I'm reading "How Comic Books Became Classics/By publishing Marvel comics like Black Panther, X-Men, and The Avengers, Penguin Classics is pushing the literary canon into new, contested territory" (The New Yorker).
"Classics, by definition, have aged, and some parts of these books aged badly. ... [C]onventionally ugly or visibly disfigured characters are usually villains, from the scarred and vengeful Madame Hydra to the big, round, glum Blob. Attempts to address the civil-rights struggle suffer from a milquetoast centrism. Villains explain their plans for no good reason; everything comes with exclamation points. Women (or “girls,” like the Invisible Girl) have feminine powers, like shrinking, or espionage, or invisibility; rarely do two or more women converse. Some plots make little sense.... [T.S.] Eliot opined that true national classics had to display a 'whole range of feeling' and to elicit 'response among all classes and conditions of men.' The Marvel Universe, all in all, arguably comes close...."
We are what we share, and we are in decline.
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This stuff may be flawed in many ways but it’s still culture. I don’t know if it’s “Penguin Classics” worthy, but it is important.
“We are what we share, and we are in decline.”
Amen, sister Ann.
Althouse community!
Name the last best selling novelist who might be considered both important and serious.
I’ll start. Tom Wolfe. And I can’t think of anyone else.
Reading a classic novel requires the kind of sustained mental effort that fewer and fewer people are capable of, therefore, comic books are now the classics. Next it will be memes.
The problem with this is not that comics are not good, but that the kind of sustained mental effort required to read books is also required to make our tech based society work.
Books reached their zenith during the 1800s Victorian era when they were the only way to store standard plots (vs. live shows), and after industrialization brought the cost of printing down. Books went into decline with the rise of radio 100+ years ago. Books fell further with the dominance of movies and TVs after WWII. Books fell to being a cultural footnote with the rise of the Internet, ebooks, and social media.
I see Penguin today as merely squeezing the last bits of profit from "collectable editions" sold to nostalgic hobbyists. This says little about cultural decline and a lot about the investment dreams of the collector market.
See the rise of Marvel $$$$$$ luxury watches (150,000 CHF Black Panther here) from Audemars Piguet:
https://www.audemarspiguet.com/com/en/watch/apxmarvel.html
https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/audemars-piguet-black-panther-watch-live-pics-pricing
The language of Marvel isn't literary. It's baseball statistics. Being able to list minutiae of a beloved topic is a narrowly focused interest for a select community.
Tolkien is the universal community through shared reading, but also visual media. Miyazaki, who is strictly film, is also a global language.
“ We are what we share, and we are in decline.”
Do’h!
Re: Dave Begley:
Name the last best selling novelist who might be considered both important and serious.
Murakami Haruki?
Dave Begley,
Kurt Schlichter. His stuff is as sadly predictive as Bonfire of the Vanities.
Our great grandfathers' serial pulp/pop fiction (Dickens, Dumas, Gaskin, Hawthorne...) became our fathers' classics and our own fodder for contemporary media. How many stage, radio, movie, TV, comic book and video game versions/derivatives are there for Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Long John Silver, Lizzie Bennett, Dracula, ...?
What we are losing as a common culture are the quick references to preschool literature. Bible tales, Mother Goose rhymes, Grimms' Fairy Tales, Aesop's Fables, Greek Myths. Once an allusion to Goliath, Samson, Jonah, Lazarus ... would evoke the giant, the strong man, the jinx, the beggar reborn ... Chicken Little whose sky was falling. The Little Red Hen who, lacking assistance, would do it herself. The Goldilocks Zone. The Fox's Sour Grapes. Icarus flying near the sun. Whole concepts embedded in tales evoked by one protagonist's name. But we don't explicitly pass the tales on and so we cheat our children of both the concepts and the efficient discussion of those concepts.
Oh My Heavens, the sky *IS* falling! We must run and tell the King!
Publishers would collect Bazooka Joe gum wrappers and publish them if they thought someone would buy it for the one-liner jokes on the margins. Publishing for any "community" that can pay more than the cost of the print run is after all their business.
The Hulk I recall from comic books got stronger as he became more and more angry at the actions the puny humans took against him, and there was no defined upper limit to his strength. Pulling up a hillside to use as a bludgeon wasn't that unusual in the comic books. That changed in the movies, for the worse, I think, because Hulk was pure emotional release in his early days, not rational application of power.
I also recall the Classics Illustrated comic books, apparently a publishing move to avoid total censorship of real comic books. They were great reads, starting from higher literary standards than "Hulk smash!" and helped my appreciation of Conrad, Kipling, Melville, Hawthorne and other writers, by letting me experience the plots in picture format years before trying the often dense pages of the books.
If anime can have a series of published books about a newly hired Japanese wine salesman learning about the wines of the world (and such a series exists) why not anything else?
Re: Enigma:
Books fell to being a cultural footnote with the rise of the Internet, ebooks, and social media.
I think that's the fault of the publishers, though, not the medium. The Harry Potter books (published 1997-2007) overlapped with the rise of the internet, Myspace (2003), Facebook (2004), and Twitter (2006), and successfully attracted huge readership. If books are a cultural footnote today -- something I'm not sure is true -- it's because authors and publishers aren't putting out the kind of material that audiences want to read.
