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Comics as Media_ __Afterword__W. J. T. Mitchell
Comics as Media_ __Afterword__W. J. T. Mitchell
Author(s): W. J. T. Mitchell
Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 40, No. 3, Comics & Media, edited by Hillary Chute and Patrick
Jagoda (Spring 2014), pp. 255-265
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/677376 .
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Comics as Media:
Afterword
W. J. T. Mitchell
W
hen the idea first emerged to combine the pro- ema, and television—not to mention the new media asso-
ceedings of the 2012 Chicago “Comics: Phi- ciated with the invention of the computer? If so, what is
losophy and Practice” conference with a group its specific role and status among the media? Is there some
of essays on questions of media, old and new, I admit that kind of medium specificity to be identified, some essential
I was a bit skeptical. The comics artists are perfectly capa- character of the comics medium (for instance, its inevi-
ble of speaking for themselves, even though they tend to table rootedness in the extremely old media of drawing
speak in a language relatively unadorned by academic jar- and writing, or its technical pedigree in the very modern
gon: that is, the modest language of practitioners who like invention of the printing press and the rise of newspapers
to practice their art more than they like to talk about it. and magazines, or its contemporary articulation as a kind
So this collection of texts and comics is a kind of arranged of bookish and materialist alternative to the dominance
marriage at two levels: first, the conference itself com- of virtuality and screen-based media)? Finally, what is the 255
pelled an ongoing conversation between academics and meaning of the historical coincidence between the rise of
artists, a conversation that was occasionally interrupted the new digital media and the emergence of comics as a
by muttering from the artists in the audience (most nota- newly “serious” medium of art, collected and exhibited
bly Robert Crumb) about “academic bullshit.” Second, by major museums, capable of taking on subjects such as
the proceedings have now been led into a marriage with the Holocaust or the genocide in Bosnia while engaging in
the history and theory of media. What has emerged from vanguard experiments that reflect on the nature of com-
this double marriage is the text before you. Will it have ics themselves? When one looks at the work of the art-
numerous offspring in the disciplines of media studies ists gathered for the Chicago symposium none of whom
and comics studies? Will it be a happy marriage? Consider have ever bothered to depict superheroes), one feels that
these remarks nothing but a kind of postceremonial bless- the medium and its practitioners have themselves entered
ing on one of the most adventurous and exciting projects a heroic phase. Comics and comics artists are now able to
that Critical Inquiry has undertaken in my thirty-six leap tall buildings at a single bound, especially all the old
years as editor. boundaries between art and mass culture, juvenile and adult
The big question, of course, is what precisely is the forms of expression, generic distinctions between satire and
relation of comics and media? If this is an arranged mar- autobiography, fiction and nonfiction, poetry and philoso-
riage, who is the husband and who is the wife? Who is the phy and history. Is there some sense in which contemporary
top and who is the bottom? Crumb’s cover, with its image comics are themselves a new medium, in the grip of radical
of an odd couple applying for their marriage license, innovations in form and content, technologies and genres?
strikes me as the perfect picture of our situation. Should We could put all this in simpler and more comics-
we think of comics as personified by the muscular drag appropriate form simply by inserting here the question
queen or the slender youth? Who is the academic theorist that Art Spiegelman posed in his “keynote conversation”
and who is the comic artist? Crumb provides a wonder- with me to open the comics conference:
fully carnivalesque framework for thinking beyond our
stereotypes, for opening a new world in which we no WHAT THE @#&!* HAPPENED TO COMICS?
longer know the answers to all the predictable questions. Of course Spiegelman’s question is a historical one,
Where do comics fit among the media, and what can the interrogating the recent transformations in the status of
study of media tell us about comics? Is comics simply one comics. But there is also a more philosophical question,
medium among others, a minor medium to be placed well namely the question of ontology, or the being of comics,
below painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, cin- the essential specificity of comics as a medium:
WHAT THE @#&!* ARE COMICS? tic and epic stories. If stereotyping is indeed fundamental
One thing the philosophical question reveals immedi- to comics, it need not be funny; it can be vicious, heroic,
ately is a peculiar grammatical glitch in the word comics: pornographic, allegorical, or statistical, ranging from
is it or are they a singular or plural phenomenon? animal caricature to the isotypes of Otto Neurath and the
logical positivists (fig. 1).
