For decades, comics enthusiasts and practitioners have been complaining, Rodney Dangerfield-style that the art form doesn’t get the respect it deserves. Among the many standard grouse formats is the “museum grouse,” which goes a little like this: “Museums will put some Roy Lichtenstein riff on a Kirby panel on the wall and everyone goes apeshit for it, but why won’t they put the actual Kirby stuff on display?!”
Well, guess what–“they” finally did, most notably in the recent high-profile Masters of American Comics exhibit. And what was the reaction of the comics community?
Bitching and complaining.
I was just checking out the contents of the new, and very cool, comics magazine, Comics Comics, and noted that in it, “Dan [Nadel] has some bones to pick with the Masters of American Comics show.” I’m guessing this won’t be a glowing review.
Last week, I received the most recent issue of The International Journal of Comic Art, which contained what was apparently intended to be a point/counterpoint sort of thing, but since both reviewers didn’t like the exhibit it was really just “counterpoint/counterpoint.”
The Comics Journal‘s R.C. Harvey hasn’t quite weighed in fully as of issue 282’s introductory essay, but we’ll see what the second half brings when #283 arrives. (I get my issues along with my monthly comics, so I’m guessing everyone probably has gotten this issue but me.)
Folks more on the P.C. tip complained about the lack of women in the exhibit.
Even cartoonist Art Spiegelman, who helped put the exhibit together, and was himself included in it, eventually found fault with it and withdrew his work from it.
I remember discussing this exhibit with a prominent comics scholar at last year’s SPX who was, needless to say, kvetching about it, and asking him what he would have included to make for a better show. His advice for the Masters of American Comics exhibit, only half-jokingly: all European cartoonists. Quoth Charlie Brown: Good grief!
So, what’s the point of my grousing about all this grousing? I’m not exactly sure–certainly not that a major exhibit of comics art should be above reproach simply because it’s… well, a major exhibit of comics art. But I do wonder, though, if we of the comics community might heed a bit of old Southern wisdom regarding the longterm and sustained progress of our art form into the realm of “respectable” art: You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. (Although, as the character Woody once remarked on Cheers, you can catch the most flies with a dead squirrel.)
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