Montage of monotype studies done, September 2015. I’m trying some new techniques, and exploring how they fit in with older techniques.
I’m slowly ( once a week right now) getting going in the studio again as other commitments drop away. Hello, fall! I’m re-taking up watercolor, too, which has a similar subtractive composition to printmaking. In simpler terms, the whites- and thus the full range of values- disappears the more paint or ink you add. So planning, restraint and mindfulness are important.
This is a montage of some of the sketches and studies I’ve printed in the last three weeks. I didn’t put a lot of effort into clean, professional finish and composition, so it’s likely the last time these will see the light of day. But I’ll start putting some of ideas into finished works soon. I’m really excited to be making pictures again!
Reading list:
Ten Years in the Tub, Nick Hornby. Sub titled: “A Decade Spent Soaking in Great Books”. I made mention of The Polysllyabic Spree, a slim volume of Hornby’s somewhat irreverent Believer Magazine columns on reading. I didn’t know they’d later published a large volume encompassing 10 years, until I ran across it browsing in the library, so I snapped it up. Don’t know that I’ll write anything more about it, or when I’ll finish it now that I’ve stopped riding the train everyday with the end of my temp job at the bookstore. But- reading about reading, what’s not to like?
McSweeney’s #29: I’m nearly finished with #48, one of my favorite issues so far. So I grabbed this one for $6 at my favorite used bookstore. How I can tell it’s my favorite bookstore: they buy up old issues of McSweeney’s and sell them for $6. In my home, good short stories are now considered a staple, like sugar, coffee and bacon. Wine! Did I forget wine? Wine.
My experiment with mainstream comics is over, for now, and I’m returning to my favorite category of graphics- the alternative comics. My tour through the mainstream publishers’ offerings- the superhero genre of DC and Marvel, and the sci-fi and action thriller books of creator-owned Image, was rewarding in some ways, and continued much longer than I anticipated. It will continue still- I just last week bought Volume 5 of the Saga series ( comic book chapters 24-30), which is still holding my interest as a space-borne pot boiler. So, though I encountered on the racks much darkly imagined, muddily hued dreck, done in the over-rendered house style, there were some very fresh things, too. I’m counting on my favorite comics blogs and infrequent visits to the store to keep me relatively updated.
Most of these mainstream experiments were influenced by the alternative auteurs like Chris Ware and Paul Pope and the cutting edge illustrators of Blab and NoBrow magazines or even by the superhero movies they originally spawned. The simplified, gestural art and minimalist, muted color schemes can certainly be attributed to the alternatives. Their most identifiable color scheme from the early 80’s was black and white, of course. But as publishers like Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly began to move to the euro-style album format, the artists experimented more often with monotone or duotone color schemes to get depth and mood without soaring production costs.
A good example of a mainstream superhero book that adopted this look as creative strategy is Hawkeye. That acclaimed book during its Matt Fraction-David Aja run combined Fraction’s zippy cinematic storytelling with Aja’s gritty urban sketches in moody purples and oranges. It helped enliven a moribund genre by melding the pacing, humor and gritty irony of movies with the muted colors, raw, punk/DIY aesthetic(“do it yourself”, a reference to the self-produced records and zines that kept Rock and Roll alive during the bland, AOR-dominated 70’s and 80’s), and bandes dessines’ inkpot-verite .
While the mainstreams were appropiating their look, however, alternative auteurs have not been sitting still. Marvel, DC and Image cherry-picked their visual style, colors and narrative experimentation. But alternatives have lately been experimenting in the form of the comics.
I’ll explore four publications from recent years here. Chris Ware, Building Stories, 2012; Richard McGuire, Here, 2014 ; Alvin Buenaventura and Sammy Harkham, editors, and company in Kramer’s Ergot number seven, 2008. And Dash Shaw in The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century, 2009. All of these projects push the form in more than stylistic ways, aided by the liberties that bookstore market and high end production they have pioneered provide. Some don’t even look like comics in the way that Hawkeye, which I chose to try in the traditional pamphlet form, does.
It’s conventional wisdom to say that book publishing is dying in the internet age. It’s certainly changing, but dying? Probably not for a while. One category that is actually expanding is graphics and comics, where digital forms are becoming more popular, but not eclipsing the sensual and user friendly appeal of the traditional bound book. Ricard McGuire’s Here differs from traditional comics in the sense that it is not the expected grid of panels in sequential time. Instead McGuire uses full page illustrations with inset panels to highlight different times within the same place, where over thousands of years past and future, people and their houses and personal dramas come and go.
This is a larger derivation of a black and white eight page cartoon first published in the innovative alternative comics mag Raw in 1986. Most of the action takes place in one room, furnished in different eras’ tastes and inhabited by various, mostly anonymous families. There is no attempt to connect these disparate fragmented narratives and thus the reader forms his own themes and narrative resolutions, if any.
The concept is elegant but ultimately abstract and emotionally unfulfilling. We wonder what happens to the man who has a heart attack over coffee with his friends. But like life itself, loose ends are not always tied up and a more coherent narrative might have been too pat and subverted the simple elegance of the concept. This is a quandary that McGuire never solves. The paintings are wonderful, though, and the concept, though more suited to the piece’s shorter, more schematic beginnings, dazzles.
