Comics as a Cross-Writing Tradition

An observation by Charles Hatfield set a challenge for this roundtable. “Comics and childhood: the pairing of the two seems inevitable, yet remains, somehow, both contentious and under-examined” (par. 1). Might this pairing be explained readily as merely ideological or commercial, a historically entrenched but not actually “inevitable” artifact of the modern rise of comics? Undoubtedly, yes, in part at least, but I would like to propose a broader explanation that is also theoretical and that embraces both the inevitable and the ambiguous aspects of the association between childhood and comics.

In his meditation on this subject, Hatfield begins by insisting on the distance between comics and young people’s cultures (YPC), remarking that comics has roots in adult social and political satire and has conveyed themes (and aesthetics, I would add) that are addressed directly to the unique experience and concerns of adults (par. 2). Yet he also acknowledges the close, even integral institutional relationship between comics and YPC as well as some thematic consequences of this symbiosis:

Undeniably, the dominant comics markets or cultures are rooted in children’s publishing traditions, whether European . . . , Japanese, or American. Every such market has given rise to its own hegemonic model of “mainstream” comics, rooted in children’s titles, as well as its resistant counter-models, its “alternatives.” Children’s comics, selling across generations to millions of readers, are the taproot of modern commercial comics, the ideological counterweights to alternative comics, and, inevitably, items of talismanic significance, so often invoked in the nostalgic reminiscences of today’s comics creators and enthusiasts. . . .

In short, both adult and children’s comics, and the ways we talk about them, testify to the centrality of children’s comics. In addition, many of the best—the most stimulating, most troubling, most psychologically questing, ideologically fraught, and artistically vital—comics for adults have as their subject matter childhood and its possibilities: its potential for tenderness, awe, terror, and social critique.

(pars. 9–10)

What I would like to take away from this institutional picture of comics history is a simple question: why? I would like to play with the idea that it is no accident, that there is something intrinsic to comics that enables this pull toward the child in its history: specifically, that across diverse institutions of comics, whether they are purely for children, purely for adults, or addressed to both, there is an inescapable aspect of comics that is a mode of cross-writing, “dissolv[ing] the binaries and contraries” of child and adult perspectives that, ideologically if not in practice, “our culture has rigidified and fixed” (M. Myers and Knoepflmacher viii).

This aspect of comics is illuminated best when, in addition to viewing comics as a diverse social and economic institution, we consider comics as a mercurial creative tradition that crosses institutional boundaries, both as an artistic practice and as a symbolic network over time. This is a cross-writing tradition in two ways: formally, in its roots in what has been called caricature, understood as an iconography or kind of style, and thematically, in what I will call its animalization, understood as an iconology or vehicle for ideas.

In concert with leading comics historians such as David Kunzle, Roger Sabin, and Brian Walker, Hatfield recognizes the centrality of an adult institution of caricature in satirical cartoons that were the forerunners of comics style, for example in newspaper and magazine social satire and political cartoons (2).¹ I propose that these forms of caricature are themselves rooted in a longer artistic tradition of the grotesque—of weirdly distorted or oddly animalized, defiantly unrealistic and often playful figures in European public and domestic art from the Roman Empire forward. This tradition was always considered unserious ornamentation, just fooling around, ludic. Whether as a gargoyle poised above a busy town thoroughfare or as a crowd of chimera ornamenting the ceiling of a wealthy home, this insistently decorative, carte blanche art typically made no distinction of age or sex in its audience.² Caricature, as a tradition, belongs to the cross-writing iconography of grotesquery.

Grotesquery, and caricature with it, takes liberties with nature, inventing...