George S. McCue and Clive Bloom

SOURCE: "The Moderns," in Dark Knights: The New Comics in Context, Pluto Press, 1993, pp. 55-66.

[In the following essay, McCue and Bloom trace the development of comic books during the 1970s and 1980s, in terms of both their subject matter and marketing strategies.]

Comic books in the early 1970s looked surprisingly like those of the early 1950s. The medium was dominated by heroic action books and sales were dropping rapidly. Social relevance had failed as a direction for the medium. Other sources of comic book art were beginning to find a market and underground comic books began making real inroads into the readership, further contributing to the mainstream industry's economic woes. DC was hit harder than Marvel during this time because of personnel problems and the lack of the fiercely loyal readership that Marvel's discursive style had earned them. Nonetheless, both companies were in trouble and they scrambled to bring out a cavalcade of new characters: 'vigilantes and barbarians, gods and jungle lords, monsters and pulp heroes, every stripe of hero and anti-hero, both original and adapted, in a mad scramble to find something that would keep comics alive' [Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones, The Comic Book Heroes].

Comic book companies knew they had a devoted core audience from the letters, conventions, fanzines and comic-book speciality shops that began springing into existence. The problem was that such a core was too small to support the industry. Companies had to find a format or genre they could use to expand the readership. This 'try anything' approach led to a chaotic atmosphere in which it was difficult to hold on to creative people or standards or, subsequently, a public and a market.

Moreover, the books aimed at the existing market suffered from a similar malaise. As more and more fans-turned-pros entered the medium, they developed a kind of artistic inbreeding. The advantages were obvious: for the first time creators were no longer working under the impression that their craft was throwaway literature, and they approached comic books as legitimate art. [In a 1990 interview, Dennis O'Neil of DC Comics] points out:

The big difference today with the young guys, say under 30, is they make no apologies about it. They see it as a 'Capital A' art form. In their minds it is very much on a par with cinema or anything else. They regard it as an art form in which they express themselves and reach out and touch their world. We regarded it as a job, hopefully the best job we could do, but it was basically not a lot different than journalism.

The drawback was that these were fans writing for fans and the stories and techniques became repetitive and even absurd caricatures of the best of the Silver Age. Stan Lee's characterization was copied and standardized. Every hero got a stock personality profile to go with his powers and union suit.

All heroes had to be either hot-headed, alienated, bitter, frivolous, hard as nails (if female), or slow and genial. Between any two given heroes, a conflict had to be contrived where there had formerly been no reason for any to exist.

[Jacobs and Jones]

A typical example was the feud between Green Arrow and his new space-cop foil, the Thangarian Hawkman, to inject 'characterization' into The Justice League of America. Marvel had lost the lustre of newness from the ploy but DC had lost the quality scripting that had been its hallmark in its own attempt to ape Marvel.

This is not to say that there were absolutely no worthwhile comic books, but most of the ones worth reading weren't about superheroes. Barry Smith's Conan and Mike Grell's Warlord were barbarian swordsmen of the first order. Joe Kubert provided DC with some of the finest war comics in its history and the most beautiful Tarzan ever seen. Even when Marvel and DC seemed to copy each other exactly, as in the case of Swamp Thing and Man-Thing, when handled with the care of Berni Wrightson and Steve Gerber, respectively, they were effective and compelling horror books. There was even a brief resurgence of interest in Golden Age characters as several histories of comic books were published, most importantly, Jim Steranko's History of Comics. This resurgence was weak and short-lived, fuelled only by hardcore fans who were still few in number.

The problem was one of synthesis. Marvel had introduced characterization to comic books and attracted a slightly older, more sophisticated market. Their work, however, suffered from inconsistent quality and excess. DC had prided itself on well-crafted books and clear story-telling but lost out trying to out-Marvel Marvel. The first signs of this synthesis came in the form of a few superheroes who, characteristically, had been too tough to kill off entirely even in the slump. A new age was coming but it followed the path of ambitions and innovative creative teams rather than entire companies, and it would require almost ten years to gather strength.

One of the few books to show glimmers of hope in this period was The Legion of Superheroes. The Legion had been brought back after a guest shot in Superboy showed that there was tremendous interest. The key to the strip was a unique recontextualization of traditional minutiae to introduce new themes. Artists became aware that they could use supporting characters and objects from the Legion's past to evoke very particular images since there was a long-standing notion of what they were supposed to involve. An imaginative treatment of an old artefact could be highly effective. The complex and extensive lore of the Legion was excavated by writers Jim Shooter and Cary Bates, both trained in traditional DC writing by Mort Weisinger. Combined with the art of Mike Grell, whose realism rivalled Neil Adams, they were spurred to bring true-to-life issues to the book. Adult themes seemed to creep in beneath the storyline.

In 'Brainiac 5's Secret Weakness', for example, Brainiac 5 builds a robot of Supergirl in his sleep and later convinces himself that the machine is his real, flesh-and-blood lover; in 'The Trillion Dollar Trophies', the Legion is attacked by Grimbor, the 'greatest master of bondage, restraint, and security in the universe', and his woman Charma, a mutant whose powers evoke abject devotion from men and violent hatred from women.

[Jacobs and Jones]

Grell's art served to highlight the subtexts and create a book that could appeal to several different age groups simultaneously.

Marvel achieved their version of this kind of success with Jim Starlin's cosmic mix of superhero, science fiction and fantasy in Captain Marvel. Starlin was originally assigned only as the artist, but he quickly took over both the writing and drawing. He took some of Marvel's unused characters, particularly the galactic level ones, and began to build a separate corner for them in the Marvel Universe. There he crafted Warlock. The series' star character was a space messiah who battled the evil Magus. Unfortunately, they were manifestations of the same energy. To kill the other was to be destroyed oneself. They waged glorious, futile battles across space with a wide and varied supporting cast of Starlin's invention.

With themes so far-reaching, Starlin needed to be fairly wordy to explain his plots. Nevertheless, he deftly avoided the over-characterization that plagued Lee's imitators by making sure that each word moved the totality of the art work forward. Starlin also designed his pages so that the numerous word balloons were not oppressive and added to the total artistic composition. He did not allow his philosophizing to become either gratuitous or silly.

[Starlin] developed a repertoire of personal storytelling gimmicks—symbolism, shifting visual/narrative viewpoints, quick panel progressions suggesting stop-action camera work—that told stories in terms uniquely suited to the comic book medium.

[Jacobs and Jones]

Starlin's work made a lasting impression on the artists who came to dominate the medium in the 1980s—in particular John Byrne and George Perez, whose work on The X-Men and The New Teen Titans, respectively, would be instrumental in the first books of the Modern Age.

The X-Men had vanished through lack of sales in 1970, along with many of their comic-book colleagues. Writer Len Wein and artist Dave Cockrum revived the team for a one-issue shot of nostalgia in Giant-Size X-Men in 1975. Nevertheless, the cover proclaimed '68 Big Pages' and 'Senses Shattering First Issue' in the usual Marvel manner. The first page read, 'From the ashes of the past there grow the fires of the future. The grandeur and the glory begin anew with Second Genesis!' Wein could not have known he was speaking for the entire medium.

In this tale, it seems the original X-Men were captured by an evil mutant, and a Professor X had to gather a new team to rescue them. He went to Russian wheat farms, the jungles of Africa, aristocratic Japan, the Bavarian Alps and the American Southwest. The team he assembled was the most diverse ever seen in comic books. Chris Claremont soon took over from Wein and used this mix to create the premier superteam of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Rather than use their ethnicity or special powers to determine a stock character attitude, Claremont worked at developing them into characters as complex as their backgrounds. One of the characters, Kurt Wagner, is Nightcrawler—a blue fuzzy mutant who was endlessly persecuted in his native Germany. Rather than becoming embittered or alienated like the Thing, he is devoutly religious and fancies himself a swashbuckling adventurer, Ororo is the mutant Storm, whose powers control the elements. Originally an orphan pickpocket on the streets of Cairo, she found her way to an African tribe who revered her as a goddess. She is the maternal figure of the team who is simultaneously enthralled and repulsed by her own power. The most famous team member, and arguably the most popular character in comic books for the past decade, is Wolverine. His untold origin and multifaceted persona have contributed to his high sales. He is as comfortable with Zen philosophy as he is in a barroom brawl in a berserker rage.

