I've been following the growing discussion on lit crit and webcomics over at Websnark because, well, I'm still a lit crit geek. Duh. Anyway, Ursula Vernon (of Digger and gearworld fame) has some of my favorite entries. On the lit crit / fan fic connection:

For people with a literary background, who can speak with authority about literary devices and actually know who Balzac was, this sort of criticism can be FUN. Frustrating, tough, sure, granted, geeky, hell yeah, but it's basically an English major equivalent of arguing about where access panels on the Enterprise were located. It is an expression of passion for the form, in the idiom that these people enjoy. It's all about The Love, or at least an analysis of why The Love failed in this particular case.

Better still, Ursula gets the Best Metaphor award in the secondary discussion that's developed there re: the place of authorial intent:

The only way to make your interpretation stick is to stand next to the canvas and grab each viewer by the lapels and scream "THIS IS WHAT I MEAN!" Even that's only got a fifty-fifty shot. Merely posting an explanation won't do it. Once you do art, it goes out into the wide world, a tender, trembling doe-eyed image, stepping on delicate little Bambi-like hooves through the grasses of sweet innocence, and then the viewers jump on it and mug it. You find your painting in [a] pool of vomit in a back alley a few hours later, with two black eyes, torn clothes, reeking of booze, and the only thing still IN its wallet is your artist's statement.

Much, much more at the link. Part of the reason I haven't jumped in is because I don't think I have it in me to read all of it, but even skimming, it's some good stuff. If you're so inclined, take a look.

Tags: art, criticism, recommendations, webcomics

I seem to run into more and more days when I wish I had a better vocabulary for discussing visual art. I don't know if that means I'm finally starting to develop the beginnings of an eye for these things, or if I'm just overwhelmingly jealous of The Pickytarian, but either way, it's there.

Heck, this time it's not even the line art generally, but is focused on the inks. Specifically, Andrew Hennessy's inks on Spellbinders #1. Between this and his work on Madrox, Hennessy's developed a line that's ... see, here's where the words start flipping me off and loudly mocking my inability to use them. I want to say it's fluid, but that's not right. Or, rather, it's not right in context. A fluid line is such because it flows, whereas Hennessy's line is fluid in the liquid sense. In both of the books listed above, figures seem, well, malleable, I suppose. Soft. Just a little ... melty? I have this weird sense in some panels like I could dip my finger into the image and the whole thing would suddenly produce ripples along its surface.

In both cases, it works just fine for me. Madrox, with its questions of identity and duplicating / absorbing mutants (and shapeshifting mutants, for that matter) seems the kind of story that benefits from equally fluid visuals. Spellbinders does the same. There are unseen demony things and people turning into piles of lizards and hands shaping themselves out of walls. With the overall sense that the world isn't as ... well, solid and immutable as we want it to be, that same liquid effect contributes to the atmosphere of it all.

There may not be a point here, beyond the fact that I (probably unfairly) don't tend to attribute stylistic elements to inkers, and I'm kind of excited that I seem to have come across one all on my lonesome. Possibly, too, this is just a blind call for confirmation that I'm not just convincing myself the element's there.

Tags: art, comics, criticism

A week or so ago, I finally found a copy of Dann Slott, Juan Bobillo, and Paul Pelletier's She-Hulk: Single Green Female, the collection of the first six issues of the series that just went on hiatus. I jumped on late in the game, so this caught me up with what I was missing. It's a bit like reading a series backwards, in that I kept hitting on set ups in the early stories which paid off in the stories I already knew.

As I made my way through the first four stand-alone stories, I could appreciate how clever Slott was being. Most self-aware super-hero stories have a tendency to think winking at the audience is in and of itself worth the return of a trope. While I'd say Slott's still winking, he's also twisting the super-hero standards he's playing with enough to make the story he's telling new while still familiar.

As I read along, however, I realized I wasn't--as I had with later Slott She-Hulk stories--laughing. Flipping back through, I could certainly see the joke moments. It wasn't that early issues had fewer jokes or something. Rather, I was nodding and smirking at them rather than trying to hold back an obnoxious guffaw. I wanted to say that Slott just got funnier as he went along, that he traded in one kind of humor for another. But, really, when the first story alone has She-Hulk belly-bouncing men out of her bed, free parking gags, and drinking your enemy under the table ... no, the humor was of the same temperament, certainly.

