Now's an opportune and wonderfully promising time, a time of gathering energy, in the academic study of comics and cartooning. As evidence, consider recent developments such as the launch of the journals Mechademia (from U of Minnesota Press, starting in 2006), European Comic Art (Liverpool University Press, 2008) and Studies in Comics (forthcoming from Intellect, 2010).
Consider too the outpouring of book-length studies of comics from academic presses. Most particularly, the University Press of Mississippi (full disclosure: my publisher) has published a long and varied list in comics studies, including recent titles such as Mark McKinney et al.'s History and Politics in French-Language Comics and Graphic Novels (2008) and Natsu Onoda Power's God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-World War II Manga (2009) and forthcoming titles such Jean-Paul Gabilliet's Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books (translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen) and José Alaniz's Komiks: Comic Art in Russia.
In addition, Yale University Press has produced a number of books in or relating to comics studies, such as Todd Hignite's In the Studio: Visits with Contemporary Cartoonists (2007) and the more purely academic Writing and the Image Today (2008), edited by Jan Baetens and Ari J. Blatt (Number 114 of the series Yale French Studies). Also, several academic journals have devoted symposia or special issues to comics and visual narrative, among them American Periodicals, English Language Notes, Modern Fiction Studies, PS: Political Science and Politics, and SCAN: Journal of Media Arts Culture.
Finally -- and this will be especially poignant for those who, like me, work in English Studies or other fields of Literature -- consider the recently-approved petition to launch an MLA (Modern Language Association) discussion group for Comics & Graphic Narratives. This effort, the culmination of a growing trend in comics scholarship at the MLA, has been spearheaded by Hillary Chute of Harvard and will lead to the organization of said discussion group at the 2010 MLA convention (27-30 December, Philadelphia) followed by a first set of programming in 2011 (January 2011, Los Angeles). From my POV this marks a watershed. Equally encouraging is the MLA's forthcoming Approaches to Teaching the Graphic Novel, edited by Stephen Tabachnick, among many signs of the accelerating interest in teaching comics at colleges and universities.
But: all this does not mean that we can expect a sudden avalanche of comics studies that will carry off all opposition, smash through all institutional inertia, and lead summarily, magically, to the legitimization and entrenchment of the field within academia.
From my perspective, what we're now seeing are the hard-won dividends of more than fifteen years of accumulating work in the field, dividends that are now being consolidated and built upon in a hopeful but decentered way. Field development from this point forward will not be automatic or easy; serious work remains to bring this field to self-awareness, self-sustainability, and, most importantly, academic integrity, by which I mean higher standards and an earned confidence.
I hope to contribute to the dialogue that such field development will require. In that spirit, I offer the following statement, which was written especially for academics. BTW, I'm not presuming here that academia is the only legitimate and productive source of comics scholarship (the history of the field clearly shows us otherwise), or that academic research is in every instance better or more reliable than non-academic work. I don't intend to dis independent scholars and fan-scholars. I'm a fan myself, and expect always to be one. But academics have professional needs and priorities that are peculiar to the profession, and it's my belief that comics studies in the academy must grapple more deliberately with those needs and priorities. Frankly, I think we're going to have separate out our fandom connections from what we need and what we hope to accomplish as academics.
I drafted the following for a specific occasion, the "Comics Studies Summit" held at the 2008 San Diego Comic-Con/Comic Art Conference. In preparation for the summit, organizer Peter Coogan pitched a series of questions at participants, and what follows grew out of my responses. I have since taken some of these ideas, and some of this prose, as a springboard for an article on comics studies and interdisciplinarity that will appear in Transatlantica's forthcoming special issue on North American comics and comics scholarship (due out this fall).
The State of Comics Studies
Q: What is the state of comics studies? Is
it a field? What institutions does a field have, and what institutions do
we have or lack?
Comics studies
constitutes a nascent field.
At this point one
might expect and hope that the field would be more than “nascent” – that the
field would deserve to be called something other than embryonic. After all,
much work has been done, horizons for future work have begun to take shape, and
the broader cultural reception of comics at present is encouraging, insofar as
people are now used to taking comics seriously as an object of appreciation and
study. The outlook is promising. However, three factors make it hard to speak
of the field as anything other than nascent:
1. Comics studies lacks a secure institutional footing. At
present the field is the sum total of its people rather than a field sustained
and supported by healthy institutions with prospects for long, independent
life. What I mean by this is that the institutions we have, for the most part,
are closely tied to their founders, that is, to the individuals who started
them and who still keep them going. Rather than institutions, these are personal projects, reliant on the energy of the persons involved and in danger of
disappearing when those persons move on. The obvious exceptions to this are two:
first, the long-lived Comic Art & Comics area of the Popular Culture Association, and,
second, ostensibly, the comics studies concentration at the University of Florida, comprised of UF’s graduate degree track in Comics and Visual Rhetoric and the online journal
ImageTexT. These are institutions
that seem to stand a good chance of outlasting the current generation and serving as anchors for future
work.
In contrast to
these, most institutional resources in comics studies are so closely tied to
the individuals or small groups that founded them that we cannot be sure they
will continue in perpetuity. This includes such resources as the
Comic Arts Conference, the International Comic Arts Forum, and the International Journal of Comic Art. All
of these have the potential to survive, but to guarantee their survival more
people will have to develop vested interests in them. This means that the official work
of organizing and producing them will have to be more widely shared. Bylaws, processes
of recruitment, and editorial procedures need to be formalized and publicized,
and up-and-coming comics scholars need to be assured that service to these
institutions will count as a means of professional development. Such service
needs to be formalized so as to render it recognizable and legitimate in the
larger circles of academia. (Full disclosure: I work for the International Comic Arts Forum, but the views I'm expressing here are my own.)
An established academic field would be one in which there would be offices to fill and annual events to organize that would continue even if all the current officers and organizers were suddenly to retire. In other words, an established academic field would have its own institutional momentum.
2. Comics studies, from a disciplinary standpoint, is incoherent. A major obstacle to developing a firmer
institutional footing is that comics studies does not have a disciplinary
identity that is clear, cohesive, and self-contained. I’m not about to argue
that we need such an identity; rather, I’d say that comics studies cannot have such an identity, for two reasons: one, because the heterogeneous nature
of comics means that, in practice, comics study is at the intersection of various
disciplines (art, literature, communications, etc.); and, two, because comics’ multidisciplinary
nature represents, in principle, a challenge to the very idea of disciplinarity.
