Book Review: Critical Directions in Comics Studies edited by Thomas Giddens

Critical Directions in Comics Studies. Thomas Giddens, editor. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020. <https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Critical-Directions-in-Comics-Studies>

 Book Review by Stephanie Burt, Professor of English, Harvard University

In our experience, matter ordinarily comes in three varieties: solid, liquid, gas. Critical approaches to an art form come in three varieties too: first, fan takes and essays aimed for those who already care about the primary texts. Think film-fan magazines, or letter columns, and then The Comics Journal; think Samuel Johnson’s essays, too. These can be a gas: they circulate rapidly, though-- confined to periodicals-- they may not stick around.

Second come more ambitious and more formal explanations, either showing new audiences how to take the art form seriously, or else laying out tool sets other critics can use. In our field that’s Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics; in another it might include E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel. These takes often demonstrate canon formation too, along with counter-canons, anti-canons, and anti-formalist populism (think Pauline Kael). They are the liquids of critical thinking: some move slowly and smoothly, some try to cover everything, and they rarely vanish into thin air.

Third come the books and articles after a canon, a working history, and a formal vocabulary have solidified. Extended works of criticism respond to earlier works; models from other disciplines sometimes alien to practitioners—Continental philosophy, say, or data analysis—build out a robust academic field, taking part in continuing debates that exceed one art form’s discursive world.

Critical Directions in Comics Studies is by these standards a very solid book. “Critical” in the title connotes not only literary and comics criticism (though that too), but self-conscious multidisciplinary approaches to an academic field, with overtones of critical legal studies, Continental Marxist thought, and other radical critique. Its best parts will lead almost any comics critic to ideas they might not otherwise have find.

If there’s a through-line, it comes from legal studies (five of thirteen contributors, including editor Giddens, come from the law): comics, according to much of this volume, reveal the assumptions that underpin modern society by breaking its stated or unstated rules. Christopher Pizzino’s opening chapter adds a persuasive reading of Kyle Baker’s magnificent Nat Turner (1986), with its frame-breaking, texture-heavy pages, to a perhaps unhistorical broader claim. There’s something especially mediated, material, embodied about a comic book, Pizzino suggests, so that “its great theme is violation,” whereas—with its disembodied prose—“the novel is on the side of the law.” (p. 27) Pizzino supports this contrast via the anticomics discourse of the 1950s. But almost every moral panic around a new art form has ventured similar claims: the new art (whatever it is) excites readers’ bodies, rather than guiding their minds. Consider video games in the 1980s, or Gothic novels via Northanger Abbey (1803). Pizzino’s emphasis on physical pages also raises questions: is the stunningly successful webcomic Check, Please! not embodied? Or not a comic?

Yasemin Erden gets more reliable results in her serious reading of (wait for it…) Marvel’s Deadpool, “a being without an essential nature” (p. 61) whose utter, disorienting, ridiculous freedom makes him an existentialist antihero, his “identity tied up with the breaking of things generally: of rules, of people, of walls.” (p. 69) (OK, but what makes him funny?)  Maggie Gray offers a careful history of comics-making at the countercultural 1970s Birmingham Arts Lab, with its anti-elitist, anti-commercial mission, “distributing expertise… and democratizing culture and media.” (p. 123) And Matthew J. A. Green examines Utopian visions in Mary and Bryan Talbot’s The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia (2016), a graphic novel about Louise Michel, who took part in the Paris Commune of 1870 and ended up in New Caledonia. Non-UK readers may, and should, discover the intricacies of the Talbots’ joint works here.

Books like this one often focus on indie comics, but the most complex of its persuasive arguments takes on a classic Marvel hero. Timothy Peters looks at secular law and Christianity in two runs of Daredevil, whose alter ego Matt Murdock is both a blind lawyer and (since Frank Miller’s run in the 1980s), a devout, troubled Catholic. Kevin Smith’s 2003 story “Guardian Devil” shows Matt deceived by material entities, as if Creation were full of snares (a deeply Protestant position). Miller and David Mazzuchelli’s “Born Again” (1986) instead finds a “participatory legal aesthetics,” showing in Daredevil’s actions and in our experience of comics form how our bodies exist as “part of the law.” (p. 99) Like Matt, we must connect justice to equity, rules to cases, spirit to all of the senses, removing the law’s metaphorical blindfold.

