We see this tension erupt in a number of different ways in comics, notably in such conventions as the splash panel, where text is typically silenced (or kept to a noticeable minimum) in order to have a full page image supplant the dual pull on our attention. Here, we are offered a brief moment where we can access the art object in the conventional way, in that we are allowed to provide the context for ourselves. Images naturally beget a textual response in our minds as we mull them over, bringing our experiences and personal histories to bear on them despite the environment in which they’re encountered. With the presence of text, we are denied this natural response, interrupted in our efforts by the constant push and pull between author and artist, between allowing the images to naturally form cognitive responses and allowing the text to do the exact opposite.

Reading comics is challenging because it causes us to fuse these binaries, making the experience multiple in ways we are rarely cognizant of. As Scott McCloud notes, there is a “visual vocabulary” in comics (and indeed in all art) that makes us react to images in particular ways and draw unconscious associations from them, and the apprehension that we feel when this internalized vocabulary encounters the printed word can be palpable. The appropriately named “virgin cover” – an oft employed convention in long running serials where all text (title, author, even UPC code) is removed in order to solely let the image speak for itself – is another example of comics’ way of acknowledging the tension between text and image, forcing the reader to frame the image himself without the aid of any authorial description. Alex Ross’ painted variant virgin cover for Star Wars #1 demonstrates the power that an image can take on when denuded of all of the details of publisher, artist name, even price when trying to engage comics as art. Compare it then, side by side, with its counterpart, fettered with titles, tagline and publication details. Which cover, pictured left and right, more closely represents that ambiguous term “art”?

An example of this relationship can be further seen in Joseph Michael Linsner’s several “Dawn” miniseries, in which each panel is painstakingly hand painted despite the advent of technologies that could do the work for him. If the big A “Art” could be found anywhere in comics it is here, as Linsner rehashes religious themes mixed with fantasy and myth, drawing inspiration from Franzetta in alternating between pastels and oils and providing rich imagery to accompany his text – it’s significant to note that he also has employed alternate virgin covers in allowing the reader a different type of access to his work than comics typically allows. His images are lush and lavishly textured, each issue taking months to produce.

Despite the obvious craft that goes into even the smallest panel in “Dawn,” however, it is still marketed as comics instead of as art directly. Interestingly, however, Linsner’s publisher Image Comics also produces full size, more conventional volumes of Linsner’s work titled “The Art of Joseph Michael Linsner” – here, we see Linsner’s paintings in full page spreads (often the reproduced covers of his individual issues) with no text at all except for the occasional appending paragraph discussing the motivation behind an individual piece. It appears, at least in this case (though there are many others, including the superlative work of Dave McKean and Adam Hughes), that we are more comfortable labeling art as such only when it is unaccompanied by textual content, when the images are the sole offering and are allowed to speak entirely for themselves.

There is a single case in which comics are, in the industry, consistently referred to as art, and that is when one is trying to acquire an original page from which all others were produced. Collectors of “original art” in comics similarly divorce the original textual context from the drawings themselves, collecting particularly provocative pages removed from the storyline as a whole, removed even from the plotlines of the individual issues of which they ultimately became only a part.

There is something Benjamin-esque in this, in attempting to catch the aura of a work surrounding its original production prior to its mass production on the newsstands. Pages of original art are often stained, sketched over with blue pencil, handwritten in the margins with editorial notations – they are the least polished versions of the final product, and yet they are sought after as art far more than their reproduced descendants. The monetary value of these pages also mirrors that of what we would commonly call art, even moreso in the age of digital reproduction, often fetching thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars for a single page. Art, then, is here again tied to our traditional concerns with valuing a work wherein we provide the context for the image instead of having it provided for us through text or narrative.