Comics studies flouts the assumption that disciplines can be discrete and self-contained;
in effect, the field defies the compartmentalizing of knowledge that occurs in
academe. Our field inevitably brings together various disciplines and methodologies.
It could be
argued that the same should be true for all academic disciplines. Already we lose
important opportunities for intellectual exchange by being divided into
departments of Literature, Communications Studies, etc., and already the need
for interdisciplinarity is a popular topic among scholars. The special challenge
faced by comics studies is that the field is emerging at a time when academic
disciplines and departments are already entrenched. In this context, there is
no institutional warrant for creating self-contained departments in comics
studies, because such departments would in effect reinvent the wheel, drawing
on tools and methods that are already being used in other departments and
programs. Bureaucratically, then, the ideal model for comics studies would seem
to be interdepartmental, that is, a setup that takes advantage of and
builds bridges between already-existing university departments.
Personally, I
find this an exciting prospect: an interdepartmental program that draws faculty
and courses from extant university departments, for example Communications
Studies, Art, Art History, Literature, Rhetoric, History, and so on. I’d rather
teach in such a context than in an exclusively “comics”-centered department. But
there’s an obstacle here: comics studies has not yet had, and desperately needs
to have, a concerted discussion (both in person and in writing) about the
challenges posed by multidisciplinarity. It’s not enough for us to practice a
“don’t bother me, I won’t bother you” approach to our differences. We need to discuss
frankly the crucial differences between our outlooks and methodologies; we need
to develop an intentional model of interdisciplinarity, one that
acknowledges, without merely surrendering to, the heterogeneity of the field.
Since
comics studies cannot be a narrowly circumscribed discipline in the traditional
sense, it has to make up for this lack of cohesion by being intentional about how it
accommodates and takes advantage of its multidisciplinary nature. So it’s time we held
dialogues about our differing disciplinary methods and expectations. There are crucial
differences between, say, an art historian studying the development of
caricature and a literary critic studying contemporary comic books under the
aegis of postmodernism. There are differences between a journalism scholar studying
the impact of political cartooning and a cultural studies scholar studying the
relationship between anime and manga. There are differences between those
studying comics as artists’ books and those studying comics as mass production.
These differences don’t mean that we cannot all belong to the same field, but
they do mean that we are sometimes talking at cross-purposes without realizing
it. If we are to bring together different disciplines, it would behoove us to
do this in a conscious way: by analyzing our differences, by forming discussion
groups or caucuses at conferences, and by undertaking collaborative projects
across disciplinary lines. Such intentional collaboration is, I believe, the
best way to achieve coherence in a field that, by nature, will never honestly
fit into one pigeonhole.
3. Comics studies spends too much energy
reinventing the wheel. Every year I
read conference paper proposals in the field, and, to be honest, one
thing I find dismaying is that so many of the proposals are written without
reference to the existing work on comics, as if comics studies were a
brand-new, unexplored field. It isn’t. A lot of groundwork has been laid, and
scholars in the field should acknowledge that. For example, too many proposals focus
exclusively on the formalism of McCloud, as set forth in Understanding Comics (published in 1993), without recourse to the
substantial work that preceded and that has followed McCloud. This has the effect of
making the work appear uninformed if not undisciplined. Also, too many projects
construct the field too narrowly, ignoring important and useful theoretical work
from “outside” comics studies or focusing exclusively on one genre of comics
without acknowledging that other genres exist. This makes the work seem,
basically, unserious.
Granted, part of
the appeal of comics study may be its relative newness, and freshness – but the
field is no longer a pipe dream; it’s an actual field, with a substantial
archive of research. There’s such a thing as needing to do a literature review
before embarking on study. There's such a thing as writing up to an audience versed in comics and comics studies and trying to take the discussion further. In short, we need to raise our standards.
Part of the
problem here may be a lack of concerted teaching and mentoring for
up-and-coming scholars in the field. Because of this lack, a lot of scholars
seem to be hunting around in the dark; we keep seeing the airing of
the same old topics and same disputes (a perennial complaint of many of those involved in listserv discussions of comics scholarship). Yes, these are not the "same old topics" to those newly entering the field; better teaching is needed to introduce and contextualize these topics and to help students get a sense of topsight, that is, an overview of the field and its foundational debates. To better support comics teaching, we need to address the aforementioned lack
of institutional footing for comics study. Stronger institutional support, in
the form of programs or concentrations in comics studies, would help increase
awareness of prior scholarship and encourage more disciplined work. So, all of
these problems are related.
Q: Where should comic studies be as a field
in five years?
I hesitate to prescribe
what the field “should” be doing in five years, but, in light of the above, I’d
like to see the following:
- an
explicit commitment to interdisciplinarity in the field, i.e., a rigorous,
self-aware pluralism.
- a
firming-up of existing institutions so that they can outlast the current
generation (this might include the adoption of bylaws, the opening up of
organizations to more voices, and greater participation in peer review).
- an
increase in the number of refereed professional forums through which rigorous
peer review can be offered.
- the
development of academic programs, both majors and minors, in comics studies
(perhaps through the interdepartmental model described above, perhaps through other avenues).
What would probably go a long way toward enabling the above is the formation of a Comics Studies association that could lend its imprimatur to existing resources, establish a coherent Web presence, sponsor publications, and present an annual or biennial conference of the highest standard. Such an association, I firmly believe, would need to be primarily academic in nature, independent of fandom, and committed to the principle of peer review, and would probably need to be supported by members’ dues. Some people might criticize such a project as elitist, but I believe its time has come.
So, by way of conclusion, I would like to take part in serious, sustained, practical discussion about the formation of a Comics Studies association: What purposes would it serve? What services or advantages could it offer its members? How could it help to raise scholarly standards in the field? I believe that public discussion of these questions, in the various forums for comics studies (both online and in person), is an important next step for our field to take.
I welcome critical responses to the above!
Hear, hear!
I agree with each of your proposals there, Charles. In particular, I think it's time for that stronger commitment to peer review. That step would probably force us to be accountable to our own interdisciplinarity (and our colleagues') in a way that we often aren't nowadays.
It's also true that there ought to be programs in comics studies. That may be harder to pull off, just because there don't tend to be multiple people working on comics at the same institution, but maybe we'll get lucky one of these days.
