More on 'Literary' comics

My aside about Kevin Huizenga being a 'literary' cartoonist has provoked some response (including on Nick Mullins' blog). This being my first experience of blogging, it gave me quite a thrill (jaded veterans of the blogosphere can just sigh and click away at this point).

However, I thought it might be worth clarifying what I meant, lest people get the (incorrect) idea that I'm dissing Huizenga. I'm not trying to suggest that Huizenga's work is 'not visual enough' or 'too word-based' or anything like that. It's more that it seems very engaged with the history and practise of literature, and with what's currently happening in the literary world. His intent as a cartoonist seems to be about constructing narratives that explore various issues and themes (and particularities of everyday life) in a way which seems very 'literary' - to me, anyways.

Whereas others seem to approach their comics more the way a painter might - being compelled to explore certain images or motifs, issues of style and representation, etc. Rege's work, for example, feels less like a writer constructing a novel, and more like an artist making an intensely personal series of narrative images - in which the 'action' is not only (or even primarily) within the 'story.' The way he's drawing, the rhythm and music of the page as a visual structure, his decorative motifs, individual images asimages - that's where much of the real action is. With some cartoonists, narrative - story - seems almost a by-product of that process, rather than a primary motivating force. Or maybe it's merely another tool in their repertoire, along with colour, line, visual iconography, etc.

Of course, I don't want to overstate this distinction and turn it into yet another false dichotomy. One of the things I've always said about comics is that they allow you to be both an artist and a writer all at once. And many (James Kochalka is one example who comes to mind) seem to me to defy any attempt to place them in either of two such arbitrary 'camps.'

I also don't want to give the impression that I'm criticising Huizenga. I truly don't believe it's better to be an 'artistic' or 'literary' cartoonist. The main reason I mentioned it in the first place is entirely selfish: as Nick Mullins points out, my own comics have always been extremely 'literary' and novelistic. But there's the thing, you see: as my own taste and enthusiasm for the novel has waned, I've been forced to reassess my relationship with my own comics, looking for other ways of thinking about them, bringing to the fore things I'd previously neglected. I guess I've been rediscovering the graphic, as opposed to the novel, in my work. So this is more about me dealing with my own disability (that allergy to literary fiction); I'm not about to start criticising others for not sharing that disability!

So I hope that makes some kind of sense. There is an infinite number of ways to look at and think about comics (as I've said before ad nauseum). And I'm not trying to suggest that one way is better than another.

Oh - one last point: a different way of comparing Huizenga to Rege would be to say that one makes 'prose fiction' and the other makes 'poetry'. Again, that doesn't mean one is better than the other - just that there are slightly different things going on with their work.

Or I suppose we could just say "they both make great comics" and have another beer...