Session of Feb. 28: From politics to poetics of laughter in graphic humor
In the last session of the course, I presented some methodological questions about the cultural analysis of graphic humor, taking as a reference some discussions that cut across the reflection on two particular sub-fields of studies on comics: on the one hand, the way in which certain aspects from cultural history identify the genesis of comics as a cultural form, as the conjunction of technological, artistic and economic variables of cultural modernity; on the other side, in the context of the origin of the academic interest in the studies on comics and graphic humor, especially in light of Latin American scenarios - with the particular emphasis brought by the instruments and vocabularies of the social sciences of the last century and under the specific focus of critical views on the social scene in these contexts.
In these two main lines in which this discourse on comics and the specificity of graphic humor have developed, my working hypothesis reflects several points that emerge in some of these fields – more particularly in the key brought by some of the authors that I mobilized for this last exposition (such as David Foster and Ian Gordon, among others): in the case of perspectives from cultural history on the origin of comics, I notice a predominance of economic and technological variables over those that emerge from a better understanding of the consolidation of drawing styles specific to humor – especially in the perspective of its a more focused interpretation on the expressional materials of this art; in the case of approaches that link visual humor in Latin America to the social and political realities of the region, it bothers me that little attention is paid to what concerns the impact of these manifestations, from the point of view that I would decline to be of a sensitive or aesthetic appeal of those materials.
In the first case, I have emphasized how approaches of cultural history neglected the dynamics in which the problem of graphic humor in comic strips and visual jokes emerges, even when they recognize it only punctually: Gordon's perspective of analysis, for example, is not far from such a required sensitivity to the stylistic matrices of late 19th-century art of drawing, but his main concern with the relationship between these genres and a consumer culture sustained by several aspects of these formats ends up distancing his views from these very issues - in a manner not seen in the postures of other scholars such as David Kunzle, for example.
Moreover, in the case of structured perspectives on the examination of comics in Latin America and Brazil, Foster's text points in the direction of another type of negligence, namely, that which marks the silencing of cultural analyzes in this field on the variables of textual construction of the sense of humor, in the art of cartoonists like Ziraldo or Quino. To that end, let us consider the case of the analysis of a character such as “Jeremiah the Good One”, by Ziraldo, published in the humor section of Jornal do Brasil, at the very time of the beginning of the military regime in Brazil, in the 60s of the last century: what is required for a cultural analysis of the format of this particular comics is more than those merely thematic (or content-driven) correlation between episodes of each strip and the current political affairs of the country; instead, let us take into account those traces of the visual and graphic style of Ziraldo´s drawing and also the narrative strategies thereby replicated from episode to episode – and in which communication established between graphic humor and its audience is consolidated, even more notably, in contexts of particularly heightened political tension.
A cultural analysis that could do justice to these aspects should not neglect the evident connections of these productions with their specific contexts. Still, it would not need to overlook the subtleties through which their expression is materialized in traits of style, for example – something Foster reminds us when commenting on the particular trait of Jeremiah, either in terms of drawing embodiment or in the qualities of his character:
“Jeremias is portrayed as having no trunk to his body, and there is nothing below the waist but his spindly legs and enormous shoes; the shoulder area is extremely accentuated and schematic; especially with the geometric centering of the tie; the man wears an old-fashioned stiff collar, and the lines on his face suggest a more or less constant state of abashment. The disconsonance of the figure of Jeremias in terms of the other more relatively realistically represented characters is one of Ziraldo´s strategies for establishing a focal point of reference for Jeremias.” (FOSTER, 1989: 20)
Well, now is the time to go a little further in the direction of those points that specific authors identify as problematic questions of method, in the cultural analysis of graphic humor – in the perspectives suggested by cultural history and the social sciences: without disregarding the political and economic realities that condition the ways visual humor is consecrated in its entertainment functions (or else commodified in several of its aspects, as an engine of consumer culture), we are interested in dwelling a little deeper on the perspectives of analysis which allow us to locate the cultural and symbolic effectiveness of these products, in those aspects highlighted by a poetics of graphic humor.
With that in mind, I am less inclined towards denying the intrinsic value of more traditional perspectives of cultural analysis of comics - but instead indicating in these theories the lack of nuances allowing for a better source of the social impact of these products; such aspects usually escape from economical or sociological logics, in a more or less exclusive way. To this end,lLet us think about the case brought to the fore by Isabella Cosse, as she builds on the permanence and influence of the narrative universe of the character Mafalda, created by the Argentine cartoonist Quino: published for practically 10 years in the leading periodicals of the country, this character was ended around 1973 – shortly before the onset of the period of most significant political violence in Argentina, with the 1976 coup and the establishment of the military junta, which would govern the country until the mid-1980s.
