Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium

by Jeet Heer (Editor), Kent Worcester (Editor)

When Art Spiegelman's Maus-a two-part graphic novel about the Holocaust-won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, comics scholarship grew increasingly popular and notable. The rise of "serious" comics has generated growing levels of interest as scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals continue to explore the history, aesthetics, and semiotics of the comics medium.

Yet those who write about the comics often assume analysis of the medium didn't begin until the cultural studies movement was underway. Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium brings together nearly two dozen essays by major writers and intellectuals who analyzed, embraced, and even attacked comic strips and comic books in the period between the turn of the century and the 1960s. From e. e. cummings, who championed George Herriman's Krazy Kat, to Irving Howe, who fretted about Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie, this volume shows that comics have provided a key battleground in the culture wars for over a century.

With substantive essays by Umberto Eco, Marshall McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler, Gilbert Seldes, Dorothy Parker, Irving Howe, Delmore Schwartz, and others, this anthology shows how all of these writers took up comics-related topics as a point of entry into wider debates over modern art, cultural standards, daily life, and mass communication.

Arguing Comics shows how prominent writers from the Jazz Age and the Depression era to the heyday of the New York Intellectuals in the 1950s thought about comics and, by extension, popular culture as a whole.

Genres: Comics, Nonfiction, Essays

200 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2004

About the author

Jeet Heer is a senior editor at the New Republic who has published in a wide array of journals including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and VQR. He is the author of two books: In Love With Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (Coach House Books) and Sweet Lechery: Essays, Profiles and Reviews (Porcupine’s Quill). He has co-edited eight books and served as a contributing editor on another eight volumes. With Kent Worcester, Heer co-edited A Comics Studies Reader (University Press of Mississippi), which won the Peter C. Rollins Book Award given annually to the best book in American Studies or Cultural Studies. He’s been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship.

Reviews

[Ravi · Rating 3 out of 5]

This quirky and evidently too short anthology deserves the attention of anyone interested in the history of comics criticism. Divided into three parts, "Early Twentieth Century Voices", "The New York Intellectuals", and "The Postwar Mavericks" this edited volume features commentary from a variety of intellectuals including C.L.R. James, Donald Phelps, Clement Greenberg, e.e. cummings, Umberto Eco, Delmore Schwartz, Thomas Mann, Marshall McLuhan, Irving Howe, Manny Farber and many others. Reading the book is like entering a lost world a la Borges as one is captivated by the intellectual milieu of the 1940s, before television was hegemonic and psychological theories played a more prominent role in public life. Moreover in a world before reality tv, there actually was a public press that discussed intellectual ideas and took the public reader to be a diligent individual trying to make the world a better place. It is a refreshing read and the editors, both highly accomplished scholars-writers in the academic and popular press (Worcester has written arguably the best biography of the legendary socialist and cricket writer C.L.R. James while Heer has published numerous articles in both the United States and Canada in the liberal media), are clearly passionate about the topic. I would have preferred to have had a more substantive contribution from the editors. They confine themselves to a short introduction and then brief commentaries to each section. The text is also occasionally frustrating because each extract is so short. Nevertheless, the essay by Eco alone is worth the price of this book. These editors have paid the reader the ultimate tribute: unapologetically demonstrating their love of an arcane field and with dedicated passion. Do yourself a favour and buy this volume today.

[Neal Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

An anthology of writing on comics, from the early 20th century to the 1960s. The focus is first on American newspaper strips, then on comic books of the 1940s and 50s, although an exception is Thomas Mann on Frans Masereel.

After "Early Twentieth-Century Voices", the middle section of the book is "The New York Intellectuals". Their perspective is still generally negative, with some items being relentless tirades, although some are more reflective. In particular, a 1954 article by Robert Warshow from the journal Commentary sheds some light on the violent and unregulated content of the comic books of the time, with concerns that are reminiscent of those of today's parents about video games.

The most insightful section is the third and final one: "The Postwar Mavericks". Here there is more respect for the artists, e.g. "Bisect almost any box from L'il Abner with two diagonals and you will find the lines crossing all the important details: bosoms, hag's face, fleeing bachelors, six-shooter barrel peeled back like a banana." To my mind the best piece is by Marshall McLuhan, who likens Superman to the angels of previous eras. He cites Thomas Aquinas to point out that Superman is likewise "quite superior to time or space", an insight that was later expounded more verbosely by Umberto Eco, in what's included here as the final piece.

[Dennis Jacob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many of the critical essays are downright disgusting, bordering on Wertham's mad project. They need not have been included. Worth getting for Umberto Eco's Superman essay and a few others. Note that most of the critical points posed by Eco has been dealt with in later Superman stories.