Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud (No.49)

Understanding Comics (1993)

by Scott McCloud

REVIEW BY RICH KREINER:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

When the venerable Will Eisner (see entries #15 and #57) offered his insightful Comics & Sequential Art (1985), he addressed the student and the academic with a hard-won how-to of explanations and examples that focused on the mechanics of the vehicle. Eight years later, Scott McCloud used comics to explain comics and, in effect, slipped the reader behind the wheel of the powerful and stylish medium. He congenially chatted about the wholly unique properties and wonderful accessories possible even while continually revealing the dazzling scenery that panel-by-panel narrative provides.

Using the vernacular to explicate the vernacular was an audacious, yet ultimately self-validating technique. For matters both philosophically ambitious and precisely concrete, McCloud not only pointed but effectively demonstrated comics' ability to convey and captivate. His topic may have attracted the attention of the cartoon cognoscenti, but it was the comics format that provided the hook for the casual reader. In deference to both audiences, McCloud made his treatise incisive, inclusive, democratic, and accessible, opening up the investigation of mysteries to common sense, common speech and masterful comics. Even as he exposed the tricks of the magical medium, he magnified the artistry involved. As the discussion progressed, McCloud proved congenially yet intellectually rigorous, a cartooning cross between Will Rogers and Umberto Eco. 

While the book may turn down some roads there was no great need to travel, the real disappointment is that McCloud's ruminations have yet to be met - at least in print - with the analysis and vigour they deserve. Perhaps that's why he's self-propelled and pulling away: his next book projected Reinventing Comics, rethinking the "Invisible Art" he'd so freshly fleshed out and animated.

REVIEW BY NEIL GAIMAN:

With Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics the dialogue on and about what comics are and, more importantly, what comics can be has begun. If you read, write, teach or draw comics; if you want to; or if you simply want to watch a master explainer at work, you must read this book.

REVIEW BY ALAN MOORE:

Understanding Comics is quite simply the best analysis of the medium that I have ever encountered. With this book Scott McCloud has taken breathtaking leaps towards establishing a critical language that the comic art form can work with and build upon in the future. Lucid and accessible, it is an astonishing feat of perception. Highly recommended.

REVIEW BY ART SPIEGELMAN:

Cleverly disguised as an easy-to-read comic book, Scott McCloud’s simple looking tome deconstructs the secret language of comics while casually revealing secrets of Time, Space, Art and the Cosmos! The most intelligent comics I’ve seen in a long time. Bravo.

REVIEW BY WILL EISNER:

Bravo!! Understanding Comics is a landmark dissection and intellectual consideration of comics as a valid medium. Its employment of comic art as its vehicle is brilliant. Everyone... anyone interested in this literary form must read it. Every school teacher should have one.

FURTHER READING:

Scott McCloud Official Site

Cartoonist Kayfabe Review: Understanding Comics (2020)
Cartoonist Kayfabe Interview: Scott McCloud (2021)

Madman's Drum by Lynd Ward (No. 69)

Madman's Drum (1930)

by Lynd Ward

REVIEW BY TOM SPURGEON:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

More technically accomplished than the highly-successful God's Man, which preceded it in publication by a year, Madman's Drum is woodcut artist Lynd Ward's strongest and most representative book. Ward's picture novels, along with those by Belgium Frans Masereel, humorist Milt Gross, and a number of lesser known but often remarkable artists, are some of the comics mediums most lauded works. Because such artists worked towards the expectations of an arts audience rather than the customers of a commercial printing concern, their themes, aims and subject matter often closely resemble those in art comics from decades later.

Ward once wrote, in an introduction to a collection of his work, "Of all the graphic media available to artists today, the simplest is wood. Images cut on wood and inked and impressed on paper are not only the least technically complicated to produce, but are also the most ancient." One of the strengths of Madman's Drum is how perfectly Ward's use of woodcuts imparts a sort of timeless air to a story with historical and generational weight. Madman's Drum tells the story of a curse transferred from a slave holding past, through the slave-holder's son and onto his children. Because of the heavy inks of the woodcut picture, the story becomes timeless and, in a dramatic sense, inevitable in its drastic conclusions, achieving a power of persuasion that does not exist in later, more overtly political works of the artist.

Ward was also never more effective in utilising the strengths of the woodcut in service of symbolism. The central image of the curse, a grinning, jester-like face, is chilling and well-used. But other symbols are more nuanced without losing the story's fable-like feel: the rejection of religion by the slave-holder's son is obviously depicted in his discarding crucifix, but what exactly is meant by that crucifix's role in the death of his mother? Like the great novels of the 19th Century, Ward's work gains strength through the ambiguity of his symbols and their obvious dramatic power, rather than a specific, strident interpretation. Madman's Drum is a work worthy of constant reconsideration.

