Comics as Art I: Comics Go as Music Went

The tides that move art do not necessarily confine themselves by medium. While artistic communities can become insular and disconnected from each other, some tendencies in art relate a great deal to the commerce of art and human psychology.

Thus, although on an altogether different schedule, comics evolved through parallel developments to other forms of art. In many ways, for instance, the changes that redefined popular music in the 1960s involved a complex of value judgments and pronouncements that would reappear in later decades in the evolution of comics.

Why should two separate forms, theoretically isolated one from another, follow such a similar pattern? One can, most likely, attribute the parallels to similar forces acting on both forms, including the pressures of art as a marketable commodity, which vendors must distinguish from competing merchandise by defining gimmicks, and, furthermore, to the nature of celebrity and artistic ego. But to make the point clearer, consider the following trends in both music and comics.

From Song to Album, from Story to Series

Popular music once had to consider the means of its distribution via airplay and contain itself within parameters dictated by this medium. With the song as a fundamental unit, music could sell as a 45 RPM single (with the inevitable, and frequently disposable, accompanying B-side) or as an album; both housed a number of self-contained pieces, constrained to a fixed length by the requirements of radio airplay.

Besides the convention imposed by distribution, no particular practical reason compels a song to last three minutes (or, better, two minutes and fifty seconds). Songs can take longer (consider songs that take one side of an album), or finish in a shorter time (consider much of the Ramones' output). In the sixties, experimental popular composers would tamper with the dogma of the three-minute song. The result often created pieces radio stations would not play (out of a surly resistance to anyone who dared tamper with their sacred format) or could not play (the issue of a twenty-five minute song becomes problematic on a radio station whose sponsors require it to provide commercial breaks four times an hour).

The change in approach to a variable-length song unloosed much creative energy that three minute formats could not contain. At the same time, it changed the distribution of recorded music, decreasing the importance of the single and increasing the importance of the album. Eventually, this change would flow upwards to the radio stations themselves. With the rise of FM radio, fewer stations confined themselves to playing conventional singles and more adopted a format described as "Album Oriented Rock."

The album, rather than the single, had become the fundamental unit of music, and composers would develop pieces with this in mind. Works like the Beatles' Abbey Road fit conceptually as an album rather than as a disconnected series of singles (as one might judge their earliest work).

Comics had gone through similar length definitions in its format. Pieces tended to belong to several size categories: the one-page gag (a staple of humor comics); the five-pager; the ten-page story; and the twenty-page story (often broken down into five or ten page chapters). With the Lee-Kirby revolution over at the upstart Marvel Comics, however, comics would begin to ignore the format rules. A story could spill over into a second issue.

Implicitly, comics had for decades adhered to something like the Julie Schwartz Principle, which directed creators to assume that the comic they produced represented the first, and possibly the only, comic a reader might consume. This approach compelled creators to attempt to grab a reader based solely on what that single issue contained. With the creation of multi-issue stories, however, the single issue ceased to play the role of the fundamental unit of comics.

Purists might consider this one of the Key Developments that Broke Comics, because the expansion of comics stories into larger and larger environments did have something to do with their becoming less accessible to new readers. Stories spread from two issues to three issues, and to more issues, without any imposed upper limitation. Stories spread across titles, making the output of a comics publisher interdependent rather than self-contained. Comics continuity became an important principle, one that effectively redefined the fundamental unit of comics not as the issue, story arc, or even the series, but theoretically as everything a comics publisher had ever printed.

Natural limitations of human ability, however, forced most talents to work in a smaller environment, and in general the comics series itself, though tangent to other products by the same publisher, came to serve as the fundamental unit of comics. Pieces like Kurt Busiek's Avengers would demonstrate the approach of the series as the fundamental unit; while the first years of this third series would contain distinct stories and arcs, much in the work also deals with the long overview of the entire series, through four hundred or so issues of its first volume.

The House Style as the Sound

By the sixties in music, bands would strive to get the happening sound, whether that month's version came from British Invasion bands, psychedelic bands, post-psychedelic soul bands, post-psychedelic pre-metal bands, post-psychedelic pre-punk bands, or whatever.

By a similar token, superhero comics attempted to redefine them in the form of the one existing plausible editorial and style model, the Marvel Style, a form which shaped art, story, and particulars of the editorial principle that would apply to all stories a company might print. DC conspicuously strove to redefine itself as Marvel, Mark II, in the mid-eighties; it had watched much of the competition die after failing to do so themselves in the seventies.

