Projections : comics and the history of twenty-first-century storytelling

241 Pages·2012·5.517 MB·English

by  Gardner, Jared

Projections
Florence Dore and Michael Szalay, Editors
Post•45 Group, Series Board
Projections
Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling
Jared Gardner
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
©2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.
This book has been published with the assistance of Arts & Humanities, The Ohio State
University.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic
or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gardner, Jared, author.
Projections : comics and the history of twenty-first-century storytelling / Jared Gardner.
pages cm. -- (Post 45)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8047-7146-7 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-8047-7147-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Comic books, strips, etc.--United States--History and criticism. 2. Motion pictures and comic
books--United States. 3. Narration (Rhetoric) I. Title. II. Series: Post 45.
PN6725.G36 2012
741.5'973--dc23
2011031184
Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/15 Minion
For Eli Gardner and Gideon Hewitt

Contents
Preface ix
1 Fragments of Modernity, 1889–1920 1
2 Serial Pleasures, 1907–1938 29
3 Fan-Addicts and the Comic Book, 1938–1955 68
4 First-Person Graphic, 1959–2010 107
5 Archives and Collectors, 1990–2010 149
6 Coda: Comics, Film, and the
Future of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling 180
Notes 195
Index 215

Preface
The subject of this book—comics—is named on a false assumption: that com-
ics themselves are necessarily comical or funny (thus, “the funnies”). And as a
form, comics has been plagued by a series of critical misconceptions and mis-
understandings that have only served to compound the error of the name: that
they are directed primarily at juvenile audiences; that they are easy or transpar-
ent reading; that they are, if not beneath contempt, certainly not worth notice
from those whose job it is to determine what is, indeed, worthy of notice.
The effects of these misapprehensions of the comics form are clear. Until
extremely recently, there were few serious attempts to study comics, either
formally or historically. There have been periods when some comics creators
experienced fame and even riches for their work (the 1920s and 1930s, for ex-
ample), and there have been times (the first decade of the twentieth century,
the late 1940s) when hysterical responses to comics prevailed. But for the most
part, the art of sequential comics remained a culturally, critically, and com-
mercially undervalued form throughout the first century of its existence. And
while there have been periods when comics readers have been taken seriously
(Hollywood’s recent engagement with comics fans is the most obvious exam-
ple), those who have found unique readerly pleasures and communities around
the comics form (in all its forms) have been largely treated with suspicion or
derision by those who have accepted the premises that there is nothing worth
looking at in comics.
To be fair, there have been benefits to the cultural and scholarly neglect of
comics. By only sporadically being profitable and almost never being respect-
able, comics has been left to develop its own language and its own unique
relationship with readers, often for long periods, with few or no attempts to
make the form respectable—to do for comics what Hollywood sought to do in
the 1920s: “to kill the slum tradition in the movies” in order to create an “art”
that would “meet the ideals of cultivated audiences.”1 As Gilbert Hernandez
ix