Webcomics Part 3

The Visual of Appeal of Comics: Childish Trash or Political Medium? 

                The visual appeal of comics is particularly important for American comics because the use of comics in newspapers came as a response to Mark Twain's success with his illustrated novels. The idea that books were made more successful thanks to the use of pictures points to the way in which American society took to the childish idea of pictures and text. Americans seemed to prefer their novels to be more like bed time story picture books. It can be said that this preference is due to the fact that pictures in novels provided readers with more tools to immerse themselves within Twain's stories. Scott McCloud suggests that the “cartoon is a vacuum into which our identity and awareness are pulled...an empty shell that we inhabit which enables us to travel in another realm,” and also claims that this is why television cartoons are particularly successful. (36) It can be argued that this idea presents us with a picture of an American society that from its very early history preferred to be submerged into fantasy than to deal with the problems of society. The use of color in comics propelled their success even more, and comics like The Yellow Kid comic strip, became extremely popular. The fantasy world of the comics had become more realistic thus moving readers further into a fantasy world that became more like their own. Readers were not only encouraged to laugh at the funny gag of a comic, but to immerse themselves in a world that was full of laughter and exaggeration outside of their own serious, working class world. In a sense the role of color in comics in the early nineteenth century worked to further the distance between comics and the political, drawing a line between the gray drab world of political news and the fun colorful, careless world of the cartoon. This sense of escapism is one of the inherently childish characteristics that lies at the heart of comics which has magnified itself in the last thirty years and more so thanks to the internet because we can now plunge into our fantasies at any place. By the time comics had made it to America in the nineteenth century the mass produced comic no longer possessed any of the artistic, political, or elite appeal it did in Hogarth's era, and instead began to develop as a purely childish entertainment. It is important to review the extensive history of comics to see that there has always been tension between comics and social-political discourse that ultimately resulted in an alienation between the two.

                Another important aspect to note in order to understand this alienation is the way in which the early comics that were meant as entertainment for adults, became a medium of amusement mainly directed at the youth of America. This began when the humor magazine Puck in 1914 began to change its focus from domestic type humor to humor that would appeal more to a younger audience, and many magazines began to follow suit. This trend would not change until the sixties when counter culture began to use comics as a way of expressing its political ideas. A new movement from the underground erupted, and this new incarnation of comics was dubbed “comix.” These “comix”brought in adult topics that had not been touched on before in the mainstream, such as sex, drugs, and underground/alternative culture. These comix also broke away from regular comic strip, and comic book convention and possessed an artistic flare to them. Comix surfaced in part as a response to the anti-Comics Code that arose in the fifties, which “had stipulated 'no violence', 'no sex', 'no drugs', and 'no social relevance'” (Sabir 92) In the minds of the artists of the underground the Code meant, essentially, that a comic was prevented from saying anything meaningful about the real world, and in defying it they were able to make critiques. Nevertheless, the key word here is “underground,” as this artistic revolution in comics would not be seen in the mainstream. Newspapers comic strips and comic books would retain their status as entertainment for children. This is comparable to what we see today where the “serious” graphic novels have taken a back seat and the childish world of webcomics is what has exploded into the mainstream. Some have argued that “webcomic artists are working within the spirit of the Underground movement” and that this is “reflected in their subversion of comic book conventions and their freedom of expression in content and form.” (Fenty and Houp and Taylor, ImageTexT) However, despite the fact that during our time we have experienced ourselves a controversial war experience parallel to that of the Vietnam war, webcomics have very rarely taken advantage of the freedom that the internet provides to approach head on the problems of the Bush administration, the war on terror, or the current economic crisis that the country is facing. Furthermore, webcomics lack the artistic exploration that the underground comix movement once had because they are devoid of any social commentary and while they may be mash ups of old and new styles of comic art they do not experiment with the same artistic ambition. Their main aim is the entertainment of the masses. This can be seen in the way in which many webcomics will experiment with Flash programs to add limited movement and allow for fan interaction with their webcomics. In other words, the so called “experimental expressions,” which are made possible by the freedom that the internet provides for webcomics, are nothing more than bells and whistles that webcomic creators add to their work.

                Graphic comic artists like award winning Art Spiegelman¹utilized the comics medium during the sixties and seventies to “ 'unselfconsciously [redefine] what comics could be, by smashing formal and stylistic, as well as cultural and political, taboos.' ” ( qtd. in Sabir 118) Nevertheless, we have to be reminded that this movement was completely underground and came about as a response to the mainstream comics that were predominantly infantile and purely for entertainment. In this way we can see that in spite of the cultural impact some artists who were part of the underground comix movement went on to make later, these types of attempts to turn comics into a serious medium for political discussion would remain only within a niche audience of die hard fans, or the scholarly crowd. As Walter Ryce tells us in “1985, Will Eisner published Comics and Sequential Art, a treatise that approached the craft of comics as a serious medium...inviting writers and artists to strive for higher aspirations.” (30) While the creators of graphic novels would strive to push the boundaries of their art their fans would revere their quality but would nonetheless in a way come fetishize their works, and as Sabir points out is that what became the center of attention was not the creators, but the characters they created. In analyzing the fact that the fans lost sight of the fact that these graphic novel creators were looking to be thought of as artists is indicative of the way in which American society was not interested in art, but in the escape that these comics provided.

1Spiegelman received many awards for his work Maus, which depicted his father's struggles during the Holocaust, and among these awards the prestigious Pulitzer. Spiegelman was “the first cartoonist ever to be so honoured” (Sabir 186)