I begin this week's lecture with a letter.

Comic scholar Christopher Pizzino

discovered this letter
in the archives of the Library of
Congress.
The letter is from The Dagger, an
otherwise anonymous comics fan, to Dr.
Fredric Wertham.
It reads, you big bums, you're nuts!
I hate you for saying that Dick Tracy is
bad for us.
You rotten slobs, you and your whole
joint.
Whoever let you out of the nuthouse must
have been bats.
The Dagger.
From its three-fold skull and crossbones
motif, through its hand drawn
lineation, to its stylized signature.
The Dagger resists authority.
It resists good forms, it resists the
psychiatrist, the doctor.
Indeed, in writing and sending it, The
Dagger probably resisted his parents as
well.
And so I see in it the call of a
generation of readers.
A generation who'd had, had enough of the
boss's rule.
Who wanted to read their comics regardless
of the psychiatrist's conclusion.
Of the sub-committee's ruling, of their
parents worries
about content, and of society's disregard
for the comic book.
And so I term this lecture, The Death of
the
Father, or the Advent of the Graphic
Novel.
And my question is, what is the graphic
novel?
And why is it important, and more than
that, what is it's relationship
to the comics of the past?
In answering this question, I know
full well that in our very first lecture,
Mark Raxton told us already.
Mark Raxton, in ultimate Spider Man 78, he
said.
The thing is, do you know who Will Eisner
was?
You ever hear that name?
And then, and
then Mary Jane, she said no!
But then Mark continued and, he became
very passionate about it.
He said, he was like this famous comic
book artist.
In fact, the guy.
The guy invented the comic book, the
graphic novel.
And what he did was he took something.
The writing and artwork.
A comic strip.
And he made it into a, a, a book.
He put it together and
he told a story with it.
No one thought to do it before him.
He was the first.
He, he, he created something.
That prior to his creating it, it didn't
exist.
It's easy to dismiss Mark Raxton's
statement.
After all, he's a fictional, high school
senior.
In a comic book.
But I would suggest that his claim.
That artistic innovation is revolutionary,
that, that an individual artistic genius
comes to a field and revolutionizes
it, alone and dynamically.
That claim is persuasive, and I would
suggest further.
That the claim that comic book are their
own medium, that they, too, are
individual and separate from the other
arts
and contain a revolutionary power, is
similarly persuasive.
And so I turn to Scott McCloud's great
book Understanding Comics.
And here, on page 104, McLeod writes us a
poem about the comics medium.
It is a poem ultimately about the reader
and the comic.
He begins, in comics, as in film,
television and real life,
itt is always now.
This panel, and this panel alone,
represents the present.
Any panel before this, the last one for
instance, represents the past.
Likewise all panels still to come.
This next panel for instance represent the
future.
But unlike other media, in comics, the
past is more than just memories
for the audience and the future is more
than just possibilities.
Both past and future are real and visible
and all around us.
Wherever your eyes are focused, that's
now.
But at the same time, your eyes take
in the surrounding landscape of past and
future.
Like a storm front, the eye moves over the
comics page pushing
the warm high pressure future ahead of it,
leaving the cool low-pressure
past in its wake.
Wherever the eye hits land we expect it to
begin moving forward.
But eyes, like storms, can change
direction.
McCloud lays out a brilliant analysis, it
opens in the first tier.
With a galaxy of clocks strangely floating
from there
we turn to three measured panels in which
McCloud talks
to us about the past, the present and the
future.
And the rhythm of those panels.
Is similar in their measured equality to
the ticks of a clock.
Indeed, each tick moves ahead, turning
future into present, and
then into past, like the movement of the
second hand on the clock.
And the gutters, that separate those
panels.
Are like the no man's land between the
markers on a clock, in which
the secondhand sweeps across, marking a
time without marking.
McCloud's opening is to suggest that
reading
bears some uncanny resemblance to time
itself.
And we can see that in that his
eyes are circular like the clocks in the
background.
In the second tier though, McCloud
dissolves this distinction.
And so the panel falls away from him and
his hands, indeed his whole
body, is open.
To that no man's land, that timeless time
of the gutter.
