Women and (super)Men

Let's try to take a look at Action Comics #1 (the 1938 one, not the New 52 one) from a feminist perspective, and see what we come up with.

The first thing to note, of course, is that Superman is gendered.  That might seem like a stupid thing to point out; of course Superman is gendered. Isn't everyone?  There's no such thing as a gender-neutral person, is there?  But there are two important things to notice here.  Firstly, the division of all of humanity into one of two gender categories is not necessarily as obvious as it may seem--we'll leave that point to the side for now--but secondly, there's no reason that the "man" part of Superman has to be there.  Superman has had such an influence on superhero nomenclature (Batman, Spider-man, Aquaman, Hawkman, Plastic Man, Iron Man, Ant-Man, Giant-Man, X-Men, not to mention Wonder Woman, Batgirl, Hawkgirl, Power Girl, etc) that we can easily forget that there's no inherent reason why a superhero's name needs to be gendered.  But Superman is not just a super person, he's a super MAN, and it is implicit in his identity from the beginning that whatever else he is he is a figure of idealized hyper-masculinity.

Superman's first real appearance in the comic (real appearance as opposed to a brief expositional flashback) shows him carrying a woman who has been bound and gagged.  The gender politics of that first image should be clear, the (super)man is in motion and has full agency, while the woman is completely powerless.  We later learn that this bound woman is a "murderess," and Superman's hurry here is to convince the governor to pardon an innocent woman who is about to be executed in favour of having this blonde woman arrested.

A few pages later Superman has a second--indirect--interaction with a woman.  Clark Kent, in his role as a reporter, has been called to report on "a phoned tip" of "a wife-beating."  He arrives as Superman:

The paradigm set up here is of woman as either criminal or victim.  Although it is true that Superhero comics tend to be populated with many criminals and victims in general, by this point in the comic we have seen sixteen male figures of whom one is a criminal and four female figures of whom two were victims and one was a criminal. Women here mostly conform to the "damsels in distress" trope, and they exist fundamentally so that the figure of hypermasculinity will have someone appropriately weak to rescue.

Lois Lane is both a famous example of this tendency in Superman comics and also a subversion of it.  On one hand here and for much of her presence in Superman stories in all media Lois is Superman's built-in damsel-in-distress.

On the other hand Lois' character is, even in this first outing, a more developed character than are the other damsels/victims, and her relationship to Clark/Superman is not limited to being rescued.  Lois is one of the vertices of a love triangle between Lois, Clark, and Superman.  Clark loves Lois, but she spurns him. Lois loves Superman.  In this first comic the love triangle is barely developed--certainly Lois' affection for Superman is not yet established.  But here is what we do see:

Lois is established here as symbolic of an unattainable woman.  Clark pursues her--and the "for once" line lets us know that he makes a habit of it--but he is usually ineffective.  She's cold and aloof yet desirable, and while we might say that this is partly because she is not a human character but an object Clark wishes to possess, we might also note that she is given real agency and a real personality here.

Lois avoids Clark because he's a coward, and we see here that Lois' strength is one of the things Clark admires about her.  The preoccupation with strength is a theme in Superman comics, especially as created by Siegel and Shuster.  The emphasis on strength is part of an emphasis on masculinity, and Siegel and Shuster define manliness as strength.

And there you have it: a preliminary examination of some of the gender politics in Action Comics #1; a feminist reading of Superman.

Feminist Superman

Feminist theory covers a lot of ground and a lot of approaches to literature.  The simplest way to understand feminist criticism is to say that a feminist reading of a text is one that focuses on women.

Sometimes that means focusing on books that were written by women--often as a way of correcting a historical inequality.  For most of the history of literature most of the books that have been seriously studied have been written by men--but men were never the only people writing.  Feminist criticism is a way to try to fix what we read and who wrote it.  This kind of feminist reading would point out that there have proportionally been very few women who write comics for DC, but would draw our attention to women like Dorothy Woolfolk, Mindy Newell, and Gail Simone.

Sometimes that means focusing on female characters in stories--again often as a way of correcting historical inequality.  Focusing on female characters in a feminist context can mean a lot of different things, but in brief it always has to mean focusing on the female characters themselves, instead of just focusing on how they relate to male characters.  So talking about Lois Lane is a start but if we're talking about Superman's girlfriend Lois Lane then we're still defining her as a character in terms of her relationship to a male character. A feminist reading might instead want to talk about Lois Lane herself.  Or even a focus on Superman can be feminist in this way if it is a focus on Superman as Lois Lane's boyfriend.

Sometimes that means focusing on gender in general.  Certain strains of feminist theory have stressed that "woman" as a category is invented by culture, and that it is defined in contradiction to "man" as a category.  So a reading of Superman that focuses on how Superman is a representative of masculinity, especially when that reading emphasizes the way masculinity is socially constructed and the way that it simultaneously constructs femininity, might also be a feminist reading.

Those are only three of many ways to do feminist criticism, but I hope you are getting a picture of how much scope there is in feminist criticism.  I'll be back soon with a second post on feminist criticism, where we will actually do a (brief) feminist reading of Action Comics 1.

I Like Racist Things

Sexist, too.

All right, calm down everybody.

I don't mean that I like these things because they're racist/sexist/whatever. It's not that I go out looking for racist stuff to enjoy.  A better, less provocative way of putting it would be "Things I like are Racist".

But look, I read comic books and Medieval literature. I can't pretend that stuff is unproblematic. More, I don't think it is right to pretend it's unproblematic.  I think it's bad scholarship, and I think it's bad human-ship.  But let's not get ahead of ourselves.  What is the problem here, and what can we do about it?

I've posted a (slightly) different version of this on Medievalala too, because the issues I'm going to write about here really concern both medieval literature and comics--especially the kind of comics I usually focus on.

The Problem with Comics

Although my title references racism specifically, I'm concerned here with the whole rainbow of discrimination: racism, sexism, ablism, heteronormativism, classism, beautyism, sizeism you name it.  While arguably all literature and definitely all categories of literature contain some problematic stuff, mainstream superhero comics are especially bad.

In its simplest expression, the problem is this: superheroes are white.

Click to Enlarge. If I did it right.

That image is a splash page from the 2004 "Identity Crisis" storyline.  That story isn't important (yet) to this post, but what this page is convenient because the idea of this scene is that it's a funeral and all the major DC superheroes attend.  Take a look and see how many People of Colour you can pick out of that crowd.

I count four obvious and a few ambiguous.  And of those four only Cyborg could really be called an A-list character.  And while DC has made some (tiny) attempts at improving lately (by adding Cyborg to the Justice League, for example), this tiny progress does not do much to change the landscape.

The point is that this is a very white universe.  The superheroes are white and they fight mostly for the interests of White America.  DC's past attempts at addressing this have been well-intentioned but ... clumsy.

