in establishing the precise nature of the contributions made by individual artists to the comics that published their work, and to the assessment of the full extent of their artistry. It is likely that in many cases, cartoonists and comic strip artists provided, in verbal form, the gist of a gag or a narrative to a sub-editor who then set it down according to the house style of the publication, and indeed the prevailing style of British comics generally. In the case of Jack Yeats, there is good reason to suspect that he may have had more of a hand in devising the text also, as he was publishing fiction and short plays for children during the early 1900s and would later author an additional number of novels and plays. It is important here to note a key distinction between the conventional focus of the art connoisseur and that of the comics scholar. In the main, connoisseurs of art are concerned with identifying original works, and the authenticity of that work as having been produced by the hand of a given artist is paramount in any assessment that they make. Thus, the science that supports (some would argue “supersedes”) connoisseurship may include the analysis of paints, with specific pigments revealing information that can date the work or place it in a geographical location. The constituents of canvases and frames can similarly yield important information. In the case of published comic strips, as opposed to the original drawings from which they were derived, these factors are largely irrelevant. However, original comics art may contain clues, in the form of agency stamps, for example, that point towards a specific roster of artists, or indeed signatures that did not appear in the work as published. In the case of Yeats’ original drawings for Punch, held in the National Gallery archive, the reverse of the cards feature Yeats’ own address, presumably for payment purposes. The question of authenticity, in the sense of assessing whether or not a particular artefact is genuine, obviously applies more readily to original art than to published comics and is a contemporary issue that would not have applied to the same degree in Yeats’ time, when less value was placed on original work by cartoonists. The bootlegging of comic strip material for wider commercial distribution was an issue from early on, with, for example, Rodolphe Töpffer’s Histoire de Mr. Vieux Bois (1837) plagiarized and retitled as Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck (1841, 1849) by Tilt and Bogue in England, and subsequently by two separate publishers in New York (Kunzle 2007, p. 162; 175, Gardner 2017). This kind of international piracy has remained an issue in various parts of the

  CONNOISSEURSHIP, ATTRIBUTION, AND COMIC STRIP ART: THE CASE… 

49

world, for example, in the case of the widespread distribution of illegally reprinted manga in China during the 1990s (Lent 2015, p. 37). In the case of original artwork, due to the relative difficulties in producing convincing fakes of entire strips or comics pages, and because such artwork is unique and may be widely known to be already in the possession of particular collectors or archives, it is much more common for forgeries, when they do appear, to come in the form of one-off sketches and drawings by well-known artists. These may be based on published images, or on original work available via the Internet or other sources, but have the advantage to the forger of not being falsifiable due to the existence elsewhere of the same piece, as with specific pages, for example. The comics collecting market is still relatively small, and the sale of work by key artists is unlikely to go unnoticed, making duplication of this kind more difficult to attempt. Artists whose styles are simple or minimalist and whose work may appear to be superficially easy to imitate, like Charles Schultz or Matt Groening, are more likely to be copied in this way than somebody whose style is more complex, such as Bernie Wrightson. This is all very much the domain of the stereotypical connoisseur introduced at the very beginning of this chapter, but of course, whether or not the answers are being sought in relation to commerce or scholarship, methodologies may be equally applicable in either case. Consideration of comics in terms of connoisseurship begs the question of not only the assessment of comics as art but also of the representing of comics material within the space of the auction house or gallery. Andre Molotiu has argued that the appreciation of comic strip art in these fine art contexts, particularly original rather than printed work, implies very different aesthetic criteria and modes of looking (2010). Examination of a piece of comics art on a gallery wall, which in its original form is often at least twice the size that it appears in published form, encourages both the apprehension of the whole page as a single image and a focus on small details of execution, both in preference to the conventional zig-zag reading down the page for narrative comprehension. The researcher or scholar as Morellian connoisseur is engaging in an analogous activity in that by isolating specific graphic elements from their representational function within the panel, and, by extension, the narrative function of the panel within the broader context of the strip, the sequential component of comics is relegated in importance. Indeed, the narrative qualities of the work tend to be not only de-emphasized, but effectively ignored altogether, highlighting oppositions between the literary and visual arts modes of analysis that broadly characterize the two central approaches to comics scholarship. There are many examples of this decontextualizing of comics material, such as the contemporary proliferation of single panels posted in isolation to blogs and image hosting sites, or where such images are repurposed entirely as memes. The Internet has to some extent opened up the activity of attribution to a wider community that includes consumers and fans as much as scholars, democratizing this aspect of connoisseurial investigation via calls for help in the

50 

M. CONNERTY

identification of “mystery” artists. A sample thread on the Certified Guaranty Company (CGC) forum, in which a member seeks help in identifying the artist behind a number of panels from a 1940s romance comic, is illustrative of how the Morellian approach is instinctively adopted for this purpose (“Can you identify the artist of these comic book panels?”, 2010). Responses focus on a range of details: a character’s mouth; the positioning of an eye socket; the rendering of fingers; as well as idiosyncrasies of composition and layout, as part of arguments in favour of this or that artist. This approach to identifying artists, often successful, exploits the range of reading experience in a group of enthusiasts and independent researchers rather than that of the individual expert of traditional art historiography. Open discussion among contributors to comments threads or listserv groups lend the process a transparency and a recourse to demonstrable evidence that was perhaps not always a factor in traditional connoisseurship. This is certainly not to deny the value of scholarship and expertise but to note the possibilities opened up by the wider sharing and dissemination of images, the increased accessibility of digital archives, and the building of dynamic communities of knowledge and research. This “democratization” of connoisseurship is also reflected in the ways that connoisseurial engagement is encouraged by contemporary publishing practices such as the production of lavishly illustrated artist’s editions featuring original art, and the high-quality reprints of, for example, early American newspaper strips at original scale. These are only the most recent ways that the comics publishing industry has worked to foster a culture of collecting and discernment, as well as an acceptance of its substantial economic implications. Indeed, as Jean-Paul Gabillet notes, the repackaging of comics in the form of expensive coffee table books represents a departure from comics’ popular cultural origins as affordable and accessible publications (Gabillet 2016, p.  23). Though reasonably new to comics, this kind of vaguely academic presentation has been common since the 1950s with regard to specialist genres in music publishing, such as jazz and folk, which encouraged a scholarly approach to the music via the inclusion of detailed sleeve notes, or booklet inserts, that offered biographical, generic, and, particularly in the case of reissued material, cultural and historical context, encouraging the consumer to consider specialist knowledge, expertise, and education as important components of the overall package. The connoisseurial attitude towards comic strip art is something relatively new. For this reason, its application to the comics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is inevitably an act of recovery, of rediscovery, and validation. The connoisseur thus conceived aspires to a level of intimacy with the work of a period that becomes a foundation for a kind of authority: the ability to make substantial claims regarding comics history, identification, and attribution, which are necessarily open to refutation, but which are rooted in an empirical accumulation of evidential material and a thorough engagement with a given corpus. This authority might also be said to derive from structures of trust and collegiality within the Comics Studies community (Freedberg, 2006, p. 38). This is still a reasonably youthful field, much of the historical territory

  CONNOISSEURSHIP, ATTRIBUTION, AND COMIC STRIP ART: THE CASE… 

51

remaining to be mapped out, and, while acknowledging the importance of socio-cultural structures, industrial contexts, and other determining factors, the figure of the individual comics artist remains central to that activity. Without recourse to theoretical rationale or historical foundations, many who operate within the arenas of either comics art commerce or scholarly historical research will cite the recurrence of superficially inconsequential stylistic details as key to the identification of unsigned work by any artist. What the Morellian method offers is a refinement and codification of what is essentially a common-sense, deductive approach to the attribution of comic strips and cartoons.

Notes 1. My research into the work of Yeats was conducted as part of my PhD studies at Central Saint Martins UAL, 2014–18, and subsequently as the basis for my book The Comic Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). 2. For more on the appearance of American reprints in British comics during this era, see Michael Connerty, “Happy Ike, The Pink Kid and the American Presence in Early British Comics,” International Journal of Comic Art 19:1 (Spring/ Summer 2017): 525–37. 3. For a thorough account of Ben Day and related print history see Guy Lawley’s blog Legion of Andy, at https://legionofandy.com/2015/09/09/ben-­day-­dots-­ part-­4-­pre-­history-­origins/#arrival

References Beaty, Bart. 2012. Comics versus Art. Toronto: University of Toronto Press Berenson, Bernard. 1927. Three Essays in Method. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Berenson, Bernard. 1902. The Study and Criticism of Italian Art. London: George Bell and Sons. Can you identify the artist of these comic book panels? 2010. Certified Guaranty Company (CGC) online forum thread. Accessed at https://www.cgccomics.com/ boards/topic/191559-­can-­you-­identify-­this-­artist-­mystery-­artists/ 10 May 2021. Connerty, Michael. 2017. Happy Ike, The Pink Kid, and the American Presence in Early British Comics. International Journal of Comic Art. 19:1, pp. 538–546. Diamond, Clare. 2015. Connoisseurship in a globalised art market: reconciling approaches to authenticity. Eras Journal. 17:1, pp. 25–44. Freedberg, David. 2006. Why connoisseurship matters. In Munuscula Amicorum: Contributions on Rubens and His Colleagues in Honour of Hans Vlieghe, ed. K. van Stighelen, Turnhout: Brepols, pp. 29–43. Friedlander, Max. 1960. On Art and Connoisseurship. Boston MA: Beacon. Fyfe, Gordon J. 1985. Art and reproduction: some aspects of the relations between painters and engravers in London 1760–1850. Media, Culture and Society. 7, pp. 399–425. Gabillet, Jean-Paul. 2016. Reading facsimile reproductions of original artwork: the comics fan as connoisseur. In IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE. 17:4, pp. 16–25. http:// www.imageandnarrative.be/index.php/imagenarrative/article/view/1318. Accessed on 23 November 2020.

52 

M. CONNERTY

Gifford, Denis. 1975. The British Comic Catalogue 1874–1975. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. Ginzburg, Carlo. 1980. Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: clues and scientific method. History Workshop. 9, pp. 5–36. Gardner, Jared. 2017. Antebellum Popular Serialities and the Transatlantic Birth of “American” Comics. In Media of Serial Narrative, ed. Frank Kelleter. pp. 37–52. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press Groensteen, Thierry. 2007. The System of Comics. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Konstantinos, Vassiliou. 2017. Anonymous art reconsidered: anonymity and the contemporary art institution. Journal of Aesthetics and Culture. 9:1, pp. 1–10. Kunzle, David. 2007. Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töppfer. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Lent, John A. 2015. Asian Comics. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Molotiu, Andrei. 2010. Permanent ink: comic-book and comic-strip original art as aesthetic object. The Hooded Utilitarian. http://www.hoodedutilitarian. com/2010/10/permanent-­inkby-­andrei-­molotiu/. Accessed 26 June 2013. Morelli, Giovanni. 1883. Italian Masters in German Galleries, translated by Louise Richter. London: George Bell and Sons. Neer, Richard. 2005. Connoisseurship and the stakes of style. Critical Inquiry. 32, pp. 1–26. O’Connor, Francis V. 2004. Authenticating the attribution of art: connoisseurship and the law in the judging of forgeries, copies, and false attributions. In The Expert Versus the Object: Judging Fakes and False Attributions in the Visual Arts, ed. Ronald D. Spencer. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 3–27. Opperman, Hal. 1990. The Thinking Eye, the Mind That Sees: The Art Historian as Connoisseur. Artibus et Historiae. 11:21, pp. 9–13. Pyle, Hilary. 1994. The Different Worlds of Jack B. Yeats: His Cartoons and Illustrations. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Scallen, Catherine. 2003. Rembrandt, Reputation, and the Practice of Connoisseurship: Reputation and the Practice of Connoisseurship. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Scully, Richard. 2018. Eminent Victorian Cartoonists Vols 1–3. London: The Political Cartoon Society.

Reading Comics with Aby Warburg: Collaging Memories Maaheen Ahmed

Abstract  This chapter takes the pioneering visual epistemology of the art historian Aby Warburg as the starting point for a guide to reading comics. It transposes Warburg’s montage of images in the incomplete Mnemosyne Atlas to comics along two axes: it treats comics pages as collages and examines the symbolic and emotional charge of comics images. The Mnemosyne Atlas acquires special relevance through reading comics as collages of words, images, panels and of different media or imitations thereof. Combining the ideas propelling the Mnemosyne Atlas with the concept of media memories, or the ways in which media remember and reference each other, this chapter reads two French-­ language comics (Hugo Pratt’s Les Celtiques and Manu Larcenet’s Le Combat ordinaire), to show how these insights can be applied to a spectrum of comics ranging from genre fiction to personal stories. Keywords  Aby Warburg • Hugo Pratt • Manu Larcenet • Memory • Collage • Montage The German art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929) can be credited with introducing a new, modern method of visual analysis that moved beyond artistic canons to understand human expression across diverse image-making

M. Ahmed (*) Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Gray, I. Horton (eds.), Seeing Comics through Art History, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8_4

53

54 

M. AHMED

activities. He founded the Warburg Institute in Hamburg, which moved to London in 1933 with the rise of National Socialism in Germany. Together with colleagues such as Erwin Panofsky, Fritz Saxl and Gertrud Bing, Warburg honed a new methodology for analysing images, first called iconography and later expanded into iconology. As elaborated by Panofsky, iconography is the description of images based on their content and their context, whereas iconology adds an additional level of meaning by focusing on the symbolism activated by the artwork (Panofsky 2019). This chapter focuses on the related but more intuitive methodology that Warburg honed through his incomplete Bilderatlas Mnemosyne [Mnemosyne Picture Atlas]: “[w]hereas iconology encourages detailed paraphrase, Mnemosyne embraces the concision, ambiguity, and instability of metaphoric expression” (Johnson 2012, p. xi). Warburg’s project shares similarities with Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk [Arcades Project], for which the method was “literary montage. I have nothing to say, only to show” (Benjamin quoted in Johnson 2012, p. 18). Based on juxtapositions and associations, this methodology is a productive mode of understanding  the often sequential and frequently syncopated art of comics. Building on the collage-­ like aspects of comics and the emotional expressivity of images, this chapter elaborates on how Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, composed of montaged images with shared tropes, paves possibilities for reading comics.

The Bilderatlas Mnemosyne Warburg worked on the Mnemosyne Atlas from 1927 until his sudden death from heart failure in 1929. At the time of his death, the Mnemosyne Atlas comprised of 63 plates, measuring around 200 × 150 cm (with notes permitting the reconstruction of up to 79 plates).1 To fulfil his aim of mapping the transfer of images and the recurrence of similar themes across centuries of European and global visual culture, spanning antiquity to the early decades of the twentieth century, Warburg would have needed an indefinite number of plates. Themes covered by the existing plates include cosmologies, pathos and figures such as the Muses, the nymph and Fortuna.2 Georges Didi-Huberman considers the Mnemosyne Atlas as a reflection of contemporaneous methods in the humanities, especially those established by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, founders of the Annales School, which propelled the study of mentalities (psychology of an epoch) and a transdisciplinary, de-centred approach to history and historiography (Didi-Huberman 2011). Matthew Rampley draws similar parallels between Walter Benjamin, Warburg and contemporaneous developments in psychoanalysis: both Benjamin and Warburg sought to explore collective memory’s “proximity to the process of repetition-compulsion outlined by Freud” (1999, p. 112). In order to reconstruct connections and bridge individual and collective experience, both turned to montage (Didi-Huberman 2003b, p. 191). The Mnemosyne Atlas, despite its vastness, offers some lessons that can be useful for reading comics. Two components in Warburg’s iconographical project seem especially pertinent: the emotional charge of images and the technique of montage or collage.

  READING COMICS WITH ABY WARBURG: COLLAGING MEMORIES 

55

The evolutionary biologist Richard Semon’s concept of the Engramm had a strong influence on Aby Warburg’s cultural memory work: engrams are psychic imprints resulting from powerful shocks. They reflect Warburg’s interest in the transposition of intense emotional experiences, initially “stored as ‘mnemonic energy’”, engraved in collective consciousness and channelled into art (Assmann 2011, p. 198, 358). Warburg sought “to explore the specifically visual forms of the engram”, which he called dynamograms (Rampley 1999, p.  104). Dynamograms underpin Warburg’s Cultural History project of tracing visual memories and their transformations across diverse forms of cultural production, from popular, everyday images to paintings and sculptures. They capture the expressive affordances of images and their ability to move their viewers. Warburg’s Cultural History was a form of psychohistory, based on emotions and their expression, seeking to construct a historical archive of intensities [archive historique des intensités] (Didi-Huberman 2001). Dynamograms precede the Pathosformeln and can be seen as the graphic containers of those formulae, as in the case of ornamental lines indicating movement in comics (Schankweiler and Wüschner 2019, p. 110).3 Pathosformel captures the visualization of emotions in images: “models of sense” or the emotive gestures embedded in images (Didi-Huberman 2003b, p.  626), “[p]athos formulae are the visible symptoms—corporeal, gestural, presented, figured—of a psychic time irreducible to a simple thread of rhetorical, sentimental or individual turns” (p. 622). The Pathosformel is situated at the crossroads where visual heritage—accepted means of visualizing and transmitting emotions—and individual artistic style meet. These “formulas” have a broad scope; they can be as specific as the loaded expression or pose of a specific character or they can be present across groups of images that speak, for instance, of a specific era or period style as in the case of the hyperexpressive, corpulent bodies of Baroque art. Anchored in the figurative, the Pathosformel is an invitation to consider how images convey emotions, following certain conventions and, in a manifestation of individual style, breaking away from others. This lies at the heart of the Mnesmosyne project, “the images of which are intended, most immediately, to present nothing but a traceable inventory of pre-coined expressions, which demanded that the individual artist either ignore or absorb this mass of inherited impressions surging forward in this dual manner” (Warburg and Rampley 2009, p. 280). The emotionality of comics images is encoded through the styles and forms of their stories, which are in turn informed by a history of image making. The kinds of Pathosformel in comics are often tempered with a certain distance in keeping with the exaggeration and irony of caricature that pervades most comics drawing. Writing on Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, Johnson points out that “the mediation of memory, be it personal or cultural, still functions metaphorically” (Johnson 2012, p.  4). Correspondingly, the many monsters encountered in comics—Frankenstein’s creatures, or the Swamp Thing, which give form to collective anxieties (rapid technological and scientific progress, human encroachment on and alienation from the natural world)—function as mnemonic metaphors, laden with emotional and historical import.

56 

M. AHMED

Reading Comics as Collage Art and memory have a filial, affective relationship: Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, was the mother of the nine Muses. Memories—of the maker, of the reader and the viewer, of overlapping contexts—breathe life into the arts. Elaborating on scholarship on memory and Warburg, Karin Kukkonen (2008) has argued for the importance of contextual knowledge in comics such as Bill Willingham et al.’s Fables, which rework popular fairy tales. Taking inspiration from the Mnemosyne Atlas, it is possible to visualize the functioning of memory in popular culture as a collage of images and, by extension, contexts. As a form and practice, the collage is echoed by comics pages, with their orchestration of diverse verbal-visual elements and images, and by images that mix media (see also Ahmed 2016, pp.  53–74; Dittmer 2010, pp.  228–233). In both situations, the collage reflects the imbrication—and intervention—of memories and associations within the comics story. “Every medium”, writes Aleida Assmann, “opens up its own access to cultural memory” (2011, p. 11). Comics offer access to an essentially visual cultural memory comprising both still and moving pictures, experimental narrative temporalities and fantastic tropes, which is transposed into a distinctive comics idiom. This idiom is a child of modernity, a “sponge” of iconic images but also techniques,4 such as sequence, ellipses and the materialities of production and reproduction. Emphasizing the anarchic, fragmentary nature of early comics—a fragmentation generated by seriality as well as panels—Jared Gardner suggests that comics “was dedicated to diagramming the serial complexities of modern life and fixing the fragments of modernity on the page” (2012, p. 7). In an earlier article, Gardner also links the interaction of memories to create a visual archive in comics: The comics form is forever troubled by that which cannot be reconciled, synthesized, unified, contained within the frame …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. (2006, pp. 801–802)

The collage form of comics—the arrangement of panels on a page, the juxtaposition of words and images within panels and on pages—coexists with different levels of memory, of associations channelled by drawing styles but also representations and compositions. Collage, established in aesthetic discourse through modern art, “is not just a loss of order–it shatters order” (Assmann 2011, pp. 270–271). However, collage also goes further since “[p]resenting history as montage involved ‘telescoping the past via the present,’ whereby the linear notion of history was replaced by the idea of the dialectical image” (Rampley 1999, p. 102). The image is caught in a diachronic dialogue, looking towards the past and the future, just like Benjamin’s Angel of History.

  READING COMICS WITH ABY WARBURG: COLLAGING MEMORIES 

57

Collaging can be seen as the practice structuring both the Mnemosyne Atlas and comics. It is also the act performed by the comics reader in piecing together different elements, but this performance does not necessarily result in closure. The connections in comics are more constructed and less reader-dependent and intuitive, but they remain a way of communicating and generating knowledge through images while channelling cultural memory. The worlds of comics are vast: we encounter dream worlds, action-packed sequences, slapstick comedy and other pillars of “light” entertainment. These elements coexist with more existential concerns—mortality, solitude, human relationships—that are treated with different degrees of intensity in the two comics discussed below. Thierry Smolderen has proposed the concept of polygraphy to account for the diverse drawing styles and techniques coexisting in comics (see, e.g. 2014, pp. 53–58). This can be extended to the presence of different media—from novels and films to popular entertainment and folk rituals such as the carnival— that influence and inform comics images and stories through direct references but also indirectly, through structural, generic similarities. Comics collage memories of different kinds of media. These memories travel through evocations of other media, styles and images and often activate different degrees of narrative weight and emotional power. The concept of media memories offers a means of expanding on the collage-like aspects inherent in comics (see Ahmed 2019). Approaching Warburg’s Mnemosyne project through media memories enables mapping the vast network of visual influences, the meaning-making processes connected to those images and the related emotional charge layering comics. I will trace the media memories conveying and entangling personal and collective memories in two very different comics: Hugo Pratt’s Les Celtiques [Celtic Tales] and Manu Larcenet’s Le Combat ordinaire [Ordinary Victories]. These comics are separated by almost three decades of French-language comics production that reflect different degrees of interaction with the emergence and importation (from the English-language context) of the graphic novel, which privileges experimental and self-contained stories (see Baetens and Frey 2014). They are particularly intriguing to discuss in tandem because of their respective proximity to genre fiction (Les Celtiques) and graphic memoir (Combat ordinaire). For examining them more closely, I propose a Warburgian comics reading hinged on two questions: 1. What kinds of connections are enforced through images? I focus on the connections with media that are activated by images and the genres they inhabit. 2. How do visual style and textual narration converge to generate and manage emotions? In contrast to Warburg’s project, the starting point for the atlas of images I work with below is located within each comic rather than without. Further, through the notion of media memories, I attune this reading to allusions

58 

M. AHMED

generated and references to other media. The mapping of cultural memory is consequently a mapping of both (popular) cultural memories and of the vista of memories that comics create for themselves and that are channelled primarily through images, style, characterization and storytelling. This is, of course, only one possible means of reading comics with Warburg. Other potential readings could focus more on style and specific Pathosformel or work with a bigger corpus and a database of images to draw connections with images in comics.

Les Celtiques: Genre Fiction and Mythological Dreaming Many of the short stories collected in the Casterman editions of Les Celtiques first appeared in the magazine, Pif Gadget, in the early 1970s. A reformatting and rebranding of the periodical Vaillant (1945–1969), Pif Gadget (1969–1993) stood out from other comics magazines through rejecting the practice of serializing stories and offering instead as announced by its subtitle, “tout en récits complets” [all as complete stories]. One of the publication’s main attractions, Pratt’s Corto Maltese adventures, combines the media memories of genre fiction (adventure, romance, fantasy) with references to myth, literature and historical contexts. The stories collected in Les Celtiques unfold during the last two years of the First World War. Casterman published the Les Celtiques stories in a new series, “Les grands romans de la bande dessinée”, in 1980 and would continue to republish (occasionally in colour) at least four of the six stories. The title of the third story in Les Celtiques “Concert en O Mineur pour Harpe et Nitroglycérine” [“Concert in O minor for Harp and Nitroglycerin”] reflects the short story’s confluence, or even blending, of the individual and the collective, since nitroglycerine is used for heart medication as well as explosives. A confluence of music and chemistry, the title also reflects the combination of romance and adventure. In this story, Pratt’s iconic, solitary sailor, Corto Maltese, finds himself in Ireland to avenge the death of his friend and fictional Sinn Féin leader, Pat Finnucan. The year is 1917, a year after the Easter Rising, with pro-British militias fighting Sinn Féin. The narrative opens with an encounter between an armoured car of the militia and the Sinn Féin fighters,5 placing Corto in the centre of the conflict, while also leaving him detached and unharmed since Corto is the archetype of the eternal foreigner, mysterious and without ties. In “Concert” he helps Sinn Féin procure weapons, avenges his friend’s death and then goes his own, solitary way. This solitude is reinforced by interludes of silent panels portraying Corto, often only a shadow, in a deserted town or the windy shore (Pratt 2000, pp.  60, 71, 73). Corto, like many comics heroes, is an amalgam of media memories bringing together influences ranging from the adventurer, the noir hero and even something of the superhero owing to his ability to always transcend death and danger (see

  READING COMICS WITH ABY WARBURG: COLLAGING MEMORIES 

59

Eco 1972). Pat Finnucan’s widow, Sinn Féin militant and one of Corto’s many love interests (which change with each new story and setting), Moira (Banshee) O’Dannan, calls him, not without irony, a “superhomme” (Pratt 2000, p. 66). Like most Corto Maltese stories (and the superhero genre), romance and adventure are combined in “Concert”. In order to ensure reiteration and Corto’s trademark solitude, the romances are short-lived. This is also the case with Moira who has already seen the death of Pat Finnucan and their former friend O’Sullivan. This motif is resurrected in another story of Les Celtiques, discussed below where Corto is told that Pandora Groovesnore, a young heiress he encountered in his first adventure, The Ballad of the Salty Sea, is still in love with him and is often seen sitting on the dunes of Cape Cod “à regarder l’infini” [staring into infinity] (Pratt 2000, p. 104), a gesture that Corto repeats at the end of the same page and through several other stories, expressing his status as the eternal, solitary dreamer (Fig. 1). The pose in profile, the easiest to draw and most familiar to comics because it suggests movement, also expresses his mysteriousness: we only see one side of him. This final page of “Concert” exemplifies the use of Pathosformel in comics genre fiction and in the Corto Maltese stories in particular. Within the span of this one page, Moira and Corto are united and separated. While Corto’s face remains inscrutable, his body postures betray desire, dangerous and impossible for Corto, both within the storyworld and beyond it; besides Moira’s belief that she is cursed, having suffered the death of two husbands, Corto must remain without a family if he is to have all his exotic adventures and romances. The gulls reappearing in every tier of the page symbolize Corto’s connection with the uprootedness of the sea. On the final page of “Concert”, the Celtic harp, a symbol of Irish nationalism and portrayed early in the story through a graffiti, reestablishes itself as a media memory (Pratt 2000, p. 60). Moira evokes the harp at the end of the story and traces its inspiration to the sound of the wind passing through the bones of a whale skeleton, which appears in the foreground of the same panel, hovering between reality and imagination (Pratt 2000, p. 74). In addition to symbolizing Celtic folklore and Irish nationalism, the harp also incorporates allusions to death and figures as an instrument of mourning. This symbolism is reinforced by the Celtic crosses in the graveyards which serve as meeting places for Corto and Sinn Féin militants (Pratt 2000, pp. 60–61, 71, 73). Further, while appearing only as a graffiti, albeit detailed and glorifying (the handle is an angelic figure), the harp evokes and comments on its own mediated essence as well as the inescapable silence of the comic strip—it puts to test the limits of word and image. The role of media memories is even more pronounced in the fourth story, “Songe d’un matin d’hiver” [Dream of a Winter Morning] which, as foreshadowed by its title, evokes Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and opens with Oberon, the king of fairies and the sprite Puck, who meet after 300 years at Stonehenge, worried that the Germans might succeed in invading Britain, bringing their own supernatural creatures with them and eradicating the

60 

M. AHMED

Fig. 1  Final page of the short story, “Concert en O mineur pour harpe et nitroglycérine”, Les Celtiques, p. 74

remains of Celtic Britain. The two turn to Morgan Le Fay (summoned from Avalon) and Merlin (summoned from the Forest of Brocéliande), figures from the legends of King Arthur, destined to rise and defend Britain whenever needed. The opening scene is emblematic of the overlapping spaces of dream, reality and legend in the Corto Maltese stories but also comics in general, facilitated through the freedom of drawing to traverse real and imaginary spaces

  READING COMICS WITH ABY WARBURG: COLLAGING MEMORIES 

61

through the immeasurable evocativeness of the page, easily transformed by a few marks into spaces of multiple dimensions and fluid borders. This easy transition between fact and fiction enables the incorporation of media memories of fantasy and some subversion. In Merlin’s words, Corto “songe les yeux ouverts et ceux qui songent les yeux ouverts sont dangereux parce qu’ils ne savent pas quand leur songe prend fin” [dreams with his eyes open and those who dream with their eyes open are dangerous because they do not know when their dream ends] (Pratt 2000, p. 81). The comic can be read as parallel to the large panels of the Mnemosyne Atlas: it collages Oberon, Puck, Morgan and Merlin, uniting them through their connections with Celtic folklore and British literature in the comics story. They wield a nostalgic, affective hold over the story. The four figures guide Corto through a characteristically unwitting victory saving Britain from an impending attack by the Germans. The story ends where it began: with Corto sleeping at Stonehenge without knowing how he got there. The circular, serial structure of “Songe d’un matin d’hiver” mirrors the workings of both memory and remediation (Sielke 2013, p.  48). Sabine Sielke ties this claim to sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s observation that “[m]emory constructs repetition, that is, redundancy, with continued openness towards what is current, with continually renewed iterability” (2013, p. 47). In interweaving historical events and media memories of myth and literature, this Corto Maltese story, like many others, exemplifies the processes of iteration of different memories and their renewal through a new context. It thrives on the similarities and potential connections established through different worlds of fiction. There is an inevitable distance in comics, an implicit remove that paints everything in the second degree, while incorporating, depending on the style, a trace of the persona of the artist, or graphiateur (a concept introduced by Philippe Marion, see Baetens 2001). This style is a negotiation between personal expression, training and constraints imposed by trends and the limitations of the medium. In the case of Corto, the lines forming and surrounding him are distinctly lyrical and carefree, often hurried, similar to the quick stream of action and Corto’s elusive mysteriousness, which is compatible with the flatness of serial, recurrent characters. Son of a gypsy sorceress and a British sailor, Corto combines magic and adventure. Adventure and fantasy, and the escapism associated with these genres, form part of the media memories of comics. While the visual style of Pratt and the markers of the comics adventure genre set the tone, the references to other literary and mythological characters situate the Corto Maltese stories in a contrasting space where the protagonist meets figures from “higher” literary works and legends on his turf. Pratt’s trademark strokes and heavy chiaroscuro subject the media memories of literature and of popular entertainment—ranging from comics to the puppetry encountered in the fifth story—to the laws of the comic, which partakes of only as much as is needed of each media memory to tell an action-packed story. The fifth story, “Burlesque entre Zuydcoote et Bray-Dunes” [Burlesque between Zuydcoote and Bray-Dunes], unfolds in an Allied army camp in

62 

M. AHMED

Northwest France. The story opens with a strange shadow play in which Merlin despairingly watches Viviane fall in love with an American captain. This captain has the form of a skinny cat whose first words are those of the wartime song, “Mademoiselle from Armentières”, to which the cat sardonically adds that he will forget Viviane as soon as the war is over and he returns home (Pratt 2000, p. 92) (Fig. 2). The still charmed Viviane, however, longs to hear about the fairytale world of Hollywood and hopes to make a career there. The short play ends with a dejected Merlin giving in to his mirthless sleep. The bizarreness of the story is generated through the intermingling of the brash, modern American world and the medieval world of Arthurian legends and folktales, which also represent the preponderance of the Old Continent’s history. Visually, the play recalls silhouette animation, especially Lotte Reiniger’s films, and references early Hollywood cinema; media memories of both are interlaced in the medium of comics. These memories are rendered porous through the imitation of silhouette animation, which interweaves the disparate worlds. Notably, the final panel in the image below places the reader-viewer right behind Corto: we watch the play with him. Different diegetic levels are collaged in this panel. Reading the comics story is a collaged experience interweaving the diverse media contexts of Reiniger’s films, First World War songs and Arthurian legends. This coexistence is facilitated by the medium-specificity of comics, which includes limited claims on realism or diegetic logic. Memories of the First World War also form part of the atlas. Caïn Groovesnore, a young boy who

Fig. 2  Excerpts from the shadow theatre performance with an incredulous Merlin witnessing Viviane’s seduction by the American cat. Les Celtiques, “Burlesque entre Zuydcoote et Bray-Dunes”, Les Celtiques, p. 100

  READING COMICS WITH ABY WARBURG: COLLAGING MEMORIES 

63

played a central role in the first Corto Maltese adventure, Una ballata del mare salato [The Ballad of the Salty Sea] (published in the Italian comics magazine Sgt. Kirk in 1967), reappears as an officer. His falling into shock after shooting a lieutenant evokes shell shock, even though it is caused by a spell by Mélodie (Viviane in the show). Similarly, the puppets used for the silhouette play evoke the mechanization of bodies through their spasmodic, unnatural movements and, by extension, the disabilities engendered by the First World War, the first large-scale mechanized war. Corto’s participation in the war itself remains limited: he is unfazed in “Songe d’un matin d’hiver”, decorated with medals from both the Germans (a parting token from a captured German spy) and the British (for helping them), and briefly puts on the latter for the amusement of himself and the crow (the form adopted by Puck to communicate with Corto) who had been his companion throughout the story (Pratt 2000, p. 93). A silent panel with the laughing crow and the posing Corto captures three main associations well grounded in comics: that of satire and caricature, the easy sliding between dream and reality, and the relative simplicity and flatness of the characters, which bestows an aura of popular myth. “Burlesque entre Zuydcoote et Bray-Dunes” ends with the following remark by Corto to Captain Rothschild, who confirms that all will be well (the war will be won, Caïn’s victim will survive and Caïn himself will be released from coma, spell and service): “tu ne voudrais pas toujours parler de guerre, n’est-ce pas?… Et puis nous n’avons pas grand-chose à voir dans cette histoire” [You don’t want to always talk about war, no?… After all we don’t really have much to do with this story] (Pratt 2000, p. 118). Such often ironic, but always distanced, participation bestows on Corto the status of a mediator between history and popular entertainment, dialoguing with, and reworking, established images in the idioms of comics and popular literature. The hasty succession of events, especially towards the end of the stories, is propelled by the short story format but is recurrent in most serial publications. Although it is not the representation of history, but the representation of personal memories that occupies most contemporary graphic novels, Corto, despite his detachment, personalizes history for his readers and even catalyzes it through his charisma and distance. He personifies the limits of individualization in serialised fiction as already suggested by Umberto Eco’s analysis of the superhero: the mysteriousness that shrouds most of his personality and his life is both a layer of coolness and an obstruction for the reader to be fully invested in his stories (we know that everything will be more or less all right in the end) (Eco 1972). Corto mediates the memories of the popular fiction hero and superhero while remaining a singular character with his distinctive story moulded by Pratt’s trademark style. Pratt’s lines materialize and adapt the mnemonic energia of both the First World War and Celtic folklore. The rapprochement between the two is rendered possible by the playful essence of comics themselves, which can afford to unite or collage disparate worlds, liberally and capriciously. This remains a

64 

M. AHMED

recurrent characteristic and media memory of comics that can traced back to its connections to caricature. Each page can function as a collage of historical events with mythical figures and media such as theatre and animation. Viewing the comic from such a meta-perspective unveils the potential atlas of images and memories propelling the comics narrative.

Le Combat Ordinaire: Drawn Photographs, Anxiety and Ordinariness Appearing more than 30 years after Les Celtiques, the four volumes of Manu Larcenet’s Le Combat ordinaire [Ordinary Victories] were published from 2003 to 2008. In complete contrast to the charismatic Corto, Larcenet’s protagonist, Marco, is puerile, blundering and a few pills away from an anxiety attack. His story is likewise understated: not so much an adventure through exotic places but a constant struggle to deal with issues most adult readers will easily recognize (self-doubt, death, parenthood). Larcenet’s drawing styles and narrative techniques and Marco’s characterization are indicative of a new way of manipulating media memories—and ultimately a new set of media memories—associated with comics as they move away from the realm of genre fiction, often for young readers, to graphic novels for adults (in practice such distinction between readerships is increasingly less binary, given the increasing popularity of graphic novels for children and young adults and crossover fiction). As with Les Celtiques, the media memories involved bridge comics with the higher arts. While in Les Celtiques such media memories are related to literature, in Combat ordinaire, these memories are essentially those of image-making. Larcenet’s Combat ordinaire exemplifies the personal, confessional comics story that is simultaneously moving and humorous, while remaining embedded in a context in which making and holding on to images, and thus indulging in a storytelling process serving to preserve and convey memories, remains central. Combat ordinaire juxtaposes the personal issues and the anxieties of the protagonist, Marco, a photographer, with collective memory (the Algerian War, deindustrialised France). It focuses on the daily business of living, telling and remembering. This ordinariness is reinforced by the comic’s obsession with everyday moments and objects. Instead of collaging fantastic elements and historical backgrounds as in Les Celtiques, Combat ordinaire juxtaposes the protagonist’s struggle to overcome his anxiety and depression to drawn photographs, usually portraits and scenes from Marco’s everyday life. Marco’s sessions with his psychoanalyst, his disclosure of his most intimate fears and details of his life, inscribe the comic in a confessional space. Psychological issues (the first book opens with Marco on his psychoanalyst’s couch) and physical degradation (Marco’s father has Alzheimer’s and eventually kills himself) coexist against the background of past wars—the Algerian War, in which Marco’s father and Marco’s neighbour fought, as well the many

  READING COMICS WITH ABY WARBURG: COLLAGING MEMORIES 

65

wars Marco photographed. These wars form a haunting, painful, but also vague and fragmentary, presence. Writing about American artist Jules Feiffer in the catalogue accompanying the 1967 comics exhibition Bande Dessinée et Figuration Narrative [Comics and Narrative Figuration], Maurice Horn describes the depressing tones of his works as part of the “rejuvenation” of comics (1967, p. 109). Incongruent as depression might seem with the notion of comics, it plays a prominent role in recent comics focusing on individual, often autobiographical, struggles of ordinary—not typically comicsy (blundering slapstick protagonists, superheroes)— people. Most of Combat ordinaire, barring Marco’s photographs and moments of anxiety, unfolds in a cartoony style, abstracting both figures and settings through a playful line that is reinforced by cheerful colours. The atlas of images for Combat ordinaire saddles comics traditions, photography and a personalized narrative that also extends to the kinds of Pathosformel employed: Marco’s anxiety attacks interweave familiar comics clues (exaggerated postures, lines indicating shaking) with visual elements that enhance the anxiousness of the moment (warped space, a distinctive shade of red). Writing on comics with documentary impulses Nina Mickwitz elaborates on observations about the processual and indexical nature of drawing to conclude that “drawing occupies a space comprising both representation and ideation” (2016, p.  32). “The cartoon, selective and deliberate, is […] oppositional to the photograph” (p. 35). This tension permeates the photographic moments in Combat ordinaire and, ultimately, questions “the hegemony of photographic realism as the privileged model for visually depicting reality” (p. 35). Incorporating different shades of abstraction, never acquiring the same degree of reality as a photograph or a film, comics combine mimetic elements with non-mimetic ones. Comics inevitably, but, as in the case of abstraction, to varying degrees of obviousness, situate the personal in both collective and media memories. In Combat ordinaire, the moments of self-insight are expressed through black and white panels maintaining an allusive relationship between words and images. This echoes both psychoanalytical methods of reading beyond superficial appearances and the practice of collaging to read comics. The second volume includes two pages of portraits that Marco takes of shipyard workers, his father’s former colleagues, in an attempt to draw attention to their disappearing world. In the captions accompanying these “photographs”, which are realistically drawn, carefully hatched black and white drawings, Marco reflects on his emotional paralysis and his realization that taking photographs is a coping mechanism (2004, p.  20). The supposedly objective photograph—already layered with some subjectivity through the presence of the drawing hand—acquires emotional import while enacting the distance that enables the protagonist’s insights (see, e.g. Mickwitz 2016 and Cook 2012). Correspondingly, in a later sequence of portraits, Marco reflects on the relationship between the artist and his work (Larcenet, 2004, p. 46). Marco’s interest in “ordinary” people and his own anti-heroic persona is emblematic of the trend of focusing on the ordinary and the everyday

66 

M. AHMED

(exemplified, for instance, by Chris Ware’s comics). Unsurprisingly, for the context of the comic, and reproducing the high art-low art binary, the “deliberate ordinariness” of Marco’s work is seen as a stain by a Parisian gallerist (Larcenet, 2004, p. 36). This reaction evokes the media memory of comics as a belittled medium struggling for legitimation. The need to be taken seriously often, and problematically, manifests itself in seeing comics through the lens of the established arts and comics’ attempts to imitate those established arts. Marco’s portraits, belittled as an “industrial freak show” by an eminent photographer and Marco’s co-exhibitor (2004, p. 45), are an attempt to introduce the shipyard workers into a space and a discourse that alienates such realities in the quest for aesthetics. Inscribed within this constellation, and clash, of media, the drawn photographs go further: they set into motion the media memory of socially conscious photographic portraits of “ordinary” people usually not deemed worthy of being photographed and immortalized by photographers such as Jacob Riis, Dorothea Lange and August Sander.6 In the third volume, Ce qui est précieux [That Which Is Precious], Marco photographs the tools in his recently deceased father’s shed as a means of channelling his grief. These images imitating the camera objective and mediated through drawn lines are imbued with affect: they highlight the absence of the man who had constructed a life using those tools and allude, like much of Combat ordinaire, to mortality and the fragility of the human condition. They alternate with Marco’s reading of a “notebook of small things” which he discovers only after his father’s death (Larcenet, 2006, p. 12). It recounts “rien d’extraordinaire… il n’y a que des détails des moments courts… que des petites choses” [nothing special…only details of short moments… nothing but small things] (p. 22). It also offers material for reflection over what constitutes a life and the possibilities of remembering and retelling a life story. Once again, it is the form of the collage that enables such reflections. Just before his suicide, Marco’s father sends Marco a childhood picture of Marco and his brother, with a small note at the back: “Before I forget, I wanted to say I won’t forget you. Papa” (2004, p. 52). In the picture we see a young Marco disguised as Zorro, posing with his toy sword next to his brother. The affective value of the photo established through the portraits is reinforced through this childhood picture, which reappears several times in the third volume. The nostalgic, monochromatic tones of the photograph and the children’s quiet joy are emotionally charged. To take the reading further, the photo also plays on the connection between children and comics, undoing the assumption of triviality and the presumed need to grow up that connect both. Like the pages from the Corto Maltese stories, this half-page from Combat ordinaire also activates a collage of media: the childhood photograph, the father’s words scribbled at the back and the comics drawing style. This photograph also hints towards the fourth volume’s concern with childhood. Planter des clous [Driving Nails]—a reference to Marco’s father’s job and potentially the children’s nursery rhyme, Planter des choux [Planting Cabbages]—acquires a different tone with the birth of Marco’s daughter,

  READING COMICS WITH ABY WARBURG: COLLAGING MEMORIES 

67

Maude. It taps into the media memories surrounding the concept of childhood and, inevitably, the relationship between children and comics: the most prominent of these is exaggerated emotions, already evident in the child’s tantrums as well as the playfulness and spontaneity associated with children’s drawings (see Ahmed 2020).7 In Planter des clous, the sequences of reflection, which unfolded across portraits or realistically drawn scenes in the preceding volumes, show Maude’s stuffed animals (Larcenet, 2008, pp. 3, 24). The first sequence is about Marco’s love for Maude. Each panel shows a different stuffed animal as Marco admiringly adds how his child has taught him about re-considering and questioning everything. The child and the child’s perspective are juxtaposed to the eternally smiling stuffed animals which provide unconditional comfort and companionship to their young owners just like, to a certain extent, Marco’s daughter does for him (see also Ahmed 2020, p. 139). In the second sequence however, the stuffed animals accompany a reflection on the necessity of poetry, a poetry that knows no cultural hierarchies and encompasses popular songs, animé and paintings (see also Ahmed and Tilleuil 2016, p. 29). Through the collage of images, the comic establishes connections across media, spanning time and space. More importantly, it mobilises the affective hold of those connections. All of Marco’s “photographs,” of his father’s tools, his daughter’s toys and the shipyard workers are imbued with affect. Moreover, their drawn essence evokes the history of image-making and attunes us to both the mediation of the image and its affective affordances.

Trying to Read Comics with Warburg: Constraints, Adjustments and Possibilities Brian Cremins likens the magic wielded by budding superhero Billy Batson (Captain Marvel) to the “magic” of comic books themselves, which “lies in its uncanny ability to document and interrogate memory itself” (2017, p. 7). The comic book is comparable to the Historama, the “super-television screen” on which Billy and the wizard Shazam watch the events of Billy’s past together. “That machine”, for Cremins, “is like a comic book in miniature, a device capable of depicting past, present and future events”, often simultaneously, in one panel (p. 7). Such a condensation of time is present in many comics panels and is symptomatic of media memories: it offers a means of tracing the past and present of comics creation through loaded references and techniques. This is illustrated through the drawn photographs in Combat ordinaire and the intersection between fictional and historical realities in the Corto Maltese stories, which recur in comics belonging to related genres (autobiographical and autofictional graphic novels and adventure and fantasy). Warburg’s Mnemosyne project, based on how images connect and carry with them a shared, deep history of image-making, enables us to read the relatively disparate comics of Pratt and Larcenet in the same breath, and situate them in

68 

M. AHMED

a network of media and cultural interactions. In drawing out possible connections with Warburg’s project to map cultural memory, I have tried to show how comics remember other media and layer their stories through those memories. Both comics discussed above have imbibed a concern with the canonical hierarchy of image-making and storytelling. This struggle, like the Pathosformel, is also one of finding a means of expression and establishing emotional connections. Such connections unfold through the serial figure of Corto, who sustains a regular readership, and through the confessional, almost intimate, mode of Combat ordinaire. This transposition of Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas  to comics encourages thinking about and beyond cultural hierarchies, focusing on interactions and influences between media. It is also an important step in shifting the focus towards image-based analyses. Further, it encourages us to rethink and productively displace the interpretative scope accorded to fragmentation and gutters. As the discussion on collage suggests, fragmentation laden with significance is not only present in the space between panels or between words and images, it unfolds across the medium, generating different levels of associations. This is the case, for instance, when comics drawing imitates other media such as photographs and silhouette animation. In this chapter, I have worked with montages of images and associations evoked by the comics. In a more ambitious vein, such a project of reading comics with Warburg furthers the line of thinking proposed by W. J. T. Mitchell in his seminal What do Pictures Want? (2010): both take the aliveness of images, their ability to move spectators, to travel across time and space as their point of departure in mapping the desires of images—their modes of communication, the messages they can transmit—which remain deeply embedded in the histories and techniques of image-making and collective memory. One of the main challenges of transposing Warburg’s Mnemosyne project to comics comes from the untenable scope of the original project: it is impossible to account for diverse reading-viewing experiences and the vast historical and cultural connections each image is inscribed in. While comics reading is often discussed with reference to gutters and closure in comics, the above attempt to read comics with Warburg encourages moving beyond the spaces between panels to thinking about how images and styles configure stories through the gamut of visual, historical and cultural connotations they mobilize. A recent Spanish graphic novel, Warburg & Beach (2021) by Jorge Carrión and Javier Olivares is animated through the collaging of lives, both famous and lesser known: the leporello book places the stories of the modernist publisher and bookshop owner, Sylvia Beach and Aby Warburg on opposing sides and interweaves the lives of the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, Marcel Duchamp and his partner, art collector and book binder, Mary Reynolds and Frances Steloff, founder of the Gotham Book Mart. The comic thus sets into motion the possibilities of meaning-making opened up by collage. That Warburg becomes one of the protagonists of this unusual comic that renders symbolic interactions material is only too apt.

  READING COMICS WITH ABY WARBURG: COLLAGING MEMORIES 

69

Notes 1. The Mnemosyne Atlas was recently reconstituted and exhibited at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. See the catalogue by Roberto Ohrt et  al. Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne – the Original (Hatje Cantz 2020). 2. The website to which Johnson 2012 is a companion volume provides an overview of the themes around which diverse plates were organized: https://warburg. library.cornell.edu/about/mnemosyne-­themes 3. For further discussion of the archive in relation to Art History and Comics Studies Cf. Sommerland Chapter “Real Queer Bodies: Visual Weight and Imagined Gravity in Sport Manga”. 4. I am alluding to philosopher John Sutton’s discussion of spongy brains (2007). 5. The comic, conflating all differences between militant and political movements, presents Sinn Féin as a militant party. 6. For further discussion of documentary photography Cf. Hardy-Vallée Chapter “From Tableau to Sequence: Introducing Comics theory within Art History to Study the Photobook”. 7. Children’s drawings are accorded a more central role in Larcenet’s Blast comics, where they are used to visualize the protagonist’s moments of euphoria.

References Ahmed, Maaheen. 2016. Collage in Comics: The Case of Dave McKean. In The Cultural Standing of Comics/Le Statut culturel de la bande dessinée, ed. Maaheen Ahmed, Jean-Louis Tilleuil, and Stéphanie Delneste, pp. 53–74. Louvain-la-Neuve: Academia-L’Harmattan. Ahmed, Maaheen. 2019. Instrumentalising Media Memories: The Second World War According to Achtung Zelig! (2004). European Comic Art 12:1, pp.  1–20. doi:https://doi.org/10.3167/eca.2019.120102. Ahmed, Maaheen. 2020. Children in Graphic Novels: Intermedial Encounters and Mnemonic Layers. Études Francophones. 32, pp. 129–148. https://languages.louisiana.edu/sites/languages/files/8.%20Ahmed%20EF%202020%20Intermediality.pdf Ahmed, Maaheen, and Jean-Louis Tilleuil. 2016. Introduction. In The Cultural Standing of Comics/Le Statut culturel de la bande dessinée, ed. Maaheen Ahmed, Stéphanie Delneste, and Jean-Louis Tilleuil, 23–36. Louvain-la-Neuve: Academia/L’Harmattan. Assmann, Aleida. 2011. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baetens, Jan. 2001. Revealing Traces: A New Theory of Graphic Enunciation. In The Language of Comics: Word and Image, ed. Christina T. Gibbons and Robin Varnum, pp. 145–55. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Baetens, Jan and Hugo Frey. 2014. The Graphic Novel: An Introduction. New  York: Cambridge University Press. Carrión, Jorge and Javier Olivares. 2021. Warburg & Beach. Barcelona: Salamandra Graphic. Cook, Roy T. 2012. Drawing of Photographs in Comics. Journal of Art and Aesthetic Criticism 70:1, pp. 129–138.

70 

M. AHMED

Cremins, Brian. 2017. Captain Marvel: Art of Nostalgia. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2001. Aby Warburg et l’archive des intensités. Études photographiques 10 (November), pp.  144–68. https://journals.openedition.org/ etudesphotographiques/268 Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2003a. Dialektik Des Monstrums: Aby Warburg and the Symptom Paradigm. Art History 24:5, pp. 621–45. Didi-Huberman, Georges 2003b. Images malgré tout. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2011. Échantillonner Le Chaos. Aby Warburg et l’atlas Photographique de La Grande Guerre. Études photographiques 27. http://journals. openedition.org/etudesphotographiques/3173. Dittmer, Jason. 2010. Comic Book Visualities: A Methodological Manifesto on Geography, Montage and Narration. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35:2, pp. 222–36. Eco, Umberto. 1972. The Myth of Superman. Translated by Natalie Chilton. Diacritics 2:1, pp. 14–22. Gardner, Jared. 2006. Archives, Collectors, and the New Media Work of Comics. MFS Modern Fiction Studies 52:4, pp.  787–806. doi:https://doi.org/10.1353/ mfs.2007.0007. Gardner, Jared. 2012. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First Century Storytelling. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Horn, Maurice. 1967. Le renouveau dans la bande dessinée. In Pierre Couperie (ed) Bande dessinée et figuration narrative: histoire, esthétique, production et sociologie de la bande dessinée mondiale, procédés narratifs et structure de l’image dans la peinture contemporaine, pp. 103–28. Paris: SERG. Johnson, Christopher D. 2012. Memory, Metaphor and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kukkonen, Karin. 2008. Popular Cultural Memory. Comics, Community and Contextual Knowledge. Nordicom Review 29:2, pp. 261–73. Larcenet, Manu. Le Combat ordinaire, vol.1. Paris: Dargaud 2003. Larcenet, Manu. Le Combat ordinaire, vol. 2. Les Quantités négligeables. Paris: Dargaud 2004. Larcenet, Manu. Le Combat ordinaire, vol. 3 Ce qui est précieux. Paris: Dargaud 2006. Larcenet, Manu. Le Combat ordinaire, vol. 4. Planter des clous. Paris: Dargaud 2008. Mickwitz, Nina. Documentary Comics. Graphic Truth-Telling in a Skeptical Age. New York: Palgrave 2016. Mitchell, W. J. T. 2010. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Panofsky, Erwin. 2019 [1939]. Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance. New York: Routledge. Pratt, Hugo. 2000 [1980]. Les Celtiques. Brussels: Casterman. Rampley, Matthew. 1999. Archives of Memory: Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas. In The Optic of Walter Benjamin, edited by Alex Coles, pp. 94–117. London: Black Dog Publishing. Schankweiler, Kerstin and Peter Wüschner. 2019. Images that Move. Analyzing Affect with Aby Warburg. In Affective Societies, ed. Antje Kahl, pp.  101–119. London: Routledge. Sielke, Sabine. 2013. ‘Joy in Repetition’; or, the Significance of Seriality in Processes of Memory and (Re-)Mediation. In The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in

  READING COMICS WITH ABY WARBURG: COLLAGING MEMORIES 

71

Literature and Film, ed. Russell J.A. Kilbourn and Eleanor Ty, pp. 37–50. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Smolderen, Thierry. 2014. The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi. Sutton, John. 2007. Spongy Brains and Material Memories. In Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England, ed. Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan Jr., pp. 14–34. London: Palgrave. Warburg, Aby, and Matthew Rampley. 2009. The Absorption of the Expressive Values of the Past. Art in Translation 1:2, pp.  273–83. ­doi:https://doi.org/10.2752/ 175613109X462708.

PART II

Perception, Reception and Meaning

Psychologies of Perception: Stories of Depiction John Miers

Abstract  “Psychologies of perception” refers in this chapter to a strand of art-­ historical debate that recruits empirically derived observations about the nature of the human perceptual system to the exploration of philosophical problems regarding the interpretation of pictorial images. The first half presents an overview of this tradition beginning with Ernst Kris and Ernst Gombrich’s work on caricature and taking in contributions from Rudolf Arnheim, Richard Wollheim and Kendall Walton. Each of these writers is characterised as engaged in a balancing act between the competing aims of making falsifiable claims about perceptual processes and evoking the pleasures of engaging with artworks. The relevance of these debates to Comics Studies is framed primarily with respect to the attention they pay to the effects of drawing style on the recognition of pictorial images. This argument is developed in the second half, which introduces recent developments including the influence of Arnheim’s work on contemporary metaphor theory and Simon Grennan’s recent theorisation of narrative drawing, both of which inform the author’s autobiographical comics presented in this section. The chapter concludes by suggesting that comics scholarship’s focus on the narrative effects of depiction offers to art historians a novel way of exploring artists’ representational choices. Keywords  Psychology • Drawing style • Caricature • Depiction • Seeing-in

J. Miers (*) Kingston University, Kingston, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Gray, I. Horton (eds.), Seeing Comics through Art History, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8_5

75

76 

J. MIERS

Introduction This chapter summarises a range of work from the past hundred years that examines the psychological processes involved in viewing depictions, with a focus on the tension between applying empirical methods to the study of pictures and responding to them as works of art. In the second half I describe how this strand of Art History informed the stylistic and narrative choices I made in producing a comic about my experience of living with multiple sclerosis.

Methodological Framework, Key Contributors and Debates If “psychologies of perception” had a single visual motif, it would be the duck-­ rabbit illusion originally published in the humorous weekly Die Fliegende Blätter (Fig. 1), adopted by the psychologist Joseph Jastrow (1899) to make the point that perception involves mental activity as well as optical stimulus, and schematised by Wittgenstein (Fig. 2), who gave the name “seeing-as” to our act of perceiving either animal (Wittgenstein 2009, p. 207). Its significance for the methodological field introduced in this chapter is due to its use as an example in the opening pages of Ernst Gombrich’s Art and Illusion. Gombrich introduces it as a counter to the claim that illusion, having been rendered “artistically irrelevant” by modern art’s abandonment of representational accuracy as a criterion of aesthetic value, “must also be psychologically very simple” (2002, p. 4). In his account, switching our reading between “rabbit” and “duck” results in transformations of the shape, as different aspects of the drawing become more or less prominent depending on the interpretation we apply. But in order to understand how different features of this graphic array affect our experience as we make these shifts, “we are compelled to look for what is ‘really there’, to see the shape apart from its interpretation, and this, we soon discover, is not really possible” (2002, p.  5). While looking at the shape as a rabbit, we remain aware of the possibility of seeing it as a duck, but we cannot perceptually “experience alternative readings at the same time” (2002, p. 5).

Fig. 1  Rabbit or Duck? Anon (1892), Die Fliegende Blätter, October 23

  PSYCHOLOGIES OF PERCEPTION: STORIES OF DEPICTION 

77

Fig. 2  The Duck-­Rabbit, from Wittgenstein (2009, p. 165)

The question at the core of this discussion has been central to aesthetic philosophy since antiquity: how are we able to gaze upon an arrangement of marks on a flat surface and take it to be an image of something else? But rather than appeal to the idea that the picture signifies through mimesis, Gombrich instead directs us towards the examination of our processes of perception and categorisation. In short, “psychologies of perception” applies findings from the science of psychology to the philosophical problem of depiction. Although the visual examples most frequently referred to by Gombrich, his contemporary Rudolf Arnheim and later contributors to this field including Richard Wollheim and Kendall Walton come from the established canon of fine art, non-art examples such as the duck-rabbit prove useful because they allow the critic to isolate specific visual effects, and the reader to reflect directly on the critic’s discussion thereof. While reading these remarks, you have been able to engage in the perceptual games under discussion, and to form an assessment of the nature of your perceptual experience without needing to subscribe to or reject any philosophical assertions about the nature of reality. Such examples do not even need to qualify as depictions: a key phenomenon discussed in work in this field is “the face in the clouds”, our ability to “see” imagined subjects in natural formations that were not produced with any representational intent, to which Cutting and Massironi (1998) have given the name “fortuitous pictures”. Examples like these, where our ability to hold an imagined subject in mind is not impeded by our awareness that the optical array supporting those imaginings is profoundly unlike the thing imagined, lead naturally onto consideration of the “riddle of style”, to borrow from the title of Gombrich’s introduction to Art and Illusion. Artists may employ any number of strategies for the arrangement of graphic marks in representing any subject, and while the observable differences between those strategies might characterise that subject in different ways, they do not usually provide any barrier to the act of recognition itself. Here we begin to see one of the uses this methodology has for the comics scholar who is interested in the visual achievements of cartoonists. Deliberate manipulation of graphic style is a key implement in the cartoonist’s toolkit, frequently employed within a single comics text to achieve specific narrative effects, and more broadly the effect of graphic style on the reader’s

78 

J. MIERS

experience is a central concern for comics narratologists.1 The distortions of caricature, in which the exaggeration of the features of a face is taken to signify character traits or heightened emotion rather than physical deformation is an obvious example of such manipulation, and in this light it is no surprise that Gombrich was one of the first art historians to study this type of drawing. A comparison of “The Principles of Caricature” (Kris and Gombrich 1938),2 with Gillian Rhodes’s Superportraits (1997) on the same theme, will serve to elaborate the main characteristics of this methodology, as well as the different disciplinary emphases that have been made in such work, and the general direction of travel in how this field has formed and refined itself. Caricature is useful to perceptual psychologists because it allows for fairly precise framing of a problem of depiction. As viewers we judge a successful caricature on grounds of identification: whatever mockery the drawing may make of its subject, it must first be recognisable as a portrait of that subject. And while we expect this identification to be instantaneous and unambiguous, we are not only aware of, but draw pleasure from, the caricaturist’s distortions. Thus reflection on the experience of viewing a caricature allows us to examine “from inside” our appreciation of that drawing. We are simultaneously aware of our perception of a likeness to a specific individual and of the ways in which the image deviates from the appearance of that individual. Kris and Gombrich highlight caricature as a type of picture that supports a close examination of how the artist “plays with and reshapes sensory experience under the influence of internal and affective states” (1938, p. 319). The psychological framework they apply is psychoanalysis, specifically Freud’s work on the interpretation of dreams (1913). They argue that Freud’s work marks “a turning point in the history of aesthetics just as it does in psychiatry”, and that the work of psychoanalysts in establishing that there are “laws of dream construction” entails that there must also be “psychological laws of art construction” (Kris and Gombrich 1938, p. 319). But they do not see their work as a one-directional process of using developments in psychology to buttress art-­ historical narratives; they also suggest that “a study such as this which starts out as a survey of pictures of a bygone time may throw some light on the problems of the clinician today” (p. 319). Kris and Gombrich credit the brothers Annibale and Agostino Carracci with the invention of caricature in the late sixteenth century. The story they tell of its development is that this was a period in which artists’ understanding of their work had shifted from the Aristotelian conception of producing an “imitation of nature” to attempting “penetration of the innermost essence of reality” (1938, p. 321). Caricature may distort the features of an individual’s face, but in doing so it “penetrates through the mere outward appearance to the inner being in all its littleness or ugliness” (p. 321). The ability to produce representations of the inner self rests on the same principles of dreamwork identified by Freud, in which “a single feature often stands for the whole, and a person is represented by one salient characteristic only” (p. 323).3

  PSYCHOLOGIES OF PERCEPTION: STORIES OF DEPICTION 

79

Thus underlying features of cognition are applied to problems of pictorial representation, and in pursuing this programme art historians may also arrive at findings that are useful to the psychologist from whom they take inspiration. Superportraits also departs from the observation that caricatures can seem more true than naturalistic portraits. However rather than drawing on Freud, Rhodes takes her cue from cognitive psychology, and applies a wider range of cognitive functions, and a greater concern with empirical evidence. Her approach is based in norm theory: she argues that we construct normative mental representations of commonly encountered objects, and that it is cognitively efficient to store mental representations of members of an object class by coding the ways in which they deviate from stored norms. For example, an individual with a large nose will be recognisable because that nose contrasts to our norm for the size of noses. Therefore a drawing that exaggerates the size of that nose will be easy to recognise because it makes easier the process of comparison we would typically use to recognise that individual. Both texts focus on a type of depiction that enables the examination of psychological processes, but the shift towards a greater appeal to empirical verification in Rhodes is characteristic of the type of engagement with psychology that has become more common since Kris and Gombrich’s essay.4 The source of Rhodes’s empirical evidence reveals a difference between these two texts that points to diverging analytical aims rather than simply a linear process of development in methodological exactitude. Kris and Gombrich invoke Plato, Nicholas Poussin and Annibale Caracci in a sweeping art-historical contextualization of caricature that takes in its stride the decorations of Mannerism and the distortions of form and space that were prevalent in then-contemporary art. In contrast, Rhodes’s examples of caricatures are not produced by artists seeking to reveal their sitters’ innermost nature by creating “the perfect deformity”, but instead by a computer: the examples she discusses are produced by Susan Brennan’s caricature generator, which “is used to create caricatures by amplifying the differences between the face to be caricatured and a comparison face” in a process which “simulates the visualisation process in the imagination of the caricaturist” (Brennan 1985, p. 170). For scholars whose interest in pictures is primarily as a set of visual stimuli that support psychological conclusions, Rhodes’s choice of corpus is an “additional strength” because it allows the operationalisation of caricature through the “construction of scaled caricatures, controlled experimentation, and replication of studies” (Cabe 1999, p.  152). From this perspective, Kris and Gombrich’s psychoanalytic account and invocation of beliefs in the ability of pictures to uncover truths about reality might look over-reliant on an old-­ fashioned critical model of discerning connoisseurship in method, and credulously tolerant of a naive reliance on the notion of mimesis in argumentation. Gombrich and Kris emphasise that caricature should be engaged with as an art, and for scholars who take this view, by removing the subjectivity of the artist’s interpretive play, Rhodes has bled her subject dry of the very thing that makes it worthy of study in the first place. Kris and Gombrich argue in their opening

80 

J. MIERS

paragraph that it is precisely because academic psychology “deals in the main with the cognitive functions and with stimuli from without” rather than internal and affective states that it has “added comparatively little to our understanding of art” (1938, p. 319). While these countercriticisms themselves have an element of caricature, they do highlight a tension that runs through much psychologically oriented aesthetic philosophy: on the one hand, not letting an interest in the demonstrable phenomena of perception blind the analyst to the experience of engaging with art as art, while on the other preventing the examination of subjective experience from becoming a trapdoor into sloppy thinking. This tension is evident throughout Rudolf Arnheim’s “Agenda for the Psychology of Art” (1952), which sets out a number of questions that remain salient for theorists of pictures, including the overarching question of “the concrete conditions which make a beholder accept a pattern as an image of something else, say, a human figure” (p. 313), and concerns with foreshortening and overlapping, distortion and depth perception. Arnheim’s agenda is at root an exhortation to greater cross-disciplinary fertilisation: “more intimate contact between art and psychology is the first pre-requisite for progress” (p. 310). He begins by attributing what he sees as the failure of psychology to respond adequately to the examination of works of art and artistic processes to psychologists’ lack of first-­ hand experience of artistic activities. Psychologists are likely to waste time on “side issues, bad taste in the choice of examples, and the clinging to conventional notions about art” (p. 311) unless they learn “to handle the brush or the chisel […] to a degree which will keep the feeling of genuine artistic experience alive” (p. 310). Artists, for their part, need to overcome their “suspicion against the undertakings of the psychologists” and “remnants of the romantic prejudice that art excludes reason” in order to “obtain from psychology a more solid foundation for the generalisations that play such an important role in all studio practice” (p. 311). His agenda is also an indication of the methodological shift away from the psychoanalysis that interested Kris and Gombrich and towards the cognitive psychology on which Rhodes and contemporary scholars in this field draw. He claims that part of the reason artists and art educators are unconvinced of the value of psychology is that they have been put off by the “orgy on a bare mountain which the psychoanalysts have been celebrating in recent years” (p. 310). But, he maintains, building a solid analytical foundation must leave room for intuitive judgement: for Arnheim, the tendency towards excessive quantification is as much of a stumbling block as suspicion and ignorance, and limiting our results to “what can be measured and counted” will mean that “we are likely to miss the vital core of our problems” (p. 312). Among the misguided analyses at which he takes aim are “attempts to derive a formula of beauty from mathematical proportions” and the treatment of compositional structure “as though it consisted of rigid geometrical patterns” (p. 312). Gombrich conducts a similar balancing act throughout Art and Illusion, although the formalism he avoids is not an insistence on quantifiable

  PSYCHOLOGIES OF PERCEPTION: STORIES OF DEPICTION 

81

measurements but the overstatement of equivalences between pictorial and linguistic signification. His earlier work on caricature with Kris hinted at the idea that artistic production involved creating something like a lexicon of visual devices that could reliably produce certain types of illusion: in the same breath as praising the “sublime freedom” of the pen strokes in a caricature by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, they observe that the face depicted is “distilled down to a few lines as if it were restricted to a formula” (2002, p. 323). Gombrich develops this in greater detail, with a wider historical and stylistic scope, in the elaboration of Art and Illusion’s core principle of “making and matching”, in which, as Patrick Maynard puts it, “depiction is largely a matter of building a toolbox of effective devices  – dodges  – passed on, studied, borrowed, stolen, or invented, though occasionally systematised” (2005, p. 98). Seeing the development of styles of pictorial representation as a process of building language-­ like formulae allowed art historians to comprehensively reject the idea that representational accuracy “had progressed from rude beginnings to the perfection of illusion” (Gombrich 2002, p. 4), which for Gombrich had ethical as well as analytical value: seeing historical styles as indications of the sophistication “of collectives, of ‘mankind’, ‘races’, or ‘ages’ […] weakens resistance to totalitarian habits of mind” (p.  17). Such was the influence of Gombrich’s approach that W. J. T. Mitchell (1987, pp. 75–94) would later credit him as the initiator of the “conventionalist turn” of the second half of the twentieth century, although for Gombrich the comparison of the visual arts to verbal language functioned more as a metaphor than an explicit endorsement of a programme of study. Mitchell argues that Gombrich never abandoned the idea of the pictorial image as being in some regards “natural”, and in the later decades of his career “his argument [was] no longer with the naïve “copy theory” of representation but with what he [tended] to regard as the oversophisticated relativism and conventionalism of semioticians and symbol theorists” (1987, p. 81). The idea is that there is something natural in pictures that escapes quantification is invoked at the beginning of a passage in which Gombrich describes art historian Kenneth Clark’s attempt to “‘stalk’ an illusion”: “works of art are not mirrors, but they share with mirrors that elusive magic of transformation which is so hard to put into words” (2002, p. 5). Clark stepped forwards and backwards in front of a Diego Velázquez painting hoping to observe the moment at which globs of paint “transformed themselves into a vision of transfigured reality” (ibid), but found himself unable to hold the visions of paint as paint, and paint as image, in his mind at once. This account, which suggests that attention to the depicted subject replaces attention to the depiction’s surface, is one of the few central arguments in Art and Illusion that has been rejected in subsequent scholarship. The theories of depiction proposed by philosophers Richard Wollheim (2015 [1968]) and Kendall Walton (1990, pp. 293–352) both rest on the idea that viewing pictorial representations involves simultaneous attention to marked surface and depicted subject.

82 

J. MIERS

Wollheim elaborates his core concept of “seeing-in” by contrasting it to Wittgenstein’s “seeing-as”, and his argument departs directly from the Gombrich passages discussed above. Gombrich’s error, according to Wollheim, is in conflating the duck-rabbit with Clark’s anecdote. “Everyone would recognise […] that we cannot simultaneously see the duck and the rabbit” (2015, pp. 157–158), but this holds for special cases such as bistable images and not for representational seeing in general. The “seeing-as” approach fails “to assign to the seeing appropriate to representations a distinctive phenomenology” (2015, p. 158). When looking at a Velázquez, we may see the brushstrokes as Venus, or Pope Innocent X, but we also see those figures in the painted surface, and we attend to both at once. Seeing-in has a twofold phenomenology that “permits unlimited simultaneous attention to what is seen and to the features of the medium” (2015, p.  156). In keeping with Arnheim’s desire to bring the analytical precision of specific psychological effects to bear on questions of depiction on while retaining an emphasis on the pleasures of aesthetic appreciation, Wollheim offers two arguments that emphasise each of these methodological foci in turn. The psychological argument proceeds from the principle of object constancy: if we change position while looking at a picture, the picture does not undergo perspectival distortion. That is to say, if we were standing in front of a painting consisting of parallel horizontal lines, and then moved to view it from an oblique angle so that the lines converged in our field of vision, we would still understand the lines to be horizontal and parallel in the image itself. This is possible because “the spectator is, and remains, visually aware not only of what is represented but also of the surface qualities of the representation” (2015, p. 159). The aesthetic argument holds that we would be unable to “marvel endlessly at the way in which line or brushstroke or expanse of colour is exploited to render effects or establish analogies” (p. 159) if we were unable to observe those features and their effects simultaneously. It is difficult to see how Gombrich could square his enjoyment of the virtuosity of the caricaturist’s pen with this challenge. Kendall Walton’s theory of depiction (1990, pp. 293–352) is close enough to Wollheim’s to have motivated him to publish clarifications of the distinctions between the two (Walton 1991), but his theory of “mimesis as make-believe” places greater emphasis on the role of the imagination, and in the case of depiction on the inseparability of perceptual and cognitive activity. Walton regards Wollheim’s theory as “not so much mistaken as incomplete” (1991, p. 423), in that he does not offer an explanation of what the experience of seeing a figure in a picture actually is, instead brushing away the need for such clarification by claiming that seeing-in is such an everyday experience that he only needs to gesture towards it for a reader to follow his meaning (p.  424). Without an explanation of how a spectator sees a depicted subject in a marked surface, the account of the phenomenology of looking at pictures is incomplete. Walton’s solution is to argue that representational seeing is “participating in a visual game of make-believe” (p.  425) in which we imagine, not that Velázquez’s canvas is Pope Innocent X, but that our seeing of the canvas is the seeing of the

  PSYCHOLOGIES OF PERCEPTION: STORIES OF DEPICTION 

83

Pope. In other words, we do not imagine the painting to be anything other than what it is—a painting—but we do imagine our own perceptual activity to be something other than what it is. All of the work discussed thus far has to some degree argued that perception and cognition are intertwined, but Walton’s argument rests on a particularly strong version of this position: “I do not mean just that thoughts have causal effects on one’s experiences, but that the experiences contain thoughts” (1990, p. 295).

The Comics Research Project: I Preferred It When This Stuff Was Just Theoretical The project I outline here is an ongoing series of autobiographical comic strips, but that artistic production is so closely intertwined with the theoretical work undertaken in my doctoral research project that some exploration of that will be required as an introduction. My thesis, Visual Metaphor and Drawn Narratives (Miers 2017), took as its starting point an exploration of visual metaphor in narrative drawing, with a focus on cognitively oriented theories of metaphor, amongst which the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) developed by linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson (Lakoff and Johnson 2003) is the most influential. I argued that, despite the still-growing body of work that applies CMT to comics and cartoons, the field lacked a substantial account of depiction and was thus unable to account for the perceptual nature of visual as opposed to verbal metaphor. Following this intuition, I sought to integrate the methodological field outlined above with contemporary metaphor theory. Walton’s work was key to achieving this synthesis: his arguments about the inseparability of perception and cognition are echoed in the “embodied cognition” framework that underpins CMT, which holds that having a physical or sensory experience and simultaneously forming an evaluative judgement of that experience, as we do when engaging in visual games of make-believe, forms a phenomenological whole: “It can be misleading […] to speak of direct physical experience as though there was some core of immediate experience which we then ‘interpret’ in terms of our conceptual system” (Lakoff and Johnson 2003, p. 56). There are genealogical as well as thematic links between these frameworks. Johnson (1987, pp. 74–100) begins his discussion of metaphorical extensions of the concept of balance by discussing Arnheim’s (1974, pp. 10–41) use of Gestalt psychology in a discussion of the notion of visual balance. Arnheim asks how it is that, when looking at a circle placed in a square frame, we can instantly and without the use of measuring instruments tell that it is slightly off-centre. He proposes that this intuition can be explained by the existence of “perceptual forces”, which are “assumed to be real in both realms of existence – that is, as both psychological and physical forces” (1974, p. 16). Johnson extends this proposal into an account of how the polysemic extensions of the word “balance” develop from embodied knowledge we begin accumulating in infancy.

