An exhibition in Dunedin celebrates the art of comic books - perhaps not the stuff of masterpieces, but more sophisticated than one might think.
By LENNIE BENNETT
Published October 17, 2004
[Images from the Dunedin Fine Art Center]
Walter Simonson and Bob Wiacek, Uncanny X-Men, pencil and ink on board. The characters in early versions.
Walter Simonson and Bob Wiacek, Uncanny X-Men, pencil and ink on board. The characters in early versions.
Bob Kane, Batman, pencil, pen and ink on board. Kane created the character in 1939. This illustration from 1973 recalls his original vision for the superhero.
Mark Buckingham, Spectacular Spider-Man, pencil and ink on paper. Shifting viewpoints increase the tension in this panel.
Umm . . . KAZOOM! POW!! And *#@$*!!!
Which is to say, "The Comic Book Hero" has landed at the Dunedin Fine Art Center.
The exhibition features original panels from X-Men, Spider-Man, Batman and Superman, from the 1950s to the present, by some of the biggest writers and illustrators (pencilers and inkers, as they're called) in the industry.
Comic book fans are a dedicated, even obsessive, lot, so I probably can add little to their wealth of knowledge and lore.
This is a review for people like me, members of the congregation, not the choir, who come to comic books with only rudimentary understanding of their profound and continuing impact on modern culture.
It's now a bona fide genre taught in art schools and studied in universities, legitimized over the past 20 years and given its own fancy name, sequential art. Sequential art has developed into a literary movement, too, in the form of the graphic novel. (And despite what you might assume from that name, it is not pornography.)
Comic books are an outgrowth of comic strips that began in the 1920s and gained large popular currency in the 1930s. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster are credited with inventing the modern comic book hero with Superman, a mortal with extraordinary powers.
A case could be made, and has been, that sequential art began with the ancient cave drawings in Lascaux, France. That's a specious argument. Isn't everything a result of what came before it? Artists who choose this genre may have some sort of DNA link extending back thousands of years. Comic book art is a contemporary sensibility and doesn't need a lot of postmodern deconstruction. (Those Superman tights! The thing going on between Batman and Robin! Homoeroticism! Wink, wink.) Enough with the hoo-haw intellectualization.
Okay, maybe a little bit, from Will Eisner, creator of the Spirit, teacher and author of Comics and Sequential Art. Eisner likens comics' repetitive use of visual clues and cumulative combinations of images to Egyptian hieroglyphics and Chinese calligraphy.
There remains the argument that comic books are dumbed-down literature for young people too attention-deficient to concentrate on a real read. Comic books (and by extension graphic novels) are a different kind of reading, one that requires you to process images and words simultaneously. It defies skimming, engaging the reader in every panel, controlling the tempo not by the speed of the reader, but by the number and sizes of the panels on a page. Unlike traditional word-based narratives, comics' sequential art can convey time elapsing. It's a genre suited to our age, in which great, tragic stories and epic poems are no longer written, and the people we celebrate and venerate the most are often about as complex as Velveeta. And, truthfully, the story lines and characters have always had the greatest appeal to adolescent boys, the targeted audience for most comic books.
Sequential art isn't great art, or profound. But it is sophisticated, engaging us in a way that other visual genres cannot. And within its limited format, it allows for a lot of variety and interpretation.
"The Comic Book Hero" encourages such comparisons. The Batman wall traces the evolution of the masked alter-ego of playboy Bruce Wayne from the character's creation in 1939 by Bob Kane for DC Comics to its devolution into parody in the 1950s (due in part to stringent morality police who decried its violence, and a campy TV show) to Batman's reinvention in the 1980s as "The Dark Knight" by Frank Miller, in which Batman wields weapons and actually kills people (only the very corrupt and violent, of course), to today's Batman, as penciled by Jim Lee. Beginning with Miller, we were allowed to see into Batman's psyche, an innovation that was part of a new approach to superheroes.
For all their strengths, the newer superheroes have flaws, unlike Superman's aversion to kryptonite, that are often as much psychological as physical. Batman is a brooding counterpoint to Superman's wholesomeness and earnestness. Marvel Comics' Spider-Man, a.k.a. Peter Parker, grapples with teen angst. And Marvel's X-Men are mutants with a lot of emotional baggage.
Their basic characteristics have not changed through the decades, but in seeing panels from different eras, we can see how generations of talented pencilers and inkers put their stylistic stamps on the characters.
For many years, a comic book page was divided into equal squares, sometimes punctuated by a half- or full-page illustration. But along the way, artists began treating the division of space as an important component in telling the story. It was one more element in the visual dialogue.
A page chopped into elongated strips of images has a staccato rhythm of developing tension. A double-page spread in which the panels are scrolled as if on a long film strip conveys a sense of drama unfolding. A choice to use extensive crosshatching gives more depth and definition to the figures and background. Point of view influences the way we perceive the action, too. The cartooners shift it from a character's perspective to an objective outsider's view, from closeups to long shots.
What you see in this exhibition are the panels, all hand-drawn, before color is added. Sometimes, as in the case of a 1978 Spider-Man episode in which the cast of Saturday Night Live becomes part of the story, you can see the whiteout the inker had to use to adjust the drawing to please the real actors.
One part of the show illustrates the steps involved in making a page. Mostly, it's done the old-fashioned way, by hand, in a time-consuming collaboration among the writer, the penciler who designs and draws the story, and the inker who pens over the graphite lines, determining the tonal varieties of the drawing. Computers are now commonly used to add the color, which has given the pages a much richer look.
Inclusion of several Hellboy panels by Mike Mignola of Dark Horse Comics is a nod to the "underground" comics movement that began with Robert Crumb in the 1960s, stories and characters that were antiheroic, sometimes downright seedy. Art Spiegelman also advanced, in his groundbreaking comics such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus, the idea that comics could explore real topics, even one as horrific as the Holocaust.
But this exhibition is about comic book heroes and does not delve into these more novelistic works.
Still, because it takes a somewhat academic approach to its subject, the exhibition isn't designed for children, even though there are the obligatory collateral objects: a life-size statue of Val Kilmer as Batman, the Batmobile from the 1960s movie and an X2 movie poster signed by the cast. The hand-drawn panels in black and white, with extensive wall text, are the point here. Sequential art fans with children can still enjoy a visit; the David L. Mason Children's Art Museum, also in the building, is filled with activities for youngsters, including drawing, clay modeling and computer games.