Then I hit the two-part "Big House" story, and all of a sudden I was laughing again. As I finished up, it occurred to me that the first few She-Hulk issues I tried had worked the same way. The cosmic judge story had been clever but not laugh-out-loud funny, but She-Hulk's return to Earth had me in stitches. The answer was fairly obvious, then. Somewhere in my head Juan Bobillo's artwork makes She-Hulk a clever-humor / smirking book; Paul Pelletier gives me a She-Hulk owing far more to slapstick and belly laughs.

For me, this is something new. I can't really remember reading a book and having its entire tone shift with a change of artist. That doesn't mean it didn't happen, but if it did, I wasn't aware of it.

I have to say, the criticism brain in me is getting something of a kick out of the experience. That I can stipulate the writing style isn't notably altered between the issues gives me this wonderful little artsy plaything / learning tool for analyzing how humor and tone and atmosphere work in comics. Little tingles I've got over that.

So I flip through and look at, say, Bobillo's more understated facial expressions. I find myself realizing that Pelletier tends to lay out his pages to emphasize a lot of the visual "punch lines," where Bobillo often puts those elements in a corner of his page or off-center in a panel. I look at who seems to use more close ups (I'd say Pelletier), whose figures feel "lighter" on the page (I'm going with Bobillo).

While I still don't have the (visual) vocabulary to really do justice to the discussion, I nonetheless find the study intriguing. All these individual elements I so often take for granted add up to two similar but noticeably different books. It's one of those things that reminds me how comics are unique, and probably explains why I'm still reading them.

Tags: art, comics, criticism

Creative Autonomy Myth #2: Purity of Vision

The argument here, as I understand it, is that the artist requires full, unencumbered freedom because each piece of interference contaminates his initial vision. Work-for-hire by its nature robs a creator of his inspirational center and expressionistic through line, and as such results in something less than art. Commissions, corporate or private, are either meant to pay the bills and fund the "real" work, or are the purview of the sell-out. This position fails to acknowledge the revision process, the tendency to get too close to one's work, and the inspirational possibilities inherent in outside influence (and, for that matter, the outside influences underlying "original inspiration" itself).

Artistic Myopia

Purity of vision implies, quite incorrectly, that there is a single vision at play when an artist expresses himself in his work. If it is a sin for someone not the artist to suggest / motivate changes in the work--since then the work has been contaminated--is it not similarly damaging to the pure vision for the artist to change it? The inspiration, the pure expression of the vision, after all, has been altered either way. That the same person killed the baby doesn't change the fact of its death.

With rare, prodigy-level exceptions, the only artists who refuse to revise their work in the act of creation are widely agreed to be either egomaniacs or rank amateurs--or both. The pursuit of art requires the artist be malleable, recognizing when his purpose (as mentioned before, the purposes can be varied) and the piece he's creating aren't working together. It might change the composition, might switch out or mix up the media, might even call for starting all over from the beginning. Art is change, and what a good artist starts toward is rarely the place he eventually ends up.

And for all that being "in the groove" creatively is a wonderful feeling, it can also be indicative of one of the other, more dangerous, aspects of a singular vision: the tendency to lose perspective.

Ideas fly in the window

Worldview is unique, and artists have a similarly unique ability to express theirs. The important element of the word, for the purposes of this argument at least, is "world." There's only one of those, and for all that an artist may have a new and exciting angle on it, he doesn't have exclusive rights to the source material.

Worldview is original, but it is also an amalgamation of world experience, such that art itself springs up from an often-unacknowledged collision of outside interference or influence. Love poems channel a love of something (and, unless they're purely masturbatory, love of something not the artist). Paintings full of rage are generally, likewise, rage evoked by an element outside the self. Stories inevitably mirror work the author has read or heard or just pieced together over the course of his life. None of it originated with him. All of it is interpreted--is, shall we say, contaminated by him.

