Session of February, 14 - Questions of Method in Cultural Analysis of Comics
James Gillray, "Napoleon´s Manic Ravings (1851)
Rudolphe Töppfer,
"Essais d´Autographie" (1846)
“His was indeed a new kind of caricature, innocent compared to Gilray’s, yet with something of the impish and whimscal air of Cruikshank’s (...). In an age of increasing specialization, Töpffer bridged the arts, as Goethe himself had done 303much more imperially. The rapid, sketchy, casual lithographic stroke bespoke sincerity and reckless spontaneity, which informed the storyline as well; and Goethe, with reference to Delacroix’s lithographic illustrations to his Faust, had found such freedom to be the trademark of creative genius” (KUNZLE, 1990: 30)
Even if such an approach of comics scholarship resulted from certain trends of cultural history (mainly devoted to the emergence of visual products of modern industrial societies), this sort of critical discourse on the cultural genesis of comics might also allow for an altogether different kind of heuristic strategy: one important point is the characteristic style of caricature that emerges from Töpffer’s artwork and the practical and artistic contexts within which it germinates; to achieve a proper account of these problems, the analysis of pictorial style must stress upon the particular semantic realizations of portraiture through plastic hyperbole – an aspect which, once again, I will deal with slowly only later in the course.
In the sense that the perspectives of the cultural history of graphic humor imply the feature of modernity, as an aspect that combines artistic, technological and economic dimensions of the prevalence of this visual discourse, in the scales of its circulation that give it the part of a phenomenon worthy of study , is the contribution of Ian Gordon that initially places us in the scope of the debate about what makes graphic humor and its functions of social and political commentary an element whose cultural dignity does not derive – as in Kunzle´s viewpoints – from the lineage relations between the caricature and the pictorial art of drawing: in this sense, humor drawing is, according to Gordon, subjected to the process in which this same aspect of social criticism and political satire through humor drawing involves a process of commodification of these same practices – what is at the very heart of his thesis on the origin of modern graphic humor, in the way in which the universes of daily comic strips cum perform these same functions:
“These characters won comic strips an institutionalized place in newspapers, first in New York and later across the country. Artists' development of popular characters, rather than the graphic form per se, accounted for the strips' success. Indeed, artists created mechanisms basic to the comic strip as means of embellishing their characters. Devices such as panels and word balloons worked to elaborate and extend these characters by placing them in narratives and supplying them with voices. More important, comic strips were the form newspaper proprietors, editors, and artists developed to market distinct comic art characters. Characters laid the basis for widespread distribution of comic strips and development of the formal properties of the artform that later proved useful for advertising”. (GORDON, 1998: 14)
Another non-insignificant aspect of this origin of comics as a commodity is undoubtedly the fact that a significant part of its subjects is correlated with childhood and with its more privileged modes of representation - at least from the point of view of the comic fun with which are often programmed: this aspect of the narrative imagination about childhood consumes the energies of a good part of those who reflect on this pioneering graphic humor in the genesis of comics, as well as serving as a model for an immense contingent of analytical literature on humor. These perspectives imply the cultural analysis of these products, and specifically the correlation between subjects privileged by this cultural universe and specific agendas characteristic of different eras and styles. By the way, just consider what was supposed to have made the reason for the success of a character like the Yellow Kid – admittedly the first comic hero in comics, created by Richard Outcault, in 1896:
“Why did the Yellow Kid succeed in capturing the public's fancy when other characters had failed? What made him special? Obviously, his bright yellow nightshirt with humorous messages scrawled thereon caught the reader's eye. Further, the Yellow Kid had a striking appearance. He was bald and big-eared, and at first glance many readers assumed he was Oriental. In fact, his name was "Mickey Dugan" and he was an Irish tenement hooligan. The strip portrayed familiar locales, such as Coney Island, and incorporated topics of special interest, such as the America's Cup race”. (OLSON, 1993: 28)
The fact that this character is a child, on the other hand, is not a
negligible aspect, in the considerations about a specific cultural logic in
which the graphic humor of comics is inscribed, from its origins to the present
day: if we consider the immense lineage of children characters who populated
this cultural quadrant so far, there is something to think about the dimensions
in which childhood is constituted as a universe of reference for these
productions.