Chris Ware, in Building Stories takes a similarly non linear approach to narrative. His solution is to publish a box- something tried in literature and poetry, but never to my knowledge with a single theme. In this case, Ware, like McGuire, chooses a single place, the eponymous building, as his subject. Around this conceptual framing device he presents many continuing stories in a variety of formats, all boxed up for browsing. There is a hard back graphic novel, a Golden Books style children’s book and even a bee newspaper. The building is sometimes allowed its own viewpoint, with brief bursts of sentient observation. One can enter the narrative from many different angles and attitudes.
Ware does connect his vignettes with a running cast of characters, primarily a woman whom he tracks from art school through her marriage and move to a tony section of Chicago. There is also the old woman who owns the building and a troubled couple upstairs. And Branford the Bee, a kind of every-bug, droning his way through life and trying to define his place in it. There’s no set beginning or end, and some of these segments become fugue-like: no words or dialogue, just silently repeated movements and camera angles, all contributing to an unsettledness, a sense of time passing without resolution of larger questions of life. But where McGuire’s narrative is too fragmented to create real emotional tension and his illustrations too limited in scope to provide perspective, Ware’s is drenched in irony and bathos. Even the bee provides a ground level view of the psychological dramas and perils even a single day on a single city block can hold.
For sampling a broad variety of new approaches to comics, Kramer’s Ergot is the go-to. It is to the recent era what the aforementioned Raw Magazine was to the 80’s, though most of the artists featured in this anthology are now coming from a fine art or cutting-edge illustration background rather than the underground punk DIY scene of Raw’s 80’s heyday.
The most obvious formal innovation here is actually a very old one- size. At 15×21″, Kramer’s Ergot #7 harkens to the birth of comics in America- the Sunday funnies published in turn of the century broadsheets. Raw published work in a large, 11×17″ format, and one of its founders, Francoise Mouly went on to showcasing comics artists in magazine illustration as art director of the New Yorker.
Then and now, these artists can be expected to try new media, subject, and writing forms.
But the artists who epitomized the vibrancy and creative élan of the funnies at their dawning- Windsor McCay, George Herriman, Cliff Sterrett- might be somewhat unimpressed by many of these efforts. In too many cases, these are simply standard pamphlet-style grids writ large, or worse, standard-sized panels stretched across one large page, rather than several standard-sized ones. Enjoyable enough, but one wishes for more of the sort of fanciful fairy tale panoramas of a Lionel Feininger, or the desert dreamscapes of Herriman. With notable exceptions, such as a two page spread by Ware, who has often worked in a large formats with a designed narrative scheme before, the artists seem not to have tried or had time to execute new forms. Harkham and Buenaventura should have demanded or allowed for more, but 50 intervening years of shrinking, narratively stunted comics may be more than one year’s anthology can overcome.
Dash Shaw hews closest of all these auteurs to a familiar GN format, though his book is actually a splicing together of unpublished comics with storyboards for an animated movie, a formal cousin to comics. Shaw’s comics push the boundaries of illustrated graphics though, by divorcing his raw brushwork from his unaligned colors and by balancing his paranoid psychedelic sci fi story lines with his self contained, sometimes credulous characters. Thus we get a mix of the imposed innocence and directness of Golden Age comics with the creepy distopianism of a David Lynch. At first glance, Shaw’s work seems crude and slapdash but it sticks with you in a vaguely disturbing way.
Comics have just begun to enter a new renaissance, inspired by more creator-friendly publishing (all of these artists hold copyright to their work; the innovators of the past I mentioned did not), access to a broader and more literary and artistic audience through the traditional bookseller market, and more critical attention- the New York Times has both published, and reviewed, Ware, for example. There’s little doubt there will be more experimentation forthcoming.
Reading List: The Young Romantics, Daisy Hay: Group bio of England’s Late Romantic poets; their radical lifestyles, chaotic relationships and influential writings at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Impossible to put down for the account of their unwitting invention of, and simultaneous challenge to, the myth of the artist as romantic genius that still haunts us. They may be precursors to the pop culture stars of today. I’ll return to this one when I’ve finished it, I’m sure.
The Wasteland and Other Writings, T.S. Eliot: I blitzed through this modernist milestone in college English courses and needed to revisit it, but was also drawn to Eliot’s ‘other writings’, including critical essays on poets such as Blake. Apparently I’m on a English Romantic/American Romantic/Early Modernist poetry binge, which often happens when working my bookstore temp job.
Break, Blow Burn, Camille Paglia: “Libertarian feminist” bad girl and Post Structuralist/academic feminism’s bete noir, Paglia is a fresh, if pugnacious voice in Romantic/Early Modernist era writing, and plays it uncharacteristically straight here, sticking to close readings of poems from throughout history, a sort of mini-anthology. After making room on my shelves for my college-age Norton Anthology of English and American poetry through numerous moves, I finally relinquished it after moving to my present, small apartment, in the name of uncluttered living. Mostly, this is a good thing, but I really regret that decision.
Do you Instagram? If so, follow me at @JoeHigginsMonotypes. I enjoy posting Instagrams from museums, where there are often many architectural subjects to explore. This one was taken at the Clifford Still Museum.
September! It’s the best month for a vacation, don’t you think? When I had a regular job, I always reserved a couple of weeks in September for traveling, or just for hanging around the house or in museums. But one casualty of the creative life is often free time. Make no mistake- I’m free to schedule my time, and I enjoy that. But the necessity of creating cash flow to pay off previous health, framing or other business costs when sales don’t cover them often leads to a lack of unscheduled time, especially during prime months.
