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Underground > Comic Books >

Comics: Genre or Medium?

  
 
sleazenation
20:02 / 06.12.06
One of the more perniciously annoying features of the ongoing torrent of "comics are (not) grown up/literature/books/worthy of critical attention/wider readership" articles that have become a recurring feature of news and current affairs publications over the last two decades is the notion that comics is a genre.

Usually I greet this kind of ignorance with a mixture of annoyance, distain and resignation, but recently I have started to wonder if comics really have become all about genre, to the people that read them regularly as well as the journos that occasionally write about them.

Some, including leading comics advocate Scott McCloud (a figure somewhere between the Stephen Hawking and the Richard Dwarkins of comics) have argued that comics are a messenger rather than a message, but is there a a case to be made that comics is genre after all?
 
 
DaveBCooper
21:27 / 06.12.06
Not an argument that I can see too readily, Sleaze; as a means of conveying information/entertainment/whatever, I feel comics are a medium, like TV, book, radio or whatever.

Granted, the medium tends to be dominated by the superhero genre, possibly because it invented (or at least popularised) the capes’n’tights genre, and does it so well, but I’d no more argue that comics are one single genre than I would books or TV… assuming this is the general gist you were driving at ? Maybe I’ve missed the point quite spectacularly? Could you clarify the sort of argument you have in mind?
 
 
H3ct0r L1m4
21:33 / 06.12.06
Comics are now a Literary genre [this of the graphic narrative], but have always been a medium in their own right, filled its own particular genres [and manga is not one of them].

the line has begun to blur a while ago.
 
 
The Falcon
23:26 / 06.12.06
You're correct that manga's not a genre, Hector - it's Japanese for 'comics', so is no more one than BD. It's interesting how various countries comic cultures have grown up, though, and there does seem to be a strong element of the fantastical as a backbone to each; possibly because if you can do limitless visual narratives, the ideal is (for many, I know it is for me, largely) to go as far out as possible and possibly because they will, I think, always enjoy a cultural status several degrees below the most mocked of genre fiction - but that's possibly a chicken/egg situation.
 
 
The Falcon
23:31 / 06.12.06
I'd actually argue that between, say, Brubaker's Catwoman and - I dunno - Legion of Superheroes there's some question as to whether 'superhero', the dominant American genre, can actually be classed as such, as a genre, so much as a hybridisation or amplification of genre staples: here, case 1. crime noir and case 2. science fiction. Or say, Kamandi for fantasy and Priest's Black Panther for political/espionage thriller.
 
 
Spaniel
08:15 / 07.12.06
I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at Sleaze. Sure, comics in the US and the UK are dominated by the superhero genre, but to suggest that comics are best thought of as a genre because of that is just utter nonsense. I think I must be missing something from your post because I just don't understand how you could be compelled to make that intellectual leap, or even explore it as a possibility - it's self evidently untrue.
 
 
ginger
09:46 / 07.12.06
coming at this from an academic standpoint, i think the genre / medium debate’s pretty much settled in the favour of treating comics as a medium, and i think rightly so. it’d be foolish to write an article taking ‘blankets’ and ‘OMAC’ as being essentially part of the same genre.

i think part of the reason for the blurring of the line between genre and medium, at least as far as academic study’s concerned, is in the tendency to focus in on a few well-known comics when sending out calls for conference and journal papers, in the hope of attracting business from general academia. in short, 50% of calls for papers mention ‘maus’, which is naturally going to lead to a linking of the medium with the autobiographical strand of the genre.

the call for papers for the 2006 ‘graphic narratives’ special issue of modern fiction studies, an issue which seeks to ‘expand the discourse around graphic narratives from a focus on one author to multiple authors and a serious examination of the form itself’, still pays lip-service to ‘maus’, even while pointing out that things’ve moved on: ‘The book publication of Art Spiegelman's ‘Maus: A Survivor's Tale’ brought graphic narratives to the academy; in the two decades since the publication of the first volume of ‘Maus’, the field of graphic narratives has expanded significantly.’

there’s a more general, lazier strand to this kind of maus-dropping; the call for papers for the 30th Annual New Jersey College English Association Spring Conference: ‘Over the past twenty years, the ‘graphic novel’ has become a mainstay--if second-class citizen--of the popular media. But can we say the form is properly understood when two of the most highly regarded ‘Graphic Novels’--Spiegelman's Maus and Satrapi's Persepolis--are not ‘novels’ at all?’. they mention ‘maus’ because it was serially published and people’ll’ve heard of it, and for no greater thematic reason.

i’ve got a bee in my bonnet about this one, because from the weird little corner in which i sit, the confusion of genre and medium’s entirely down to laziness. if we, in this case meaning the teeny tiny group of people who make up comics academia, would get of our arses and write about something new, the case for the medium’d be much stronger. the incorrect perception of comics as a genre’s entirely due to a public ignorance of the diversity of the form, which is a state of affairs i frequently see people who i’d think have a vested interest in changing passively propagating.

sorry if that turned into a bit of a rant.
 