Even though no new episodes have been published since the end of Mafalda´s adventures, this fictional universe continued to make significant connections with the various reconfigurations of the political scenery in that country. Not to mention the evocation that this character and her companions continued to establish with various other contexts of the struggle for individual freedoms and public policies in different periods after the original publication of Quino´s work. According to Cosse, this phenomenon of permanence of the relevance of graphic humor would be associated with an aspect of the social memory retained by this particular creation:
“In 1973 the importance of Quino’s decision was not immediately evident but, over time, it helped the more atemporal meanings of the comic, as well as the new meanings created by the manner in which the strip was constantly being reworked and brought up to date, to endure. As a result, Quino unwittingly breathed fresh life into his creation. The updated pact with its readers meant that Mafalda began to evoke meanings tied to the time of its creation and daily publication (the 1960s), mobilizing the history of the strip itself and its relationship to the lives of individual readers. It began, in short, to speak to the relationship between past and present. Mafalda was located in the sphere of collective memory”. (COSSE, 2017: 88)
In Cosse´s perspective, the issues related to greater attention for the “textual production” aspects of graphic humor - as elaborated by Foster in the light of the case of Ziraldo – are certainly not entirely ignored: these are possibilities for approaching the reasons why such a phenomenon of Mafalda´s survival which could be ultimately approached. Cosse recognizes and enumerates these cases when she mentions other theoretical works situated in perspectives closer to a “poetics” of comics - and even certain approaches to semiology that were certainly responsible for the popularization of the systematic studies on these cultural forms (especially when approaching the specific case of this character of Quino).
One of the most famous cases is the
introduction of a collection of comic strips by Mafalda, published in Italy, in
1969, and written by Umberto Eco – in which the semiologist discusses the
parallels between this character and other cases of “problematic children”, of
which the most famous example is Charlie Brown, created by Charles Schulz:
“Mafalda's universe is not only that of an urban and developed Latin America: it is also, in general and in many aspects, a Latino universe, and that makes her more understandable than many characters in North American comics. In short, Mafalda, in all situations, is a 'heroine of our time', something that does not seem like an exaggerated qualification for the little character of paper and ink that Quino proposes. No one denies that comic strips (when they reach a certain level of quality) assume a questioning function of customs. And Mafalda reflects the tendency of a restless youth that assumes here the paradoxical form of childish dissidence, of psychological schemes of reaction to the mass media, of moral hives caused by the logic of the Cold War, of intellectual asthma caused by the Atomic mushroom. Since our children are going to become - by our merit - so many other Mafaldas, it will be prudent for us to treat her with the respect that a real character deserves.”
It is curious that, in the eyes of a Semiologist, it is precisely the same orders of questions that are of interest in the evaluation of the survival of the appeal for audiences from different times and social contexts in the adventures of a comic book character - except for the fact that that these aspects of cultural impact are here evaluated from a different standpoint of that of a cultural historian like Cosse: from the outset, it is the fact that, for Eco, there is something related to this character's fictional universe (let us call it the " narrative logic" of Mafalda's fictional world) that precedes, in some way, the aspects typically chosen by historians and social scientists to address such signals of Quino´s success and cultural importance.
In the approach of textual semiology, it is
more important to consider the relationship between the internal elements of
this narrative universe, as well as the fact that they belong to recognizable
lineages of other sorts of characters in graphic humor throughout the last
century - such as, for example, the fact that they are children who behave like
adults. None of this, however, implies any disregarding of the specific social
and political contexts from which each of these works originates (as in the
case of the comparison between Quino and Schulz):
“Charlie Brown is American; Mafalda is South American. Charlie Brown belongs to a prosperous country, to an opulent society to which he desperately seeks to integrate, begging for welfare and solidarity. Mafalda belongs to a country full of social contrasts that, however, wants to integrate her and make her happy. But Mafalda resists and rejects all attempts. Charlie Brown lives in a children's universe from which, strictly speaking, adults are excluded (although children aspire to behave like adults). Mafalda lives in a continuous dialectical relationship with the adult world that she does not esteem or respect, which she opposes, ridicules and repudiates, claiming her right to continue being a child who does not want to be incorporated into the adult universe of her parents. her. Charlie Brown must have read Freud's “revisionists” and is looking for a lost harmony; Mafalda probably read Che"
From the perspective of social history and
memory studies, however, other views are valued for the examination of the
inscription of the social impact of graphic humor: in Cosse, these questions
involve a preference for aspects of Quino´s work recognition that are external
to the manifestation of visual humor as governed by certain horizons of effect
conferred by the textual form of the humor drawing and the daily strips.