In the end, art may be in and of itself a form of contamination. Art speaks to us not because it's pure, but because of its contaminants.

Tags: art, commentary, writing

I got started thinking about creative autonomy after reading this David Fiore post referencing this Ninth Art editorial by Alasdair Watson and the Delphi thread David started in response (Delphi registration required for that last link). I'm not sure this is really a direct response (though I suppose it may eventually come back to being that), but inspirational credit where it's due and all that.

In any case, it seems to me that most arguments about super-hero comics vs. "indy" books are, firstly, actually debates about corporate-owned comics vs. creator-owned ones, and that the heart of that debate is either one of fiscal control or creative autonomy, depending on the angle. The fiscal argument isn't as clear-cut as it seems, in that plenty of "creator-owned" series aren't, really, as creator ownership deals differ between publishers, and don't necessarily include complete ownership of all ancillary rights to a property. It also doesn't interest me nearly as much as the second argument.

Let's shorthand this, then: creative autonomy is a myth. It's the Santa Claus/poodle in the microwave/magic diet pill of the artistic community. Worse still, it's a collective myth, built on a number of others. Today, the one I think lies at the core:

Art for art's sake

Art for its own sake is a wonderful aspiration, but as with most aspirations, its usefulness is in the fact that it is singularly unattainable. The problem here is that, in order to create such art, the artist can't have an audience. Or, rather, there can be an audience, but the work isn't "for" them; it is not--and cannot by definition--be influenced by the audience. While I've met plenty of artists self-important enough to create without a thought for any other person, even here, there is an audience: the artist herself.

She can make all the arguments she wants, but the fact of the matter is that true artists get something out of the act of creation. Whether it's a physical satisfaction, an emotional release, or an intellectual stimulation, making something out of nothing (or finding something in nothing, depending on how you view it) does something to an artist. Something that compels the creative act. Something addictive. Here already art has been compromised by the artist-as-audience. If one of the most sublime pleasures of creation is the feel of wet clay, art will inevitably skew toward sculpture. If the expression of her inner rage drives an artist, then her inner love or lust or hero-worship are all cast aside in favor of it. If she feels an endorphin rush looking back at an argument she's been trying to make for ages, now finally organized and set in words, she isn't quite so likely to make her points with pictures.

Whether she'll admit it or not, she's playing to the audience. There's nothing wrong with this, of course. She has a more intimate knowledge of her viewer/reader/consumer than anyone else. She has the inside track, you might say. But she's nonetheless sold out the ideal. Art here, as anywhere, is for someone other than itself.

Tags: art, commentary, writing

There are any number of good comics I could recommend from Girlamatic, but today I'm pointing to I Was There and Just Returned by Hope Larson. I like it for a number of reasons, not the least of which is Larson's word play; or, rather, her letter play.

Take today's update. As the protagonist (Jenne) wakes up, still a little out of it, the narration's similarly wavy and a little hard to make out. I especially love the third panel here: wispy, dotted lines and curling sentences both fill out the panel and point to Jenne's isolation. She's literally alone with her thoughts, and the lettering represents that visually.

You won't see it in the current entry, but Larson uses her word balloons just as creatively. In a previous installment, a mysterious character thanks Jenne for her help, and the balloon's tail wraps graciously around Jenne, the words embracing the character even as the sentiment does.

Okay, I'm gushing, but I haven't seen a lot of this in comics before, though it seems so very natural now that I have. In a medium where visuals and words come together, it's only appropriate that words themselves act as visuals. Brava, Hope.

And, lest you think it's all about the pretty words, there's a lot of pretty pictures here, too. Check it out.

Tags: art, recommendations, webcomics

This week's Strip Search entry teaches us the importance of the need for properly-sized lettering. Until the last page, it's all pretty squint-worthy (and even then it's borderline, it seems to me).

Of course, given that the narration is heavy handed and redundant in most spots, maybe it's supposed to be obscured by the lettering.

I haven't decided if I like the linework yet. It's certainly good for supplying moodiness, though I'm still debating if it's an original style that merely reminds me of Jae Lee, or if it's Jae Lee Clone.

Tags: art, reviews, webcomics