84 

J. MIERS

As children we experience physical balance, in the straightforward sense of weights being distributed evenly around a fulcrum, when learning to walk, and we experience the ability to maintain this balance as a positive one. The more abstract uses of the concept of balance, such as legal or moral balance, or the balance of rational argument, are extensions of the schematic structure of embodied experience mapped from concrete domains of experience to more abstract ones. This, in abrupt summary, is the core of Lakoff and Johnson’s claim that “metaphor is primarily a matter of thought and only derivatively a matter of language” (2003, p. 153). Any metaphorical expression that uses the concept of balance, be it a linguistic one such as my earlier reference to Gombrich’s analytical balancing act, or a visual one such as the image of the scales of justice, works by fleshing out the schematic cognitive structure described above.5 A significant recent contribution to the examination of comics as drawn texts, Simon Grennan’s A Theory of Narrative Drawing (2017), makes extensive use of some of the work discussed here. Wollheim’s seeing-in is key to a number of its arguments, and the notion of “image schema”, the name Johnson gives to the kind of minimally elaborated cognitive structure described in the previous paragraph, is a fundamental part of Grennan’s elaboration of his aetiological account of drawing. Grennan’s theory is primarily concerned with the ways in which drawings mediate embodied social behaviour rather than the perceptual effects of aspects of graphic arrays, but an entailment of his arguments is that different forms of representation produce different narrative meanings. For example, in one of the “drawing demonstrations” that conclude the book, Grennan adopts Mike Mignola’s form of representation in drawing pages based on a script extrapolated from two pages of Jim Medway’s Teen Witch (Medway 2007). Although the plots of the two sets of pages remain the same, moving the events from Medway’s gentle north of England populated by anthropomorphic cats to the world of Mignola’s Hellboy (specifically Mignola 1998) produced new readings of specific events within the plot, to say nothing of the different inferences of mood and intention produced by the new drawing. A spell cast by Medway’s protagonist to humorous effect now carries the possibility of lasting harm, and the word “princess” becomes a literal title rather than a term of familial endearment (Grennan 2017, pp. 192–193). My own work presented in this section draws on the core idea of creating a new narrative by adopting the representational forms of another, but does not fully attempt to make new drawings that could pass as the work of another cartoonist. So I Guess My Body Pretty Much Hates Me Now (Miers 2019) emerged from an unusual coincidence of research interests and personal circumstances, as summarised on its opening page (Fig. 3). Soon after settling on visual metaphor as the main topic of my thesis, I decided that David B.’s graphic memoir Epileptic (2006) would make an excellent case study for my final chapter. The visual metaphors B. develops throughout the book as he depicts the trauma that his brother Jean-Christophe’s epilepsy visits upon his family would allow me ample opportunity to apply the theoretical framework developed in the

  PSYCHOLOGIES OF PERCEPTION: STORIES OF DEPICTION 

85

Fig. 3  John Miers (2019) So I Guess My Body Pretty Much Hates Me Now, p. 1

preceding chapters, and my admiration for the book would make writing the chapter an enjoyable end to the project. I could not have known that when I began writing the chapter, in January 2017, I would be reeling from a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis I had received the previous month.

86 

J. MIERS

Questions of how a cartoonist could use their practice to work through trauma caused by chronic neurological disease took on a new and acute salience. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to begin exploring how they could be answered through drawing during a “Researcher in the Archives” residency in University of the Arts London’s Archives and Special Collections Centre at London College of Communication. Working primarily with the Les Coleman Collection, a vast and rich bequest of mostly European and American underground and alternative comic books given by the late British artist, poet and curator, my intention was to adapt for my own purposes the visual metaphors for illness and disability I found in the comics it contained.6 This ran aground when a survey of the collection uncovered few depictions of physical illnesses, certainly not enough to begin identifying any common themes or patterns. There were, however, frequent occurrences of visual metaphors in which physical injuries or disabilities were used as metaphors for psychological or emotional distress. Perhaps I should not have been surprised. This observation was entirely consistent with CMT, which holds that concrete physical and sensory experiences are typically used as metaphors for more abstract experiences, and not the other way around. I was struck by a sequence in Ivan Brunetti’s Schizo #1 (1994) depicting a dream in which Brunetti imagines himself returned to high school. He confesses to the reader, “I get so nervous around people that I inevitably lose control of my excretory f-f-functions!” (1994, p. 3). Immediately after that, a group of jocks and bullies mock his loss of bodily control (Fig. 4). This seemed an exact inversion of my own experience. In general, I am fortunate not to experience the kind of social anxiety depicted in this sequence. On the other hand, the incontinence Brunetti’s dream-image suffers from is a common symptom of multiple sclerosis. An aspect of the experiences I was hoping to confront through metaphor was itself being used as a metaphor for another type of affliction.

Fig. 4  Ivan Brunetti (1994) Schizo #1, p. 4, panels 1–3. Fantagraphics

  PSYCHOLOGIES OF PERCEPTION: STORIES OF DEPICTION 

87

Metaphor analysis in CMT usually begins by identifying the two concepts that are brought together by a metaphorical expression. In this case, a depiction of loss of control of bodily functions supports an account of loss of control of social function. In this methodology, understanding Brunetti’s visual metaphor involves first recognising what is depicted, and then ascribing metaphorical meaning to that subject. But scholars interested in psychologies of perception also argue that metaphorical thinking is present in the process of seeing-in itself. Gombrich likens the artist’s ability to apply new denotations to visual stimuli to the creation of metaphor (2002, p. 264). Walton perceives a “kinship” between metaphor and the games of make-believe we play with representational art (1973, p. 292). Flint Schier (1986), Virgil Aldrich (1971) and Jon Green (1985) have given accounts of representational seeing that align the twofold phenomenology described by Wollheim to the way in which metaphor makes two concepts active in the mind at once. Wollheim explores this connection in more detail and proposes a distinction between “pictures that are metaphors” and “pictures that have metaphors as their textual content” (1987). Observing that Brunetti’s loss of continence metaphorises his social anxiety is to identify a metaphor of the second type. The first type refers to the way in which the properties of the marked surface imbue the depicted subject with metaphorical meaning. Philip Rawson took a similar position two decades earlier when he observed that in any drawing “the main bulk of the marks will not just refer directly to everyday objects but will “qualify” them by investing them with analogous forms …endowed with a kind of metaphorical radiance” (1969, p. 26). If drawing style operates as a metaphor for the qualities of represented objects, then “implicit in every drawing style is a visual ontology, i.e. a definition of the real in visual terms” (1969, p. 20). Grennan invokes this comment as part of his account of how his drawing demonstrations change not only the appearance but the story of the comics pages he takes as source material (2017, p. 177). In more general terms, Douglas Wolk has suggested that “cartooning is inescapably a metaphor for the subjectivity of perception” (2007, p. 21). Brunetti’s drawing style in Fig. 4 conforms to conventions of underground cartooning. It mimics the rounded and elastic forms popularised by the work of Walt Disney and an array of graphic storytelling aimed at children, but renders these forms with a dense and enervated facture that suggests transgressive intent. In Brunetti’s metaphor, incontinence serves a cognitive role that contradicts the relationship I had to it: for him, it was a means of addressing another trauma. For me, it was part of the trauma I wanted to address. CMT did not seem to offer a way out of this conundrum, but drawing on my engagement with psychologies of perception, I decided to confront Brunetti on the comics page and to adopt his visual ontology in doing so (Fig. 5). Following Grennan’s arguments about the inseparability of visual and narrative expressions of subjectivity, in order to realise this confrontation as a coherent story my autobiographical self needed to not only look like one of Brunetti’s characters but behave like one, and this meant being misanthropic, foulmouthed and scatological. Grennan reports feeling dishabituated when looking at the results of his drawing demonstration (2017, pp. 212–214), and that was my experience here too. The page did not look like drawings I had previously completed, and despite being its creator, I

88 

J. MIERS

Fig. 5  John Miers (2019) So I Guess My Body Pretty Much Hates Me Now, p. 15

  PSYCHOLOGIES OF PERCEPTION: STORIES OF DEPICTION 

89

was shocked by the result. Nevertheless, it felt like a breakthrough. Emboldened by what I saw as the success of this drawing, on subsequent pages I continued with a similar style to retell an incident in which, as I put it in Fig. 5, I “shat myself in public”, reframing an episode of intense disgust and humiliation as a slapstick tale of gross-out humour. The process was empowering and contributed to my ability to retain a sense of agency and resilience in the face of illness. Proceeding along the same methodological lines, the second story in So I Guess My Body Pretty Much Hates Me Now (Fig.  6) adopted the graphic

Fig. 6  John Miers (2019) So I Guess My Body Pretty Much Hates Me Now p. 3

90 

J. MIERS

expression of Mark Beyer.7 The bulk of Beyer’s output depicts the misadventures of his characters Amy and Jordan, who suffer a procession of physical injury and psychological torment. His graphic style is characterised by distorted figures, obsessive hand-drawn patterns and exaggerated incoherent perspectives. As Chris Mautner puts it, “There’s no plot, per se, […] just a series of hazardous events that eventually stop” (2016, n.p.). The impression of a nonsensically cruel universe created by Beyer’s work felt appropriate for a story that begins with the moment of my diagnosis and the response that life-­ changing news provoked: why me? Producing these drawings required engagement with both poles of the methodological range mapped by the work of Kris and Gombrich, and Rhodes: mimicking the material properties of the graphic languages of other cartoonists required minute observation of their habits of composition, mark-making and spatial construction, while the psychoanalyst’s focus on internal and affective states provided the motivation for completing these confessional works.

Benefits and Challenges for Comics Studies Some of the applications of this methodological field to Comics Studies have been discussed already, most prominently in the analysis of caricature. Not all drawing in comics is caricature, of course, but its characteristic features of exaggeration, distortion and simplification are present to some degree in the work of most cartoonists. The work of Kris and Gombrich, and Rhodes, analysed how recognition of characters is achieved and sustained through caricature, and of how this approach to drawing can create character. But the value of this methodology is not limited to one set of graphic languages already covered in canonical texts. A key concern for psychologies of perception is the examination of the material features characteristic of any given style, and the psychological processes by which those features support seeing-in. For example, the work of John Kennedy (1993) has analysed the psychological processes by which outline drawings provide information about the scenes they depict. Lefèvre and Meesters (2018) recently provided a productive example of how empirical studies of this type of drawing might be applied to comics scholarship. They showed viewers a video of a line drawing being produced, as well as stills from that video, and recorded their interpretations of what was depicted at each stage. Although their experiment was not intended to specifically examine “the clear line style and other minimalistic styles […] often used in […] comics”, they draw on previous research demonstrating that “a line drawing does part of the pre-processing that our brain has to do to make sense of visual stimuli” in suggesting that “our experiment may help to understand why simplicity is very important in these styles” (2018, p. 214). Kennedy’s work places greater emphasis on the way in which outline drawings support the construction of mental representations of the three-dimensional form of objects, which has value for analysts seeking to understand how sequential drawings support imaginings of continuous physical spaces.

  PSYCHOLOGIES OF PERCEPTION: STORIES OF DEPICTION 

91

It is difficult to think of any material feature of graphic style that has not been examined in this field. Walton has paid attention to the effects of specific types of facture in the development of his notion of the “apparent artist” (1987), a figure that bears a family resemblance to Philippe Marion’s “graphiateur” (Baetens 2001) in its concern with the narrative effects of how drawn marks appear to have been made. All of the key figures discussed in this chapter have given attention to the effects of different approaches to perspective and the construction of pictorial space, a necessary part of understanding the visual creation of fictional worlds in an art form which, as Hillary Chute has put it, has “an intense concern with locating bodies in space” (2011, p. 107). If, as Lefèvre (2016) has argued, graphic style serves as the “primary entrance to a story”, it behoves the researcher interested in cartooning as a visual art to attend to the ways in which graphic style mediates access to the fictional worlds it constructs. Comics scholarship that draws on CMT would also benefit from closer attention to graphic style. Applications of this theory to comics tend to focus on what Wollheim called “pictures that have metaphors as their textual content”; the analyses often take representational seeing for granted and give little attention to the processes by which seeing-in is achieved, meaning that the effect of stylistic variation on the use of visual metaphor is frequently elided. Elisabeth El Refaie (2019) makes a valuable intervention by developing a tripartite classification system for visual metaphors that includes pictorial metaphors, spatial metaphors and, most pertinently to this discussion, stylistic metaphors, which “use features such as brightness, colour, form, level of detail, and quality of line, as well as actual or implied material qualities of the page or the whole book, to indicate an abstract concept or a non-visual sense perception” (2019, pp.  85–86). Charles Forceville, whose Pictorial Metaphor in Advertising (1996) was the first substantial application of CMT to visual metaphor, notes in a review of El Refaie’s work that this framework proposes promising refinements to both metaphor and Comics Studies (Forceville 2020). Finally, Walton’s account of depiction as a self-conscious fusion of imaginative and perceptual activity, and its subsequent development by Grennan, raise the possibility of a closer integration of visual and narratological approaches to comics by describing the ways in which narrative drawings do not just illustrate but create fictional worlds. Gombrich hints at this idea when he introduces the duck-rabbit as “the simple trick drawing which has reached the philosophical seminar” (2002, p. 4). He does not take up the riddle of why Wittgenstein felt it necessary to reduce Jastrow’s drawing to a diagrammatic form before inviting it to the seminar, but alludes to an answer when he observes that Jean de Brunhoff’s rendering of the face of Babar8 with “a few hooks and dots” (2009, p. 283) succeeds “partly because its lack of elaboration guarantees the absence of contradictory clues” (p. 284). Grennan argues that “every story has a story, in the sense that everything that is told also affords the story of its telling/ showing” (2017, p. 174), and if we take the story of Wittgenstein’s showing of the duck-rabbit to be the presentation of a precise argument about linguistic

92 

J. MIERS

categorisation of sensory stimuli, it makes narrative as well as theoretical sense that he would not want his audience distracted by contradictory clues. Equally, Gombrich’s concern with the material aspects of pictures meant that he needed richer stimuli to work with, so he reinstated the more heavily textured version from Die Fliegende Blätter. The art historians discussed in this chapter frequently treat the visual and narrative properties of depictions separately. Such questions are more likely to be intertwined in comics scholarship; thus, the field offers novel ways of apprehending the stories that produce and are presented in depictions, even when they are employed purely in the service of elaborating theoretical arguments. Figure 7 asks what use characters in Mark Beyer’s world might make of the duck-rabbit. Their stories do not permit them the intellectual repose of philosophical argumentation, and so the drawing’s competing interpretations are instead recruited into the unending struggle to comprehend the torment of existence.

Fig. 7  John Miers (2020) Mark Beyer’s Duck-Rabbit

  PSYCHOLOGIES OF PERCEPTION: STORIES OF DEPICTION 

93

Notes 1. Narratological analyses of style in comics include Pascal Lefèvre’s (2011a, 2011b, 2016) emphasis on graphic style’s ability to create fictive worlds; Simon Grennan’s (Grennan 2012, 2017) conceptualisation of graphic style as the realisation of intersubjective relationships; Eszter Szép’s (2020, pp. 109–134) analysis of the ethics of style as an element of interpersonal engagement; and Elisabeth El Refaie’s theorisation of “stylistic metaphors” (2019, pp. 109–117) 2. Gombrich returns to the analysis of caricature later in Art and Illusion (2002, pp. 279–303); also of interest to comics scholars is his argument that visual metaphor is the primary weapon in “the cartoonist’s armoury” (1963). 3. For further discussion of caricature Cf. Mutard chapter “From Giotto to Drnaso: The Common Well of Pictorial Schema in ‘High’ Art and ‘Low’ Comics”. 4. Gombrich himself provides evidence of this shift in his discussion of Rodolphe Töpffer’s Essai de Physiognomonie (1845), which he frames as a systematic investigation of the psychological principles of “minimum clues” and “release mechanisms” (Gombrich 2002, pp. 283–289) 5. For further discussion of Arnheim and visual balance Cf. Sommerland chapter “Real Queer Bodies: Visual Weight and Imagined Gravity in Sport Manga”. 6. The collection can be browsed at http://bit.ly/lescolemanlcc 7. Beyer began self-publishing in 1975 and is best known for comic strips starring his luckless characters Amy and Jordan. During the 1980s and 90s his work appeared in a variety of underground and alternative periodicals including the influential anthology RAW, and has been reprinted in Amy and Jordan (Beyer 2004) and Agony (Beyer 2016). 8. An anthropomorphic elephant who starred in seven children’s books authored by Brunhoff between 1931 and 1937.

References Aldrich, Virgil C. 1971. Form in the Visual Arts. The British Journal of Aesthetics. 11:3, pp. 215–226. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjaesthetics/11.3.215. Arnheim, Rudolf. 1952. Agenda for the Psychology of Art. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 10:4, pp. 310–314. https://doi.org/10.2307/426060. Arnheim, Rudolf. 1974. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye. 2nd Revised Edition. Berkeley, CA; London: University of California Press. B, David. 2006. Epileptic. London: Jonathan Cape. Baetens, Jan. 2001. Revealing traces: A new theory of graphic enunciation. In The Language of Comics: Word and Image eds. Robin Varnum and Christina T. Gibbons. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 145–155. Beyer, Mark. 2004. Amy and Jordan. New York: Pantheon Books. Beyer, Mark (2016) Agony. New York Review Comics. Brennan, Susan E. 1985. Caricature generator: The dynamic exaggeration of faces by computer. Leonardo. 18:3, pp. 170–178. Brunetti, Ivan. 1994. Schizo. Fantagraphics 1. Cabe, Patrick A. 1999. Superportraits: Caricatures and Recognition (Book Review), Metaphor and Symbol. 14:2, pp.  149–157. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327868 ms1402_5.

94 

J. MIERS

Chute, Hillary. 2011. Comics form and narrating lives. Profession. 2011, 1, pp. 107–117. Cutting, James E. and Massironi, Manfredo (1998) Pictures and their special status in perceptual and cognitive inquiry. In Perception and Cognition at Century’s End: History, Philosophy, and Theory ed. Julian Hochberg. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, pp. 137–168. El Refaie, Elisabeth. 2019. Visual Metaphor and Embodiment in Graphic Illness Narratives. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Forceville, Charles. 1996. Pictorial metaphor in advertising. New York: Routledge. Forceville, Charles. 2020. Book review of: Elisabeth El Refaie, Visual Metaphor and Embodiment in Graphic Illness Narratives (Oxford University Press, New  York, 2019, ISBN 9780190678173). Journal of Pragmatics, 155, pp. 352–354. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma/2019/09/007. Freud, Sigmund. 1913. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by A.  A. Brill. New York: Macmillan. Gombrich, Ernst. 1963. The Cartoonist’s Armory. In Meditations on a Hobby Horse, and Other Essays on the Theory of Art. London: Phaidon, pp. 127–142. Gombrich, Ernst. 2002. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. 6th edn. London; New York, NY: Phaidon Press. Green, Jon D. 1985. Picasso’s Visual Metaphors. Journal of Aesthetic Education 19:4, pp. 61–76. https://doi.org/10.2307/3332299. Grennan, Simon. 2012. Demonstrating discours: Two comic strip projects in self-­ constraint. Studies in Comics. 2:2. pp.  295–316. https://doi.org/10.1386/ stic.2.2.295_1. Grennan, Simon (2017) A Theory of Narrative Drawing. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Jastrow, Joseph (1899) The Mind’s Eye. Popular Science Monthly. 54, pp. 299–312. Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis Of Meaning, Imagination, And Reason. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Kennedy, John M. 1993. Drawing and the Blind: Pictures to Touch. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kris, Ernst and Gombrich, Ernst. 1938. The Principles of Caricature. British Journal of Medical Psychology. 17:3–4, pp.  319–342. https://doi.org/10.1111/ j.2044-­8341.1938.tb00301.x. Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. 2003. Metaphors We Live By. 2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lefèvre, Pascal. 2011a. Mise en scène and Framing: Visual Storytelling in Lone Wolf and Cub. In Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods eds. Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan. New York and Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 71–83. Lefèvre, Pascal. 2011b. Some Medium-Specific Qualities of Graphic Sequences. SubStance. 40:1, pp. 14–33. Lefèvre, Pascal. 2016. No Content without Form. Graphic Style as the Primary Entrance to a Story. In The Visual Narrative Reader ed. Neil Cohn. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 67–88. Lefèvre, Pascal and Meesters, Gert. 2018. The interpretation of an evolving line drawing. In Empirical Comics Research. Routledge, pp. 197–214. Mautner, Chris. 2016. Agony (review), The Comics Journal. Available at: http://www. tcj.com/reviews/agony/ (Accessed: 11 December 2020). Maynard, Patrick. 2005. Drawing distinctions: the varieties of graphic expression. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Medway, Jim. 2007. Teen Witch. Buxton: Paw Quality Comics.

  PSYCHOLOGIES OF PERCEPTION: STORIES OF DEPICTION 

95

Miers, John. 2017. Visual Metaphor and Drawn Narratives. PhD thesis. Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. Miers, John. 2019. So I Guess My Body Pretty Much Hates Me Now. Self-published. Mignola, Mike. 1998. The Chained Coffin and others. Milwaukee: Dark Horse Books. Mitchell, William J. T. 1987. Iconology: image, text, ideology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rawson, Phillip. 1969. Drawing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rhodes, Gillian. 1997. Superportraits: Caricatures and Recognition. 1st edition. Hove, East Sussex, UK: Psychology Press. Schier, Flint. 1986. Deeper Into Pictures: An Essay on Pictorial Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Szép, Eszter. 2020. Comics and the Body: Drawing, Reading, and Vulnerability. Ohio State University Press. Töpffer, Rodolphe. 1845. Essai de physiognomonie. Schmidt. Walton, Kendall L. 1973. Pictures and make-believe. The Philosophical Review. 82:3, pp. 283–319. Walton, Kendall L. 1987. Style and the Products and Processes of Art. In The Concept of Style ed. Berel Lang. Revised and expanded edition. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, pp. 72–103. Walton, Kendall L. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe: on the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Walton, Kendall L. 1991. Reply to Reviewers. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 51:2, pp. 413–431. https://doi.org/10.2307/2108140. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2009. Philosophical Investigations. John Wiley & Sons. Wolk, Douglas. 2007. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press. Wollheim, Richard. 1987. Painting, metaphor, and the body: Titian, Bellini, De Kooning, etc. In Painting as an Art. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, pp. 305–57. Wollheim, Richard. 2015. Art and its Objects. ebook. Cambridge University Press.

Aesthetics of Reception: Uncovering the Modes of Interaction in Comics Nina Eckhoff-Heindl

Abstract  First developed in the literary studies of the late 1960s, the aesthetics of reception was gradually applied within the discipline of Art History. This methodology considers the artwork itself as the result of the interaction between the work and its viewers. Consequently, this approach encourages a focus on the possibilities of perception, experience and the mechanisms in the artwork which unveil these potentials. The approach to aesthetics of reception here are based on a discussion of three early art-historical approaches, namely, those of Wolfgang Kemp, Gottfried Boehm and Max Imdahl. Using two comic examples by Chris Ware, I will demonstrate the potential of reception aesthetics for Comics Studies, and, in a final step, evince the challenges associated with it. A first attempt at an explanation of the method’s restrictions was undertaken by Janneke Wesseling, who critically reflected and expanded on the perspectives of the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing from her insights, this chapter concludes with an outlook on aspects essentially connected to comics and which should be followed in developing a reception aesthetics of comics. As I argue from a perceptual-theoretical orientation, comics can be characterised as a visual-tactile medium, which has to be understood in its dialogical relation with its reading viewers.

N. Eckhoff-Heindl (*) University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany University of Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Gray, I. Horton (eds.), Seeing Comics through Art History, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8_6

97

98 

N. ECKHOFF-HEINDL

Keywords  Chris Ware • Gottfried Boehm • Iconic difference • Janneke Wesseling • Max Imdahl • Reception aesthetics • Wolfgang Kemp

Introduction First developed in literary studies in the late 1960s by Hans Robert Jauß and Wolfgang Iser, an aesthetics of reception approach was gradually applied in Art History, mostly in German-speaking regions, whereas it remained quite unnoticed in Anglophone countries (Wesseling 2017, p. 14). The method considers the artwork as such as the result of its interaction with its viewers. Thus, not only does the artefact carry an embedded meaning, but at the same time the viewers put their subjective interpretation into it—both are seen as active counterparts within a process, turning them into integral constituents. Consequently, this methodological approach encourages a focus on the possibilities of perception, experience and the artwork’s mechanisms which unveil these potentials. This means that reception aesthetics concentrates on the interaction between artefact and viewers from a theoretical point of view and asks particularly about the extent of modes of action within artefacts (Kemp 2011, p.  388; Grave 2014, p. 55). It must therefore be distinguished from empirical research on forms of reception, which is interested in the perceptions of actual reading viewers of comics. In terms of methodology, the two approaches differ in their set starting point: reception aesthetics as a theoretical approach starts from the artefact, empirical-experimental approaches work with interviews or eye-­ tracking of the viewers.1 As this characterisation already implies, aesthetics of reception is not linked to a predetermined framework as, for example, Erwin Panofsky offers with his approach to iconology.2 Rather, it contains underlying premises on which researchers can base different positions and perspectives. In this chapter, I will discuss three early art-historical approaches using reception aesthetics, namely, those of Wolfgang Kemp, Gottfried Boehm and Max Imdahl.3 Using two comic examples by Chris Ware, I demonstrate the potential of reception aesthetics, and, in a final step, evince the challenges associated with it. A first attempt at an explanation of the method’s restrictions was undertaken by Janneke Wesseling, who critically reflected and expanded on the perspectives of the 1970s and 1980s by examining the active role of viewers and the accompanying implications. Drawing from her insights, this chapter concludes with an outlook on those aspects which are essentially connected with comics and which should be followed in a reception aesthetics of comics.

From Literary Studies to Art History It may come as a surprise that Art History—as a discipline in which the reference to the viewer is so closely connected to the investigated object—has not played a leading role in the methodological development of reception aesthetics. Wolfgang Kemp explains this with reference to historical changes in the concept of art: the understanding of art up until the eighteenth century

  AESTHETICS OF RECEPTION: UNCOVERING THE MODES OF INTERACTION… 

99

considered the triad of artist, work and viewer in different constellations (1992, p. 9). However, this understanding of art changed during the Enlightenment— towards an aesthetics of autonomy: the artwork’s effect on the viewer is all the greater the less it cares about the viewer (Kemp 1992, p. 14). This perspective, in turn, laid the foundation for the focus on the artistic genius of the nineteenth century. Thus, it can be summarised that there were already earlier approaches in Art History which focused on the relationship between artwork and viewers (Kemp 1983, pp. 10–27), but the emergence of an independent method, the so-called aesthetics of reception, only begins with the involvement of literary studies. Two prominent stances within the literary approach are those of Hans Robert Jauß and Wolfgang Iser. While Jauß is interested in the history of reception, that is, in exploring how a novel was perceived at different times (Jauß 1972), Iser is concerned with the development of a theory of reception aesthetics. For this purpose, Iser constructs the implied reader, a concept describing the requisites of the reading position presupposed by the text, and deals with the blanks of the text that must be filled imaginatively by readers (Iser 1972, 1984). Kemp is probably the most prominent expert on the art-historical aesthetics of reception and has contributed significantly to its understanding.4 Nevertheless, his approach evinces limitations due to its thematic as well as methodological focus. Thematically, he deals with representational and figurative art, especially historical paintings from the nineteenth century and the classical modern period.5 Furthermore, his perspective only covers a certain methodological entry point for the investigation of the dialogical relation between artwork and viewers. His conception can be characterised by its adaptation of literary concepts for Art History. Therefore, he notably addresses issues of representation, that is, depicted objects and their relations in terms of storyline in three-dimensional image space. These ‘internal reception requirements’, as he calls them, must—in its transposition from literature to the fine arts—be supplemented by an understanding arising from the artwork’s spatial disposition as well as the socio-cultural perspective of the viewers. Kemp considers art-historical reception aesthetic’s most important task as pointing out the relationship between the internal and external conditions of art reception during different epochs (1983, pp.  33–34). The analyses of blank spaces in paintings is probably Kemp’s most influential transfer of concepts from literary studies. Wolfgang Iser defined these in literature as spaces in the text that can be filled by the readers’ own imagination (1984, p. 284). A textual characterisation of a person’s facial expression, for example, contains descriptions of form and measurements of their nose, eyes and other facial features—the reader then puts these together as one whole face. Therefore, these blank spaces are in need of the reader’s combinatory willingness. Similarly, reading and viewing sequential panels in comics entails a filling of blanks: the reading viewers have to imagine the connection between panels A and B (Postema 2013, pp. 65–66). Blank spaces in paintings also require the viewers’ combinatory skills, though slightly differently in its medial manifestation. As Janneke Wesseling points

100 

N. ECKHOFF-HEINDL

out, the blank spaces that Kemp treats in his analyses are consistently charged with a semiotic, symbolic or narrative function. She emphasises that the term “blank space” generates what is, in essence, a traditional iconographic interpretation or narrative construal of the painting, an interpretation based on the literary strategy of the “omniscient storyteller”’ (Wesseling 2017, p. 59). As Wesseling argues, Kemp’s focus on representational and figurative art is insufficient for the whole range of the history of painting, including, for example, abstract paintings—let alone the complete array of artworks in general (2017, pp. 73–74). All artforms should be addressed by aesthetics of reception since they are based on the dialogical exchange between artwork and viewers to the same extent. Wesseling’s criticism will be dealt with in more detail in the final section of this chapter, but first I want to discuss two more image-based approaches to show what the focus on a reception aesthetics methodology with an orientation to visual theory can add to the previously mentioned representational mode. Therefore, I turn to Gottfried Boehm who pursues an art philosophical and systematic approach with a focus on visual aspects in which he coined the term ‘iconic difference’.6 Boehm defines his highly discussed concept as a simultaneous effect of repulsion and collaboration in images (2010, p. 49). For a description of this concept, I refer to three basic contrasts involved in the experience of images which are all intertwined with each other. The first contrast contains two levels inside an image: the level of the depicted and the level of depiction. The first level corresponds to the representational mode mentioned above in Kemp’s approach. Viewers focusing on the level of the depicted perceive the figurative content, the depicted objects and characters in the construed spatial depth. Perceiving the level of depiction, in turn, emphasises the planimetric, that is, planar, two-dimensional relations of forms and colours as well as the artefact’s facture by also thematising aspects of its production. The second contrast is intricately linked to the first and is characterised by the constant interplay of both transparency and opacity (Majetschak 2005, pp. 179–182). Transparency, in this regard, means that the images can open up a perspective on something else that is visualised at the level of the depicted. Opacity, on the other hand, means that the image shows itself and its medial construction at the level of depiction (for this contrast in comics: Heindl 2018). The third contrast of iconic difference is the interplay between simultaneity and successiveness in the image perception. Thus, an image is perceivable in its entirety as well as successively with its details—both aspects of which can never be separated. This mechanism has also discussed in the field of Comics Studies as a central aspect of single comics pages or double-page spreads (Bredehoft 2006, p. 873; Groensteen 2007, p. 18; Raeburn 2004, p. 25). However, by addressing only one basic contrast, comics’ image-theoretical implications have not yet been sufficiently considered in Comics Studies. The relationship of transparency to opacity and—what is more—the repulsion and collaboration

  AESTHETICS OF RECEPTION: UNCOVERING THE MODES OF INTERACTION… 

101

between the level of the depicted and the level of depiction also have significant implications for the understanding of comics and its perception mechanisms. As mentioned earlier, these three facets of iconic difference are closely linked as Boehm shows using examples across the history of paintings. In this respect, Boehm and Max Imdahl have similar approaches. Both focus primarily on paintings through all epochs from medieval codices to classical modernism and contemporary art. Yet, while Boehm deals with the mechanisms in images against the backdrop of an image-theoretical and systematic interest, Imdahl ties his considerations closely to a specific artwork’s interpretation. Imdahl’s main research question concerns how planimetric correlations at the level of depiction generate meaning at the level of the depicted and for the artwork as a whole (1996a, p. 21).7 According to him, the two levels inherent in images are associated with different sight concepts. Regarding the level of the depicted, he speaks of ‘identifying sight’ [‘wiedererkennendes Sehen’]: a picture’s characters and objects can be named and thus distinguished from one another (Imdahl 1996b, p. 316). The level of depiction, on the other hand, is more strongly connected with ‘seeing sight’ [‘sehendes Sehen’]: for example, when a brushstroke is discernible as such instead of as part of a body or an object (Imdahl 1996b, p.  316). Imdahl states that the identifying sight has become a habit and the ‘normalised’ way of seeing. Seeing sight, in contrast, is subordinated to the conventionalised sight and requires the viewers to maintain an in-depth focus (Imdahl 1996b, p. 304). Yet it is only the interaction of both forms of sight that makes it possible to perceive images in their full significance—he calls this interaction ‘distinguished sight’ [‘erkennendes Sehen’] (Imdahl 1996a, pp. 92–93). In his analyses, Imdahl combines these perceptual-theoretical implications of sight with the individual mechanisms of iconic difference. He developed his approach in dealing with Concrete and Optical Art, but he has also applied it to visual narratives with an emphasis on detailed image description as well as their modes of interaction. The discussion of his perspective on the dialogical relation between artwork and viewer is closely linked to his analyses of individual works; therefore, one of his main examples serves to illustrate his approach. The miniature of the imprisonment of Jesus (Fig. 1; Imdahl 1996a, VIII) from the medieval Codex Egberti (between 980 and 993 AD) is based on the Gospels. It depicts Jesus Christ, caressed by Judas Iscariot as well as surrounded by his disciples to his right and his opponents to his left. As Imdahl argues, this miniature takes advantage of the characteristics of images, which can be summarised as the simultaneity of successive and synchronous occurrences as well as planimetric correlations (1996c). This means that the consecutive events of the biblical text are transferred to a simultaneous perceptibility: Judas’s kiss, Jesus’s capture as well as the events before and after are depicted side by side and are merged in the figure of Jesus. Through his hand postures, Jesus is represented simultaneously as actor and receiver. With his right, he gestures towards, that is, talks to, his disciples whilst

102 

N. ECKHOFF-HEINDL

Fig. 1  Miniature of the imprisonment of Jesus. Codex Egberti, Ms-Lat. 24,  Fol 79v-80r (between 980 and 993 AD). (From Anderlik 2005)

they want to save him; his left hangs limply by his side whilst he is captured by his opponents. Jesus is not just an actor nor solely a receiver, instead he is both of these combined. This is also the case with him and Judas. Although Judas envelops Jesus, he does not dominate Christ but rather operates as an accessory, in terms of size and pose. At the same time, Jesus is exposed to all this by his mere size—he is the only figure who crosses several thresholds inside the picture and is the centre due to the other figures’ positions. With this description, Imdahl shows that the succession of the biblical text is transformed into vivid simultaneity in the miniature. In addition, the planimetric relations in the figures’ size and posture, the directions of their gazes and actions as well as the spatial disposition contribute significantly to the constitution of meaning. These three approaches to reception aesthetics all examine the dialogical relation in experiencing fine art with regard to the artworks’ mechanisms. Whereas Kemp is mostly interested in the impact of the correlations on the level of the depicted, Boehm and Imdahl investigate the basic contrasts of the so-called iconic difference. With their focus on the interplay between the level of the depicted and level of depiction, effects of transparency and opacity as well as the dynamics of simultaneity and succession, Boehm and Imdahl highlight how visual mechanisms create additional meaning and subliminally affect the understanding of images. What all three perspectives bring together is that they are developed primarily for paintings and other ‘stand-alone’ artistic images like engravings, etchings or drawings. Against this background, it is important to critically conceptualise the differences between the chosen investigated objects in Art History to date and comics as my subject of study. These differences include aspects of production, handling, interaction and systemic

  AESTHETICS OF RECEPTION: UNCOVERING THE MODES OF INTERACTION… 

103

dimensions, some of which will be addressed in this chapter’s conclusion. Yet, one aspect correlates directly with the explanations so far: the definition of images in comics. In my view, a comics page or double-page spread should not be understood as a conglomeration of images but should be seen as one entity and—in conclusion—as one image. Basically, I here incorporate Thierry Groensteen’s concept of ‘iconic solidarity’: I define this as interdependent images that, participating in a series, present the double characteristic of being separated  – this specification dismisses unique enclosed images within a profusion of patterns or anecdotes – and which are plastically and semantically over-determined by the fact of their coexistence in praesentia. (Groensteen 2007, p. 18; original emphasis)

Groensteen’s understanding of ‘iconic solidarity’ as an interaction of all panels on a page implies that each individual panel is part of a larger arrangement. It can neither be extracted nor can it be representative of the whole comics page. In this regard, it is important not to use ‘panel’ and ‘image’ interchangeably. Not every individual panel functions as one image in its own right, but the collaboration of all panels on one comics page or double-page spread does so by its perceptual implications.8 Closely related to my understanding of the term ‘image’ with respect to comics is the term ‘reading viewers’ which I use for the characterisation of the comics audience. This designation also stems from the former methodological considerations: when a printed comic is opened or a digital one is accessed, the addressees are first viewers, as they perceive the entire single comics page or double-page spread in its visual structure. Only then do they turn successively to the single panels forming sequences, an action that is interrupted and expanded by the simultaneous observation of the single comics page or double-­ page spread. In the following, I illustrate the potential of art-historical reception aesthetics for Comics Studies through two case studies, namely, the comics episode Rusty Brown. Autumn., published in the collection The ACME Novelty Library Report for Shareholders (2005), and a double spread from ACME Novelty Library #18 (2007), both by comics artist Chris Ware. Ware’s comics are particularly suitable for illustrating this methodical approach, as his composition style focuses decisively on visual means. Yet even with differently constructed comics, it is important to consider the visual implications for the comic’s meaning. By implementing crucial aspects of the method of reception aesthetics, I will show in the first case study that a supposedly trivial visual element, potentially dismissed as a mere accessory, lays bare the subliminal emotional tensions within the visual narration. For the second case study, I will argue that by the way it is composed and situated within the book, the page layout of the spread makes the intricacy of thought processes perceptible. Both examples illustrate how planimetric correlations in comics can generate meaning.

104 

N. ECKHOFF-HEINDL

Rusty Brown. Autumn. The one-page episode from the life of young Rusty Brown (Fig. 2; Ware 2005, p. 60) deals with the relationship between father and son. The comic strip consists of a header containing the protagonist’s name and an overall structure of nine equally sized panels. The first two depict a situation during which Rusty watches TV, while speech bubbles indicate a dispute between his parents in the next room. The father then drags his son to join him on his walk to the park,

Fig. 2  Chris Ware. Rusty Brown. Autumn. © Chris Ware 2022. (From Ware 2005, 60)

  AESTHETICS OF RECEPTION: UNCOVERING THE MODES OF INTERACTION… 

105

even though the boy would rather continue watching his programme. The following seven panels then take place outside: the father walks ahead, smokes a cigarette and raves about the surrounding beauty of autumnal nature. After they have arrived at the park, the father sits down on a park bench, coughing and sobbing. The boy senses his chance to escape unnoticed. In the last panel, he can only be identified by the shoe heel walking away in the panel’s upper left edge, while his father has collapsed on the bench and now crouches totally lost at the picnic table. As a unique framing device, there is a branch structure that covers the entire comics page, except for the first two panels, due to the fact that they take place inside. The branches complicate the Western conventional reading direction from top left to bottom right by ‘growing’ from the margins into the panel arrangement. Furthermore, they protrude above and below the different panel boundaries and literally weave the panels together. This interweaving of panels and branches has temporal and spatial implications. In order to highlight the different dimensions of these simultaneous mechanisms, this can be compared to formally similar panel arrangements, in particular Sunday strips from Frank King’s comics series Gasoline Alley. In addition to the fact that Chris Ware adopts the classic structure of early newspaper strips, the comparison with Gasoline Alley is particularly suitable due to King’s experiments with the entanglement of time and space in comics. Besides, Ware himself repeatedly emphasises that Frank King’s work is an important inspiration to him (Hignite 2006, pp.  236–253; Ware 2017, p.  171). Thus, it is very likely that the thematic alignment with Gasoline Alley is not coincidental and is also echoed in Rusty Brown’s character world. Through comparisons with some of King’s panel arrangements, the visual implications of the branch structure in Ware’s episode can be underlined. One of Frank King’s signature panel layouts in his Sunday strips is the layout that divides a scene in several panels.9 The atmosphere of a continuous space is retained by the background, single occurrences of each figure, and the gutter that takes on a structuring function. The simultaneous scene is split into smaller units that can be scanned by the eye step-by-step. The conventional reading direction does not have to be followed—yet it is probably still the preferred one. All these aspects make it a simultaneous scene that is spatially and temporally consistent. Even though Rusty Brown. Autumn. suggests a similar arrangement at first sight due to the continuous branch structure, this is undermined by the fact that the protagonists are depicted in every panel. Hence, the outdoor scene cannot be perceived in a spatially and temporally consistent way. In the Sunday page of April 22, 1934 (Fig. 3; Maresca 2007, n. p.), Frank King also experimented with modes of depiction in terms of spatial consistency with the possibility of temporal variance. Walt’s adopted son Skeezix climbs with one of his friends on top of a house on a construction site. Another youngster then chases them across, through and around the house. The mechanisms of perception in this strip are especially intriguing due to the relation of a single panel to the whole and this correlation’s spatio-temporal implications. Each

106 

N. ECKHOFF-HEINDL

Fig. 3  Frank King. Gasoline Alley (Construction site). Chicago Tribune, April 22nd, 1934. (From Maresca 2007, n. p)

individual panel represents only a small part of the house, and it is only in conjunction with the overall background that the characters can be spatially located. The children’s activities are shown in all panels simultaneously—as well as the fragments of the house. The logic of this visual narration demands that the reading viewers envision the characters only in the particular panel

  AESTHETICS OF RECEPTION: UNCOVERING THE MODES OF INTERACTION… 

107

they focus on at that moment, while the house as a whole must be kept in mind to ensure the characters’ respective spatial position in this episode. In Rusty Brown. Autumn., the branch structure connotes just such a spatial consistency with temporal variance as seen in King’s house-episode. The branches pervade all the panels of the exterior space and take over the function of the house in Gasoline Alley: it holds the scene together. The crucial difference is that in Rusty Brown. Autumn., the branches and the characters are not causally interlinked with each other. The comparison with Gasoline Alley clarifies that in Rusty Brown. Autumn. the reading viewers are repeatedly made aware of the complexity of spatial and temporal entanglements. Even more so, when the transition of branches is considered from one panel to the next above the gutter. It invokes self-reflexive conventions of the comics medium by overstepping panel boundaries, yet also stresses the idea of a coherent space constructed by the whole panel arrangement—an idea, as the analysis of the spatio-temporal variability has already shown, that is consistently undermined and questioned. This formal analysis of how the branches enter and exit the panels helps to understand the role of the foliage for the spatio-temporal dynamics of the comic strip. Beyond that, the branch structure also plays an important role in characterising the relationship between the two protagonists. From the third panel onwards, when both leave the house, Rusty keeps the exact same distance while he follows his father. Only in the penultimate panel the boy’s attachment to his father seems to loosen. He turns away from him and, in the last panel, disappears. The thereby denoted relationship of father and son is visually reinforced by the branches. As the bond between father and son weakens, the planimetric dominance of the branch structure increases from each panel to the next. From the sixth panel onwards, when the father sits down at the picnic table and thus no longer gives the boy any direction of movement, the branch structure also moves between the two characters. Rusty and his father are spatially separated from each other for the rest of the episode. The branch structure becomes increasingly more expansive, while the characters have increasingly less space for themselves. This planimetric relation culminates in the last panel, which is entirely dominated by the strongest branch. The dynamic relationship between father and son is thus perceivable on a visual, planimetrically oriented level of depiction. The reading viewers can literally see the ever-widening emotional gap between the two characters through the depiction of the branches. One last comparison between Rusty Brown. Autumn. and an episode of Gasoline Alley underlines this observation. In the Sunday episode of December 5th, 1927 (Fig. 4; Maresca 2007, n. p.), Walt takes his son for a walk. King thereby invokes the topos of the instructive walk of the knowledgeable father and his inquisitive son. In its course, Walt admires the autumnal variety of shapes and colours painted by Mister Frost. Therewith, the basic motif in King’s as well as Ware’s episode is comparable, as Jeet Heer has pointed out (2010, p.  8). The differences are intriguing when we compare the depicted

108 

N. ECKHOFF-HEINDL

Fig. 4  Frank King. Gasoline Alley (Autumn walk). Chicago Tribune, December 5th, 1927. (From Maresca 2007, n. p)

relationship between father and son. Walt and Skeezix are very familiar with each other: in every single panel they hold hands, sit next to each other or Walt carries Skeezix in his arms. Only once, are they partly separated in planimetrical terms. In the fourth panel, in which the protagonists admire a wild cherry, Walt’s head is separated from his torso by a branch that protrudes across the panel.

  AESTHETICS OF RECEPTION: UNCOVERING THE MODES OF INTERACTION… 

109

In Frank King’s case—if at all—this produces a funny effect on a formal level, while Chris Ware uses it to enhance the narration as well as the emotional inclusion of the reading viewers. The reference to Frank King’s Gasoline Alley evokes a special form of father-son relationship that corresponds to the nostalgic ideal of a traditional nuclear family with its promise of happiness and contentment in early twentieth-century America (Lovett 2007, pp. 2–4; McCarthy 1997, pp. 1–6). Against this backdrop, the emotional distance between Rusty and his father seems even larger—the latter needs an excuse to spend time with his son. Following the example of Walt and Skeezix, the father wants to intensify the relationship through an instructive walk. Yet, as it turns out, the emotional gap between the two family members only widens. The branch structure and its planimetrical relatedness to father and son uncovers this abstract and subliminal correlation. At the level of the depicted, the branch structure serves to frame the content of the autumn walk. From the perspective of the reading viewers, this can be described as addressing the identifying sight. At the level of depiction, the seeing sight is targeted and the branches take on a structuring function that ties the layout together. In addition, the branch structure also visualises the emotional gap between father and son. This third aspect correlates with Imdahl’s third form of sight, the distinguished sight. This form of vision emerges from an in-depth examination of the comic strip and is based on the interplay of the identifying and the seeing sight. I Just Want to Fall Asleep While the first example represented a rather self-contained episode, the second is part of a book-length comic story.10 When they open ACME Novelty Library #18 (2007), the reading viewers are confronted with a complex, diagram-like panel structure that covers both endpapers (Fig.  5; Ware 2007, n. p.). This double page does not meet the expectations or, rather, conventions related to opening a comic book: common components of comics such as speech bubbles, thought balloons, panel grid or a comprehensible plot within panels are reduced to a minimum, image and text are interwoven differently than with conventional panel arrangements. The layout consists of three panels, each situated at the side margins. Although text is used sparingly in speech bubbles or in commentary boxes, it is predominantly arranged on arcs (partially inverted) and thus connects different areas of the structure. After an initial orientation, the panel on the right-hand side of the page can be identified as the starting point of the diagrammatic construct. The (consistently unnamed) female protagonist lies in bed, arms crossed, covering her face. From this panel, thought bubbles lead to the centre of the double page, proclaiming ‘I JUST WANT TO FALL ASLEEP AND NEVER WAKE UP AGAIN’. The whole panel arrangement turns out to be protagonist’s thought construct. Starting from the centre, circular movements repeatedly lead back to the middle of the double page. The woman’s thoughts literally ‘circle’ around loneliness, uncertainty, anxiety about the future and considerations of suicide. The connections

110 

N. ECKHOFF-HEINDL

Fig. 5  Chris Ware. I Just Want to Fall Asleep © Chris Ware 2022. (From Ware 2007, endpapers)

  AESTHETICS OF RECEPTION: UNCOVERING THE MODES OF INTERACTION… 

111

between one uncertainty and the next in the protagonist’s train of thought are taken over by various arrow shapes and directional reading instructions.11 Page layouts like this one from ACME Novelty Library #18 are consistently referred to as diagrams in the research literature on Chris Ware’s work (Bartual 2012; Cates 2010). Indeed, Ware uses mechanisms and modes of depiction that are familiar to reading viewers from their own experiences with diagrams: structures of references, oppositions as well as the combination of both graphic and textual components. Felix Thürlemann defines the diagram as a synthesising graphic of geometric or topological references (such as left/right, top/bottom, central/peripheral, near/far) and as a resource for mental processing of complex facts or as an instrument for guiding actions (2011, p. 91). Thürlemann and Steffen Bogen point out, that on the level of production, the features of diagram can be summarised as concentration and, on the level of reception, in the unfolding or expansion which demands an intensive examination by the viewers (2003, p.  8). These characteristics also apply to this double page in which Ware interweaves diagram-like elements with conventional panel structures. Therewith, he incorporates diagrammatic qualities into the presentation of the protagonist’s mental world. The characteristics of diagrams support visualising the intricacy and entanglement of the woman’s negative thoughts. However, this page layout seems too complicated to understand it at first glance. A longer and more intensive examination is necessary to be able to collate her thoughts and grasp their emotional extent. This is further reinforced by the succeeding double page, packed with a total of 79 panels, in which the protagonist wakes up, showers and shops. Various actions, such as the descent down the stairs, are laid out over several panels. Compared to the diagrammatic structure, this double page can be received conventionally, even though the plethora of panels is just as atypical for most comics. Ware depicts the protagonist’s everyday rituals in just the same way as the reading viewers can look at this double-page spread: in a comparatively simple and fast manner—in stark contrast to the previous double page. It is important to see both double pages in correlation with each other. Without the protagonist’s world of thought, this double page seems almost trivial—nothing of her inner struggle and suffering is conceivable in the multicoloured, cheerful-looking panels. The diagrammatical structure of the preceding pages puts the second double page in a completely different light: as the day progresses slowly, the dejection and emptiness inside the woman is only intensified by the colourful world outside. The perception of these everyday activities depends to a large extent on how much the reading viewers have previously familiarised themselves with her ‘circling thoughts’ about suicide and loneliness. A final comparison with an earlier draft of this composition (Fig. 6; Ware 2017, p. 241) illustrates the relevance of the initial disorientation and circular motion in the published version. Here, the diagrammatic structure is based on a panel row, which in ACME Novelty Library #18 is integrated into the succeeding double page. This ‘footing’ embeds the thought world directly into the next comic story. As the panels progress, her circling thoughts are

112 

N. ECKHOFF-HEINDL

Fig. 6  Chris Ware. I Just Want to Fall Asleep, 2002. Ink, coloured pencil and white gouache on Bristol, 20 x 28 in © Chris Ware 2022. (From Ware 2017, 241)

interrupted by the comment ‘BUT’, succeeded by ‘Maybe it’s not so bad …’ in this page’s last panel. The depressive content of the diagrammatic structure is thus directly played down and retracted.12

  AESTHETICS OF RECEPTION: UNCOVERING THE MODES OF INTERACTION… 

113

At the same time, the panel row makes the orientation of this double page quite clear as it adds a bottom to the circling world of thoughts. This is supported by the emblem in the upper left corner of the page. The emblem is the only part of the graphic that is pencilled, not inked. It shows the protagonist in a bust portraiture overwritten with ‘YOUR NARRATOR’. Not only does the emblem open up a direct correlation between the rather ambiguously depicted figure in the panels and the portrait, but it also identifies her as the protagonist who will be the subject of the following story. Moreover, the emblem’s orientation supports the longitudinal alignment of the whole layout. Due to this directionality, every turning of the book leads back to the vertical orientation and thus underlines the fixation by the panel row at the lower edge of the protagonist’s thought world. The published double page of ACME Novelty Library #18, in contrast, is much more ambivalent. The layout’s vertical orientation is considerably reduced and only held in the lower area by the panel from which the thought bubbles emanate. Furthermore, the protagonist is neither characterised by external attributions nor in her appearance. This ambiguity is also continued in the book design. Due to its location on the endpapers, instead of the main matter of the book, the question arises whether this double page belongs directly to the comic’s story or whether it needs to be understood as a paratextual addition. The reading viewers do not receive guidelines that apparently have to be followed to understand this double page. Neither can they build upon previous experiences with other comics to get more information. The diagrammatic structure, which must be perceived from all sides and angles, demands an intensive examination of the intricate layout and equally intricate thoughts of the protagonist. Her thoughts and fears are not merely described but shown and become palpable in a never-ending circular process. Experiencing this double page does not only take place mentally and intellectually by turning letters around or understanding relations but also in the physical act of turning and rotating the book during the reading process. Chris Ware transfers the elusive arrangement and logic of the (seemingly endless) trains of thought, which are also constantly renewed in new associations, into a page layout enriched by diagrammatic structures. Similar to the function of the branch structure in Rusty Brown. Autumn., the circling thoughts become visible and, furthermore, accessible intellectually (through mirror-inversions and the complexity of reference structures), emotionally (through the subjects of her thoughts) and physically (by turning the book in one’s hands).13 With regard to the three basic contrasts of the iconic difference, it is a matter of emphasising one pole in each case. In relation to the two interconnected levels of the visual, the level of depiction is emphasised, while the level of the depicted is strongly reduced: objects and figures can be identified, but the rather pictogram-like content is only rounded off to possible actions through the relations on the level of depiction. This is underlined by the fact that the panels provide less insight into constructed spaces (transparency), instead they rather remain flat (opaque). Referring to the third basic contrast, it is also

114 

N. ECKHOFF-HEINDL

apparent that the simultaneous mode of action dominates. While in a usual panel arrangement an already socio-culturally conventionalised way of perceiving can be applied, in the layout of I Just Want to Fall Asleep, the simultaneous effect of the double page must first be ‘overcome’. Therefore, the circular layout without a particular starting or end point confronts the reading viewers with their own reception habits.

Reception Aesthetics of Comics The two examples Rusty Brown. Autumn. and I Just Want Fall to Sleep have been analysed on the basis of the method of reception aesthetics, which presupposes a dialogical relationship between comics and reading viewers. Based on three art-historical approaches to aesthetics of reception, I have emphasised the interweaving of the level of the depicted and the level of depiction with reference to image-theoretical implications. The foliage in Rusty Brown. Autumn. cannot be dismissed as a mere decorative accessory. Rather, it is an elementary and important component of the story, which visualises the relationship between father and son, and helps reading viewers perceive the emotional gap. Therefore, the analysis of Rusty Brown. Autumn. helps to illustrate integral visual aspects and, more specifically, planimetric relations for the interpretation of comics. In I Just Want to Fall Asleep, the emphasis was on the analysis of the spread’s circular layout and diagrammatic structure. Through its ambivalences, the accessibility from several entry points and the implications of understanding diagrammatic relations, the experience of ruminating is translated into a page structure. This brings an intellectually and emotionally demanding examination to the beginning of the comic story and makes the rolling of negative thoughts perceptible. As the analyses show, a reception-aesthetic perspective enables reading viewers to uncover the modes of interaction that lie in the visuality of comics, which have been as yet insufficiently considered in the field of Comics Studies. However, the implementation of this methodology to comics is also affiliated with challenges that affect art-historical research on the one hand and comic studies on the other. In her book The Perfect Spectator. The Experience of the Art Work and Reception Aesthetics (2017), Janneke Wesseling points out the problems of older approaches to art-historical reception aesthetics. She argues that the method has remained underdeveloped, since the focus has solely been on paintings and the viewer’s position in the dialogical relationship has only been treated implicitly (Wesseling 2017, pp.  10, 50). Against this background, Wesseling updates the approach by expanding the subject area and strengthening the viewers’ role in their embodied and situated perception (2017, pp. 9, 76, 121). This update to art-historical reception aesthetics must also be taken into account for the adaptation of this method to comics. A second important aspect is the expansion of the levels of analysis, which have so far only focused

  AESTHETICS OF RECEPTION: UNCOVERING THE MODES OF INTERACTION… 

115

on implications regarding the so-called iconic difference. For I Just Want to Fall Asleep, for example, it is essential to also take the need to turn and rotate the book into account. Moreover, the double page cannot stand alone but is embedded in the book as a whole (including its paratextual features) as well as in the succeeding pages. I build on these findings by introducing the level of topological relations into the analytical model in addition to the level of the depicted and level of depiction. Similar to the planimetric relations on the level of depiction, the topological level is also characterised by a structural, relational understanding of elements, here, however, explicitly related to spatiality. For the analysis of the topological level of comics, art-historical research which deals with multipart pictorial forms can be adapted. Helga Lutz and Berhard Siegert, for example, point out that the operations that primarily perform or enact the spatial relations should be considered accordingly (2016, p.  110). Regarding printed comics, this ‘performance’ is about handling: turning pages, opening and closing double spreads, turning and rotating the book. However, the handling cannot be addressed on its own; instead, it must be analysed in relation to the materiality of comics, that is, including their physical, technological and sensual aspects. Thus, the analysis of the topological level of comics comprises the object-oriented materiality and the processual handling. Since both are mutually dependent, I summarise them under ‘tactility’. From the Latin tactilis, meaning ‘touchable’, this term marks an intersection, on the one hand, of materiality and handling, on the other hand, of comics and reading viewers. In order to pursue this perspective further, a reception-aesthetics approach of comics can expand on Ian Hague’s multi-sensory understanding of comics (see Hague 2014). Unlike Hague, who puts all senses on an equal footing in the reception of comics, I suggest an emphasis on visual and tactile connections for the characterisation of comics. Thus, in order to take a look at comics as a visual-tactile medium, the perceptual dimensions must be considered in their interrelatedness. The method of reception aesthetics offers a suitable basis for looking at comics from a perceptual perspective. By implementing and refining art-­ historical reception aesthetics, I propose an understanding of comics as a visual-­ tactile medium that focuses on the interplay of visuality, materiality and handling. This procedure facilitates the understanding of comics in the interaction of the level of depicted, depiction and topological relations. Besides this benefit for comics research, the development of reception aesthetics for comics offers the opportunity to enhance the method and sharpen the focus on the dialogical structure between work and reading viewers.14 Acknowledgements  This chapter was written in the context of my doctoral thesis on comics as aesthetic experience and as a visual-tactile medium, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 713600.

116 

N. ECKHOFF-HEINDL

Notes 1. Within Comics Studies, a rich body of research has developed focused on reception theory, with approaches informed by Cultural Studies forming one early strand; see, for example, Martin Barker’s Comics, Ideology, Power & the critics (1989). Mel Gibson is another comics scholar using reception theory, where— in my opinion—reception-aesthetic components can be found in her methodological foundation although she often works using interviews with readers (Gibson 2012, 273). One of the most recent approaches focusing on reception can be found in the work of the German Early-Career Research Group Hybrid Narrativity, who use cognitive experiments such as eye tracking (Dunst et al., 2018). 2. Iconology is a method of interpretation for which Erwin Panofsky developed a three-stage model consisting of pre-iconographic as well as iconographic analysis and in the final stage iconological interpretations (Panofsky 1939). 3. Wolfgang Kemp is a representative of a reception-aesthetic approach. Max Imdahl and Gottfried Boehm, in contrast, make use of reception-aesthetic procedures. Yet they refer to them by other terms—Imdahl with ‘Ikonik’ [Iconic], while Gottfried Boehm does not specify his approach in this regard. 4. Kemp‘s most important study in regard to reception aesthetics is Der Anteil des Betrachters. Rezeptionsästhetische Studien zur Malerei des 19. Jahrhunderts [The Viewer’s Share. Reception-Aesthetic Studies on 19th-Century Painting] from 1983. Furthermore, he is editor of the publication Der Betrachter ist im Bild. Kunstwissenschaft und Rezeptionsästhetik [The viewer is in the image. Studies on Art and Reception Aesthetics] from 1992. 5. Following the 1970s and 1980s, Kemp also focused on contemporary art; see, for example, Der explizite Betrachter. Zur Rezeption zeitgenössischer Kunst [The explicit viewer. On the reception of contemporary art] (Kemp 2015). 6. Boehm’s engagement with the method of reception aesthetics occurs within his body of research especially in essays such as Bild und Zeit [Image and Time] (Boehm 1987). 7. In his comprehensive study Giotto Arenafresken. Ikonpgraphie, Ikonologie, Ikonik [Giotto’s arena frescoes. Iconography, Iconology, Iconic] from 1980 Imdahl developed key aspects of his approach. However and much like Gottfried Boehm, he mostly conducts his art-historical research in research papers. In 1996 these papers were collected in three volumes, edited by Gottfried Boehm, Angeli Janhsen-Vukicevic and Gundolf Winter, and published with the German publishing house Suhrkamp. 8. For futher detail on Groensteen’s idea Cf. Hardy-Vallée chapter “From Tableau to Sequence: Introducing Comics Theory Within Art History to Study the Photobook”. 9. Due to the manifold examples from King’s Gasoline Alley, which are characterised by this layout, I only describe the main design decision without concentrating on one specific example. It is used, for example, in the Sunday page of the Chicago Tribune from 24th of May 1931 (Maresca 2007, n. p.). 10. Space does not allow for a more detailed discussion of the fact that Rusty Brown. Autumn. is not entirely self-contained, since The ACME Novelty Library Report for Shareholders also includes the three other seasons as episodes of Rusty Brown’s life. In addition, these pages are juxtaposed with comic strips about Quimby the Mouse, which also take place during the respective seasons.

  AESTHETICS OF RECEPTION: UNCOVERING THE MODES OF INTERACTION… 

117

11. For a more extensive analysis, see Heindl 2014. 12. In the published version, this restricting remark has been removed. 13. In Heindl 2017, I describe this tedious reconstruction or rather cognitive exploration of meaning as an ‘experienced’ metaphor. 14. I pursued this dual objective (implementing an approach of reception aesthetics for Comics Studies as well as enhance the theoretical framework of the method by discussing comics) in my doctoral thesis Comics als ästhetische Erfahrung am Beispiel von Chris Wares ‘Building Stories’ [Comics as aesthetic experience using the example of Chris Ware’s Building Stories] from 2021, in which I developed a model of comics as a possibility of aesthetic experience, conceptualised the medium as visually tactile and offered a systematic approach to visual-tactile narration in comics.

References Anderlik, Heidemarie. ed. 2005. Der Egbert Codex. Virtuelle Bibliothek. CD-ROM. Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum. Barker, Martin. 1989. Comics, Ideology, Power & the Critics. Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press. Bartual, Roberto. 2012. Towards a Panoptical Representation of Time and Memory: Chris Ware, Marcel Proust and Henri Bergson’s ‘Pure Duration’. Scandinavian Journal of Comic Art 1:1, p. 46–68. Boehm, Gottfried. 1987. Bild und Zeit. In Das Phänomen Zeit in Kunst und Wissenschaft. Weinheim, ed. Hannelore Paflik, p. 1–23. Weinheim: VCH. Boehm, Gottfried. 2010. Jenseits der Sprache? Anmerkungen zur Logik der Bilder. In Wie Bilder Sinn erzeugen. Die Macht des Zeigens, ed. Gottfried Boehm, p.  34–53. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Bogen, Steffen, and Thürlemann, Felix. 2003. Jenseits der Opposition von Text und Bild. Überlegungen zu einer Theorie des Diagramms und des Diagrammatischen. In Die Bildwelt der Diagramme Joachims von Fiore. Zur Medialität religiös-politischer Programme im Mittelalter, ed. Alexander Patschovsky, p.  1–22. Ostfildern: Jan Thorbecke. Bredehoft, Thomas. 2006. Comics Architecture, Multidimensionality, and Time. Chris Ware’s “Jimmy Corrigan. The Smartest Kid on Earth.” Modern Fiction Studies 52:4, p. 869–890. Cates, Isaac. 2010. Comics and the Grammar of Diagrams. In The Comics of Chris Ware. Drawing is a Way of Thinking, ed. David M. Ball and Martha B. Kuhlman, p. 90–104. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Dunst, Alexander; Laubrock, Jochen and Wildfeuer, Janina. ed. 2018. Empirical Comics Research: Digital, Multimodal, and Cognitive Methods. New York: Routledge. Gibson, Mel. 2012. Cultural Studies: British Girls‘ Comics, Readers, and Memories. In Critical Approaches to Comics. Theories and Methods, ed. Matthew J.  Smith and Randy Duncan, p. 267–279. New York: Routledge. Grave, Johannes. 2014. Der Akt des Bildbetrachtens. Überlegungen zur rezeptionsästhetischen Temporalität des Bildes. In Zeit der Darstellung. Ästhetische Eigenzeiten in Kunst, Literatur und Wissenschaft, ed. Michael Gamper and Helmut Hühn, p. 51–71. Hannover: Wehrhahn. Groensteen, Thierry. 2007. The System of Comics. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

118 

N. ECKHOFF-HEINDL

Hague, Ian. 2014. Comics And the Senses. A Multisensory Approach to Comics And Graphic Novels. New York: Routledge. Heer, Jeet. 2010. Inventing Cartooning Ancestors. Ware and the Comics Canon. In The Comics of Chris Ware. Drawing is a Way of Thinking, ed. David M.  Ball and Martha B. Kuhlman, p. 3–13. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Heindl, Nina. 2014. Becoming Aware of One’s Own Biased Attitude: The Observer’s Encounter with Disability in Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library No. 18. In The Review of Disability Studies. An International Journal 10:3/4, p. 40–51. Heindl, Nina. 2017. Abstrakte Korrelationen erfahrbar machen. Die visuelle Metapher in Chris Wares Comics. In Figurationen. Gender Literatur Kultur, 1, pp. 70–87. Heindl, Nina. 2018. Opazität und Transparenz: Überlegungen zum poietischen Potenzial in Chris Wares Comics und Animationen. In Ästhetik des Gemachten. Interdisziplinäre Beiträge zur Animations- und Comicforschung, ed. Hans-Joachim Backe, Erwin Feyersinger, Julia Eckel, Véronique Sina and Jan-Noël Thon, p. 177–202. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Hignite, Todd. 2006. In the Studio. Visits with Contemporary Cartoonists. New Haven: Yale UP. Imdahl, Max. 1996a. Giotto: Arenafresken. Ikonographie  – Ikonologie  – Ikonik. Munich: Fink. Imdahl, Max. 1996b. Cézanne  – Braque  – Picasso. Zum Verhältnis zwischen Bildautonomie und Gegenstandssehen. In Max Imdahl. Reflexion, Theorie, Methode. Gesammelte Schriften. Bd. 3. ed. Gottfried Boehm, p.  303–380. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Imdahl, Max. 1996c. Sprache und Bild  – Bild und Sprache. Zur Miniatur der Gefangennahme im Codex Egberti. In Max Imdahl. Zur Kunst der Tradition. Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 2, ed. Gundolf Winter, p.  94–103. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Iser, Wolfgang. 1972. Der implizite Leser. Kommunikationsformen des Romans von Bunyan bis Beckett. Munich: Fink. Iser, Wolfgang. 1984. Der Akt des Lesens. Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung. Munich: Fink. Jauß, Hans Robert. 1972. Kleine Apologie der Ästhetischen Erfahrung. Mit Kunstgeschichtlichen Bemerkungen von Max Imdahl. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag. Panofsky, Erwin. 1939. Studies in Iconology. New York: Oxford University Press. Kemp, Wolfgang. 1983. Der Anteil des Betrachters. Rezeptionsästhetische Studien zur Malerei des 19. Jahrhunderts. Munich: Mäander. Kemp, Wolfgang. 1992. Kunstwissenschaft und Rezeptionsästhetik. In Der Betrachter ist im Bild. Kunstwissenschaft und Rezeptionsästhetik, ed. Wolfgang Kemp, p. 7–27. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer. Kemp, Wolfgang. 2011. Rezeptionsästhetik. In Metzler Lexikon Kunstwissenschaft, hrsg. Ulrich Pfisterer, p. 388–391. Stuttgart/Weimar: J.B. Metzler. Kemp, Wolfgang. 2015. Der explizite Betrachter. Zur Rezeption zeitgenössischer Kunst. Konstanz: Konstanz University Press. Lovett, Laura. 2007. Conceiving the Future. Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890–1938. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P. Lutz, Helga and Siegert, Bernhard. 2016. In der Mixed Zone. Klapp- und faltbare Bildobjekte als Operatoren hybrider Realitäten. In Klappeffekte. Faltbare Bildträger in der Vormoderne, ed. David Ganz and Marius Rimmele, p. 109–138. Berlin: Reimer. Maresca, Peter. ed. 2007. Sundays with Walt and Skeezix by Frank O. King 1921 through 1934. Palo Alto: Last Gasp of San Francisco.

  AESTHETICS OF RECEPTION: UNCOVERING THE MODES OF INTERACTION… 

119

Majetschak, Stefan. 2005. Opazität und ikonischer Sinn: Versuch, ein Gedankenmotiv Heideggers für die Bildtheorie fruchtbar zu machen. In Bildwissenschaft zwischen Reflexion und Anwendung, ed. Klaus Sachs-Hombach, p.  177–194. Cologne: Herbert van Halem. McCarthy, Desmond. 1997. Reconstructing the Family in Contemporary American Fiction. New York and Washington: Lang. Postema, Barbara. 2013. Making Sense of Fragments. Narrative Structure in Comics. Rochester: RIT Press. Raeburn, Daniel. 2004. Building a Language. In Chris Ware, ed. Daniel Raeburn, p. 6–26. New Haven: Yale UP. Thürlemann, Felix. 2011. Diagramm. In Metzler Lexikon Kunstwissenschaft. Ideen, Methoden, Begriffe, ed. Ulrich Pfisterer, p. 91–94. Stuttgart and Weimar: J. B. Metzler. Ware, Chris. 2005. The ACME Novelty Library Annual Report for Shareholders. New York: Pantheon. Ware, Chris. 2007. ACME Novelty Library #18. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly. Ware, Chris. 2017. Monograph. New York: Rizzoli. Wesseling, Janneke. 2017. The Perfect Spectator. The Experience of the Art Work and Reception. Amsterdam: Valiz.

Reading Richard Felton Outcault’s “Yellow Kid” Through Perception of the Image Christine Mugnolo

Abstract  Richard Felton Outcault’s smelting of visual structures, his plucking of social archetypes, and his manipulation of consumer practices all illuminate how his serial comics from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries helped invent modern comics. This chapter explores what the new visual structures and unorthodox narratives of the Yellow Kid, Outcault’s first serial comic and one of his most commercially successful characters, relayed to their infatuated readers. This analysis turns to the art historical methodologies formulated by Svetlana Alpers and Hans Belting, particularly their concept that “images” can be unlinked from their material embodiment in pictures and their physiological embodiment in human perception. Outcault’s Yellow Kid pulled from a variety of conventions governing how images operated in humour magazines, urban periodicals, and reports on New  York’s poor. By bringing together incompatible spheres of picturing, Outcault’s mixture deconstructed and inverted their ideologies. Eschewing satire, Outcault used ecstatic violence, jolting non sequiturs, and convivial repartee between characters and readers to generate a comedy that was simultaneously bodily, empathetic, and intellectual. By violating pictorial protocols, he heightened the characters’ performance as images, and thus as avatars a diverse readership could invest with their own dispossessed, exasperated experience of the “American Dream”.

C. Mugnolo (*) Antelope Valley College, Lancaster, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Gray, I. Horton (eds.), Seeing Comics through Art History, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8_7

121

122 

C. MUGNOLO

Keywords  Outcault • Nineteenth-century comics • Visual Studies • Sunday supplement • Yellow Kid

When American cartoonist Richard Felton Outcault died in 1928, newspaper obituaries crowned him “father of the Modern Comic Newspaper Supplement”. This accolade still endures, positioning R. F. Outcault as a key figure not only in the history of comic strips but also in the labyrinthine origins of comic books and comic strips as a visual medium developed in the modern era.1 Although Buster Brown was Outcault’s most enduring commercial success, comic studies tends to devote attention to the artist’s initial commercial hit, the “Yellow Kid”, for its forage into word balloons and sequential imaging. While Outcault did not originate these structures, he continues to stand as a pivotal figure who launched comic strips as an experimental, interactive medium capable of bending and stretching social boundaries. The Yellow Kid performed as the lead character in Outcault’s slapstick-­ driven comedy and became a favourite feature of the late nineteenth-century Sunday newspaper supplement (see Blackbeard 1995; Gordon 1998; Meyers 2019). “Yellow Kid” is the colloquial name fans coined for Mickey Duggan, a character who appeared in Outcault’s production of both “Hogan’s Alley” and “McFadden’s Flats” between 1894 and 1898 in large single-panelled cartoons as well as multi-panelled strips. Performing with an entourage of juvenile mischief makers in New York City’s Irish tenements, the Yellow Kid stood apart as a character with his clean-shaven scalp and iconic yellow nightshirt who frequently addressed the reader with a direct gaze. To simplify my discussion, I generally refer to Outcault’s complex line of production as “Yellow Kid” or “Yellow Kid comics”. Outcault’s smelting of visual structures, his plucking of social archetypes, and his manipulation of consumer practices all illuminate how Outcault helped initiate many of the structural and conceptual approaches that define comics as a unique medium. Yet precisely what he invented for the American public is less clear. What did the new communicative structures of Yellow Kid actually communicate to their infatuated readers? A recent wave of scholarship has applied ground-breaking methodologies to Outcault’s serials to explain his enduring primacy in Comics Studies. Approaches from seriality studies (Meyer 2019), materialist studies (Gordon 1998), and formal analyses of Outcault’s visual strategies (see especially Blackbeard 1995 and Smolderen 2014) have all revealed new insights into how Outcault set light to cultural flashpoints and helped engender the medium of comics. My exploration of Outcault relies on understanding how Outcault’s Yellow Kid comics operated specifically as images. Separated from their concurrent identities as serial events or commercial products, images provoke a different set of questions that engage the unique corporal processes by which images are physically processed and culturally understood.

  READING RICHARD FELTON OUTCAULT’S “YELLOW KID” THROUGH PERCEPTION… 

123

Outcault’s comic strips are particularly well suited to be discussed as images. Outcault’s Yellow Kid famously accumulated a bewildering omnipresence in popular culture that quickly transcended his authorship. In October of 1896, William Randolph Hearst’s New York World notoriously hired away Outcault from Joseph Pulitzer’s New York Journal and syndicated his “Yellow Kid” comic strips under the new title “McFadden Flats” (see Meyers 2019, pp. 6–9). With no copyright protecting the reproductions of Yellow Kid’s signature costume and features, the original comic “Hogan’s Alley” continued to run in the New York Journal illustrated by Ashcan School artist George Luks. While simultaneously headlining two Sunday supplement papers, Yellow Kid’s visage freely circulated through New York City’s visual markets as a public icon, reappearing in unlicenced reproductions in advertisements, as toys, and on various leisure products (see Gordon 1998; Meyers 2019). Art-historical methodologies formulated by Svetlana Alpers and Hans Belting describe how images should be handled differently from other historical materials. Alpers’ and Belting’s revolutionary approaches serve as cornerstones in the field of Visual Studies, a discipline that branches from the temperamental category of “high art” to include all visual production. The distinction between “images” and their material embodiment in pictures is crucial to this expansion. The Yellow Kid successfully roamed between various physical containers with a versatility that, in Belting’s sense, forefronts this character’s identity as an image as opposed to a picture. In traditional art-­ historical analysis, the artist’s mastery over a medium is often prioritised, a key to unlocking how the artist fashions meaning through his or her pictures. A history of images explores the lapse of this authorial control. In Belting’s words, “the less we take notice of a mediums’ presence, the more we are captured by the image, until it seems to us that the latter exists by itself” (2001, p. 16).2 Both Belting and Alpers prioritise how images are physiologically processed through human perception. By cleaving images from pictures, Belting highlights how images perform as mental constructs. Absorbed through imagination, images inhabit the mind and intermingle with the brain’s own image production (Belting 2001, p.  16). Using the perspective of anthropology, Belting emphasises the control of images as “they colonize our bodies (our brains), so that even if it seems that we are in charge of generating them, and even though society attempts unceasingly to control them, it is in fact the images that are in control” (2001, p. 10). Belting’s description of the internalisation of images provides a conceptual structure for considering how readers not only consumed comic strips for entertainment, or read them for political satire, but physically absorbed them. The repetition of the Yellow Kid implies not only a desire to consume the character as a product but also a compulsive desire to actively picture the Yellow Kid by multiple agents. I would contend this is a symptom rather than the source of Outcault’s masterful understanding of the power of images. The visual structures that Outcault applied to his Yellow Kid comic strips not only innovated new meanings but were necessary

124 

C. MUGNOLO

for challenging the status quo of how images operated as sources of knowledge and authority in popular culture. Images are also deeply ingrained in our understanding of what it means to look and see. Alpers reveals how practices of looking are not detached anatomical operations but highly structured cultural practices. Practices of looking are constantly in flux as scientific understandings about the operation of the human eye and changing practices in image production redefine and expand our understanding of the visual spectrum. At the heart of Alpers’ discussions is the relationship of images to truth which constructs how people decide to direct and shape their gaze. Outcault’s various forays into the comic medium derailed entrenched practices of looking to question the relationship between image, looking, and truth.

The Cartoon Image in the American Newspaper To begin, it is essential to understand how comic strips and their characters functioned as images within the structures of the newspaper. The question is so simple that it seems self-evident. This is where Alpers’ seminal text The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century offers methodological guidance. Alpers’ examination of seventeenth-century Dutch painting understands that it must unlock her subject from an art-historical discourse formulated within and overwhelmed by the tenets of Italian Renaissance painting (1983, p. xix). According to Alpers, the “active confidence in human powers” derived from Italian Renaissance thinking had become naturalised as the definition of representational art rather than a “particular modality” which excludes non-­ conforming paintings from critical analysis (1983, p. 43). To understand how the Dutch approached vision as an index to truth, Alpers scrutinised Dutch treatises and pictorial resources. She detected a mode of seeing that recognised the distance between the distortions of the eye (the world seen) and scientific instruments that could produce alternative pictures of the world (1983, p. 35). The aggregate of views so often found in Dutch painting thus did not reflect a deficient understanding of linear perspective but an awareness of its limitations in the empirical pursuit of knowledge. Entrenched modes of seeing also governed 1890s cartooning. Visual ingredients like line and colour and narrative mechanisms like text and action followed customs honed over decades of political cartooning. Outcault’s cartoons are particularly difficult to analyse because they challenge and overturn many of these reigning traditions. By experimenting with word balloons, sequential panels, and onomatopoeic visuals several years before they became an institutionalised practice, Outcault’s comic strips seem to have more in common with the ancestral tree of modern comic books than the nineteenth-century industry of political cartooning (see Harvey 1998, pp. 13–17). However, Alpers demonstrates the importance of questioning whether the constructs of an academic discourse actually resonate with the historic dialogues generating those pictures under analysis.

