Who’s Afraid of Superman?
Stripping to the Core
On the first day of his class, Art Spiegelman, without his habitual cigarette, sits with a handful of eager, shy students in one of the more remote basement rooms in Columbia’s Heyman Center for the Humanities. Dressed somewhat anachronistically in a vest and no tie, he quips a little with some students and furiously tries to arrange library reserve books before he starts his lecture.
He confesses that his primary motivation for teaching Columbia’s new seminar, Comics Marching into the Canon, originated from the recently closed “Masters of American Comics” art exhibit. “Masters of Comics” toured across the country and featured 15 of the most influential comic artists in the history of the medium, from turn-of-the-century Little Nemo creator Winsor McCay, to original Mad Magazine artist Harvey Kurtzman, to Spiegelman himself, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his graphic novel Maus in 1992.
The exhibit, Spiegelman explains, was the culmination of a “10-year lobbying effort” to get the museum world to recant for the Museum of Modern Art’s display of comics next to high art renderings in its “High and Low” art show in 1990. “I know that I was at very least an early adaptor and probably an engine for a sea change that’s taking place in this comics stuff in the last few years,” Spiegelman admits. “Something’s changing very recently. When I proposed that show to the curators 10 or 12 years ago, it really couldn’t happen, it was like proposing a show on socks ... ”
But, indeed, “Masters of American Comics” did happen, starting at two museums in Los Angeles and working its way across the country, finally ending late last month in New York. Once in New York, Spiegelman withdrew his art for reasons both geographic (part of the exhibit was being shown in Newark) and political (some of the artwork had been censored) as well as personal. From there Spiegelman came to the Columbia campus to introduce “Comics Marching into the Canon,” the first full course on comics offered at the school. Consequently, the class has helped legitimize the genre in a university that prides itself on upholding the established canons of the core.
The battle to allow comics to depart from their decidedly cultish audience (New York’s Comic-Con, one of the largest gatherings for comic fans, is being held this weekend) and breach academia is not drastically different from the one fought by other forms of mass media throughout the last half of the 20th century. At Columbia, as well as many institutions, the introduction of such popular media as jazz, film, and pop music at first seemed both vulgar and childish.
Columbia’s Center for Jazz Studies was not founded until 1999. At that time, founder and director Robert O’Meally explained to The Record, “How would modern American music sound had there been no Louis Armstrong, no Duke Ellington, no Bessie Smith, no Charlie Parker, no John Coltrane?” Of course classes had existed in jazz studies before the department’s conception, but the consolidation represented a significant shift toward serious regard for jazz on campus.
Jazz has now become a highly respected genre at Columbia and, with the help of such staff additions as MacArthur genius George Lewis, its method, history, and theory is being studied with utmost rigor.
Kate Sain, CC ’07, came to Columbia specifically seeking a jazz program. “I’m in the ... first group of students to graduate with a jazz studies concentration,” Sain says. “The difference I found when I was looking at other schools is that they would offer some jazz studies courses or a jazz history course or they might offer jazz performance lessons or something like that, but Columbia was the only place I could find that wasn’t a conservatory specifically that had an established department.” This points to how new the acceptance of jazz is in academia. “When I came to college I was right on the edge of that change,” Sain says.
Sain, who works part-time at Jazz at Lincoln Center, is quick to point out how drastic the change is. “Wynton Marsalis [jazz artist and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center] himself has taken a lot of steps to bring jazz back into education,” she says. “Just the fact that’s he’s bringing jazz and putting it on a concert stage speaks to the fact that it’s a more highly regarded art form than just a club scene.”
Like jazz, comics have been on campus, albeit incognito, for some time. Nelly Rosario incorporates a comic writing exercise when she teaches Narrative Forms for the writing program, and Maura Spiegel includes Harvey Pekar’s graphic novel, Our Cancer Year, in her class, American Literature After 1950. Additionally, students have studied comics independently, including working on graphic novels as senior writing projects. Still, the addition of an official course represents a very different level of inclusion, one not unlike the changes in jazz studies.
The presentation of comics has changed commercially as well, from its early days in daily strip form to the recent influx of Hollywood films based on comic book heroes. Today, they’re finding increased legitimacy and marketability as full length books under the somewhat overused term “graphic novel.”
Still, not all have received comics so warmly. Even some of the hippest venues of pop culture still denounce the medium. When Gene Luen Yang’s graphic novel, American Born Chinese, was nominated for a National Book Award in 2006, Wired magazine columnist Tony Long denounced the decision. In October 2006, he wrote, “I have not read this particular ‘novel’ but I’m familiar with the genre so I’m going to go out on a limb here. First, I’ll bet for what it is, it’s pretty good. Probably damned good. But it’s a comic book. And comic books should not be nominated for National Book Awards, in any category. That should be reserved for books that are, well, all words.” He goes on to equate comics to “juvenile literature,” concluding with “Sorry, but no comic book, regardless of how cleverly executed, belongs in that class.”
