Tag Archives: Comics Scholarship

Comics Scholarship

Under Review: Mike Borkent, Comics and Cognition, Toward a Multimodal Cognitive Poetics (Oxford University Press, 2024); Benôt Crucifix, Drawing from the Archives, Comics Memory in the Contemporary Graphic Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2024); Alexander Durst, The Rise of the Graphic Novel, Computational Criticism and the Evolution of Literary Value (Cambridge University Press, 2024); Fabrice Leroy, Back to Black, Jules Feiffer’s Noir Trilogy (Rutgers University Press, 2025);  Jonathan Najarian, ed., Comics and Modernism, Memory, Form and Culture (University Press of Mississippi, 2024); Diana Whitted, ed, Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics (Rutgers University Press, 2023); Frances Gateward & John Jennings, The Blacker the ink: Constructions of Black identity in Comics & Sequential Art (Rutgers University Press, 2015); Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, ed., Arguing Comics: literary Masters of a Popular Medium (Mississippi, 2004); Paul Buhle and Abigail Susik, ed., Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues: Selected Writings on Popular Culture (PM, 2025).

Essay by Paul Buhle

We comics readers and fans, engaged in the nearly-vanished Funny Pages since we learned how to read old-fashioned ten cent comic books, are likely to be overwhelmed by the reality, let alone the volume, of comics scholarship. One of the scholars under review here quips that comics scholarship is among the most “productive” cultural efforts by sheer volume, in the continuing rise of deconstructive university life. Jobs and salaries depend on something here, and if most undergraduates these days are said to shy away from actual books, the graduate student world offers new horizons. And not only in the US, and not only in English, of course.

It all makes sense, at least some sense, first of all because the number of undergraduates taking courses on comics, or with comics as part of the curriculum, seems to continue to rise. For prospective comics artists or writers, the world of digital comics, at least, can only grow larger and more global.

Comics history can only be an uncertain part of this large narrative. Ben Katchor, magnum figure in his own artwork but also with his use of comics classes at Parsons, quipped that the word “new” in comics signifies only what is happening today. Very respectfully, your reviewer considers the emergence of Underground Comix as the end of censorship in the creative regions of comic art, and the proper beginning of something new that remains something new. But Katchor certainly has a point.

Historians  of comics will likely feel  that “new” does not reach what they find most interesting. Several of the essays in Desegregating Comics point to the story line and art work of artists in the local (sometimes not so local) Black press, at its comics peak from the 1910s to the 1970s.

To take a case in point, Jackie Ormes, creator of the Patty-Jo ’n Ginger strip that ran for a decade in the Pittsburgh Courier (the largest-circulation Black paper for many years), combined fashion, cheesecake and politics in ways impossible for white artists. She was watched closely by the  FBI in the 1940s-50s, and she wrote popular novels that pushed at the edges of racial controversies.

There are plenty of other cases in point in this remarkable volume, including the rise and fall of Negro Romance during the 1950s, and the post-censorship Black comics full of bemuscled men and full-figured women in states of undress and violent behavior.  Plenty more in these pages offer the reader/scholar a lot to take in and mull.

An earlier anthology along the same lines by the same publisher, The Blacker the Ink, explores Black comics productive from somewhat different angles. Here we find some analyses of African novels unknown to me, and some superheroes, male and female, like none seen before. Consider pregnant teen Raquel/Rocket who strains to click on her utility belt over a very pregnant belly, in a comic referencing Batman and Robin but with a  Black  superhero Batman and a very un-Robin. Most of all, however, consider artist Aaron McGruder’s Boondocks, hugely syndicated around the turn of the twenty-first century. The Black Power era was long gone by this time but the strip’s star, Huey, won’t let it go forgotten. In referencing a past radical challenge, Huey seriously criticizes the invasion of Iraq and its Black apologist, Condoleezza Rice. Huey, named for Huey Newton, uses the hip hop culture icons to attack the unending white domination of society and the eagerness of some Black elites to become partners of it.

Historical study can be extended in other ways, as we learn in the essays of Comics and Modernism. Consider this, for example: the promoters of the famed Armory Show of modern art in Manhattan, 1913, challenging and in some ways transforming the US art scene, happened to be….comic artists in local newspapers. Katherine Roeder’s “Modernism for the Masses” has a lot more to say about how the graphic ridicule of cubism in particular inevitably made the ideas about modern art available to a wide audience. And how the Greats, at least some of them (like Winsor McCay) toyed with modernist themes in their drawings, and George Herriman’s Krazy Kat based a certain amount of its strangeness in the internalization of modernist gestures. “While plot and dialogue loop in upon themselves, Herriman’s  customarily changing landscape ramifies with kaleidoscopic consequence for the reader’s eye and comprehension.” (p.77). ( Yes, reader, “ramifies” is a word.)

