In the Studio: Visits with Contemporary Cartoonists (review)

Comics and graphic novels have clearly come of age. They are everywhere—libraries, bookstores, and classrooms. With comics, there is something for everyone, from Jennifer and Matthew Holm's Babymouse series for young children to Art Spiegelman's Maus. The appearance of Chris Ware's multiple covers for a single issue of the New Yorker to comics appearing in weekly installments in the New York Times Magazine—which is quite an accomplishment given that the paper of record still refuses to publish Sunday comics—to the 2005 critically acclaimed traveling art exhibition "Master of American Comics" suggest that not only have comics come of age, but they have become respectable. However, it is fair to say there are still plenty of comics that provide the plots for the some of the more cheesy blockbuster films that can be found playing at your local metroplex as well as those more challenging ones that will not see distribution beyond your local comic bookstore.

Comics are both high art and popular culture, visual and verbal art, including readership that crosses between children and adults. They seem to be everywhere these days, especially in the hands of child and adolescent readers. Charles Hatfield's comprehensive essay review, "Comic Art, Children's Literature, and the New Comics Studies," is an excellent source of critical information and scholarship for those working in children's and adolescent literature who want to explore the intersections of comics and children's literature and culture.

In the Studio, which collects the interviews that Hignite, the founding editor of Comic Art magazine, supervised is another excellent book to add to the growing body of scholarship on comics. Hignite and the artists he interviews use the term "comics" to refer to comic books, newspaper strips, gag cartoons, caricatures, woodcut novels, and illustrated books. This collection could have appropriately been subtitled "What We Talk About When We Talk About Comics." It provides the reader with the wonderful opportunity of listening to established cartoon artists discuss their own work and their literary and visual influences as they pull out and share examples of the visual stuff that clutters up their work spaces and imaginations and frequently comes out transformed into their comics. Hignite selected a limited group of nine major contemporary American cartoonists—Ivan Brunetti, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, Robert Crumb, Jaime Hernadndez, Gary Panter, Seth, Art Spiegelman, and Chris Ware—and talked with them at length about their art. It would have been helpful to have a couple of female cartoonists included, such as Lynda Barry, Phoebe Gloeckner, or Alison Bechdel. While one might quibble about the selection of cartoonists included in this collection, they are significant and have interesting things to say about comics. This series of interviews makes a great companion to either Ivan Brunnetti's edited Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories (Yale UP, 2006) or Harvey Pekar and Anne Elizabeth Moore's The Best American Comics: 2006 (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). One can read the comics in those two outstanding compilations and then move on to the extended discussions of comics by their creators in Hignite's volume. However, like any good comic, the interviews collected by Hignite are much more than words. What makes In the Studio exceptional is the abundance of illustrations from the artists' sketchbooks, published or unpublished work, or their personal collections. These cartoonists show the toys, magazines, album covers, posters, and book jackets that have inspired them. What comes through in these interviews is that these artists have deep appreciation for, knowledge about, and massive personal collections of comics from the earlier in the twentieth century. These are the kids that started reading and collecting comic books as kids. They began to copy them and never gave up. While there are excellent collections of critical essays by scholars examining the image-text dialogue at the heart of comics and graphic novels, such as Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester's Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium (Mississippi UP, 2004), it is more...