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Underground > Comic Books >

Post-modernism and Grant Morrison

MaximusOverdrive

20:57 / 23.04.02

hey everyone, i know that despite the fact that a lot of people go into the various different boards, most always check in back here, so i figured i would drop this note here and see if i can get any leads back.

as some of you may know, i'm an art student at University of the Arts in philadelphia. i'm taking a Modernism class this semester and i have a final paper that i have to write for it. the paper is supposed to do two main things

1) concern in some way modernism or post-modernism

that's pretty much a given, the class being called Modernism.

2) relate to my major and the field of the Art world i want to enter into.

this is the hard part. i'm an illustrator that wants to do comic books.

so, this basically leaves me writing a paper about Comic Books and the Post Modern world. now, i really like the idea of the paper, the problem comes in that i need to have a number of good sources that i can go to in order to construct the paper.

this is where you guys can come in if you are all so kind as to help. i need good sources that talk about the meeting of Comics and Art. if any of you guys read Comics Journal or any reputable (ie: not Wizard) published magazine or know of any good texts i can go to for things such as this, it would be a great help.

my current direction on the text is to lay down the modernist past of the comic world and then make the break to post-modernism most likely with the publication of Dark Knight Returns or Watchmen, seeing as how both followed the mold of "we've stripped the superhero down as much as possible, now it's time to change the direction they travel". ultimately it will lead into the current very post-modern work of writers like grant morrison and mark millar. any suggestions or help in firming up this idea is of great help too.

please, find that little warm and golden light in your heart that begs of you to help me! ;-)

21:06 / 23.04.02

I'm teaching postmodernism & Grant Morrison to my final-year undergrad class tomorrow, so I'm chilled to the bone by the fact that I can't think of a single helpful thing to tell you.

I have a couple of papers I wrote on comics (one on Shade's non-phallic masculinity, one on the representation of sound in comics) hanging about, which I could email to you if you want, though they haven't been published and they don't cite anyone talking about comics except Scott McLeod's book 'Understanding Comics'. Oh, hang on, there's a guy called Robert Eaglestone who's written on comics and *has* been published, but mostly on their representation of fascism and the Holocaust.

The scholarly literature on comics is patchy, scarce, and shoddy, I'm afraid. There's a couple of asides where Derrida and Freud mention comics: Freud says somewhere that "speech figures in dreams in much the same way that captions figure in comic strips", and Derrida...

Shit. I've just tried to look it up and I seem to have lost my folder with all my old essays in it. How can that be? Where the fuck has it gone?

Excuse me while I hyperventilate a moment.

Matthew Fluxington

21:08 / 23.04.02

Needless to say, this really should NOT be in the Conversation. We've had threads like this in the past (in fact, I'm sure one had the exact same title), you should go check the archives of the comics forum for possible answers to yr questions.

21:09 / 23.04.02

Found it. But it turns out Derrida was talking about something else and I just pretended he was talking about comics.

Actually, looking at them, neither of these essays would be helpful at all, I don't think: certainly no mention of modernism/postmodernism.

21:10 / 23.04.02

Check out
Join the Crowd Invisible

There's some stuff about post-modernism in comics towards the bottom.

MaximusOverdrive

21:17 / 23.04.02

hey, thanks for the assist Deva. at least you tried. ;-)

flux, sorry about posting in here. sincerely, didn't mean to step on any toes. just thought i might get a better responseby posting here.

and Trijhaos? where's the link of which you speak?

21:20 / 23.04.02

Dammit!!!!

You're going to have to copy and paste this.
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~hkortti/seminar/index.html

MaximusOverdrive

21:22 / 23.04.02

fantastic link trijhaos! damn... i post this little message, and five minutes later i'm already getting some good stuff. thanks! ;-)

22:05 / 23.04.02

All I know is that Grant Morrison rules, and that while I myself have been pigeonholed into the "postmodernist" category I find myself cringing at the term much like the term "hipster." I mean, postmodernism is so flavor of the week. Trendy ass shiat, dude. If Grant Morrison is jumping on the "I'm gonna call myself a postmodernist" bandwagon, even if this is a wry display of post modern irony, I could give two dancing shits.

MaximusOverdrive

04:39 / 24.04.02

i'm not a big fan of the categorization of music outside of a truly historical standpoint, but i am forced to take a class on modernism. as such, i have to tender in a paper that will get me a passing grade. rather than putting comics into late modernism, an era i really have no love for, i thought it would be a fun challenge to try and go for post-modernism.

MaximusOverdrive

04:39 / 24.04.02

oops, i said music, but i meant art. agh!