REVIEW BY WILL EISNER:

Perhaps the most provocative graphic storyteller of the twentieth century.

REVIEW BY ART SPIEGELMAN:

In Madman’s Drum Ward tried to tell a story spread across generations that had themes that reverberated and had a layered narrative of how different people, connected by blood, work through their lives. In the course of trying to give a back story to every character - that was the most interesting thing he tried to do - he wanted each character to have their own narrative reality, something that one associates with a good novel. That’s easier for George Eliot than it is for an illustrator trying to tell a story. The result is that this book requires a lot of rereading, not to enter deeper into the story but to penetrate what the hell the story is. Although there are sequences that are done very, very deftly and intelligently, this book doesn’t have the streamlined quality of Gods’ Man. Ward got more ambitious visually in Madman’s Drum and tried to engrave more finely in the wood; sometimes this led to good results but sometimes to something a bit murkier. I don’t mean to put the achievement down. It’s an interesting work and there are things I like about it. But because of the aspect of kitschiness in Gods’ Man that led Susan Sontag to put it into her canon of works defining “camp” - and because Madman’s Drum strives but fails at its ambition - I consider both interesting more for the territory they open than for the territory they ultimately colonize.

FURTHER READING:

Lynd Ward at Library of America

Art Spiegelman on Lynd Ward
The Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize

Krazy Kat by George Herriman (No. 1)

Krazy Kat (1913-1944)

by George Herriman

REVIEW BY TOM SPURGEON:
(from The Best 100 Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

Krazy Kat has been the acknowledged greatest comic for so long, by so many esteemed critics, that it becomes tempting to knock it from its throne. At a casual glance, George Herriman's long-running strip seems quaint and antiquated, full of half-realised characters, and Herriman's art may be a half-step behind the visual bravado of Feininger's or McCay's.

But to immerse yourself in Krazy Kat, to yield to Herriman's looping verbal rhythms and lovely-depicted desert backgrounds, to experience his perfectly realised triptych of unspoken and unconsummated love, yields a very, very different result. Herriman's creation is not only great comics, with a wonderful command of the medium's possibilities and strengths, but it is also great art - an affecting exploration of some of life's most basic issues in a way that enlightens and thrills. Every cartoonist who turns to comics as a medium of personal expression follows in Herriman's path, and that is why his is the greatest comic of the 20th Century.

Krazy Kat was the work of a veteran cartoonist in the prime of his career. Born in 1880, Herriman was doing newspaper strip illustration by 1897 and selling stand-alone one-page strips by 1901. Herriman spent most of the first decade travelling from town to town, newspaper to newspaper in much the same manner as a medieval journeyman would do. Along the way, he worked with some of the finest cartoonists in America (the art room at the New York American in 1904 included Frederick Opper, James Swinnerton, and the great sports cartoonist Tad Dorgan), and created several short-lived strips full of vaudevillian humour: Home Sweet Home, Bubblespikers, and the wonderfully titled Mazor Ozone's Fresh Air Crusade. He also created three animal-oriented strips that perhaps more directly presage Krazy Kat: Goosebury Spring, Alexander The Cat and Daniel Pansy.

The characters that would become Krazy Kat and Ignatz the mouse got their start as incidentals in a strip called The Dingbat Family. Ignatz first beaned Krazy in a 1910 strip. Their evolution was extremely organic. They next appeared in their own little strip accompanying that same strip, now re-named The Family Upstairs. They finally graduated to their own strip in 1913. Printed vertically, it presaged what would become one of the hallmarks of Krazy Kat's history: a variety of formats and layouts. From 1925 to 1929 the Sunday strip lost its standard full-page format in favour of a combination of strips and stand-alone illustration that papers could print in one of two ways. And it wasn't until 1935 that Herriman was able to use colour. 

Looking at Krazy Kat with fresh eyes, it is clear how much it benefited from its specific developmental path. Nailing down standard newspaper styles allowed Herriman the freedom to develop his own idiosyncratic approach, and many of the strips - not just the animal-based ones - served as dry runs for areas of Herriman's interest. Similarly, the change in styles kept Herriman at his most inventive, and allowed certain strengths to evolve at their own pace. As noted in Krazy Kat: The Comics Art of George Herriman by Patrick McDonnell, Georgia Riley de Havenon and Karen O'Connell (to which this essay owes the vast majority of its factual information, and a not insignificant portion of its shared insight), the strip developed from slapstick to verbal-based vaudevillian humour as the format changed; similarly, Herriman's use of slightly surreal desert landscapes were dramatically altered by the introduction of colour.

