IJOCA has reached out to some of the people close to the ground-breaking scholar and asked for their remembrances of Prof. Martin Barker.
Martin
Barker (1946-2022)
Ian Gordon
I saw that Martin had died through Paul Gravett’s social media post.
Earlier Roger Sabin emailed to let me know Martin Barker had died. Roger knows
how much I appreciate Martin’s work, but for some reason this message went to
the spam folder, like so many important emails. I am not sure how many emails
Roger sent out but if the outpouring of love on social media are any indication
it might have been a lot. Martin touched many academic lives and his generosity
knew few bounds.
I first met Martin at the College Art Association meeting in Washington,
DC in February 1991. I was just at the start of my PhD research and attended
the conference specifically to meet Martin. It was held in the cavernous
Marriott hotel (then a Sheraton) in Woodley Park with the overflow of attendees
in the Omni Shoreham across Calvert Street. Martin’s presentation at the
conference was a breathtaking image driven piece. He used three projectors (no
PowerPoint then) and counterpoised a series of images. Looking through his
publications this paper gave rise to Martin’s piece on Judge Dredd. He dealt
with the
shift from corporation control to creator control of comic art characters. He
spoke of fan communities’ roles in opening these opportunities and the
corresponding direct marketing set up by entrepreneurs. He was weary of the
entrepreneurs, but hopeful about the fan communities. This was 1991!
I remember being nervous and wanting to introduce myself to Martin and
realizing there would be a throng of people wanting to talk to him at the end
of the session. I anticipated a long wait so went to the bathroom during the
last paper and there, washing my hands, I met Martin. I hesitantly introduced
myself and apologized for doing so in that space. He laughed. I mentioned how
wonderful and helpful I had found A Haunt of Fears when doing some work
on comics as an undergraduate. I mentioned my research and he took particular
interest in my tracing of when comic strips spread to newspapers across
America, then a rather difficult process of research using microfilm at the
Library of Congress. After about 10 minutes standing outside the bathroom with
audience members starting to spot him there (look we all drank a lot of cheap
coffee at these things in those days) and wanting to chat we agreed to meet the
next day in the hotel foyer and have lunch. Martin went back to the session.
The next day I waited and waited, but clearly there had been some
miscommunication. I was quite happy though to have met him and to have had a
better chat than the snatched few words that so often happen after a popular
paper at a conference.
I did write to Martin and asked what had happened. I also outlined some
more aspects of my work including an interest in intellectual property. Being a
pack rat I have both these letters still. He apologized and said the whole
session had been a blur thanks to his nervousness and when asked by Nina Kallmyer
to go to Philadelphia, he had forgotten our arrangement. Reading his letter, I
had not remembered that it was Martin who pointed me in the direction of long
time-Duke, and now Columbia professor, Jane Gaines’s work on intellectual
property and Superman, work that shaped my thinking on that issue and indeed
eventually saw me write a book on Superman. That’s a thirty-year intellectual
debt and I’m glad to have been reminded of the connection. I saw Martin again
at the International Conference on Graphic Novels and Comics in Manchester in
2011. He was working the room approaching scholars young and old to discuss
their papers and, in some cases, solicit contributions to his open access
online journal Participations. I wish I had spoken to him more, but I do
remember being thrilled to see him again and very chuffed to be asked for a
piece.
For me, Martin’s stand-out work on comics is Comics:
Ideology, Power & the Critics (1989). Writing for the volume Secret
Origins of Comics Studies in 2017 (p. 125) I noted it “is a work often
overlooked by comics scholars but widely cited in cultural studies work. It is
a rich and complex book, although written in a conversational tone, with many
useful cautions about drawing conclusions based on methodology that a priori
sets up the conclusion as the only possible outcome of the research. Barker
addresses ideology in comics directly and takes issue with many scholars’
readings of ideology into comics. Barker’s absence from so much comics
scholarship is perhaps explained by his primary focus on British comics and his
explicit exclusion of superhero and underground comics from his analysis.
Barker criticizes scholars’ too-easy use of a notion of identification, the
resort to media effects as a justification for moral panics on both the left
and the right, develops his own approach to ideology, and brings this all
together as a theory and a method in a case study application in reading How
to Read Donald Duck.
One reason Barker is not so widely cited in comics scholarship is that
he is not a theory builder, but rather a careful critic of theory who avoids
totalizing statements and generalizations. To demonstrate the weak points of
Dorfman and Mattelart’s work he offers three other interpretations of Disney
that “appeal to exactly the same evidence from the stories” (1989, p. 287). As
he tells it “for Reitberger and Fuchs … capitalism is mocked by being made
absurd,” for another critic Dave Wagner “if we were not able to laugh at
Scrooge, he could not survive to be the object of our derision” and for Michael
Barrier “the humour is a parable of human absurdity”—how we are undone by our
obsessions (Barker, 1989, p. 287). For Barker it is not that comics do not have
an ideology, but that such is not singular, even within, say, Uncle Scrooge
comics and that getting at this requires more than a reading of a comic or set
of comics. What he calls the production history of comics is also important.
