pictures gone sequential
While standing outside beneath a rear-garden tent at a horrifically crowded East Village bar this weekend, I found myself talking comics with a friend of mine. Specifically, Sin City opened things up, which led to a more general talk of writers and artists who explore the potential of the medium.
(Side note: in the "food for thought" department, here's a take on the film, and comics in general, from the folks over at Bookslut that I don't agree with 100%, and here one can find Matt Fraction and Joe Casey discussing the film and its adaptation. Fraction's a filmmaker who's also written some remarkably good comics, and Casey himself crosses a number of disciplines).
I was about to type, "I'm a fan of comics" just now, except that typing that reminded me of Saturday's conversation: specifically, that comics are a medium, as prose or film or theatre might be. And while one can certainly say, "I'm a fan of music" or "I'm a fan of film", it's a little bit strange to do so. Citing genres makes perfect sense, but there's a tendency -- even among those of us who dig comics, I suspect, to treat comics as a genre as opposed to a medium. And that's where the problem comes in. The works of Chris Ware, David Lapham, and Jack Kirby all fall under the umbrella of "comics". All are respected creators in the field. And yet, one's not going to find a lot of commonalities among the three.
Finding innovative work is equally hard: Eisner, Ware, and Clowes are obvious names, but on the more genre-oriented side of things, writers like Grant Morrison and Warren Ellis are pushing the form in other ways. It seems to me that the more (for lack of a better word) literary creators -- generally writer/artists -- are noticed for this more frequently. What I don't know is whether the auteurity (yes, I realize I made that word up) causes certain innovators to be noticed and others to be passed over. Alan Moore is one of the few writers I can think of who gets relatively glowing mainstream coverage. (Neil Gaiman as well, come to think of it -- though I'd contend that Moore's take on the medium is more experimental than Gaiman's.)
I could be off my gourd here, though, conjuring up hypothetical media scenarios; as a counterpoint, I could bring up the fact that Arthur has put both Morrison and Moore on its cover. I could also take this argument with myself further and point out that none of these writers writes comics exclusively: Gaiman has several novels out, Moore's novel Voice of the Fire was reissued last year, Morrison's written short fiction and plays, and Ellis's first novel will be out later this year.
I fear that this post may have reached the point of irrelevance, so I'll conclude with this idea. No one finds it odd for a writer or director of films to cross genre lines, but if the same thing took place in comics -- if Chris Ware undertook a project similar to Transmetropolitan, or Morrison began a moody, open-ended psychological drama -- readers would be baffled. Even in Europe, it seems that someone like Enki Bilal can pull this off with ease; stateside, the same does not seem to be true. Yet.
(And that's not even touching creators like Lapham, Paul Grist and Andi Watson, who seem to fall somewhere between the two "camps" -- but that's a digression for another time.)
(Side note: in the "food for thought" department, here's a take on the film, and comics in general, from the folks over at Bookslut that I don't agree with 100%, and here one can find Matt Fraction and Joe Casey discussing the film and its adaptation. Fraction's a filmmaker who's also written some remarkably good comics, and Casey himself crosses a number of disciplines).
I was about to type, "I'm a fan of comics" just now, except that typing that reminded me of Saturday's conversation: specifically, that comics are a medium, as prose or film or theatre might be. And while one can certainly say, "I'm a fan of music" or "I'm a fan of film", it's a little bit strange to do so. Citing genres makes perfect sense, but there's a tendency -- even among those of us who dig comics, I suspect, to treat comics as a genre as opposed to a medium. And that's where the problem comes in. The works of Chris Ware, David Lapham, and Jack Kirby all fall under the umbrella of "comics". All are respected creators in the field. And yet, one's not going to find a lot of commonalities among the three.
Finding innovative work is equally hard: Eisner, Ware, and Clowes are obvious names, but on the more genre-oriented side of things, writers like Grant Morrison and Warren Ellis are pushing the form in other ways. It seems to me that the more (for lack of a better word) literary creators -- generally writer/artists -- are noticed for this more frequently. What I don't know is whether the auteurity (yes, I realize I made that word up) causes certain innovators to be noticed and others to be passed over. Alan Moore is one of the few writers I can think of who gets relatively glowing mainstream coverage. (Neil Gaiman as well, come to think of it -- though I'd contend that Moore's take on the medium is more experimental than Gaiman's.)
I could be off my gourd here, though, conjuring up hypothetical media scenarios; as a counterpoint, I could bring up the fact that Arthur has put both Morrison and Moore on its cover. I could also take this argument with myself further and point out that none of these writers writes comics exclusively: Gaiman has several novels out, Moore's novel Voice of the Fire was reissued last year, Morrison's written short fiction and plays, and Ellis's first novel will be out later this year.
I fear that this post may have reached the point of irrelevance, so I'll conclude with this idea. No one finds it odd for a writer or director of films to cross genre lines, but if the same thing took place in comics -- if Chris Ware undertook a project similar to Transmetropolitan, or Morrison began a moody, open-ended psychological drama -- readers would be baffled. Even in Europe, it seems that someone like Enki Bilal can pull this off with ease; stateside, the same does not seem to be true. Yet.
(And that's not even touching creators like Lapham, Paul Grist and Andi Watson, who seem to fall somewhere between the two "camps" -- but that's a digression for another time.)
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home