The Panel as Page and the Page as Panel: Uncle Shelby and the Case of the Twin ABZ Books

I'm someone who grew up reading comics. With a few notable and some half-remembered exceptions, I didn't begin reading what we tend to call "children's literature"—picture books included—until I hit college and took a course in children's literature led by Richard Flynn. I was the kind of kid who read comics: comic books, comic strips, collections of comic strips and one-panel gag comics. My ambrosia was anything with word balloons and panels, whether four-color or black and white, floppy or hardbound, Schulz or Kirby, digests of Beetle Bailey stolen from the PX bookstore or traded issues of Bronze Age Superman done up by Swanderson, that team so classic it's known by a single name.¹ Besides comics, if I really wanted to out myself, I suppose I'd have to add to my list various and sundry Dungeons and Dragons² field guides (or whatever they were called)—a face-saving gesture, that parenthetical—(I know full well what they're called). Those and miscellaneous books of mythology and fairy tales. I preferred stories, as Randall Jarrell apparently did, set in "that world where / The children eat, and grow giant and good" (286), but mostly I dug those stories, to modify slightly Alice's famous pronouncement, with pictures formed by thick black lines and conversations hovering above in a field of white.

Around the same time I took Richard Flynn's children's literature class at good old Georgia Southern University, I began reading what we like to call, tongue firmly in cheek, the "so-called LANGUAGE Poets." This was in the mid-1990s. And these good poets and their queer, genre-bending books led me back in time to once-ignored but now somewhat fashionable Modernist masterpieces like Louis Zukofsky's A, Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, William Carlos Williams's Spring and All, and Ezra Pound's Cantos. Those, in turn, pointed my way to the historical avant-garde, a journey that took me past the Beats (whom I largely found tedious) and the giddily effervescent poetry of the New York School, a group of writers unafraid to extol the virtues of the comic books I so loved as a child.³

This bit of autobiography serves to explain how I came to be so uninterested in Aristotelian categories, with their necessary and sufficient properties. Many of the texts I read as a young man are marked by an active resistance to the Aristotelian model. The conceptual poem, the sound poem, the visual poem, the performance poem: they all stand on somewhat shaky ground, generically speaking. To illustrate, let's turn to a musty old chestnut by Robert Frost—or at least a stanza of it. (And fear not: we'll get back to comics shortly, picture books shortly thereafter.)

Whose woods these are I think I know.His house is in the village though;He will not see me stopping hereTo watch his woods fill up with snow.

(224)

A more stable example of the twentieth-century lyric poem I can't imagine, one that stands in stark contrast to the visual poems of Man Ray, the sound poems of Kurt Schwitters, the minimalist poems of Aram Saroyan, the computer poems of bpNichol, the conceptual poems of Christian Bök.

Now, consider Geof Huth's little poem "jHegaf" (figure 1), or take a trio of poems from Chains, by Derek Beaulieu (figure 2), or even Arnold Adoff's difficult-to-name poem from Slow Dance Heart Break Blues, which can be "read," at least part of it, rather conventionally (figure 3) (maybe we could call it "He/ ehS"?). All these texts are "poems," but as a crew, there's very little uniting them,

Figure 1.

"jHegaf," by Geof Huth.

© and used by kind permission of Geof Huth.

Figure 2.

Chains, by Derek Beaulieu.

© and used by kind permission of Derek Beaulieu.