There’s something ineffable about accompanying text that makes us not necessarily devalue the art object but value it differently, in terms that perhaps society has yet to define. Perhaps the blending of image and text creates a new, transcendent art form as we struggle to adapt to the competing visual representations of storytelling juxtaposed with our own stories intertwined, making sense of the images in tandem with having them made sense for us. It is in this liminal space, though, that comics become the most engaging, playing to and against our expectations of literature as art and “art” as art.

Many of the slice-of-life and autobiographical narratives I gravitate towards use more simplicity in the imagery than more traditional superhero comics.  They make extensive use of blank space and rarely use colour.  Lines are spare; explressions are subtle and nuanced.  I can read a lot in a single panel of, for example, Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles.

God, so few lines but so much is evocative.  This comes at the moment in the text when the narrator realizes that her mother is not all there — this embrace, with the empty faces and the simply figures, suggests the absence that will soon be replaced by the knowledge of Alzheimer’s and the progressive deterioration of the mother.  The images blur here: which is the mother and which is the daughter?  Who is being held?  It’s not clear.  Both characters are scared and anxious; both are lost as they await news.  And furthermore, this image illustrates an underlying anxiety in the comic that Sarah is her mother — that their physical similarity will result in her also developing Alzheimer’s, that she cannot escape this fate because they are one and the same.

I feel pretty darn chuffed with myself for getting so much from a single image.  I’m awesome!

But I’m consciously choosing texts that force me to do this — that offer up empty space ripe for analysis — that ask me to put the pieces together.  Am I really thinking less like an English Lit person, or am I simply finding texts that make it so I have a lot to “read” in the imagery and that invite me to do the kind of work I feel comfortable with?  Because when I read a representative sample of Marvel Civil War, I excuse myself from any cognitive work in looking at the images.

Why?  Have I made some distinction between high and low comics — those “literary” enough for visual analysis and those not?  I suspect that that’s exactly what I’m doing, and perhaps it’s not entirely unreasonable and undeserved, but it requires that I question my understanding of how to read a comic.  I’m going to start trying to apply some of the skills I’ve built on my slice-of-life comics to more traditional superhero narratives.

I’m starting to learn that the art of reading comics is a process.

To this definition, I bring the most recent incarnation of Hawkeye. Written by Matt Fraction and drawn by David Aja, Haweye takes up the character first put out there by Stan Lee in Tales of Suspense 57 in 1964. Hawkeye has most recently been spotted in the Avengers movie and a brief cameo appearance in Thor. The point here is not to show that Hawkeye has been around a while or is still relevant, but to establish that the subject itself is not new. That distinction is an important one since what defines something is often difference—think Stan Lee’s characters as different than DC’s characters or the early nineties turn marked by Todd McFarlane’s work on Spiderman and Spawn. That said, what needs to be resisted at all costs in a discussion about comics and art is a comparison to something we might refer to as institutional art — think pictures of the naked Madonna with child or giant waterlilies or pastiche or blurry colours or Art Speigleman (I know that mention will kill him, but when you have travelling gallery shows, that’s saying something). Instead, we must first confront the work on its own terms within its own context. To this extent, Hawkeye is art.

But what kind of art is it and how does it stand in relation to what we might call Art (intentional Speigleman pun there)? Aja references the history of comic art in a number of ways, but most relevant here are his allusions—primarily visual—to the work of Chris Ware. Ware has a characteristic style that alludes to his own sense of aesthetics— a set of principles that govern what he takes to be a worthwhile expression. He favours the intricate and the intimate; tends to treat the page as if it were a building or container for the representation of detached, dejected lives; focuses on expressive representations of the body with a slow, developing narrative, that emphasizes the minute spaces between motions. A few representative examples appear below.

Enter into this conversation Hawkeye. Aja captures Ware’s sense of the page, with its intersecting lines and narratives. The allusion is entirely clear to someone who has a knowledge of Ware’s work. The close-ups on the face, the slow-moving minutae of the body, the built-up page (in fact, the whole story in this issue takes place in Clint’s (Hawkeye’s) building.