One can also track developments in the relationships between the characters. Although the physical relationship of cat and mouse was the basis of the strip at its origin, its thematic possibilities were not established until the very late '20s. Krazy Kat in its prime focused on the relationship between three characters. Krazy Kat adored Ignatz mouse. Ignatz mouse hated Krazy Kat, the expression of which was in throwing bricks at Krazy's head. Offisa Pup loved Krazy and sought to protect her (Herriman actually believed Krazy to be neither male nor female), mostly by throwing Ignatz in jail. Each of the characters was ignorant of the other's true motivations.

This simple structure allowed Herriman to build entire worlds of meaning into the actions. Most famously, Krazy interpreted the brick in the head as an expression of love from Ignatz. But there were more nuanced readings to be had: Ignatz's brick as an expression of art or as a necessary curb on Krazy's flights of fancy; Offisa Pup's enforcement of his role as studies in how personal feelings affected vocation or how the world reacts to art and artists. It is that thematic depth to which the critics like Gilbert Seldes and the editors of Vanity Fair reacted to in the early 1920s - even in its initial conception, the role of Krazy and Ignatz as romantic and realist were hard to resist. The fact that Herriman was able to build on these themes, making them deeper and more fully realised, is an amazing achievement given that usually took hold of even the greatest strips.

In Krazy Kat, theme reigns over all other factors. Not that Krazy Kat didn't work as humour, or serial comedy, or even as rollicking adventure. A score of funny, interesting characters inhabited the strip's "Coconino County" in addition to the leads. And Herriman's best-known episode, 1936's Tiger Tea serial, stands with any of his contemporaries' long-running stories in terms of its narrative inventiveness. But because Krazy Kat was so well-anchored, all of these elements only served to further our understanding of the core relationships. Herriman's idiosyncratic use of language, all creative spelling and eloquent babble, delineated Krazy's dreaming, Ignatz's harsh denunciations, and Offisa Pups recriminations in equal stead. Even the great landscapes - beginning in formal play in the strip's early years and continuing through the colour-period - are best known as an expressionistic background for the central drama.

Krazy Kat reminds us that art is achieved from the inside out. Herriman was right: love clumsily expressed is funny and beautiful and fascinating enough to hold our interest for another hundred years.

REVIEW BY CHRIS WARE:
(from the essay 'To Walk In Beauty', 2017)
Krazy Kat has been described as a parable of love, a metaphor for democracy, a “surrealistic” poem, unfolding over years and years. It is all of these, but so much more: it is a portrait of America, a self-portrait of Herriman, and, I believe, the first attempt to paint the full range of human consciousness in the language of the comic strip. Like the America it portrays, Herriman’s identity has been poised for a revision for many decades now. Michael Tisserand’s new biography Krazy does just that, clearing the shifting sands and shadows of Herriman’s ancestry, the discovery in the early 1970s of a birth certificate which described Herriman as “colored” sending up a flag among comics researchers and aficionados.

REVIEW BY ART SPIEGELMAN:
The Poet Laureate of comics, of course, was George Herriman (1880–1944) - or more accurately the Comics Laureate. Krazy Kat wasn't much like anything that ever happened in any other medium... Herriman worked variations on a deceptively simple theme for over thirty years. In one of literature's more peculiar love triangles, Krazy Kat's love with Ignatz Mouse who, loving no one but himself, finds no greater pleasure than 'kreasing that kat's bean with a brick.' Though intended as an act of aggression Krazy receives the brick as a sign of love. Offissa Pup is in love with Krazy (who loves everyone) and quite naturally hates Ignatz, who he regularly incarcerates in a jail made of... bricks... Herriman's genius allowed him to give his theme the weight of a poetic symbol. For some it is a strip about Democracy, for others about Love and Sex, for others still about Heaven and Hell. For all, it is about a cat getting hit with a brick.

REVIEW BY BILL WATTERSON:
Despite the predictability of the characters' proclivities, the strip never sinks into formula or routine. Often the actual brick tossing is only anticipated. The simple plot is endlessly renewed through constant innovation, pace manipulations, unexpected results, and most of all, the quiet charm of each story's presentation. The magic of the strip is not so much in what it says, but in how it says it. It's a more subtle kind of cartooning than we have today... Krazy Kat was not very successful as a commercial venture, but it was something better. It was art.

FURTHER READING:

Herriman at Fantagraphics Books
Herriman at Sunday Press Books

Krazy: George Herriman, A Life in Black & White by Michael Tisserand

Little Nemo In Slumberland by Winsor McCay (No. 5)

Little Nemo In Slumberland (1905-1911, 1914, 1924-1927)

by Winsor McCay

REVIEW BY RICH KREINER:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century!, The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

Ancient culture, uncovering impressive remains of still more ancient cultures, often attributed to their predecessors a superhuman stature. Finding the great walls and gates made of stone blocks they no longer possessed the technology to move, descendants presumed ancestors to be a race of giants or cyclops whose achievements were inconceivable through merely human means.