There is a strong sense of atmosphere in the books and Claremont worked to maintain a feeling of oppression. The theme of racial persecution drew the characters together as a family rather than as a superteam, creating one of the most extended comic book soap-operas ever written.

a book about racism, bigotry, and prejudice.… It's a book about outsiders, which is something that any teenager can identify with. It is a story about downtrodden, oppressed people fighting to change their situation, which I think anybody can empathise with.

[Jacobs and Jones]

Claremont also tried to break through the traditional gender barrier in comic books. Working with Cockrum, he created the character Phoenix from Jean Grey, formerly Marvel Girl. Her immense power, her love affair with Cyclops (based on a relationship between equals), and her personal heroism and intelligence were the first real attempts to appeal to women in a medium dominated by male-power fantasies. Phoenix's death under Claremont and Byrne, as she tried to prevent her power from destroying a planet, is still one of the most famous events in comic-book fandom.

Claremont's consistent efforts with Cockrum and then Byrne showed that all the superhero mainstream needed for success was the consistent ministrations of talented people. This, of course, meant acquiring and retaining creative talent that could hold audience interest. For a mature artist-audience relationship to flourish, newsprint and poor four-colour printing sold on old rusty metal revolving racks just wouldn't do.

The problems of the 1970s were more than merely a content gone thin and stale. Comic books were marketed primarily on what was called 'the news-stands'. There were in fact very few true news-stands that sold comics and these usually appeared in convenience stores, delis and soda fountains. Comics were invariably stacked at the bottom of a rack of every other type of magazine available, which proved both frustrating and disappointing to people such as Dick Giordano.

A distributor would come in and say, 'I've got a hundred comic books for you, Joe', and he'd say, 'Fine put'em up on the rack.' They were never identified by title or by company. They were just comic books and they were put on the rack. It became impossible then for us to tell which of our books were popular because of accident and which were popular by design. If they got out there, they might have sold, but they didn't all get out there. We were certainly aware that a lot of our books came back with our wrapping on them. In the newsstand outlets, sales have diminished every year for the past 20 or 25. There has been no year that has been better than the previous, no matter what material was put out.

[Interview with Dick Giordano of DC Comics]

The material in comic books, which had been sold for years to children in this offhand manner, had worked its way from those children through adolescents and teens, and now it was attracting adults. Creative pressures and more sophisticated audiences demanded new formats and new sale venues. Comic-book speciality shops were the obvious answer, but there had never been a demand that could support them.

Phil Seuling was the father of the modern comic-book shop. Such a retail network, however ad hoc, would put the final piece in place for continuance and renewed success of the medium.

The existence of the shops is almost an accident in terms of somebody having an idea about supplying comic books to his friends. Literally, the shops came into existence because of Phil Seuling. Phil Seuling was a comic book fan and he and his friends used to go to the same stores every month and couldn't get the same comic books. Phil Seuling lived in Brooklyn and he called up here and said, 'Look, can I buy 10,000 copies from you, wholesale, so that I can sell some to my friends and keep some in the back room?

[Giordano]

Up until that point, comic books had been supplied to the market through magazine distributors. To sell comic books, you had to be willing to sell Playboy and Time as well. With the work of Seuling in the eastern US and similar moves made by Bud Plant in California, comic books went directly from producers to sales shops. The industry was revolutionized.

The first effect of these stores was that while DC and Marvel were saved, they were no longer the only companies doing business. Newsstand outlets had been dominated by distributors and small grocery stores were hesitant to carry comic books because of the small profit margin available, so the industry had been effectively dominated by the two big houses. Now, anyone who could staple pages together had a place to sell his comic book. Independent companies, with no allegiance to the Code, began to thrive. The first of these included the now famous Cerebus the Aardvark by Dave Sim, and Wendi and Richard Pini's Elf quest.

DC and Marvel were not slow to realize that this was where the future would be found.

… we realized at that time that the possibility existed that the whole thing could collapse. I mean the direct sales market, but it was the only chance we had. So … Paul Levitz and Jeanette Kahn developed a plan that would have us direct our entire line to that audience. If it survived, we survived with it. If it didn't survive, we were gone anyway. I don't think we were quite that negative but each of us knew that there was that possibility …

[Giordano]

Marvel's first attempt to target this new market came with the first new comic-book term: the graphic novel. 'Graphic novel' is a term used by some comic-book intellectuals (who may be the same as intellectuals who read comic books!) to denote a new respect for comic products of old. For Marvel it meant a very specific magazine-sized book with high quality glossy paper. The first paper graphic novel was called The Death of Captain Marvel. The company recalled their Kree Captain and gave him to Jim Starlin, who wrote a one-episode tale of the heroes of earth gathering to help their friend battle not another villain but cancer. In a classic Starlin style, he managed to have the Captain come to terms with his own mortality and the heroes with their relative impotence.

DC began to see that their market could be tapped to support limited projects that would have strong followings but not support a long-term series. They introduced mini-series and maxi-series. Minis were normally four issues long and maxis twelve. Each issue contained a complete story that could stand on its own and usually delighted fans with a strong character who was not a star in his own right, for instance The Atom, Green Arrow and The World of Krypton. DC's first maxi-series demanded more development than an established character needed since there were only twelve issues with which to explore the possibilities. Their first maxi was Camelot 3000, enjoyably done by Mike W. Barr and Brian Bolland who used some inventive touches as they reincarnated the Knights of the Round Table to ward off an alien attack. The most memorable character was Sir Tristan reincarnated as a woman. However, with Camelot 3000, DC took an even bolder step. All twelve issues were available only in comic book speciality shops, which had come to be known as 'direct-sales outlets'. The natural home for the medium had been found. Then came the deluge.

Once the new path for comic books had been cleared, the two major companies did not allow themselves to be left behind. The key was to synthesize DC's scripting and Marvel's characterization from the Silver Age while utilizing the marketing possibilities of their new audience and the comic shops. Marvel had less ground to regain even though their mainstream product line was as erratic in quality as DC's. Nevertheless, by matching books and creative people properly they were able to achieve some truly wondrous books for their new audience, such as John Byrne's Fantastic Four and Walt Simonson's Thor.

DC's first real contribution in this arena came packaged in an unremarkable team-up between Superman and Green Lantern in issue 26 of DC Comics Presents, where they met and defeated a typically menacing alien. The interesting part was a bonus insertion about the reforming of a team from the Silver Age. The Teen Titans—whose gimmick had been to bring together a team consisting exclusively of sidekicks: Robin, Kid, Flash, Wonder Girl, Aqualad and Speedy—still included most of the above but now added such figures as Cyborg, a scientist's son who was half-man-half-machine; Raven, sorceress and empath, daughter of the demon Trigon; and Starfire, princess of an alien warrior race. This blend of old and new seemed to strike the same chord for DC that the X-Men had struck for Marvel. Their differing backgrounds made each character unique while threats from the vastly different pasts of Raven and Starfire forged them into a family.

DC revived The Legion of Super-Heroes under Paul Levitz and Keith Giffen. Levitz was a long time Legion fan who was able to excavate arcane details of Legion lore to great effect while Giffen's art was a thoroughly comprehensive and convincing vision of the future. The pinnacle of old entertainment synthesized with new techniques came when Roy Thomas moved to DC and began both All-Star Squadron and Infinity Inc. All-Star showed Thomas's love for comics history as he retold the wartime adventures of the Justice Society and their innumerable Golden Age counterparts. Thomas rarely radically altered the myths so much as retold and fleshed out the origin stories. Infinity Inc., its modern companion, chronicled the adventures of the Squadron's superheroic children in the present. More significantly it was only for direct sale. While Thomas's painstaking attention to detail attracted older readers and a few younger fans fascinated by the Golden Age, he was never able truly to reach the new fans who had come to expect radical departures for their superheroes and who were now increasingly being influenced by the independent and nonsuper comics flooding their local shops.

Comic fans nowadays have become a well-educated group, and independent books vie, often successfully, to take sales away from the major houses. Today's more demanding readers have also attracted the attention of artists and writers who want to work unfettered by the rules of Marvel and DC and successful books such as Howard Chaykin's American Flagg and Mike Grell's Jon Sable Freelance have emphasized the need for reviewing the terms by which major companies employ their creative people.

