Masks Of Anarchy: The History Of A Radical Poem, From Percy Shelley To The Triangle Factory Fire

111 Pages·2013·16.62 MB·English

by  Michael Demson

First published by Verso 2013
Text and preface © Michael Demson 2013
Artwork © Summer McClinton 2013
Foreword © Paul Buhle 2013
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
Verso
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www.versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
eBook ISBN: 978-1-78168229-6
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
v3.1
FOR AUDREY
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
FOREWORD BY PAUL BUHLE
PREFACE
1: THE DEVIL’S WALK
2: HER NAME WAS HOPE
3: AFLOAT, DRIFTING
4: HAIRBRUSHES & CIGARETTES
5: FROM GRAVEYARD TO MOUNTAINTOP
6: LET A VAST ASSEMBLY BE
7: PETERLOO
8: THE FACTORY FIRE
9: THE MASK OF ANARCHY
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
FOREWORD
PAUL BUHLE
COMICS MEET HISTORY, AND POETRY, TOO!
The book before you, reader, is one of the most remarkable works of comic art
to date. One can safely predict that Masks of Anarchy will cast its influence widely
over future nonfiction graphic work, especially as regards the uses of poetry and
the meanings of social, labor and women’s history.
Scholar Michael Demson and artist Summer McClinton have mediated
between—and in one or two ways actually merged—the saga of the great English
revolutionary poet Percy Shelley and the story of courageous immigrant labor
activist Pauline Newman, who stirred working women into action, in part
through the use of Shelley’s work and legacy. An amazing true-life tale in itself,
the combined version is memorably captured here both in narrative and art.
Shelley and Newman come alive equally for us, their fates taken together with
the poetic lines offering proof and promise of the human capacity to dream and
to act.
We need to appreciate this book within the field of comic art, and in particular
the evolution of nonfiction comics. Speaking as an editor of nearly a dozen of
these works and a scholar of the field at large (in the English language), I hope a
small history lesson will remind readers how very much has changed in a short
time with the acceleration of developments in comic art and narrative, and how
best to appreciate the text in hand.
We might most effectively begin near the chronological end: the first decade of
the new millennium has seen more significant developments in comic art than
any time since the first comic strips appeared, in the dailies of the 1890s. Now, of
course, comics as well as their artists and readers are found all over the globe,
both in print and on the Internet. From a visual standpoint, today’s comics are
inspired and shaped by a contemporary readership that is not only substantially
larger than in the past, but also arguably more aesthetically sophisticated than its
predecessors in the “reading” of the comics.
As late as 2000, the nonfiction component (a microscopic corner of the so-
called graphic novel world) would have seemed most unlikely to grow much or
to make an impact. How it has since done both is a story wound around a larger
comic art history, which has gained more facets but also more clarity than one
could have imagined only a decade or so ago. Comics have now become a full-
blown field of scholarly inquiry, as numerous scholarly journals and books have
vanished in their earlier forms to be replaced by electronic versions, and as comics
scholars themselves gain status in the universities. This marks either a fitting irony
or a kind of fulfillment of the art form.
THE RECEDING PAST
The field of comic art, always subject to volatile market conditions and very often
to a boom-and-bust pattern, with surges followed by collapse, has advanced so
unpredictably that almost nothing seems far in the past. Newspaper comic
favorites like Blondie have notoriously refused to die or retire with their creators,
continuing over generations with one imitator after another. With most of the
strips, the less famous have disappeared from public memory, but “classic reprint”
volumes of past comic art began to appear in large numbers during the 1970s-80s,
a trend that has only accelerated. The presence of the Internet, with less strict
copyrights (or less attentive enforcement), has added enormously to the volume
and variety of comic art readily available.
And yet artistic innovations have in some respects been historically quite slow
as well as idiosyncratic. Harvey Pekar once quipped that the “art” of comic art
has been so limited that the modernism that transformed the very nature of
painting during the 1910s-20s only reached American comics during the 1970s-
90s. Even then, these advances of artistry appeared highly avant-garde, almost
shocking, and doubtless unwanted by legions of superhero-trained, juvenile-
mentality readers. Not only had the parameters of style and narrative been
narrow, but outside of the daily press, in comic books, trends like war, horror,
and love-interest comics tended to come and go in a rush, along with the bulk of
the smaller publishers themselves. Rare were the individualistic talents with the
time and the encouragement to grow to their full potential. Rarer still were those
artists who could make a living on such experimental efforts.
Still, even the earliest comics of the 1890s offered hints that they might be at
last understood and appreciated a century and more later. The discovery of a
potentially massive daily readership with a taste for a new kind of illustration
potentially massive daily readership with a taste for a new kind of illustration
prompted the onset of comic strips as a major commercial art form of the fin de
siècle, evolving within a generation or two into most of the modern versions that
readers recognize today. How was it that the barely literate newspaper readership
of the 1890s-1920s, obviously craving visual humor and drama, sought images of
themselves (or of those distinctly unlike themselves), in art, or at least a kind of
art, hitherto unknown?
Were comics on the “funny pages” perhaps simply easier, cheaper, to access
than a vaudeville stage or the first movies? Did the “family” comics reader—that
is, presumably the middle-class reader of influential, slow-moving domestic
dramas like Gasoline Alley—of the 1920s and after also go to art galleries? How
did things change with the sudden emergence of the hugely popular comic book
format, aimed squarely at the young (and mostly boys)? Such questions and others
were first posed by scholars around 1960, part of the growing academic interest in
“mass culture” that emerged alongside an actual decline in the circulation of
comic books and a reduction, in various ways, of innovation and actual space for
the more artistic newspaper strips. Decades late in even being posed, these were
the very questions that the next generation asked a second time in the aftermath
of the next phase, the rise and fall of uncensored, openly radical “Underground
Comix.” A quipster of the 1970s remarked that for Parisian graduate students
before 1968, writing a dissertation on comic art was impossible, impermissible,
but after the student revolts, became irresistible, albeit there were few in actual
numbers. The generation or so of professors that followed actually used comics as
illustrations in their presentations, and increasingly assigned comic art to students
bored with the normal reading matter.
Until such “graphic novel” courses in colleges and universities placed comic art
on bookstore racks alongside manga titles, only a small handful of comic artists
had gained serious recognition. Art criticism, let alone art history, in this field was
still waiting to be born. The majority of published comics scholars, the writers of
monographs, has to date continued to consist mostly of self-taught non-
academics. Even the academic scholar writing commentary aims mostly at an
audience of fellow fans, usually providing texts with as many illustrations as
possible on oversized pages. Classics Illustrated: A Cultural History by William B.
Jones, Jr., is the finest single example. This has begun to change, but anything like
a full-blown, formal comics scholarship remains for the future.
A small-scale rush beginning in the first years of the new millennium saw the
emergence of online journals, scholarly conferences, and the very occasional
scholarly series on the topic. The academic field is still largely the domain of