The Ed Piskor "Grooming" Hoax: A Recap

It has been ninety days since we lost Ed Piskor, a brilliant cartoonist and comics historian whose career was only beginning to ramp up. Here, in under 4000 words, is a comprehensive summation of what is known after three months:

The Death of Socrates and What We Athenians Should Do About It

One argument that will surely trigger me in 2024 and beyond goes something like: “For all we know, Ed suffered from depression and was already suicidal.” If you have the temerity or foolishness to run this notion past this 62-year-old cartoonist, you had best be on the other side of the table and prepared to run like hell and disappear into the crowd when you do so. And make sure somebody’s ready to capture all this on their smartphone, too—the video will surely go viral.

You Want a Piece of Me? The Art of the Transactional

“You want a piece of me?”

Perhaps the most hilarious moment in Seinfeld is when Frank Costanza, played by the great Jerry Stiller, asks Elaine, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, “You want a piece of me?” Even funnier is the blooper reel of outtakes as Jerry repeatedly delivers the line to Julia, who can’t keep from cracking up.

Megaton Man and the Doom Defiers: This Is the New Stuff!

This seems as good a time as any to explain what I’m up to with the current work-in-progress. The working title is Megaton Man and the Doom Defiers; to date, I’ve completely drawn and lettered some fourteen pages which you can read (below). Although Megaton Man himself has yet to appear (soon!), it concerns all of his supporting cast and particularly Clarissa (Ms. Megaton Man), Simon (his son), and the teams of megaheroes that are now arrayed around New York City a.k.a. Megatropolis.

The Summer of '85 and the Megaton Man Reprints That Never Happened

By the summer of 1985, it was clear that Megaton Man was the hottest title Kitchen Sink Press had ever published to that point.

The Secrets of Dumbalmoore: Fantastic Bleats and Where to Find Them

This text began as a Facebook reply to Stephen Bissette, who was commenting on a link to Mikey Crotty's video, and somehow turned into yet another long-winded and self-serving blog post, rehashing the same tired, stale tropes as I've done elsewhere, on my insignificant collaboration with Alan Moore. Enjoy!

Clarissa at #100

The Ms. Megaton Man™ Maxi-Series at the Two-Year Mark 

The Ms. Megaton Man™ Maxi-Series is fast coming upon episode #100, as well as the two-year mark of my posting of a 3000-4000-word chapter online every Friday. I’d like to take moment to reflect on what I’ve learned from the experience so far.

My Latest False Start, or, Why the Ms. Megaton Man Maxi-Series, Anyway?

As of this writing, I have composed eight chapters of what I call my "YA prose experiment," the Ms. Megaton Man Maxi-Series. Four chapters have dropped, to use the modern parlance, on my Ms. Megaton Man Blog, and one is scheduled to drop over the next four Fridays at 8:30 pm EDT. And there's plenty more where that came from.

When a Giant Pencil is Worn to a Nub on South Craig Street: Yet Another Pittsburgh Arts Casualty

Just two weeks after the announcement that the Art Institute of Pittsburgh (once the flagship of a national chain of trade schools), and only a week after a realigned Pittsburgh Center for Arts and Media tacitly announced a downgraded role for traditional manual arts such as drawing, painting, and sculpture in their newest incarnation, an iconic Pittsburgh art supply store has abruptly announced it will be going out of business after 48 years.

Conventions of Contemporaneity: An Anxiety Dream

I had a dream last night that I attended a current San Diego Comicon (in reality I have not attended the biggest comic book convention in the world since 1996, and by all accounts it is now almost ten times bigger than it then was). Upon entering, one was completely overwhelmed by an island of booths containing a Wonder Bread display, of all things (simulated loaves of Wonder Bread stood as pillars holding up a canopy over the space), followed by islands that were fully-furnished convenience stores so that attendees would not have to go outside the hall and out into downtown San Diego to shop for necessities. (No doubt this symbolized how commercial and insular comic book conventions have become -- you don't even get to experience the wonderful city you are visiting at all.) With my portfolio, I finally found my way to artist's alley (I had not bothered to reserve a space in advance); I did not recognize any of the younger people there, and nobody recognized me, although only a few artists had set up this early in the show.