This allusionary context is a marker for defining a developing, emerging, or established aesthetic. Ware’s style is being translated into another storyline through allusion both subtle and apparent—an institution, we’ll call it the Institution of Ware, is establishing itself. In fact, Aja may be playing on the pun of “cutting” the cords with a mentor, bringing the sometimes antagonistic relationship between practice and principle, hereditary and innovative into play. Seems simple enough: hang a picture by Aja from Hawkeye next to a page by Ware and boom, there you have it—Art and an aesthetic style to accompany it.

That said, there are conflicting analytical principles at play here. The first is that Chris Ware writes and draws his work entirely whereas Hawkeye is a collaborative effort. In other words, we need to ask what part of the comic is art exactly? Is it the the writing, the drawing, the colouring, the text? Each of these functions has a distinct personality behind it. Moreover, the drawings by Aja certainly allude to Ware’s work, but then so does the colour-scheme.

Note how Matt Hollingsworth mimics the style of these colour-schemes in Hawkeye, emphasizing the subtle variations in hue and tone, even the presence of red (see the early Hawkeye pages above and Clint’s red hat).

Is Aja guiding Hollingsworth and how does a collaborative effort stand in relation to a single-authored piece? Does Chris Eliopoulos not deserve credit for his fine lettering given the attention often given in aesthetics about typography and the designs for representing the word? In short, comics bring tough questions to bear on traditional concepts governing the definition of artistic practice and its accompanying aesthetic philosophies.

Fact is, the question of comics’ relation to art is a moot one. It’s already over before it began. We’ll never know what the relationship is because we don’t really need to. It’s a fruitless exercise at this point; the history of comics is established enough that comics can be discussed within their own context in relationship to nothing but themselves. To open up that discussion, connecting Hawkeye’s covers with the work of Jasper Johns for instance, only dilutes the conversation we might be having about comics.

Comics stand in relation to art like the internal combustion engine stands in relation to the steam engine: they may well be andecendants, but to think of them in this way does nothing to help us understand either. That comics are often a collaborative, usually repetitive, almost always recycled endeavour opens spaces for new conversations about the nature of the medium. These conversations must occur outside the already established aesthetic principles of artistic production in precisely the same way that a discussion of the steam engine must stand outside a discussion of an internal combustion engine. Comics are a multi-mediated and re-mediated form of practice and cultural production that can only be defined within its own contexts—a context that more than justifies its significance as the most relevant form of twenty-first century aesthetic practice—and that means it can’t be art or Art… or, mercifully, stand in relation to either.

Works Cited:

Fraction, Matt, David Aja, Javier Pulido. Hawkeye Volume 2: Little Hits (Marvel Now) (Issue 6). Marvel, 2013.

Ware, Chris. Building Stories Pantheon, 2012.

In spite of a general effort to celebrate the visual aspect of comics as being their key feature, artists get the short end of the stick in mainstream commercial comics. Writers like Alan Moore, Ed Brubaker, and Neil Gaiman get lionized, while artists are celebrated, yes, but more as an accessory to the concepts of the “author”. Independent comics tend to celebrate the auteur: the complete artist who generates images in perfect harmony with his or her ideas. Pick your Hernandez brother. Or Jason. But even in these cases, logos tends to override image. See Charles Hatfield’s latest review of Gilbert Hernandez’ Julio’s Day and Marble Season. If you didn’t know Hernandez was a comics artist and didn’t see the images associated with the review, then it would take you a while to figure out that there was a visual dimension of the work. This is not to criticize Hatfield, who is one of the most skilled critics of comics. I just want to draw attention to the conceptual dominance of ‘story’ over picture in the discussion.

While I admit to painting an overly simple picture here, it gives rise to the question of how certain comics artists who put drawing before storytelling challenge the notion that comics must tell a story supported by pictures. What if the picture came first, and the story came second? Arising from the image as it were, rather than preceding it?