… We're selling Blackhawk because Howie Chaykin did it because nobody has any real interest in Blackhawk. I'm talking about the prestige series. Chaykin likes to work with your characters and likes to work with his own stuff. he likes to fool around with his own stuff for another publisher. He hasn't created anything new for us. He always takes our characters and messes with them. Anything new he has he brings someplace else. Then there's other people who just want to create their own stuff. They really aren't interested terribly in working on your characters. Frank Miller is one of those. He would rather do his own stuff. Dave Gibbons can go either way.

[Giordano]

Thus, the major companies began exploring other formats and genres to entice artists, writers and fans with interests decidedly different from the usual superhero comic. During the 1980s Marvel began to publish expensive, square-bound books such as Barbara Slate's Yuppies From Hell—a black-and-white book in comic strip style that mocks money-grabbing, status-seeking yuppiedom. DC has gone so far as to create a separate publishing company called Piranha Press for their own adult titles. Such books are specially designed for older and more sophisticated readers in comic shops. Stories such as 'The Crypt of the Magi' in Piranha's Beautiful Stories For Ugly Children shows that they certainly warrant the cover warning, 'For Mature Readers'. In 'Crypt', for instance, a husband moonlights in a factory to earn money to buy coloured contact lenses for his wife who has always hated the drab colour of her eyes. He mutilates his hands in a machine during his last night on the job but returns home on Christmas Eve with the lenses.

She, of course, has sold her eyes to a medical school to buy brass knuckles so he will no longer be mugged for his paycheck! These grim and gothically amusing stories are becoming increasingly common as adults are discovering or rediscovering comic books and as the medium becomes more sensitive to the demands of adult entertainment. Independent productions such as Bill Sienkiewicz's Brought To Light, which shows the American Eagle defending the Iran-Contra affair with barroom bravado, and Maus, a holocaust history with mice as Jews and cats as Nazis, have begun to show the range of potential in the medium, a medium long used for adult entertainment in Europe and Japan.

As comic book fans have become increasingly willing to define themselves in terms of this medium, comic books have tried to speak to them in techniques reminiscent of, albeit far more accomplished than, Lee and Kirby. By playing with the codes and conventions of superhero comics, fans gratify themselves by buying books that show they are 'in the know'. Often this is played for laughs as semi-logical extensions of well-known superhero characteristics are extended. DC has done very well by casting its Justice League International books in this mould. League members regularly make fun of Batman's 'ears', join the group to make money because heroing is usually a non-profit profession, and get lost because they don't know a local language.

These kinds of jokes only work if your audience knows what usually happens in comic books, or more accurately, what is supposed to happen. Everyone knows that while Batman is an incredibly menacing figure, his ears are funny, especially when drawn as impossibly elongated as some artists have done for horrific effect. Satiric magazines using super-heroes are not unusual. One of Mad's earliest successful issues featured 'Super-Dooper Man'. These comics are different because they are aimed at very specific readers with knowledge about the magazine they read and the people that produce it. It's no accident that the most prolific mainstream producer of these meta-comics is Marvel. They pioneered the chatty, humorous atmosphere between artists and readers. Their Damage Control series has the interesting premise of a construction firm dedicated to rebuilding property wrecked in super-battles.

Perhaps the steadiest self-parody has come from The Sensational She-Hulk, also in the Marvel line. She-Hulk is already a character of dubious seriousness simply because of her name and her green-skinned relative. John Byrne is well known as a star artist of modern comic creations and the magazine sells partly because he is featured as writer and artist. Byrne's affection for the character is long-standing, dating back to his work on her own special graphic novel. The attraction of the book lies in its use of comic conventions. She-Hulk will yell at Byrne for not getting the story right and, if she is truly frustrated, she will say, 'I can't wait until this issue is over' or will have her fight scene censored for the Comics Code.

She-Hulk is with all that a mainstream book and is, in fact, approved by the Comics Code. Marvel's alternative publishing firm, Epic Comics, is not under such restrictions. The idea of twisting unique superhero codes was carried to its extreme in Epic's recent Crime and Punishment: Marshall Law Takes Manhattan by Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neil. Marshall Law is a hero hunter garbed in black leather. In a world that mocks and mirrors Marvel's own products, almost every major hero and convention is taken to task. Although their names are not spelled out, their identities are obvious. A true knowledge of the Marvel Universe is necessary to decipher all the coded messages from the clues given. The superheroes of this world were created by government experiments that eventually drove them mad and caused them to murder several innocents. They all end up in a ward for the insane, allowed to 'wear a costume of [their] choosing to assist in recovery'. The magazine is full of psychological case studies for each hero, such as this version of Spiderman.

Case 5: A shy and sexually inhibited young man, who was experiencing difficulties with his marriage and coping with his super-powers, he was diagnosed as suffering from a psycho-sexual neurosis. He tried to overcome his marital problems by a blatant form of exhibitionism. Namely: spending his nights leaping from building to building in a hairy spider suit, 'Web-Shooting'. The sexual significance of this, along with the circumstances under which he was arrested, is discussed below.

The heroes speak in the overblown Lee style of heroic nobility:

'Hmm … those stairs … I suspect they could
lead up to the next floor!'

'Well spotted, my friend! It's there we shall make
our Last stand!'

'And ours shall be victory!'
'I am with you! Yours shall not be the glory alone!'
'I, too! For a true hero never abandons his comrades.'

Their version of Daredevil walks about in a costume in which none of the colours match and bumps into walls in the background of panels. When the heroes are thrown from the top of a skyscraper at the climax, each assumes that his own power will save him in the way that superpowers have performed in countless previous comics. Daredevil senses a flagpole coming up and it tears his arms off as he reaches out for it. Captain America grabs a satellite dish antenna, mistaking it for his 'trusty shield'. Dr Strange recites that immortal spell that will open a portal to another dimension; 'Jondag, Jondag, Jiggle, Matmitty, Matmitty'. In the end they all plunge to their deaths in the streets below, and the post-holocaust cannibals that live there roast the Punisher over the Human Torch. In the final panel Marshall Law utters the Marvel slogan, 'Nuff Said'.

An Epic comic of this type is unusual not only for its content but also for its physical form and high price. The characters and events are copyrighted to Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neil, reflecting a growing trend towards creative rather than corporate control over artwork and text. The book is also printed on high-grade paper with no advertisements and is 'square' bound. These kinds of comics are becoming increasingly common for a multitude of reasons. An adult market means a demand for a higher quality product as well as an ability and willingness to pay for such quality. The higher price helps to steer the book into the right hands—a twelve-year-old is less likely to end up with an adult comic when it carries a 5 dollar price tag. Dick Giordano points out:

The formats and the production values have become more important to us because we don't think of it as throw away literature anymore. We think of it as something you're going to put on your bookshelf and we try to produce material that will at least live as long as you do. With exceptions, almost all of them are printed on good paper with good quality inks and so forth so that they're likely to last as long as the person who purchases them. Not only because it needs to be collected but because it needs to be read 20 years from now by somebody else … because it will still be readable 20 years from now without any extraordinary steps being taken to preserve it. Most of the stuff will last longer.

The adult reader and the serious material both seem to demand a comic book that fits well on a bookshelf or coffee table, not merely in a cardboard box. One of the most popular new forms for the medium is the trade paperback. A softbound book with square binding, it is the size of a comic book, only thicker. A series usually consists of four to twelve issues. The limited series of the 1980s, such as Camelot 3000, WatchMen, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, and other mini- and maxi-series, have been the most successful because the books are visualized as complete and homogeneous productions. However, when a particularly popular artist or writer has a successful tenure on a continuing series, these issues are likely to find their way into the trade paperback also. These formats have expanded creative and marketing possibilities as comic book companies such as Marvel and DC are becoming fully fledged publishers. Marvel's graphic novels, featuring such well-liked characters as Dr Strange teamed with Dr Doom or Wolverine and Nick Fury, are now hardcover books and have reached a level of artistic maturity and acceptance previously unknown. DC's long-awaited Arkham Asylum is both a hardcover and multimedia production, using experimental methods and avant-garde techniques.

