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What's New Podcast Transcript Episode 9, the Hidden Universe of Comics

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What's New Podcast Transcript Episode 9, the Hidden Universe of Comics What’s New Podcast Transcript Episode 9: The Hidden Universe of Comics January 30, 2018 Host: Dan Cohen, Dean of Libraries and Vice Provost for Information Collaboration at Northeastern University. Hillary Chute, Professor of English and Art & Design at Northeastern University Dan Cohen, Host: Comics are often viewed as lesser form of storytelling. Colored as they are by the superhero movies that fill multiplexes in the summer. But in the unique way they combined hand-drawn images, with equally flexible lettering, comics can also [00:00:30] convey profound expressions of humanity, tragic events and humorous escapades, subtle observations of everyday life, loneliness and taboo, sexual desire. Today on What's New, the Hidden Universe of Comics. Welcome back to What's New, I'm Dan Cohen. Joining me in the studio is Hillary Chute, the author of a wonderful new book, Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere. Hillary is a Professor of English and Art and Design here at [00:01:00] Northeastern University. Welcome to the program Hillary! Hillary Chute: Thank you for having me. Dan Cohen, Host: So I noticed the title of your book is Why Comics with a question mark, rather than something more assertive like the Genius of Comics. And I guess it seems that's because comics kind of need an evangelist or at least a helpful interpreter to get across why they aren't just an immature medium for kids. But why do you think that this is still true in 2017? Hillary Chute: Well, I think that one of the most common misperceptions about comics is that it [00:01:30] is a genre and not a medium, and that, that genre is superhero comics. So for people who pay attention to comics, people would know that there are various genres, right? You know, including comics, journalism, romance comics, western, you know the whole thing, science fiction. But most people, if they don't really think about comics when they think the [00:02:00] word comics, they think of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman. All those Marvel, angsty neurotic superheroes from the so-called silver age. And you know, all the superheroes that are now sort of glutting mainstream cinemas. So I think the association of the form with superheroes still persists as a kind of cultural shorthand. Dan Cohen, Host: Right. So people don't view them like books or TV where we know that there are lots of different formats for those medium? 1 Hillary Chute: Right. Well, it's starting to change, but I don't think it's as widespread yet as I [00:02:30] would hope. And so in a way I wanted to write this book so I could stop explaining so often what I do at cocktail parties, and faculty get-togethers, so and so forth and so on. Because I think there is still the assumption that comics is largely about fantasy. Dan Cohen, Host: Right. Right. So maybe we could rewind a little bit, how did you get interested in comics? [00:03:00] Hillary Chute: So, I was not a particular fan of comics as a kid, unlike other people I know who study comics for a living like I do. I got interested in comics in graduate school. So, my PhD is in English and I read Art Spiegelman's Maus for the first time as a second year graduate student in a course on contemporary literature. And that was in the year 2000 and I have been thinking about this book a lot [00:03:30] ever since, including working on a book with Art Spiegelman for six years called MetaMaus, that was a collaborative project. And so even though I've worked with the author of Maus for six years about Maus and I've written countless book chapters and articles about it, I still feel like I haven't solved it. For me, it's a book that keeps on giving; every time I read it I find something new. I feel like that's the book that really got me started thinking about why this [00:04:00] kind of form for serious kinds of stories, which is how I got interested in comics in the first place. Dan Cohen, Host: Same was true for me. I read Maus. It came out my freshman year in college. Hillary Chute: Did you read it for a class? Dan Cohen, Host: I did not, but interestingly a couple of years later. So it came out in 1986, and then a couple of years later it had already been incorporated into a course, actually, on literature that I took through New Forms of Literature along with Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns as a kind of disruptive new format for what [00:04:30] seemed like a traditional superhero based genre. I think both of those things were fairly shocking for me. I mean, particularly Maus, I think for those who have not encountered it before, it's a not very superhero-ish, exploration of the Holocaust and the nature of memory and the nature of family relationships that really struck me as a freshman, who thought comics were Richie Rich or the original Batman or Batman on tv, which was very comical. There was a depth there, right? [00:05:00] Hillary Chute: In Maus, certainly, and it's also such a fascinatingly styled work, which is one of the things that struck me about it right away. So he chose to do Maus in black and white. He chose that kind of loose, sketchy style in Maus that all of the 2 characters are rendered in. And so when I worked with him on MetaMaus, I saw [00:05:30] his years of stylistic exploration to get to something as coherent but as loose as Maus looks like. So I think one of the things that's so interesting about it too is that it has that kind of intimacy that just pulls you right in, sort of like a diary or a manuscript. Dan Cohen, Host: Since our audience is listening to this rather than viewing, and you've got some incredible page images in your book, can you describe what new kind of graphic novel like Maus in the 80s did? What does the form look like and how would you describe it? Hillary Chute: Do you mean that specific work, because I would love to describe that? [00:06:00] Dan Cohen, Host: Yes, sure. Can you just describe the line drawing and the paneling and how it was put together that looked a lot different than other comics? Hillary Chute: Sure. So, I mean, one of the things I love about studying comics and graphic novels is that I feel that these works really call readers’ attention to the book as material object, in a way that I worry is sort of evaporating from the contemporary fiction landscape, you know, since I am a person who has a PhD in contemporary literature. [00:06:30] So I feel like these books really inhabit themselves as physical objects. So the end papers are beautiful. The cover is beautiful. They're designed front to back by cartoonists, which is really a huge difference than most books. I mean, any other books in the book industry. There's no other form of book for which the author is the default designer. Dan Cohen, Host: Hillary, you've got a lot of examples in the book of a cartoonist who really ... they [00:07:00] made the book in many cases, right? They printed it themselves and they designed that. As you notice the cover and the back and you think about modern books are, often the designer's off somewhere in New York doing the cover and the author is just responsible for the text. But, in this case it's really end to end as you know. Hillary Chute: Right. And so what it shows to me is an understanding that cartoonists aren't only illustrators and aren't only storytellers, but are rigorous designers. So, I [00:07:30] once said to the cartoonist Joe Sacco, and I think this is maybe in the book, he's a fabulous comics' journalist who does amazing works mostly about contemporary conflict zones like Israel and Palestine. And I said, "So, you know, you have to be like a designer as a cartoonist. You have to design each page, design each panel, design the whole thing." And he just looked at me and said, "You know, that's like walking if you're a cartoonist." So it's really about designing elements in space. And for a work like Maus, that 3 [00:08:00] means that it's not only about each page having its own aesthetic logic, but it's also about the size and shape of the book overall. So Maus is digest sized, so it's six by eight. It's quite small. Spiegelman deliberately meant it to be small. Spiegelman composed Maus with a common fountain pen from a stationary store on common typing paper. He used white [00:08:30] out and little gummed labels, very deliberately as a sort of aesthetic political choice. He wanted to make this work about the Holocaust, work that was composed with common everyday materials as against a kind of aesthetic virtuosity that he associated with Nazism. So in an example like that, you can see that all of these production choices and format choices really have a big impact, but also a big political import too.
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