Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature

199 Pages·2005·6.64 MB·English

by  Charles Hatfield

ALTERNATIVE COMICS
Gilbert Hernandez, “Venus Tells It Like It Is!” Luba in America167 (excerpt). © 2001 Gilbert Hernandez. Used with permission.
ALTERNATIVE COMICS
AN EMERGING LITERATURE
Charles Hatfield
UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI • JACKSON
www.upress.state.ms.us
The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses.
Copyright © 2005 by University Press of Mississippi
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First edition 2005
(cid:2)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hatfield, Charles, 1965–
Alternative comics : an emerging literature / Charles Hatfield. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-57806-718-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-57806-719-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Underground comic books, strips, etc.—United States—History and criticism. I. Title.
PN6725.H39 2005
741.5'0973—dc22 2004025709
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction ix
Alternative Comics as an Emerging Literature
1 Comix, Comic Shops, and the Rise of 3
Alternative Comics, Post 1968
2 An Art of Tensions 32
The Otherness of Comics Reading
3 A Broader Canvas: Gilbert Hernandez’s Heartbreak Soup 68
4 “I made that whole thing up!” 108
The Problem of Authenticity in Autobiographical Comics
5 Irony and Self-Reflexivity in Autobiographical Comics 128
Two Case Studies
6 Whither the Graphic Novel? 152
Notes 164
Works Cited 169
Index 177
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Who can do this sort of thing alone? Not I. Thanks are due to many.
For permission to include passages from my article, “Heartbreak Soup:
The Interdependence of Theme and Form” (Inks 4:2, May 1997), the Ohio
State University Press. For shepherding that article in the first place, Inksedi-
tor Lucy Shelton Caswell.
For the use of copyrighted material, the many artists and other rights-
holders represented herein.
Special thanks to the following, without whom my vague aspirations and
tentative arguments could not have become a book:
For guiding my first draft, my advisors at the University of Connecticut:
Tom Roberts, Jean Marsden, and Tom Recchio. For information and images:
Robert Beerbohm, Cécile Danehy, Gary Groth, John Morrow, Mark Nevins,
Nhu-Hoa Nguyen, Nick Nguyen, Eric Reynolds, Michael Rhode, Patrick
Rosenkranz, Randall Scott, R. Sikoryak, Tim Stroup, Brian Tucker, and the
Comics Scholars’ Discussion List ([email protected]). For the corre-
spondence, Gilbert Hernandez. For patience and counsel, Seetha Srinivasan
and Walter Biggins. For design, Pete Halverson.
For mentorship and friendship, Joseph (Rusty) Witek. For help of all sorts
and friendship in all weathers, my fellow traveler Gene Kannenberg, Jr.
For inspiration and conversation, my brother Scott. For unstinting moral
and material support, my parents Ella and Jerry and my parents-in-law Ann
and Bob.
For the spark, Jack Kirby.
Finally, and above all, to my own dear family: Michele, Coleman, and
Nicholas.Norp!
vii
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INTRODUCTION
ALTERNATIVE COMICS AS AN EMERGING LITERATURE
This book is about comics. Specifically, it is about the growth, over the past thirty-
odd years, of the American-style comic book and its loosely named offshoot, the
graphic novel. In the English-reading world, the graphic novel in particular has
become comics’ passport to recognition as a form of literature. Through this book
I aim to cast light on both the necessary preconditions for and certain key exam-
ples of this newly recognized literature, while unashamedly holding up as
a backdrop the form’s populist, industrial, and frankly mercenary origins. In all,
this book offers an entry—or rather several points of entry, including the socio-
historical and the aesthetic—into that most fertile and bewildering sector of comic
book culture, alternative comics.
Alternative comics trace their origins to the underground “comix” move-
ment of the 1960s and 1970s, which, jolted to life by the larger social
upheavals of the era, departed from the familiar, anodyne conventions of the
commercial comics mainstream and provided the initial impetus, the spark of
possibility, for a new model of comics creation. The countercultural comix
movement—scurrilous, wild and liberating, innovative, radical, and yet in some
ways narrowly circumscribed—gave rise to the idea of comics as an acutely
personal means of artistic exploration and self-expression. The aesthetic and
economic example of the underground (as related in this book’s scene-setting
first chapter) spurred the development of what eventually became a highly
specialized commercial venue for comics: the comic book specialty shop, as it
blossomed in the seventies and eighties. Within this specialized environment,
the collision of “underground” distribution with mainstream comic book pub-
lishing resulted in the growth of a hermetic yet economically advantageous
market, one that catered to mainstream comic book fans but sustained, at its
margins, the fevered sense of artistic possibility ignited by comix.
ix