  READING RICHARD FELTON OUTCAULT’S “YELLOW KID” THROUGH PERCEPTION… 

125

When the Sunday comics first boasted full-colour production in 1894, they triggered a comparison to the polychrome cartoons dominating the market in pricier humour magazines such as Puck, Judge, and Life (Kahn and West 2014, p. 11). The comic weekly Puck established the tradition of using complex chromolithography to produce full-colour political cartoons for its front cover and double-page centrefold followed by a social lampoon for its back cover. This standardised format was soon adopted by competitors Judge and Life, distinguishing American humour magazines from Punch and other European counterparts while highlighting the status of chromolithography as a technical innovation and prized commodity (Gordon 1998, p.  15; Kahn and West 2014, p. 14). In addition to sophisticated colour production, high priced “glossies” calibrated their political humour and social commentaries to the interests of their elite readership (Couch 2001, p. 63). These class markers were embedded in the complex and sophisticated construction of their polychrome political cartoons. Their cartoons presumed a common visual literacy, dependent on a classical education and thorough knowledge of political events. Upholding its Shakespearian motto “What fools these mortals be”, Puck’s visual parodies worked “to expose folly and puncture pretension” by combining contradictory visual ideologies (Kahn and West 2014, p. 13). Readers unlocked the wit of their cartoons by decoding visual symbols, a process assisted by labels and explanatory texts. Although full of foul analogies, these political cartoons were processed essentially like allegorical paintings by navigating a network of symbols that were “read” and knitted together. Cheap colour printing, previously too expensive and laborious for daily newspapers, developed from a series of technical innovations. In 1892 Walter Scott & Company installed the first four-colour rotary press for the Chicago Inter-Ocean, the first American newspaper to offer a colour illustrated supplement (West 2013, p.  11). As necessitated by the newspaper format, these presses were configured to print both sides of the newspaper sheet in polychrome. In 1894 the New York World installed a five-colour rotary press and published its first full-colour Sunday supplement in November of that year, complete with comic cartoons alongside features dedicated to fashionable urban entertainments. Two weeks after its launch, the Sunday World regularly featured a multi-page section dedicated to full-colour comics and would expand over the next year in size and complexity (Kartalopoulos 2013, p. 16). Due to their escalating popularity, these Sunday supplements became central players in the ruthless competition for subscribers between so-called yellow journalism’s two juggernaut newspapers, Pulitzer’s New York World and Hearst’s New York Journal (Kartalopoulos 2013). As an embodiment of the supplement, comics were positioned at the forefront of this battle, called upon for ever more raucous and unpredictable imagery. Colour was a crucial signifier of the Sunday supplement’s aspiration as an upper-class commodity at a fraction of the price. However, increasingly sensationalised approaches to layouts, colour, linework and text quickly declared its

126 

C. MUGNOLO

images were no longer playing by polite society’s rules. In the Sunday supplement, artists imbued images with a new tactile, physical force. Their innovative formats challenged the regulatory grid-structure of the newspaper itself, creating not simply a collection of jokes but an immersive funhouse environment where regulations were relaxed. This force was embodied in the Sunday supplements’ approaches to layout design. When one opened an issue of a humour magazine like Puck or Judge, there was a stark visual contrast between the brilliantly coloured illustrations and the interleafing monochrome pages. These inside pages, printed in black and white, were crammed with humorous stories, pun-laden comic panels, and derogatory ethnic humour, all sandwiched together. Orderly columns kept these features organised, perfect for quick consumption during a businessman’s short respites throughout the day (Couch 2001, p. 73). Like humour magazines, the Sunday comics formatted their cartoons between blocks of humorous text. Yet both the New York World’s “Comic Weekly” and New York Journal’s “American Humorist” section liberally experimented with ways to upset their predictable, vertical rhythms. Comic panels might step diagonally rather than horizontally through the page, shaping surrounding text into a staircase pattern. Text would ebb and part for egg-shaped comic panels. Vertical columns of text, reminiscent of New  York’s soaring skyscrapers, would even crumble and fracture as cartoon buffoons created the illusion of dissolving their structures. This transformed reading into a physically mobile experience, where stories and images needed to be scaled and chased throughout the broadsheet. Far from just a container for comics, the newspaper layouts performed as playful, pictorial forms in their own right. Layouts could momentarily transform the newspaper into an alternate leisure object. On Valentine’s Day of 1897, the New York Journal’s “American Humorist” fashioned its comic panels to mimic the shape of posted love notes and a string of paper hearts. On February 21, another layout transformed the page into a giant deck of cards, shaping its comic panels as hearts, spades, diamonds, and clubs. This compositional play merged comics with other parlour room entertainments while simultaneously making these polite diversions untenable and illogical over the giant broadsheet dimensions. Outcault published his first “Hogan’s Alley” instalment for the New York World on 5 May 1895. Frequently published at full or half broadsheet dimensions, his comics crucially helped generate the new image phenomenon in the Sunday supplement, foremost through his choice of subject matter. In the comic weekly, expensive colour printing designated a humour hierarchy, positioning polished, painstaking political satires at the top. Slapstick comedies, tenement humour, and garish ethnic caricature were positioned as lowly, monochrome fodder between the chromolithograph satires. The ubiquity of colour in the Sunday supplements meant colour no longer assigned a superior position to comics on the cover or in the centrefold. The New York World’s and

  READING RICHARD FELTON OUTCAULT’S “YELLOW KID” THROUGH PERCEPTION… 

127

New York Journal’s decision to frontline the Yellow Kid’s low-brow entertainment seems to contradict, even self-ridicule, its upper-class aspirations. More crucially, Outcault’s commitment to sprawling, uncontained slapstick meant he was using different visual vehicles to orchestrate narrative and meaning. The political allegories of Life, Puck, and Judge required a “stop and go” reading experience. Each spasm or physiognomic exaggeration needed to be distilled for its symbolic meaning, and then reassembled like a tapestry of threads. By contrast, Outcault’s composition entailed a “swarming” effect that comics historian Thierry Smolderen traces to the eighteenth-century pictorial storyteller William Hogarth (Smolderen 2014, pp. 4–5). Smolderen elaborates how this compositional approach permitted circuitous paths for constructing meaning, allowing us to “lose ourselves” in a “relaxed and whimsical fashion”, ultimately embodying liberation (2014, p.  4). In line with the supplement’s focus on images as corporeal forces, circuitous readings can also engender dizzying and disorienting experiences affecting not only the physical stability of the newspaper but also that of the reader. Outcault’s approach to colour and text further restructured the image as a physical force rather than a passive graphic. In the humour magazines, chromolithographs typically reserved saturated colour for symbolic functions. The very fact that comic strip character Mickey Dugan was colloquially termed “Yellow Kid” by his fans reveals how deeply periodical consumers read colour as an identifier. In the Sunday supplements, however, colour was frequently free of symbolic weight. Instead, newspapers deployed free-flowing colour to generate sensual experiences of space, temperature, and motion. In Outcault’s large-scale comics, colour flowed unhindered by black boundary lines to punctuate explosions, lend impact to collisions, and create atmospheric effects. Editors permitted Outcault’s colour to bleed freely into adjacent passages of text. Rendered as pure colour silhouettes, the Yellow Kid’s miscreants could even climb up and invade columns of text without severely impairing their readability, as in “The Residents of Hogan’s Alley Visit Coney Island” (Fig. 1).3 Why would the Sunday supplements wish to hone images that seemingly willed themselves free of the periodical’s bounded structures? Outcault’s preference for images capable of overtaking body and brain, images that Belting asserts “are in control”, speaks not only to the prerogatives of Sunday supplements but also to the visual culture of the rising American city and its sensory onslaught (2001, p. 10).

Picturing as a Mode of Urban Living Despite its chronological and geographic distance, Alpers’ work on seventeenth-­ century Dutch society provides a convenient model for approaching late nineteenth-­century New York City. Both cultures prioritised vision and picturing as modes for forging identity. Alpers describes visual experience as “a central mode of self-consciousness” by which seventeenth-century Dutch citizens situated their role in the broader society (1983, p. xxv). The Dutch impulse to

128 

C. MUGNOLO

Fig. 1  R. F. Outcault, “The Residents of Hogan’s Alley Visit Coney Island”, 24 May 1896, New York World. San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection, The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library

obsessively “picture” their surroundings was moulded by broader cultural philosophies that constructed looking as a crucial means to actively construct new knowledge. Alpers’ preference for the term “picturing”, an active verb, rather than the passive noun “pictures”, emphasises this “inseparability of maker, picture, and what is pictured” (1983, p. 26). Art historian Rebecca Zurier likewise draws on urban sociology and practices of looking as methodologies for analysing the viewing cultures of late nineteenth-century New York City in Picturing the City. Zurier describes

  READING RICHARD FELTON OUTCAULT’S “YELLOW KID” THROUGH PERCEPTION… 

129

New York as an image capital where its citizens operated in a compact environment of “perpetual visibility” (2006, p.  47). Living as an image was both a condition of living in New York and a frame of mind conditioned by the city’s visual industries, particularly those of “fashion, publishing, advertising, and entertainment” (Zurier 2006, p.  49). Zurier positions the illustrated metropolitan press as the beating heart of this visual capital as it both “created and chronicled these developments, making individual events resonate in representations of representation” (2006, p. 53). As in Dutch visual culture, fragmented looking dominated New York’s urban representation. However, in New York City, fragmented looking resulted less from a deliberate meditation on the limits of vision. It instead manifested as unavoidable symptom of a distracted frame of mind shaken by the city’s fast-paced modalities for living and leisure. Take, for example, Yellow Kid’s approach to word panels, aimed at triggering an overwhelming sensory, rather than deductive, experience. Any relatively blank surface in a Yellow Kid comic became a receptive surface for inscription, including shirts, hats, and even clouds. The discombobulating use of text echoed New York City’s long-maligned visual pollution by advertisements and sandwich boards (Zurier 2006, pp.  55–59). Unlike the political cartoons of humour magazines, these texts did not easily coalesce into expository meanings. Rather these images forced the reader to fight against the visual din of text to access any meaning, duplicating the frustrations of city-life. Zurier catalogues how New  York’s “urban representation” manifested through various drawing and compositional styles designed to transport readers to the edge of scandal and catastrophe. Outcault’s Yellow Kid comics channelled many of the stylistic attributes developed within newfound brands of pictorial journalism. In the mid 1890’s, artist reporters, many of which became associated with New York’s Ashcan School of painters, moved from a diagrammatic technique to a sketch-artist approach that depended on long, sweeping lines with a focus on movement and incomplete contours. Rather than deriving their authenticity from an empirical or authoritarian approach, such images emphasised individual testimony, a physically embodied experience that was progressively blending with late nineteenth-century conceptions of realism (Zurier 2006, p.  145). Zurier follows these same methods through the cartoonists of the Sunday supplements whose “autographic drawing became a way of re-presenting things the artists had seen in a distinctive, opinionated voice” (2006, p. 183). Outcault generated this autographic form of drawing through multiple means. The outlines rendering the features of his juvenile cast are relatively open and abbreviated. Quick, loose lines helped propel his bodies and objects into perpetual motion. Outcault tended to vigorously mark explosions, flinging objects, dust clouds, and splashing water with multiple lines, emphasising their transitory and deleterious effects. As David Kunzle has shown, such methods for generating the experiential sensations of motion, impact, and pain had long occupied cartoonists throughout the nineteenth century, responding to the pressures applied by society’s new mechanised means of living and

130 

C. MUGNOLO

production (1990, pp. 348–375). However, in the context of the 1890s urban periodical, these techniques accrued new associations with authenticity that legitimised Outcault’s representations as “true” portrayals of the urban environment. Crucially, Outcault’s cartoons were not only participating in the newspaper’s picturing of the city but also its commitment to reporting. Close analyses performed by comics historians such as Christina Meyers and Bill Blackbeard reveal how Outcault’s seemingly farcical slapsticks were intricately threaded with pointed political critiques. In these final sections, I explore how Outcault recombined and fractured various imaging systems in his Yellow Kid comics, thus challenging the veritable claims made by pictorial journalism. This brings Outcault’s work unexpectedly close to Alpers’ assertions about the fractured spatial organisation of Dutch painting. Both present incoherence as a highly conceptual position which points to the fallibility of human perception. Outcault’s images in the Yellow Kid comics did not behave as images ought to behave, particularly regarding the protocols governing images of the poor.

Violating the Rules for Imaging Outcault had a penchant for combining incommensurate image universes. His images of poor and ethnic minorities pulled from a variety of pictorial conventions, each loaded with different, even diametrically opposed, aims. As with fellow pictorial reporters, Outcault’s emphasis on tactile, immediate drawing techniques helped to virtually transport the viewer to the tenements, emphasising the shock and immediacy of squalid conditions. The layouts Outcault used for “Hogan’s Alley” echoed an aestheticisation of the poor developed within the socially conscious illustrations of highline magazines. According to Zurier, the preference for open foregrounds and panoramic vistas with plunging perspectives formulated by artists like Ashcan school painter and magazine illustrator Everett Shinn heightened the realism and presence of the slums “while simultaneously pushing the viewer away with an aestheticizing distance” (2006, p. 160). To bring Belting’s picture/image theory into play, these formal devices directed attention to the containing medium. By emphasising the picture’s design and structured composition, even raw depictions of the poverty-stricken packaged a socially conscious subject for polite consumption. While recalling activist practices of imaging, Yellow Kid comics also followed cartooning conventions that served up poverty and racism as sources of comedy. Far removed from any empathetic intent, ethnic caricatures of immigrants and other designated “savages” reinforced derogatory stereotypes. Humour often rode on these groups’ attempts to unsuccessfully parrot Western or upper-class leisure activities (see Soper 2005b). In the comic weeklies, ethnic cartoons contrasted sharply with images of elites exchanging witticisms in a fashionable parlour setting, providing a clear signal to their affluent readers. Ethnic cartoons were objects of distant contempt, while elite cartoons pointed to the reader’s own experience of clever repartee.

  READING RICHARD FELTON OUTCAULT’S “YELLOW KID” THROUGH PERCEPTION… 

131

The Yellow Kid comics thus operated as an odd Venn diagram of different, diametrically opposed modes of urban representation. The ultimate effect of this mishmash is complicated considering the Sunday supplement was read by a diverse audience which included those very working-class and immigrant members caricatured within their comics (Soper 2005a, p. 184). Many scholars debate how the Yellow Kid comics reinforced pejorative stereotyping and precluded access to social spaces (see especially Meyer 2019, pp.  143–148 and Saguisag 2019). Outcault’s own self-presentation as a glib entertainer rather than a social architect further obscures the potential readings and intentions of his work (Blackbeard 1995, pp. 18, 134–135). These discussions compound the universe of images with the realities and experiences of their represented subjects. However, if the grounds of discussion are shifted from living subjects to pictorial genres, Outcault’s use of pejorative caricatures reveals a complex deconstruction at play. Alpers’ analysis of the “studio phenomenon” and the artist’s workplace is useful here. In The Vexations of Art: Velazquez and Others, Alpers meditates on the studio as a modality for constructing images, where “the relation of the artist to reality is seen or represented in the frame of the workplace” (2005, p. 9). By exploring how the concept of “the studio as the world” took hold in the seventeenth century, Alpers accounts for this era’s more indecipherable and anachronistic modes of painting which reflected the investigations prompted by the setting of the “studio-laboratory” (2005, p.  14). I propose that Outcault operated similarly, creating investigations prompted not by the studio but a workplace bounded by the irrational rules of print culture and imaging. By confusing different modalities for picturing the poor, Outcault’s images begin to strip back the veneer of truth proclaimed by these modes of urban representation, pointing to their fictional constructions. Whether Outcault’s comics produced any egalitarian by-product is difficult to confirm. What does seem indisputable is Outcault’s interest in critiquing New York City’s upsurge of social crusaders. This happens directly via political allegories interlaced through his Yellow Kid comics. It also happens visually, notably in the methods Outcault used to deconstruct the reformist overtones of two of his most direct antecedents, cartoonist Michael Angelo Woolf and photographer Jacob Riis. When Outcault debuted his first instalment of “Hogan’s Alley” in the New York Journal, its title and ethnic shorthand established its tenement as an Irish ghetto. This choice is important as one of the reigning motifs in Irish jokes was child death and disease. Blackbeard links Outcault’s early Irish tenement cartoons to the techniques of Michael Angelo Woolf, whose cartoons of street children appeared in Life and Puck throughout the 1880s (1995, pp. 17–19). Woolf’s dark humour derived from his characters’ wretchedness as the children attempted social graces, normalised alcoholic fathers, and threatened to infect each other with measles. His images often adopted a sympathetic and reformist tone, and sometimes forewent humour all together as pleading editorials lamenting the plight of the poor. While Outcault’s early cartoons almost

132 

C. MUGNOLO

directly aped Woolf’s style, they resisted his paternalist stance (Blackbeard 1995). Outcault rendered “Hogan’s Alley”’s street urchins as resourceful and resilient individuals rather than meek starving waifs. Their irascible and destructive penchant for mischief further troubled their position as charitable subjects. Outcault’s cartoons similarly channelled and mollified the reformist aesthetics of one of the nineteenth century’s most famous documentary photographers, Jacob Riis. Pulling from the popular visual device of the slum tour, Riis’ photographs of tenement life introduced a stark, new aesthetic for immigrant poverty while subscribing to Victorian conceptions of the urban destitute (Yochelson 2015, pp. 12–13). To create images of juvenile truancy, Riis asked boys to enact the “typical” poses of shooting craps and selling newspapers (Yochelson 2015, pp.  14). Outcault’s renditions of New  York’s signature stacked tenement dwellings, narrowly packed streets, and vacant lots often appear almost directly pulled from Riis’ signature compositions. Yet Outcault’s miscreant misbehaviours are far more elaborate and innovative, pushing truancy into an ecstatic creative form. Rather than succumbing to their conditions, Outcault’s children transformed and dominated their surroundings. One cartoon in particular, “The War Scare in Hogan’s Alley” (Fig. 2), suggests a direct and intentional revision of Riis’ 1894 photograph “Drilling the Gang”. Riis’ image was reproduced as wood engraving by A.  D. Fisk for Century magazine approximately a year before Outcault’s cartoon was

Fig. 2  R. F. Outcault, “The War Scare in Hogan’s Alley”, 15 March 1896, New York World. San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection, The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library

  READING RICHARD FELTON OUTCAULT’S “YELLOW KID” THROUGH PERCEPTION… 

133

published on 15 March 1896. The similarities with Outcault’s comic are overwhelming. Both Outcault’s and Riis’ composition included 13 boys aligned in single file with heels together. For “Drilling the Gang”, Riis arranged the group of boys to pose as an organised drill team, illustrating the reformative potential of military-style summer camps. The wood engraving is as much a study in discipline as an analysis of the uneven growth spurts and ethnic features of the Mulberry Street boys. Their straight-backed military stance highlighted their physiognomic irregularities, a worrying sign of truancy, while reassuring its healthy rectification through urban programming. An invisible camp drill sergeant supposedly controls their motions off camera. “The War Scare in Hogan’s Alley” reconstructed Riis’ visual program, destabilising its reassurances and annulling its crusader overtones. Outcault replaced the implied adult sergeant with a juvenile soldier in flamboyant pose, erasing state regulation. The cartoon line-up also exaggerated the ethnic diversity of the crowd. Racist caricatures frequently served as stand-alone jokes in nineteenth-­century cartooning practice, placing Outcault’s image in line with other derogatory comics. Yet the atypical range of ethnicities on display here and the nod to Riis suggests that the comic’s satirical target was taking to task the social phobias propagated by photojournalism rather than the ethnic populations themselves. A small fisticuffs scene of two bald toddlers in nightshirts pointed to this meta-critical stance. The duking toddlers were nearly identical in physiognomy and visually interchangeable, excepting the braided pigtail and slippers that signified one as Chinese. Here Outcault violated the protocols for displaying two ethnic cartoons in combat, which nearly always pivoted on their exaggerated physiognomic difference. A deeper dive into the symbolism of “The War Scare in Hogan’s Alley” reveals how Outcault’s comic presented a complex critique of contemporary events, collapsing the roles of the slapstick farce with calculated editorial cartooning. Bill Blackbeard and Steve Carper have identified that the boys of Hogan’s Alley are organising in response to Britain’s release on March 5 of the “Venezuela Blue Book” (Blackbeard 1995, pp.  37–38;  Carper 2015). This document advocated Britain’s position in the Venezuelan border dispute and was largely decried for inaccuracies by the American press. An allegorical lithograph published in Judge a month previously on 5 February 1896 forthrightly defended the United States’ position in this debate with clear-cut symbolism. In Judge’s cartoon, a defiant Uncle Sam defended the frightened, diminutive characters labelled “Venezuela” and “Nicaragua” against highly decorated European powers. Uncle Sam stood before a sign proclaiming “No Trespass. America for Americans. Uncle Sam”. By contrast, in Outcault’s image, the boys held placards pronouncing “Down wit Ingland” and “Down wit Spane”. Although essentially voicing the same message as the Judge cartoon, in Outcault’s image, the text was confused, misinformed, and reactionary. One placard read “We don’t know Venezuela but we are wit him troo tick & troo tin all right”. Their response was also violent. An apartment window displaying the sign “Hurrah for old England” had been destroyed by projectiles. The

134 

C. MUGNOLO

incoherent pronouncements paired with military zeal suggested an uneducated, knee-jerk patriotism. Newspaper editorial cartoons frequently positioned lower-class commentators as both common-sense mouthpieces and pejorative comic relief. A decadesold cartooning tradition employed by British caricaturist George Cruikshank, impoverished individuals were often positioned to the side of current events to comment on political injustice, functioning like an all-seeing yet agencydeprived Greek chorus. These characters often delivered pun-driven comments in heavy dialect, emphasising both their stupidity and their position as a mouthpiece for the author’s argument. Outcault’s tenement crew recalled these cartooning techniques. However, their juvenile age range and histrionic play indicated that theirs are not heartfelt opinions but a raw parroting of the incoherent debates the children would have overheard from adults. Victorian concepts of childhood innocence combined with the innate “savage” stage of juvenile development (see Hall 1904, especially pp. 44–45) scrambled corrective or disciplinary responses to their antics, confusing whether the kids were conscious of their own social critiques. The cartoon thus did not so much critique the political event itself as surreptitiously mock the emotional overreaction it generated in an invisible adult newspaper-reading public. The “Hogan’s Alley” Independence Day episode titled “The Day After the Glorious Fourth Down in Hogan’s Alley” (Fig. 3) further demonstrates how Outcault fused different genres of illustration together, disrupting the prescribed ways such pictorial methods were intended to frame the city’s social

Fig. 3  R. F. Outcault, “The Day After the Glorious Fourth Down in Hogan’s Alley”, 7 July 1895, New York World. San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection, The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library

  READING RICHARD FELTON OUTCAULT’S “YELLOW KID” THROUGH PERCEPTION… 

135

problems. On and around 4 July 1895, issues of Pulitzer’s Evening World ran multiple articles addressing New York City’s new firecracker ban. Ironic acknowledgements that “it is not likely that the children’s fun will be checked” were reinforced by editorial cartoons displaying children of both lower and upper-class origins setting off explosives underfoot helpless cops, tying fireworks to their pet’s tails, and nursing firework-induced injuries (see “The Small Boy” 1895). The cartooning styles were boisterous and light-hearted, humorously illustrating the main content of the articles while matter-of-factly delivering naughty children their comeuppance. In contrast, Outcault’s “The Day After the Glorious Fourth Down in Hogan’s Alley” flaunted a morbid range of explosive-induced injuries in an unusually sombre Hogan’s Alley. In the foreground, one child displayed his missing fingers to companions, who were in turn missing an arm and sporting bandaged heads. The range of injuries and property damage infused Outcault’s cartoon violence with real events by closely repeating previously published news reports on “The Fourth’s Casualties”. For example, a burned out second floor window in Outcault’s illustration recalled an article published three days prior about a fire in Mulberry Street started by children who chucked a firework through an apartment window. Historian Roy Rosenzweig records how July 4th was a sore point in the struggles over the Americanisation, culminating in a “divided fourth” where middle-class families frequently left the city to escape the noise and violence of urban celebrations (Rosenzweig 1983, pp.  65–90). Outcault’s cartoon appeared at a time when the blame for “loud celebrating” started to shift away from young boys who “embodied nostalgic recollections of the writer’s own youth or indulgent feelings about his or her children” and onto immigrant populations (Rosenzweig 1983, p. 156). Moving into the twentieth century, papers increasingly highlighted the deaths and injuries resulting from these immigrant gatherings, which in turn became targets of reform and legislation. To conclude, boyish misbehaviour and immigrant misbehaviour were two very different problems when it came to Independence Day, both of which appear uncomfortably suspended together in Outcault’s cartoon. Collaging pictorial conventions from different genres of pictorial journalism, Outcault’s images confused their aims and exposed their artifice. By rewiring political satire into the circuitry of the juvenile slapstick cartoon, he was reinventing the rules of political cartooning. Cartoons and pictorial journalism are not always codified as “art”, but these genres do resonate with Belting’s definition of art as an “aesthetic mediation” where authors “seize power over the image and seek through art to apply their metaphoric concept of the world”, a place “about which artist and beholder can agree between themselves” (1994, p. 16). By disabling the methods through which cartooning and art controlled its arguments, Outcault emphasised the autonomy of the image and image-reading as a personalised, interactive process. This process invested his images with a range of “reading options”, an aspect Christina Meyers ties to the Yellow Kid comics’ serial dynamics and medial liminality (see especially 2019, pp. 82–86).

136 

C. MUGNOLO

Outcault’s images succeeded best as political critiques when the reader identified directly with his miscreants, recognising that the discombobulation of the rebelling children echoed their own urban experience. For instance, in “The Residents of Hogan’s Alley Visit Coney Island”, children tumbled out of the baskets of hot air balloons. With strings snapping and flailing, all these balloons were branded with urgent, boastful ad campaigns. If one identified with the hurdling children, the comic moved beyond a slice of farce toward a metaphor for dishonest branding and the fallout that ensues. This final section examines the critical work the Yellow Kid himself performed to open these reads and function as an avatar for perceiving the city.

The Yellow Kid as a Mask The Yellow Kid helped propel the connection between the reader and his serial comic through his direct reciprocal gaze. The first instance of this phenomenon launched in January of 1895 in “Golf – The Great Society Sport as Played in Hogan’s Alley”. Frequently laughing, sometimes expressing terror or despair, Yellow Kid’s text rarely added narrative content that was not already implied by the visuals. Rather, the interactive potential of this character seemed to hinge to his brazen repartee with the reader, something neither the impoverished waif nor the caricatured immigrant was supposed to attempt. The Yellow Kid’s dialogue, scrawled in mishappen font on his nightshirt, imbued printed text with bodily vitality. This text contributed to Outcault’s formation of the comic as what Smolderen termed an “audio visual” stage, collapsing boundaries between image and text as well as speech and action (see Smolderen 2014, p.  147). Rather than advancing the narrative, these texts typically expressed intentions and reactions. As ensuing slapstick thwarted his expectations, the Yellow Kid narrated the emotional experience of being caught up in the maelstrom of shocks and jolts of urban chaos, a condition that Tom Gunning shows had become popularised as symptomatic of modern urban living (Gunning 2000). The Yellow Kid thus coordinated gestures and text to prompt the reader to identify with him and become vicariously disoriented. Yet how could a reader from the newspaper’s diverse populace be expected to associate themselves with such a specifically Irish and impoverished caricature? Belting’s Face and Mask: A Double History suggests strategies for contemplating this possibility. Belting understands face and mask comprising a single theme with fluid boundaries. Masks encompass both man-made objects and the living face shaped by its bearer. While the operation of the mask fluctuates according to time and culture, in its Western incarnations Belting defines the mobile face as an “open form” and the mask as a “closed”, conceptually distilled form (2013, p. 93). Belting explains that the boundary between face and mask become ambiguous “wherever the vivid interaction between gaze and facial expression is disturbed or interrupted” (2013, pp. 6–7). To illustrate his point, Belting describes a wearer of a man-made mask who looks on with living

  READING RICHARD FELTON OUTCAULT’S “YELLOW KID” THROUGH PERCEPTION… 

137

eyes, fixing us with an unreadable gaze which “acquires an uncanny force that renders us powerless” (2013, p. 7). I contend that the Yellow Kid fixes the viewer with a similar face/mask amalgam. His impossibly forward-facing ears and tendency to confront the viewer straight-on emphasise his head as a flat shape, rather than a full volume, an attribute that Christina Meyers connects to his iconic reproducibility (2019, p. 13). His open, unflappable smile, repeated week after week, echoes the frozen, expressive countenances of Greek theatre masks. Meanwhile the empty circle eyes and clean-shaven scalp channel the eerie, smooth shells of Venetian masks. The combination of illiterate script with clever double entendre on his nightshirt recalls that it is not the kid at all but the artist who speaks in code to the reader through his caricatures. The Yellow Kid’s mask-like performance draws attention to the role of the living face (a supposed locus for authenticity) as mask (a disingenuous matrix), a concept that Belting asserts became the fate of the face in modern mass media. Kerry Soper’s study of ethnic humour in the comic strips resonates with Belting’s meditation on face and mask. As Soper describes, the ethnic caricature can disarm its function as “a marker of foundational identity” and instead “become a mask to be worn lightly ambivalently, or ironically” to damage entrenched hierarchies (Soper 2005b, p. 262). Like an absurdist collage, ethnic masks, when relocated to an experimental creative space, can take their repressive presumptions to task. Soper discusses how the ethnic “mask” can also operate as a point of “sympathetic identification” and as a receptacle for the reader to inhabit. Soper invokes Scott McCloud’s work in Understanding Comics to explain how abbreviated marks used to render a recognisable caricature like Yellow Kid potentially invites the reader to “project themselves into the comic world through an open-ended, unfinished dialectical image” (pp. 262–263). Outcault’s “A Wild Political Fight in Hogan’s Alley – Silver Against Gold” (Fig. 4) published on 2 August 1896 demonstrates how the Yellow Kid’s reciprocal gaze and mask-like visage helped transform the comedic image into a complex site for projection and self-mirroring. The cartoon targeted the presidential race between Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan and Republican William McKinley which hinged on the debate whether to maintain the gold standard or switch to a bimetallic standard that backed US currency with silver. The Hogan’s Alley rally featured exclusively juvenile campaigners. Flying bricks, children cowering from a barking dog, and a boy tossing a cat from a roof accentuated the physical chaos without forwarding any ordering narrative or agenda. However, a building clock arranged and labelled as the time “16 to 1” (the rate of silver to gold) echoed the Democratic slogan and underscored the central currency issue. Rally signs for both candidates choked the scene and paired political alignments with ridiculous justifications. Outcault’s image embodied the hysteria, confusion, and suspicions of incompetence that characterised contemporary headlines and New  York’s political climate.

138 

C. MUGNOLO

Fig. 4  R. F. Outcault, “A Wild Political Fight in Hogan’s Alley-Silver Against Gold”, 2 August 1896, New York World. San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection, The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library

The Yellow Kid characteristically took a central foreground position on a raised platform as a campaign speaker. With gleeful fervour, the Yellow Kid lunged forward, looking directly at the reader, with his nightshirt proclaiming “Fer O’Bryan” and, in smaller text, “At last I am in ter politics”. His dopey smile and misspelled dialogue implied a hapless innocent swept up in politics merely as an urban rite of passage and mistaken alignment with his Irish heritage. Yet the Yellow Kid also extended forward an uncharacteristic diamond ring, signalling political influence and corruption. Roughly two weeks prior to Outcault’s cartoon on 20 July 1896, The New  York Times announced, “Tammany to Endorse Bryan”. The Tammany Society was an influential political organisation in New York City that typically controlled Democratic nominations. It also notably assisted incoming Irish immigrants, particularly with scaling the political ladder. In this light, the Yellow Kid may instead be a shrewd colluder who has been paid for his Tammany endorsement and only performs as the innocent to maintain his profitable popularity. Here the Yellow Kid flipflops between joyful participant, instigator, and a gullible victim simply aping American customs. As a haunting mask, he embodies forces of chaos at work over American urban life. As a site for projection, the Yellow Kid invites the readers into the maelstrom and takes to task the reader’s complicit role in that chaos.

  READING RICHARD FELTON OUTCAULT’S “YELLOW KID” THROUGH PERCEPTION… 

139

Eschewing symbolism and satire, Outcault used ecstatic violence, jolting non sequiturs, and convivial repartee between characters and readers to generate a comedy that was simultaneously bodily, empathetic, and intellectual. He heightened his characters’ performance as images, and thus as avatars a diverse readership could invest with their own dispossessed, exasperated experience of the “American Dream”. As a methodological model, this study suggests how Belting’s and Alpers’ approaches to the image can shift the definition of comics from what they look like to what they are doing. This opens avenues for research into the early formative stages of comics that is less dependent on its defining visual structures, like word balloons and sequential panels. By targeting comics’ unique performance as images, this theoretical approach also positions comics as an art form that was formulated to satisfy urgent needs and collective longings generated by modern culture.

Notes 1. The accolades given by R. F. Outcault’s obituaries are overly simplistic and have been nuanced by scholarship in Comics Studies. David Kunzle’s book Rudolphe Töpffer: Father of the Comic Strip rightly challenges Outcault’s position as a prime originator of modern comics. However Outcault did have crucial formative influence on the development of the “Comic Newspaper Supplement”. 2. For further analysis of Visual Studies as an approach Cf. Roan chapter “What Is an Image? Art History, Visual Culture Studies, and Comics Studies”. 3. For further detail on the role of colour and comics Cf. Uhlig chapter “Colour in Comics: Reading Lorenzo Mattotti Through the Lens of Art History”.

References Alpers, Svetlana. 1983. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Alpers, Svetlana. 2005. The Vexations of Art: Velázquez and Others. New Haven: Yale University Press. Belting, Hans. 1994. Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Belting, Hans. 2001. An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Belting, Hans. 2013. Face and Mask: A Double History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Blackbeard, Bill. 1995. R. F. Outcault’s The Yellow Kid: A centennial celebration of the kid who started the comics. Northampton: Kitchen Sink Press. Carper, Steve. X rays and the Yellow Kid. Flying Cars and Food Pills. 2015. https:// www.flyingcarsandfoodpills.com/x-­rays-­and-­the-­yellow-­kid. Accessed 20 December 2020. Couch, N. C. Christopher. 2001. The Yellow Kid and the Comic Page. In The Language of Comics: Word and Image, ed. Robin Varnum and Christina T. Gibbons, p. 60–74. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

140 

C. MUGNOLO

Gordon, Ian. 1998. Comic Strips and Consumer Culture: 1890–1945. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. Hall, George Stanley. 1904. Adolescence: Its psychology and its relations to physiology, anthropology, sociology, sex, crime, religion, and education. New  York: D.  Appleton and Company. Harvey, Robert C. 1998. Children of the Yellow Kid: The Evolution of the American Comic Strip. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Gunning, Tom. 2000. The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde. In Film and Theory: An Anthology, ed. Robert Stam and Toby Miller. New York: Blackwell. Kartalopoulos, Bill. 2013. Tug of War: Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. In Society is Nix: Gleeful Anarchy at the Dawn of the American Comic Strip, ed. Peter Maresca, 16. Sunday Press Books. Kahn, Michael Alexander and Richard Samuel West. 2014. What fools these mortals Be!: The story of Puck. San Diego: IDW Publishing. Kunzle, David. 1990. The History of the Comic Strip: The Nineteenth Century. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Meyer, Christina. 2019. Producing Mass Entertainment: The Serial Life of the Yellow Kid. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Saguisag, Lara. 2019. Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Smolderen, Thierry. 2014. The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay. University Press of Mississippi. Rosenzweig, Roy. 1983. Eight hours for what we will: Works and leisure in an industrial city, 1870–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. “The small boy with a predilection for arson is wide awake as ever.” 1895. The Evening World, July 3: 2. Soper, Kerry. 2005a. Performing ‘Jiggs’: Irish Caricature and Comedic Ambivalence toward Assimilation and the American Dream in George McManus’s “Bringing up Father”. The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 4:2, p. 173–213. Soper, Kerry. 2005b. Swarthy Ape to Sympathetic Everyman and Subversive Trickster: The Development of Irish Caricature in American Comic Strips between 1890 and 1920. Journal of American Studies, 39:2, Nineteenth-Century Literature: p. 257–296. West, Richard Samuel. 2013. Secret Origins of the Sunday Funnies. In Society is Nix: Gleeful Anarchy at the Dawn of the American Comic Strip, ed. Peter Maresca, 11. Sunday Press Books. Yochelson, Bonnie. 2015. Jacob A. Riis: Revealing New York’s Other Half. New Haven: Yale University Press. Zurier, Rebecca. 2006. Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Colour in Comics: Reading Lorenzo Mattotti Through the Lens of Art History Barbara Uhlig

Abstract  The question of the thematic dimension of colour has been a neglected one in many fields, including Comics Studies and Art History. In the twentieth century the latter, however, started to shift towards a new interpretation of the significance of colour. The first scholar who dedicated himself to this important topic was the German art historian Ernst Strauss. He laid the basics for our present understanding of the subject. His student Lorenz Dittmann expanded his theories and published them in an accessible way under the title Colouring and Colour Theory in Western Painting. A handbook. Unfortunately, neither Strauss’s nor Dittmann’s work has been translated, so they remain rather unknown outside of German-speaking Art History. Another seminal researcher in the field of colour, and more well known in the English-­ speaking world, is John Gage and his book Colour and Culture has become canonical. Drawing on these scholars and a hermeneutical approach, their theories will be applied to Lorenzo Mattotti’s and Jerry Kramsky’s adaptation of Doctor Jekyll & Mr Hyde. Mattotti often evokes specific historic artworks and painting styles in his comics and here transferred the story from Victorian London to Weimar Berlin, often referencing artworks from this period. The methods of Dittmann and Gage allow for a better understanding of the dialogue of colour, contrast and form that Mattotti simulates. The hermeneutical analysis places the comic in a larger context, allowing many differing sources to enrich and enlighten the interpretation.

B. Uhlig (*) Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Munich, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Gray, I. Horton (eds.), Seeing Comics through Art History, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8_8

141

142 

B. UHLIG

Keywords  Colour • Hermeneutics • Dittmann • Doctor Jekyll & Mr Hyde • Expressionism • Otto Dix

Introduction As art historian Christoph Wagner (1997) has expounded, research into colour has undergone numerous changes over the last two centuries. Various scientific methods have attempted to address the subject of colour, with differing degrees of success. Art-historical approaches employing iconographic methods regarded colour purely phenomenologically and came to the conclusion that for interpretation no importance need be attached to it (e.g. Panofsky 1985). Colour iconography attempted to remedy this analytic defect. Although this led to significant single results, the extremely narrow concept of the symbol meant that colour could not be comprehended in all its complexity in colour iconography. Colour was reduced to canonised symbolism (green for hope, red for love, etc. (Haeberlein 1939)), which could not however be applied universally. This approach was not flexible enough to take into account the whole spectrum of variable possibilities of cultural, historical and artistic meaning that come into play (Wagner 1997, p. 184). Attempts to expand and extend the iconography of colour by means of a semiotic analysis also failed due to a too rigid classification scheme and a conceptual structure which could not properly adapt to differing medial circumstances.1 Anthropological, ontological and colour psychology approaches were likewise doomed to failure because they all wanted to create binding norms for the interpretation of colours which were not tenable. Only hermeneutics has so far proved promising and in addition provides sufficient space in research, historico-­culturally, systematically and also methodologically. As Wagner argues, Hermeneutics …offers not merely a sophisticated and methodologically sound model for understanding an individual work of art, seen from the point of view of art history. …Furthermore, this approach opens up perspectives for a synoptic exploration of the potential for artistic perception together with the historico-­ cultural background, the history of reception, and even considerations of the experiences of modern observers. (1997, p. 185)

Accordingly, this chapter will first deal with the methodology of hermeneutics and in particular of art-historical hermeneutics according to Oskar Bätschmann. Following that, it will present two central theoreticians of colour in Art History, Lorenz Dittmann and John Gage, who represent different approaches. Dittmann stands for a very practical interpretation of colour, oriented close to the artist and the work of art, whereas Gage focuses on the embedding of the artist in their historical context as well as on the interplay between the artist and contemporary academic discourse. In the final section, these theoretical approaches will be applied practically to the comic Docteur Jekyll & Mr Hyde by Lorenzo Mattotti and Jerry Kramsky, published in 2002.

  COLOUR IN COMICS: READING LORENZO MATTOTTI THROUGH THE LENS… 

143

Hermeneutics in the History of Art The term “hermeneutics” was used as early as Antiquity in the writings of Plato and Aristotle to interpret various terms. It is derived from the Greek verb hermeneúein, which means to state or to interpret. At first it was mainly applied to the interpretation of text or speech. Gottfried Boehm created the foundations of the “hermeneutics of a picture” in his article of the same name (Boehm 1978).2 In his book Einführung in die kunstgeschichtliche Hermeneutik [Introduction to Hermeneutics in Art History] (1984), Oskar Bätschmann was first to apply it specifically to the field of Art History, namely, to the sub-genre of painting. This differentiation is important since according to him there exists not just one single form of interpretation but a different one for at least each genre of art (1984, p. 9): For the hermeneutical strategy, the object of interpretation is at the core, meaning a three-dimensional sculpture calls for a different approach to interpretation than a two-dimensional painting, for example. Bätschmann’s aim is to question the established methods of analysing a painting and to focus on the viewer-related interpretational approach. Therefore, he does not so much concentrate on the question of what the artist tried to express, but on how we as the recipients perceive the painting. The hermeneutical method is therefore by no means limited to Art History, but in it reaches “a special manifestation” (Dittmann 1975, p. 154). What is essential with this method is on the one hand to understand it as a process that admits of changes when new sources or discoveries appear. It is therefore important to accept the plurality of opinions. On the other hand there is similarly not simply one correct interpretation. Rather it is a question of realising when an interpretation is correct. For Bätschmann, interpretations are correct when they are methodically transparent, when they capture the elements of a work and their relationships and when they substantiate their procedure and their results with arguments (Bätschmann 1984, p. 161). This opens up the possibility of several correct interpretations for one work.

Seminal Theoreticians in Contemporary Colour Research As can be seen from the remarks above, many theoreticians have made valuable contributions to the field of colour, with constantly changing focal points and standpoints. In the twentieth century, a shift in art departed from colour being tied to a mimetic function and thus forced a new orientation in research. In Germany, this was developed by Ernst Strauss. In his groundbreaking book Koloritgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur Malerei seit Giotto und andere Studien [Colour Historical Analysis of the Art of Painting since Giotto and Other Studies]3 (1972), he laid down “that the physically specified, empirical colour differs from the aesthetically effective painted colour of a picture not only materially but also in essence” (1972, p. 12). The importance of this sentence cannot be overstated. Strauss was referring to the difference between the colour

144 

B. UHLIG

on the painting’s surface and the colour in nature. Shaped by the artistic experience of Modernism, especially by abstract art, he separated colour from the concept of mimesis and distinguished between the colour of the “visible world” and the colour in the work of art as being “completely different” (Wagner 2001, p. 306). For Strauss the colour on the surface to be painted first of all passed through the artist’s will, was changed by it and finally became a means of structure and significance of equal rank with all the other elements of the picture. It could therefore no longer be ignored. In 1955, Strauss’s student Lorenz Dittmann wrote his doctoral thesis on Die Farbe bei Grünewald [Colour in Grünewald’s Art].4 Using Strauss’s methodology and Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology as a starting point, Dittmann developed his own academic approach and forged a link between art in the Middle Ages and abstraction in the twentieth century. The focal points of his research were the history of colouring in Western painting and the development of chiaroscuro. Here, too, Dittmann continued Strauss’s research. His publications on the subject of colour in painting can be regarded as pioneering achievements in this field, as his 1986 article on colouring in German and French paintings in the eighteenth century, or his article Lichtung und Verbergung in Werken der Malerei [Clearance and Obscuring in Selected Paintings]5 (1989). Dittmann’s main work, which remains a canonical text for research into colour in the history of art, was published in 1989 under the title Farbgestaltung und Farbtheorie in der abendländischen Malerei [Colouring and Colour Theory in Western Painting].6 What is typical of his approach is a rejection of an analytic interpretation based purely on form and colour, a l’art pour l’art point of view. Instead he stresses that he wants to comprehend the “content of an artist’s work that represents existence and the world” (Dittmann 2002, p. 151). Dittmann’s work is characterised by an extremely comprehensive knowledge of source history as well as by an analytic, almost dissecting perspicacity. His great strength lies in a precise, very well-structured analysis, both of writings and of works of art, which in detailed investigations always forms the basis of all his statements. In contrast to iconography or iconology, he tries to bring in all possible sources to give the full picture, from the artist’s own words to that of their contemporaries, from preliminary studies to recent insights into the circumstances of the painting’s creation, while keeping an open mind for the significance of colour in the specific artwork. Someone who is often mentioned in the same breath as Dittmann is the art historian John Gage. He came to colour research via J. M. W. Turner, about whom he also wrote his doctoral thesis. Gage’s publications, in particular his book Colour in Turner: Poetry and Truth (1969), led to a change in perspective when considering Turner’s work. Up until then Turner’s attainments had been reduced to the purely optical dimension of his oeuvre; his written legacy was ignored. Gage’s great achievement was proving that Turner was intimately involved in the academic and literary circles of his age and was influenced by

  COLOUR IN COMICS: READING LORENZO MATTOTTI THROUGH THE LENS… 

145

them. From this it can be seen that Gage was early on concerned with an interdisciplinary view of painting. Gage’s and Dittmann’s aims in analysis are similar, but where Dittmann focuses on the painting itself and describes it in great detail, Gage focuses on the artist’s milieu and hardly mentions the painting’s pictorial content. While Dittmann explores the progressive changes in perception of colour between different artists, Gage delves into the application of colour theory in painting which derive from science.7 In the chapter “Colour without Theory”, which encompasses more than 100 pages and which spans from George Seurat’s idea of pictorial colour to Frank Stella’s view on materiality, he only describes one work of art in some detail: Piet Mondrian’s triptych Evolution, to which he dedicates five sentences. To better understand his approach, it is helpful to look at his analysis of Mondrian’s work, to take just one example. He starts with chemist and philosopher Wilhelm Ostwald and traces his reception by the group De Stijl, to which Mondrian belonged. Mondrian was friends with painter Jan Toorop who in turn introduced him to theosophy and their views on colour. The Theosophists had implemented nineteenth-century research into colour which led Mondrian to science and his first Cubist paintings. Then he met the mathematician M. H. J. Schoenmaekers and adapted his ideas on colour in his own paintings. An encounter with artist Bart van der Leck lead him to explore coloured line paintings, soon turning to a grid taken from psychological studies. As this shows, Gage meanders between art and science, seeking the connection between them. Comparing John Gage and Lorenz Dittmann, we can see that Gage is more interested in the greater context than the interpretation of the specific artwork, whereas for Dittmann, the artwork is central and the greater context enriches his own interpretation. Together they complement each other and form academic guiding principles—a space for one’s own research in the field of colour in the history of art.

Colour in Comics Both Dittmann and Gage worked almost exclusively on paintings, a genre that is related to the field of comics but not identical with it. Some aspects can easily be transferred, others adapted, but as Bätschmann rightly asserted, each art-­ historical genre needs to take its specific objects into account. The following is therefore not a fixed theory but a proposition on how to approach colour in comics. In the following section, I will briefly summarise the rather meagre literature on colour in comics before applying the hermeneutical approach outlined above to the comic adaptation of Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Lorenzo Mattotti and Jerry Kramsky.

146 

B. UHLIG

The Current State of Research In 2011, Jan Baetens published the article “From Black and White to Color and Back”, an important exploration of the back and forth movement in comics outlining preferences for either colour or a black and white style. He also argued that colour is greatly under-theorised. This has not changed significantly in the past decade. The body of source material concerning the topic of colour in comics research is still problematic. Two systematic studies of comics devote only one section to colour (Baetens and Frey 2014; Hague 2014). However, as these works want to cover comics in their entirety, the comments on the theory of colour naturally tend to remain underdeveloped. The few articles that focus on colour in comics deal either with technical aspects, such as the development of four-colour printing (Blackbeard 2003), or with cultural associations, in particular the depiction of race in comics (Chiu 2015; Aldama 2018; Smith 2019). The most important sources that deal with the question of colouring are Couleur directe. Masterpieces of the new French Comics (Gaumer et  al. 1993), as well as I linguaggi del fumetto [The Languages of Comics]8 (Barbieri 1991), which however adopts a semiotic approach and therefore displays limitations with regard to the analysis of colouring. Although there are individual areas within comics research which accord the topic of the colour scheme greater significance, for example, in couleur directe (direct colour) or the ligne claire (clear line) established by Hergé, most analyses mention this field without providing a deeper theoretical background (Groensteen 2007; Postema 2013; Cohn 2013). The Application of Art-Historical Theory to Comics To apply the principles of art-historical hermeneutics as adopted by Lorenz Dittmann to comics, we must examine closely how he in general approaches the issue of colour in works of art in his writings. In his basic principles he follows Strauss, who identifies three categories: firstly, the colouristic principle; secondly, the luminaristic principle; and thirdly, the chromatic principle. The colouristic principle refers to large, solid areas of colours that are clearly defined, for example, but not necessarily by a contour line, and in contrast to each other. Think of Simone Martini’s depiction of Madonna and Child (1326): Her black cloak is in sharp contrast to both the surrounding golden background and the red dress of the child she is holding. The luminaristic principle is characterised by a tension between light and dark and a transitory merging of colours, not by a contrast between individual, differentiated colours. This is closely related to the painting style of chiaroscuro, for example, in the works of Rembrandt or Caravaggio. The chromatic principle is a combination of the colouristic and the luminaristic. In a chromatic painting, the contrasting colours present themselves in a micro-structure and are not characterised by their own value but by their interaction. Often they mix in the eye of the

  COLOUR IN COMICS: READING LORENZO MATTOTTI THROUGH THE LENS… 

147

viewer. Good examples are Impressionism and Pointillism, for example, in the works of Claude Monet and Georges Seurat, respectively. Dittmann usually starts by mentioning the framework of creation of the work of art he proposes to analyse. His first step is therefore to analyse which of the three principles is dominant in the design. This includes material, colour and direction of light. A single painting can usually be assigned to one category. (With a comic, which can vary greatly in length and can undergo major stylistic changes in the course of the narrative, it is conceivable that different design principles can occur in different sections.) Dittmann then supports his judgement as far as possible with quotations from the artist about the design of the painting. Building on this, he describes the painting’s structure, construction and subject, which is then interpreted in a subsequent step. In doing so he repeatedly draws on quotations by the artist and statements by contemporaries as well as on sources, either literary or artistic, which the artist used or may have used in the process of creating the work of art. In this way Dittmann embeds his statements in the historical world of the artist and of his work. Of great importance to Gage are the artist’s own words, the literature they read and adapted and the interaction of science and art. He looks for the bigger picture, compares the artist’s stylistic development with similar realisations by other artists, academics and related disciplines and reveals connections between them. It is therefore difficult to use his writings as guidelines on how to interpret images. They are, however, excellent works of reference, which can guide and amplify one’s own interpretation. To adapt his approach in my research, I created a document listing Lorenzo Mattotti’s work by date of creation, which sometimes differs greatly from its date of publication, adding the names of artists he met, influential publishers he worked with, books he read, important political events of the time. In the resulting grid I marked stylistic changes and long-lasting developments, cross-referencing and connecting the dots between these instances. This proved messy and tedious at first, but did help to identify connections. I applied this approach in my article on Mattotti’s comic Murmure (Uhlig 2015) as well as in my previous article on Docteur Jekyll & Mr Hyde (Uhlig 2016). Based on these approaches, I will now examine in more detail the comic Docteur Jekyll & Mr Hyde by Lorenzo Mattotti and Jerry Kramsky from 2002. I examined this work in 2016 from the point of view of the literary and artistic adaptation, but did not focus on the aspect of colour (Uhlig 2016). I now propose to build upon and expand the 2016 article. In accordance with both Gage’s and Dittmann’s method, detailed statements by the artist will also be adduced. The comic was initially created to fulfil a request: An Italian magazine kept asking Lorenzo Mattotti for a graphic adaptation of a classic text which was then to appear in its pages. Since Mattotti was interested in playing with the Gothic genre and had already illustrated Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Pavilion on the Links in 1992, they settled on a reinterpretation of Jekyll and Hyde. Mattotti’s childhood friend and long-term collaborator Jerry Kramsky would

148 

B. UHLIG

write the text. Unfortunately, a dispute arose between Mattotti and the editors and he decided to stop the project. The French publisher Casterman expressed interest, so they returned to the ten pages that already existed, tore them apart and restructured the project as a classic bande dessinée album: The book was published in a hard-cover edition measuring 24  cm by 32  cm. It is thread stitched, so the 64 full-colour pages remain open. The high printing quality as well as the black border around each frame make the vivid colours of the drawings pop against the smooth, bright white background of the pages. The paper is not translucent so that the reverse sides do not shine through. On a structural level, Mattotti and Kramsky made a number of crucial changes in their adaptation of Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Although the text of the comic follows the Italian translation of the novella by Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini very closely, the scene of the action has been transferred from Victorian London to Berlin in the final years of the Weimar Republic. Many of the works of art referred to in the comic were created after the year 1930—the year “when the Weimar Republic ceases to be a democracy” (Schröder 2018). The date of its creation also coincides eerily with the September 11 attacks. George W. Bush had just proclaimed the War on Terror, the French weekly news magazine L’Express had announced gloomily: “The 3rd World War has begun” (Jeambar et al. 2001). It is against this background that Mattotti and Kramsky create their “hysterical” (Mattotti and Gravett 2017) story of madness and senseless violence. Mattotti says that when the idea of adapting Stevenson’s work came up he immediately thought not of London but of Berlin during the Weimar Republic: Every time I tackle a book I like to think what forms it will have, what references I will have. I automatically think, I don’t know, of a romantic story, so I go and see what paintings fascinate me, what films have been there before. This whole library, in my imagination, in my mind. And so in Docteur Jekyll & Mr Hyde the first thing that came to my mind is not to put it in the Victorian period, I didn’t want to do it in foggy London, I found it limiting. Immediately, I automatically saw Mr. Hyde and Dr. Jekyll drawn with German Expressionism, with extremely dry, hysterical forms, a mean side of the situation. And immediately I went to see some paintings, drawings by painters from the Weimar period, Expressionists, and I bumped into Beckmann’s self-portraits. I made a whole series of his self-­ portraits and, looking at him, I said to myself: “But this is Mr. Hyde!” With a sort of cynical look, the way of placing his hands, a sort of hysteria, of inner wickedness, and I said to myself: “But this is really Mr. Hyde!” Then I also went to see Grosz, Otto Dix of course and slowly I saw before me this very possibility of developing Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde with all what is the culture of Expressionism. Expressionism reaching as far as Bacon, because Bacon too is one of the most, of the last greats of contemporary Expressionists.9

It must be pointed out that although Mattotti repeatedly speaks of Expressionism, from the point of view of Art History, he interprets the term in much wider artistic terms. It includes Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) as

  COLOUR IN COMICS: READING LORENZO MATTOTTI THROUGH THE LENS… 

149

well as Kritischer Realismus (Critical Realism) and extends as far as the post-­ war works of Francis Bacon. In general, it can be said that by Expressionism Mattotti understands something similar to what Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (using his pseudonym Louis de Marsalle) said in 1921: “Since these images have been created with blood and nerves and not with a coolly calculating intellect, they speak directly and suggestively. …Despite the calmness a heated struggle for the things can be felt” (Kircher, quoted from Dittmann 2010, p. 278). From this Dittmann rightly concludes that “[t]he self-expression, the experience of the artist” are in the foreground (2010, p.  278). However, the comic, and Mattotti’s art, is subservient to the narrative, and it is therefore not Mattotti’s struggle that is the central point, but that of the characters experiencing it— Jekyll and Hyde. Similar to the Expressionist paintings Kirchner refers to, Mattotti’s polychrome drawings are carried by colour itself, which becomes “an emotional state”. As Mattotti described, “colours …are life, the energy you can pass to others” (2003). At the same time, it gives the artist great freedom, as colour is emotionally rich without being specific in content. In Mattotti’s work, colour is used narratively but uniquely to each story. The significance given to specific colours can change throughout the story, or can link scenes chromatically, the way Mattotti links Hyde’s blazing joy of being transformed into a body of his own with the blood bath of his first murder using the colour red. Mattotti executes the drawings with opaque coloured crayons. He always colours and draws by hand, even though it can become tedious for longer stories, because he likes the physical aspect of the work. He worked extensively in monochrome before, for example, in his preceding comics The Man at the Window (1992) and Stigmata (1998), but decided to return to colour in this work. According to him, it is often an intuitive decision whether to work in monochrome or polychrome: “There are stories …that cannot do without color; otherwise it would be as if they were losing the breath they need. …The choice of technique is also a function of the type of emotion you want it to pass. It’s a choice, not always rational” (2009). Thus it is the story itself which demands a certain mode as colour is an integral part of the narrative: “You …need to find the right story, where the color and the story have equal importance” (Bi and Mattotti 1997). Often, he leads his panels to the brink of abstraction, as in the last pages of Docteur Jekyll & Mr Hyde. The text will fade into silence, the forms will dissolve and the narration is carried by symbolic colours, a code the reader deciphers on a very basic level: “In Fires, there’s a scene in the forest where the combat takes place and you see the soldier falling and the blood. It’s a scene you see and just accept without other explication. There was no other way to tell this” (Bi and Mattotti 1997). Many artists Mattotti mentions as inspiration for Docteur Jekyll & Mr Hyde—Hanns Kralik, Carl Barth, Heinrich Maria Davringhausen10—tend towards abstraction. Similarly for Mattotti the formal composition and the colour scheme take on the visualisation of the great emotions in the story: madness, pain and hysteria. Other artworks, like Otto Dix’s Großstadt

150 

B. UHLIG

(Metropolis, 1927–1928) or Die sieben Todsünden (The Seven Deadly Sins, 1933), are obvious reference points as they are open commentaries on both the original novella and the situation in Weimar Germany, linking the two.11 The influence of Weimar cinema is also unmistakable. In films like Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) or Fritz Lang’s M (1931), the evil is reduced to a shadow roaming the streets, much like Hyde in the opening scene of the comic. They all consciously avoid showing the faces of their antagonists, shrouding them in darkness or playing with their silhouette. The lightning in the Weimar films is dominated by stark contrasts, the scenery is distorted and angular, thus rendering it grotesque and showing a world about to come apart—elements that can also be found in the comic. A final inspiration can be found in the world of comics itself: Mattotti and Kramsky’s comic is dedicated to Alberto Breccia who made an adaptation of the same story in watercolours. Though the execution of the drawings is very different, both Breccia and Mattotti prioritise the colours red and blue in contrast to black in the first pages of their adaptations. Mattotti’s drawings are filled with a murkiness that in the first half of the album is set as darkness in opposition to garish shades of yellow and red. The colours are planar and are deployed in contrast to each other: Red can be found next to purple, orange borders on blue, yellow beams of light throw turquoise shadows. In this way the colour of the picture is freed from any relation to reality. Applying the approach of Strauss and Dittmann, the colouristic principle is paramount in the comic as Mattotti puts an emphasis on colour contrasts to create strong tension and highlight the clash between Jeykll’s and Hyde’s emotional states. He does, however, subtly play with the chromatic principle characterised by chiaroscuro as seen in its use of shadow and silhouettes but skilfully transposes this into colour. Subsequently it is less dominated by light and dark while maintaining a harmonious colour palette—as in Caravaggio’s work—but instead by colour contrasts that are fractured by Hyde’s dark figure. The colours are not consistent from panel to panel as they are not intended to represent reality but to evoke emotion. In the panel top left of page 2, the girl may wear a green skirt; in the adjacent panel top right, her entire figure is swathed in shades of violet, the complementary colour harmony to the first panel (Fig. 1). Also the colours are determined as blue sky, yellow houses and red pavement in the first panel, reserving the primary colours for the largest areas of each panel. In the fifth panel (bottom left), however, this order is reversed: What used to be up (the blue sky) is now down and vice versa. The traditional rules no longer apply which foreshadows the narrative. When Hyde attacks the girl, the architectural space is dissolved—much as the world stops following the same rules as before Hyde’s creation. Instead, geometrical shapes are set against each other in primary colours, aiming for the highest tension possible, both artistically and narratively. This reinforces the violence of the act and expresses the girl’s shock and pain. What is important is therefore not the colour in detail but the overall impression of colour and their contrasts. Mattotti identifies this a typical characteristic of German Expressionism:

  COLOUR IN COMICS: READING LORENZO MATTOTTI THROUGH THE LENS… 

151

Fig. 1  Docteur Jekyll & Mr Hyde, Mattotti/Kramsky, © Casterman S.A. Pay attention to the reduced drawing style and the use of primary colours In Docteur Jekyll & Mr Hyde, by using this style of German Expressionism I found myself using colours I [normally] didn’t use much. They are very contrasting colours, very (pause) I call them hysterical, acid, I mean, I put acid green colours next to orange colours, next to pink colours, violet colours with much

152 

B. UHLIG

contrast, nearly wild, to give the idea of hysteria and in the end they belong to the rawness of the painting of these painters.12

His choice of colour as representing light carried by homogeneous areas of colour is therefore by no means random. It can be seen in the early works of the group of artists known as Die Brücke [The Bridge] and achieves vital importance in colouration in twentieth-century art, because it manages to take over and replace the functions of other pictorial elements. Mattotti follows this design closely; composed of geometrical figures, the characters have a coloured shading that gives them an extraordinarily plastic consistency, which is strongly reminiscent of Oskar Schlemmer’s human figures, “not for the sake of reference, but just to find strength in things that have gone before” (Bi and Mattotti 1997). The forms are created purely by colour without monochromatic delimiting contour lines. Pure and strong areas of colour complement each other “according to laws of contrast or harmony” (Jantzen 1914, quoted in Dittmann 1987, p. 92). Colour here represents light and shade, plasticity and contours. Mattotti’s use of space is also remarkable. It is characterised by straight or triangular areas, very occasionally also by round ones, which are strictly marked off from each other. The backgrounds are in perspective but seldom shaped three-dimensionally. Instead of a landscape there are geometrical forms whose aim is to guide the tension and in this way support the narrative. The girl, for example, appears in front of a light-coloured background. Hyde on the other hand stands out against the darkness. He emerges from a black shadow and stands in front of the midnight-blue sky, while the red background of the fifth panel illuminates his rage and the physical assault on the girl. Everywhere the perspective appears to collapse; it often lacks the spatial continuum of Euclidean geometry. Instead we see a metaphysical space that is reminiscent of Giorgio de Chirico’s pittura metafisica. Each scene in the narrative has its own colour scheme, with most scenes comprising three pages. The pages devoted to Jekyll are remarkable for their lighter colour scheme, which is dominated by a contrast between orange and light blue, referencing Hyde’s primaries but toned down. Similar to Hyde’s colours, they become darker as the narration progresses and Jekyll’s desperation grows. In addition to the colouristic changes between scenes, there are three major artistic breaks. The first appears on page 21 (Fig. 2), shortly after Jekyll’s impressive transformation, which is derived from Bacon’s crucifixion cycle. The use of space is clearly more detailed: the colours are less solid and more chromatically graduated; the colour palette has shifted from predominantly primary to secondary colours in orange and green; the background is intensified by the superimposition of contoured dancers in crimson red; wavy lines, which are supposed to make the music of the saxophonist audible, are used for the first and (conspicuously) for the only time. Narratively, the colours express Hyde’s “awakening”, as he rages in the bottom right panel: “we celebrate my liberation”. The panels are shot through with irregular horizontal lines, reminiscent of claw marks, as if Mattotti wanted to cross out the pictorial

  COLOUR IN COMICS: READING LORENZO MATTOTTI THROUGH THE LENS… 

153

Fig. 2  Docteur Jekyll & Mr Hyde, Mattotti/Kramsky, © Casterman S.A. The drawings are more fleshed out, the colours have shifted to green and orange. Criss-crossing lines appear

content of the panels. He himself pointed out that Expressionism makes use of signs that destroy themselves: “also in reference to Expressionist painting, that is, with hard signs, almost contradicting this colour that flakes off, that destroys itself, underneath.”13 In the comic he uses this stylistic device to symbolise Jekyll’s decline and Hyde’s descent into excess. The visual style of muted

154 

B. UHLIG

colours and the criss-crossing lines is therefore intensified in the course of the second half of the narrative. The section from page 41 to page 44, immediately preceding Hyde’s first sexually motivated murder,14 has a key function. As with earlier in the story in these pages, the range of colours shifts into the tertiary area. Yellowy green and orangey red are the dominant shades of this sequence, with accents in yellowy orange and bluish green shadows. This highlights Hyde’s decline. Originally a creature of pure, albeit violent, emotions, he follows his pleasures without restrictions. Hyde is well aware of his devious actions but submits to lust nonetheless. The experience, however, changes him, which is foremost captured in the comic in a chromatic shift. After this scene—after the murder—the pictorial object disintegrates rapidly. The geometrical areas in pure colours from the early pages of the comic give way to detailed chromatic areas in violet and darkened yellow, the bold geometric triangles splinter into small shapes, which are superimposed by a grid of dark lines (Fig. 3). Also the pictorial style changes significantly. The passers-by in panels two and three are reminiscent of the famous triptych Grande Ville (1927–1928) by Otto Dix. Mattotti had made allusions to this famous painting before (Uhlig 2016, p. 16). The first time, however, the colours were applied solidly, single pen strokes could not be identified. The second time the colour application appears almost hatched in places. The dark shadows in the third panel are broad strokes, colours bleed into each other, contours are less clearly defined, details are roughly executed. Therefore the colour application itself appears hectic, even driven. This fragmentation of the pictorial object is reflected in the narrative. The border between Jekyll and Hyde becomes increasingly blurred. The serum that ensures the transformation from Jekyll to Hyde and back ceases to work. Hyde himself is out of control, living in the streets, eating food out of trash cans. Jekyll is tortured by self-reproach. Increasingly, he finds himself trapped inside the body of Hyde. The final sequence, which is devoted to Jekyll’s despair and his decision to commit suicide, is remarkably dark in colour. This is the third break mentioned above. Black is the dominant colour, offset by various shades of grey with yellow highlights. Jekyll’s effort to keep Hyde away by keeping his purest and most joyful memories in his mind fails—he appears buried by his memories. His body undergoes one last transformation, but this time it is not the metamorphosis—characterised by pain—into Hyde. It rather resembles a transformation into a cloud, which in the end dissolves, leaving behind a void, which is accompanied by a sense of peace. We have been able to see that colour in Mattotti’s works is never random. It is always determined by the narrative and carried by it. The decision to shift the action to the Weimar Republic is echoed in the accents that Mattotti and Kramsky place in Stevenson’s work, not least in their choice of colour. They focus on change and transformation: from Jekyll to Hyde, from democracy to dictatorship, from Jekyll’s striving for the pure human being to the National Socialist idea of an Aryan human being. The aim of this adaptation is not to simply retell the story but to empathise with the hysteria, the inner evil, the

  COLOUR IN COMICS: READING LORENZO MATTOTTI THROUGH THE LENS… 

155

Fig. 3  Docteur Jekyll & Mr Hyde, Mattotti/Kramsky, © Casterman S.A. The drawings are overly detailed, almost grotesque. The colours are mixed with black

pain of transformation, despair as well as Jekyll’s longing, and the unbridled lust that breaks through in Hyde’s behaviour. It finds its narrative counterpart in the garish, untamed colours, in their explosive force. His colours capture the menacing atmosphere of the era, which is often compared to the “dance on the volcano”. Mattotti intensifies his narrative by adding in new scenes which do not occur in the original novella: Shortly before Jekyll’s death, he lets him

156 

B. UHLIG

think back to a moment in his childhood, in which young Jekyll holds a goldfish bowl in his hand and watches the movements of the goldfish in it. The colours are even and placed calmly next to each other; the background is not divided up into triangles but uniformly dark. A moment of tranquillity and joy. To fathom the emotional depths of his characters and make them comprehensible to the reader in an equally emotional and intuitive manner by the construction of the image and the use of colours—that is Mattotti’s declared aim.

Conclusion A hermeneutical approach to colour is highly beneficial as colour in art follows its own logic. It is not to be confused with the colours in the real world but should be recognised as a highly stylistic sign. Colour semiotics was largely unsuccessful because its terms for defining colour were too limited. Colours defies a universal system of codes, though it may well play with it. In this comic, Lorenzo Mattotti does, for example, make use of the colour red as symbol of intense emotion which also pays tribute to art of the early twentieth century. As Gage shows though, the meaning instilled in these colours was far from stable: Albeit Piet Mondrian consistently used the primaries, red in his theosophist phase symbolised—rather traditionally—pride, avarice, anger or sensuality. Later, under the influence of M.  H. J.  Schoenmakers, red for Mondrian signified “the radial movement of life, visual art and volume” (Gage 1999, p. 257). More important is Mattotti’s use of primaries, their colour contrast, their interaction as well as their increasing alteration into secondary and tertiary colours symbolise the descent of both Jekyll and Hyde. Colour, therefore, needs to be analysed in the context of the specific artwork. It is crucial to examine which function colour fulfils in a specific comic, how it is related to other colours or forms, if it changes in the course of the comic. In a second stage it is useful to see if the artist has a unique meaning for colours that can be traced in other works as well. Mattotti, for example, uses a very typical shade of green he reserves to express calm and tranquillity, that plays only a subordinate role in Docteur Jekyll & Mr Hyde—probably because tranquillity is missing in the story. This hermeneutical approach to colour is consequently best suited as it does not force a pre-set concept on the comic but explores how colour is manifested in the work itself. Bätschmann’s approach, which finds its echo in Dittmann’s and Gage’s method of interweaving artist comments, contemporary and modern views as well as a viewer-related analysis, is helpful in the scope of the interpretation. As mentioned, he opens up the interpretation to include several correct conclusions. Here, I highlighted Mattotti’s and Kramsky’s focus on transformation, on the destabilising nature of Jekyll’s experiment. Other interpretations that are just as valid have emphasised the horror of the war in Hyde’s behaviour and Mattotti’s references to Grosz and Dix (Gangnes 2017). This proves particularly helpful in analysing Mattotti’s comics as he often keeps his stories deliberately ambiguous (Uhlig 2015).

  COLOUR IN COMICS: READING LORENZO MATTOTTI THROUGH THE LENS… 

157

Lorenz Dittmann’s approach to the analysis of the use and significance of colour in a painting (and this in the widest sense includes comics) is strongly oriented to practice. This makes it easier to observe comics and to analyse them. This approach is eminently suitable above all for key scenes and for short or relatively homogeneous comics. On the other hand, Dittmann’s clear focus on the construction of the image, the structure and the use of colour makes it more difficult to encapsulate the entire comic in its mutability and its development. This becomes laborious in particular with very long comics or ones that extend over several volumes. Also the emphasis on attributing a painted artwork to either the coloristic, chromatic or luminaristic principle is of less importance. It used to imply a historic association that is less relevant to a young medium as the comic. It can, however, be useful in that it helps recognise main artistic trends in the comic: Does the artist try to create tension by using colour contrasts? Or do they create atmosphere by focusing on light and dark? Does it change in the course of the comic? John Gage’s approach is considerably more theoretical and often less accessible for one’s own analysis. In some contexts, however, his approach can prove extremely helpful. Such a context may, for example, be the change of colour with a switch of medium, for example, from a material medium like the coloured crayons that Mattotti uses to a purely digital colouring. The advantage of Gage’s approach is that it is easier to apply it to a series of pictures such as a comic because it focuses less on concrete descriptions of the images and more on basic stylistic characteristics and the wider socio-historical picture. Combined, these theories provide a helpful frame for analysing comics from an artistic point of view. Applying methods used for interpreting paintings can bring great results but may need to be adjusted to mixed-media comics, for example. So as Bätschmann saw the necessity for different interpretation for at least each genre, it might be necessary to establish more granular variations in the very diverse field of comics.

Notes 1. See for this Felix Thürlemann‘s analysis of Albrecht Dürer‘s Allerheiligenbild as well as the note „Über Farben. Rekonstruktion einer historischen Farbsyntax [On Colour. Reconstruction of a historic colour syntax] (Thürlemann 1990). For further reading, the texts of Michael Baxandall (1972) and Margret Lisner (1990) are recommended. 2. For further detail on Boehm and the aesthetics of reception Cf. Eckhoff-Heindl chapter “Aesthetics of Reception: Uncovering the Modes of Interaction in Comics”. 3. This is my translation of the title. The book itself has, unfortunately, never been translated to English. 4. Again, this is my translation of the title. 5. The translation of the title is my own. 6. This, too, is my own translation.

158 

B. UHLIG

7. This may be both Gage’s greatest strength, as this approach produces excellent results, and at times his greatest downfall, as he makes the artist the servant of technology and denies him his own creative thoughts. 8. This is a great book that to my knowledge has only been tranlsated into Spanish. Therefore, the translation is my own. 9. In 2011 the comic was published as an iPad App in the Apple Store together with extensive extra material, in particular short thematically structured interviews with Lorenzo Mattotti. The longer statements by Mattotti have all been taken directly from these videos, though the translation is my own. Unfortunately the app is no longer available in the Apple Store. 10. Hanns Kralik (1900–1971) was a German painter and belonged to the association of avantgarde artists called Young Rhineland, founded in Düsseldorf in 1919. Carl Barth (1896–1976) is most famous for this tempera paintings dating from the 1930s, which stylistically belong to New Objectivity and Magical Realism. Heinrich Maria Davringhausen (1894–1970) also belonged to the association Young Rhineland as well as the to November Group of expressionist artists. He was close friends with George Grosz and a pioneer of New Objectivity. 11. For a detailed interpretation, see Uhlig 2016 as well as the article “Hysterical Reality” by Madeline Ganges (2017). 12. Interview on iPad App 2011. 13. Interview on iPad App 2011. 14. The motif of sexually motivated murder, referred to as “Lustmord”, was a very common one in German art in the first half of the twentieth century. In Stevenson’s work it is not referred to as openly as in Mattotti’s, but it is discernible in the story of Jack the Ripper, which resonates in the background. A drawing by Otto Dix from the year 1922 served as a concrete example for Mattotti’s interpretation.

References Aldama, Frederick Luis. 2018. US Creators of Color and the Postunderground Graphic Narrative Renaissance. In The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel, ed. by Jan Baetens, Hugo Frey, and Stephen E Tabachnick, pp. 303–19. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baetens, Jan. 2011. From Black & White to Color and Back: What Does It Mean (not) to Use Color?. College Literature, 38:3, pp. 111–128. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/college_literature/v038/38.3.baetens.html Baetens, Jan, and Frey, Hugo. 2014. The Graphic Novel: An Introduction. Cambridge Introductions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barbieri, Daniele. 1991. I linguaggi del fumetto. Bompiani. Bätschmann, Oskar. 1984. Einführung in Die Kunstgeschichtliche Hermeneutik  : Die Auslegung von Bildern. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftl. Buchgesellschaft. Baxandall, Michael. 1972. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style. Clarendon Pr. Bi, Jessie, and Mattotti, Lorenzo. 1997. Entretien Avec Lorenzo Mattotti. Du9, l’autre Bande Dessinée. https://www.du9.org/en/entretien/lorenzo-­mattotti764/. Blackbeard, Bill. 2003. The Four Color Paper Trail: A Look Back. International Journal of Comic Art, 5:2, pp. 205–15.

