Top

Published in:

2016 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

3. A Short Story by Robert Crumb?

Authors : Bart Beaty, Benjamin Woo

Published in: The Greatest Comic Book of All Time

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US

Activate our intelligent search to find suitable subject content or patents.

search-config

AI-assisted search

Off

Abstract

This chapter is the first to posit a potential alternative to the domination of the field by Spiegelman. Examining the most celebrated American cartoonist within the world of visual arts, the chapter considers how the field of comics studies might have evolved differently had it been shaped by in disciplinary terms by art history. The chapter suggests the ways that cartoonists are disadvantaged in comics studies when they do not produce “graphic novels.”

Dont have a licence yet? Then find out more about our products and how to get one now:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 102.000 Bücher
über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

previous chapter Maus by Art Spiegelman?

next chapter A Superhero Story by Jack Kirby?

George Gene Gustines, “A Comics Scholar Draws a New One of His Own,” The New York Times, February 3, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/03/books/scott-mcclouds-new-graphic-novel-is-the-sculptor.html

Take, for instance, the International Comic Arts Forum 2014 meeting at the Ohio State University. The leading American conference of its kind featured thirty-two presenters who work or study in language departments as compared to twelve from other disciplines (including American studies, anthropology, art history, communication studies, film studies, and women’s studies).

English departments have also had something to gain, as courses in popular literatures have been a pragmatic, if not always enthusiastically adopted, solution to the problem of declining enrolments; Colleen Flaherty, “Where Have All the English Majors Gone?” Inside Higher Education, January 26, 2015, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/01/26/where-have-all-english-majors-gone

Gary Groth, ‘Grown-Up Comics: Breakout from the Underground,’ Print November–December 1988: 102.

We are excluding here reviews, interviews, and biographical profiles.

See, for example, Claire Pelosse, “Le Procède Kafka en BD”, Langues Modernes 100:4 (October–December 2006), 16–19; Manuel de la Fuente Soler, “La memoria en viñetas: Historia y tendencias del cómico autobiográfico”, Signa: Revista de la Asociación Española de Semiótica 20 (2011), 259–276.

Edward Shannon, “Shameful, Impure Art: Robert Crumb’s Autobiographical Comics and the Confessional Poets,” Biography 35 (2012): 627–649.

Don Ault, “Preludium: Crumb, Barks, and Noomin: Re-Considering the Aesthetics of Underground Comics,” ImageText 1, no. 2 (2004), http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v1_2/intro.shtml

Robert Crumb, Waiting For Food: Restaurant Placemat Drawings (Northamption, MA: Kitchen Sink Press, 1996); Robert Crumb, Waiting For Food 2: More Restaurant Placemat Drawings (San Francisco, CA: Last Gasp, 2002); Robert Crumb, Waiting For Food 3: More Restaurant Placemat Drawings (Montreal, QC: Drawn & Quarterly, 2003).

For an excellent overview of criticisms of Crumb’s attitudes toward women in the context of underground comix as a whole, see Claire Litton, “No Girls Allowed! Crumb and the Comix Counterculture,” PopMatters, January 23, 2007, http://www.popmatters.com/feature/no-girls-allowed-crumb-and-the-comix-counterculture/

Leonard Rifas, “Race and Comix,” in Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle, ed. Frederick Luis Aldama (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2010), 27–38.

David Bordwell, Making Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 8–9.

Alison Bechdel, interview by Hillary Chute, Modern Fiction Studies 52 (2006): 1004–1013.

Hillary Chute is a leader in this area, but see also Elisabeth El Refaie, Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), Ann Miller, Reading bande dessinée: Critical Approaches to French-language Comic Strip (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2007), Susan Kirtley, Lynda Barry: Girlhood Through the Looking Glass (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2012).

Indeed, popular cultural texts (or, more accurately, the plots of popular cultural texts) are commonly appropriated by academics as “examples” or “applications” of theoretical approaches.

For a discussion of these pieces, see Hilton Als, “When Comics Aren’t Funny”, The New Yorker, November 14, 1994, 48.

For instance, as recently as October 2015, Crumb declared “I would be lying if I said I had no beef with the female of the species.” Jacques Hyzagi, “Robert Crumb Hates You”, The New York Observer, October 14, 2015, http://observer.com/2015/10/robert-crumb-hates-you/

See, for example, “Women in Comics: Farmer & Robbins on Abortion, Anger and Underground Comix”, Comic Book Resources, March 15, 2013, http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=44269; Françoise Mouly, “It’s Only Lines on Paper”, in Masters of American Comics, ed. John Carlin, Paul Karasik, and Brian Walker (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 282.

Two notable exceptions are Gerald Early, “The 1960s, African Americans, and the American Comic Book”, in Strips, Toons, and Bluesies: Essays in Comics and Culture, ed. D.B. Dowd and Todd Hignite (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), 60–79, and Corey Creekmur, “Multiculturalism Meets the Counterculture: Representing Racial Difference in Robert Crumb’s Underground Comix”, in Representing Multiculturalism in Comics and Graphic Novels, eds. Carolene Ayaka and Ian Hague (London: Routledge, 2014), 19–33.

Literature, of course, has handwritten or typeset early drafts that are often studied by scholars, but these are only very rarely displayed to the public.

Michael Hutter, Christian Knebel, Gunnar Pietzner, and Maren Schäfer, “Two Games in Town: A Comparison of Dealer and Auction Prices in Contemporary Visual Arts Markets,” Journal of Cultural Economics 31 (2007): 249.

See Beaty, Comics versus Art, for a history of auctions in the comics world.

Heritage Auctions has also sold pieces of original comic strip art by Alex Raymond, Bill Watterson, Charles Schulz, and Winsor McCay for similar prices. As our discussion focuses on comic books, however, these comic strip pages are not included here.

Crumb’s score is bolstered by the fact that one of his pieces was sold by the auction house twice.

Charles Hatfield, Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2012).

Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 231.

John Thornton Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 3.

Title: A Short Story by Robert Crumb?
Authors: Bart Beaty
Benjamin Woo
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US
Book: The Greatest Comic Book of All Time
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-56196-1

Electronic ISBN: 978-1-137-53162-9

Copyright Year: 2016
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53162-9_3