New York Times Magazine: Not Funnies. Last weekend the New York Times magazine ran a cover story surveying the current state of comics.
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They mostly stuck to top-tier (Fantagraphics, Drawn/Quarterly) North American comics (with a brief stop to drop by Gaiman and Alan Moore).
The article is amazing. Whoever wrote it really did their research. I highly recommend it to both fans and to people who are looking to pick up something new. It also hammers out two very important points, which I'd like to comment on:
1) The Decline of Robert Crumb – For most of the 90s, you couldn't discuss comic books without trying to make them all seem like descendents of Robert Crumb, the misogynistic, disturbed 60s comic book artist portrayed in the excellent Terry Zwigoff movie. Everything followed from him; Clowes and Ware and everyone else couldn't talk about what they were doing without bringing him up.
The problem was that it didn't fit. If you actually read the output of Crumb it's very limited and not all together great. I'm going to break with a lot of people in that I consider it mostly crap. Sure it's misogynistic and self-loathing (and something the movie only hints at, but unbearably racist); what's worse is how repetitive it is. Once you've gotten though about 10 comics of his you know what you are in store for. So why are people like Clowes, who has had one of the most expansive careers in comics, with every project varied and rich, going to bat for this guy?
The magazine points out that all these people, even Sacco, go through an intense self-loathing period in their comic art.
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Their comics reflect their otherness, their sexual misadventures, and their problems with other people. Crumb gives them the ability to say "this is ok.
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Keep doing this." And these comic artists keep working at it and don't give up; they eventually get the rawer edges of it out of their system, and can go off in exciting new directions. It's a shame Crumb never was able.
2) The Rise of Art Spiegelman The real focus point for looking at these new artists is art Spiegelman. Like a lot of indie musicians of the time period, comic book artists aren't just comic book artists. They are salesmen, producers, advertisers, promoters and a hundred other things. As late as 6 years ago, there wasn't a real industry to nurture your talent – so you had to create one yourself. And nobody has done this quite like Spiegelman. "He's as important as he thinks he is" is an excellent quote, because it's true on both accounds.
3) Diversity in Comics I was a little worried when I first saw that picture. Sure they are some of my favorite comic book creators, but at the end of the day they are guys with poor eyesight complaining about how awkward they are. Then I noticed Joe Sacco was in it. Sacco has been doing amazing work with journalistic comics – it really blows away anything like it. And the writeup they do of him is the best I've seen.
They have so many comics covered than just the normal run-of-the-mill Crumb descendents – "Persepolis" and "Blankets" are by far the two best comics of the past year, and they both get writeups. People should be throwing copies of "Persepolis" from the rooftops; the memoir of an Iranian girl growing up during the revolution is about as far from a 'typical' comic book as you can get.
So read the article. And then read some comics. And then let's discuss.
Ladybelle Fiske says:
I read your piece with interest. I agree with you that R. Crumb's racist and sexist tendencies are and always have been the least attractive part of his work. He knows how I feel about this (I am a friend of his and of many of the other cartoonists, from New York in the Sixties); but I can't agree that his work is coming to be seen as overrated and less worthy than people thought. He has a great skill, versatility, and power that when used for something worth the energy he puts into almost all his work, is peerless. I do think Robert will later be seen as a truly great artist, especially if he were to "get over" the racist and sexist stuff in his work, whether it is or is not Swiftian social commentary, as he sometimes says it is.
Art Spiegelman too was a friend of mine in those days (I was his girlfriend for several years, and a friend for many more). He is "as important as he thinks he is," –actually, aren't we all? But I think both of those boys will end up as important influences on the culture and art of the 20th-early 21st centuries. Have never understood why it has to be a competition.
They are both great artists and Robert is actually a very kind and caring person, something people don't know about him very well. He is as important as he thinks he is too, but perhaps he would be even more important if he thought he was too important to express negativity against women, black people, and Jews (his beautiful, witty wife Aline being Jewish, as I am in part).
What the heck. We are all nobly born, as Laura Huxley puts it in her book about her life with Aldous Huxley, This Timeless Moment…
Ladybelle Fiske
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mike says:
Thank you for your informed opinion. If I knew anyone would read the comic section of this thing I'd post more!