Today is a beautiful day and an unexpected day off. My temp job at the bookstore will not need me to cover vacations till next week. I am trying to catch up a few tasks today, and then I’m giving myself a vacation, too. I’ll need it! I have another job coming behind this one that will be interesting- fabricating art for installations here and in other cities. But it will again make downtime scarce.
Artists also need to schedule studio time, and it’s easy to put on the back burner, especially when paying debts off. But again, the ability to give myself regular studio time doesn’t feel like obligation- it feels like freedom. It’s necessary, and art work suffers when I don’t print regularly, but creative hours don’t constrain the mind; they actually stretch it.
I’m lucky- and grateful- that some of my various part-time jobs actually help me to engage my creative life. I checked my 4-week monotype workshop and it just barely filled. So vacation postponed for Tuesday, and part of Wednesday too, as I have a DPL workshop at Schlessman Library that evening. However, the workshops will be a return to art in an unusually important sense for me. I recently alluded to the notion of writing about books in my posts to process what they mean to me. The same is true of teaching printmaking. My monotype workshops are intended to address the frustrations of trying to incorporate our creative lives into our daily lives. With that in mind, I try to engender a spirit of camraderie, exploration and spontaneity into the proceedings all while trying to instill disciplined habits and a professional manner in the print room. When there are 7 fellow artists in one studio, one must be mindful. But that mindfulness is a precious gift, to me.
I’m usually rusty after a break from studio anyway ( it’s been over 3 months) so the simple physical act of making demo prints and re-establishing good print room habits is valuable in the sense that body memory is a useful physical discipline. But the conversation will also help me get my mind back to my real work as well. In helping others solve creative problems, I’ll loosen up my own creative muscles. I often stay after my class and work on my own things – I have the ink and tools out anyway. I’m hoping to hit the ground running this fall and produce some large work. I’ll try to post more about my various projects this fall, though I really love the book blurbs too, so I’ll be posting those, as well.
But Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday of this week I’m putting down to reading, museums, soccer and puttering about the house. The weather should be good, and my last big paycheck will arrive Friday. It’s been a long, productive summer (except art making) so I’m going to reap my reward: time. Studio time is as valuable as a glass of wine and a good book in warm golden September sun, and I’m going to try to get a little of both before the first frost hits.
What’s in the stacks: A quick post of first impressions about the stuff I am currently reading:
Vamps and Tramps, Camille Paglia: Libertarian feminist Paglia cannot be ignored, though she sometimes seems more interested in stirring up the academic feminists than in tempering her improvisatory, provocative and oft times counter intuitive views. She is determined to start the conversations that dogma tries to end.
Howler Magazine (#8): Subscriptions to this lushly illustrated large format paean to the beautiful game are pricey; I order it when I can. In this issue, I came for the exquisite cover painting of American hero Carli Lloyd attempting to put Sepp Blatter’s head into the net from oh… 53 yards away. I stayed for the strange and wondrous assertion that FC Torino’s legendary Serie A teams of the 40’s were inspired by the direct attacking style of 1927’s New York Giants (the other, other New York Giants, of the ASL).
American Heritage Magazine, December, 1958 issue. Dimly recalled from my father’s bookshelf, then encountered in a used bookstore. Though I’m sure it was the high drama of the die hard Confederate raider C.S.S. Shenandoah that attracted me as a boy, this time it was a long history of the Hudson River from an art and culture standpoint that made me pick it up, plus a story about Nathaniel Hawthorne’s love affair with Sophia Peabody.
McSweeney’s #48: When you read one of these precise yet oneiric short stories, say by Kelly Link or Valeria Luiselli, then you suddenly see their work mentioned or displayed everywhere; the NYT, Atlantic, college or independent book stores.
The Tenth of December, George Saunders: horrifying and delicate, like a love letter written in Exacto knife across young flesh. I first discovered him when Fox 8 was published in McSweeney’s, which brought me back to the short story, now my summer evening’s passion.
Colorado: The Artist’s Muse, Hassrick and others: A collection of critical essays on various subjects in early Colorado art history. A companion volume to the Colorado Public Television 12 documentary on Allen Tupper True by my producer friend and former gallerist Joshua Hassel, (who also produced a spot for me). Contains a long, lavishly illustrated article on the Rocky Mountain School, a descendent of the Luminists and the Hudson River School.
The Polysyllabic Spree, Nick Hornby: I savored this, as it was perfect in length and tone for the morning and afternoon train. Compact, funny as hell monthly ruminations of what was in Hornby’s own book stack published in McSweeney’s Believer Magazine. Yes- I am writing about reading a book about someone writing about books he may or may not have read. I firmly believe this is what heaven is like, should it actually exist.
When Gloria Steinem needed a powerful feminine icon to put on the cover of her new magazine for and about self-empowered women, she chose Wonder Woman. The first Ms. Magazine even published a companion volume of WW stories from her Golden Age, when she often lectured young girls about the importance of letting no man get the upper hand. These were eight or so stories, carefully chosen for one important reason: Wonder Woman, invented by feminist psychologist William Moulton Marston, and modeled after his assistant/companion Olive Byrne, was like her creator, a bit of a freak, and WAY into bondage. Steinem wanted a figure that fit neatly into her narrative of empowered womanhood, and wanted no part of the bondage.