What if the best thing to do with the law is to break it, to smash an entire society in hopes the future will build something else? That revolutionary, or anarchist, hope animates several writers here. Two focus on Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta, whose anti-hero or hero in his Guy Fawkes mask brings about (according to Peter Goodrich) “the destruction of Parliament, the end of representational politics… so as to take back the theatre of the political and embody it in the community.” (p. 257) Giddens himself recommends the graphic novel 100 Months (2010), which the British artist John Hicklenton completed as he was dying: its demonic heroine Mara “is the unstoppable wave of beyond that destroys, that undoes and razes” a humanity ruined by capital. (p. 229)

These essays enlist Walter Benjamin (despite his protest against the aestheticization of politics!) and Giorgio Agamben (“bare life cannot separate itself from sovereign power”) (p. 210) in a somewhat predictable anti-political politics. People who have lived through revolutions rarely end up so excited about them. Fortunately the collection does not end there. Instead it concludes with another legal scholar, Adam Gearey, examining the 2010 graphic memoir To Teach, in which the onetime Weather Underground revolutionary and present-day expert on pedagogy Bill Ayers, together with artist Ryan Alexander-Tanner, model the open-mindedness teachers require: “unless you confront your own self-certainty, you become lost in your own impeccable radicalism.” (p. 293)

Matter actually has four states, not three. Under high enough heat and pressure, it turns into plasma, a gooey high-energy state that eliminates boundaries between atoms. Comics criticism, too, has a fourth state, in which it becomes its own hand-drawn subject. In a trio of “comics interludes,” Giddens, the education researcher Lydia Wysocki and the literary scholar Paul Fisher Davies cartoonify their preferred, and self-conscious, approach. Wysocki parodies Olivia Newton-John’s music video for “Physical,” whose stills give Wysocki a model for her light-hearted, multi-modal, heteroglossic, frame-by-frame affair. “Let’s get critical,” her headband-wearing athletes demand. “Let’s get into critical.” (p. 106) There’s a lot to get into here.

A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 23-2.

Book Review: EC Comics: Race, Shock and Social Protest by Qiana Whitted

EC Comics: Race, Shock and Social Protest. Qiana Whitted. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2019. https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/ec-comics/9780813566313

Book Review by Maite Urcaregui

 

Qiana Whitted’s EC Comics: Race, Shock and Social Protest explores how William M. Gaines’ Entertaining Comics (EC) experimented with generic constraints in their “preachy” stories to critique the status quo of the Atomic Age, “the post-World War II era known as both the ‘Fabulous Fifties’ and the ‘Age of Anxiety’” (p. 5). Whitted brings critical attention to the “preachies,” also referred to as social-protest comics or message stories, “a distinct group of EC stories designed to challenge readers’ assumptions about racial, ethnic, and religious prejudice, Cold War paranoia, and other anxieties over social difference and American heterogeneity” (p. 5). These stories appeared in EC’s genre-fiction anthologies, such as Shock SuspenStories or Incredible Science Fiction, beginning in 1952 and ending in 1956, when EC ceased publishing comic books due to the Comics Code Authority’s increasing restrictions. While EC’s Mad or individual EC creators have received critical attention,¹ the preachies have been overlooked, often dismissed as too formulaic and didactic.² Whitted’s “study takes a different approach by analyzing the creative choices and critical significance of the message stories within the EC brand and against the larger ideological contexts of the Late 1940s and 1950s” (p. 6). EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest introduces readers not only to the breadth of EC’s social-protest stories, but also to their depth. Whitted’s analysis of the preachies emphasizes the network of narrative, aesthetic, and marketing strategies that the company developed as part of their “EC way” (p. x). These formal innovations opened opportunities for the company to initiate conversations around racial justice during a time of simultaneous social progress and increasingly insular national impulses.

In her “Preface,” Whitted beautifully elucidates her personal investments in and the political stakes of her work by reflecting on Mad’s back cover “fold-ins.” Describing the process of folding the page to reveal “a new picture and a clever quip,” she concludes: “I marveled over the story that our hands made together. Even now I remain fascinated by the way the words and image that seemed so familiar could be reoriented to expose something wholly unexpected from within” (pp. ix-x). Just as the fold-in’s “sleight of hand” invites readers to become a part of the clever joke that their hands have helped co-create (p. x), EC’s preachies played with generic conventions (extradiegetic narration, twist- or snap-endings, optical illusions) to shock readers out of complacency. Through this generic call and affective response, EC challenged its readers to question normative notions of race, nation, authority, and safety. I linger over the preface because it was such an elegant, efficient example of how a meditation on medium and materiality can look outward and can gesture toward community. In her short preface, Whitted stakes out her hope for the book, “that readers will come away with a deeper insight into how American comic books advance the public understanding of complex social problems through popular media” (p. xi). Certainly, Whitted does her part to fulfill that hope throughout the book. In an effort to draw out the complex social problems that EC Comics: Race, Shock and Social Protest explores, this review thinks with and through the provocations of the book’s subtitle--race, shock, and social protest--to showcase these distinct yet interconnected contributions.

