Splitter.
Joey Manley’s Graphic Novel Review has launched with, among other things, a meaty interview with Eddie Campbell; read it, even though he’s cranky, and you’ll mourn the vine-death of Egomania and The History of Humor, and despite the fact that in his laudable attempt to atomize all of art into a great amorphous cloud, he somehow staggeringly misses the point of the comics on Trajan’s column. The syllogism Campbell disparages—
- Comics are sequential art;
- Trajan’s column is sequential art; therefore
- Trajan’s column is comics
—is lousy logic, true, but it’s also made of straw. Say instead that you accept, for the sake of argument, the definition of comics as sequential art, well, look at Trajan’s column: see? How much bigger your idea of comics has become? —Campbell and McCloud are trying to do the same thing from the opposite ends of the table: grab somebody, anybody, readers and artists both, by the collar and show them that all they have to work with is one picture after another. That’s it: the only tool; the only limitation. Go! But Campbell’s trying to do it by jettisoning the word “comics” and the brightly colored longjohns overstuffed into its baggage; he wants a new name, a new movement, of graphic novelists, doing some different, other thing. And he’s not without his point, and his point is not without its sympathy. But we’re you and me both at once tenacious and fickle: once we’ve named a thing, we balk at the idea of changing that name—but that very truculence lets black-garbed stagehands work some magic by changing the thing just enough when we’re looking somewhere else. I’ve seen previous attempts to do what Eddie Campbell wants, from “comix” to “drawn books,” and while I’d never say never or not in a million years, nonetheless: my money’s on “comics.” Sad as it may seem, it’s much, much bigger than the longjohns—and it always would have been, if only we’d known how to look.
(“Manga”? Well, yeah, manga’s caught on as a term, but hey: those are Japanese comics. Different thing entirely. —Geeze, what were you expecting? Logic?)
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