Comics and Literature #6: The Crusade of the Comics Journal
I get into the nitty-gritty of the most influential comics fanzine
In 1976, Gary Groth took over the editorship of the Nostalgia Journal, soon to be retitled The Comics Journal. At the time, the Journal was a cheaply-printed tabloid that consisted mostly of advertisements for mail-order comics vendors, barely distinguishable from the legion of other comics fanzines. In the same year, Harvey Pekar self-published the first issue of American Splendor, featuring stories from Pekar's life illustrated by prominent underground cartoonists. Pekar's signature brand of working-class realism is certainly evident in this issue, but it seems tempered with a desire to appeal to underground readers – drugs and sex play a much more prominent role than in later Pekar stories, and the cover prominently advertises that the lead story is illustrated by underground icon R. Crumb. Dave Sim's Cerebus would begin its 300-issue run the next year with an unassuming Conan the Barbarian parody that would eventually turn into one of the most ambitious narratives attempted in North American comics. All three publications would become long-running fixtures of the alternative comics movement, each lasting until roughly the mid-2000s.
These periodicals operated in very different genres and registers – allegedly dispassionate criticism, high fantasy, and autobiographical realism. However, they bear more than chronological similarities. Groth, Sim and Pekar were all vociferous advocates of comics as literature, a cause which involved not just a cultivation of autonomous comic art but the denunciation of derivative and commercial work. Their advocacy of artistic freedom was chiefly an advocacy for the freedom to produce particular types of comics. They promoted the most orthodox version of the developmental narrative in which literature acted as an exemplar of artistic maturity to which comics should aspire and take example. These authors thus marshalled literary referents as well as accusations of maladjustment and immorality against those they perceived to be their enemies.
The ways in which they used these figures, however, reveal some crucial ideological differences as well as broad similarities. A critical reading of these three periodicals will thus reveal both how figures within alternative comics promoted a narrow comics-as-literature discourse as well as how the meanings of both “comics” and “literature” were contested within this discourse. This reading will involve paying attention to both the explicit cultural positioning of the authors in question as well as the way in which they deploy literary referents and tropes in their work. I will also be looking at both the comics texts with which Pekar and Sim obtained their platform and the paratexts that they used, including writing in the Journal. Both comics art and prose nonfiction were a part of these firebrands’ arsenal, and thus any examination of their aesthetic must pay attention to paratext as well as text. It is by considering Groth, Sim, and Pekar as both authors and actors within the field of alternative comics that we can bring into focus the complexity of what would become “comics as literature.”
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