And even if DC undertook a massive about-face and made their universe truly inclusive, they still have decades of history that will still exists and that--frankly--is what I study.  So the problem here doesn't go away even if the comics industry changes.  Which doesn't mean that it shouldn't change, by the way.  But since superhero books are primarily aspirational, and since there are so few POC characters, that means that historically readers of colour were implicitly told by comics that what they should aspire to be is white.

The sexism of comics has been so well documented and so extensively commented upon that I'm not even going to rehash it except to say that the mainstream comics industry systematically objectifies, sexualizes, and marginalizes female characters, even to the detriment of both story and sales.  If you don't know what I'm talking about, just Google "Starfire new 52".

Why This is a Problem

Now I'm going to give you all the benefit of the doubt and assume that you don't actually want to marginalize, objectify, or dehumanize people.  But that's what the problem here is about.  Politics of representation is not just a matter of over-sensitive political-correctness.  I believe that books matter, and if I didn't believe that then I wouldn't spend all my time reading them.  The stories we tell and the stories we hear both shape and are shaped by our worldview.  Bigotry in fiction is a problem firstly because it reveals the bigoted assumptions behind the creation of that fiction.  So it should be no surprise that while the exact percentages change often and are disputed and disputable, but it is indisputable that there are, for example, far fewer women than men creating comics at DC or Marvel.

I'm not saying that these publishers need to hire women and minorities indiscriminately, or that the people creating comics are all racist and sexist as individuals, or even that the policies of DC and Marvel are sexist or racist.  They may be, but that's not really my point.  My point is simply that by far the bulk of comics that have ever been published by DC and Marvel were written by white men about white men the concerns of white men with a white male audience in mind.  And that should bother us as readers--whether scholarly readers or simply fans.  It should (and often does) bother women who read comics because they are so clearly and often aggressively the object rather than the subject of the narrative, so the narrative is alienating.  It should (and often does) bother minorities who read comics because they are so often absent from the idealized world being depicted and are do not have the same scope for identification that their white counterparts have.  And it should bother white male readers of comics, like me, firstly because we are being presented with an impoverished and limited world and that's boring, and secondly because (at the risk of repeating myself), we don't actually want to marginalize, objectify, or dehumanize people.

False Solutions

As a reader, whether a fan or a scholar, the solution to these problems can't be to ignore them.  It can't be to deny them, or to pretend that the problematic representations in comics don't matter.  The option to ignore harmful representations is the option of privilege, and exercising that option is being complicit in the racism and sexism behind those representations.

And it can't be to excuse these problematic representations on the grounds of special-circumstances: that the A-list characters are all legacies of a different time.  There are many problems with this excuse, but the simplest is that no matter when things were produced they are being read now.  Even if we accept the (frankly lame) excuse that writers of the past didn't know any better, readers of today do.

Possible Solutions

One possible solution, of course, is to choose something else to read.  Within the medium of comics, mainstream superhero comics are not all there is.  Plenty of independent comics are light-years better than DC or Marvel in terms of the politics of representation.

When you're reading for fun, this is easy.  Don't read things that you don't enjoy.  If the problematic elements are such that they overwhelm the pleasure of the reading then there really is no problem. 

When you're reading as a scholar, whether a student reading an assigned text or a higher-level academic reading for the edification of yourself or others, the option of just not reading problematic stuff is less viable.  In the first place, pretending that problematic texts don't exist is itself deeply problematic because it is an idealized and false representation of the world.  In the second place, sometimes texts are just plain worth reading from an academic standpoint--whether because of their historical significance or because of artistic value or as a counterpoint to another text. 

A possible solution here is to read with (faux) objectivity.  A scholarly study of art or literature as an object need not imply any kind of tacit approval.  There are plenty of historians who study Nazi Germany and that emphatically does not make those historians Nazis.  It is possible to study the racism and/or sexism of comics directly.

But eagle-eyed readers will notice the bracketed (faux) I placed before the word "objectivity" in that last paragraph.  I like Superman comics.  If I read them from a position of objectivity, that is a false position and I am being disingenuous.  I suspect that most academic readers of comics share this position with me.  I suspect that most scholars like what they read, at least on some level.  And if they don't, I think that is ... well ... sad.  And they should think about changing specializations.  Even historians who study atrocities often look for good in the responses to those atrocities, and it is usually not so much so that they redeem the historical period as so that they redeem the process of studying the historical period.

But academic readings do need a certain degree of, or a certain kind of objectivity.  A critical analysis is not a review, and within an academic context nobody cares very much whether I like Superman better than Batman.  But they might care what I think is happening within a given Superman comic, or how the character evolves or resists evolution over time.  There are multitudes of angles from which to approach comics that have little to do with race or gender, and they're valid.  So without arguing that the problems of representation don't matter, I can legitimately argue that they're not my point.

Which brings me back to readings for pleasure.  If the problematic elements aren't enough to keep you from enjoying a text--if you do enjoy reading problematic stuff--then I think what you need to do is acknowledge the problems, and articulate the positive.  This post over on the Social Justice League blog has a few good suggestions for how to approach fandom of problematic material.  The author suggests that fans must acknowledge the problematic elements without attempting to defend, excuse, or gloss-over those problems.  What I think is missing in her article, though, perhaps because she thought it went without saying, is that narratives are complex and the best ones are the most complex.  Which, if we rephrase it in subjective terms, means that the comics you think are the best are the ones you find complexity in.  Like a racist family member, you confront the text about its flaws but continue to love it despite them, maybe because of its virtues, and maybe just because of its familiarity.  When I say "articulate the positive" I don't mean argue that the positive outweighs the negative, so that you can argue someone else into liking what you like.  But I do mean learn to articulate what it is you like and why, even if the only one you're articulating that to is yourself.

Thoughts?

The Myth of Superman (no, not THAT "Myth of Superman")

The title of this post is a reference to an essay by Umberto Eco entitled "The Myth of Superman".  I write about Eco's essay here.

Like a psychoanalytic reading, a mythological or archetypal reading of a text is content-based.  And like psychoanalytic readings, mythological/archetypal readings are typically preoccupied with symbolism.  Rather than being concerned with psychology--with the workings of a mind--however, mythological readings are concerned with mass-psychology--with the collective imaginings of all people.  And though mythological/archetypal readings have in the past made a claim to account for all people, many critics now argue that archetypes are culturally bound, so when archetypal critics talk about "all people" they often really mean "all people who share our culture".  On the other hand, given the effects of globalization and the ease with which cultural/mythological/archetypal ideas spread,  there's a good case to be made that all cultures have interacted with all others to at least some degree.