  COLOUR IN COMICS: READING LORENZO MATTOTTI THROUGH THE LENS… 

159

Boehm, Gottfried. 1978. Zu Einer Hermeneutik Des Bildes. In Seminar: Die Hermeneutik Und Die Wissenschaften, pp. 444–71. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Chiu, Monica ed. 2015. Drawing New Color Lines: Transnational Asian American Graphic Narratives. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Univ. Press. Cohn, Neil. 2013. Beyond Speech Balloons and Thought Bubbles: The Integration of Text and Image. Semiotica, 197, pp.  35–63. https://doi.org/10.1515/ sem-­2013-­0079. Dittmann, Lorenz. 1975. Kunstgeschichte Im Interdisziplinären Zusammenhang. Internationales Jahrbuch Für Interdisziplinäre Forschung 2, pp. 149–74. Dittmann, Lorenz. 1987. Farbgestaltung Und Farbtheorie in Der Abendländischen Malerei: Eine Einführung. Darmstadt. https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.29814. Dittmann, Lorenz. 2002. BILDERTRÄUME.  Das Goldene Zeitalter Bei Marees, Cezanne, Matisse. In Der Traum Vom Glück: Orte Der Imagination, ed. Konrad Hilpert and Peter Winterhoff-Spurk, pp. 103–49. Annales Universitatis Saraviensis : Philosophische Fakultäten 15. Sankt Ingbert. Dittmann, Lorenz. 2010. Farbgestaltung in Der Europäischen Malerei: Ein Handbuch. UTB Kunstgeschichte, Kunstwissenschaft: 8429. Böhlau Gage, John. 1969. Colour in Turner: Poetry and Truth. New York: Frederick A. Praeger. Gage, John. 1993. Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction. London: Thames and Hudson. Gage, John. 1999. Colour and Meaning. Art, Science and Symbolism. London: Thames and Hudson. Gangnes, Madeline B. 2017. Hysterical Reality: Weimar Germany and the Victorian Gothic in Mattotti and Kramsky’s Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, pp.  1-11  ; ISSN 2150-4857 2150-4865. https://doi.org/10.108 0/21504857.2017.1383281. Gaumer Patrick, Thierry Groensteen, Gilbert Lascault and Didier Moulin. 1993. Couleur directe: Chefs d’oeuvres de la nouvelle bande dessinée française. Meisterwerke des neuen französischen Comics. Masterpieces of the new French Comics. Edition Kunst der Comics. Groensteen, Thierry. 2007. The System of Comics. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Haeberlein, Fritz. 1939. Grundzüge Einer Nachantiken Farbenikonographie. Römisches Jahrbuch Für Kunstgeschichte. Hague, Ian. 2014. Comics and the Senses  : A Multisensory Approach to Comics and Graphic Novels. London: Routledge. Jeambar, Denis, Louyot, Alain and Coste, Philippe. 2001. Guerre contre l’Occident. L’Express. September 13. https://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/monde/amerique-­ nord/11-­septembre-­2001-­guerre-­contre-­l-­occident_491025.html (accessed March 03, 2021). Lisner, Margrit. 1990. Die Gewandfarben Der Apostel in Giottos Arenafresken: Farbgebung Und Farbikonographie Mit Notizen Zu Älteren Aposteldarstellungen in Florenz, Assisi Und Rom. Zeitschrift Für Kunstgeschichte. Mattotti, Lorenzo and Mairy, Frédéric. 2003. J’essaie, de plus en plux, de ne suivre que mes envies. Entretiens. https://www.avoir-­alire.com/lorenzo-­mattotti-­j-­essaie-­de-­ plus-­en-­plus-­de-­ne-­suivre-­que-­mes-­envies Mattotti, Lorenzo and Kramsky, Jerry. 2002. Docteur Jekyll & Mister Hyde. Paris: Castermann. Mattotti, Lorenzo and Norina Wendy Di Blasio. 2009. Intervista a Lorenzo Mattotti. Interview. https://www.mangialibri.com/interviste/intervista-­lorenzo-­mattotti.

160 

B. UHLIG

Mattotti, Lorenzo and Paul Gravett. 2017. Lorenzo Mattotti: The Magic & Music of Comics. Interview. http://www.paulgravett.com/articles/article/lorenzo_mattotti. Panofsky, Erwin. 1985. Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der bildenden Kunst. In Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, ed H. Oberer and E. Verheyen, 85-97. Berlin. Postema, Barbara. 2013. Narrative Structure in Comics: Making Sense of Fragments. Comics Studies Monograph. Rochester: RIT. Schröder, Christian. 2018. Krisenjahr 1930. Der Anfang Vom Ende Der Weimarer Republik. Der Tagesspiegel, November 1, 2018. https://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/krisenjahr-­1930-­der-­anfang-­vom-­ende-­der-­weimarer-­republik/21194536.html. Smith, Zoe D. 2019. 4 Colorism, or, the Ashiness of It All. WWAC. https://womenwriteaboutcomics.com/2019/05/4-­colorism-­or-­the-­ashiness-­of-­it-­all/. Strauss, Ernst. 1972. Koloritgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur Malerei seit Giotto. München [u.a.]: DtKunstverl. Thürlemann, Felix. 1990. Vom Bild Zum Raum  : Beiträge Zu Einer Semiotischen Kunstwissenschaft. Erstveröff. DuMont-Taschenbücher: 244. DuMont. Uhlig, Barbara. 2015. Refiguring Modernism in European Comics: “New Seeing” in the Works of Lorenzo Mattotti and Nicolas de Crécy. European Comic Art, 8(1), 87–110. doi:https://doi.org/10.3167/eca.2015.080107 Uhlig, Barbara. 2016. Hidden Art: Artistic References in Mattotti’s Docteur Jekyll & Mister Hyde. Image [ & ] Narrative, 17:4, pp. 43–56. http://www.imageandnarrative.be/index.php/imagenarrative/article/view/1327/0. Wagner, Christoph. 1997. Farbe Und Thema – Eine Wende in Der Koloritforschung Der 1990er Jahre?. Zeitschrift Für Ästhetik Und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, 42:2, pp. 181–249. https://doi.org/10.11588/artdok.00001063. Wagner, Christoph. 2001. Kolorit/Farbig. In Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, ed. by Karlheinz Barck.

PART III

The New and Newer Art Histories

Feminist Art History as an Approach to Research on Comics: Meta Reflections on Studies of Swedish Feminist Comics Margareta Wallin Wictorin and Anna Nordenstam

Abstract  The aim of this chapter is to illuminate how the theories of the feminist art historians Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker can be utilized when analysing Swedish comics. What are the potentials and the deficiencies, and what other theories and methods are needed when investigating comics from feminist perspectives? The analysis will be based on four case studies of Swedish feminist comics: “The Future in Swedish Avant-Garde Comics, 2006–2014” (2017), “Högerideologi som dansbandsmelodi. Politisk satir i svenska feministiska serier” [Right wing ideology as popular dance music. Political satire in Swedish feminist comics] (2017),“Women’s Liberation. Swedish Feminist Comics and Cartoons from the 1970s and 1980s” (2019) and “Comics Craftivism: Embroidery in Contemporary Swedish Feminist Comics” (2021). The chapter is structured according to Pollock’s three positions for feminism’s encounter with the canon, which began with the Women’s Liberation Movement in the early 1970s (Pollock, Griselda, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories. Routledge, London 1999). This chapter ends with a reflection on the relevance—the potential and

M. Wallin Wictorin (*) Karlstad University, Karlstad, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] A. Nordenstam University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Gray, I. Horton (eds.), Seeing Comics through Art History, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8_9

163

164 

M. WALLIN WICTORIN AND A. NORDENSTAM

the deficiencies—of feminist art-historical approaches to the field of Comics Studies, and their methodological possibilities. Keywords  Feminist comics • Swedish comics • Linda Nochlin • Griselda Pollock • Rozsika Parker

Introduction The Swedish Women’s Liberation Movement has for a long time constituted a vital force. Since the middle of the nineteenth century it has produced a wide variety of journals which have functioned as arenas for feminist issues and debates, formation of opinions, mediation of art, literature and humour and so on (Nordenstam 2014). From the 1970s onwards some of the journals also included feminist comics and cartoons. Nicola Streeten (2020) has demonstrated that British feminist cartoons and comics played an important part in the Women’s Movement in Britain from the 1970s, with humour as a key component, and the same conclusion is applicable for Sweden (Nordenstam and Wallin Wictorin 2019). The authors of this chapter had vague memories of comics in Swedish feminist journals and anthologies from the 1970s, but before 2019 they had been neither researched nor documented by art historians or any other researchers (Nordenstam and Wallin Wictorin 2019). There are a few art historians, such as Isabella Nilsson, who have claimed knowledge of Swedish feminist comics from the 1970s, but a close look at her research reveals that the comics mentioned date from the 1980s, 1990s or even later (Nilsson 2005). Olle Dahllöf, member of the Swedish Academy of Comics, himself a collector of comics and an author writing about comics for a general audience, in 2019 published a book about women comics artists in Sweden active between the end of the nineteenth century and the 1970s. He asserts that the historiography of Swedish comics has been continuously dominated by men from the start, despite the considerable presence of women artists. To challenge this exclusion Dahllöf showcased 28 women who published comics in Sweden between 1887 and 1970 (Dahllöf 2019). Dahllöf discovered the first of them in 1989 when he was working at the Swedish daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter, and in connection to the newspaper’s 125  years jubilee searched the company archive for older comics. He found many comics by women artists, especially from the 1920s and 1930s, which according to Mira Falardeau corresponds in time with a rise in comics by women in the daily press in North America (Falardeau 2020, p. 30). In 2017 Dahllöf was asked by some members of the Swedish Academy of Comics to write a book about women comics artists. By then the academy had 7 women members out of a total of 18, after having been exclusively male between its foundation in 1965 and 1990 (Svenska Serieakademin n.d.). Dahllöf continued to search for women comics artists, found several and noticed that they had often been published in daily newspapers and in magazines for children (Strolz 2020). As a matter of fact, the literary scholar Helena Magnusson, who

  FEMINIST ART HISTORY AS AN APPROACH TO RESEARCH ON COMICS: META… 

165

was the first to write an academic dissertation about Swedish comics, had also discovered some of these, and other women comics artists, while working on her dissertation about children’s comics in the early 2000s (Magnusson 2005). Magnusson, who studied children’s and family magazines as well as daily papers and albums, did not focus on the artists in her study, but mentions that the male dominance of the comics field was broken with the publication of children’s comics in the 1920s and 1930s (Magnusson 2005, p. 367). This shows the importance of investigating different kinds of media and digging deeper into the archives. C(h)ris Reyns-Chicuma, who has written about bande dessinée and gender (2021), notes that what we nowadays see as typical comics, that is, strips, at an earlier stage were mostly published in mainstream family-­ oriented newspapers and children’s magazines. The early structural exclusion of women in the historiography of comics appears to be similar to the historiography of art in general, but regarding art in general the differencing of the canon began earlier, already in the 1970s, in Sweden as well as in other parts of the Western world. The omission of comics for children is not the only reason for why there are so few women artists in the histories of comics. Falardeau, who in 1981 obtained her Ph.D. from the Institute of Aesthetics and Art Sciences at the University of Paris, writing on comics by women in France and in Quebec, in her 2020 book, A History of Women Cartoonists, asks why there still are so few women in the areas of comics and cartoons (Falardeau 2020, p. 22). She suggests that part of the problem is the stereotypical expectations placed on women, especially the idea that women are not supposed to laugh in the public sphere and that men often have had problems with recognizing or appreciating women’s humour. Falardeau points to the low number of women comics artists, but Trina Robbins and Catherine Yronwode, by contrast, emphasize their amplitude. They write in their early attempt to differentiate the comics canon, Women and the Comics (1985), another of the first books ever published on this subject, that there have been hundreds of women comics artists but that they have been overlooked and ignored. Their book documents the careers of a large number of women who have created and worked in the field of comics strips, comic books and cartooning, in America during the twentieth century (Robbins and Yronwode 1985). Robbins, who started out as a comics artist herself, continued to publish volumes on women in the comics field, including A Century of Women Cartoonists (1993), The Great Women Superheroes (1997), From Girls to Grrrlz: A History of Women’s Comics from Teens to Zines (1999), The Great Women Cartoonists (2001) and Pretty in Ink (2013). Among Swedish comics researchers, such as Nina Ernst, Inger Jalakas, Helena Magnusson, Kristina Arnerud Mejhammar and Isabella Nilsson, Robbins is mostly mentioned as a comics artist. But her work in uniting women comics artists in the Wimmen’s Comix collective, later titled Wimmin’s Comix, for c. 20 years from 1972 onwards, might have been an inspiration for the Swedish feminist comics artists network Dotterbolaget [The affiliation, or literally The daughter’s company], founded in 2005 (Ernst 2017, p. 74).1

166 

M. WALLIN WICTORIN AND A. NORDENSTAM

Around the turn of the millennium, there was an increase in the production of feminist comics in Sweden, related to a new generation of feminists and of women comics artists (Nordenstam and Wallin Wictorin 2021b). Some years into the new millennium, there was a rapid expansion of feminist artists in the field. The vital ideas and innovative aesthetics in the comics and cartoons of artists such as Liv Strömquist, Åsa Grennvall (Schagerström), Nina Hemmingsson, Sara Granér, Nanna Johansson, Lotta Sjöberg and later Moa Romanova have mostly attracted attention from national readers and researchers.2 Now that Swedish comics are increasingly being translated to other languages (Strömberg 2020), more international research has appeared (e.g. Rauchenbacher and Serles 2021). In Swedish Art History, theories of the feminist art historians Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker have been used from the 1970s onwards. Pioneers in this regard have been Anna Lena Lindberg and Barbro Werkmäster, and many scholars, such as Yvonne Eriksson, Linda Fagerström, Anette Göthlund, Bia Mankell, Johanna Rosenqvist, Margareta Wallin Wictorin and Eva Zetterman, have followed their example. However, these feminist art-­ historical theories have not been explicitly used in comics research in Sweden, even if the question of “Why have there been so few women comics artists” has been discussed, at least since the 1980s.3 The aim of this chapter is to illuminate how the theories of these feminist historians—Nochlin, Pollock and Parker—can be utilized when analysing Swedish comics. What are the potentials and the deficiencies, and what other theories and methods are needed when investigating comics from feminist perspectives? The analysis will be based on four case studies we have recently published regarding Swedish feminist comics: “The Future in Swedish Avant-Garde Comics, 2006–2014” (2017), “Högerideologi som dansbandsmelodi. Politisk satir i svenska feministiska serier” [Right wing ideology as popular dance music. Political satire in Swedish feminist comics] (2017), “Women’s Liberation. Swedish Feminist Comics and Cartoons from the 1970s and 1980s” (2019) and “Comics Craftivism: Embroidery in Contemporary Swedish Feminist Comics” (2021).

Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock’s Feminist Theories of Art History In the 1970s many women art historians and artists questioned conventional Art History that often focused on male artists and so-called canonical works (Lindberg 1995, 10).4 Linda Nochlin published the groundbreaking essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists” in 1971. It has been reprinted several times, in the UK and the USA, and is included in Nochlin’s Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays (Nochlin 1994). In 1995 it was published in a Swedish translation. Nochlin challenged the established view of art history as a single sex world, populated by men and structured as a canon that permeated the art world and thwarted women artists. In her essay, Nochlin

  FEMINIST ART HISTORY AS AN APPROACH TO RESEARCH ON COMICS: META… 

167

argued: “In the field of Art History, the white Western male viewpoint, unconsciously accepted as the viewpoint of the art historian, may – and does – prove to be inadequate not merely on moral and ethical grounds, or because it is elitist, but on purely intellectual ones” (Nochlin 1994 [1971], p. 146). Nochlin claimed that art isn’t made by natural geniuses, but by trained human beings. Throughout the greater part of history, artistic training, and in particular drawing and painting from life, has been exclusively available to men. Historically, the few women with the opportunity to study art and achieve pre-eminence came from exceptional situations, such as growing up with artist fathers or with the support of strong male artistic personalities (Nochlin 1994 [1971], pp. 168–169). Nochlin’s ideas received significant attention, and her theories have been both appreciated and criticized from various perspectives. In the 1980s the British feminist art historians Parker and Pollock claimed that Nochlin did not challenge traditional definitions of art and creativity, and that she studied the actors in the field of art, rather than the structures that made possible the oppression and exclusion of women (Parker and Pollock 1981, p. 49). In their opinion, the modern definition of “artist” was based on the romantic nineteenth-­century myth and ideal of the artist as a male, divinely inspired creator, an outsider, an anti-social and anti-domestic bohemian. It was not applicable to women, since they were obliged to fulfil a socially ordained domestic and reproductive role at home, rather than appearing and exhibiting art in public life (Parker and Pollock 1981, pp. 82–113). Pollock and Parker’s critique is relevant, and Pollock developed it further in several books about structural conditions around artists such as Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas and Vincent van Gogh. She generated a set of theories, three strategic positions regarding feminist challenges to the canon, stating that it’s necessary but not enough to add women artists; that it’s necessary to consider the systematic devaluation of aesthetic practices, material and procedures associated with women; and, finally, that the feminist movement must interrupt the naturalized (hetero)sexual divisions that identify the structures of difference on which the canon is based—woman as Other, sex, lack, metaphor and so on. Nochlin was the one who pointed to the canon, and her notion that women had been excluded from artistic careers by being denied academic education is significant. In this chapter we regard Nochlin’s text as the important point of departure for an extensive research area in Art History, and also as a background for our studies regarding women’s and feminist comics. Mira Falardeau’s question, “Why are there so few Women cartoonists?” (2020, p. 22), is very similar to Nochlin’s “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”. The title of Robbins book from 2001, The Great Women Cartoonists, also echoes the outcry from Nochlin in 1971. However, we have chosen to structure this chapter on Pollock’s three positions further outlined below, since Pollock takes the question further into a broader field of intersecting power structures. Her three step-model is also pedagogically elucidating.

168 

M. WALLIN WICTORIN AND A. NORDENSTAM

In 1999 Pollock published the book Differencing the Canon. Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art Histories. Here she presented the three positions for feminism’s encounter with the canon after the Women’s Movement of the early 1970s. These positions can be understood as feminist strategies for dealing with problems caused by the existence of a patriarchal canon. The first position concerns the situation when “[f]eminism encounters the canon as a structure for exclusion” (Pollock 1999, p. 23). The strategy here was to fill the gaps in historiography by including women artists. Evidence of women’s uninterrupted activities in the arts was regarded as crucial in exposing the canon’s selectivity and gender bias. However, Pollock claimed that it was not enough to, like Nochlin suggested, add the women, without deconstructing the discourse of Art History and its gender-based hierarchy. This leads to a second position, presented as: “Feminism encounters the canon as a structure of subordination and domination which marginalises and relativises all women according to their place in the contradictory structuration of power  – race, gender, class and sexuality” (Pollock 1999, p. 24). The strategy here could be to valorize low status practices and procedures, especially practised by or associated with women, such as art made with textiles and ceramics. Acting from a marginalized position, interrupting Art History with a political voice challenging hierarchies of value was regarded as having a subversive force. However, there is still the risk of entrapment in a binary value system in which women are regarded as the Other to the universal sign Man (Pollock 1999, p. 25). The third position was presented as when “[f]eminism encounters the canon as a discursive strategy in the production and reproduction of sexual difference and its complex figurations with gender and related modes of power” (Pollock 1999, p. 26). The strategy proposed to overcome this inequality is to deconstruct discursive formations of Art History and to produce radically new sources of knowledge regarding the seemingly “ungendered” domain of art and Art History.

Pollock’s First Position on Comics When we, the authors of this chapter, were engaged in the research for “Women’s Liberation. Swedish Feminist Comics and Cartoons from the 1970s and 1980s”, published in European Comic Art in 2019, we discovered a gap in knowledge regarding feminist comics from the 1970s. Therefore, we decided to conduct a systematic search through feminist journals from the 1970s and 1980s, knowing that their editors had been radical in many ways, and possibly in their attitudes towards comics. We started with Kvinnobulletinen [Women’s bulletin], published by the left-wing feminist organization Grupp 8 [Group 8], between 1971 and 1996 and Vi Mänskor [We humans], the journal of the Svenska Kvinnors Vänsterförbund [Swedish Women’s Left Federation] which was published under different names from 1947 to 2011. We searched these journals systematically in the Women Studies Collection at Gothenburg University Library. In the very first number of Kvinnobulletinen, we found a

  FEMINIST ART HISTORY AS AN APPROACH TO RESEARCH ON COMICS: META… 

169

comic by Anne Lidén, “Lena i livet” [Lena’s life], a full-page, four-strip, black-­ and-­white comic in 12 panels (Fig. 1). The comic narrates the story of a young woman looking for a job, who discovers that all women’s jobs have worse pay than men’s jobs.

Fig. 1  © Anne Lidén, “Lena i livet” [Lena’s life], Kvinnobulletinen 1 (1971), p. 10

170 

M. WALLIN WICTORIN AND A. NORDENSTAM

There were comics in many of the other issues, too, with 14 comics and 3 single-panel cartoons discovered in the issues published between 1971 and 1979. Among others, we discovered Helga Henschen’s cartoon in which she expressed her wish for “the new human” instead of “the new woman” (Kvinnobulletinen 3–4 1973), and Ann Marie Langemar’s comic about “the women’s house” (Kvinnobulletinen 1 1979). “Katja” published comics about lesbian issues (“Lisa är rådvill”, [Lisa is perplexed], Kvinnobulletinen 2 and 3 1977). We are unable to identify this artist since she published anonymously, this being an era when it could be problematic to be regarded as promoting homosexual relations and when lesbianism was still considered a mental disorder in Sweden (until 1979).5 In the journal Vi Mänskor, there was a comic by Anne Lidén about the 8th of March and the history of International Women’s Day in number 1, 1973, but otherwise there were hardly any comics at all in this journal during the 1970s. In the 1980s a few more comic strips were published in this magazine, but the big flood came with the Fnitter anthologies (see below). In total this led to an increase in the media we studied, even if in the 1980s, the number of feminist comics in Kvinnobulletinen slightly decreased to 12 comics and some cartoons in the decade 1980–1989. However, they displayed a great variety of themes and styles. Among the themes explored were heterosexual and lesbian love (signed by Marie Falksten and Margareta Stål), elderly women’s love, body issues, and problems and joys in the workplace. We found 45 feminist comics and 90 cartoons in the Fnitter [Giggle] anthologies from the 1980s (Nordenstam and Wallin Wictorin 2019). They were the results of a campaign started at the daily social democratic newspaper Aftonbladet in 1980, encouraging women from all over Sweden to contribute feminist and humorous material to the editorial board of the women’s supplement. The underlying ambition was to use humour and satire, including irony, to contest the prevailing attitude that women had no sense of humour, while challenging the patriarchy. Essays, comics and cartoons were first published in the newspaper, and later collected in three anthologies. These anthologies contained comics and cartoons by, among others, Christina Alvner, Susanne Fredelius, Marie Falksten and Margareta Stål, Kersti Frid, Gunna Grähs, Helga Henschen, Arja Kajermo, Lilian Lindblad-Domec, Maria Lindhgren, Eva Lindström, Katarina Ribrant, Aja Thorén, Ingrid af Sandeberg and Cecilia Torudd. There were also quite a few anonymous comics and cartoons (Nordenstam and Wallin Wictorin 2019). Alvner, Grähs and Torudd continued after the 1980s to publish comics rather frequently and have been included in more recent comics research (Nilsson 2005, Arnerud Mejhammar 2020). We expected to find feminist comics in Puss [Kiss], a politically radical, underground journal. Puss, published from 1968 to 1974, was part of the student protest movement of 1968. The editor Lars Hillersberg was a student at the Academy of Art in Stockholm, as were several of the co-editors.6 There were comics in most of the issues, and in some of them several, but many of these were anonymous. Therefore, we were initially unaware that the artist

  FEMINIST ART HISTORY AS AN APPROACH TO RESEARCH ON COMICS: META… 

171

Karin Frostenson was responsible for approximately 50 images, cartoons and comic strips. None of her contributions were signed, and several of her images have mistakenly been attributed to her husband at the time, Lars Hillersberg (Gerdin 2020, p. 22). Both Frostenson and Hillersberg studied at the Academy of Art in Stockholm and worked as artists for many years. Hillersberg has received far more attention than Frostenson and has gained the reputation of being a politically and stylistically controversial artist. He seems to fulfil the prerequisites for an ideal bohemian modernist artist according to Parker and Pollock and is included in the latest comprehensive Swedish Art History book (Johannesson 2007, p. 249), while Frostenson is not. It wasn’t until we read the catalogue published to accompany Frostenson’s solo exhibition at Thielska galleriet in Stockholm in 2020, a retrospective organized around her art practice, that we learned of her extensive but anonymous engagement with the Puss journal (Gerdin 2020, p. 22). Nochlin’s theory about women artists’ exclusion from the canon of art history is applicable here, since we find it possible and necessary to add Karin Frostenson to the canon of comics and feminist comics, but Pollock’s first position is also applicable, since Frostenson’s exclusion does not depend on any lack of education, but rather patriarchal structures that made possible her oppression and exclusion (Parker and Pollock 1981, p. 49). The fact that she didn’t sign her comics, and didn’t get the same public attention as her husband, the rebel, anti-social and bohemian editor, seems to have been at least one of the reasons for her exclusion. As researchers in a related study, we clearly placed ourselves in Pollock’s first position, in which “[f]eminism encounters the canon as a structure for exclusion” (Pollock 1999, p. 23). We applied a strategy that aimed at filling gaps in history by including women artists previously ignored. By turning to politically radical and feminist journals such as Kvinnobulletinen and Vi Mänskor and to the feminist Fnitter anthologies, we directed our work to sources not previously consulted for the study of comics. We found women artists and their feminist comics which had not been discussed previously in the context of comics research.

Pollock’s Second Position on Comics Pollock’s second position of feminism’s encounters with the canon considers it to be “a structure of subordination and domination which marginalises and relativises all women according to their place in the contradictory structuration of power – race, gender, class and sexuality” (Pollock 1999, p. 24). One reason for marginalization of women art and artists that she points to is connection to materials and techniques that have been used in domestic contexts, such as weaving, embroidering and ceramics, media that in Western society have been regarded as crafts rather than art since medieval times. Lately such media have been elaborated by different kinds of artists in order to question exclusion and devaluation. The idea is that acting from a marginalized position, the interruption of Art History by a political voice challenging hierarchies of value can be

172 

M. WALLIN WICTORIN AND A. NORDENSTAM

a subversive force. Our strategy has been to focus on a low status practice associated with women, embroidery, which has been taken up by feminist comics artists in Sweden. In 1984 Rozsika Parker published the book The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine. It has been reprinted many times, which points to its relevance, and in 2010 it was revised and republished, with an emphasis in the introduction on how embroidery can be used to challenge norms. According to Parker, the art of embroidery has functioned as a means of educating women into the feminine ideal, with coercion in connection with marriage and the labelling of household textiles, while conversely providing a weapon of resistance against the constraints of femininity (Parker 2019, p. xix). It also functions as a source of pride and socialization through sewing circles (Parker 2019, pp. xv–xvi). In the 1970s Swedish feminist movement, embroidery was seen by some as a form of oppression to be opposed, while others began using it in free and creative ways to express feminist political messages (Waldén 1988, pp. 24–34; Eriksson 2003, p. 63). The situation was the same in the UK and other Western countries, where the craft was brought out from female domesticity into the public domain, carrying freedom, joy and feminist ideas, strengthened by cooperative work for the betterment of sociopolitical conditions (Parker 2019, xi–xxi). A development of this phenomenon is described by the concept “craftivism”. This term was launched in 2003 by the crafter and writer Betsy Greer in order to join the spheres of craft and activism (Greer 2014, p. 8). Craft can be described as “an occupation or trade requiring manual dexterity or artistic skill” (Merriam Webster n.d.-a).7 Examples of crafts are pottery, carpentry and sewing. “Activism” may be defined as “a doctrine or practice that emphasizes direct vigorous action especially in support of or opposition to one side of a controversial issue” (Merriam Webster n.d.-b). When these are merged, according to Greer, “the very essence of craftivism lies in creating something that gets people to ask questions […] to join a conversation about the social and political intent of the creations” (Greer 2014, p. 8). When used with a feminist perspective, craftivism can be defined, according to Sandra Markus as “the use of craft to challenge patriarchal hegemony, advocate for political and social rights, and promote the recognition of women’s traditional art forms” (2019, p.  2). Together with twelve British women, Greer formulated a craftivism manifesto, accessible on the web. It states that you can use craft, such as sewing, as a voice, to raise consciousness and create a better world, stitch by stitch, and share ideas with others, celebrating traditional skills in new ways. The manifesto also states that craftivism is about creating wider conversations about uncomfortable issues, and that one can make a difference by crafting individually or collectively, while benefiting from the fellowship of other crafters (Greer n.d.). In Sweden during recent years increasing numbers of comics artists have made use of embroidery. In 2020 we wrote the article “Comics craftivism: embroidery in contemporary Swedish feminist comics” about the work of these artists for the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics which we labelled

  FEMINIST ART HISTORY AS AN APPROACH TO RESEARCH ON COMICS: META… 

173

comics craftivism. We saw their comics as conscious ways to challenge stereotypical preconceptions about art and feminism as well as enjoy the opportunity to indulge in developing at the same time embroidery technique and comics making. The examples we wrote about in the article can be seen as what Pollock called “subversive opposition to a structure of subordination and domination, which had marginalised and relativised women according to their place in the contradictory structuration of power” (Pollock 1999, p. 24). The subversive force that emanated from the historically marginalized position of embroidery was apparently still robust, judging from the frequent use of traditional embroidering techniques. The cross-stitch, the stem-stitch and the chain-stitch, as well as conventional patterns associated with family relationships, are now used in freer ways resulting in ironic and other critical effects. The first comics artist using embroidery that we encountered was Åsa Grennvall, who has changed her name to Åsa Schagerström in connection to publishing her last book where she denounced her genealogical background. The change of name can be seen as a symbol of her denying the family origin and her connection especially to her mother. She has been thematizing the issue of violence in close relations from a feminist perspective since her comics album debut Det känns som hundra år [It feels like a hundred years] in 1999. She started to include embroidery in 2003 with reproductions of embroidered images on covers, such as the cross-stitched portrayal of a couple for her fourth album, Det är inte värst sådär i början [The beginning is not the worst]. In 2007 she crafted the front cover for her book Svinet [The swine] in stem-stitch and chain-stitch. In 2019, after three more comics books, two of which have reproductions of embroidered images on the covers, Schagerström published Urmodern [The original mother], a book consisting of 78 pages with reproductions of embroideries. Here the entire story is told in embroidered images, some of them combined with applications. Even the verbal text is embroidered. Lotta Sjöberg is another artist who makes embroidered comics and cartoons on the theme of heterosexual family life in private homes, with ironic humour and feminist critiques. She has published the albums Family Living (2011) and Det kan alltid bli värre [It can always get worse] (2014). The latter includes embroidered comics. Sjöberg has produced a large number of embroidered comics which are posted on Instagram, not leastwise with images of the Coronavirus during the pandemic period. In her second album she has drawn a sequential comics story about a group of crafters. The narrator expresses the joy and power experienced by the women as they craft and chat together, but the overall rhetorical strategy is ironic, political and humorous, as signalled by the title: “It can always get worse.” (Det kan alltid bli värre 2014, pp. 37–39). Lisa Ewald, Sara Granér and Marie Tillman have also published embroidered comics and cartoons in comics albums and on Instagram, often expressed with irony and humour. Increasingly in recent years, Sara Granér has also used ceramics as a form of expression. The anthropomorphic teddy bears that populate her comics and cartoons appear now as ceramic figures. Both Granér and Schagerström have recently held exhibitions at art galleries in Sweden where

174 

M. WALLIN WICTORIN AND A. NORDENSTAM

they show and sell their comic works (images, embroideries and ceramics), placing them in the field of art as well as comics (Nordenstam and Wallin Wictorin 2021a). As noted by Pollock herself, one risks getting trapped in a binary value system with women as the Other to the universal Man when applying her second position in the arts (Pollock 1999, p. 25). The risk is present when studying the emerging and expanding category of comics as well. However today, more than 50 years after the beginning of the second wave of the feminist movement, both men and women make embroideries (Parker 2019). Artists schooled in the fine arts, such as Louise Bourgeois, Tracy Emin and the Swedish artist Brita Marakatt Labba, have contributed to raising the status of the technique. Marakatt Labba’s embroidered works that focus the oppressed Sami people in the north of Sweden, Finland and Norway received abundant attention at Documenta 2017. Embroidery has become trendy among a growing number of young crafters with various backgrounds and agendas (Arnqvist Engström 2014). The problematic relationship between women and the craft, described and analysed by Parker, has changed to a freer one, based on voluntary activities and with other topics and styles than previously displayed. Traditional techniques are used freely, now combining manual crafting also with digital technology. Embroidery traditions provide a bank of techniques, patterns and styles, but are now used creatively via methods similar to sampling. Through the use of scanning, photographing and uploading on the internet and social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, embroidered comics and cartoons have become important art expressions in the public sphere. Thus, embroideries now appear in a contemporary context, created by a generation that has grown up with punk and a do-it-yourself attitude (Greer n.d.).

Pollock’s Third Position on Comics Pollock’s third position refers to the situation in which “feminism encounters the canon as a discursive strategy in the production and reproduction of sexual difference and its complex figurations with gender and related modes of power” (Pollock 1999, pp. 26–27). The third position is no longer an internal matter within the discipline. It implies a shift from Art History into the broader Women’s Movement, which covers several fields of discourse and institutional bases. To create new knowledge, researchers need to turn their attention to new and wider perspectives (Pollock 1999, pp.  26–27). In our research on feminist comics, we work closely together, an art historian and a literary scholar. We jointly formulate research questions and discuss theoretical perspectives and methods from our separate disciplines, and, rather than alternating, we interweave the writing of our articles. We experience this as a productive way of collaborating, and quite suitable since comics are characterized by an intermedial structure, based on words and images, verbal and visual narration. Gender studies and cultural sociological perspectives are examples of further areas of knowledge that we find important to include in our work. Some

  FEMINIST ART HISTORY AS AN APPROACH TO RESEARCH ON COMICS: META… 

175

researchers argue that the establishment of an independent Comics Studies discipline would facilitate research in the field (Strömberg 2016, p. 134). We, however, would rather emphasize the positive aspects of interdisciplinary studies utilizing methods gathered from several disciplines. Cooperation can also be seen as a feminist strategy and a way of challenging the boundaries between the disciplines. In relation to Pollock’s third position, we will discuss two more of our articles. The first is “The Future in Swedish Avant-Garde Comics, 2006–2014”, published in the anthology Visions of the Future in Comics. International Perspectives, edited by Francesco-Alessio Ursini, Adnan Mahmutovic and Frank Bramlett (2017). In this text we analysed the future as a theme in Swedish contemporary comics by arguing that “the Swedish comics artists elaborating on future conditions express existential confusion or/and strong critique against the neoliberal ideology” (Wallin Wictorin and Nordenstam 2017, p. 213). The material for this analysis involved comics by three men and two women artists: Henri Gylander, Fabian Göransson, Joakim Pirinen, Lotta Sjöberg and Liv Strömquist, all well-known and important comics artists in Sweden. As theoretical perspectives we included ideas and concepts formulated by Zygmunt Bauman and Chantal Mouffe. Bauman’s thoughts on how politically governed institutions have given away previously common tasks to politically uncontrollable global markets and withdrawn from functions they previously performed (Bauman 2004) were central to our study, as was his discussion concerning the uncertain feeling of seeking or choosing individual identity in the postmodern condition he called liquid modernity (2007). This is also in line with Pollock’s way of working. In 2007 she emphasized the importance of a transdisciplinary encounter between a sociology of liquid modernity, a sociology of the information society and artistic practice with a consistent and profound social engagement and analysis. This was to be done in order to take up the challenge of thinking with concepts offered by such a cultural sociology to those of us in fields divided from mutual understanding by the current maps of knowledge: sociology, informatics, aesthetics, cultural analysis (Pollock 2007, p. 112). We also found Chantal Mouffe’s theories in On the Political (2005) salient, where she defines the political as “the dimension of antagonism I take to be ‘constitutive of human societies’” (Mouffe 2005, p. 8). Mouffe advocates the potential of critical art, the different ways in which artistic practices can contribute to questioning the dominant hegemony (Mouffe 2007). In several of the feminist comics, we found the idea of discerning and pointing to conflicting interests as distinct, for example, in Liv Strömqvist’s comic about the climate crisis and Lotta Sjöberg’s comic about “individual choice” (Wallin Wictorin and Nordenstam 2017). A common trait among the comics we analysed and interpreted was sharp critique of the dismantling of the welfare system performed by the bourgeois Swedish government between 2006 and 2014. Many of the reforms were seen as threatening to women, men, children and the elderly as well. We analysed how this critique was visualized and narrated by studying formal elements such

176 

M. WALLIN WICTORIN AND A. NORDENSTAM

as line, form, colour, composition, the viewer’s perspective, setting, characters and events, verbal narration, dialogue and image conventions in relation to their context. One object of study was a story by Lotta Sjöberg, published in the comics journal Galago (1 2013, p.  61) about shifting possibilities when “choosing” one’s future life (Fig. 2). On top of the page there is an introduction (translated from Swedish): “Since the solidarity was replaced by individual choices you must make a successful choice already from the start” (our transl. in Wallin Wictorin and Nordenstam 2017, p. 223). Then the story is broken down into two female torsos constituting the “panels”. The setting is two wombs with a baby in each. The babies “speak” about the future in one balloon each, having already chosen their life paths. Their choices are connected to their mothers’ situations and

Fig. 2  © Lotta Sjöberg, “Valfrihet” [Individual choice], Galago 1 2013, p. 61

  FEMINIST ART HISTORY AS AN APPROACH TO RESEARCH ON COMICS: META… 

177

to their own respective genders, class and ethnic origins. The first baby, a male, says “Hey! I thought like this! I choose a dong to get the best possible future salary. 100% Swedish of course, and well-off parents on the sunny side, with documented experience of tax evasion” (our transl. in Wallin Wictorin and Nordenstam 2017, p. 222). Since he is male, white and upper-class (evidenced by the trademark of his mother’s underwear), he will become rich, have a nice job and so on. The second baby says: “How funny! I choose exactly the opposite: a vagina and low salary. Third generation immigrant, Single mother without social security, in a marginalized suburb, well, macaroni!” (our transl. in Wallin Wictorin and Nordenstam 2017, p.  223). Since she is female and of immigrant descent, she will not gain a rich future, like the baby boy. The two babies are intended to be viewed sequentially, and in opposition. The horizontal perspective on eye level gives the reader an impression of being on the same level as the babies and of taking part in the discussion. Sjöberg illustrates here how an intersection of structural factors forecasts the future for individuals. She uses irony as a rhetorical device, but the verbal remark is serious: “the solidarity has been replaced by individual choices” (our transl. in Wallin Wictorin and Nordenstam 2017, p. 223). With Mouffe’s theory on the political in mind, we concluded that Sjöberg displays conflicting alternatives as problems that need to be handled politically (Wallin Wictorin and Nordenstam 2017). Another case is the four-page piece by Henri Gylander published in 2012, “Jag drömmer om en ålderdom…” [“I dream of an old age…”]. The theme of the story is the selling out of elderly homes, public welfare institutions, and the setting is contemporary Sweden. This is an important issue from a feminist perspective, since taking care of elderly people traditionally has been an unequally distributed workload. The comic is designed like an old black-and-­ white photograph album with oval images. This is a framing device that relates to an image convention in which past events in someone’s life are nostalgically recalled. This album, however, tells a story about the future. The protagonist is a man who dreams about his coming old age. The setting is a home for the elderly. The events in the images here have not taken place but are rather visualizations of the man’s fears regarding his future. Verbally, in captions, the story points forward to a person’s declining years with hopes and dreams of good health care and companionship, but the images express anticipated setbacks owing to political conditions, thus creating a strong ironic effect. Gylander is issuing a warning for that which Bauman has described as the selling out of the welfare state with all services contracted out, left for private initiatives, a playground for capricious and unpredictable market forces (Bauman 2004). Another article we published that can be related to Pollock’s third position is “Högerideologi som dansbandsmelodi – politisk satir i svenska feministiska serier”, [“Right wing ideology as popular dance music. Political satire in Swedish feminist comics.”] published in a Swedish anthology about comics, De tecknade seriernas språk [The language of Comics], edited by David Gedin (2017). In this study we analysed how political satire was visually and verbally narrated in Swedish feminist comics from 2006 to 2014. Swedish feminist

178 

M. WALLIN WICTORIN AND A. NORDENSTAM

comics artists used a wide variety of drawing styles, using satire and humour in their reactions to the political implications of the period. The use of humour as a weapon is a common strategy in Swedish feminist journal texts (Nordenstam 2014) and in feminist activism (Rosenberg 2012). As mentioned above, this conforms with results from Streeten’s and Falardeau’s research on feminist comics in English and French speaking parts of the world. When working with the aforementioned article, we became aware of Lotta Sjöberg’s use of embroidery. But at the time we concentrated on other techniques such as the collage used by, among others, Sara Granér and Nanna Johansson, in a way reminiscent of Hannah Höch and Martha Rosler. During this period, satire was extensively employed by these comics artists, especially against bourgeois politicians, including the male prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, of the conservative party (Moderaterna). One example of Granér’s work is a collage with Reinfeldt in a hospital bed, his head realistically photographed in colour, looking up at the nurses around him. Typically for Granér, the nurses are drawn as anthropomorphic yellow teddy bears, here wearing little white nurses’ hats with red crosses. Ironically, Reinfeldt, who frequently argued for the privatization of hospitals, appears rather frightened, bedded down as he is in linens displaying the logo of the county council, responsible for national health care in Sweden. Another trend in the feminist comics of the era was the use of references to popular culture such as TV series and popular music. One frequent referent was the TV-series Sex and the City (1998–2004), with the four characters Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha and their luxury lives on Manhattan. In one image they appear Photoshopped as the four leaders of Sweden’s bourgeois political parties. From left to right, wearing the red and black dresses of the Sex and the City women, they are Annie Lööf, Jan Björklund, Fredrik Reinfeldt and Göran Hägglund. The image signals shallowness, false gaiety and forced celebration. Nanna Johansson used the same four politicians in another of her collages, but as members of a fatuous and fictional popular dance music band with the typically wacky name “Jan-Göranz”, here referring to the politicians as populists. The ironic title “Jan-Göranz”, with the equally ironic subtitle “Högerideologi som dansbandsmelodi” [“Right wing ideology as popular dance music”], appears in the comic album Hur man botar en feminist [How to cure a feminist] (2013), which of course is yet another highly ironic title. Why cure a feminist?

Conclusion As we have shown in this chapter, women artists have been excluded from the canon in the comics field, as well as in the field of fine art, and we have been motivated to search in other printed media than mainstream comics albums and magazines in order to fill in the gaps, and also question the art-historical discourse. Clearly, Nochlin’s question and Pollock’s first position are still relevant, and it was necessary for us to deconstruct, for example, the history of the

  FEMINIST ART HISTORY AS AN APPROACH TO RESEARCH ON COMICS: META… 

179

Swedish underground magazine Puss and its leaders, to discover the extensive work by Karin Frostenson. However, Pollock’s conclusions might not be sufficient regarding comics, since it also seems to be a matter of laughter and humour. As Falardeau suggests, women have not been supposed to laugh or engage in humorous speech or cartooning. Streeten also emphasizes the aspect of humour. And Swedish feminist cartoonists and comics artists and authors in the 1980s found it necessary to make a statement against the patriarchal notion that “women do not have any sense of humour” and met it by assembling texts including comics and cartoons in the Fnitter anthologies. Comics and cartoons are part of popular culture, which does not necessarily include the same expectations on women as the fine art sector, where humour is not a required component, but where there are other obstacles impeding women’s recognition. We have also found it productive to look for comics artists using techniques other than drawing, and materials, other than paper and ink, in order to achieve a richer and more complete understanding of the production of comics, bearing in mind that this phenomenon is apparently increasingly common and trendy among Swedish feminist artists. Hence Pollock’s second position is also relevant. Today contemporary feminist comics artists in Sweden attract attention in the media; their works are exhibited in art galleries and included in comics research. Their inclusion in the contemporary written history of comics indicates their possible entry into the canon. Researchers now have the opportunity to investigate how feminist issues are treated in comics, as we have done in, for example, the article “The Future in Swedish Avant-Garde Comics, 2006–2014” (Wallin Wictorin and Nordenstam 2017). They can also study the use and visualization of satire in feminist comics, as in “Högerideologi som dansbandsmelodi” (2017), or examine other interesting issues in relation to feminist comics. When doing this, Pollock’s third position becomes relevant, since, as she suggests, we need to traverse several fields of discourse and institutional bases. To generate new knowledge, we need to include theory from several disciplines and apply new and wider perspectives.8 We have found it productive to use a multidisciplinary perspective on comics, combining theories and methods used in the social sciences with those applied in art history and literary studies in order to find a deeper and broader understanding of feminist comics in specific periods and the Swedish contexts. The feminist method of working together has been helpful here, where multidisciplinary perspectives have been needed. We still need to utilize basic art-historical methods when describing and analysing various types of comics. Considerations of the formal elements such as line, form, colour, composition and style are important, as well as of such aspects as image conventions and the viewer’s perspective. But in addition, we might well need special terms for describing comics in other techniques such as embroidery, ceramics and digital comics. Furthermore, we also need some kind of contextual method for interpreting the meanings of the images and the stories, perhaps related to iconologically or semiotically inspired methods, while

180 

M. WALLIN WICTORIN AND A. NORDENSTAM

including practices from Literary Studies to handle verbal narration and narratological element, rhetorical style figures, themes and motifs, also in relation to feminism and intersectional perspectives. A feminist movement in Comics Studies would go on searching for excluded feminist comics artists in the history and in the contemporary practice of comics, because there is still much to do all over the world. It is also important to put focus on other artists than white, middle-class comic artists who seems to get most attention, at least in the West. In Sweden, there is a rising number of feminist comics artists with migrant backgrounds, and their voices need to be discerned, analysed and paid attention to. It is also necessary to ask questions about politics and power in the comics market. A dislocation of power is needed in the field of Comics Studies too, and a wider variety of issues that do exist in comics needs to be raised, such as the conditions of the precariat, children and the elderly. A feminist movement in Comics Studies needs to be based on a multidisciplinary approach, where Art History and Visual Studies is one important field among others. Acknowledgement  This chapter is funded by the research project “A Multidisciplinary Study of Feminist Comic Art” (2018–2021), Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies.

Notes 1. For further discussion of the role of Trina Robbins in the field of women’s comics and comix, as artist, editor, and scholar, Cf. Olsza Chapter “Towards Feminist Comics Studies: Feminist Art History and the Study of Women’s Comix in the 1970s in the U.S.” 2. In English: Classon Frangos 2020, Lindberg 2016, Nordenstam and Wallin Wictorin 2017, 2019, 2021a and 2021b. 3. One early example is Ingrid Jalakas who in 1986 published the chapter “Tecknade tjejer – och tecknande” [Drawn girls and drawing] in Boken om serier [The book about comics], eds. Elisabet Haglund and Johan Andreasson. Johanneshov: Hammarström & Åberg. 4. For further discussion of the questioning of the canon by feminist art historians Cf. Olsza chapter “Towards Feminist Comics Studies: Feminist Art History and the Study of Women’s Comix in the 1970s in the U.S.”, and Yu-Kiener chapter “The Lives of the Artists”. 5. In 1979 the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare decided to stop regarding homosexuality as a mental disease (https://www.rfsl.se/om-­oss/ historia/). 6. Other editors were Åke Holmqvist, Carl-Johan De Geer, Karl-Erik Liljeros, Ulf Rahmberg, and Lena Svedberg. 7. It is also interesting to compare with Glenn Adamson’s view on craft, which claims that craft can refer to a process or an activity rather than a discipline. He regards craft as positioned within modern production – and increasingly within today’s post-disciplinary practice. For Adamson, the conventional narrative of

  FEMINIST ART HISTORY AS AN APPROACH TO RESEARCH ON COMICS: META… 

181

craft emerged during the Industrial Revolution and the Arts and Crafts Movement. Adamson, Glenn. 2013. The Invention of Craft, Berg, Oxford. 8. For further discussion of interdisciplinarity and its importance for Comics Studies Cf. Sommerland Chapter “Real Queer Bodies: Visual Weight and Imagined Gravity in Sport Manga”, and Roan Chapter “What Is an Image? Art History, Visual Culture Studies, and Comics Studies”.

References Adamson, Glenn. 2013. The Invention of Craft. Berg: Oxford. Arnerud Mejhammar, Kristina. 2020. Självsyn och världsbild i tecknade serier: visuella livsberättelser av Cecilia Torudd, Ulf Lundkvist, Gunna Grähs och Joakim Pirinen. Diss. Summary in English. Strängnäs: Sanatorium förlag. Arnqvist Engström, Frida. 2014. Gerillaslöjd: garngraffiti, DIY och den handgjorda revolutionen. Stockholm: Hemslöjden. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2004. Wasted lives. Modernity and its Outcasts. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2007. Liquid Times. Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press. Classon Frangos, Mike. 2020. Liv Strömquist’s Fruit of Knowledge and the Gender of Comics. European Comic Art. 13:1, pp.  45–69. https://doi.org/10.3167/ eca.2020.130104. Dahllöf, Olle. 2019. Våra serietecknerskor. Uppsala: SerieZonen. Eriksson, Yvonne. 2003. Den visualiserade kvinnligheten ur ett feministiskt perspektiv. Ett 1970-talsprojekt. In Från modernism till samtidskonst, eds. Ingar Brinck, Yvonne Eriksson, and Anette Göthlund, pp. 48–77. Lund: Signum. Ernst, Nina. 2017. Att teckna sitt jag: grafiska självbiografier i Sverige. Diss. Summary in English. Malmö: Apart förlag. Falardeau, Mira. 2020. A History of Women Cartoonists. Toronto: Mosaic Press. Gerdin, Valdemar. 2020. Karin Frostenson, Puss och svensk undergroundkultur. In Karin Frostenson: nutid, dåtid, drömtid: 12 oktober 2019 – 26 januari 2020, Thielska galleriet, ed. Patrik Steorn, pp. 16–25. Stockholm: Thielska galleriet. Greer, Betsy. ed. 2014. Craftivism: The Art of Craft and Activism. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. Greer, Betsy. (n.d.) craftivism. craft + activism = craftivism. “The Craftivism Manifesto”, http://craftivism.com/manifesto/. Accessed 20 June 2020, and 19 Nov 2020. Jalakas, Ingrid. 1986. Tecknade tjejer – och tecknande. In Boken om serier, eds. Elisabet Haglund and Johan Andreasson. Johanneshov: Hammarström & Åberg. Johannesson, Lena. ed. 2007. Konst och visuell kultur i Sverige 1810–2000. Stockholm: Signum. Lindberg, Anna Lena. 1995. Inledning. In Konst, kön och blick. Feministiska bildanalyser från renässans till postmodernism, ed. Anna Lena Lindberg, pp. 9–22. Stockholm: Norstedts. Lindberg, Ylva. 2016. The Power of Laughter to Change the World. Swedish Female Cartoonists Raise their Voices. SJoCA Scandinavian Journal of Comic Art. 2:2, pp. 3–31. Magnusson, Helena. 2005. Berättande bilder: svenska tecknade serier för barn, Diss. Summary in English. Stockholm: Stockholms universitet. Göteborg: Makadam.

182 

M. WALLIN WICTORIN AND A. NORDENSTAM

Markus, Sandra. 2019. The Eye of the Needle: Craftivism as an Emerging Mode of Civic Engagement and Cultural Participation, Diss. Columbia University, Published by ProQuest LLC. https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/d8-­ t120-­na44. Accessed 20 June 2020, and 19 Nov 2020. Merriam Webster (n.d.-a). Craft. www.merriam-­webster.com/dictionary/craft. Accessed 20 June 2020, and 19 Nov 2020. Merriam Webster (n.d.-b). Activism. www.merriam-­webster.com/dictionary/activism. Accessed 20 June 2020, and 19 Nov 2020. Mouffe, Chantal. 2005. On the Political, London: Routledge. Mouffe, Chantal. 2007. Art as an Agonistic Intervention in Public Space. Open! Platform for Art, Culture & the Public Domain. January 1 2007. https://onlineopen.org/art-­and-­democracy. Accessed 21 June 2021. Nilsson, Isabella. 2005. Serier  – komik, vardagsrealism och dödligt allvar. In Konstfeminism: strategier och effekter i Sverige från 1970-talet till idag. ed. Anna Nyström, pp. 198–207. Stockholm: Atlas. Nochlin, Linda. 1994 [1971]. Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? In Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays, ed. Linda Nochlin, pp. 145–178. London: Thames and Hudson. Nordenstam, Anna. ed. 2014. Nya röster. Svenska kvinnotidskrifter under 150 år, Möklinta: Gidlund. Nordenstam, Anna and Wallin Wictorin, Margareta. 2019. Women’s Liberation. Swedish Feminist Comics and Cartoons from the 1970s and 1980s. European Comic Art. 12:2, pp. 77–105. https://doi.org/10.3167/eca.2019.120205. Nordenstam, Anna and Wallin Wictorin, Margareta. 2021a. Comics Craftivism. Embroidery in Contemporary Swedish Comics and Cartoons, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. https://doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2020.1870152. Nordenstam, Anna and Wallin Wictorin, Margareta. 2021b. Swedish Feminist Comics and Cartoons at the Turn of the Millennium: Joanna Rubin Dranger and Åsa Grennvall (Schagerström). In Comic Art and Feminism in the Baltic Sea Region. Transnational Perspectives, eds. Kristy Beers Fägersten, Anna Nordenstam, Leena Romu, and Margareta Wallin Wictorin, pp.  17–39. London and New  York: Routledge. Nordenstam, Anna and Wallin Wictorin, Margareta. 2017. ‘Högerideologi som dansbandsmelodi’. Politisk satir i svenska feministiska serier. In De tecknade seriernas språk: uttryck och form, ed. David Gedin, pp.  166–185. Stockholm: Gedin & Balzamo förlag. Parker, Rozsika. 2019 [1984]. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts. Parker, Rozsika and Pollock, Griselda. 1981. Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology. New York: Pantheon Books. Pollock, Griselda. 1999. Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s histories. London: Routledge. Pollock, Griselda. 2007. Liquid Modernity and Cultural Analysis. An Introduction to a Transdisciplinary Encounter. Theory, Culture & Society. 24:1, pp. 111–116. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0263276407071578. Rauchenbacher, Marina and Serles, Katharina. 2021. A Brief History of Girlsplaining? Reading Klengel, Patu and Schrupp with Strömquist. Or: Reflecting Visualities of Gender and Feminism in German-language comics. In Comic Art and Feminism in the Baltic Sea Region. Transnational Perspectives, eds. Kristy Beers Fägersten, Anna

  FEMINIST ART HISTORY AS AN APPROACH TO RESEARCH ON COMICS: META… 

183

Nordenstam, Leena Romu, and Margareta Wallin Wictorin, pp. 61–82. London and New York: Routledge. Reyns-Chikuma, C(h)ris, 2021. Genre, Gender, Sexual, Textual and Visual, and Real Representations in Bande Dessinée. In The Routledge Companion to Gender and Sexuality in Comic Book Studies, ed. Frederick Luis Aldama, pp. 196–212. London and New York: Routledge. RFSL. 2015. Om oss, Historia. https://www.rfsl.se/om-­oss/historia/. Accessed 24 November 2020. Robbins, Trina and Yronwode, Catherine. 1985. Women and the Comics, Bellingham WA: Eclipse. Rosenberg, Tiina. 2012. Ilska, hopp och solidaritet: med feministisk scenkonst in i framtiden. Stockholm: Atlas. Streeten, Nicola. 2020. UK Feminist Cartoons and Comics. A Critical Survey. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Strolz, Martina. 2020. Våra serietecknerskor – samtal med Olle Dahllöf. Bild & Bubbla. 223:2, pp. 64–67. Strömberg, Fredrik. 2016. Comics studies in the Nordic Countries – Field or Discipline? Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. 2, pp. 134–155. Strömberg, Fredrik. 2020. Alessandra Sternfeld  – agent med rätt att sälja. Bild & Bubbla. 223:2, pp. 60– 63. Svenska serieakademin. (n.d.) https://seriewikin.serieframjandet.se/index.php/ Svenska_ Serieakademin. Accessed 1 February 2021. Waldén, Louise. 1988. Den tidskrävande onyttighetens betydelse, Häften för kritiska studier. 21:2, pp. 24–34. Wallin Wictorin, Margareta and Nordenstam, Anna. 2017. The Future in Swedish Avant-Garde Comics, 2006–2014. In Visions of the Future in Comics. International Perspectives, eds. Francesco-Alessio Ursini, Adnan Mahmutović, and Frank Bramlett, pp. 211–228. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers.

Towards Feminist Comics Studies: Feminist Art History and the Study of Women’s Comix in the 1970s in the United States Małgorzata Olsza

Abstract  This chapter examines the applicability of feminist art criticism for Comics Studies. This question is discussed in the historical timeframe of the 1970s with a focus on women’s underground comix in the United States, which developed in response to second-wave feminism (e.g. It Ain’t Me Babe (1970), Wimmen’s Comix #1 (1972) and Tits & Clits #1 (1972)). The methodological framework comprises both historical and contemporary art criticism written from and in dialogue with the theoretical perspective of second-wave feminism. Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock, Rozsika Parker and Lucy Lippard first addressed such issues as the objectification of women in art, the existence of the essentially male canon, systematic discrimination against women in art institutions and even the implication that there exist distinct male/female techniques, genres and styles. Feminist art criticism in the context of women’s comix in the United States in the 1970s is discussed in two perspectives: the comics canon and the canon of feminist “high” art. Both perspectives allow comics and art historians and scholars to discuss systematic discrimination in the comics and comix world and locate women’s comix in the history of feminist art.

M. Olsza (*) Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Gray, I. Horton (eds.), Seeing Comics through Art History, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8_10

185

186 

M. OLSZA

Keywords  Comics Studies • Feminist criticism • Women’s comix • Women’s comics • Feminist art • Canon In the present chapter, I examine the applicability of feminist art criticism for Comics Studies. Specifically, I discuss this question in the historical timeframe of the 1970s, focusing on women’s comix in the United States, which developed in response to second-wave feminism, including titles such as It Ain’t Me Babe (Robbins et al. 1970), Wimmen’s Comix #1 (Moodian et al. 1972) and Tits & Clits #1 (Chevli and Sutton 1972). The methodological framework comprises art-historical writing and criticism (Nochlin 1973 [1971]; Lippard 1976; Pollock and Parker 1981; Nochlin 1988; Pollock 1988; Pollock 1999) written from and in dialogue with the perspective of second-wave feminism. Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock, Rozsika Parker and Lucy Lippard first addressed such issues as the objectification of women in art, the existence of male canons, systematic discrimination against women in art institutions and even the implication that there exist male/female techniques, genres and styles. The responses of feminist art historians to the “canon question” varied— understandably so, considering that feminism/s is/are not a methodology but a strategic perspective (see Horne and Tobine 2017, pp. 32–4)—ranging across the need for the canon to be critically re-examined, extended, reformulated and “re-desired.”1 I will read feminist art histories in the context of women’s comix in the United States in the 1970s, focusing on two main issues: the question of the comics canon and the canon of feminist “high” art. Both approaches allow comics scholars and art historians to discuss systematic discrimination in the comics and comix world and further locate women’s comix in the history of feminist art, especially as regards shared artistic practices and the “politics of representation” employed in feminist comix and feminist “high” art, since “[a]t its most provocative and constructive, feminism questions all the precepts of art” (Lippard 1980, p. 362). The organization of the chapter follows the line of argument presented above. Feminist art criticism is discussed first. It provides a critical and methodological framework for the discussion of the canon in the two contexts outlined. Ultimately, I aim to demonstrate that feminist art criticism can inform the study of comics and, in a critical move “from practical strategies to strategic practices” (Pollock and Parker 1981, p. 3), help re-examine the history of comics, comix and feminist art in the United States.

Challenging the Canon: Feminist Art History in the 1970s While the very question of the canon may seem outdated in twenty-first-­ century Art History, it has nevertheless defined, framed and conditioned the functioning of the art world for centuries, beginning in the sixteenth century,

  TOWARDS FEMINIST COMICS STUDIES: FEMINIST ART HISTORY… 

187

when the “father” of the modern Art History Giorgio Vasari “distinguish[ed] the better from the good, and the best from the better” (2007, p. 58) in Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects.2 “Old masters” and “great artists,” as concepts, were legitimized and promoted by the canon, as were the notions of beauty, taste and aesthetic quality. It was in the 1970s, to somewhat abruptly move forward in time and space, that the supposedly ahistorical, aesthetic and thus objective concept of the canon was questioned by New Art History (Harris 2001, pp. 39–62), and feminist Art History in particular. In addition to new periodicals, including The Feminist Art Journal (1972–1977) and HERESIES: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics (1977–1983), Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay “Why have there been no great women artists?” and Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock’s 1981 book Old Mistresses: Women, art and ideology chronologically and symbolically mark the beginning and the end of the 1970s as the decade of revisionist feminist art histories. The question asked by Nochlin in the title of her now classic essay challenged the view and the construction of the canon as “natural” and “professional.” Nochlin openly stated that “the white Western male viewpoint, unconsciously accepted as the viewpoint of the art historian, is proving to be inadequate. (…) [T]he current uncritical acceptance of ‘what is’ as ‘natural’ may be intellectually fatal” (1973 [1971], p. 1). Apart from the very concept of the canon, Nochlin also challenges the constructs associated with (and supported by) this notion, including “greatness” and “genius.” Eventually, Nochlin points to the greatest misconception associated with art and its creation, namely, that [t]he making of art involves a self-consistent language of form, more or less dependent upon, or free from, given temporally-defined conventions, schemata, or systems of notation, which have to be learned or worked out, either through study, apprenticeship, or a long period of individual experimentation. (…) The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education (…). (1973 [1971], pp. 5–6)

Women had been systematically excluded from the art education system and, at best, could only be active in “the ‘minor’ and less highly regarded fields of portraiture, genre, landscape, or still life” (Nochlin 1973 [1971], p.  25). The question of the canon was in fact the question of institutions. One of the goals of feminist art criticism in the 1970s was to expose and dismantle the systematic processes of exclusion to which female artists had been subjected (see Schapiro 1972). While she does not state it directly, and in fact does not use the category of the canon in her text, Nochlin nevertheless concludes that the solution is not to ignore the canon and the categories of “greatness” and “genius,” but to reform the existing institutions (and by extension the language of these institutions) (1973 [1971], p. 37). Nochlin expressed a similar view in Women, Art and Power (1988). She argued that the systematic

188 

M. OLSZA

discrimination against women in the art world was reflected in the canon of Western art, but she did not “conceive of a feminist art history as a positive approach to the field, a way of simply adding a token list of women painters and sculptors to the canon” (Nochlin 1988, p. xii). The canon should not be simply expanded. The “institution” of the canon (including art education system, the language of criticism and the language of art histories) should be reformed. In 1976, in a collection of essays entitled From the Center, the art critic, activist and curator Lucy Lippard also focused on the institutional problems, which oftentimes prevent women from not only achieving “greatness” but also pursuing a career in the arts in general. “The worst sources, not only of discrimination, but of the tragic feelings of inferiority so common among women artists,” Lippard writes, “are the art schools and college art departments (especially at women’s colleges), most of which have few or no female faculty” (1976, p. 33). As if summarizing and concluding the debate that had taken place in feminist art histories of the 1970s, Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker subjected Art History as a discipline to critique in Old Mistresses: Women, art, and ideology (1981). Like Nochlin, they distanced themselves from the essentialist understanding of women’s art and instead investigate the institutional problem: We are not concerned to prove that women have been great artists or to provide yet another indictment of art history’s neglect of women artists. Instead, we want to know how, and more significantly, why women’s art has been misrepresented and what this treatment of women in art reveals about the ideological basis of the writing and teaching of art history. (Pollock and Parker 1981, p. xvii)

Pollock and Parker demonstrate how dominant ideologies had consistently undermined the role played by women in the art world and the reception of their works, including the concepts of “femininity,” “stylistic or formal innovation [as] the exclusive standard of evaluation in art” and the distinction between “arts” and “crafts” (Pollock and Parker 1981, pp. 6–23). As a result of institutional and patriarchal obstacles and misreadings, the notion of “great (innovative) art” is associated with masculinity, while women’s art is relegated to the sphere of domestic crafts or imitative (i.e. unoriginal) art. Pollock and Parker conclude that while “[w]omen’s practice in art has never been absolutely forbidden, discouraged or refused,” it was nevertheless reduced to “the means by which masculinity gains and sustains its supremacy in the important sphere of cultural production” (1981, p. 170). Constructed and safeguarded by dominant patriarchal ideologies, the canon was exclusive by definition. Acting in dialogue with mainstream Art History and its revisions, feminist art histories in the 1970s sought to not only secure a place for women but, more importantly, expose the mechanisms of discrimination. Although this discussion was especially prominent in the 1970s, Pollock further commented on the issues at hand in her later writings. In “Women, Art, and Ideology: Questions for Feminist Art Historians” (1983), Pollock

  TOWARDS FEMINIST COMICS STUDIES: FEMINIST ART HISTORY… 

189

discusses the role of institutions in Art History, emphasizing that the discipline “omits and marginalizes” women, promoting the “exclusively male” concept of the genius artist (1983, p. 40). She repeatedly warns against “unthreatening and additive feminism” which incorporates some women into the canon, thus allowing it to function without major transformations in its very structure. “A central task for feminist art historians is, therefore,” Pollock argues, “to critique art history itself (…) as an institutionalized ideological practice which contributes to the reproduction of the social system by its offered images and interpretations of the world” (1983, p. 40). In Vision and Difference, Pollock continues to question the “masculine paradigm” inherent to the concept of the canon and the “patriarchal discourses of art history” (1988, p. 137) and summarizes her position in Differencing the Canon, where she writes about the canon as a structure of “exclusion,” “subordination,” “domination” and “Western masculinity,” which demands “deconstructive” and productive “re-­ reading” (1999, pp. 23–38). The discussion of the feminist Art History in the 1970s and its both critical and productive approach to the notion of the canon is meant to act as a starting point for a discussion of women’s comix in the 1970s. Naturally, the goal of such a pairing is not only to apply second-wave feminist art criticism to a body of primary sources. While I will first discuss the relations between second-wave feminism in the United States and comics, paying particular attention to the place of women comix artists in the canon of comics and comix in the 1970s, ultimately, I want to re-read the history of art and, in keeping with what Nochlin, Lippard, Pollock and Parker encouraged feminist art historians to do, ask whether it is possible to locate women’s comix in feminist Art History of the 1970s. While comics and comix held low cultural value in the 1970s and their position not just in Art History but also in feminist art histories was marginal, or non-existent, they were nevertheless women’s art—just like embroidery, sewing or other “low” and “minor” art forms which feminist Art History reclaimed (see Lippard 1980; Pollock and Parker 1981; Parker 1984; Nochlin 1988; Pollock 1999). As such, I read women’s comix in the 1970s in terms of two complementary processes of “breaking out” and “breaking in(to)” different canons.

“Breaking out”: The Comics and Comix Canon and Women’s Comix in the 1970s The 1970s were the time of the unprecedented development of women’s comix in the United States and It Ain’t Me Babe (1970), All Girl Thrills (1971), Wimmen’s Comix (1972–92), Tits & Clits Comix (1972–87), Come Out Comix (1973), Abortion Eve (1973), Dynamite Damsels (1976), Wet Satin #1 (1976), Twisted Sisters (1976–94), Dyke Shorts (1978) and Mama! Dramas! (1978), to name just a few, are all complex products of the era. In this section, I discuss women’s comix in a (new) art-historical perspective. The notion of

190 

M. OLSZA

the canon, and its critique in feminist art histories, is the starting point for my reflection on systematic discrimination against women in the comics and comix world. To further problematize these questions, I draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory (1996), since the sociological approach, and the sociological study of institutions and academic Art History, further informs feminist Art History as a “revisionist” practice.3 Indeed, I propose to see women’s comix as a player, or an actor, in the power field of comics production in the 1970s in the United States. The other two key actors are the mainstream comics scene and men’s underground comix scene. I discuss them briefly to contextualize the development of women’s comix in the 1970s and then analyse selected comix. The first actor in the power field of comics and comix in the 1970s was the mainstream comics scene. While the focus of this chapter is on women’s comix, any avant-garde or alternative scene is by definition a “reaction” to and an “escape” from dominant trends (Poggioli 1981, p. 64), which have not only sanctioned but also monopolized the relations in the field. While, to paraphrase Nochlin, the question “Why have there been no great women comics artists?” would be inaccurate (see Robbins 1993, 2001, 2013), the institutional barriers described by feminist art historians also applied to comics production. The male-oriented, at best, and openly sexist, at worst, nature of mainstream comics has been criticized by many comics historians and critics (see Robbins 1999; Wolk 2007; Chute 2010; Sabin 1996). To paraphrase Pollock, “like woman in a phallocentric culture, feminism is already posited as the difference, that is, as something other, and outside” the world of comics (1999, p. 8), and women artists have often functioned on the margins of the mainstream comics market as inkers and colourists (Robbins 2013, p. 110). As Wolk observes, even as late as in 1996, the “Masters of American Comics” exhibit featured only men (2007, p. 71), and the cult of Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, to name just a few mainstream artists, may be read as the comics equivalent of the celebration of “male genius” in Art History. Respectively, in terms of content, mainstream comics perpetuated gender stereotypes (Robbins 1999, pp. 47–78) and sexualized superheroines (see Grunzke 2019, pp. 23–44). It was only in the 1970s, concurrently with the rise of second-wave feminism, that mainstream superheroines became more independent and popular (see Robbins 1996; Robinson 2004; Grunzke 2019, pp. 45–64; Hanley 2018, pp. 221–50).4 The second actor in the power field of comics and comix in the 1970s was the underground comix scene, which developed concurrently with the counterculture and the civil rights movement in the United States (Hatfield 2009, p. 18), corresponding to Bourdieu’s model of challenging “the internal hierarchy” in the “field of power” (1996, p. 252). Initially, this scene was animated mostly by men. Gilbert Shelton, Jack Jackson and Frank Stack published first underground comics in 1963 (Robbins 1999, p. 83). In 1968, Robert Crumb published the first comix in his successful Zap series (Gabilliet 2010, p. 65) and other male artists, including Denis Kitchen, Art Spiegelman and Justin Green, followed. Men’s comix are suspended between liberating experimentation and misogyny, as if echoing the debate surrounding the interpretation of Philip

  TOWARDS FEMINIST COMICS STUDIES: FEMINIST ART HISTORY… 

191

Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). And even if “the underground was no more or less ‘sexist’ than the counter-culture as a whole” (Sabin 2013, p. 224), comics like Robert Crumb’s Fritz the Cat (1965–72), Snatch (1968–9) and Big Ass Comics (1969–71) raise the question of pornography, objectification and sexual violence against women.5 This aspect of the underground comix movement has been discussed from different perspectives (see Shannon 2012; Calonne 2021; Worden 2021b). Worden (2021b, p. 68), for one, explains that “Zap’s indulgence of male sexual violence (…) projects the vision of the comics reader as a sexually dissatisfied, emotionally immature, and socially awkward white heterosexual male, and comics are akin, if not equal, to pornography,” but then again the context for the comix is “white heterosexual male desire and sociality” and “that context itself has some explanatory power.” Crumb further argues that the medium tamed the imagery, insofar as drawing, even realistic, provides distance (Groth 2014). This notwithstanding, as Pollock observes in her discussion of sexuality and art, “[m]asculine heterosexuality has become a constitutive trope in the modernist myth of masculine, phallic mastery” (1999, p. 41), and the same holds true for men’s comix. Respectively, from the point of view of representation per se, such images are exploitive, and, understandably, sparked a process of reclaiming the image of the female body, and female desire, in women’s comix (as explained below), which echoed the feminist sex wars,6 allowing Art History, and Visual Studies in general, to move “away from the model of critique towards other modes of analytic practice” (Cartwright 2017, p. 319). The historiography of American comix further strengthens the power relations in the comics and comix field in the 1970s and the position of the male canon. It is predominantly the history of men (and, consequently, “male genius” and the history of comix as a male medium) (see Estren 1993; Rosenkranz 2002; Skinn 2004; Kitchen and Danky 2009). While women are included in the canon, it is often on the “unthreatening and additive” basis, criticized by Pollock (1983, p. 207). Similarly to the canon constructed in Art History, the comix canon is governed by “the Western masculine subject, its mythic supports and psychic needs. The Story of Art is an illustrated Story of Man,” as Pollock observes, and “it needs constantly to invoke a femininity as the negated other that alone allows the unexplained synonymity of man and artist” (Pollock 1999, p. 24). The process of not so much “adding to” but critiquing the discipline itself postulated by Nochlin, Lippard, Pollock and Parker plays an important role in understanding the situation of women comix artists. This process was initiated by the artist who was not erased from the histories of the underground comix scene written by men—Trina Robbins. In her publications on the history of women’s comics and comix, A Century of Women Cartoonists (1993), The Great Women Cartoonists (2001) and Pretty in Ink: North American Women Cartoonists 1896–2013 (2013), to name just a few, Robbins continuously questioned “exclusion,” “subordination,” “domination” and “Western masculinity” (Pollock 1999, pp. 23–38) inscribed in the comics and comix canon. While

192 

M. OLSZA

it may seem obvious today, it was Robbins who established a close connection between women’s comix in the 1970s and the rise of second-wave feminism in herstories of comics, which constituted a foundation for comics scholars in later years (see Sabin 1996, pp.  104–5; Hatfield 2009, p.  20; Chute 2010, pp. 20–4). Alongside Joyce Sutton, Lyn Chevli, Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Diane Noomin, she is one of the most important actors in the field of women’s comics and comix. As a modern Vasari and Pollock in one person, she writes histories of comics and comix, re-reading and reformulating the male canon. Apart from the institutional barriers in the mainstream comics world (i.e. limited opportunities for women), Robbins (1999, p. 85) also openly objected to the sexism and misogyny of the male-dominated underground scene, both in terms of systemic exclusion (even though this term seems incongruous in the greater context of the comix scene which was a reaction the exclusion from the mainstream comics scene) and the portrayal of women. The notion of exclusion (which I shall read in terms of the canon and male genius) was the main theme of the first comix created solely by women, It Ain’t Me Babe, in 1970. It Ain’t Me Babe was created by “a women’s collective,” including Trina Robbins, Lisa Lyons, Carole (last name unknown), Michele Brand, Barbara “Willy” Mendes, Meredith Kurtzman and Nancy Kalish, and “conceived by the Women’s Liberation Basement Press” (Robbins et al. 1970). While underground comix and presses run by men also functioned as cooperatives (e.g. Rip Off Press), the collective editorship of It Ain’t Me Babe, and other women’s comix, may be interpreted in the feminist context, insofar as “probably the most important contribution of the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s was that it gave women a sense of their collective power” (Epstein 2002, p. 118). Lee Marrs observes (as quoted in Robbins 2013, p. 125) that “[t]here was no way a beginning artist could break in, no place for it. All the Underground comics consisted of friends printing friends. They were all buddies; they didn’t even let us in,” emphasizing that collective authorship was not gender-inclusive (still, women artists received support from Rob Turner’s Last Gasp). Lippard observes that instead of formal innovations, feminist art’s greatest contribution are “inclusive structures and social collages,” and specifically, “cooperative/ collaborative/ collective or anonymous art making,” in keeping with “the favourite feminist metaphor: the web, or network, or quilt as an image of connectiveness, inclusiveness and integration” (1980, pp.  364–5). Respectively, Twisted Sisters (1976–94) was created by Kominsky-Crumb and Noomin, with numerous contributing women artists (even though Noomin asserted “We’re not ‘a feminist art collective’” (1995, p. 6, see also Noomin 2004), distancing herself from what she and Kominsky-Crumb perceived as a limiting ideological, and not artistic, position). Lesbian artists Mary Wings and Roberta Gregory created, respectively, Come Out Comix (1973) and Dyke Shorts (1978), and Dynamite Damsels (1976), as individual projects.7 It is important to acknowledge the complexity of the scene, considering the subsequent critique of the 1970s feminist Art History, which failed to address the questions of sexuality and race (see Pollock 1988, pp. 155–99, and Wallace 2004).