For Barker the Scrooge comics oscillate between “two poles of American
middle-class ideology: a self-congratulatory but humourous desire for wealth;
and an obsessive fear of power-politics” (Barker, 1989, p. 299). Barker’s views
here are predicated on his belief that comics establish a contract with their readers
in which various negotiations of topics and content occur, negotiations
somewhat observable through circulation figures and changes in plot devices,
tropes, and the like in comics. In Disney’s case, the Scrooge comics are absent
the awful lack of play induced by Disney’s creation of theme parks where all
the work of play has been done already, and they also lack the horrible
prettiness of Disney’s nature films where “animals end up performing to a
Disney script with a voice-over narration making then cutely, dehumanised
humans” (Barker, 1989, p. 290). Barker saw his work as “hints and gestures” and
that “new kinds of research” that it was necessary to do more."
Hints and gestures. New kinds of research. And necessary to do more. These
are Martin’s legacy. The reminder to be humble in “hints and gestures” should
not override the extraordinary rich work of Martin Barker.
Big Name B: With Thanks to and in
Memory of Martin Barker
Jonathan Gray (University of
Wisconsin – Madison)
The first
academic conference at which I ever presented was the Media, Communication, and
Cultural Studies Association (MeCCSA) Conference in London, 2002. I was two
years into my PhD and ready to share some thoughts, findings, and ideas. But my
talk wasn’t till the last day, and I’d been warned this meant nobody would
come: they’d all be on a train home. So I realized that receptions were likely
my only place to make any kind of intellectual contact. Working up the
confidence and gumption to introduce myself to Big Name A whose work I admired
took the whole first half of the event, as I stood nervously eating crudités.
Then I went and talked to him and he was a monumental jerk: condescending and
rude, he seemed angry that I liked his work, disdainful that he needed to stoop
so low as to talk to me. I retreated, shell-shocked, and decided I should maybe
head home. As I shuffled off ignominiously to the door, though, I saw a man
standing with no interlocutor. His name tag grabbed my attention since I loved
his work. Big Name B was Martin Barker. Figuring that BN-A had already done the
damage, and what worse could BN-B pour on, I thought I’d give this a second
shot. Ten minutes later we were still talking. Barker was lovely. Gracious in
receiving my compliments, yes, but quick to pivot to ask me about my work, and
then enthusiastic and generous in discussing it. He challenged some of my
assumptions and recommended some remedial reading, but all so constructively.
In a room in which I didn’t matter to almost everyone, he made it clear that my
ideas did matter to him. Later on he encouraged me to send him some of my work,
which I did, fully expecting no response, and feeling apologetic for doing so
(surely he was just being nice, and now here I was calling his bluff?) … and
shortly got a long response back with incredibly thoughtful comments. Barker
was probably the first person who wasn’t one of my own professors to express
interest in my ideas, to communicate they might be important and valuable, and
to encourage me to move onwards.
I’ve held
that story privately for two decades, since egregiously Barker and his work
weren’t more widely known. And then he passed away, and all of a sudden,
Twitter and Facebook came alive with remembrances from so many others echoing my
story. Except it was their story too, clearly, of Barker being enthusiastic and
encouraging at an early age, generous and constructive, supportive and
inspirational. And so although I share “my” story, I am now happy to know that
it is a shared experience that many of us had, because Martin Barker really
cared about ideas, not the position or name on their name tag.
I’ve also
come to realize how appropriate this is given his scholarship. Barker wrote
important work about comics, but the work I knew best was about film audiences.
What was especially exciting and important about it was that he regularly
talked to the audiences before the film was released, or at least in its early
days. This may strike some as profoundly odd: surely, one might think, an
audience has to be created in the act of consumption. How can one study
“reception” or audience “reactions” to something that “doesn’t [yet] exist.”
Barker sagely realized, though, that so much of the work of interpretation
happens before we interact with a text, at the levels of anticipation,
expectation, and framing. Thus his superb book with Kate Brooks, Knowing
Audiences: Judge Dredd, Its Friends, Fans, and Foes (Luton: University of
Luton Press, 1998), reports back on audience research conducted with people who
were anticipating the Stallone Judge Dredd. Barker and Brooks posit that
we all come to films with/in our own SPACE (Site for the Production of Active
Cinematic Experience), our own orientation, and they insist that audience
reception should begin with a consideration of these, not with the naïve
assumption that audiences arrive as blank slates. Then, with Jane Arthurs and
Ramaswami Harindrinath, The Crash Controversy: Censorship Campaigns and Film
Reception (London: Wallflower Press, 2001), he tracked how the censorship
campaign surrounding David Cronenberg’s film Crash was so overpowering
in the UK that it framed the film, trapping it within tight interpretive bonds,
for all audiences (even those who found the campaign odious). More ambitiously,
he then worked towards a large and multinational reception project examining
reception of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, where anticipation was once
more a key (but by no means) the only object of analysis. So when I say it’s
only appropriate that Martin Barker cared so much about helping young scholars,
it’s because his work announced his realization that beginnings matter, that trajectories
can be established from the very outset. He knew this of media, and he ensured
that he cared about it with people studying media.
It saddens
me to know we’re now without Barker. My last email from him came about two
years ago, out of the blue, with pages worth of comments and questions about my
most recent project. He never gave up being a mentor, yet never talked to me as
though I was a mentee, just a colleague, peer, and equal who was working on
something. May we all learn something from him. Be, or seek to be, Big Name B.
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