Medium Specificity and the Ethics of Narrative in Comics

One of Plato’s enduring concerns was about the best mode of education. Unsurprisingly, he opts for philosophy over poetry. In Book X of the Republic and several other dialogues, notably the Ion, Plato inveighs against mimetic poetry on grounds that include its ontological inferiority (qua imitation) and its pernicious effects on the development of the just person and the just state.

To the contemporary mind, Plato may appear to be a crank or even an embarrassment. After all, the poetry he targets (Homer, for instance) is now considered to be among the greatest works of literature of all time. However, as Alexander Nehamas (1988) has persuasively argued, Plato’s true concern is not with high literature or fine arts at all (since those concepts did not exist at his time), but with the ancient Greek equivalent of contemporary mass-media narrative forms. At root, Plato’s attacks on poetry are identical to the recurring attacks on television, film, and, I would add, comics.

Are Plato’s attacks warranted? To answer this question, it will be useful to introduce the notion of medium specificity. As Noël Carroll defines it (2008: 35–37), medium specificity is the view that the media associated with a given art form (both its material components and the processes by which they are exploited) (1) entail specific possibilities for and constraints on representation and expression, and (2) this provides a normative framework for what artists working in that art form ought to attempt.

Those who endorse medium specificity tend to do so to differing degrees, offering a range of ideas about the strength of the constraints that media impose, drawing different conclusions about the relations of the first criterion to the second (perhaps there is no entailment here, or perhaps the first is true and the second false), and sometimes focusing only on one or two art forms.¹ Medium specificity, in any degree, is controversial, and I am not going to argue either for or against it here. Rather, I simply stipulate—in agreement with many of those I mention in note 1—that the kinds of narrative that can be conveyed in a given medium are both constrained and enabled by the medium itself. (I put aside the issue emphasized in Carroll’s second criterion, except when questions about normative frameworks are foregrounded by artistic productions themselves.) Roughly speaking, the idea is that some narrative media are better than others at conveying stories of a given kind. Apart from the intrinsic merits of this stance, what interests me is its role in Platonic criticism of the arts.

Following Eaton (2005), the most plausible way to assess individual artworks ethically is in terms of the responses that those artworks mandate or invite. If an artwork, properly interpreted, prompts the percipient to adopt the wrong evaluative attitudes (approving of that which is bad, disapproving of that which is good), then it is ethically problematic.² Correspondingly, to criticize a medium itself or a set of media on ethical grounds, as Plato does, one must focus on the responses that those media mandate or invite—which requires that one advert to the particular representational or expressive tendencies of those media. In effect, Platonic objections are based in some degree of medium specificity (in particular, acceptance of the definition’s first criterion).

So does medium specificity commit us to the Platonic view that some arts ought to be condemned on ethical grounds? I argue that it does not. Even if it is true that some media offer particular and distinctive narrative affordances, this does not entitle us to draw a conclusion about the ethical implications of those media.

My strategy is to focus closely on one medium: comics. One of the twentieth century’s most predominant narrative media, comics is not only underrepresented in narratology, but there is also a long, well-documented history of condemning the comics medium itself (not merely individual comics or comic subgenres) on ethical grounds.³ Most prominently, there was a surge of arguments against comics culminating in Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of...