Comic books

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Chronicle of Higher Education, May 16, 2003

The New Scholarship of Comics
By PAUL BUHLE

The late historian-philosopher C.L.R. James enjoyed quoting Hegel's
aphorism that the old man repeats the nightly prayer of his childhood --
but with a lifetime of experience. James, my intellectual inspiration
for decades (and the subject of my earliest biographical volume), was
doubtless speaking of himself as well. Today, students who come to a
campus with Spider-Man on their minds may have trouble believing it, but
they share the superhero with middle-aged professors. For, in our
scholarly lives, many of us are not just harking back to distant
memories of the Marvel comics of our childhoods, but creating a new
scholarship on the comic book and the comic strip.

The scholarly part is an odd experience and, for the most part, a recent
one. The longtime lack of respectability of the subject guaranteed that
most of the historical documentation would, for decades, be undertaken
by comics fans themselves, hardly any of them professors. It consisted
mainly of interviews with the artists, or reviews of specific works,
published in fan magazines like The Comics Journal, in books from small
presses, and, more recently, on the Internet. The reprinting of strips
and books, dating to the 1970s but growing by leaps and bounds since
then, is probably the biggest spur to historical interest, although the
hoarding of rare issues and the continued growth of "fan cons"
comics-fans conventions suggests that the fannish quality of interest is
not ebbing.

All of that probably owes less to postmodernism (although Andy Warhol
did give comic-strip art an iconic status) than to a spillover from the
huge film- and-television-fan phenomenon. Science-fiction fanzines date
to the 1930s and the availability of inexpensive, used mimeograph
machines. But it was the Hollywood memoir -- invariably ghostwritten --
and the star-studded photo album that opened up a huge commercial niche.
The fact that the "Film and Television" section of a Borders or Barnes &
Noble is still over-whelmingly stacked with books about stars
demonstrates that things haven't changed much.

The growing interest in researching and writing about comics by
intellectuals who were born in the 1940s only partly reflects what's
happened in the world of commerce. More, I think, many of us are
attempting to find, or relocate, ourselves -- almost like an earlier
generation tried psychoanalysis. Some of today's more indulgent
theorizing about comics, indeed, suggests a considerable overlap between
the two. Most of us, however, have simply been struck by how much mass
culture, from the early moments when we could take it in as children,
has affected us. Memories of childhood grow more intense with aging, and
we find Unca Donald (of Huey, Dewey, and Louie, that is), Wonder Woman
(speaking for boys, our first sex goddess), and the hilarious Mad comics
satires of the likes of them considerably more vivid in recollection
than our real-life relatives.

Back in the depths of the cold war, a handful of politicians and
psychologists arrived with horror (or mock horror) at some similar
conclusions. Congressional investigations, the Comics Code, and the
banning of some items by several states -- including a satire of Santa
Claus in an issue of Mad comics' clone, Panic -- greatly accelerated a
decline of comic-book sales already made inevitable by the growing
competition of television. Although new and revived superheroes,
including Spider-Man, made (and have repeatedly made) a big comeback,
today's fans are not like we were. They don't see comics the way that we
saw them in the Golden Age, and the way that we still see them in our
mind's eye of childhood.

full: http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i36/36b00701.htm

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