This he says, is what makes comics unique.
Both past and future are real and visible
all around us.
Then the third panel.
The third panel introduces a powerful
simile
that at once advances and changes
McCloud's argument.
The thrid panel,
the third tier first panel opens with a
panel of panels.
In it is the eye.
The eye here is both the reader's eye But
also, following
a new simile, it is a hurricane's eye, it
is the
quietude in a larger spinning circle, and
so McCloud at the
end of this tier reminds us that eyes like
storms change direction.
Storms move linearly.
But the also arc back.
And so we're brought back to those first
clocks, and
we realize that as much as they move
linearly across
time, stamping out second after second,
devouring the future in
the present and making it the past, they
are also circular.
And so reading, McCloud suggests for
comics, is both linear and
recursive, both forward-moving and also
charting a past in which
we can turn back and read the other panels
around us.
McCloud's notion of sequence here,
sequences
moving forward but also everywhere around
us.
Is at the heart of his definition of
comics which he offers some pages earlier.
McCloud defines comics as juxtaposed
pictorial and other images in deliberate
sequence.
And so comics, McCloud argues, have a
unique relationship to both the
page and to time, and I think we can say
by extension.
The graphic novel marks the medium's
maturity.
It has the same unique relationship to
time but it
marks a growing up, a movement away from
children's stories
to a more sophisticated stories.
To
this, I would say, don't be fooled.
The
comics page is how all representational
narrative art
works.
All narrative art drives linearly.
To its conclusion, all narrative art seeks
finality.
But it is the nature of art, embodied as
it is in the material forms, it is
the nature of art to allow the reader to
escape this linearity in at least
two powerful ways.
First, every form of art allows
the reader to reflect on narrative story,
thus,
witnessing a drama.
We can return the following evening, study
it again.
Viewing a movie?
We can pause it.
Rewind, study a scene, reading a novel, we
can re-read the prose.
Or we can turn back 100 pages and see how
it's developed.
Looking at a painting, we can take in the
whole painting, but then stop.
And study various moments,
to see how they interrelate.
All art.
Allows the readers to escape the
inevitable narrative sequence and rewind
it, recur
on details, and deepen, and enrichen, and
reflect on his or her understanding.
But more, all art also moves across time
in a massive scope.
And thus, we can read art in the present,
but we can
also return to the past.
Return to the past and read the art of the
past.
We can examine a story a 100 years ago,
200 years ago.
And we can enjoy it for what it says about
its own time, or for what it speaks to us
now.
All art allows us to escape sequence
allows
us to recur like the eye of a hurricane
on the past, on it's own past, or on a
global past.
And so.
The comic's page is in fact how all art
works.
And this brings us to a larger point.
Art is not progressive.
Individual geniuses do not break
fundamentally
from the past, for if they did.
The would be
unable to read that past.
They would be unable to know what had been
made before them, and they would
invalidate that past.
It is the fact that artists are within
time, but they too, can step out of time.
And speak to one another in that nether
region between the ticks of clocks.
So what I would argue is that the
argument for medium is actually an
argument about authority.
It is an argument that says.
Comics are their own medium.
When it means to say, comics have the
authority of all art.
It is an argument that says the graphic
novel is revolutionary.
When what it means to say.
Is simply take
comics seriously.
And in this I would say
that the true power of recognizing comics
is not merely to understand
their marvelous stories, but that they
teach us to think about all art.
In this.
I would like to turn now to Will Eisner in
some depth.
Particularly to a lecture that he gave in
2002, at the University of Florida.
I think that Will Eisner is a marvelous
storyteller.
In prose or in comics, and that his
lecture helps
us understand the role of authority in art
over all.
Izzore tells us and then something
happened in 1969- 71 in San Francisco.
An underground movement began.
A bunch of heads got together in San
Francisco, Crumb,
Spain, Spiegelman, and they began turning
out some really remarkable comics.
They were, I guess, insulting, in a way,
but they took on the establishment.
At that time, I was a suit.
I was running a publishing company up in
Connecticut.
My secretary came in, and she said.
Mr. Eisner, there's a man on the phone
named Phil Seuling.
