Modernism in Comics

Modernism, as the last two decades of criticism have taught us, resides in many places. From Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring to the jazz of Louis Armstrong, the Dadaist oddity of Ballet Mécanique to the silent comedies of Buster Keaton, the expansiveness of James Joyce’s Ulysses to the lithe sophistication of Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the ubiquity of modernist experimentation in twentieth-century art exposes the porous boundary between the avant-garde and mass entertainment, its practitioners blending genres, forms, and media in ways that defy easy categorization. But even as critics struggle to establish—or to admit the futility of establishing—a definition of modernism that suits any and all works that might fall within its purview, they have acknowledged that works formerly dismissed as mere popular culture cannot be uniformly excluded from any definition they seek to create. With that acknowledgement has come a livelier and more accurate account of the modernist period, attentive to the many manifestations of modernism one finds across geographies, temporalities, and media. From Tsitsi Ella Jaji’s scholarship on stereomodernism, which describes “texts and cultural practices that are both political and expressive, activated by black music and operative within the logic of pan-African solidarity,” to William Solomon’s work on slapstick modernism, which explores “the coalescence in cultural practice of the artistic experimentation associated with high modernism and the socially disruptive lunacy linked to the comic film genre,” we now have several persuasive accounts of modernism’s circulation within popular aesthetic forms, all of which have made it abundantly clear that in contemporary modernist criticism, to speak of modernism and the popular in the same breath is, if not quite to state the obvious, then to state something that seems fundamentally correct.[1]

This is not to imply, however, that such criticism has been exhaustive. We are still finding modernism where we had least expected it, and “Modernism in Comics” shows us where we ought to be looking by analyzing one of the period’s most vibrant yet critically derided art forms—comics—in its alternately vexed and vital relationship to modernism. This cluster’s contributors begin from the premise that comics are just as crucial to understanding modernism as any other artform, as well as the conviction that any connection between the two cannot be reduced to historical serendipity. While modernism and comics may have come of age at approximately the same time—that is, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—their affinities are more than chronological, and in no way coincidental. Both challenge longstanding notions of formal experimentation and tradition, feature idiosyncratic depictions of individual experience and social change, push readers to engage with the work of art in unfamiliar and often uncomfortable ways, and continue to inflect contemporary conversations about the formal affordances of textual and visual art, about cultural capital and arbiters of taste, and about what it means to label a work as popular. Taken together, these characteristics establish modernism and comics as related vehicles for questioning available means of representation and for challenging presumed distinctions between high and mass culture.

This perception is a far cry from the tired suspicion of comics as an aesthetically impoverished medium, and from the long-outdated sequestering of modernism from popular cultural forms that Lawrence Rainey, by 1998, had already declared a misconception when he suggested that the familiar critical move of positing “a rigorous opposition between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture may be inadequate to account for the growing complexity of cultural exchange and circulation in modern society.”[2] Now over 20 years later, contemporary critics can safely remove Rainey’s tentative qualifier and assert that any opposition between “high” and “low” not only is inadequate to understanding cultural production, but also rests on two mistaken assumptions: first, that a work associated with modernism or a popular literary form fits neatly and completely into either category, and second, that the designations “high” and “low” are in and of themselves meaningful descriptors of a work of art. While such mistakes have not entirely evaporated from recent criticism, they thankfully no longer represent the scholarly norm.

It is, then, important to state as plainly as possible that this cluster conceives of modernism and comics as related phenomena without assuming that their relation is reducible to a simple high/low binary, in which the estimable figure of modernism lifts a debased medium like comics from the cultural gutter while the act of dallying in that gutter lends modernism an air of performative rebellion (though, as some of the essays contained here note, various comics artists and modernists have used such a perception to their own ends). Rather, the contributors to “Modernism in Comics” show how the works we examine are better understood as instances or at least significant determinants of popular modernism, or a modernism that emerges through and within popular aesthetic and cultural forms and thereby demonstrates how the aesthetic aims of a given work coalesce in a productive blend of generic convention, constraint, and play. As Daniel Worden argues, as a form of popular modernism, “comics offer a bridge between the populist, working-class visions of much of late 19th and early 20th-century popular fiction, and the more rarefied world of modernist art and literature.”[3] This cluster presents one model for erecting such a bridge even as it questions the notions of modernism as necessarily “rarefied” and comics as necessarily populist. Again, it does not tamely suggest that modernism and comics are related concepts, but instead takes a more comparative approach to illustrate how modernism and comics inform one another in ways that are both understated and explicit, in a continual process of exchange. While contributors take decidedly different approaches to the subject, focusing on specific authors and artists separated by a century or more, or defining modernism and comics in relation to one another in ways that are not always commensurate, they align in both their assertion that histories of modernism that take seriously the contributions of comics artists and writers are ultimately more valuable than those that ignore them, and their endeavor to write those histories from previously unacknowledged or undervalued perspectives.