Two quick full disclosures on my part : From Crumb I've read the collected Fritz the Cat, On America, Introducing Kafka, and about 2/3rd of the R. Crumb Coffe Table Art book. Most of these have been read in the past 2-3 years, well after I've been introduced to comics. So (a) I've never read it as single issues and (b) I'm sure I'm missing a lot of stuff that would be recommended (please fill me in!)
I'm also 25, so my first great "wow this is what comics are capable of!" moments during high school are from Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman and Dave Sims (speaking of sexist tendencies). They kept me around in comic shops long enough to find Alan Moore and Frank Miller; later I found out about the whole Fantagraphics lot. As such, I had read a lot of comics, and had a lot of opinions formed by the time I encountered Crumb.
Which is unfair to him, as a lot of his contribution to the form is the fact that he broke a lot of the molds on what one could talk about, and how personal one could get with comics.
What always struck me as weird was the way some people, a lot of the 90s era Fantagraphics people for instance, would talk about him. I thought maybe I'm just really missing something. But that nytimes article made me think that part of the awe is the fact that, like the artists/writers above, Crumb was "that person" who broke the mold for them.
Sometimes I get in the awkward situation of being around people talking about, and hating on, Dave Sim, and regardless of how Cerebus feel off and the whole interviews thing, I defend him solely on the basis that if I wasn't handed a copy of "High Society" when I was 14 I would have probably thrown away the idea of reading comics period. That goes a long way. And that article kinda put Crumb in the same context for a lot of the people who are breaking out now.
By definition though, that means his appeal is ephemeral to his contemporaries and "the next generation." A think, as someone who obviously doesn't know him and is encountering him much later (the 21st century!), what bothers me isn't that he has negative opinions against women, black people, etc., but that the overwhelming stock of his work is based out of this. That's why I was so impressed with "Introducing Kafka"; it showed that he is capable of bending his distinct style to bear against things other than his own issues with women, etc. There's only so many times I want to read the same story.
Ladybelle Fiske says:
Thanks for your thoughtful response to mine. I agree the racist and sexist stuff tends to subtract from the whole picture of Crumb's remarkable ability. It's hard to look beyond that. But there's something else– in some of his Mr. Natural strips, in "A Short History of America," and in some of his drawings of Blues musicians, for instance– that goes beyond all that nonsense. I really wonder how much Robert himself believes the racism thing at this point in life. See "Self-Loathing" — one of his and Aline's French-based comix– I can't remember if it's issue one or two but seems to be saying that even he finds it hard to justify all that silliness any more. He and I had quite a few discussions about it in the old days in the Sixties. His prejudice seems to come from growing up in blue-collar America, rather than from sorting it all out on a rational basis.
There's some great work he's doing now in Art and Beauty– it's still about woman as sexual object, I suppose, but reminds me much more of a fine artist doing studies of the female form. I admire Robert's ability to draw just about anything. Art's ability falls into a whole other category…
At the moment I'm not awake enough to come up with a terribly lucid contrast/comparison as I've just been up most of the night at the All Night Costume Dance Party we hold once a year up here in Vermont (at one of the country's oldest alternative living situations, since 1946) to celebrate my daughter's birthday and the lives of the other young people who grew up here. You are the right age to enjoy it, come up sometime– first weekend in August usually.
I also like R. C's Sketchbooks. There is something incomparable about his artistry. I think both he and Art will be remembered as great artists with an influence on the culture of the mid-to-late 20th-&early 21st century. It's like comparing Da Vinci and Michelangelo… they're both as important as they think they are, it seems to me…
TX for the chance to write in. I do think it's good to take a look further into R.C's work and also to keep complaining about racism and sexism in comix. Trina Robbins has been a good influence in that way. See her "The Great Women Cartoonists" — my mother was a cartoonist in the Forties (p. 69, B. Hall) and is now rather embarassed about her own racist comics of the time, anti-Japanese. I do think we should all try to overcome our conditioning in those areas, no matter who we are…
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