College Literature

Critics who cover established literary forms have spent much of the last twenty years in flight from formalist and evaluative [End Page 166] analyses; comics critics have spent much of those years developing just such analyses for their medium. Mike Catron and Gary Groth co-founded The Comics Journal in 1976 to "cover the comics medium from an arts-first perspective" (the cantankerous Groth remains its editor); the long-revered comics writer and artist Will Eisner opened the field to book-length criticism with his Comics & Sequential Art (1985). Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics (1993) described itself as "a comic book about comics," "an examination of the art-form"; McCloud advanced hypotheses about "how . . . we define comics, what are the basic elements of comics," and "how time flows through comics," among other topics (vii). Because McCloud cast his work in comics form, his claims could often provide their own illustrations. "To define comics," McCloud explained, "we must first do a little aesthetic surgery and separate form from content" (5). (The panel showed him lifting a gleaming axe.)

McCloud sought to see the medium as a medium, rather than as a genre or a set of already-extant examples: he tried to describe not just its past but its potential and to establish a flexible language for future criticism, and he succeeded. (His more recent work involves comics on the World Wide Web.) After McCloud, comics criticism found itself with three available paths. One path led deeper into form, examining comics less as a literary or narrative mode than as a mode of visual art. Another path eschewed aesthetic evaluation and downplayed formal analysis, looking at comics as part of United States (or Japanese or Mexican) history, and looking not at a few best (or most innovative) comics but at what most consumers actually read. A third path focused on genre, performing not art-historical but literary interpretations focused on characters and narrative.

The first three of these four informative books demonstrate, respectively, those three approaches. Varnum and Gibbons's anthology of essays considers comics artists' formal accomplishments (sometimes within heavy theoretical frames), from nineteenth-century French magazine strips to contemporary United States graphic novels. (Superheroes are pointedly not represented, perhaps because their commercial dominance in English-speaking countries can obscure the range of styles and ideas other genres contain.) Wright chronicles only United States comics and only commercially dominant genres—superheroes, mostly, but also the crime, detective and romance comics popular from the late 1940s through 1954; he reads them all as clues to history and reads them well. Of the three, Klock covers the narrowest range, with the greatest originality. Examining superhero titles from the past two decades, Klock tries to show how literary ambitions can operate in, and on, superhero comics as a genre. Each of these three approaches bears attractive results: Klock's should stimulate (or provoke) much more. Each, however, [End Page 167] seems on its own insufficient to a medium defined by its combination of stories and pictures, typified by certain characters, and most visible (in the United States at least) through some of its least sophisticated examples. Bukatman devotes just a couple of chapters to comics. Yet those chapters make for ideal models—they acknowledge both the exceptional and the typical, exploring both writers' choices and commercial or cultural meanings, without neglecting comics form.

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