Broken Frontier

Just like last year, the best news about comics scholarship in 2007 is that there was so much of it! Comics scholarship is growing at a vigorous pace, with increasing numbers of new books, energetic conferences, and thoughtful academic papers in journals.

The American Political Science Association published online the contributions to its April 2007 symposium, The State of the Editorial Cartoon.  In a very exciting development, a new academic journal devoted to the history of early comics and sequential art was launched this year, called SIGNs: Studies in Graphic Narratives.  Check next week’s Library of Babble for an in-depth look at the first issue.

Comics scholarship is a global affair, and this year, the Library of Babble has internationalized the report on comics scholarship 2007 by welcoming two guest contributors. Domingos Isabelinho is a Portuguese comics critic who has published in Quadrado, Satelite Internacional, The Comics Journal, Indy Magazine Online and The International Journal of Comic Art. Huib van Opstal is a Dutch picture-analyst and designer, author of Essay RG, his 1994 biography of Tintin artist Hergé. Isabelinho writes a thoughtful survey of scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic, and van Opstal expertly reviews one of the more stunning of the collected reprints to be published this year.

Domingos Isabelinho

2007 was another great year for comics scholarship!

It began beautifully in Europe with the publication, by the Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, of Mythe et bande dessinée (Comics and Myth), a collection of essays edited by Viviane Alary and Danielle Corrado.

Between December 2006 and April 2007 the University of Geneva organized a series of panels under the title Bande dessinée et dessin de presse: regards critiques (Comics and Editorial Cartoons: The Critical Gaze). Among other less recognizable names the usual suspects did presentations there: Harry Morgan, Thierry Groensteen, Benoît Peeters, and Michel Melot. (I’m also glad to see that a great Swiss comics journalist, Patrick Chapatte, attended one of the panels.)

During July, for the second year in a row, Angouleme’s CNBDI (French National Centre for the Comic Strip and Image) organized the Summer University under the title Quoi de neuf dans la Bande Dessinée? Situation de la creation contemporaine (What’s New in Comics? Contemporary Creation). Many practitioners were present (Lewis Trondheim, Yvan Alagbé, Lorenzo Mattotti, for instance), but some critics (Jean-Philippe Martin) and scholars (Ann Miller) attended too.

In London the International Bande Dessinée Society’s 2007 conference occurred in April. The themes were crossing boundaries, social and sexual identities, aesthetics and approaches. Presenters included Laurence Grove, Lance Rickman, Mark McKinney, and Paul Gravett. Thierry Groensteen presented the boundary-crossing (between American, British, and Franco-Belgian comics scholarship) translation of his book The System of Comics (University Press of Mississippi).

In America the ICAF (International Comics Arts Forum) convened on October 18. It will be unfair to those who were actually there, but I must underline that I’m shocked. My good internet friend Ernesto Priego couldn’t attend because the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services did not renew his visa. This reminds me of Abbas Kiarostami, one of the greatest artists alive, being denied entry into the United States. Is there a pattern in the making? I hope not.

Anyway, the presentations were by Ian Gordon, Orion Ussner Kidder, Joseph Witek, Ken Parille, Jose Alaniz, among many others. Panels were, among other themes, about othering and stereotyping, the theory and practice of comics studies, and audiences and reception cultures.

On the internet a few issues of Image[&]Narrative and ImageText were published. Even if both magazines are not about comics exclusively (far from it), they published good essays about comics. Image[&]Narrative published Pascal Lefevre's Étude du Cahier bleu d’Andre Juillard: Une approche narratologique de la bande dessinée (a study of The Blue Notebook by Andre Juillard, a narratological approach to comics). ImageText published Panelling Parallax: The Fearful Symmetry of William Blake and Alan Moore by Roger Whitson.

During 2007 two issues of the International Journal of Comic Art were published (volume 9). These two voluminous magazines are a boon to comics scholarship. The Spring issue included a great overview of the eighteenth-nineteenth century Japanese comic book Kibyoshi. The essays were edited by Adam L. Kern. Another symposium, edited by John Lent, surveyed Australian comics. As usual for the magazine other countries were featured as well: Argentina (by Florencia Paula Levin); Mexico (by Kyle D. Wagner); Indonesia (by Karna Mustaqim); Francophone Africa (by Massimo Repetti); Tanzania (by Jigal Beez), etc. Draw a Thousand Words: Signification and Narration in Comics Images by Barbara Postema was my favorite essay.