 
Mario
09:49 / 07.12.06
It's a medium, a graphical format for literature. Genre refers to the kind of story (romance, sci-fi, superhero) not the way the story is delivered.
 
 
Spaniel
12:17 / 07.12.06
The thing is, none of us are telling Sleaze anything he doesn't know, so the question remains, what are you on about, Sleaze?
 
 
This Sunday
14:55 / 07.12.06
There was a thread on the 'superhero genre' not too long ago (resurrected from a three-post trial some years before, to run over one hundred posts and still not get us terribly far) that may be of some interest to anyone seeking to knock superheroes = comics straight out of the park, break the field's gravitational influence, and leave the miserable misconception floating somewhere in the vast depths of 5D quintisquad outerdarkspace.

Since my early artschool training was in the dubious area of 'installation' I have a horrible tendency to dismiss even the definitions of medium, in general, as being unnecessarily limiting, but definitely, to pose that the external materials for crafting a narrative are a genre, themselves, is a bit much. Television isn't a genre, regardless of what you show on it, and when you show a 'film' on TV, it becomes television. The tropes and tendencies which people claim to be utilising when they make a 'comicbooky' film or novel... a prose 'Wildcards' antho is not comics, nor is the Mendes' 'Road to Perdition' or 'The Amazing Kavalier and Clay' or the musical accomplishments of Wagner.

To imply a film is 'comicbooky', label a comic as 'truly cinematic' or a novel as 'painterly' is to miss that medium defines method of communication, not the communication. Unless we're talking about lightbulbs. They can be message, medium, and even massage. Comics are comics are comics. A Batman comic does not fail at being comics because of a dearth of intricate characterization any more than a novel fails to be prose because it hasn't got a soundtrack included with it, or, in fact, because the novel does not have a deep, complicated portrayal of characterization, either.
 
 
unbecoming
16:22 / 07.12.06
I would say its unfair on graphic narrative to consider it as merely a genre of fiction. (see comics journalism, Joe Sacco for example) However, it could be argued that ‘comics’ is a genre of the wider medium of graphic narrative.

I generally think it would be useful to try and narrow the amount of work which the term ‘comics’ refers to. For example I would probably exclude Chris Ware and Bill Waterson from comics and include them in the genre of cartoons instead. This is obviously problematic because they are both comics and cartoons, Sacco is Both Journalism and comics etc.
 
 
This Sunday
17:29 / 07.12.06
See, now, I would feel comfortable asserting that 'cartooning' can be done without visual, at all. 'Cartooning' or the ballooning, parodying, or making-over-recognizable-through-reduction of a thing, need not be purely visual, but would include a lot of stuff commonly called 'comicky' or 'comicbooklike' when meaning stuff outside comics.
 
 
H3ct0r L1m4
19:14 / 07.12.06
it all comes down to context:

if you compare Batman with Blankets you have different genres of a medium.

but if you put those next to novels in a bookstore you have different approaches to Literature; "genres", some might say.

that wasa recent controversy over a graphic novel being nominated to a Book Award. what are Comics? they're [kid/adult] Pulp, but they're also Art [aimed at kids and adult].

that what I was talking about the blurring of the line. ah, the beauty of Comics, the tranny of print arts.
 
 
The Falcon
19:22 / 07.12.06
but if you put those next to novels in a bookstore you have different approaches to Literature; "genres", some might say.

Different approaches to narrative, Hec, although you do get films and comics that are non-narrative; the literary equivalent here would be, I suppose, poetry.
 
 
This Sunday
19:39 / 07.12.06
Being put on paper and between covers can't make two things the same medium, it seems, unless putting a movie on a compact disc makes it music or text-files or stolen comicbooks in CBR format.
 
 
unbecoming
20:33 / 07.12.06
put those next to novels in a bookstore you have different approaches to Literature; "genres", some might say.

I wouldn't say that, since, the difference between the mediums is the very fact that one uses words alone to evoke an emotive or dramatic response and the other uses a combination of words and visual communication.

I think it is quite often the graphic aspect of graphic narrative which sees it often left out of the 'high' art forms; i.e a book with pictures is seen as a less complex endeavour and ultimately an activity for those who aren't gifted enough to read proper literature
 
 
This Sunday
20:50 / 07.12.06
I've never understood the looking-down on illustrated text-works. Even stuff that's just prose or poetry with an image next to it, or on an insert. Is 'As You Like It' or 'Catch-22' or even 'Winnie the Pooh' suddenly enhanced by removing any possible line art in an edition? People who argue that one... there's got to be no helping them, yeah?

I do think there's a tendency to downplay or treat as juvenile, bastard mediums. Look at how movies are often treated, in respect to books. Like there aren't millions of requiring-less-than-supreme-consideration novels out there, to compare with even the most popcorn of flicks. Or, contrariwise, movies and comics that kick the average prose-work whimpering down the street before going through its pockets for all the spare change and cigs can be found.