Therefore, whatever be the cultural value of these narrative universes, it must
be situated within the scope of the social dynamics of the transmission of
collective memory about political realities - which is particularly significant
in Mafalda's relationship with the different incarnations of political tension
in Argentina of the last 35 years, at least:
“I aim to understand the meanings attributed to Mafalda in the 1980s and 1990s, when it was positioned in the field of social memory. The way its meaning was located in the present was tied to events that shook Argentine society and everyday life across Latin America and beyond, namely the trials of those who had violated human rights, debates over the 1960s and 1970s, and the rise of neoliberalism. Within this context, both the comic and the character became image, object, and mode of questioning the past but always in relation to the realities and struggles created by the crisis in the sense of belonging that it had fomented. These questions over the past, facilitated by Mafalda, allow us to assess how a certain progressive sensibility addressed, during the 1980s, political debates over human rights and the political violence of the 1970s and in the 1990s the abandonment of social utopias and the triumph of neoliberalism”. (COSSE, 2017: 89)
There is an aspect of curious coincidence between such approaches and those that I have already identified as more specific to certain branches of cultural history. Cosse mentions a trace of the origin of Mafalda's character which connects to contexts of the commodification of graphic humor, something at the center of Ian Gordon's reflection on the origin of North American comics, namely: the fact that this character was born from a demand by advertising agencies, in search of elements of attraction for advertising strategies on electrical products. In this sense, the character's origin, long before serving to represent the values of political contestation and existential dissatisfaction, was precisely the spearhead of a mercantile strategy, centred on his/her attractive potentialities, as one acknowledges its carrying of qualities proper to advertising of commodities.
In a similar vein to what happens with parts of the universe of contemporary modern comics, Mafalda's case is in the lineage of a potentiality of commodification that crosses the history of graphic humor, practically since its origin. This is precisely the topic that moves Ian Gordon to think about the consolidation of the cultural form of humor drawing, especially when childhood is implied as a topic – Mafalda being representative of most recent cases, while Outcault´s creations being the inaugural instances. We already saw - in the previous session, with Gordon´s help - the ways in which the appearance of a modality of graphic humor more focused on the recurrence of characters and narrative situations of a certain type triggers a culture of commodification of graphic humor that is considerably less explored in historical studies on this cultural form.
Well, since the very origin of comics,
articulated in that triple condition of technical, stylistic and economic
circulation conditions provided by the media (visual humor newspapers and
children's sections of daily newspapers), the appearance of graphic humor as a
cultural form is virtually inseparable from the potentials for the commercialization
of these figures-characters – as illustrated by the cases of Mafalda, Snoopy,
and, at the very origin of the phenomenon, the creations of Outcault, Yellow
Kid and Buster Brown.
“Outcault´s Yellow Kid demonstrated the potential of comic characters to capture the public´s imagination and boost newspaper circulation. Both Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst saw this potential and waged a battle over the right to publish the Yellow Kid comics. Hearst arrived in New York from San Francisco in 1895. He took control of the New York Journal and set about emulating Pulitzer´s Sunday World. To achieve this goal in the shortest possible time, he hired away from the Sunday World almost the entire staff at higher salaries. When Hearst decided to publish a humor supplement, it was natural to poach Outcault, especially because his ‘Hogan´s Alley’ was the central feature of the World supplement.” (GORDON, 1998: 32)
Going further in this process in which cultural consolidation of comics and graphic humor goes in hand with the contexts in which humorous drawing is commodified to advertise consumer products, Gordon examines the case of this second Outcault creation, Buster Brown: especially evaluating the aspect of intensification of this association of comic book characters with a series of products associated with his profile and his identity, Gordon focuses more especially on the character´s shoes bearing his name and which borrowed aspects of the character's very appearance and clothing.
But, as Gordon observes, the process of commodification of comics expanded in very different directions, according to the aspects that were desired for exploration - as an extension of the artistic effect that this cultural form began to experience, from its circulation in the daily newspapers, at the beginning of the 20th century: this commercial advertising of the impact of these figures did not only involve the emulation of narrative universes, through products (such as dolls, garments or the like), but also implied the very materiality of the drawn line, and its potential of manifestation on other sorts of media platforms: from this period of genesis of the modern form of graphic humor, the crossings taking place between comics and animation have involved practically all the main protagonists of these narrative universes- among which Gordon particularly recalls the cases of Winsor McCay and George Herriman.
Beyond these aspects in which commercialization of graphic humor universes becomes a kind of “advertising norm” for disseminating products, and as one approaches the incorporation of wider expressive resources of the art of comics (with visual sequences and graphic resources own to this universe), I am interested in evaluating this correlation between graphic humor and its potential for a consumer culture at the beginning of the 20th century. In another perspective of this same end, I am interested in appreciating something left in momentary suspension by such ideas about the origin of comics - something that leads me to think about how much the dimension of poetic creation of individuals like Outcault, Herriman and McCay is somehow diminished, by means of processes of appropriation by the logic of mercantile circulation in which the vehicles in which graphic humor starts to be recognized work as a cultural form in the early 20th century.
