Equal Time

In a vague year-end wrap up of sorts I wrote a little while ago, I talked about my great appreciation of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. It's had a lot of attention lately, not all of it positive, and earlier this week, Tim O'Neil wrote a great examination of its strengths and witnesses in his blog, The Hurting. He used it as a jumping-off point to explore different ways that comics work.

Essentially, you've got two ways of reading comics: comics as literature and comics as visual art. For the longest time fans of serious (or, "serious") comics were essentially forced into a bunker mentality, wherein any divisions in reading preferences were essentially swept under the rug by the blanket shared assumption that comics were a valid vehicle for potentially meaningful art. But now the bunker's been blown, and the good guys won. Now it's time to examine the fact that even though mainstream audiences are increasingly interested in the form, they are bringing their own prejudices and preferences to the table -- to a comics insider (and I think most folks reading these words can safely qualify), it may seem inexplicable, but it's only to be expected.

Comics are a complicated art form. The variety of approaches available to any prospective cartoonist on how to tell a story is probably close to infinite. There's an old argument in fanboy circles - usually given in terms of corporate comics' division of labor - about which is more important: art or writing. It makes a certain kind of sense, in a corner of the medium where these tasks are compartmentalized and even, in many instances, in direct competition, to place them at odds. But when discussing the actual product itself, an artistic entity known in the abstract as "Comics", it should be impossible to differentiate between the two. But this isn't how most people probably read comics. Lacking the funds to sponsor an independent academic study on the matter, I'm going to guess that many people who read comics - especially those who came to the form late in life, like anyone who may have initially been exposed to the likes of Ware, Satrapi or Bechdel from magazine articles or newspaper lists - see comics less as a holistic whole and more as simply a hybrid. It may seem like a meaningless distinction but it's actually vital to how people perceive the format. For them, and probably for most, the words in the boxes and balloons are the primary vehicle, and the pictures merely illustrate the action. This is how many people grow up reading super comics, or at least it was in an era (which I very vividly recall) when printing was abysmal and most artists were, at best, journeymen: you read the captions and skimmed the art, and you never missed much by doing this. The interesting action always announced itself.

But that's an unfulfilling approach to comics. Fun Home is a good comic, some might even say a very good comic, but it falls short of truly essential for the very simple reason that throughout the book Bechdel purposefully hampers her own visual vocabulary. Reading the book, it's impossible not to come away with an awareness and appreciation of her pacing and structure. This is a book that has been expertly designed in terms of allowing every step of the plot to unfold with utter precision. Every revelation, every character moment, every allusion reveals itself to the reader in good time, unfolding like a blooming flower. But it seemed to me that, while Bechdel is obviously a keenly talented storyteller, her instincts as a cartoonist were perhaps hobbled by the sobriety of her story. The book reads less like a graphic novel than a prose novel with accompanying pictures - not a problem I've ever noticed with her Dykes to Watch Out For strip, which is far looser in both tone and execution.

Despite the lengthy quote, O'Neil writes quite a bit more, about Fun Home and about comics in general, and the whole thing is worth the read. It's an easily understood discussion of how different readers approach comics and what we should look for when we read them. And he also cites this unrelated piece in which Tom Spurgeon offers some thoughts on how art and writing works together in comics that I was intending to link to myself but never quite got around to it (at least I got this close). Take the opportunity to click over for a look yourself.