Does Mad Need a Museum?

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"Whatever they were they were tall, but not too tall — space limitations, you see; they were dark...; they were handsome — well, symbolically handsome. The world of comics was a form of visual shorthand, so that the average hero need not have been handsome in fact, so long as his face was held to the required arrangement of lines that readers had been taught to be the accepted sign of handsome: sharp, slanting eyebrows, thick at the ends, thinning out toward the nose, of which in three-quarter view there was hardly any — just a small V placed slightly above the mouth, casting the faintest nick of a shadow. One never saw a nose full view. There was never a full view. They were too hard to draw. Eyes were usually ball-less, two thin slits. Mouths were always thick, quick single lines — never double. Mouths, for some reason, were rarely shown open. Dialogue, theoretically, was spoken from the nose. Heroes' faces were square-jawed; in some cases, all-jawed. Often there was a cleft in the chin."

Before there was a superhero, there had to be a hero. In the early '30s that was Dick Tracy, Chester Gould's city cop with an FBI agent's love of forensics and gadgetry (the Crimestopper's Textbook instructed kids on how to catch bad guys). What's striking today about the strip is its sanctified sadomasochism. No question, Tracy could dish it out, as in this sequence from 1947: "Like a whip, a piece of chain flies through the air — a chain attached to Tracy's cane handle. AGAIN AND AGAIN, the chain slashes! Tiny pieces of glass fly through the air." More often, though, Tracy was on the receiving end of the mayhem.

Here's some ghoulish Gould from panels reprinted in Masters of American Comics, we see the detective's hair burned to the scalp; he's shot in the forehead by a .22 rifle bullet; he's left to starve to death, his own prop a smirking skull. This is the text in a Sunday splash from 1943: "A brawny arm is hurled forward! With the speed of lightning, a leather thong wraps itself around the detective's neck — he chokes. His hands struggle toward his throat. His body is yanked backward. The pain is excruciating! The whip butt rises and descends as all senses leave the brain of detective Dick Tracy —"

THE TRIUMPH OF WILL

Will Eisner, who died two years ago at 87, was a force in the medium — two media, really, comic strips and graphic novels — and as both an artist and an entrepreneur, for more than six decades. TIME.com maven Andrew Arnold calls him "one of comix' greatest forward-thinkers." In the biz from his teens (everybody started young in comics), Eisner wanted to break out of the newspaper-illustration straitjacket, saying, "A daily strip to me is like trying to conduct an orchestra in a telephone booth." So at 23, on June 2, 1940, he introduced The Spirit, which ran as a separate comic book in the Sunday papers — an eight-page symphony, if you will. Not a graphic novel, yet, but a graphic short story.

The hero was another strong man with a secret identity: in this case, Denny Colt, a detective who was believed killed and resurrected himself as the do-gooder Spirit. With Superman and Batman and their caped cronies running altruistically amok through urban mean streets, Eisner was encouraged to make his protagonist a bit more like them; only reluctantly did he slap a mask on the Spirit to establish his kinship to the superheroes. New York (Metropolis, Gotham) was here called Central City, though later the Spirit traveled abroad. Sometimes he nearly disappeared from his own strip, making only a perfunctory appearance in the lives of supporting characters or guest villains. In that sense, The Spirit was a proletarian comic strip with a collective hero: the "little people" of Central City.

To peruse the strip in sequence - as you can in the handsome collection called The Spirit Archives, now up to its 22nd volume - is to see Eisner shift within genres and tones. One week's story might be a melodrama, the next a comedy, the third a parable. But beyond the variety of stories was a striking visual consistency: the tone was bold, dark and mature - a grownup vision, compared to the adolescent world-view of the standard superhero strip. To quote Feiffer: "Will Eisner was an early master of the German expressionist approach in comic books - the Fritz Lang school. Muss 'Em Up' was full of dark shadows, creepy angle shots, graphic close-ups of violence and terror. Eisner's world seemed more real than the world of other comic book men because it looked that much more like a movie. ... The further films dug into the black fantasies of a depression generation the more they were labeled realism. Eisner retooled this mythic realism to his own uses: black fantasies on paper. Just as with the movies, it was labeled realism."

