Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling by Jared Gardner, and: Comics versus Art by Bart Beaty (review)

Perhaps more than any other facet of twentieth-century print culture, comics—a notably wide-ranging medium that encompasses newspaper strips, single-panel cartoons, comic books, graphic novels, and other combinations of text and image—presents remarkable opportunities and frustrations for contemporary critics. Designated by a term that, as Hillary Chute observes, “doesn’t settle comfortably into our grammar,” comics is a form known for its definitional ambiguity as well as its cultural ubiquity, two qualities that have made it a daunting yet attractive object of inquiry in recent years.¹ Informed by interdisciplinary methodologies that combine elements of book history, cultural studies, literary criticism, and art history, comics scholarship has become increasingly visible on the academic landscape, and a growing number of book series, online and print journals, scholarly associations, and conferences all attest to a thriving discipline that approaches the study of comics from multiple perspectives. And yet, with its relatively recent and oftentimes only partial acceptance into the academy, comics scholarship has struggled to solidify its position as a legitimate field, as the conventional perception of comics as an ephemeral form of mass entertainment, produced as part of a commercial publishing enterprise with little regard for aesthetic merit, still persists.

Two recent monographs make substantial interventions into this debate over the place of comics within the academy, and demonstrate just how much comics can contribute to our understanding of modern print culture, narrative theory, and the history of art. The first, Jared Gardner’s Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling, explores how the medium of comics has cemented its position as an innovative and challenging narrative form that engenders new methods of active, participatory reading, while the second, Bart Beaty’s Comics versus Art, takes a more pointed view of the relative neglect of comics as a form of visual art, explaining how that exclusion has come to define much of its history. Aimed at comics scholars yet clearly pertinent to those working in other, related fields, both books make a powerful case for how the history and theory of comics can unsettle traditional notions of twentieth-century reading practices and divisions between high and low art, and suggest that contemporary critics would be well served by including comics as part of the larger history of visual, literary, and popular culture.

While both volumes offer detailed assessments of the history of comics and their audiences, Projections is more attentive to the complex exchanges between text and reader that have earned comics a popular reception unique among other cultural productions. According to Gardner, “of all narrative forms, comics are in many respects the most inefficient, a form that depends as much on what is left out as on what is included—and a form that depends on an active and imaginative reader capable of filling in the gaps in time” (xi). By attending to the challenges one faces in piecing together a comics narrative—linking image to text and one panel to another—Gardner outlines the demands that comics makes upon its readers as well as the methods through which those readers help to establish the meaning of their comics, a system by which early twentieth-century comics “helped to educate audiences into new storytelling practices for the new century” (2). The result is a reception history that positions readers on the same level as creators in determining the course of comics narratives, and at the same time argues that the earliest readers of comics attained their position by learning how to interpret the medium’s discontinuities, false starts, and narrative absurdity as a sophisticated response to the shocks and sensations characteristic of modern life. Here Gardner builds upon a familiar trope–the idea of shock as the quintessential condition of modernity—in surprising ways, as he shows how the work of early cartoonists like F. M. Howarth...