These are the kinds of questions that Warren Craghead asks. Craghead talks about his own work as trying to avoid the “cinematic” aspect of more mainstream comics, the feeling that one is looking through windows or frames at an unfolding story. Instead, he wants his drawings to come out at the viewer…to be objects in the world. To Craghead, a drawing is both a thing and a picture of a thing. The way I understand his work is to think of it as a perpetual questioning of what it means to draw a picture of something, incorporating a complex of mind, hand, technology, and external world.

Craghead trained as a painter but has become a compulsive “pencil hound,” someone who draws habitually, experimentally, and humorously in search of the narratives that his art might generate rather than illustrate. That is, his drawings reach for something that he hasn’t yet thought of, even though they are frequently referential: you can spot dogs, surfers and formula one cars but also strange lines and shapes that you can’t identify.

For instance, Craghead draws while driving (always paying attention to the road, he says), while watching television with his daughters, whenever he gets the chance, just to see what happens. One of his projects is to draw comics on Post-it notes and leave them stuck in various places in his world. Similarly, with Seed Toss Craghead sends drawings out into the world to see what happens to them. Maybe one will take root and grow while the others that shrivel up and become nothing. The exciting thing for Craghead is not knowing: each drawing is a lottery ticket, potentially with the right combination of numbers.

In our discussion with Craghead and Simon Moreton in our Graphixia podcast, I asked what the connection was between their work: because Rob Clough in his Comics Journal piece on Moreton’s Smoo comics said that they reminded him of Craghead’s work, but I couldn’t see the relationship. Moreton’s comics seem to be the careful distillation of things, every lamp post in the street refined to an economy of line so as to require nothing more. Craghead’s comics, in contrast, look more like mad scribbling, as if there were not enough time to worry about the kind of refinement we see in Moreton’s work. This stop light only allows so much time for a drawing: better get it down as quickly as possible. You get the feeling that to slow down for Craghead would be to risk missing something. This feeling I have may just be an illusion. For all I know, Craghead agonizes over every mark and gesture.

The real connection between the two artists is that each is coming at the question of what it means to draw a picture of something from a different angle. In the podcast, both artists talked about memory, place, and searching for something while not quite knowing what it is. In Moreton’s work, these terms create perhaps a mistaken sense of nostalgia; he’s not trying to capture the past or present it through rose coloured glasses, but to look for something in it that he can’t quite figure out. The urgency in Craghead’s work has the same effect, of tying to express something in the reaction between brain and manifest world with the movement of a pencil.

Ultimately, Moreton and Craghead have a Romantic sense of what it means to draw a picture of something: what matters is not so much the verisimilitude in the representation of the thing as what the representation expresses about the artist’s mind in response to the thing.

I first came across Castrée’s work in Drawn & Quarterly Showcase in 2005. Each issue showcased three up-and-coming artists and Castrée was featured in issue three, alongside strips by Sammy Harkham and Matt Broersma. In the credits she is listed as Geneviève Elverum, her married name which she appears to have used only briefly.

I initially picked up the book because I was fascinated by Castrée’s attractive and distinctive artwork on the cover. Inside, her dreamlike story ‘We’re Wolf!” begins as a meditation on depression before moving on to thoughts about love and our place in the world. It was the art that struck me first however, with meticulously detailed illustrations in fine-nibbed pen, and ink wash. There are rarely panel borders and often one image fills the whole page. Each page may have hundreds of tiny marks on it but it never looks cluttered, this is a strip that always feels spacious and delicate, both in illustration style and emotion.

The strip opens with a depressed girl reading a comic in bed, the book looks a lot like Tintin in Tibet. Later the pages blossom into life as she meets a boy riding the elephant that was originally a manifestation of her depression. They leave the elephant behind and climb into a snowy mountain landscape. The clear deliberate line work also brings to mind Hergé’s Himalayan adventure. Both characters resemble Castrée, creating a feeling that this work stems from autobiography.