Posted by: Isaac | September 10, 2009 at 05:52 AM
Concerning your second point: I always feel somewhat frustrated when I tell people my field of research is comics, and they nod approvingly, not really knowing what it means... I feel it is as stupid to say that someone's field is "comics" as to say it is "literature". It's too much vast a genre for that. But then, if you tell people "I'm working on American silent comics in the 20th century", they're even more lost...
Posted by: Côme Martin | September 10, 2009 at 05:53 AM
Isaac, you raise a good, point, that "there don't tend to be multiple people working on comics at the same institution." Yes, that's true, and a real impediment to getting up a head of steam in the field. Teaching, I believe, is at the core of most of the issues I raised, and we need a critical mass of teachers, therefore of courses and programs, to make a difference over the long haul.
The fact that few institutions will support multiple scholars specializing in comics probably helps account for the importance we place on networking beyond our local institutions, and for the enthusiasm that still greets new comics conferences and other networking opportunities (and of course Net discussions like this one, which take us beyond our local and regional limits). Still, we need more of the embodied, day-to-day stuff, more regular contact with students and advisees, to make the real difference.
One thing that might help is thinking interdepartmentally, that is, thinking of people we might work with who are at our institutions but outside of our departments and disciplines and therefore outside of our usual routine contacts (I've noticed that each department at my university is a sort of ecosystem and culture unto itself, and that it's much harder to forge connections with faculty outside of that culture). The only warrant for comics studies programs (majors, minors, concentrations) that I can see working at most universities is interdepartmental, in much the same way that transdisciplinary fields like medieval studies sometimes lead to interdepartmental majors: English meets History meets Philosophy meets Art History, etc.
Posted by: CharlesWHatfield | September 10, 2009 at 08:10 AM
Côme, I hear what you're saying. To me it's frustrating that a certain narrow conception of comics (very often, American periodical comic books and their GN offspring) is so dominant that people don't even acknowledge the existence of other comics genres and other, alternate, genealogies of the comics form. This is as true of people within comics studies as it is of curious outsiders.
This is what I had in mind when I said, "too many projects construct the field too narrowly, ignoring important and useful theoretical work from 'outside' comics studies or focusing exclusively on one genre of comics without acknowledging that other genres exist." I have seen so many conference paper abstracts that treat American comic books as a synecdoche for ALL comics, without even acknowledging that there might be a larger field (larger in terms of both cultural geography, publishing format, and genre); it's frustrating.
Of course the problem is slightly different "from the outside," that is, when trying to explain one's work to someone who has no familiarity with comics studies of any kind. Then you're left trying to infer the listener's understanding of what "comics" means before you can even begin to explain your specialization in, say, wordless comics.
It is true that comics and comics studies are vast and diverse fields. I would like to think that we can devise ways of bringing the many different approaches into dialogue, so that we can support one another without unthinkingly collapsing everyone's work into the same generic conception. I would say that we have to bring up and discuss our differences (in discipline, methodology, purpose) before we can get anywhere useful as a field
Posted by: CharlesWHatfield | September 10, 2009 at 08:19 AM
Charles, isn't it a good idea to limit the scope of one's paper, class, etc? Are you arguing that a paper that (for example) examines misogyny in Frank Miller's work needs to also mention the same in Osamu Tezuka's work? That you can't teach a class about the comic book artform without mentioning Herge and other European artists?
Posted by: Phil Rippke | September 10, 2009 at 09:37 AM
As a (for the most part) outsider to the world of academia, I'm certainly no expert on such things, but I think the points you outline here, if achieved, would certainly further the cause of comics studies at colleges and universities. What I wonder though is, would this really forward the understanding and appreciation of comics as a whole. I guess what I fear is a bifurcation of comics discourse that would yield essentially what we have today in film: writings on "film studies" that are (shall we say, to be kind) often less than opaque and written by, intended for, and read solely by other academics--and mass market film reviews that are usually just cursory summaries. Is a comics discourse that excludes say, Gary Groth, or Bill Blackbeard what one should be shooting for? Certainly, as you say, academics have their own particular concerns, but I wonder if in "circling the wagons" to address those you're not moving toward a vision of comics studies that's by its nature completely insular. Of course, that may not be something that's viewed as a problem. I certainly don't get the impression that academics in the humanities are overly-concerned that they produce and consume work solely for one another. (There's an excellent essay by Joseph Witek in a recent IJOCA.)
Posted by: Ben Towle | September 10, 2009 at 10:41 AM
That's:
There's an excellent essay by Joseph Witek in a recent IJOCA that addresses some of these issues.)
Posted by: Ben Towle | September 10, 2009 at 10:43 AM
Phil, I agree that limiting the scope of one's work is important, even necessary. But, to take your example, examining misogyny in Miller's work with or without addressing the same issue in Tezuka's, I have seen many studies or abstracts that are not even capable of acknowledging that comics outside of Miller's comic book/graphic novel tradition exist.
A case could be made that misogyny in Miller reveals something deeply entrenched and troubling about the American comic book subculture. But would we want to tacitly send the signal that this same "something" is identically present in comics all around the world, without so much as acknowledging that differences in the treatment of gender and sex (and differences in audiences and form) obtain among the different comics cultures of the world?
When people automatically assume that "comics" means "the kind of comics I am used to reading" or "the kind of comics I grew up with," we are in danger of a serious and damaging provincialism. The point is not that all studies should cover all things -- heavens forfend! -- but that scholars should become more adept at positioning their work vis-a-vis the larger project of comics studies.
I have no problem with carefully contextualized studies of particular areas; I'm trying to create such a study in the Jack Kirby book I'm working on now. That book is all about the kinds of comics books I grew up with. But setting one's sights in such a specific way is not the same as assuming that "comics studies" equals "comic book studies" (a presumption I've seen in play over and over).