Little Nemo In Slumberland appears to us today as an expansive, extravagant, and glorious monument to imaginative vision and artistic mastery. For all the strip's direct and accessible beauty, for all its immediate appeal, it seems faintly exotic, the product of some preternatural insight and ability. It practically dares us to consider it as the work of mortal hands - let alone a single pair - in a commercial industry. Who thought up these wonderful things? How could they have possibly have been committed to paper, Sunday after Sunday?

How do we explain the intuitive ingenuity, the calculated riot of the strip's evolving excitement? Where is the precedent for such lush and dazzling mass-produced fantasies? Who had the trained and prolonged concentration sufficient to exactingly portray the wild variety of objects and scenes... or the audacity to indelibly entwine the most mundane and the most utterly preposterous? How can we count for the sheer output of images? What about the degree of detail rendered, the magnificent colouration, the adeptness of line, the thrilling ornamentation, the design elements both subtle and flamboyant, the grand architectural settings, the fluid experiments in perspective and animation, the sustained visual fireworks? Today, to us, the care, scope, bravado, and devotion displayed in Little Nemo seem the hallmarks of a lost era.

However gifted, Winsor McCay can be seen as human as the rest of us, thanks in part to the valuable Canemaker biography. McCay was a pioneer in animated cartooning and enjoyed success in a stage act that featured his drawing skills. He originated a number of strips, such as Little Sammy Sneeze and Hungry Henrietta, with strong formulaic and thematic hooks. Another Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend feature spectacularly conceived and rendered nightmares that invariably end with awakening.

While precursors, these earlier strips could hardly have prepared readers for the untethered wonder and grand scale of Little Nemo. Here McCay's ambition, training, natural talent and love of drawing coalesced in the full-page colour funnies feature that unfurled from 1905 to 1911 (with a reincarnation as In The Land Of Wonderful Dreams extending through 1914 and a revival from 1924 to 1927). His earlier employment - as caricaturist, editorial cartoonist, illustrator, graphic reporter, and poster maker for the circus and dime museums - was surely instrumental in the punctual forays into a world built upon pageantry, splendour and marvel. McCay's lack of formal artistic training may have additionally contributed the notion that nothing was unthinkable in the furtherance of expression.

Certain images and sequences from Little Nemo, appropriated by all manner of art and commerce, have gained a life of their own during later, hungrier cultures. Once glimpsed, especially at a tender age, fragments become unforgettable - the galloping bed, the roller-coaster stairway bannister, the house gobbling turkey, the dragon carriage, the plausible chaos of Befuddle Hall.

Thanks to the Fantagraphics' luxurious (yet still undersized) reprint series, we can now see just how astonishing McCay's entire run was. Pick a month of instalments, any month, (though earlier would likely more thoroughly amaze than later). September, 1908? It begins with a runaway locomotive, plowing through streets, buildings and forests. Next week it's a carousel whose animals come to life in their circle chase only to end in the menageries' chain reaction collision; this is followed by a home hooked by a ship's anchor, hoisted high, and dropped to earth; then the floor beneath and the background behind the characters undergo a series of mechanical transformational shifts as if they were part of child's puzzle. October begins with Nemo's bath becoming a pond, then a swamp infested with wildlife, and finally open water where he dodges the prows and wakes of ocean-going ships only to reach an ice-flow where he's chased by a polar bear. I could go on and on, because McCay went on and on.

One doesn't so much read these strip as drink them in. With all there is to see in each panel of Slumberland, the proper pacing for the strip might well approach one episode per week. Taken too quickly, Little Nemo can prove to be an exhausting read with its incomparable deluge of wonders (to say nothing of those unaccountably crammed word balloons and the thoroughly pedestrian dialogue) Even a glance at one of its timeless pages suggests it remains a strip to ogle and, perhaps, to inform our own dreams.

REVIEW BY ART SPIEGELMAN:

(from Comics For The Holidays, The Comics Journal #270, November 2006)

...for those of us who care to give the very best, there's Winsor McCay's Little Nemo In Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays (Sunday Press, $120). Yeah It's pricey, but the work is priceless, and the book is actually not overpriced. The production is impeccable. Collecting the best pages from the best period (1905-1910) of the most visually and structurally ravishing strip ever made, this 16x21-inch, 120-page bundle of joy weighs in at about 10 pounds and is probably the biggest object you can place under a Christmas tree short of plunking the tree down on top of a new Porsche. I'm embarrassed to be gushing - it's not in my nature - but this is one of the few books I could not resist providing a blurb for in the past few years. (Despite repeated injunctions from my agent that I shouldn't since it breeds exponentially more blurb requests. Every blurb is a long haiku that takes too much time away from other forms of procrastination.) Anyway, my endorsement read:

