Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling by Jared Gardner (review)

To claim today that comics are not a part of our academic discourse is to ignore the volume of scholarship published over the past two decades. A simple perusal of any well-stocked bookstore (physical or virtual) or of university press catalogs will show an emergent body of work on the formal system of comics, comics and narrative theory, pedagogical issues surrounding the graphic novel, the history of comics, comics and history, comics and other forms of visual narrative, gender/ethnicity/race in comics, comics and life writing, the political import of comic art, and of course, general overviews of comic studies. In addition to those with an already rich history concerning graphic narrative, such as the University Press of Mississippi and McFarland, a growing number of publishers facilitate scholarship in comic studies and even devote entire series to the medium.

One university press recently entering this arena is Stanford, with Jared Gardner’s Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling as an inaugural volume in its new “Post 45” series. This line of texts (according to the Stanford University Press website) is devoted to popular and avant-garde US culture after the Second World War; in that regard, Gardner’s book, with its early emphasis on late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century entertainment, both does and does not fall within the series parameters. However, this is certainly not a liability for the text. Even though almost half of the study concerns pre-World War II cultural history—clearly falling outside of the stated emphasis of this series on the postwar—Gardner productively uses this context to establish many of the larger arguments he makes concerning more contemporary comic narratives. Indeed, one of the greatest strengths of Projections lies in the author’s juxtaposition of comics with film, arguing not only how the history of each greatly informed the development of the other, but how both art forms share common parentage.

The first two chapters of the book, “Fragments of Modernity, 1889–1920” and “Serial Pleasures, 1907–1936,” are arguably its critical high points. They not only focus on the dynamic relationship between the two emerging media but, perhaps more significantly, underscore the interactive nature of early-twentieth-century comics. What largely gave rise to the popularity of such strips as Happy Hooligan, Mutt and Jeff, and The Gumps was what Gardner calls the “transmedia conversation” (46) among daily newspapers, early cinema, and an increasingly savvy advertising industry. Readers became enmeshed in the comic strips because, according to Gardner, the narratives permeated their daily lives in multiple ways—e.g., they read the daily strips, they watched the movies based on the comics, and they shared these engagements with friends and family—binding the audience so that it felt impelled, and was certainly urged by creators and publishers, to participate (through writing letters, buying newspapers, and attending movies) in the ongoing narratives. As Gardner points out, long before the letters page of contemporary comic books, fans were encouraged to comment on what they read and, in the process, to help shape the very product of their consumption.

This emphasis on an energized and participatory fan base, heavily invested in the various manifestations of popular culture, informs Gardner’s subsequent discussions of comics in America as they evolved from individual strips into pamphlet or magazine form. For example, he highlights the science-fiction fandom roots of the superhero genre as it took off in the years immediately preceding World War II, the cult of the “fan-addict” surrounding William Gaines’s EC Comics in the 1950s, and Marvel Comics’ efforts to nurture a hip “insider” reader identity (largely orchestrated by Stan Lee) through a shared philosophy and an expanded narrative universe. Gardner also anchors his analyses in those phenomena that have by and large determined the trajectory of American comics, such as the reactive efforts...