Posted by: CharlesWHatfield | September 10, 2009 at 10:56 AM
As a follow-up to Phil, I want to say that I think placing comics within larger cultural and theoretical contexts makes them more interesting and makes our scholarship more urgent. Again to use the example of Miller, knowing Miller's invocations of European and Japanese cartoonists, his indebtedness to film noir, his worship of crime fiction, his participation in debates regarding "free speech" versus "censorship," his often contentious (though dependent) relationships with both the mainstream comic book industry and the film industry, and the cachet that his name currently has with people outside the comics industry are all important things for understanding how, e.g., Miller frames sex, sexuality, and gender in his comics. To represent these issues well, we would probably have to have recourse to criticism regarding European BD and Japanese manga, among other topics. At the least, we would have to acknowledge Miller's invocation of non-US comics within a US publishing context, and how this invocation helped cement Miller's auteur status (cf. Ronin). We would also have to acknowledge Miller's opinions on the high/low culture debates within comics, his criticism of or resistance to the gentrification or consecration of comics "as literature," and his very black-and-white, Manichean reading of the anti-comics campaigns of the 1950s, which of course brings us to larger debates about the role and alleged effects of mass culture in that period. I think an examination of misogyny in Miller would be an excellent research topic, but the research would certainly have to go further than the most readily available fan resources re: Miller, at least by way of introduction, contextualization, and literature review.
And, no, I don't think one ought to teach a class on American comic books without at least referencing, by way of introduction, that there are other ways of doing comics, other formats, other genres, other reading cultures. At the least, I think American comic books ought to be contextualized in terms of the rest of the comics world, even if it's only briefly in the course of an introductory lecture or presentation. I believe the specificity of the comic book medium is better illustrated by comparative/contrastive invocation of other forms of comics.
This incidentally is a question I struggle with routinely in teaching my annual "Comics & Graphic Novels" class, as I try, first, to sketch out the contours of the larger world of comics, then to bring the course down to a level of specificity and focus that actually makes it manageable. As a result of this struggle, my class contains what may seem like some odd detours, but I'm in favor of that if it helps students frame what they're doing historically and culturally.
Posted by: CharlesWHatfield | September 10, 2009 at 12:56 PM
Ben, thanks for your question, which I think is an excellent one, one that cuts right to the heart of what I'm talking about. In fact it's a question Craig and I have often discussed, and will probably keep on discussing. :)
You asked,
"Is a comics discourse that excludes say, Gary Groth, or Bill Blackbeard what one should be shooting for?"
Emphatically not, but I don't think that's the issue here. I think the issue is that academics studying comics have to frame their research questions, adopt their methodologies, and present their findings in terms that are comprehensible to other academics and held up to peer review. That doesn't mean that they have to fall into the trap of insularity.
FORGIVE ME WHILE I GO ON A BIT HERE:
As I've said, I would never claim that critical discourse about comics must always be academic in nature, or that non-academic work has had no value.
Case in point: The Comics Journal has changed my life. Seriously. I doubt I would be doing the work I do today without the singular example of TCJ to goad me toward looking more closely, thinking more critically, and asking more important questions about comics. TCJ has had many academic contributors but is, by nature and by choice, not an academic publication. I wouldn't change that if I could. But TCJ does not deal routinely with the kind of things I needed to deal with when writing my book on alternative comics, nor the kinds of things that concern me now as an academic.
Another case in point: Blackbeard's lifelong work as archivist and historian is hugely important, among the most important scholarly projects ever in American comics studies. Without Blackbeard's archiving of comic strips, for example, our access to and understanding of vintage strips would be much, much poorer. Blackbeard's collection is a great gift to our field, the kind of gift without which it might be difficult to say that we have a field. Scholars are now making use of what Blackbeard preserved in order to ask kinds of research questions Blackbeard has never asked. Which is exactly what such resources are for.
But the major questions facing academics who want to make comics study an acknowledged, professionally significant part of their work include:
How can I present my work in such a way that disinterested academics will find value and inspiration in it?
How can I go about understanding the ways comics are connected to larger cultural, historical, artistic, and theoretical concerns?
How can I be sure that the things I've read and heard repeated ad infinitum in fan lore are actually accurate? How can I use academic and institutional resources to corroborate and enrich my work, to move beyond lore to genuine historiography? (An example of this challenge is the study of the anti-comics campaign of the 1950s, study that has been hampered in American fan discourse by a shroud of misinformation, half-truths, distortions, and defensive posturing.)
How can I gain a warrant for teaching this material on a regular basis, so as to spread knowledge about comics?
I have to say that, as an academic, I've read my share of turgid, uncommunicative, downright impenetrable writing. I understand where those characterizations come from. But I have difficulty accepting the idea that academic discourse that cleaves to academic standards must by its nature be "completely insular."
Knowledge production sure as hell isn't limited to academia, but academics do make knowledge according to what are supposed to be firm standards, particularly the standard of peer review. That's still lacking in academic comics study, and that lack is hampering the further growth and legitimization of the project. IMO comics scholars in academia need to face the fact that their primary audiences are fellow academics and students, and that this obliges them to go beyond fan resources and to make connections with diverse centers of knowledge.
BTW, any academic studying the American comics scene who does not follow what Groth and Blackbeard are doing and have done is guilty of not doing his/her homework. Academics have an obligation to pursue these non-academic sources of knowledge!
Posted by: CharlesWHatfield | September 10, 2009 at 01:27 PM
Charles has raised important issues in a characteristically thoughtful manner. I hope his piece circulates widely. I completely agree with his points about defining comics broadly, building on the relevant secondary literature, making connections across disciplines, and moving away from a fannish mentality.
He might have emphasized the vital contributions that non-US scholars have made, and the far-from-completed task of translating key works from French (etc.) into English. A more thorough-going process of internationalization will help to create and sustain the kind of serious-minded comics scholarship that Charles is calling for in this post.
As Charles knows, I'm partial to the mid-century New York Intellectuals and the tradition of freelance cultural criticism. I realize that Charles agrees that folks like Groth and Seldes are worth reading, but his piece doesn't make it sufficiently clear that non-academics have a vital contribution to make to comics studies. That said, he's right that academics have an obligation to be taken seriously by other academics. Comics studies should not be a safe harbor for folks who can't get published in refereed journals. I like writing for the Comics Journal, but I don't put those reviews on my vitae.
For self-interested reasons I'm curious how 'A Comics Studies Reader' fits into his analysis - is it sufficiently professional in its approach? Would "disinterested" scholars find it credible? Are there key debates and approaches that we left out? At some point there will hopefully be a second edition, and Jeet and I will need to give some serious thought to the kinds of issues that Charles has flagged here.
Posted by: Kent | September 10, 2009 at 02:13 PM
Kent, thanks so much for your considered response.
