Comics are increasingly becoming a site of academic criticism and analysis. A multiplicity of reiterations of this statement can usually be found at the beginning of most academic articles that discuss the impact and possibilities of comics. Comics lend themselves to be critiqued through multiple lenses such as semiotics, narrative theory, literary analysis, art criticism, and cultural studies. This interdisciplinary focus occurs because of the nature of comics. They are a low culture product printed for mass consumption that is also a hybrid medium that consists of textual and image components that can be simultaneously viewed as a narratives created by the spatial arrangements of the panels within them. This complexity of comics has led to a prominent discourse of form and definition in the field since its inception.
The origin of critical interest in comics can be traced back, according to French comics theorist Thierry Groensteen, to the creator of the modern comic, Rodolphe Topffer. His essay Essai de physiognomonie [1845] was “the first 'defense and illustration' of comics” (1). The work of Will Eisner in Comics and Sequential Art [1985] and Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics [1993] are popular texts that discuss the form of comics without situating themselves in the surrounding discourse. This makes using their work difficult, but it is invaluable because both of these authors are cartoonists themselves. Their work at defining what comics are can be placed within the discussion of comics as spatial narratives. This is critically addressed in Thierry Groensteen's The System of Comics, and its stance can be contrasted with the view that comics are a hybrid of images and text. This latter definition has its beginnings in WJT Mitchell's Picture Theory [1994]. Although Mitchell only addresses comics in a few short paragraphs, his book provides a critical look at how text and images play together to form meaning. The title of his book has been used to name one of the few academic journals devoted to comics, ImageTexT.
In addition to a debate about the definition of comics, there has been work that analyzes the history and content of comics. There is overlap between these two areas, particularly in American comics, because the reader can identify and examine the content of comics by identifying and examining the historical period the comics were published in. This can be seen in the discussion of the Comics Code Authority. In 1954, the Comics Code was established as the de facto censor of comic books published in the United States. This has led to a historical discussion of comics Pre-Code and Post-Code. The power of the Code lay with the fact that the primary distributors of comics would not sell anything without the Code's seal of approval. This led to the underground comix movement, which led to subversive and perverse comics that were sold through new means. Charles Hatfield's Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature [2005] traces the history of comix to the production of the graphic novel, the most visited site to examine the aesthetics and literariness of contemporary comics. Hillary Chute's article Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative clarifies the term “graphic novel” (substituting in 'graphic narrative” as the more accurate term) by making a distinction between fictitious comics and the graphic nonfiction that has become common to analyze in comics scholarship. She makes the claim that nonfiction comics, giving the examples of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home; Art Spiegelman's Maus; and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, are the best site of literary analysis in comics.
Despite her claim that the best analysis lies in nonfiction, there are a plethora of writers that focus on the other genres in comic books. One author of note that receives quite a bit of attention in comics circles as well as literature circles in Neil Gaiman. His work is within the genres of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Gaiman's The Sandman series has been the most popular work of his to analyze because of its strong literary elements and because of the intense intertextuality in the work. Gaiman combines original mythology, the mythology of ancient cultures, and the modern mythology of DC comics in order to present a narrative that explores the themes of storytelling, identity, and a plethora of others. Because of the varied content, critics can focus on many different materials in the works. For example, Lyra McMullen's essay in the anthology The Sandman Papers [2006] discusses the Asian dress in the main character Dream. ImageTexT's first issue in volume four specifically focused on the comics work of Gaiman, and includes essays that range to applications of Lacan's Mirror Stage in The Sandman to an examination of The Sandman as a neomedieval text. An essay to specifically note in this issue is Clay Smith's Get Gaiman?: PolyMorpheus Perversity in Works by and about Neil Gaiman. This scathing essay works to go against the celebratory criticism found in a majority of discourses surrounding Gaiman. It acts as a reminder of that poststructualist maxim that the author is dead.
The last issue in ImageTexT's volume four is ImageSexT: Intersections of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality. This is one of the few instances where a queer reading is introduced to comics. This is unfortunate, because comics lend themselves to be queered, especially when one takes into account the focus on space presented in Groensteen's The System of Comics and the marginality present in alternative comics. The queer geographies and conceptions of space theorized in Judith Halberstam's In A Queer Time and Place enables a queered reading of comics that can understand the way they develop their narratives. Halberstam's theories of queer time and queer space go beyond the textual play found in Eve Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet. Halberstam also provides a nuanced understanding of the term “queer” by divorcing it from sexuality and placing it with those that experience “strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices” (1).
Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University of
Mississippi, 2007. Print.
Mississippi, 2007. Print.
Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New
York UP, 2005. Print.
York UP, 2005. Print.
