The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts

Introduction: In the Year 3794

xi Introduction: In the Year 3794 —PAUL WILLIAMS AND JAMES LYONS Comics will be the culture of the year 3794 —Salvador Dali (Qtd. in Gravett 2007, 14) SalvadorDali’spredictioninvitesonetohypothesizewhattheworld of 3794 will look like—and whether any of its social coordinates will correlate to the ones we recognize at the start of the twenty-first century. Not so long ago, admirers of the medium’s possibilities might have asked whether there could be any similarity between an Anglophone world that considers comics as culture and the one in which they currently lived. Over a thousand years in the future—that would sound about right for the kind of radical cultural reestimation that would have to take place before comics could escape the stereotypes and prejudices surrounding their production and consumption. This is no longer the case: comics have jumped closer to the promise of Dali’s 3794 in unprecedented ways. If comics are not often considered “culture ” in the way some members of the population consider ballet and legitimate theater to be “culture,” the current position they occupy in hierarchies of taste place comics as both high art and mass medium. This transformation is of course complexly related to the industrial, cultural, and academic institutions that have reshaped comics’ production and reception. As The Rise of the American Comics Artist demonstrates, one way to make sense of this process is to see the comics creator as the prism through which to explore recent changes in the medium. Crucially, shifts in the perception of the people creating comics have been the corollary of such changes, as well as contributing to them. As its subtitle suggests, this book employs the systems and structures of the comics industry to scrutinize the role of the creator critically, whether those contexts are institutional or cultural, economic or generic, ethical or aesthetic. While existing scholarship has addressed how comics is a creator’s medium shaped by the styles, stories, and characters of xii PAUL WILLIAMS AND JAMES LYONS individual writers and artists (see Sabin 1996; also Hatfield 2005; Raeburn 2004; Witek 1989), The Rise of the American Comics Artist is the first book to offer a detailed survey of the distinctive ways in which the dynamics of comics creativity has been reconfigured in contemporary culture. The book is organized into five sections, each of which centers on a major way that creators have been understood: as powerful brands able to position comic texts according to the perceived logic of the market; as allegorists and interpreters of international political events; as (simultaneously) artists aloof from the concerns of financial reward and workers for hire; as political actors involved in the arena of representing gender, sexuality, and ethnicity; and finally as literary authors—with consequent implications for how reviewers and critics have analyzed the texts they produce. In each section the creators and texts symbolizing that particular conceptual node undergo critical attention, and each section references the scholarship relevant to its subject, inviting the reader to see what others have written regarding the study of contemporary comics. The creative and commercial decisions made by comics practitioners offer further opportunities for study, and several sections conclude with interviews with landmark creators from the period covered. These interviews correlate with the concerns of that section, illuminating creativity in ways that offer a productive tension with the preceding scholarship. The historical period covered by this collection begins in the late 1980s, whenambitionsforthemediumwereraised,andvoiceswithinandoutsidethe comics industry proclaimed that the successes of Art Spiegelman’s Maus (first published in collected editions in 1986 and 1991), Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons ’s Watchmen (1987), and Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986) would propel comics towards new audiences. Few readers would disagree that the material form of comics has evolved since then, or that the type of narratives being written and drawn has expanded the vocabulary of the medium. The Rise of the American Comics Artist continues the process of mapping out how the position of comics has changed, especially in the eyes of reviewers and critics, whether found in universities or newspaper offices or in feminist discussion groups. Certain articles about comics still perpetuate stereotypes, assuming the medium remains the preserve of awkward pubescent males, as this example from The Times (London) demonstrates: “COMICS. Cheap, flimsy, disposable. Scattered next to dirty socks on teenage bedroom floors” (Greenwood 2004, 15). Usually those stereotypes are introduced to disarm a potentially dismissive reaction by preempting reader skepticism. Nonetheless...