WHAT THE @#&!* IS COMICS? And this leads us to notice a certain confusion of genre
Like the concepts of medium and media, more gener- and medium in the word comics itself.3 On the one hand,
ally, comic and comics seem to want it all. That is, we speak it suggests a certain plot type and particular sorts of char-
of a comic book (a singular totality composed of multiple acters. Comedy classically involves low, ridiculous char-
pages, frames, panels, and images) but of a comics page acters, stereotypes, caricatures, or, at best, low mimetic
(plural name for a singu- realism—characters who
lar element of a book). In are no better than us.4 On
writing about this curious the other hand, comics are
singular/plurality in the graphic discourses, com-
case of media, Mark Han- bining words and images,
sen and I came to the fol- writing and drawing to
lowing conclusion: “What communicate meaning.
is to be understood is not As a medium, as graphic
media in the plural” (that discourse, comics can be
is, the empirical listing of applied to any genre of
the many different types narrative or discourse;
of media) “but media in one can write a letter,
the singular . . . which is to philosophize, describe a
say, by reconceptualizing procedure, or tell a story.
understanding from the Does comics name the
perspective of media.”1 content? Or the form?
If we substitute the word The divided iden-
comics for media in this tity of comics as genre
statement, we come up and/or medium came
with the aim of this vol- Figure 1. Otto Neurath, Isotypes. up recently in the comic
256 ume, and this afterword: to reconceptualize understand- adaptation by Ryan Alexander-Tanner of Bill Ayers’s auto-
ing, not just of comics or of media, but of the world as such, biographical account of his career in education, To Teach
from the perspective of comics understood as a singular (fig. 2). Ayers is expressing concern that comics are “not a
plurality (or should we say a plural singularity?).2 genre that a lot of folks are familiar with,” whereupon the
But what is the perspective of comics? Is it the point comic artist leaps out of his chair exclaiming “ROMANCE
of view of comics artists? Or is it something impersonal, IS A GENRE. COMICS ARE A MEDIUM, LIKE MOV-
built into the very structure of comics as a medium? How IES OR NOVELS.” Ayers accepts that he is being schooled
can an impersonal system have a perspective? Is there a in a subject to which he had given little thought. He and
comic view of the world? Put this way, the question makes Alexander-Tanner quickly begin levitating, reflecting on
a kind of sense and resonates well with the abundance of the “dazzling dance of the dialectic” between words and
humor that flowed through this conference and that char- pictures, constructing a palace of imaginary bricks that
acterizes so much of the work of the artists who partici- begin to float, along with Ayers himself, in an airborne
pated. If the cartoon as visual joke, as graphic one-liner, chair. In the midst of their enthusiasm they are inter-
is a kind of molecular unit of comics, then it seems that rupted by Bill’s spouse, Bernardine Dohrn, who looks at
satire, parody, caricature, and clowning, along with the a sample page of the comic-in-progress, and pays a com-
merry (and sometimes savage) playing with stereotypes, pliment: “Wow, this is great. You guys are going to intro-
the reduction of individuals to abstract, general formulas, duce a whole new audience to this genre.” Bill and Ryan
must be central to the perspective of comics. But we know promptly set her straight: “IT’S NOT A GENRE!” The
that this isn’t all there is to it; not all comics are comical. unimpressed Bernardine replies: “Oh, please. Get over
They range over the infinite variety of genres: romance to yourselves” (fig. 3).5
tragedy, history to biography, autobiography to apocalyp- So is this the last word? Who cares if “comics” is sin-
1. W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, introduction to Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. Mitchell and Hansen (Chicago, 2010), p. xxii.
2. Compare Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of the self as a singular plurality in Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stan-
ford, Calif., 2000).
3. The OED tells us that “comic” singular is “of, proper, or belonging to comedy . . . as distinguished from tragedy.” In the plural, it denotes “the comic
strips in a newspaper” (Oxford English Dictionary, s. v. “comic”). See Robert C. Harvey, “Describing and Discarding ‘Comics’ as an Impotent Act of Philo-
sophical Rigor,” in Comics as Philosophy, ed Jeff McLaughlin (Jackson, Miss., 2007), pp. 14–26.
4. I am following here Northrop Frye’s classic theory of narrative modes from Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, N.J., 1957).
5. Ryan Alexander-Tanner and Ayers, To Teach: The Journey, in Comics (New York, 2011), p. 15. This is a “translation” into comics of Ayers, To Teach: The
Journey of a Teacher (New York, 2010).
Figure 2. William Ayers and Ryan Alexander-Tanner, To Teach: The Journey, in Comics (2011).
