One of the last editors of the old "Punch", before it was revived, briefly, into a
kind of living death by Mohammed al Fayed, rather usefully coined the
collective noun for cartoonists as a "whinge". Of course, cartoonists aren’t the
only group of artists who moan ceaselessly about the neglect and ingratitude
the towering edifices of their genius suffer at the hands of editors, publishers
and the public - poets, obviously, are just as bad; it’s just that cartoonists do it
better than anyone else. Take, for example, Chris Ware, guest editor of
McSweeney’s General Concern No 13. For the uninitiated, it should be
pointed out that Ware is something of a cartooning hero. His dense comic
book The Adventures of Jimmy Corrigan The Smartest Kid on Earth was a
phenomenon, up there with Art Speigelman’s Maus in breaking out of the
ghetto comics normally inhabit into the wider world of books. As it says on
the cover of Jimmy Corrigan, "Also, winner of The American Book Award
and The Guardian Prize 2001. (The consumer will note that these honors are
generally only bestowed upon those authors who refuse to learn how to
draw.)" That slight chippiness of tone is repeated in Ware’s introduction in
McSweeney’s General Concern, with lines like "Comics are not a genre, but a
developing language... despite the discipline’s extraordinary diifficulty, labor-
intensiveness, and paltry recompense..." or "where real writing and reading
induces a sort of temporary blindness, comics keep the eyes half-open,
exchanging the ambiguity of words for the simulated certainty of pictures."
Which is fine in itself, but I’m not entirely sure what point Ware’s making, or
indeed what the point of this lavishly and beautifully produced book actually
is. Is it, as it first appears, an anthology of contemporary American comic
book art, a rather heavier version of Speigelman’s Raw? At that level it works
very well, with contributions from Ware himself, and from modern masters
like Robert Crumb, Kim Deitch and Joe Sacco, who with his comic books on
Palestine and Bosnia has more or less single-handedly created a new genre of
politically-engaged cartoon reportage. Naturally, this is interspersed with a
good deal of badly drawn, badly scripted and self-obsessed stuff typical of the
current trend for solipsistic autobiography in American comics, sub-Crumb
and mostly crumby, but there you go. The reader can pick and choose as the
mood takes him or her (no, that should just be him).
But then, between the strips, there are also lengthy articles, including one from
John Updike, despite Ware’s warning that these may cause blindness. Most of
these are lengthy reflections on how comics were the only thing that kept a
whole bunch of lonely, gloomy American kids from going mad. Again, fair
enough, but mingling with these are other articles which are entirely more
academic in tone. Some are about the development of the strip cartoon, from
its alleged inventor Rodolphe Topffer [umlaut on the o, which this machine
can’t do] onwards (and let’s not quibble that Gillray was producing things that
looked remarkably like comic strips in the 1790s, years before it’s claimed
Topffer thought up the genre or, if you prefer, "developing language", in
1845); others rehearse the old line about the comic strip being the first truly
American artform (if you discount jazz and ignore the fact that Topffer was
Swiss). Others yet evince a reverential, almost fetishistic awe for iconic
artifacts of comic art. Thus we have the original artwork for a Mutt and Jeff
strip, run confusingly over 4 pages just so it can be reproduced same size
(respect!); likewise, six pages are devoted to scraps of paper half covered with
preliminary doodles of his cast of characters by Charles Schulz, the creator of
Peanuts. These come, it says, from The Charles M. Schulz Museum and
Research Center in Santa Rosa, California, and are reproduced so lovingly that
it’s clear that, before being rescued and duly archived, Schulz had screwed
them up and tossed them in the bin. The last Krazy Kat drawings by George
Herriman get the same treatment, although as he never got round to putting the
words in, all we can do is gaze at them in wonder.
In his introduction, Ware briefly comes down to earth when he writes "all this
flouncy nattering, however, doesn’t change the fact that comics are also
wonderfully vulgar and coarse, resistant to too much fluffing up or
romanticization". And yet this thick, hard-backed and heavy volume does just
that, fetishizing what were once called "funnies"and whose purpose was to be
disposable, light relief and generally being yet another sally in that old, old
struggle to get comics to be taken seriously and recognised by the adult world
in general as "respectable".
Except that comics aren’t and shouldn’t be respectable. The closest they
should come to the adult world is as a kind of foul-mouthed, filthy-minded
and grubby adolescence, with adolescents of all ages duly sequestered in that
teenage bedroom and, between bouts of what teenagers do, thumbing through
thin, flimsy funnies instead of damaging their wrists trying to hold this latest
over-weighty, overproduced whinge. Ware, after all, is rich and famous, and
thanks to this book will doubtless be mobbed by the thousands and thousands
of aging retards for whom comics still float their boat. Which, again, is fine,
but I wish he and the rest of them would accept that, in the ecology of culture,
comics flourish where they are for a reason, and so he should stop pushing
against an open door into an empty room.