Spiegelman has encountered such biases before, both from reviewers and academia. “The main thing is,” he says, “nobody would argue with novels being taught in colleges, right? But back in the day, back in the 1820s, this was the comic book of its moment, you know. This was seen as vaguely sub-culture. And not meaning subculture, but below culture.”
In the University, this low brow classification is applied to pop music, where the survey class on rock music hasn’t been taught for at least a year but students are required to study the Western Classical canon and theory in depth.
At Columbia’s Computer Music Center, however, which specializes in studying the methods and history of electronic music composition, avant-garde music is played alongside Madonna and Trent Reznor in classes like CMC head Brad Garton’s MIDI Music Production Techniques . “I don’t make any real distinction between ‘pop’ music and ‘serious’ music. I can cite a bunch of ethnomusicological reasons why (music as a social function),” Garton writes, via e-mail. “In my case, it’s probably because I pay a lot more attention to how music is constructed, especially with respect to the technology involved. Often ‘pop’ music is doing really radical stuff in that way that ‘serious’ music doesn’t, so I go where the action is!”
Garton laments those who must draw distinctions between the study of pop and avant-garde electronic music. While he admits that the CMC often focuses on technique, meaning the lines between pop and art music can blur, he still discerns that some treat studying certain genres unequally. He likens it to understanding the “language” of a medium or genre with its acceptance into academic culture. As he put it, “Academics love a good theory!”
Garton compared this conflict to jazz’s struggle. “I think jazz began to gain currency when academics figured out how to talk ‘intelligently’ about it. There is much of jazz discourse that is informed by contemporary social/critical theory, and that’s probably what opened the doorway.”
Although comics have been widely distributed and associated with various artistic movements since the beginning of the 20th century—including cubism by Lyonel Feininger, one of its practitioners and ‘Masters’—it has only been in the last 15 years that an analytical explosion has developed.
For Brown University professor Ralph Rodriguez, who has taught comics since graduating from the University of Texas-Austin in 1997, it was a 1992 conference at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne that started changing the way people viewed what came to be known as cultural studies. “It was a way of breaking down the divide between high culture and low culture, doing more kinds of anthropological studies of culture and sociological studies,” Rodriguez explains, adding that it gave universities around the country a “back-pat to do stuff like detective fiction, romance novels, graphic novels, so that was one of the big drives ... ”
Rodriguez, who has eagerly used comics in classes about Latin American literature, points to some other institutions and events that helped legitimize comics over the last few years. The New York Times published an article in 2004, “Not Funnies”, which interviewed some of the most prominent contemporary artists like Chris Ware. The addition of serialized comics to the Sunday magazine also helped. “But to make it into the New York Times in that magazine piece was all of a sudden to say, oh, wow this is important, intellectually,” Rodriguez says. He also indicates that this perhaps is a second boom for comics, which had renewed interest in the mid-’80s with the publication of Spiegelman’s Maus and Alan Moore’s Watchmen.
Besides teaching a 95-student course called Guns and Graphics, which looks at comics along with detective fiction, Rodriguez has also organized an exhibit at Brown for “Los Bros Hernandez”, two of the most renowned Latino comic artists who epitomized the Los Angeles punk scene in their series, Love and Rockets. The exhibit intentionally confronts some of the conflicts between the culture of comics and academia. On display until March 19 in one of the larger rooms of the John Brown House, the exhibit is filled with collage-style black-and-white excerpts of the comics wallpapering the building, along with larger excerpts which are “taped” DIY-style to the wallpaper. The ambiance is completed with an ’80s-style green velvet chair, true-to-date beer bottles, L.A.-area punk bands playing on a television, and other bands like Richard Hell and the Voidoids on continuous loop over speakers.
A more direct response to the Masters exhibit is a book by Dan Nadel, Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries 1900-1969. Nadel teaches a class on Graphic Novels in conjunction with the New School and the Parsons School of Design that centers around the genre’s collaborative method of drawing and construction. “We wanted to… try to bring together writing students and art students since comics are a mix of picture and prose. We wanted to try to bring together students who specialize in each.” It also varies from Spiegelman’s course by teaching students methods rather than history.
Nadel wanted to conceive a “counter history” to the Masters exhibit that he considered a “conservative canon.” Nadel explained that comics were too broad an art form to be focused on so few masters, a sentiment shared by both Spiegelman and Rodriguez. “It’s not just a medium done by 15 white guys, and I think it was a bit of a failure of imagination in a way,” Nadel says. “It’s the problem of trying to present a conservative canon and it’s a problem of viewing comics with such limited sort of spectacles on.” He also wanted to emphasize that comics, like film and other media, have different inherent canons. “There’s a canon for literary fiction, there’s a canon for science fiction, there’s a canon for detective novels. There’s a canon for French literature ... you know I think it’s a huge mistake to make a single linear canon for comics. I think it’s backwards thinking and sort of retarded.”
Certainly other sections of Columbia academia have followed this model, with the film department having separate seminars on anything from Film Noir to Clint Eastwood as an auteur.
