In this installment of The Beat, comics reporter and former Vertigo editor Heidi MacDonald takes a look at Chris Ware's The Best American Comics 2007 and asks where all the stories went.
So what’s my beef? Well, the tenor of the book is struck, unsurprisingly, from the very first page, a comic called “The Horror of Simply Being Alive” by Ivan Brunetti. I think you can see where this is going. This is followed up with Art Spigelman’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!” which presents an autobiographical tale of the typical self-loathing young nerd finding solace in comics as a refuge from failure in sports, parental attention, love and even the purchase of a pup tent.
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Writes Ware, “I think we’re at a point here where it’s becoming clear that comics can accomodate a variety of sensibilities and wildly divergent dispositions, and I wonder whether the more dramatic mode of presented scenes and situations is necessarily the only approach.”
Comics as a medium not a genre? Daring! Thus, give a formalist the reigns and he’ll chose other formalists. No surprise there. Or as Ware continues:
But even a casual flip through of the pages of this book will demonstrate a highly individual approach by each and every artist all with the aim of getting at something new or, more preceisly, real.
While I enjoy wallowing in the misery and pointlessly of the Real, the problem here, I think is that the history of great literature is full of the UNREAL and that’s what missing from The Usual Suspects. Like I said, it’s not that there’s anything in this volume (unlike last year’s odd batch) that doesn’t belong, it’s just that it’s all so, so real.
Ware arranges the contents as a journey from non fiction to fiction, but by the end we’ve only gotten to Dan Zettwoch’s account of the historical Louisville Flood. Whoa, buddy, easy there – that’s just one step removed from Countdown Presents: The Search for Ray Palmer !
In terms of scope, this books has only traveled from Soho to Nolita. What ever happened to the tradition of creators like Winsor McCay, George Herriman, Charles Shulz, Milton Caniff and Carl Barks? And Herge and Tezuka and Frank King and Jack Kirby and Chester Gould and C.C. Beck and Harvey Kurtzman?
What ever happened to Stan Sakai and Sergio Aragones? They’re actually mentioned in the postscript of the book, compiled by Moore, of the year’s top 100 comics. I can’t help but feel a frowny face coming on. Stan Sakai and Sergio Aragones are national goddamned treasures. Any club that won’t have them, I don’t want to be in.
This is something littlestar has complained about -- storytelling has a huge value all its own, and shouldn't be ignored. In summing up her essay, Heidi points out that the current boom in "comics as literature" was spurred largely by a bunch of storytellers:
I think of Spiegelman’s daring conceit that made MAUS the classic it is, using the conventions of a genre to tell the most horrific story in modern history.
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I’m not sure who the next Jeff Smith or Stan Sakai is. I only know that great fiction is great storytelling and great moments, whether it’s Molly Bloom wandering through Dublin, Indiana Jones stealing the idol, Ignatz throwing a brick, Charlie Brown kicking a football, Luba taking her kids to meet their fathers or the story twist at the end of I KILLED ADOLF HITLER. Or even the SIlver Surfer giving up Zenn-la to save Earth.
The current generation of cartoonists has amazing chops. And they are young. Great work takes some maturity, I think. The kids need to suffer. And they need some guidance and role models. My hope is that they will continue to cast a wide net for those role models. If they do, it’s quite possible that the best really is yet to come.