Patrick Daugherty, director of the Frank L. Melaga Art Museum, pondering the placement of my work yesterday. Some of Frank L. Melaga's paintings from the permanent collection are on the facing walls, while my works are on the floor waiting to be hung and in the showcase in the background.

I saw a group of artists seated on a raised podium, about eight or ten young people, mostly male but some female, all dressed remarkably alike in black with ball caps or berets like a paramilitary volunteer police militia, and thought I spotted Billy Tucci among them, but he kept disappearing behind the heads of other people. This group must have been his entourage, although they all seemed to be sketching or autographing, although no fans were yet present.
 

Pages from Alan Moore's "In Pictopia," which I drew in 1986, and two Megaton Man splash pages, one from 1989 and 1999.

I finally ended up in an internet cafe somewhere in the dealer's room, populated mostly by young Asian men, who were all buzzing about their laptops. (I suppose mobile device now dominate comic book conventions as they do everything else, although this had not been the case the last time I was at the San Diego Comicon). For some reason I was table hopping -- I'm not sure if I was giving advice, showing my work, explaining how to find my stuff online, or just trying to get connected myself. When I finally sat down to get online myself, I realized my laptop was missing. I looked everywhere for it, and came to the realization that it had been stolen. (Why would any of these people with their much slicker devices steal my old clumsy thing with nothing on it?) Then I woke up.

The showcase is a mixture of artists and comics that influenced me as well as some of my own art, including "Batman Upgrade 2.0" from DC's Bizarro World (2005).

No doubt this dream came to me because I had been helping to hang my gallery exhibit of old and new cartooning and life drawings last night, and had attended a small comic book show in Youngstown last weekend. I have been doing a great deal more cartooning since this past spring than I have in many a year, since I returned to college and earned my PhD. I don't think of any of this as a "comeback," in part because I have little idea what I would be coming back to. Am I being sucked back into the scary world of comics, and is this dream a portent of what it will be like? Anxiety!

Can Doc Savage be Adapted to Comics? Or to Anything?

I've been looking forward to Dynamite Entertainment's new comic book adaptation of Doc Savage ever since I heard about it through Comic Shop News last fall. Not because I was particularly impressed with any of the preview art, or even the Alex Ross faux-James Bama covers, but because of this very question: Can Doc Savage be adapted to comics? Or to anything?

I was first exposed to Doc Savage with Marvel Comics' Doc Savage #1 with the cover date of October, 1972. This was the second month for me as a Marvel reader (the September 1972 cover date, probably June or July in reality, still holding a nigh-cosmic significance in my life experience), and the first #1 issue of a comic book series I ever bought, thus an unforgettable milestone. It was a weird experience: a crimefighter who was not a super-powered costumed character, set in the Depression era, and adapted from another medium, books. I immediately latched onto several of the Bantam Books paperbacks, themselves reprints of something from the past called pulps, and within months had also sent away for Steranko's History of Comics volume I, which included a chapter called "The Bloody Pulps," positing the even stranger thesis that the comic book artform had evolved out of pulp fiction (still problematic in my mind), with a lengthy passage on Lester Dent's (the real name of the pseduonymous author Kenneth Robeson) Doc Savage adventures. Later, I bought Bantam's 1976 edition of Philip José Farmer's Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, an even weirder experience. (This mind-blowing tome suggested, among other things, that Doc Savage, The Shadow, Tarzan, and Sherlock Holmes, among others, were all real and in fact related to one another through something called the Wold-Newton family tree.) Lastly, I recall Marvel's Doc Savage magazine by Doug Moench, John Buscema, and Tony DeZuniga, perhaps the best adaptation of Doc Savage ever done (peremptorily answering my own question on one level, that yes, Doc Savage can be adapted to comics, at least in longer-format chunks), in any case more satisfying than the Steve Englehart and Ross Andru version of 1972.

