Modernist Funnies

I. An Ithaca Moment

At the climactic moment of the final chapter of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Alison and her father Bruce are taking a drive together to watch the 1980 film, Coal Miner’s Daughter (fig. 1). For the first time since she has come out to her family, Alison tries to have a frank conversation with her father about her sexuality—and his. She has recently learned that her father has been sleeping with men for decades. The encounter is tense. Bechdel emphasizes this tension by changing the panel layout of her graphic memoir. Featuring twelve panels per page, this climactic two-page spread creates an array of equally apportioned narrative beats. By constructing an invariant background of panels, each featuring a nearly identical drawing of Alison and Bruce, Bechdel focuses our attention on the emotional drama unfolding within them. The alternation of captioned commentary and (stilted) dialogue, as well as subtle changes in Alison’s and Bruce’s expressions, stage the awkward failure of daughter and father to have an honest conversation. The failure is heavy with our retrospective knowledge as readers that this is Alison’s last (failed) chance; Bruce will shortly after this scene be killed by a truck, possibly committing suicide. The accompanying captions invoke the encounter between Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in the “Ithaca” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Bechdel writes, “It was not the sobbing, joyous reunion of Odysseus and Telemachus. It was more like fatherless Stephen and sonless Bloom having their equivocal late-night cocoa at 7 Eccles Street. But which of us was the father?”[1] After Bechdel asks this question, Alison and Bruce watch the movie, and as they leave the theater the narrator comments that “I would see my father one more time after this. But we would never discuss our shared predilection again.” In a caption superimposed over a hand-drawn reproduction of Bruce’s copy of Ulysses, Bechdel writes, “We had had our Ithaca moment” (222). The remainder of the chapter extends Bechdel’s comparison between the Alison-Bruce relationship and the Stephen-Bloom relationship. In her final pages, reflecting on the Joycean theme that “spiritual, not consubstantial, paternity is the important thing,” Bechdel wonders whether it is “so unusual for the two things to coincide” (231).

Bechdel’s announcement of the convergence of the two sorts of paternity—her acceptance of Bruce as both biological and artistic father, her speculation that she might have inherited her father’s inventive genius—symbolically resolves a longstanding tension in the book. The opening chapter of Fun Home sets up this tension as an aesthetic opposition between Alison and Bruce. He’s “Victorian,” she’s “Modern” (15). This is, to be sure, a surprising opposition. Bruce’s commitment to the “Victorian” might seem, in many ways, like the antithesis of his modernist literary tastes. It was, after all, against a belated Victorianism that some modernists rebelled. And Alison’s commitment to the “Modern” might seem at odds with her later resistance to her father’s love of modernist literature. But the content of their aesthetic commitments seems less important to me than the fact that Bechdel figures her relationship to her father as, at least at first, rivalrous. Bruce tries to inculcate a love of literary modernism in his daughter, but Alison resists replicating her father’s tastes. Bechdel sometimes suggests that her father’s love of modernism has inspired him to model himself on the pathological lives of his literary heroes. And, though Alison does reluctantly take a winter session course at Oberlin on Ulysses—her father’s “favorite book of all time” (203)—she struggles to finish the novel and is more interested in her extracurricular reading, which is helping her navigate her sexuality. Yet at this final moment, Alison relents. Bruce’s modernist heroes become hers. Her father’s favorite book, Ulysses, becomes not only a model of Alison’s relationship with Bruce but also a model for Fun Home itself. Of course, this choice of model is ambivalent. It gives form to Alison’s ultimate failure to connect with her father. Yet by making her memoir a descendent of Ulysses, by acceding to her father’s aesthetic commitments, Bechdel creates a father-daughter reconciliation through art that life did not afford her. Alison becomes both Stephen and Bloom, Icarus and Daedalus. She is both her father’s daughter and the (figurative) father of her father. Bruce is a supreme artificer, a master of false, seductive appearances, whose life of artifice becomes the very subject matter of her art. Bechdel’s act of graphic remembrance becomes not only a means of recollecting her lost father’s life but also a means through which she’s able—retrospectively—to invent him. Bruce’s favorite book of all time becomes Alison’s (and Bechdel’s) book.