… We started talking about, 'Gee can we paint covers? Why not? Let's try some new covers.' That led to painting a whole book. That's what Arkham Asylum is. It's a book that's painted. It's not black and white drawing with good colouring on it. It's painted artwork. It's multimedia painted artwork. It's got things pasted on it. The artwork weighs a ton. Some of the things that you see there weren't painted, they were glued to the board. [The artist] decides, 'Oh, this is interesting, this will make a special effect', and he glues that to the painting. You'll see some of those things when you see the book. We've encouraged people to take those kinds of chances and they're doing it.

[Giordano]

Perhaps the best example is The Complete Frank Miller Batman, which was leatherbound and sold in bookshops for 25 dollars for the 1989 Christmas season.

Comic books are no longer restrained by any rules other than those generated by the medium. There are only the relationships between words and pictures and artists and audiences. The evolution of comic books from a stunted, retarded medium with only one genre, only one physical form and an audience of perpetual children to one in which a full range of readers from children to adults can enjoy graphic works which are both mature and intellectually satisfying has opened new directions for the comic books of the 1990s and beyond.

Terri Sutton

SOURCE: "Adventures in Adult Comics Land," in Utne Reader, No. 59, September-October, 1993, pp. 111-12, 114.

[In the following essay, Sutton surveys autobiographical comic books for adults.]

Masturbation, nose picking, stupid jobs, and unsatisfying sex—the subject matter of most autobiographical adult comic books is so pathetically routine that it's past parodying. This strain of alternative comics was born the day Robert Crumb's nebbish alter ego first drooled over a big booty in a tight dress. At their worst, such self-referential stories are the graphic equivalent of getting stuck next to a nonstop talker on a five-hour flight from L.A. to New York. At their best, though, they flash a real-life informality like a lure, and then hook you with the barbed ends of good storytelling.

The past few years have seen a resurgence of autobiographical work by a New Wave of young cartoonists influenced by Crumb, Harvey Pekar (who has solicited Crumb and others to illustrate his own stories in American Splendor since 1976), and Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez. While the latter's 10-year-old Love & Rockets is for the most part fictional, the Hernandezes' vibrant depictions of day-to-day relationships in marginalized communities—Hispanic punks, white slackers, Central American villagers—undoubtedly encouraged aspiring writers to look to their own backyards for inspiration.

Along with any renaissance comes the backlash, of course, and the Hernandez brothers in particular have hammered on autobiographical comics for their claims to honesty and realism, noting rightfully that a fictionalized narrative is usually more emotionally "true" than a first-person account, which can be hampered by its struggles to "tell the truth."

But that criticism ignores one of the more potent roles of autobiographical writing: witnessing. When female reactions to the misogyny of underground comix came together in the early '70s, the anthologies that resulted—It Ain't Me Babe, Wimmins Comix, Tits V Clits, and the like—were generously spiked with personal anecdotes aiming for political impact. The truth of these stories of sexual misadventure, abortion, dyke bashing, and survival was more significant than their form (although these women artists' skill bore its own message). This testimony underscored the reality of events and feelings that were invisible, or demonized, in mainstream media.

It's revealing, then, that contemporary autobiographical work by women weighs in as the most adventurous of the genre. Perhaps because women continue to be underrepresented in popular culture, both as creators and as characters, truth telling likewise remains an effective tool for female cartoonists. But, just as feminism's focus has moved from rights to the often deeply rooted reasons for oppression, women's stories today unfold in the private sphere. Artists such as Fiona Smyth, Julie Doucet, and Renee French play with dreams, memories, what-ifs, acted out primarily on the bodies of their cartoon alter egos.

These comics pointedly explore a more complex femaleness than the cultural left or right has acknowledged. In Dirty Plotte, Doucet has repeatedly rummaged through the stock wardrobe of her belly-button-gazing peers, but self-absorption fits differently on her—and registers differently on a reader—if only because the image of a woman stroking her crotch still surprises. More daringly, Doucet has put her big-eyed, goofy cartoon self-image to work unpacking the idea of gender. Doucet flirtatiously fills panels with dicks and cunts in fantasies that don't so much fight sexual oppression as confound it. For Doucet, the language and logic of dreams serve her purpose, which is to peel away the skin of the stories we like to tell ourselves and uncover the jumble of secrets underneath.

Like Doucet, Renee French messes with expectations of female identity—especially expectations about sexuality. Her new comic Grit Bath strikes out on the well-worn road of childhood memory, but takes a left before it reaches Norman Rockwell country. This is uncensored girlhood, complete with ritualistic sexual exploration and cruel fascination with geeks and younger sisters (what else can we make her do?). French's drawings push normality into the grotesque: braces are mouth wounds and everybody looks like little Wednesday from The Addams Family.

Meanwhile, in her aptly named Nocturnal Emissions, Fiona Smyth investigates her mind's landscape with a fourth-grade girl's fascination with ornamental detail. Smyth's snakeheaded, multiorganed, and tattooed creatures make Peter Max posters look like minimalism: Nearly every panel is covered with squiggles, flowers, flames, and circles within circles. Explicitly sexual and spiritual, the book presents a psychedelia with Frida Kahlo's face—an elaborately sensual, pro-female space where drugs, dreams, and myths meet. Smyth re-envisions the self-loathing porn fantasies of too many boy cartoonists with celebratory zeal.

To read these comics as personal revelations brings the possible into the real: The impudent female qualities portrayed here are not mere potentials, they're alive and kicking.

In a similar way, Joe Sacco's series Palestine uses impressions and conversations from his travels around Jerusalem and the West Bank to give character to people many Americans narrowly view as terrorists. Sacco admits his own biases: He remembers the athletes murdered in Munich, but, he writes, "if Palestinians have been sinking for decades, expelled, bombed, and kicked black and blue, even when it's made the evening news I never caught a name or recall a face." That, in effect, is his task: to find those faces, and to figure out why, as an American, he's never seen them before.

Both as an artist and as a reporter, Sacco fiddles with perspective. He draws his slope-shouldered, big-featured figures from either knee level or bird's-eye perspective, juxtaposing points of view. At the same time, he's interspersing stories (of idealistic American Jews in Jerusalem, sadistic rock-throwing Palestinian kids, grieving mothers, angry nurses) into his own rapid-fire commentary (I'm scared; what are they asking of me; cute soldiers—whooee!).

It's a sensitive project that could easily fall into superficial cultural rubbernecking or, worse, dogmatism. Sacco cleverly plays off both. Mostly he emphasizes the loss and pain that register in the faces of those he meets, allowing their words to carry the narrative. The ace he holds is a fine sense of incongruity—something he used to great effect in the Gulf War ruminations from his last book, Yahoo. Here, he describes a night in Balata (in the West Bank) with a group of refugees who entertain him by playing a videotape of Delta Force. The Chuck Norris film depicts a Beirut hijacking by a group of evil but cowardly Palestinians, who are eventually "blown to bits by Norris from his rocket-firing motorcycle." Sacco's hosts "watch impassively, shaking their heads from time to time." In the morning, he leaves by taxi, gunfire popping behind him.

Palestine works as a comic because Sacco's a skillful, subtle storyteller, but its urgency comes from the very real voices he's made known. Ditto David Greenberger's Duplex Planet Illustrated. Greenberger, who works at a nursing home in Boston, first began collecting stories from its aged residents in 1979. Soon after, he put the interviews and anecdotes together in a small fanzine, The Duplex Planet, which he's still publishing; he started the picture book version this year.

These are autobiographical bits and pieces told to Greenberger and drawn by a host of cool cartoonists (Dan Clowes, Roberta Gregory, Drew Friedman). Again, the potential for emotional tourism is high, not to mention the risk of relating these fragile stories with condescension or treacly melodrama. Fortunately, Greenberger manages a light touch; the focus is on strikingly told sketches, like one about a National Guardsman's farcical experiences with communist partying in the early '40s. Duplex Planet is careful to capture the individual voices of its speakers, and it's a real pleasure to read cadences of the English language not shaped by MTV or Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

One side effect of drawing from amateur storytellers is a sort of narrative zigzagging, a dreamlike spiraling off from facts, old movies, and reminiscences that can get as delightfully weird as any Twin Peaks episode. Or a story's very simplicity may provide its charm: In its entirety, "What I Learned from Francis McElroy" reads, "If you are an old man, and you go into a bar in pajamas, people will buy you drinks." Sly, poignant, sometimes absurd, Duplex Planet Illustrated reminds the smug younger reader that human nature is a wacky, complicated thing, whether you're 9 or 90.

