Comic Books Are America's REAL Indigenous Art Form

Here's the Palmer family portrait by Ariel Schrag referenced below. 

I'll go to the mat with anyone who says that jazz is America's only indigenous art form. First of all, jazz sucks. I can't even listen to it. I suspect I'm not supposed to. I suspect that jazz exists only for the pleasure of the people playing it. Which means it appeals to musicians, who probably genuinely appreciate it, and the jerkoff highbrows who pretend to like it because it's sophisticated. 

I also hate it because the people who play it dress like imbeciles. With all due respect to Tom Waits, the only permissible reason to wear a porkpie hat is if you're selling apples at the corner of Broadway and Market and it's 1936. 

Jazz is hardly America's only indigenous art form. Unless I'm mistaken, we also invented rock and roll. And hip hop. And to my mind, most notably, the comic book. 

I was a fanatical comic book fan when I was a kid, and then I stopped. They were vulgar kid stuff, and, as I was growing up in a small Rust Belt Indiana town where the haircut of choice was the permed mullet and the height of fashion was a plaid flannel shirt if you were over 30 and a black Def Leppard concert tee shirt if you were under, I wanted to run as far away from any kind of vulgarity as possible. So I affected what I thought were New Yorkish highbrow airs, like carrying around a paperback copy of "The Castle" and learning how to drop the r's at the end of words. 

Secondly, it was high school, and I was trying to score some ass, and the other people who read comic books evinced so little interest in chicks that you'd think their testicles hadn't yet dropped. They were geeks. I was too. Still am. But at the time, I was trying very hard not to be one. It didn't work. I had to graduate from college and go to Russia for a year before I finally broke my cherry. I was still a geek, but in a country full of geeks, the least geeky is king. 

But remission wore off in graduate school, when one of the best and wisest friends I still have--a Ph.D. in information science and inveterate gamer, an OG (Original Geek) from way back who never tried to hide it--introduced me to Neil Gaiman's "Sandman." And I gave up the struggle, because Sandman was just so goddamned good that I stopped caring whether the dialogue was between quotation marks or in speech balloons. 

Ever since then, I've been off the wagon. And I'm glad to be. Let's survey the ancient and noble history of comics. 

Now, cartoons with speech balloons have been around for a long time. Eighteenth century at least, and probably well before that. Which means nothing as far as whether or not comics are an indigenous art form, because jazz rhythms go back to Africa. But the first ongoing comic--that is to say, the first cartoon that told a story with a fixed cast of characters--first appeared, as did so much else, in Joseph Pulitzer's revolutionary paper, the New York World. 

It was called Hogan's Alley, and it chronicled the adventures of a bunch of grimy little immigrant street urchin alley kids. It was drawn by Richard F. Outcault, an artist from Ohio, and was, like so much 19th century American pop art, gloriously, deliriously, magnificently offensive. It made fun of blacks, Jews, the Irish, the Chinese, the Italians, the Germans, and even WASPs, whom it caricatured, pretty accurately, as effete, lace-collared, velvet-jacketed, ribboned hat-wearing Little Lord Fauntleroy sissies. So from its very inception, comics was subversive, vulgar, offensive and lowbrow. Or, to put it another way, democratic. 

It also, by the way, provided a moniker for the kind of over-the-top, no-holds-barred journalism that Joseph Pulitzer and his arch-rival, the brazen plagiarist William Randolph Hearst indulged in during the Spanish American War. "Hogan's Alley"'s main character was this little gaptoothed toddler who dispensed wiseassery and social criticism in am Irish brogue, and wore a yellow nightshirt. He never had a name, so he just became known as the Yellow Kid. 

Hearst, with his daddy's money, ripped off most of Pulitzer's staff, including Outcault, who kept drawing the Yellow Kid for Hearst's newspaper, the New York Journal. Pulitzer just hired another artist to draw "Hogan's Alley," so the Kid appeared in both sensationalist papers. Thus, "Yellow Journalism." 

Okay, so it was just a one-frame cartoon. But it was the beginning of what we think of today as Sequential Art--using pictures to tell a story--so if Joseph Pulitzer wasn't exactly the father of the comic book, he was, at the very least, a great uncle. Yet another reason to love the man as passionately as I do, and I'll tell you why in a subsequent post, God willing and the creek don't rise. 

Comics moved on. Before too long, cartoonists figured out that if you used more than one frame, you could actually tell a short narrative. Almost like... well, gosh, almost like a... a motion picture. Isn't it interesting that the first antediluvian motion pictures and the first nascent comics appeared at the same time? Yes, we'd had one-frame cartoons and photographs for a good long time. But it was only around the turn of the century that people started figuring out that if you put pictures together, they could tell a story. 

Because these short narratives took up a row of pictures, they were called "strips." Comic strips. 

And then the Next Great Leap forward took place. The first great generation of comics artists--Walt Kelly (Pogo), Hal Foster (Prince Valiant), Elzie Segar (Thimble Theatre, which turned into Popeye), Lee Falk (Mandrake the Magician and The Phantom. From St. Louis, by the way), Winsor McKay (Little Nemo in Slumberland), George Herriman (Krazy Kat)--figured out that if you put not only the pictures, but the strips together, you could tell an ongoing story. 

The next lurch forward in the development of the Comic Book was to actually make it into a book. M.C. (Max) Gaines (Ginzburg) came up with the idea of packaging all these strips together. Taking comics and putting them in books. Comic... books. Comic books. Max "M.C. Gaines" Ginzburg, whose company was called EC--Educational Comics--would go on to create a whole bunch of other comics--some really lurid ones about crime and horror and science fiction and humor. Including Mad Magazine. Not really educational, but a hell of a lot of fun. 