The Writer Who Sings as the Artist Who Writes

At the beginning of the sixties, a performer need not have composed the material that appeared in his concerts or recordings. The marketing of music presupposed that the quality of the material should serve as the primary grounds for its inclusion.

As musical theories began to abound, and more of the audience of popular music began thinking in terms of Art with a Capital A, a principle developed that stated Musicians Must Perform Their Own Material. The teen idol type of singer, who generally did not write his songs, came, somewhat unfairly, to appear as parasitic based on this principle. After all, do we expect as much of actors - that they only perform material they wrote themselves?

By the late sixties, this meant that a number of artists came into prominence as writers rather than as performers. Some, like Neal Diamond, found a new audience through abandoning the variety of fronts to perform their material. Others, whose reputation derived mostly from their writing, seemed disinclined to concern themselves too much about the unimportant business of quality control in their performance - note the slide of Bob Dylan's performance to a frequently incomprehensible series of nasal grunts and barks.

Because of the occasional talents who excelled both as performers and writers, everyone assumed he could do it and should do it, somewhat to the detriment of product. The same thing would happen to comics.

Kirbys and Simons and Eisners and Ditkos had made the business of putting out comics by single talents seem like the only way to approach the business. By the late eighties, more and more artists had dabbled in writing; by the time the Image stable emerged, artists assumed that the ability to draw somehow automatically imparted the ability to write. For Erik Larsen, Keith Giffen, and a few others, this had proven true; but for others, such as the enthusiastic but often simplistic Rob Liefeld, the reviews suggested that artists and writers as separate people could work together and still produce something worthwhile.

As with music, a great deal of outright dreck had to hit the shelves before folks started to notice the absence of something. In music, where the writer-as-singer peddled poorly-executed pieces propelled by the celebrity of the composer, many unlistenable albums became a canon to hard-core fans but disposable nothingness to listeners who sought the song or the sound. The supposed genius of one day frequently burned out, but burned out over a series increasingly weak pieces.

Similarly, the crash of the "New Comics" somewhat reflected the natural limitations of flashy artists to write solid stories. Not all of them could, and audiences figured it out, and sales declined (with this as one reason, but not as the reason). In the aftermath of the bursting of this bubble, however, comics rediscovered the dedicated writer. Moore, Waid, Augustyn, Busiek, Priest and the like would become central names in comics discourse even as Miller, Ordways Larsen, Jurgens, and others carried on the business of the writer-artist. A kind of aesthetic selection had begun to push talent back to its natural level.

The Grace Note as the Tick Line

In music, and in comics, celebrity performers have always moved product by power of their reputation (these reputations deriving from an artists' proven ability to deliver consistently satisfying output). However, the sixties saw a point where the artist per se came to dominate his material. His quirks and eccentricities became increasingly important, to the point that other aspiring talents would begin to imitate these, creating a series of affectations. Consider all the innocent guitars destroyed in imitation of Pete Townshend's decadent guitar-smashing episodes in the sixties, and consider also that the imitative events in no particular insured that anything in the accompanying performance contained redeeming qualities.

As the celebrity performer himself became, in some ways, more important than his work, upcoming talents sought more and more to develop signature moves that audiences would recognize as belonging to them. By the seventies, guitar players had fallen into an arms race based on the number of notes they could play, and the Ronnie Montrose / Sammy Hagar / Eddie van Halen school of hammer-on run playing had become an orthodoxy in the early eighties. Guitar players competed to see who could get in the mostest notes the fastest and put this consideration over getting notes in the bestest. From this era would originate the derisive term "fret wanker," used to impugn guitarists who overplayed.

The cult of celebrity in comics, by the early nineties, had produced tendencies one might view as parallel to fret wanking. The latest new trick, the latest gimmick, the latest no-substance means of exploiting new technology, came to serve as signature features. For the cult-hero artist in comics, frequently the number of pen or pencil strokes came to falsely quantify artistic merit. The extremely busy styles of Image-stable artists such as Todd McFarlane reflect this tendency.

The Splash as the Solo

When I see a decadent, post-Image piece, such as one of the more excessive Liefeld books, with a series of posters barely strung together by slightly less than a story, it reminds me a great deal of a kind of rock song that began to appear in the sixties and still hasn't had the decency to die out today.