09:18 / 24.04.02

i feel it's a bit of a misonception people have to think of modernism as "the usual boring thing you understand" and postmodernism as "the cool thing that comes next." modernism was a completely nutty reaction to a whole lot of things that happened before it, and happened at a particular time and place with a (more or less) readable set of motives and approaches.

to consider watchment of dark knight examples of "modernism" just because they came before the invisibles does the sort of injustice to the categories that makes people turn against categorization.

there is something markedly different in the invisibles from watchmen -- but is it really the same sort of difference one finds between, say, To the Lighthouse and Invisible Man? Monet and Warhol?

14:17 / 24.04.02

I took a class at University of Florida from Dr. Donald Ault, who *has* published work on comics. His tastes, however, run to the Mickey Mouse stuff. That and Romantic Poetry (so he's got a great perspective on Blake).
Here's a symposium on graphic novels he was involved with. Bound to be plenty of leads in there - just do searches on his name and the names of all the other presenters. Actually, the more I look at that page, the cooler it seems. Can't believe I didn't do more studying with this guy. (And Deva, I can't believe I didn't bring him up when you posted yer syllabus question a few months back. Sorry.)
I liked Jennifer Razee (fellow student) and Scott Nygren (a spacey video teacher) but didn't get on with Nygren's wife Maureen Turim (a very theory intensive prof with... odd style). Wow. I really wish I'd clicked onto this thing before the symposium actually happened.

For your purposes, also, it'd be worth looking for scholarship on Roy Lichtenstein and other pop artists - at least for ways to frame the cultural impact of the comics genre. This is also the central concern of Michael Chabon's novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay, which could be valuable in a backgroundy sort of way.

Murray Hamhandler

14:59 / 24.04.02

FYI-See also:
* Invisibles & Postmodernism

15:22 / 24.04.02

Um, especially if your middle is Miller's Dark Knight you can find some nice quotes in The Many Lives of Batman: approaches to a superhero and his media (Pearson, Roberta E. and Uricchio, William eds.)... specifically Eileen Meehan's "Holy Commodity Fetish, Batman!" which rightly situates Dark Knight (and the other "deconstructions") as a warm up for the movie. I wish I could find the stuff on Spiderman; the whole process now being well-charted territory.

PVP #5, "The Comix" would be a good text to throw in at the end, too.

19:04 / 24.04.02

I don't know if any of the links on this page will help, but have a look.

http://www.invisibilia.co.uk/

There's a paper on Morrison and the romantics and some thoughts on The Invisibles by a few posters to the invisbles mailing list. The stuff by Jhoe may be of interest, and you might also want to contact him, he might be able to help you.

MaximusOverdrive

01:03 / 25.04.02

yeah, i agree with you Gypt, modernism does often catch shit from the masses because of the way media has defined it. while i may not be a fan of some of the more masturbatory work of some of the later modernist artists, especially performance artists that came out of John Cage, i enjoy the works of, say, Jasper Johns or Lichtenstein immensly.

i'm still flailing around a little on the paper. see, modernism within the framework of the class i'm taking, is the furthest possible extension of the elightenment, stripping everything away from art until it is unrecognizable as anything but art. no subject matter, no decided technique, and in some cases, no voice. using these ideas, the turning point within the comics community towards post-modernism really lies with a couple of things:

1) the works of Frank Miller on Daredevil/ batman
2) the Adventures of Luther Arkwright
3) Maus
4) Watchmen

so, i've got to decide where i want to draw my line and say "okay, modernism ends here with this work and this is the first postmodern work." this obviously doesn't have to include Morrison's work, though i feel that his stuff is definetly the pinnacle of comic book writing as post-modern communication at the moment.

well, gotta rent movies. thank you grant, bea and steve for the links. the more, the merrier. and any other suggestions would be helpful. laters!

10:27 / 25.04.02

try and track down a copy of Steven Shaviros' 'Doom Patrols: A Thoeretical Fiction about Postmodernism'...whole chunks of it are about Morrison...

11:50 / 25.04.02

Steven Shaviro's Doom Patrols is at http://www.nettime.org/%7Erolux/cp/sha/dp/morrison.html

This link looks at how Borges influenced Morrison.

We're The Great Old Ones Now

11:56 / 25.04.02

There's a book called 'The Immediate Experience' by Robert Warshow which talks about comics, but not modern ones - it was compiled out of a series of essays, and published in 1957 or so. It has to be decoded a bit, because (I think) the writer was gay and trying not to get blacklisted/McCarthy-ised. Not sure.

I mention it because the writing on Gangsters and Westerns is very relevant to Batman, the Shadow, Superman, and so on. And the linkage Warshow makes between events in culture and developements in the stories in movies and comics during his period, whilst completely experientially-based and without stats support, is both fascinating and I think very accurate - and could be used as a template for an interesting look at more recent comics.