In any case.  Mythological/archetypal readings are also reminiscent of some kinds of structuralist criticism, because both often appeal to archetypal narrative elements like "the hero".  In these terms, Superman seems particularly easy to read.  Superman is the hero.  He is an archetypal representative of masculine strength.
Clark Kent is both an archetypal representative of the hero's weakness and also of the Jungian "persona", emphasizing that the face we show to the world is not the same as our "self".

Definitely two different selves.

This, by the way, is the answer to the commenter on the Marxist post who pointed out that Superman's boss is only a cover, that Clark is not really allied with the proletariat because his "boss" has no real authority over him. That's definitely true.

On the other hand, part of the point of Superman is that the self is divided. Debates about whether Clark or Superman (or Bruce or Batman) is the "real" identity miss the mythological resonance that makes the secret identity such a compelling narrative archetype.

Superegoman

Like Marxist readings, psychoanalytic, or Freudian, readings are focused on interpreting and understanding the content of a story.  There are a number of different approaches to a psychoanalytic reading of a text, and I'm just going to begin one, but I'll also suggest a possible approach to some others.

We should begin by noting that in psychoanalytic readings we differentiate between the manifest content and the latent content.  In Freud's own terms, the mind is like an iceberg.  What we see is the manifest 10% -- the tip of the iceberg.  Everything that lies beneath the surface -- the 90% -- is latent.  So a psychoanalytic reading of literature takes for granted that the apparent meaning of a text is only the tip of the iceberg, and that literature contains much more content beneath the surface.

Nope. No latent psychological meaning here.

This approach, by the way, is one that frustrates students, because it implies that there is a "secret meaning" hidden in the text.  We shouldn't let that impression persist.  Even within psychoanalytic readings, the latent meaning is not a "coded" or "secret" meaning that the author and the critic both understand but have hidden from the reader.  Rather, it is subtext that comes from how the mind is understood to function.  The author is likely no more aware of it than the reader is, and the critic is not assumed to be correctly deciphering the real meaning of the text, but to be suggesting one possible interpretation.



The three clear ways to approach a psychoanalytic reading of a text are to 1) read to psychoanalyze the characters, 2) read to psychoanalyze the author, or 3) read to discover the latent meaning of the text and describe it in the language of psychoanalysis.

Forcing the Governor to Act Morally

In the case of Superman there are, as I said, a few good approaches.  Freud suggested that the mind was divided into the id, which operates on the pleasure principle, is basically pure desire, and seeks to achieve pleasure and avoid pain; the ego which is operates on the reality principle, is basically pure reason, and seeks to rationalize action; and the superego, which is basically the seat of morals, and seeks to make the person socially acceptable and therefore "good".  According to this model we can see that Superman is virtually always a manifestation of the superego, acting as a moral authority to impose good.  Superman's villains, who are usually criminals against property, are manifestations of the id's desire.  The Superman-superego stops the criminal-ids from acting on their desire because acting on that desire would be detrimental to society.

I'll put my cards on the table here and say that I usually don't put much stock in psychoanalytic theory myself, but plenty of people do and it's worth knowing what it is and how people approach it.

Superman: Marxist.

Though it is true that Superman has been portrayed as a communist in at least one story, you should not understand "Marxist" as "communist".  Marx was, in Foucault's terms, the founder of a discourse.  He was the first to write from a certain perspective, and everyone who writes from the same perspective--even if it is to discredit Marx--is writing within the discourse of Marxism.  When we're thinking about literature, any time we focus on class, or economics, we're reading from a Marxist perspective.

That said, there are implicit class positions in Superman comics.  Grant Morrison once said in an interview that "Bruce has a butler, Clark has a boss".  In his earliest incarnations, Superman continually and predictably fights against the powerful on behalf of the weak; against the rich on behalf of the poor.  In one of his first appearances, in Action Comics #3, Superman rescues some trapped miners, then threatens the owner until he provides better conditions and pay for the miners.  In Action Comics #8, he destroys the slums of Metropolis to force the government to rebuild them.  I wrote each of these stories in a previous blog post, and I bring them up again now to stress that Superman, in his original inception, was explicitly concerned with class.

The Superman of the Silver Age (see this post for more on the "ages"), as Eco points out in his essay "The Myth of Superman", fought mostly for the protection of property.  Superman, whose power in the Silver Age was such that he could (and did) easily crush coal into diamonds, and search the bottom of the sea to find sunken treasure.  In other words, he was removed from the need for capital, but protected the capital of others.  In contrast to Action Comics #8, the Superman of the Silver Age does nothing to change society, but instead works carefully to uphold it.

We can read any individual Superman comic through a Marxist lens, and find that the subtext changes dramatically depending on the writer and on the editor, on the political atmosphere of the time.  I think that if we read Superman in general, however--if we focus on the parts of Superman that remain the same and on the impetus for the character--we'll find what in theological terms we call "a preferential option for the poor".  I think Superman is fundamentally a conflicted character.  He does uphold the status quo despite the fact that he has the power to change it.  But Clark Kent doesn't have a butler, he has a boss.

Man and Superman

Formalism and structuralism both focus on the work of art as an object independent from the people or the world that created them.  But plenty of kinds of criticism does care about things outside the work of art as an artifact.  The biography of the authors, the historical moment out of which the work arose, the influences upon the work and its influences on other works, all of these focus outside the work itself.

Superman arose out of a specific historical moment.

As you may know, Superman was created by artist Joe Shuster and writer Jerry Siegel.  In 1938, when the first Superman comic was published in Action Comics #1, Siegel and Shuster were both 24 years old, and they'd been working together on Superman for at least five years.  Their first published Superman work was their short story "The Reign of the Superman", published in a 1933 fanzine.  That original story featured a bald "Superman" bent on world domination: recognizable now as an early version of the Ultra-Humanite, who was himself an early version of Lex Luthor.

The origin of the name "Superman" is up for debate, but in the 1930s there was another historical movement using the same term.  Adolph Hitler (who became chancellor of Germany in 1933) was strongly influenced by his reading of Nietzsche and by the idea of the Ubermensch, which in English translations of the day was given as "Superman".  Hitler considered himself to be the Superman, who by strength of will could, and SHOULD, overcome lesser men and exert his power.  Hitler, of course, applied Nietzsche's ideas along racial lines, and considered the Arians to be a race of Supermen, who would use their will to dominate lesser races.

Siegel and Shuster, Harry Donenfeld, Jack S. Liebowitz, Sheldon Mayer, (not to mention Bob Kane, Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee) were all Jewish.  Though Siegel has said that he never read Nietzsche and he wasn't thinking of Hitler, in 1938 a Jewish-American community created and published a story about a dark-haired alien* Superman who used his power not to dominate but to protect the weak, and who exerted his power on behalf of so-called "lesser men".  Superman's first acts in the comics include saving a woman wrongly accused of murder, stopping a man from beating his wife.  Whether his creators intended him to be such or not, then, Superman is a direct refutation of the Nazi idea of the Ubermensch.