This book's a dream. A slumbering giant has stirred and walks among us - its that hot new artist, Winsor McCay. You literally can't imagine what loving production and full broadsheet-sized scale have wrought! A testimonial (please don't confuse this with "hype"): I have every book of Winsor McCay's Little Nemo ever published. I even have a few actual Sunday Pages, but I tell you, it's as if I'd never seen Nemo before! Certainly never read it. (The "writing" in Nemo, even the lettering has been underestimated - it was always hard to squint and absorb it even in so-called "one-sized" reproductions.) Perhaps you THINK you know Nemo - that its easy to extrapolate from what you've seen and go "Uh-huh. I get it. It's bigger." Uh-huh. You DON'T get it - but if towering aesthetic achievement interests you at all, you gotta get it! I mean, it's as if somebody showed you a table-top model of the Chrysler building and said, "It's just like that, only bigger." Or if you saw a refrigerator magnet reproduction of a Van Gogh painting and figured you've seen Van Gogh... I dunno, for an artist as concerned with shifts in scale and meticulous attention to detail as McCay was, this heartbreakingly beautiful book is the reinvention of Winsor McCay - as if he was being published for the first time. Only better.

FURTHER READING:

Sunday Press Books

Read Little Nemo online at GoComics!

John Canemaker's McCay Biography

Maus by Art Spiegelman (No. 4)

Maus (Book I, 1986; Book II, 1991)

by Art Spiegelman

REVIEW BY GENE KANNENBURG:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century!, The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

It's almost too easy pick Art Spiegelman's Maus for this list - almost. After all, it won a Pulitzer Prize (1992) and received probably more journalistic and academic attention than any other comics work, or any cartoonist's oeuvre, for that matter. To speak of Maus' importance in American Comics has become cliche. The book's themes - the Holocaust, the generation gap, the more general burdens of the past - brought the book attention, in part, because it so little looked "like a comic book" that reviewers were caught off-guard. It's central metaphor - representing Jews as mice and Nazis as cats - was equally striking; was this an unforgivable breach of decorum or a skilfully wielded narrative and thematic device? Observations such as these prefaced most of the book's initial reviews, and they continue to inform analysis of the book today. In this case, believe the hype: Maus fully deserves the attention and praise it has received.

One of Maus' strengths lies in how (deceptively) easy it is to read. The narrative (or narratives - more on that in a second) comes across almost effortlessly. The stylistically spare but highly expressive drawings accompany text which drives the narrative; there are few wordless panels to be found. Indeed, many people who are intimidated by the comics form itself find remarkably little difficulty in following the story, owing to the book's clear, carefully presented storytelling - a seemingly radical departure from Spiegelman's large body of experimental  "comics about comics". The important observation here, however, is that Spiegelman wields his bag of formal narrative tricks as much as ever, although here in a far more sophisticated, less flashy fashion. It's only with concerted effort that you begin to notice just how Spiegelman has permeated almost every page with innovative layouts, sophisticated temporal transition, and artful panel compositions. In other words, the first time you read Maus, you get caught up in the book's story; on subsequent readings, however, you can get equally caught up in exploring the book's storytelling.

Narratively, the book is structured in a series of temporal layers. At the core lies the story of how Art's parents (his mother, Anja and, particularly, his father, Vladek) survive the Holocaust. Actually, as the book often stresses, it's not really a story of how they survived; pinning blame or reason on a story such as this is almost impossible. Rather, it's a story which explains that they survived and how these experiences continued to affect not only their own lives but the lives of everyone around them, especially their son Art. The second story-layer functions as the "present" in Book 1; in this story, Art reacquaints himself with Vladek (and Vladek's second wife Male, herself a survivor) almost solely for the purposes off recording his father's story in order to create Maus. An in-between state is presented by the inclusion of Spiegelman's Prisoner on the Hell Planet (1973), his memoir of Anja's suicide, rendered in a highly expressionistic style. Maus II's chapter entitled Auschwitz (Time Flies) adds an additional layer, which takes place after the publication of Maus I and presents Spiegelman attempting to deal with the fame which that book has brought him - and the problems such fame presents, both personally and artistically.

It is this combination of times and stories which lends Maus much of its richness and reward. By presenting so many juxtapositions of past and present, Spiegelman can explore questions of witness, guilt, dependance and obligation both verbally and visually. Conversations between Vladek and Artie segue to narrated history and back again, often on the same page; we can see the influence of the past on the present. In Maus II especially, we witness Spiegelman's ambivalence about the book's (and his own) success, from the page layout in Auschwitz (Time Flies) which creates the impression that Art's pipe smoke doubles as exhaust from a crematorium to the back cover illustration, which melds the stripes of Vladek's camp uniform with the book's UPC code. These temporal and thematic balances come about naturally, almost organically as the overall story progresses - a testament to the power of the comics form to present narrative nuance and depth.

