Wonder Boy Fights the Forces of Elitism
By mcwrath | Posted in • Comics • General • ReadingMichael Chabon, genius writer of Wonder Boys and Pulitzer winner for The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, responds to an article in the New York Times Book Review weakly condemning comic books and rock & roll on the same wobbly pretenses.
Read on, lovers of both:
In its issue of 14 August 2003, The New York Review of Books ran a review, by David Hajdu, of three graphic novels, one by Daniel Clowes and two by Joe Sacco.
David Hajdu is a smart man who wrote an acclaimed book about Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and their circle in the folk-rock world of the early-to-mid sixties.
But as delighted and gratified as I was to find the wondrous Ghost World being (somewhat belatedly) reviewed in the august pages of TNYRoB, I felt that Hajdu’s consideration of comic books—not to mention that of rock and roll—left something to be desired.
I wrote a letter to the editors, expressing my dismay. It was never published, possibly because it was simply too long. But my outrage did seem to have the positive effect of bringing me to attention of the magazine’s editors. They asked me if I would be interested in reviewing books for them, which I have since undertaken with great pleasure to do.
Here is the letter itself:
To the editors:
David Hajdu’s enthusiasm for the work of Joe Sacco and Daniel Clowes is understandable, and welcome—as is the NYR’s giving review-space to comic books. But Hajdu’s review is so mistaken, in its premises and in its particulars, that I feel I must risk ingratitude and complain.
For brevity’s sake, I will skip taking Hajdu to task for his shaky grasp of comic-book technique and terminology (“Ghost World… is drawn in black-and-white brush lines”), unsophisticated analysis of comics grammar (“All comic book panels are cinematic; they look like cleaned up and primped versions of the storyboards that directors use as guidelines for film production”) and debatable statements about history of comics (claiming, for example, that Joe Sacco’s attention to the backgrounds of his panels makes him an anomaly among “bylined” artists). Instead I will concentrate primarily on the controlling analogy of Hajdu’s review, namely, the lowbrow, high-testosterone blood-brother fraternity between comic books and rock and roll. In this false, or at best flawed, analogy are expressed all of Hajdu’s underlying biases and misguided assumptions.
“Comic books, the rock and roll of literature,” he begins, “have always been a disreputable form of junk art for adolescents of body or mind… Hyperenergetic, crude, sexually regressive and politically simplistic, comics, like rock (and, in recent years, hip hop) give fluent voice to their audience’s basest and most cynical impulses.”
But are comic books the rock and roll of literature?
If there is a kinship between the two forms, it lies not in any shared politics, simplistic or otherwise. Rock and roll politics have, on the whole, tended to affect a subversive, antiestablishment pose, while for the first twenty-five years of their history, a period during which they evolved most of the conventions that still make people like Hajdu feel compelled, in public, to condescend to them, comic books preached—with some notable exceptions—absolute conformity, respect for authority, law and order. Comic book superheroes remained the paramount champions of the status quo well into the 1970s.
As for the forms’ sharing a quality of being “sexually regressive”—well, what does that phrase mean, really? Is it the opposite of being “sexually progressive”: showing (at least) a tolerance for “deviation,” a regard for the rights and the pleasure of women, a willingness to experiment? On this score, true, comics have until recent years stood solidly in the rearguard—but surely the same could not be said for rock and roll? From Little Richard on, rock and roll music has been, by this limited definition, as progressive as anyone could wish. But perhaps by “sexually regressive” Hajdu means something more akin merely to “sexist and misogynist,” a charge which can with justice be leveled at both comics (home of Invisible Girl and Shrinking Violet) and rock and roll (see the Rolling Stones “Stupid Girl” inter alia). How illuminating a point of comparison is that, though, when the same charge could be leveled at every other form of popular art, from the dime novel to the Hollywood film, that has evolved here over the past century or so?
Now, what about Hajdu’s claim that, “comics, like rock… give fluent voice to their audience’s basest and most cynical impulses”? Jeez! How can he say such a thing? Even if a search of the record bins of rock history turns up base and cynical impulses aplenty, from the studied barbarism of Kiss to the manufactured bubblegum of the 1910 Fruitgum Company, surely these impulses do not strike one, as Hajdu’s assertion seems to imply, as among the music’s most salient characteristics! Has he never known the exaltation of listening to, say, Pet Sounds or the first Clash album? As for comics, one has only to turn to the characteristic output of Marvel Comics, for the period from about 1961 to about 1975, to find not an expression of base and cynical impulses but of good, old-fashioned liberal humanism of a kind that may strike us today, God help us, as quaint, but which nevertheless appealed, in story after story, to ideals such as tolerance, technological optimism, and self-sacrifice for the benefit of others.
