Barbelith Underground > Comic Books > Good Readers, Bad Readers, Authorial Intent, and Subtext in Comic Books

tim,

as’s been noted numerous times above, think this ‘bad’ thing’s iffy. i recognise that this’s all come out of an interview when you probably weren’t exactly spending hours checking your draft, so it’s fair enough, but the whole thing brings up an interesting point, especially since it reminded me of a moment in your book, which i read this very morning.

i’m not going to skip across the room and get a page reference, but there’s a footnote where you describe the kupperberg doom patrol as ‘pretty bad, the less said about it the better’ or something similar, before the text goes on to sing the praises of morrison for the next few hundred pages. i’m not going to suggest that kupperberg wasn’t the comics equivalent of cold porridge, but my tired, boozed mind does transpose the whole thing across on to my beloved workplace.

in my faculty, people who i consider to be the academic and literary equivalent of kupperberg spend most of their lives doing what you’re arguing for: reading ‘the waste land’ in terms of meaning and authorial intent, and then writing the poetic equivalent of one of those walk-through guides to DOOM. the rest of us, a tiny minority, ignore all that and run around trying to fuck them up by persuading them that they’re probably missing the point with all this authorial intent bollocks, because we’re really not convinced that such a thing’s necessarily decipherable or even detectable within a text. instead, we try and work out how the text’s read, and how it functions as an object liberated from its author.

admittedly, i’m pretty sure i’m the only one who resorts to telling them that grant morrison’s probably not written a comic in twenty years, because the artists get in the way and scribble all over his pretty writing before it even gets to the printers, but i don’t think they’ve noticed.

my point being: this ‘bad reader’ stuff’s all very well, and i’m sympathetic as far as the e-slagging for trying to be a little cleverer and move things forward goes; but i think that otherwise, you’re on potentially shaky ground. there’re plenty of ways of looking at a text without going near meaning and archaic Romantic ideas.

i appreciate the attempt to drag the level up, so to speak, though there’s also a lot to be said for simple, hedonistic reading of these things on the purest, poppiest level on occasion; i’m interested to know if you’re also trying to drag things sideways, by suggesting that there’s a single ‘good’ way to read. would you dismiss an examination of ‘arkham asylum’ that considered the relationship between painted images and written captions, on the grounds that it didn’t mention tarot cards or batman wanting to diddle his mum?

apologies, drivel as ever.

(no criticism of your book implied, by the way; an explosion of barthes would’ve been a little out of place. the cover’s a little disconcerting; i had to turn it over and leave it face-down on my desk, wee bugger was giving me the eye...)