Comics and Literature: a Love Story
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Comics and Literature: A Love Story by Robert Hutton A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario © 2017 Robert Hutton Abstract This dissertation investigates the conjunction of comics, literature, prestige, and narratives of development and deviance. Drawing on case studies from the forty-year history of alternative comics, I argue that comics creators and publishers referenced literary figures and characters as a means of developing their ideas of artistic autonomy and development. This tangle of ideas stems from the suspicion and censorship of comics in the 1950s, when the young medium was accused of promoting deviance and maladjustment. Early figures in alternative comics such as Harvey Pekar, Dave Sim, and the critics of The Comics Journal fought this idea by drawing on the prestige of literature to present a vision of comics that adhered to conventional ideas of autonomous elite culture. In doing so, these writers sought to create a new form of comic that could help the medium and its readers out of the maladjustment it found itself in. Later, the writers of "groundlevel" comics referenced canonical literary authors in ways that both reaffirmed and, in the case of Alan Moore, questioned their canonical light. It is here that we begin to see total rejection of the developmental narrative, and a celebration of comics' low cultural status. Finally, I argue that the work of Ariel Schrag and Alison Bechdel takes a step forward in developing a queer idea of reading and writing that disrupt the narrative upheld by earlier authors. By shifting the focus of the developmental narrative to their personal queer journeys, Schrag and Bechdel call into question the heteronormative premises of the discourse around the status of comics. By focusing on how these comics present the literary, this dissertation aims to demonstrate how such representations are always entangled in questions of status and normativity, and how the world of alternative comics' attitude towards these questions changed during their period of cultural ascendance. Hutton iv Acknowledgements I started reading comics regularly in high school, specifically in the form of manga. My parents deserve credit (or blame) for perenially renewing my subscription to the English- language Shounen Jump and never complaining about the unwieldy boxes of paperback volumes that began to pile up. On a more serious note, I’d like to thank my parents for continually supporting my education over the last two decades and change in both financial and spiritual ways, and for never asking me what a degree in English was good for. My supervisors Franny Nudelman and Brian Johnson have provided invaluable guidance throughout this process, always offering both support and a daunting amount of suggestions, most of which have hopefully been incorporated in this final draft. I would also like to thank all the members of my committee for their time and consideration, and for their feedback which will doubtlessly result in a better version of this work in the future. Many more people in the Carleton English department and the broader academic sphere have their fingerprints on this project. Rob Holton helped to shepherd me through comps and refine my ideas about theory as well as always provide a calming presence. Sarah Brouillette both graded the assignment that started this whole mess and has influenced my thought throughout my time at Carleton. Jodie Medd provided crucial expertise on some of the literary history which I was unfamiliar with. The anonymous reviewers at Contemporary and Image- TeXt helped to refine the section on Fun Home throughout its frustrating but ultimately edifying publication process. The various attendees of the Canadian Society for the Study of Comics have provided great feedback for most of the dissertation as well as general inspiration over the past three years. And of course, none of this would be possible without the administrative work of Lana Keon and the other department administrators who have helped me in so many different ways over the past five years. I was also forunate to be part of a vibrant and friendly group of students here in the English department. My cohort-mates Kim Sigouin and Chris Kerr have been my most constant ears to unburden myself to over the years. My Americanist predecessors Andrew Connoly, Chris VanDerWees and Rob Mousseau blazed the trail before me and provided both inspiration and bitter realism in equal measure. A special shout-out goes to my comics kouhai Ryan Prittie and Jonathan Chau, who I expect to write much better dissertations than mine in the coming years, as well as everyone who came out to trivia, softball, and the many other ways I distracted myself. Despite the weather and the elevators and everything else, I never felt quite so much at home at a school. Hutton iv Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iii Introduction 1 A Brief