*We should understand "alien" not only as a science-fiction designation, but as a racial one. Superman is defined as an outsider.  He's not an Arian, but he's not Jewish either, exactly. He's a stranger in a strange land--though that is itself a designation that has often historically been adopted by or thrust upon Jewish people.

Structuralist Superman Strikes Again!

One of the tendencies of structuralism that I didn't represent last time is the tendency to diagram and analyse. Structuralism aims toward a more "scientific" approach to literary analysis, and so it sometimes expresses the structure of a story in terms of an algebra of story elements. For example, we could say B means "male protagonist" and G means "female protagonist", + is for a meeting, # is for a conflict * is for a resolution, and (M) is for a marriage. Then if we write

B+G(B#GB*GB(M)G

We are describing an awful lot of stories, and we can clearly see how the structure is the same.

We can do that with Action Comics 1.

First we make an key of algebraic substitutions.

0=Origin Story
R=Superman rescues someone
T=Superman threatens someone
t=someone threatens Superman
c=Superman as Clark Kent
w=Clark feigns weakness
l=Lois snubs Clark

Then Action Comics 1 is:

OTtTRcTtRcwlTRclT

Presented like this we can see patterns (for example, the Rc pattern that means Superman appears as Clark Kent right after rescuing somone, or the prominence of T showing that Superman threatens more than he either is threatened or rescues). I we were so inclined we could also compare this story with others, and by changing the characters' names into generic terms (like hero) we could compare this structure with any other story.

Superstructure*

Unlike the formalist reading, a structuralist reading really can be of Superman in general, not just of one specific comic.  Structuralism, as the name suggests, looks at the structure of ... whatever.  You can do structuralist readings of single texts or of entire genres, of language or of culture.  Anything that is organized or patterned is fair game for structuralism.

Let's start by looking at the central characters.  Superman is a hero, Lois Lane is a princess (the object of the hero's desire), Lex Luthor/Brainiac/Metallo/Etc is a villain, Jor-El is a mentor.  All of these characters fit their structural roles in a usually uncomplicated way.  A structuralist reading would suggest that these are roles or functions filled in every narrative.

Superman stories have not followed the same structure throughout the existence of the character, but there are in general three kinds of Superman stories:

1) Superman intervenes to prevent some threat upon another character.  Superman is rarely under any direct threat in this kind of story.  The tension comes from the possibility that Superman will fail in his purpose, rather than the possibility that he will suffer any physical harm.  This is partly a threat of identity, because if he fails then he is not the hero.  This kind of story is typical of the Golden Age.
2) Superman's secret identity is in jeopardy.  Again, Superman is rarely in physical danger, but the tension here is more personally connected to the character, since his identity is in danger.  This kind of story is also a threat to the continued narrative.  Part of the tension comes from the threat that Superman's identity will be exposed and that therefore there will be no more stories.  This kind of story is typical of the Silver Age.
3) Superman is under some direct threat.  Again the tension comes partly from the threat of conclusion--the threat that this will be the last Superman story.  This kind of story is typical of the Bronze Age, where the drastic reduction of Superman's powers meant that he could be seriously threatened.

There's a lot more to do with structuralism--a lot of what gets said about superheroes is structuralist in its slant--but I'm going to let it rest here because I've been heard some feedback saying that my posts tend to be to long.  I'll do another structuralist post next, and then move on to ... I'm not sure yet.  Poststructuralism?  Deconstruction?

*Superstructure is a term from Marxist theory, but this post is actually about structuralism.  In Superman.  It's a pun, get it?

A Formalist Reading of Superman

For the next few posts I'm going to be talking about Superman using some of the major schools of literary theory from the past century or so.  I'm not going to be doing anything in depth, just a little taste.  Hopefully this will be both interesting as a few different ways of looking at Superman, and also as primer on literary theory for those of you who care about such things.  First up: formalism.

Formalist analysis, as the name implies, is centrally concerned with form.  The form of the art is the important part.  This means disregarding the historical context, the stated intention of the author, the emotional response of the reader.  The meaning of a text is equivalent to its form; as we describe and analyse its form we are also describing its meaning.

Strict literary formalism would object immediately to an attempt to do a formalist reading of a comic book, because its form is not the same as literature, and from a formalist perspective that is crucial.  Formalism is a type of criticism that might be concerned with distinguishing literary writing from other writing, and also with literary genres.  But I'm not going to be strict.

On one hand, it doesn't really make sense to talk about a formalist reading of Superman.  Formalism stresses close reading, and emphasizes the text as a complete, internally coherent, hermetically sealed package.  So a formalist reading of Superman would require that we read every Superman comic ever written, and consider it as a single work of art.  Strangely, then, though a formalist reading doesn't really make sense on one hand, it is what many fans and also many editors of comics try to do.  It's a formalist impulse that makes retcons necessary, because it is a formalist impulse that tries to read Superman comics as a single coherent, continuous narrative.

For all these literary theory posts, my go-to text will be Siegel and Schuster's Action Comics #1--mostly because the different ways of reading will be more interesting if I keep going back to the same story.

So let's a few sections of Action Comics #1:

Aside from a full-page backstory establishing who Superman is and what exactly his powers are, this is the beginning of Superman as a character.  In plot terms, then, this is the beginning, and beginnings are important both in that they set the tone for what follows, and in that they are memorable.  The first line of this story: "A tireless figure races thru the night.  Seconds count ... delay means forfeiture of an innocent life."  This establishes the stakes of the action of the tireless figure, as well as establishing mystery about that figure.  The text also immediately makes certain establishing notes about the character of the tireless figure.  He is motivated by the need to save an innocent life.  He holds a bound woman, and we might infer, even from this first panel, that he intends her some kind of harm.  Since the introductory page tells us beforehand that the figure is Superman and that he is beneficent, we might deduce that he is bringing the woman to be punished for a crime (and in fact we later learn that she is a murderer), but the caption tells us that his motivation is not the punishing of the guilty but the defense of the innocent.

The fact that the opening happens at night, as well as the fact that Superman is not named in this panel (or at all on the first two pages) and finally the fact that he is carrying a bound and gagged woman establishes him as both mysterious and threatening, even as the caption establishes his motivation as benevolent.  So there is some tension suggested here between the direct and the indirect characterization.

In terms of plot, there is virtually no exposition given here.  The page that precedes this one is expository in that it gives a background of Superman's powers and origin, but it does not tie in at all to the blond woman.  The storyline begins in media res, and we're never given the full backstory.  This is in keeping with the breathless, frenetic pace of the story, and the pacing of the plot is parallel to the emotional state of the central character.