We can speculate on those dimensions in which childhood is just an alibi of these narrative universes, fundamentally constructed by the perception of adults about this phase of life, the most crucial feature for a historical approach to these issues is certainly to do, once again, with the graphic humor commodification processes: the emergence of a good part of these characters, whether in the origin of the comics or in its further development, has an immense correlation with the rise of a readership of this same age group – at least in a good number of these cases – and the fact that the presence of these characters in different contexts of consumption (not only the cultural one, but that of products associated with these characters, through the advertising they lend to them) consolidates the cultural circulation that newspapers start to promote about these products.
In the case of studies on graphic humor in more specific national contexts, such as those that traverse the history of the genre in Latin America and more particularly in Brazil, the emphasis of cultural analysis falls less on aspects such as the cultural/historical matrices upon which it forms the centrality of humor (as an element of social or political commentary), to the same extent that, despite its relative similarity to the factors that condition its appearance in this specific environment, the Latin American case - and the Brazilian case included therein, do not involve the process of consolidating a logic of commodification of these products, except in absolutely exceptional cases, such as Turma da Mônica, in Brazil, created by Maurício de Sousa.
To a certain extent, and due to the character, that informs the genesis and development of a culture of graphic humor in this other quadrant, it can be said that the systematic reflection on these phenomena is more informed by certain intellectual agendas that guide the analyzes in this field, than the social and political realities from which this production originates. Perhaps it is better to say that the political contexts of Latin America, in the period when a certain interest in graphic humor becomes more pronounced (that is, around the 60s of the last century), infuse in the methodological frameworks of this thought the idea that certain branches of social theories begin to incorporate, relatively to a more sophisticated criticism of the ideological discourse in the field of culture.
Product of a time when specific segments of the social sciences were beginning to welcome these new cultural materials (in the wake of the equal incorporation of the instruments of a newborn Semiology, in turn, applied to these same materials of a “mass” popular culture), these ideas about comics, in the more general context of cultural analysis, reflected a then desired conjunction between the rigours of a closer analysis in the textual details of the meaning of these universes and a critical view of the discursive tricks in which these devices of textual meaning reflected movements of systems deeper ideological lines – somehow prolonging that same programmatic line scribbled, among others, by Roland Barthes' semiological project, in Mythologies.
Without it being necessary to decline the
immense line of authors who represent this sort of conjunctive ethos of the
sciences of text and meaning and theories of ideology (some of which are fully
circulating in our contemporary intellectual culture, even today), I only
recall this passage from a preface to the 1970 edition of his book on the myths
of a modern media culture, in which Barthes sets out the very parameters of
this theoretical and methodological convergence:
“What remains, however, beside the essential enemy (the bourgeois norm), is the necessary conjunction of these two enterprises: no denunciation without an appropriate method of detailed analysis, no semiology which cannot, in the last analysis, be acknowledged as semioclasm”. (BARTHES, 1972: 8)
Especially in the case of authors such as Umberto Eco (writing about Charles Schulz, Quino and other comic creators) and of lesser-known pioneers among us, such as Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle (author of the first more extensive treatise on comics, resulting from his doctoral thesis, back in 1972 ), this attention given to graphic universes reflected the spirit of a “semiological adventure” that was outlined within the debates of the social sciences - with notable consequences for the acceptance of a heuristic derived from the understanding of varied cultural phenomena, from their textual dimension of manifestation.
This context of crossing a cultural analysis by the critique of ideology is also particularly contemporary with the famous reflection that Armand Mattelart and Ariel Dorfmann dedicated to the universe of comics, with their very influential essay on How to Read Donald Duck, from 1972: for entire generations of those who, located in the emerging field of studies on Communication, included sub-domains such as comics as centers of interest, the apparent novelty introduced in terms of cultural materiality did not hide the fact that the main agenda of this thought was clearly that of identifying the compromises between the cultural production of modernity and the geopolitical assemblages of global domination, in the cultural logic of capitalism.