History of Comics, Sex and Prestige 6 Literature and Degeneracy 13 An Alternative by Any Other Name 19 Prestige and the Literary in Comics Scholarship 22 Literary Tactics and Strategies 26 Comics Versus Art Versus Literature 30 Chapter 1: Prestige and Ideology at the Dawn of Alternative Comics 36 The Crusade of The Comics Journal 37 Graphic Novels and the Comics Canon 53 “Erotica for the Juvenile Mind!” 58 Grub Street, USA: Prestige and Literary Realism in American Splendor and Beyond 66 Modernism, Misogyny and Self-Publishing in Sim’s Cerebus 80 Comics and Literary Machismo 95 Chapter 2: The Groundlevel and Canonical Remixes 100 Canonical Genius in The Sandman 103 Romantic Rebellion in The Invisibles 108 Metafictional Magic in Promethea 114 Perverse Victoriana in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 119 A Literary Pornography: Moore and Gebbie’s Lost Girls 132 Iconic Resonance 142 Chapter 3: Queer Reading Strategies in Schrag and Bechdel 145 Likewise and the Crises of Identity and Authorship 147 Queer Reading Strategies and Identification in Fun Home 156 Bruce Bechdel and Identificatory Reading 159 Alison’s Rebuke: The Queer Erotics of Reading 173 The Graphic Memoir as Queer Literary Education 192 Conclusion 195 Works Cited 204 Hutton 1 Introduction Chris Ware dramatizes the hopes and anxieties of the alternative comics creator in the mainstream book market on the back cover of the paperback edition of his graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Boy on Earth. This miniature comic narrative situates the graphic novel in a very specific commercial and cultural context. An anthropomorphized version of the book is about to be shelved in the literature section of a book superstore, cementing its place in the literary canon :“Tolstoy... Updike... Vonnegut... Ware!” (Ware bc). An ignorant sales manager intervenes, and insists that it should be shelved in the graphic novel section (“somewhere near science fiction and role-playing games, I think”) because it is “kid's lit... you now... superhero stuff... for retards!” (Ware bc). Separated from its true literary audience, the graphic novel is neglected and thrown out, only to be rescued by Ware himself. Questions of shipping, distribution, and marketing, the mundane business transactions that the autonomous author is supposed to be disdainful of, are here positioned as vital to the work’s identity. This comic is obviously tongue-in-cheek and could be dismissed as a throw-away gag, but in the process of being flippant Ware hits on the hopes and anxieties that drive much of alternative comics. The ambition of Ware’s graphic novel, as expressed by the back cover, is not to be acclaimed within its own subculture but within the cultural economy of literary fiction, with Tolstoy and Vonnegut forming more logical antecedents then Lee and Kirby. The back-cover narrative is also noteworthy because the specialized comic book store, where Ware’s book would presumably face unimaginable indignities, is never mentioned. Indeed, from its bookstore-ready size to its baroque instructions on how to read a comic, the collected Jimmy Corrigan is a comic that obviously aspires to an audience that does not normally read comics. How did such a paradoxical bit of marketing come about? It is not that Ware is a Hutton 2 snobbish outlier among alternative comics artists. If anything, he is among the least obviously “literary” of the major figures in contemporary comics, being more obviously influenced by graphic design and the eccentricities of turn-of-the-century print culture than literary fiction (Bredehoft, “Comics Architecture” 884-885). But he nevertheless promotes a discourse that positions acceptance by the literary sphere as the natural aspiration for comics creators who have ambitions beyond the commercial. Graphic novels are now sold in the same stores as literary novels and reviewed in the same publications. Those within both the comics sphere and mass media present this as the maturation of the medium (Pizzino 1). Comics, having passed through decades of juvenile adventure narratives, have finally reached their full potential of being heavily-illustrated novels. This assumption is embodied in the very phrase “graphic novel,” with the novel as the central noun being modified. This is a term that has been used by alternative comics artists since the 1970s and popularized by Will Eisner as an expression of literary ambition as much as format, and been criticized by some scholars as an appeal to the authority of another medium (Weiner 6). By comparison, Scott McCloud’s preferred term of “sequential art” (5) is almost never used by publishers. I do not believe this paradigm to be a betrayal of comics, nor do I wish to denounce those who created and advocated for it. The emergence of comics-as-literature has brought a broader array of readers and writers into the medium, and produced more diverse and frankly more interesting work than the continually-shrinking cloister of the direct market.