I've been a journalist nearly half my life, but since I was 10 or so the comics have been central to my experience of newspapers. Where once they were my sole interface, they have become the climax of the daily reading of the newspaper. Ten years ago, working at a newspaper, I'd lunch at my desk and work my way strategically through that morning's paper to the comics pages, down one and up the next to Calvin and Hobbes. At times it was the high point of my day. I have Doonesbury, Funky Winkerbean and Gil Thorpe on my browser toolbar, next to The (alas, comics-free) New York Times. In Las Vegas, I have three comics-savoring moments daily.
And yes, I read The New Yorker for the articles.
So I wonder sometimes why I never got into comics culture or the related, latter-day Culture of Comics. Equally serious-minded friends have regaled me with tales of Superman and Sgt. Rock, and I'm hard-pressed to explain why my newspaper comic-reading never spread into other categories.
My friend Jef had older brothers, guides no doubt into hero-world; one painted a bedroom with a near-life-size mural of a Hulk-like creature. Jef and his brother built successful careers as graphic designers, nudged at least part of the way along, I have to guess, by that pictorial presence.
I was in my hometown, Pittsburgh, before Christmas and made my customary pilgrimage to the Carnegie Institute, where Jef and I as kids took the same Saturday-morning art lessons that Andy Warhol once attended to greater effect. My destination was the Carnegie International, the triennial contemporary-art invitational. I had read little about it, and so was pleasantly surprised to discover, amid the usual carnival of tedious video installations and disturbing expressionist paintings, a room devoted to R. Crumb.
Incredible. Yes, the raucous chronicler of the 1960s had been knighted in one of artdom's sacred keeps. Curators of contemporary art enjoy tweaking conventional sensibilities, but I wondered if in this instance they had sensed it was time to acknowledge comics as a genuine genre and so had made the relatively safe choice of anointing an elder statesman.
But I had never thought of R. Crumb as a "serious" artist; in my compartmentalizing mind, he was a counterculture advance on a milieu dominated by Peanuts and Family Circle. Much as, say, FM rock was an improvement on bubblegum. As snobbish as my rock tastes run, I have never nursed illusions that it amounted to great art. It established my regular-guy bona fides that I admitted rock and comics into my hierarchy, but I wasn't about to elevate them to the status of—well, art.
R. Crumb had, perhaps, introduced a generation to a world beyond Beetle Bailey, and the newspaper comics pages responded in following decades with sharp, charismatic and socially aware strips, from Garry Trudeau's consistently piquant Doonesbury to Lynn Johnston's occasionally sappy but mostly appealing family saga, For Better or for Worse. The apex, for me, was Calvin and Hobbes, now 10 years gone. Bill Watterson's comic danced neatly between spot-on observation of a boy's mischief (take that, Dennis) and trenchant critique of a warped society. Those who paste in their pickup windows decals of a spiky-haired imp peeing on a rival logo clearly missed the latter point.
Meanwhile, comics infiltration progressed from campy television to gradually less-campy movies (think Superman to Spiderman) to fully animated films that compete with live-action blockbusters. Japanese anime seeped into the frame. A wide range of "alternative" and avant-garde comics took the work of pioneers such as Stan Lee and Will Eisner to dazzling and dizzying graphic extremes.
From that milieu arose Art Spiegelman, who edited the magazine Raw through the 1980s. Spiegelman breached the high-low threshold with the Pulitzer-winning Maus, a Survivor's Tale, his narrative of coming to grips with his father's Holocaust experience. My problem with Maus was not the inappropriateness of addressing the Holocaust in the comics format, but rather Spiegelman's all-too-contemporary-American tendency to examine events through the standard, "What does this mean for me?"
The same holds true for his jumbled requiem for the World Trade Center, 2004's In the Shadow of No Towers, which nonetheless has its share of poignant and clever moments. Between those two publications, Spiegelman had held an enviable staff position at The New Yorker, a fact that helped make comics something more than a wry accent to that magazine's long gray pages of interminable profiles.
Those pages frequently welcome graphic narrative. My friend Jef points to Chris Ware, who like Spiegelman has published several books, and whose idiosyncratic, geometric figures ramble through panels of keen culture analysis—check out Ware's "Dick Public" in the December 20 and 27 New Yorker. As if to confirm the comics' apotheosis, The New York Times Book Review on Sunday tackled Frenchman David B.'s Epileptic. Reviewer Rick Moody used the occasion to examine the nascent genre, ascribing its popularity in part to the fact "that comics are currently better at the sociology of the intimate gesture than literary fiction is."
That might be true, particularly in a society in which such gestures increasingly are communicated visually, not verbally. The pioneer comics artists were inspired by movies—sequential graphic panels are much like storyboards—and their descendants find movies mining the comics for ideas. A future whose entertainments meld visual narrative, digital graphics and video games might look back on Ware and Spiegelman as its Shakespeare and Milton.
Chuck Twardy is a really smart guy who has written for many newspapers and magazines.