This is an aspect of the thinking about
comics that, not infrequently, culminates in the attenuation (or even in the
suppression) of the expressional and material particularities of the 9th Art –
and, why not say, of all the segments of a cultural industry strongly
structured in the basis of mere cognitive simulation and seduction. And, even
these days, especially in the more local or regional quadrant of research on
comics, it is noticeable how much the lack of greater attention to these
“internal” dimensions of the 9th Art causes harm to greater profitability of
all that - which derives from the relationships between such expressive and
narrative universes and the social, political, and economic dynamics of
cultural circulation on a massive scale. Examples of this perception are not
rare, of which I offer only a sampling here, in the introduction of a
collection of texts on the contemporary context of the cultural production of
comics in Latin America:
“Following the cultural neo-imperialism of earlier periods of comics production, I will argue that the diverse manifestations of comics circulating beyond print media demonstrates how they have become a key site for exploring and contesting transnational exchanges, and also for developing dialogues between state-driven narratives of identities, histories and traditions and those fomented by NGOs and comics communities”. (SCORER, 2004: 4)
The constant subordination of the so-called “internal” perspectives of analysis, identified under the damnable cloak of “immanentism”, or “formalism”, and now identified as mere auxiliary lines of sociological analysis, were already identified by someone like David William Foster as associated with certain deformations of culturalism in the academic field of cultural analysis:
“Superficially, it could appear oxymoronic to conjoin the study of Latin American popular culture and the theoretical principles of semiology – that is, the study of the process by which texts create meaning their structural organization, and their production within the context of the cultural and ideological codes of a society. Nevertheless, such scholars as Umberto Eco have demonstrated how much we can say about the texts of mass culture by utilizing these principles (…). But the vast majority of writing about Latin American popular culture has been based on the techniques of content analysis and on a form of ideological interpretation that is a variety of the hermeneutics of meaning in the service of sociocultural analysis.” (FOSTER, 1989: 7)
If we consider, finally, a certain state of
intellectual segregation between approaches to cultural analysis, specifically
in the way it organizes certain thematic zones in comic book studies, we can
see how justified these considerations are about the lack of greater attention
to the study of variables in this field. phenomenon less guided by agendas
external to the, so to speak, expressional dimensions of comics: a sole
example, there has been a considerable increase in the perspectives of analysis
that value cognitivist perspectives of the aesthetic reception and appreciation
of graphic universes, certainly tributary to the treasure that the pioneers of
these studies more oriented by the textual and plastic dimension of the comic
forms bequeathed to us.
And especially in the cognitivist segments of
comic narratology, it is remarkable how precisely this heritage is mobilized,
less in a merely celebratory and reverent spirit (of the kind that inaugurates
rooms with the names of honorees), but with the intellectual respect that
demands simultaneous doses. The memory of the origins and the critical
assessment of the present, in which these first thoughts can still – or not –
remain in the game of heuristics proposed for the valorization of the
phenomenon of comics in contemporary cultural analysis. For it is in such a
framework of respect and criticism that Eco's initial ideas, for example, are
considered, evaluated, and critically pondered, within the framework of the new
theories of narrative that are used contemporaneously in many studies of
comics:
“Eco looks for codes, that is, conventionalized signs that we can read because we know, from our cultural context, what they mean. I look for clues, that is, elements on the page that prompt readers to draw particular inferences which, in turn, can be based on our cultural knowledge or psychological capacities. Eco focuses on how this comic (primarily) reproduces and modifies cultural conventions to tell its story. I propose to focus (primarily) on how it engages readers’ everyday cognitive capacities for making sense of the world. On Eco’s semiotic account, comics form a system of signification in which readers need to be competent. On my cognitive account, comics dynamically play into our cognitive predilections and put them to particular narrative and literary use”. (KUKKONEN, 2013: 13)
What worries me, as an aspect of a better and more productive organization of the field of studies of comics, especially in the context in which a greater epistemological complexity is consolidated in many of its contemporary aspects, is precisely how much the dominance of thematic elements (today embodied in a considerable number of propositions that make the cultural examination of comics just a pretext for staging important current political agendas) ends up shaping any heuristic perspectives more centered on the text, the narrative, the regimes of aesthetic comprehension and reading, such as if they were second-rate articles, left out in the consolidation of this field.
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