A few panels later, on the same page, we have this interaction:

There are three separate conflicts being developed in this first page: the race against time is a conflict between Superman and himself, in that he must be fast enough to succeed.  The conflict presented here explicitly is a conflict between Superman and the governor's butler.  Finally, the Butler's remark that this is illegal entry sets up a conflict between Superman and society.  He is working within the law in that he is bringing information to the governor in hopes of securing a pardon rather than simply breaking the innocent woman free by force--but he is also established as working outside the law, not just in the sense that he is not officially mandated, but in that he shows an active disregard for certain laws.

I think that's enough for now.  I could go on, but I think what I've already done gives an idea of how a formalist reading helps to understand the characterization of Superman and the themes initially suggested.  Next: Structuralism

Continuity Continued

One of the comments on my last post was that, though the title of the blog says "introduction" that post was more like a 3rd year course. I'm going to try not to do that, but feel free to ask questions in the comments if something I've said doesn't make sense. It's just as likely that I'm just plain not making sense as it is that it's going over your head.

In my previous post about comics continuity I talked about Umberto Eco and especially his suggestion that Superman can only work as a character if the timeline is unclear. The character must be timeless but the stories are necessarily timely.

The mechanisms that make comic continuity so confusing -- like alternate histories, flashbacks, tangents, and retcons -- are also the mechanisms that allow the story to continue to be told. If the continuity were simple or straightforward then comic book characters would need to die eventually. But a comic like Superman can't be stuck in an eternal present the way for example a gag-a-day comic like Hagar the Horrible is, because a Superman story requires some kind of threat or obstacle, which Superman overcomes. When he overcomes an obstacle, he changes his world and himself, which means that time has passed. As long as the character is mortal, time passing means movement towards death, or simply the end of the story.

To me, the complicated chronologies and continuities of comics seem like an oral tradition more than they do like a conventional literary tradition. Many people have written about literacy and orality, most notably Walter Ong in Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word , and I'm not going to summarize Ong here except to say that conventional wisdom is that literate people think differently than do non-literate people. And by "literate people" and "non-literate people" I don't mean individuals who can or can't read, I mean cultures that have the technology of reading and writing. Even illiterate people withing Canadian (or American, or German, or whatever) think like literate people because the technology of literacy is all around them. And one of the most obvious impacts of the technology of literacy is the immutability of the past. Once something has been written down you can check it later. In an oral culture, stories literally exist in memory, so storytelling techniques are (unconsciously) designed to lodge the story firmly within memory. That's why there is so much repetition of tropes in fairy tales that come from an oral tradition. That's why folk stories often exist as rhymes or songs. That's why if you read The Iliad (for example) you'll find that every time anyone has a sacrifice the scene is described in the exact same words. The Iliad is taken from an oral tradition.

Part of what that oral tradition means is that the story seems (and is) fresh every time. The teller can edit the details, embellish on the story, continue past what had previously been the ending. Although Eco is right to point out that someone like Hercules came with an already-completed-past-tense-story, it is also the case that oral traditions by their nature constitute an open tradition. Hercules's story is over, but in an oral tradition the teller can change what that story was.

Comics, paradoxically, often function as if they were oral, although in practice of course they are not. That is part of the paradox of retcons. The current story can tell me that what I've heard about Superman's origin story is wrong. A new book can tell me that Superman's parents are alive and well and living in Smallville, even though the first Superman story -- in which both of Superman's earth-parents are dead by the time he moves to Metropolis -- is still available for me to check. In practice retcons pretend that I don't have the ability to check what has already been written. They pretend that they are a part of an oral rather than a literary tradition.

Partly that is because the disposability of comics (especially at first) meant that a writer could not count on his (and at first it was all "he") readers checking with what has been written already, but there's more to it than that. We'll talk more about comics continuity in a future post, but for now let's just leave it here: comics continuity often acts as though it is functioning within an oral tradition, even though it isn't. Very strange.

Eco, Continuity and Comics

In his essay "The Myth of Superman", Umberto Eco gives a careful, thoughtful, considered account of the nature of serialized publication, particularly in the case of Superman.  Eco's essay focuses primarily on the dual identity of Superman/Clark Kent and on the so-called "Imaginary Tales" of DC.

Eco begins by pointing out that in contrast to traditional mythological characters like Hercules, whose story is complete and in the past, the "mythological character of comic strips" (110) does not come complete with a finished story.  Superman must be recognizable -- archetypal -- but his story is both episodic and ongoing.  In order to be mythological and archetypal he has to be consistent, but in order to make sense in the story he has to change.  The story requires growth of character, but the archetype requires an already complete character.

According to Eco, once Superman has accomplished something he has "made a gesture which is inscribed in his past and which weighs on his future.  He has taken a step towards death" (111).  And Superman must be mortal.  These steps must be towards death, or else "the public's identification with his double identity would fall by the wayside" (111).  Clark Kent is not merely a disguise, but is a mechanism by which Superman can be a figure of identification and not only of aspiration.  We identify with Clark Kent and admire Superman.  But if Superman is really immortal then the secret identity becomes useless as a mythological device.

In Eco's terms, "Superman comes off as a myth only if the reader loses control of the temporal relationships and renounces the need to reason on their basis, thereby giving himself up to the uncontrollable flux of the stories which are accessible to him and, at the same time, holding on to the illusion of the continuous present" (116).  The writers (unconsciously) employ a number of mechanisms for confusing the chronology and therefore the temporarily of the stories.  Although theoretically Superman as written in the most recent issue of "Superman" comics is the same character as the Superman of Action Comics 1, and therefore should be at least 72 years old, in practice the publication of the stories as built in mechanisms to prevent the reader from reaching that conclusion.

Each "Superman" comic does not directly follow the previous one.  The chronology of Superman comics is not unidirectional.  In the first place, any number of Superman comics throughout the 72 years of publication have been flashbacks.  The existence of characters like "Superboy" -- who as originally conceived was Superman when he was a boy -- mean that not all Superman stories are intended to take place in the "present" of the comic, but even discounting that, comics frequently feature flashbacks of alternate futures, tangents, time travel.  Furthermore, it is both unclear and inconsistent what the "real-time" equivalent of an individual Superman story is. Some stories take place over the course of months or even years, others over the course of minutes.  Beyond this is the existence of alternate or non-canon stories.  Stories, such as the popular Silver Age "imaginary stories" that answer "What if?" questions (what if Superman were president?), that are explicitly stated to be outside the continuity of the ongoing story can nevertheless have an influence on readers's conception of the character.  They confuse and obscure the timeline.