Wonder Woman’s star spangled hot pants, magic lasso (more bondage!) and surprising feminist history- Olive Byrne’s aunt was none other than birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger, her mother, suffragist Ethel Higgins Bryne- make her fascinating. Harvard historian and New Yorker contributor Jill LePore’s Secret History of Wonder Woman tells the tale well, with detailed research and tempered language, despite the story’s more sensationalistic elements. Comics don’t always get respectful treatment when they step into the reflected glare of the ivory tower. And it’s no different here. LePore approaches the tale from the perspective of “first wave” feminism’s long transition into “second wave”, and is clearly out of her element in the subject of comics history-as a later foray into comics and feminism proves. More on that later. But in trying to place Wonder Woman within the context of a medium that once featured plenty of female characters and creators, then suddenly didn’t- as my previous post outlines- I sought out two other books from a growing list of critical literature about comics.
Wonder Woman was born of feminism and fetish. Her creator, a relentlessly self-promoting psychologist with three Harvard degrees and four kids by two different women, had a belief in women’s superiority as civilizing leaders, and a fondness for the trappings of kink. He lived and raised children with both his legal wife, also a dedicated feminist, and Byrne, who wore cuff-like bracelets similar to Wonder Woman’s. The language of bondage and submission infused the comic, where women including Wonder Woman often fell into heavy bondage as a reminder of the folly of letting men rule them. Lepore treats this quirky history somewhat dispassionately though she sniffs prudishly at WW’s “kinky boots”. And she never really explains how Wonder Woman links first- and second wave feminism, though WW’s ignominious descent into a domesticated limbo during the repressive 50’s exactly mirrors feminism’s disappearance from the front pages.
Bondage remains the unspoken 800 pound gorilla in the room, in all of these books. LePore and Trina Robbins (see last post) ignore it as much as possible, reporting, but not analyzing it. Steinem tiptoed around it. Daniels gives an excellent history of reactions to it, and DC’s struggle to reel it under control while not upsetting the applecart- WW was selling well, even better than Superman and Batman some months. Tim Hanley, in Wonder Woman Unbound cooly quantifies it, counting and graphing each panel to prove that, yes, the least kinky WW comic had more bondage scenes than the most kinky of any other comic. Only Hanley passes any sort of judgement: the bondage, especially in concert with Marston’s strongly feminist rhetoric, was “problematic.” He confronts the controversy: where some have maintained that her (Marston’s) fetish imagery disqualifies her as a feminist icon, Hanley concludes “Wonder Woman was both feminist and fetishist.”
After Marston’s early death in 1949, DC , the company that bullied Siegel and Schuster into giving up the rights to Superman, showed Olive Byrne and Elizabeth Hollaway Marston the door, despite their role as Marston’s assistants, and took the opportunity to reconfigure the character. Les Daniels tells this story without sugar coating in A Complete History of Wonder Woman. Robert Kanigher presumably had a mandate to eliminate the problematic bondage and submission elements as the censorship movement gathered steam. He never had any affection for the character (He is known mainly for his work on DCs iconic war comics, many images from which were swiped by Roy Lichtenstein for such irony laden pop art masterpieces as “Blam!”, which I credit with starting two complex conversations- about both appropriation in art and creator’s rights in comics, here.)
His work on WW however can best be described as Comics Code Authoity- era hack work, and under him the character sank into complete irrelevance, even as the girls who’d loved her during Marston’s didactic feminism grew up to initiate second-wave feminism.
The CCA was created by scared publishers, seeking not to protect creative expression from censorship, but to protect corporate profits from Wertham style crusades. It, along with the general paranoia of conformist, 50’s America, led to a period in comics when crime must not pay, and a bland, stereotyped vision of family life as the ultimate good must always triumph. Since superheroes, the dominant genre in comic books, were usually lone, pulp-style vigilantes written by lone, underpaid hacks as the censorship shrank the industry, the family narrative was difficult to fit in. This led to a bizarre phenomenon in 50’s and 60’s DC comics, noted in Hanley and others, which can be described as the pseudo, or faux family. Thus did Batman and Robin, after insinuations about their sexuality arose acquire a rival/wife/mom figure, Batwoman; and Wonder Woman, in Kanigher’s ad hoc style, become a mother figure to her own teen and toddler selves (through time travel). She also allowed puppy-like Steve Trevor to turn the tables, in direct disobedience to the Amazon code- she was now pathetically desperate to marry him. This was a bondage of a far different, and more insidious sort.
Worse was to come, as in the late 60s, post Kanigher, DC sought to revamp the character. They chose a stylish yet retrograde solution, given the times: WW was stripped of her powers and her mythological roots and became a swinging London clothes horse.
Enter Gloria Steinem. Steinem, a reader of WW as a girl, was a friend of Warner’s Steve Ross, who’d just bought DC. Steinem was outraged that WW had been stripped of her powers. As abruptly as it appeared, the new WW was gone, and the old appeared on the cover of (the Steve Ross-supported) first issue of Ms. Magazine. It was a return, of sorts to her feminist roots, though DC was very slow to catch up. A plan to install one of Marston’s assistants as editor of the character in the heyday of second-wave feminism fizzled, even as the ERA itself died. The always available, ever-hackneyed Kanigher was brought back. The character drifted through different iterations, retcons and reboots, never re-finding her feminist soul, even as the role of women in comics, as outlined in Mike Madrid’s useful Supergirls, slowly grew. Meanwhile, A radical backlash led by Ellen Wills against Steinem’s self-improvement-as-empowerment style of rhetoric led to Steinem’s bizarrely being accused of working for the CIA.
