Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
|
|
| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
|
|
Tuesday, June 01, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Praising with Faint Damnation!  So I had to post the three sides of it here. 
Chris Ware designed it, edited it, and contributed extensively to it and comparisons to Art Spiegelman's RAW are not inapt: Spiegelman also edited RAW, contributed to it (I now wonder if 'Maus' would have ever been completed without the pressure to get RAW out putting new wind in Spiegelman's sails), and, with partner Francoise Mouly, designed it. What's interesting, however, are the differences between the projects. Ware's McSweeneys comes off like RAW on steroids: at twenty-six bucks (if you have to pay tax), you get a 264 page book, two minicomix, a four color comic strip broadside by Ware (with an enormous Gary Panter mural on the back with contributor notes) and works by just about everybody who's anybody in North America (at the moment, the only person I can think of who got the shaft was James Kolchaka), to say nothing about the essay by John Updike about cartooning, photos of Charles Schulz's rough drafts and George Herriman's last 'Krazy Kat' strip (or strips, I can't remember). And yet, compared to Spiegelman's RAW (I know, I know. Why compare it to Spiegelman's RAW?), it feels distinctly less impressive. I say that with a guilty defensiveness, having followed a scathing thread on the Comics Journal Messageboards (is there any other kind to be found there?) where Kim Thompson of Fantagraphics announced that any fan of the comics artform who didn't kiss Chris Ware's feet (and the corresponding tootsies of publisher Dave Eggers) was an ungrateful swine. His point was more about the staggering amount of work Ware had done, and the non-existent amount of compensation Ware was getting in return, rather than an attack on any actual criticism, and yet it stuck with me. McSweeneys 13 is a labor of love, make no mistake. I cannot imagine any other publisher in this country publishing this book and I cannot imagine any other editor working so hard upon an anthology. And yet, there is something compulsively OCD-ish about the quality of this love, something so unremittingly pained and labored, I found it at times uncomfortable. In trying to serve as the introduction to alternative comix today, McS 13 has a larger goal than any set by Spiegelman during his time at RAW. Ware proselytizes much more openly than I recall Spiegelman ever doing, and for larger ground: the acceptance of comics as a valid artform--as, perhaps, the most important artform because of its simultaneously base and sophisticated effects. By contrast, Spiegelman did not much bother with the case for comics' acceptance. In fact, much of RAW was a sustained argument for the effectiveness of non-linear comic storytelling, for subversion of traditional melodramatic storytelling, and for the richness of experimentation. To my mind, Spiegelman worked the New York insider angle to RAW perfectly--his case for comics being an artform was made much more persuasively by being a priori from the outset, and going on to stump for more advanced concerns from there. As such, Spiegelman didn't have to include all the great cartoonists in RAW, only the pieces that best argued his claims and there was, consequently, a shock of the new that made RAW such important reading, no matter what level of comics awareness you had. Which explains why, if you follow alt comix closely, you may not have much need for McS 13. Out of the forty-four contributors to the book, at least nineteen by my count are submitting previously published work (these numbers are very messy--several of the contributors are dead and therefore won't be wowing anyone with new work). While this may be a convincing testament to the strength of the current alt comix industry--almost half of the current luminaries are currently engaged in ongoing works!--it also can make such a treasure feel a bit second-hand, rather like if you got one of the world's great chefs to make you a meal of leftovers. Staggering presentation? Undeniably. Old delights seen in new ways? Yes. Beautiful pieces and new tastes overlooked or previously untried? Delightfully so. Yesterday's meatloaf? Well, your mileage may vary, but... It could, and I suspect will, be argued that this volume of McSweeneys is not for the alternative comix fan: it is for the McSweeneys fan, the types who buy every issue, or have a subscription, or use that quarterly as a way of keeping abreast of a certain kind of literature and indulging in a certain kind of object fetishization (there are issues of McSweeneys on my shelf I haven't done anything more extensive with than caress lovingly). And for those people, I recommend it wholeheartedly. But the curse of the introductory anthology is that it must, inevitably, be scrutinized by those with some awareness of the field it covers. And in my case at least, I wish Ware's McSweeneys had been a little more like Spiegelman's RAW in one crucial aspect: that it had been daring enough to be exclusive, rather than inclusive, and point initiate and disciple alike to new directions previously unattended by either. posted by Jeff Lester | 6:41 PM | |
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