These discussions call for a more nuanced outstanding care regarding these evident correlations between cultural and artistic production and the economic models that sustain and promote it, hence requesting from analysts a little more focus on another source of its recognition and consecration: this other dimension to which a cultural analysis of graphic humor demands our attention is a key to what I define as a poetic approach to graphic humor. And even in perspectives such as that of cultural history, exemplified by the work of Ian Gordon, this dimension never seems to be completely subtracted from analytical consideration, insofar as the aspects that make this production something culturally recognizable are certainly correlated with evaluation criteria that claim this very nuance of a “poetics of graphic humor”:
“Comic strips with continuing casts proved well suited to the task of habit formation. Their attraction lay in their unique and striking characters. To late twentieth-century readers this may seem obvious because we are accustomed to the mass media´s creation of new characters, such as Bart Simpson, with sharply defined personalities. But at the opening of the century the construction of such characters was a recent phenomenon. Comic strip artists still, however, had to give their characters voices before those characters could meet the standard of performance required of the twentieth-century personality and thus be able to achieve celebrity status.” (GORDON, 1998: 34-35)
In this sense, a cultural history of graphic humor more focused on the role of certain authors is the perspective allowing us to delineate more clearly this aspect of an orientation of cultural analysis more guided by the poetic horizons of the effect of creations on the audience, in the origin of these cultural forms: for this is how the historian Donald Crafton refers to the case of the French artist Emile Cohl (1857/1938), a pioneer in the art of comics and film animation, but who works in a context considerably different from the one in which we recognize the genesis of graphic humor published in printed vehicles at the beginning of the 20th century.
In the chapter dedicated to the thorny problem of the mediatic intersections that define the respective influence between comics and cinema, in the passage between the last two centuries, Crafton explores a critical aspect of the genesis of graphic humor, undoubtedly related to the origin of cultural modernity, as centered on the technological transformations linked to printed forms and the emergence of photography and cinema as modalities of visual recording – and usually less crossed by commercial injunctions resulting from the continued exploitation of these same resources.
In other words, the perspective in which Crafton captures the importance of Cohl's work identifies his creations as installed in the context of a "culture of attractions", typical of the universe of shows characteristic of early 20th-century modernity and more oriented by expressive potentialities of these resources than by their commercial exploitation results: it is in these terms, for example, that the discussion about the origin of graphic humor and comic strips emerges more guided by the possible correlations between the genesis of these formats and the structures of the burlesque spectacle, consecrated by the first cinema of the same period.
This is a context of cultural analysis in which the register of commentary implies questions that are too specific to the characteristic sensitivity of studies on media forms – as in the case of cinematographic studies: the debate on the potential proximities between the format of daily strips and the first cinema reveals this trace of sensitivity of historical consideration closer to the expressional structures of cultural formats – as in this passage in which Crafton evaluates the structures of narrative staging in both formats:
“Rather than shifting points of view and moving the camera, the first generation of filmmakers tended to shoot continuous actions as self-contained tableau, regardless of whether the source material was ´original´ or a comic-strip adaptation (…). This answers the question as to why, if there were so many affinities, did it take cinema so long to discover its ´language´ when it was there waiting for it all along in the comic strip?” (CRAFTON, 1990: 225)
At this point in our exploration, we begin to get closer to the details of that perspective of cultural analysis I am designating as a “poetics of graphic humour”: it should imply considerations of a historical nature about the origin of comics - including aspects such as the mixture of material and technological resources in which the formats of political satire and social commentary are consecrated that make the art of humorous drawing recognizable in our experience.
But, in addition to these aspects, a poetic approach to graphic humor will also take into account what happens on the plane of the humorous drawing, as an aspect of its consolidation as a pictorial style – as well as the narrative potentialities that emerge from the resources it mobilizes for the experience of its continued enjoyment and consumption. These will, however, be the topics of our next exploration, only at our next meeting.
References:
COSSE, Isabella. “Mafalda: talisman of democracy and icon of nostalgia for the 1960´s”. In: Comics and Memory in Latin America (Jorge Catalá Carrasco, Paulo Drinot, James Scorer, eds.), Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2017: pp. 86-107
CRAFTON, Donald. “Graphic humor and early cinema”. In: Emile Cohl, Caricature, and Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990: pp. 221-256;
GORDON, Ian. "Comic Strips as Culture: from national phenomenon to everyday life". In: Comic Strips and Consumer Culture (1890-1945). Washington: Smithsonian, 1998: pp. 80-105.
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