II. Avant-Garde Comic Strips

Fun Home dramatizes the process through which Alison (the character) becomes Bechdel (the artist)—and not just any kind of artist, but a latter-day modernist artist. The graphic memoir might very well have been called A Portrait of the Cartoonist as a Young Lesbian. Unsurprisingly, then, many critics have discussed Bechdel’s invocation of modernism. Ariela Freedman has suggested that “[i]n repeatedly citing, revising and challenging writers including Joyce, Fitzgerald, and Proust,” Bechdel is “inviting the reader to read her book alongside theirs and making a space for herself on the shelf of modernist literature.”[2] Bechdel hopes, Freedman argues, to make a “very Joycean point” that “books have other books as babies while adding an implicit twist; that graphic narratives are the queer bastard child of high modernism” (Freedman, “Drawing,” 138). Bechdel may have been (reluctantly) influenced by modernist art, but what might it mean to say comics as an art form is a child of high modernism, let alone its “queer bastard child”? After all, comics have historically been understood as definitionally outside modernism, part of the great tidal wave of Kitsch that industrial modernity produced, which was the social context in which high modernist experimentation became artistically distinct in the first place.[3] What has comics inherited from that sometimes-hostile tradition? To the degree that it has inherited anything, how has it changed that inheritance?

Different scholars would answer these questions in different ways. Advocates of the new modernist studies (which is today, we must admit, not so new) would likely have little problem uttering “comics” and “modernism” in the same sentence. One aim of this paradigm was, after all, to expand the recognized boundaries of modernism—geographically, temporally, and in terms of cultural register.[4] Working within this paradigm, scholars might be inclined to reconfigure older understandings of the relation between comics and modernism. First, they might note that comics depended on and influenced the development of new technologies of print.[5] Is comics not an almost textbook example of a medium that flourished in a context of metropolitan modernity?[6] Might we not, as a growing chorus of scholars has suggested, discuss comics as embodying a “popular modernism” or “vernacular modernism”?[7] If, as Jackson Ayres has argued, “[c]omics and modernism . . . served to coproduce each other,” why not consider contemporary comics a perfectly plausible descendent of modernism, or even an example of it?[8] I would argue that we should resist such an easy resolution. I agree with David James and Urmila Seshigiri, who argue that scholars should not assume that “modernism [is] inherently positive, transportable across time, and transferable to the work of contemporary writers” (James and Seshagiri, “Metamodernism,” 88).[9] Similarly, if we count almost all emergent cultural production under modernity as modernism, we risk occluding modernism’s historically oppositional relationship to mass culture. And if we retain a sense of modernism’s “aesthetic, historical, and political” distinctiveness, we are also better equipped to see the complexities in Bechdel’s aesthetic situation. Bechdel is, after all, a cartoonist. And for the cartoonist, I argue, it is especially hard to invoke modernism without ambivalence. The historical exclusion of comics from the category of modernism doesn’t mean cartoonists haven’t invoked modernism—they do so all the time—but that the way they do so requires them, if they’re in any way conscious of the history and legacy of modernism, to take a critical stance toward that tradition.

But cartoonists haven’t all taken the same position on modernism. They’ve developed differing, even clashing, stances on the significance of the comics–modernism relation. The remainder of this essay offers a thumbnail sketch of how the history of comics might be rewritten as a history of these conflicting stances. I will highlight two axes of disagreement. The first concerns form. Does comics have a medium-specificity in the sense Clement Greenberg articulated in his discussions of midcentury painting and sculpture?[10] Or are comics ineluctably hybridized?[11] If there is a formal specificity to comics, to what degree should the cartoonist pursue it? The second axis of disagreement relates to modernism’s relation to popular media and mass culture. Should cartoonists embrace high culture or reject it? Should they pursue cultural populism? Celebrate the medium’s historical association with Kitsch? These have arguably been critical questions for comics studies, but they’re also, more importantly, questions cartoonists themselves have asked and answered. Cartoonists do not always plainly express their views on these questions in interviews or essays, but I contend that we can find the substance of their positions on modernism embedded in their art: in layouts, figuration, narrative structure, and book design. What I am interested in, specifically, is how cartoonists represent, engage, and resist modernism on the page.   

III. Populist Hybridity

Take the opening page of R. Crumb’s “Abstract Expressionist Ultra Super Modernistic Comics” (fig. 2).[12] Published in 1967 in the first issue of Zap Comix, Crumb’s important underground magazine, the three-page comic features a sequence of irregularly shaped panels, each of which depicts abstract and grotesque forms, which bear some resemblance to modernist sculpture and painting. Many of these images foreground Crumb’s characteristic obsessions, including variations of images of naked female bodies and closeups of eyes, teeth, body hair, and genitalia. Though it invokes modernist painting and sculpture, the verbal and visual rhetoric of “Abstract Expressionist Ultra Super Modernistic Comics” is an ironic engagement with that source material. The cover of the same issue of Zap, which Crumb wrote and drew entirely himself, reinforces this ironic rhetoric. The cover announces that the book is “For Adult Intellectuals Only!” and a parody of the Comics Code Seal of Approval says that this issue has been “Approved by the Ghost Writers in the Sky.”[13] Zap’s irreverence is what we might expect from a work published in 1967 at the height of the underground. For many participants in that milieu, attacking the corporate censorship of the mainstream comics industry could seem apiece with attacking highbrow authorities that relegated comics to the margins of American culture. Though Crumb vigorously resists corporate restrictions, he evidently thinks that the notion that comics might aspire to the condition of capital-A Art is equally, if not more, ridiculous.

