Comics Reality Checks I: The Three Trashmen Tests

Sometimes a philosophical bent - combined with the expedient of a leisure problem and a web page to feed - incline the amateur comics journalist on the web to explore the big questions. Not questions like "But do we consider Weisinger's Krypton real, or Byrne's?" No, questions that view comics from a greater distance - questions like "Can we boil down what makes comics good to a theory?"

The question occurs because standards occur in other arts for determining the difference between a masterpiece, a classic, a piece of hack work, and an embarassing pile of trash. For comics, however, criticism sometimes does not get beyond the first stage, in which an observer's positive response makes for a great work. Such phenomenological aesthetic theories provide a difficult channel through which to communicate the essence of the excellence of a work.

Therefore, with this column, the Quarter Bin Opinions feature explores the possibility that some theory or theories might shed some insight on how to establish a dividing line between the good, the great, the bad, and the unmentionable in comics.

Sometimes insight can come from a strange place, and for one very important test I look to a nearly-forgotten surf band from the sixties.

Learning from Minnesota Surf Bands

I hold with some sentiment a particular collection of music by a band from the sixties called "the Trashmen," a band that unashamedly proclaimed themselves as the first surf band from Minnesota. While aesthetes might argue if pieces like "Surfin' Bird" qualify in a canon of music - or even a very specific canon of surf music - the redactor who compiled a particular collection of their works had an understanding of music, and popular culture in general, that added a concept to my own lexicon of art.

The idea the anthologist presented suggested that worthwhile music classifiable as "rock and roll" needed to satisfy a threefold criterion to remain valid. Since the tests derive from discussion contained on the inside of a greatest hits compilation of Trashmen tunes, we therefore describe this powerful analytical tool "The Three Trashmen Tests."

Some music makes it, and some doesn't. Often the bloviated importance granted to pieces by long-winded critics travels in inverse proportion to the compliance with the standard; while we can roll our eyes at hopelessly self-important acts whose works find their way into freshman literature courses (masquerading as poetry or as words of substance), we can turn, wrily, towards three truths the Trashmen understood. Music can qualify as fun and worthwhile if it qualifies three criteria that together compose a necessary condition.

• Only such music as we might describe as loud at any volume qualifies.
• Only music which we might describe as annoying to grown-ups qualifies.
• And, most importantly, only music which we might describe as stupid qualifies.

And that, in a nutshell, explains why "Louie, Louie" by the Kingsmen holds a warm place in the hearts of overly loud drunks in a way that "Revolution Number 9" probably never will. It undermines the necessary loudness by dabbling in long stretches of quiet and subtlety; rather than annoying grownups, it invites them to greater feats of self-admiration by basking in a glow of perceived genius; and it invites too-serious discussion, denying it the label of "stupid" even where certain details of the song make the exclusion somewhat problematic.

The Trashmen Tests provide a line, and much in recorded musical media clearly stands on one side or the other of this separation. More importantly, however, the Trashmen Tests provide a means for judging outside the boundaries of music. One could, with little adjustment, use them as a valid way to measure the entertainment value of comic books.

Sufficient versus Necessary Conditions

While I hesitate to propose the Trashmen Tests as necessary conditions for valid comics - my head, in this case, wins an argument with my heart - we can, at least, consider them as sufficient conditions.

Recall, if you will, that a necessary condition creates a limitation, but its fulfillment does not guarantee success. To open a locked door, you could view possession of a key as a necessary condition; but having the key wouldn't help someone half a planet away if he wanted to open the door.

A sufficient condition, however, represents a case that guarantees the satisfaction of some precondition. If a bulldozer knocked down a wall on your house, you could consider that a sufficient condition for getting inside, since nothing remained standing to keep anyone out along that portion of the masonry where heavy machinery created a de facto new entrance.

Loudness at Any Volume

Look at a comic book where two unkempt souls sit around a table drinking espresso, chain-smoking, and discussing relationships, politics, or philosophy and you might miss the fundamental loudness that has done so much to make comics entertaining.

On the other hand, view a piece by Kirby in his prime - perhaps in the two or three years bracketing the dawn of the 1970s - and you see many studies in loudness, panels that threaten to erupt from the page and bring down the plaster off the ceiling.

Erik Larsen can do loud. Tom Grummett can do loud. John Romita, Jr. can do loud and I imagine his remarkable father can still do loud. At moments, the Silver Age got so loud that the echoes that stylistically implicate Silver Age origins still occasionally show up in contemporary superhero comics.

Furthermore, loudness does not belong uniquely to a specific genre of comics, though naturally enough one might expect it in the more action-oriented forms. Humorous comics, when dabbling in slapstick, engage the reader with potent visual stimuli in the same way as a muscular-men-in-tights rumble.

