I enjoyed reading comic
books as a kid. Sometimes I enjoy reading them as an adult. Comics have
always been for adults (and kids, too). While popular superhero
comics have told stories of the physical and moral paragons of our fantasies,
comics have also been a place accessible to those who didn’t see themselves
represented in other media. The combination of words and pictures, sometimes
more of a juxtaposition, that are the language of comics can powerfully present
a point of view. Hilary Chute
considers the power of comics to communicate the experience of individuals and
subcultures in Why Comics?
While Chute focuses on comic books, she considers cartooning more
broadly, especially the early cartoons that appeared in British
magazines (quickly imitated in the U.S.) and
the American newspaper comic strip.
While some newspaper comics were designed to appeal to kids, many were meant to
attract adult readers. They often depicted people from poor and immigrant
communities. In addition, cartooning could also be very artistic and even in
the early days of comic strips some artists were recognized for the quality of
their images and storytelling, such as Winsor McCay
and George
Herriman.
Because Chute generally focuses on groups that were historically or
currently marginalized, much of the book focuses on underground
and independent
comics. I’ll admit that I’ve not particularly been a fan of underground
comics. My earliest introduction to underground comics in the 1980s was mostly
to 1960s and 1970s books that
featured drug
culture and bizarre or pornographic depictions of sex.
In the subsequent years, I’ve come across some incredibly good underground, literary
or artistic comics. Chute discusses some of them such as Art
Spieglman’s Maus, Marjane
Satrapi’s Persepolis and Harvey
Pekar’s American Splendor. I’m a Midwesterner and
I was amazed to see Pekar’s depictions of scenes I might see in my own town.
Comics were born as a mass media, which may explain some of the stigma
attached to them, and mainstream comics have always been produced in
factory-like manor with a division of labor (writer, penciler, inker, etc.).
Some creators were uncredited, or one name appeared on the work of many (this
practice was common in the newspaper comic strips, too). Undeground and art
comics were more often the work of an auteur, who produced the entire work.
This opened up comics to more individual perspectives that strayed farther from
the mainstream. Comics can powerfully represent personal experience or memories
because it is like memory: it mixes words and images, it can readily present
comparisons and contrasts, and it can show past, present, future, real and
imagined on the same page.
I don’t plan on adding a lot of underground comics to my reading list,
but I did enjoy Chute’s book. If someone is looking for an introduction to
comics that are outside the mainstream and done well, Why Comics? is a good place to start.
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