Since then, both Wonder Woman and feminism have struggled to define themselves. WW has haltingly revisited her mythological roots in the 80s George Perez era, and after a detour as a well-hootered sword and sorcery hero during the 90’s “Bad Girl” style that fueled the fanboy/ speculator boom, has returned to it, as well as the idea of family in a recent Brian Azzarello/Cliff Chiang epic as she protects an earthling’s child by Zeus . It was a refreshing take, though Azzarello was not able to add much of the Greek Canon’s characteristic sexual tension because Wonder Woman had already hooked up with Superman in another book, and DC’s marketing strategy, as always, trumped the esthetic requirements of graphic art.
WW is now being authored by a husband and wife team in the stereotypically boob-a-licious DC house style. There will soon be a movie released, though fanboys on the web were quick to criticise the lead actor, Gal Gadot for being “too skinny”, fanboy code-speak for too flat chested. Whatever the proper bust metrics the character requires, there is a lot riding on this movie. the big screen has a tendency to define a character, for better or worse.
Wonder Woman’s relation to family, men, and her role as a feminist icon have never been resolved to this day, and like feminism itself, hasn’t resolved a role for men in the ongoing struggle for equality, yet hasn’t really defined women’s role either.
LePore got herself dragged into this ongoing schism when the New Yorker, having apparently decided she was now the resident comics expert at the magazine, handed her a copy of A-Force, an alternate universe tale of an all female superhero team written by the well-regarded G. Willow Wilson, who’d gained a name for herself in feminist circles of the comics blogosphere for Ms. Marvel, a fresh superhero tale featuring a teenaged girl superhero who also dealt with the uncertainties that teen aged girlhood entails, as well as being a Muslim in Tea Bag America.
Abandoning the assiduous research and restrained, non-sensationalistic narrative of Wonder Woman for the arch flippancy of the New Yorker’s lead-off commentary section, LePore promptly handed it off to her pre-adolescent sons, an odd and somewhat stereotyped choice, given that mainstream comics haven’t primarily targeted children in well over 40 years, when the direct market took over from corner drug store newsstands. Predictably, Lepore reports the youngsters loved it, because… boobs. However, LePore again sniffed at the “pervy” costumes. But A-Force, when I checked, was fairly restrained in its costuming by comic book, or even athletic wear, standards. “If Dr. Lepore is categorically opposed to latex, she should consider trolling a different genre.”G Willow sensibly advises.
Wilson posted a very passionate response (here) to LePore’s “perplexingly shallow, even snarky” non-review, and the internets had a good larf about a comic book writer taking on the imperviously high brow New Yorker’s Midtown snark. But in fact, G. Willow, (who has, after all, been herself published in The Atlantic and in the New York Times Magazine) lands not a few haymakers. She closes:
“I imagine Dr. Lepore and I want the same thing: better, more nuanced portrayals of women in pop culture. What I don’t understand is why someone in her position would, from her perch a thousand feet up in the ivory tower, take pot shots at those of us who are in the trenches, doing exactly that.”
And neither do I.
What the perpetually marginalized medium of comics has to say about feminism, what feminism says about comics may not be of import to Jill Lepore. But it has become a force in pop culture is where society’s murmurings become custom. WW is bound (heh) in various author attitudes toward women and family and has never developed a clear voice of her own. Rebels, lovers and hacks created her, their vision shifting like mis-registered color on a comic page. Now their their creation hits the big screen. What tales they might tell if bound in her wondrous magic lasso and forced to confess the truth: unsure of their own direction, they created a character both supremely powerful yet oddly powerless, dreaming a kaleidoscopic picture of the perfect woman. She floats, star spangled golden, bound in our hopes and dreams.
Pop culture is often where small battles play out in the larger culture war. Libraries have discovered comics -as a way to spur reading in young people and English second language readers- but so have the censors who see not a revival of creativity, but a challenge to the established bland infantility of the 50’s. Comics are often attacked, even some of the ones mentioned here, where I’ve tried to pick out the most progressive titles.
Comics are the offspring of a rapacious corporate culture and a free wheeling creative spirit. Their vitality continues to appeal to the marginalized in society despite, or perhaps because of, their function as a platform for marginal imaginings. Like weeds, they have found a way into the light.
Academics and pop historians have discovered this subject. I’ve especially been looking forward to The Secret History of Wonder Woman, by a top rank cultural historian, Jill LePore. After spending quite a while on the DPL waiting list to receive a copy, I’ve read her book. But I’ve discovered one thing while waiting: the subject is too large for one book. Delving into the history of women in comics led to a surprising amount of reading. LePore is actually weak in the history of comics; she limits her scope to a feminist history that includes WW. It’s a compelling tale, but all of the surprisingly large literature of comics history is needed to fill in a complete picture. It IS 70 years of pop culture history, after all.
I like posting about comics here for a few different reasons:
It allows me to post regularly about something not related to me and my own work, so there are usually more regular posts.
It taps me into a larger conversation about pop culture which is related to the culture wars, and thus to my experience in art.
It allows me to “think out loud” about the things I’m reading, which in turn helps me to process them.
And it forces me to get better at writerly skills such as citation, summarization, finding and organizing different sources, and editing.
It’s fun, of course- a nice escape from reading academic art theory and history, which I enjoy, but which is often intended for other academics, and clotted with jargon. I want to remain topical. Comics and graphics are related to the history of printmaking. Here’s some of what I’ve been reading about the medium’s history:
Comic Books and America, 1945-54, William W. Savage, Jr, University of Oklahoma Press. This is a lively academic reading of comics’ treatment of race, gender, and war in the cold war era, including the censorship movement. America’s paranoid, conformist post-war years are a watershed in every aspect of comics history: censorship movements infantilized comics and reinforced the cultural pressure on women to adopt “traditional” consumerist housewife roles that had, in fact, never existed before. Mighty Wonder Woman stopped fighting for democracy and women’s superiority, and was shoehorned into a bizarre pseudo-family. Only Little Lulu fought back.
