Why Comics? / Outside the Box by Hillary L. Chute

“One thing my mother did say about [Fun Home] was that I didn’t get the wallpaper pattern right. And she’s right... There was a point early on when she read one chapter and she said, Wow, this is really good. That was pretty astonishing. But since the book came out, she hasn’t said anything about the content of the book itself. But you know, how could she? This memoir is in many ways a huge violation of my family. I can’t expect them to give me strokes on my style, you know?” - Alison Bechdel, Outside the Box

Chris started the year by attending a seminar about comics and graphic novels, and as a result, I’ve read a number of them this year. I’ve been interested in the form since I was a kid, when I spent hours reading stacks of Archie digests and drawing my own comics starring a turtle-like humanoid named, uh, Josh. Then, when the first Spider-Man movie came out, I bought a bunch of black and white Marvel Essentials and got into superhero comics. Concurrently, I started visiting the bookstore near my college and reading--in the coffeeshop there--lots of indie books by many of the creators in these two books--Daniel Clowes (Ghost World), Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan), Art Spiegelman (Maus), and even a little R. Crumb.

I’ve read a couple books about comics history, but always within the context of mainstream, usually superhero, books. While Chute does mention them occasionally, superheroes stay on the periphery--even a chapter called Why Superheroes? Why Comics? spends more time on the sci-fi aspects of the Hernandez Bros’ Love and Rockets than it does on Superman--as she discusses the form, history, and structure of comic books as a medium. Outside the Box, the contents of which are often excerpted in Why Comics? Is a collection of interviews with various creators and made a great companion piece, which is why I combined these two reviews. They cover a great deal of similar ground so reviewing them separately seemed superfluous.

Why Comics? Is structured around a series of Why questions--why disaster, why superheroes, why women, why sex, etc--using them to push off into discussions of how comics, especially indie comics, moved out of the newspapers, onto the newsstands, and eventually, deep into the heart of the 60s and 70s counterculture. A few creators figure very, very large; not a single interview in Outside the Box fails to mention R. Crumb’s Zap or Spiegelman’s Raw and Maus. And those two, along with editor and publisher Francoise Mouly and Justin Green, creator of Binky Brown Meets the Virgin Mary, a book I’d never heard of that has a strong claim to being the first graphic novel, truly are the cornerstones of the comix movement. As someone says in their interview, “Everyone had their R. Crumb phase”. And, as a result, most of the works discussed in these two volumes aren’t family friendly, putting it mildly. The topics are dark, the motives hard to suss out, the perspectives unflinching. From Justin Green’s compulsive masturbation and religious guilt, to Crumb’s strips about incestuous families, to Phoebe Gloeckner’s chronicles of childhood molestation, to Joe Sacco’s incredibly disturbing scenes of real life war, to Spiegelman’s Holocaust, well. I had to make sure I kept this book well away from the kids lest they open up to the double-page spread of Popeye and Wimpy, um, pleasuring Olive Oyl in a reprint of a Tijuana Bible and have to deal with that in therapy.

Chute writes dispassionately in Why Comics? and makes a strong case for the wildly free expression underground comics provided creators, and draws lines from Crumb to The Simpsons, and it’s not hard to see the influence on later comics and animation like Adventure Time and Spongebob that emerged from this anarchistic movement. And of course, it’s not all adult content either. While most of the cartoonists here target adults primarily, I was charmed by Lynda Barry’s painted strips, Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For (and of course, Fun House). There’s a joy to even the bleakest of these works (well, maybe not Gloeckner), and in Outside the Box, the artists opine about the physicality of creating the artwork. As Bechdel says, “A novelist may never touch his words at all, but my fingers touch every part of the page.” There’s a lot of interesting stuff in both books about structure and what comics do well, some of which I stole pretty much wholesale for my review of Hostage. The control of time and space, the density that’s possible, the postmodern aspects of signifier and signified (which Chris Ware goes on about to such length that he gets embarrassed and stops). 