First off, I would say that "A Comics Studies Reader" is a fine book and a marvelous classroom text. It is thoroughly professional in approach, with an eye toward facilitating teaching. It introduces key texts and debates in several different but complementary areas. Its introduction is excellent, a de facto roadmap to major questions in the field. It takes a rounded, informed, multidisciplinary view of comics, but with admirable focus, conciseness, and editorial finesse. In short, I think it sets a high standard.
It also happens to be an excellent companion to your and Jeet's earlier "Arguing Comics," which is, as I see it, essentially an academic compilation of mostly non-academic work that predates the rise of Cultural Studies. What makes AC academic is its provenance and its way of focusing the issues. However, it is not "exclusively" academic, and could provide readers outside of the academy with a helpful sense of context.
You said,
"I realize that Charles agrees that folks like Groth and Seldes are worth reading, but his piece doesn't make it sufficiently clear that non-academics have a vital contribution to make to comics studies."
I thought I'd made that clear, but in hindsight I believe the point is obscured by the fact that my post is, essentially, a polemical attempt at intervening in academic discussion. I did write the piece for an academic audience, and it was (and is) my intention to elicit commentary specifically from academics. In that sense the piece is unlike most of my TB posts.
I'm not trying to play the Status Game here vis-a-vis freelance intellectuals and cultural critics, and I emphatically would not make the case that academic contributions to comics studies are the only important ones. I believe good critical writing should be valued wherever it comes from; I also believe that academics have (though they have often neglected this) an obligation to seek clarity and directness in communication. Academia is a moving, shifting target, not monolithic in style or outlook, and I am one of those academics who would like to see fewer examples of imitative theorizing and obscurantism, more attention to clear, forthright, and forceful writing, and a greater effort to gloss specialized concepts for the benefit of non-academic readers (to say nothing of our students!).
But I do think that, as you say, "academics have an obligation to be taken seriously by other academics." I contend that academic comics study has a way to go in that regard. The bottom line is that cultural criticism and scholarship, whether academically affiliated or not, need to achieve escape velocity from fandom and need to cleave to the practice of peer review and honest self-examination. That is, if comics studies is to be taken seriously as a scholarly endeavor.
Posted by: CharlesWHatfield | September 10, 2009 at 11:51 PM
Charles,
First of all, your manifesto is valuable! Thank you for posting it. You can see that it is already generating good dialogue, both here and on the Comix List. I drafted these remarks yesterday, so they are not fully conversant with the ensuing discussion in the comments, but I still wanted to post my initial response.
There is no question that the field of comics studies is maturing significantly right now (though North America lags, as noted by all those comix list discussants who are pushing for more translations, behind other nations [esp. Belgium and France] in the synthetic use of complex theoretical work in conversation with comic texts. My dormant French is getting a good workout now that I am highly motivated to read European scholarly articles on BD/comics theory etc. that have not been translated into English.). As you mention, the critical mass of specialized journals, dedicated comics conferences, panels at more general academic conferences, book publications, etc. has risen exponentially, and is a very heartening sign for those of us who occupy this scholarly niche.
At the same time, our process of vetting is erratic; to truly profess that we are participating in peer-reviewed, academically credible scholarship, it would probably help to begin consolidating our disparate methodologies, foci, assumptions about which scholarly conversations a given researcher is entering, and to which s/he is responding, etc. I believe it was Bucky Carter who mentioned at a recent comics conference that the very "hotness" of this field means that the flood of writing we can expect in the next few years might include as many examples of limited, isolated (i.e. uninformed) attempts at contributing to the field as successful, theoretically grounded, and "serious" (your term, Charles) pieces. Thus, your call for a regulating body (ack, bad term) such as an overarching (international, I'd hope) Comics Studies Association, seems not only like a good idea, but a necessity.
On the issue of "disciplinarity," I am wondering why you are, on the one hand, acknowledging that the inherent nature of the field is interdisciplinary but, on the other hand, using single discipline programs as your comparative. To me, it is clear that comics studies follows in the tradition of programs like Asian Studies, Gender Studies, American Studies, etc. I do not agree that there can be no "disciplinary identity" for such programs. These programs are our ancestors or closest parallels, if you will, and they have fairly well-defined parameters, approaches, philosophies. That's not to say that implementing such programs is unproblematic. We already know, for example, that our colleagues who hold dual appointments often feel half-recognized by both their affiliations, rather than seen as a practitioner of complex, connective work. Those whose appointment is actually in the interdisciplinary program often find themselves very isolated as a member of a one-three member "program" without clear "departmental" status.
Obviously, and as you note, Charles, the very notion of disciplines has been fraught for some time now. Isn't it time for us to acknowledge the parochial nature of such divisions (especially in the social sciences and humanities)? I think it IS possible to have a cohesive set of precepts for multidisciplinary programs; these precepts would be built on the very intersectionality, debate and continual reshaping which marks their nature.
Some initial thoughts in response to your stimulating post. I'll continue to watch the discussion unfold.
Posted by: Adrielle Mitchell | September 11, 2009 at 12:17 PM
I was having a discussion about comics and academia a few days ago with people at work. Some were incredulous about how I had I written papers on comics for classes. (they were also amazed that i went to graduate school to study popular culture). And that was back in the late 80s and early 90s. I had hoped people had gotten to the point where, even in the real world, studying things like comics and film wasn't shocking.
I too am glad to see the field maturing, said as someone who has presented papers on comics both for academic conferences and for Pete and Randy's CAC at San Diego.
Posted by: twitter.com/odessasteps | September 11, 2009 at 03:33 PM
Adrielle, thank you very much for this stimulating and from my POV very helpful response! In particular, your contributions re: multidisciplinarity and how to implement interdepartmental programs are thought-provoking and IMO important. I agree with you that interdisciplinary programs such as (I take these examples from my own school, CSU Northridge) Women's and Gender Studies, Queer Studies, American Indian Studies, and Asian-American Studies are the best model here.
I myself tend to invoke the Medieval Studies program at my alma mater, UConn, to explain the point: that program, as it says on its webpage (http://www.medievalstudies.uconn.edu/ is the URL), works as follows:
>> The Departments of Art and Art History, English, History, Modern and Classical Languages, Music, and Philosophy cooperate in the program. Students take courses in three cooperating departments, with a major emphasis in one department or departmental area.<<
I believe this kind of model would work best for comics studies in most cases (depending on the institution, of course) because it would allow for truly interdisciplinary study while avoiding the costly and needless reproduction of bureaucratic structures and services already in place.