A double page spread blooms into bright colour and features the two characters surrounded by an intricate pattern of green leaf covered branches. In bright red circles in the corners of these pages Castrée writes, “What will it take to seduce you?” but the question is immaterial, I am already smitten.

Despite falling for her work in a big way I found other books hard to obtain here in the UK. Castrée has released a few books with Montreal based publisher L’Oie de Cravan including book/LP packages. She also recorded drone/folk/pop music under the name Woelv and more recently, Ô Paon, and has stated that both drawing and music are forms of meditation to her. When I began to see the pre-publicity for Susceptible I was very excited but there was also a slight feeling of trepidation, what if the long wait had built my expectations up too high?

I need not have worried; Susceptible is a beautiful book drawn from a childhood and adolescence filled with wonder and pain, and darkness and light. A coming of age story where the need to break free of one’s upbringing is imperative. As Castrée says at the end “I’m eighteen. I have all my teeth. I can do what ever I want”

The book begins with Castrée (or Goglu as her character is named in the book) as a naked baby on an almost empty page. The narration is in Castrée’s characteristic neat yet intricate cursive text and discusses the topic of nature versus nurture. As Goglu grows older a plant beside her grows too, and as she ponders her depressive nature the plant slowly begins to entrap her. She struggles and eventually breaks free, we see her curled up and clothed and the text says “I have pulled myself so far away from my family that it is almost like I don’t belong to it anymore”. These four pages lay out themes of the book common to other coming of age stories; the feeling of being trapped by family, attempting to find one’s sense of self, and the desire to fly the nest.

Susceptible details Goglu’s life until the age of 18, she lives with her mother Amère and her partner Amer. Everyone in the book is given a pseudonym and on initial reading I didn’t realise that these names translated as ‘bitter’ but that certainly describes these two. Amère was the youngest of 16 siblings and appears not to be able to handle being single. She is the opposite of Goglu who craves silence and solitude.

Goglu’s father Tête d’Oeuf (great name!) left when she was two years old to go live at the other end of Canada in British Columbia “a mythical kingdom where dads go to disappear”. There is a very atmospheric double page spread as Goglu watches him leave from a second floor window. Outside it is night and raining heavily, and the only illumination is from the headlight of Tête d’Oeuf’s motorbike. Castrée draws precipitation beautifully.

In the Comics Journal Harvey Pekar described Robert Crumb as having “a cartoony style, but his work, because of its wealth of accurately observed detail, is also realistic”, the same can be said about Castrée’s artwork. Clothes are meticulously striped or checked, furniture is painstakingly patterned and vehicles are realistically rendered.

When she is 15 Goglu visits her father for the first time in 10 years and she begins to experience the freedom and space that she has been craving “I discover true solitude and I savour it”. The book touches on her experiences with drugs, sex and music as she begins to find her way in the world and moves towards the inevitable break from her mother. Amère makes a last attempt to stop Goglu leaving by suggesting they get an apartment together and when Goglu refuses she tries to make her feel guilty “well… you’ve abandoned me…”. Goglu can take no more and floats out of her shoes and through a hole in the white space of the page.

In interviews Castrée has admitted to a problem that faces all autobiographical cartoonists, how do people feel about being depicted in the book? She confesses that the comic may upset her mother “I have this magical power to break my mom’s heart”. Despite this and perhaps because she has not spoken to her mother for several years, Castrée felt that this was a story she had to draw. I am very grateful that she did.

Works cited

Castrée, Geneviève Susceptible. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2013.

Elverum, Geneviève, Harkham, Sammy & Broersma, Matt Drawn & Quarterly Showcase Book 3: An Anthology of New Illustrated Fiction. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2005.

Hergé Tintin in Tibet. Tournai: Casterman, 1960.

Pekar, Harvey Blood and Thunder: Harvey Pekar and R. Fiore in The Comics Journal. Seattle: Fantagraphics [online] http://www.tcj.com/blood-and-thunder-harvey-pekar-and-r-fiore/ [Accessed 23^rd April 2013].