Outside comics, the visually-loud approach commends itself by the manner in which it increasingly tends to dominate major American motion picture releases. These pieces aim for bigger and more expensive explosions, more in-the-face visual effects, sparklier eye candy and almost anything they can use, at great expense, to attempt to induce a seizure, or at least interest, in the audience. Though often a black hole into one can sink endless sums of money, this approach to movies recognizes that one does well to grab the attention of the audience with something difficult to look away from.

And, of course, before movies had the budgets or special effects technology to put up flashy visuals, comics had made them a standard ingredient. Look to the movies of 1968 and the comics of the same period and see which did loud better.

The Ability to Annoy Grown-ups

Comics seem more amusing when one considers that the vast world of self-styled grownups fail to "get" them. The fact that scowling disciplinarians in public schools might like to divest a young reader of anything that might distract him from the deliberate tedium of a listless lesson makes a simple pleasure into a lurid, forbidden one.

If one might doubt the value of this ability to annoy grown-ups, consider, for a moment, the antithetical position as represented by comics viewed as edifying or educational. A historical comic with, say, Judge Taney discussing the Dred Scott decision would probably fail as comics in proportion to the degree it succeeded as history; where the writers imposed story on the material, they would do so by deviating from the canons of history.

On another level, though, one can frequently define grown-ups by a desire for quiet and order. I still recall all the hours of my life wasted in public school during recess periods on days when it rained. Most of the teachers at that particular elementary school would simply order the entire class to sit with their heads on the duration of the recess period so they might enjoy some peace and quiet. The effect of this on the human power plants we call "children" did not always suit the grown-up purposes any more than putting in the clutch on a race car but idling the engine for thirty minutes.

This quest for calm-at-any-cost expresses itself in a number of ways, including drugging schoolchildren and other inmates. A comic without exciting visuals and some kind of innate loudness, however, remains dull as death, and, frequently, just as pointless. Comics, therefore, do better to stir us up than to calm us down.

Stupidity

The term "stupidity" has a variety of meanings, generally pejorative, generally used by those who arrogate to themselves claims of intelligence. Here, given the context, we might take the term to indicate an unselfconscious lack of concern about the establishment or fortification of an intellectual credential.

Given a recurring cultural tendency to try to make things highbrow, or acceptible to persons with exclusive (and sometimes contrivedly so) tastes, the occasional dose of stupidity does much to bring material back to earth. Comics that reek of self-importance, that glow in the evidence that their design intends to exclude anyone outside a narrow (and dwindling) set of aesthetic illuminati, that try to make themselves incomprehensible out of a morbid fear that someone might catch a NASCAR fan liking them, have, in some ways, forgotten their roots and lost their soul, just in the sense of posturing "art" rock pieces that lack the fundamentals that make a song entertaining and infections but do pander to the desire to have university English teachers analyze them as poetry.

One can see the consequences of ignoring the essential aspect of stupidity in the evolution of some comics creators' styles. For instance, which of the following two Steve Ditko pieces seems more likely to entertain: A sixties-era Doctor Strange story where the hero duels to the death with some improbable nemesis that looks like a hatrack that Salvador Dali might have sculpted, or a dawn-of-the-seventies Mister A story where the hero contends with villains for a few panels before the story stops and eight pages of political / ethical sermonizing begin?

With stupidity recognized as a virtue or an essential ingredient of comics, it becomes that much more difficult for creators to reach the point where they claim entertaining the reader represents an affront to the dignity of the medium. It becomes very difficult to inflate oneself with notions of superiority to the reader with a story containing a character like Arm-Fall-off-Lad.

Problems with the Trashmen Tests

Some of the lamest stuff to come out of the early and mid 1990s still fulfills the conditions of the Trashmen Tests. As such, these tests by themselves fail to provide an adequate measure or screen for comics of worth, lacking the necessary ability to weed out horrible dreck like Bloodstrike #5. That piece inspired the Truly Awful Comics feature, yet it seems to comply with all three Trashmen Tests.

Return for a moment to the notion of necessary and sufficient conditions. With the Trashmen Tests operating as neccessary conditions, they nonetheless fail as sufficient ones in pieces such as the aforementioned title. Bloodstrike #5 satisfied a test for loudness, for nuisance value for grownups, and most certainly for stupidity, yet failed to use these in a way that gave much to the reader. The combination reads less like an amusing and dramatic prank at the expense of starched-collar types and more like a car wreck.

The Trashmen Tests leave a hole open through which true pointless dreck can ooze. Therefore, we can catalog the Trashmen Tests as one, but by no means the only, possible measure of whether a comic works. We need more tests, viewing the substance of comics from various angles that validate them differently. Subsequent columns in the Opinions feature will explore the question further, investigating other possible gauges of how to measure a comic or kind of comics work.

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Column 258. Completed 03-JUN-2001.