  TOWARDS FEMINIST COMICS STUDIES: FEMINIST ART HISTORY… 

193

The feminist collective complicates and challenges the art-historical notions of author, authorship and the myth of the (male) lone genius (see Duncan 1975), as constructs “produced” in “an elaborate work of framing” (Bal and Bryson 2009, p.  252). Collective authorship exposes the fact that “whole genres” are “excluded from ‘authorship’ (…), and the decisions regarding such genres are historically variable to a degree. In our own time, graphic art occupies a mysteriously fluctuating zone between authorship (many graphics in magazines bear signatures) and anonymity (many others do not)” (Bal and Bryson 2009, p. 253). This holds true for many women’s comix (see Galvan 2017). The importance of the “collective” is emphasized on the now iconic cover of It Ain’t Me Babe, which shows the rebellion of numerous female comics characters. The cover functions as both the quintessence of second-wave feminism (with its emphasis on feminist rebellion) and its shortcomings (with its portrayal of only white characters drawn by white artists). The question of women’s collective power, announced on the cover, is developed in the story “Breaking Out” (Fig. 1): female comics characters (from commercially successful franchises) rebel against misogyny, sexism and discrimination. Their “feminist interventions (…) disrupt canonicity and tradition by representing the past not as a flow or development, but as conflict, politics, struggles (…)” (Pollock 1996, p. 12). In the final panel, they create their own “club” where “no boys are allowed” (Robbins et  al. 1970). The characters (whose number corresponds to the number of comix creators who contributed to the first issue of It Ain’t Me Babe) literally break out of the male canon. The form of the drawing is further worthy of critical attention. Though the black and white drawings appear austere, upon closer examination it is revealed

Fig. 1  Carole (artwork) and the It Ain’t Me Babe Collective, the two first pages of “Breaking Out” in It Ain’t Me Babe, 1970, Last Gasp Ecofunnies

194 

M. OLSZA

that the entire comix is, paradoxically, overwhelmed by and devoid of idiosyncratic style. All characters are drawn in their original “mainstream” styles. The simplicity of drawing characteristic for the syndicated edition of Little Lulu (drawn by Irving Tripp and John Stanley, whose style differed greatly from the original cartoon style of Marjorie Henderson Buell) is discernible in panels one, two and three (counting from top to bottom and from left to right), while Juliet Jones (panels four and five) is drawn in a more elaborate style of the 1950s. The same applies to Betty and Veronica. Respectively, Supergirl in “Breaking Out” is the exact copy of the Supergirl who was first introduced to readers in 1959 in Action Comics #252. While so many commercial styles of drawing are employed in a single story, a unique style characteristic of a given artist (clearly visible in other stories anthologized in It Ain’t Me Babe) is indiscernible. Unity, and thus a sense of “collective” voice, is nevertheless achieved thanks to the use of tone and inking (officially, the story is credited to the “It Ain’t Me Babe Basement Collective” and the artwork is credited to “Carole [last name unknown]).” Such an approach to drawing style raises a number of interpretive questions. While drawings in comics and comix are often characterized by “typification (…) the abbreviation of a character to several pertinent lines” (Groensteen 2007, p.  162), the drawing style is also seen as an idiosyncratic marker or “index” of the artist, especially in the case of alternative creators (Crumb, for example, “self-consciously invokes and describes his linework” (Worden 2021a, p.  13)). “The aesthetics of drawing style produce stirring effects,” Hannah Miodrag observes (2013, p. 211), “flavoring the experience of reading.” The question of individual style is even more important in Art History, where it is almost inextricably associated with creativity, ingenuity and reputation. David Summers (2009, p. 145) observes that “the matter of style, however, is not so simple, and the very fact that deep values of selfhood and authenticity have been attached to it should suggest that it may also be valued differently (…).” The decision to refrain from using an idiosyncratic drawing style in “Breaking Out” may be read as refraining from speaking in one’s own original voice, which could be considered a tribute to women artists who had been for so long deprived of it (and thus of creative control), working only in colouring and inking. As a feminist critique of authorship, it enhances the collective ethos of publication. Respectively, the decision to copy the commercial drawing styles so carefully may also be read in terms of “critical encoding,” which “is to force a dislocation with old forms in order to make explicit both old and new meanings” (Jefferies 1995, p. 166). The dominant and oppressive mainstream style is “critically encoded” in the comix, for example, when Little Lulu’s visual simplicity and innocence clash with the character’s uncompromising language. The use of screentone also raises questions of art/mechanical reproduction, to draw on Walter Benjamin, and thus the question of comix as a work of art, on which I will comment in the next section. The question of the (male) canon was also discussed directly in one-page comix, “So, ya wanna be an artist” by Lee Marrs published in Wimmen’s Comix

Fig. 2  Lee Marrs, “So, ya wanna be an artist” in Wimmen’s Comix #2, 1973, Last Gasp Ecofunnies

#2 (1973a) (Fig. 2) and “The woman who couldn’t” by Trina Robbins published in Trina’s Women (1976), much in keeping with the principles presented by Nochlin in “Why have there been no great women artists?” in 1971. Marrs

196 

M. OLSZA

presents the obstacles that the contemporary female artist faces, urging aspiring cartoonists to “be prepared for usual situations,” such as attacks of sexual predators, who lure them into meetings but are not interested in their art, and “be open to unusual situations,” such as meeting men who truly admire their art. Realistically assessing the comics and comix market, she observes that women artists tend to be employed in non-creative positions, such as “typist” or “receptionist.” Marrs also breaks the historic taboo, on which Nochlin comments in her essay, on women drawing the male nude and ends the strip in the bottom right corner with her self-portrait as an artist, sitting at a desk, with writing utensils on the side, and her hands covered in ink, asserting her creative role. Respectively, Robbins presents in her comic the history of the great “mistress” Suzanne Valadon, observing that as a woman, mother and breadwinner she could not have focused on her art and thus failed to achieve the status of men artists (Degas, Renoir, Utrillo). Robbins ends the story with a personal comment: “Suzanne Valadon died in 1938, the year I was born. I sometimes feel that in my body she has been given another chance, and this time we won’t blow it!” (1976). Ultimately, in the power field of comics and comix, women’s comix challenge and “break out” of the male canon, both mainstream and alternative, and question the notions of “male genius.” This has been confirmed by a simultaneous reading of texts by Nochlin, Pollock, Parker and Lippard and selected women’s comix. Respectively, since feminism signifies a set of positions, not an essence; a critical practice not a doxa; a dynamic self-critical response and intervention not a platform. It is the precarious product of a paradox. Seeming to speak in the name of women, feminist analysis perpetually deconstructs the very terms around which it is politically organized. (Pollock 1996, p. 5)

In the next section I shall focus on the question of (challenging) the canon in a different feminist perspective, namely, in the context of feminist “high” art, asking questions about the status of women’s comix.

“Breaking in?” The Canon of Feminist Art and Women’s Comix in the 1970s While we may speak of feminist art as a distinctive form and practice, it is nevertheless as dynamic and complex as feminisms. Neither “an essence” nor a “doxa” (Pollock 1996, p.  5), feminist art is created and studied in dialogue with other disciplines. The focus on the 1970s, however, allows us to identify themes, concerns and critical positions that were shared by feminist artists. Even within a single decade, these varied, from the utopian (and essentialist) visions of womanhood to a more critical investigation of popular images of the woman’s body, the female nude, the male gaze and representation in general

  TOWARDS FEMINIST COMICS STUDIES: FEMINIST ART HISTORY… 

197

(see Berger 1972; Mulvey 1975; Barry and Flitterman-Lewis 1980). And while women comics and comix artists may be found neither in Edelson’s Some Living American Women Artists (1972) nor in Judy Chicago’s Dinner party (1974–9), in this section I would like to discuss women’s comix in the 1970s in the power field of feminist “high” art, demonstrating that the shift from the idealistic representation of the female body to its critique and reformulation is also observable in women’s comix. Reading women’s comix in dialogue with the 1970s feminist art raises the question of “breaking in(to)” the canon of feminist art and art histories, which, we might speculate, was a concern for some women comix artists. Robbins acknowledged the connection she shared with Valadon, Kominsky-Crumb praised Art Spiegelman for elevating comix “to another level of (…) high art (…) and [taking] it out of the comics ghetto” (after Chute 2014, p. 7), and, as I explain below, feminist comix and art engaged in similar critical practices (and at times fell victim to the same essentialist presumptions). It appears, however, that the revisionist feminist art criticism in the 1970s did not go as far as to acknowledge women’s comix or, at best, to paraphrase Pollock (1999, p. 6), comix functioned as a “supplement” to the feminist canon of “high” art.” And while I wish to emphasize the importance of the critical revaluation of the canon of feminist art in general, I nevertheless do not want to reproduce binary divisions, of which “low”/“high” art is a part, and which have already been dismissed in feminist Art History by Pollock and other critics. Instead, following in the footsteps of Pollock, I propose to discuss feminist comix and art through “feminist desire” for “knowledge of the other” (1999, p. 306), focusing on three main approaches to the representation of the female body observable in feminist art in the 1970s. The first approach was, as Helen McDonald (2001, p. 2) observes, a “feminist ideal” linked to “images of the archaic goddess whose maternal body was tied spiritually and essentially to Nature and the Earth” and “the goddess archetype” in general (see the special issue of HERESIES 1978 and Orenstein 1990). Such an understanding and representation of femininity may be found in women’s comix especially in the early 1970s, for example, in Mendes’s “Oma” and Robbins’s “Lavender” and “Remember Telluria” published in It Ain’t Me Babe (Robbins et  al. 1970) or Nina Salina and Kay Rudin’s “Star Cake” published in Wimmen’s Comix #2 (1973a). Women are drawn as powerful and connected with nature. It Ain’t Me Babe literally ends with the image of a goddess (Fig.  3). The back cover shows a woman holding a baby, half Mary, mother of Jesus, and half Gaea, the goddess of fertility and the earth, as indicated by the representations of nature which surround her. As far as form is concerned (the shapes, the colours and the elaborate framing), the drawing also celebrates “marginal forms” of women’s art, such as decorative arts. This iconographic motif died out in the second half of the 1970s. The back cover of Roberta Gregory’s Dynamite Damsels (1976) is an intriguing counterpoint for the back cover of It Ain’t Me Babe: instead of a blonde, white

198 

M. OLSZA

Fig. 3  Barbara “Willie” Mendes, the back cover of It Ain’t Me Babe, 1970, Last Gasp Ecofunnies

goddess, women of different body types and races are represented. The caption simply reads “We’re women and we’re beautiful.” Respectively, the second approach was concerned with more radical body and vaginal art. Feminist artists “aimed to ‘demystify’ patriarchal conceptions of the female body by experimenting with body art and vaginal iconology. They set out to create alternative ‘positive’ images of the female body by making ‘visible’ those parts that had been censored in traditional art” (McDonald 2001, p. 81), as exemplified by the early works of Judy Chicago and Carolee Schneemann. In comix, we may see such an approach to the female body in numerous stories published in Tits & Clits Comix, Twisted Sisters and Wimmen’s Comix, to name just a few.

  TOWARDS FEMINIST COMICS STUDIES: FEMINIST ART HISTORY… 

199

Five issues of Tits & Clits were published between 1972 and 1979 (and additionally two more, one in 1981 and one in 1987). The entire series was built around and focused on female sexuality, and its “positive” representation (including the need to produce feminist porn movies, as discussed in Roberta Gregory’s “Free enterprise” published in Tits & Clits Comix #4 in 1977) and as such corresponded to the ideals of second-wave feminism and the rediscovery of female sexual pleasure and female desire. Barbara Rose observes in “Vaginal iconology” (2001 [1974], p. 377) that while such images are intimate, they are not meant to be misconstrued as “erotic”: “feminist art that has been labelled ‘erotic’ because it depicts or alludes to genital images is nothing of the sort. (…) Hannah Wilke’s soft latex hanging pieces, Deborah Remington’s precise abstractions, Miriam Schapiro’s ring-centred Ox, Rosemary Mayer’s cloth constructions, Judy Chicago’s yoni-lifesavers are all vaginal or womb images.” While “vaginal art” was later criticized in connection with its essentialist view of womanhood, such art may also be discussed in the context of the ontology of the image and the fact that representation cannot be controlled, which means that images that are not meant to be erotic may be misread or misconstrued (which of course does not mean that feminist art cannot be erotic, see Webster 1981). Bal observes that “by reusing forms taken from earlier works, an artist both carries with [them] the text from which the borrowed has broken away and constructs a new text with the debris” (2001, p. 69). The “new” image is “contaminated by the discourse of its predecessor, and thereby fractured, ready to fall apart at any time” (Bal 2001, p.  69). Feminist “vaginal art” is thus “fractured” and “ready to fall apart” simply because of the history of certain iconological motifs (i.e. the (ab)use of the female body by male artists). In this case, comix seem to have the advantage of text. The visual does not stand on its own but is incorporated into a subversive and “anti-mythological” message, in keeping with Pollock’s (1988) notion of “scripto-visual” strategies (see also Schor 1997, pp. 82–6). It is thanks to language (word balloons, captions and the narrative in general) which contextualizes and tames the image that the image of the woman, and especially the female body, no longer falls victim to institutional sexism. In Chevli’s “Fonda Peters vaginal drip” published in Tits & Clits Comix #1 (1972), the focus is on the vagina, albeit in a context that disrupts the expectations of the male gaze. Fonda Peters is struggling with a yeast infection. She is drawn naked or semi-clothed with her vagina exposed, but the images are not “sexual”: they normalize the representation of the female body and medical procedures. It is at the end of the story that Fonda Peters explores her sexuality by participating in an orgy once she is cured. As such, Chevli and Sutton participate in the greater feminist project of identifying icons of femininity and transforming them into iconoclastic representations. As McDonald observes: By the 1970s and 1980s, early second-wave feminist research had unearthed a great number of stereotypes in the history of art that were based on a binary

200 

M. OLSZA

system of desirable and undesirable forms of femininity. These stereotypes, which ranged from the ‘civilised’ virgin, mother and muse to the ‘uncivilised’ whore, monster and witch, were shown to serve as role models for women. Although the investigations of these earlier feminists were conducted in traditional, i­ conographic terms, they demonstrated that such stereotypes of femininity reinforced a ‘patriarchal’ ideal, an ideal that in art was embodied in the female nude. (2001, p. 15)

In Sutton’s “The menses is the massage, starring Mary Multipary,” also published in Tits & Clits #1 (1972), the artist further plays with the notions of “civilised” and “uncivilised” images of womanhood. Mary Multipary, the narrator and the protagonist, tells the reader/viewer about her week, with a particular focus on the symptoms of PMS (mood swings, depression) and later her struggles to afford period products. Like Peters, the character may be seen semi-naked, albeit not in a sexual context. For example, on page 8 (Fig. 4), Multipary is devising her own period product from a sponge, observing that “Virginia Johnson would be proud of her.” In the panel to the right, she is seen inserting the home-made tampon. The image is detailed, yet not “erotic” (if anything, the image itself could be read as a masturbation scene but the focus would still be on the experience of the woman and not the “visual pleasure” of the viewer). In a minor but telling visual gesture, Multipary transgresses the limitations of the frame (her left foot presses on the bottom edge of the panel and oversteps it, while her right foot dents the edge of the panel to the left), thus transgressing the limitations and taboos around the representation of the female body. In the two panels that follow, Multipary asserts that “this [the tampon] even feels good standing up.” This strip also represents a deeper change that had taken place in feminist art in the 1970s, namely, “a shift from representation – how the female body should be represented – to the question of subjectivity – what it means to inhabit that body: from the problem of looking (distance) to the problem of embodiment (touch)” (Betterton 1996, p. 7). This question also further relates to the tensions in the women’s comix scene, which surfaced earlier in connection to the

Fig. 4  Joyce Sutton, the top row from “The menses is the massage” in Tits & Clits #1, 1972, Nanny Goats Productions

  TOWARDS FEMINIST COMICS STUDIES: FEMINIST ART HISTORY… 

201

notion of the “feminist collective,” insofar as not only Chevli and Sutton but also Kominsky-Crumb and Noomin questioned the idealized representation of the female body promoted by, among others, Trina Robbins (Noomin 2004). The Twisted Sisters authors “preferred to have [their] flaws and show them” (Noomin 2004), creating fictional (Noomin’s Didi Glitz) and autobiographical characters (Kominsky-Crumb’s Goldie) who “inhabited their bodies” and thus questioned all the “shoulds” of representation. Both authors were originally contributors to Wimmen’s Comix (Goldie first addressed the questions of body shame and female sexual pleasure in Wimmen’s Comix #1). Respectively, Wimmen’s Comix engaged with different approaches to feminist iconology, including vaginal art, most prominently in Cathy Millet’s “Where have you been you little pig?” in issue #5 (1975). Millet draws a vagina in a series of 11 panels arranged in two rows, zooming in on its inside. The images are so detailed that they are almost abstract, playing with the very notion of representation. The third approach to the representation of the female body in feminist art was concerned with the wider category of “hybrid forms” of feminist art which “eclectically appropriate or replace, quote and parody, contaminate and are contaminated by ‘other’ traditions, languages and gender inscriptions” (Jefferies 1995, p. 166). Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party (1974–9) exemplifies a playful approach to Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, and so does Edelson’s Some Living American Women Artists (1972). Similarly, Barbara Kruger’s collages playfully imitate advertisements and slogans created by men. Indeed, in a quasi-framing fashion, the notion of “eclectic appropriation” and “collage technique” in women’s comix takes us back to the discussion of “Breaking Out” in It Ain’t Me Babe (Robbins et al. 1970), which challenged the canon through the use of screentone and different drawing styles. Analogous strategies of “critical encoding” (Jefferies 1995, p. 166) were adopted in the 1970s (e.g. Tits & Clits as a response to Playboy and/or Robert Crumb’s Big Ass Comics). The prime example of such a strategy were “ReActionary Comics by Petchesky [Margery Peters]” published in Wimmen’s Comix #3 (Marrs et al. 1973b) and Wimmen’s Comix #6 (Brown et al. 1975). The stylized font made it clear that the strips were both appropriating and rereading Action Comics. Respectively, such an active approach to iconological traditions, both in “high art” and comix, was based on the same feminist foundation, namely, activist art. As Mary Jo Aagerstoun and Elissa Auther observe, “[s]ince its emergence in the 1970s, feminist activist art has consistently exhibited a diversity of subject matter and form that defies the attempts to pigeonhole the practice” (2007, p. vii) and artistic strategies shared by “high art” and women’s comix demonstrate that the latter are part of the greater landscape of feminist art in the 1970s and should be recognized as such.

202 

M. OLSZA

“There to Make Trouble”: Towards Feminist Comics Studies Nochlin writes that “feminist art history is there to make trouble” (1988, p. xiii) and perhaps reading women’s comix in the double framework of “breaking out” of the male canon and “breaking in(to)” the feminist art canon is the best kind of trouble. It demonstrates that the relation between feminist art histories and Comics Studies is reciprocal. For one, the benefits and challenges of feminist Art History for Comics Studies revolve around the benefits and challenges of feminisms as a critical practice per se. Feminist art histories reveal systematic oppression and discrimination inscribed in both mainstream and underground comics, demonstrating that the histories of comics need to be critically re-written and reformulated. While at a time when the most successful comics artists are women, including Alison Bechdel, Lynda Barry, Phoebe Gloeckner and Marjane Satrapi, to name just a few, it may be difficult to believe that some women artists, both mainstream and underground, still need to be rediscovered and reclaimed, it is nevertheless true. As I have tried to show, the answer to the question “Why have there been no great women comix/comics artists?” is “That is not true!” in the American context—there were many brilliant women artists who questioned the male canon in the 1970s and before (as shown by Robbins’s herstories of comics)—but it may be different in other parts of the world. Feminist art histories help comics scholars discover why— “they locate a network of minor roads that simply covers more territory than the so-called freeways” (Lippard 1980, p. 365). Respectively, Comics Studies exposes and challenges the elitism of feminist art histories, allowing the discipline to stay the course and “make trouble,” since it is “a dynamic self-critical response and intervention not a platform” (Pollock 1996, p. 5). Acknowledgement  The research for this chapter was funded by the Polish National Science Centre [Narodowe Centrum Nauki] (Miniatura 2: 2018/02/X/HS2/00693, Drawing feminism: Female artists on the underground American comix scene in the 1970s and 1980s). The research was conducted at Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, Columbus, Ohio, USA.

Notes 1. For further discussion of feminist art-historical approaches to the canon Cf. Wallin Wictorin and Nordenstam chapter “Feminist Art History as an Approach to Research on Comics: Meta Reflections on Studies of Swedish Feminist Comics”. 2. For further discussion of the canon and Vasari’s Lives Cf. Yu-Kiener chapter “The Lives of the Artists”. 3. For further discussion of drawing sociology (and political theory) into a multidisciplinary feminist approach Cf. Wallin Wictorin and Nordenstam chapter “Feminist Art History as an Approach to Research on Comics: Meta Reflections on Studies of Swedish Feminist Comics”.

  TOWARDS FEMINIST COMICS STUDIES: FEMINIST ART HISTORY… 

203

4. As Robinson observes (2004, pp. 14, 81–2), Wonder Woman was born a fierce Amazon in the 1940s, branded a lesbian (and thus a “dangerous role model for children”) by Frederic Wertham in the 1950s, and “conformed to the sexy 60’s ideal.” She was “reclaimed” as a feminist in the 1970s (Robinson 2004, p. 82). The development of other superheroines followed a similar path, while some were forgotten (see Robbins 1996). 5. The objectification of women and the representation of sexual violence have a long history in comics, dating back to the 1920s and Tijuana Bibles. They also influenced men’s underground comix and Crumb (see Adelman 1997). 6. “Feminist sex wars” of the 1970s concern debates among feminists about pornography and sexuality, which culminated in anti-pornography positions of the early 1980s since some feminists drew connections between pornography and sexual violence (see Hunter 2006). The responses of women’s comix ranged from idealizing the representation of women, reclaiming women’s sexual pleasure (e.g. Wet Satin, All Girl Thrills), to, incidentally, depicting sexual violence against men (e.g. Dot Bucher’s “A sordid affair” in Wimmen’s Comix #3 (1973b)). 7. To be specific, in Dynamite Damsels (1976), Gregory gives thanks for the “support and encouragement” and “valuable technical info” provided by Chevli and Sutton but ultimately she thanks herself “for doing all the writing + drawing + everything else.” In Dyke Shorts (1978), Wings thanks a number of women as well. She refers to them by their first names (which makes it difficult to identify some of them), but one name is obvious: she thanks Trina [Robbins].

References Aagerstoun, Mary Jo, and Auther, Elissa. 2007. Considering feminist activist art. The National Women's Studies Association Journal. 19:1, pp. vii-xiv. Adelman, Bob. 1997. Tijuana Bibles: Art and wit in America’s forbidden funnies, 1930s–1950s. New York: Simon & Schuster. Bal, Mieke. 2001. Looking In: The art of viewing. London: Routledge. Bal, Mieke, and Norman Bryson. 2009. Semiotics and Art History: A discussion of context and senders. The Art of Art History: A critical anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi, pp. 243–255. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barry, Judith, and Flitterman-Lewis, Lisa. 1980. Textual Strategies: The politics of art-­ making. Screen. 21:2, pp. 35–48. Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin. Betterton, Rosemary. 1996. Intimate Distance: Women, artists and the body. London and New York: Routledge. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1996. The Rules of Art: Genesis and structure of the literary field. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Brown, Barb, et al. 1975. Wimmen’s Comix #6. Berkeley: Last Gasp. Calonne, David Stephen. 2021. R. Crumb: Literature, autobiography, and the quest for self. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Cartwright, Lisa. 2017. Art, Feminism, and Visual Culture. In The Handbook of Visual Culture, eds. Ian Heywood and Barry Sandywell, pp. 310–325. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Chevli, Lyn, and Sutton, Joyce. 1972. Tits & Clits #1. Laguna Beach, CA: Nanny Goat Productions.

204 

M. OLSZA

Chevli, Lyn and Sutton, Joyce. 1973 Abortion Eve. Laguna Beach, CA: Nanny Goat Productions. Chute, Hillary. 2010. Graphic Women: Life narrative and contemporary comics. New York: Columbia University Press. Chute, Hillary. 2014. Outside the Box: Interviews with contemporary cartoonists. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Duncan, Carol. 1975. When Greatness is a Box of Wheaties. Artforum 14, pp. 60–64. Epstein, Barbara Leslie. 2002. The Successes and Failures of Feminism. Journal of Women’s History 14.2: 118–125. Estren, Mark. 1993. A History of Underground Comics. Berkeley: Ronin. Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. 2010. Of Comics and Men: A cultural history of American comic books. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Galvan, Margaret. 2017. Archiving Wimmen: Collectives, networks, and comix. Australian Feminist Studies. 32:91–92, pp. 22–40. Gregory, Roberta. 1976. Dynamite Damsels. Self-published. Groensteen, Thierry. 2007. The System of Comics. Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Groth, Gary. 2014. Zap: An interview with Robert Crumb. The Comics Journal 143. http://www.tcj.com/zap-­an-­interview-­with-­robert-­crumb/. Accessed 26 March 2021. Grunzke, Andrew L. 2019. Education and the Female Superhero: Slayers, cyborgs, sorority sisters, and schoolteachers. Lanham: Lexington Books. Hanley, Tim. 2018 The Evolution of Female Readership: Letter Columns in Superhero Comics. In Gender and the Superhero Narrative, eds. Michael Goodrum, Tara Prescott-Johnson, and Philip Smith, pp.  221–250. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.s Harris, Jonathan. 2001. The New Art History: A critical introduction. New  York: Routledge. Hatfield, Charles. 2009. Alternative Comics: An emerging literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Horne, Victoria, and Tobine, Amy. 2017. An unfinished revolution in art historiography, or how to write a feminist art history. In Feminism and Art History Now: Radical critiques of theory and practice, eds. Victoria Horne and Lara Perry, pp. 31–40. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Hunter, D. Nan. 2006. Contextualizing the sexuality debates: A chronology 1966–2005. In Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture, eds. Lisa Duggan and Nan D. Hunter, pp. 16–28. London and New York: Routledge. Jefferies, Janis. 1995. Text and textiles: Weaving across the borderlines. In New Feminist Art Criticism: Critical strategies, ed. Katy Deepwell, pp.  164–173. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kitchen, Dennis, and Danky, James. 2009. Underground Classics: The transformation of comics into comix. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Kominsky-Crumb, Aline, and Noomin, Diane. 1976. Twisted sisters #1. Berkeley: Last Gasp. Lippard, Lucy. 1976. From the Center: Feminist essays on women’s art. New  York: Dutton Books. Lippard, Lucy. 1980. Sweeping Exchanges: The contribution of feminism to the art of the 1970s. Art Journal. 40:1–2, pp. 362–365.

  TOWARDS FEMINIST COMICS STUDIES: FEMINIST ART HISTORY… 

205

McDonald, Helen. 2001. Erotic Ambiguities: The female nude in art. London: Routledge. Marrs, Lee, et al. 1973a. Wimmen’s comix #2. Berkeley: Last Gasp. Marrs, Lee, et al. 1973b. Wimmen’s comix #3. Berkeley: Last Gasp. Miodrag, Hannah. 2013. Comics and Language: Reimagining critical discourse on the form. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Moodian, Pat, et al. 1972. Wimmen’s comix #1. Berkeley: Last Gasp. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen 16:3, pp. 6–18. Nochlin, Linda. 1973 [1971]. Why have there been no great women artists? In Art and Sexual Politics: Why have there been no great women artists?, eds. Thomas B. Hess and Elizabeth C. Baker, p. 1–39. New York: Collier and Macmillan. Nochlin, Linda. 1988. Women, Art and Power. New York: Harper & Row. Noomin, Diane. 1995. Foreword. In Twisted sisters 2: Drawing the Line, ed. Diane Noomin, p. 6. Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press. Noomin, Diane. 2004. Wimmin and comix. ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies 2:1. http://imagetext.english.ufl.edu/archives/v1_2/noomin/. Accessed 10 March 2021. Orenstein, Gloria Feman. 1990. The Reflowering of the Goddess. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Parker, Rozsika. 1984. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the making of the feminine. London: The Women’s Press. Pollock, Griselda. 1983. Women, Art, and Ideology: Questions for Feminist Art Historians. Women’s Art Journal. 4:1, pp. 39–47. Pollock, Griselda. 1988. Vision and Difference: Femininity, feminism and histories of art. London and New York: Routledge. Pollock, Griselda. 1996. The politics of theory: Generations and geographies in feminist theory and the histories of art histories. In Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist readings, ed. Griselda Pollock, pp. 3–12. Hove: Psychology Press. Pollock, Griselda. 1999. Differencing the canon: Feminist desire and the writing of art’s histories. London and New York: Routledge. Pollock, Griselda, and Rozsika Parker. 1981. Old Mistresses: Women, art and ideology. New York: Pantheon. Poggioli, Renato. 1981. The Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. G. Fitzgerald. Cambridge and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Robbins, Trina. 1976. Trina’s Women. Princeton, WI: Kitchen Sink Press. Robbins, Trina. 1993. A Century of Women Cartoonists. Princeton, WI: Kitchen Sink Press. Robbins, Trina. 1996. The Great Women Superheroes. Princeton, WI: Kitchen Sink Press. Robbins, Trina. 1999. From Girls to Grrrlz: A history of women’s comics from teens to zines. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. Robbins, Trina. 2001. The Great Women Cartoonists. New  York: Watson-Guptill Publications. Robbins, Trina. 2013. Pretty in Ink: North American women cartoonists 1896–2013. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books. Robbins, Trina, et al. 1970. It Ain’t Me Babe. Berkeley: Last Gasp. Robbins, Trina, et al. 1971. All Girl Thrills. Berkeley and San Francisco: The Print Mint. Robbins, Trina, et al. 1975. Wimmen’s Comix #5. Berkeley: Last Gasp. Robbins, Trina, et al. 1976. Wet Satin #1. Princeton, WI: Kitchen Sink Press. Robbins, Trina, et al. 1978. Mama! Dramas!. Princeton, WI: Educomics.

206 

M. OLSZA

Robinson, Lillian. 2004. Wonder Women: Feminisms and superheroes. New  York and London: Routledge. Rose, Barbara. 2001 [1974]. Vaginal iconology. In Feminism, Art, Theory: An anthology 1968–2014, ed. Hilary Robinson, pp. 376–377. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Rosenkranz, Patrick. 2002. Rebel Visions: The underground comix revolution, 1963–1975. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books. Sabin, Roger. 1996. Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels: A history of comic art. New York: Phaidon Press. Sabin, Roger. 2013. Adult Comics. London and New York: Routledge. Schapiro, Miriam. 1972. The education of women as artists: Project Womanhouse. Art Journal. 31:3, pp. 268–270. Schor, Mira. 1997. Wet: On painting, feminism and art culture. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Shannon, Edward. 2012. Shameful, impure art: Robert Crumb’s autobiographical comics and the confessional poets. Biography. 35:4, pp. 627–649. Skinn, Dez. 2004. Comix: The underground revolution. New  York: Thunder’s Mouth Press. Summers, David. 2009. Style. In The Art of Art history: A critical anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi, pp. 144–148. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The Heresies Collective. 1978. The Great Goddess (special issue #5). HERESIES: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics. Vasari, Giorgio. 2007. The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. New York: Random House. Wallace, Michele. 2004. Dark Designs and Visual Culture. Durham: Duke University Press. Webster, Paula. 1981. Tits & Clits Comix. Sex Issue (special issue #12). HERESIES: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, pp. 48–51. Wings, Mary. 1973. Come out Comix. Portland: Portland’s Women Resource Center. Wings, Mary. 1978. Dyke Shorts. Berkeley and San Francisco: The Print Mint. Wolk, Douglas. 2007. Reading Comics: How graphic novel work and what they mean. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press. Worden, Daniel. 2021a. Introduction: R. Crumb in Comics History. In The Comics of Robert Crumb: Underground art in the museum, ed. Daniel Worden, pp.  3–18. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Worden, Daniel. 2021b. Reading, looking, feeling: Comix after legitimacy. In The Comics of Robert Crumb: Underground art in the museum, ed. Daniel Worden, pp. 61–76. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Real Queer Bodies: Visual Weight and Imagined Gravity in Sport Manga Ylva Sommerland

Abstract  The method introduced in this chapter combines queer theory and Rudolf Arnheim’s theory of visual composition introduced in his book Power of the Center  – A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts (1982), and more specifically his concept “visual weight”. The main purpose of using a queer method in Art History or Visual Studies is to add visual records of queer bodies and queer life into the catalogue of a queer Art History or used in an interdisciplinary context—the queer archive (Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press, 2005). I will study visual weight as imagined gravity in the sport manga Real by Takehiko Inoue with the purpose to discuss the queer body. Real is a story that evolves around three young men who experience different tragic life-­ changing events. They all have a common passion for basketball, and sport performances are at the centre of this story. Damage to their bodies caused by illness and accident has led two of them to be dependent on a wheelchair to be able to practise basketball. The third character suffers from bad conscience having caused a traffic accident resulting in a girl damaging her legs. Keywords  Rudolph Arnheim • Visual weight • Imagined gravity • Queer bodies • Sport manga • Takehiko Inoue

Y. Sommerland (*) National Library of Sweden, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Gray, I. Horton (eds.), Seeing Comics through Art History, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8_11

207

208 

Y. SOMMERLAND

The method introduced in this chapter combines queer theory and Rudolf Arnheim’s theory of visual composition introduced in his book Power of the Center – A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts (1982); more specifically his concept “visual weight” is used in the analyses. I will study visual weight as imagined gravity in the sport manga Real by Takehiko Inoue with the purpose to discuss the queer body. Real is a story that evolves around three young men who experience different tragic life-changing events. They all have a common passion for basketball, and sport performances are at the centre of this story. Damage to their bodies caused by illness and accident has led two of them to be dependent on a wheelchair to be able to practice basketball. The third character suffer from a bad conscience having caused a traffic accident resulting in a girl damaging her legs. All bodies have a weight, in this text a question is asked of how weight is depicted visually. Gravity is present in sport as resistance, threatening to end the play by forcing bodies to the ground and immobility. To approach visual representations of the queer body from this angle, the surrounding motifs defining the boundaries of human bodies are examined, and the role of an imagined gravity is studied, in a selection of panels from Real. The argument put forward is that human bodies are defined around resistance of gravity, as in sports classes, where, for example, human bodies are separated by gender and age in an evaluation of the ability of muscles, mobility, and weight to resist gravity, to create fair games. Additionally, gravity as an agent in the sport performance can be considered a teammate or co-player, as well as an opponent. It is part of the game to contest gravity. Comics in general are full of icons and symbols that represent the experience of gravity. Nevertheless, how are these qualities of visual weight performed with lines, dots, light, and shadows and in some cases colours? The “play” concept is useful for queer analysis, and from a sports perspective, and these concepts have in common the performative aspect and the act of performance. It is also important to have in mind that the images studied here are fiction. They depict fictive characters that do not exist. This is a play with bodies performing in sport zones. The manga Real depicts human bodies in wheelchairs performing basketball, or wheelchair basketball. In these images, I will look closer at weight and the representation of the queer, cyborg bodies in transition.

Queer, Cyborg, and Bodies in Transition The queer analysis demonstrated here as a method for reaching towards silent motifs is developed from performative methodological approaches used in Art History as applied by art historian, queer feminist theorist, and curator Amelia Jones. In In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance, Jones aims to outline the genealogy of “discourses surrounding concepts of queer or gender fluidity and performativity or performance” and to investigate in what ways they are connected and why (2021, p. 4).

  REAL QUEER BODIES: VISUAL WEIGHT AND IMAGINED GRAVITY… 

209

Clearly there are no singular origins of queer as we know it today. Rather, it is a complex field of concepts and words eventually pointing to crystallized activist and theoretical definitions by 1990, shifting into mainstream applications by the 2000s in television and other mass media. (Jones 2021, p. 188)

The use of queer in academia and the introduction of queer theory was initiated by Teresa De Lauretis in 1990, in a special issue of differences where she argued that queer theory could offer rethinking of sexualities. Jones furthermore highlights Sue Ellen Case’s claim in the same special issue on the alignment of queer theory to the “counter-normative force of queer performing bodies” (Jones 2021, p. 188; Lauretis 1991). Jones points out the common misconception that Judith Butler frequently is credited to have introduced queer theory and invented the idea of queer performativity. Jones furthermore presents some critique of Butler’s theory of gender performance, where she questions Butler’s claims surrounding the subversive acts of repeating or imitating gender, such as drag, because they risk “missing the complexities of any manifestation or experience or claim of sex/gender as embodied, contingent, intersectional” (Jones 2021, p. 191). It is questionable if this subversive act of gender ever could be voluntary and express “an ‘authentic’ interior self or enacts freely chosen gender attributes” (Jones 2021, p. 208). Nevertheless, the impact of Butler’s writing for the development of queer theory is indisputable. Eve Sedgwick, also a significant influential queer theorist like Butler, according to Jones, does not highlight queer performativity as such. Intersectionality is one theory applied in critiques of queer theory focusing on the perspective that lived experience includes additionally lived identifications that intersect with the experience of gender and sexuality. In Tendencies Sedgwick writes: At the same time, a lot of the most exciting recent work around ‘queer’ spins the term outward along dimensions that can’t be subsumed under gender and sexuality at all... Thereby the gravity (I mean the gravitas, the meaning, but also the center of gravity) of the term ‘queer’ itself deepens and shifts. (1993, pp. 8–9)

The focus of study in this chapter are not bodies contesting heteronormativity, but bodies contesting human body normativity—what we define as a “normal/natural” human body. In comics, this means contesting the borders of human/machine, human and woman/man/girl/boy, hero/antihero and which can be related to Donna Haraway’s figure of the cyborg. To further clarify the approach of using a queer method in the context of this chapter, it is helpful to draw attention to the method’s proximity to what Donna Haraway describes in her seminal essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1991) as “ironic faith” or blasphemous fidelity. What is put into question when using a queer method is the very existence of a natural and/or “normal” body. Donna Haraway explains the cyborg as: “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (1991, p. 149). This chapter focuses on queer perspectives of the imagined body that question

210 

Y. SOMMERLAND

the “normal” body of an athlete and the potentials of bodies in motion depicted in images. The images are chosen from a realistic sport manga, but still the context qualifies them for study for the queer archive, and the cyborg motif is present, even though it is neither a fantasy nor a science fiction manga. Since the bodies playing basketball use machines in the form of manual wheelchairs, they can be defined as cyborgs. A human body in a wheelchair is an example of a body that could be described as a cyborg, a human and a machine interacting, in this case to carry and move the human body.

Queer Comic Archives The main purpose here of using a queer method in Art History studies or Visual Studies is to add visual records of the queer body and queer life into the catalogue of queer Art History, or, used in an interdisciplinary context, what Jack (also Judith, or J. Jack or Judith Jack) Halberstam describes as the queer archive (Halberstam 2005). Halberstam, professor in Gender Studies and English at Columbia University, specifically focuses on transgender bodies and queer subcultures. Halberstam is active in archival practices in creating a queer archive, where examples from visual culture constitute a significant part of the material studied, especially visual identities expressed in popular culture and film. Since both comics and especially the images of manga have a close relation to film and have been considered a part of popular culture rather than Art History, I have found Halberstam’s method useful for this chapter. This furthermore contributes to including comic images and specifically manga in the records of the archive of Art History, a context where comics so far has not received much scholarly attention (Sommerland and Wallin Wictorin 2017). A few remarks need to be emphasized on how the category manga is used in this chapter. By manga, I mean comics produced and published in Japan, Japanese comics, and not a specific style, genre, or media type within comics. It is worth noting though that sport manga is a popular genre in Japan and the number of comics in Japan with sport as the main subject is extensive compared to Euro-American comics. It is the images from the English translation of Real that are studied in this chapter and not the original in Japanese. In translation, especially of manga into English, there might be a need to deal with significant intercultural aspects both when it comes to the visual and the language. The intercultural aspects of manga and Japanese popular culture in a broader sense regarding research on this material is discussed in, for example, Reading Manga: Local and Global Perceptions of Japanese comics (Berndt and Richter 2006), Comics Worlds and the World of Comics: Towards Scholarship on a Global Scale (Berndt 2010) and Popular Culture, Globalization and Japan (Allen and Sakamoto 2008). When using the method of both queering the archive of Art History and queering the archive of comics with manga, this needs to be considered. At the same time, sport as motif, or the sport zone, is a space with intercultural standards; for example, the rules for basketball studied here are the same in Sweden as in Japan.

  REAL QUEER BODIES: VISUAL WEIGHT AND IMAGINED GRAVITY… 

211

Thus, this chapter argues for the usefulness of queer methods for analysing comics, regarding the concept “queer” as a tool for studying objects in the margins, and motifs and materials excluded from the norm of art-historical studies. Consideration of the archival turn in Cultural History will help clarify the purpose of a queer archive of Art History as a method. One important function of what is called the archival turn is making noise where there exist archival silences. It could be argued that both comics, and especially manga, as art, and queer bodies have been left in a space of archival silence in an art-historical context. One reason for this could of course be an assumption that comics as well as queer cultures are rooted in subcultures and are by definition found far off centre where they emerge and take shape in transitional spaces. A polyphony of methodologies is necessary for analysing comics, as pointed out by manga scholar Jacqueline Berndt, professor in Japanese language and culture and specifically manga/anime/comics theory (Berndt 2010), as well as for queer analyses of performance art and queering the archive, as pointed out by art historian Mathias Danbolt. Motifs in the margins or transitional spaces need to be lifted into the centre as part of an interdisciplinary approach since cultural expressions in the margins are difficult to frame from only one perspective (Danbolt 2013; Jones 2021).1 It is furthermore important to be aware that using queer theory in Art History and Visual Studies gives opportunities to ask different questions than is the case for real bodies in “social reality”. It could even be argued that all bodies drawn in comics are always queer or, at the very least, inhabit queer possibilities. This is important to mention to clarify that the boundaries of human bodies in drawn images shows the limits of imagined bodies and are not studies of real bodies. In this chapter Real queer bodies are studied, that is, bodies present in the fictional world of the sport manga Real. However, imagined bodies and visual identities affect how we perceive the concept of what makes a human body. In Touching History: Art, Performance and Politics in Queer Times (2013), Danbolt reviews the use of queer methods in Art History. Danbolt illuminates the performative aspect of archival practice in the physical act of actually touching history when reaching out and handling the archival material, which had not received attention in previous research. Drawing on philosopher, dancer, and visual artist Erin Manning’s Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (2007), Danbolt notes the importance of the performative act of archival research when using queer methodologies: “These touches should, in other words, be seen as an inventive ‘act of reaching toward’ rather than as secure arrival” (Danbolt 2013, p. 308).

Performative Comic Archives In Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2009), Ann Stoler points out that a shift from “archive as source” to “archive as subject” became visible in the fields of critical history and cultural theory in the 1990s across a wide range of disciplines. This was the case in studies

212 

Y. SOMMERLAND

spanning from “rereading histories of colonialism to those of gay rights” (Stoler 2009, pp. 44–45). Stoler further explains that this archival turn has created two completely different spaces when it comes to research for historians and research for cultural theorists. For historians it is the physical (or digital) documents, and the archival institution that is responsible for them, that is being studied. For cultural theorists, according to Stoler, the archive has become “a metaphoric invocation for any corpus of selective collections and the longings that the acquisitive quests for the primary, originary, and untouched entail” (Stoler 2009, p. 45). The archival turn means a performative perspective on the archive and a critical approach to it. This critique poses questions regarding the factors that shape the archive and the effects of its form, what the archive does. When using the performative method, the researcher approaches the archive as a place with ambiguous answers. This may seem contradictory, since the archive represents stability and duration, while the performative perspective is used to describe movement, variability and questioning of origin. In studying diffractions from the “normal”, the concept of performativity enables a critical way of studying the archival history and memory of comics with a queer perspective. The performative perspective enables us to create queer memories and make queer bodies and identities visible. The performative archive thus refers to both the creation and shaping of archives and to how the form of the archive itself affects memory creation and collective memory. New types of questions could be asked of the archive. What happened before the archive was created? What influenced the selections made? Alternatively, we can ask, as do the editors of Comics Memory: Archives and Styles, what comics do with and to memory, and what memory does to comics (Ahmed and Crucifix 2018, p.  3). Studying the silence means to study what has been excluded and not been shown or spoken about and therefore has been out of reach for future research to build new knowledge upon—what Danbolt and Halberstam refer to as archival silences. In the philosopher David Davies’ theory of performance, appreciation and shared understandings are important factors of a performance (Davies 2004). This is also the case when communicating visually, as Arnheim points out with his theory on visual perception. In the anthology Performative Realism  – Interdisciplinary Studies in Art and Media, the visual aspect of recognition is stressed as important part of performances (Gade and Jerslev, 2005). Acknowledgement of comics as a significant part of the archive of Art History and Visual Studies, or visual cultures, should be obvious since it is part of a globally spread visual expression—a visual culture that exceeds the pages of volumes of manga and influences other visual media, as for example film, painting, and fashion.

  REAL QUEER BODIES: VISUAL WEIGHT AND IMAGINED GRAVITY… 

213

Visual Weight, Imagined Gravity, and Play To investigate the potential of visual representation of gravity, I have been influenced by a method developed by art historian Rudolf Arnheim.2 He argues that there is a visual aspect in human experience of gravity and that composition in art is gravity perceptually experienced through visual weight. By visual weight, he means how different forms create dynamic centres in a composition, because they attract a different amount of attention, and he shows which elements lead a form to have increased or decreased visual weight compositionally. In the Power of the Center  – A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts, Arnheim writes: In the field of forces pervading our living space, any upward movement requires the investment of special energy, whereas downward movement can be accomplished by mere dropping, or by merely removing the support that had kept the object from being pulled downward. (1982, p. 10)

This investment of energy is certainly at play when performing sports. Arnheim further claims that; “overcoming the resistance of weight is a fundamental experience of human freedom” (1982, p. 11). When investigating composition, he starts by comparing two spatial systems, cosmic space and parochial space. In cosmic space mass is organised around a manifold of centres. Parochial spaces are the narrow spaces where “the curvature of the earth straightens into a plane surface” to create order (Arnheim 1982, p. vii). This is space is ordered in parallel lines and right angles. Visually he translates these to the Cartesian grid and the concentric system of circles, “the cosmic onion”, with a clear centre, and he argues for a combination of these two systems when analysing art: Together they serve our needs perfectly. The centric system supplies the midpoint, the reference point for every distance and the crossing for the grid’s central vertical and horizontal. And the grid system supplies the dimensions of up and down and of left and right, indispensable for any description of human experience under the dominion of gravity. (Arnheim 1982, pp. ix–x)

When analysing the images of comics, these could function as starting points when looking at the composition of spreads and composition within each panel. Gravity is a basic property of life and the living and strongly connected to time. This is also something Arnheim points out. And this is also true when describing the characteristics of sport. Sport is a game or play where gravity and time define the limit of different types of sport. A ball “lives” when it is moving, and the play is only ongoing within a limited time and space. All kinds of movement require forcing the power of gravity. Sport discourse, or what I choose to call the visual sport zone in the context of image analysis, is here defined as a time and space where images of bodies are performed. In the regulations of different sports in real life, the physical body is significant (Woodward and Woodward 2009). The sport zone is a space where questions can be

214 

Y. SOMMERLAND

investigated of how bodies are performed. In sports, it is important that all participants compete under the same conditions; there exists a claim for equality and fair play (Morgan 2007; Steenbergen et  al. 2001; Tännsjö and Tamburrini 2000). Questions of criteria for inclusion or exclusion are present when delineating the communities created as sport zones. How this is performed in depictions of contesting gravity is a crucial part in the staging of a sport act. In sport events, a play with gravity is present in obvious ways. The characteristics that define different sports or sport events are dependent on the way bodies relate to weight, and how human and/or non-human bodies move in certain patterns. The range of ability to contest gravity is connected to the categories of gender, age, and ability. Here the body matters when it comes to constraining the conditions for how different bodies must contest gravity and these are the grounds for dividing sport performing bodies into different classes, as part of the rules of the game. I have found the performative aspects of sport performances as a motif in art to be usefully framed by the concept of “play” according to sociologist Roger Caillois’ definition. Caillois presents six criteria for defining play (1961, pp. 9–10): . Free. Play is a voluntary activity. 1 2. Separate. Play is circumscribed in a time and space that is set beforehand. 3. Uncertain. The player’s initiative and performance play a part in the course of the result of the game. 4. Unproductive. Play is materially unproductive. 5. Governed by rules. Every play has a set of rules that define it. 6. Make-Believe. Play takes place in a second reality or “free unreality, as against real life”. These criteria are particularly useful to distinguish the sport performances in fictional images from a real-life sport performance. The sixth and last criterion is evermore true when the sport performance is conducted and experienced in two-dimensional still images. Since the performances of sport experienced in the manga studied here are the kinds of play that function as if a sport performance is done, the viewer or reader must agree to play—to pretend as if a sport event is occurring in the pictures (Caillois 1961). This view of “free unreality, as against real life” could be related to contesting gravity as a criterion for sport and Arnheim. He claims that there has to be freedom of space for matter to organize around a dominant mass in patterns (Arnheim 1982). When studying sport performances in comics Caillois’ second criterion of play is also important. A basketball game has a set period that decides when the game is at play. It is the case that when this clock stops, the game stops or pauses. However, it is also the case that the game can stop the clock, for example, when rules are broken. Gravity is also involved in framing the time of a game. It could be a basketball falling through the net or a ball in volleyball or tennis hitting the net and landing on the wrong side, then the clock stops, and the game is paused.

  REAL QUEER BODIES: VISUAL WEIGHT AND IMAGINED GRAVITY… 

215

Queer Spaces: Lost and Found in Transition The sport manga studied as an example here consists of material from the basketball manga Real by the contemporary manga artist, Takehiko Inoue. It was originally published as a serial in 1999 in Shūkan Yangu Janpu [Weekly Young Jump]. In 2001, the first collected volume of the previously serialised chapters was published, and to date 15 volumes have been published in Japanese. This procedure in publishing is common for manga in Japan. Real was first translated and published in English in 2008 by Viz Media, and the English translation of volume 15 is scheduled to be released in December 2021. At the time of writing this chapter, the story is ongoing. The genre of sport manga is chosen because of the rich flow of material published in sports comics from Japan. The sport discourse in fiction is also useful for discussions on the performative aspects of bodies. I studied this material in my PhD thesis (Sommerland 2012) in which I started to develop the method demonstrated in this chapter but have also applied the method to completely different material outside of comics discourse. In the article “Giving Indra’s daughter a female body: trans-time gender captivity” (Sommerland 2016), I studied visual traces from an actress, Ellen Widmann (1894–1985), who played the part of Indra’s daughter in one of the first performances of August Strindberg’s play A Dream Play, set in Düsseldorf in 1918. The materials studied in that article were scenography sketches from the play, photographs of Widmann from her succeeding theatre performances, and film screenshots from her film career. In this article, I also discussed the queer body and how gravity affect the boundaries of the female and human body. Real is a story where wheelchair basketball is the main theme, and the story is constructed around visual depictions of movement, direction, and other elements that Arnheim discusses in the context of visual weight. Arnheim studies visual weight in the context of composition of one image, for example, a painting or a sculpture. In the case of comics, there also exists visual weight in the composition of panels on the page overall. In the following section I will present a method for demonstrating how visual weight is depicted, to show how imagined gravity as a motif represents a force that could be used to discuss queer bodies in transition. With queer bodies, I mean non-normative bodies acting outside set limits for identity markers like gender, race, sexuality, and body normativity in general, bodies in transition. The analyses do not cover all images in the story and are not centred around the story, even if it affects part of the interpretation. Two spreads are chosen from Real volume 1. To find examples of depictions of gravity in this material has not been difficult, and I undertake a close analysis of the two chosen examples, but they could be regarded as visual quotes to strengthen the point put forward to demonstrate the method. Of course, almost all realistic depictions of life include some representation of gravity, and in depiction of sport bodies demonstrating forces attempting to break free from gravity is part of the story. As Arnheim writes:

216 

Y. SOMMERLAND

Overcoming the resistance of weight is a fundamental experience of human freedom… To spontaneous perception, motion is the characteristic undertaking of living things, whereas dead things are ineluctably possessed by their heaviness. (1982, p. 11)

Thus, depictions of realistic life in images are very likely to include gravity as a motif. Arnheim also points out that gravity is a force that we perceive as pulling mass down, while we rather perceive weight as a property within bodies that weighs them down (1982). Figure 1 shows a one-on-one basketball game inside a sports hall from the first volume of Real. Here the images demonstrate neither a regular wheelchair basketball game nor a regular basketball game. Figure 2 shows a previous scene preceding what is happening in Fig.  1. New spaces of basketball games are performed in these images, where the rules are played with and negotiated during the game in transition. The panels read from right to left, as in the Japanese original. When applying Arnheim’s concept of visual weight, the examples include a moment in time when the game stops because several of the rules are broken affected by imagined gravity and depicted as visual weight. The players fall out of their wheelchairs to the ground and the ball moves outside of the field that defines the basketball court into the lap of a spectator (Fig. 1) From reading

Fig. 1  Inoue, Takehiko. 2008. Real. Vol. 1 San Francisco, CA: Viz Media, pp. 54–55

  REAL QUEER BODIES: VISUAL WEIGHT AND IMAGINED GRAVITY… 

217

Fig. 2  Inoue, Takehiko. 2008. Real. Vol. 1 San Francisco, CA: Viz Media, pp. 42–43

the whole story, we can also learn in the previous pages that one of the players is not used to playing in a wheelchair and he has borrowed the wheelchair from the girl sitting on the floor. He then switches wheelchair with his opponent’s more advanced wheelchair to “make things fair” in his mind, since he has never used a wheelchair before (Fig. 2). The players try to use their energy to catch the ball but lose their balance and fall to the ground. Gravity is the strongest competitor in this play, even in the sweat drops that flow on their faces and bodies. In addition to this, the time of the game stops when the basketball lands on the lap of the girl who is placed outside the play, as a spectator. The girl holding the ball uses her muscles to stop gravity from moving it. This is not visible in the image other than the formation of her hands and fingers round the shape of the ball. This is not part of what frames the basketball game. Instead, this scene takes place in a space and time where the sport performance has paused for a moment. But in opposition to the other images, this panel includes parallel horizontal lines crossed by some vertical ones, creating right angles. The centre is placed in the circle forming the ball in the girl’s lap. In the other panels the circular centres are found in the speech balloons that rather could be described as speech suns, since they are shaped like a circle with beams that recall sun beams. The text in these circles are interjections, in fact all texts included in Fig. 1 are interjections or onomatopoeic words. Before this scene described here in Fig. 1, one of the players is playing basketball standing up against the person in wheelchair. To start a fair game, he

218 

Y. SOMMERLAND

suggests they both play sitting. The person sitting on the floor is the owner of one of the wheelchairs but must give it up for the play and just sit and watch (Fig. 2). There are thus three bodies in the scene. Some of the depicted bodies are not able to use the muscles in their legs to move. Instead, they use their arms and a wheelchair to perform the game and contest gravity. They perform basketball sitting down, but the goal that defines this sport is to invest energy in the ball that pushes it in an intended direction. In the wheelchair game they let the ball rest in their lap before bouncing it to the ground and then use all their energy in their arms for pushing their bodies in the direction of the basket where they will throw the ball and it is intended to land, fall to the ground, and stop the game, to reach the goal—the centre of the game. Speed lines depict the vertical force being exerted to move the bodies while competing against both the opposing player and competing against gravity. The act of resisting the fall of body mass to the pull of gravity involves the impact of muscles at work and sweat pressing out of pores keeping their body temperatures intact. This works as a sign of contesting gravity but also indicates the human part of their cyborg bodies. There are no sweat drops pouring from the wheelchairs. The visual weight and imagined gravity are shown with several different key features. Thicker and more densely hatched lines mark the floor as one centre of gravity, or perhaps the main centre in which direction the drawn falling mass is pulled. We see the two bodies falling out of their wheelchairs and the power of gravitational pull is also shaped by the placement of circles or round forms depicting different motifs. The two circles we interpret as heads are facing too close to the floor, and the fall is strengthened by the depictions of wheels spinning over their bodies. There are a number of other details that amplify the drama of bodies giving in to the force of gravity, the sweat drops, tensed muscles, radiating lines and onomatopoeic words connoting hard sounds, and speech balloons in the form of circles surrounded by beams, expressing interjections (Fig. 1). Gravity is also shown in the girl sitting on the floor (Fig. 2) and the ball landing in her lap (Fig. 1). Her legs and the ball are drawn without any counterforce towards gravity and seem still and immobile. (Figs. 1 and 2). In contrast to this she spins the ball on her finger, and in the scene her smile plays a significant role as a symbol of life force and will to live, as a victorious gyroscopic protest against the force of gravity to end the game and even life (Fig. 2). Gravity is also very present in their clothes and how the cloth falls on their bodies. These images show bodies fighting and falling that are cyborgs pulled down by an imagined gravity and queer bodies because they depict marginalized images of human bodies that are not represented in Art History. They move their bodies in queer ways that disqualify them from a regular basketball game standing up. Gravity keeps them from standing or running, because they do not have muscles in their legs to resist. However, in this manga it is the “normal” body and the way to play the game. If we return to Caillois’ criteria for play, the rules are unique and set up for this particular time and space. This is

  REAL QUEER BODIES: VISUAL WEIGHT AND IMAGINED GRAVITY… 

219

one of the main purposes of using a queer method, to shift focus on what is “normal” and seeking to include more visual representations of human bodies in a queer archive of Art History. The characters have all found themselves in a space where they are lost and found in transition outside the “natural” body and the “normal” way of living their lives, when the rules they are used to don’t apply to their bodies anymore. What then is the counterforce to gravity and weight in the images? A reoccurring motif in Real is a panel depicting the sky and some clouds in the foreground. A calm space compared to the more dramatic depictions of the struggles of sport games. It is also common that these cloud images include text that reflects the inner thoughts of a character. Skies, clouds, stars, and thoughts seem like obvious examples of forces free from gravity and weight, with floating and flying capacities. This could be compared to thought bubbles common in Euro-American comics that are cloud shaped. In one of the panels in Real, that showing a cloudy sky, there exists only one black cloud. In English the term gravity also means seriousness, as in the quote from Sedgwick above. The word has its etymology in Latin “gravis” meaning “heavy” and “gravitas”, meaning “weight”. Other words, similar in many languages, sprung from the same Latin root include, for example, “gravid” and “grave”. Play is an antonym to gravity, but still sport is very serious. A cloud can be gravid with rain, a black cloud that eventually will have to give in to gravity and let the rain fall. There are several centres in these pictures. In Fig.  1 one obvious centre is the girl smiling and spinning the ball and after that then throwing it out of reach, outside the space of the play. This scene is ended with a panel showing a sky full of light clouds. The smile is also a strong counterforce to gravity both in the meaning of contesting the gravitational pull and in the meaning of seriousness and lighting up a heavy mind.

Greetings to Rudolf Arnheim from the (Queer?) Future Rudolph Arnheim’s theory of ‘visual weight’ has been a support when analysing queer bodies in images. With visual weight, it has been possible to demonstrate how bodies are categorised and framed in a visual composition. This has functioned as a method for discussing depiction of the limits of human bodies in comics framed by visual representations of human/machine, the cyborg, as well as how the rules in sport define the limitations and the possibilities of human bodies. The challenging of gravity was studied here in sport manga, where flying material, like balls in the air and human bodies lifting from the ground are in focus, and falling objects mark a disruption in time and the flow of the story, where moving objects are the sign of action. In fantasy manga, or superhero comics, the flying body is a significant and well-known reoccurring figure (Bukatman 2003). As well as being almost a trope for the superhero in comics, it is a common motif in Art History in a larger context, for example, in religious motifs, where, as a sign for God not being constrained by the rules of

220 

Y. SOMMERLAND

gravity and a visual representation of the transcendent, bodies are depicted, floating, flying, or falling (Edwards and Bailey 2012). Comics are a queer zone because it is a zone where almost anything can be imagined and as Caillois states “it is a free unreality” (1961, pp. 9–10). But as Arnheim argues, this unreality must be perceptually imagined into an image that makes sense or a “make-believe”. His argument that thinking is not just words, but thinking in images is as important, is interesting for analysing comics. The queer perspective is made explicable when using the imagined gravity to study body normativity. It is these visual perceptions that help us form a motif in a composition and words guide us in a certain direction and function as an amplifier, especially onomatopoeic expressions common in comic images. Our visual perception of human bodies form patterns or compositions from previous experiences. The queer body is not queer anymore the more often it is exposed to our sight. To sum up, how did it work to combine an art historian from the twentieth century and his theories on visual perception with a queer method? When I read the introduction to Arnheim’s The Power of the Centre, his text echoed to me in the future in a queer way. He writes: A technical matter of diction requires mention here, namely my unwillingness to supplement masculine pronouns with feminine ones… Now that the masculine pronouns, which have always been “unmarked”, as the linguists say, are in the process of becoming marked, we can expect our language to supply us soon with terms that embrace both genders equally. (Arnheim 1982, pp. xi–xii)

As a final point, here are my greetings from the future to you, Rudolf Arnheim, queer theory and queer activism, has supplied us with these terms and the option to use them when found necessary.

Notes 1. For further discussion of the importance of an interdisciplinary approach Cf. Wallin Wictorin and Nordenstam chapter “Feminist Art History as an Approach to Research on Comics: Meta Reflections on Studies of Swedish Feminist Comics”, and Roan chapter “What Is an Image? Art History, Visual Culture Studies, and Comics Studies”. 2. For further discussion of Arnheim’s work and its relevance to, and influence on, Comics Studies Cf. Miers chapter “Psychologies of Perception: Stories of Depiction”.

References Ahmed, Maaheen and Crucifix, Benoît. eds. 2018. Comics Memory: Archives and Styles. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Allen, Matthew, and Rumi Sakamoto. 2008. Popular Culture, Globalization and Japan. London: Routledge.

  REAL QUEER BODIES: VISUAL WEIGHT AND IMAGINED GRAVITY… 

221

Arnheim, Rudolf. 1982. The Power of the Center: a study of composition in the visual arts. Berkeley: University of California Press. Berndt, Jaqueline and Richter, Steffi. eds. 2006. Reading Manga: Local and Global Perceptions of Japanese Comics. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag. Berndt, Jaqueline. 2010. Comics Worlds and the World of Comics: Towards Scholarship on a Global Scale. Kyoto, Japan: International Manga Research Center, Kyoto Seika University. Bukatman, Scott. 2003. Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th century. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Caillois, Roger. 1961. Man, Play, and Games. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe. Danbolt, Mathias. 2013. Touching History: Art, Performance, and Politics in Queer Times. Bergen: University of Bergen. Davies, David. 2004. Art as Performance. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell. Edwards, Mary D., and Bailey, Elizabeth. 2012. Gravity in Art: essays on weight and weightlessness in painting, sculpture and photography. Jefferson [NC]: MacFarland. Gade, Rune. and Jerslev, Anne. eds. 2005. Performative Realism: Interdisciplinary Studies in Art and Media. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Halberstam, Jack. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press. Haraway, Donna J. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: the Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Inoue, Takehiko. 2008. Real. Vol. 1. San Francisco, CA: Viz Media. Jones, Amelia. 2021. In Between Subjects: a critical genealogy of queer performance. London: Routledge. Lauretis, Teresa de. ed. 1991. Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities; special issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. 3:2 (Summer). Manning, Erin. 2007. Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Morgan, William John. 2007. Ethics in Sport. Champaign, Ill: Human Kinetics. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1993. Tendencies. Durham: Duke University Press. Sommerland, Ylva. 2016. Giving Indra’s daughter a female body: trans-time gender captivity. In Dream-Playing Across Borders: accessing the non-texts of Strindberg’s A dream play in Düsseldorf 1915–1918 and beyond. Ed. Astid von Rosen, pp. 63–91. Göteborg: Makadam förlag. Sommerland, Ylva. 2012. Tecknad tomboy: kalejdoskopiskt kön i manga för tonåringar. Diss. Göteborg: Göteborgs universitet, 2012. Göteborg. Sommerland, Ylva, and Wallin Wictorin, Margareta. 2017. Writing Comics into Art History and Art History into Comics Research. Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History. 86:1, pp. 1–5, https://doi.org/10.1080/00233609.2016.1272629. Steenbergen, Johan, de Knop, Paul, and Elling, Agnes. eds. 2001. Values and norms in sport: critical reflections on the position and meanings of sport in society. Oxford: Meyer & Meyer Sport. Stoler, Ann Laura. 2009. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tännsjö, Torbjörn, and Tamburrini, Claudio Marcello. eds. 2000. Values in Sport: elitism, nationalism, gender equality and the scientific manufacturing of winners. London: Spon. Woodward, Kath, and Woodward, Sophie. 2009. Why Feminism Matters: Feminism Lost and Found. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

PART IV

Comics for/Beyond Art History

Afrofuturism and Animism as Method: Art History and Decolonisation in Black Panther Danielle Becker

Abstract  Art Historians have, since the late twentieth century, grappled with the discipline’s origins as a nineteenth-century Western European discourse enmeshed in the epistemological context of European colonisation. As a result, there have been a variety of tactics employed to shift art-historical discourse away from its parochial origins, expand its objects deemed worthy of study and diversify its methodologies. The strands of this attempted shift have tended to focus on a decolonisation of the discipline through the expansion of cultural or geographical location or expansion through a focus on material from the realm of popular culture. However, attempts to make these changes to Art History have, primarily, focused on including previously neglected content as opposed to looking at potential methodologies for the creation of new discursive frameworks, such as a specifically African Art History. With this in mind, this chapter presents a case study analysis of Black Panther in both its film and comic book manifestation with the aim of understanding how the frameworks of animism and Afrofuturism can be used as potentially decolonial methodologies. The film and comic are analysed as works of visual culture whose use of African cultural material through the lens of animism and Afrofuturism provides an epistemological framework for the decolonisation of Art History. Keywords  African Art History • Decolonisation • Afrofuturism • Animism • Art historiography

D. Becker (*) Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Gray, I. Horton (eds.), Seeing Comics through Art History, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8_12

225

226 

D. BECKER

Introduction This chapter discusses Art History from a historiographic perspective so as to gain an understanding of the challenges the discipline poses to epistemic decolonisation and how the methodological approach of Afrofuturism used in the Black Panther film and recent comic book iterations may present a tool for such decoloniality. In what follows I will outline the perception of Western Art History as an ideological apparatus that has led to the unequal distribution of the label ‘art’ among cultures, classes and racial groups on a global scale. This moves on to a brief discussion of how the classification of material culture through the discipline of Art History has impacted the way in which both African artworks and global contemporary forms, such as comics, may be perceived. Having established the perception of cultural value conferred through Western Art History, I begin a discussion of Afrofuturism and animism as methodologies before moving on to a case study analysis of the character of Black Panther as he appears in comic and film form. The chapter concludes with a look at what these methods may offer the discipline of Art History and what they might contribute to its decolonisation.

The Discipline of Art History and Its Decolonisation Art History is a discipline whose origins and development have been intertwined with the history of European modernity and in turn Western European colonialism. It is also a discipline whose power to determine the value of material culture has spread across the globe from its geographical origins in Western Europe. This epistemological spread has had an immense effect on the way in which objects and visual material are, and have been, perceived. As a dominant discourse, Western European Art History has historically had the power to decide which objects among the world’s material culture can be given the label of ‘art’ (imbued with its correlative perceived value) and which cannot. In short this has manifested, historically, in objects of Western cultural origin being described as art and objects from other cultures for example, African cultures, being described as craft, artefact or material culture. I want to focus on two, intertwined effects of using the term ‘art’ and its distribution: the effect on perceptions of culture and race, and the effects on perceptions of class. It is on both these counts that Art History as a discipline has been asked to change. Art History has been asked to include a greater range of visual material and objects so as to disrupt the perception that it is elitist and based on class prejudice. This is where the use of art-historical discourse to study comics becomes relevant. Art History has also been asked to include a wider range of cultural production so as to decolonise its discourse and its ideological apparatus. This in turn points us in the direction of Art History being used to study African art and African cultural production or, rather, the creation of an African art-historical discourse. The unequal distribution of the label ‘art’ has, as mentioned, had an impact on the way in which

  AFROFUTURISM AND ANIMISM AS METHOD: ART HISTORY AND DECOLONISATION… 

227

particular cultures (which in the Western colonial system became linked to conceptions of race) have been valued historically, as well as how cultural production is linked to perceptions of class. One of the primary ways in which civilisations were distinguished, in Western thought, from cultural groups supposedly lacking civilisation was in the perceived lack of objects that could fit within the definition of ‘art’. Objects that were not ‘art’ were defined as ‘craft’ or ‘artefact’ and were expected to occupy different spaces and positions in the value hierarchy. Western Art History or Art History that draws on historical European art is, in other words, a pervasive epistemology that has, through centuries of colonisation and globalisation, become discursively dominant. In this sense Art History belongs to a Western epistemological system that has become globalised. This becomes clear when one looks at the material taught at universities across the globe. In South Africa, for example, Western Art History was transplanted into the settler colonial state during the apartheid period, so that students up to the present day receive a large amount of Western content and very little African Art History, particularly when it comes to historical African material. Even in the later decades of the twentieth century, many departments at South African universities included no historical or contemporary African content in art-historical curricula (Nettleton 2006, pp.  54–55). This slowly began to shift in the post-apartheid period, and a greater focus was placed on contemporary African and South African art in the curriculum at many universities, though still with a heavy focus on Western material (Nettleton 2006). The relative lack of African content and methodologies in the curriculum at South African universities is in part what catalysed the student protests that began in 2015 under the banner of Rhodes Must Fall and later Fees Must Fall. These student movements drew a number of strands of discontent together and asked for both physical access to universities (through a waiver of fees) and epistemological access through an increase in African content in the curriculum. As such the term decolonisation was pushed to the forefront of discourse and has become the primary theme in the years since the protests. In contemporary South Africa the term decolonisation has been used to refer to the transformation of space, epistemology and ideology from one dominated and created by the Anglo-American/Western European system to one resonating with the non-West, the Global South or, most specifically, a localised Afrocentric vision.1 There is an effort to decolonise the curricula at South African universities, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. For Art History this means shifting towards more African art (historical and contemporary), but there is also the sense that the art-historical methodologies employed to study material need to find an African or at least non-Western counterpart so that the shift is not merely an inclusion of African content within an existing Western discipline. Apart from the drive to decolonise art-historical curricula and epistemologies, decolonisation also seeks to decolonise the museum. The Western museum is being asked, for example, to decolonise by returning African art works to their countries of geographical and cultural origin.2 The movement of the

228 

D. BECKER

works constitutes an act of decolonisation in a physical sense but also in an ideological sense as it changes the object’s status from anthropological ‘artefact’ to ‘art’ and in so doing increases its perceived cultural value. There has also been a movement towards decolonising the art-historical curriculum internationally. Following on from the student movements in South Africa, students at other universities, such as those at Oxford University and at University College London, began to demand that the content of their studies be rethought in relation to colonial epistemological bias (Grant and Price 2020). This in turn made the need to radically change the discipline of Art History a more urgent quest. The impetus to decolonise follows on from an earlier acknowledgement by scholars that Art History needs to move away from its parochial beginnings to an international outlook. There has been an acknowledgement, since the late-twentieth century, that Art History is formed by its own epistemological bias and as such the application of its disciplinary framework to contexts outside of its point of origin in Western Europe are at best fraught and at worst a continuation of colonial hegemony.3 Such an acknowledgement, that the global distribution of Art History is tied to colonialism, has begun to change the historiographical understanding of the discipline itself and has led to what is now known as the ‘global turn’ (D’Souza and Casid 2014). In James Elkin’s edited collection Is Art History Global?, Chika Okeke-Angulu proposes that the globalisation of Art History either means the adoption of Western models or the rise of “several, parallel or contradictory, art historical models and methodologies” that allow for a diversity of views rather than different yet subordinate perspectives (Okeke-Agulu in Elkins 2007, pp.  206–207). The ‘global turn’ in Art History had, until the student movements of 2015, focused on the method of inclusion into the existing Western model. Writing more recently in response to questions posed by Grant and Price in Art History, James Elkins asks if what is required is something more radical: a “deconstruction of colonial heritage and reconceptualization of art history” that results in something new that does not ‘look like’ the colonial version at all (Elkins in Grant and Price 2020, pp. 22–23). In other words, there is now an acknowledgement that the decolonisation of the art-­ historical curriculum needs to be wary of the process of assimilation that appears to have been operating since the latter part of the twentieth century. Debates have moved to a question of creating different methodologies and multiple Art Histories rather than broadening the existing discourse through inclusion. Writing in 2009, Freeborn Odiboh maintains that Art History in Africa can be decolonised and Africanised if a discipline is created with a new nomenclature and methodology rather than a replication of an existing Western system (Odiboh 2009). To differentiate, in the case of an African Art History, has the danger of being nullified by ideological power if the differentiated phenomena is absorbed in an effort to tame its difference. For Homi Bhabha, importance lies in differentiation without dominance so that ‘cultural difference’ is the “attempt to dominate in the name of a cultural supremacy which is itself produced only in

  AFROFUTURISM AND ANIMISM AS METHOD: ART HISTORY AND DECOLONISATION… 

229

the moment of differentiation” (Bhabha 2012, p 51). This moment of differentiation in turn creates the risk of ‘assimilation’, in the sense described by Michel Foucault, where a differentiated and subordinated epistemology is absorbed within the canon (Foucault 1977). In relation to these difficulties, universities have, on an international scale, been attempting to broaden their curricula beyond the engrained Western model. Abiodun Akande writes that Nigeria and Ghana, like most African countries, had art-historical curricula that were based on the Western model during the colonial period and that despite attempts to shift this focus there has not been an adequate shift in the “Eurocentric learning experiences” (Akande 2017, p. 2). Looking at the curriculum at Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria, and Kwame Nkurumah University in Ghana, Akande notes that there is still a pervasive domination of European or Western content and methodologies (2017). Akande goes on to propose a new curriculum that will significantly increase the African or ‘indigenous’ focus while still providing for some focus on European material and allowing students to learn “from the ‘known’ to the ‘unknown,’ thus making indigenous art-history experiences count as prerequisites to art histories of Europe and other foreign regions” (2017, p. 11). Akande’s analysis provides an example of the contemporary state of art-historical decolonisation, which is replicated in South Africa, where attempts to decolonise have largely resulted in a process of including African material into the existing Western model. This is in line with the increasing disciplinary linkage between Art History and Visual Studies which is also modelled on the notion that ‘traditional’ Art History can be changed through the inclusion of a broader range of material, rather than creating a new discipline of African Art History using African methodologies.

