Micharmut 1953 - 2016

Juan Enrique Bosch Quevedo (aka as Micharmut) had to be a comics artist because his last names included the surnames of both a famous painter and a great writer. And what a great comics artist he was! Coming from the Valencian clear line school, with Mique Beltrán, Daniel Torres and Sento, Micharmut was a lot more inventive and avant-garde than his peers. I remember him from the pages of Medios Revueltos (where he signed J. Bosch) and Nosotros somos los muertos, but I also include a page from Besame Mucho, for good measure, below. Micharmut died yesterday.

Micharmut, "El hombre que veia insectos" [the man who saw insects], Medios Revueltos # 1, Spring 1988.

Micharmut, "Historias muertas" [dead stories], Nosotros somos los muertos # 2, May 1996.

Micharmut, "Caza mayor" [big game], Besame Mucho # 5, September 1979.

Restoring Hope

José Muñoz, Buenos Aires, 6 de Mayo 1955.

José Muñoz me ha enviado la ilustración arriba como respuesta a mi entrada Restoring Sgt. Kirk. Es el dibujo que ha servido como afiche al tercer Festival Comicópolis del año pasado en Vicente López.

He aqui su comentario:

El Misterix del dibujo es el 345, del 6 de Mayo de 1955. Es el penùltimo a aparecer en tu muestra de restauraciones. Esto si que es Restoring Hope, dirìa yo.

Kirby, Who?

While an entire history of critics from Matthew Arnold to Harold Bloom have sought to identify excellence as an intrinsic and objective element, we contend that excellence is not a property of works but a judgment asserted on their behalf.

 Bart Beaty and Benjamin Woo, The Greatest Comic Book of All Time, Palgrave, 2016, 3.

Maus may not be intrinsically the greatest comic ever published, but that is a perfectly credible claim to make on its behalf.

 Bart Beaty and Benjamin Woo, The Greatest Comic Book of All Time, Palgrave, 2016, 94.

Ninety one pages are a lot of pages, apparently. In any case ninety one pages are enough to forget what we have written on page three.

I'm now on page ninety five of the above cited book, but I don't have much to add to my previous post.  The Greatest Comic Book of All Time seems, at times, like a fan history of American comic books instead of an academic essay (subtract the fan history and what you get is a slim pamphlet; ironically it should have been published in a comic book instead of a graphic novel format). But that's not what really bothers me. What really bothers me is this: Beaty and Woo appropriated features (quality signifiers, as they call them) for literature that don't belong to any art form. How is it possible to say that valuing a serious narrative with good characterization is valuing literariness? Do you really want to know? Because lit critics are smart and art crits are dumb, that's how. Let's suppose that the two fields are so far apart as Maus is from Youngblood or the Fantastic Four. This would mean that comics critics with a visual bend would value silly stories with cardboard caricatures.

Oops! They do! This is awful, Beaty and Woo are right!

I wish I could say to you that I was kidding above, but unfortunately I was not. Apparently, in the strange world of comics criticism, lit critics are smart and art critics are dumb. What I don't accept though is that narrative in comics is literature's monopoly (re. characterization, cf. last post). If that's true how do you explain the work of Frans Masereel, William Gropper or Martin tom Dieck, for instance?...

Frans Masereel, Mon livre d'heures [Passionate Journey], A. Kundig, 1919.

Crumb, Who?

Bart Beaty and Benjamin Woo, The Greatest Comic Book of All Time, Palgrave, 2016.

I've read just two chapters of the above book. Since this blog is about my personal comics canon (something that can't exist, of course, because a canon is a social construct, ergo it can't be created by an individual alone) and this book is about the comics canon from a sociological point of view, I have to comment on it here. 

I wonder if I should wait until I read the whole book instead of writing this post as early as page 41, but, anyway, here're my very first impressions.

This book has two important limitations: it's about comic books, not comics; it's about English (but mainly American) comic books, it's not about all comics or even about comics stories (albums, graphic novels, or whatever) in other languages. That said I agree with the authors when they say that with other scope "The actors change, but the roles stay much the same" (10).

Bart Beaty's and Benjamin Woo's main thesis in these two chapters is that English Departments in Academia dominated the field of comics studies so far. This explains why Maus by Art Spiegelman is at the top of the top of the below square. They explain to us that scholars working with lit methodologies favor the graphic novel, serious themes, depth of characterization, etc...

Bart Beaty and Benjamin Woo, The Greatest Comic Book of All Time (12).

I don't disagree with any of this. Maus is a good example of cultural and economic success, no doubt. My problems with this book start with the following phrase: 

While [Robert] Crumb has received little recognition in the literary world, he is arguably the most prominent American comic book artist within the art world - and art world prestige is derived in different ways than is literary prestige.

 No, it's not.

Suddenly on page 35 Heritage Auctions are a source of "prestige." I don't know if  this "prestige" means "cultural" or "economic" capital, but it most certainly must mean the latter because only original art sold for more than $100,000 is listed. Therefore, no cultural capital comes from Heritage. This is understandable because original art collectors invest in nostalgia and craftsmanship, not art. A Todd Mcfarlane cover sold by Heritage for $657,250 must certainly go to the quadrant on the right.

Even if

Robert Crumb has received attention from more - and more prestigious - museums and galleries than any other American cartoonist by a margin so wide as to be virtually unsurpassable (38)

he is nonetheless the world's biggest pygmy in the art world; not even a footnote of a footnote in the history of art. In the art world (and he doesn't need to be there because he's a comics artist, not a painter or a contemporary conceptual artist), if compared with the true greats, Crumb is in the lowest quadrant of the chart above.

This point is important to me because when I was more active on American forums on the Internet (The Comics Journal Messboard and The Hooded Utilitarian, Noah Berlatsky's blog) I always felt misunderstood. I remember Eddie Campbell calling me (and others, of course), the literaries. I beg your pardon, but I have a degree in studio art. I never was even near a Lit department.

Let's take what Beaty and Woo call a "signifier[...] of quality in literature" (15), characterization. Why is that signifier of quality literature's property? And isn't "looking at [comics'] images" (40) the same as "talking about narrative" (40)? Aren't drawings in comics the narrative too? Unless we extract them from the story as I do below. in that case we aren't talking about comics anymore, are we?

Anyway, take the below comics panel by Robert Crumb:

Robert Crumb, "Ooga Booga," Zap # 4, June 1969.

It triggers every racist alarm in my head, of course, but since Beaty and Woo invited us to look at pictures, let's really look and forget racism for a moment. Would you say that this is great characterization? Why do you think that this painting is highly praised? Do you still think that characterization is literature's monopoly?

To be candid about it I know next to nothing about today's contemporary art, but as far as I know, and correct me if I'm wrong, it is highly political in a political correctness sense. That's why Robert Crumb can't really be part of it. On the other hand I'm against essentialism. Beaty and Woo try so hard to show that different disciplines spawn different canons that they fall head and shoulders in the essentialist trap.