Date: Thu, 28 Apr 1994 00:21:48 CDT Sender: COMICS Discussion List <[COMICS L] at [UNLVM.UNL.EDU]> From: Bill Hayes <[IANR 012] at [UNLVM.UNL.EDU]> Subject: Volume 4 Issue 15 Part 3 April 27, 1994 The Comics List Weekly Vol. 4 No. 15 Pt. 3 Scholarship : US- 3rd Annual Comics Arts Conference (part 1 of 2) +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Date: Sun, 17 Apr 1994 23:53:29 -0400 (EDT) From: Peter M Coogan <[c--ga--e] at [student.msu.edu]> Subject: CAC 3 Abstracts/Pro Invitation Please feel free to distribute this to other professionals. Dear Comics Professional: The Third Annual Comic Arts Conference will be held in conjunction with the Chicago Comicon on July 2, 1994 at the Radisson Suites O'Hare, directly across the street from the Convention Center. The Comic Arts Conference seeks to build bridges between academia and the comics industry by bringing together scholars and professionals for serious, vigorous, and friendly investigations of topics ranging over the world of comics. Founded in 1992 by Communications professor Randy Duncan and American Studies graduate student Peter M. Coogan the CAC has been attached to the San Diego Comicon for its first two years, and will be in Chicago for the next two. Currently the Conference organizers are seeking professionals willing to serve as respondents to papers. Respondents will receive their paper(s) three weeks in advance of the Conference in order to provide adequate time to prepare remarks on the scholars' work. Past respondents have included Scott McCloud, Will Eisner, Donna Barr, Steve Bissette, R.C. Harvey, and Clayt Moore. Mike Friedrich took part in a panel discussion, which Dave McKean attended as an audience member. Carl Potts, Scott McCloud, and Steve Bissette also presented slide shows. While specific professionals are being approached to respond to specific papers, the organizers want to involve a broad range of professionals, from both within and outside the mainstream. If you would like to participate in the Conference, please look at the abstracts below. Indicate which papers you would like to respond to, and your order of preference. We recognize that many professionals, artists especially, cannot be absent from the Comicon proper for extended periods; each panel lasts an hour and a half, and we expect that many respondents will come and go throughout the day. Besides paper preference, please also indicate time preference as the schedule and panel composition are not finalized. We will be scheduling the panels partially according to the needs of professionals' Comicon commitments. The tentative schedule for the Conference is as follows: 8:30-9:00 Registration; 9:00-10:30 Panels A and B; 10:30-12:00 Panel C ("Comics Are Not Books"); 12:00-1:30 Lunch (during which the discussion usually continues); 1:30-3:00 Panels D and E; 3:00-4:30 Panel F ("Comics Scholarship: Views From The Academy And The Industry"). There is a registration fee of $20.00 ($10.00 for students). Please return the Respondent form to: Peter M. Coogan, Comic Art Studies, MSU Libraries, East Lansing, MI 48824-1048; or by email: [C--ga--e] at [student.msu.edu.] For more information, please write or call: (517) 485-8039. ____________________________________________________________ PANEL A: Mirror or Lamp?: How Comics Shape and Reflect Their Readers and Creators. 1. "The Inner-Directed Batman: Comics and The Lonely Crowd " Mark T. Best, Comparative Literature, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. In The Lonely Crowd (1950) sociologist David Riesman used the comics, among other mass media, to demonstrate his paradigm of "other-directedness" and "inner-directedness," images of social character which attempted respectively to summarize the social ills of post-war America and to hearken to a superior individualism of the past. This paper examines Riesman's use of the comics by contrasting his argument (based on the seminal study of comic book readership, especially of the superhero genre, by Wolf and Fisk in 1949) that the comics promoted "other-directedness," with the centrality of Riesman's notion of "inner-directedness" to the superhero genre itself. 2."Canadian Comics Fans Fifty Years Later: Finding Canada Jack Club Members and Finding Out What They Remember." Vicki A. Green, Educational Program, Okanagan University College, Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada. This presentation looks at the role comics have in nested narratives of reminiscences, based upon individual interviews with former members the Canada Jack Club. 3. "Drawn Together II: Ritualistic Behavior and Practices of the Gay and Lesbian Community, as Portrayed in Homosexual Relationstrips." Solomon Davidoff, Popular Culture, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio. As rituals are formal and elaborately repeated sets of actions that can be specific within communities, it can be useful to examine representative examples of popular/mass culture artifacts in order to learn more about a community; to learn how they represent themselves to themselves and to others. Utilizing examples of comics produced by the gay and lesbian community, I will explore common rites of passage, unity, seasons, reversal, displacement, and spectacle and how these rituals can guide us to understanding and acceptance of all groups. Examples will come from the work of Allison Bechdel, Jane Caminos, Andrea Natalie, Nancy Dunlap, among others. ____________________________________________________________ PANEL B: Constructing Legitimacy: Caught Between Expectations. 