From Girls to Grrrlz, and Pretty in Ink: North American Women Cartoonists, 1896-2013, Trina Robbins, Chronicle Books and Fantagraphics: Curious hybrids that double as coffee table surveys and memoirs of Robbins’ own story of her role in the 2nd wave feminist efforts in comics’ underground/small press alternative publishing era in the 70’s and 80’s. There’s a nice overview of women’s long history both on and off the page, starting with the sentimental humor of turn of the century newspaper strips, then the sassy flapper era and war era adventures of female characters and their creators ( Pretty), and in her discussion of the teen and romance comics boom of the post war era ( Grrrlz), the inevitable domestication of women and their characters. Interestingly, this is about the time that women disappeared from the mainstream comics “bullpen”.
This is wrapped around a personal memoir of Robbins’ role in the alternative/underground comics movement of the 70’s-80’s. She played a significant role in the dawning of comics as a vehicle for personal/political expression for women (as they were for gays and other groups as well). It’s a good story, which she tells in both books, using many of the same examples. But Robbins is not big on interpretation; she lumps the giants who challenged assigned roles both on and off the page-Such as Tarpe Mills and Lily Renee-in with commercially successful, but ultimately sentimental figures as Grace Drayton. She also tends to ignore the mainstream houses after 1970. It lends the impression that the alternative comics are the apotheosis of the medium, a pretty thought- the alternatives certainly played a large role in opening up mainstream comics for different types of expression and creators beyond the usual adolescent power fantasy superhero tale told in the DC or Marvel house style. Their influence is celebrated in many posts here, and I made the same transition Robbins does as a reader. But given the small print runs, they don’t have much impact in the public at large, thus marring Robbins’ value as historical survey.
To get that story, one must refer to others, such as Mike Madrid’s The Supergirls. Madrid provides the only overview of women creators and characters from beginning to end in comic book history, centering mostly on mainstream publishers. While LePore and others focus on Wonder Woman’s roots in feminism, and Robbins on the feminist self-publishing and mini-comics of the underground/alternative years, only he links them all together, both on and off the pages. There is the excruciating, slow movement of the mass market comic book publishers toward less sexist characters, and more diverse creative teams, complete with much backsliding, e.g. the 90’s “bad girl” era of violent but hooter-licious superheroines intended for fan-boys, which even subsumed ( originally feminist) Wonder Woman.
These dark years also included the practice of “fridging”, or disposing of strong central female characters, often WAGs of central male characters, in a violent manner to facilitate cheap drama and plot transition. This is named after writer Gail Simone’s Women in Refrigerators blog which asked questions about “violence against fictional females” of male-dominated publishers and editorial teams for this heinous and sleazy fabulism. I happened across an interview of Simone in an old copy of The Comics Journal. It covered WIR, as well as her work as one of the first female writers at Marvel and DC, where she wrote iconic characters such as Wonder Woman and Superman.
Comix: A History of Comic Books in America, Les Daniels, Bonanza. Helpful for his very hard hitting assessment of the Wertham anti-comics crusade that led to the mainstream publishers’ rather craven and mercenary establishment of the Comics Code Authority censorship program. This, and one presumes, the sudden absence of women in the creative sphere, led to a bizarre phenomenon in which characters became grouped into pseudo-families to alleviate the censorship pressures. Superman acquired a cousin/daughter figure in Supergirl, who had a super cat as well, and Wonder Woman bizarrely acted as mother/sister/grandmother to her OWN younger selves during the Kanigher years after her creator, feminist William Moulton Marston died. Her teen and toddler selves were transported through time to provide domestic plot ideas when popping bad guys, enjoying bondage and dominating her simpering boy friend, Steve, was no longer considered a good marketing strategy by DC.
Superman’s rather sadistic habit of “teaching” the nuptially-obsessed Lois Lane “a lesson” by humiliating her with elaborate ruses to counteract her even more elaborate ruses to prove her marriageability were mentioned by multiple authors here. His icy Closet- er, Fortress of Solitude predated Simone’s refrigerator as a way of dealing with inconvenient female characters. And Wertham noted that Batman, in order to “protect his secret identity”, lived only with his athletic young ward Robin.
Eventually, through the efforts of Robbins, Simone and many others, and in concert with the fresh ideas and greater creative power that the direct market brought to the industry, women have found an increasingly prominent place in comics. Alison Bechdel’s and Marianne Satrapi’s tales of personal struggles were a big part of comics’ entry into the bookstore market. This, and creator-owned publishers such as Image Comics has opened opportunities for female (and male) creators in the mainstream. I’ve reviewed comics here by fresh faces such as Mariko and Jillian Tamaki, Kelly Sue DeConnick and Emma Rios. I’ve also pointed out female characters, such as She Hulk, once slut-shamed mercilessly by her own writers, that transcend the super-babe-waiting-to-be-stuffed-into-a-refrigerator model.
Many women (and men) in the burgeoning comics blogosphere have called out the industry on these issues. Here’s a writer who challenges the long held assumptions about comics. Gloria Steinem thought enough of her girlhood memories reading Wonder Woman to put her on the cover of the first issue of Ms. Magazine.