Figure 3. William Ayers and Ryan Alexander-Tanner, To Teach: The Journey, in Comics (2011).
259
Figure 4. Art Spiegelman, . . . Spiegelman Still Tries to Learn to Walk the Line.
gular or plural, a medium or a genre? What is at stake? between verso and recto, sinister physicality and cerebral
Well, in some straightforward sense, nothing much. Ber- rectitude. The tightrope is, appropriately enough, not
nardine is right. The important thing is the “whole new tethered to the right-hand support, but floats free in a vor-
audience” that may come to comics (whoever they are), tex or spiral line—the signature of the artist since Apelles
not what they are called. I am not much interested in and Hogarth, the sign of transformation and empathetic
drawing boundaries around comics and defining their doodling (fig. 5).6
medium specificity (which in any case would be highly Comics is also transmediatic because it opens audi-
subject to historical variation). From the standpoint of ences onto a deep history that goes back before mass
comics as philosophy, in the framework of media theory, media, perhaps even before writing and drawing, to the
and of the being or ontology of comics, comics is a trans- fundamental moment of the mark, the graphic sign. Com-
medium, moving across all boundaries of performance, ics is transmediatic in its openness to multiple alternative
representation, reproduction, and inscription to find frameworks in terms of style, form, structure, material
new audiences, new subjects, and new forms of expres- support and technical platform. Any audiovisual medium
sion. Comics is transmediatic because it is translatable involving language, speech, writing, music, photogra-
and transitional, mutating before our eyes into unex- phy, cinema, architecture, painting, dance, and theater
pected new forms. The comics artist draws and walks a is fair game for representation, remediation, and incor-
line of style that is grounded in his or her predecessors, poration in comics. Any represented content, from voice
but ventures out over an abyss of possibility like Spiegel- to thought to feeling to bodily motion to figure/ground
man the tightrope walker (fig. 4). Here the pillars of style relations, may be seen and read on the comics page. And
are the turdlike masses of Crumb on the verso and the the page itself is only one, albeit central, material support
typographic abstractions of Steinberg on the recto. Spie- for graphic discourse: stone and sand, paint and plaster,
gelman teeters, trying to maintain his balance at the fold woven fabrics, wax tablets, wood panels, story boards,
6. See my conversation above with Spiegelman on the line of beauty in Hogarth. See also my essay, “Metamorphoses of the Vortex: Hogarth, Turner and,
Blake,” in Articulate Images: The Sister Arts from Hogarth to Tennyson, ed. Richard Wendorf (Minneapolis, 1983), pp. 125–68, for a discussion of the spiral
form in the graphic arts.
10. See Mitchell, “An Artist’s Struggle,” Chicago Tribune, 17 July 2012; see also Gabriel’s website, Philmworx.com, philmworx.com/philmworx.com/Post-
lude__Chicago_Tribune.html
11. See Harvey, “Describing and Discarding ‘Comics’ as an Impotent Act of Philosophical Rigor.”
12. The concept of too-close reading is indebted to D. A. Miller, Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (Princeton, N.J., 2003); see also the critical appreciation
of its methods by Frances Ferguson, forthcoming in Critical Inquiry.
13. Art Spiegelman, “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2011/10/05/art_spiegelman_before_maus.html
Figure 11.
Figure 13.
the thought was, but comics shows and tells us at the same
Figure 12. time, diagramming the plural singularity of the human
subject thinking, hearing, and speaking in multiple direc-
loon contains some words that do not fit with the straight- tions and modes.
forward message: “off” and “err” appear as a kind of visual Meanwhile Nate is thinking ahead to number 4, where
stuttering that might be fragments of longer words (a mis- he will confess his love for Ware and Seth and discover a
spelled “offerring” that signals its own error?). The over- “new kind of mark,” a hieroglyph that combines the tri-
lapping frames, moreover, suggest a reaching out to the angle, circle, and fork. This mark provides an abstract
medium of the touch screen, which would permit us to reduction of the spiritual body displayed in number 4, the
264 peel back the frames, treating what we used to call the final panel with its chakras linked in a “connected soul”
gutters of comic narration as something like live, flex- portrayed by a painter whose hands twirl the signature
ible wires, sensitive to the brushing touch of the reader/ spiraling empathetic doodle of the cartoon artist and
viewer’s finger. whose eye has turned into a third arm/hand, wielding the
What path do we take next? Do we jump directly to paintbrush “artwise.” Nate then promises to keep me, the
number 2, where the hospitality is spelled out? A thank you addressee of this thank-you note, “updated” on what he
“for thinking of inspiring and offering me this unique awe- does “f o r
some glimpse into this world of cartoons”? Or do we go e
v
back to the beginning, to the “thought” that trails off into re
rr
another visual stutter of “T, T, T, T, t, t” in a graphic dimin- r
uendo of plus signs (+++) that comes to rest in the brain r
r
of a schematic fisherman, with the bait of love suspended r
from his line (fig. 11)? This fisherman is, we notice, himself r.”
