Comics and Media

"Comics and Media" edited by Hillary Chute and Patrick Jagoda Special issue, Critical Inquiry 40, no. 3 (2014). 284 pages The very first thing one notices about "Comics and Media," aside from its unmistakably Robert Crumb-drawn cover (in which a brawny drag queen and an effeminate youth hold hands in application for a marriage license), is its size, its materiality--appropriately enough, considering the collection's emphasis on the materiality and embodiments of comics and, more broadly, media at large. In the introduction to this collection, editors Hillary Chute and Patrick Jagoda describe the size of this special issue of Critical Inquiry as unprecedented in the journals history. Indeed, there is much about "Comics and Media" that is somewhat unprecedented, particularly its unique blend of scholarly essays, panel transcripts and interviews, and original artwork by nine leading cartoonists. What holds these disparate units together is Chute and Jagoda s editorial emphasis on embodied practices of reading and creating, particularly amid "the intertwining of theory and practice" evident in "Comics and Media" (2014,2). "Comics and Media" had its inception at the University of Chicago's May 2012 "Comics: Philosophy and Practice" conference, the proceedings of which are printed in this edition. According to the introduction to "Comics and Media," the conference (organized by Chute) "aimed to create generative exchange between arts practice and critical and theoretical practice" (1). One might even push this claim a step further and argue that a key concept in "Comics and Media" is precisely arts practice as theoretical practice. In this sense, "Comics and Media" continues the work of Chute's Graphic Women (2010), in which she highlighted the centrality of the cartoonist's hand to the intimacy of comics. "What feels so intimate about comics is that it looks like what it is" Chute argues; "handwriting is an irreducible part of its instantiation," as distinct from the typeface in which a work of prose can be printed (Chute and Jagoda 11). Among the sources informing Graphic Women were a number of interviews with the five comics artists under consideration; in "Comics and Media" the artists themselves take the floor and speak with each other, with interviewers, and as presenters. The contents of "Comics and Media" can be divided into three categories: conference transcripts, original artwork, and critical essays. In the first of these, the text transcribes eight panels and interviews from the May 2012 conference, and a few words should be said about the contents of these eight transcripts. In lieu of a keynote lecture, Art Spiegelman and W.J.T. Mitchell address the question "What the %$#! Happened to Comics?," considering the recent elevation of comics studies as a line of serious inquiry. Spiegelman suggests that the "mongrel" hybridity of word and image, of legitimacy and vulgarity present in comics has found acceptance thanks to the contemporary pervasiveness of polyvocality, of "using two different languages" (29). Other "public conversations" reprinted include Joe Sacco on his work as the leading comics journalist, Aline Kominsky-Crumb on the trajectory of her career, Francoise Mouly on the relationship between editing the underground comics anthology RAW and working as art editor for the New Yorker, and Alison Bechdel on her fascination with photography and archival material. In the wake of Roland Barthes's declaration of the death of the author, the foundational work in the field of comics studies was conducted on largely formalist grounds, with figures like Will Eisner, Scott McCloud, and Thierry Groensteen theorizing comics by way of assessing and defining the mechanics of the medium. Comics and Media does not quite insist on resurrecting the author, but it does allow these authors the opportunity to talk back to academia, as when Bechdel admits that academic criticism of her work "is kind of enlightening [and] I enjoy being analyzed" (215). …