To make a long story short, I was nearly as much a Doc Savage fan, for a certain portion of my teenage years, as I was a Marvel fan, and at least as much as I was a fan of Jeff Rice's Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Pierre Boulle's Planet of the Apes, and Martin Caidin's The Six-Million Dollar Man. While I can't say that I've read more than twenty of the 181 "supersagas," I've read Farmer's Gnostic history of The Man of Bronze at least a dozen times, and pondered the impracticalities (to say nothing of the social implications) of the Wold-Newton Universe.

To make a short story even shorter, I don't think the new Dynamite version is very good. Let me be clear that my purpose is not to pick on writer Chris Roberson (who after all boasts three editions of Farmer's Apocalyptic Life in his library) or newcomer artist Bilquis Evely, for whom this is clearly a labor of love. Let me further state that I could never imagine performing the research on all the Art Deco necessary to pull off an even passable period adaptation of Doc Savage.

In any case, the first two issues are far from satisfying. I can't imagine anyone other than a diehard Savage fan being at all interested in this project. In each, a complete, original "supersaga" is presented, telescoped into something barely as long as your average movie trailer. The Savage supersagas were known for there outlandishly improbably and inexhaustible twists and turns, if not intellectual complexity; here they are simplified into brief glimpses of icon Savage locales: the Empire State Building, the Fortress of Solitude, the Crime College. In these two installments, the nemeses turns out to a be lone nut jobs with ham radios who are easily dispensed with a few punches, hardly the Johnny Sunlight-caliber evil-doers who could keep Doc and his fabulous five at bay for at least a hundred prose pages. Further, it is often difficult to tell Doc apart from his fabulous five aides, since this adaptation has forgone the dark bronze complexion, has chosen to integrate both the Clark Gable loose hair and James Bama widow's peak, and not even shown him in a torn shirt (except for the Ross covers), or even the 1972 Marvel blue vest.

On the other hand, I will say that there does come across, even in these absurdly truncated exploits, a certain egalitarian camaraderie among Doc and his five aides that is quite enjoyable, reminiscent perhaps more of Buckaroo Banzai than the Doc stories proper, or of any of Doc's artistic progeny (James Bond, Indiana Jones, Jor El -- all of whom I at least tend to think of as loners). And Ms. Evely's art, although indecisive when it comes to depicting the male characters (they all wear suits and are about the same stature, with even Monk blending into the crowd), her art really comes alive when she is drawing that butch-femme dynamo Pat Savage. Pat, Doc's proto-feminist metrosexual sister, is seen in jodhurs and unbuttoned safari shirt that, while not torn to shreds, recalls the iconography of the Bama covers associated with Doc more vividly and convincingly than even the Ross covers (the first of which fetishize the shreds into a kind of swirling whirlwind of flames--a kind of divine transfiguration). One is tempted to say just to forget the traced skyscrapers and cardboard male characters altogether, and let Evely draw Pat kicking ass for 17 pages an issue. And let the shirt get torn to shreds. I would buy it.*

"Do these jodhpurs make my thighs look fat?" More problematic is the shirt, clearly made of more durable fabric than those of her clothing-optional cousin. Bilquis Evely's art comes (Tarzan!) alive when she draws Pat Savage, from the Dynamite adaptation.

It is too soon to tell where Roberson (not to say Robeson) is going with his multi-decade story arc (if you can call these fleeting episodes stories at all). It seems clear that Doc and Pat are the only ones who will not age (although whether this is the result of Doc's pharmacological ingenuity or of immortal chromosomes mutated by the Wold-Newton meteor remain to be seen), while Monk, Ham, and the other three (who were never very discernible anyway) are slated to die off, to be replaced by next-gen whiz kids. Frankly, I would prefer to see the comics adapters attempt a "rattling good story" faithful to the original time period rather than a meta-discursus on the post-Street and Smith narrative (with its obsession of integrating the various hair-eras of Doc with Farmer's Gnostic history of pulplit). Needless to say, the only creative idea that Marvel and DC have been able to come up with these past few decades have been these kinds of Talmudic exegesis on continuity rather than creative storylines, and this is hardly in the spirit of the American comic book. Neither is it in the spirit of Doc or the pulps.