I do think, though, that it's interesting that the market for fiction hasn't democratised in the way I would have thought. To give a contrasting example, the Japanese fiction market has proper novels (including genre stuff, like the humorous detective novels I usually read) and "light novels," which are sort of like young adult fiction, a lot of fantasy and scifi, sort of like comic books/manga except novels. And an awful lot of light novels seem to start as free online novels self-published on sites like syosetu.com or kakuyomu.com. I don't know the ins and outs of how it works, but it really seems like publishers just look at what's most popular with readers on the site, license it, and publish it (sometimes with an edit and a rewrite). Meanwhile in the US you hear about these whispering campaigns and struggle sessions set up to block novels from publication -- publishers and editors seem to have set themselves up as gatekeepers over what ends up in front of readers. And I think that's been a mistake. Maybe if you're a highfalutin publishing house with reputation for a certain sort of work it makes sense to take that tack, but you need a channel to give people the bodice rippers and the dumb parallel world fantasies they want to read, even if you think they're morally or ideologically suspect.
Isn't Ibram X Kendi writing a comic book? All the cool geniuses this century are.
I just read that back in the 30s and 40s that comic books were considered trashy and low class. They were printed on cheap paper, and the expectation was that you'd throw them out after reading them.
It was also something for kids. That was still the attitude when i was a kid back in the 70s. No respectable adult cared about "Superman" or "Batman". Comics were 'silly' which is why 60s Batman was satirical.
Now, we're writing about Comicbooks in the New Yorker. And "classic" comics at that! I wonder what James Thurber or John O'hara or Harold Ross would've thought about that. I blame the Boomers. Every generation before them, put away their childish things and grew up. But the Boomers refused to stop obsessing about sports, reading comics, or listening to Rock'and Roll as they got old.
16 is the new 56.
You can argue that having 65 y/o obsessing over the NFL or batman is harmless, except its done as a SUBSTITUTE for higher culture and more important things.
Seems self-evident that a culture coheres around shared stories. A nation is in some ways a bigger version of a culture, or an amalgamation of cultures, mobilized around some common concern (e.g. going to war, electing its leaders).
Shared stories = reading the same stuff
When Tiktok replaces MTV replaces network replaces magazines replaces broadsheets, you can watch the culture dissolve and reform itself. Maybe not always for the "better."
Of course, we can't rule out that Penguin could just be exacting economic revenge for all those Classics Comic books that Boomers could use in a pinch to do book reports on assigned classics fiction works in the 50s and 60s.
Back when I was in Basic Training 50 years ago, the happiest day of the month for many of my fellow trainees was the day the new comic books came out. (We called them comic books back then). As soon as we were dismissed for the day, they would rush directly to the PX, sometimes missing the evening meal.
I found this fascinating. But maybe even more so, they would read those comic books over and over again for the entire month until the new ones came out.
Maybe that’s why we lost the Viet Nam war.
I'm going to reveal my nerd-hood, once again, and point out that the Invisible Girl also has the power to project force fields and is the most powerful member of the Fantastic Four.
Balfegor,
You make a good point at 8:50, except the whisper campaign isn't about the highfalutin publishers not getting disapproval by publishing low class stuff, it's about that stuff not being able to be published at all.
@Balfegor: The problem is that new material competes with the back catalog. This started happening with music and movies in the 1990s. Everyone knows the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, etc. Everyone knows classic fiction. Some people like the old stuff more than the new stuff. Lord of the Rings set the bar for fantasy fiction, and JK Rowling was by necessity derivative in joining the mature fantasy genre (as simplified teen fiction too).
"Good books make for bad movies, while bad books make for good movies." -- This is why it took ~50 years to bring LotR to the screen as Peter Jackson's 10-hour trilogy. This is why JK Rowling wrote new novels as the old ones were being filmed. She was quickly cribbing notes from Tolkien and many others.
The same thing happened with IT and computer programming. At one time programmers needed to know "machine language" or assembly code. Over time, libraries and shortcuts were created. So now, a team will license code from half a dozen sources and paste it together quickly. The new stuff builds on past work. It's not original, it's just a new theme with new artwork. It would cost many millions and decades to develop from scratch but ends up in a million-seller video game in a couple years.
Video games took the soul and energy from passive written and video fiction. They did this a full 25 years ago among young males. It doesn't help that edgy quality fiction is now censored in favor of woke moralizing (very few people choose predictable preaching "entertainment"). But, they are fighting the back catalog and trying to make a mark when making a mark is not possible.
One of my colleagues in the library for a few years was a ferociously left-liberal lesbian (smart, funny, ambitious, and hard-working) who insisted that the library needed to collect graphic novels. She got her way, when we had money to spend.
A lot of it was just lurid to the point of porn, and I don't think the library is buying them (or many other physical books) now.
