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Home arrow Not quite art

Not quite art
Page 3 of 4

Comics and Sequential Art
Page from Will Eisner's Comics and Sequential Art (Poorhouse Press, 1985), demonstrating the flexibility of facial expressions. Eisner's book was the first in English to take a close look at the mechanics of comics storytelling.
Excluding comics from cultural legitimacy in this way raises other questions, like: exactly who decides which mediums qualify and which do not? Is commercialism per se any less valid than 'self-expression'? How much of this prejudice has to do with the tastes of different social classes? And so on. Indeed, many comics creators themselves are suspicious of respectability. To quote one of Robert Crumb's typically foaming strips: '"ART" is just a racket! A HOAX perpetrated on the public by so-called "Artists" who set themselves up on a pedestal, and promoted by pantywaste (sic) ivory-tower intellectuals and sob-sister "critics" who think the world owes them a living!"
It would be futile to get bogged down in such a debate here. The essential idea implicit in the history told in these pages is that comics may or may not be 'art', but they are indisputably an art-form. There is a difference, of course, but the distinction may be unusual to some readers. After all, if one has grown up with the old-fashioned notion of comics as nothing but mindless pap, then there is no great incentive to think about their subtleties as a medium of communication.
In fact, there has been a lot of 'thinking' recently about these very properties. With the emergence of the new, sophisticated titles in the 1980s and 1990s there has appeared an accompanying literature analysing the mechanics of how the medium works. These studies have shown that comics are a language: they combine to constitute a weave of writing and art which has its own syntax, grammar and conventions, and which can communicate ideas in a totally unique fashion. They point, for example, to  the way in which words and images can be juxtaposed to generate a mood; to how the amount of time that is allowed to elapse between images can be used for dramatic effect; to the way that cinematic cutting can be used for extra movement; and to the fact that, ultimately, there is no limit to what a comic can do other than that imposed by a creator's imagination.
In other words, everything in a comic has to work -words, pictures and timing - or else it fails. Sometimes, when it succeeds, it is capable of generating a thrill that is impossible in any other medium. As Frank Miller once explained: "The illustrations are not really illustrations of what's going on. The narration isn't really describing what's going on, either. There's a gap there, and somewhere in that gap is reality.'
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