I fully agree with your critique of the notion of disciplines. My forthcoming article in Transatlantica, which is titled "Indiscipline, or, The Condition of Comics Studies," is devoted to this very question. I look forward to that coming out and I hope you and I will continue dialoging after you've had a chance to read it.
In closing, you said, "I think it IS possible to have a cohesive set of precepts for multidisciplinary programs; these precepts would be built on the very intersectionality, debate and continual reshaping which marks their nature," and I want to underline that passage with fluorescent highlighter! The nature of that intersectionality is exactly what I think we need to be debating and articulating, going forward.
Posted by: CharlesWHatfield | September 11, 2009 at 03:34 PM
I'm re-posting a message I sent to the comics scholars listserv at Charles' request....
The question posed was, "what is comics studies: what is its locus and focus," and the questioner asked and reiterated the question a bit more forcefully than seemed productive...This was my response... (and it does have some indirect bearing on the conversation so far here).
Comics is a mixed media and is, by its nature, a mixed discipline...
Comics as “art” (visual)
Comics as narrative
Comics as literature
Comics as “culture” (often popular or mass culture)
Comics as history
Comics as communication
Comics as media
Comics as rhetoric
Etc. etc.
When there are enough of us and enough interest institutionally, it becomes possible to cull all of these things (and more) together to construct independent departments, programs, (more) journals, etc. As it is, comics’ multidisciplinarity (many loci/foci, etc.) is a strength...since it allows comics to occupy many places intellectually and institutionally. Therefore comics studies can exist without having an official “home.” Maybe it would be preferable to have such a home, but pigeonholing one (or two) locus and focus seems counterproductive given the current academic and economic environment. At the moment, I can write about and study comics because its just a slice of my professional life...If it were my sole focus, I have little doubt I wouldn’t have a job.
Comics studies is the study of comics...This can be done in many ways (and is)--and, of course, the definition of “comics” is itself perpetually up for debate, widening the field even more....But so what? Literary studies is the study of literature (if many if not all of the above ways)...and we still don’t know what “literature” is either. While an interesting conversation to have, not having a defined answer hasn’t exactly killed the discipline.
Posted by: Eric Berlatsky | September 11, 2009 at 05:26 PM
Let me add my proverbial two cents to these thoughtful responses to Charles' post.
First, I don't agree with Ben’s characterization of film studies as a field polarized between consumer-guide newspaper reviews and impenetrable academic articles. There's a middle ground--what David Bordwell calls essayistic criticism--represented by the articles in, for example, FILM COMMENT, and by the longer essays by Jonathan Rosenbaum and J. Hoberman (both of whom are in the tradition of the freelance intellectuals Kent mentions). By presenting sophisticated ideas about film in non-academic venues like the VILLAGE VOICE, writers like Hoberman and Rosenbaum provide an invaluable service. I love essayistic criticism like this.
I see Groth, Seldes and Blackbeard as comics' version of essayistic critics. (I should mention that in his recent "Origins of the Comics Journal" post on COMICS COMICS, Jeet Heer recently downplayed the influence of public intellectuals like Dwight MacDonald on Groth. I'm still mulling that over.) Ben wonders if we should aspire to an academic comics discourse that "excludes" people like Groth, but I wonder if the exclusion isnt more the other way around. In my own TRANSATLANTICA essay (cough, cough, plug, cough), I quote an exchange between Groth and Ana Merino from THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COMIC ART:
Groth: Academia doesn't cultivate unique voices that have distinctive perceptions of the work they scrutinize: they more and more specialize in value neutral "analysis," wholly removed from qualitative distinctions. Instead of learning the virtues a critic believes a work possesses, you know how he applied or imposed certain theories.
Merino: Sometimes there is an enjoyment for the art per se. And you don’t have to focus on, say, if it is good or bad.
Groth: It's crucial. That's crucial.
Merino: No it's not.
Groth: Well, that is the perfect academic point of view.
Merino: In the moment you choose to work about something, there is a value. It is why you choose to work on that. If it wasn't of any value you will not choose it.
Groth: Sorry, your underlying presupposition is fallacious. The academy often analyzes work of no evident value whatsoever.
How is Groth defining the academy here? And who’s excluding who?
One of the major differences I see between essayistic and academic comics criticism is scope. Academic criticism aspires to get beyond arguments over qualitative distinctions--which can be valuable, but are emphatically NOT the only approach a critic can take--to place a work in all the other different contexts of meaning (narrative, visual, rhetorical, ideological, etc.) that Eric mentions, and many more.(And yep, this might mean jumping over the Atlantic and citing Jordi Bernet’s TORPEDO series in an academic article on Frank Miller and misogyny.) There's a clear difference of scope between Groth's essays for the JOURNAL and, say, David Kunzle's Topffer book, and that's what we're debating here: what kind of academic climate should we create so that we end up with a hundred or a thousand books like Kunzle's?
Posted by: Craig Fischer | September 11, 2009 at 06:23 PM
Eric, I agree with your point that "comics’ multidisciplinarity...is a strength...since it allows comics to occupy many places intellectually and institutionally. Therefore comics studies can exist without having an official 'home.'"
Of course the lack of an official home could also be construed as a weakness, and does pose organizational challenges. I think the situation we're in right now entails thinking about ways to make that putative weakness into an actual strength.
What we're going to need is an intentional model of interdisciplinarity, what Adrielle (above) calls "a cohesive set of precepts" for multidisciplinary work.
I'd like to see the formation of an interdisciplinary and international professional association that includes caucuses or discussion groups drawn up on disciplinary lines as well as annual events (e.g., symposia) of an explicitly interdisciplinary nature, focused on common topics. Conferences could be organized so as to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration, while also allowing disciplinary caucuses to focus on issues of specific disciplinary concern.
Posted by: CharlesWHatfield | September 11, 2009 at 10:19 PM
Thanks, Craig! I appreciate your comments re: essayistic criticism and your positing of a "middle ground" that brings together academics and (Kent's phrase) freelance intellectuals. I agree: clear, lucid, sophisticated criticism in non-academic (or non-exclusive) venues can be enormously valuable, and of course deeply pleasurable to read and discuss. And I'm glad to have you counter Ben's characterization of contemporary film studies.