On Netflix, I recommend the live action series "One Piece". It's based on a Japanese animated series, also on Netflix and also good . It's puerile and simple minded in the way of comic books. Which was also the way of Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and perhaps Homer....Game of Thrones was a kind of meta history that included the Gunpowder Plot, Iphegenia, The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, and The Golden Horde in one pulpy, easily digestible mass.... "One Piece" does the something similar with various comic book and pulp fiction heroes. You've got characters reminiscent of Philip Marlowe, Zorro, Asgard, Captain Hook, and so on playing out their villainy and holy quests in this series......The fights are well choreographed but there's no real gore. Some of the heroines are cute, but there's no nudity or boffing. I think it appeals not just to actual ten year olds but to the ten year old embedded just above our reptilian brain. It's very entertaining. I hope it doesn't transition to crapola the way GOT did.
rcocean said...
I just read that back in the 30s and 40s that comic books were considered trashy and low class. They were printed on cheap paper, and the expectation was that you'd throw them out after reading them.
Now, we're writing about Comicbooks in the New Yorker. And "classic" comics at that!
That's NOTHING! i was reading just the other day, about some scam artist that was reprinting old comics, and selling the reprints as "Art". Apparently, there are some people SO CLUELESS, that they would pay Real Money for these rip-off re-prints of old comics! Can you IMAGINE That? Just how Stupid would a schmuck have to be to pay good money for that trash?
HELL! i'd rather have an advertisement for a windbreaker company!!
"What do you mean we, white man?" One of the major problems with american comics IS that they have this isolated subculture.
Comics _used_ to be part of the general cultural world. You used to be able to buy them at my local gas station when I was a kid... but even then the people buying them were middle-aged men. At this point you need to go to a dedicated comic store for actual comics.
This is in complete contrast to Japan, where kids DO use "your favorite manga" as a default ice breaker and every convenience store sells them. Even here in the US, japanese manga are more popular than comics. Apparently 79% of comic/graphic-novel sales are manga in the US.
I have occasionally heard kids talk about their favorite characters in My Hero Academia (a manga). I have literally never heard a child talk about a 'comic' version of an american comic superhero... only the movie versions.
To be honest... youth music culture is also dead. Kids learn the instrument their parents want them to learn, not the electric guitar. Pictures of bands or performers on a kids bedroom wall is _strange_ this decade.
What is normal? minecraft stuff, even in teens. The occasional icon from youtube or tiktok stars. Youth culture has moved genres, and a lot of older people haven't even noticed.
It's the Toynbeean pattern: cultures age and decay, and one sign of decay is the elevation of what was considered trivial and childish to high and central positions. This is largely due to the exhaustion and loss of confidence of once creative elites.
"cult of Shakespeare"
That's a strange way to express that. (and reflects a subtle hostility for Shakespeare.)
Also, Shakespeare isn't primarily considered to be a written word medium. It's a theatrical medium where people experience it, not by reading, but by watching live performances of the plays.
As for comics: They have evolved into "graphic novels" which are also not, primarily, a written word medium. They are a unique art form that emphasizes the graphical representation first and uses the written words to support the graphics.
I also disagree with the premise of this article that we only have modern European nation states because of the written word. We have literally had nation states for thousands of years and for most of that time, most people were illiterate.
I also disagree with this statement: "Attempts to address the civil-rights struggle suffer from a milquetoast centrism. " First off, "centrism" has nothing to do with this. This is just the author slamming people for not being far left enough for her taste. It's not like only the political left acknowledges the civil rights struggle. It's acknowledged by the political centrists and the political right as well. She uses, centrist, as an insult, but we actually need more centrists and less extremists.
Lot of snobbery involved when people talk about the "Classical Novel".
One definition:
"While there are many different definitions for what makes a classic novel, it is most commonly agreed that classics are novels of literary significance that have withstood the test of time and remained popular years after their publicationK."
The bolded parts are subjective, in other words, all of it.
I'll give you a few current classical authors; Hemingway, Tolkien, Steinbeck, Heinlein.
In his influential book 'Imagined Communities,' Benedict Anderson argues that shared reading—newspapers, pamphlets, novels—made modern European nations possible."
Meaningless statement, as all these same things (existing informational mechanisms) existed for a long time before the modern Euopean nations. Meaning, shared reading is ancient so it's hardly a lynch pin to modern nations.
This statement is singular causation thinking. Other causes were war, religion, existing culture and more.
@mikee
My favorite - Prince Valiant.
jk said...
"japanese manga are more popular than comics"
I have a novel series. Oddly, it sells better in Japan than here.
“Name the last best selling novelist who might be considered both important and serious.”
J K Rowling
I'll echo what others have said about manga and gaming. "One Piece" (which is an excellent show) is based on a manga that's been churning out the series for 20 years. None of my Millennial or Gen Z kids read comics, but they all read manga. The medium for community has changed over the generations.
For some reason, my favorite comic was the crew of the m3 Stewart light tank, where the ghost of Gen JEB Stewart would appear on a smoky horse every now and then in the dust, and give the tank commander some advice, I also liked Sgt fury, and the DC comic Sgt Rock. I could only read them in the barber shop waiting to get a hair cut.
Ghost Tank with JEB Stuart.
Rock was far better than Fury.
I liked Johnny Cloud, Navajo Ace.
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