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Twenty years ago the University Press of Mississippi published Joseph “Rusty” Witek’s Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar. Although not the first academic booklength study of American comics, it was seminal in its longer-term impact. Perhaps the most striking thing about the book in retrospect is the prescience of Witek’s framing device: the narrative art of comic books and the ways in which the artists he discussed developed that medium’s potential. It is now somewhat obvious that by the s some major shifts were afoot in comics. But that was not so clear in , as Witek says: “Hell, Maus wasn’t even finished then.” Although the underground comix of the s had waned, the creative space and distribution methods opened by those comics offered new possibilities for the art form. Witek had gone to graduate school at Vanderbilt “interested in the study of narrative forms of all kinds” and “particularly interested in James Joyce.” He turned to a study of comics for his PhD dissertation not to position himself in the job market, but in the belief that he may as well study something he loved given the general unlikelihood of finding a position in a tight market. Ironically, Witek was probably the first American academic to carve out a career on the basis of his work on comics.1 One of the merits of Comic Books as History is the seriousness with which it takes the comic art form. Unlike so many previous works on comics, Witek made no apologies for studying comics. The book opens with the declarative sentence: “This book presupposes that comic books as narratives and as cultural productions merit serious critical analysis.” Such a statement may now seem self-evident, but prior to Witek almost every study of American  In Praise of Joseph Witek’s Comic Books as History ian gordon  comics included some justification, from the usual “fun house” mirror defense to the “most read section of the daily newspaper” ploy. The point here was not so much whether these validating statements were right or wrong, but that making such statements adopted defensive postures from the beginning and undercut any analysis that followed because the argument for justification often became the raison d’être for the work. After Witek, scholars who felt a need to defend their study of comics, even as a rhetorical device, seem either ill informed of critical writing on the medium or lacking confidence. Witek’s confidence in comics as an art form allowed him to see the potential of the transformation being wrought in the form by Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar. Connecting Jackson’s history, Spiegelman’s historical biography, and Pekar’s autobiographical work, Witek makes the point that the comic art form is particularly suited to these sorts of narratives because of the complexity in representation that a mix of illustrative material and written word allows. Taken together, these comics may not have represented a movement, but they did suggest that a transformation was occurring both in the sort of themes and issues comics dealt with and in the way the form needed to be analyzed. As Witek says, he tried to understand what it was that made “a big issue of RAW, a magazine-sized Pekar, and one of Jackson’s Fantagraphics collections like Los Tejanos . . . a very different stack of objects than a group of Marvel—or even underground comix—pamphlets.”2 Witek saw before most others did that work such as Jackson’s, Spiegelman’s, and Pekar’s refigured comics by creating or reinvigorating genres in the medium and consequently opening a door both for the form and its analysis. Moreover, when numerous journalists and critics wrote of Spiegelman’s accomplishment as something unique and perhaps not really of comics, but rather rising above the form to achieve greatness, Witek demonstrated through a brief history that Spiegelman’s achievement was firmly attached to comics as an art form. For numerous reasons, such as marketing and aesthetic judgments, graphic novels have come to mark something classier than a comic book. Art Spiegelman has suggested that a paternity test is required before naming him as the father of graphic novels, which comes in part from his unease at the distinction and also at some of the sloppy work being passed off as graphic novels.3 Witek shows us that if we want to consider...

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