Most people, even most of the people here, don’t get rich or particularly famous by drawing comics, so why do it? That’s a “why” that doesn’t get its own chapter header, but it’s evident reading these interviews, and Chute’s criticism that it’s a labor of love. A love for the artform, a love of the process, a love of the art itself. Cumulatively, these two books are a love letter to the form and I’d recommend them to anyone who loves comics--as long as they’re over 18. 

Reinventing Comics by Scott McCloud

I haven’t read the entirety of Scott McCloud’s career-making graphic nonfiction book, Understanding Comics, to which Reinventing Comics is a partial sequel. Fortunately for me, Reinventing Comics covers mostly different ground; unfortunately for me, it was mixed bag, due partially to its datedness at points--it was published in 2000--and its sometimes dry subject matter.

But first, the good: McCloud is a remarkably versatile artist who clearly loves the medium and is adept at communicating fairly dense information in an intuitive way. I’m not sure the information in this book could have presented any better without changing its format completely. The entire book, aside from the appendices, is written in comic book form which sometimes works great, such as when demonstrating various distribution models, and sometimes doesn’t add much, as during his discussion of diversity in comics.

The downside is that a lot of the material here just isn’t that novel or interesting. One only has to walk into a comic book store, or even look at recent comic book movies, to see that the landscape is dominated by superheroes, mostly straight, male and white. McCloud’s solution to this problem--that more women, minorities, and gays be promoted in the comics world--is sensible, but doesn’t bring anything new to the table. His discussion of genre is similarly circular.

The back half of the book mostly discusses the pros and cons of creating and distributing comics on computers. Since the book was written in a largely pre-broadband time, many of McCloud’s suggestions seem quite prescient--online distribution, microtransactions, experimental layouts and formatting--but they too suffer from a little bit of been-there-done-that in 2012 (although it is notable that DC and Marvel both adopted same-day-as-print digital releases this year). McCloud’s once-exciting predictions about everything being available everywhere have been tamped down by both real-world issues, such as the complex legal weaseling necessary to move “everything” online, and by the fact that the future he talks about is largely here and doesn’t seem to have increased mainstream acceptance of comics much. Online, there are comics about everything under the sun, instantly available, but if no one new is reading them, what does it matter?

I don’t mean to be hard on Understanding Comics. It’s very well put together and I enjoyed reading it, but I’d recommend Understanding Comics or McCloud’s Zot omnibus as an introduction--Reinventing Comics is a little depressing.

Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klostermann

"I remember saying things, but I have no idea what was said. It was generally a friendly conversation.” —Associated Press reporter Jack Sullivan, attempting to recount a 3 A.M. exchange we had at a dinner party and inadvertently describing the past ten years of my life."

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs is a collection of essays by Chuck Klosterman, probably the most polarizing and visible pop-culture critic currently working. Best known for his spirited defenses of things that are uncool, like Guns n’ Roses and Saved by the Bell, this collection touches on a large variety of topics—everything from tribute bands to the rapture to the titular Cocoa Puffs are subjected to Klosterman’s incisive eye.

Sometimes, he’s contradictory—he decries those who don’t like country in one essay while stating that people who claim to like all music really like no music at all—or just sort of off the wall, like when he claims that mainstream country is more genuine than Bob Dylan. Fortunately, Klosterman mostly avoids abrasive snark, and even the essays I disagree with most vehemently don’t come across as too self important.

The only real complaint I have about this book is the structure. The essays are separate, disconnected entities, but between them, there are little interstitial bits in tiny type, tackling some topic like mathematical probability—Klosterman thinks it’s a crock—or rambling. Sometimes these are comical, but mostly they’re interruptions and represent a pretentious shift in voice for an essayist who’s mostly pretension free.

One of my friends said that he thinks Klosterman is an unusually gifted pop culture commentator but not much else, and based on this collection, I’d tend to agree. There are worse things to be, though, and worse authors with whom to spend an evening.