One need only recognize the splash page as the equivalent of a guitar solo to make the necessary connection. As the guitar solo became metastatic at the end of the sixties, so the splash panel bloated and grew at the dawn of the nineties. More, bigger, longer could describe strokes of a pick or a pen.

An album might feature a song that lasted an entire side of a vinyl disk; and, though some acts, such as Pink Floyd, might actually compose a complex piece with changes of texture, tempo, and tone that could remain interesting through the whole of the allotted 20 minutes of one side of a conventional album, many more simply played solos until the tape ran out. Thus we reached a point where Emerson, Lake, and Palmer would attempt to release a six-disk album after the double-album had become commonplace.

Compare this to pieces like early Youngblood. In Youngblood #4, for example, splash pages consume at least seven of 22 available pages for story; two double-page splashes occurred within a single five-page spread. One could dismiss the argument that the story called for these spreads, since that particular issue did not have much story. Furthermore, one two-page spread depicted only the assembled heroes sitting in a plane talking as a narrator described each of them in captions; and another showed two superheroes jumping out of a jet. Conventional, less bloated, comics, could have condensed these four pages of excess into less than a single page.

At a certain point, solo bloat tended to reduce songs to little more than a piece of furniture upon which to hang an endless and tiresome guitar solo. Panel bloat, in its turn, helped turn some comics into pointless exercises in lack of substance, making the story an almost-absent framework onto which an artist might attach a series of posters.

The Punk Movement and .... ?

Rock music had a good ten years to drift from its original core concept (which one might define as something like "three chords and a decent beat") into all kinds of other things: ornamentations and add-ons without end, pointless self-indulgences as signature features, theories of production that could all but obliterate the part that related to what a band might do on stage.

Music became theater or politics or therapy or a fashion statement or an experiment or hero worship or a posture or a revelation, and many people noticed that, in the process, it had become a lot less interesting and a lot less fun.

Perhaps music, including popular forms, had never completely avoided a connection to these things. Nor, indeed, should art necessarily attempt to confine itself to an arbitrarily "proper" domain. At the same time, though, once the extra baggage appended on to music came to outweigh the song itself, music started to leave the listener with a verse of bad, pretentious poetry or a string of political slogans attempting to masquerade as a lyric.

Much of the movement generally described as "punk rock" involved an approach to a song that frequently ignored all the options and ornaments. Some of the early bands, truthfully, didn't have the technical savvy to push their music into such conventionally decadent channels. However, occasional acts with the ability to perform adhered to a minimal model because they wanted to and not because they had to. They sought the Woman Behind the Makeup, the necessary minimum of music, and frequently left endearing and enduring pieces when composing toward this end. At such a point, we move from the relentless primitivism of acts like the Sex Pistols and the Ramones to more conceptual, but still minimal, acts such as (Tom Verlaine's) Television and the early Cure.

Comics, still floundering in the residual decadence of its Mica Age - the Age of Gimmicks which brought the Image refuseniks into a short-lived prominence - has yet truly to discover its minimal movement. The influence of a back-issue canon created by libraries such as Marvel's "Essentials" line could help an upcoming generation of comics talent define the bare-bones of a good comic with nothing extra added, in the same way that many rock acts of the sixties turned from the flagging "psychedelic" approach to rediscover a "soul" approach to popular music. The rediscovery of a canon of artists - the prominent (or subsequently-prominent) acts of the fifties - helped somewhat in the reinvention of a subform in showing that things could work without the laser shows, endless guitar solos, flying pigs, Marines attacking baby dolls, platform shoes, sequined opera capes, impromptu theater, and other gimmicks and add-ons that had drowned out the music in the first place.

To some extent, a back-to-basics approach has resurfaced in the form of contemporary Silver Age nostalgia, from pieces like 1993's "1963" line of books from Image Comics through Marvel's "Essentials" series of reprint volumes to recent studies in Silver Age revisionism like DC's Silver Age Event. However, where such pieces appear, editors and creators seem unable, in general, to commit to the aesthetic principles that made comics of a bygone period more viable. Comics writers succumb to the temptation to include the ornate continuities, to impose modern cultural standards on pieces dishonestly purporting to represent a style of a generation ago; or, caring more about tone than established properties, creators of back-to-basics comics abandon existing concepts altogether in an act more of triage than of laziness.

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