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.