Eco, of course, was writing prior to the 1986 reboot of Superman, or the 1985 Crisis on Infinite Earths that precipitated the reboot.  Both of these events, and especially the Crisis (and its sequels, Infinite Crisis) cast a new light on the continuity of Superman and readers's perception of that continuity (I hope to write a blog post about the Crises that will explain that claim further).  In brief, both the Crisis on Infinite Earths and the reboot of Superman were intended to simplify the history of Superman.  Officially, the history of the character extends back only to 1986, not all the way to the 1938 Action Comics 1.  Yet thought the goal was to simplify the history -- so that new readers would not feel compelled to read decades of back issues in order to understand current comics -- in practice this kind of simplification may not be possible.  Only a reader who is sufficiently in the know -- who is sufficiently versed in comics history -- will understand that the history is supposed to begin in 1986.  So in practice the older comics do affect the readers's perspective of the continuity of Superman as a character.  And the character's history exists within the mind of the reader more than it exists in the official canon.

That last statement may be contentious, but while I think it is true for any fictional character, it is even more demonstrably true for a character like Superman.  The readers of today are the writers of tomorrow, who create the canonical version based on their own perspective as readers.

One way that comic writers create the canonical version of the character -- and sometimes do so out of sych with what had previously been the canonical version -- is through retroactive continuity, or "retcon".  Retcons are reinterpetations or explanations of past events in ways not intended by the original writers.  "Retroactive continuity" as term had never been applied to fiction when Eco wrote his 1979 essay.  What retcons really do is further complicate and muddy the continuity -- since, once again, only attentive readers are familiar with the (dis)continuities.


Citations of Eco are taken from The role of the reader: explorations in the semiotics of texts

Understanding McCloud: Defining The Medium of Comics

Because comics as a medium remains somewhat undefined, and because -- in the English speaking world especially -- comics scholarship is still in its infancy, theoretical approaches to comics analysis in practice usually adopt techniques from other disciplines and other media.  One of the distinguishing -- though by no means a necessary or defining -- features of comics is the presence of both image and text.  As a result, comics are often approached as a field from one of three perspectives: comics as literature, comics as art, and comics as a medium of its own.

A great starting point for comics theory is Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. McCloud makes a few theoretical assumptions and assertions that we don't necessarily need to agree with, but with which we should be familiar.

McCloud's theoretical agenda is to establish and analyse comics as a medium.  He is deeply invested in establishing comics as a medium in the popular understanding, and in separating the medium of comics from the content.  The medium has been slighted, says McCloud, because of its association in many people's minds with superhero stories for kids. For McCloud, disconnecting the content from the form is a crucial first step.  In McCloud's words: "I realized that comic books were usually crude, poorly drawn, semiliterate, cheap, disposable, kiddie fare ... but ... they don't have to be." (McCloud 3) In Understanding Comics McCloud attempts to give a coherent account of the medium, often separating it from much of the actual history of comics as they have been published.

For the moment we'll earmark the question of what constitutes a medium (and the related issues regarding differences between an artistic medium and a language, an artistic form, a genre within a medium) and just accept McCloud's assertion that "comics" is in fact a distinct medium.  Accepting that assertion, however, does not mean that we need to accept McCloud's definition of or assumptions about the medium.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.  We'll return to some problems with McCloud's conception of the medium once we've actually addressed what that conception is.

McCloud begins Understanding Comics by calling for a definition of comics--a definition that is broadenough to encompass the ""huge and varied" (4) types within the "world of comics", but not "so broad as to include anything which is clearly not comics." (4)  The definition that McCloud settles on, derived from Will Eisner's definition of comics as "sequential art", is "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence" (9).  This definition has its virtues, and it allows McCloud to consider Egyptian painting "comics", and also to imagine the future of comics very differently from the present.  McCloud elaborates his ideas on the future of comics in his follow up to Understanding Comics, the less successful Reinventing Comics.


From McCloud's perspective his formalist definition of the medium of comics is valuable because "no generes are listed in our definition, no types of subject matter, no styles of prose or poetry.  Nothing is said about paper and ink.  No printing process is mentioned ... no materials are ruled out ... no tools are prohibited ... no schools of art are banished by our definition, no philosophies, no movements, no ways of seeing are out of bounds" (22).


In addition to an attempted formal definition, McCloud also provides a pragmatic definition of comics through the rest of the book.  His choice of what to focus on suggests what comics in practice are--at least to McCloud.  The chapters of Understanding Comics are "The Vocabulary of Comics", which is largely about cartoons, "Blood in the Gutter", which introduces McCloud's concept of closure, "Time Frames", in which he posits that in comics time=space, "Living in Line", which is largely about the emotive potential of artistic style, "Show and Tell", about the relationship between words and pictures, "The Six Steps", which is an examination of the art in general and "A Word About Color", which is about colour.  There is also an introductory and a concluding chapter.

As we can see from his choice of chapters--especially the section on colour--McCloud recognizes that comics as a medium is a socio-cultural artifact, not only a theoretical formal construction.  Though he wants to distinguish the medium from its historical incarnation, largely because of what he perceives as stigma attached to that history, he can't really do that.  The section on the cartoon, the section on colour, even the emphasis McCloud places on the gutter, all highlight that what McCloud is really talking about for most of Understanding Comics is not a theoretical formal medium but a socio-cultural artifact.

And that brings me to one of the major problems of McCloud's definition.  A medium is simply not a straightforwardly understood concept.  McCloud argues that "at one time or another virtually all the great media have received critical examination in and of themselves" (6) and he lists examples: "written word, music, video, theatre, visual art, film" (6).  Yet in what way are film and video separate media?  And doesn't the medium of film often include music?  And isn't it created in the first place as written word?  And if I bring a camcorder to a play and tape it, is what I have in the end theater or film?

McCloud defines comics as a medium, but are printed comics part of the medium of print?  If comics are displayed on a tv screen do they become the medium of film?  If a comic is framed and put in an art gallery does it become the medium of visual art?

The point of all these rhetorical questions is to stress that "medium" is far from a clearcut concept.  Neil Cohn wants to separate what he calls "visual language" from the socio-cultural construct of comics, while McCloud does not.  In a future post we will look some more at a few of McCloud's central ideas, including his concept of "closure", but for now, what do you think about attempts to define comics?  Do you agree with McCloud's definition?  What are some of its strengths?  What are its weaknesses?

Are Comics Literature?

My own academic background is in literature, and my particular interest in comics is in comics as literature.  Though comics distinguish themselves from literary forms by the necessary inclusion of images, advocates of comics as literature make two main, complementary, points.  Firstly, much of what we take to be literary analysis or literary theory or literary criticism is in fact narrative analysis or theory or criticism.  This is already evident in that literature scholars often study drama, and sometimes study film.  Secondly, the study of comics as literature emphasizes the position that education in literature is more about teaching skills than about teaching a body of knowledge.  Literature students should develop the skills to read anything well, not only develop familiarity with works that have historically been considered great.