I mentioned Jill LePore’s take on that iconic character I’ll post a second part of this piece separately. The record-setting cinematic releases of iconic characters indicates they are relevant to our cultural narrative. It’s time to take the other half of these dreams and visions out of the deep freeze.
The summer has been a cool one with breezes or showers at night for comfortable sleeping. With the Summer Art Market show over and the workshops begun, I’m catching up on postponed tasks, such as paying off credit cards. I’m working a temp job in a bookstore for that, and it makes it hard to get a lot of writing or art done. It’s mostly, go to work then come home and read, with some Women’s World Cup and Gold Cup sprinkled in.
I’d wanted to work on some larger work for gallery and art consultant sales, but instead I’m watching my ideas lay fallow till Fall. It’s too bad, as there is usually a rustiness that sets in when I finally do go back to the studio. But less debt means more cash flow for supplies and frames.
I’ve got two comics posts sitting nearly finished in the can. I’m persnickety about editing, so I won’t rush them, but I hope to post within a few days. I’ll be working a few less hours the next couple weeks, and can devote time to studio and blog work.
A Taiko Chandler Monotype, using her characteristic cool secondary colors in multiple transparent layers. Taiko shows at Space Gallery, and is joining me in Booth 99 for her first Summer Art Market!
I’m spending most of my time working on my Summer Art Market show with monotype artist Taiko Chandler. We’re in Booth 99. Looks like the weather’s finally clearing up; I’ve made quite a bit of new work and Taiko will bring a whole different look with her abstract, very organic work. And filling only half a booth makes my preparation less stressful.
I’ve also got a full load of monotype workshops scheduled. I’ve updated the Workshops page with full details, but here’s a quick summary:
The last free Denver Public Library workshop is at Athmar Park branch on June 17. Full details here. There will be a full Fall schedule, including a couple of new branches, announced here in late summer.
At the League, my workshops vary in length and detail, and come at many price levels. All of them stress creative process and good conversation. It’s a great place to meet new friends and jump start your creativity!
Saturday, August 8, 9-4:30 Monotype Sampler This is a moderately detailed full-day workshop that starts with the basic print room procedure and black and white printing in the morning, and advances to color in the afternoon. Moderately priced, too ( $67.50/82.50). http://asld.modvantage.com/Course/CourseDetail/7973/monotype-sampler
You can register on line by following the links, or come down to the Summer Art Market and see the show, and register there. I’ll be there (in Booth 99), so I can answer any questions for you.
The Summer Art Market itself is June 13-14 west of the school at 2nd and Grant Street (we’ll be near the urban gardens somewhere between 2nd and 3rd on Grant). It features over 200 artists over 4-5 blocks, but is less crowded and more focused on art than most street fairs. I’ll be doing a demo there on Saturday at 1 PM, and the fair is open 10-6 PM. Sunday hours are 10-5.
Unlike past shows, I’m sharing a booth at the #SummerArtMarket2015 with another monotype artist, Taiko Chandler. I’ll post some of her work soon. It has allowed me to dial back the preparation of the small-to-medium-sized prints that usually sell there in favor of some larger work, which I will still need more of to crack into a more sustainable position from a business perspective, but also to more fully develop creative ideas. I’ve worked hard in past years at creating a large inventory of smaller pictures, so I should be able to fill a half of a booth to please the mostly smaller, middle income collectors at the show and continue to make bigger works for a higher end gallery market.
I’m also mentoring to a certain extent. Many past students in my workshops have been moving into a more professional approach to creating and selling and the SAM is a good place to test yourself. I try to help with some of the more practical concerns of presenting, showing and selling art. Taiko is one of those artists, though she’s made a fair amount of progress without me so far, so I find myself wondering what her very polished work will bring to the booth in terms of eye appeal and new visitors- two heads are better than one?
At some point, usually in May, those practical concerns start to outweigh all the aesthetic issues. I’m sorting, wrapping, and framing art. I’m digging through the garage to make sure I have important items to transport it, hang it and keep it dry.What’s an important supply item for artists? Trash bags! They help you to transport, store and protect art at an outdoor show, and they double for the same purpose for buyers bringing it home. Art supplies include bungee cords- mundane items, yet so useful when the wind comes up.
I’m also making art, mostly smaller items again to fill out the bins and to cater to beginning collectors with small walls. I’ve made some larger work, especially in April and early May, which I’m taking to the photographer this week. I’ll post some pictures and add them to the gallery next week.
I’m doing another free library workshop this week as well, and my Summer workshops are open for registration now. The weather is still wet and cool, so I’m still reading a lot too. I’ve started a “women in comics” post which will inevitably grow too large and be chopped into separate parts. My comics posts, as I’ve said, are an attempt to post something that taps into a larger conversation about the culture wars than just my studio work. It allows me to “think out loud” about the things I’m reading, which in turn helps me to process them. It turns out that conversation -and the reading stack- is large and getting larger. My supposedly brief foray into mainstream comics has extended into a larger inquiry into comics’, and all pop cultural, expression of societal change, and that subject is starting to get a lot of attention in some very high places. There’s actually a lot of material out there, and I’ve enjoyed digging into it. I imagine I’ll continue posting about where my library and bookstore excursions lead me.
