Essay: "Comic Books"

I always liked superhero comics as a kid, but I didn't regularly collect them.  They were too expensive, and every time I bought an issue it seemed to take place in the middle of a story I didn't understand.  But when I was in law school I saw an ign.com article on the 25 greatest Batman graphic novels.  They sounded pretty awesome and I wanted to check them out.  I looked on the Toronto Public Library website and found some in the Merril Collection, a pretty neat branch of the library at College and Spadina dedicated to science fiction and graphic novels.  I used to go there on Saturday afternoons to read, since you couldn't take the books out.

Eventually I started grabbing comics online with bittorrent (and reading them in class at law school, as some of you may have noticed if you sat behind me).  The great thing about bittorrent was that you could start from the beginning and figure out what the hell was going on, instead of walking in halfway through.  After a while I got "caught up" and then I started actually buying comics at the store.  I've kept it up, on and off, for the past few years.  There's something comforting about the weekly trip to the store and seeing the usual people.  It's not that much money compared to what I spend in bars.  I often think of cutting down these days, but that's because I don't like accumulating the physical books (I have about two and a half boxes now) not because I mind the expense or because I've gotten tired of Green Lantern or Captain America.

It's pretty nerdy to be into comic books of course, although what we consider to be nerdy can be fickle (why aren't you a nerd if you're obsessed with Fantasy Football?)  I don't think there's anything inherently nerdy about comics, they're just words and pictures, after all, and as Harvey Pekar said, you can do anything with words and pictures.  My basic theory is that I have a Master's degree in English and at this stage I don't need to take shit from anyone about what I read.  Batman and Superman are fascinating North American artistic creations that have been putting out a book a month since before the Second World War.  And as mindless as comic books may be (with their endless supercharged fist fights, implausible plot lines and busty heroines) they seldom approach the mindlessness of just about every program on television.  Plus, unless you're reading comics on your iPad, at least they're not on a glowing rectangle.

But even if I don't apologize for my decision to read comic books, can I really defend it?  Is there any artistic merit to be found in comics, particularly superhero comics?  I think so, and it's a kind of merit that you don't always find nowadays.  It's the merit that comes from staying within conventions.

I think historically art was subject to much stricter conventions than it is now.  You can see this best in the visual arts.  The more something looked like real life, the better it was.  Eventually this changed, and you ended up with artists like Picasso and Jackson Pollock throwing paint at the canvas.  It was all very controversial at the time but now these artists are celebrated for breaking with convention.  Their art is valued not only for its own sake, but that it was original, different, and new.  And it seems to me that being "original" is very important these days.

The trouble is that you obviously can't make "good" synonymous with "new" or "original", for the simple reason that plenty of things that are "new" and "original" totally suck.  I could film a donkey playing the ukulele with its dick and show the video backwards in an art gallery, but that doesn't mean I should.  Often there is a very good reason why something has never been done before, and conversely, there is a very good reason why people keep doing something over and over again.

Which brings us back to comics.  Comic books follow a number of very strict conventions that have been laid down over the past eighty years, since Superman lifted that first car.  For instance, they're limited in terms of their length and their form.  Comic book writers are bound by continuity and have to be consistent with the writers who worked on the book before them.  They also can't mess things up for the writers that are coming after them, by say killing Lex Luthor.  They have to use the same characters over and over again, and the same basic stories.

And it seems to me that this provides one of the greatest challenges an artist can face.  If you sit down and think for ten minutes, you can think of something that no one's ever done before.  But to tell a story within such unyielding restrictions that is still good, still interesting, still fresh (if not "original"), is a real challenge.  It means that the best comic books show a kind of remorseless discipline that you rarely see in other kinds of art.

Because originality is great and all, but there's a kind of barrenness to it, in the end, like a snake eating itself, or like Wiley Coyote, running off a cliff until he looks down and realizes there's nothing beneath him.  I think there's a place for the discipline that comic teaches us, the subordination of the artist to a tradition (and a story) larger than him or herself.  You didn't invent Captain America, and you don't own him, you're just taking care of him for the next generation.

That restless artistic egotism, the need to be a pioneer, to be original, is maybe really just the desire to never be forgotten.  But maybe the best way to never be forgotten is to be part of something bigger than you, something that will never die.