Part of the work of this cluster necessarily involves undoing some of the critical assumptions that have limited our ability to see comics as fertile terrain for modernism. As Stephanie Burt explains, a good deal of comics criticism, in academia if not in those venues that cater to mainstream corporate comics publishers like Marvel and DC, demonstrates “the tilt—built deeply into the academy, and into modernist criteria of value—toward tragedy and even horror and away from comedy, toward shock and knowledge and away from enchantment.”[4] For Burt, modernist hierarchies still structure too much of our critical perspective on comics, leading us toward certain works and away from others in a manner that produces an oddly limited canon ill-equipped to represent the wealth and variety of comics as a whole. Ramzi Fawaz, in the same issue of PMLA in which Burt’s essay appears, makes a related point, noting that any claim for comics’ vast representational possibilities should “confer plenitude and possibility on a medium that is frequently denied expansive creative capacity by those who would interpret the popularity of fantasy genres like superhero comics as a sign of the medium’s aesthetic bankruptcy.”[5] While Fawaz never identifies modernism as the critical antagonist of comics, the dismissal of the medium he describes stems from the same Adornian impulse that Burt characterizes as a hallmark of modernist critical elitism, which might praise the “serious,” formally inventive work of Chris Ware or Alison Bechdel, but draws the line at, say, The Fantastic Four.[6] In both assessments, a valuation of art founded on the modernist bedrock of formal difficulty blocks a full recognition of comics as a medium, whether because it privileges gravity over levity and therefore attends only to comics of a few types (generally, literary fiction or nonfiction), or because it rejects comics outright by conflating the medium as a whole with a few of its most popular genres (superheroes especially, but also science fiction and fantasy).

This double bind—comics achieve recognition but not fully—has been painfully and powerfully evident in comics criticism, persistent even as critics seek to move beyond it. In his provocatively titled “Why Are Comics Still in Search of Cultural Legitimization?,” Thierry Groensteen can claim that “comic art . . . has nothing left to prove” while at the same time arguing that it “suffers from an extraordinarily narrow image, given the richness and diversity of its manifestations.”[7] Yet this cluster’s aim is not to provide the legitimization to which Groensteen refers simply by placing comics alongside modernism and assuming that the latter elevates the former. To do so would be to fall into the two-pronged mistake described above. Rather, the contributors to “Modernism in Comics” are clear in asserting that the medium of comics is in no way formally inferior to other media at the same time that we acknowledge how the modernism of some of our examples is unique to those specific works, indicative of a prominent overlap between modernism and comics but certainly not of a universal condition that we can apply to all comics of the last hundred-plus years. In short, our goal is not to legitimize anything other than the inclusion of comics within modernist studies, as we trace the processes by which comics contribute to modernism both formally and historically, the contradictions that emerge through that contribution, and the forms of aesthetic judgment that have either denied the contribution or brought it to a greater critical awareness. Modernist studies has been slow to recognize modernism within comics, and even to take up comics as an object of study. We aim to speed up that process.[8]

Featuring a combination of position papers and case studies that argue for the mutually constitutive relationship between modernism and comics from the early twentieth century through the present, and that blend formal analysis with theoretical speculation, this cluster proposes new and much-needed ways of understanding what role modernism plays in comics, what role comics play in modernism, and how the two serve as such significant influences on one another. That pattern of exchange should be apparent in our title, “Modernism in Comics,” which refers simultaneously to modernism’s representation in individual comics as well as the ethos of modernism that makes itself plain within so many comics produced from the early twentieth century to the present day. Mimicking modernism’s varied role in and as comics, this cluster moves freely between time periods, styles, and formal conventions. It begins with Lee Konstantinou’s “Modernist Funnies,” an instructive and witty encapsulation of the cluster’s ethos that surveys work by Alison Bechdel, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, G B Tran, and the Oubapo collective in order to ask how mass and high culture have become entangled in contemporary comics in ways that make plain the affinities and fissures between the medium and its modernist predecessors. As Konstantinou explains, we could easily call our current moment “an age of Mass High Culture,” and an understanding of its indebtedness to modernism can help us “give an account for a world in which it has become possible for cartoonists to win MacArthur Foundation fellowships and Pulitzers and to be recognized—justly—as the most dynamic and vital artists working today.”[9]

From that opening provocation, “Modernism in Comics” moves to two pieces that historicize some of the earliest manifestations of modernist comics. Paul Peppis’s illuminating reevaluation of George Herriman’s first Krazy Kat strips demonstrates how that modernist touchstone—easily the early twentieth-century newspaper comic strip most commonly associated with modernist experimentalism, from its manipulation of panels and the logic of spatial narrative to what Kevin Cooley identifies as its participation in and inspiration for the “transatlantic social nexus of cubism”[10]—actually began its life far removed from those attributes that we now hold up as evidence of its modernism, immersed instead in the tropes and conventions of vaudeville. Next is Jean Lee Cole’s equally surprising “Repulsive Women: Djuna Barnes and Others in the American Periodical Press, 1900–1915,” which situates the early fictions of Djuna Barnes alongside the journalism and cartooning of Marjorie Organ, Kate Carew, and Barnes herself, in order to demonstrate how some of the most significant women publishing in that era’s periodicals negotiated the trials of patriarchal modernity through an engagement with the grotesque. In both cases, Peppis and Cole turn to the initial moment of modernist comics in order to reevaluate how our current conceptions of modernist formal experimentation play out in the popular press, and where, precisely, modernism emerged for newspaper readers across the United States and beyond.