Of course, the cat-and-mouse metaphor itself presents abundant food for thought - while it does effectively convey the impression of Nazis as hunters and Jews as prey, might it not also condone the idea that there are indeed separate races of people? But throughout the book Spiegelman acknowledges this tension, exploring his metaphor both through language and visual representations in ways far too numerous to delineate in this brief essay; suffice to say that this animal conceit serves, paradoxically, as a powerful, ever-constant reminder in the book about difficulties of inter-personal relationships.

One of the marks of good literature (in comics or prose or what-have-you) is that work demands and rewards careful re-reading. Maus deserves its acclaim as one of the most significant comics of the century and as an important literary work of distinction.

REVIEW BY ALAN MOORE:

(from a review in Escape #10, 1986)

Since discovering his work in the mid 70's, I have been convinced that Art Spiegelman is perhaps the single most important comic creator working within the field and in my opinion Maus represents his most accomplished work to date... Intensely subjective, it manages to encompass subjects as sensitive and diverse as the holocaust on one hand and the yawning emotional gulf between parents and children on the other, all in a fashion that is at once revealing, moving and innovatory. Maus surely marks one of the high points of the comic medium to date. It is perhaps the first genuine graphic novel in recent times, and as such its significance cannot be overstated. Please read it.

READ THIS BOOK:

Maus is available from all good book stores and your local comics shop. 

FURTHER READING:

Meta Maus by Art Spiegelman (2011)

Art Spiegelman: Conversations (2007)

Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons (No. 91)

Watchmen (1986-1987)

by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

REVIEW BY RICH KREINER:
(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)
In narrowed circles, Watchmen will be dismissed for merely being the fare-the-well vision of superheroes. True, the 1986 tale is indebted to genre conventions, but it additionally refurbishes devices from science fiction and the mystery novel, specifically the "murder at the club" sub-species. Here, however, the cast of indelibly delineated members just happen to wear masks. With this, the psychological implications of dressed-up heroism are acknowledged, examined, and then folded into richer, more complex patterns of human behaviour than covered in any crime fighter's handbook.

In fact, Watchmen as a whole represented a richer, more complex, and more ambitious narrative infrastructure than serial comics had seen before. Writer Alan Moore consciously fabricated a fastidious, densely layered, and unfailingly smart dramatic milieu. A chilling realism, but one step removed from normalcy, shapes integrated innovations from the momentous (Nixon's fourth term) to the incidental (the necessitated collateral drugs for same). Arch dialogue, aphorism, witticisms, and good jokes pepper a prose that spoke in tongues to multiple purposes and sustained a level of daunting and unprecedented word-smithing.

Dave Gibbons gave the absorbing clash of familiar and alien a reassuring coherence even while embedding the graphic tie-rods and visual lief motifs. Consciously operating within a strict comics grid, his painstaking and efficacious renderings exemplified the S&M adage that with discipline comes freedom. The series' distinctive presentation - of covers, titles, quotes, text addenda - made a strong, unified thematic statement that stood apart from commercial product.

Watchmen remains dazzling, even glaringly brilliant, so much so that it is impossible to gather it all in one reading. (Follow the sugar cubes! Construct the urban intersection at the cross-hairs! How early can you deduce, with absolute certainty, Rorschach's identity? Watch for visual conceits like the blood-splattered smiley-face that broaden into suggestive geometries the circle slashed by line segment, the circle within circles.) Repeated readings reveal how uniquely it shines.

ALAN MOORE:
(from Prisoners Of Gravity, 1991)
I think that I'd have to echo what David Bowie said about his influence, y'know, this is the face that launched a thousand pretensions. At the time I hoped that Watchmen might show up a lot of the essential silliness and redundancy of the superhero genre. It wasn't meant as a revitalization of the superhero, it was meant as a tombstone for the superhero, at least in my terms. I couldn't see any point in doing superheroes, from my point of view, after Watchmen. Unfortunately everybody else could, and there have been an awful lot of bad Watchmen clones, or not just specifically Watchmen clones, but this would extend to Dark Knight as well, people who were looking at those faintly grim and post-modern superhero comics of the mid '80s, and instead of moving on from there, have just recycled them again and again and again for the last six years. It's almost like, you know, post-modernism by numbers. You make a few references to William Burroughs, you make a few references to some currently popular band like R.E.M. that'll impress your young readers with how hip you are, um, you throw in some garbled sort of psych-, sub-psychedelic philosophy, um, and you've got a modern comic. It doesn't matter whether it has any substance, it doesn't matter whether it has any direction, but it hits enough of the right buttons so that people will recognise this as something modern and experimental and daring, and of course it is not in the least bit experimental or daring. To me, the people who have taken chances are not in the mainstream... The people who've taken the chances are the people like Chester Brown, the Hernandez Brothers, Peter Bagge, Julie Doucet, all of those people. They are not getting big royalties for this summer's giant Batman crossover, but they are doing the work that is dangerously dangerous and radical and innovative. They're the ones who deserve the credit.