However, Art Spiegelman does defend the “masters” of the exhibit, who are the cornerstones that frame and ground each meeting of his course at Columbia. “I think it’s all good because it creates a structure that one can rebel against ... the process of canonization being beckoned into the hallowed halls of bookstores, museums, universities allows the medium to stay alive, past its life as mass media, and once that happens, then there’s room for an artist to come say ‘I like working with this stuff, but comics should really be graffiti and shit.’”
Canons are meant to be wrestled with,” Spiegelman adds, citing Nadel’s book as a fine example, though he points out that both sides were featured in his magazine Raw. “It’s not like the notion of a canon is really meant to be really exclusionary, but it’s meant to set up a navigational system.” Spiegelman also sees it as a way for cartoonists to know about their past and be able to draw upon the influence of lesser known—but equally important—artists like Rodolphe Töpffer, who is now credited with inventing the form in the beginning of the 19th century.
For Brown University professor and comic enthusiast Paul Buhle, the medium exists for more reasons than just academic. Buhle, who is currently working on several different books—including a comic adaptation of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States—and has helped create much of the buzz about comics on his local campus, says that comics can be used for more than just critical analysis. “I showed some PowerPoint pages from the ongoing Zinn adaptation in class last week and it’s a teaching tool in several different ways. It’s a teaching tool because it’s a way of explaining how history is understood,” Buhle says.
Other professors are completely indifferent to the debate of comics entering academia. Ben Marcus, the chair of Columbia’s writing division, comes from Brown and has worked on many visual collaborations. For him and his group of friends, distinctions of comics and the incorporation of visual media into writing are meaningless. While comics professors had been careful to look at the debate, Marcus was hardly aware of it, and quickly brushed it off. “I have a lot of friends, Jonathan Lethem and Michael Chabon, and a lot of my writer friends are very, very indifferent to these distinctions between high and low art, so I’m very steeped in a sense to the vitality of all this and need no convincing.” He saw this indifference and acceptance by academics and writers as generational. “You’ve got ... people like Spiegelman kind of giving credibility to stuff that wasn’t happening 20 years ago and I think it’s really healthy, and I think if academics want to fight it, maybe it’s a healthy battle. Maybe these are good arguments. I don’t care that much… I don’t think it’s my job to protect the canon.”
Marcus thinks that the changes to the writing division may quickly allow for seminars on graphic and alternative media fiction, from comics to hypertext or electronic novels. As to why it hasn’t happened thus far, “It’s certainly not a polemical resistance to it,” Marcus says. “Why haven’t there been classes in a lot of things?” Marcus says a mixture of student interest and capable teachers will determine whether a comic writing class will happen in the future.
Graphic fiction has appealed to high school writing students, who can take an elective in that as well as sci-fi and fantasy as part of the Columbia High School Writing Program directed by Leslie Woodard, who is also the director the undergraduate creative writing program.
On the undergraduate level, Woodard agrees with Marcus. “We haven’t had somebody who can do that. Our thing is writing, that’s what we focus on. That’s what we try to do well,” says Woodard, who wonders whether the course would belong in visual arts, writing, or a marriage between the two, a viewpoint that matches the New School class as well as the views of Ben Marcus.
Ultimately, Woodard approved of the study of the genre. “The comics I grew up with have been incredible satirists and really extraordinary commentary on the human condition. That’s why Peanuts did so well,” she says. “It’s not a less valid art form. It’s just not mine.”
Woodard’s view seems to reflect that of the general populous of the school. Students may be indifferent to the world of comics, but support the idea of it being studied. “I don’t really read comics personally, don’t know much about them, but it sounds like a cool class,” says Sain, who points out that jazz classes discuss such diverse topics as album insert artwork. Other students may find the idea of studying the comics genre unappealing or even silly, child’s play, as Wired suggested, but no major opposition could be found for the class teaching, with students more surprised that Columbia is offering a comics class rather than chagrined.
And comics seem to have pervaded even the highest echelons of the literature world. English professor Bruce Robbins, who teaches the seminar The Contemporary American Novel, is “interested when rereading Gravity’s Rainbow, which is I think Pynchon’s masterpiece, which came out in 1973, to see how often he reached back to the childhood experience of comic book superheroes in the course of writing the most ambitious novel that we’ve had in the last 30 years or so.” Robbins points to Pynchon and Salmon Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children as books that draw upon the world of the superhero and superpowers. Robbins adds, “I think it’s great that people who have educated eyes are doing it. That is, I think it is a genuinely serious art form and it should be talked about, absolutely as one of the really interesting art forms of our time and one of the more serious ones.”
Art Spiegelman, who admits in class that he was drawn to comics because of their humor, is quick to point out that pop culture and academia’s contentious relationship is part of what makes these forms worth studying. When asked what would be the next media to march into the canon, he immediately quips, “Video games.”
Full disclosure: The author is a student in Spiegelman’s class.