But respectable America turned up its nose at its new art form. The "Best People" wanted nothing to do with this vulgar, cheap, trashy, somewhat ridiculous and disturbingly new way of telling stories, with its garish colors and blue-collar streetwise sensibility. So with the WASPs and the Old Money looking away, that left the field wide open for the new kids, who grew up in cold-water tenements, selling papers, and above all, hustling, hustling, hustling for a buck. These new kids--who weren't ashamed to do what it took to make a living, who came out of a tradition utterly saturated in storytelling, and who couldn't get a job anywhere but in the places that the "Best People" wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole--were called Jews. 

Once Ginzburg got into it, so did a whole bunch of his fellow first-generation Eastern European Jewish immigrant kids. They didn't just build the publishing houses that churned the comics out, and the distribution companies that moved them from New York to Maine, Montana and points in between. They created the stuff--wrote the stories and drew the pictures. They dispensed with the funny pages altogether and started doing comics purely for books. Will Eisner. Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster. Jack Kirby. Bob Kane. Bill Finger. Stan Lee. Even Jules Feiffer, the genius cartoonist of the Village Voice, got his start in comics. He worked in Will Eisner's studio. 

Me personally, I don't think it's a coincidence that comics and movies--two art forms that marry words and images to tell a story--appeared at roughly the same time, created by roughly the same people--East European Jews. Because while Gaines and Donenfeld and the rest of them were building the comic book industry in New York, Zukor, Lasky, Goldwyn, Fox, the Warners, and Laemmle were creating the motion picture industry in Hollywood. Damned if I can see the connection, though. 

Comics were kid stuff. They were what the kids read while Dad was reading the front page, or the editorials, or the sports page (another Pulitzer innovation. God, how I love that man) and while Mom was reading the Ladies' Page. So it followed that comic books would remain kid stuff. And there they languished for a long time. But what a magnificent period of languishment it was! We got Superman, Batman, Captain America, Wonder Woman, all the real icons of America, out of that period. 

And then Protestant America turned on its new art forms. Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, on the strength of a well-intentioned but tragically mistaken  book called "The Seduction of the Innocent," by well-intentioned but tragically mistaken psychologist Frederic Wertham (himself a Jewish refugee from the Nazis, irony of ironies), held Senate hearings investigating whether comic books are creating juvenile delinquents--at roughly the same time that Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin and HUAC started going after the movies. Yet another parallel between the art forms. See a pattern here? 

But while comics, under attack by the government, remained frozen in what seemed like perpetual adolescence in the States, the Europeans were doing what they do best--recognizing something cool, swiping it from us, and doing it better. We invented rock and roll, for example, but then we were scared of it. Kids were enjoying it, and God knows that can't be good. They were dancing. Elvis was moving his hips, and that, undoubtedly, was making good clean American girl-teenagers wet. Can't have that. So Elvis goes into the army, and while he's making the world safe for democracy, along come the Beatles. And then the Rolling Stones. And Manfred Mann. And Herman and the Hermits. 

Kind of like what they did with movies. They took an American invention and turned it into High Art. 

And they did the same thing with comic books. While we in the U.S. are disdaining comics as kid stuff, and then writing books and holding Senate hearings designed to prove that comics are causing juvenile delinquency and putting their creators in prison, the Europeans are saying, "Huh. Words and pictures together. Interesting. Let's see what we can do with it." 

And so Herge in Belgium creates the ongoing adventures of "Tintin," the boy reporter and his little dog Snowy. And Goscinny and Uderzo in France create "Asterix and Obelix." And Vittorio Giardino in Italy creates "A Jew in Communist Prague" and "Orient Express" and a whole bunch of other magnificent books--adult stories for adults. Serious stuff. Good stuff. In a whole new medium. High Art. 

In the Sixties, America started to grow up, by fits and starts. Some of us stopped drinking the Kool-Aid that our government was handing out--all that bullshit about Making the World Safe For Democracy. We decided that perhaps it was time to start treating black people with common courtesy. Bob Dylan showed us that rock and roll can plumb deeper depths than "I'm just a lovelorn teenager." Some of us started figuring out that there were better ways to settle differences with other people than shooting them. 

And a whole new generation of comics geniuses emerged, like R. Crumb, and Art Spiegelman--who would go on to win the only Pulitzer Prize ever awarded to a comic book for "Maus." Which, in my mind, sort of brings the whole thing full circle. Finally, Joe Pulitzer's prize is given to the art form that he midwifed. Cool. And full of all kinds of historically significant reverberations. 

And now, finally, American comics seem to be emerging from their long period of arrested development and what appeared to be the art form's perpetual adolescence. Now we have serious stuff emerging--realistic stuff, Magical Realism, confessional stuff. And genuine artists like Eric Powell doing it. 

Eric Powell, by the way, if you don't know who he is, is the warped genius behind "The Goon," a fevered, brilliant, and unapologetically lowbrow series that mixmasters gangster/noir, horror, Gothic, retro science fiction, westerns, and a few hundred other genres into what amounts to a glorious and hilarious celebration of the medium of the Comic Book itself. Read it. It's totally awesome. 

Hanging on the wall of my living room is a family portrait created by Ariel Schrag. Ariel Schrag is a comic book creator and TV writer (Lifetime's "The L Word" and HBO's "How To Make It In America") who chronicled her life as a student at Berkeley High School in Berkeley, CA, in four brilliant graphic novels--"Awkward", "Definition", "Potential", and "Likewise." They are funny, painful, brutally honest, and heart-wrenching. They are literature. They are art. 

Because I am a huge fan of comic books, I asked her if she would consider drawing my family's portrait. Mercifully, she is just as cool a person as she is a comics creator and enthusiastically agreed to do so. My family has now been immortalized as a comic. 

Of an evening, I like to pour myself a glass of wine, sit down, and just stare at that portrait. While not listening to jazz.