Art Spiegelman (Raw Magazine, Maus) speculates in Dangerous Drawings that comics started taking off in the mid-19th Century after printing presses began the expansion of reading into lower, less well educated classes of society. Libraries often use comics to perform the same function with immigrant populations today. Marginalized creators, too, such as Second Wave feminists in the 70’s and 80’s could get access to cheap printing and spread messages in underground comics about social change.
A slow starting day with gathering clouds- perfect! I did finish up some MoPrint biz earlier this week, and went to studio twice, but I didn’t produce a lot of finished work, mostly thinking and prepping for a final push at the SAM. Here’s another weekend book post:
Next to the bed, I have an unread Teddy Roosevelt bio by Doris Kearns Goodwin that will help fill in many of the gaps in my understanding about the last time the ultra rich were out of control in America. I enjoy stringing related biographies together in service to the larger picture. I also love Post Modern door-stop type novels. Next to TR is A half-finished David Foster Wallace novel. This contains the usual rabbit’s warren of parenthetical musings, foot-noted speculations and general digression one expects from DFW- all about tax returns! I can here the traditionalists groaning from here. Other weighty volumes within arm’s reach are unfinished Dickinson and Picasso bios. These are what I regard as winter books- best suited for the long dark hours when it would take a legendary party to get me off the couch and out in the cold city. The couch opens its arms for a long stay, bluish dusk cloaks the rare streetside movement.
Now is a time for my warm weather books, easily digestible, pop cultural back porch snacks immune to the distractions of flipping steak on the grill, baseball and soccer shouts from the park. They fit my more hectic schedule, but do tap into my desire to prove to myself, if no one else, that pop culture is where the repressed soul of human creativity often leaks out. Lately this means, natch, comics I’ve been catching up on since I started spending a lot of time in the library, those which didn’t fit my limited bookstore budget before. These are almost all guilty pleasures, a concept that we lapsed Catholics recognize as a redundancy.- something considered slightly unsavory that is nonetheless, irresistible. Tawdry fantasy bought with stolen time! Here’s what one thief has been reading when he should be reading something else:
Booklist:
Paul Moves Out: A young couple in contemporary Montreal. I took some older stuff I didn’t want to store down to Kilgore Books and Comics for trade and I got Palookaville #21, and this Michel Rabagliatti confection in return. It’s an agreeable confection, in the style of Depuy and Berberian’s Monsieur Jean series (e.g. Get a Life), a romantic comedy with a lively, Euro graphic sense. Unlike, D &B, it fails to generate even mild dramatic tension. Its emotional conflicts are solved rather early, and it devolves into some amusing situations and minor domestic complications. A triumph of style over substance, but enjoyable for the exquisite brush work.
Miss Don’t Touch Me: A young innocent girl in 30’s Paris attempts to solve her sister’s murder. Another bit of stylish eye candy, with art which hovers quite attractively between Herge’s classic Ligne Claire style, and a retro, Milt Gross gestural style. Unlike Paul Moves Out, there is plot conflict and tension aplenty, but it mostly derives from lurid, somewhat hackneyed plot devices such as the virgin in the whore house, the psychopathic S&M enthusiast, the gay dandy dominated by his rich mother. This is apparently a series of shorter episodes stitched together into album format, so its superficialities are no surprise, and nicely balanced by its period-piece charm. It’s good, fluffy fun.
Book of Genesis: Illustrated word-for-word by underground comics pioneer R. Crumb. I had declined touse limited funds and shelf space to obtain it, so hurray for a progressive library. This is the most thought provoking of the three. The last time I spent this much time with the Old Testament was in sunday school, where the nuns were understandably reluctant to delve into its many bizarre aspects. Not so R. Crumb! He generally plays it straight in the telling, though, and lets the book speak for itself. He does provide some notes at the end, and like Crumb, many of us are dying to know why- in three separate chapters- men tell wives to pose as their sisters. A question we’d’ve gotten our knuckles rapped for as kids. His take, influenced by other readings, is that these tales must be taken in the context of co-existing matriarchal hierarchies in Sumerian culture. I can’t speak to that, but it does provide a possible explanation for why Abraham might pimp his wife to the Pharoah. I predict further reading on biblical historiography will stem from this.
Punk Rock: An Oral History: This one clearly deserves, and will get- a full review, which I’ve already started writing. I’ve alluded to Punk’s influence on comics and politics, two other cultural areas that get regular attention here. Like most Americans, I came to it late (1978) but it had a revolutionary influence in my own life, and anyone honest about pop culture will recognize its influence as the equal to the flappers and the hippies. I’m glad I read this collection of often conflicting accounts from the actual players before I embarked on a more “proper” history, and a visit to iTunes for some early-to mid career Stranglers, Public Image Limited, Magazine, and The Damned has already happened.
Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby: I picked it up, devoured half of it, put it down again. I’ll finish it in a burst with a Martini or Manhattan beside me, I’m sure. Another guilty pleasure- it’s got literary shenanigans, though Scott and Zelda actually DO quit drinking and staying up till dawn for about a whole week early in this account. It takes place around the timeF. Scott was starting The Great Gatsby, the same time a sensationalized murder hit the nation’s press, which Sarah Churchwell is itching to prove informed Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. It’s got crazed youth in a post war America that had decided to give women the vote and Prohibition a try. Both 18th and 19th Amendments, incidentally, spearheaded by many of the same activist women. It’s like a Vanity Fair article stretched out to novel length- delicious!
I’ll still do the women in comics post, too- I’m up to #15 (from 40) on the wait list for Jill LePore’s The Secret History of Wonder Woman, a character which I consider essential to that subject.