On the other hand, it just may be that Doc is too plainclothes, too cerebral (after a fashion), too literary a property to be properly adapted to such a visual medium as comics (the George Pal and Ron Ely film version not offering much a rebuttal on behalf of film). I have always felt, since the time I was enjoying various entertainment in media in my teen years, that certain ideas lent themselves to certain artforms better than other, and that adaptation for the sake of spin-off licensing always involved either radical alteration or sheer loss of the charm and magic of the idea in its native form. Doc Savage was best in prose; Planet of the Apes (as it was transformed by Rod Serling and others) best in film; superheroes (prior to big-budget special effects in the late 1970s and cgi since) in comics, and so on. Since Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter, however, we've all gotten used to the idea that properties that can be more than just merchandising bonanzas but actually artistically successful on multiple platforms while at the same time faithful to their original conceptions. But I'm still not convinced this is now a universal law, hence my continued interest in the Dynamite Doc Savage as it unfolds. Can Doc Savage be adapted to comics? Or to anything? To my mind, the jury is still out.

More art from the Dynamite adaptation and an interview with Chris Roberson @ Between the Covers.

___
* Let's be honest, I would draw it. Jenny Woodlore, the female protagonist from my series Border Worlds, had her origins in an eroticized drawing I made in high school of a brunette in a Bamaesque torn shirt and jodhpurs--not exactly Pat Savage, but close enough. Such is the power of that curious motif over one young (now middle-aged) male imagination.

Don, You Drew a Frank Santoro and a Rachel Masilmani

These are studies I made of Frank Santoro's "Frank, You Made a Tom Wesselmann," which was exhibited as part of the Pittsburgh Biennial in 2011. I brought my Carnegie Museum of Art sketchbook class through the exhibit and must have made a quick sketch of it on site; later I refined the figure with two layers of tracing paper. Frank's original was a large airbrush sketch that was somewhere between a contour and gesture line, somewhat indefinite, but suggestive of the entire figure. I loved the pose and wanted to fill it in and render it more literally (in my inimitable flat-footed way, as is my wont). I've done that with other sources, such as Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase and Picasso, etc., where I've taken sketchy or abstract figures that I've tried to interpret more literally. (More recently, I've done this with some of my old sketchbook doodles, to mixed success.)

(Note: This effort, including the tracings, has remained in my sketchbook, and therefore technically is a study and not a swipe, the latter being only when one attempts to pass off a published drawing as one's own work without acknowledgement or satiric intent.)

I saw Frank last night at the Little Book Fair in the Garfield section of Pittsburgh, and met him recently at Copacetic Comics, but never made the connection that he was the gallery artist whose work I had swiped! I've owned a copy of his Storeyville for years. Apparently I need names, faces, and work impressed on me all at once to make the connection, or the information goes flying off into space.

Below, I did pretty much the same thing with a selection of figures from Rachel Masilmani's haunting comic Las Cuerpas (you can download a pdf) after coming across it and meeting her in April 2013, again at the Carnegie Museum of Art, at Drawing Power, a 'zine-and-comics fair and symposium. I've extracted all the pretty figures, but as you'll see, the story concerns the gruesome gynocide of women in Juarez, Mexico, and the conspiracy of silence surrounding these murders, and the revenge of a ghostly, gargantuan Goyaesque figure who strides over the landscape.

Jim Pascoe: Pittsburgh Zombie

Below is a sketch of Jim Pascoe, drawn in a coffee shop on Carson Street in Pittsburgh some time in the late 1990s. You can tell it is late at night because I tend to want to sketch like Moebius when I’m tired.

Here is a detail of the same page. Jim seems to have a jaundiced eye, but that is my mistake. I tried touching it up, but I had used some fountain pen I had been trying out with water-based ink, and painting over it with white watercolor didn’t work too well. What that Bill Sienkiewicz-like doodle is doing in the upper right corner I have no idea.

Jim wrote a zombie script for some kind of anthology some time in the mid-2000s, which I thumbnailed below.

Here is one of the penciled pages. I regret drawing it in 11 x 17” format which I found to be constraining. That’s one of the main reasons I never finished it. As I’m getting older, I need to draw bigger originals just to see what I’m doing and to be able to put in all the detail, such as carnival backgrounds in this case.

 

I liked these drawings a lot, though. I had to do some research on drawing children to get the right age. I like the dynamism of the figures. But I did not leave enough room to letter, which became part of my frustration with this job. I think I must have been going to school already by this time, and I was really out of practice. My instincts were just off.

Here’s the top tier of the last page I attempted to pencil. I had school and other commitments that made it impossible for me to complete this project; the inker ended up completing the art from my thumbnails. I wish I had gone that route in the first place! Jim later showed me the finished art.

Air Shark 3000: Spacecraft for Suburbia

In an attempt to channel Raymond Loewy and Ralph Mcquarrie, I sketched out this vehicle for Border Worlds sometime in the early 2000s. I recall looking at a remaindered book I had gotten on military aircraft. Notice the garage with the basketball backboard and hoop in the background.

See also Border Worlds: The Aftermath

Paleo-Girl: The Wild Child

I’ve always loved this drawing, dating from the mid- or even early-1990s, which would make it 20 years old now. I call her Paleo-Girl, for lack of a better moniker. She takes up less than a quarter of a 14" x 17" Strathmore 400 Series drawing sheet, with the remaining space to be taken up by her pet dinosaur or something. I never knew exactly what to do with her. Being semi-nude, she couldn’t appear in Bizarre Heroes without substantially changing the nature of that series; besides, with the spear and animal skin, she’s a bit too close to the Phantom Jungle Girl, shown below (although Paleo-Girl is supposedly an actual prehistoric feral child, while PJG is a modern urbanite dressed as a cave woman). The stories I can imagine for Paleo-Girl all tend to be rather on the erotic side, but not to the extent of Wendy Whitebread. They also range from the prehistoric to the post-apocalyptic, suggesting that she travels through time. Possibly she’ll wind up as a guest star in the Ms. Megaton Man sequence I’ve been toying with in my spare time for many a year now.

(Below is a sketch of the Phantom Jungle Girl for comparison.)

Speaking of semi-nudity (which, growing up in the ‘70s, we all thought would be completely legal now, along with marijuana and liberal politics) and post-apocalypticism, one of the great post-underground comic book series will soon be back in print with improved lettering (but no doubt the same overwrought, clumsy prose): First Kingdom by Jack Katz. Well, you have to be willing to take your epic sweep with a lot of melodramatic banality (which is no worse than most comics anyway, I suppose). My only wish is that it was being issued all in one volume.

Cultural Legitimacy for Comics: Act Like You've Found It

A Comics Studies Reader (University Press of Mississippi, 2009), edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, offers itself as a concise survey of the scholarly field of comics studies, one that its editors hope will be, as its back cover boasts, “ideal for classroom use.” For someone like me, a past comic book artist who has been away from the field and would like to catch up, and is now a college instructor contemplating developing either a studio or art history course of some kind that would involve readings on cartooning, this anthology promises to serve a double purpose: as a useful “state-of-the-field” overview, and as a prospective course text. With that in mind, I will offer a serialized preliminary evaluation, starting with the Introduction and first essay.

The Introduction by the editors cites the “long but often marginal history at the periphery of scholarly and intellectual worlds” of comics studies, but reports that in recent years it has become “a lively field of inquiry.” The growth in scholarly writing and publications on comics, the explosion of reprint projects, the formation of substantial research archives, and a general awareness of comics in the culture at large, the editors assert, have all “helped to legitimize comics studies.” Oddly, there is no specific mention of the onslaught of blockbuster films based on comic book properties, the most obvious cultural trend accompanying the social climb of comics studies over the past two decades. In this period in particular, the editors claim, comics scholars have “had the advantage of greater resources, numbers, and academic respectability” than that enjoyed by the pioneering generation of comics scholars of the 1960s and 1970s.

The editors are cautious in their triumphalism, however. “The emergence of a research-driven scholarly corpus … is a relatively recent occurrence,” they note, but “the energy and ferment of contemporary writing on comics” presents “an ideal moment to step back and survey the terrain.” They hope that their interdisciplinary anthology of “twenty-eight noteworthy contributions” will serve “as a starting point for defining comics studies as well as a springboard for further investigation.” The editors pause only briefly to cast an envious eye toward film, which they remark is “a younger art form” than comics (a debatable assertion) with a comparatively “larger, more systematic, and more culturally respectable” literature.

The first text in their anthology is entitled “Why Are Comics Still in Search of Cultural Legitimization?” by Thierry Groensteen. Given the generally upbeat tenor of the Introduction, it is a puzzling choice to lead off such an anthology of comics studies, since it contravenes nearly every assertion the editors have just made. Written in 2000, and therefore prior the presumed scholarly and artistic achievements of the subsequent decade, Groensteen complains that comics still “suffer from a considerable lack of legitimacy.” While he avers that what he is describing may be unique to France and not necessarily applicable to “other national situations,” he claims that comics are regarded as “infantile, vulgar, or insignificant” by “legitimizing authorities (universities, museums, the media)” in the Francophone world. In Groensteen’s view, comics history is still “widely misunderstood,” its study “retarded” due to “a complete absence of critical, archivistic, and academic attention.” A chief source of official opprobrium are educators, who view the medium as childish, in particular the curious mixture of word and pictures that achieves its apotheosis in the word balloon.

To illustrate what Groensteen perceives as the unfair persecution of comics, he quotes from a 1964 French dictionary, an art historian, a novelist, and a former curator of prints at the Bibliothèque Nationale, among a few other select publications, averaging only one quotation per decade from the 1950s to the 1990s. However, these ostensible condemnations of comics are often more insightful than the author’s own remarks on the medium, which tend toward the cliché, the trite, and the shopworn. For example, the curator attributes comics’ failure to achieve a sufficient literary and artistic density that would merit serious attention to the hybridity of the form itself, and to the overriding imperative for legibility that induces creators to simplify their material and presentation at all costs or else risk the confusion and alienation of potential readers. To this practicing cartoonist, at least, this strikes me as a fascinating and perfectly apt observation.

But rather than a productive engagement with this remark, Groensteen declares it “difficult to refute,” owing to the different aesthetic criteria applicable to cartoon drawings and “art drawings,” and moves on. Similarly, he scoffs at “great French writers” in scare quotes, but declines to engage in the fairly thoughtful observation of one novelist who observes that the blending of words and pictures is fraught with the prospect of the two channels canceling one another out, confounding the average adult literate mind. Rather than inquiring as to why this should be the case, Groensteen insists that comic book readers, and perhaps other world cultures, don’t seem to have this particular problem. The upshot is that critics of comics are stuffy, hidebound, and not hip to the at once vernacular and avant-garde form represented by comics. Needless to say, this argument would be more convincing if large numbers of people were making similar statements in 2000, at the time Groensteen is writing; the fact that he must survey half a century or more to locate a handful of benign dismissals makes one question what is really bothering the author, and why the editors find this issue so urgent as to place it at the beginning of their anthology.

Further, it is by no means clear, either in the editors’ Introduction or Groensteen’s text, what constitutes cultural legitimation, or for whom the legitimation is being sought: comics creators or comics scholars. More to the point, it is unclear how either the enjoyment of comics or their scholarly study has been hampered by this perceived lack, or how something described as cultural legitimacy would be of material benefit to creators or scholars. Apparently, some art forms enjoy cultural legitimacy as if by nature, and it is felt that comics deserve the same respect. Clearly, it pains Groensteen that the work of cartoonists like Hergé, Crumb, and Moebius do not enjoy “a wider diffusion” and appreciation, and that the keepers of official culture cannot discern this work from the run of average material. But it seems unlikely that these creators in particular, who enjoyed enormous success and near-celebrity status during their careers, were ever particularly harmed by never having been accorded cultural legitimacy. Indeed, Groensteen never makes this assertion, adding to the suspicion that the only legitimacy he is concerned with is his own. Had these creators desired cultural legitimacy, whatever that entails, they certainly had the talent to pursue other avenues to achieve that end. Rather, it seems that the imagined plight of cartoonists is invoked only as a proxy for and to be conflated with the social and academic anxieties of comics scholars, the gains set forth in the Introduction notwithstandinge.

