Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature by Christopher Pizzino (review)

Last semester I had a discussion with a colleague about the teaching of comics and graphic novels in which she expressed a justifiable confusion over what constituted the difference between them. To which I, with a slight grin, responded, "You call them comics when speaking to undergraduates and graphic novels when speaking to the dean." After reading Christopher Pizzino's important new book, Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature, I see that my quip unintentionally exemplifies his book's central concern: the problem of the medium's legitimacy (to use one of Pizzino's keywords). If the idea of code switching in the face of institutional authority expresses a fundamental anxiety over the status of comics, the particular code invoked points to the way some comics creators and many comics scholars have sought to legitimize the medium by aligning it with literature, an art form with a privileged cultural status.

To treat comics—a handful of which have been considered for and even won important literary awards—as literature undoubtedly has conferred a measure of cultural value on certain works. But more importantly for Pizzino the literary laurels some comics have won has given rise to what he refers to as Bildungsroman discourse, the narrative repeated ad nauseam in journalism on comics and in comics scholarship "that comics have changed over the past few decades" from "a medium intended only for children to one sometimes fit for adults" (30). Yet in his book's first chapter Pizzino makes the counterintuitive argument that the acclaim meted out to these works has not elevated the status of the medium as a whole. The Bildungsroman discourse, in other words, implicitly affirms the logic whereby exceptional literary comics merely prove the rule that the medium is by and large ignoble. (Thus Pizzino evidently invokes the literary term Bildungsroman with intentional irony.) Comics enthusiasts that espouse the Bildungsroman discourse, then, unintentionally contribute to conditions that devalue the medium. Moreover, Pizzino identifies at least two consequences that follow from Bildungsroman discourse that anyone who values the medium should find unsettling. On the one hand, he contends that this way of narrating the history of comics fails to acknowledge the cultural and political repression—from early twentieth-century condemnations of comics "as false copies of real literature that required real reading" (25) to the mid-century hysteria over the purported effects comics had on young readers—that comics initially faced. This history of repression reached its nadir in the infamous 1954 hearings held by the US Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency and the comics industry's subsequent self-censorship through the Comics Code Authority. The Comics Code itself, one might add, only further strengthened the prejudice that comics were primarily for children. On the other hand, Pizzino points out that the Bildungsroman discourse legitimizes some comic works largely by "applying external standards that [otherwise] have been used to devalue" (42) the medium.

If Pizzino's critique of Bildungsroman discourse helps us question the standards that we use to evaluate comics, his ensuing chapters challenge us to attend more effectively to the specificity of the medium in interpreting comics. Toward this end, his second chapter introduces the concept of autoclasm, potentially his book's most fecund intervention in the field of comic studies. (In a footnote, Pizzino reports that he was "unaware that 'autoclastic' already existed as a scientific term in the field of geology" [203] when he coined it.) Comics, it seems, are fully aware of their problematic cultural status and autoclasm is a "formal tendency" through which "the medium figures and repeats its own sense of its illegitimacy" (49). An "autoclastic icon," Pizzino explains, "effects a kind of self-breaking, as if it is designed to work against itself….as if self-destruction is its ultimate function as a signifier" (48). That is to say, autoclastic comics display a kind of performative contradiction wherein they challenge the idea, either thematically or by virtue of...