Book review: Comics and Modernism: History, Form, and Culture ed, by Jonathan Najarian

 
reviewed by John A. Lent

Jonathan Najarian, ed. Comics and Modernism:  History, Form, and Culture. Jackson, MS:  University Press of Mississippi, 2024. 336 pp. US $30.00 (Paperback). ISBN:  978-1-4968-4958-8. https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Comics-and-Modernism

 

Jonathan Najarian (Colgate University) has drawn together the thoughts of fourteen researchers (counting himself) about the overlap between comics and literary and artistic modernism. In his introduction, Najarian points out that Comics and Modernism… results from the concurrent developments of new modernist studies and comics studies. He explains that the new modernish studies were ushered in “by revaluations of the modernist canon and directed scholars to new avenues of exploration,” specifying the vertical (“high” and “low” art) and horizontal or spatial (across geographical regions) (p. 6). The tearing down of the concrete wall that separated high and low art was helped along by factors, such as the recognition of the importance to art of magazines (including comics) and books, the fondness for, and imitation of, comics by “fine” artists, such as Picasso, e. e. cummings, and T.S. Eliot, and the artistic refinement that is found in comics by the likes of George Herriman, Winsor McCay, and Lyonel Feininger.

Najarian’s treatment of comics scholarship could use some re-adjustments. He claims “before roughly the 2000,” there were a “few niche scholars” (e.g., Tom Inge and Joseph Witek, both tucked away in a footnote, and Bill Blackbeard, who is identified as having “no academic affiliation”), completely ignoring the many young researchers who were presenting astute papers at International Comic Art Forum, Popular Culture Association, or the International Association of Mass Communication Research, and publishing in Inks and the University Press of Mississippi series. Granted that comics studies exploded in the past quarter century, but to attribute this growth solely to Art Spiegelman, Françoise Mouly, and Hillary Chute is completely unfounded.

Comics and Modernism… is organized somewhat chronologically into four parts, starting with early 20^th Century newspaper funnies and progressing to contemporary comics:  “Modernism and Comics,” “Print, Ephemera, Circulation,” “Pop/Art:  Comics Low and High,” and “Comics as Modernism.” The chapters provide a rich blend of theory, particularly that of “Entanglements of Style:  The Uniqueness of Modernism in Comics,” by Glenn Willmott; history, those by Katherine Roeder on the Armory Show of 1913, Winsor McCay by Noa Saunders, “Krazy Kat” by David M. Ball, and “Torchy Brown” by Clémence Sfadi, and a hefty assortment of approaches and techniques used to explain modernism and comics.

While all of the essays are well done, those that this review found to be most interesting, because they present new topics, are:  Roeder’s “Modernism for the Masses:  The Armory Show in Comics”; Jean Lee Cole’s “Four Repulsive Women:  Marjorie Organ, Nell Brinkley, Kate Carew, Djuna Barnes,” and Nick Sturm’s “‘Our First Literature’:  The Poetics Underground of Joe Brainard’s New York School Comics.”

The Armory Show introduced Americans to European avant-garde art (especially to cubism), which used visual strategies cartoonists had deployed for years, such as motion lines. American cartoonists had much fun mocking the modern art. But, as Roeder makes clear, their mockeries “brought modernist ideas and sensibilities directly into people’s homes…thereby casually introducing them to abstraction with a wink and a nod” (p. 45).

Cole shows how the cartoons of Organ, Brinkley, Carew, and Barnes, published at the beginning of the 20^th Century, transgressed both Victorian femininity and feminine print culture and forced them to express “vivid and perhaps even repulsive truths about women’s place and experience in modernity” (p. 109), thus, subjecting themselves to indignities and assaults. Except for Brinkley, whose career was captured in print by Trina Robbins, the other three women, until now, had not made it even to a footnote in the histories of journalism and comics.

Also absent from comics scholarship is Joe Brainard, his C Comics, “composed mostly of comics made in collaboration with poets” (p. 207), and his dozen-plus strips in the underground East Village Other. While exploring Brainard’s relatively-unknown work, Sturm concludes that, “some of the most aesthetically-suggestive and ambitiously multimodal work has been done not in book-length comics but in little magazines and periodicals that circulated among local groups of artists and poets” (pp. 221-222).

Though not pointed out by the editor, this volume is limited to comics and modernism in the U.S., which is acceptable, but should be acknowledged. Modernism has been interlocked with comics in parts of Europe, no doubt, Japan, and perhaps, other parts of the world, and, hopefully, will merit additional scholarship.

Comics and Modernism… is a comprehensive and readable account of various dimensions of the subject that answers many questions, while bringing up others, that will keep the subject on a front burner. It is highly recommended.