Who says he's got a comics convention down
here in New York.
And he wondered if you'd come down.
Then she stopped and looked around the
room to make sure no one else was around.
And she said, were you ever a comic
artist?
And I said yes, I was a comic book
cartoonist at one time.
At any rate I went down to the convention,
which
was being held in one of the hotels in New
York.
And there was a group of guys with long
hair and scraggly beards who had been
turning out what they spun as literature,
really
popular gutter literature if you will, but
pure literature.
And they were taking on illegal subject
matter
that no comics had ever dealt with before.
I talked to some of them, and there was
a funny smell about them, cigarettes or
perfume or something
like that, and they laughed at the wrong
times.
At any rate, I came away from that
recognizing that a revolution
had occurred then, a turning point in the
history of this medium.
I went back to Connecticut.
This story is exciting on a number of
different points.
And I want to apply Kuskan rules one,
circle the details, and two,
synthesize those details, because I think
if we do so, we can understand
it at a deeper level.
The first thing I circle is the notion of
being a suit.
And that reminds me of R Crumb's comic,
Zap one.
Where white man, is a suit, he's trying
very hard
to conform to an ideal of what a
professional man is.
And I see that and I set it against
something else.
No one else around.
It's a funny little scene, the secretary
comes into the office.
She knows no one's in there but she's
nervous to even say this.
Were you a comic artist?
Like it's a dirty word.
So between being a suit and no one else
around, I get a sense of social authority.
Even when you're alone, you should be a
suit, because social authority
is important, and being a comic artist is
no authority at all.
Then I move to the next paragraph.
And I circle their long hair and scraggly
beards.
Those guys aren't wearing a suit at all.
They're the underground comics guys.
They're the movement of counter-culture
artists.
More than that, Eisner says that they're
spinning
out literature, gutter literature, but
it's also pure literature.
So Eisner's saying on the one hand their
subject matter isn't pure.
It's dirty, it's guttery.
But on the other hand what they're talking
about is the, is pure literature.
It's real art.
And so Eisner thinks about that, and then
he realizes that a
revolution of new readers has come and
that the medium itself.
The medium itself has changed.
And so he sees a break from
the codes of the past.
Both a break in the social codes, these
long
hairs who can smell funny, they can get
together now.
But also a break from the artistic codes,
and so.
Eisner goes on, to write a contract with
God, which he claims is the first
graphic novel.
However, the term graphic novel was first
used years before in 1964.
By Richard Kyle.
And in fact, graphic novels, novel length
comics were around since Ralph Tofer's
novels.
In the United States, France Mazareal
wrote A Passionate Journey,
which was a book entirely of wood cut
pictures, no words at all.
But it told a real narrative.
Lynd Ward wrote God's Man, a Novel in
Woodcuts which also had no words.
And all this was before Superman, in the
beginning of the 20th Century.
In Europe Tintin had been serialized in
newspapers
but also sold in books Since, since the
1920s.
By the' 70s, Gil Kane and Archie Goodman
had produced
Black Mark, in 1971, a full-length
action-adventure in
words and pictures that conformed entirely
to the shape of the novel.
Jim Steranko soon after that Wrote
Chandler: Red
Tide, which was supposedly America's first
graphic novel review.
Don McGregor and Paul Gulacy wrote Sabre,
which was a comic novel.
And, only in
1978, did Will Eisner's Contract with God
come out.
Really only four years later, Marvel
released The Death
of Captain Marvel, which they termed a
graphic novel.
My point here isn't to undermine Will
Eisner and
his account of how he came to Contract
with God.
Indeed, Eisner is truly a genius.
But his genius lies in his ability to tell
stories, in his ability to work the page
in a unique and profound way.
In fact, the graphic novel was developing,
developing over the course of the 20th
century and developing hotly in the
publishing techniques of the 1970s.
So what I would suggest is that the
strength of Eisner's story is
about the nature of authority, the
argument for medium.
It's fundamentally about the authority we
accord
comics.
On top of that, the graphic novel
is essentially a marketing term to claim
that authority,
to present comic books as worthwhile, but
we needn't use
these terms.
Because comics stand on their own.