This three-page comic is, in its rigorous negation of all high-cultural aspiration, also a visual theory of modernism (or, perhaps, a nascent theory of postmodernism). Crumb disavows modernist art. But Crumb is also not drawing for a mass audience. Instead, he adopts a position we should regard as classically postmodern, in which the high–low distinction is dissolved or overcome. Unleashed from all fetters, Crumb offers an explosion of desublimated sensation—hanging eyeballs, swollen fingers, and polymorphically perverse enjoyment. Instead of modernist meaning, we get an inventive, ecstatic anti-corporate populism. To interpret any specific image in “Abstract Expressionist Ultra Super Modernistic Comics” would be largely beside the point. What Crumb offers in lieu of interpretable images is an occasion for us to enjoy ourselves. Yet this cartoonish jouissance is not without conceptual content; its content, I would argue, is a rejection of modernism in the name of the unfettered body. Modernism, in this formulation, is a formal restriction or restraint or Law that the cartoonist must overcome. At its limit, Crumb’s rejection of modernism here becomes a vision—or we might say a fantasy—of what comics might become: an artistic practice that goes beyond the pleasure principle.

IV. Populist Formalism

Where Crumb negates modernism in the name of unfettered enjoyment, other cartoonists elevate comics by associating the medium with the Law of modernism. They hope to show either that comics already is art or that it might aspire to become art. Such cartoonists participate in what Christopher Pizzino has called the “Bildungsroman discourse” of comics.[14] This discourse argues that comics ought to “grow up,” associating the lackadaisical youth of comics with specific genres (superhero narratives), specific publishing formats (pamphlets), and specific audiences (teenage readers). Art Spiegelman is perhaps the figure most associated with the drive to elevate comics. To be sure, Spiegelman has repeatedly emphasized his ambivalence about this project of elevation—and has repeatedly expressed his appreciation for the undisciplined energies of the field—but he and his collaborators have done more than almost anyone to bring official forms of recognition to comics.[15] It was the serialized publication of Maus that inspired Ken Tucker to write in the New York Times that Spiegelman’s art might “expand the very notion of what a comic strip can do, to make intelligent readers reconsider—and reject—the widespread notion of, in Mr. Spiegelman’s phrase, ‘comics-as-kid-culture.’”[16] This expansion was what Tucker called, with full Greenbergian force, the “Avant-Garde of the Comic Strip.”

But Spiegelman and his collaborators faced a problem: they appreciated, even revered, the historically marginal place of comics. How, then, could they move beyond the limitations of the underground without also becoming the very snobs they wanted to disavow? The answer can be found in the formalism of Spiegelman’s early career. Indeed, more even than Maus, it was Spiegelman’s experimental comics magazines—Arcade: The Comics Revue (1975–1976) and RAW (1980–1991)—that were the most influential vehicles for his vision of comics. Contributors to these publications (including Spiegelman) frequently alluded to modernist graphical styles and explored the medium-specific potential of comics. These cartoonists rejected the high–low distinction, even celebrating the low origins of the medium, but consistently highlighted what, in their view, comics were uniquely capable of doing. Modernist styles and modernist ideologies of formal autonomy served as a means by which Spiegelman and his collaborators could hem in the unrestrained Id of the underground (represented by Crumb). The intense formalism of this work is evident everywhere in Spiegelman’s anthology, Breakdowns: From Maus to Now (1977), which includes an early version of Maus (published in 1972 as “Maus” in the anthology Funny Aminals), “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” (1972), and other important experiments. Spiegelman’s styles vary widely, from German Expressionist woodcut to Pop Art, but all exhibit a commitment to specifying the formal particularity of comics. The expanded 2008 edition of Breakdowns was, appropriately enough, subtitled “Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!” The cover includes the half-ironic phrase “Adults Only!”—a slogan that reproduces Crumb’s irreverence, but now in the name of an intense formalism and a commitment to comics-specificity. Spiegelman’s early-career formalism bears an ambivalent, half-ironic relationship to modernism. It tries to find a way to embrace the medium-specific power of comics while also reveling in the low history of the medium, refashioning that low history to suggest that comics might offer greater innovation and formal power than has heretofore been recognized.