REVIEW BY NEIL GAIMAN:
Moore's writing is remarkable. He catches the rhythms of speech so naturally, presents his world so seamlessly, that the whole seems effortless… Gibbon's art has never been better. Each panel a semiotician's heaven… undoubtedly the most ambitious work of science fiction since Gene Wolfe's Book Of The Sun, and the most ambitious and, in my opinion, most successful graphic novel ever.

REVIEW BY ART SPIEGELMAN:
(from an interview in The Comics Journal #180, 1995)
For better and for worse, Alan Moore is very interested in structures, and that kind of structuring is what made Watchmen stand apart from other books. It's not the dystopic vision, it's not the Twilight Zone ending, it's the fact that there's something formally at work there that you're only peripherally aware of, as you're reading through this thing, that gives weight and authority to what's being told.

FURTHER READING:
Alan Moore World
Watchmen at Wikipedia

Cartoonist Kayfabe: RAW Issue-by-Issue!

The Cartoonist Kayfabe YouTube Channel is THE place to get an audio/visual inside scoop on comics from two lifetime comic-book makers - Jim Rugg and Ed Piskor! In the videos below Jim and Ed turn the pages of the 1980s ground-breaking, experimental comix magazine RAW, edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly. Future instalments will be added below as they appear!

Cartoonist Kayfabe review RAW #1

Watch on YouTube here.

Cartoonist Kayfabe review RAW #2
 Watch on YouTube here.

City of Glass by Paul Karasik & David Mazzucchelli (No. 45)

City of Glass (1994)

by Paul Karasik & David Mazzucchelli

REVIEW BY BART BEATY:
(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century, The Comics Journal #210, 1999)
It's rare that any adaptation of a well-written novel lives up to the standard set by the original and comic books have not had a history marked by stunning success in this arena. Except, perhaps, for one.

Paul Karasik & David Mazzucchelli's adaptation of Paul Auster's short detective novel City of Glass not only lives up to the promise of the original text but also asks to be taken seriously alongside it. Paul Auster's City of Glass, as the Avon-published comic is known, does not merely render Auster's text visually but actively brings new metaphors to the surface by plumbing the novel's depths to a degree heretofore unheard of in a comic book literary adaptation.

Take, for example, the lengthy expository monologue in which Peter Stillman tells his history to the protagonist, Quinn. Reading the text it is almost unimaginable visually, yet Mazzucchelli dives straight into Stillman's mouth to find mythic icons, reflections of primitive visual representations, and a tour de force presentation of symbols (a guitar, ink, a television) that are stand-ins for direct face-to-face communication. With these pages Mazzucchelli suggests, in a fashion more direct than Auster's text alone, the inability of Stillman and Quinn to communicate one to one. The discussion is always mediated, always partial because their experiences of language (one a writer, the other raised in absolute solitude) are so totally at odds. In every way Mazzucchelli has made the copy in this instance superior to the original.

If there is one drawback to Paul Auster's City of Glass it is that the remaining parts of the trilogy (Ghosts and The Locked Room) haven't received similar treatment. Without them, the story remains incomplete. Nonetheless, if the comic book gives up something for its lack of successors, it gains much more with the addition of David Mazzucchelli's skilful and thought-provoking artwork.

DAVID MAZZUCCHELLI:
(from an interview in The Comics Journal #194, March 1997)
Auster's book is so much about language, and the structure of language, and identity, and, in fact, the structure of identity, the shifting nature and layering of identity, that the visual metaphors that Paul [Karasik] was coming up with were necessary and apropos. That was really the challenge, to find a visual way of expressing these things without having to keep all the text.

REVIEW BY ART SPIEGELMAN:
(from the introduction to City Of Glass 2004 edition)
By poking at the heart of comics structure, Karasik and Mazzucchelli created a strange doppelganger of the original book. It's as if Quinn, confronted with two nearly identical Peter Stillmans at Grand Central Station, chose to follow one drawn with brush and ink rather than one set in type. The volume that resulted, first published in 1994, overcame all my purist notions about collaboration. It offers one of the richest demonstrations to date of the modern Ikonologosplatt at its most subtle and supple. [Read the full introduction here...]

READ THIS BOOK:
The original 1994 edition of City of Glass by Karasik and Mazzucchelli is long sold out, but the second 2004 edition with an introduction by Art Spiegelman is still available from your local comics store.

FURTHER READING:
Paul Karasik Comics
David Mazzucchelli profile at PaulGravett.com

The Recommended Reading List

Comic-creators recommend their favourite comics!
This list is a work-in-progress and will be updated regularly.