My point all along has been, not to dismiss or place a derogatory asterisk next to non-academic work, but to insist that there are professional needs that academics have that must be dealt with by academics for academics: e.g., to develop academic programs in comics studies; to mentor students and introduce them to the field; to leverage institutional resources, such as funding and library resources; to set up networks for the purpose of peer review; to establish refereed forums, such as journals and conferences, that will be recognized and supported academically; to open up opportunities for professional service that will be duly acknowledged and rewarded academically; to communicate the nature and importance of comics studies across academia; etc.
This has nothing to do with ruling out of court the work of freelance, or unaffiliated, or non-academic, intellectuals. It has to do with a basic rhetorical understanding: that academics, as Kent says, have an obligation to be taken seriously by other academics. This has implications for how, where, and under what circumstances academic work is to be presented, and how academics are to venture into that "middle ground."
Speaking personally, I'd call myself an academic, a fan, and an occasional would-be essayistic critic (heh), or freelancer in any case, and I see all these roles as distinct yet complementary. That's not to say that these roles do not overlap in my experience, or that I don't use things I've learned in one sphere to help me in another; but I believe that the work I'm doing academically needs to cleave to academic standards and be seen in academic venues.
BTW, I think your point about the difference in scope between essayistic and academic criticism is right on. Academic work may and sometimes must proceed on other terms. Obviously, I disagree with Groth's contention that "academia doesn't cultivate unique voices that have distinctive perceptions of the work they scrutinize"; I think that line reflects a misunderstanding of the nature and potential of "theory" and paints too mechanistic a picture of academia.
Posted by: CharlesWHatfield | September 11, 2009 at 10:48 PM
Hi Charles,
Very interesting ideas on your post about comics studies and scholarship. Thanks a lot for having mentioned European Comic Art (ECA)!
I agree with much of what you say in your post. One group that you seem to have overlooked there is the International Bande Dessinée Society (http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/ibds/ is their address), headed by Laurence Grove. As you know, they've been around now for about twelve years, and have put on conferences (6 now, I think) every two years. The conference is growing in size (ran parallel sessions for the first time this year) and does not focus exclusively on French-language comics, although that remains its core. The group and its conference have done excellent work in mentoring some graduate students, mostly in the U.K., writing M.A. theses and Ph.D. dissertations on bande dessinée. The scholars who participate in it are publishing books and articles and/that maintain an ongoing scholarly discussion on comics. And they keep up with French-language scholarship on comics. The IBDS has a constitution and dues, and the journal ECA is now closely tied to it. The IBDS could at least partially serve as a model for the type of organization you're describing, and could perhaps also be affiliated, as a sister or member organization in a larger federation. Most of the core members of the IBDS are in university French depts. in the U.K., but some regular participants are in French depts. in the U.S. and elsewhere. And some work at universities but in other departments (e.g., art history). Others are independent scholars. It always includes invited cartoonists.
Best wishes,
Mark McKinney
Co-Editor of European Comic Art (www.eurocomicart.org)
Posted by: Mark McKinney | September 14, 2009 at 12:22 PM
Mark, thank you for the much-needed reminder regarding the IBDS! I'm sorry I overlooked it in my post, of course. Even sorrier that I have not yet had an opportunity to attend an IBDS conference (something I hope to change soon).
I may want to go back and add to the above an update re: IBDS and its relationship to the ECA journal. Certainly I'd like to talk to you more about the following, which I find very promising:
"The IBDS could at least partially serve as a model for the type of organization you're describing, and could perhaps also be affiliated, as a sister or member organization in a larger federation."
Yes, and yes. I'd love to see a North American comics studies association that could partner with IBDS in order to build international ties in our field. Thanks for the thought!
Posted by: CharlesWHatfield | September 14, 2009 at 03:06 PM
@Craig - I stand corrected about FILM COMMENT, which is (based on my hazy memories of writing a terrible undergrad film paper on BLADE RUNNER) certainly a "middle road" of film discourse. I should have chosen a discipline for my analogy that was more in my area of expertise (to the extent that I'm an "expert" at anything--a dubious proposition). I think that my comments are based largely on a (probably unrealistic) idealized thought that perhaps the developing world of comics academia might present an opportunity for a field of academic study that's not quite as insular as many. I'd not base an entire "who's excluding whom" on that one excerpted Groth quote, but I certainly think he's got a valid point: any form of analysis that can't, as a matter of course, make qualitative distinctions seems unnecessarily hamstrung. I guess, were I King of the World, what I'd want would be some comics studies version of practice research academics.
But, enough of this... I noted there's a new article posted to TB, so bring on the porn!
Posted by: Ben Towle | September 14, 2009 at 06:30 PM
Charles' further comments, and Mark's mention of the structure of the IBDS are forming a rather graphic shape in my mind: I'm having fun imagining how larger and smaller bodies of a global federation on comics could align in different configurations. There could be an annual international conference hosted by a different national federation every two years; annual conferences held by national or multi-national regions, and then, within each national conference, caucuses representing disciplines (though I'm mightily looking forward to your Transatlantica piece, Charles, and its critique of this very system). I picture a kind of Groensteenian non-contiguous linkage of components (national organizations substituted for comic panels in this analogy)which could be combined and re-combined as needed. Theme-focused, discipline-focused,theory-focused,form-focused, context-focused. . .
While this picture pleases me, I'm troubled by the local version of this work. Charles, you speak about forging connections with colleagues in other departments at our institutions. I, too, have begun plugging for this at my college, having had initial conversations with a)the Dean of Arts and Sciences, b) the Chair of the Art department, c) colleagues in History, Foreign Languages and Education. I am imagining (though very nebulously as yet) a minor in Comics Studies that could include courses in both the production and reception of the form. Literature courses, Art Studio AND Art History/Theory courses, History courses, Education courses, etc. The response has been generally positive (with the chair of the Art dept. particularly enthused), but reality is beginning to set in. Just because I (English dept member) am convinced that my colleagues in History, Anthropology, Sociology, and Philosophy could find much that recommends the form to them, the fact is that VERY few of these same colleagues have anything beyond a cursory exposure to comics. How the hell, beyond proselytizing even more than I/we do already, can these colleagues be induced to work with us to mount interdepartmental programs? Maybe at Northridge you have a number of colleagues outside the English dept. who seriously study comics. I can count on one hand (ok, maybe two) the number of colleagues at my institution who have even read one in the last five years. A few teach a single graphic narrative here and there (almost always from a content-only perspective).