And, yeah, that goes for middle-class, white, thirty-something men as well. Chester Brown's autobiographical stories in Yummy Fur have run through almost every hackneyed routine in the autobiographical genre: Playboy bunnies, obscenity, bizarre masturbation techniques, '70s pop cult references, first dates, body fluids, troubled relationships with women. So why are they so good? Joe Matt, a pal of Brown's, pulls the same shit in Peep Show and you want to force-feed him Michael Douglas movies until he tires of self-centered disaffectedness and learns to prefer Judy Davis over Sharon Stone. So why doesn't Yummy Fur make me seethe?

The difference is the absence of the Crumb factor. The reigning wisdom among a lot of attitude-copping male cartoonists seems to be "Yeah, I'm fucked up—how about some sympathy?" But in Brown's best and most startling work, concerning his adolescence, distance allows him to depict his subjects and his characters (including himself) with a tough, discerning, and moral eye.

Not that he's overt about his message; that wouldn't be good storytelling. In fact, Brown's examination of his adolescent obsession with Playboy elicited responses across the spectrum, from boys who wanted to know more about his jack-off methods to women upset that he was endorsing objectification of females. Fascinated by the cartoon Chester's ugly desperation, I read it as straightforward testimony: This is the way he learned about sex, about desire; this is the sexual model he's had to carry around, struggle against, strive to change. Reading it, living it myself, I understood better. And that's the magic of witnessing from a life.

Benjamin DeMott

SOURCE: "Darkness at the Mall: The 'New Wave' in Adult Comic Books Features Defeat, Cynicism and Despair," in Psychology Today, Vol. 18, No. 2, February, 1984, pp. 48-52.

[In the following essay, DeMott takes a dim view of the dystopias presented in more recent adult comic books like American Flagg and Edge of Chaos.]

The world of comic books is no match for the violent world of video games, but it does change significantly from generation to generation. And there is a major transformation in full progress right now, with potentially large cultural consequences. The good news is commercial; a hitherto untapped national market is emerging, made up of young males in their late teens and early 20s. They patronize an estimated 3,000 specialty outlets, mostly in shopping malls, spending up to $50 a month to stay abreast of such current adult comic-book favorites as Edge of Chaos, Camelot 3000, Warp, E-Man, Ronin, The Omega Men, American Flagg, and Jon Sable, Freelance, and dozens more. The bad news is non-commercial; it flows from the darkness of the attitudes and assumptions that dominate the new books.

No single medium shapes the mind of today's youth. But because successful mass-culture productions usually are fine-tuned to the publics they serve, it's conceivable that the themes in the new comics echo the beliefs of the target audiences. And those themes are troubling. Freedom, fairness, integrity, sympathy, individuality and other familiar values surface now and then; in their name heroes and heroines occasionally wage last-ditch holy wars. But defeats far outnumber victories, and victories are often tarnished; the key article of faith seems to be that turning the tides of political corruption, fending off nuclear disaster or breaking the manacles of Big Brother thought control will be, in the long run, impossible. The world of adult comics is full of downers; the tone aimed at, in general, is knowing cynicism, and the feelings evoked are, more often than not, grim, self-taunting and hopeless.

The extent of the negativism can be missed in casual browsing. Fans of Superman or Donald Duck—or of Batman or Spider-Man or Wonder Woman—might conclude, after a quick glance through the pages of Warp or E-Man, that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Gory sock-'em-ups, the staple of old comic books for kids, play the same role in comic books for young adults. And the presence of interplanetary wars and other items stolen from ordinary science fiction hardly adds up, in itself, to a radical departure from time-honored tradition. Is there really anything so adult about adult comic books?

Indeed there is, starting with sex. The new magazines don't cross the line into porn, but they commonly show heroes and heroines in bed together before or after galactic adventure. By exploiting time-warp conventions, moreover, they contrive pseudo-historical justification for outfitting females in sexually piquant costumes. For example, the hero of Edge of Chaos is time-warped to ancient Greece; in most panels, he appears in the company of Diana, a voluptuously bare-breasted, compliant female assistant to Zeus. And in revising old legends and myths, the story-and-art departments often introduce transformations. DC Comics' Camelot 3000, in which King Arthur is reincarnated after a nuclear holocaust, centers much of its action upon a female Tristan caught up in lesbian passion for Isolde; Tristan's price for selling out the Knights of the Round Table is a guarantee, by Morgan le Fay, of a magical sex change.

But it's not just frankness about sex that distinguishes the adult's from the child's comic book; there is also the eagerness to play pedagogue. In adult comic books, war and intrigue are regularly interrupted for mini-lectures on topics ranging from cultural relativism to existential despair, from fluorocarbons to data banks. In the opening issue of one series chronicling a post-holocaust, end-of-the-line struggle against a universal monolith called the Citadel, much is made of the differences among the 22 planetary cultures obliterated by the monolith; a letter to the reader, at the back of the book, stresses that the story's focus is the "vast variety of alien worlds" that existed prior to the Citadel's hegemony, "each [world] with its own unique attitudes and culture."

Moreover, the genre's publishers hype their products as offering news unobtainable elsewhere about the frontiers of contemporary thought. A book called Mars, for instance, is advertised as "an extrapolation from current theories about the mind." Eclipse Comics' DNAgents instructs readers in genetics jargon. Allusion to contemporary political rows in adult comics can be explicit: E-Man takes on evangelical Christian fundamentalism, mocking the current attack on "secular humanists." And recommended reading lists—works in the traditional print media—turn up in both editorial and letters columns. The book called American Flagg recommends Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell's 1984, two volumes by Alfred Bester and Revolt in 2100 by Robert Heinlein.

Ideas also have a place in the traditional comic press, as Ariel Dorfman has demonstrated in a series of witty Marxist analyses of Donald Duck and Superman. But the new comics stress their teaching mission, even as they are stuffed with clichés, misinformation and errors.

But what's most striking about the new comics is the gloom, the pervasive atmosphere of defeat. They repeat the theme that the future belongs to the Oppressors: Tiny bands of resisters may struggle for independence, but they have terrible difficulty simply staying alive; individual efforts to stand up for oneself or protest some exceptionally outrageous practice by the Oppressors tend to fail. A typical segment of First Comics' American Flagg illustrates the pattern. The place is Chicago, the time is 2031, decades after a pivotal year of cataclysm marked by an East Coast meltdown, crop failures, plagues, the collapse of the international banking system and the nuking of London by a reunited Germany. "Every surviving corporate head" and elected leader has been relocated to Mars, where they function as a puppet government jerked about by PLEX, a giant communications conglomerate. The people obliged to go on living in Chicago's rubble and elsewhere are drugged on "entertainments"—chain houses of prostitution (venereal disease from these "Adult Centers" is rife); a sports gambling industry run, in the Windy City, by a black mayor; and, most notably, a weekly, televised, world-syndicated riot called "Firefight All Night Live!" and starring two or more of Chicago's 70-odd "registered paramilitary clubs," murderous gangs armed by PLEX.

Comes a lone resister—decent young Reuben Flagg, a bribe-rejecting college dropout who, after losing an acting job, manages to find work as a uniformed security guard. Depressed by the seedy, PLEX-controlled shysterism surrounding him, Flagg hunts for a way to strike back. But his coworkers set him up. They tape his seduction by the madam of a branch Adult Center so that his claims to integrity are compromised. And his attempts at challenging PLEX come across as pointless. Alerted to the existence of subliminal signals on television that stimulate ever-more intense demands for violence among viewers, Flagg risks his life to rip out the "sublims" signal system, whereupon—the close of the segment—a wilder riot than any hitherto known commences. The last word is a taunt from Flagg's oily, deceitful boss: "Now, thanks to you, we'll see what happens … when a horde of murdering sociopaths are deprived of the only thing they love."