CHESTER BROWN:
A Contract With God by Will Eisner
Frank by Jim Woodring
Little Orphan Annie by Harold Gray

EDDIE CAMPBELL:
Ethel & Ernest by Raymond Briggs
Palestine by Joe Sacco
Prince Valiant by Harold Foster
The Strange Death of Alex Raymond by Dave Sim & Carson Grubaugh

DAN CLOWES:
Barnaby by Crockett Johnson
Dirty Plotte by Julie Doucet
MAD edited by Harvey Kurtzman

ROBERT CRUMB:
American Splendor by Harvey Pekar
Binky Brown Meets The Holy Virgin Mary by Justin Green
Dirty Plotte by Julie Doucet
Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book by Harvey Kurtzman
MAD edited by Harvey Kurtzman
The Autobiographical Comics of Spain Rodriguez
The Buddy Bradley Stories by Peter Bagge

WILL EISNER:
Madman's Drum by Lynd Ward
The Cartoon History of the Universe by Larry Gonick
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud

NEIL GAIMAN:
Alec by Eddie Campbell
Cages by Dave McKean
Frank by Jim Woodring
Master Race by Bernard Krigstein & Al Feldstein
Pogo by Walt Kelly
Tantrum by Jules Feiffer
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

SCOTT McCLOUD:
A Contract With God by Will Eisner
Frank by Jim Woodring
The Spirit by Will Eisner

MIKE MIGNOLA:
Murky World by Richard Corben

FRANK MILLER:
A Contract With God by Will Eisner
Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson
EC War Comics by Harvey Kurtzman & Others

ALAN MOORE:
Alec by Eddie Campbell
American Splendor by Harvey Pekar
Arcade: The Comics Revue edited by Art Spiegelman & Bill Griffith
Dark Knight by Frank Miller
Grendel: Devil By The Deed by Matt Wagner
Hellboy by Mike Mignola
Love & Rockets by Jaime Hernandez
Luther Arkwright by Bryan Talbot
MAD edited by Harvey Kurtzman
Maus by Art Spiegelman
Palestine by Joe Sacco
Tales of Telguuth by Steve Moore
The Book of Jim by Jim Woodring
The Loneliness of a Long-Distance Cartoonist by Adrian Tomine
The Sketchbooks of Robert Crumb
The Spirit by Will Eisner
The Suttons by Phil Elliott
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud

CHARLES M. SCHULZ:
Barnaby by Crockett Johnson
Thimble Theatre by E.C. Segar

SETH:
Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz
The Autobiographical Stories in Yummy Fur by Chester Brown

DAVE SIM:
A Contract With God by Will Eisner
Fourth World Comics by Jack Kirby
Master Race by Bernard Krigstein & Al Feldstein
The Autobiographical Stories in Yummy Fur by Chester Brown
The Willie & Joe Cartoons of Bill Mauldin

ART SPIEGELMAN:
Binky Brown Meets The Holy Virgin Mary by Justin Green
City of Glass by Paul Karasik & David Mazzucchelli
Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book
Krazy Kat by George Herriman
Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McKay
Little Orphan Annie by Harold Gray
Madman's Drum by Lynd Ward
Master Race by Bernard Krigstein & Al Feldstein
Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz
Plastic Man by Jack Cole
The Autobiographical Comics of Spain Rodriguez
The Bungle Family by George Tuthill
The Mishkin Saga by Kim Deitch with Simon Deitch
Thimble Theatre by E.C. Segar
Uncle Scrooge by Carl Barks
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

ALEX TOTH:
Wash Tubbs / Captain Easy by Roy Crane

CHRIS WARE:
Binky Brown Meets The Holy Virgin Mary by Justin Green
Gasoline Alley by Frank King
Krazy Kat by George Herriman
Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz
Zap Comix by Robert Crumb & Others

BILL WATTERSON:
Krazy Kat by George Herriman
Pogo by Walt Kelly

Read Yourself RAW! - An Introduction

Read Yourself Raw (Pantheon Books, 1987)

edited by Art Spiegelman & Francoise Mouly

The aim of this blog is simply to highlight the cutting-edge comics of today and explore classic comics of the past.

The name of the blog is a tribute to the 1980s experimental comics magazine RAW, edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly. Specifically, the name is taken from the 1987 collection, which featured the best of the first three issues of RAW. 

A total of eleven issues of RAW were published between 1980 and 1991 (eight over-sized, self-published issues in Volume 1, with a further three digest-sized issues in Volume 2 published by Penguin Books). The magazine's influence on a generation of artists cannot be understated. It even made it onto David Bowie's list of "top 100 must-read books".

FURTHER READING:
Art Spiegelman & RAW: His Other Masterpiece by Allen Rubenstein
In Love With Art: Francoise Mouly's Adventures in Comics With Art Spiegelman by Jeet Heer
RAW Magazine at Wikipedia

CONTACT:
E: Read [dot] Yourself [dot] RAW [at] gmail [dot] com