Okay, then. What about trashiness—Haidu’s “junk art”—a quality that might be defined as “tending to invite parental revilement.” Here, too, the difference is more important than the similarity. “Trashiness,” starts from without—it’s a judgment passed by the larger, higher culture on the smaller and lower-down. But rock and roll, almost from the first, discovered to its pleasure (and ours) that it could embrace its own trashiness, revel in it. Comics, because they never attained the monstrous level of financial success that rock and roll has long enjoyed, have always struggled to keep up an appearance of decency, of wholesomeness, of being, somehow, good for you, like Wonder Bread. In the early days comics regularly featured prominent banners reassuring parents that the contents had been reviewed by advisory boards of social workers, clergymen and prominent educators. Try to imagine something like that on the label of “Good Golly Miss Molly” or “Hound Dog”!
The strongest resemblance between rock and roll and comics (as, in fairness, Hajdu suggests) lies in the matter of intended audience. Comic books, at least initially, were written for children, but by the 1960s the average age of the comic book reader had crept up very close to that of the average consumer of rock and roll product. Still there remained a crucial difference between the forms. Though both were packaged and marketed by adults, rock and roll music was, almost from the first, played and sung (and presently written) by people who, at least at the time of their first success, were themselves generally teenagers, or barely out of their teens. It was not until the late sixties and early seventies—after thirty years of existence—that comics, some comics, began to be created by people not much older than the people who were reading them.
It was at this moment, as the first generation of comic book readers was growing up to become the second generation of artists and writers, that there began to emerge the rock-historic phenomena that provide Hajdu with the most maddening claim in his review: that the contemporary graphic novel (a phrase which Hajdu always carefully isolates with one of the many pairs of ironizing quotation marks that he carries around in his utility belt) is “essentially the visual equivalent of the rock opera.” Essentially, that is to say (according to Hajdu), “bombastic,” “pretentious,” “laden with pulp mythology and inchoate mysticism,” “grandiose,” and “overloaded.”
Let’s ignore, though it pains me to do so, the injustice done by Hajdu—traveling over well-worn ground—to the innovative and still-fresh work done in their heyday by talented bands such as Yes, the Who (generally credited with inventing the rock opera), the Soft Machine, and even the two groups that Hajdu singles out for condemnation, Genesis and King Crimson. The point is that the current boom—one might even dare to call it a golden age—in the graphic novel bears no resemblance whatsoever to rock’s Age of Prog. Comic books did indeed go through a period during which, at their worst, they partook of much of the same trippy pretense and overblown, pseudomythological grandiosity of the worst of the prog-rock era. This psychotropic period, not surprisingly, coincided exactly with that of, say, Rick Wakeman’s overblown Journey to the Center of the Earth [actually I like that record a lot—MC]and brought us, at its worst, the turgid spaced-out agonies of the Silver Surfer.
Had Hajdu made even a cursory survey of recent graphic novels he might easily have turned up Rucka and Lieber’s Whiteout, Craig Thompson’s Goodbye, Chunky Rice, Raymond Briggs’ Ethel and Ernest, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Ben Katchor’s The Jew of New York, Frank Miller’s 300, Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, and many more—and almost nothing in the way of “faux mythology and mysticism suitable to Seventies rock.”
What lies at bottom of Hajdu’s ridiculing, as hopelessly pretentious, of the whole idea of quote-unquote graphic novels, is the way that they are “printed between hard covers or glossy soft-cover” on “heavy paper stock.” It’s the very aspiration of comics, to be more than they have been, that makes Hajdu smile. As if, somehow, the medium were—as if any medium could be!—inherently unworthy, déclassé, incapable of genuine art. In arguing for the built-in unworthiness of comics, Hajdu not only shows disrespect to artists, such as Will Eisner, whose work he has claimed to admire; he also commits the grievous error—an error one would have expected the NYR to know better than to make—of confusing a medium with one of its genres, as if all dance were to be condemned on the basis of the Macarena, or all painting treated with the gloves of irony because of a few thousand black-velvet Elvises. It is cruel, and fundamentally adolescent, to mock someone for the way he aspires endlessly to the good opinion that you have decided, a priori, never to grant him.
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