This notion sounds right, and is in line with the general line of commentary on Krazy Kat, one of the most discussed of all comic strips, ever. I ask the reader’s indulgence to add that Franklin Rosemont, Chicago surrealist, was far ahead of this crowd of critic-scholars in his essays on Krazy Kat (also the forgotten Smokey Stover), and that a collection of Rosemont’s writings on popular culture, co-edited by myself and Abigail Susik, has shortly been published: Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues: Selected Writings on Popular Culture (PM, 2025). But I digress.

Meanwhile, the scholarly investigation of women-oriented comics is here to stay, and then some. This is new, so new that the classic collective of the field, Arguing Comics: literary Masters of a Popular Medium (Mississippi, 2004), edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, has only a couple of women commentators (one of them is Dorothy Parker, on the Red artist Crocket Johnson) and no female artists studied. Since this book’s publication, the exploration has begun in earnest.

Taking a case in point. A rather famous essay, Scott Bukatman’s “Telling Details: Feminine Flourish in Midcentury Illustration and Comics,” argues that by “reading the face” of women in comic strips and comic books, looking hard at the fashions of women in the stories, reveals something beyond the nominal plot narrative. Buried deep in the history of the magazine advertisement and the illustrations of short stories, emerging vividly in “romance comics,” these images offer the real intent. If (as the essayist recalls of his earlier writings), superheroes actually fight crime to wear costumes, romantic comic characters have plots in order to display their stylishness. Makes sense to me.

Benoit Crucifix, burdened or graced with probably the most unusual name of any comics scholar ever, argues vividly that comics have always been “about memory,” and the main change is that today’s artists more and more wish to explore the collective memory of comic art itself. Art Spiegelman, who taught comics at the School for Visual Arts (taking over the slot from his mentor, none other than Harvey Kurtzman), is naturally the key case in point. From the 1970s onward, Spiegelman reconstructed comic art tropes of the famous, like McCay, and continued to do so in a famous cardboard-framed special created as a response to living in Manhattan in 9/11.

Not that Spiegelman was alone, in his (and my) generation. Robert Crumb’s uniqueness, stunning in 1970 and hardly less so today, lay in his semi-conscious recovery of tropes from past generations, not only comics but street signage of past big cities, sheet music illustrations, and so on (including the famous Big Feet). Artist Chris Ware and book designer Chip Kidd have lifted this borrowing up to new levels, thanks to the use/manipulation of software and comics archives.

Thanks likewise to ruminations from the likes of Jeet Heer,  the totemic artist Frank King and his genre-inventing Gasoline Alley with its continuity day-by-day treatment of ordinary (white, urban, middle class) life comes back into focus.  That King was the master of the Sunday comic page recuperating museum Modernism could not be an accident. He was a walking encyclopedia.

Many are the specific studies in this new genre of comics studies. Fabrice Leroy’s study of Jules Feiffer disappoints this reader by treating only his last cycle of works—leaving aside the works that reached us way back in the early 1960s and remain in memory as “underground” before the “underground” had a name in the Counter Culture.  Never mind. The very, very, very close reading of what the critic rightly called the “noir trilogy” would be more satisfying if it had explored further Feiffer’s own family connections with the Old Left (aka Communist Party/Popular Front) and FBI pursuits. That it takes the visual text at literal face value, with plenty of excerpts, is enough. It’s a good book.

We would be a the end of this roaming except for the most difficult of texts. The notion that comics would be suscepitable to “computational criticism” is presumably as new to the readers of Comics Grinder as it is to me. But, still, the idea that a computational study of “brightness” in comics, from Donald Duck (very bright colors) to Frank Miller (very dark indeed) is intriguing.  Can the “digital humanities” gathering together comics sales figures, scholarly and popular reception, escape the overwhelming accumulation of data? I am hoping not to be kept awake at night worrying this point.

But author Alexander Dunst has something else to say, of more identifiable value to this commentator. He describes “the rise of the graphic novel as an instance of aesthetic gentrification.” (179)

This is very real, if not startlingly original. The reader of the graphic novel, at least those intended for adult audiences, is more and more likely to be buying an “art book.” The leading art book publisher in the US and Europe for a half-century, Abrams, dubs its series “ComicArts” (all one word) for good reason. The most “arty” book ever to be edited by the reviewer (along with Harvey Pekar) is Yiddishkeit (2011), published by Abrams. This is proof positive for me, but the most prestigious graphic novels these days are likely in the same category. Chris Ware produces art books that cannot be anything but art books, even with meaningful social content.

I would like to offer something lucid on the book Comics and Cognition, but I find the language-framework too hard for me to follow. Comics, with their spatio-topical apparatus, are said to be “tabular” rather than narrative, producing a “sense of sequentiality and rhythm, but refuse a sense of narrative without. Direct connection to referentiality,” amounts to a “panelogic.” (p.201)

Admittedly, this analysis refers to “abstract’ comics so far out of my world that I have no need as well as no capacity to see what is going on. Do we need to Go Gestalt or did those little lines coming out of the feet in comic characters back to the 1910s to indicate motion, seem to come from some place in popular culture that may not be susceptible to Gestalt?

We wonder.

Paul Buhle