The draftsmanship was up to the level of the vision. Here's, I promise, my last Feiffer quote: "Eisner's line had weight. Clothing sat on his characters heavily; when they bent an arm, deep folds sprang into action everywhere. When one Eisner character slugged another, a real fist hit real flesh. Violence was not externalized plot exercise; it was the gut of his style. Massive and indigestible, it curdled, lava-like, from the page." As does Feiffer's prose.

I'll stop the history tour here, in part because I've written about Kurtzman and EC comics at length on this site, in part because Andrew Arnold has written with a scholar's eloquence and a fan's passion on the later artists in the Masters of American Comics show.

But if you're wondering why I withheld this survey until after the exhibition closed, I'll tell you. One reason is that the New York-New Jersey show was far from iddeal. The L.A. museums were a car-drive away, and everyone drives out there. Back here in Manhattan, Newark might as well be New Delhi. As Spiegelman wrote to the show's producers: "While swell for New Jersey residents, placing the first half of the 20th century's comic strip artists into the Newark Museum is, from the perspective of this provincial New Yorker, the equivalent of hiding them in a Federal Witness Protection program." The Jewish Museum also censored some of Crumb's more robust drawings, provoking Spiegelman to withdraw his art from the show he had helped inspire.

But mainly, something in me is suspicious about using this show to elevate the pedigree of comics. It's the venue as much as the works that compels visitors to think that a comic strip can be taken as seriously as a Lichtenstein. I agree with Pettibon, who writes, "For fans of comics the Museum of Art is as foreboding and scary a place as the Comics Convention is for lovers of art." As fascinating and as vindicating as it is to see all this wonderful material on museum walls, the enterprise speaks to two slightly neurotic trends in our culture: the need of so-called High Art to reach down, and the need for so-called Low Art to be placed on a pedestal.

"Sadly, comic book artists have long regarded themselves as second-class citizens in the world of storytelling," wrote Frank Miller, who did the Sin City graphic novels (and co-directed the film version), in his intro to the fourth volume of The Spirit Archives. He says the result has been "a field that is constantly looking to other media for validation. See? We use REAL PAINTING, just like FINE ARTISTS do!'"

It's akin to the argument that tries to make movies art by defining them as pictures seen on a wall (museum pieces) rather than illustrated stories. Yet Ingmar Bergman and Preston Sturges, to name just two great "directors," are primarily not visual stylists but writers. Similarly, Kurtzman and Spiegelman are remarkable less for their draftsmanship than for conjuring a world and giving it narrative shape, density and bite. You don't see their work so much as you read it.

And that raises my last quibble about the museuming of comics. Many of the artists included as writers more than "directors." Put it this way: would you rather see (read) Kurtzman's Mad or Spiegelman's Maus illustrated by other artists, or have others write stories for which Kurtzman and Spiegelman provided the drawings? The first, obviously, because the genius was in the writing. Indeed, though Kurtzman and Feldstein did their own drawing for some EC comic covers and stories, most were illustrated by terrific artists (Elder, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis) who brought their own personalities to the equation. At Marvel, Stan Lee dreamed up and wrote the Spider-Man stories, while Jack Kirby illustrated them - which is why Kirby, the artist, is in this show and Lee, the writer (and copyright holder) is a multimillionaire.

Anyway, as Pettibon notes, "Comics are a book medium. Comic Books on the wall don't pass as comic books. You couldn't flip through one if you tried -- and that's a shame." That's exactly right: the way to appreciate comic book art is by reading them, in book form.

So, art lovers, invest your money in the Little Nemo book; in The Spirit Archives; in the spectacular enlarged reproduction of Mad comics that Russ Cochran produced in the 80s, or the MAC OS X compilation of all Mad magazines. Sit at your computer, snuggle up in bed or sprawl on the floor with the book open before you. Be a kid again, discovering the low thrills and high art of old Comics Books. You don't need a museum to tell you that this stuff is great.

On the Web:

Jules Feiffer
Little Nemo in Slumberland
Richard Corliss: Harvey Kurtzman
TIME: Al Feldstein
TIME: Peanuts in the Gallery
Masters of American Comics
The Spirit Archives
ABSOLUTELY MAD