Whitted’s study of race in EC’s message stories attends both to the quality of representation and to its effect on readers and public consciousness. Her analysis of the formal strategies EC used “to disassociate white normative subjectivity from virtuous qualities such as innocence, courage, and moral authority” is always situated within the cultural, historical, and political backdrop of Atomic Age anxieties over both comics and race (p. 53). Chapter One, “‘Spelled Out Carefully in the Captions’: How to Read an EC Magazine,” traces these public anxieties by explicating EC’s role in the 1954 US Senate subcommittee hearings over comics’ influence on young readers and their so-called “delinquency.” EC creatively responded to these public pressures by carefully and consciously framing their social-protest stories through extradiegetic narration and pointed captions. Toeing the “boundaries between ‘entertaining’ and ‘educational’ reading practices,”³ EC paired educational captions--verbal text that directed readers regarding how to read the comic--against more sensational and sometimes violent images of racial and mob violence (p. 26). The company’s reliance on a “containment system equipped with discursive barriers to shield readers from harm” ultimately relied on and reinscribed the cultural narratives about the hazards of comics that would lead to the Comics Magazine Association of America’s (CMAA) Comics Code Authority (CCA)--the very thing that would force EC to change its publishing model (p. 34). Whitted’s explication of the well-worn history of the CCA feels refreshing. Despite the impact the CCA had on EC, rather than overdetermining the CCA’s role in comics history, Whitted advocates that “EC’s legacy as a maverick in the mainstream comic-book industry grows out of these Atomic Age controversies” (p. 23). The book illustrates how the growing concern over comics was not disarticulated from post-World War II concerns over racial integration. In fact, as Whitted explores in her second chapter, “the landmark decision to end public-school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education” occurred in the same year as the Senate subcommittee hearings on comics, and both would fundamentally change EC’s approach to portraying the complexities of Black life (p. 53).

EC’s preachies often elicited a sense of shock or shame in their readers, creating an affective call to action. Chapter Two, “‘We Pictured Him So Different, Joey!’: Optical Illusions of Blackness and Embodiment in EC,” explores the comics efforts to picture anti-Black violence and the racial disparities of the criminal-(in)justice system on the comics page. Whitted explores stories that relied on optical illusions, or actively withheld the racial identity of a character, to create a snap ending that reveals the character’s identity alongside the reader’s own expectations and, perhaps, biases. These types of narratives frequently relied on characters of color (often Black male characters) “to embody and to complicate the race problem of the early 1950s” (p. 53).  Yet, at times, these portrayals privileged the affective responses of White readers over complex, expressive portrayals of Black identity. Whitted contends that the most effective stories were those that “call[ed] attention to the way blackness acts as an unstable image/text, a fraught sociohistorical signifier that is misread and misrecognized in American society with devastating consequences” (p. 69). One such example is Wallace Wood (artist and writer) and Marie Severin’s (colorist) “Perimeter!” which appeared in the last issue of Frontline Combat in January 1954. In “Perimeter!” Private Matthews, a Black soldier fighting in a mixed-race US platoon in Korea, is more than an image/text that carries the weight of signifying the US’s racial disparities; he is a heroic Black character who speaks and acts for himself as he struggles alongside his peers to survive. His appearance on the cover of the issue attests to how Wood and Severin created a visual portrayal of a Black man in comics that resisted the iconic weight of that image/text and spoke to readers through Private Matthews’ quotidian specificity. Chapter Three, “‘Oh God . . . Sob! . . . What Have I Done . . . ?’: Shame, Mob Rule, and the Affective Realities of EC Justice,” explores how narrative devices, such as the dramatic identity-reversal-plot or the snap ending, work to elicit shame in both the White characters they portrayed and the White readers they implicated. According to Whitted, “In EC’s social-protest comics, shame chastens society from the inside out; the writers and artists used the emotional burdens of affect to accomplish what the law could not” (p. 103).