Alas, it's hard to get hold of.

Yotsuba & Benjamin!

13:15 / 25.04.02

I wrote my Grad thesis halfways about Grant's work, (the other half was on Nabokov) and I focused on Grant's treatment of the medium itself as a subject off the book (Flex is a perfect example). Snoop around his work with that in mind and I think you'll find some neat stuff in terms of his dealings with superhero conventions, et al.

Benjamin.

17:42 / 25.04.02

I'd find really hard to draw a line between modernism and postmodernism. More and more, I'm of the mind that the two were really born together, and that the "post" part is a misnomer.

What's the first comic aware of itself as a comic?

MaximusOverdrive

20:56 / 25.04.02

the first one that i can think of as a truly self aware book is probably morrison's Animal Man, though i do remember children's comic books such as Captain Carrot and Spider Ham breaking the fourth wall barrier constantly.

i view post-modernism as less a new movement as something more akin to a right turn on the street that modernism lived on.

20:59 / 25.04.02

My first guess would be
The Flash #179 May 1968 called "The Flash---Fact or Fiction" In this issue, Barry Allen ventures into Earth Prime (our world) and discovers that he is simply a fictional comic book hero here. Now, that would be a comic identifying itself as a comic.

Before this???

21:08 / 25.04.02

I'm wondering - I caught the latest Justice League cartoon, and in it, the league find themselves trapped in a dimension where the local heroes are ones they all read about in comic books growing up. It's great - all these golden age types, including a female character Hawkgirl nearly beheads when she asks Hawkgirl to help her bake some cookies for the menfolk while they talk business.

Anyway, I'm wondering if this sort of thing happened in the Silver Age at all. It seems very much like some of the stuff early Marvel comics would've pulled off. (Most of their early stuff really made it by tweaking existing conventions in a knowing manner.) I'd be surprised if there weren't some outright meta-antics in some of those.
(edit: oo! that Flash thing sounds perfect! Dawn of the Silver Age!)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were also a parody of Frank Miller's Daredevil run, but gained a life of their own. (Parody being an important element of self-awareness and irony.)

I'd also work to include Flaming Carrot in some way - because it's a "Dark Age" comic (contemporary with Miller's "Dark Knight" and Moore's "Watchmen") that attempts in some ways to be a Golden Age comic, but through a really warped lens. Two-fisted action with a healthy dose of dadaism. And it's brilliant.

MaximusOverdrive

21:23 / 25.04.02

good call on that issue of the flash. also, haven't read any Flaming Carrot so if you could perhaps highlight a couple of issues that would be sooo helpful grant. thanks!

btw, anyone know why flex mentallo hasn't been TPBed yet? i mean, it's a seminal work of the medium, y'know? also wouldn't mind seeing continued TPBs of the Doom Patrol or even Sebastion O.

22:14 / 25.04.02

Could you also count the appearance of Stan Lee & Jack Kirby at the wedding Susan Storm & Reed Richards?

04:52 / 26.04.02

For a quick run through on why Flex hasn't been reprinted, see this thread, which veers off into uncharted waters after a while.

14:18 / 26.04.02

With Flaming Carrot, the earlier the numbers the better.

The web page has for sale back issue packs as well as the tpbs. I have a copy of "The Wild Shall Wild Remain," which I love like I love Art itself.

link to picture of Flaming Carrot cover

This page also has Bob Burden (the artist/writer) talking about his influences in making this image:

14:27 / 26.04.02

Oh, and this page here has nice issue summaries for some of the early issues, including some of the references (tributes range from Seventh Seal to Windsor McCay) and scans of cover art.

12:37 / 05.05.02

grant said: I'd find really hard to draw a line between modernism and postmodernism. More and more, I'm of the mind that the two were really born together, and that the "post" part is a misnomer.

Stephen O'Connor says that postmodernism is modernism's "inner limit", and Lyotard says that postmodernism precedes modernism. Me, I think that postmodernism means "a work bearing a particular relation to modernism" - "post" doesn't necessarily mean "after" (and since "modo" means "just now", "after-just-now-ism" is a term which fucks with linear chronology anyway).

Having said which, one trait of *both* modernism *and* postmodernism (and, arguably, all allusive works) is to construct previous works as somehow easy, knowable, simplistic, and univocal in contrast to the current work's sophisticated and multivocal intervention. So although it's maybe not the case that the Invisibles is "postmodern" and Watchmen is "modern" (I think myself there's a case for Watchmen as the first pomo comic), it may well be the case that part of the postmodern character of the Invisibles involves setting itself up as post-Watchmen.