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Home arrow Not quite art

Not quite art
Page 4 of 4

Miracleman
Page from Miracleman (Harper Collins, 1993), malting satirical comment on the passage from comics to art, and bach to comics. Warhol had been one of the main 'borrowers' of comics imagery during the Pop Art boom, and here finds himself in strip-limbo. Art: Mark Buckingham. Script: Neil Gaiman.
The first notable attempt in English to assess these properties was Will Eisner's Comics and Sequential Art, 1985 (though in Europe there had been a tradition of semiotic analysis dating back to the 1960s). Eisner himself was (and is) a greatly respected comics creator, and the book gave an insider's view,of the creative process. It was followed by a flurry of articles,. both in the comics press and academia, and finally by Scott McCloud's superb Understanding Comics (1993), which drew many of the threads together; it was a book so confident in its claim that comics are capable of expressing anything that it was itself produced as a graphic novel. McCloud's book may not be definitive (could any such study claim to be?), but it is highly recommended to readers wishing to find out more about the nuts and bolts of the medium.
In this way, once it had been confirmed beyond any doubt that the comic book was an artform, the question of whether or not it was a 'good artform' became irrelevant. Clearly, it is as good or bad as any other. For example, critics are fond of pointing out that ninety per cent of comics are rubbish. That may be true, but then, undoubtedly the same figure holds true for any other medium (how many of the films that are released every, week does one really want to see?). Needless to say, it is the ten per cent of comics that make things interesting, and we will be concentrating on the ten per cent here.
Finally, this line of argument also makes clear, in an oblique fashion, why comics are such a vibrant medium  at this particular moment in history. For if they are not able to become respectable in a way that only 'Art' can be, then at least they can remain unfettered by the critical machinery that this; status implies. In other words, comics do not merit official cultural analysis: for instance, there is virtually no space given to reviews of comics in newspapers compared to reviews of books or movies, and no airtime at all allocated to the subject on TV and radio. It is difficult not to agree with Art' Spiegelman that, 'comics fly below critical radar'.
This all goes some way towards explaining why comics have become a place, par excellence, for writers and artists to 'play'. There is a real sense in which they are a site where 'nobody is looking', and where it is possible to experiment and flex creative muscles. The results are often astonishing - as the illustrations to the final few chapters of the book prove. In the end, if the official arbiters of taste will not acknowledge comics' cultural value, then at least this means that the form remains a 'free medium' - and there are not many of those left.
Understanding Comics
Cover from Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics
Understanding Comics
Interior page from Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics (Harper Collins, 1994). McCloud's superb boob updated Eisner, and became a kind of Baedeker Guide to 'the invisible art'.


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