Art History, Visual Studies and Comics Decolonising Art History proposes a change in the discipline that draws on earlier and on-going calls to shift the focus of the academic frame. Prior to the global turn mentioned above, there was an attempt from the 1970s to broaden the range of visual material studied within Art History so as to include images from popular culture, film and indeed any set of images which were seen to allow for an understanding of the culture from which they came. A range of new disciplines emerged to address the exclusions in Art History’s object of study. These included Cultural Studies, studies in Material Culture, Film Studies, Image Studies, Bildwissenschaft and, later, Visual Studies or Visual Culture Studies.4 What has since become known as Visual Studies or Visual Culture Studies has at its base the notion that our ideological frameworks are structured in part through visual images. As Nicholas Mirzoeff notes, “visuality and its visualizing of history are part of how the ‘West’ historicizes and distinguishes itself from its others” (2011, p. xiv). Mirzoeff goes on to acknowledge that the dismissal of the discipline of ‘art history’ in favour of “visual culture studies” is therefore not only an attempt to enlarge the field of analysis but a

230 

D. BECKER

movement very much aligned with a questioning of Western and patriarchal cultural authority (2011).5 In this sense moving away from Art History towards Visual Studies has been perceived as an appropriate strategy to acknowledge the Western nature of the discourse. The move away from Art History towards Visual Studies is also based on the perception that Art History has historically been elitist and that it needs to acknowledge its bias not only in terms of culture and race but also in terms of class. The ‘elitism’ of Art History is intertwined in its value system, which I would like to outline below. It is this value system that did not allow for the study of material such as comics prior to the 1960s and 1970s. Western Art History has made a distinction between ‘art’ and ‘craft’ by privileging objects believed to have no utilitarian function over those that are seen to be purely functional. In his lauded text The Invention of Art, Larry Shiner traces the evolution of the term ‘art’ and describes the social and economic circumstances which led to its current meaning. Shiner reminds the reader that there was a time in European history when ‘art’ was a term used to denote any kind of human skill and that it was during the eighteenth century that a kind of splitting occurred, resulting in the term ‘fine art’ on the one side armed with its associations of genius and ‘popular art’ or ‘craft’ on the other with the devalued characteristic of skill (Shiner 2001, p. 5). The term ‘art’ was elevated almost to the point of spiritual worship, while ‘craft’ or ‘popular art’ was increasingly relegated to the inconsequential. The distinction between ‘art’ and ‘craft’ came into existence as a polarity between objects that carried meaning and objects that were created for utility (Shiner 2001, p. 6). It was not only everyday objects that were deemed to be ‘functional’ within Art History’s lexicon but also objects and images from popular culture which were seen as ‘functional’ in their explicit intention to sell. Despite the evolution within the Western art system towards a distinction between art as an aesthetic or ‘meaningful’ creation and craft as functional, and its supposed rejection by modern and contemporary artists, the global contemporary art market still relies rather heavily on this divide. Western Art History has denied the study of objects and images from popular culture because it has held that art should be separated from social life. The distinction of ‘contemporary art’ as the category of objects and practices with the highest value in visual culture relies on Western notions of ‘high art’ as being distinct from commercial ‘popular culture’ and ‘craft’. This distinction has its roots in the nineteenth-century German origins of Art History as a formalised academic discipline. Frederic Schwartz notes that Heinrich Wölfflin “sought to isolate form in order to establish the discipline of art history as scientific and autonomous” (Schwartz 1999, p. 9). He goes on to argue that this need to transform Art History into a pseudo-science came largely as a reaction to the beginnings of capitalist mass culture and that “style was understood quite explicitly as the nature of visual form under pre-capitalist conditions of culture” so that ‘high art’ and ‘style’ could be seen as the opposition to ‘popular culture’ and ‘fashion’ (Schwartz 1999, p. 14). It is this separation of ‘high

  AFROFUTURISM AND ANIMISM AS METHOD: ART HISTORY AND DECOLONISATION… 

231

art’ from the categories of craft and popular culture that became entrenched by the time that the academic discipline of Art History came into being. Connected to the notion that art must be separate from social life is the ideological view that objects and images need to deny their status as commodities in order to gain the appellation ‘art’. Again, this has not always been the case within Western Art History, as Renaissance artists produced paintings for patrons to order in a system where the production of art was what art historian Michael Baxandall called, “the deposit of a social relationship”, which can be defined as primarily commercial even when it pertained to religious altar-pieces (Baxandall 1988). By the eighteenth century, however, a shift had occurred. According to Gotthold Lessing, ‘art’ was said to be created for some kind of internal aesthetic content (beauty made for itself), while craft was created with an external purpose (Lessing 1958). Artisans were seen to be those who engaged in trade, while artists were characterised by genius and a desire to create that went beyond trade in commodities, despite the fact that artist’s works were also for sale. Shiner describes this as a shift from ‘concrete labour’ to ‘abstract labour’ where “the work of fine art is literally ‘priceless,’ its actual price set by the artist’s reputation and the buyer’s desire and willingness to pay” (Shiner 2001, p. 127). What emerged in the Western art system from the late eighteenth century onwards was a market system based on commodities and emerging capitalism. Although art exists within the market economy and can have a very high monetary value, its perceived value relies on the notion that it is not created for sale and as such exists in a separate, haloed realm. The Western art system also focuses on individual authorship as conferring value upon objects and images. A Western conception of ‘artworks’ as necessarily being associated with individual creators, as opposed to a collective (which often defines both popular culture, design and craft), has its roots in the Renaissance period in Europe and more specifically in writing such as Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects in which he details the individual achievements of artists like Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo as most successfully approximating a ‘universal’ aesthetic ideal of naturalism (Vasari in Holt 1958).6 While artist collectives functioning in an apprenticeship-style system continued throughout Europe, and define the workings of many artists within the Western canon, it was the individual name of the artist that began to determine value. In the sense of copyright,7 a ‘Western’ understanding of authorship as a singular relationship “ …in which a text apparently points to this figure who is outside and precedes it” means that creations by singular authors are privileged and structurally entrenched by powerful sanctioning bodies as more valuable (Foucault in Preziosi 2009). In summary, Western art is perceived to be valuable if it is perceived to have some distance from functionality and utility; it functions in a sphere distinct from everyday life and as such can be found in the gallery or museum; it appears to exist outside of the capitalist market system and is recorded as the work of an individual author. All of these attributes do not apply easily to comics, and it is for these reasons that the study of comics has existed outside of traditional

232 

D. BECKER

Art History and required the disciplinary shift towards Visual Studies and related disciplines such a Film Studies or Image Studies in order to be included in a mainstream sense. Comics, despite being aesthetic texts, are perceived to have a function in the sense that they are read in the same manner as books. In drawing on popular culture and fantasy, comics are perceived to operate within everyday life rather than outside of it. As such, comics do not pretend to exist outside of a capitalist market system as they are for sale as commodities and are in turn often openly authored by multiple people rather than a singular ‘genius’ artist. It is through the lens of Visual Studies and the more specialised discipline of Comic Studies that comics have been studied academically. It is here that I want to begin a discussion of my case study. As an academic discipline, Art History has been pushed to acknowledge its epistemological bias: its ideological link to a parochial European beginning and a disciplinary height that coincides with colonialism. In attempting to include material such as non-Western art and the material we now call visual culture (such as films) previously excluded from its historical frameworks, Art History has tended towards the tactic of inclusion rather than the creation of alternative methodological systems. As a film based on a comic that champions African content and Afrocentric discourse, Black Panther (2018), and the comic book creation of the Black Panther character, provide an opportunity to reflect on how a decolonial Art History might study comics, and, correlatively, how studying comics/comic-based films that employ methods such as Afrofuturism can shed light on methodologies for the decolonisation of Art History.

Afrofuturism and Animism In 2018 the film Black Panther was released to great popular acclaim with much of the positive critique focusing on the film’s empowering depiction of black characters; the African-American identity of its writers and director (Ryan Coogler); its reference to concerns relevant to those in the African diaspora and its reference to African art and culture. Much of this positive critique is also based on the notion that Black Panther employs Afrofuturism as a method. Afrofuturism refers to a more specific form of speculative fiction that deals with concerns relating to African and African-American people (Dery 1994, p. 180). As such it was used historically to refer to fantasy elements employed by artists and musicians such as the African-American Sun Ra who rose to fame in the 1950s through his development of a mythical persona that drew on ancient Egyptian culture and references to futuristic outer space. In this sense, and importantly for this chapter, Afrofuturism seeks to provide a discourse that bends linear time by using African references to the past so as to imagine the future. Others have pointed out that this dislocation can take on a political element because it counters the colonial idea that African culture represents some kind of living past, while European or Western culture and ‘civilisation’ represent the present and future. The idea that Afrofuturism could provide an alternative epistemology that works against colonial thought was written about by

  AFROFUTURISM AND ANIMISM AS METHOD: ART HISTORY AND DECOLONISATION… 

233

Kodwo Eshun who emphasises Afrofuturism’s intentional and necessary dislocation of time as an attempt to create both counter-memories and counter-­ futures to contest the colonial archive (2003). In writing on epistemologies and the colonial characterisation of Africa, Valentin-Yves Mudimbe emphasises the dichotomising system that emerged though the colonial world view and was subsequently projected onto existing African (and other) knowledge systems (Mudimbe 1988). This dichotomising system perceived constructed dichotomies such as ‘traditional’ versus ‘modern’ as having a temporal logic: as there being a need to evolve from the one to the other. In other words, modernity has been positioned against that which is deemed ‘traditional’, and the traditional has been relegated to the static past. As Harry Garuba points out, Africa became, from the perspective of this colonial value system, the ultimate opposition to the modern, the civilised and the rational: it was in this process of disciplinisation and the creation of disciplinary structures of knowledge that Africa fell out of the boxes and landed in the domain of anthropology … [and that] many of the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, being disciplines of modernity, were invariably defined in opposition to Africa – African animism, African irrationality, African orality, etc. In short, Africa was the ultimate sign of the non-modern that was not available to disciplinary attention, except within the domain of anthropological knowledge. (Garuba 2012, p. 45)

For Garuba the system of thought perceived to be in opposition to the modern, colonial world view can be placed under the notion of animism or an animist unconscious. Drawing an African system of thought together under the term ‘animism’ is both a way to describe a colonial view of the ‘African other’ (as a Western construction) and a reclamation of the term in order to provide a common thread for a range of subaltern knowledge systems. In an earlier article Garuba describes animism as a spiritual philosophy where “animist gods and spirits are located and embodied in objects: the objects are the physical and material manifestations of the gods and spirits” (Garuba 2003, p. 267). Even without the reference to spirituality, animism can be said to describe an order of knowledge that focuses on the symbolic meaning afforded to the material world (natural and man-made). Animism, through a disruption of the Cartesian boundary between subject and object, works against the modernist conception of isolated subjects through a focus on material symbolism and embodied meaning (Garuba 2013, p. 43). As the metaphorical sign of the non-modern for the colonial order, animism is perceived by Garuba to offer a useful frame for “a different regime of knowledge, freed of the dualisms of the modern” that may, in a process of reclamation, offer a relevant epistemological grounding for African knowledge systems (2013, p. 45). If we place the animist regime of knowledge alongside the modern Western system, there are particular elements that stand out and are useful for this discussion that attempts to theoretically link Art History, decoloniality,

234 

D. BECKER

Afrofuturism and animism. The first element in this animist world view is that of accommodation or a flexible philosophy that readily allows for assimilation and appropriation. Wole Soyinka describes this “attitude of accommodation” in relation to African deities which, he says, “deny the existence of impurities or ‘foreign’ matter, in the god’s digestive system” (1976, pp.  53–54). This ability and desire to assimilate new material or apparently contradictory views into existing epistemologies is what Garuba describes as a continual re-­ enchantment of the world through a process in which the “rational and scientific are appropriated and transformed into the mystical and magical” (2003, p. 267). While this process of spiritualising objects may be described as appropriation or accommodation, it is also a subversion of the modernist logic of binary opposition which wants to pit the scientific against the spiritual, the traditional against the modern and the past against the present (2003, p. 270). Animism instead allows these elements to exist together. This perspective also works against the notion of the original so emphasised in art-historical discourse during the process of Western modernisation as it denies the linear logic of a singular, hermetically sealed work of art whose conception exists within the logic of copyright. The notion of the original loses its power when material objects and artworks are allowed to continually and self-consciously absorb additional elements. The second element of animism that I want to emphasise here is the creation of a conception of time that is not linear, positivist or progressive and accepts the apparent discordance and the “complex embeddedness of different temporalities” (Garuba 2013, p.  49). In this sense animism perceives the world as having multiple temporalities rather than one linear progression. This puts it in opposition to the perception of time emphasised in Enlightenment thought and utilised by canonical Western Art History which places all of material reality into linear movements and is framed by the logic of cultural progression. Garuba emphasises that this conception of temporality exists within many animist cultures and as such refers to it as “subaltern time” so as to nod towards the manner in which it provides an other to the colonial modern that “simultaneously constitutes and haunts the modern” (2003, p. 281, p. 45). These elements allow for a fruitful overlap between Afrofuturism as genre, philosophy and cultural aesthetic and the animist epistemology described by Garuba and others. Afrofuturism seeks to dissolve the modernist temporal logic and instead perceives it as “plastic, stretchable and prophetic … a technologized time, in which past and future are subject to ceaseless de-and recomposition” (Fisher 2013, p. 47). This fits well within an animist world view that allows, as Garuba has emphasised, the malleable view of philosophy. Here both animism and Afrofuturism oppose colonial discourse and a Western binary logic by maintaining and enjoying the tension between oppositional temporalities, philosophies and material manifestations. Afrofuturism can be perceived as a cultural method that sits within a broader animist world view and, as is most relevant for this chapter, emphasises the undoing of linear temporality.

  AFROFUTURISM AND ANIMISM AS METHOD: ART HISTORY AND DECOLONISATION… 

235

Black Panther Manipulating temporality through an Afrofuturist perspective is described by Nomusa Makhubu as a radical return to the past in order to engage in a process of change for the future (2016, p. 300). Makhubu looks at Nollywood video-­ film and its use of the fantastic in relation to historical African cultural traditions, and proposes the use of the term ‘labyrinthine time’ to describe the performance of “fantastic concepts of past, current and future time simultaneously” (2016, p. 301). Here, the use of historical forms or references to cultural traditions through the fantastic becomes an act of political reclamation of a history denied or abused by colonial logic. The film version of Black Panther (2018) and its acclaimed references to African cultural traditions manipulates temporality in an Afrofuturist manner.8 Much of this is based on references to its comic book predecessors as discussed below. The comic book character Black Panther premiered as Marvel’s first black superhero to appear in mainstream American comics in Fantastic Four #52–53 in July 1966. The fictional character was created as writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby’s response to the civil rights movement that was gaining traction in the United States of America in the 1960s, yet the Black Panther name predates the founding of the Black Panther Party in October 1966. Following his debut, the Black Panther character made appearances in a number of Marvel comics including Captain America #100 (January–April 1968) and The Avengers #52. The character received his first starring feature in Jungle Action #5 (July 1973) and went on to star in the Jungle Action series which ran between 1973 and 1976 (#6–24). The series was written by Don McGregor from 1973 who explicitly wanted to pull the Jungle Action title away from a host of racist and sexist stereotypes that he believed were hopelessly outdated. McGregor reinvigorated the series so that it not only nodded to the fictional African nation of Wakanda but included predominantly African characters and provided far more detail on the context of Wakanda itself. From issue #10 onwards (1974–1976), the Jungle Action (Black Panther) comic had its artwork created by Billy Graham who had previously worked on Marvel’s Luke Cage series: the first black character to appear as a title character within the Western comics industry. Graham was himself African-American and was the first black artist to work on a Black Panther comic for Marvel. Black Panther ran as a series centred on the superhero for 15 issues (January 1977–May 1979). There was also a Black Panther mini-series (July–October 1988); an instalment within the anthology series Marvel Comics Presents which ran in issues #13–37 (February–December 1989); the miniseries Black Panther: Panther’s Prey (September 1990–March 1991); The Black Panther vol. 3 (1998); Black Panther vol. 4 which ran 41 issues between April 2005 and November 2008; Black Panther vol. 5 (February 2009); and a spin off from Daredevil with issue #513 titled Black Panther: The Man Without Fear (February 2011).

236 

D. BECKER

As a character, Black Panther embodies a classic superhero who has incredible physical and intellectual powers that, arguably, outperform many others within the Marvel universe. Black Panther is often depicted as having extreme physical strength and agility far beyond his enemies. Visually the character’s black, skin-tight suit reveals a body whose muscular form has been pushed towards the limit of fantasy. The Black Panther character is also depicted over a variety of his comic appearances as having enviable intelligence as he is often shown to have invented new technological breakthroughs. This is in line with the conception of the nation of Wakanda over which he rules as being a community posing as the stereotype of a primitive African tribe while in fact harbouring technological advancements far beyond the rest of the world’s capacity. In Fig. 1 from 2011 we see T’Challa, the Black Panther and King of Wakanda as the inventor of a flying suit for The Falcon, the first African-American superhero who appeared in Marvel’s Captain America in 1969. T’Challa is shown wearing a white coat in the midst of machinery so that he appears as a scientist. Both the chief character of Black Panther and the fictional nation of Wakanda take on,

Fig. 1  Jonathan Maberry (writer), Phil Winslade (penciller). Captain America: Hail Hydra, Issue #3 (March 2011)

  AFROFUTURISM AND ANIMISM AS METHOD: ART HISTORY AND DECOLONISATION… 

237

across many of his appearances over the decades, a certain futuristic, other-­ worldly and even godly perfection. The aspirational nature of Black Panther reaches beyond a simple attempt to reverse existing stereotypes of Africa and Africans as primitive and provides an Afrofuturistic view of a black god-like character: physically strong yet moral, intelligent yet spiritual, focused on the future yet rooted in cultural traditions. Perhaps it is the character’s ability to embody what Western philosophy, with its dichotomous methodology, would struggle to contain that makes it so appealing to African and African-American audiences. This “everything at once” superhero may be seen to embody the animist philosophy that Garuba sees as “a different regime of knowledge, freed of the dualisms of the modern” ready to accommodate apparent contradictions (2013, p. 45). Throughout the development of the Black Panther series as it runs through the hands of a variety of creators, there is a constant, albeit at different levels, reference to African traditions. Wakanda has two main elements at its disposal that confer great power upon it: the use of the powerful and versatile metallic ore known as vibranium and the concurrent adherence to spiritual traditions and rituals that activate vibranium’s magical properties. This fact allows Black Panther comics to artfully engage in a primary characteristic of Afrofuturism and animism through the combination of scientific and ritualistic elements. In Fig.  2 we see Black Panther explaining to the Thing in Fantastic Four #53 (1966) that he gains his panther powers through the ingestion of certain herbs

Fig. 2  Stan Lee (writer). Jack Kirby (penciller). Fantastic Four, Issue #53 (August 1966)

238 

D. BECKER

and the performance of sacred rituals. In issue #1 of Black Panther: The Deadliest of the Species (see Fig. 3), the priest or shaman character of Zawavari speaks to T’Challa/Black Panther about the panther god in a spiritual manner that emphasises the importance of the people over the individual—a philosophy common among many African cultures. In 2016 Marvel Comics published a new Black Panther series written by Ta-Nehisi Coates and drawn by Brian Stelfreeze. This was followed with a subsequent series titled Black Panther: Long Live the King (2017) written by the Afrofuturist writer Nnedi Okorafor. The key significance of the Black Panther series written by Coates and then Okorafor is that the authors focus on African and African-diasporic themes and concerns and were already known for their innovative and politically incisive writing. Coates is an African-American author and journalist whose published work deals with the socio-political concerns relating to being black in America. His first monograph (The Beautiful Struggle, 2008) was a memoir that looked at his relationship with his father who was a member of the Black Panther political organisation, and his second (Between the World and Me, 2015) dealt with the history of physical and psychological violence affecting African-American bodies. As such, when Coates became the writer for Marvel’s new Black Panther series along with the black artist Stelfreeze, it began a new era for the Black Panther character and the portrayal of the superhero. As Arturo Garcia wrote for The Guardian in September

Fig. 3  Reginald Hudlin (writer), Ken Lashley (penciller). Black Panther: The Deadliest of the Species, Issue #6 (December 2009)

  AFROFUTURISM AND ANIMISM AS METHOD: ART HISTORY AND DECOLONISATION… 

239

2015, the choice to employ Coates and Stelfreeze came at a time when Marvel had been criticised for employing too few black writers and artists (Garcia 2015). With the added promise of the new Black Panther film (released in January 2018) starring Chadwick Boseman, there was a high level of anticipation for Coates’ work and the potential disruption to the homogeneity of the comics industry. To follow this with the employment of the Nigerian-American (or as she prefers, Naijamerican), Okorafor heralded a potentially significant shift in both the specific arc of the Black Panther narrative and visual representation within the comics industry in general. Okorafor has been labelled by others as an Afrofuturist writer for some time, and her work can generally be described as fantasy or science fiction that draws on African culture, spirituality, history and mythology. Her novel Lagoon (2014), for example, begins from the premise that aliens have landed in Lagos and uses Nigerian mythology to weave together multiple points of view. In her Binti novella trilogy, Okorafor traces the life of Binti, a Himba woman who is accepted into an intergalactic university called Oomza Uni where she interacts with various alien species. Despite having been defined as an Afrofuturist writer, recently Okorafor has rejected the label and has instead advocated for her own term, Africanfuturism. She defines Africanfuturism as a “sub-category of science fiction” that is “specifically and more directly rooted in African culture, history, mythology and point-of-view as it then branches into the Black Diaspora, and it does not privilege or center the West” (Okorafor 2020, p. iv). This rejection of a given label not only asserts her autonomy on a personal level but operates as a rejection of an existing methodology that she perceives as originating in the West in favour of one that is based in African epistemology. Okorafor’s rejection then is in some sense analogous to the rejection of other Western epistemological systems, such as Art History, in favour of a new methodology that not only ‘includes’  new case studies but rather presents knowledge centred in Africa. This difference, between including new discourse within an existing epistemological system and acknowledging an existing different system, is in turn what Garuba and others point to when writing about animism as a frame for a knowledge system that provides a “spectral other that simultaneously constitutes and haunts the modern” or in other words haunts the parochial framework of enlightenment philosophy and the academic disciplines it has begetted (Garuba 2013, p. 45). The employment of Okorafor and Coates to write for Marvel on Black Panther marks an important shift in the comic book characterisation of Black Panther and the manner in which the fantastical universe of the superhero fits within the decolonisation of cultural material. Much of the critique of historical Black Panther comics, and indeed criticisms that extended to the more recent film, have pivoted on its use of stereotypical images of Africa and African people that corroborate the Western, colonial perception of Africa as primitive and its people as animalistic and physically powerful while intellectually weak. In Garuba’s terms the African became, within colonial ideology, “the ultimate sign of the non-modern”: irrational, primitive, animist, traditional and so on (Garuba 2012, p. 45). Commentators

240 

D. BECKER

on Black Panther (2018) noted that the film continued many of the racist tropes about Africa and African people that begun with earlier comic versions of the narrative. As Anna Peppard notes in relation to earlier comics, “depictions of Black Panther’s conflicts with racialized supervillains and animals as well as his routine depiction within gratuitous spectacles of suffering and bondage demonstrate a simultaneous – and occasionally overwhelming – tendency to appropriate the black body in the service of white desires and anxieties” (Peppard, 2018, p. 60). The film was perceived to perpetuate the stereotype of Africa as bound to the realm of the animalistic, as requiring white or white-­ sanctioned saviours and of being a space more akin to a homogenous nation than a large, heterogeneous continent. Similar criticisms have existed about the older comic book versions of Black Panther which readily show images of a tribal Africa where animal and human relations merge. In Fig. 4, for example, we see the introduction of the character known as Madam Slay in the Jungle Action comic (Issue #18, November 1975) drawn by Billy Graham—the image falls easily within many existing stereotypes. Madam Slay is surrounded by leopards, dressed herself in leopard skin and lying in a reclining position that potentially objectifies her body. The conflation of the animal and the human potentially reads as both racist and sexist. The Jungle Action series has historically been the subject of much criticism because of the manner in which it seems to provide exactly the stereotypical version of Africa that critical theorists

Fig. 4  Don McGregor (writer), Billy Graham (penciller). Jungle Action, issue #18 (November 1975). Showing the introduction of Madame Slay as a character

  AFROFUTURISM AND ANIMISM AS METHOD: ART HISTORY AND DECOLONISATION… 

241

Fig. 5  Ta-Nehisi Coates (writer), Daniel Acuña (penciller). Black Panther, issue #5 (October 2018)

speak about. Indeed the character of Black Panther himself as a human imbued with power through an animal potentially speaks to these problematic stereotypes. Peppard points to the historical depiction of Black Panther as being “bound up with animals in a kind of intercorporeal exchange across species lines” and the difference between the white characters who “prove and display their humanity – and their whiteness – by wearing as little clothing as possible”, while Black Panther “covers his blackness with an even-blacker animal skin” so that he become racially overdetermined (2018, p. 69). More recent versions of Black Panther in comic form continue to use similar depictions of the character, particularly in the sense of the black costume that turns T’Challa into the panther. While more recent writers and pencillers have been lauded for their postcolonial approach to the character, writers such as Coates and pencillers such as Daniel Acuña continued to push the animal-­ human hybridity seen in past iterations of Black Panther. In Fig. 5 we see an image of Black Panther from issue #5 (2018) where the character’s costume shows none of his skin and his feline characteristics, such as his claws and facial features, have been emphasised. Yet despite this, Black Panther under Coates has received great critical acclaim and a firm following from a black audience. The nod to the notion of a revolution that brings about a racial and cultural renaissance for African people in a futuristic sense is felt in both Coates and Okorafor’s Black Panthers. For issue #2 of Black Panther under the partnership of Coates and Stelfeeze, the cover shows a large statue of the panther being pulled down by a group of citizens who are revolting against T’Challa’s leadership in Wakanda (Fig. 6). The image appears to reference, somewhat ironically, the South African student movements of 2015 that had the statue of Cecil John Rhodes removed from

242 

D. BECKER

Fig. 6  Ta-Nehisi Coates (writer), Brian Stelfreeze (penciller). Black Panther, issue #2 (May 2016)

  AFROFUTURISM AND ANIMISM AS METHOD: ART HISTORY AND DECOLONISATION… 

243

the University of Cape Town under the banner of Rhodes Must Fall. This revolutionary movement spread to other parts of the world including the United States of America where an increasing number of confederate statues were pulled down in a manner akin to the panther image. While the anti-racist sentiments of Rhodes Must Fall and those leading to confederate statue removal appear to be at odds with the removal of a fictional statue of the Black Panther, the sentiment of revolution and the critique of institutionalised power is apt.

Black Panther, Afrofuturism, Art History and Decoloniality What allows the Black Panther film (2018) and the recent comic book iterations by Coates and Okorafor to read as celebratory nods to Afrofuturism (or Africanfuturism) rather than examples of a perpetuation of colonial stereotypes through a neocolonial, capitalist regime? It seems it is the reference to African traditions, fashions, spirituality, art and other forms of culture in a manner that does not attempt to protect the past in some kind of museum of authenticity but rather transports these cultural forms into a fantastical future. The opening up of a different concept of time and the seamless merging of the scientific with the spiritual in the recent iterations of the Black Panther narrative allow these phenomena to sit within the animist philosophy as Garuba describes it, as a knowledge system embodying the anti-modern or an epistemology that is both the fetishised Other of Western modernity and its antidote (2013). Herein lies the core of my argument: that the very exaggeration of African cultural elements in the Black Panther film as well as Coates and Okorafor’s comic books pushes these forms beyond the racist trope into the realm of the Afrofuturist through the animist methodology of accommodation. In other words, when Coates chooses to focus on Black Panther as a human-animal hybrid, he risks turning the character into a racial stereotype because of the historical Western perception and misunderstanding of African spirituality that exists as a result of colonialism. Yet, to avoid references to African traditions within contemporary fantasy allows the stereotypes to flourish and remain fetishised. What Afrofuturism has the potential to do is to reclaim references to African cultural traditions and push them beyond the racial fetish through the animist method of circular time or, as Makhubu calls it “labyrinthine time” (2016, p. 301). It is this methodology employed by Afrofuturist (or perhaps even better, Africanfuturist) texts that may be useful for the discourse of Art History. If we see Art History as an ideological apparatus with its origins in Western colonialism and an indelible connection to race, culture and class, then its decolonisation may not come from the addition of case studies from non-Western material culture. The decolonisation of Art History requires the acknowledgement of alternative epistemologies that operate with a different set of art-historical methods. If the methodology of Afrofuturism and animism is employed within art-historical discourse, they may offer a means for decolonisation through an emphasis on the study of historical African forms and the way in which they are linked to the present. The very analysis of material culture such as comic books

244 

D. BECKER

and films rejects Western Art History’s focus on the individually authored work of art that is positioned outside of popular culture. To study comics that reference African cultural forms within the discipline of Art History while employing methodology rooted in African philosophy may in fact be a decolonial act. Acknowledgement  This work was completed during a postdoctoral fellowship at Stellenbosch University with funding from the Mellon Foundation under the project The Decolonial Turn: Unsettling Paradigms.

Notes 1. The terminology used to define these geographical and epistemological spaces is fraught. In their recent book Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis, Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh refer to concepts originating in ‘Western Europe and the Anglo United States’ as a way of locating colonial thought in specific locales (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018: 2). 2. See Oltermann 2021. Germany has agreed to return some of the bronze works looted from Benin City in 1897 during the British punitive expedition that became part of the collection of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. Thousands of works from Benin City made their way into European museum collections as a result of the 1897 looting with the most notable collection being housed in the British Museum. What is striking about this recent agreement to return work to present-day Nigeria is that the objects will move from the Ethnological museum where they have the status of artefacts to the proposed Edo Museum of West African Art. 3. See, for example, key works on postcolonial Art History such as that of Olu Oguibe, Partha Mitter, R.  Siva Kumar, Kenneth Coutts-Smith, David Craven, and Okwui Enzewor. 4. Each of these disciplines emerged as a response to what had previously been excluded in disciplines like Art History and each proposed a specific way of overcoming art-historical biases and omissions. Each discipline emerged within a specific cultural and geographical context. Cultural Studies and specifically its British iteration, for example, maintains a focus on the political dynamics of culture and was formulated through the work of particular writers such as Stuart Hall. 5. For further discussion of Visual Culture Studies Cf. Roan chapter “What Is an Image? Art History, Visual Culture Studies and Comics Studies” (this volume). 6. For further discussion of Vasari’s Lives, Cf. Yu-Kiener chapter “The Lives of the Artists”. 7. Martha Woodmansee investigates the effect of this understanding of authorship and Western notions of intellectual property on law and literature in The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature (1994). 8. See Afrofuturism and Black Panther (Strong and Chaplin 2019) and issue number 33 of Image and Text (Karam and Kirby-Hirst 2019) with its articles on Black Panther.

  AFROFUTURISM AND ANIMISM AS METHOD: ART HISTORY AND DECOLONISATION… 

245

References Akande, Abiodun. 2017. Decolonizing the Curriculum: Synthesizing ‘Multiple Consciousness’ into the Art History Curricula of Nigeria and Ghana. CAA Global Conversations. Baxandall, Michael. 1988. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bhabha, Homi K. 2012. The Location of Culture. Oxon; New York: Routledge. D’Souza, Aruna, and Jill Casid, eds. 2014. Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn. Williamstown, Massachusetts: Clark Art Institute. Dery, M. 1994. Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. Durham: Duke University Press. Elkins, James. 2007. Is Art History Global? New York; London: Routledge. Eshun, Kodwo. 2003. Further Considerations of Afrofuturism. The New Centennial Review 3 (2), pp. 287–302. Fisher, Mark. 2013. The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology. Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 5 (2), pp. 42–55. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New  York: Pantheon Books. Garcia, Arturo. 2015. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Black Panther Is a Hopeful First Step for Diversity at Marvel. The Guardian, September 23. Garuba, Harry. 2003. Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/Writing African Literature, Culture, and Society. Public Culture 15 (2), pp.  261–286. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-­15-­2-­261 ———. 2012. African Studies, Area Studies, and the Logic of the Disciplines. In African Studies in the Postcolonial University, eds. Thandabantu Nhlapo and Harry Garuba. pp.  39-52. Cape Town: University of Cape Town & Centre for African Studies. ———. 2013. On Animism, Modernity/Colonialism and the African Order of Knowledge: Provisional Reflections. In Contested Ecologies: Dialogues in the South on Nature and Knowledge, pp. 42–51. Cape Town: HSRC Press. Grant, Catherine, and Dorothy Price. 2020. Decolonizing Art History. Art History 43, pp. 8–66. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-­8365.12490 Karam, Beschara, and Mark Kirby-Hirst (guest editors) 2019. Image and Text, 33. (themed section Black Panther and Afrofuturism). Lessing, Gotthold Ephrahim. 1958. Lacoön (1766). In A Documentary History of Art Volume II, ed. Elizabeth Holt. pp. 351-359. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books. Makhubu, Nomusa. 2016. Interpreting the Fantastic: Video-Film as Intervention. Journal of African Cultural Studies 28 (3), pp. 299–312. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2011. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham: Duke University Press. Mudimbe, Valentin-Yves. 1988. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nettleton, Anitra. 2006. Shaking Off the Shackles: From Apartheid to African Renaissance in History of Art Syllabi. In Compression vs. Expression: Containing and Explaining the World’s Art, pp. 39–56. Williamstown, Massachusetts: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute.

246 

D. BECKER

Odiboh, Freeborn O. 2009. “Africanizing” A Modern African Art History Curriculum from the Perspectives of an Insider. An International Multi-Disciplinary Journal 3 (1), pp. 451-467 Okorafor, Nnedi. 2020. Africanfuturism Defined. In African Futurism: An Anthology, ed. Wole Talabi. Brittle Paper. Oltermann, Phillip. 2021. Germany first to hand back Benin bronzes looted by British. The Guardian, April 30. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ apr/30/germany-first-to-hand-back-benin-bronzes-looted-by-british. Accessed 28 November 2021. Peppard, Anna F. 2018. ‘A Cross Burning Darkly, Blackening the Night’: Reading Racialized Spectacles of Conflict and Bondage in Marvel’s Early Black Panther Comics. Studies in Comics 9 (1), pp. 59–85. Preziosi, Donald. 2009. The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Schwartz, F.J. 1999. Cathedrals and Shoes: Concepts of Style in Wölfflin and Adorno. New German Critique 76 (Winter), pp. 3–48. Shiner, Larry. 2001. The Invention of Art: A Cultural History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Soyinka, Wole. 1976. Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strong, Myron T., and K. Sean Chaplin. 2019. Afrofuturism and Black Panther. Contexts 18 (2), pp. 58–59. Vasari, Giorgio. 1958. ‘Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550)’. In A Documentary History of Art Volume I, ed. Elizabeth Holt. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books. Woodmansee, Martha and Peter Jaszi (eds). 1994. The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

What Is an Image? Art History, Visual Culture Studies, and Comics Studies Jeanette Roan

Abstract  This chapter considers what Visual Culture Studies can offer to the study of comics. It begins with a brief overview of the emergence of Visual Culture Studies and its relationship to Art History, before focusing on how a broad framing of the object of study and the interdisciplinary methodologies used by Visual Culture Studies makes it a useful critical framework for the study of comics. The second half of the chapter engages with Lynda Barry’s explorations of the nature of the image in her works What It Is and Syllabus. Barry’s work is seen as a theory of the image in its own right, rather than an object to be analysed by theories of visual culture or an illustration of an existing theory. Instead, her contemplation of the image is situated within an interest in the presence of the image within Visual Culture Studies, and it is juxtaposed with Hans Belting’s An Anthropology of Images as one example of what a Visual Culture Studies approach to the study of comics might yield. Keywords  Visual Culture Studies and comics • Art History and Visual Culture Studies • Interdisciplinarity • Image • Lynda Barry • Hans Belting

J. Roan (*) California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Gray, I. Horton (eds.), Seeing Comics through Art History, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8_13

247

248 

J. ROAN

Introduction: Visual Culture Studies and Art History In a volume dedicated to the question of what Art History can offer to the study of comics, what is the place of a chapter on Visual Culture Studies? In order to answer this question, and furthermore to determine what Visual Culture Studies might offer comics scholarship, it is necessary to revisit the history of Art History and Visual Culture Studies. After an overview of the emergence of Visual Culture Studies, this chapter will highlight two aspects of this practice that are particularly relevant to comics scholarship: How Visual Culture Studies defines its object of study, and its interdisciplinary methodologies. The second half of the chapter will present an exploration of Lynda Barry’s theory of the image from a Visual Culture Studies perspective, followed by a concluding reflection on methodology. First, what exactly is Visual Culture Studies? Douglas Crimp wrote, “Cultural studies, visual culture, and visual studies are often used interchangeably in the current debates, although sometimes distinctions are made” (1999, p. 51). Among those who insisted upon distinctions, James Elkins began his “skeptical introduction” to Visual Studies with a chapter titled “What Is Visual Studies” in which he distinguishes between Cultural Studies, Visual Culture, and Visual Studies. He used “visual culture” to reference the current state of the field as well as the field of study, but “visual studies” to denote what he hoped visual culture would become, “the study of visual practices across all boundaries” (2003, pp. 1–7). Like Elkins, Marquard Smith devoted one section of his introduction to the book Visual Culture Studies to the question “What’s in a Name: Visual Culture or Visual Studies or Visual Culture Studies?” Smith favoured “Visual Culture Studies” (2008, p. 8). A decade after his Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction, in an introduction to an edited anthology of graduate student writings on Visual Studies, Elkins suggested, “In general, those who favor visual culture want to emphasize that the subject in question is culture and not vision, and those who favor visual studies want to stress the generality of the field and its commitment to visuality.” He continued, “Because the contributors to this book take various positions in that regard, we are not consistent in naming our subject” (2013, p. 8). For scholars who are engaged in these pursuits, “Visual Culture,” “Visual Studies,” and “Visual Culture Studies” may be terms with distinct meanings. However, for the purposes of this chapter, which considers the question of what Visual Culture Studies can offer to the study of comics, the differences among them may be less significant. Therefore, I will be using “Visual Studies” and “Visual Culture Studies” here somewhat interchangeably, though typically according to the preferences of the scholars I am referencing, and with the understanding that the terms point to roughly the same set of intellectual frameworks and practices, even though their meanings may shift depending on the context. For many scholars, the journal October’s “Visual Culture  Questionnaire” which appeared in its summer 1996 issue, was a significant event in defining the distinctions between Art History and Visual Culture Studies.1 The

  WHAT IS AN IMAGE? ART HISTORY, VISUAL CULTURE STUDIES, AND COMICS… 

249

questionnaire comprised a series of four statements which each began, “It has been suggested that.” The first suggested that Visual Culture is organised on the model of Anthropology rather than History, and therefore is “in an eccentric (even, at times, antagonistic) position with regard to the ‘new art history’.” The second traced Visual Culture’s embrace of a “breadth of practice” back to the thinking of “an early generation of art historians—such as Riegl and Warburg,” implying that Visual Culture was merely the rediscovery of certain (foundational) strands of Art History. The third suggested that Visual Culture is helping to “produce subjects for the next stage of globalized capital” via its conception of the visual as disembodied image, and the last situated the interdisciplinarity of Visual Culture within the context of pressures within the academy as well as “shifts of a similar nature within art, architectural, and film practices” (Krauss et  al. 1996, p.  25). Responses from 19 well-established scholars from disciplines as varied as Art History, Comparative Literature, Film and Media Studies, and English followed the four statements.2 The issue also included lengthier essays by Kurt W. Forster, W.J.T. Mitchell, Rosalind Krauss, and Hal Foster, some of which expanded upon the criticisms implied by the questions. Margaret Dikovitskaya’s history of Visual Culture and Visual Studies in the United States describes the statements as “openly unsympathetic to visual studies,” and suggests that the questionnaire as a whole was “conceived as an attack on the new research area” that nevertheless had the positive effect of “help[ing] proponents of visual culture to articulate their positions and thus contributed to the theoretical growth of the new field” (2005, pp.  17–18). According to Anne Friedberg, the questionnaire was directly linked to the choice of the name “Visual Studies” rather than “Visual Culture” for a new doctoral program at the University of California, Irvine: “We chose to call our program Visual Studies, rather than Visual Culture, in full knowledge of the October magazine ‘Questionnaire on Visual Culture,’ because we wanted to be certain that our definition of the study of vision and visuality and its cultural effects would not be ‘tarred by,’ i.e., too directly associated with, cultural studies” (2005, p. 156). Dikovitskaya categorises the perspectives of scholars referenced in her book into three groups based upon their views of the relationship between Visual Studies and Art History: those who believe Visual Studies is an expansion of Art History, those who see Visual Studies as independent of Art History, and those who believe Visual Studies to be a threat to Art History (2005, p. 3). The years that followed the questionnaire saw a number of scholars offering definitions of Visual Culture Studies in relation to Art History. Some of these writings, such as Irit Rogoff’s contribution to Nicholas Mirzoeff’s influential The Visual Culture Reader explicitly acknowledged the October questionnaire and went on to counterpose Visual Culture Studies to Art History. Rogoff describes Visual Culture as “transdisciplinary and cross-methodological,” offering an opportunity to “unframe” discussions from established disciplinary fields, including Art History. In a parenthetical aside she suggests that within an art-­ historical context, the formation of “the good eye” was seen as sufficient for

250 

J. ROAN

students who otherwise lacked intellectual curiosity or had a narrow understanding of culture (1998, pp.  16–17). Although this representation of Art History was an exaggerated caricature even then, her essay clearly situates Visual Culture Studies in opposition to Art History. Douglas Crimp’s “Getting the Warhol We Deserve,” which responds to not only the October Visual Culture questionnaire but also some of the articles published in that same issue, explicitly challenges established art-historical scholarship on Andy Warhol and the ways in which it has obscured Warhol’s sexuality. Crimp advocates for Visual Culture Studies, understood as a “narrower area of cultural studies,” as an alternative (1999, p.  52). W.J.T. Mitchell’s article “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture” begins, “What is visual culture or visual studies?” (2002, p. 165). Mitchell characterises aesthetics as “the theoretical branch of the study of art” and Art History as “the historical study of artists, artistic practices, styles, movements, and institutions.” In relation to these two disciplines and drawing upon Jacques Derrida, he names Visual Studies the “dangerous supplement,” which functions to fill in the “gaps” in aesthetics and Art History while also threatening their boundaries (2002, p. 167). “From a visual culture standpoint,” James Elkins writes, “art history can appear disconnected from contemporary life, essentially or even prototypically elitist, politically naïve, bound by older methodologies, wedded to the art market, or hypnotized by the allure of a limited set of artists and artworks” (2003, p. 23). In the two and a half decades since the publication of the October questionnaire, the occasionally antagonistic relationship between Art History and Visual Culture Studies has softened as the status of Visual Culture Studies has become both more institutionalised and less defined. The critiques of Visual Culture Studies implied in the four opening statements have faded, with the exception of the valorisation of early art historians, whose usefulness for the study of a range of practices, including comics, is demonstrated in previous chapters of the present volume.3 The title of the Stone Summer Theory Institute’s 2011 symposium, “Farewell to Visual Studies,” even suggested that the era of Visual Studies was coming to an end. However, the readings, lectures, and conversations that took place at the week-long event actually testified to the diverse range of practices and heterogeneity of scholarship that could be understood as Visual Studies in what turned out to be more of a reflection upon the past and future of Visual Studies than a wake for a bygone practice (Elkins et al. 2015).4 At one seminar, when W.J.T. Mitchell proposed, “All in favor of saying farewell to visual studies and getting on to something else, raise your hands,” the book version of the symposium records the collective response of the participants as “[No one raises their hands; everyone laughs]” (Elkins et  al. 2015, p.  76). Meanwhile, the International Association for Visual Culture held their inaugural meeting in 2010, and their first conference, titled “NOW! Visual Culture,” was convened by Nicholas Mirzoeff in 2012. There are now many textbooks, anthologies, monographs, journal articles, and other writings that can be collected under the umbrella of Visual Culture Studies, yet the practice of Visual Culture Studies—I am deliberately avoiding the use of the terms “discipline”

  WHAT IS AN IMAGE? ART HISTORY, VISUAL CULTURE STUDIES, AND COMICS… 

251

or “field”—is even more complicated to summarise today than it was in the late 1990s, and its relationship to Art History, which has also of course undergone considerable change in the past few decades, is no easier to determine. For example, several of the scholars I will be relying upon in the remainder of this chapter about Visual Culture Studies identify as art historians. Over time, the identity of Visual Culture Studies has multiplied, reaching backwards in time towards various origins and genealogies, and forward into future possibilities yet to be fully realised.

Interdisciplinarity and the Object of Analysis Despite the difficulty in pinning down one single definition of Visual Culture Studies in the contemporary moment, it is still possible to identify significant differences between Art History and Visual Culture Studies that impact what Visual Culture Studies can offer to the study of comics.5 I will focus on two related issues here. The first is the object of Visual Culture Studies, and the second is its interdisciplinary methodologies. While the history of art is, at its very foundation, an historical approach to the always changing, yet generally relatively narrow, definition of what constitutes “art,” the expansiveness of “visual culture” as the object of Visual Culture Studies allows for the study of a broad range of subjects, including comics. Donald Preziosi has thoughtfully delineated the shifting definitions of the object of Art History, writing, “Critical historiographic accounts of the discipline of art history are continually beset by unresolved questions about the field’s proper purview or object-domain of study” (2009, p. 8). However, even an expanded sense of what it is that Art History studies remains qualitatively distinct from how Visual Culture Studies approaches its object. Consider, for example, Michael Ann Holly’s response to undergraduates who asked her the question “What is visual studies?”: “It isn’t a discipline; it isn’t a field. It just names a problematic. It shakes up complacency. No objects are excluded. Visual studies names an attitude in relation to visual things, rather than a department” (Elkins et al. 2015, p. 45). However, Visual Culture Studies has also been criticised for its seeming lack of discrimination, and charged with flattening important distinctions between various media. As Mitchell notes, one of the “myths” surrounding Visual Culture is that it entails “the liquidation of art as we have known it,” when in fact Visual Culture “encourages reflection on the differences between art and non-art” (2002, pp. 169–170). What this means for Comics Studies is that the question of whether or not comics are “art” and therefore worthy of study becomes, instead, one of how “art” has been defined, and an interrogation of the specific operations that have marginalised practices such as comics and cartooning as merely popular or “low” culture, of little enduring value and undeserving of analysis. In other words, whether a particular creative practice is considered art or not is a topic of inquiry, rather than a requirement for entry. It is surely not an accident that Bart Beaty titled his book Comics versus Art, rather than, for example, Comics and Art. The first chapter of the book,

252 

J. ROAN

following the introduction, asks “What if Comics Were Art?” implying, of course, that comics are not art. Beaty traces the institutionalisation of Comics Studies, initially in departments of American Studies, Popular Culture Studies, Communication Studies, and Cultural Studies, then in departments of English Literature. He notes, “As art departments, and in particular art history departments, lagged in the adoption of courses and research on comics, the literary turn in the study of comics prevailed” (2012, p. 18). Thus, “One of the significant consequences of the literary turn in the study of comics has been a tendency to drive attention away from comics as a form of visual culture. Comics have rarely been considered an art form akin to painting, sculpture, or photography, and they are not commonly taught in courses in art history” (Beaty 2012, pp.  17–18).6 Although Beaty describes his book as a sociology of art rather than as a practice of Visual Culture Studies or Visual Studies, nevertheless his reference to “comics as a form of visual culture” is congruent with understandings of “visual culture” within Visual Culture Studies. The point here is that within the framework of Visual Culture Studies, comics do not have to be considered akin to painting or other forms of traditional fine arts to be taught in courses or studied and written about by scholars. For a concrete example of how comics can figure within Visual Culture Studies, we can compare two textbooks, one in Visual Studies and another in Art History. Introductory textbooks serve as ways of defining a field, giving students an initial glimpse into a specific subject and how to study and understand it. In Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Studies, now in its third edition, authors Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright include comics alongside other examples of visual culture including social media, fine arts, advertising, mass media, scientific images, and more. Scott McCloud’s play upon René Magritte’s famous painting Treachery of Images (1929) in Understanding Comics is used to make a point about representation and icons, while a few panels from Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis serve as an example of iconic signs as defined by Charles Sanders Peirce (Sturken and Cartwright 2017, pp. 21–22, 35–36). A discussion of the distinction between high and low culture, undergirded by the theories of Pierre Bourdieu, notes the struggle for cultural legitimacy on the part of comic books and graphic novels, while an analysis of Simone Martini’s and Lippo Memmi’s painting The Annunciation (1333) compares the presence of a line of Latin text in the work to the representation of speech in a graphic novel, without ever suggesting that a fourteenth-­ century painting and a twenty-first-century comic are equivalent. What they share, however, is a similar response to the common challenge of how to represent speech in a visual medium (Sturken and Cartwright 2017, pp. 64, 151). Crucially, in a section of the chapter on postmodernism about Roy Lichtenstein’s Pop Art appropriations of comics, Practices of Looking acknowledges the source for Lichtenstein’s painting Drowning Girl (1963) as Tony Abruzzo’s “Run For Love” story in the DC Comics title Secret Hearts issue #83 (1962) (Sturken and Cartwright 2017, p. 312).7 Sturken and Cartwright are not as critical of this appropriation as Beaty in Comics versus Art, who writes

  WHAT IS AN IMAGE? ART HISTORY, VISUAL CULTURE STUDIES, AND COMICS… 

253

of “pop art’s Jerome-like theft of comics-derived imagery” and how “pop art, with its seemingly tight relationship with comics and other aspects of consumer culture, is the seemingly perfect ‘evil’ in the mind’s eye of resentful cartoonists” (2012, p.  54). Nevertheless, the crediting of the cartoonist and comic book from which Lichtenstein derived his work is a marked departure from much art-historical writing about Lichtenstein and Pop Art, which typically briefly establishes Pop Art’s engagement with popular culture (such as comics) in general before moving on to analyses of the works of art themselves. As an example, Gardner’s Art Through the Ages: A Global History, a popular introductory Art History textbook, devotes a brief Artists on Art section to “Roy Lichtenstein on Pop Art and Comic Books” in which Lichtenstein is quoted as saying “[Pop artists portray] what I think to be the most brazen and threatening characteristics of our culture, things we hate, but which are also so powerful in their impingement upon us” (Kleiner 2020, p. 976). The author of the textbook adds, “The influence of comic books is evident in Lichtenstein’s mature works.” In discussing Lichtenstein’s painting Hopeless (1963), he writes, “Here, Lichtenstein excerpted an image from a comic book, a form of entertainment meant to be read and discarded, and immortalized the image on a large canvas. Aside from that modification, Lichtenstein remained remarkably faithful to the original comic-strip image” (Kleiner 2020, p. 976). There is no information about the original comic strip. Comic books are merely disposable forms of entertainment in this telling, though with the potential for being elevated to immortality as raw material for Pop Art commentary on popular culture. The people who create comics remain uncredited and inconsequential. According to the index of the more than 1000-page tome, comics are not mentioned again in this compendium of art from around the world from the Stone Age up to the 1980s. It seems clear that Visual Culture Studies more easily accommodates comics as a possible object of study than Art History does. The relationship of Visual Culture Studies to traditional academic disciplines also offers a methodological model for comics scholarship. In the introduction to her Narrative Structure in Comics, Barbara Postema identifies two approaches within comics criticism: “One says it is useful to use literary studies or film studies as touchstones for studying comics,” while “Another argues that it is important for comics studies to establish itself on its own terms, without relying on more traditional disciplines, not in the least because such reliance might hamper the discussion of comics in its own right” (2013, p. xviii). Postema recapitulates here a familiar challenge to studying comics and to the institutionalisation of Comics Studies. In the context of the present volume, we might consider whether it is useful to use Art History (rather than Literary Studies or Film Studies) as a “touchstone” for studying comics, or whether the reliance on art-historical methodologies might “hamper” the study of comics “in its own right.” Furthermore, such questions should also be related to ongoing discussions of interdisciplinarity and Comics Studies. In “Indiscipline, or, The Condition of Comics Studies,” Charles Hatfield calls for Comics Studies to “think concretely about

254 

J. ROAN

the relationships among disciplines as they interact within the field” (2010, p. 2). Gregory Steirer reinforces Hatfield’s call for a more intentional interdisciplinarity. Steirer’s review of scholarship in Comics Studies finds that it “possesses a primarily atomistic organization in which different works of scholarship do not explicitly engage with one another” (2011, p.  268). He proposes, instead, “an active or dynamic model of disciplinarity, produced through an interrogative and even competitive approach to self-identification among its representatives” (2011, p.  264). Dale Jacobs’s recent “Comics Studies as Interdiscipline” asks “How, in other words, can we move from being a collection of scholars from disparate backgrounds and attendant methodologies who all happen to study comics to being an interdiscipline that productively draws on our varied methodologies” (2020, p. 656)? Steirer explicitly looks to Visual Studies and Cultural Studies for models of how Comics Studies might engage with the question of disciplinary methodologies, as they are “‘disciplines’ marked by numerous internal debates over their own institutionalization and purpose, [and they] offer examples of such an unsettled disciplinarity in action and indeed inform this paper’s vision of how comics studies should approach its own scholarly identity” (2011, p. 264). It is true that nearly every effort to define Visual Culture Studies insists upon its interdisciplinarity. Mitchell’s description of Visual Studies, for example, bears more than a passing resemblance to the above citations: “Visual studies is not merely an indiscipline or dangerous supplement to the traditional vision-oriented disciplines, but an interdiscipline that draws on their resources and those of other disciplines to construct a new and distinctive object of research” (2002, p. 179). What might Comics Studies take from the efforts of Visual Studies to “construct a new and distinctive object of research” through interdisciplinary methods? Lynda Barry’s intriguing explorations of the image invite a creative methodological engagement that can serve as a case study for picturing how Visual Culture Studies might see comics.

Lynda Barry on “What Is an Image?” James Elkins’s introduction to Paul Karasik’s and Mark Newgarden’s How to Read Nancy suggests that there are already intersections and connections between Visual Studies and Comics Studies, not least in the very fact of the introduction itself. Even though Elkins asserts at the outset that he knows little about comics, he has clearly surveyed recent comics scholarship, and is gratified to find references to recognisable problematics and citations of scholars he has studied, what he characterises as “thin rope bridges leading from familiar territory to the world of comics” (2017, p. 13).8 He even offers bibliographic citations to those who “are interested in walking across these rope bridges that connect visual theory to comics” (Elkins 2017, p. 13). It is my hope that the present chapter could be considered another “thin rope bridge” between Visual Culture Studies and comics. What follows below is hardly the only way to imagine the intersection of Visual Culture Studies and Comics Studies,

  WHAT IS AN IMAGE? ART HISTORY, VISUAL CULTURE STUDIES, AND COMICS… 

255

particularly in light of the diversity of Visual Culture Studies as outlined above, but it gives one example of what a Visual Culture Studies approach to comics might yield. In a Guardian interview Lynda Barry credits Marilyn Frasca, her college painting teacher, with first asking her the question “What is an image?” Barry then adds, “And that has directed my entire career” (Randle 2015). Barry’s interest in the nature of the image has become more explicit in the works What It Is (2008), Picture This: The Near-Sighted Monkey Book (2010), and Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor (2014).9 Her latest, Making Comics (2019), implicitly continues her exploration of the image through an emphasis on the practice of drawing. The question “What is an image?” is of course a vast one within both Art History and Visual Culture Studies, and there are many different answers. However, the purpose of this case study is not to answer the question and define the image but, rather, to consider the ways in which we might engage with Barry’s explorations of the question within a Visual Culture Studies framework. This topic differs from much of the established scholarship on Barry, which has tended to address the themes of girlhood, multiracial identity, childhood trauma, and other related topics. Her more pedagogically oriented works have been less obvious subjects of study, perhaps because they fit less easily into frameworks of literary study; they are even less like a “novel” than the typical “graphic novel.”10 But Barry’s longstanding interest in the image is quite relevant to Visual Culture Studies. To be clear, the point is not to use Visual Culture Studies to analyse Barry’s work, nor to use Barry’s work to illustrate theories of visual culture. Viewing Barry’s work as itself a theoretical exploration of the nature of the image will help us to gain some insights into the image in general, which is to say that Barry can help us to “see” the image in a particular fashion. Furthermore, as comics, Barry’s reflections upon the image have the advantage of taking shape through images themselves, images that Barry or her students (or both, as in Barry’s tracings of student drawings) have created, alongside text that, as in all comics, sometimes reinforces the message of the images, or perhaps adds to them, or challenges or contradicts them. For the purposes of this brief foray into Barry’s work, my focus will be on one example each from Syllabus and What It Is, beginning with one of the most memorable assignments reproduced in Syllabus. The prompt for Barry’s assignment is based upon Ivan Brunetti’s spontaneous drawing exercises from his Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice. Brunetti’s instructions for the first exercise are to draw a car in three to four minutes, then to redraw it in decreasing amounts of time: two minutes, one minute, thirty seconds, fifteen seconds, and finally, five seconds. The second exercise involves drawing quick, five-to-ten second doodles of famous cartoon characters from memory (Brunetti 2011, pp. 25–26). Although there’s no record of exactly what Barry tells her students to do, on a page from Syllabus we see the handwritten suggestion, in Barry’s distinctive cursive lettering, “Let’s draw a car and then let’s draw Batman” (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1  Lynda Barry, Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor (Drawn and Quarterly, 2014), p. 25

She shows us her students’ drawings, reproducing them over ten pages, sharing space with handwritten, meandering reflections about the process of drawing. The first six pages feature a mix of cars and batmen, while the latter four are entirely full of batmen (Fig. 2). All the images are utterly compelling. Brunetti says of the results of his second exercise, “often these drawings are, technically speaking, ‘wrong’—but

Fig. 2  Lynda Barry, Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor (Drawn and Quarterly, 2014), page 30

also kind of right at the same time. One can tell who the character is supposed to be, even though it need not be strictly ‘accurate’” (2011, p. 26). The drawings from Barry’s students are stiff, awkward, largely uncertain, but, most of all, highly idiosyncratic. For the most part the batmen bear little visual resemblance to the famous caped crusader, aside from sharing what could be described as the minimum required to signify “Batman”—a cowl with pointy

258 

J. ROAN

ears, a cape that resembles the wings of a bat. If we look at these batmen as representations of the Batman, whether from the comic books, television shows, films, or some amalgamation of the above, then they are rather poor representations, as none of them really “look like” the familiar figure. But achieving perfect mimesis, as Brunetti points out, isn’t really the point of the exercise. The cursive text that surrounds the batmen in Syllabus, filling in the spaces of the pages between one batman and another, asks us to reconsider our largely unstated and ambiguous understandings of what constitutes a “good drawing,” and why people are so embarrassed when their drawings turn out seemingly childlike, naïve, and unpractised. Barry counters, “But what if the way kids draw—that kind of line that we call ‘childish’—what if that is what a line looks like when someone is having an experience by hand? A live wire! There is an aliveness in these drawings that can’t be faked, and when I look at them, that aliveness seems to come into me. I’m glad to see and feel them. Real aliveness of line is hard to come by.” On the next page she adds, “When someone learns to draw – to render – it’s the first thing that goes—the aliveness” (Barry 2014, pp. 31–32). The life of a line, the “aliveness” of a drawing—Barry’s language suggests a view of drawing as an animating practice. Eszter Szép argues, “Barry uses the word ‘image’ to describe the experience of aliveness felt in drawing lines” (2020). On page 14 of What It Is (2008), Barry tries to explain how an image is alive through a series of analogies: “alive in the way our memory is alive… alive in the way the ocean is alive… alive in the way thinking is not, but experiencing is.” These efforts at explaining the “aliveness” of an image—like memory, like the ocean, like experiences—offer a view of the image very much at odds with an approach to it as an inert object of analysis and interpretation. But this line of thinking has much in common with developments outlined in an article published in the Journal of Visual Culture by art historian Keith Moxey in which he traces the emergence of a renewed interest in what he calls the presence of an object or image. (Moxey uses the words “image” and “object” interchangeably in the article.) He opens with the assertion, “Affirmations that objects are endowed with a life of their own – that they possess an existential status endowed with agency  – have become commonplace” (2008, p.  131). Attention to the presence of an image or object approaches it as something to be “more appropriately encountered than interpreted,” in Moxey’s words, and involves “the demand that we take note of what objects ‘say’ before we try to force them into patterns of meaning” (2008, p. 132). Some of the names associated with such perspectives are the French art historian Georges Didi-­ Huberman, who himself looks back to Aby Warburg, and in the German context, Gottfried Boehm, Hans Belting, and Horst Bredekamp, who are linked to the work of Bildwissenschaft, usually translated as “image science.” W.J.T. Mitchell, familiar to many in Comics Studies for his work on text-image relations, and James Elkins have also been associated with this perspective.11 Although each of these theorists has their own emphasis, what links them in Moxey’s overview is a common conception of “the visual object as invested

  WHAT IS AN IMAGE? ART HISTORY, VISUAL CULTURE STUDIES, AND COMICS… 

259

with an animating power of its own” (2008, p. 139). So, if all of these theorists have an interest in the animated image, are any of their theories similar to Barry’s articulation of the aliveness of the image? One intriguing juxtaposition is with art historian and theorist Hans Belting’s book An Anthropology of Images, in which he emphasises the relationship between the image and the body as a medium.12 As he points out, in Art History, the term “medium” is typically used to reference the material used by the artist, as, for example, a painter who works in the medium of oil on canvas. But Belting defines “medium” slightly differently, as “that which conveys or hosts an image, making it visible, turning it into a picture” (2011, p. 18). He’s interested in particular in the human body as a medium: “our bodies themselves constitute a place, a locus, where the images we receive leave behind an invisible trace” (Belting 2011, p. 38). Belting gives us another way to see the batmen from Syllabus, as the results of a process or an “experience” in Barry’s words. They are the external, visible, and highly individual expressions of a collective, social image of Batman. Each drawing shows what becomes of the image in the hands of each individual. Each batman is so specific, so particular to the person who drew him! As Belting suggests, “An ‘image’ is more than a product of perception. It is created as a result of personal or collective knowledge and intention. We live with images, we comprehend the world in images. And this living repertory of our internal images connects with the physical production of external pictures we stage in the social realm” (2011, p. 9). Seeing this series of batmen gives us a hint of how individual style comes about, in some mysterious alchemy of memory and movement. In the introduction to the English translation of his book, Belting identifies his fourth chapter, titled “Image and Death: Embodiment in Early Cultures,” as the most important section of the book. In its emphasis upon death, it touches on what Belting feels is essential to understanding the image: the play of absence and presence. He writes, “an image finds its true meaning in the fact that what it represents is absent and therefore can be present only as image. It manifests something that is not in the image but can only appear in the image. An image of the departed was therefore not an eccentricity, but rather an early and rather literal statement of what an image essentially is” (Belting 2011, p. 85). Belting discusses mostly ancient examples, including a diorite statue of Gudea, king of Lagash, from c. 2120 BCE; a “reserve head” of an official from Old Kingdom Egypt (2630–2524 BCE); and a head of a Neolithic statue from Jericho from c. 7000 BCE. He contrasts these animated images to images from “modern times,” when “‘image magic’ has been relegated [to] the dark realm of demonology.” He laments, “Today, when we have nothing like a cult of the dead, we are apt to mistake the meaning of the human production of images” (Belting 2011, p. 89). Here, Belting makes a remarkable, transhistorical, transcultural claim for the origin of images that extends far beyond Barry’s explorations of the “aliveness” of the image. But our potential discomfort with Barry’s belief in the animism of the image, which broaches the typical boundaries between what is alive and what cannot be, could well be an example of what Belting describes as a modern antipathy to “image magic.”

260 

J. ROAN

The discussion of page 14 from What It Is thus far has cited Barry’s written response to the question “What is an image?” but did not remark upon the drawings on the page. But the drawings are undeniably there, as examples of images on a page that asks the question “What is an image?” Moxey writes of encountering rather than interpreting the image, and the demand that “we take note of what objects ‘say’.” What is an image? Well, what do the images themselves show or say (Fig. 3)?

Fig. 3  Lynda Barry, What It Is (Drawn and Quarterly, 2008), p. 14

  WHAT IS AN IMAGE? ART HISTORY, VISUAL CULTURE STUDIES, AND COMICS… 

261

The first panel of the page introduces a multi-eyed monster acting as a stand-in for Barry asking into a microphone “What Is An Image?” in a large word balloon. The second panel is almost entirely text, with a small celestial body in the upper right-hand corner—a sun or moon?—and three diminutive, rather indistinct figures at the bottom. The capitalised block lettering reads “AT THE CENTER OF EVERYTHING WE CALL ‘THE ARTS,’ AND CHILDREN CALL ‘PLAY,’ IS SOMETHING WHICH SEEMS SOMEHOW ALIVE.” The third panel of the page continues, this time in a mix of capitalised block lettering and cursive, “It’s NOT ALIVE IN the WAY YOU AND I are alive, BUT IT’S certainly not dead.” Below the text, there is a drawing of a bird on the left, and another similar drawing of a bird on the right, but upside down and with a tell-tale “x” over its eye. We immediately understand the bird on the left is alive, and on the right, dead, in part because of familiar conventions of drawing. However, as drawings, although they may or may not be representations of an actual living or dead bird, they are definitely neither alive nor dead in themselves in the same way that real birds are alive or dead. So what do they tell us about the life of images? How is it that an upside-down image looks dead to us? How effective is that small “x”? It’s incredible how the slope of the back versus the straight line makes all the difference in the world. Perhaps there is something in the juxtaposition of the two drawings, and the way in which the movement between the two, reading from left to right, is from life to death, and how we feel a twinge of melancholy as we arrive at the upside-down bird. And yet the upside-down bird is not really dead, as it was never truly alive, but it can still make us sad because it reminds us of death, of the absence of an animating spirit that enlivens its immediate predecessor to the left. What of the octopus in the next panel, Barry’s “Magic Cephalopod,” either just arriving in the panel or perhaps edging away from it into the yellow right-­ hand margin? Some viewers may think of Hank, the octopus, in the Pixar film Finding Dory (2016) or perhaps the beautiful but deadly creatures in the James Bond film Octopussy (1983). The Monterey Bay Aquarium, upon which the aquarium in Finding Dory was modelled, has a Pacific octopus that is almost always motionless in the corner of its tank, at least during public visiting hours. In contrast, Inky, a New Zealand octopus, apparently made a daring escape from its aquarium enclosure into the ocean (Bilefsky 2016). If, according to Belting, “our bodies themselves constitute a place, a locus, where the images we receive leave behind an invisible trace,” drawing may be one way of expressing these “invisible traces” as visible images. Seeing existing images acts to trigger previous images received as well as adding to one’s personal repertoire of images. Barry says that images are alive like memories, like the ocean, like experiences. This page from What It Is suggests that the question to ask of an image is not “What is it?” but rather “What does it do?” What happens when we draw an image? What happens when we look at images that others have drawn? Although “What is an image?” might be the first text the reader sees on the page because of its size, reading from top to bottom the page actually begins with “The story of transportation,” typed text centred at the top of the

262 

J. ROAN

page that serves as a title. Transportation is about movement, both literal and metaphorical. It’s about the way images move between us and a book, for example, as well as how they can move us, make us feel, think, remember, reflect. What is an image? Hans Belting’s original German version of his book includes more than 100 illustrations that are not a part of the English translation. According to one reviewer, given the relatively minimal role the reproductions play in his argument, very little is lost. The reviewer describes the illustrations as “a visual counterpoint to the text,” rather than as “evidence” or “information” for the argument, rendering the images apparently non-­essential and secondary to the text, unlike a more conventional art-historical treatise in which images of the objects analysed are essential to the argument (Visonà 2014). But what if we viewed the images and text in Belting’s book in terms of the kinds of text-image relationships more typically found in comics? Lynda Barry’s books are full of images and also words, and as comics, the images are not so easily ignored. She both shows and tells us what she thinks images are, and even if the tendency is to look to her words for her theory of the image, her images actually show us what they do, what they are, and how they work, in part by working on us. “Pictures can help us find words to help us find images” Barry writes (2008, p. 149) (Fig. 4). What if the best way to answer the question “What is an image?” is to draw a picture? Elkins has suggested, “Images need to start arguing. If Visual Studies is to fulfill its promise of thinking of images differently than Art History, then the most fundamental challenge is to stop taking images as illustrations of theories, exemplifications of historical arguments, or mnemonics for encounters with the original, and begin employing images to argue” (2015, p. 6). What is an image? In offering images in response, images that are drawn, seen, sent, and received, Barry shows us how images can begin to argue and how scholars can see, and study, the images in comics with new eyes.

Visual Culture Studies and Comics Lynda Barry’s work, and in particular her inquiries into the nature of the image, are unique within the broader landscape of comics. What does this one example suggest about the ways in which Visual Culture Studies might engage with Comics Studies and vice versa? As noted earlier, the interdisciplinarity of Comics Studies has been a subject of discussion.13 In some ways, these conversations mirror those that took place in Visual Culture Studies as well, and some Comics Studies scholars, like Steirer, have looked to Visual Culture Studies’ engagements with the question of disciplinarity as a model. One compelling investigation of interdisciplinarity and the object of Visual Culture Studies is Mieke Bal’s “Visual Essentialism and the Object of Visual Culture.” Bal draws upon Roland Barthes to declare, “Interdisciplinary study consists of creating a new object that belongs to no one” (2003, p. 7).14 This “new object” is not simply visual objects, which have always existed, but rather “visuality as the

  WHAT IS AN IMAGE? ART HISTORY, VISUAL CULTURE STUDIES, AND COMICS… 

263

Fig. 4  Lynda Barry, What It Is (Drawn and Quarterly, 2008), p. 149

object of study,” which she describes as “what happens when people look, and what emerges from that act? The verb ‘happens’ entails the visual event as an object, and ‘emerges’ the visual image, but as a fleeting, fugitive, subjective image accrued to the subject” (2003, pp. 7–9). This expansive outline of the object of Visual Culture Studies feels remarkably apt for an engagement with

264 

J. ROAN

Lynda Barry’s theory of the image, except that Barry would most certainly add the question of what happens when people draw to that of what happens when people look. Bal’s emphasis on practices of looking and acts of seeing distinguishes Visual Culture Studies from object-based disciplines such as Art History or Film Studies, and highlights the relationship between the one who sees, and that which is seen. A similar method applied to comics could allow for a broad range of approaches to the text, all while foregrounding it as something that is seen by someone. Furthermore, as Elkins reminds us, images can be more than illustrations or examples, but rather arguments in themselves. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Bal’s representation of the object of Visual Studies is that, “objects are active participants in the performance of analysis in that they enable reflection and speculation, and they can contradict projections and wrong-headed interpretations (if the analyst lets them!) and thus constitute a theoretical object with philosophical relevance” (2003, p. 24). One response to the question of how best to study comics “in its own right” then might be to allow comics as a “new object of knowledge” to lead the way, as we consider what happens when people draw, and what happens when people look, in our encounters with rather than interpretations of comics.

Notes 1. October is an American journal of contemporary art theory and criticism. It was founded in 1976 and was named after the Russian Revolution of 1917 as well as the Sergei Eisenstein film October (1927) which depicted the revolution. The journal was among the first publications in the United States to introduce structuralist and post-structuralist theory to critical discourses of Art History and contemporary art. 2. The journal published responses to the questionnaire from the following individuals: Svetlana Alpers (History of Art, UC Berkeley), Emily Apter (French and Comparative Literature, UCLA), Carol Armstrong (Art History, Graduate Center, CUNY), Susan Buck-Morss (Government, Cornell University), Ton Conley (Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University), Jonathan Crary (Art History, Columbia University), Thomas Crow (Art History, Yale University), Tom Gunning (Radio, Television, and Film, Northwestern University), Michael Ann Holly (Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, Art and Art History, University of Rochester), Martin Jay (History, UC Berkeley), Thomas Dacosta Kaufmann (Art and Archaeology, Princeton University), Silvia Kolbowski, Sylvia Lavin (Architecture, UCLA), Stephen Melville (History of Art, Ohio State University), Helen Molesworth (Editor of Documents), Keith Moxey (Art History, Barnard College/Columbia University), D.N. Rodowick (English/Visual and Cultural Studies, University of Rochester), Geoff Waite (German Studies, Cornell University), and Christopher Wood (History of Art, Yale University). 3. For example, Ahmed chapter “Reading Comics with Aby Warburg: Collaging Memories” exploring the work of Aby Warburg, and Miers chapter “Psychologies of Perception: Stories of Depiction” drawing on the work of Ernst Gombrich and Ernst Kris.

  WHAT IS AN IMAGE? ART HISTORY, VISUAL CULTURE STUDIES, AND COMICS… 

265

4. I attended the symposium as one of 15 Fellows, so my reflections upon the event are based upon both my memory of them as well as what was published in the book version (Elkins et al. 2015). 5. For further discussion of Visual Culture Studies/Visual Studies, Art History and comics Cf. Becker chapter “Afrofuturism and Animism as Method: Art History and Decolonisation in Black Panther”, and Mugnolo chapter “Reading Richard Felton Outcault’s “Yellow Kid” Through Perception of the Image”. 6. Currently, in the United States, courses on the history and theory of comics are more likely to be found in Literature than Art History departments. Although some art schools today offer courses on and degrees in comics, Daniel Clowes’s savage parody of art schools in his comic “Art School Confidential” seems relevant here. It ends with a warning from the disaffected narrator to “never mention cartooning in art school because it is mindless and contemptible and completely unsuitable as a career goal” (Clowes 1991). In Jamie Coe’s more recent Art Schooled (2014), the main character’s comic is not particularly well received by his instructors or his classmates, but not explicitly because it is a comic. I thank Maggie Gray for this reference. 7. It is worth noting that the examples discussed here were not included in the first edition of Practices of Looking (2001). Some of them were part of the second edition (2009). Thus, each progressive edition of this text has incorporated more comics examples than the previous version, suggesting that although comics may not have been a significant part of earlier Visual Culture Studies, there is increasing interest in this topic. 8. Elkins mentions work by Charles Hatfield, Pascal Lefèvre, and David Carrier, and the edited anthologies A Comics Studies Reader (Heer and Worcester 2008) and The Language of Comics: Word and Image (Varnum and Gibbons 2001). He notes that work by W.J.T. Mitchell has been referenced by Anglophone Comics Studies scholars and included in the above edited anthologies, and Francophone art theory by Louis Marin and Hubert Damisch has also been cited by French-­ speaking as well as Scandinavian and German scholars. Although Elkins does not mention it, Mitchell also participated in the May 2012 “Comics: Philosophy and Practice” conference at the University of Chicago which inspired the “Comics & Media” special issue of Critical Inquiry, the journal Mitchell edits (Chute and Jagoda 2014). This issue reproduces a conversation between Mitchell and Art Spiegelman that served as the keynote address of the conference, along with an afterword by Mitchell (2014). 9. What It Is and Picture This come out of Lynda Barry’s workshop “Writing the Unthinkable,” which is designed to help people who do not consider themselves writers or artists to explore and develop their capacity for creative expression. Syllabus is based on Barry’s teaching at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she is an Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Creativity in the Art Department. 10. Susan E. Kirtley’s excellent monograph on Barry does open with a discussion of Barry’s definition of the image in relation to W.J.T. Mitchell’s work (2012). It concludes with a discussion of What It Is and Picture This in the final chapter, with a focus upon how the books showcase Barry’s development as an artist and her creative process, in the context of her career-long attention to representations of girlhood. Hillary Chute devotes a chapter of Graphic Women: Life Narrative & Contemporary Comics to Barry, specifically the book One Hundred

266 

J. ROAN

Demons (2010), which has also been the subject of critical essays by Melinda de Jesús (2004a, 2004b) and Theresa M.  Tensuan (2006). Miriam Harris’s “Cartoonists as Matchmakers” (2009) explores Barry’s use of text and image primarily through examples from Ernie Pook’s Comeek. Eszter Szép’s recent book Comics and the Body differs in its attention to Barry from the previous works cited, as the first chapter is dedicated to the same works I examine here, What It Is and Syllabus, with an emphasis on the image, drawing, and the line (2020). 11. See, for example, Mitchell’s What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (2005) and Elkins, On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them (1998). 12. For further application of Belting’s work on the image and its relationship to the body to comics Cf. Mugnolo chapter “Reading Richard Felton Outcault’s “Yellow Kid” Through Perception of the Image”. 13. For further discussion of interdisciplinarity and Comics Studies Cf. Wallin Wictorin and Nordenstam chapter “Feminist Art History as an Approach to Research on Comics: Meta Reflections on Studies of Swedish Feminist Comics”, and Sommerland chapter “Real Queer Bodies: Visual Weight and Imagined Gravity in Sport Manga”. 14. Rogoff cites the same passage from Barthes as Bal does, about interdisciplinarity having to do with “the constitution of a new object of knowledge,” while adding Gayatri Spivak’s argument “it is the questions that we ask that produce the field of inquiry and not some body of materials which determines what questions need to be posed to it” (1998, pp. 15–16).

References Bal, Mieke. 2003. Visual Essentialism and the Object of Visual Culture. Journal of Visual Culture 2, pp. 5–32. Barry, Lynda. 2008. What It Is. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly. Barry, Lynda. 2010. Picture This: The Near-Sighted Monkey Book. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly. Barry, Lynda. 2014. Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly. Barry, Lynda. 2019. Making Comics. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly. Beaty, Bart. 2012. Comics versus Art. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Belting, Hans. 2011. An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body. Trans. Thomas Dunlap. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bilefsky, Dan. 2016. Inky the Octopus Escapes From a New Zealand Aquarium. The New York Times, April 13. Brunetti, Ivan. 2011. Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Chute, Hillary L. 2010. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia University Press. Chute, Hillary L. and Jagoda, Patrick. eds. 2014. “Comics & Media” special issue. Critical Inquiry 40. Clowes, Daniel. 1991. Art School Confidential. Eightball 7: unpaginated. Coe, Jamie. 2014. Art Schooled. London: Nobrow Press. Crimp, Douglas. 1999. Getting the Warhol We Deserve. Social Text 59, pp. 49–66.

