Why comics? From underground to everywhere

IN HER WONDERFUL book "Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere," Hillary L. Chute suggests that we're in a blooming, expanding era of the art - call it the protean age. Chute sees comics as a sequential medium, which at its heart "is about distillation and condensation." The comics theorist Scott McCloud calls this "amplification through simplification"; Art Spiegelman just calls it "picture writing." However they're defined, comics are everywhere, on big and little screens, on the page and online. Wonder Woman is a movie star; the Muslim superhero Ms. Marvel, a Pakistani-American teenager from New Jersey, is fighting the good fight, as is the Black Panther in the series written by Ta- Nehisi Coates. To answer the question posed by her title, Chute divides her study into the "10 biggest themes in today's comics and graphic novels," themes she sees as constituting the "guiding questions on the value of comics today." Each one receives its own chapter, starting with "Why Disaster?" ("the foundational theme of the comics") and moving onto "Why Sex?" and "Why Girls?" Although she avoids taking a purely chronological approach, she nevertheless sketches in the medium's larger historical arc as she moves from question to question, tracing currents and following the line from one artist's pen to another, from DC Comics to EC Comics and beyond. Chute wedges a great deal into "Why Comics?," including history, content analysis, artist interviews, amusing asides and more than 100 pages of illustrations. A professor of English at Northeastern University, she puts across complex ideas without academic jargon, and her writing can be helpfully instructive ("her hand, as cartoonists refer to style") and sometimes beautiful, as when she writes of the "boxes of time and memory" in Chris Ware's 2000 opus, "Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth." Her enthusiasm can also be contagious, as I discovered midway through "Why Comics?" when I eagerly started pulling some of my old comics offthe shelf. Untethering her book from linear history frees Chute up, allowing her to leap from idea to idea, rather than simply from one period to another. She fills in the basics, introduces foundational artists and sketches in some of the medium's industrial history, though largely as a departure point for her discussions of independent artists like Robert Crumb, a leading figure in underground comics, a.k.a. comix - the "x" indicates adult content. (Chute doesn't go into the legal obscenity fights over comix in detail, which I mention only because in 1969, my father, then working in an East Village bookstore, was arrested for selling a Crumb comix. My dad went free; Crumb kept on outraging.) Some of Chute's finest insights involve superheroes, and I was particularly taken with her observation that "a significant feature of the very notion of comics for grown-ups is a rejection of the idealization of men in tights (and women in leotards)." Both that claim and her interest in comics primarily as an auteurist enterprise are in contrast to the mainstream preoccupations of Reed Tucker's "Slugfest: Inside the Epic 50-Year Battle Between Marvel and DC." As his subtitle indicates, his book largely concerns the two historically dominant companies in American comics, which he characterizes as "the Coke and Pepsi of spandex." A former features writer at The New York Post, Tucker embraces this dominance and effectively treats comics as a synonym for superhero comics, its most famous genre. For the most part, Tucker tracks the company histories of DC and Marvel, how each came into existence, how they were different and how they were the same. DC was stuffier; Marvel looser, ostensibly hipper and finally more in tune with the young adult audience than DC. A lot of this history has been covered elsewhere, as the book's bibliography indicates. As a writer, Tucker tends to get swept up in details and there's a lot about rotating company personnel and when various superheroes hit covers solo and in groups (The Avengers #1, September 1963, Iron Man, Thor, etc.), only to be retired, transformed into villains, taken offthe shelf and then exhumed for a newly launched series. Tucker occasionally turns a nice phrase, as when he helps explain Marvel's impact on the comic-book world, writing that by comparison, at the stodgy old DC, "Robert's Rules of Order was their greatest supervillain." Having defined the superhero field decades earlier, DC was "still aiming at little kids" in the late 1960s, profoundly failing to grasp the generational culture divide that Marvel exploited so successfully. Now, each company has been absorbed by larger media conglomerates - Marvel is owned by the Walt Disney Company and DC Comics is part of Time Warner - which brand and sell their comics every which way, including in endless big-screen franchises. Chute suggests that the popularity of Marvel's and DC Comics' superhero movies factors into the popularity and legitimacy of comics in the mainstream. That may be the most positive effect the big screen's Iron Man, Superman and the rest of their brethren have had on the world. Superhero movies have been a major force at the box office since 2005, when "Batman Begins" resurrected a moribund series, inaugurating the current, seemingly unending superhero- branded cinema. This supremacy can be dispiriting, especially given that the big studios often seem uninterested in making other types of movies, which has led to grim considerations about the very future of film. As I write, five out of this year's top 10 grossing domestic releases are superhero fantasies. I'm not sure that Chute answers the metaphysical question posed by the title of her book; it hardly matters. "Why Comics?," like its subject, encourages you to fill in the blanks and ask your own questions. In addition to sending me to my modest comics library, her references to visual culture also sent me racing down a nice twisty rabbit hole. She raises the topic of visual culture more generally in her discussion of how disaster is represented in comics and what she calls "the media spectacle" of Sept. 11, a date that, as she writes, "ushered in a new, intensified global visual culture heavily invested in articulating - and often actually documenting - disaster and violence." Chute doesn't distinguish among the types of images that make the present what she calls "the most visually amplified era in recent memory," with its "videos, GIFs, digital photographs and myriad visual interfaces online." Yet while many images that flow around us are visually amplified (3D, IMAX) much of this amplification is dedicated to photographic representation. New technologies, in turn, are often focused on the intensification of visual verisimilitude (virtual and augmented reality). We are inundated with the banal (cat videos) and the horrific (atrocity imagery); we are flooded with a nonstop visual stream that I think of as the 24/7 movie. Perhaps, in part, the popularity of comics that Chute rightly celebrates is a reaction to our fatigue with certain aspects of this inundation. This too is why Chute's often lovely, sensitive discussions of individual expression in independent comics seem so right and true. Her ideas about the utopian promise of comics - and, by extension, popular culture - can feel overstated when she refers to the "democracy of forms and types of media" at conventions like Comic-Con (where big companies dominate) or in superhero movies ("Economically, it seems to work to everybody's benefit"). Far more persuasive are her discussions of the artist's hand - the shakiness of Aline Kominsky- Crumb's line, the crosshatching of her husband, Robert, the rigorously controlled quality of Charles Burns's drawings. It's here that Chute finds "the grain of individual experience," locating the touch of the human that reaches and sometimes flies offthe page. To be a grown-up, Chute writes, is to reject 'the idealization of men in tights (and women in leotards).' MANOHLA DARGIS is one of the chief film critics for The Times.

Chute (Disaster Drawn) serves up an accessible introduction to the major themes and literary achievements of comics. Arranged topically-disaster, sex, queerness, etc.-the survey offers in-depth analysis of famous works including Fun Home, Jimmy Corrigan, Maus, and Persepolis, and also some lesser-known but key works such as Lynda Barry's One! Hundred! Demons! Chute's enthusiastic account is accompanied by analysis of the storytelling language of comics (aided by full-color reproduction of the pages in question) and a smattering of biographical analysis. Troubled relations with fathers is a recurring theme, found in the lives of Jerry Siegel, Art Spiegelman, and Chris Ware, among others. Literary comics capture the lion's share of attention, while superheroes get almost no play-Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns are dispensed with briefly and never returned to, an approach readers will view as either negligent or refreshing. Chute also propagates the narrative of the graphic novel tradition as largely based on white male neuroses, with R. Crumb at the epicenter. Anyone seeking a persuasive and perceptive entryway to the world of comics need look no further. Agent: Zoe Pagnamenta, Zoe Pagnamenta Agency. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.