Usually, interdepartmental programs (Women's and Gender, Medieval, Asian Studies, etc.) forge linkages among faculty who ALREADY employ similar theoretical frameworks, albeit limited to a single discipline prior to their conscious entry into multidisciplinary thinking). If we are trying to legitimize the study of comics qua comics (with its own formal properties, critical histories, theoretical questions, etc.) then wouldn't we need to engage only those colleagues who are immersed in such study in our interdepartmental project? It almost seems to demand that such a program recruit all (or nearly all) of its faculty members from OUTSIDE the institution, based on expertise. Which university could afford to do this?
Posted by: Adrielle Mitchell | September 14, 2009 at 07:41 PM
Adrielle, thanks once again for your thought-provoking commentary. I like your suggestions re: national organizations federating to create a larger international exchange. I particularly like the idea of an annual (or at least regular, i.e., biennial or triennial at the least) international event hosted by different national or multinational organizations on a rotating basis. I'm thinking about how the IAWIS (International Assoc. for Word and Image Studies) holds its international conference every three years but various other allied or related events take place more frequently.
But the most important issue raised in your comment, I think, is the question of how to build interdisciplinary comics studies degree programs on a local level. I agree that that's likely to be a very difficult task.
In my case, at CSU Northridge, I'm the only faculty member, to my knowledge, to teach courses in comics on an annual basis (English 333: Comics and Graphic Novels, a survey course I founded but that in theory other faculty could teach as well; I also teach other courses in which comics play an occasional part, and last spring I taught my first grad seminar in comics studies). However, there was a History class taught last year, I believe it was a senior-level proseminar, about the history of American comic books, taught by someone who I'm afraid I haven't met yet (I'm working on that). And I know faculty in Art and in Cinema and Television Arts who are interested in the subject, enough so to send students my way. :)
Also, the Head of the Japanese section of our Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures Dept. teaches courses in modern Japanese culture that include anime and manga and has sometimes guest-lectured on manga in my comics survey. So I've got some connections with fellow faculty here (bearing in mind that CSUN is a large university with 30K+ students and thousands of faculty and staff).
I've discussed with the Chair of the Art Dept. the prospect of team-teaching a combined theory and studio class (Art and English) in comics, and he was interested, though both of us foundered when it came to figuring out who the ideal population for such a course would be and whether students from different majors would have the right skill sets to get on well in the course.
I've learned from practical dealings (not only about comics) that creating those ideal interdisciplinary partnership programs is a cussedly difficult matter that has as much to do with territoriality, competition for student enrollment, and pragmatic considerations as it has to do with disciplinarity specialization per se. But I still think it's the best way to go with comics studies.
One thing to consider is that some of the courses that might benefit a student in comics studies might not be comics-centered. For example, courses in publishing and book history, textuality, modern and postmodern art history, popular culture, etc., while not specifically related to comics, could serve as elective or even required courses in an interdepartmental comics studies minor, with the proviso that students enrolled in them could pitch their term projects, etc., in the direction of comics. And one course in a minor, perhaps a capstone, might be a thesis or creative project that need not be housed in a particular department but could be arranged with a member or members of the comics studies faculty cohort. What this might require is, say, three faculty members with a vested interest in comics studies and a bunch of others willing to have students pursue individualized comics research in their seminars. Outside readers might also be considered for senior/thesis projects.
I do agree that the likelihood of finding several comics studies specialists at one college or university is small; it seems likely that some of the essential scaffolding for a minor (or major) would have to be laid by one or two faculty, in a small cluster of required core courses. If courses relevant to -- not necessarily specific to -- comics could be found in other departments, including perhaps some foundational Art History courses, etc., these might be used to supplement the core comics courses, thus to enrich the program.
In my college, minors are typically 18 to 21 units (six to seven standard 3-unit courses), of which we could expect, say, 12 units at least to be required as opposed to electives. Me, I'd say we'd need at least three solid comics courses to constitute the core of a minor, one on form and aesthetics (as you said, comics qua comics), one offering a comparative study of different national traditions from a cultural studies POV (sort of an overview of the world map of comics, talking about issues of popularity, marketing, legitimacy, canonization, comics literacy, etc.), and at least one requiring focus in a specific genre and/or historical period. Three or four other elective courses could serve to complement this core, courses that are not necessarily comics-centric, and a 3-unit thesis/project requirement with prospective directors pulled from three or four departments would be ideal.
Mind you, I'm thinking of a minor here. A major would something much more involved. Given that it has taken five-plus years to get my comics survey course permanently added to the catalog (entrenched, legitimized, known, etc.), I have to believe that larger programmatic goals would take even longer. There is no easy way, sigh, to do these things.
I believe that we're going to have to seek strategic alliances with, e.g., new media studies, visual rhetoric, cultural sudies to get comics studies started, to find the sympathetic faculty needed, to find enough courses to sustain degree programs. I'm sorry to say that I don't see this kind of thing happening readily at institutions that are not large enough to support the needed faculty. This is where consortia of multiple institutions might have to come into play, though of course some interested institutions might be so widely separated geographically as to make such partnerships impracticable. :(
Would you be interested in joining a discussion here, as a guest co-blogger sometime, re: the very challenges of creating academic degree programs in comics studies? (I see that you and I will probably meet soon at ICAF 2009!)
Posted by: CharlesWHatfield | September 16, 2009 at 11:16 AM
Just a quick reply to your question for now (will add more when able on the topic of your last post): I think it would be quite enjoyable to guest co-blog (fun phrase to say, too) on this issue; it occupies much of my thinking these days as I try to figure out how to support students who are interested in continuing their comic studies beyond my sui generis, biannual upper division lit course, International Graphic Narrative.
Re: ICAF. Yes! It rapidly approaches (which means it's high time I started scanning the images that go with my paper). You're not to get a swelled head from the fact that my paper actually begins with your name, and phrase("art of tensions"); your presence there predates this conversation by months! I'm excited about ICAF. First time for me, and I think the paper lineup sounds stellar. You're on the board, right? Do you think there's room in the schedule for an impromptu (or, smile, semi-promptu) discussion of the key issues you raised in your statement: the need for an overarching comics studies organization, and the feasibility of interdepartmental comics studies programs at colleges and universities? Perhaps an evening coffee hour or some such announced gathering? I'm arriving in the early evening on Wed and leaving early evening on Saturday.
Posted by: Adrielle Mitchell | September 17, 2009 at 12:54 PM