This attitude toward modernism sees the cartoonist as both an Artist and a %@&*!; the seeming irony of Spiegelman’s %@&*! doesn’t negate his artistic ambition—but rather names it, sous rature. He is, like other comics formalists, who embrace the self-deprecating rhetoric Pizzino calls “autoclasm,” slightly embarrassed to admit that he is—yes, yes, okay—actually an artist (Pizzino, Arresting Development, 4–5). The most apt slogan for this cartooning position might be the tagline of the third issue of the second volume of RAW, which promises that the magazine offers “High Culture for Lowbrows.” Ultimately, Spiegelman’s aspiration toward lowbrow high culture is an aspiration toward formal specificity, not social exclusiveness or cultural capital; Spiegelman hopes to locate the specific formal genius of otherwise low or populist forms.

V. High-Cultural Hybridity

A less conflicted attitude toward respectability can be found in the comics-memoirs that have, with increasing frequency since the breakthrough of Maus, been widely celebrated in the literary press and by academics. These titles have, since the start of the twenty-first century, been among the most successful at breaking free from the world of comics production and distribution—and in garnering mainstream literary recognition. These are the kinds of books literary imprints have most wanted to publish and that were first to appear in bookstores (as opposed to specialty comic-book shops). When cartoon memoirists invoke modernism, their invocation does often have a formal dimension; modernism undoubtedly affects the visual and storytelling style of their pages. But more often, modernism appears as content, as these cartoonists are far less committed to the formal autonomy of comics than were the contributors to Arcade and RAW.  These memoirists are, in short, committed to comics as art, but they treat comics as a hybridized form, inverting Spiegelman’s position during the formalist phase of his career. Depending on our emphasis, we might even include Maus in this third category. The new respectability of comics is well represented by Bechdel’s Fun Home, which was published in hardcover by Houghton Mifflin and selected as Time’s book of the year in 2006—beating Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower for the title.[17] And Bechdel was eventually selected as a MacArthur Fellow in 2014.

In the first section of this essay, I discussed how Fun Home uses a canonical modernist text as a template, which helps Bechdel narrate and interpret her relationship with her father. But this incorporation of modernism into the graphic memoir isn’t unique to Bechdel. G B Tran’s critically acclaimed graphic memoir, Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey (2010), published by Villard (a literary imprint of Random House), offers another important example. Tran invokes French Impressionism as a visual intertext to tell the story of his family’s experience in Vietnam in the years leading up to and during the Vietnam War. Specifically, he uses Impressionism to allude to the movement’s influence on his father, a talented painter. Tran contrasts his father’s talent as a painter to his own attraction to cartooning, juxtaposing an Impressionist visual style with the ligne claire style associated with the Belgian cartoonist Hergé. At other moments, Tran incorporates the bright primary colors of Vietnamese communist propaganda. These diverse graphical allusions, which collide on his pages, serve as a means by which Tran explores what we might call the graphic unconscious of Vietnam’s colonial and postcolonial condition. There is much more to say about Vietnamerica, but what I would emphasize is that Tran, like Bechdel, turns modernism into the subject-matter of his art, without committing to a stringent comics formalism. Comics enters into a—sometimes anxious, but ultimately fairly amicable—intertextual conversation with modernism.

Whatever we think of its critical ascendence, the graphic memoir represents a more well-adjusted denizen of the world of art-comics, one that has made a sort of peace with its modernist predecessors. It is not the only member of the category I call here high-cultural hybridty. I would include important fiction and journalism by Chris Ware, Joe Sacco, Charles Burns, Seth, and others. The cover of Spiegelman’s Breakdowns still ambivalently includes the half-ironic phrase, also plastered on the cover of issues of RAW, “Adults Only!” But a work like Vietnamerica or Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? (or, internationally, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis) simply admits that it is, yep, for adults. So this is what comics look like when it has finally grown up! At the same time, Bechdel might well invoke Joyce’s Ulysses, but she doesn’t embrace the formal variety of that encyclopedic text. This variant of cartoonish response to modernism, which I’d call high-cultural hybridity, leaves behind the irony of RAW in favor of the sincerity of the New York publishing world. It also, unlike early Spiegelman, sees comics as a mixture or bringing together of different modalities. On his personal web page, Tran describes himself as “a graphic designer and illustrator whose not-so-secret identity is a cartoonist.” The same might be said about a generation of visual and narrative artists for whom comics is one mode of creative expression among many. 