The cluster then moves deeper into the twentieth century while also shifting its geography. In “Tove Jansson’s Moomin Modernism,” Mike Classon Frangos assesses the Finnish author’s celebrated Moomin franchise—which included comic strips and illustrated novels published in English and Swedish before numerous translated editions appeared in other languages, making the franchise a global sensation—in light of modernism’s well-known engagement with queer challenges to conventional notions of gendered and sexual identity. Jansson, Frangos contends, uses “her Moomin characters to articulate queer discontent by way of increasingly complex formal experiments,” making these works, ostensibly intended for children, into something much more deliberately avant-garde.[11] Similarly, Kinohi Nishikawa’s “Harlem Composition: Adapting Chester Himes into French Comics” provides a fascinating and necessary history of how Himes’s La Reine des pommes (1957) was adapted by Melvin Van Peebles and Georges Wolinksi into a 1964–65 bande dessinée of the same name. Here, Nishikawa combines compelling evaluations of the work itself with a stimulating theorization of the thorny work of cross-media adaptation and translation more broadly, and demonstrates how a study of Himes’s bande dessinée can allow us to understand the novel upon which it was based in ways uniquely indebted to the medium’s visual affordances. 

The cluster ends with a trio of essays that probe modernism’s legacy in contemporary comics. In “Revise/Reboot: Retcons and the Modernist Restructuring of History in Superhero Comics,” Marie Sartain offers a surprising juxtaposition of contemporary superhero comics and modernist theories of temporality, arguing that the phenomenon of the “retcon,” whereby new creative teams revise the histories of long-running corporate superhero titles in ways that attempt to smooth over previous inconsistencies or make available new routes for future narratives, demonstrates an unexpectedly modernist commitment to envisioning the past as fluid. In this way, Sartain responds to Bart Beaty’s claim that “[c]omics studies has rarely focused attention on the truly popular, opting instead for work that can be presented as groundbreaking—work that is formally innovative and inventive, that explores new expressive ground, and that tackles taboo themes or subjects,” by showing how some of the most popular mainstream comic books ever published are inseparable from their “groundbreaking” qualities, as they borrow from modernism’s seemingly distant example.[12] Meanwhile, my own contribution to the cluster, “Vintage Seth: Comics against Nostalgia,” approaches questions of modernist temporality from a different angle. By analyzing both the cultivated persona of that eponymous Canadian cartoonist as well as his long-running serial Clyde Fans (1997–2017), I argue that a prominent strain of anachronism, which I term “the anachronistic aesthetic,” in contemporary comics embodies cartoonists’ broader attempts to draw in distinctively anachronistic visual styles that simultaneously suggest the value of outdated aesthetic objects and the problem of nostalgia as a papering over of past social and political attitudes. Visually echoing the cartooning styles of the early and mid-twentieth century, artists like Seth represent the past as never truly past but capable of being inhabited in the present in tangible, material ways.

Fittingly, “Modernism in Comics” ends by discussing a contemporary work of radical strangeness, in which reference to modernism’s experimental imperative makes what could seem simply humorous legible as a knowing manipulation of the comics medium toward a wholly unexpected end. In her piece, Lisa Siraganian examines Robert Sikoryak’s Terms and Conditions: The Graphic Novel (2017), which illustrates in comics form the boilerplate legal document to which all users must agree to access Apple’s iTunes platform. Situating the history of legal boilerplate alongside an analysis of the quintessentially modernist forms of the exquisite corpse, Duchampian Readymades, found poetry, and photomontage, Siraganian traces the intersections of legal history, modernist aesthetics, and comics as a form of visual reference and irony as they appear in Sikoryak’s curious object, and in so doing reveals how this tongue-in-cheek comic is a much more self-conscious reflection of modernism’s interest in language’s wobble between meaning and meaninglessness, its becoming an object to be probed and prodded—if not always understood—rather than a vehicle of conventional expression.

In this way, Siraganian’s piece speaks to the twin goals of this cluster as a whole: to find new ways of seeing modernism in comics, of course, but also, and more fundamentally, to encourage modernist studies to see modernism in comics in the first place. Our contributors pursue these goals via different paths, but converge as their objects of study lead them from modernism’s early history to its afterlife, from early newspaper serials to contemporary graphic novels. As Gilbert Seldes famously claimed in The Seven Lively Arts (1924), the comic strip serves as “a changing picture of the average American life” that paradoxically offers its readers a glimpse of “the freest American fantasy.”[13] For obvious reasons this cluster does not follow Seldes in confining itself to an American context, but it does ask, to borrow Seldes’s language, where and how comics have served as a means of bringing a modernist fantasy to multiple audiences, and why critics must attend more carefully to the medium in order to recognize it as the form of popular modernism it is. Our hope is that this cluster will continue to fuel debate about the lively art of comics, and in the process affirm why modernist studies is such a crucial venue for those conversations.

Notes