Trauma-Toons
A shortish documentary called Cartoon College, directed by Josh Melrod and Tara Wray, celebrating the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont, left me thinking about a bunch related or semi-related things. The (unaccredited) Center offers a two-year course leading to a Master of Fine Arts in cartooning.
First of all, is such a curriculum necessary? In the applied-arts sense, probably not really, but as a supportive place for artists doing something that, the film proclaims, society at best ignores, or at worst sneers at, it shines. Kids and adults – including a man in his late 60s – act as though they are finally being allowed to crawl out from under the carpet.
Which by the end made me uneasy. The presumably self-selecting group projects a stereotype of cartoonists as universally depressed dweebs with godawful childhoods – salvaged suicides or serial killers in waiting. Somehow, I can’t believe this is a broadly accurate cross-section of those involved in an admittedly wacky profession.
Which then led me to recall how much the newspaper comics meant to me growing up, and to a lot of kids of that era. And it wasn’t just kids reading the “funnies”; consider the sophistication and orientation of “Winnie Winkle,” “Brenda Star,” “Rex Morgan” – these were works written with an adult audience first and foremost in mind.
They were the static YouTube of the time, and their hold on me has never relaxed. Will Eisner and his seven-page Sunday adventure "The Spirit" were the highlight of my week. In the ‘70s, Eisner’s boundary-breaking foray into the “graphic novel” made my liver quiver.
Try reading bio-bits by and about Eisner and his studio (which produced Jules Feiffer and Wally Wood among many others), and you don’t come away with the idea that the comics artists of the ‘40s and '50s worried much about making a living, what their work “meant” or whether it reflected their traumatic youth – even though many of them went totally unrecognized. Carl Barks, who drew the iconic Scrooge McDuck comic books, was not identified as their author until after he retired, all original credit going to Walt Disney, whose talent was business and hype, not drawing.
I’ve always taken cartoonists seriously, in a way that, I think, Eisner did. They aren’t little laugh generators snickering off to the side, but unleashers of big guffaws at what society is and does, as were Rowlandson and the political cartoonists of the 19th century. But somehow, along about “Superman,” we began to separate “serious” words from “frivolous” pictures in published art – a highbrow-lowbrow division and a reversal of the Renaissance, when painting and drawing ruled as the ultimate expressions of what the artistic mind could produce.
The aspiring artists at the Center for Cartoon Studies see cartooning as a particularly personal form of expression, neither social commentary nor kiddie trifles, but the key to the release of their inner demons (or at least their under-the-bed monsters). Yet they fear, one and all, that they will forever be viewed as warped outsiders.
I don’t think that’s anywhere near true in the wider world. But then, we’re very confused these days in how we approach art: We don’t know how to look at it, don’t have any definition of what art is. We don’t need academic definitions, certainly, but we do need social definitions. These were assumed in past ages but are now fluctuating and scattered.
Science fiction author J.G. Ballard foresaw this social-aesthetic removal in his Vermillion Sands stories, where art of the future becomes something we cannot keep hold of. In the half-mad art conclave of Vermillion Sands, statues whisper meaningless phrases and poetry floats on the breeze, not because it’s all ephemeral, but because no one can pin down what it might or should proclaim.
Graphic novels and higher comic book prices, better digital graphics programs and Art Spiegelman’s Maus have together given comics a more upscale image while removing them from their common ground. That holds largely true of most public art. Is this a wonderful thing – art set free from relevance, to be whatever we say (or fail to say) it is? Or have we sliced it off from life, made it an “other,“ a separate thing to worship like modern religion (or laugh at, given your inclination), to appreciate without underlying humanity?
by Derek Davis