In the Fall issue gallery comics were in focus with essays by C. Hill, Joanna Roche, Andrei Molotiu, and Mark Staff Brandl. Adam Rosenblatt wrote about an underrated Argentinian comic, El [the] Eternauta, and Rodrigo Baeza wrote Roberto Fontanarrosa’s obituary. Other great essays investigating comics are about the visual and the literary (Julia Round), geographical classification (Martin de la Iglesia), 9/11 (Christophe L. Dony), Art Spiegelman (Mattew T. Jones), Phoebe Glockner (Meisha Rosenberg), postcolonial identities (Ann Miller), etc.

Speaking of which, Ann Miller must be the comics scholar of the year. Besides being everywhere (cf. above), 2007 ended with the publication of her book, Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Aproaches to French-Speaking Comic Strip (Intellect Books).

Huib van Opstal

Dream of the Rarebit Fiend: FINALLY COMPLETE ON SHELF AND SCREEN!

Winsor McCay’s strips were about obsessions. A boy’s obsessive urge to sneeze! A girl’s obsessive urge to eat! A man’s obsessive attempts to get rid of his ‘dull care’ valise! But... his greatest obsession proved to be dreaming. First, his strip series Dream of the Rarebit Fiend (1904-1913, in black-and-white), which was about addicts of Welsh Rarebit, a heady dish of melted cheese over toast — which could give one the weirdest of dreams. Second, his strip series Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905-1911, in dazzling full color), this time specifically about a child dreaming.

The American artist-writer Winsor McCay lived from 1867 to 1934. He did everything single-handedly, with drawing board and ink bottle as his ball and chain; a baffling human dynamo, obsessed with obsessive behavior. He left us weird and wonderful strips and cartoons, of which the strips under his pen name SILAS were among the earliest for adult readers. His forte was the dreamstrip full of realism and surrealism… That’s my capsule bio of him.

His strip Dream of the Rarebit Fiend in the early 1900s consisted of everyday actualities, and everyday dreams and dramas — especially adult ones. McCay was an early adapter of cinematic techniques, something he did from before the year 1900. A sign of the times, perhaps, and long before the Comics Code Authority ‘seal of approval’ existed, his Rarebit strip did contain many a suicide attempt, plus alcohol abuse, euthanasia, insanity, death, blood, and offensive violence. ALL modern themes seem to be there in these vintage strips, in often surrealistic varieties.

Roughly a century later, there is now a SUPERB and complete (!) Rarebit Fiend reissue, all in English. The man behind it is German medievalist Dr. Ulrich Merkl, a scholar who ‘...spent six years as a house husband raising two children and writing the present book...’ With many annotations and many unknown visuals he opens eyes as never before. This is the best scholarship I’ve seen in years. On the subject of copycat authors after McCay, to avoid using nastier words like ‘stealing’ or ‘thieving’, Merkl labels the phenomenon of authors-copying-earlier-authors politely as ‘possible quotations’*... Get ready for some great excitement!

Now, history is bound to repeat itself. For me, Merkl’s 2007 The Complete Dream of the Rarebit Fiend book + DVD proved to be THE brainstorm of the century... At last, all known strip episodes of Winsor McCay’s dream interpretations (821 of them, chronologically numbered by Merkl) are on our shelf and on our screen!

See all details on Merkl’s web site.

*Author’s note: What Ulrich calls ‘possible quotations’, Huib called ‘picture rhyme’, ‘beeldrijm’ in Dutch.

A final note from Beth: Look for van Opstal’s full-length essay on Merkl’s Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, to be published soon. The Library of Babble will post the link. My fondest thanks to Domingos Isabelinho and Huib van Opstal for making this year’s report on comics scholarship almost as international as the scholarship itself. (And for doing most of the work!) Here’s to a great year of scholarship! Happy New Year!