That last statement may invoke an objection from some readers.  Who says that comics are not great?  Who says that comics aren't worth reading for their own sake, to be absorbed into the canon?  After all, there are certainly comics that have had a profound impact on culture  There are two responses to this objection.  The first and simplest is that this is a case when the difference of medium becomes relevant.  There are great comics, but even the greatest comics are not great novels.  Just as there are canonical and great films, but the great films do not necessarily belong in the canon of literature, so perhaps the great comics do not belong in the canon of literature, but rather in the canon of comics.  The second reason is that comics have not existed for long enough to objectively establish any specific comic within the canon of literature.  The only criteria by which a work can be objectively placed within the canon is historical.  Though the "great" works of literature are worth studying, worth reading, on their own terms, so are minor works not considered great within the standard canon of literature.  The placement of works within a canon serves two purposes; the first is to highlight influential or often alluded-to works so that other, later works can be better understood -- so for example Tennyson's Idylls of the King are made richer through familiarity with Malory's Le Morte Darthur --and the second is to recommend works that a consensus of readers historically have considered to be excellent.  If I don't appreciate a canonically great book it is likely that I am missing something in it.  That does not mean, however, that books that are not canonically "great" are not worth reading, or that they are not worthy of being recognized as great.  But we can only recognize new books as great -- if that is our goal -- by reading books not already so considered.  In short, there is no need to (falsely) insist that Alan Moore's Watchmen is the equivalent of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.  It isn't, but it doesn't need to be.

This isn't intended to undermine the status of comics as literature.  On the contrary, it is intended to argue that even comics that aren't the canonically great works of the medium are still worthy of being read and studied as literature, and that studying comics as literature helps hone the analytical skills of literature scholars, and helps expand our collective understanding of comic narratives and of narrative in general.  The third purpose of somehow legitimizing comic studies is either impossible or redundant, depending on the sympathies of the audience, and is ultimately unnecessary anyway.

Comics as Art: Style and Palaeography

Neil Cohn's theory of visual linguistics suggests that the images of comics constitute a language, with its own grammar and conventions.  If we accept this theory, then the artist's style in a comic is like handwriting more than it is like the style of a single, unique, discreet work of art.  This is especially true within a particular genre of comic - just as paleographical comparisons are more easily made within a single language. We can think of the difference in style and in convention between a mainstream American superhero comic and an independent comic is like the difference between Latin script and Greek.  The comparison is possible to make, and someone familiar with both Roman letters and Greek can identify the difference immediately, but the two use different alphabets, and expertise in one does not necessarily imply expertise in the other.  Like all analogies, this way of thinking about mainstream and independent comics is imperfect, but it may be helpful as a starting point.

If the difference between mainstream and independent comics is tantamount to a difference of alphabet, then differences of convention within what we call "mainstream" are still substantial.  Superhero comic books, newspaper comic strips, self-contained graphic novels, each approach the medium differently, with different linguistic and paleographical conventions.

Though individual artists have distinct and often recognizable styles, comic books also have style conventions based on when and where they were made.  Unlike scripts, through which it is easier to date than to locate a manuscript, conventions of place are easier to determine than are conventions of time, but it is often possible to use the evidence to deduce the date as well as the location of a comic's production.

More than as a method of dating the work -- which in comics is largely unnecessary, since unlike manuscripts the date and location of a comic is rarely in serious question -- thinking of comic style in palaeographic terms allows us three advantages.  Firstly, it emphasizes and explains the collaborative, community-based nature of style in comic books.  Though usually, even within mainstream comics, an artist's individual style is something to be celebrated, thinking in palaeographical terms allows us to also celebrate, and more significantly to intelligently theorize the common stylistic elements within a given context.  Secondly, a palaeographical perspective on comic book style encourages us to approach comic books as a historical continuity.  So changes in the way Superman is drawn reflect not only changes of continuity - of the ongoing plot, such as it is - they also reflect changes in the script in which comics are written.  Tracking those changes helps us to understand the development of the "language" of comics, as well as to locate any given comic within a continuous but fluid tradition.

As paleographers focus primarily on letter-forms, so a description of comic book style can focus on any of a number of elements.  The underlying question is "what is the basic unit of a comic book?  In the same way that we may imagine the basic unit of a manuscript to be the quire, or the folio, or the page, or the paragraph, or the line, or the word, or the letter, based on our focus and our purpose, so the basic unit of a comic book may be the story or the page or the panel or the active entity or line based on our particular focus.  For the purpose of this page we will suggest two different ways of thinking about a comic book palaographically - firstly with the cell or panel as the basic unit, and secondly with what Neil Cohn refers to as the "active entity".

If we take the panel as the basic unit of a comic, then we can apply any number of descriptive techniques to characterize style.  Some are very helpful for dating and locating a comic, even if it is a comic that is previously unknown, and some are helpful mostly to describe and classify comics whose origin is already known.

Ken Parille identifies six elements with which to describe the style of a comic: line, texture, panel density, gestures of face and body, body proportions, and density of character detail. We may wish to add to this list a seventh element which Parille probably overlooks because it seems to him too obvious to be worth mentioning: colour, and an eighth: backgrounds.

Parille's context is informal and pedegogical - he is not writing a formal analysis of comic style, he is writing a blog post about teaching comic style.  Still, his distinctions are very helpful, especially as a starting point.

So we may note that, for example, Herge's Tintin, Goscinny and Uderzo's Asterix', and Morris's Lucky Luke, all Franco-Belgian comics but with different artists, each exhibit a smooth, tight, thin line, little texture, relatively sparse panel density, unrealistic face and body gestures, unrealistic body proportions, relative sparsity of character detail, extensive and subtle use of colour, and detailed or realistic backgrounds.

Compare this with a page from the first appearance of Superman, where the style features smooth, tight, thick line, texture in the form of hatching for shading, comparatively dense panel density, realistic body gestures, realistic body proportions, relative sparsity of character detail the use of a simple four-colour system, and unrealistic or highly stylized backgrounds.

We should perhaps digress for a moment to note also that all of these observations are matters of judgement.  It is up for debate whether Superman has realistic body proportions--there's a good case to be made that usually he doesn't.  But while the degree of success is a matter for debate, it seems to me that in contrast to Asterix, Shuster's Superman here is aiming at an idealized realism that Asterix simply isn't.

This approach to describing comic book style is especially helpful in dealing with the wider range of global comics, both mainstream and independent.  The weaknesses of this approach are firstly that it is highly subjective, and secondly that the number of relevant criteria are very debatable.  So someone may consider Siegel and Shuster's Superman to be realistic in its body proportions, and may consider that to be the most important distinction between Superman and Asterix in terms of style, but another critic may consider Superman to be unrealistic in body proportions, but find the realism of body proportion to be irrelevant.  Our imaginary second critic may think that the placement and shape of word-balloons, which I haven't addressed at all, is the crucial element for describing, categorizing and identifying comics.