Somehow, it's reverse lasersharking in principle; a picture is good, and text is good, but combining them is less good... a picture is good and sound is good, but putting them together means it'll never reach the achievements of the totally played and staid internal monologue we've come to collectively accept as the height and zenith of true artistic representation of the human condition.

Actually, most people probably don't go that far, but there is a tendency to treat those 'purer' mediums as inherently superior or somehow involving a more true artistic stance necessitating more intelligence and development.
 
 
sleazenation
22:57 / 07.12.06
Well, just to clarify, this thread had its genesis in my exasperation on the ongoing focus on one particular genre, or perhaps I should refer to a supergenre, composed of a variety of subgenres thereof. It was my attempt to elicit some arguments for the view, occasionally expressed in print, but seldom explored with any vigour, that comics are a genre. Since I was unable to fathom the reasoning behind such a view I figured it was worth posing the question to see if anyone else could see any justification for the view.

I would also point out that to my mind the plural of 'medium' is most properly 'media', unless one is referring to a group of people involved in communication with the spirit world.
 
 
The Falcon
23:38 / 07.12.06
I thought as much; are you particularly referring to the implicit use of the word 'comics' to refer to superhero comics? While I personally tend to prefix it with 'superhero' or 'mainstream' for absolute clarity, I do think this is a commonly understood shorthand, at least in English-speaking countries. 'Manga', to my knowledge, does not contain quite the same connotation but, again, I'm only conversant in English and it's often shorthand for 'something I do not like' there.
 
 
some guy
05:23 / 08.12.06
A medium comprised of various genres, as others have suggested. However, I disagree that comics are "literature" and actually feel efforts to claim they are diminish the medium by artificially increasing the importance or academic supremacy of prose. Comics shouldn't aspire to be literature any more than a film or a painting should; they should aspire to be comics. For example, I think it's a strength that Watchmen would be significantly undermined in any other medium; it's a weakness that Preacher wouldn't be. And it's interesting that the work getting the most notice often seems to be graphic non-fiction.

How we define literature is a thread in itself. I don't place any greater weight on one medium than another myself.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
06:40 / 08.12.06
I think it's plain that comics are a medium that contains genres. An interesting point is raised above though.

Manga and BD are not genres. Should we consider them "movements"?

I'm thinking of the useful precedent set long ago now in cinema ~ cinema is a medium, the musical is a genre, Italian Neo-Realism is a movement. (Noir is also often referred to as a movement, so there's an interesting slippage between this and genre. In at least this one case).

Also interesting to think of the superhero genre's generic sources. I hadn't really done that before but yes, it does seem obvious when you point it out. Interesting too that no other medium has combined those two genres to produce the superhero genre. (Except when copying comics).
 
 
Mario
12:26 / 08.12.06
The problem with manga (I don't know enough about BD to comment) is that the term has been applied lazily for years.

The original definition was quite simple:

"Manga: Comics from Japan".

That's it. No restrictions on format, art style, or storytelling. If it came from Japan, it was manga. If it came from anywhere else, it wasn't (tho it could be manhua or manhwa).

Then we started getting artists who were inspired by one or more Japanese artists. And people started talking about "manga-style art", as if there was a standard art style. And a nebulous definition formed, usually based on "big eyes and speed lines".

Eventually, enough manga hit the shores that people realized "You know, Lone Wolf & Cub doesn't look much like Pokemon", and the label became less common. But then, the collections started arriving. LOTS of them.

Now, suddenly, "manga" was a format. Black and white, paperback-sized, sometimes flipped. And people started writing for that format. And now we have "Original English Manga", which (in a literal sense) is just another word for "comics written for a paperback-sized trade".

So in order to answer the question "Is Manga a genre or a medium?", you first have to define what you MEAN by Manga.
 
 
some guy
13:11 / 08.12.06
Interesting too that no other medium has combined those two genres to produce the superhero genre.

I'm not sure that's true. I see Japanese costumed hero TV serials as superhero work and I wouldn't necessarily suggest those are directly inspired by comics.
 
 
unbecoming
20:44 / 08.12.06
i wouldn't say that manga is a movement, purely because it suggests that it is a development in the wider field of comics. I think that is unfair to manga, which, as said above, is simply the comics of japan. Both manga and comics are forms of visual narrative but have developed individually from each other, up to a point, and have different traits and conventions, different languages for expressing their communication.

However, I think a pseudo manga aesthetic is a definite movement within comics, as more western artists become increasingly influenced by manga.

Returning to the idea of comics as literature; i agree that comics shouldn't have to aspire to be like literature to recieve artistic consideration; i think this generally a form of over compensation from the camp of people who like graphic narrative but want to escape the stigma attached to reading superhero style comics.

I don't think comics should be seen as just writing plus pictures, illustrated prose. It's the thoughtful and artistic combination of two narrative forms which make comics so intriguing to me and it is the same thing that makes them such a powerful communication format.
 
  
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