Form vs. Content

[Gothos]

OK, here's a link to the blog-piece I wrote in reach to "Defense of Superhero Comics":

http://arche-arc.blogspot.com/2008/0...r-content.html

It's not a large disagreement, but here's the nub of it:

'Callahan says that [literary approval] was merely a matter of one form being extolled over another; that poetry was automatically considered superior to theater-plays. Yet it's possible that it wasn't merely a matter of form, but of some content associated with that form.'

[TimothyCallahan]

I read your post when it first came out -- and you e-mailed me a link, right? -- and I just read it again, and I find no disagreement whatsoever.

Of course the content matters, but it's the form that blinded people to the content, to use that Shakespeare example. Sometimes the content is so great, that people begin to see the literary possibilities of the form. That's what happened to plays, and it happened to English-language novels, which were rarely studied in academia until the late 19th century. The belief was that English-language novels were popular forms of entertainment and didn't need to be studied along with the (oft Greek and Latin) "classics."

In the case of comics, the form has already broken through the "literary" barrier, with "Maus" and a handful of other books now regularly appearing on college syllabi. But the genre within that form -- the genre of the superhero -- has not made a similar leap, and my main point is the anti-superhero bias is part of a larger anti-Romantic bias that's been in place for a couple of generations.

[stealthwise]

I think, as an English student for 6 years, that those I interacted with either had no interest in studying comics or simply didn't know what kind of comics to look into. Not that they (overtly) opposed the idea of doing research on comics, but there was the feeling that there were far too many to look at, and no idea where to start. I would usually point people to different things, but they would get so caught up in ENJOYING the comics they read that they didn't want to put forward the critical lens towards them, more often than not anyways.

And then there was my supervisor, who flatout said that he couldn't read the comics. Had no problems with text, and no problems with visuals (he does cultural studies and the like with tv and film), but couldn't put them together.

[TimothyCallahan]

Did he say he couldn't read comics with a wistful air? Like he wished he could read comics, but he was just physically incapable?

Because otherwise it seems like an incredibly dismissive comment. If someone said to that professor, "I can't read prose. I know my letters, and I can say words, but I just can't read prose at all. I can't decipher it," do you think he would let the person off the hook so easily?

[Couchman]

I actually took a comics as literature class in college a couple years back. It was pretty decent.

Here was our reading list:

Understanding Comics
Maus
Persepolis
Watchmen
American Splendor
Romance Without Tears (anthology of 1950's romance comics)

And the professor had us each go out and buy a manga of our choice to discuss the superficial differences, I picked Lupin III.

It was an English class taught by a cultural studies professor. We spent more time talking about the form of comics than the content. It was frustrating at the time because it was my first time through Watchmen, Maus and Persepolis and I had A LOT I wanted to say about the stories. But it wasn't too bad because I was taking the class with friends, so we could talk about the stories by ourselves and cover the form in class.

The professor did give quite a bit of freedom with our essays. I wrote one on Scott McCloud's DESTROY, I can't remember what I covered. My (now) wife wrote one on the use of symbols as dialogue in Owly. And my final was on writers that use comics, a medium used to tell fantastic stories, to tell really mundane stories. Writers like Daniel Clowes (some issues of Eightball in particular), and Harvey Pekar. I convinced one of my friends to write his paper saying American Splendor IS the great American novel.

It was a 495 lvl class and a lot of people took it who had never read a comic, or had previously dismissed them because all they knew were superhero books - not that there's anything wrong with superhero books, but they have negative connotations for a lot of lit students. Once they were exposed to really good comics they wanted more. I think the main problem in getting those kinds of people to read comics is that the scene is really impenetrable. Even when they find out that there are good comics it's really hard to figure out where to go from there. Comic book stores can be frustrating because there usually aren't a whole lot of non-superhero books, there's the Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh kids running around, and there's the holier-than-thou attitude a lot of the clerks appear to have - most I've met are actually very nice once you get to know them of course. So the lit people go to Barnes and Noble or Borders or some such store that have ridiculous hang ups about comics, like putting Maus and Persepolis in biography or history and expelling them from the comic shelf ghetto. Those stores also carry much more manga than western comics, which of course attract the manga kids which make me uneasy. And then if they can get past all of that, they're still stuck with a ton of superhero books to decipher, try figuring out why there are 20 or so X-titles and which one to read. Comics take a lot of work to get into whereas mainstream lit doesn't. There's the established cannon of lit, the bestseller list, and so on to go through to find a book.

Since I got back into comics in the last couple of years when a friend bought me Marvel Essentials Silver Surfer for a wedding present, I've spent days worth of time wikipedia-ing Marvel and DC to figure out what I like and where the stories are at. And importantly for me, figuring out what caused me to stop reading comics when I was younger - endless, pointless cross-overs, specifically the Onslaught event in 90's Marvel, and not being aware that I had options outside of Marvel, DC, and Dark Horse.

[stealthwise]

Did he say he couldn't read comics with a wistful air? Like he wished he could read comics, but he was just physically incapable?

Because otherwise it seems like an incredibly dismissive comment. If someone said to that professor, "I can't read prose. I know my letters, and I can say words, but I just can't read prose at all. I can't decipher it," do you think he would let the person off the hook so easily?

No, he basically said it like a person who "can't read Shakespeare," as in, likely could if he was willing to put in the effort, but didn't have the time/caring. Ironically, I could have put in my thesis and defended it without a single person on my committee having read any of my primary texts, but now I'm in a different line of work.

[FunkyGreenJerusalem]

No, he basically said it like a person who "can't read Shakespeare," as in, likely could if he was willing to put in the effort, but didn't have the time/caring.

Steven Grant once had a column where he pondered the idea that some people who claim they can't read comics may not be able to as it requires both sides of the brain to be working together (to take in text and images at the same time), and so that those who didn't read them as a youngster may really struggle with reading them.
I've known a few people who have read comics and then complained because it didn't make sense when they read all the words and then looked at the pictures, or vice versa.

[Matthew E]

My wife has said a couple of times that she has trouble reading comics. She finds it awkward to get the panels in order and match the words to the pictures, and I think she once speculated about the right-brain, left-brain thing.

But when I said, "But what about Asterix and Tintin? You like reading Asterix and Tintin," she said, "Oh, yeah. Huh."

[TimothyCallahan]

I'm sure some people do have trouble, since reading comics is a skill. But I do get frustrated when people just dismiss the medium. Preaching to the choir here, obviously.