Focus on the active entity as a basic unit is a less versatile approach, but may be more fruitful within its limits.  This approach requires prior familiarity with the active entity, and so it is most useful with mainstream comics.  By "active entity", we mean the person, animal or thing within a panel that performs the action.  So there are four active entities of the cover of Action Comics 1: Superman, and the three men who are afraid of him.

As paleography places more interpretive weight on certain letters than on others so in a palaeography of comics we can place more interpretive weight on some active entities than on others, and the interpretive weight is directly proportional to the number of appearances of that character.  We can place much more interpretive weight on the details of Superman's representation in a given appearance than we can put on one of the unnamed extras who never appears again.

There are, within mainstream superhero comics, any number of heroes whose design has changed dramatically, but when those changes take place within the narrative, and are perceptible by other characters within the fictional context, we will consider that to be a separate phenomenon to the kind of palaeographic style changes that are of interest for the purpose of this argument.

The top image on the left, taken from a 1959 Superman comic, is notable as a product of its period for the large stylized pentagon "s" shield (compared with the "S" of the 1938 Superman, as seen above), Superman's shorter cape, the less defined musculature, and the lack of detail in the face.  It is recognizable as a bulk reprint because it is in black and white.  The second image on the left, from 1971, features a much more (indeed, overly) muscled Superman, though it is still an attempt at realism rather than an overt stylization or caricature.  The flatness of the colour provides evidence that it was made before the 1990s.  The top image on the right is a 2010 reprint of a 1979 cover.  The increased realism, especially the inclusion of a real-world character, suggests that this comic is from near the early 80s, but the colour, especially the blue of Superman's costume, is includes more subtle shading than was typical of comics prior to the 2000s.  Compare with the original.The second image on the right is from a 2005 comic, and is notable for the increasingly nuanced but unrealistic shading and colour provided by digitized colouring process and less exaggerated musculature of Superman. Individual artists do have their own styles, of course, but the general tendency of how a publisher depicts its characters, especially its most iconic and recognizable characters, provides a wealth of material for identifying, catagorizing, dating and locating comics.

The image below to the left is from the 1990s, but is an example of a character design change that constitutes a narrative point rather than a shift in style.  Note, however, the change in style of Superman's "s" shield, which corresponded also to a change in the design of the title of the comic.

A Bibliography of Comics Theory

Here is a suggested bibliography for comics theory. There's more to read, of course, but these will give you a few major touchstones in comics scholarship.  I would especially recommend Understanding Comics as a popular (rather than rigorously scholarly) central text.

Form, Medium, and Genre: Defining Some Terms

One of the difficulties that a serious approach to comics faces is that despite the definitional work of a handful of theorists -- most popularly notable among them Scott McCloud -- "comics" remains a fairly ambivalent term.

How we define "comics" will depend firstly on the context and secondly on our theoretical position with regard to art in ontology. Is a work of art defined by its production or its consumption? Is a poem a different medium from a novel, or only a different form? Is television a different medium from film?

If we understand "Comics" as a medium, then there is a difference between “comics”, “comic books” and “comic strips”. Though all three share characteristics in common, the distinction between them is important to note. “Comic strips” are a form consisting of juxtaposed images, published in a newspaper. In this sense, comic strips are defined by their context. Material produced for newspaper publication is a comic strip. Even after this material has been collected and re-published in book form, it is still a comic strip. A book collection of comic strips is not a comic book any more than a series of short stories published in book form is a novel. In contemporary culture, most comic strips are necessarily short and self-contained, since there can be no assurance of a reader having access to the rest of the story. Comic strips are usually humorous (or constitute an attempt at humour), but this is not necessary, and within the form of “comic strips” exist the genres of adventure strips, gag strips, soap opera strips, superhero strips, etc.

“Comic books” are produced and published in book or magazine form, independently of newspapers. Although by far the majority of comic books historically have been superhero comics, there are of course no inherent restrictions in terms of content or subject matter. Like comic strips, many comic books are published as periodicals, with serial stories. There is, however, no inherent limit on space, and longer “graphic novels”—or, in the words of Art Spiegelman, creator of Maus, “comic books that need bookmarks”(quoted in Versaci 1)—are gaining popularity.

“Comics”, as defined by comics theorist Scott McCloud are “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence” (McCloud 9). McCloud argues that the term “comics” refers to “the artform—the medium ... [which is] a vessel which can hold any number of ideas and images” (6), and he wishes to define that medium as broadly as possible, “while not being so broad as to include anything which is clearly not comics” (4). He points out that Will Eisner's older definition of “sequential art” applies equally to animation, and even to film, but that those images are not spatially juxtaposed—that “space does for comics what time does for film” (7). McCloud's clunky “pictorial and other” is intended to acknowledge that “letters are static images ... [but] when they are arranged in a deliberate sequence, placed next to each other, we call them words.” (8) McCloud also differentiates between comics and cartoons. For McCloud, although “there is a long-standing relationship between comics and cartoons .. they are not the same thing! One is an approach to picture making—a style, if you like-while the other is a medium which often employs that approach” (McCloud 21). As McCloud, and those influenced by him, uses the term, “comics” is a a plural noun without a singular—like “pants”.

McCloud's definition is helpful, but it is unclear if or why, by his definition children's picture books are not considered comics. Also unclear is what the proportion of text to image (or “pictorial” to “other”) is required for something to be considered “comics”. A text book with illuminating figures or diagrams, in which the diagrams are essential to the understanding of the text, might be considered “comics” by McCloud's definition, so long as the diagrams are juxtaposed in deliberate sequence—as they often are. Finally, by McCloud's definition of the term, it is almost absurd to discuss the history of comics. It seems likely that people have been making use of juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence for as long as people have been attempting to communicate with one another. Certainly they have been doing so for all of recorded history. Comics pre-date writing, at least by McCloud's definition of comics. For McCloud, this is part of the virtue of the definition.  But comics exist as a medium defined historically and culturally, and expanding the definition too broadly makes historical-cultural perspectives on the formation of comics as a medium seem deceptively unimportant.

While theoretical definitions have their place, and though it is helpful include theoretical definitions of “comics” here in order that the historical, pragmatic and functional definitions may have a context and may not be assumed to be exhaustive, those functional definitions are eventually necessary. The most valuable of functional definitions may be the traditional definition, since it allows us to join a dialogue with the past on its own terms. Traditionally, then, the first “comic” has been considered Outcault's Yellow Kid, in 1896 (Robinson 12). And though this is usually granted to have been the first comic strip, it is also traditionally accepted that comics did not begin to come into their own until the advent of Superman, superhero comics, and comic books.

Sources
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
Robinson, Jerry. The Comics: An Illustrated History of Comic Strip Art
Versaci, Rocco.  This Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics As Literature