1. "Adapting the Canon: Reader's Digest, Classic Comics Illustrated and the Problem of Mass Literacy." Bart Beaty, Communications, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. When, in 1955, Leslie Fiedler wrote that "the fear of the vulgar is the obverse of the fear of excellence" he proposed a model for understanding comic books which is fundamentally untenable. Fiedler suggests that critical attacks on comic books stem primarily from middlebrow critics whose objections are more strongly related to the content of comic books than they are to form. Indeed, in Fiedler's understanding of the matter the question of form is of so little weight that, according to a middlebrow aesthetic, comics which are adaptations of 'literary classics' should be as well received in American culture as are Life Magazine and Reader's Digest. Yet this argument suffers from an obvious and fatal flaw: namely that, outside of a specialized collector market, comic book literary adaptations have never been seen to have literary or social merit. The problem arises because by limiting his analysis of comic books to the level of content Fiedler is only able to define the middlebrow as an extension on the genteel tradition which characterized American notions of literature in the nineteenth century. Yet, as Gayle Rubin has pointed out, the middlebrow sensibility is characterized not simply as a continuation of gentility into an era of increasing industrialization, but also as a specific negotiation of the idea of 'high art' and the commodity form. Although anti-comic book rhetoric is ostensibly concerned with issues of content (or more precisely sex and violence), the opposition to the medium can be better understood, I would argue, more generally as a problem surrounding the commodity status of comic books. In this paper I will attempt to demonstrate the connections between opposition to comic books and to other forms of commodified (or 'disposable') literature. Specifically, by examining the similarities between critical attacks upon both Classic Comics Illustrated and Reader's Digest Condensed Books (both of which seek to present 'literary classics' in an accessible fashion) I hope to illustrate that the ongoing marginalization of comic books in American culture is simply the continuation of a larger reaction against the extension of literacy beyond the boundaries of the privileged classes. 2. "Up from the Swamp: The Rise of the 'Mature' Comic Book." Greg M. Smith, Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. When a devalued artform begins to gain cultural status, this rise is often tied to certain high profile artworks which obviously demonstrate what the medium is capable of. This paper traces the strategies that DC Comics' Swamp Thing used in the 1980's to gain the kind of cultural cachet rarely given to a comic book. I delineate the textual strategies used to differentiate Swamp Thing as a comic for "mature" readers, and I examine how effective these strategies were in the comic's reception. Based on reception data from more than fifty fan interviews, I discuss how readers perceived the comic and its bid for new cultural status. By focusing on both text and reception, this paper hopes to shed light on how the devalued medium of comics has gained some small measure of cultural standing. 3. "Nina Paley: Funny Girl or Twisted Sister?" Justin Estes, Louisville, Kentucky. Nina Paley is a self-syndicator of her strip. She frequently deals with issues of acceptance by both the "mass culture" as represented by the syndicates and the underground comix community. Her cartooning style is "too nice" and "too cute" for readers of more "traditional" female underground cartoonists while at the same time, her subject matter does not fit with traditional concepts of the newspaper "funnies" page. This paper examines Paley as a cartoonist caught between the expectations of established perceptions of what a female cartoonist is or does. ____________________________________________________________ PANEL C: Comics Are Not Books: Issues of Reading and Writing. 1. "How Not to Read Comics like a Book." R.C. Harvey, Champaign, Illinois. This slide presentation might be termed a primer on how comics work. Because it stresses the blending of words and pictures, it serves as somewhat of a counterpoint to Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, which concerns itself almost entirely with the visual element. 2. "Approaching Milligan's Meta-Comic Through Post-Structuralism and 'Literature'." Christopher Busiel, English, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud compares the effects of pictorial and non-pictorial icons, making the following comment: because the non-pictorial icons represent invisible ideas, appearance doesn't affect their meaning. "Words," he says, "are totally abstract icons" (28). This is a notion particularly prevalent in post-structuralist theory, and McCloud's further reference to that touchstone of post-structuralism, Magritte's "The Treachery of Images," suggests the connections possible between his theoretical approach to the medium of comics, and extant strategies within the literary academy for approaching non-pictorial texts. >From this nexus I will begin an investigation of Peter Milligan's recent work, with particular focus upon his meta "literary" discussion of the act of writing. In his thematic application of Finnegan's Wake in Skreemer, his tribute to the Burroughs