VI. High-Cultural Formalism

A more astringent, if no less sincere, practice of experimental comics has embraced the idea that comics might be high art and has also recommitted itself to the formal pursuit of medium-specificity. We might cite, as one clear example of this approach, Abstract Comics, edited by Andrei Molotiu, whose varied contributors visually cite a range of graphical modernist styles, expressionist styles, and other experimental modes drawn from across the twentieth century. Abstract Comics, perhaps surprisingly, includes Crumb’s “Abstract Expressionist Ultra Super Modernistic Comics,” but this inclusion seems to me to mark a misunderstanding of Crumb’s purposes. Indeed, the cartoonists in this collection are more likely to use abstract expressionist style than to mock it. Another group we might associate with Molitiu’s project is Oubapo. Modeled on Oulipo, Oubapo (l’Ouvroir de bande dessinée potentielle) are a mostly French group of cartoonists who have engaged in constraint-based experiments with the conventions of comics storytelling. Their name translates to the “workshop of potential comic book art,” and they represent a major site of experimentation in the international comics field, taking formalism to a new level of intensity.

As a warrant for Oubapo’s experimental practice, Bart Beaty has claimed that comics “had no modernist moment.”[18] The art form “[w]ore a dunce cap for most of the twentieth-century.” Oubapo, Beaty suggests, “asks us to imagine a modernist art movement in a postmodern era, ironically championing the value of comics so that the notion of comics as valuable no longer seems ironic” (Beaty, “Comics”). Beaty is not alone in suggesting that comics might have experienced a belated modernism. Writing of Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore’s 1986–1987 comic book series Watchmen, Andrew Hoberek has described the “mideighties as the comic book’s modernist era.”[19] Watchmen, after all, alongside Maus and Frank Miller’s reimagining of the Batman story in The Dark Knight Returns are often held up together as major innovations in the field, inaugural moments in the history of the form, when comics grew up. This belated modernism is, for Beaty, qualified. Though we are postmodern—we supposedly don’t believe in antiquated discourses of aesthetic value—we nonetheless are able to imagine comics as modern (or modernist) to confer some simulacrum of value upon the form. But I would suggest that artists like Molotiu and the members of Oubapo want to remove the scare quotes from Beaty’s critical assessment. They want to fully embrace the possibility of comics modernism. They aren’t so much in dialogue with modernism as aspiring to make modernist comics. Here’s a practice of making comics that, at last, can unironically claim to be only for Adult Intellectuals.

VII. Mass High Culture

What happens when we stop ironically championing the notion that comics can be art, and simply affirm that it is? What will we now be able to recognize about the transformed household of art in the twenty-first century? Our answer will have implications beyond the field of comics. It will revise the claim made by a prior generation of scholars about cultural value. Thirty years ago, when critics discussed postmodernism, many claimed that postmodernism demolished the high–low boundary, undermining art’s autonomy, challenging prior narratives of high art. Fredric Jameson’s classic essay “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” crystalized this orthodoxy. Postmodern art, in his view, no longer quoted mass culture, paraliterature, and Kitsch but rather incorporated them “to the point where the line between high art and commercial forms seems increasingly difficult to draw.”[20]

Today, it seems more accurate to say that new arts are mass produced more efficiently than ever before. So many low forms, so many genres, so many distinct mediums, so many formerly non-artistic activities have risen and are on the rise that the former categories critics have used to describe positions within the cultural field must be reconsidered.[21] The techniques by which a cultural practice can become an art are now widely known. Over the last thirty years, comics studies scholars have successfully advocated for comics in and out of the academy, and comics has, with increasing success, been incorporated into scholarly fields as diverse as trauma studies, autobiography and life writing studies, the medical humanities, and many others. There are even job market lines specifically in the field of comics studies, and several universities have started comics studies programs; it would be no surprise if similar programs took root at many more, and if the study of comics came in time to be integrated into more and more academic disciplines, in and out of the humanities.[22] It seems safe, even obvious, to say that academics and other cultural curators have come to recognize the power and significance of comics. Within comics studies, this is old news.

Yet even comics studies scholars seem unsettled about how best to articulate the relation between comics and modernism. I can’t settle or even fully outline these differences here. I would like to end, instead, by suggesting that academics should not merely advocate for comics; we should also reflexively take this historical process of elevation and advocacy as an object of study in its own right. It would not be wrong to say, tongue only slightly in cheek, that we live in something like an age of Mass High Culture, and that we (critics) have ourselves had a hand in making this age what it is. What we need to do isn’t only to interpret the specific cultural products of this new era but also to 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. As we look ahead to the near future of literary and cultural studies, we find ourselves facing a whole new array of questions. The humanities may be in an epochal crisis, but it’s also an exciting time to be a comics scholar. There’s much important work to be done, and—I have suggested—the conflictual juncture of modernism and comics represents one crucial site for critical investigation.