The final chapter of EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest firmly situates the preachies within a tradition of social protest literature. Chapter Four, “‘Battling, in the Sea of Comics’: EC’s Invisible Man and the Jim Crow Future of ‘Judgment Day!’” examines one of EC’s most famous stories: Joe Orlando (artist) and Feldstein’s (writer) “Judgment Day!” first published in Weird Fantasy #18 in 1953 and republished in a 1956 issue of Incredible Science Fiction #33.⁴ Whitted explores the suggestiveness of this science-fiction story, which “uses the speculative to denounce Jim Crow” (p. 106). “Judgment Day!” is a futuristic tale that follows Tarlton, a helmeted astronaut from Earth, who has been charged with inspecting life on Cybrinia, the “Planet of Mechanical Life” (p. 107). Tarlton is disappointed to see a hierarchical system imposed by the orange androids that relegates the blue androids to segregated portions of the city and positions in the workforce, “a system that bears striking resemblance to the racial segregation of midcentury America” (p. 107). Notably, in the final panel of the comic, Tarlton, now inside his ship and headed to Earth, takes off his helmet to reveal that he is a Black man. Through Orlando’s realistic physical rendering of Tarlton’s face with “beads of perspiration on his dark skin twinkl[ing] like the distant stars” (cited on p. 127), his visage in the final panel becomes emblematic of the expressive possibilities of space itself, an aesthetic precursor to Sun Ra’s Afrofuturist proclamation that “space is the place’ of Black liberation.⁵ In her analysis, Whitted recognizes “Judgment Day!” as more than a social allegory and, through a conceptual (rather than a comparative) reading of the comic alongside Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), uncovers the narrative’s call that “recognition [is] a requisite part of meaningful social change” (p. 126).

This fourth and final chapter, my favorite of the book, illustrates the critical import and creative ingenuity of Whitted’s work. She pairs a deep sense of historical responsibility and cultural specificity with a responsiveness to the preachies’ formal innovations and affective demands. EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest models how comics scholars can open up a space for social protest and justice without flattening texts into sociological mirrors. The book offers extensive, in-depth analysis of many of the social-protest stories that were published throughout EC’s tenure, and Whitted’s close readings are as exciting to read as the shocking plots they plumb. Qiana Whitted’s EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest emphasizes how “even the most disposable ephemera of American popular culture can have a lasting impact,” and it is a work that likewise will have a lasting impact on not only the study of EC comics but also the study of race and form in comics studies more broadly (p. 136).  

Endnotes

1. Mad was EC’s longest running comic. Founded by Gaines (EC’s publisher) and Harvey Kurtzman (Mad’s creator and first editor) in 1952, the humor magazine would continue until the present, although largely via reprints since 2019, long after the company closed down its publication of comic books in 1956, and Gaines sold the company in the 1960s. For more on Mad, see Judith Yaross Lee and John Bird’s collection Seeing MAD: Essays on MAD Magazine’s Humor and Legacy (2021); Grant Geissman’s Feldstein: The MAD Life and Fantastic Art of Al Feldstein! (2013); and Frank Jacob’s The MAD World of William M. Gaines (1972).

2.   Whitted discusses the critical tradition around EC Comics on page six of EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest (p. 6).

3.      When the company began in 1944 under the direction of Maxwell Charles Gaines (né Ginsberg), EC stood for “Educational Comics.” When William Gaines inherited the company from his father in 1947, he rebranded it as “Entertaining Comics” (p. 9).

4.      Whitted notes how the 1956 reprinting only narrowly gained the CCA seal of approval because Charles F. Murphy, the CCA administrator, wanted the company to make Tarlton White. Gaines argued that Tarlton’s racial identity was “the point of the whole story,” and through his outrage, pushed the story through the Code review unchanged from the 1953 original (p. 105-106).

5.      See Space Is the Place, directed by John Coney, written by Joshua Smith and Sun Ra, performed by Sun Ra (1974; Berkeley: North American Star System, 1974), YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iAQCPmpSUI.

A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 23-2.

 

Maite Urcaregui (she/her/hers) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her current research investigates contemporary mixed-media literature that experiments with visual poetics to examine the relationship between and among race, citizenship, and political belonging. Her most recent publication, “(Un)Documenting Single-Panel Methodologies and Epistemologies in the Non-Fictional Cartoons of Eric J. García and Alberto Ledesma,” appeared in a special issue on “Latinx Studies” in Prose Studies in 2020.