American Flagg's portrayal of the media as manipulative providers of "bread and circuses" achieves, at moments, satirical edge. But its pessimism about the engulfing forces of thievery and injustice remains unrelieved from start to finish. And roughly similar views of life appear in countless other adult comic books. Ronin, perhaps the most visually impressive publication in the field—at $2.50, it's also among the more expensive—offers images of New York City's future that are staggeringly bleak. A single corporate complex spreads itself over midtown; the rest of the city consists of burning buildings, monster rats and huddled, starved, half-naked bums preying miserably on each other. (New York is "warlike, desperate, hopeless, evil to the root.…") The savagery and greed of Ronin's corporate giant, called SAWA, is matched, in DNAgents, by that of a chemical combine called Matrix. When futuristic comics are set in post-corporation ages, the survivors are programmed to tear each other apart—see The Omega Men—in mindless struggles for the leadership of forlorn groups that haven't a prayer of prevailing against the going universal tyranny. And when comics develop reincarnation themes, a standard plot feature is an act of shameless turpitude committed by a standard-brand politician upon some upright figure out of the past. In Camelot 3000, the sitting President in the White House, presented as a conventional American Yahoo, double-crosses King Arthur.

It's fair to acknowledge that a few humorous adult comics continue to be marketed—the best of them is Pacific Comics' Groo The Wanderer, a send-up of quest motifs that borrows the idioms of Mel Brooks' 2,000-year-old man. And in contemporary adult mass media, melancholia, self-pity and despair are scarcely unique to adult comics; the lyrics of the Talking Heads or Lou Reed or of many Iggy Pop albums don't exactly overflow with good cheer. And before long, some observers no doubt will announce that it's not the content of the new comics that's significant but, instead, the age of their consumers. Once upon a day, comic books meant kids in their subteens, bike-riding youngsters who dropped by the drugstore or stationery store to check out Bugs Bunny and the rest on innocent Saturday afternoons. Is it not proof of the onset of mass adult illiteracy that the new comic-book audience is composed of people who work for a living and drive to malls, at night, to lay out hard-earned dollars for junk?

Still, the range of allusion and vocabulary in the majority of the adult comics goes beyond that of standard daily newspapers. It's less likely that adult comics are read because they're easy than because they seldom affront the deepest beliefs and intuitions of their audiences. It's hard to be precise about the nature of these audiences: Comic-book publishers don't take complicated readership surveys. Asked what he knows about his adult customers, Mike Flynn, promotion manager at DC Comics, could say confidently only that most are males between the ages of 16 and 24, and that two-thirds had completed some college; he had no information on income levels.

My guess is based partly on the comments I listened to, particularly about American Flagg, in the local branch of Moondance, an important Eastern chain of comics stores, and partly on scrutiny of the letters columns of a score of magazines, which seem not to be housewritten. That guess is that dropouts and community-college students, uncertain of their direction, constitute the bulk of the readership. Preached at since childhood about American abundance, the dream of success and upward mobility, these readers find themselves increasingly remote from the success culture, alienated from what Herbert Marcuse once spoke of as "the cosmos of hope." They thus have good reason to value any indirect, non-humiliating explanation of their exclusion from the American Dream.

Sounder explanations than those offered in adult comics are available—versions of the present and future of "opportunity" that take into account shifts in the nature of the economy and the composition of the work force. In theory, public education in a democracy has an obligation to acquaint younger citizens with such historical factors. They also should be informed about the ways in which ideological competition with noncapitalist nations has stimulated extravagant expectations about free enterprise. But that obligation is not met, and one result is that the country's young losers have little choice, when attempting to interpret the more punishing contemporary realities, except to fall back on fantasy, moral oversimplifications and stylized, knowing cynicism about the evil of all who hold power.

A speculative analysis, granted. Equally speculative is the notion that adult comics are a better safety valve for the millions who read them than, say, membership in crypto-Fascist youth groups. What's clear, in any case, is that the new adult-comics press, with its smotheringly enormous corporate giants and hopelessly situated, yet young and decent, American Flaggs, is too disturbing a cultural phenomenon to be pigeonholed under casually dismissive labels. The deep, broad-based cynicism expressed and reflected in adult comics has not been a norm in this country's working-class youth; its advent could have a powerful impact on politics and culture.

Adam Gopnik

SOURCE: "Comics and Catastrophe," in The New Republic, Vol. 196, No. 3779, June 22, 1987, pp. 29-34.

[In the following essay, Gopnik examines Art Spiegelman's Maus, a comic book about the Holocaust, in the historical context of traditional cartoon imagery and caricature.]

If you ask educated people to tell you everything they know about the history and psychology of cartooning, they will probably offer something like this: cartoons (taking caricature, political cartooning, and comic strips all together as a single form) are a relic of the infancy of art, one of the earliest forms of visual communication (and therefore, by implication, especially well suited to children); they are naturally funny and popular; and their gift is above all for the diminutive.

But these beliefs about cartooning are not merely incomplete; they are in almost every respect the direct reverse of the truth. Cartoons are not a primordial form. They are the relatively novel offspring of an extremely sophisticated visual culture. The caricature, from which all other kinds of cartooning descend, first appears around 1600 in Italy, within the circle of Bernini and the Carracci—and then not as a popular form, a visual slang, but as an in-group dialect, an aristocratic code.

Some of the devices that belong to cartoon and caricature might seem to be very ancient. There may appear to be precedents in Egyptian and Assyrian art for the device of combining human and animal elements in one figure; and we find distorted or grotesque human faces on everything from Greek pots to Gothic cathedrals. But these ancient practices have essentially nothing in common with apparently similar devices in modern cartoon and caricature. Before 1600 the tradition of combining human and animal elements in a single figure was a tradition of splicing—usually placing an animal head on a human body in order to symbolize reverence (as in Egyptian art) or contempt (as in certain Roman graffiti). It was only around 1600 that the tradition of splicing human and animal elements was replaced by a tradition of melding those elements together in such a way that the abstract likeness of man and animal was made into an animated visual fusion.

Similarly, grotesques before 1600 were never portraits: Roman and Gothic grotesques are meant to depict sub- or transhuman types. They are not meant to be striking, much less affectionate, likenesses of individuals. Distortion of the human face for the purposes of caricature, rather than the creation of monsters or satyrs, and the device of melding, as against splicing, human and animal features together are unique to the cartoon tradition, and are at most 300 years old (though, inevitably, certain kinds of simple caricature and cartoon are haunted by earlier "grotesque" traditions).

It took more than a century before the caricature was reimagined, in England in the late 18th century, as a form of popular political and social satire. And the "diminutive" cartoon, the kind of cartoon we associate in this country with the work of Walt Disney, is not a simple extension of the cartoon tradition, but a real departure from it, an American invention of the same vintage as contract bridge or the NFL.

Our mistaken beliefs about cartooning testify to the cartoon's near magical ability, whatever its real history, to persuade us of its innocence. Even though cartoons are in fact recent and cosmopolitan, we respond to them as if they were primordial. If we could understand why this happens, we might begin to understand the special cognitive and even biological basis of our response to the form. That educated people don't know very much about cartooning just shows that we don't usually think it worthwhile to educate people about it. But this situation is changing. That, for the first time, educated people are coming to have an opinion about cartoons is largely due to the influence of one remarkable work, Art Spiegelman's book Maus: A Survivor's Tale.

By now everyone has heard something about Maus. It has been widely and enthusiastically reviewed, has sold a surprisingly large number of copies, has been nominated for a National Book Critics' Circle Award. And by now everyone knows what Maus is: the Holocaust Comic Book. This label is one of those oxymorons—like "nonfiction novel" and "rock opera"—that put reviewers into a kind of hypnotic trance. Rising from their baskets and swaying back and forth, they worry ponderously about categories rather than values. Maus is a work in progress, a serial that has appeared in installments in Spiegelman's magazine RAW, a magazine of what used to be called "underground" cartooning. (RA W is to New York painting in the '80s, which often draws heavily on cartoon imagery, what Minotaure was to Paris painting in the '30s—a kind of pret-b-porter catalog of avant-garde form.)

On one level, Maus is an autobiographical documentary about Viadek Spiegelman, the artist's father, and his experiences in Poland as a Jew during the Second World War. Maus begins with Art visiting Vladek today in Rego Park, Queens. "We weren't very close," Art admits. (We learn later that the two men had been tom apart by the suicide of Art's mother, Anja, a few years before.) In part to encourage a warmer relationship with his father, in part because it seems important for its own sake, in part because it offers a new avenue for Art's work, Art decides to write a book about Vladek's experiences during the war, experiences that, we discover early on, took him into Auschwitz. The story then moves freely from Rego Park today to Poland during the horror, as we both follow the track of Art's inquisition of his father and move back into the lost world Vladek's memories evoke.

