On Comics and Audience

In his 1979 interview with Alfred Bergdoll for Cascade Comix, Art Spiegelman refers to comics a “fugitive medium,” saying that “it’s born of the sawdust, you know, rather than the fertile soil.”  He goes on to observe,

There’s a funny thing about comics which is that you’ve got to simplify your drawings because you’re working with, more often than not, sharp black and white.  You can’t even too successfully, usually, work in grey tones.  So you have to simplify drawings for that reason.  You also have the fact that most panels are very small so even if you’re drawing twice as large, you’re still working in an area that would be considered a very small etching, let’s say, with a maximum of five or six inches high.  And you also have the fact that you have to simplify the gesture to make it communicate quickly because it’s a kind of picture writing.  And you have the fact that you can’t fit that much text into any one panel, so you have to simplify your text and therefore, to do something really potent you have to suggest much, much more than you can actually state.  And in that sense, maybe comics have more in common with poetry than with prose.  And that’s merely a limitation that the medium presents …

While his “fugitive medium” comment  could be read as an expressing understanding of the limitations of comics as a medium, I think Spiegelman goes on to clarify that by adding “born of sawdust” he’s also talking about the audience expectations of comics at the time:

… but every medium has its limitations and it’s incumbent on the artist to deal with those and make the most of it.  Limitations can be turned to an advantage.  And on the other hand one, one of the problems with comics is, well, for one thing, they’re called comic strips so they’re expected to give you a boffo laugh, or I guess at most they’re expected to give you some escapist super hero entertainment or something, but they’re not really expected to do more than be a vehicle for mass medium entertainment.  So it doesn’t really attract artists to come along and grapple with the material because that’s not what it’s billed as.  And it doesn’t attract an audience who’s serious for the most part.  Serious audiences are probably at least as important as serious artists.

After Bergdoll points out that “there are not many more serious comics fans than there are comic artists, Spiegelman continues, “I think that the problem of audience is a major one.  It’s very important for people to be willing to stretch themselves to meet the work rather than to have the work poured down their sleeping, open gullets.”

Later, in his 1980 interview with Dean Mullaney for Comics Feature, Spiegelman discusses how prominent segments of the underground comics culture had begun to ossify, due in large part in his estimation to publishers responding to audience expectations that alternative comics were largely about sex, violence, and drugs.  With first Arcade and then the much larger format RAW, he and Françoise Mouly try to break away from historic expectations about graphic storytelling to foster a new audience and perhaps a fertile soil:

It’s just that we wanted to see a new context for the material.  And that’s RAW.  I think it exudes a certain kind of class and elegance.  I think it’s an interesting tension because comics, in America at least, are considered this real gutter medium.  To have that tension between an elegant format and a medium we’re used to thinking of as junk literature makes you look at the work in a different way.  The risk it runs is seeming pretentious.  The risk is worth it because it asks for an involvement on the part of an audience that’s much more intense than the audience is used to giving a comic.  That makes a different kind of work happen.  It’s one possibility of what we want to see happen to comics in the future, and we certainly want to explore it.

The supposition that fostering a new and differently engaged audience would foster and make more possible different kinds of work from comic and graphic artists is an interesting one.  After a back and forth with Mullaney, Spiegelman continues:

An important part of the equation that’s usually left out is that the audience is as important as the artist.  The audience determines what’s possible, and right now the audience expects and receives this stuff that you’re supposed to lean back and let hit you for a second, and then go away somewhere else.  Nothing is asked of you as an audience; you’re not asked to participate in a piece of work and give it your attention, give it your energy and thereby reap a far richer reward than you would from the kind of material that doesn’t require any effort.  Hopefully, we’ll find that kind of an audience.  We’d like to do real art that has an audience.

I’m drawn to Spiegelman’s thoughts about the role of audience and its importance to what can grow artistically within the medium of comics.  I think his observations could be used to build a framework with which to begin a class on graphic storytelling, which I do hope to develop in the coming year.  Getting students to look at expectations and assumptions can form an important part of first week pedagogy.

I’m still developing my formative thoughts on the importance of Con audiences and of cosplay community and culture, bubbling up through my last post, and I’m still reflecting on Bart Beaty’s art world idea as shared in my review of his book Comics versus Art, so I’m sure reflecting on audience roles and functions in the development of graphic storytelling will be a recurring theme of this blog.

Seeing Machiko Hasegawa

Looking at Machiko Hasegawa’s post-WWII yonkoma manga, Sazae-san, I’m drawn to two examples in particular.  While others of her strips focus on family life and often offer gender observations, these strips seem to offer commentary on the Japanese-American dynamics and relationships after the war.  In the above strip, Namihei, Sazae-san’s father, goes with an American colleague or friend to a photographer to have their portrait taken.  However, when the photo is developed Masuo is all but left out of the frame.  There seems to be a mixture of pride in the friendship or working relationship, perhaps exemplifying a certain post-war pride Japanese took in the developing post-war relationship, but the focus on the importance of the American here (and perhaps in the larger national scene itself) leaves the Japanese subject outside the picture.  Likewise, while walking on a bridge below and enjoying the view, Sazae-san finds herself being beckoned by an American serviceman to pose for a photo.  However, much to her embarrassment, it turns out that the photographer sees and was addressing not her but the geisha-looking woman behind her.

Sazae-san, even whilst between the American and the “geisha,” seems to remain unseen in the last frame.  What is seen, instead, is the external stereotype and expectation formed by outsiders of what constitutes Japanese beauty, an idealized Japanese femininity.  In the presence of the “geisha,” Sazae-san is an absence.  I wonder to what extent the above yonkoma (four panel strip form of manga) can stand in as metaphors for Japan and manga/anime exports today.  To what extent do manga and anime in the U.S. reflect an American focus, and to what extent do we miss seeing a wider range of what’s actually out there?

At the moment, I’m reading Beautiful Fighting Girl by Saito Tamaki and Japanese Visual Culture, edited by Mark W. MacWilliams.  This makes me wonder to what degree does the beautiful fighting girl, so popular in manga and anime … from Princess Knight (1967) to Cutie Honey (1973) to Sylia/Priss/Linna of Bubblegum Crisis (1987) to Sailor Moon (1992) to Gally of Battle Angel (1993) to Birdy (1996) to Rushuna Tendo of Grenadier (2004) to almost the entire character list of Claymore (2007) to Saeko of Highschool of the Dead (2011) to Mikasa of Attack on Titan (2013) to name a few of the more memorable … to what extent do all these beautiful fighting girls and their popularity obscure or obfuscate what else is out there, not only in terms of the broader sense of Japanese femininity but even just within the range of representations of the feminine in manga and anime?  As MacWilliams points out in his introduction to Japanese Visual Culture, manga and anime are part of mass art or mass culture and exist as industrial exports between capitalist economies; as such, artistic creation contends with or may be constrained by marketability.

Analogous to the photographer’s orientation with the “geisha” in Hasegawa’s yonkoma, to what extent do we in the U.S. primarily see manga and anime that fulfill our expectations?  Just as the American serviceman above misses seeing Sazae-san for the “geisha” on the bridge, so too do many in the U.S. miss seeing Machiko Hasegawa for the beautiful fighting girls so pervasively in our midst.  Consider how little known Machiko Hasegawa and her housewife heroine remain outside of Japan.  It’s a shame, given that her manga, Sazae-san, ran for nearly thirty years, leading to radio and anime adaptations over the course of her career as an artist (the anime series is actually still active as of 2017).  As well known as Charles Schulz is in the U.S., so Hasegawa is in Japan.  She even has her own museum.