  WHAT IS AN IMAGE? ART HISTORY, VISUAL CULTURE STUDIES, AND COMICS… 

267

De Jesús, Melinda. 2004a. Liminality and Mestiza Consciousness in Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons. MELUS 29, pp. 219–52. De Jesús, Melinda. 2004b. Of Monsters and Mothers: Filipina American Identity and Maternal Legacies in Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons. Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 5, pp. 1–26. Dikovitskaya, Margaret. 2005. Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Elkins, James. 1998. On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them. Reissued edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elkins, James. 2003. Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction. New York: Routledge. Elkins, James. 2013. An Introduction to the Visual Studies That is Not in This Book. In Theorizing Visual Studies: Writing Through the Discipline, ed. James Elkins et al., pp. 3–15. New York: Routledge. Elkins, James. 2017. An Introduction. In How to Read Nancy: The Elements of Comics in Three Easy Panels by Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden, pp.  12–19. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books. Elkins, James et  al. eds. 2015. Farewell to Visual Studies. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Friedberg, Anne. 2005. An Interview with Anne Friedberg. In Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn by Margaret Dikovitskaya, pp. 154–161. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Harris, Miriam. 2009. Cartoonists as Matchmakers: The Vibrant Relationship of Text and Image in the Work of Lynda Barry. In Elective Affinities: Testing Word and Image Relationships, eds. Catriona Macleod, Véronique Plesch, and Charlotte Schoell-Glass, pp. 129–43. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press. Hatfield, Charles. 2010. “Indiscipline, or, The Condition of Comics Studies.” Transatlantica 1. https://doi.org/10.4000/transatlantica.4933 Heer, Jeet and Worcester, Kent. eds. 2008. A Comics Studies Reader. Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi. Jacobs, Dale. 2020. Comics Studies as Interdiscipline. In The Oxford Handbook of Comic Book Studies, ed. Frederick Luis Aldama, pp.  656–670. New  York: Oxford University Press. Kirtley, Susan E. 2012. Lynda Barry: Girlhood through the Looking Glass. Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi. Kleiner, Fred S. 2020. Gardner’s Art Through the Ages: A Global History, Sixteenth Edition. Boston: Cengage Learning. Krauss, Rosalind, et al. 1996. Visual Culture Questionnaire. October 77, pp. 25–70. Mitchell, W.J.T. 2002. Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture. Journal of Visual Culture 1, pp. 165–181. Mitchell, W.J.T. 2005. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W.J.T. 2014. Comics as Media: Afterword. Critical Inquiry 40, pp. 255–265. Mitchell, W.J.T. and Spiegelman, Art. 2014. Public Conversation: What the %$&# Happened to Comics? Critical Inquiry 40, pp. 20–35. Moxey, Keith. 2008. Visual Studies and the Iconic Turn. Journal of Visual Culture 7, pp. 131–146. Postema, Barbara. 2013. Narrative Structure in Comics: Making Sense of Fragments. Rochester, NY: RIT Press.

268 

J. ROAN

Preziosi, Donald. 2009. Art History: Making the Visible Legible. In The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, New Edition, ed. Donald Preziosi, pp. 7–12. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Randle, Chris. 2015. Lynda Barry: ‘What is an image? That question has directed my entire life.’ The Guardian, May 14. Rogoff, Irit. 1998. Studying Visual Culture. In The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff, pp. 14–26. London: Routledge. Smith, Marquard. 2008. Introduction: Visual Culture Studies: History, Theory, Practice. In Visual Culture Studies: Interviews with Key Thinkers,  ed. Marquard Smith, pp. 1–16. London: Sage. Steirer, Gregory. 2011. The State of Comics Scholarship: Comics Studies and Disciplinarity. International Journal of Comic Art 13, pp. 263–285. Sturken, Marita and Cartwright, Lisa. 2017. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. New York: Oxford University Press. Szép, Eszter. 2020. Comics and the Body: Drawing, Reading, and Vulnerability. Kindle version. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Tensuan, Theresa M. 2006. Comic Visions and Revisions in the Work of Lynda Barry and Marjane Satrapi. Modern Fiction Studies 52, pp. 947–64. Varnum, Robin and Gibbons, Christina T. eds. 2001. The Language of Comics: Word and Image. Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi. Visonà, Monica Blackmun. 2014. Review of Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body. CAA Reviews. https://doi.org/10.3202/caa. reviews.2014.104.

From Giotto to Drnaso: The Common Well of Pictorial Schema in ‘High’ Art and ‘Low’ Comics Bruce Mutard

Abstract  In The Aesthetics of Comics, David Carrier argued that at the time of Giotto, all of the visual technology required for making comics was present (2000). This term is analogous to Michael Polanyi’s concept of tacit knowledge (1966) which refers to knowledge that is not explicable, such as how to hold a brush loaded with ink to make a certain mark, allied with knowledge of composition, perspective, colour, shape, line, texture, etc. to depict, say, a building. Ernst Gombrich describes all this as a schema, specifically that of Western Art (1959). This chapter, presented in the comics register, will show how Western comics schemas, originated from the break that Giotto made with the Byzantine iconic, hierarchical tradition, to a humanist form Susan Vogel described as the ‘Western Eye’ (1997). I show how comics schemas arose through the Western art training and interests of eighteenth century caricaturists and Rodolphe Töppfer, leading to the work of Nick Drnaso (2016, 2018), who I argue is as much an adherent of the Western Eye as Giotto and all who came in between. I explain why pictures in Western comics appear as they do and that it is not unreasonable to posit Giotto as the father of Western comics, and not just because his astounding fresco cycle in the Arena Chapel (ca. 1300) is a visual narrative. Keywords  Western eye • Tacit knowledge • Schema • Giotto • Caricature

B. Mutard (*) Edith Cowan University, Joondalup, WA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Gray, I. Horton (eds.), Seeing Comics through Art History, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8_14

269

270 

B. MUTARD

  FROM GIOTTO TO DRNASO: THE COMMON WELL OF PICTORIAL SCHEM… 

271

272 

B. MUTARD

  FROM GIOTTO TO DRNASO: THE COMMON WELL OF PICTORIAL SCHEM… 

273

274 

B. MUTARD

  FROM GIOTTO TO DRNASO: THE COMMON WELL OF PICTORIAL SCHEM… 

275

276 

B. MUTARD

  FROM GIOTTO TO DRNASO: THE COMMON WELL OF PICTORIAL SCHEM… 

277

278 

B. MUTARD

  FROM GIOTTO TO DRNASO: THE COMMON WELL OF PICTORIAL SCHEM… 

279

280 

B. MUTARD

  FROM GIOTTO TO DRNASO: THE COMMON WELL OF PICTORIAL SCHEM… 

281

282 

B. MUTARD

  FROM GIOTTO TO DRNASO: THE COMMON WELL OF PICTORIAL SCHEM… 

283

284 

B. MUTARD

Picture Sources All pictures redrawn and/or transformed from the original by Bruce Mutard. Page 1, panel 2: Giotto, The Last Judgement. Capella degli Scrovegni, ca. 1300–05 Page 2, panel 2: Giotto, The Last Supper. Capella degli Scrovegni, ca. 1300–05 Page 2, panel 5: Giotto, Charity. Capella degli Scrovegni, ca. 1300–05 Page 3, panel 2: Giotto, Capella degli Scrovegni, detail. ca. 1300–05 Page 3, panel 4: ©Jack Hayes, Michelangelo Painting the Sistine Ceiling, detail. 1964 Page 3, panel 5: Giotto, The Raising of Lazarus, detail. Capella degli Scrovegni, ca. 1300–05 Page 3, panel 6: ©Nick Drnaso, Sabrina. 2018 Page 4, panel 1: Giotto, Capella degli Scrovegni, ca. 1300–05 Page 4, panel 3: Giotto, Capella degli Scrovegni, ca. 1300–05 Page 4, panel 4: Cimabue, Virgin Enthroned with Angels, detail. ca. 1290–95 Page 4, panel 5: Raphael, The Sistine Madonna, detail. ca. 1512–13 Page 4, panel 6: ©Andy Warhol, Brillo Soap Pads Box, 1964 Page 5, panel 1: ©Nick Drnaso, Sabrina. 2018 Page 5, panel 2: ©Nick Drnaso, Sabrina. 2018 Page 5, panel 3: Puff the Magic Dragon. Page 5, panel 4: Baule people, Rabbit Mask; Female Figure; Pendant Mask. Dates unknown. Page 5, panel 7: Masaccio, Brancacci Chapel, detail. ca. 1425–27 Page 6, panel 1: ©Alain, 1955 Page 6, panel 2: Giotto, Joachim and Anne Meeting at the Golden Gate, detail. ca. 1300–05 Page 6, panel 6: Cimabue, Madonna Enthroned with the Child, St Francis and Four Angels, detail. ca. 1278–80 Page 6, panel 7: Giotto, Capella degli Scrovegni, detail. ca. 1300–05 Page 7, panel 2: Masaccio, Masolino, Filippino Lippi, Brancacci Chapel, detail. ca. 1425–27 Page 7, panel 3: Masaccio and Filippino Lippi, Raising of the Son of Theophilus and St Peter Enthroned, detail. ca. 1425–27 Page 7, panel 4: Masaccio, Tribute, detail. ca. 1425–27 Page 9, panel 2: Giotto, The Last Judgement, detail. ca. 1300–05; ©Nick Drnaso, Sabrina. 2018 Page 9, panel 3: James Gillray, Monstrous Craws at a New Coalition Feast. 1787 Page 9, panel 4: Thomas Rowlandson, Doctor Convex and Lady Concave. 1802 Page 9, panel 5: Rodolphe Töpffer, Histoire de M. Jabot, excerpt. 1831 Page 10: Adapted from the characters Krazy Kat, Ignatz and Officer Pup by George Herriman. Page 11, panels 5–9, 14–15: ©Nick Drnaso, Sabrina. 2018 Page 11, panels 10–13: ©Nick Drnaso, Beverly. 2016

  FROM GIOTTO TO DRNASO: THE COMMON WELL OF PICTORIAL SCHEM… 

285

Page 12, panels 1–15: ©Nick Drnaso, Sabrina. 2018 Page 13, panel 1: Giotto, Joachim and Anne Meeting at the Golden Gate, detail. ca. 1300–05 Page 13, panel 3: Amedeo Modigliani, Nude. 1917 Page 13, panel 5: Piet Mondrian, Composition C, No. 3 with Red, Yellow and Blue. 1938 Page 13, panel 6: Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q. (version). 1930 Page 14, panel 6: Giotto, Capella degli Scrovegni, detail. ca. 1300–05 Page 14, panel 9: Giotto, Capella degli Scrovegni, detail. ca. 1300–05

Notes 1. Lubbock, Jules. 2006. Storytelling in Christian Art from Giotto to Donatello. New Haven: Yale University Press. p. 7. 2. Refers to a tradition in the Catholic Church that the evangelist St. Luke painted the first picture of the Virgin and Child, known as the Salus Populi Romani, in the Santa Maria Maggiore, in Rome. St. Luke is also known as the patron saint of artists (among others). https://udayton. edu/imri/mary/s/salus-­populi-­romani.php Retrieved 17 Oct 2021. 3. See Ayrton, Michael. 1969. Giovanni Pisano Sculptor. London: Thames and Hudson. p. 186. 4. Carrier, David. 2000. The Aesthetics of Comics. Penn State: Pennsylvania State University Press. p. 5. 5. Ibid. 6. Vogel, Susan. 1997. Baule: African Art, Western Eyes in African Arts, 30:4. Special Issue: The Benin Centenary, Part 2. Los Angeles: UCLA, James Coleman African Studies Center. p. 64. 7. By ‘us’ I refer to those beholders who have grown up with or are familiar with the modes of visual arts communication in the Global north, or ‘Western’ world. 8. Lavin, Marilyn. 1990. The Place of Narrative: Mural Decoration in Italian Churches 431-1600. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 4. 9. Ibid. p. 7. 10. Carrier, David. 2000. p. 14. 11. Ibid. It is worth noting the irony here that Gombrich was antipathetic towards Hegel. 12. Danto, Arthur. 1964. The Artworld. The Journal of Philosophy, 61:19. American philosophical Association. p. 580. 13. This is commonly understood as ‘realistic’ art, usually determined as something that visibly exists in the world. 14. McCloud, Scott. 1993. Understanding Comics. Northampton: Kitchen Sink Press. p. 51. 15. Vogel, Susan. 1997. p. 64. 16. Ibid.

286 

B. MUTARD

17. Baxandall, Michael. 1988. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 29–103. 18. Ibid. 118–128. 19. Gombrich, Ernst. 2000. Art and Illusion. London: Folio Society. p. 3. 20. Polanyi, Michael. 1966. The Tacit Dimension. Chicago: University Press of Chicago. p. 4. 21. Gombrich, Ernst. 2000. p. 53. 22. Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Giotto’s Joy in Desire and Language. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. p. 18. 23. By Giotto’s schema, I mean those that he introduced as mentioned, as a package of possibilities in representation. 24. Note that Massacio designed but did not complete all the panels. He had an elder partner, Masolino who completed some panels, and some others were completed a number of decades later by Filippino Lippi, the son of Masaccio’s pupil, Fra Filippo Lippi. 25. Specifically, Italian painting of the fifteenth century. This means it was built upon schemas present and developing in the northern Italian peninsula of this era, which was not influenced by developments North of the Alps in say, Flanders. 26. Lee, Alexander. 2013. The Ugly Renaissance. New  York: Doubleday. pp. 41–42. 27. Baxandall, Michael. 1988. pp. 15–16. 28. Academic training always meant rigorous instruction in drawing before proceeding to painting. The methods of academies across the European continent varied according to tradition and beliefs of masters, but an example is given in Wickham, Annette, The Schools and Practice of Art in Simon, Robin (ed). 2018. The Royal Academy of Art: History and Collections. London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Royal Academy of Arts. pp. 433–442. 29. The academic hierarchy of painting was formally established by the Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture in Paris in the middle of the seventeenth century. First was History, then portraiture, genre, landscape and down through to animals and still-life. The list was not immutable. See Poë, Simon. From History to Genre in Simon, Robin (ed). 2018. p. 256. 30. Wickham, Annette. The Schools and Practice of Art in Simon, Robin (ed), 2018. 432. 31. Poë, Simon. 2018. p. 256. 32. Carrier, David. 2000. p. 108. 33. Medley, Stuart. 2012. The Picture in Design. Champaign: Common Ground. p. 48. 34. Ibid. p. 47. 35. Ibid. 36. Gombrich, Ernst. 2000. p. 342.

  FROM GIOTTO TO DRNASO: THE COMMON WELL OF PICTORIAL SCHEM… 

287

37. Kunzle, David. 1973. The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c. 1450 to 1825. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2–3 & 7. Note that the descriptive definition of comic strips I used here is not precisely that of Kunzle, whose own was an attempt to circumscribe a boundary definition to delimit his monumental survey of pictorial narrative precursors to comic strips and thus, comics. 38. Carrier, David. 2000. p. 3. 39. Witek, Joseph. 2011. Comics Modes: Caricature and Illustration in the Crumb Family’s ‘Dirty Laundry’. In Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods eds. Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan. Taylor & Francis Group. ProQuest Ebook accessed 2021-07-12. 40. Ibid. p. 31. 41. There is nothing exceptional about this. Plenty of makers eschew the use of these common visual features of comics for their own reasons. I did not use them in my books The Sacrifice (2008) and The Silence (2009), but liberally so in Bully Me (2021). 42. Witek, Joseph. 2011. p. 34. 43. Danto, Arthur. 1964. p. 582. 44. I use the word ‘primitive’ as reflective of its use and thinking in the art world by and through the colonial, imperial mindset of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when such arts were blithely appropriated for Western ethnographic museums.

References Apkon, Stephen. 2013. The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Ayrton, Michael, Moore, Henry. 1969. Giovanni Pisano Sculptor, London, Thames and Hudson. Baetens, Jan, Frey, Hugo, Tabachnick, Stephen E. 2018. The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Baxandall, Michael. 1988. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Beaty, Bart. 2012. Comics Versus Art. Toronto, Toronto University Press. Carrier, David. 2000. The Aesthetics of Comics. Penn State: Pennsylvania State University Press. Danto, Arthur. 1964. The Artworld The Journal of Philosophy. 61:19. American Philosophical Association, pp. 571–584. Drnaso, Nick. 2018. Sabrina, London, Granta. Drnaso, Nick. 2016. Beverly, Montreal, Drawn and Quarterly. Duncan, Randy, Smith, Matthew J., Levitz, Paul. 2014. The Power of Comics: History, Form, and Culture, New York, Bloomsbury Academic. Gombrich, Ernst. 2000. Art and Illusion, London, Folio Society. Jacobus, Laura. 1999. Giotto’s Annunciation in the Arena Chapel, Padua. The Art Bulletin, 81:1. pp. 93–107.

288 

B. MUTARD

Kunzle, David. 1973. The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c. 1450 to 1825. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Lavin, Marilyn. 1990. The Place of Narrative: Mural Decoration in Italian Churches 431-160. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Lee, Alexander. 2013. The Ugly Renaissance, New York, Doubleday. Lubbock, Jules. 2006. Storytelling in Christian Art from Giotto to Donatello. New Haven, Yale University Press. McCloud, Scott. 1993. Understanding Comics. Northampton: Kitchen Sink Press. Medley, Stuart. 2012. The Picture in Design. Champaign: Common Ground. North, Laurence. 2019, Architecture and the Graphic Novel. Journal of Illustration. 6:2, pp. 341–364. Poë, Simon. 2018. From History to Genre in Simon, Robin. (ed). The Royal Academy of Art: History and Collections. London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Royal Academy of Arts. Rebold Benton, Janetta. 1989. Perspective and the Spectator’s Pattern of Circulation in Assisi and Padua. Artibus et Historae. 10:19, pp. 37–52. Vogel, Susan. 1997. Baule: African Art, Western Eyes. African Arts, 30:4 Special Issue; The Benin Centenary, Part 2. UCLA, James S.  Coleman African Studies Center. pp. 64–77, 95. Walker, Brian. 2011. The Comics: the Complete Collection. New York: Abrams Comic Arts. Wickham, Annette. 2018. The Schools and Practice of Art in The Royal Academy of Art: History and Collections. London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Royal Academy of Arts. Witek, Joseph. 2011. Comics Modes: Caricature and Illustration in the Crumb Family’s ‘Dirty Laundry’. In Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods eds. Matthew J.  Smith and Randy Duncan. Taylor & Francis Group. ProQuest Ebook accessed 2021-07-12.

VAST/O Exhibition (De)Construction: Exploring the Potentials of Augmented Abstract Comics and Animation Installations as a Method to Communicate Health Experiences Alexandra P. Alberda, João Carola, Carolina Martins, and Natalie Woolf

Abstract  This chapter critically reflects on the methodological potentials of augmented abstract comics and animation installations to positively impact public awareness of the lived experience of mental health through emotive responses to the installation VAST/O. In developing our approach, we employed Astrid von Rosen’s (Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History 86:1, pp. 6–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/00233609.2016.1237540, 2017) Warburgian methodology which was proposed as an “activist art history” giving space to the marginalised, voiceless, and the undefinable experiences that

A. P. Alberda (*) Manchester Museum, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK e-mail: [email protected] J. Carola Ar.Co, Lisbon, Portugal C. Martins University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal N. Woolf Universidade Lusófona, Lisboa, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Gray, I. Horton (eds.), Seeing Comics through Art History, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8_15

289

290 

A. P. ALBERDA ET AL.

are denied in a canonised telling of Art History and evade it static conclusions. We explore von Rosen’s (Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History 86:1, pp. 6–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/00233609.2016.1237540, 2017) methodology in the space of the gallery through abstract comics where readers take on the performance of a museum visitor. Our proposed methodology breaks from the bound nature of comics to explore the architectural element of installations, namely, the visitor’s experience of the (de)constructed gutter. Rosalind Krauss’ (Grids. October  9, pp.  51–64. https://doi.org/10.2307/778321, 1979) seminal work, “Grids,” and the power of structured abstraction on the psychological experience of viewing and creating art within this well-known framework, is used to make sense of our own reliance on and rejection of the gutter, or grid, in augmented visitor experience. We advance the perspectives of researchers and artists in this chapter in merging theory with practice, and explore the advantages and challenges of our method. Keywords  Augmented reading • Abstract comics • Comics activism • Animation installations • Graphic medicine • Visitor experience In this chapter, we critically reflect on the methodological potentials of augmented abstract comics and animation installations to positively impact publics regarding the lived experience of mental health. We explore this method for its potential to start conversations of health, facilitate empathic reading, and raise awareness of lived realities through emotive visitor responses to VAST/O. We conceptualise VAST/O, the installation and project, as forms of graphic medicine, which is a genre that encompasses works in which the comics medium and health(care) intersect (Czerwiec et al. 2015) and seeks to empower individuals whether patients, medical professionals, or general publics to build understanding. In this vein, graphic medicine can be analysed as health activism that uses the affordances of comics to stimulate social change. In our project, we assert that the installation can be considered as a work of graphic medicine that plays at the boundaries of different media to deliver a more affective and multisensory experience to visitors. Gallery comics have the “potential to disrupt standard museum modes of consumption” (Peltz 2013), which we seek to explore further through spatial-reading that shows what comics can do and make us feel when abstracted through installation (La Cour 2019). While this interdisciplinary project encompasses practices and theories from multiple fields, we reflect on the art-historical methods and theories that make sense of our methodology. Astrid von Rosen’s (2017) Warburgian methodology, proposed as a comics “activist art history,” gives space to the marginalised, voiceless, and the undefinable experiences that are denied in a canonised telling of Art History and evades its static conclusions that feminists and others have critiqued since the 1960s.1 The fluidity of this methodology, and our own, is hinged on the performative nature of both artists and readers. Going beyond this, we explore

  VAST/O EXHIBITION (DE)CONSTRUCTION: EXPLORING… 

291

von Rosen’s (2017) methodology in the space of the gallery through abstract comics where readers perform as visitors. Through approaching this as a performance, our proposed methodology breaks from the bound nature of comics to explore the architectural elements, namely, the visitor’s experience of the (de)constructed gutter. Art historian Rosalind Krauss’ (1979a) seminal work, “Grids,” and the power of structured abstraction on the psychological experience of viewing and creating art within this well-known framework, is used to make sense of our own reliance on and rejection of the gutter, or grid, in augmented visitor experience. Comics scholarship also examines the role of the grid in gallery comics. Priego and Wilkins (2018, p.  16) present us with a vision of the grid that relates to gallery comics’ performative nature when they state that it “is like the stage technology in theatre or musical performance: sometimes we ignore it; sometimes it intervenes in the action in a particular way and is made meaningful.” Whether a book or an installation, (meaningful) reading is always what becomes of the feedback loop between author, medium, and reader. In gallery comics, considered in Daniel Goodbrey’s (2017) practice and research, the concern with the integration of the architectural and visual cues of the space and reader placement are of the utmost importance. The latter is intimately related with the grid, which, in a gallery, will work much more like in a staged performance where the barrier of the fourth wall is mostly non-existent, turning everyone in an active participant, even if apparently just a voyeur (D’Arcy 2020).

VAST/O Our VAST/O installation explores lived experience of anxiety through immersive technologies, audio, and spatial-reading. It contains a distributed narrative and inner dialogues that attempt to share the complex physical and emotional experience of claustrophobic and acrophobic symptoms. It is based on two research threads: the tangibility of drawing and animation to facilitate physical understanding (communicating phobias), and spatially distributed reading in graphic novel and comic book contexts (reading through architectural placement). The installation composed of animation, abstract comics, and poetry spatially integrated in order to convey Martins’ lived experience of spatial anxieties, such as with animations projected onto other works. The overall installation plays with being an augmented abstract comic in its entirety through exploring how the architecture and comics’ affective qualities (what comics do—not what they are) come together (La Cour 2019). Through developing the installation, we employ different media, such as animation (visual and audio elements) projected into the space, abstract comics blended with poetry and gestural markings, and abstract landscape murals, as well as the staging of a domestic setting with a live webcam feedback loop. The installation was arranged across two levels that created a domestic space (ground floor) which

292 

A. P. ALBERDA ET AL.

portrayed physical experiences and an interior space (basement) which conveyed emotional and intangible experiences (Fig. 1). The research project stemmed from Carolina Martins’ doctoral research and lived experience. It was developed (over two years) through detailed conversations and visual elaborations with Natalie Woolf, an artist and moving image researcher. They collaborated to identify the significant elements of Martins’ condition and find visual solutions to represent and embody them in an installation. Later, João Carola, a comics artist Martins had previously worked with on the piece “like glass” in 2018–19,2 joined. Carola designed the application of Martins’ poetry for the exhibition as an abstract comic that begins at Entrance’s (Fig. 4) gestural poem mural and ends at the entry point of Arrival (Fig. 2) with the “like glass” sculptural comic. All three curated the Entrance space that also contained a number of Martins’ publications (zines documenting her lived experience) and Woolf created a “mise-en-abyme altered lens” piece. Woolf grounded the installation’s design with the titling Entrance, Descent and Arrival to help its processional thinking and introduce its structuring dualities (discussed later), additionally producing two animations: “Anxious Hands” (Fig. 3) and “Breathe” (Fig. 2) and the painting “Landscape-1-2-3loop” (Fig. 2). Arrival was also curated collaboratively. These works and our intentions are analysed later in this chapter. Martins also brought in Alexandra Alberda, a graphic medicine researcher, to explore earlier iterations of the work through visitor responses in order to develop the VAST/O installation we reflect on in this chapter. Visitor responses revealed how we could elicit what comics scholar Erin La Cour (2019) describes as the affective qualities of the social abstraction of comics through exhibition, which incorporates Krauss’ (1979b) theory of the post-medium that is elastic and self-reflexive. All the team contributed towards the dual challenge of expressing the concepts while engaging with the theoretical approaches within Martins’ doctoral research. We wanted to explore what blended comics and animation can do in installations less concerned with medium boundaries and more with self-reflexive methods. After several starts, Martins, a Portuguese researcher, became aware of the differences between the sound of the English word vast (open) and the Portuguese word vasto (closed) whilst reading Gaston Bachelard’s analysis, in The Poetics of Space (1958), of Baudelaire’s use of the French word vaste. Woolf and Martins found this analysis allowed them to bridge differences in their lived experiences: Indeed, whenever we read this word [vast] in the measure of one of Baudelaire’s verses, or in the periods of his prose poems, we have the impression that he forces us to pronounce it. The word vast, then, is a vocable of breath. (Bachelard 2014, p. 113)

At first, these phonetic cues led to an exploration of breathing, breathlessness, and the respiratory system, particularly through Woolf reflecting on the movements made by the mouth while uttering those words. Following this

  VAST/O EXHIBITION (DE)CONSTRUCTION: EXPLORING… 

293

Fig. 1  VAST/O installation layout, 2021. (Illustration by Alexandra P. Alberda and Photography by Alexandre Ramos). Note on illustration: grey lines indicate features that were behind walls that visitors could not see without moving in the space (made transparent here), the large arrow indicates the entry into the space, and the music notes represent the audio installation in the basement that played the sound of breathing. The fading music notes indicates the loudness of the sound and how it could faintly be heard at the top of the stairs as visitors descend. (Collaged images at the bottom show where the later examined works existed in the space)

294 

A. P. ALBERDA ET AL.

Fig. 2  The Arrival montage, 2019. In collaboration with Carolina Martins: Wall installation art “Landscape-1-2-3-loop” by Natalie Woolf, pillar installation art “like glass” by João Carola. Landscape mural: brown paper glued on wall, white acrylic paint, and pencil markings; like glass pillar: alcohol-based pigmented paint on Crystal Acrylic Plates; Video/Audio animation: projected hand painted animation on wall. (Photography by Alexandre Ramos)

awareness of the oral mechanics involved in enunciation of these words, Martins began to visualise the letter “O,” the last letter of the Portuguese word, enclosing the English word in its entirety. Martins felt this was a visual symbol of her own agoraphobia as the “O” swallows and disorients the other letters within its circularity. This is resonant with the vertiginous nature of von Rosen’s (2016) methodology and is a theme that gave shape to the installation. VAST/O has since been developed over three iterations.3 And, while we focus on the installation at Atelier Concorde, Lisbon, Portugal (November–December 2019), the others exist as important extensions of our own vertiginous methodology. Vertiginous here relates to a methodology that is not seeking closure, like comics, or a finite answer as to how augmented abstract comics and animation

  VAST/O EXHIBITION (DE)CONSTRUCTION: EXPLORING… 

295

Fig. 3  “Anxious Hands” by Natalie Woolf, 2019. Hand-drawn animation projected on floating translucent screens and walls behind Entrance. Photography by Alexandre Ramos. Note: this photograph is taken from behind the first screen. Visitors stood in the background of the image having the animation projected around and onto them

installations can achieve a definitive way to convey health experiences, but a method that helps us to work through emerging contradictions and complexities in communicating these in an open-ended manner.

Activist Art History and Knowledge Montage An activist Art History methodology gives us the analytical framework to make sense of and develop abstract comics and animation installations to contribute to health activism. In her article “Warburgian Vertigo: Devising an Activist Art

296 

A. P. ALBERDA ET AL.

Historical Methodology by Way of Analysing the ‘Zine’ Family Fun,” von Rosen presents an activist Art History in which Aby Warburg’s vertiginous knowledge montage methodology “makes possible an engaged art history interested in societal, political and individual change with and through visual, embodied, hybrid and moving expressions” (2017, p. 27). Warburg was an art historian and cultural theorist who is credited with founding the iconographic-­ iconographical approach.4 Warburg’s knowledge montages combined fragments from different media (photos, reproductions of art, text excerpts, etc.) that reflect our memories or realities to explore their relationship to each other and thus construct new meanings based on this interpretative process (Galofaro 2017). Von Rosen (2017) argues that since his death in 1929, Warburg’s work was subject to misinterpretation by scholars following Erwin Panofsky’s ideas, before being liberated by E.H. Gombrich in the 1970s. Recently, art historians have returned to Warburg’s theories, but von Rosen contends that they often overlook his own experience of mental illness,5 which she believes is integral for understanding the intricacies of his Mnemosyne panels, or knowledge montages. Von Rosen asserts that Warburg’s methodology can be used to reveal “how our culture is shaped by entangled subjective and objective forces” (2017, p. 9). This enables us to confront these tensions and contradictions and the “psychologically and affectively charged histor[ies]” (von Rosen 2017, pp.  26–7) that inform our understandings of mental illness. Informed by Warburg’s own experience, von Rosen argues that her reimagining of his methodology is apt for going beyond an understanding of how devastating trauma is, or limited historical narratives about mental illness treatment. Instead, it embraces the complexity of lived experiences alongside these histories. Warburg used his Mnemosyne panels as tools to think through art and Cultural History of the Renaissance in a spatial and physical method that allowed relationships to emerge from putting different knowledges together (Murphy 2021). However, Warburg’s Mnemosyne panels and the fragments on them were moveable as new information could establish new relationships and rewrite Art History. Von Rosen’s methodology borrows Warburg’s concepts of the Denkraum (thinking-space), the Pathosformel (pathos formula), and the Nachleben der Antike (the afterlife of antiquity),6 in order to adapt his knowledge montage work into her own activist Art History. She creates a knowledge montage of Una’s Family Fun: On Sanity, Madness, & Family Tunnel Construction (2012), which collages excerpts from the zine with pictures, postcards, and text taped on a wall, sometimes overlapping and sometimes separate. She views her own knowledge montage as a performative supplement, or meaningful other, and “multifaceted mind-map in motion” (von Rosen 2017, p. 28), to explore Una’s work with women’s experiences of health and enable creative testing of the iteration and transformation  – Nachleben  – of cultural images and memory. The most powerful device is perhaps the Pathosformel, as it can effectively help researchers uncover and understand often contradictory psychological and affective charges in visual, embodied, spatial and hybrid features.

  VAST/O EXHIBITION (DE)CONSTRUCTION: EXPLORING… 

297

Importantly the Denkruam allows both personal and scholarly engagement to feed into the analysis, making sometimes vertiginous process as conscious and clear as possible. (von Rosen 2017, p. 28)

Importantly, this methodology also neither silences Una’s art and voice “nor [uses] it solely as an illustration of what [von Rosen] wants to do with Warburg’s methodology” (von Rosen 2017, p. 7). Disrupting these silencing practices in art-historical analysis is seminal in von Rosen’s (2017) methodology which seeks to actively contribute to change in understanding marginalised voices in health. She does this through examining women’s voices in the mental health contexts present in Una’s work. This methodology is also in constant motion and she states it is only temporarily frozen in her article but exists to transform and develop beyond it (von Rosen 2017). This is similar to how we view each VAST/O installation as well as our methodological discussion in this chapter. Visitors’ responses to the earlier iterations became new fragments added to the installation montage and prompted the artists to shift the different works in the installation to stimulate new meanings. In never claiming a restitutive ending common in public health and clinical narratives (Frank 1995), this vertiginous constant motion moves collaborators between a place of disruption and stability. This allows us to methodologically engage in the realities of mental illnesses and lived experiences. We engage with von Rosen’s (2017) methodology to make sense of our own contradictions and performances as researchers, artists, and individuals, which also includes engaging with our (de)constructing of the gutter within the installation.

Against the Grid Krauss’ (1979a) article, “Grids,” explores the emergence and modernist histories of grids and how these operate within psychological readings of such works. At the time of writing her article, grids had been being produced for decades by modernists such as Piet Mondrian, Sol LeWitt, and Donald Judd, but she also describes the presence of grids in Symbolist Art through windows (Krauss 1979a). Krauss reflects on how the grid is repeated, but resists change, and describes it as a modernist form that has the “capacity to serve as a paradigm or model for the antidevelopment, the antinarrative, the antihistorical” (1979a, p.  64). Strongly aligned with modernist art, the grid functions spatially and temporally. For Krauss, spatially, the grid “is what art looks like when it turns its back on nature” as it seeks to establish an organisation that is aesthetic and not an imitation of the natural (Krauss 1979a, p. 50), though there are different perspectives on the grid that challenge her interpretative framework of modernism;7 Krauss (1979a) did not position the grid as determined by a specific historical chain of events, but grids have a temporal and causal relationship with modernity. Thus, grids as an aesthetic tradition and individual works are an emblem and a myth of modernity:

298 

A. P. ALBERDA ET AL.

For like all myths, it deals with paradox or contradiction not by dissolving the paradox or resolving the contradiction, but by covering them over so that they seem (but only seem) to go away. The grid’s mythic power is that it makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion, or fiction). (Krauss 1979a, p. 54)

Using Mondrian as an example, Krauss believes these grids have seemingly contradictory centrifugal and centripetal readings. For Krauss a centrifugal reading sees the work of art as a fragment of a grid that extends infinitely, which comics scholars may align with readers’ world-building that is interpreted actively in the gutter but supported by the frozen panels that provide fragments of this world. A centripetal reading views the grid as an autonomous “re-presentation of everything that separates the work of art from the world, from ambient space and from other objects” (Krauss 1979a, pp. 60–1, emphasis in original). We view our own work as being able to have similar contradictory readings, because it tries to communicate the intangible and incommunicable lived experiences of health that can only be told in fragments. The environment acknowledges the separation from the visitor’s reality before they enter the space by creating an immersive experience, and, in fact, we celebrate that subtle shift with our dissolved and dissolving reality should visitors choose to fall into our grid-less and, therefore, blurred boundaries. Krauss, in her article “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” examines artistic interventions into architectural spaces, through the medium employed, as “mapping the axiomatic features of the architectural experience  – the abstract conditions of openness and closure  – onto the reality of a given space” (1979b, pp.  41). VAST/O explores the play between the blurred meeting of comics, animation, and architecture to reveal the affective lived experience of spatial anxiety. VAST/O dissolves the grid’s temporality and autonomy from development, narrative, and history through using abstract comics and animations designed to facilitate spatially augmented readings. As the visitor slips between the gutter and the panel, they also become the movement that happens between animated frames, if we extend Norman McLaren’s definition of animation to that of animated space (McLaren 1995). Martins’ fragmented poetry ties the emotive experience of the artists’ works together playing with being classed either as an anti-narrative or narrative, emblematic of chaos illness narratives (Shwetz 2019; Frank 1995). We hope to stimulate activist engagement through sociocultural (anti)narratives and histories of health and individual voice. We explore this through closing the space physically and emotionally between visitors’ bodies and the multilayered emotive presences asserted by the installation.

  VAST/O EXHIBITION (DE)CONSTRUCTION: EXPLORING… 

299

Dualities and Contradictions as Creative Stimulus In this section, we confront three dualities, or contradictions, in the installation and reveal how these can be thought of as creative stimulus for health activism. These dualities have both conceptual and physical levels and are meant to stimulate similar responses in visitors. We examine here in detail the three contradictions that arose in developing VAST/O, which reveal the interplay of comics, Art History, and health activism, before exploring how the artists in our team (de)constructed the gutter when bringing abstract comics and animation together. In her own analysis, von Rosen (2017) reveals how exploring contradictions can promote more complex understandings of health realities when we embrace them rather than try to resolve them. In the following section, we do not attempt to resolve these contradictions but rather to demonstrate how we embraced them in an attempt to communicate the lived experience of spatial anxieties more meaningfully to visitors. The first duality we face is creating a sense of both vastness and enclosure that individuals with spatial anxieties feel. In attempting to theorise the installation’s contradictory aims, Bachelard provides answers by telling us “The word vast reconciles contraries” (2014, p. 209, emphasis in original), offering a stepping off point for Martins to confront dualities in her own lived experiences of spatial anxiety. His words also provided an angle for her collaborators to begin to understand the duality of her experience. Emerging out of Bachelard’s text Woolf was confronted with the complexity of trying to represent vastness. She determined that this was better achieved by allowing visitors to share a sense of vastness as she experienced it, communicated through repetitive, consecutive, and inconsecutive numbers associated with a calming technique for anxiety sufferers drawn on the walls of the landscape piece “Landscape-1-2-3-loop” (Fig. 2). The empty landscape, with or without horizon, is explored in detail by Dylan Trigg: As we see, homogenous space – space perceived as having no horizon – becomes especially problematic as it leaves the agoraphobic subject ‘stranded’ in a void, without any means of escape. (2018, p. xxiii)

Trigg here discusses the loss of a horizon as a significant factor in triggering his own agoraphobia; however, Martins felt the horizon line would confer the sensation of extension, which, in extending without end, produces its own type of vastness that is both a void and enclosed space, discreetly and eerily felt. This reflects how those experiencing agoraphobia can generate fear from vast and open spaces that become smothering and claustrophobic. Woolf’s landscape represents these dualities as both internal and external spaces in Arrival (Fig. 2). Her exploration of these contradictory lived experiences can be considered as her working in the Denkraum. Von Rosen (2017, p. 10) states that those working in this space have “to both lose her/himself in an endless associative abyss and navigate in precise ways to capture the more

300 

A. P. ALBERDA ET AL.

relevant (but still open and moving) aspects of the investigation.” The Denkraum is a well-equipped conceptual space for understanding the realities and histories of mental illness, since it requires an acceptance that no one definitive answer can be found. Instead, Woolf’s various, congruent sketches and experiments aim to find an experience that speaks to intangible mental health realities. Technical limitations did not allow for multiple projections, so Woolf created a homogeneous space of vastness through the representation of a static interior landscape. The landscape became a fixed drawing that wrapped around the basement gallery, aesthetically connecting with Carola’s work. In VAST/O, both the landscape and the enclosed cave-like space of the basement are a play with the Nachleben carrying new meanings through the context of the installation while also maintaining cultural memories of these visuals that call to external contexts. With its tactile presence, this seemed more suited to the duality of the task: to express the challenge of vastness but also not instill too much fear so that the visitor could not engage with the works. For Martins, the drawing and the horizon line concept also represented the diaphragm itself, the muscle of breathing. To Alberda, this work references early Abstract Expressionist paintings by Helen Frankenthaler, and suggests an expansive landscape from the mere gesture of a horizontal line stretched out, consuming the visitor’s entire vision. Similarly, the VAST/O landscape is an abstraction of the physical realities that trigger those with spatial anxieties, and it is a visual illness metaphor to communicate these intangible experiences. In the tradition of narrative and the Pathosformel, inner dialogues are presented throughout via the poetry to anchor the emotions of the affectively charged visual works. These diverging interpretations of the same work reveal the contexts and histories carried by the individual contributors and the presence of the Nachleben. Von Rosen (2017) states that these operate by attempting transformation and making readers confront contradictions through affective performance, using the Pathosformel. The second duality we explore is the push/pull between the static imagery and the moving animations that were based on Martins’ bodily reactions when experiencing spatial anxiety. The fixed imagery includes the visual poem, gestural marking, abstract comics, and landscape elements, while the moving imagery is on-screen or projected animated drawing. Though contradictory, it is the still images (discussed in relation to the grid in the next section) that pull the visitors’ bodies through the installation by establishing the narrative. The differences between still and moving imagery are essential in conveying the vertiginous nature of health and stimulating critical engagement that aligns with activism on an individual level. The movement and content of the animations is constantly conveying the physical symptoms of spatial anxiety: nervous gestures, difficulty breathing, and discomfort in seemingly neutral places. The abstract comic and still images tell the experience grounded through a narrative with a high emotional equality. But, these different parts do not exist separately. The animations are projected on top of and around the still images that

  VAST/O EXHIBITION (DE)CONSTRUCTION: EXPLORING… 

301

make up the abstract comic and its extensive parts; vice versa, the still images exist wherever there is room making the narrative immersive and inescapable and without closure. Von Rosen (2017) states that the lack of closure in a vertiginous methodology enables it to contribute to activist Art History. This is because it actively creates space for unheard and marginalised voices to reinterpret the work. So ultimately, Woolf suggests a kind of inversion to the tradition of the panel in comics. The still images cause movement, while the moving images frame the viewer and fix them in space for the purpose of viewing. The exception being “Anxious Hands” (Fig. 3), which through the expansion of the screen—the transparent curtains—catch the projected image and spread it through the space, mixing visitor and image together, and allow both a still and moving viewing, becoming more energised as people passed through it. These curtains capture and obscure the animation, but they also allow for it to be projected onto the bodies of the visitors as they watch it. In the installation, we hope that the constant shifting between immersing the visitors in someone else’s story and reminding them of the physicality of their own bodies will aid in drawing connections between their own personal experiences and others’ for deeper understanding. This closes the conceptual distance between the visitor’s and Martin’s (drawn) body. This animation exists as the bridging piece after visitors enter the constructed domestic space and before the visitors descend into the interior landscape. Lurking behind the Entrance (and therefore also the exit), this projection is positioned at a point when action/departure is required. Often tied to the second duality, the third duality we explore is the overlapping exterior and interior realities present in the installation (Figs. 2 and 4). This duality is important for trying to communicate mostly invisible health experiences to affect social change, because clinical attempts at communicating these experiences often rely on text-based communication and/or lists of symptoms. These are often linked to master (clinical) narratives concerned with communicating treatment and behavioural change. This is not the point of VAST/O, which is an attempt to communicate what is missing here: the emotional lived experience of mental health that is not felt linearly or is not communicated in symptom-focused medical texts. To achieve this, we construct these two realities across the two levels, starting with something that looks like a calm physical reality (domestic space) at first, but later dissolves into a charged emotive landscape (interior space) at a point of turmoil. Visitors can only experience the installation in this order and must return to the physical reality before leaving the installation with the knowledge that what is under the surface is contradictory to what can be seen. But, even within this domestic space, there is vertiginous movement that disrupts a complete sense of calm. The “domestic set” (Fig. 4), or constructed reality, was meant to shift the visitor from a sense of physical place to the later interior emotional landscape. We had an entrance that naturally offered a sense of domesticity, since it conveyed a kitchen and had space for us to simulate a living room, with seating, tables, and screen. The changing light of the entrance space caused by the glass

302 

A. P. ALBERDA ET AL.

Fig. 4  Entrance—The “Domestic Set” and Transition montage, 2019. Water-based acrylic painted on walls. (Installation art by João Carola, Carolina Martins, and Natalie Woolf. Photography by Alexandre Ramos)

door kept the notion of time passing in the “domestic set” situated at Entrance. Here, Woolf devised the “surveillance loop” that created a mise-en-abyme whereby what appeared on screen was footage of the viewer captured on a webcam. This works on a similar level to that suggested by Chavanne’s analysis of Inside Moebius by Jean Giraud (Grove et al. 2020), where, within the “diegetic world” of the gallery, we replace the panel with the monitor, that cannot deny its configuration, capturing (imprisoning) its live subjects. This acts in part as an inset panel, and since we are following the action of the viewer, we replace “artist activity” with the viewed and viewer. If the viewer then reads from one of Martins’ publications, placed on the table, the internal spiral continues. The domestic space sits as transition between the visitor’s own reality of the world outside and the beginning of the constructed reality that will unfurl within the installation. The mise-en-abyme of the domestic setting begins to suggest a vertiginous recurring, out of linear time, of illness experiences, as well as prompting the viewer to think about narratives within narratives (Cohn and Gleich 2012). Importantly the footage was not a straight feedback/reflection

  VAST/O EXHIBITION (DE)CONSTRUCTION: EXPLORING… 

303

of people within the range of the camera. Because the webcam lens was altered, you only became aware that you were the subject when you realise your movements were being echoed on screen. A partial, unnerving self-awareness is awakened, but the image is not clear enough to be used as a mirror. During students’ visits, when asked about the purpose of the surveillance loop, one person replied “it’s because we are the last frame” and another stated “you cannot escape from yourself.” The live webcam view of the entrance door proposes not only a sense of in/security and disturbing the borders between in and out but also reinforces the idea of circularity present in Carola’s marks and the sense of vertigo we wanted to convey through the overall reading. Augmentation and abstraction are by definition the transforming and deconstructing of realities into something else, as in La Cour’s (2019) theory of the social abstraction of exhibited comics. The installation sought to do that by playing with the multimedia affordances that help create worlds through reader engagement, such as the gutter in comics or movement in animation. By deconstructing them, we were able to explore methodological potentials for these types of installations for communicating health experiences beyond clinical or homogenous concepts of illness. Our method’s ontological position is that every visitor has their own version of reality (Levers 2013). Therefore, it is crucial to consider audiences’ abilities to suspend disbelief and enter into shifting realities the installation facilitates. This type of project requires collaborators to engage with multiplicity and inform visitors of the nature of the health experiences in the installation prior to their visit, as it is difficult to self-monitor in immersive installations.8 This last point resonates with von Rosen’s Warburgian activist approach that is in constant motion and never seeks closure but is open to individuals’ unpredictable personal experiences that give emotive meaning to sociocultural and political associations.

(De)constructing the Gutter Through Abstraction and Augmentation VAST/O attempts to blur the boundaries between each of its elements and spaces, proposing an expanded environment, where a certain reality is shaped for the audience to feel incorporated in the narrative, corrupting one of the key elements of comics: the gutter. The gutter is a kind of “venue where the minds of readers interact with the comics text” (Kukkonen 2011, p. 217) and delineates what belongs in the realm of the fictional or of the real world. In the context of an installation, where boundaries are not clear, the reader is constantly in and out of the gutter, traversing the real and the fictional. In these examples, the gutter is diluted in a hybrid space, becoming a venue to be traversed and used as a connection. In installations, this space becomes a literal venue bordered object by object where the readers are juxtaposed in praesentia (Groensteen 2007). Ultimately, we found the abstraction of experiences and the works in the installation created an emotive site through which a

304 

A. P. ALBERDA ET AL.

just-within-grasp narrative, further augmented through spatial-reading, could be asserted overall. Krauss’ (1979a, b) work is used here to understand how VAST/O’s (anti) narrative required the abstraction of the gutter into the architecture in order to achieve an immersive and prolonged reading experience that explicitly reveals its contradictions. Shwertz (2019) states that traditional chaos narratives “can often be identified by sentences that are themselves disordered and chaotic instead of clearly written and grammatically succinct.” In VAST/O, Carola does not make distinct caption boxes and communication bubbles around Martins’ poem, symbolically fixing phrases to narrative time. Instead, Martins’ distributed poetry directs movement and leads visitors through the architecture more vertiginously. Alongside the poetry, Carola paints abstracted gestures that accentuate this movement, leading the visitor down into the interior landscape (Fig. 2). These gestures resonate with those present in Woolf’s animations, as well as the sculptural comic in the interior landscape below. We assert that this immersive experience can more effectively stimulate health activism by purposefully hiding gutters (boundaries) between panels (works), so that when, in “like glass” (Fig. 5), a work is made more distinct within the installation, the visitor feels this separation, as works push and pull them between competing centrifugal and centripetal readings. We need to work backwards to understand how the abstract comics part of the installation was formulated, because Carola’s artistic process is the opposite of the visitors’

Fig. 5  The “like glass” art by João Carola and poetry by Carolina Martins, 2018–19. Alcohol-based pigment hand painted on Crystal Acrylic Plates. (Photography by Alexandre Ramos)

  VAST/O EXHIBITION (DE)CONSTRUCTION: EXPLORING… 

305

experience of the works. In the installation, visitors start from a resistance of gutters and grids in the domestic space and abstract comics mural, but the grid emerges in “like glass,” the last piece visitors encounter in the basement. Martins has a fascination with glass’ materiality, origins, fragility, and contradictions, similar to Krauss’ (1979a) analysis of the appearance of the grid in the windows of Symbolist Art. Martins already had a fixed grid in mind for Carola to adapt: four square pages divided in four equal squared panels. The poem itself explores the body’s connection to emotional fragilities and its characteristics became an epigraph of the comic and installation. Firstly, its circular nature, where the first four verses are structurally similar to the last four verses, gave Carola his first narrative idea: ending up in a situation that is very similar to where we started from. In the installation, these four pages are placed against the sides of the same plinth making the reader walk circularly around the comic to read it in an order of their own making. This circular physical movement needed to read the comic embodies the cyclic features that Carola illustrates on the acrylic and appeals to the reader’s immersion in the (anti)narrative, while the structure (grid) conveys its prison-like stiffness. From the very start, Carola had a feeling that the poem and the narrative growing in his head were asking for a different type of format away from paper. The various materialities and textures, at times in a metaphysical way, not only dictate the material in which the comic should be produced but also the course of its own narrative. In fact, the first couple verses speak of notions of transparency and opacity, which gave Carola the initial idea for a different type of material: an acrylic book as an installation piece where each page would be divided in four transparent layers. The layers were painted with opaque black ink so, when together, they would complete the graphical information of the page as well as accentuate a notion of tridimensionality within the object: a space inside the book. The narrative of the comic is a journey of observation, approximation, and transformation. In its space there exist markings that keep showing themselves to us in order to reveal their fractal nature. The poem dictates their interactions, sometimes in accordance with its text but other times not, creating a disparaging dissonance. Carola’s brushstrokes in the comic connect to the graphic communication of the entire installation, increasing their urgency and velocity. Carola felt a desire to explode these brushstrokes onto the walls of the gallery in order to connect the two floors separated by a staircase. He approached this as creating a graphic narrative work that uses the space of the gallery as a narrative tool (Duffy 2009). Using Martins’ poetry again, Carola continues an exploration of an empty space inhabited by smudges that shows themselves in a process of transformation to the visitors. This work establishes a continuous stream of walls that text and image share, without other graphic boundaries like panels, speech bubbles, or text boxes. We read through the narrative without the need of windows, symbolic and literal grids (Krauss 1979a), since we are already in its diegetic world: the gallery itself. Text and image punctuate each other creating a reading rhythm based on the movement of the reader

306 

A. P. ALBERDA ET AL.

inside the gallery. Quick and sparse brushstrokes accelerate its reading but bold, heavy strokes and big dense dark blobs of paint grab the reader, trying to stop them from walking further, demanding to observe them harder. One powerful instance of this occurs when the visitor is coming to the bottom of the stairs where the ceiling requires most people to crouch. Here, Carola places a bold and dark brushstroke, so that the emotional and physical tightness of the space stays with the visitor. Walking down to a more open area is not done in relief, as the visitor brings the closed-in sensation of the tight staircase with them. Almost because of that last brushstroke, the visitor does not actually transition to a more open room. They bring that feeling with them as they read the last verses of the poem while still immersed in it: “my body stops / it becomes a place.” When visiting the exhibition, we start with the urgent moment of the exhibition poster, then we read the erratic and violent moments of the mural and poem, and we end up in the “like glass” grid. In a way, any of these three pieces of work are all branches from the same narrative tree. They can be seen as short narratives, with the same characters, exploring the same themes in different diegetic times. However, the return of the grid in “like glass” creates a moment of calm transformation as the visitor arrives at a point of emotive self-discovery and a centripetal reading is facilitated to allow separation from the immersive and augmented work. In his book Comics and Communication, Paul Fisher Davies explores Abstract Comics in their capabilities to communicate. In Chapter 3, “Abstraction in Comics,” Davies (2019) refers to Andrei Molotiu’s two types of abstract comics. The first one being “recognisable mimetic images (…) combined in ways McCloud’s system would classify as ‘non-sequitur’”; and the second one being the comics that do not mimetically represent recognisable real-world images (2019, p. 38). Carola’s work falls into the latter. Its organic forms, contrasting with the obtuse angles of the architecture, are animated by passing readers. At the same time, its rhythm expresses a physical discomfort and disorientation, recalling Davies’ reading of Benoît Joly’s “Parcours” (1987), where he calls upon C.S. Peirce’s “indexical” mode of representation, which “represents the traces left by physical action which are then implicit in the reading” (Davies 2019, p. 53). It is Carola’s interpretation of rhythms in the textual poem, mimicked in the visualised gestural marks of the mural, that lead the reader’s passing throughout the space and creates its own narrative world. However, the audio of the breathing from Woolf’s animations does not allow visitors to separate their reading of Carola and Martins’ “like glass” for long before pulling them back into the enveloping presence of overall chaos and discomfort of the installation.9 A centripetal reading is both encouraged by the grid in “like glass” and denied by the audio that reminds the visitor of the experiences beyond it. This could be understood as a vertiginous voicing of silence, trying to make something intangible tangible, made accessible to readers through the repeated visual and textual expressions and disrupted by the audio (von Rosen 2017), like the constant noise of thoughts in the back of

  VAST/O EXHIBITION (DE)CONSTRUCTION: EXPLORING… 

307

your head. Visitors stated that it ultimately led them to need to return to the domestic space above where the audio was only faintly heard and, thus, less emotionally pressing and able to be dealt with. It became apparent that audio was important in conveying a fragment of the lived chaos of spatial anxieties and the need to find an escape. By creating this, we hope to facilitate a meta-­ reading of the installation as the visitor without spatial anxieties re-emerges from the interior landscape, and realises that it is only they themselves who are able to escape as the installation is a representation of Martins herself and her lifelong condition of spatial anxieties. We hope that this emotive experience stimulates individual change through a non-medical understanding of health, which feeds into larger social changes and health activism that advocates for more empathetic understandings of patient’s dual and seemingly contradictory experiences.

Reflection: Installing Health Activism In this chapter, we explored how to merge theory with practice, and the advantages and challenges of our method. Researchers wanting to explore abstract comics’ emotive potential in communicating health experiences need to engage collaboratively with artists familiar with this genre, as well as individuals who have experienced the health condition and seek to liberate it from limiting and toxic social stigmas. With each reiteration of the installation, our action research approach reacts to visitor feedback to build our own method and continue to disrupt existing canonised inequalities opened up by an activist Art History. A comics activist Art History allows researchers to go beyond academic disciplinary conversations and actively contribute to social, political, and individual change (von Rosen 2017). The greatest strength of this exhibition lies in its ability to immerse the reader, physically and emotionally, in the diegetic world of its pieces. The world that the reader discovers is not welcoming, as the feelings present are of aversion and repulsion, but the installation gives a voice to lived experiences to confront prevailing harmful sociocultural and charged historical contexts. Abstract comics and animation installations provide us an opportunity to communicate lived health experiences and empower artists and individuals through supporting their work and voices. An activist approach makes us as researchers confront our own current practices that may marginalise creators’ voices or agency. Von Rosen’s idea of the vertiginous montage and our own on-going vertiginous installation methodology “keeps critical motion alive” (2017, p. 28). This means that we as collaborators are continuously and actively engaged in adapting the work to new spaces, voices, and visitors in ways that do not adhere to master narratives and promote visitor agency. Visitor reactions, as well as other observations collected from informal feedback, have helped us to consider how far to take the augmentation of the gallery spaces to present a powerful immersive experience. Abstract comics and animations afford the artists the ability to combine actual and animated spaces

308 

A. P. ALBERDA ET AL.

in the gallery, static and moving, to work towards our goals but not cause harm, which is a challenge when working with immersive health experiences. For us, working on an installation that is always in motion and only freezes temporarily as it is installed is exciting; however, it calls for site-specific consideration in order to effectively convey its activist intentions. Von Rosen’s work affords us analytical devices for deepening our own engagement with creating these works as well as creating meaningful experiences for visitors. For Comics Studies scholars, this methodology also requires us to be human within the work, and make transparent how we ourselves relate to the topics, work, and histories we engage with. This not only allows for our work to affect sociocultural or political change through facilitating emotive visitor responses, but the method has the potential to stimulate our own individual transformation through methodological activism that uses self-reflexivity. These personal and societal changes are meaningful whether the impact would be perceived as slight or major by the researcher, visitor, artist, or institutions. VAST/O is not supposed to be a clinical report providing a clinical or medical understanding of spatial anxieties. It was our intention from the beginning to convert Martins’ emotions into a format visitors could feel. We believe that our methodology reveals that an abstract comics and animation installation that seeks to augment space in order to communicate health experiences is impactful and meaningful for some visitors. Augmented abstract comics and animation installations allow for a balance between personal illness narrative that tells a singular story and also ambiguity and emotion that can lead to visceral and emotive embodied experiences. Researchers might consider the power of abstract comics in conveying intangible and untouchable health experiences to publics. They may also benefit from blending the boundaries between different media to add narrative depth and create an immersive environment that mimics sensory experiences associated with comics or the health experience (Hague 2014). By engaging with local artists and patients, researchers can employ a comics Art History activist approach that empowers these groups and works to destigmatise health realities through emotive installations.

Notes 1. For further discussion of feminist Art History’s critique of the canon Cf. Wallin Wictorin and Nordenstam chapter “Feminist Art History as an Approach to Research on Comics: Meta Reflections on Studies of Swedish Feminist Comics”, and Olsza Chapter “Towards Feminist Comics Studies: Feminist Art History and the Study of Women’s Comix in the 1970s in the United States”. 2. The poem like glass came together when Martins first tried to explore the strangeness of her own bodily relation with spaces. It was made previously into an unbound, multiple page, limited print comic that was multicursal and readers had to twist and move to read; Carola worked again with Martins to adapt the work into a sculptural comic. It is a metaphor that links the toughness and vulnerability of the human body with glass properties, ending up signaling overcoming the terror of one’s own uncanny relation with space, from which you cannot escape.

  VAST/O EXHIBITION (DE)CONSTRUCTION: EXPLORING… 

309

By choosing a composition that conveys the turning of the sheet and of the head to read it, it purposely induces a vertigo feeling. Besides this, due to its multicursality, one can enjoy different readings, similar to what happens when reading the plexiglass object it came to be as a sculptural comic. 3. A partial pilot exhibited in Bournemouth, UK (open to the public), and two immersive installations at Atelier Concorde, Lisbon, Portugal (November– December 2019), and the Banco das Artes Galeria, Leiria, Portugal (November 2020–January 2021). 4. For further application of Warburg’s methodology to comics Cf. Ahmed chapter “Reading Comics with Aby Warburg: Collaging Memories.” 5. Following World War I, Warburg suffered from severe psychosis, which was initially diagnosed as schizophrenia, but was later challenged by Emil Kraepelin as mixed manic-depressive state. Warburg recovered over six years, across three different institutions, and was discharged from Binswanger’s Belle Vue clinic, Switzerland, in August 1924. Here artistic ventures were encouraged in patients’ treatment and Warburg spent time with psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn discussing topics related to his later Mnemosyne work. For more on Warburg’s treatment and mental health, see Barale, Emanuele, and Politi (2011), Punzi (2019), and Theiss-Abendroth (2010) (in German). 6. Warburg intended to make a book from his Bilderatlas Mnemosyne; however, he died before this could happen, and thus the work we discuss here is based on his many reflections and talks he gave while alive. The three concepts of his method that we employ here are the Denkraum (thinking-space), the Pathosformel (pathos formula), and the Nachleben der Antike (the afterlife of antiquity). The Denkraum for Warburg was not the work, but the tools that enabled the thought experiment, such as the individual parts that he moved around his panels in searching for their relationship, and the environment its physicality created for thinking. The Pathosformel was what the panels portrayed, and what his book would convey, which was the emotional quality and actions of what is contained in the art, through gesture and content, that reaches through time. The Nachleben der Antike refers to the relationship between the different elements emerging from the methodology that creates new constructed meanings. For more on Warburg’s montages and reactions to it, see Kathryn Murphy (2021). 7. Krauss’ theory of the grid has been contested by some and differs from others, such as Amy Goldin (1975), Andrew McNamara (1992, 2009), and Francesco Proto (2020). 8. Alberda conducted curator and visitor interviews of graphic medicine exhibitions for her PhD research. Self-monitoring was described as the ability for an individual visitor to monitor their own emotional responses to the works, and if those became too powerful, and potentially harmful, the visitor would have the space to not engage with the work. Immersive health exhibitions must consider how visitors are enabled to act on self-monitoring to maintain their wellbeing in an exhibit. The concept of self-monitoring is an important ethical consideration and reality supported by semi-structured interviews conducted for that forthcoming work. 9. These reflections were shared informally with Alberda, Martins, and Woolf during the opening and tours they ran at the gallery in November and December 2019. However, the audio was tested in the Bournemouth exhibition earlier that year to see if it would do this and Alberda conducted semi-structured interviews which capture these reactions.

310 

A. P. ALBERDA ET AL.

References Bachelard, Gaston. 2014. The Poetics of Space. London: Penguin Classics. Barale, Alice, Emanuele, Enzo, and Politi, Pierluigi. 2011. Aby Warburg, 1866–1929. American Journal of Psychiatry 168:8, pp. 782–782. Cohn, Dorrit, and Gleich, . 2012. Metalepsis and mise en abyme. Narrative 20:1, pp. 105–114. Czerwiec, MaryKay, Williams, Ian, Squier, Susan Merrill, Green, Michael J., Myers, Kimberly R., and Smith, Scott T. 2015. Graphic Medicine Manifesto. Vol. 1. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. D’Arcy, Gerard. 2020. Mise en scène, Acting, and Space in Comic. London: Palgrave Pivot. Davies, Paul Fisher. 2019. Comics as Communication: A functional approach. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Duffy, Damian. 2009. Learning from Comics on the Wall: The old new media of sequential art in museology and multimodal education. Visual Arts Research: educational, historical, philosophical, and psychological perspectives 68, pp. 1–11. Frank, Arthur W. 1995; 2013. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 2nd edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Galofaro, Luca. 2017. On the idea of montage as form of architecture production. Presented at the International and Interdisciplinary Conference IMMAGINI? Image and Imagination between Representation, Communication, Education and Psychology, Brixen, Italy, 27–28 November 2017. Goldin, Amy. 1975. Patterns Grids and Painting. Artforum 14:1, pp. 50–54. Goodbrey, Daniel Merlin. 2017. The Impact of Digital Mediation and Hybridisation on the Form of Comics [online]. Thesis (Professional Doctorate in Design (Ddes)). University of Hertfordshire School of Creative Arts. Available from: http://e-­merl. com/thesis/DMGthesis2017web.pdf. Groensteen, Thierry. 2007. The System of Comics. Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Grove, Laurence, Anne Magnussen, and Ann Miller. 2020. Introduction, European Comic Art 13:2, pp. 1–5. https://doi.org/10.3167/eca.2020.130201 Hague, Ian. 2014. Comics and the Senses: A multisensory approach to comics and graphic novels. Oxford: Routledge. Kukkonen, Karin. 2011. Metalepsis in popular culture. In Metalepsis in Popular Culture, eds. Karin Kukkonen and Sonja Klimek, pp. 213–231. Berlin: de Gruyter. Krauss, Rosalind. 1979a. Grids. October 9, pp. 51–64. https://doi.org/ 10.2307/778321. Krauss, Rosalind. 1979b. Sculpture in the Expanded Field. October 8, pp.  30–44. https://www.jstor.org/stable/778224. La Cour, Erin. 2019. Social abstraction: Toward exhibiting comics as comics. In Abstraction and Comics/Bande Dessinée et Abstraction, eds. Aarnoud Rommens, Benoît Crucifix, Björn-Olav Dozo, Erwin Dejasse and Pablo Turnes, pp. 401–417. Liège: Presses Universitaires de Liège. Levers, Merry-Jo D. 2013. Philosophical paradigms, grounded theory, and perspectives on emergence. Sage Open 3:4. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244013517243. McLaren, Norman. 1995. The definition of Animation: a letter from Norman McLaren, Animation Journal 3:2 (Spring), pp. 62–66. McNamara, Andrew. 2009. An Apprehensive Approach: The Legacy of Modernist Culture. Bern: Peter Lang.

  VAST/O EXHIBITION (DE)CONSTRUCTION: EXPLORING… 

311

———. 1992. Between Flux and Certitude: The Grid in Avant-Garde Utopian Thought. Art History 15:1, pp.  60–79. https://doi.org/10.1111/ j.1467-­8365.1992.tb00469.x Murphy, Kathryn. 2021. With his cryptic clusters of images, Aby Warburg remapped the art of the past. Apollo: The International Art Magazine, 13 February 2021. https://www.apollo-­magazine.com/aby-­warburg-­bilderatlas-­mnemosyne-­review/. Accessed 28 March 2021. Peltz, Amy. 2013. A Visual Turn: Comics and art after the graphic novel. Art in Print 2:6, pp.  8–14. https://artinprint.org/article/a-­visual-­turn-­comics-­and-­art-­after-­ the-­graphic-­novel/. Accessed 18 November 2020. Priego Ernesto and Wilkins Peter, (2018) The Question Concerning Comics as Technology: Gestell and Grid, The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship 8:0, p. 16. https://doi.org/10.16995/cg.133. Proto, Francesco. 2020. Abject Objects: Perversion and the Modernist Grid. Architecture and Culture 8:3–4, pp.  564–582. https://doi.org/10.1080/2050782 8.2020.1801027 Punzi, Elisabeth, 2019. Art and mental health care as cultural heritage and current practice. IKON 12, pp. 295–302. https://doi.org/10.1484/J.IKON.4.2019034 Shwetz, Katherine. 2019. The Chaotic Narratives of Anti-Vaccination. In Routledge Handbook of the Medical Humanities, ed. Alan Bleakley, ebook. Oxford: Routledge. Theiss-Abendroth Peter. 2010. Die psychiatrische Behandlung des Aby Warburg: eine historische Kasuistik [The psychiatric treatment of Aby Warburg: a historical case report]. Fortschritte der Neurologie-Psychiatrie 78:1, pp.  27–32. https://doi. org/10.1055/s-­0028-­1109966 Trigg, Dylan. 2018. Topophobia. London: Bloomsbury Academic. von Rosen, Astrid. 2017. Warburgian Vertigo: Devising an Activist Art Historical Methodology by Way of Analysing the “Zine” Family Fun. Konsthistorisk tidskrift/ Journal of Art History 86:1, pp.  6–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/0023360 9.2016.1237540 Williams, Oli, Sarre, Sophie, Constantina Papoulias, Stan, Knowles, Sarah, Robert, Glenn, Beresford, Peter, Rose, Diana, Carr, Sarah, Kaur, Meerat, and Palmer, Victoria J. 2020. Lost in the shadows: reflections on the dark side of co-production. Health Research Policy and Systems 18, pp. 1–10.

From Tableau to Sequence: Introducing Comics Theory Within Art History to Study the Photobook Michel Hardy-Vallée

Abstract  Since the late 1970s, the skyrocketing prominence of photography in the art world has been accompanied by the production of large, tableau-like prints and their study within Art History. The institutionalization of photography within the museum has been met by a rising interest in the photographic book—or photobook—among collectors, critics, and scholars. This has created a need for methods to perform the fine analysis and interpretation of pictorial sequences, a task that comics theory can help fulfil. Thierry Groensteen’s System of Comics defines at a fundamental level the material and conceptual framework of the medium. For art-historical research on the photobook Open Passport (1973), by Canadian photographer John Max, Groensteen’s system has been repurposed to analyse the photographic sequence. This framework has been useful in building a detailed interpretation of the book, and its application was extended to the exhibition variant of Open Passport. Groensteen’s semiotic analysis fills a gap in the analysis of narrative pictures, which often neglects the space in which images are situated, as well as image-to-image syntax. This usefulness does not point to a homogeneous scholarly field for pictorial sequence but rather to the connected nature of cultural forms and the need for interdisciplinary dialogue.

M. Hardy-Vallée (*) Concordia University, Montréal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Gray, I. Horton (eds.), Seeing Comics through Art History, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8_16

313

314 

M. HARDY-VALLÉE

Keywords  Photobook • John Max • Thierry Groensteen • Canadian photography • Visual semiotics To read a pictorial sequence, art historians often heuristically rely on cultural conventions like sinistrodextral reading, character consistency, gestures and facial expressions, or patterns of pictorial composition, especially when their focus is on narrative, historical, or political aspects of the work. Such pre-­ theoretical concepts adequately serve the purpose of many studies, just as literary scholars need not recapitulate the principles of linguistics every time they write about a novel. However, there are occasions when syntactical, lexical, or even phonological analysis is relevant, and so it is with pictures. The photographic book (photobook) has created in Art History a need for methods to perform the detailed analysis and interpretation of pictorial sequences that comics theory can help fulfil. Since the late 1970s, the skyrocketing prominence of photography in the art world has been accompanied by the production of large, tableau-like prints and their study within Art History—the work of Jeff Wall, Thomas Ruff, or Gregory Crewdson is paradigmatic in this regard. At the heart of this institutional shift is not so much an opposition between the documentary and artistic values of photography but rather a debate on the rapport between images and audiences. Modernist critics such as Michael Fried have championed a kind of photographic art that could not be examined up close in the hands like small prints, magazines, or books can, entertaining “the ontological fiction that the beholder does not exist” (Fried 2008, p. 40). Fried thus directly precludes the artistic value of both expressive and performative photographic practices—from the humanistic documentary of W. Eugene Smith to the pictorial appropriations of Sherrie Levine—and relegates to the suburbs of fine art as mere objecthood the photographic sequence, which takes for granted the viewer’s participation in connecting the images. The book has rallied scholars and critics reacting to the increasing place of photography within the museum (Dugan 1979; Crimp 1989; Armstrong 1998; Parr and Badger 2004), identifying the birth of the medium with the publication of the first book combining printed text and photographs, the 1844 Pencil of Nature (Fox Talbot 2011). An account of the author’s development and application of his pioneering photographic process, the Pencil of Nature ushered in a new era of mechanical reproduction: unlike the daguerreotype, which produced unique images on silvered copper plates, Talbot’s calotype process employed paper negatives allowing the production of multiple positive copies. Redefining thus the origin of photography acknowledges the resounding fecundity of the negative-positive process, while flipping the conversation once more from the single to the multiple image, as well as from the

  FROM TABLEAU TO SEQUENCE: INTRODUCING COMICS THEORY WITHIN ART… 

315

ignored to the acknowledged audience, since books are made to be touched, thumbed, earmarked, chewed, or cherished. Martin Parr and Gerry Badger’s epoch-making survey The Photobook: A History therefore excludes books notable for their emphasis on the stand-alone photograph. Artistic intent lies instead close to editorial control. Parr and Badger define the photobook as “a book—with or without text—where the work’s primary message is carried by photographs. It is a book authored by a photographer or by someone editing and sequencing the work of a photographer, or even a number of photographers” (Parr and Badger 2004, p. 7). They take the comparatively smaller scholarly interest in the photobook to reflect academics’ sense of a “contradiction in the very idea of the photographer as auteur” and a refusal to consider “the photographer’s view of the medium” (Parr and Badger 2004, pp.  10–11). The study of photography in books is today a growing field, but it has inherited a quarrel pitting the book and the tableau, a quarrel that recapitulates eighteenth-century philosopher G.E. Lessing’s essay on the Laocoön, the canonical expression of the opposition between narrative and pictorial art (Lessing 1984).1 A case like Open Passport shows instead how the photographic “museum” and “library” are interrelated rather than mutually exclusive, to borrow the famous opposition (Crimp 1989). My own research has therefore aimed to overcome this fault line by relating the photobook to multiple sites of photographic dissemination—the book, the gallery, and the screen. The photobook visibly sits among a constellation of practices that employ photographs in groups such as chronophotography, thematic exhibitions, the photo-novel, or the magazine photo-essay (Smith 2008a). This new perspective awakens old questions: what defines a photographic work and its variants; how to elucidate its genesis, interpret its meaning, or preserve it in a collection (Greenough 2009; Koudelka and Chéroux 2017)? More than ever, the answer requires paying greater attention to the semiotic rapports between photographs than between the image and its referent. While theories of cinematic montage can provide starting points to articulate the temporal, fictional, or perceptual aspects of photobooks (Méaux 1995), their usefulness is offset by the comparative rarity of spatialized pictorial sequencing in films. Comics, in contrast, are most typically characterized by sequencing based on juxtaposition and page layout. Both photobooks and comics have a temporality comparable to that of reading. Academically, comics and photographic studies have experienced heated debates over the status of their object of study, navigated a complex positioning within departments, and suffered from unfavourable comparison to established media. Nevertheless, few links have been made; nothing yet compares at the theoretical level to what has been accomplished in practice by the trilogy Le Photographe (Guibert, Lefèvre, and Lemercier 2010), seamlessly fusing the contact sheet to the strip. Narratology informs the art-historical analysis of images (see Kemp 2003), but the attention given to the narrative dimension leaves the sequential aspect relatively unexamined. In the case of photographs, both narration and sequence

316 

M. HARDY-VALLÉE

alter our received idea that they are a slice of time-space (Baetens 2007, p. 60), but only the sequence requires us to consider the space of audiences: how pictures are arranged, and in what order. This problem drew me to the work of Thierry Groensteen on the semiotics of comics in my research focused on Canadian photographer John Max [Porchawka]. His Open Passport (Max 1973) was an innovative work with a storied genesis that cast a long shadow in its native context. A narrative about the transformation and failure of a couple around the birth of their child, it was a complex sequence built on the repurposing of images picked across the photographer’s entire archive. It posed formidable challenges of description and interpretation from its audacious sequencing, but also because it was produced as exhibition, slide show, and book. The work done by Groensteen to define at a fundamental level the material and conceptual framework of comics allowed me to build an interpretation of Open Passport that withstood scrutiny and could be extended beyond the printed page while distinguishing this photobook from comics. In the following pages, I situate Groensteen’s System of Comics in relationship to the scholarly background that justified its use and critically consider its usefulness. After an overview of my research on John Max and the photographic book, I will illustrate my application of Groensteen’s system to the case of Open Passport according to its principal components. I conclude on the benefits and challenges of this method by considering the horizon of a general theory of pictorial sequences.