Vladek, we are informed, came from a family of well-off Polish Jewish merchants. As a young man he married the plain and troubled daughter of a much wealthier family. (It is a measure of Spiegelman's extraordinary intelligence and delicacy as a kind of novelist that he manages to make his father's mixed motives in this marriage perfectly apparent without seeming censorious.) When the war breaks out, Vladek joins the army. (There is a hilarious flashback to the Spiegelman family's distinguished history of draft evasion.) Vladek participates in a single, doomed battle with the Polish army, in which, quite unremorse fully, he kills a wounded German soldier ("I was glad to do something"). He is sent to a prison camp, where, interestingly enough, his Jewishness doesn't seem to single him out for especially sadistic treatment. Then he is released, and returns to his family. Practical and exceptionally enterprising, he begins to build up his business again—and then, in its oddly impersonal way, the Nazi "noose begins to tighten" around the throats of Vladek and his family.

Spiegelman makes the bureaucratic sadism of the Germans uncannily vivid—all the steps and reroutings and sortings and resortings that preceded mass murder. Maus is a work of hyperrealist detail. Nobody could have anticipated that a comic book about the Holocaust could have told so much about the way this particular endgame was played out: precisely how the black market worked within the ghettos; exactly what happened, in sequence, when the Germans occupied a town; why in 1943 a Jew would have thought Hungary a haven, and how he would have tried to get his family there. The book version of Maus, published by Pantheon in 1986, ends with Viadek and Anja in Auschwitz, and the latest installment in RAW picks up their story again in the camp.

At the same time, we see Vladek as he tells his story today. Vladek is not exactly Elie Wiesel. He is a pinched, mean-spirited, and hilariously miserly old man. In the middle of telling Art how Anja's parents were the first among the family to be sent off to Auschwitz and the ovens, he breaks off the conversation to pick something up from the street. Art: "What did you pick up?" Vladek: "Telephone wire. This it's very hard to find. Inside it's little wires. It's good for tying things." Art: "You always pick up trash! Can't you just buy wire?" Vladek: "Pssh. Why always you want to buy when you can find!? Anyway, this wire they don't have it in any stores. I'll give to you some wire. You'll see how useful it is." Art: "No thanks! Just tell me what happened with Haskell." And then we are back in Poland.

No summary can do justice to Spiegelman's narrative skill—his feeling for the dramatic juxtaposition of hideous and comic material; his rendering of the exasperated love of a son for his inadequate, persecuted father; above all his ear for voices. No writer in any genre since the young Philip Roth has managed make the Jewish speech of several generations sound so fresh or uncannily convincing, an achievement that's all the more impressive since it has been done within the incredibly tight confines of comic-strip balloons.

But none of this is what has made Maus famous in its time. That notoriety due to a simple, hallucinatory device: all the characters in Maus are drawn as animals—the Jews as mice, the Poles as pigs, the Germans as cats, and the Americans as dogs. It's extremely important to understand that Maus is in no way an animal fable or an allegory like Aesop or Animal Farm. The Jews are Jews who just happen to be depicted as mice, in a peculiar, idiosyncratic convention. There isn't any allegorical dimension in Maus, just a convention of representation. In fact, at one key moment in the book real mice, animal mice, appear, and the Anja and Vladek characters, though drawn as mice, respond exactly as real people would respond to real rodents.

But the cartoon device in Maus has been widely seen not as a way of organizing the horror vividly and effectively, but as a way of denying the horror altogether, of turning remembrance into folktale. It's even been said that Maus marks the end of real Holocaust literature, the moment when, in the hands of the survivors' children, the horror settles into folktale and fable. Or else, in the hands of those few reviewers committed to the "underground" cartoon as a form, Spiegelman is seen not as an artist working within the best traditions of the cartoon, but as the Spartacus of the underground comic strip, the hero of a movement that has emancipated the cartoon from mere cuteness—liberated the seven dwarfs from the Disney mines, so to speak, and turned them into underground men of a better and different kind.

Both these views are fundamentally ahistorical. Working not against the grain of the cartoon but within its richest inheritance, and exploring the deepest possibilities unique to the form, Spiegelman has reminded us what the cartoon is capable of: Maus is an act not of invention, but of restoration. And in rediscovering the serious and even tragic possibilities of the comic strip and the cartoon, Spiegelman has found another way to do what all artists who have made the Holocaust their subject have tried to do: to stylize horror without aestheticizing it.

Mostly we think about the problems of art about the Holocaust in literary terms, and not sufficiently about how the problem has been addressed in the visual arts. It is the visual arts, after all, that memorials to national disasters and martyrdoms have traditionally been made. Some of the terms and concepts evolved in art criticism and art history may help us to understand what is, after all, an iconoclastic dispute, a debate about the legitimacy of images. To borrow a distinction from Meyer Schapiro, we want art about the Holocaust to be both narrative and iconic. We want to be told or shown exactly what happened, but because we know in advance that what we're going to see is more horrible than anything we can imagine, we want the style of the depiction to be elevated and even a little mysterious, like great religious art.

Even the few inarguably great public statements about suffering in our time seem inadequate to the events of the Holocaust. If we were told, for instance, that Picasso's Guernica is a memorial to, say, Lublin, I think we would feel a little disgusted. Guernica, after all, is an elegy to the losing side in a conflict: the painting takes sides, and has a point. But the uniquely horrible thing about what happened to the Jews in Europe is that the "sides" existed only in the paranoid fantasies of their persecutors. (And in Guernica, as in The Charnel House of 1945, we can't help but feel that we're being had a little. Picasso's great achievement in art was to ask us to read "distortions" of human form not merely as horrific, but as capable of expressing an enormous range of emotion. In their way these pictures are too beautiful.)

Of course, the notion that modern warfare has brought with it a new kind of evil—not merely cruel, but senseless—does not begin with what happened in Europe in the '40s, and neither does the corresponding notion that the traditional forms of elegiac art are in some sense inadequate. Goya saw clearly that the traditional forms of ennobled suffering were utterly incapable of dealing with a new kind of horror—and he was the first to see, too, that it was the tradition of the cartoon, of all things, that might offer a solution. What may strike us most about Goya's etchings in The Horrors of War or The Third of May is their documentary realism, but, as E. H. Gombrich has pointed out, it wasn't firsthand experience that gave form to Goya's art; rather, it was the tradition of popular imagery, of caricature and political cartoon, that Goya borrowed and reimagined as the appropriate armature on which to hang his indignation.

One of the most frightening and memorable of Goya's devices in The Horrors of War is borrowed from the popular tradition of making men look like animals and animals look like men—the tradition of "physiognomic comparison." What's most striking about the major examples of the tradition, even before Goya, is how fascinatingly ambiguous they are, and how essentially humorless. If we look at, say, Charles Lebrun's Comparisons of 1667, the most encyclopedic of all the essays in physiognomy, we seem to be seeing something proto-Darwinian in its vision. Are these images of the bestiality latent in man, or of the humanity latent in beasts? Even those animal types that have become, in our time, stock instances of the diminutive cartoon (rabbits and mice) have in Lebrun's drawings an utter gravity and melancholy. The faces of Lebrun's little humanized rodents not only look uncannily like the faces in Maus; they also look like us. They seem, for all their obvious grotesqueness, so much more modern than any of the portraits Lebrun painted precisely because of their ambivalence—not man secure in a social role but man staring into the abyss of his own possible bestiality.

Thus the tradition of the cartoon, far from being essentially diminutive and escapist, has been from its beginnings well suited to expressing certain kinds of high seriousness. Again and again throughout the history of the cartoon, serious artists have drawn not just on the satiric potential of the form, but on its ability to stylize a certain kind of horror as well, the horror that occurs not when human beings behave wickedly but when they lose (or are robbed of) their humanity altogether. This is a tradition Lebrun articulated and Goya ennobled. (It is also the tradition of cartoon that Picasso drew on in his political comic strip of the '30s, The Dream and Lie of Franco.)

