Lit Graphic

Richly visual and intimately understood, graphic novels — with their anti-heroes, narrative appeal, and storylines sometimes off-limits in other modes of expression — may be prepared to usurp the role that novels currently play.

I call bull%$#@.

Didactics are an important component of the museum experience. Good wall text provides museum visitors with background, context, and history. It illustrates something about the relevance of a particular artist or work in their medium or relative to their position in the history of art. It also explains how a given artist or work reinforces the theme of they exhibition in which they appear.

But oh my; didactics also become a channel for curatorial excess, overreaching, and pretension. Case in point: the above text from one of the introductory didactic panels included in the Lit Graphic: The World of the Graphic Novel exhibition currently on display at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

Comics (or “sequential art” if you prefer) are (or is it “comics is?”) a wonderful storytelling medium. The form is dynamic, flexible, and capable of rendering everything from the birth of an idea to the death of a god, and all stops in between.

But “storylines sometimes off-limits in other modes of expression?” What the heck does that mean? The melding of word and image creates a singular vehicle for exploring all manner of stories, but comics are no more boundary-breaking than any other medium. The closest comparison to comics is film, which is also about presenting visual ideas sequentially. But as with any comparison between print and film, there is a level on which reading is always the more active process, watching the more passive. Regardless of how the information gets into our brain, however, the fact is that neither comics or film (or poetry, or painting, or sculpture, or any other creative endeavor) is constrained by storylines.

Anti-heroes? Narrative appeal? Is there a form of storytelling that can’t include anti-heroes? I’m hard-pressed to think of one, and that’s a good thing. Anti-heroes are usually more interesting than heroes. Is there some sort of narrative that isn’t, or at least can’t be, appealing? That’s a qualitative issue, and not one related to the inherent nature of comics, or any other narrative medium. Some stories are appealing. Some stories aren’t. Good storytellers can take the most mundane story and make out of it something that makes the audience reevaluate the very nature of the world around them. Bad storytellers can take great ideas, strip them of all originality and vitality, and regurgitate them in a way that makes the audience feel debased and insulted.

A mode of expression is a box. Whether that box contains diamonds or dog%$#@ says something about the skill of the creator, not about the structural limits of the box.

And usurping the novel? What the actual hell? Again, any comparison that assumes an absolute scale of comparison between two narrative forms is misguided at best. If cinema has not entirely usurped the novel, comics won’t be the ones to knock the novel off its perch either.

Grandiose and unsupportable claims notwithstanding, there is a lot to like in this exhibit. There was also much that I found either flawed or frustrating.

The gallery featuring pages from Harvey Kurtzman and Will Eisner was simply amazing. Looking at these selections, there is no doubt why two of the biggest awards in the comics field are named after these creators. The Will Eisner Spirit story on display in the gallery is a revelation; The Spirit barely appears in the story but his absence creates the suspense that drives the story.

Then, the scale of many of the pieces on display was impressive. As a comics reader, I’m used to seeing art on the typical comic book sized page, or smaller. Many of the pieces in Lit Graphic were original art, rendered on illustration paper. When published, the camera-ready art is reduced to the appropriate size. As with any reproduction, the process eliminates some of the texture and detail of the drawn work. Seeing it as the artist intended showed off the skill, and the effort, and made these works all the more impressive.

Case in point, the selections from Dave Sim and Gerhard’s Cerebus. In particular, the cover illustration from the collected Church and State I is phenomenal when seen in a larger scale.

As anyone who has read Cerebus knows, Gerhard’s backgrounds are terrifically detailed, with intricate cross-hatching and meticulous shading, while Mr. Sim’s characters are designed down to the last wart and unfortunate hairdo. The reduced image on the “phone book” collection of the story simply can’t do justice to the amount of effort it takes to produce a piece like this, or the level of detail it contains.

Indeed, this may be the most meaningful contribution exhibitions like Lit Graphic make to the comics field. It’s not that showing comics in museums legitimizes this art form and allows people to play the “Comics aren’t just for kids!” card. Rather, these showings demonstrate that comics are (comics is?) art. Comics don’t need to be legitimized, they merely need to be seen from a different point of view. By displaying these works at the scale at which they were created, by showing every pen line and brush stroke, Lit Graphic demonstrates beyond any doubt the artistry of comic book art.

For me, this great strength was also part of Lit Graphic’s greatest weakness. While the artistry of the creators exhibited is diverse, taken in the aggregate the show feels like overkill. Howard Cruse and Jessica Abel, to pick two names from the exhibition group, are both wonderfully talented, incredibly engaging storytellers with unique artistic styles. Put them side by side (or in the case of Lit Graphic, in the same gallery) and the work of each creator remains distinctive and recognizable. Put them in a gallery with other (and in some cases, lesser) artists whose work encompasses slice of life narratives and the unique style of each artist begins to give way to a certain sameness of convention and form. Taken collectively as representative examples from larger works, these individual panels and sequences become, if not repetitive, then at least somewhat familiar. The similarities start to overshadow the differences in a way that does not happen with a collection of, say, portraits.

But no exhibition is perfect, especially those organized around a particular theme. Large group shows invariably include things that will resonate with some individuals, and leave others unimpressed. What I like may not appeal to everyone. What someone else likes, I may loathe. That’s part of the museum going experience. So long as the these works revolve around a curatorial idea that has the gravitational pull to hold the pieces together, the exhibition can work, regardless of the subjective preferences of any given visitor.

By presenting comic book art as art first and comics second, Lit Graphic does a great service to this unique and important art form. It is both interesting and appropriate for the Norman Rockwell museum to present an exhibition like this. Mr. Rockwell’s career and reputation embody the often dismissive tension between the respect afforded to the artist by the elite, and their dismissal of art with commercial appeal as mere illustration. Just as the museum (rightly) insits on Mr. Rockwell’s artistic legitimacy, so too Lit Graphic helps to legitimize comics.

That’s achievement enough without attempting to stake out exclusive narrative territory for comics alone.

Lit Graphic is on display at the Norman Rockwell Museum (9 Glendale Road, Route 183 Stockbridge, Massachusetts 01262; 413-298-4100 ) through May 26, 2008.