nested inside the brain of a waiter,14 whose arm supports Nate’s thank you began with a thought, and ends
a bloody napkin and the image of the rabbit-artist with a with a promise. He heads off down the dark corridor that
Mayan diagram tattooed on his tummy. leads to an unknown future. His head seems to leave a
And from here it is smooth sailing. We plunge into zig-zag trace on the wall, like a trace of a heartbeat, or
the “talk talk talk” of the comics conference, with adoring brain waves.
Mayans clustered around the chain-smoking ART who So far my analysis of Nate’s comic has emphasized its
(unsurprisingly) personifies the ART that everyone has multiple temporalities and alternative pathways through
come to celebrate (fig. 12). We are then led into number sequences of images and words. But there is another way of
3, a sidebar in which Nate thinks about pitching his idea looking at this work that is specific, if not unique, to com-
for Mesoamerican comics employing Mayan writing and ics, and that is the possibility of seeing the whole thing as
iconography, only to hear Sacco talking about building on a unified, synchronic structure. Despite its lack of a salu-
this influence in his “next comic.” Which leads Nate to tation (there is no “Dear Tom”), the epistolary template
think—not say out loud—“Hey, that’s my idea! LOL” (fig. of the page is evident from its opening announcement
13). How does one “LOL” in thought? Is thought just inter- that it is a thank-you note to its closing “Love Nate” at
nal text-messaging? Free indirect discourse tells us what the bottom. A quick scan of the numbers reveals that the
14. What looks like an 8 on the waiter’s chest is, I am informed, supposed to be an infinity sign.
Figure 14.
entire composition is structured as a reversed S-curve, the schematic emblem of the way comics themselves are orga-
formal cousin of the spiraling line that seems so endemic nized as a unified, yet internally differentiated body, play-
to the comics medium, the line of beauty and signage. ing upon temporal sequence and spatial synchronicity.
Meanwhile, the panel structure defies the usual notion Comics, in other words, are portrayed here as an expres-
of frames and gutters as fixed elements in a determinate sion of the “connected soul” and its immersion in “life
sequence. Panels overlap one another, reminding us of and love”—here connected to others through the social
the cascade arrangement of windows in computers and medium of letter-writing, and internally connected by
touch-screen devices. Panels shift their orientation, tilting way of the synchronic array of panels suturing words and
up/down coordinates by 90 degrees, as Nate maneuvers images, speech and bodies, selves and masks.
to make his Mesoamerican pitch. The boundaries of the Finally, outside all the frames and panels is a tableau that
human figures are similarly flexible, sometimes reaching summarizes the dialectic of the transitory and permanent,
across gutters from one frame to the next and sometimes the sequential and the synchronic in this composition. A
turning into frames themselves, opening doorways into graphic postscript appears in which Nate has dropped the
bodies (the puking baby with the aperture in his stom- Mayan mask and shifted his address from me to the ghostly 265
ach) or the fisherman inside the head of the waiter. And image of Gabe. Nate’s naked, moony self is calling out to the
throughout Nate makes generous use of chicken fat, pil- spirit mask of his friend and fellow artist, “Gabeeeeeee.” Is
ing on detail to slow down the sequential progress so that this a silent “e” or a wailing crescendo (fig. 14)?
the dripping faucet may slow its tempo to nearly zero and Only in the singular plurality of comics can one see
we find ourselves pondering the meaning of “a new kind and dwell on this merging of silence and sound in quite
of mark.” Narration comes to a full stop when Nate turns this way. The true addressee of Nate’s letter, absent from
comic philosopher in panel 5, informing us that “though the opening salutation, is finally revealed. This letter
life and love are impermanent as the wind, the connected has been addressed to the dead all along, revealed in the
soul flows through all.” The transitory and the eternal are postscript to a letter that can never be delivered and that
emblazoned on his body in the cycle of chakras, a kind of therefore stands as the afterimage of this afterword.