How to use this Page

Questioning whether something is actually art isn’t so useless if one can define the standards he’s judging it by, and use those same standards to explain his reaction to the art in some detail.

There are problems when someone describes something as art simply because it elicits a reaction, but the would-be judge can’t explain either the standards being used or the reaction.

Banality in art is a problem when what’s being expressed has been expressed, by others or by the artist himself, many, many times and is so easy to do that there’s no longer any point in doing it. Being original doesn’t automatically make something good, but if someone is setting out to create art, being original means he’s sufficiently familiar with the field he’s working in to avoid repeating what others have done.

SRS

Hooded Utilitarian just seems to be a bunch of pseuds seeing who can be the biggest pseud.

“Nerd Court” is definitely going into my lexicon. Thanks, Tom/Heidi!

Doesn’t the use of the neologism “pseud” kind of brand one as a pseud?

Or do you have to use a word such as “neologism” too? ;)

Jason A. Quest – Doesn’t the use of the neologism “pseud” kind of brand one as a pseud?

Fair point though I don’t think it always holds true – however pseud has been in use since it was coined in the UK nearly fifty years ago so it’s not a very ‘neo’ neologism.

Perhaps snobbery is a better way of describing part of what’s at stake here, not least since it focuses on the activity rather than the person engaging in it.

“Bootlicking acceptance”, as Ng Suat Tong puts it, can just as easily apply to the act of licking ones own boots.

A) F*** you Frederic Wertham…

B) I Gave up on the Hooded Utilitarian long ago, the last post I enjoyed from them was one on Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s body of work, also by Ng.

I still haven’t finished Eddie Campbell’s article, but so far I get the sense that he isn’t critically praising / defending EC as much as using the argument as a launchpad for his view that comics been be appreciated as a unified visual narrative thing, and “bad” writing can’t, by that definition, sink the entire ship by itself.

It reminds me of the Nerd Court arguments over Brian De Palma movies: on one side are the people who think film should adhere to traditional literary standards and on the other side are the people who say, “It’s a MOVIE man, just LOOK at it with the sound off and you’ll be fine!” Then the fighting ensues. So that’s the argument Campbell was wading into, not the “We should all appreciate bad commercial art once it’s more than 40 years old” argument.

The best metaphor I can come up with for this argument is two third-world nations at war: Each invests what little defense funding they have in several fancy new fighter aircraft. The fighters are manned, they take to the skies, and duke it out in intricate, technology-driven aerial combat. Eventually, a victor emerges…or not…and no one on the ground gives a shit about any of it.

Every superhero fan should be grateful for Fredric Wertham. Without his crusade and the resultant Code, there would probably have been no superhero revival in the late ’50s and early ’60s.

With the imposition of the Code, horror and crime comics were killed, and the remaining genres (war, western, romance) were greatly watered down. Yet comics still had to tell visually exciting stories. Solution: bring back the superhero. Superhero comics allowed for visual spectacle, and for action without graphic violence. And, being fantasies, superhero comics were less upsetting to parents and other authorities than, say, a comic where the protagonist was an axe murderer.

Hi Heidi!
I may inadvertently have come across as a blowhard on the old TCJ messboard, but it was never one of my haunts. I think my total posts in the many years it existed must have clocked in under 25.

And I like many things! Including EC! What have I done to be lumped in with Domingos and Suat? I’m very fond of them both, but I also disagree with a lot of what they say and write, and I don’t think I’ve ever promoted the elitist doctrine they represent so well, have I? Please let me know. I’m confused.

Basically, I think this TCJ/HU/EC discussion sadly went off the rails just as it was getting interesting. Eddie’s piece was excellent food for thought. Although it was vague around the edges and can justly be criticized for it, I think he managed to say things clearly and concisely that I’ve been trying to say much less clearly and concisely for the last few years in my many arguments with Noah B and Domingos at HU.

Synsidar said:

“Questioning whether something is actually art isn’t so useless if one can define the standards he’s judging it by, and use those same standards to explain his reaction to the art in some detail.

There are problems when someone describes something as art simply because it elicits a reaction, but the would-be judge can’t explain either the standards being used or the reaction. ”

Finally, something Synsidar and I can agree on! Yes, it’s one thing to be an elitist critic, another to be an elitist whose only criterion is that he personally was impressed with a given work.

I would echo Heidi’s criticism to the extent that the HU critics usually don’t seem interested in breaking down stories to see why they do or don’t work, and sometimes seem alienated from the very idea that telling a story effectively can be a positive accomplishment. Tong’s essay is very much in this vein; if Kurtzman doesn’t write of war the way Tong thinks that the subject should be addressed, then Kurtzman is Bad Art.

George,

I think you’re essentially right that the superhero genre was the accidental beneficiary of Wertham’s campaign, although that was certainly not due to Wertham’s actual rhetoric, which condemned all forms of violent entertainment, and lumped the superhero genre in with the genre of “crime comics.”

Even if Wertham had no more effect on the industry than his sometime colleague Gershon Legman, I think it would still be proper to condemn both of them for having evinced the intent toward censorship. Morever, if Tilley is correct then he also falsified evidence, which is equally contempt-worthy. Up till now, the worst one could say was that probably a lot of the delinquents in W’s care caught on fast to what the Old Guy wanted to hear, and fed him stories about how they wanted to be sex maniacs and whatnot. But playing around with his supposed empircal data is far worse than that.

Arguably there were good developments that evolved from the presence of the Code. But just as with the Motion Picture Code, that doesn’t make either one good in and of itself.

One last thought: the reason that the argument about comics-as-art has lasted this long (I’d put it even further back myself) is because no one has successfully come up with a Theory of Art that applies equally to comics and other literature. All we have are a lot of little theories on comics specifically, which leads to a whole lot o’ nothin’.

Of course theories abound in academia, and it doesn’t stop the arguments there either. But at least the proponents have some semi-coherent ideas about the topics under discussion.

A problem with a comic book’s artwork, and a story’s use of a continuing character is that they both encourage manipulation of the reader. Artwork can elicit involuntary (programmed) responses; manipulating a reader who’s attached to a character is trivial. If someone reads a piece of fiction that uses a formula he’s familiar with, he’s letting himself be manipulated. Manipulation isn’t art.

One benefit of valuing originality in storytelling is that the original material, something a reader hasn’t seen before, forces him to react intellectually to it. Experienced readers love being surprised by a successful story.

SRS

I’m not a Wertham fan. His work was slanted and sensationalized. And he didn’t bother with footnotes or endnotes listing his sources (i.e., which comics he took his examples from), which wouldn’t fly in any “scholarly” work today. In fact, he took some criticism for it in 1954.

Of course, “Seduction of the Innocent” wasn’t aimed at academics. It was aimed at a large mainstream audience … and at parents who wanted to be told they bore no responsibility for how their kids turned out. I think it was Robert Warshow who described “Seduction” as sort of a crime comic book for adults.

However, many people today may not realize how transgressive EC (and “Crime Does Not Pay” and other comics) were in their time. EC went beyond what was permissible in movies, radio or TV in the early ’50s. This was a time when self-censorship was the rule. In this climate, they were almost asking to be attacked.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-study-of-man-paul-the-horror-comics-and-dr-wertham/

Here is Robert Warshow’s great essay, “Paul, the Horror Comics and Dr. Wertham” (June 1954). It’s fascinating as a reaction to the controversy as it was happening. Warshow stakes out an intelligent middle ground — he wishes his son was not an “EC Fan-Addict,” but still disapproves of Wertham’s tactics. Warshow thought “Mad” was very funny, but not appropriate for children.