THOUGHT BALLOONISTS

Comics studies, Part 2: Why we need a learned society

The following is by guest Balloonist and longtime colleague Joseph (Rusty) Witek, in response to our previous post on The state of comics studies, and what to do about it. Thanks, Rusty, for furthering the dialogue!

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Like Charles and Craig, I’m an academic who focuses on the study of comics, and I’d first like to thank them both for inviting me to join this important discussion. Also like them, I’ve been looking for new ways to strengthen the long-term professional infrastructure for the study of comics in academia. I’m hoping that the present discussion of how to go forward in comics studies in the US will benefit from some consideration of where it’s been in the past, and that a sketch of some historical context will clarify just where an academic learned society, and its associated peer-reviewed journal and conference, could fit into the larger world of comics studies as a whole.

I published my first article on comics in 1984, and I’ve had the opportunity to work with a number of book and periodical publishers and other academic institutions as a reader and evaluator for submitted articles, book manuscripts, and proposals for edited collections of essays on comics for, well, a pretty long time now. What I’ve seen certainly bears out Charles’s idea that recent developments in comics studies “are the hard-won dividends of more than fifteen years of accumulating work in the field.”

In the lively comments to Charles’s characteristically thoughtful post and its carefully worded manifesto, I was particularly struck by this statement from Ben Towle: “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 found the idea that such a thought would be idealistic or unrealistic quite startling, because in my view that’s where the field has always been. Arguably the single most distinctive characteristic of contemporary academic comics studies in the US is that the field was born out of and has long been nurtured by an explicitly anti-elitist intellectual ideology, and a great deal of our comics scholarship has been produced without the conventional gatekeeping mechanisms of nearly all other academic fields.

Pigeonholes (a follow-up), featuring Isaac Cates

 

My “introduction” to Brian Chippendale’s Maggots (was it as far back as May 12?) was really an introduction to a way of thinking about the relationship between orthodox and experimental (or avant-garde) comics. This post inspired some interesting back-and-forth in our comments section, thanks to our friend Isaac Cates (who supplied the diagrams here, thanks).

Isaac is, among other things, an outstanding comics scholar and teacher and the co-creator, with Mike Wenthe, of Satisfactory Comics, both the minicomix series and the blog. Isaac and Mike's latest issue (which I played a very small role in helping to shape) has been the subject of a series of fascinating behind-the-scenes posts at their site:

(and you should definitely follow the links if you want to know more, and want a chance to read a clever, funny, formally inventive comic in a disarming format).

Isaac and I have taken the liberty of reformatting and expanding our comments into a proper post, here, in hopes of turning the spotlight on our discussion. First, by way of recap: