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.

What Makes GApds - Golden Age Public Domain (Costumed) Characters - So Different, So Appealing?

What is the appeal of Golden Age public domain characters?        Fans may rightly ask, and I certainly ask this myself: Why am I wasting time drawing Golden Age public domain characters, especially when I have so many creator-owned characters under IP (intellectual property, i.e., creator-owned projects like Megaton Man and Border Worlds) going begging?

Why In Pictopia Has No Author

Update - December 16, 2023: Now including my groveling final plea to Alan prior to his final response!

This is the last communication I received from the author of “In Pictopia,” a story I illustrated with the help of Mike Kazaleh and Pete Poplaski, beautifully colored by Eric Vincent, in 1986 (as I was making the transition from Megaton Man to Border Worlds and then obscurity). The story originally appeared in Anything Goes #2, published by Fantagraphics Books in December, 1986 (a benefit book for their now-legendary legal hassles), and later collected in Fantagraphics’ Best Comics of the Decade, Volume I (June 1986). In 2021, Fantagraphics Underground issued what I consider the definitive edition of the story, but without the author’s name.

Pictopia in Pittsburgh: Pulse-Pounding Panel PIX Didn't Want You to See!

I will be offering a slideshow lecture at this year's 2019 Three Rivers Comic Con on Sunday, May 12, 2019 at 3:00 pm.

Kunzle’s Pre-History of Comics: But Is It Really?

The scholar David Kunzle declared in 1973 that he was writing “a history or pre-history” of the modern newspaper comic strip. This enterprise has come to encompass a significant portion of his professional scholarship, including four major books with the term “comic strip” in the title: History of the Comic Strip, Volume I: The Early Comic Strip—Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c.1450 to 1825 (1973)[1]; The History of the Comic Strip, Volume II: The Nineteenth Century (1990)[2]; Rodolphe Töpffer: The Complete Comic Strips (2007)[3]; and Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer (2007)[4]. These four volumes are preceded by one of Kunzle’s first published articles, a translation of Francis Lacassin’s “The Comic Strip and the Film Language,” which is augmented by almost 4 ½ pages of “supplementary notes” by Kunzle and amounts to a prolegomena to Kunzle’s own scholarship on pre-twentieth-century picture stories and their relationship with cinematic history.[5] Such a sizeable corpus of research and writing,[6] to say nothing of the publication of these sometimes cumbersome and profusely illustrated works, would be a worthy if not magisterial achievement for any scholar, particularly one working in such a pioneering area of graphic art as pre-twentieth-century printed picture stories. However, the twentieth-century term “comic strip” figures prominently in each of the titles mentioned, and Kunzle in his own right has become considered a father of sorts to scholars of comics, and has had a surprising and unexpectedly substantial impact on the way comics are being perceived today.

So it may seem impertinent to ask: is Kunzle's undeniable accomplishment really a history or pre-history of the comic strip? Does it do justice to the pre-twentieth-century material Kunzle studies to be considered primarily as comic strips or precursors to comic strips? What are Kunzle’s motivations for claiming the term “comic strip” as his rubric, and would his material have been better served by another term, such as “picture story”? What effect has Kunzle’s work, and his assimilation of his material to the modern comic strip, had on comics (both on its scholarship and the art form)? Would it be more productive, in fact, for comics scholars and artists to think, not of earlier graphic (printed) picture stories as latent comic strips (or comic books or graphic novels), but of comics as a particular formulation or solution to the problems presented by the graphic picture story? Would it be more productive for twenty-first century creators to consider the creative potential of combining words and pictures freely, with the entirety of the history of culture offering suggestion, rather than reducing the history of all previous words-and-pictures experiments down to a teleological, evolutionary drama narrowly concerned with the perfection of a specific, marketable form of picture story?

The reference room of the Frick Fine Arts Libary, University of Pittsburgh, which holds a copy of Kunzle’s History of Comics Volume I (not pictured).

An informal search Google N-Gram search and search of databases at my disposal suggests that the term comic strip did not emerge as a term of description for the American newspaper feature we now know by that name until probably the mid-1910s. All the material Kunzle studies in his four major works dates from prior to the twentieth century. The few times that Kunzle mentions twentieth-century newspaper comic strips throughout this corpus, it is with at least mild disdain; he seems to regard the more popular successors to his material as an attenuated if not fallen and debased artform when compared to the earlier material he finds more richly varied as to subject matter and political and social viewpoint and consequently so much more engrossing. So why does he so emphatically embrace the term comic strip by placing it firmly in the titles of all his works, and why does he so earnestly want us to view the narrative strips, picture stories, broadsheets, and other material under scrutiny as comic strips?

Kunzle acknowledges more than once that his project was inspired by the art historian Ernst Gombrich, who published his ground-breaking Art and Illusion in 1960 (which is still on some required reading lists).[7] Gombrich is the first to make the connection between early print picture stories (and specifically the work of Töpffe) to the modern newspaper comic strip form. Gombrich asserts, “to Töpffer belongs the credit, if we want to call it so, of having invented and propagated the picture story, the comic strip.”[8] Gombrich views Töpffer’s combination of words and pictures as especially prescient, “In view of what has happened during the last decades,” presumably a reference to the rising popularity of newspaper comic strips and children’s books (Gombrich was writing in the 1960s).[9] Gombrich, however, does not elaborate on the distinctions or definitions of the terms “picture story” or “comic strip,” let alone recount the evolution from one to the other. 

Enter Kunzle, Gombrich’s student, who does explore this terrain, and also assumes the elder scholar’s identification of Töpffer as a key figure in the development of the form(s). Kunzle also, at least at the outset, also assumes Gombrich’s terminological ambiguity (“the picture story, the comic strip”). Kunzle himself claims to “use the terms picture story and comic strip indifferently,” although he frequently refers to “the development of the picture story and comic strip,”[10] along with other terms, quite often, as if they were separate and distinct forms demanding the covering of all bases.

Kunzle establishes his use of the term comic strip in the Introduction to History of the Comic Strip Volume I, although he never justifies or explains his choice, or indeed, that he is making a choice. In the opening section, Kunzle considers a range of terms used to describe the twentieth century newspaper feature, particularly foreign variants such as Italian fumetti, the French bandes désinées (drawn strip), and the German term Bilderstreifen and Bildergeschichte (literally, picture strip and picture story, respectively), and the French term bande dessinée. Kunzle blandly asserts, “Of all these terms, ‘comic strip’ is the most commonly used for the newspaper strip,” which he describes as “an artistic phenomenon.” He writes,

All over the Western world, the comic strip has become a major form of mass communication, a potent force in molding public opinion, an international language […] understood and enjoyed by the literate and semi-literate alike.

But Kunzle offers no rationale as to why the term “comic strip” should be favored in describing this phenomenon, let alone why it should be applied retroactively to graphic material prior to the advent of the American daily newspaper. 

The clear inference is that Kunzle is saddled with the term “comic strip” whether he finds it appropriate or not for the pre-twentieth-century material he is studying. And indeed, he finds in completely inappropriate, arguing, “only the English language […] insists that ‘drawn strips’ are comic,” while in fact

the truly comic strip [Kunzle’s emphasis] does not emerge until … late eighteenth-century England. At this stage of its development, however, I have preferred to use the phrase “caricatural strip” …. [Therefore] I never refer to the pre-caricatural (i.e. pre-1780) strip as the “comic strip,” even when it contains an element of humor. I generally use the terms “narrative strip” or “narrative sequence,” “picture story” or “pictorial sequence” (depending on the format involved) in order to stress the narrative role of the medium, which I consider primary.[11]

Kunzle finds formal similarities between the material of his study and twentieth-century newspaper comic strips sufficient to justify the connection previously made by Gombrich, and constructs a definition of the term “comic strip” broad enough (most notably by not being dependent on the word balloons) to justify its application to his material.[12] However, Kunzle never again employs the term “comic strip” in History of the Comic Strip Volume I following the Introduction.

Further, Kunzle’s anachronistic application of the term “comic strip” to the material of his study is all the more puzzling, since he seems to have little knowledge or interest in twentieth-century material, or in discussing “comic strips” per se. Indeed, Kunzle rarely discusses twentieth century newspaper strips throughout his oeuvre, and then only generally and vaguely, usually only with broad reference to their popularity, and often with a good deal of disdain for what he sees as an artistic devolution from the rich social commentary and propaganda of his favored era into banal soap opera and gags of the time of his writing. Kunzle is also dismissive of the historically uninformed “Compilers of books on the twentieth-century comic strip” and their “potted” histories.[13] For example, Kunzle blasts a biography, “that modern stalwart, Milton Caniff,” for the name-dropping pretentions of its subtitle (“Rembrandt of the Comic Strip”), and the author’s ignorance in conflating Renaissance cartoons (preparatory drawings for paintings or tapestries) with the modern graphic form.[14] Kunzle expresses no interest in extending his own research into twentieth century material, to write a corrective history of twentieth century comic strips, or even to compare examples of the pre-1896 material of his study with more recent examples. 

In fact, Kunzle seems to have regretted his choice of placing the term “comic strip” in the title of his history of broadsheets and picture stories. In the Preface to History of the Comic Strip Volume II (1996), Kunzle goes on an extended, unscholarly rant about the problems the term “comic strip” has created for the reception of his scholarship in the intervening two decades.

As a respectable academic I have, I suppose, sought to give the comic strip academic respectability. I doubt that I have succeeded yet. The “scientific literature” of my discipline (art history) has tended to pass by Volume 1, The Early Comic Strip, no doubt because of its frivolous title, which has not convinced even the (nonacademic) celebrants of the genre in the 20th century that there is indeed a comic strip worthy of the name before the Americans “invented” it in 1896 or so. I was recently sent a script for an ambitious television series on the (20th century) comic strip, for which funding was being sought and to which I was nominated a “scholarly advisor.” The script started with the assertion that the first comic strips appeared in American newspapers at the end of the 19th century. Of course. By now I should have learned that to deny in the face of the U.S. media that the United States invented the comic strip is about as pointless as denying that the United States invented freedom and democracy. So I look once more to academe, which should understand that the real title of the present volume is “The acquisition and Manipulation of New Sites of Comoedic [sic] Narrative Discourses and Significations by Volatility-prone Social Sectors.” A big book should have a big title anyway.[15]

Kunzle further laments that his two-volume prehistory of the comic strip “has been a lonely endeavor in many ways, just how lonely I can now measure, in retrospect, as I enter the well-established field of 17th century Dutch art.”[16] More well established, and presumably more academically respectable. 

Fischer von Erlach’s Entwürf einer Historischen Arkitektur (inventive history), 1721, showing the Halikarnassus plate.

Nonetheless, Kunzle retains the term “comic strip” for the title of his second mammoth volume, and more freely and boldly uses the term in discussing nineteenth-century material, even while acknowledging its anachronism. He muses,

 The comic strip in the 19th century, for all its popularity, is without a recognized name. Töpffer called his comic albums either “picture novels” or, deprecatingly, “little follies.” In the trade they were called “caricatural albums,” or the “série Jabot,” after the initiating title. Töpffer himself pretended anonymity, which the pirates all too scrupulously observed. It is as if Jabot, the social upstart, having forced himself and his upstart graphic genre upon the public, was forever to be denied the dignity of a distinct literary or artistic category.[17]

Kunzle, to his credit, would stick with his guns, and even more boldly assert the term “comic strip” in the titles of his two subsequent publications on Töpffer.

But why did Kunzle initially adopt the term “comic strip” in the early 1970s? Kunzle seems to have made the pragmatic calculation that labeling his research on broadsheets and picture stories a “history or pre-history of the comic strip” would be of benefit to his scholarship both academically and in terms of landing a publisher for what was no doubt a prohibitively expensive undertaking. In the post-war era, after cinema and jazz, the comics strip seemed next in line as the American art destined for academic validation and publishing success. Several decades had elapsed since Coulton Waugh’s The Comics (1947), but in the first half of the 1970s, the first of a new wave of comic-strip histories were beginning to appear, or were being readied for publication. These included Dick Lupoff and Don Thompson’s anecdotal anthology All in Color for a Dime (1970)[18]; Les Daniels’ Comix: A History of Comic Books in America (1971)[19]; Marvel artist Jim Steranko’s two-volume The Steranko History of Comics (1970, 1972)[20]; Arthur Asa Berger’s sociological study The Comic-Stripped American: What Dick Tracy, Blondie, Daddy Warbucks and Charlie Brown Tell Us About Ourselves (1973)[21]; and Jerry Robinson’s The Comics: An Illustrated History of Comic Strip Art (1974)[22]. Kunzle may even had been aware of Maurice Horn’s The World Encyclopedia of Comics (1976), then in preparation.[23]

 

An important hint may lie in the fact that the Preface to History of the Comic Strip Volume I, dated 1968, contains no reference to or use of the term “comic strip” all, only “picture story” (twice).[24] But the volume was not published by the University of California Press until 1973, a five-year interval encompassing not only the publication of most of the comic strip histories listed above, but also Kunzle’s translation of the Lacassin article for Film Quarterly, also a UC publication (1972). The titling of the History of the Comic Strip Volume I and the writing of its Introduction, which uses the term “comic strip” more than 30 times (nowhere else in the volume does the term appear) may have taken place only after the Preface and body of the volume had been complete in 1968. The foregrounding of the term “comic strip,” for which Gombrich had already paved the way, may have belatedly occurred to Kunzle or been suggested by his publisher in recognition of  a “comic strip” trend in publishing that had emerged since 1968. Such a move would not have been merely a cynical ploy to make the publication of the mammoth volume more feasible, but could have also been a sincere effort to connect Kunzle’s rather obscure study of broadsheets and picture stories to more current (and more sexy) scholarly discourses, particularly cinema.

Back dustjacket flap of Kunzle's History of the Comic Strip Volume I: The Early Comic Strip—Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c.1450 to 1825, at the Special Collections room, Hillman Library, University of Pittsburgh.

This is most emphatically suggested by Kunzle’s 1972 translation of Lacassin for Film Quarterly. The introduction to the article, set in large bold italic that upstages the body text, presents the article not only as a precursor but also an unprecedented plug for Kunzle’s forthcoming History, and explicitly ties Kunzle’s work to the “intellectual respectab[ility]” belatedly emerging for comics that had been established for film “three or four decades ago.” The notes added by Kunzle, “which qualify some of Lacassin’s findings,” are half as long as Lacassin’s text.[25] Kunzle begins,

This is not the place to quarrel with Lacassin’s assumption, which is so widely shared, that the comic strip and cinema were born at the same period. Since the material has simply not been available hitherto, critics cannot know that, in fact, the narrative picture strip reached a certain maturity in German, Dutch, and English broadsheets in the seventeenth century. In my book, which the University of California Press will shortly publish, I reproduce an extensive corpus of these remarkable early picture stories, which will thus become available for analysis and discussion. Nor need we at this point question by what feat of logic Lacassin makes the “birth” of the comic strip postdate by two generations one of the recognized “fathers” of the art (for Gombrich, the father), Rodolphe Töpffer.[26]

Whatever his reasoning or motivation for declaring his work “a history or pre-history” of the comic strip, Kunzle stuck to his guns, using the term “comic strip” in the title of two more scholarly publications on Töpffer. It is now common, in fact, to see references in academic art historical publications and museum exhibition catalogs to Töpffer as  father or inventor of the comic strip.[27] But as Geoffrey Batchen reminds us in the case of the history of photography, such determinations are suspect. He remarks that historians

continue to squabble over which of them was the first to discover the one, true inventor of photography. […] [T]his is invariably an argument as much about virility and paternity as about history, as much about the legitimacy of both photographer and historian as historic primogenitors as about the timing of the birth itself.[28]

To the extent that Kunzle’s work is seen as foundational to comic strip and comic book scholarship, his legacy is a mixed bag. The unfortunate example of Kunzle’s snarky Preface to Volume II, mentioned above, as well as its Introduction which dwells at length on the status of nineteenth century picture stories as a “childish genre,”[29] suggests that a cloying desire for “academic respectability” has been passed down to more recent scholars who continue to openly bitch, “Why Are Comics Still in Search of Cultural Legitimization?”[30] On the positive side, as David Carrier attests, “I admire Kunzle, a bold and original scholar, for gathering these materials, without which my own philosophical study [on comics] could not have been conceived,” but departs from Kunzle on the issue of word balloons.[31] The more substantial implication being that Kunzle’s scholarship is not about comics at all, but something that predates comics historically, and if anything chronicles part of a pictorial and textual tradition that is larger than comics.

To the extent that Kunzle’s scholarship is a rebuke of twentieth and twenty-first century comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels (and there is plenty of ammunition for such an argument throughout Kunzle’s four major works on pre-twentieth-century picture stories),[32] and a prompt to live up to the larger pictorial and textual tradition that is Kunzle’s concern, this admonition might be stated in a more effective way. Instead of saying comics should be better than they are, one could simply say, stories told in words and pictures don’t have to be comics. Perhaps that is the far greater lesson to be derived from Kunzle’s work.

---

[1] David Kunzle, History of the Comic Strip, Volume I: The Early Comic Strip—Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c.1450 to 1825 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1973).

[2] David Kunzle, History of the Comic Strip, Volume II: The Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990).

[3] David Kunzle, ed., trans., Rodolphe Töpffer: The Complete Comic Strips (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007).

[4] David Kunzle, Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer (Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2007).

[5] Francis Lacassin, “The Comic Strip and the Film Language,” trans. with additional notes by David Kunzle, Film Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 1, (Autumn 1972), pp. 11-23. Kunzle’s footnote on p. 11 reads as follows: “Translated from Lacassin’s Pour un neuvième art: la bande dessinée (Paris: Union Generale, 1971) and his preceding article “Bande dessinée et langage cinematographique,” Cinema ‘71, (September1971), by permission of the publishers. The material has been slightly abridged from its longer version in the book, but incorporates the refinements Lacassin made in the book.” Kunzle’s additional notes occupy the final 4 ½ pages of the article, set at the same type size as translated text, pp. 19-23.

[6] For brevity, these works will be referred to hereafter as History I and II, Complete, Father, and “Lacassin.”

[7] See Kunzle, History vol. 1, preface, and Father, p. ix.

[8] Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 3^rd ed. (Princeton: Bollingen, 2000 [1960]) p. 336.

[9] Gombrich, p. 337.

[10] Father, quotes from pp. xi and 53 respectively.

[11] History I, p. 1.

[12] History I, p. 2-3. David Carrier, among others, takes issue with Kunzle, claiming “The speech balloon is a defining element of the comic [strip].” See David Carrier, The Aesthetics of Comics, (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), pp. 3-4; quote p. 4.

[13] History I, p. 1.

[14] History I, p. 2.

[15] History II, p. xix.

[16] History II, p. xx.

[17] History II, p. 6.

[18] Dick Lupoff and Don Thompson, eds., All in Color for a Dime (New Rochelle NY: Arlington House, 1970).

[19] Les Daniels, Comix: A History of Comic Books in America (New York: Bonanza Books, 1971).

[20] Jim Steranko, The Steranko History of Comics, vols I and II (Reading PA: Supergraphics1970, 1972).

[21] Arthur Asa Berger, The Comic-Stripped American: What Dick Tracy, Blondie, Daddy Warbucks and Charlie Brown Tell Us About Ourselves (New York: Walker, 1973).

[22] Jerry Robinson, The Comics: An Illustrated History of Comic Strip Art (New York: Putnam, 1974).

[23] Maurice Horn, The World Encyclopedia of Comics (New York: Chelsea House, 1976).

[24] History I, Preface [n.p.].

[25] The introduction or abstract of the article reads, in bolder and larger type than the article, “The comic strip is now becoming intellectually respectable in somewhat the same way that film did, three or four decades ago. Studies of contemporary strips abound; serious artists are using the form for their own purposes-often, of course, satirical purposes. As the French historian Francis Lacassin argues in the pioneering article below, the “language” or syntax of the comic strip shows many similarities to (and certain historical priorities over) the language of film. The article has been translated by David Kunzle, author of the forthcoming The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet, c. 1450-1826—a sociocultural history of the first mass medium’s origins—and he adds notes of his own which qualify some of Lacassin’s findings and extend them even further back in time.” See Lacassin, p. 11.

[26] Lacassin, p. 19. The Lacassin article and its influence on comics scholarships merits a discussion of its own, which in fact I first essayed on an earlier incarnation of this blog around 2005. I plan to revisit that article and repost soon.

[27] See for example Laura Hoptman, Drawing Now: Eight Propositions (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), p. 129.

[28] Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997), p. 35.

[29] History II, pp. 2-4.

[30] Thierry Groensteen, “Why Are Comics Still in Search of Cultural Legitimization?” in Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, eds., A Comics Studies Reader (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi Press, 2009), pp. 3-11. [I discuss this article in a previous post on this blog.]

[31] Carrier, pp. 3-4; quote p. 3.

[32] Not to mention Kunzle’s translation of Dorfman and Armand Mattelart’s 1973 Para leer al pato Donald into English as How to Read Donald Duck in 1975, suggesting that if Kunzle were to regard modern comics at all, their status as capitalist commodities would be foremost in his critique.

Back dustjacket flap of Kunzle's History of the Comic Strip Volume II: The Nineteenth Century, at the Special Collections room, Hillman Library, University of Pittsburgh.

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.