What needs explaining, then, isn't the emancipation of the cartoon tradition by Spiegelman and the RA W stable of artists, but its previous domestication. Stephen Jay Gould has explained the essential psychological device that allowed the artists of the Disney studios, in particular, to transform humanized animals from totemic beasts into pets. Gould demonstrates that Mickey gradually became more and more "neotenic" as time went on; that is, he came to have more and more of the features of human infants: large forehead, floppy joints, head out of proportion to body size, and so on. Mickey, in short, came increasingly to look like a human baby, and, as Gould goes on to suggest, this transformation turned the cartoon mouse into a kind of red flag waved at the most basic of human instincts. We are prewired, it seems, to respond with passionate affection to anything that has a certain set of infantile features; the anonymous artists of the Disney studio had forged a key that fit a primal lock in the human mind.

What Gould didn't point out (and had no need to) was how utterly discontinuous this discovery was with the rest on the history of cartooning. The Disney invention was so astonishingly successful that in some respects it effectively expunged any other kind of cartooning or any other potential for the cartoon, from the memory of educated people. We see here the source of the paradox with which we began: the neotenic cartoon has overwhelmed not just all other kinds of cartoons, but our memory of all other kinds of cartoons.

This was possible, in part, because at a deeper level cartoons and caricature have always had more direct access to basic types of human cognition than almost any other kind of drawing. Some cognitive psychologists theorize that caricatures and cartoons are so memorable because their external forms in some way mirror the internal structure of our mental representations, the idealized and schematized mental imagery that our minds use to presort and structure perception. The mind's eye, they argue, in effect sees caricatures when it looks at the world and sees cartoons when it tries to remember what it has seen. The discovery of caricature, on this view, is as much an episode in the history of psychology—a fundamental discovery about the way the mind works—as it is an episode in the history of art.

I do not invoke Goya and Picasso to provide Maus with a tony pedigree. Maus is, by comparison, visually timid and even a little crude. In fact, Maus is considerably less daring, as drawing and design, than almost anything else in RAW, and less daring than much of Spiegelman's own earlier work. (An episode of an earlier Spiegelman strip, "Prisoner of Hell Planet," is inserted into Maus to make this plain.) The drawing here is, even by Spiegelman's own standards, deliberately folklike, stiff and unvaried.

If Maus depended for its effect only on the cartoon device, it would not be much more than an interesting curiosity. But Maus draws its power not from its visual style alone, but rather from the tension between its words and pictures, between the detail of its narration and dialogue and the hallucinatory fantasy of its images. At the heart of our understanding (or our lack of understanding) of the Holocaust is our sense that this is both a human and an inhuman experience. We know that it happened to people like us, but we also know that what happened to them is not what happens to people, that what happened was not just discontinuous with the rest of human history, but also with our notion of what it is to be a person, and of how people behave. In order to show that these events are in some way sacred to us, we have to indicate, in art, that they are at once part of human history and outside it.

This overlay of the human and the inhuman is exactly what Maus, with its old form, is extraordinarily able to depict. On the one hand this is entirely history of the motives and desires of particular people, the story of Vladek and Anja's hundred individual decisions, failures, betrayals and disappointments. On the other hand it is a history in which all human intention has been reduced to the hunted animal's instinct for self-preservation, in which all will and motive has been degraded to reflex. The heart-wrenching pathos of Maus lies in its retrospective, historical sense: Art, drawing Maus, knows that Vladek and Anja are finally as helpless and doomed as mice fleeing cats—but they still think that they are people, with the normal human capacity for devising schemes and making bargains.

Maus thus gives form to something essential to our understanding of the Holocaust. It is both loving documentary and brutal fable, a mix of compassion and stoicism. This is the consequence of its strange form, which pays perfect and unerring respect to the fate of particular people caught up in the horror, and at the same time makes it plain that the horror cannot really be understood or explained as a sum of individual actions and desires. Our fear about the depiction of the Holocaust is not only that it will be trivialized, but also that it will be assimilated to the Western tradition of tragedy, that organizing it will allow us in some sense to dismiss it—to leave the theater of history, purged. But with its seemingly bizarre juxtaposition of visual and literary struggles, Maus manages to give dignity to the sufferers without suggesting that their suffering had any "meaning" in a sense that in some way ennobled the sufferers, or that their agony has a transcendent element because it provides some catharsis for those of us who are told about, or are shown, their suffering.

Spiegelman's animal metaphor captures something crucial about the psychology of Holocaust survivors. Those few I have met are remarkably articulate about their story, but they are interestingly uncurious about the motives of their persecutors. They do indeed seem to see them as cats, as natural and unthinking predators who simply do what they are born to do. But the Germans weren't cats. They didn't have to do what they did. The cartoon form can supply a perfect mix of literary and visual metaphor, but metaphors aren't explanations.

If Maus is a nearly magical description of what happened—if it manages to sum up the experience of the Holocaust, for the survivors and their children, with as much power and as little pretension as any other work I can think of—it still must be said that the book succeeds so well in part because it evades the central moral issue of the Holocaust: How could people do such things to other people? The problem with the animal metaphor is not that it is demeaning to the mice, but that it lets the cats off too easily.

There is also a deeper level of image magic at work in Maus, which accounts for both its power and its extraordinary fit with its subject. I have mentioned earlier that a tradition of "spliced" animal and human forms precedes the "melded" forms of caricature. The image of a human body with an animal head is one of the very oldest in art, and it occurs frequently for the same reason: not, as in the physiognomic tradition, to compare man and animal, but to symbolize the presence of the sacred. In a way that I am almost certain is completely unconscious, Maus is also haunted by the older tradition, and, particularly and strangely, by a peculiar Jewish variant of the older tradition.

Spiegelman's animal heads are, purposefully, much more uniform and mask-like than those of almost any other modern cartoonist. His mice, while they have distinct human expressions, all have essentially the same face. As a consequence, they suggest not just the condition of human beings forced to behave like animals, but also our sense that this story is too horrible to be presented unmasked. The particular animal "masks" Spiegelman has chosen uncannily recall and evoke one of the few masterpieces of Jewish religious art—the Bird's Head Haggadah of 13th-century Ashkenazi art. In this and related manuscripts, the Passover story is depicted using figures with the bodies of humans and heads of animals—small, common animals, usually birds.

Now, in one sense the problems that confronted the medieval Jewish illuminator and the modern Jewish artist of the Holocaust are entirely different. The medieval artist had a subject too holy to be depicted; the modern artist has a subject too horrible to be depicted. For the traditional illuminator, it is the ultimate sacred mystery that must somehow be shown without being shown; for the contemporary artist, it is the ultimate obscenity, the ultimate profanity, that must somehow be shown without being shown. But this obscenity, this profanity, has become our sacred subject, in the sense that our contemplation of it has become nearly liturgical.

Yet still we want a sacred art that isn't a transcendent art. We want an art whose stylizations are as much a declaration of inadequacy to their subject as they are of mystical transcendence. And this is the quality that Maus and the Bird's Head Haggadah, for all their differences, share: in both these Jewish works, the homely animal device is able to depict the sacred by a kind of comic indirection. The device is so potent precisely because it seems, at first, so disarming.

So the self-conscious element of primitivism in Spiegelman's drawing has the deepest affinity with the very small body of important Jewish art. It is an affinity that may help lead us to a better understanding of what a modern Jewish art can be, a Jewish art that leads away from Chagall and his levitating Hassidim, away from banal affinities rooted in sentimental imagery, from ersatz connections between ancient form and modern abstraction such as those made by modern Israeli artists who draw on Hebrew calligraphic traditions. The affinity between the medieval Jewish illuminators and Art Spiegelman may be rooted in a much more profound set of solutions—solutions that turn deliberately to the homely and the unpretentious, rather than to the transcendent and mystical, in order to depict the sacred.

One of the platitudes about modern art is that it exists in the face of the failure and dissolution of religious art. In some sense, of course, this is true. And yet the human need to see depicted all those things that used to be the province of religious art—the geography of good and evil, of heaven and hell—remains constant. The deeper preoccupation of modern art, from Matisse's Arcadia to Francis Bacon's infernal interiors, has been to find some secular visual language to fulfill that need. Cartoons reflect this preoccupation too, and have been surprisingly successful in making these images for us: images of Eden in the work of George Herriman and Winsor McCay, and now potent images of extreme horror in Maus. If all the old forms of religious art have gone into diaspora, there seem to be moments in heaven, and circles in hell, that have taken shelter in the comic strip.