cut-up in his brief run with Animal Man and the appearance of James Joyce in Shade, Milligan demonstrates the attraction of the literary figure in the process of writing comics which seek to question the creation of comics. What post-structuralism and the fiction of both Joyce and Burroughs all share is a problematizing of the role of author in the production of text. Another fundamental principle of McCloud's book, of course, is that we should not conflate writing comics with other kinds of writing--they are distinct acts with their own characteristics and strategies. With that in mind, the latter part of this paper will be concerned with comparing Milligan's essentially post-structuralist view towards literature with his meta-treatment of writing specifically for comics, in Shade, and more extensively in Enigma . ____________________________________________________________ PANEL D: Cartoons and Cartoonists: World War II and Cold War America. 1. "The Atomic Bomb, the Hydrogen Bomb, and Their Portrayal in Political Cartoons." Todd Allen, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. This paper examines political cartoons related to nuclear weapons from two critical periods: 1945, when people formed their first impressions of atomic energy and weapons, and from 1954, when America made public its successful testing of the hydrogen bomb. The cartoons' methods of humor are classified and contrasted. Portrayals of nuclear weapons, nuclear power, nationalities, and Earth; personification; and tone are major themes. The subject of representational change through public perception of nuclear weapons is addressed. 2. "Nibbled to Death by Ducks: An Introductory Study of Walt Kelly's Editorial Cartoons." Steve Thompson, Richfield, Minnesota. Known for political commentary within his Pogo comic strip, Walt Kelly served as editorial cartoonist three times between 1948 and 1964. Each period shows different elements of Kelly's artistic style and opinions on politics and society, some of which could not be presented in Pogo. His newspaper cartoons appeared only in New York papers, yet garnered recognition in the national press. Primarily known as a strip cartoonist, Kelly's editorial work is generally unknown, having never been collected. Selections from all three time periods show Kelly's approach to events such as the 1948 and 1953 presidential elections and social changes beginning in the 1960s. 3. "The Comic Artists Who Won the War." Hal Higdon, Hal Higdon Communications Inc., Michigan City, Indiana. This presentation will discuss cartoonists from the 1940s, whose heroes fought World War II. Included will be: Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates), Roy Crane (Buz Sawyer ), Leslie Turner (Captain Easy ), Frank Robbins (Johnny Hazard ), and Zack Mosely (Smitlin' Jack ). Other cartoonists who served in the war included: Jack Kirby, Dan Barry, and Will Eisner. The presentation will be an expansion of Mr. Higdon's article "Combat Comics" that appeared in the December/January Air and Space Smithsonian. Mr. Higdon will illustrate the lecture with art from his collection. ____________________________________________________________ PANEL E: Presenting Characters: Writers and Editors. 1. "The Heroic Image: A Content Analysis of Comic Book Covers." Randy Duncan, Henderson State University, Arkadelphia, Arkansas. This study seeks to determine if there has been a significant change in the image of comic book super-heroes. More specifically, it is a study of the super-hero image as "marketed" on comic book covers. A content analysis methodology is used to examine the situations, actions, and presentation on selected Timely/Marvel Comics covers from the 1940's to the 1990's. 2. "Chris Claremont and Narrative Exposition in the X-Men ." Mark McClusky, Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota. The serial form of comic narrative creates unusual demands on the writer. One of the greatest challenges is to establish the cast of characters of a book quickly, so prospective readers feel attached to them, compelling them to read the series. Chris Claremont, at the start of his run as the writer of Marvel's X-Men , provides one model of how a creator can introduce a cast of characters for future adventures. An analysis of the first ten to twenty issues of Claremont's tenure will show how he established character traits he used over the next 150 issues. 3. "The Comics Code and The Punisher : A Case Study of the Editorial Process." Amy Nyberg, Communications, Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey. The comic book industry adopted a self-regulatory code in 1954. That code, although revised in 1971 and in 1989, is still in effect today. Many have argued that such a regulatory code is no longer necessary and hinders the creative development of the medium, but recent comments by fans and retailers in the Comic Buyers' Guide suggest that adherence to the code is necessary to protect the industry from the new wave of public concern over violence in the media. This paper will explore how the comics code affects the content of those comics which still adhere to its standards. The author has selected one of Marvel Comics' most popular titles, The Punisher, as a case study to examine how the comics code affects editorial decisions, utilizing interviews with the writer, artists, and editor and investigating past disputes with the code office. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- End part 3, more to follow...