Whether poorly written, poorly translated, or poorly excerpted, Groensteen’s text is unconvincing, and reads as if he is merely preaching to the converted. Against the paltry and rather benign (and perhaps even constructive) criticisms he has dredged up, Groensteen offers no serious argumentation, but provides the usual litany of bland generalizations. Critics of comics, he asserts, unfairly tar the medium with the brush of childhood entertainment, and, imbued with modernism’s mandate for specificity, simply fail to understand the unique hybridity of the comics form. Never mind that Groensteen ends the article by laying claim to his inner child (although he does not employ that term), or that he makes the completely modernist assertion that “Comic art is an autonomous and original medium,” i.e., that comics can pass the same modernist test of specificity he has just denounced. In short, one gets the impression not so much of a widespread, culturally-ingrained discrimination towards comics as a comic book fan with a persecution complex looking to manufacture rejection from the most obscure and forgotten denunciations he can cobble together.

In any case it is abundantly clear from the positioning of Groensteen’s text immediately following the Introduction that cultural legitimation is a preoccupation of comics scholars or at least the editors of A Comics Studies Reader, the attainment of which is seen as a primary goal of comics studies. “How are we to defend comic art,” Groensteen pleads, from those who would rashly disqualify it as an art? One strategy, one is tempted to respond, might be to simply ignore or forget the scattered denunciations that Groensteen has labored so mightily to unearth. Better still, to seriously address the sticking points that these critics have so helpfully pointed out, rather than to petulantly dismiss them.

For all I know, Groensteen’s is an apt summation of the situation in France at the end of the 1990s (and as far as that goes, belies the cherished myth Americans have that comics are taken more seriously in Europe), but devoting eight pages of precious space to these neurotic musings in an English-language anthology in 2009 is more than questionable and worse than unfortunate. Certainly, the critical reception of comics over time is of historiographic interest, but Groensteen’s text is not presented historiographically, but rather as if still reflecting current concerns in the field. If the intent was rhetorical, to show that as recently as a decade earlier scholars were still ruminating about cultural legitimacy but now things look brighter, this might have been dealt with more efficiently in a citation in the editors’ Introduction, before reporting on the substantial gains in the fortunes of comics and comics scholarship in the interim. More to the point, I know of no scholarly field that foregrounds the question cultural legitimacy of its objects of study to such an extent as comics studies. Of course, scholarly activism in nothing new in the humanities, but it is generally on behalf of some social cause, political issue, or exploited group, never an art form. The appeal being made on behalf of comics is not being made on behalf of any ethnic, gender, or identity group, but rather an expressive form, which, by the editors’ own account, is finally receiving its due. Besides, most scholars assume that their objects of scholarly study are worth scholarly attention by virtue of the fact that they are bothering to study it, at the very least that cultural legitimacy is bestowed by their act of investigation. Why isn’t this the case in comics?

From the viewpoint of tradition, the anxieties expressed by Groensteen and the editors concerning the cultural legitimacy of comics are little more than the continuation of an entrenched tradition in comics scholarship: comics studies as the academic expression of comics fans seeking validation for their juvenile enthusiasms, avid enthusiasts who have never gotten over some early rejection by relatives or some potential object of affection, even years after they have made a success of it. By including Groensteen’s text, however, the editors have elevated their deep-seated anxieties concerning the cultural legitimacy of comics or comics studies to the level of a social cause, risking ridicule for the entire field, and worse, perpetuating the worst tendencies of twentieth-century fandom into the twenty-first century. While not completely ruling out the use of A Comics Studies Reader for classroom use, the inclusion of “Why Are Comics Still in Search of Cultural Legitimization?” should give any comics scholar or educator pause. Why indeed. Do we really want to visit the neuroses and prejudices of the past on the college students of today, who see only an artistically viable and valid art form, capable of great depth and range of expression? Perhaps if comics and comics studies acted as if they already had cultural legitimacy, they would find it.