Problems in Sequence The meaning of the term “sequence” when applied to photography varies remarkably between authors, especially when contrasted to the cognate “series.” Most authors will use one term to refer to a group of pictures that is more organised (thematically, narratively, or plastically) than the one they identify by the other term: someone’s sequence is someone else’s series. This makes discussing conceptual frameworks a somewhat daunting exercise in synoptic reading, but all authors grapple with the same fundamental issue: how to speak of related images. My usage follows that of Groensteen: a series is constituted by pictures following one another, continuously or not, that are related according to iconic, plastic, or semantic features; a sequence is a narrative series (Groensteen 1988, p. 65). Studies of photographic sequences have favoured close reading of visual content above syntax. American Studies scholar Alan Trachtenberg’s ground-­ breaking analysis of Walker Evans’s Message from the Interior (1966), inspired by literary criticism, draws attention to the cumulative impact on the viewer of the photographs (Trachtenberg 1979). Art historian Peter C. Bunnell adopts a similar approach to Minor White’s non-narrative works. Inspired by Zen Buddhism, White made in the 1950s a number of abstract photographs that he presented according to a linear order, which function by appealing to intuition and emotional response rather than to character and plot (Minor White,

  FROM TABLEAU TO SEQUENCE: INTRODUCING COMICS THEORY WITHIN ART… 

317

Klochko, and Hershberger 2015). Bunnell examines the sustained effort of concentration that is required of the audience attempting to connect the images (Bunnell 1991). Art historian Lew Andrews, considering Evans’s American Photographs (1938), draws attention both to thematic and symbolic aspects of the sequence, noting oppositions and leitmotifs, but neglects page layout (Andrews 1994). Cultural Studies and comics scholar Jan Baetens analyses Lawrence Levy’s Going to Heaven (1976) using A.J. Greimas’s semiotics and Gérard Genette’s narratology, but he does so to illuminate the thematic structure of the work, not to qualify the nature of relationships between images (Baetens 2001). His interest in hybrid forms has also led him to do extensive work on the photo-novel and the film photonovel, as well as the photographic narrative (Baetens 1995, 2008, 2010, 2019), but his focus is on their cultural significance and their hermeneutical aspects, not the specifics of image syntax. Recent studies of photobooks bring in a much-needed expertise in the materiality of the book and its cultural significance, but still face the challenge of operating in a scholarly context for photography that has until now favoured the study of iconography and its relation to ideology across multiple disciplines (Nickel 2001). As Visual Studies scholar Shamoon Zamir notes on the subject of Edward S. Curtis’s major work: The failure to attend with exactness to the work of form in The North American Indian [1907–1930] has narrowed our understanding of the book’s ethical and epistemological dimensions and obscured what remains most creative and engaging in the work. Despite the substantial body of existing commentary on Curtis’s project, we still have no sustained close reading of an image, or of an image group, or sequence, or of the interaction of image and text—no account, in fact, of the work as precisely what it is, a photobook. (Zamir 2012, p. 39)

The limits of his essay do not allow Zamir to perform systematically the kind of analysis he wants for his subject, but for curator Joel Smith, this is perhaps a pipe dream: the image-to-image syntax of a series is an unreliable index to the series’ sense, or intended reading. After all a single mode of organization, such as minute variations on a theme, can serve purposes as different as valorization by analogy ([Lewis W.] Hine), motion analysis ([Eadweard] Muybridge), formalist self-­ expression ([Alfred] Stieglitz), salesmanship (the stove inventory), and disinterested typology ([Bernd and Hilla] Becher). Since, therefore, compiling a taxonomy of sequential structures does not promise to be of much help as a basis for understanding the varieties of photo-series, it might be better instead to begin from the opposite direction: that of origin and context. (Smith 2008b, 14)

Smith despairs from lacking a unified framework to do the kind of analysis Zamir is looking for, but he might be asking too much of conceptual tools. Image-to-image relationships between photographs can be studied empirically (Tardy 1964) or theoretically (Méaux 1997), while the concept of closure has

318 

M. HARDY-VALLÉE

focused a comparable discussion in the context of comics (McCloud 1994; Gavaler and Beavers 2020). However, a theoretical framework cannot be mechanically applied. It supports the interpretive effort of the scholar engaging with the meaning of a pictorial sequence but does not supplant it. The image-­ to-­image syntax of Open Passport constitutes a necessary, not a sufficient determination of its meaning. Literary scholar Mireille Ribière draws a distinction between photographic sequences, series, and sets that comes close to providing such a framework. Her notion of sequence corresponds to “the order in which the pictures have been taken” (as can be seen on a contact sheet, for example), while the series “results from a process of selection and combination of shots in order to tell a story” (Ribière 1995, p. 288). Sets concern “linear and translinear networks within a visual narrative,” such as leitmotifs (Ribière 1995, p. 288). They account for the fact that a work employing multiple photographs can be understood non-­ linearly. Ribière also acknowledges the specificity of photographic work: sensitive materials are typically exposed only once to image-forming light. After a fraction of a second or longer, a new image can be exposed, allowing chronological order. However, multiple exposures or the simultaneous use of cameras wreak havoc on the coherence of Ribière’s notion of photographic sequence. Still, within a limited photographic practice, it may be applicable. Taking her framework as a whole, we have concepts to analyse both the linear order of photographs and their translinear order, but we are lacking a concept for photographs presented according to a purposeful linear order neither chronological nor narrative—for instance, in the abstract works of Minor White. Thierry Groensteen’s semiotic analysis of comics developed in Système de la bande dessinée (Groensteen 1999, 2009)2 is indebted to the interdisciplinary work in pictorial semiotics of Groupe μ (mu) from the Université de Liège (Belgium). In the Traité du signe visuel: Pour une rhétorique de l’image (1992), the Groupe argues that codes, or conventions, should be studied at the level of the whole picture rather than at the level of point and line (Edeline et al. 1992). This is fundamental for analysing the sequence of panels typically found in comics, which are individually fragmentary and depend on the co-presence of other panels to be meaningful. Comics exploit narratively both the succession and simultaneity of multiple images, relying on the active participation of reader in filling gaps between pictures to do so, something which can be done in the absence of text. The linking of panels is a core topic for the study of the medium, framing the discussion at the level of reader’s imaginative involvement (Stein 2019). Pictures in comics thus exhibit what Groensteen calls iconic solidarity: I define this as interdependent images that, participating in a series, present the double characteristic of being separated … and which are plastically and semantically over-determined by the fact of their coexistence in praesentia. (Groensteen 2009, p. 18)

  FROM TABLEAU TO SEQUENCE: INTRODUCING COMICS THEORY WITHIN ART… 

319

Iconic solidarity is minimally possible in suites of pictures, the broadest category of works constituted of multiple pictures, which Groensteen defines as “a collection of disparate uncorrelated images” (Groensteen 2009, p.  146). Taking at random pictures from newspapers constitutes a suite because of the pictures’ lack of prior correlation. Series and sequences are more specific cases of suites, and by definition afford iconic solidarity as well. Making a collage out of the newspaper pictures can constitute a series; turning it into a story makes it also a sequence. Iconic solidarity is the minimal condition lacking in Ribière’s framework that could help characterize Minor White’s non-narrative works as series (in Groensteen’s terms). Pictures in relation of iconic solidarity must inhabit a shared space to be interpreted together: a single page, a spread, or even a codex. The meaningful organization of space corresponds to Groensteen’s notion of spatio-topical system: how it is subdivided; how these subdivisions are located relative to each other; what shapes they assume; and how blank space is used. The spatio-­ topical system describes the spatial arrangement of pictures in a work exhibiting iconic solidarity, and the space itself in which they are located. We finally come to the issue of image-to-image syntax with Groensteen’s concept of arthrology: a feature of iconic solidarity that describes how these pictures are semantically and plastically linked together. It is itself subdivided between restrained arthrology—the linear relationships between pictures immediately following one another in a sequence—and general arthrology— the translinear relationships between two or more pictures located anywhere in the entire work. Both Ribière and Groensteen pay close attention to these two kinds of relationships between pictures. In this respect, their concepts overlap, and Ribière was there first. While the System of Comics lacks Ribière’s consideration of photographic temporality, it compensates in usefulness with its concepts of iconic solidarity and spatio-topical system, which proved necessary to analyse the spatialization of pictures in Open Passport and unpack its linear order. Language is the medium in which we commonly express meaning. Groensteen reminds us that a picture can be transformed into statements by the interpretive work of the reader (Groensteen 2009, p. 107). But pictures are not equivalent to statements: they can be translated. Being able to translate a sequence of photographs into statements is a way of validating its narrativity or making sense of a non-narrative work. As philosopher of hermeneutics Hans-­ Georg Gadamer reminds us, language is the milieu in which our being and the world meet: what can be understood is language (Gadamer 2013, p. 490). To bring the meaning of Open Passport into language—or as art historians would put it, “a representation of thinking about having seen the picture” (Baxandall 1985, p. 11)—requires a broad and flexible framework of analysis, one taking into consideration both simultaneity and succession, the relationships between immediately successive images, those between images separated by any other arbitrary number of images, and between image and text.

320 

M. HARDY-VALLÉE

A Canadian Transient John Max worked and lived most of his life in Montréal. Born to a family of immigrants from Galicia (now Ukraine), he began his photographic career in the mid-1950s. Mostly self-taught, his brief frequentation of art schools gave him access to an artistic scene then in full expansion, thirsty for international exposure (Whitelaw, Foss, and Paikowsky 2010). Max built an extensive corpus of spontaneous and formal portraits of painters, dancers, sculptors, musicians, filmmakers, and writers that he used both for magazine work and exhibitions. Pursuing an artistic rather than a journalistic career, he eventually won the support of major institutions that sponsored the production and circulation of his work at home and abroad, especially the Still Photography Division of the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), the National Gallery of Canada, and the Canada Council. His photographs were characterized at the plastic level by extreme contrasts, elliptical compositions, and a theatrical atmosphere evoking both Expressionism and Surrealism; however, his primary mode of expression was the sequence rather than the individual print, and he never abandoned figuration for abstraction. He proved to be an important reference for younger photographers (S.P.  Cousineau 1977; Clément 2005; Ewing 2009), but his career went through often complicated routes, and his legacy is still under construction. Open Passport is a long narrative sequence, recognized among the country’s landmark works, the only one Max published as a book. First exhibited at the NFB Photo Gallery in Ottawa (5 October 1972–1 January 1973), it subsequently travelled to Montréal, Vancouver, and a number of smaller venues in Ontario and Québec. The slide show variant was shown at the Ottawa and Montréal openings, while the book variant was published by Toronto magazine IMPRESSIONS in late 1973 as a special double issue, in close collaboration with Max. Weaving together images taken over 15 years in a multiplicity of contexts, Open Passport tells a fictional story: how the arrival of a child impacts a couple and the attendant dilemma between the pursuit of art and domestic responsibilities. Freedom is a central theme, the crux of the conflict, and its achievement elicits ambivalent rather than celebratory feelings; the real-­ life counterpart to this story in Max’s divorce gives Open Passport elegiac notes. From an art-historical point of view, I have sought to understand what artistic strategies John Max used to challenge the denotative meaning of photography during an era of intense theorizing on the medium. Understanding denotation as what a photograph refers to and connotation as its associated meanings in a given culture, Roland Barthes laid out the apparent paradox of the photograph: an image that connotes the fact of its denotation (Barthes 1961, p. 129). In doing so, he was stressing the almost mythical proportions to which the photograph was understood as emanating directly from the real, unmediated. All major theoretical accounts of the medium from the 1970s onwards have dealt with the relationship between the photographic image and its referent (Krauss 1977; Sontag 1977; Barthes 1980; Schaeffer 1987; Tagg

  FROM TABLEAU TO SEQUENCE: INTRODUCING COMICS THEORY WITHIN ART… 

321

1988; Dubois 1990; Elkins 2007). John Max evidenced the awareness of the photographic community itself that the medium could not be reduced to its denotative function alone. How did he employ the photographic sequence, and what did he require of his audience to understand it? Taking into consideration Open Passport’s multiple variants, related works, and Max’s archive, my research followed an interpretative approach, circling hermeneutically between the part and the whole. Being monographic in scope, its findings led to a renewed understanding of the work and significance of John Max—to whom many tall tales, misunderstandings, and enigmas were attached—as well as a reconsideration of the methodological isolation of the photobook from other forms of photographic production (Hardy-Vallée 2015, 2019a, 2019b, 2022).3

Theory in Practice The book variant of Open Passport is made of 168 photographs presented according to a complex layout. Rich relationships between them must be understood, and text has a necessary, but supporting role in this task. The role of text-image relationships has been taken to be central by previous studies: Carole Armstrong, for instance, argues that photographs in books depend upon a verbal frame to anchor their meaning, being highly ambiguous and of limited symbolic content (Armstrong 1998, p. 2). I argue instead that the collation of multiple photographs in an artwork can construct and clarify meaning, not simply pile up ambiguity. The frame of a photograph, when there is one, needs not be verbal: it can also be pictorial. Iconic solidarity is a concept particularly germane to my purpose, as it suggests that photographs in a sequence hold together in a systemic way. To illustrate the usefulness of iconic solidarity, I will begin with a counterexample. The following review of Open Passport, as it opened in Montréal in 1973, assumed that it was a typical retrospective exhibition of a documentary photographer: Walls, sidewalks, roads, unnamed men with telling faces are John Max’s favourite subjects. He, going hither and thither, does not have a perceptible line of conduct, an organizing theme … directing sometimes his research on plastic effects, as in this depiction of horses where heads constitute the principal armature of the photograph. Fugitive men and women, and especially a great number of extremely expressive faces are shown to us often under different aspects… . The photos exhibited have been chosen over a fifteen-year period of activity. This explains, undoubtedly, the unequal presentation. (Toupin 1973 [my translation])

The critic analyses each photograph in isolation, glossing over the sequential aspect and narrative content. This illustrates the difficulty for an artist who relies on conventions that may not be shared by all: we default to an interpretation of photographs as slices of time-space unless we are familiar enough with sequences. Despite a narrative understanding being suggested in the artist’s

322 

M. HARDY-VALLÉE

statement and noticed by other contemporary reviews (Confino 1972; P.  Cousineau 1973; White 1973), this particular critic was unable to relate Open Passport to existing models of sequence. Open Passport employs multiple strategies to induce in the audience an awareness of iconic solidarity. Repetition of the same photograph, for instance, draws attention in a striking manner to both the separateness and relatedness of the two identical pictures (Fig. 1). After an initial dedication, epigraph, and liminary poem, the second spread with photographs shows twice the image of a boy (Max’s son) rowing a boat: alone on the left-hand page and as part of a square grid of four pictures on the right-hand page. On both pages, the photograph is at the same position and has the same size. Working from Groensteen’s definition, iconic solidarity applies when pictures, two or more, can be clearly distinguished, while being related both plastically and semantically. The two identical photographs of Max’s son exhibit iconic solidarity because their co-­ presence allows us to witness their identity. But by presenting this photograph first on its own, then surrounded by other photographs, these two pages cue in an interpretative strategy central to the entire work: when looking at a given photograph, one must especially pay attention to the ones framing it. Each photograph exhibits iconic solidarity with the others on the same spread. Near-identical pictures also instruct the reader to link, rather than to isolate pictures. For instance, in a group of four (Fig. 2), two portraits of photographer Sam Tata highlight their iconic solidarity by the fact of their similarity, which allows one to notice their minute plastic differences. All of this points

Fig. 1  Spread 04 of John Max, Open Passport, Toronto: IMPRESSIONS special issue No. 6 and No. 7 1973. Offset lithography on paper, 28.5 × 22 cm. (Author’s collection)

  FROM TABLEAU TO SEQUENCE: INTRODUCING COMICS THEORY WITHIN ART… 

323

Fig. 2  Spread 37 of John Max, Open Passport, 1973

towards a unified, rather than a fragmented, understanding of Open Passport, in which the juxtaposition of photographs, especially identical or very similar ones, announces iconic solidarity. Juxtaposition also makes possible semantic features such as the identity of subjects across pictures, temporality of action, and identity of setting. These indications of iconic solidarity could also suggest what Ribière calls the photographic sequence, that is, the order in which actual photographs are shot: based on archival evidence, the two portraits of Sam Tata are the result of the same session.4 However, Ribière’s concept is of limited utility here: although it suggests that our understanding of the photographic act can bear upon our interpretation of images, iconic solidarity rests on linking pictures. On the contact sheet, two photographs can be interpreted as two attempts at making the same image; on the page, they function instead as two moments in narrative time. Pictures must inhabit a shared space to show iconic solidarity. The spatio-­ topical system and both kinds of arthrology are aspects of iconic solidarity, not distinct entities, which means that they are always conjoined. Their separate consideration here only helps the demonstration. Iconic solidarity does not depend on juxtaposition but on the ability of audiences to recognize connexions between pictures both in intent and in effect. A photobook using only one photograph per spread, such as Evans’s Message from the Interior, still allows for iconic solidarity: memory rather than juxtaposition establishes links.

324 

M. HARDY-VALLÉE

Spatio-topical System Open Passport is organized as a rectangular book, subdivided into a variable grid of rectangular pictures using changing amounts of blank space between them. In comics, the single printed page is also often divided into a grid of panels. This grid pattern may vary from page to page, and so Groensteen terms the sum total of these subdivisions in a book the “multiframe” (Groensteen 2009, p. 28). It is, so to speak, the Cartesian space in which is located each individual panel. The multiframe of a typical comic book is divided into pages, but the multiframe of Open Passport is a collection of spreads, as is suggested by the iconic solidarity between pictures on facing pages. Each spread is then subdivided into a grid of photographs and blank space. Within the grid, individual pictures can be described according to their site, their (x,y) spatial coordinates. The shape of the grid determines the kind of visual rhythm accomplished. When contemplated in its entirety, Max’s book can be broken down into four main grid subsystems. First, the most common type of spread is the 2 x 2 grid of photographs in landscape orientation. It provides the more regular motif— or, to use a musical metaphor, its basic time signature. Two smaller subsystems provide variety and accent, or pauses: 1 x 2 grids, and longer strips. Groups of photographs in portrait orientation can be lumped together as a single subsystem for the sake of expediency, but a certain number of sub-sub-systems of few exemplars each can readily be seen. Finally, no photograph spans both pages of a spread. Most of the time, independently of the kind of grid, the sites are equally spaced, but there are some instances of irregular positioning that break the regularity of layout. The site of pictures inside the multiframe helps define the order of reading (Groensteen 2009, p. 34). In fact, it also defines the manner of interpretation as reading in Open Passport. Its first illustrated spread juxtaposes a poem on the left-hand page to photographs on the right-hand one. It cues in readers to the left-to-right order, but it also establishes some correspondence, a continuity between text and image. The similar positioning of text and image on each page of the spread suggests that there is, for the artist, a similarity between reading words and looking at pictures. Following Groensteen, I use “reading” to qualify the process of interpreting Open Passport and do not reserve it only for the interpretation of textual components. Text in Open Passport facilitates and guides reading, but the work is narrative independently of it. The repeated picture of the rowing boy on facing pages (Fig. 1) creates a visual tension that engages the reader to look left-to-right, top-to-bottom across both pages to read each spread as a whole. As Groensteen argues, narration is fully possible in the absence of text for pictures both organized spatio-topically and related through a process of arthrology. The margins around the photographs are part of the multiframe. In Open Passport they are variable: most often very narrow, sometimes absent, but occasionally very large. As Groensteen notes, whatever frames a picture participates in its message, and conditions its visual reception, so that many comics authors

  FROM TABLEAU TO SEQUENCE: INTRODUCING COMICS THEORY WITHIN ART… 

325

Fig. 3  Spreads 13 and 14 of John Max, Open Passport, 1973

are known to colour or draw in their margins. The size of margins in Open Passport establishes a level of distance to the reader: the feeling of proximity is proportional to the amount of white space surrounding a picture. Margins also function as negative space in relation to site: for instance, a spread can begin at top left with a small image, then continue across a vast expanse of blank paper at the bottom right, emulating a fall to the ground (Fig. 3). The spatio-topical system thus functions as the underlying architecture of iconic solidarity and structures meaning beyond the content of individual pictures. Open Passport evidences a rich, expressive spatio-topical system, which is apparent when

326 

M. HARDY-VALLÉE

compared to other photobooks that rely on uniformity of layout like Robert Frank’s The Americans (1959) or Duane Michals’s Sequences (1970). The spatio-­topical system not only modulates our response to individual pictures like layout can, but it allows us to establish relationships between pictures by locating them relative to each other. When these relations are narrative, they can be detailed by Groensteen’s concept of arthrology. Restrained Arthrology Whereas a spatio-topical system can exist for any suite or series of pictures, arthrology only concerns pictures that constitute a narrative series—a sequence according to Groensteen. He defines narrativity by refining semiotician Tzvetan Todorov’s definition: any statement relating actions, gestures, or events together according to a logic of succession and transformation is narrative (Groensteen 2009, p. 104). As applied to pictures, Todorov’s definition would be overreaching and also apply to series. Groensteen responds that for pictures to constitute a narrative, they must also follow one another according to logical inferences and relationships of causality or deduction. The mere juxtaposition of pictures is not sufficient to create narration. Narration is only possible when the reader can infer that one event caused another, not simply witness change over time. The sequence in Fig. 3 happens in the first third of Open Passport. The photographs can be dated between 1962 and 1970 and are not shown in chronological order. Three different women can be distinguished: a circus performer, Max’s wife Janet Peace, and Gail Zappa (with her musician husband). Going from picture to picture, the narrative progression suggests that something is about to turn the situation upside down like the circus performer. The growing Zappa family stands in for the arrival of a child, something that slows down the course of time before the resulting whirlwind, the consequent exhaustion or desire for inner peace. From disparate sources, Max put together a very clear narrative line, one that most parents would recognize. Consistency of character is maintained despite the use of different women for the role of the mother. Finally, and most importantly, the narrative meaning derived from the sequence interacts with the spatio-topical system: birth is literally and symbolically rendered as a fall. Reading Open Passport as a continuous narrative requires the ability to unpack the use of multiple tools at the artist’s disposal—not relate it to a specific taxonomy of sequences. Methodologically speaking, a taxonomy is a flat tool of analysis: elements may or may not fit within specific categories. In contrast, a poetics (like versification or musical theory) presupposes a range of possible devices known to artist and audience that can be adapted to the needs of a particular work. The poetics of John Max’s photobook draws on features common to that of comics or narrative poetry. Groensteen’s notion of restrained arthrology directs our analysis towards the image-to-image syntax of Open Passport, in which a number of familiar tropes can be discerned: metaphor,

  FROM TABLEAU TO SEQUENCE: INTRODUCING COMICS THEORY WITHIN ART… 

327

rhythm, repetitions, or symbolism combined in an organic manner to constitute more abstract entities like character, theme, plot, and narrative arc. Once these are recognized in the context of images in space, rather than language, then a reading of Open Passport is possible. However, if one fails to recognize the photographs as having iconic solidarity and space as meaningful, the door to narrative meaning will remain shut. General Arthrology As I was working through the main narrative line, I took note of photographs that could be grouped together on the basis of iconic, plastic, or semantic correspondences, and which are not presented in a contiguous, successive manner in Open Passport. For instance, I constructed series involving food, people closing their eyes, and boys because they corresponded to themes or to elements of the plot. Although these photographs are part of a sequence, grouping them does not constitute a sequence. General arthrology exemplifies a deeper level of formal and thematic organisation in a work and provides additional layers of meaning. Patterns and repetitions across non-contiguous pictures tap into the memory of the reader, and the full meaning of pictures at the beginning of the sequence can be deferred until the end. Groensteen names braiding this network of meanings that functions both synchronically and diachronically within the story (Groensteen 2009, p. 147). Similarities between images encourage audiences to compare them, mentally or visually, while their distinct position within the narrative also prompts us to consider them as different moments in time. The first and last groups of images of Open Passport constitute a series marked by plastic resemblances and thematic changes—a case of braiding (Fig. 4). On the last spread, a photograph of a seawall shot in perspective geometrically resembles the road of the first one. The tonal composition of both photographs is also similar: dark on the sides, light in the centre. The young boy accompanied by a dog is in thematic opposition to the solitary old man. While the aspect ratio and relative positioning of photographs on the page is identical in both spreads, their reproduction size varies, those on the first being smaller than those on the last. The change in picture size suggests growth, but the relationships between beginning and end implies a return, taking stock of the path travelled along the road. Finally, since these four pictures are the beginning and the end of the photographic sequence, one can read them as a kind of thematic chiasmus: boy, road, road, man. Comparable constructs can be found in Open Passport around motifs of food or eyes. General arthrology builds on the hermeneutical principle that any element of a work is potentially meaningful in relation to all the others: a detail on page three may help understand a plot point 60 pages later. It is not only narratively constructed but also spatially constructed, as it depends on the physical distance between pictures, as shown by the first and last spreads of Open Passport. The spatio-topical system of the book involves a constant unit of space—the

328 

M. HARDY-VALLÉE

Fig. 4  Spreads 03 and 46 of John Max, Open Passport, 1973

spread—in which photographs constitute a grid. This space is experienced sequentially during reading, with each spread being equally separated from the other—only one can be seen at a time. In contrast, the spatio-topical system of the exhibition variants of Open Passport resulted in a much less linear experience. They were designed according to a circular floor layout, and in Ottawa the very first and very last photographs were actually hung back-to-back on a single wall. Photographs distant from each other in sequential terms were spatially close to each other. In comparison to the book, the exhibitions thus

  FROM TABLEAU TO SEQUENCE: INTRODUCING COMICS THEORY WITHIN ART… 

329

presented the narrative of spiritual liberation of Open Passport inside a circular form, which in turn alluded to Max’s Buddhist beliefs. In the gallery, one could posit the individual walls as units equivalent to spreads—both being flat and bounded. However, this would be a mistake for Open Passport, insofar as the relative position of photographs to each other in adjacent or facing walls matters as much for the structure of the exhibition as the individual grouping of photographs. The spatial layout of exhibitions is the site of relationships between pictures that are not possible in the space of the printed codex.5 The units of space were therefore the zones within which the visitor’s field of view is bound, as verified by the manner in which the subsequent hanging of the exhibition in Montréal maintained these zones rather than the linear sequence of groups (see the analysis in Hardy-Vallée 2019a). Finally, the relationship between text and image in Open Passport sets it apart from the medium of comics. Open Passport, devoid of captions but not of text, allows for polysemy. Text in comics first accomplishes Barthes’s functions of anchoring and relaying. Anchoring is to limit the polysemy of pictures; relaying is to provide complementary information. But text in comics also has a “stitching” function: because the narration consists of multiple pictures, text may help linking two pictures together (Groensteen 2009, p. 131). Text can speed up or slow down narrative time. From the start of Open Passport, text and image are related, but their relationship does not occupy centre stage. In the absence of stitching text, it cannot be easily ascertained whether the span of narrative time between two pictures is nine months or nine years. Max dedicated Open Passport to his son, something which relays the book externally as an object; a quotation on the same page from Persian poet Rūmı̄ anchors the book internally. The text “This world is as the dream of a sleeper” suggests that the world which we are about to enter, the book itself, is not a world that is real as a naïve reading of photography would suggest, but instead that it is a world thick with signification and multiple senses, or illusions, as a dream is. It links photography and poetry by using the premise of the dream to support free associations and symbolic meaning—the use of poetry alongside photography being in its own right another practice popular in France after 1950 to signal a detachment from denotation (Frizot 2009, p. 192). However, in the 1961 translation by Arthur John Arberry of Rūmı̄ ’s Fihi Ma Fihi [‫]فیه مافیه‬, most likely the source used by Max, the same passage suggests that the world of the uninitiated is but a dream (Rūmı̄ 1961, p. 194), which can also lead to a spiritual reading of Open Passport. This quotation, like the dedication, bears a relationship to the entire work more than to specific pictures. As such, these texts establish a formal and thematic context of interpretation for readers. Beyond the artist’s statements and title cards, very little text accompanied the photographs of the Open Passport variants. John Max believed in the division of labour between text and image: Interviewer: What do you think about people who put words with their photographs?

330 

Max:

M. HARDY-VALLÉE

It depends how the words are used. I would use words with images, but as a counterpoint, it would be like a fugue. But the images must stand, must be able to work and do everything that is inherent in the language of the image, by itself, it must not depend on the word. That the word would be added as just another piece of beauty, doing what the language of words can do. But the picture must not depend on the word, giving you any sort of information in order for the photograph to work for you. That’s the way I look at it.6

Only the book had text in close proximity to the photographs: the poem written by Max and translated in French by his friend, playwright Jean-Claude Germain (Fig.  4). For the exhibition, it was instead included in the promotional leaflet. Text in Open Passport neither anchors nor relays the meaning of images, but provides cues for interpretation, priming audiences for a particular kind of reading. The “open passport” of the title is a metaphor, meant by Max to suggest a passport to go anywhere, the cost of total freedom (Lamothe 2010). It puns on the idea of an “open ticket,” suggesting that a precise moment to return is not intended.

Fusion on the Horizon To reuse the terminology long established by German philology, my research put together internal and external evidence concerning Open Passport using judgement—Kritik—and explained the work both in itself and according to its relevant context—Hermeneutik (Schleiermacher 1998; Boeckh 2013). The semiotic tools developed by Groensteen gave me the initial traction for engaging with the meaning of Open Passport: a story told in the first person about the conflict between freedom and existence. Despite the importance of pictorial narratives for Art History, its spatial and sequential mechanics remain a secondary concern to the analysis of images themselves. The study of painting’s integration to architecture is perhaps one of the discipline’s closest equivalent to a spatio-topical system, itself a reflection of painting’s uses over time. Photography’s own intertwined history with the printed page has often drawn it into the orbit of literature, but I believe theories such as Thierry Groensteen’s system of comics offers two previously unreaped benefits. First, it provides a steppingstone for the combined analysis of sequence and space; second, a focus on relationships between pictures rather than between image and referent, as is so overwhelmingly the case in photographic studies. Max mustered a variety of existing tropes and techniques, in addition to producing many variants, casting doubt on the autonomy of the photobook as a medium and suggesting its porousness to other artistic and cultural practices. Comics, in comparison, has often been claimed to be a unique, autonomous medium with well-defined characteristics—this is after all the premise of any

  FROM TABLEAU TO SEQUENCE: INTRODUCING COMICS THEORY WITHIN ART… 

331

system like Groensteen’s. Applying comics theory to the photobook leaves us on the horizon of a larger problem, namely, whether there is a unified medium for all picture stories. Some comics scholars and theorists have enthusiastically developed histories reaching far into the European Middle Ages, even pharaonic Egypt, providing grammars and systems (Kunzle 1973; McCloud 1994; Cohn 2013). However, such approaches tend to suffer from a teleological bias—positioning the contemporary comic strip as the culmination of a deep evolution—and from a technocratic bias—every concept has sharply defined boundaries, functions within a grammar, has a limited number of possible cases, and so on. In doing so, they recapitulate the same problems that have plagued philosophical systems.  Being interpretative, my research employed culture-bound reading heuristics comparable to those Alan Trachtenberg used, but in my case, these heuristics interacted with the possibilities opened by semiotic analysis, not literary criticism. This might be the true usefulness of any theoretical framework: not to create a mould that pre-emptively circumscribes all possible cases, but rather offer an intellectual construct which multiplies a scholar’s ability to achieve the task at hand. Against the various species of photographic sequence, it is tempting to lift one’s hand in despair like Joel Smith. Repurposing intellectual tools developed for the study of comics to the context of the photobook suggests that no dedicated tool was available. However, there is no such thing as a tailor-­ made conceptual framework: the “linguistic turn” in the humanities was a large-scale repurposing of ideas developed for other disciplines than philosophy, literary criticism, or history. Collectors and antiquarians did much to help raise the visibility of photobooks, and the product of their work reflects their intellectual baggage: categorization, surveys, corpora, and reprints. My goal in working on Open Passport was to draw connections between the photobook and other cultural forms. Comics, of course, but also exhibitions. There has been a good deal of work on photographic books and photographic exhibitions, but few studies draw them together (Wells 2012). In addition to the detailed analysis of the book, Groensteen’s tools have also allowed me to unpack the formal characteristics of the Open Passport exhibition. This opens up a completely different track for further research than the application of the System of Comics to other pictorial sequences: it poses the problem of understanding such sequences in space rather than on a page. Are the museum and the library the unfolded and the folded modalities of a yet unconceived multiframe? Even if they do not inhabit a homogeneous field, they remain sites more in need of bridges than borders.

Notes 1. Incidentally, Lessing’s analysis precluded the kind of art Rodolphe Töpffer would produce several decades later. 2. Page references are given for the English translation by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen.

332 

M. HARDY-VALLÉE

3. I am focusing here on the work I did during my PhD research, but further research has been done in preparation for an adaptation in book form of my dissertation. 4. Contact sheet for negative HG 33, Fonds John Max en dépôt P18, Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal. 5. For further discussion of comics in relation to the space of the gallery Cf. Alberda, Carola, Martins and Woolf Chapter “VAST/O Exhibition (De)Construction: Exploring the Potentials of Augmented Abstract Comics and Animation Installations as a Method to Communicate Health Experiences”. 6. John Max, Interview with Katherine Tweedie, 1978–1982, Katherine Tweedie Fonds P126, Archives and Special Collections, Concordia University, Montréal.

References Andrews, Lew. 1994. Walker Evans’ American Photographs: The Sequential Arrangement. History of Photography 18:3, pp. 264–271. Armstrong, Carol M. 1998. Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843–1875. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Baetens, Jan. 1995. John Berger and Jean Mohr: From Photography to Photo Narrative. History of Photography 19, pp. 283–285. ———. 2001. Going to Heaven: A Missing Link in the History of Photonarrative? Journal of Narrative Theory 31:1, pp. 87–105. ———. 2007. Conceptual Limitations of Our Reflection on Photography: The Question of ‘Interdisciplinarity’. In Photography Theory, ed. James Elkins, The Art Seminar, pp. 53–74. New York: Routledge. ———. 2008. La lecture narrative de l’image photographique. In Littérature et Photographie, ed. Jean-Pierre Montier, Interférences, pp. 339–348. Rennes, France: Presses universitaires de Rennes. ———. 2010. Pour Le Roman-Photo. Réflexions Faites. Bruxelles: Impressions nouvelles. ———. 2019. The Film Photonovel: A Cultural History of Forgotten Adaptations. World Comics and Graphic Nonfiction Series. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Barthes, Roland. 1961. Le Message Photographique. Communications 1:1, pp. 127–138. ———. 1980. La Chambre Claire: Note Sur La Photographie. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma. Baxandall, Michael. 1985. Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Boeckh, August. 2013 [1877]. Encyclopédie et méthodologie des sciences philologiques: Première partie principale. Trans. Marie-Dominique Richard. Sankt Augustin, Germany: Academia Verlag. Bunnell, Peter C. 1991. Minor White’s Photographic Sequence ‘Rural Cathedrals’: A Reading. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 135:4, pp. 557–568. Clément, Serge. 2005. Hommage: John Max, Open Passport. Montréal: Serge Clément. Cohn, Neil. 2013. The Visual Language of Comics: Introduction to the Structure and Cognition of Sequential Images. London: Bloomsbury. Confino, Barbara. 1972. Intimate Images. The Montreal Star, 7 October, C5. Cousineau, Penny. 1973. John Max’s ‘Open Passport’. Afterimage 1:5, p. 3. Cousineau, Sylvain P. 1977. Mona Nima. Almonte, Ontario: Powys Press.

  FROM TABLEAU TO SEQUENCE: INTRODUCING COMICS THEORY WITHIN ART… 

333

Crimp, Douglas. 1989. The Museum’s Old/the Library’s New Subject. In The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton, pp.  3–14. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dubois, Philippe. 1990. L’acte photographique et autres essais. Paris: Nathan. Dugan, Thomas. 1979. Photography between Covers: Interviews with Photo-Bookmakers. Rochester, NY: Light Impressions. Edeline, Francis, Klinkenberg, Jean-Marie, Minguet, Philippe and Groupe μ. 1992. Traité du signe visuel: Pour une rhétorique de l’image. Paris: Seuil. Elkins, James. 2007. Photography Theory. London: Routledge. Ewing, William A. 2009. Benoit Aquin: Fire & Ice = Benoit Aquin: de feu et de glace. Ciel variable: art, photo, médias, culture 81, pp. 25–31. Fox Talbot, William Henry. 2011. [1844] The Pencil of Nature. Chicago, London: KWS Publishers. Fried, Michael. 2008. Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Frizot, Michel. 2009. Robert Frank and Robert Delpire. In Looking In: Robert Frank’s the Americans, ed. Sarah Greenough, pp.  190–198. Washington and Göttingen: National Gallery of Art/Steidl. Gadamer, Hans Georg. 2013. Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. Bloomsbury Revelations. London: Bloomsbury. Gavaler, Chris, and Beavers Leigh Ann. 2020. Clarifying Closure. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 11:2, pp.  182–211. https://doi.org/10.1080/2150485 7.2018.1540441. Greenough, Sarah, ed. 2009. Looking In: Robert Frank’s the Americans. Expanded ed. Washington and Göttingen: National Gallery of Art/Steidl. Groensteen, Thierry. 1988. La narration comme supplément. In Bande dessinée: récit et modernité, ed. Thierry Groensteen. Paris-Angoulême: Colloque de Cerisy, Futuropolis-CNBDI. ———. 1999. Système de la bande dessinée. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. ———. 2009. The System of Comics. Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Guibert, Emmanuel, Lefèvre, Didier, and Lemercier, Frédéric. 2010. Le Photographe. Marcinelle, Belgium: Dupuis. Hardy-Vallée, Michel. 2015. Open Passport: Le récit photographique et le langage universel de John Max. In Les récits visuels de soi: mises en récit artistiques et nouvelles scénographies de l’intime, ed. Magali Uhl, pp. 197–206. Paris: Presses universitaires de Paris ouest. ———. 2019a. The Photobook as Variant: Exhibiting, Projecting, and Publishing John Max’s Open Passport. History of Photography 43:4, pp. 399–421. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/03087298.2020.1771052. ———. 2019b. Making Photography Speak: John Max’s Open Passport (1973) and Photographic Narration. PhD thesis, Art history, Concordia University. ———. 2022. Pour finir de recommencer: Open Passport (1973). In Le Livre, ed. Martha Langford, pp. 22–45. Montréal: Artexte/Formes actuelles de l'expérience photographique (FAEP). Kemp, Wolfgang. 2003. Narrative. In Critical Terms for Art History, eds. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, pp. 62–74. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

334 

M. HARDY-VALLÉE

Koudelka, Josef, and Chéroux, Clément. eds. 2017. Josef Koudelka: The Making of Exiles. Paris: Éditions Xavier Barral / Éditions du Centre Pompidou. Krauss, Rosalind. 1977. Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. October 3, pp. 66–81. Kunzle, David. 1973. The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c.1450 to 1825. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Lamothe, Michel. 2010. John Max: A Portrait. Les Films du 3 Mars. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. 1984. [1766] Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Trans. Edward Allen McCormick. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Max, John. 1973. Open Passport. IMPRESSIONS special double issue—No. 6 No. 7. McCloud, Scott. 1994. Understanding Comics. HarperPerennial. Méaux, Danièle. 1995. Duane Michals’ Real Dreams. History of Photography 19:4, pp. 278–282. ———. 1997. La photographie et le temps: le déroulement temporel dans l’image photographique. Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence. Nickel, Douglas R. 2001. History of Photography: The State of Research. The Art Bulletin 83:3, pp. 548–558. Parr, Martin, and Badger, Gerry. 2004. The Photobook: A History. 3 vols. Vol. I. New York: Phaidon. Ribière, Mireille. 1995. Danny Lyon’s Family Album: Sequence, Series, Set. History of Photography 19:4, pp. 286–292. Rūmı ̄, Jalāl al-Dı ̄n. 1961. [ca. 1260–1273] Discourses of Rūmı ̄. Trans. Arthur John Arberry. London: Murray. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. 1987. L’image précaire: du dispositif photographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1998. [1838] Hermeneutics and Criticism and Other Writings. Trans. Andre Bowie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Joel, ed. 2008a. More Than One: Photographs in Sequence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum. ———, ed. 2008b. More Than One: Sources of Serialism. In More Than One: Photographs in Sequence, pp. 8–29. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum. Sontag, Susan. 1977. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Stein, Daniel. 2019. Gaps as Significant Absences: The Case of Serial Comics. In Meaningful Absence across Arts and Media: The Significance of Missing Signifiers, eds. Werner Wolf, Nassim Balestrini and Walter Bernhart, Studies in Intermediality. Leiden, NL: Brill. Tagg, John. 1988. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Education. Tardy, Michel. 1964. Troisième signifiant. Terre d’images 3, pp. 313–322. Toupin, Gilles. 1973. Théâtre et libération. La Presse, 10 February, D14. Trachtenberg, Alan 1979. Walker Evan’s Message from the Interior: A Reading. October 11, pp. 5–29. Wells, Liz. 2012. Beyond the Exhibition—from Catalogue to Photobook. In The Photobook: From Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond, eds. Patrizia Di Bello, Colette Wilson and Shamoon Zamir, pp. 129–144. London: I.B. Tauris. White, Michael. 1973. John Max: Photographs Born of a Beat Generation. The Gazette, 10 February, p. 48.

  FROM TABLEAU TO SEQUENCE: INTRODUCING COMICS THEORY WITHIN ART… 

335

White, Minor, Klochko, Deborah, and Hershberger, Andrew E. 2015. The Time Between: The Sequences of Minor White. San Francisco: Modernbook Editions. Whitelaw, Anne, Foss, Brian, and Paikowsky, Sandra. eds. 2010. The Visual Arts in Canada: The Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press. Zamir, Shamoon. 2012. ‘Art-Science’: The North American Indian (1907–30) as Photobook. In The Photobook: From Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond, eds. Patrizia Di Bello, Colette Wilson and Shamoon Zamir, pp. 35–51. London: I.B. Tauris.

Index1

A Abortion Eve (1973), 189 Abstract art, 144 Abstract comics, 3, 4, 6, 290–308 Abstract Expressionism, 300 Abstraction, 282 Academic Art, 190, 277 Academy, 30n1, 35, 164, 249 ACME Novelty Library, 103, 109, 111, 113, 116n10, 118, 119 Activist Art History, 290, 295–297, 301, 307 Acuña, Daniel, 241 Adventure, 4, 58, 59, 61, 63, 64, 67 Aesthetics, 2, 4, 5, 7, 14, 15, 34, 37, 49, 56, 66, 76–78, 80, 82, 98–115, 117n14, 132, 135, 157n2, 166, 167, 175, 187, 194, 230–232, 234, 250, 297 Aesthetics of comics, 98, 114–115 Affect, 5, 6, 47, 66, 67, 76, 102, 114, 211, 212, 215, 301, 308 African art, 6, 226, 227, 232, 274 African Art History, 227–229 Afrofuturism, 6, 226–244 Akande, Abiodun, 229

All Girl Thrills (1971), 189, 203n6 Alpers, Svetlana, 5, 7, 123, 124, 127, 128, 130, 131, 139, 264n2 American Photographs (1938), 317 The Americans (1959), 326 Amy and Jordan, 90, 93n7 Anchoring function, 329 Andrews, Lew, 317 Anecdote, 4, 14–24, 26–28, 30, 82, 103 Animated image, the, 259 Animation, 62, 64, 68, 291, 292, 294, 295, 298–301, 303, 304, 306–308 Animation installations, 4, 6, 290–308 Animism, 6, 226–244, 259 Annales School, 54 Anthropology, 2, 5, 123, 233, 249 An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, 259 Apelles, 21 Apollodorus, 21 Archival silences, 211, 212 Archival turn, 211, 212 Archive, 3, 4, 6, 7, 38–41, 48–50, 55, 56, 69n3, 164, 165, 210–212, 219, 233, 316, 321

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Gray, I. Horton (eds.), Seeing Comics through Art History, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8

337

338 

INDEX

Arena Chapel (Capella degli Scrovegni), 269, 271–273, 282, 283 Ariel, 41 Armstrong, Carol M., 264n2, 314, 321 Arnheim, Rudolf, 5–7, 77, 80, 82, 83, 93n5, 208, 212–216, 219–220, 220n2 Art academy, 277 Art and Illusion (2002), 76, 77, 80, 81, 93n2 Art-historical methodologies, 2, 3, 6, 7, 40, 123, 227, 253 Art historiography, 50 Art History and Visual Culture Studies, 248, 250, 251, 255 Arthrology, 319, 323, 324, 326–330 Artist’s biography, 4, 14, 17–19, 21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 29, 30 Artist’s monograph, 14, 17, 18, 23, 24 Art market, 18, 35, 230, 250, 277 Art museums, 29, 277 Art training, 277, 278 Art world, 8n2, 29, 35, 38, 166, 186, 188, 282, 287, 314 Assmann, Aleida, 55, 56 Attribution, 3, 17, 34–51, 113 Audubon, John James, 20 Augmented reading, 298 Authorship, 3, 6, 35–37, 41, 47, 123, 192–194, 231, 244n7 Avant-garde, 3, 190 B B., David, 84 Babar, 91 Bachelard, Gaston, 292, 299 Badger, Gerry, 314, 315 Baetens, Jan, 57, 61, 91, 146, 316, 317 Bal, Mieke, 193, 199, 262, 264, 266n14 Baldinucci, Filippo, 35 Barry, Lynda, 6, 202, 248, 254–262, 264, 265n9, 265–266n10 Barthes, Roland, 262, 266n14, 320, 329 Batman, 255, 257–259 Bätschmann, Oskar, 142, 143, 145, 156, 157

Baudoin, Edmond, 23–25 Bauman, Zygmunt, 175, 177 Baxandall, Michael, 6, 157n1, 231, 274, 277, 319 Beaty, Bart, 2, 35, 251, 252, 331n2 Belting, Hans, 5, 7, 123, 127, 130, 135–137, 139, 258, 259, 261, 262, 266n12 Ben Day pattern, 47 Benjamin, Walter, 54, 56, 194 Berenson, Bernard, 15, 37, 38, 40 Berndt, Jaqueline, 210, 211 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 81 Beverly, 280, 284 Beyer, Mark, 90, 92, 93n7 Bhabha, Homi, 228, 229 Bildwissenschaft, 2, 229, 258 Black Panther (comic book series), 235–239, 241 Black Panther (film), 226, 232, 235, 239–244 Black Panther: Long Live the King (2017), 238 Black Panther: Panther’s Prey (1990–1991), 235 Black Panther: The Deadliest of the Species (2009), 238 Black Panther: The Man Without Fear (2011), 235 Blanchard, Gérard, 3 Blanks, blank spaces, 99 Blue Ribbon Comics (1942), 18–20 Bodleian Library, 40 Body as medium, 259 Boehm, Gottfried, 5, 7, 98, 100–102, 116n3, 116n6, 116n7, 143, 157n2, 258 Bootlegging, 35, 47, 48 Bourdieu, Pierre, 190, 252 Braiding, 327 Brancacci Chapel, 276, 284 Brand, Michele, 192 Brennan, Susan, 79 British Library, 40 Browne, Tom, 48 Brunelleschi, 276 Brunetti, Ivan, 86, 87, 255, 256, 258 Brunhoff, Jean de, 91, 93n8 Bunnell, Peter C., 316, 317

 INDEX 

Burckhardt, Carl Jacob Christoph, 15 Buster Brown, 122 Butler, Judith, 209 C Caillois, Roger, 214, 218, 220 Calotype, 314 Canada Council, 320 Canadian photography, 314 Canon, 3, 4, 6, 7, 14, 15, 18, 23, 24, 27, 29, 30, 39, 77, 165–168, 171, 174, 178, 179, 180n4, 186–202, 202n1, 202n2, 229, 231, 308n1 Canonical feedback loop, 4, 15, 18, 23, 27, 29 Captain America (1969), 236 Captain America: Hail Hydra, 236 Caracci, Agostino, 78 Caracci, Annibale, 79 Caricature, 3–5, 7, 34, 55, 63, 64, 78–81, 90, 93n2, 93n3, 126, 130, 131, 133, 136, 137, 250, 277, 288 Carole (last name unknown), 192, 194 Carrier, David, 265n8, 272, 273, 275, 277–279 Cartooning, 3, 4, 44, 46, 87, 91, 124, 130, 133–135, 165, 179, 251, 265n6, 277 Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, 255 Cartoon mode, 279–281 Cavazzola, Paolo Moranda, 36 Centre Pompidou, Paris, 23 Centrifugal readings, 298 Centripetal readings, 298, 304, 306 Certified Guaranty Company (CGC), 50 Chevli, Lyn, 186, 192, 199, 201, 203n7 Chiaroscuro, 61, 144, 146, 150, 276 Chicago, Judy, 197–199, 201, 265n8 Children’s comics, 165 Chromatic, 146, 150, 154, 157 Chronophotography, 315 Cimabue, 273, 275 Clark, Kenneth, 81, 82 Class, 7, 34, 47, 79, 125, 131, 168, 171, 177, 208, 214, 226, 227, 230, 243 Clément, Serge, 320 Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 238, 239, 241–243 Cognitive psychology, 79, 80

339

Coleman, Les, 86 Collage, 5, 6, 54, 56–58, 61, 63, 64, 66–68, 137, 178, 192, 201, 296, 319 Colonialism, 212, 226, 228, 232, 243 Colour, 2, 5, 19, 46, 47, 58, 65, 82, 91, 100, 107, 124–127, 139n3, 142–157, 176, 178, 179, 197, 208, 325 Colouristic, 146, 150, 152 Colour processes, 46–47 Combat ordinaire, 64 Come Out Comix (1973), 189, 192 Comic Cuts, 38, 42, 45, 48 Comics activism, 290, 295, 299 Comics, affective qualities, 291, 292 Comics craftivism, 172 Comics Studies and Art History, 3 Comics Studies, history of, 2, 3, 8n2, 180, 186–202, 248–264 Comics versus Art, 251, 252 Commodity, 35, 125, 231, 232 Composition, 15, 45, 50, 56, 90, 103, 111, 127, 130, 132, 133, 149, 176, 179, 208, 213, 215, 219, 220, 309n2, 314, 320, 327 Composition in art, 213, 278, 279, 282 Conception of art, 274, 277 Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), 83, 86, 87, 91 Connoisseurship, 5, 17, 30n5, 34–51, 79 Connotation, 34, 68, 320 Corto Maltese, 5, 58, 59, 61, 63, 66, 67 Couperie, Pierre, 3 Cousineau, Sylvain P. “Henri,” 320 Craft, 171, 172, 188 Cremins, Brian, 67 Crewdson, Gregory, 314 Crimp, Douglas, 248, 250, 314, 315 Critical Race Art History, 7 Cruickshank, George, 277 Crumb, Robert, 190, 191, 194, 201, 203n5 Cultural History, 3, 55, 211, 296 Cultural memory, 55–58, 68, 300 Cultural Studies, 2, 116n1, 229, 244n4, 248–250, 252, 254, 264n2, 317 Cumberland, George, 17

340 

INDEX

Curator, 2, 6, 34, 86, 188, 274, 309n8, 317 Curricula, 227, 229 Cutting, James, 77 Cyborg, 6, 208–210, 218, 219 D Daguerre, Louis, 20 Daguerreotype, 314 Dalí (2012) (graphic novel), 23–25, 27, 29 Dalí, Salvador, 14, 23–25, 27 Danbolt, Mathias, 211, 212 Danto, Arthur, 273, 282, 285, 287 Dating of art works, 34, 37 De Lauretis, Teresa, 209 Decolonisation, 6, 226–244 Denkraum (thinking-space), 296, 299, 300, 309n6 Denotation, 87, 320, 329 Depiction, 4, 76–93, 100–102, 105, 107, 109, 111, 113–115, 130, 146, 214–216, 218, 219, 232, 240, 241, 272, 274, 277, 278, 283, 321 Diamond, Clare, 35 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 54, 55, 258 Dikovitskaya, Margaret, 249 Disability, 7, 63, 86 Distinguished sight, 101, 109 Dittmann, Lorenz, 142–147, 149, 150, 152, 156, 157 Dix, Otto, 148, 149, 154, 156, 158n14 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 37, 38 Drawing, 6, 7, 15, 18, 19, 21, 23, 24, 41–44, 46, 48, 49, 55, 60, 65, 67, 68, 69n7, 76, 78, 79, 83, 84, 86, 87, 89–92, 98, 102, 129, 130, 148–150, 153, 155, 158n14, 167, 179, 180n3, 191, 193, 194, 196, 197, 202n3, 203n7, 211, 232, 233, 250, 255–261, 266n10, 277, 286, 291, 300, 301 Drawing style, 2, 5, 8n2, 56, 57, 64, 66, 87, 151, 178, 194, 201 Drnaso, Nick, 6, 272, 274, 278, 280–283 Dubois, Philippe, 320 Duchamp, Marcel, 68, 282

Duck-rabbit, 76, 77, 82, 91, 92 Dürer, Albrecht, 17, 157n1 Duris of Samos, 15 Dutch Art, 124, 129, 130 Dyke Shorts (1978), 189, 192, 203n7 Dynamite Damsel (1976), 189, 192, 197, 203n7 E Eco, Umberto, 59, 63 Edelson, Mary Beth, 197, 201 Education, 4, 15, 50, 125, 167, 171, 187, 188 Eiffel, Alexander Gustave, 20 El Refaie, Elisabeth, 91, 93n1 Elkins, James, 228, 248, 250, 251, 254, 258, 262, 264, 265n4, 265n8, 266n11, 321 Emanata, 45, 280 Embroidery, 6, 172–174, 178, 179, 189 Engraving, 132, 133 Epileptic (2006), 84 Epistemology, 227, 229, 232–234, 239, 243 Eshun, Kodwo, 233 Evans, Walker, 316, 317, 323 Experience of art, 80, 274 Expressionism, 148, 153, 320 F Facial characteristics, 44 Falardeau, Mira, 164, 165, 167, 178, 179 Family Fun: On Sanity, Madness, & Family Tunnel Construction (2012), 296 Fantastic Four, 235, 237 Félibien, André, 35 Felton, Samuel, 17 Feminist art, 6, 15, 164–180, 186–202 Feminist comics, 4, 6, 164–180, 186–202 Feminist criticism, 185–187, 189, 197 Feminist sex wars, 191, 203n6 Film photonovel, 317 Fisher, Mark, 234

 INDEX 

500 Years Too Soon! (comic book story) (1947), 19, 20 Fnitter, 170, 171, 179 Forceville, Charles, 91 Fortuitous pictures, 77 Foucault, Michel, 229, 231 Fox Talbot, Henry, 314 Framing, 45, 78, 105, 177, 193, 197, 214, 318, 322 Frank, Robert, 326 Frankenthaler, Helen, 300 Freud, Sigmund, 37, 54, 78, 79 Fried, Michael, 314 Friedberg, Anne, 249 Frostenson, Karin, 171, 179 Funny Wonder, The, 38 G Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 319 Gage, John, 5, 142, 144, 145, 147, 156, 157, 158n7 Galleries, comics exhibited in, 49, 290–291, 305–308 Gallery comics, 6, 290, 291 Gardner, Jared, 8n2, 48, 56 Garuba, Harry, 233, 234, 237, 239, 243 Gasoline Alley, 105–109, 116n9 Gaze, reciprocal, 136, 137 Gender, 7, 39, 165, 168, 171, 174, 177, 190, 201, 208, 209, 214, 215, 220 General arthrology, 319, 327–330 Genette, Gérard, 317 Genius, 16–19, 99, 187, 189–193, 196, 230–232 Genre, 4, 14, 18, 19, 23, 27, 29, 30, 46, 50, 57, 59, 61, 67, 131, 134, 135, 143, 145, 147, 157, 186, 187, 193, 210, 215, 234, 286, 290, 307 Genre fiction, 57–64 Germain, Jean-Claude, 330 Ghiberti, Gianlorenzo, 30n3 Gifford, Dennis, 40 Gillray, James, 277, 278, 284 Ginzburg, Carlo, 37, 38 Giotto (di Bondone), 4, 6, 17, 21, 23, 30n3, 116n7, 270–275, 277–279, 282–287 Global turn, 228, 229

341

Goddess archetype, 197 Going to Heaven (1976) (photobook), 317 Gombrich, Ernst, 3, 5–7, 76–82, 84, 87, 90–92, 93n2, 93n4, 264n3, 275, 278, 282, 285, 296 Graham, Billy, 235, 240 Granér Sara, 166, 173, 178 Graphiateur, 61, 91 Graphiateur, 91 Graphic medicine, 6, 290, 292, 309n8 Greimas, A.J., 317 Grennan, Simon, 84, 87, 91, 93n1 Grid, 3, 6, 47, 109, 145, 147, 154, 213, 291, 297–298, 305, 306, 309n7, 322, 324, 328 Groening, Matt, 49 Groensteen, Thierry, 2, 7, 41, 100, 103, 146, 194, 303, 316, 318, 319, 322, 324, 326, 327, 329–331 Groupe μ (mu), 318 Gylander, Henri, 175, 177 H Halberstam, Jack (also Judith, J. Jack), 210, 212 Handling, 102, 115, 211 Haraway, Donna, 209 Harmsworth, Alfred, 46, 47 Hatfield, Charles, 190, 192, 253, 254, 265n8 Health activism, 290, 295, 299, 304, 307–308 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 273, 279, 285 Hellboy, 84 Hermeneutics, 142, 143, 146, 319 Herriman, George, 279, 284 Het Schilder-Boeck, 17 Historia Naturalis, 14, 15 Hoffman, Malvina, 20 Hogarth, William, 35, 127 Holland, Frank, 48 Holly, Michael Ann, 251 Holmes, Sherlock, 37–38 Homer, Winslow, 20 Humour, 282 ethnic humour, 126, 137

342 

INDEX

I Iconic difference, 100–102, 113, 115 Iconic solidarity, 103, 318, 319, 321–325, 327 Iconographic, 3, 44, 100, 116n2, 142, 197, 200 Iconography, 54, 116n7, 142, 144, 274, 317 Iconology, 3, 54, 98, 116n2, 116n7, 144, 198, 201 Identifying sight, 101, 109 Ideology, 125, 166, 175, 177, 178, 188, 227, 239, 317 Illusion, 76, 81, 126, 298, 329 Illustrated Chips, 38, 48 Image, the, 45, 47, 48, 55, 56, 62, 67, 78, 82, 84, 100, 116n4, 122–139, 156, 157, 177–179, 191, 197, 199–201, 208, 210, 213, 216, 217, 219, 241, 248, 253–256, 258–262, 264, 265–266n10, 266n12, 295, 303, 314, 315, 317, 322, 330 Image schema, 84 Imagined gravity, 208–220 Imdahl, Max, 5, 98, 101, 102, 109, 116n3, 116n7 Imitative drawing, 42 Index, 7, 124, 194, 253, 317 Inside Moebius, 302 Instagram, 6, 173, 174 Interdisciplinarity, 2, 3, 7, 249, 251–254, 262, 266n14 Intermedial, 174 Intersubjective relationships, 93 Irony, 55, 59, 170, 173, 177, 285 Iser, Wolfgang, 98, 99 It Ain’t Me Babe (1970), 6, 186, 189, 192–194, 197, 198, 201 Italian Quattrocento, 274, 276 Italo-Byzantine, 273, 275 J Jacobs, Dale, 254 Jauß, Hans Robert, 98, 99 Jesus Christ, 101 Johansson, Nanna, 166, 178 Johnson, Mark, 83, 84 Joly, Benoît, 306

Jones, Amelia, 208, 209, 211 Jones, Sue Ellen, 209 Judas (Iscariot), 101, 102 Judd, Donald, 297 Jungle Action, 235, 240 Juxtaposition, 54, 56, 259, 261, 278, 283, 315, 323, 326 K Kalish, Nancy, 192 Kemp, Wolfgang, 5, 98–100, 102, 116n3, 116n4, 116n5, 315 Kennedy, John, 90 King, Frank, 105–109 Kirby, Jack, 190, 235, 237 Knowledge montage (Mnemosyne panels), 296 Kominsky-Crumb, Aline, 192, 197, 201 Kramsky, Jerry, 5, 142, 145, 147, 148, 150, 151, 153–156 Krauss, Rosalind, 6, 249, 291, 292, 297, 298, 304, 305, 309n7, 320 Krazy Kat, 279, 284 Kristeva, Julia, 275, 286 Kruger, Barbara, 201 Kunzle, David, 3, 48, 129, 139n1, 278, 287, 331 Kurtzman, Meredith, 192 Kvinnobulletinen, 168–171 L La Cour, Erin, 290–292, 303 Labour, 65, 231, 329 Lakoff, George, 83, 84 Larcenet, Manu, 5, 57, 64–67, 69n7 Lavin, Marilyn, 264n2, 273 Le Photographe (graphic novel), 315 Le Vite De Piu Eccellenti Pittori, Sculptori E Architettori [Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, 16 Lee, Stan, 190, 235, 237 Leech, John, 39 Lefèvre, Pascal, 90, 91, 93n1, 265n8, 315 Leonardo (da Vinci), 14, 17–20, 22–24, 30, 201, 231, 274

 INDEX 

Leonardo da Vinci: Painter and Scientist. Pioneer in Engineering (comic book story), 19 Leonardo da Vinci (comic book story), 18, 20 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 231, 315, 331n1 Level of the depiction, 100–102, 107, 109, 113–115 Levine, Sherrie, 314 Levy, Lawrence, 317 LeWitt, Sol, 297 Lichtenstein, Roy, 252, 253 Lidén, Anne, 169, 170 Life-and-work model, 5, 14, 17, 18, 23–24, 26–28 Line, the, 8n2, 20, 43, 55, 61, 63, 65, 66, 68, 81, 82, 89–91, 122, 124, 127, 129, 133, 145, 146, 152–154, 175, 176, 179, 186, 194, 208, 213, 217, 218, 229, 236, 241, 252, 258, 261, 266n10, 293, 299, 300, 315, 318, 321, 326, 327 Linguistics, 2, 8n2, 81, 84, 91, 314, 331 Lippard, Lucy, 6, 186, 188, 189, 191, 192, 196, 202 Literary Studies, 2, 98–103, 179, 180, 253, 255 Looking, as a practice, 124, 128, 264 Looking at art, 274–276 Luke Cage, 235 Luks, George, 123 Luminaristic, 146, 157 Lyons, Lisa, 192 M Majno, Luigi, 17 Maker, 56, 122, 128, 275, 287 Makhubu, Nomusa, 235, 243 Mama! Dramas! (1978), 189 Manetti, Antonio, 30n3 Mannerism, 79 Marion, Phillipe, 61, 91 Marrs, Lee, 192, 194–196, 201 Marvel Comics Presents, 235 Mask, 136–139 Massacio, 274, 276, 286 Massironi, Manfredo, 77

343

Material culture, 226, 229, 243 Materiality, 2, 3, 56, 115, 145, 305, 317 Mattotti, Lorenzo, 5, 142–157, 158n9, 158n14 Max (Porchawaka), John, 7, 316, 320–326, 328–330, 332n4, 332n6 Maynard, Patrick, 81 McCloud, Scott, 137, 252, 274, 306, 318, 331 McFadden’s Flats, 122 McGregor, Don, 235, 240 McLaren, Norman, 298 Medium, 3, 18, 21, 29, 34, 35, 39, 41, 56, 61, 62, 66, 68, 82, 107, 115, 117n14, 122–124, 130, 157, 191, 252, 259, 290–292, 298, 314, 315, 318–321, 329–331 Medley, Stuart, 277, 286 Medway, Jim, 84 Meesters, Gert, 90 Memory, 4, 53–68, 154, 164, 212, 255, 258, 259, 261, 265n4, 296, 300, 323, 327 Mendes, Barbara “Willy,” 192, 197, 198 Mental representations, 79, 90, 277, 278 Message from the Interior (1966), 316, 323 Metaphor, 55, 81, 83, 84, 86, 87, 91, 93n1, 93n2, 117n13, 136, 167, 192, 300, 308n2, 324, 326, 330 Methodology, 2–7, 34, 37, 40, 44, 49, 54, 77, 78, 87, 90, 98, 100, 114, 122, 123, 128, 142, 144, 186, 211, 226–229, 232, 237, 239, 243, 244, 248, 250, 251, 253, 254, 290, 291, 294–297, 301, 307, 308, 309n4, 309n6 Michals, Duane, 326 Michelangelo (Buonarotti), 17, 22–24, 231, 273 Mignola, Mike, 84 Millet, Cathy, 201 Mimesis, 77, 79, 144, 258 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 229, 249, 250 Mise-en-abyme, 302 Mitchell, W. J. T., 68, 81, 249–251, 254, 258, 265n8, 265n10 Mnemosyne Atlas (Bilderatlas Mnemosyne), 54–57, 61, 69n1

344 

INDEX

Modernism, 3, 101, 144, 282, 297 Modernist, 68, 171, 191, 233, 234, 297, 314 Modernity, 56, 175, 226, 233, 243, 297 Modigliani, Amedeo, 282, 285 Molotiu, Andre, 8n3, 49, 306 Mondrian, Piet, 145, 156, 282, 297, 298 Monochrome, 126, 149 Montage, 54, 56, 68, 294–297, 302, 307, 309n6, 315 Morelli, Giovanni, 5, 34–38, 40, 42, 44, 46 Mouffe, Chantal, 175, 177 Moxey, Keith, 258, 260, 264n2 Mudimbe, Valentin-Yves, 233 Multidisciplinary, 6, 179, 180, 202n3 Multiframe, 324, 331 Muse, 54, 56, 200 Myth, 58, 61, 63, 167, 191, 193, 251, 297, 298 N Nachleben der Antike (the afterlife of antiquity), 296, 309n6 Narrative, 4, 6, 7, 8n2, 14–16, 18–30, 48, 49, 56–58, 64, 65, 76–78, 83, 84, 87, 91, 92, 100, 101, 124, 127, 136, 137, 147, 149, 150, 152, 154, 155, 180n7, 199, 239, 240, 243, 273, 275, 279, 283, 287, 291, 296–298, 300–308, 314–318, 320, 321, 323, 324, 326, 327, 329, 330 Narrative fresco cycle, 4, 273, 276 Narratology, 2, 315, 317 National Film Board of Canada, Still Photography Division, 320 National Gallery of Canada, 320 Naturalistic mode, 46, 280, 281 Negative-positive process, 314 Negative space, 45, 325 New Art History, 5, 187, 249 New Objectivity, 148, 158n10 Newspaper supplement, 122 New York City, 122, 123, 127–129, 131, 135, 138

Nineteenth century comics, 4, 34, 122, 124, 164 Nochlin, Linda, 5–7, 15, 166–168, 171, 178, 186–191, 195, 196, 202 Noomin, Diane, 192, 201 Norm theory, 79 The North American Indian, 317 Nostalgia, 61, 66 O Object, 2, 6, 64, 79, 87, 90, 98–102, 113, 126, 129, 130, 136, 143, 145, 154, 176, 211, 213, 219, 226–231, 233, 234, 244n2, 248, 251–254, 258, 260, 262–264, 266n14, 298, 303, 305, 309n2, 315, 329 Object constancy, 82 October (1927), 248–250, 264n1 Oeuvre, 17, 24, 29, 45, 144 Okeke-Agulu, Chika, 228 Okorafor, Nnedi, 238, 239, 241, 243 Omniscient storyteller, 100 Opacity, 100, 102, 305 Open Passport (1973) (photobook), 7, 315, 316, 318–331 Opper, Frederick, 46 Optical Art, 101 Ordinary Victories (Combat ordinaire), 5, 57, 64–68 Outcault, Richard Felton, 5, 122–139, 139n1 P Panel border, 278, 280 Panofsky, Erwin, 54, 98, 116n2, 142, 296 Parcours (abstract comic), 306 Parker, Rozsika, 5, 6, 166, 167, 171, 172, 174, 186–189, 191, 196 Parr, Martin, 314, 315 Parrhasios of Ephesos, 16, 21, 24, 26 Patch, Thomas, 17 Pathosformel, 55, 58, 59, 65, 68, 296, 300, 309n6 Pearson C. Arthur, 46 Peirce, C.S., 252, 306

 INDEX 

Perception, 2, 5, 15, 23, 30, 76–93, 98, 100, 101, 105, 111, 114, 122–139, 142, 145, 212, 216, 220, 226, 227, 230, 234, 239, 243, 259 Perceptual forces, 83 Performance, 6, 7, 57, 62, 115, 137, 139, 208, 209, 211, 212, 214, 215, 217, 235, 238, 264, 291, 297, 300 Performative archives, 212 Personal stories, 64 Period Eye, 6, 274 Persepolis, 252 Personal stories, 53 Perspective, 7, 35, 39–41, 47, 67, 79, 90, 91, 98–102, 109, 114, 115, 123, 124, 130, 142, 144, 152, 166, 167, 172–177, 179, 180, 186, 189, 191, 196, 208, 209, 211, 212, 220, 226, 228, 233–235, 248, 249, 258, 276, 278, 280, 297, 315, 327 Peters, Margery “Petchesky,” 201 Photobook, 7, 314–331 Photo-essay, 315 Photography, 4, 20, 65, 252, 314–317, 320, 329, 330 Photo-novel, 317 Picture(s), 2, 5, 6, 21, 37, 39, 56, 66, 76–82, 87, 91, 92, 101, 102, 123, 124, 128, 130, 143, 144, 147, 150, 157, 214, 219, 259, 262, 274, 283–285, 296, 314, 316, 318, 319, 322–327, 329–331 Picture plane, 282 Picture This: The Near-Sighted Monkey Book, 255 Pif Gadget (1969–1993), 58 Planimetric relations, 102, 107, 114, 115 Plato, 79, 143 Play, 6, 48, 62, 63, 65, 66, 78–80, 87, 107, 126, 130, 131, 134, 142, 150, 156, 191, 200, 208, 213–215, 217–219, 252, 259, 262, 290, 291, 298, 300 Pliny the Elder, 4, 14, 15 Polanyi, Michael, 269 Political cartooning, 124, 135 Politics, 138, 180, 186, 193 Pollock, Griselda, 5–7, 15, 166–179, 186–193, 196, 197, 199, 202

345

Polychrome, 125, 149 Polykleitos of Sikyon, 14 Pop Art, 252, 253 Pornography, 191, 203n6 Postcolonial Art History, 5, 7, 244n3 Postema, Barbara, 99, 146, 253 Postmodernism, 3, 252 Post-structuralism, 5 Poussin, Nicholas, 79 Poverty, 130, 132 the poor, images of, 130, 131 Practice as research, 1 Pratt, Hugo, 5, 57–59, 61–63, 67 Presence, of an image or object, 258 Preziosi, Donald, 231, 251 Protogenes, 16, 19 Psychoanalysis, 37, 54, 78, 80 Psychology, 2, 5, 54, 77–80, 83, 142 Punch, 39, 41, 48, 125 Pyle, Hilary, 40 Q Queer bodies, 208–220 Queer performativity, 209 Queer theory, 208, 209, 211, 220 R Race, 7, 81, 137, 146, 168, 171, 192, 198, 215, 226, 227, 230, 243 Rampley, Matthew, 54–56 Raphael (Sanzio da Urbino), 231, 273, 274 Reading viewers, 5, 98, 99, 103, 106, 107, 109, 111, 113–115 Realism, 62, 65, 129, 130, 280 Realism continuum, 274 Real Life Comics (1942), 19 Ream, Vinnie, 20 Reception aesthetics, aesthetics of reception, 5, 98–115, 116n1, 116n3, 116n4, 116n6, 117n14, 157n2 Relaying function, 329 Rembrandt (graphic novel), 23, 26–28, 30 Rembrandt (Harmenszoon Van Rijn), 14, 26–28, 30, 146

346 

INDEX

Representation, 47, 56, 63, 65, 78, 79, 81, 82, 84, 90, 99, 129–131, 186, 191, 196, 197, 199–201, 203n5, 203n6, 208, 213, 215, 219, 220, 239, 250, 252, 258, 261, 264, 265n10, 286, 300, 306, 307, 319 Representational art, 87, 99, 100, 124, 273, 276, 277, 282 Restrained arthrology, 319, 326–327 Rhodes, Gillian, 78–80, 90, 277, 278 Rhodes Must Fall, 227, 243 Ribière, Mireille, 318, 319, 323 Riegl, Alois, 249 Riis, Jacob, 66, 131–133 Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 25 Robbins, Trina, 165, 167, 180n1, 186, 190–193, 195–197, 201, 202, 203n7 Rogoff, Irit, 249, 266n14 Romance, 50, 58, 59 Rowlandson, Thomas, 277, 278, 284 Rudin, Kay, 197 Ruff, Thomas, 314 Rūmī, Jalāl ad-Dīn Mohammad, 329 Rusty Brown Autumn, 5, 103–109, 113, 114, 116n10 S Sabrina (2018), 6, 272, 280–282, 284, 285 Salina, Nina, 197 Satire, 63, 123, 126, 135, 139, 166, 170, 177–179 Satrapi, Marjane, 202, 252 Schaeffer, Jean-Marie, 320 Schema(s), 6, 84, 275–280, 282–287 Schizo, 86 Schneemann, Carolee, 198 Schorn, Ludwig, 17 Schultz, Charles, 49 Schwartz, Frederic, 230 Scientific analysis, 34, 37, 38, 48 Scrovegni, Enrico, 270, 271 Seeing-in, 82, 84, 87, 90, 91 Seeing sight, 101, 109 Semiotics, 2, 8n2, 100, 142, 146, 156, 315–318, 330, 331

Sequence, 4, 6, 56, 57, 65, 67, 86, 103, 154, 314–331 Sequences (1970) (photobook), 326 Sequential images, 122 Series, 2, 4, 18, 21, 30n6, 41, 42, 45, 58, 83, 90, 103, 105, 125, 148, 157, 178, 190, 199, 201, 235, 237, 238, 240, 249, 258, 259, 316–319, 326, 327 Set, 5, 20, 44, 48, 61, 64, 66, 68, 79, 80, 84, 90, 98, 122, 150, 167, 196, 198, 214, 215, 218, 229, 231, 243, 248, 250, 318, 329 Sexuality, 7, 168, 171, 191, 192, 199, 203n6, 209, 215, 250 Shiner, Larry, 230, 231 Shinn, Everett, 130 Signatures, 37, 41, 48, 105, 123, 132, 193, 324 Signifiers of comics, 278 Simultaneity, 100–102, 318, 319 Site, 35, 49, 105, 106, 137, 138, 303, 308, 315, 324, 325, 329, 331 Sjöberg, Lotta, 166, 173, 175–178 Slapstick, 57, 65, 89, 126, 127, 130, 133, 135, 136 Smith, Joel, 315, 317, 331 Smith, Marquard, 248 Smith, W. Eugene, 314 Smolderen, Thierry, 31n9, 57, 122, 127, 136 Sociology, 2, 5, 128, 175, 202n3, 252 Sontag, Susan, 320 Soyinka, Wole, 234 Spatio-topical system, 319, 323–327, 330 Speech balloons, 46, 217, 218 Spiegelman, Art, 190, 197, 265n8 Steirer, Gregory, 254, 262 Stelfreeze, Brian, 238, 239, 242 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 145, 147, 148, 154, 158n14 Stitching function, 329 Stoler, Ann Laura, 211, 212 The Story of Painting (comic book story), 14, 21–23 Strauss, Ernst, 5, 143, 144, 146, 150 Streeten, Nicola, 164, 178, 179 Structuralism, 5

 INDEX 

Style, 2, 5, 8n2, 37–39, 41–49, 55–58, 61, 63–66, 68, 77, 81, 87, 89–91, 93n1, 103, 129, 132, 135, 146, 151, 153, 154, 170, 174, 179, 180, 186, 194, 210, 230, 231, 250, 259, 273, 275, 280, 281 Successiveness, 100 Suite, 319, 326 Summers, David, 194 Sunday supplement, 123, 125–127, 129, 131 Superhero, 4, 6, 58, 59, 63, 65, 67, 219, 235–239 Sutton, Joyce, 69n4, 186, 192, 199–201, 203n7 Swedish comics, 164–166, 175 Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor (2014), 255–257 Symbolist art, 297, 305 T Tacit knowledge, 272, 274, 275, 277 Tagg, John, 320 Tata, Sam, 322, 323 Teen Witch (2007), 84 Tenniel, John, 39 Tits & Clits Comix (1972–87), 189, 198, 199 Todorov, Tzvetan, 326 Töpffer, Rodolphe, 48, 93n4, 278, 331n1 Topological relations, 115 Trachtenberg, Alan, 316, 331 Transparency, 50, 100, 102, 113, 305 Trigg, Dylan, 299 Tropes, 14, 21, 23, 24, 26–28, 30, 54, 56, 191, 219, 240, 243, 326, 330 True Comics (1947), 19 Twisted Sisters (1976–94), 189, 192, 198 Typex, 23, 25–28, 30 U Una, 296, 297 Underground comix, 4, 6, 190–192, 203n5, 281 Understanding Comics, 137, 252

347

V Vaginal art, 198, 199, 201 Valadon, Suzanne, 196, 197 Van Eyck, Johannes, 22 Van Mander, Carel, 4, 14, 17, 21–23 Vasari, Giorgio, 4, 14, 16, 17, 19–24, 26, 35, 187, 192, 231, 274 Vasarian biographical model, 17 Velázquez, Diego, 81, 82 Viewing, cultures of, 128 Villani, Filippo, 30n3 Vi Mänskor, 168, 170, 171 Visitor experience, 291 Visual Culture, 7, 54, 127, 129, 210, 212, 230, 232, 248–252, 255 Visual Culture Studies and comics, 254, 262–264 Visuality, 3, 114, 115, 229, 248, 249, 262 Visual metaphor, 83, 84, 86, 87, 91, 93n2 Visual methodologies, 100, 248, 251, 254, 275 Visual semiotics, 142, 147, 179, 313, 315, 318, 330, 331 Visual Studies, 2, 6, 123, 180, 191, 210–212, 229–232, 248–252, 254, 262, 264, 317 Visual-tactile, 115, 117n14 Visual technology, 272, 275 Visual weight, 6, 208–220 Vogel, Susan, 6, 272, 274, 282 Von Bode, Wilhelm, 37 Von Rosen, Astrid, 6, 290, 294, 296, 297, 299–301, 303, 306–308 W Wagner, Christoph, 142, 144 Wall, Jeff, 314 Walton, Kendall, 5, 77, 81–83, 87, 91 Warburg, Aby, 5, 7, 53–68, 249, 258, 296, 297, 309n5, 309n6 Ware, Chris, 5, 66, 98, 103–105, 107, 109–113, 117n14 Warhol, Andy, 250, 273 Weimar, 148, 150 Wesseling, Janneke, 98–100, 114

348 

INDEX

Western Eye, 6, 272, 275, 276, 279, 282, 283 Wet Satin (1976), 189, 203n6 What It Is (2008), 6, 255, 258, 260, 261, 263, 265n9, 265–266n10 White, Minor, 316, 318, 319 Wimmen’s Comix, 6, 165, 189, 198, 201 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 15 Witek, Joseph, 280 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 76, 77, 82, 91 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 230 Wollheim, Richard, 5, 77, 81, 82, 84, 87, 91 Women’s comics, 180n1, 191, 192

Women’s comix, 186–202, 203n6 Women’s Liberation, 166, 168 World War One, 58, 62, 63, 309n5 Wren, Christopher, 20 Wrightson, Bernie, 49 Y Yeats, Jack B., 5, 34, 40, 42 Z Zamir, Shamoon, 317 Zappa (Sloatman), Gail, 326 Zeuxis of Herakleia, 16