“Comics
have always had the potential to be a radical medium, because they
edge around the mainstream, because they are collaborative, because
they play with time and form, and because they’re so much bloody
fun.”
“The
effect of these pulp paper nightmares is that of a violent
stimulant.”
-
Sterling North
Noise
in the Library
Of
course only the most clueless straight would look at the poster to a
show called 'Comics Unmasked' (above), and be
surprised to see a mask. I mean, get like post-ironical, dude. Check
out the nonchalant slouch of the pose, the diffident expression.
Above all, check out the alley setting, chosen in contrast to some
expansive, panoramic rooftop. 'Comics Unmasked' is
a slack way of saying 'Superheroes Got Slack'.
Now
for once in my life I may be using so dated an expression as 'slack'
deliberately. The image is by Tank Girl creator Jamie Hewlett, and
does reflect the Nineties era in which he chiefly found fame. It
draws its frisson from presenting superheroes not in the heroic poses
we're used to. And yet there's now nothing particularly unusual in
this image. It's not impossible to imagine, say, the Black Widow from
the Marvel Universe films pulling that pose. It could be taken to
suggest comics have been frozen at their seeming moment of triumph,
hands reached out for but never quite grasping that elusive
mainstream acceptance.
But
it also suggests comics have a cumulative history. They're not some
cultural equivalent of a social climber desperate to hush up their
lowly lineage, but amending their history for their own ends. It's
not just that superhero comics, despite everything, could sometimes
be cool. It's that what once seemed a firewall between alternative
and superhero comics is now a porous border. Superheroes are part of
the lexicon, for us to pick up and mould should they seem useful. We
don't need to mask anything off.
In
fact the word I most seized on in the title wasn't even 'anarchy' but
'comics'. In recent years people have taken to the term 'graphic
novel' much in the way they say 'bathroom' when what they really want
is a toilet, as a polite euphemism. Milligan and McCarthy's splendid
'Skin' is even applauded for “opposing the
gentrification of comics”. Which it did.
But
perhaps the most cheering factor of all is the choice of venue.
There's an inherent problem with trying to fit comics into art
galleries, whose essential purpose is to display original works of
art. Even if at times they might venture into posters, they're still
dealing with objects designed for public display. Whereas with comics
the existence of original art is merely a means to an end (in these
digital days often having no physical existence at all), with the
finished product that's designed to be read. And
things that you read belong in a library. It's a basic point, but an
important one.
'Comics
Unmasked' reverses this almost to a fault – well,
actually to a fault. It was often hard to actually read
those comics, given the combination of glass cabinets, low lighting
and my middle-aged eyesight. It having already been established we're
not looking at original artefacts, they could have done more to blow
sections up on walls. (Plus you can often learn as least as much
about an artist by seeing their work enlarged as you can by studying
the original art.)
But
of course they didn't just stick some old comics
under glass. The earlier 'Propaganda' exhibition had proven the British
Library able and willing to do inventive, irreverent and audacious
things with display. And, despite all the jokes about patrician
Librarians shushing the punters, it may be the venue feels enabled to
take more liberties. After all, you go to a Klee or Matisse
exhibition to see Klee or Matisse, and the curators don't want to
distract from that too much. They strain to make their efforts almost
invisible, like roadies at a concert. 'Propaganda'
was almost the reverse, a demonstration of concepts and ideas with
works chosen to illustrate them, like walking inside some virtual
reality essay. I tend to use the terms 'show' and 'exhibition'
interchangeably. But 'Propaganda' was quite
definitely a show.
I'd
hoped this would follow in the same vein, and in many ways it did. It
states early “comics can be a playground for the imagination”,
and then does much to provide an adventure playground for the eyes. A
giant Moebius strip stretches round the gallery, with projections
played upon it (below). You realise this motif is becoming a visual
analogue for comics history - twisting, multi-sided, subject to be
rewritten, yet stretching through time.
You
have of course to see such shows as aimed at newbies and innocent
bystanders, rather than us obsessive insiders. And the associated
unlearning isn't always easy. It's not just that they can't hope to
include all the artists we'd like to see. (A subject which has set
sections of the net's comics neighbourhood a-buzzing.) It's that we
cannot help but see the gaps and so things inevitably appear to us as
scattershot. Of course the premise is in many ways a hopeless one, a
case of setting yourself up to fail. Its not like the next British
Library show will be on the history or the novel, while the Tate will
counter with the history of painting and the British Museum weigh in
with the history of history. We pretty much have to just accept the
picture will be partial, or else stay home.
Anyway,
the show finds nuggets to reward us fans for our attendance, for
example the trial 'Dan Dare' strip (1949, above)
when he was still the originally intended dog-collared Chaplain, or
the Judge Dredd strip 'Battle of the Burger Barons'
(1978, below) never reprinted after satirising actual burger chains
by name. (They state here through publisher jitters rather than
actual legal threats.)
It
was perhaps less a lure to the average comics fan, and hear me out on
this one, but I was also interested to see for the first time
'Bulldog' (1981). Given this was published by the
far-right National Front to lure in young members, you may understand
my earlier reluctance to hand over cash for a copy. And it looks
pretty much what you'd expect. In many ways the far right have no
identity of their own, but are just a bizarre looking-glass-world
inversion of the left - no matter how absurd a place that takes them
to. It includes a graphic of a cop searching a white kid, a copycat
image of one originally used by the Motherfuckers, above the sentence
“the police have declared war on the white youth of Britain”.
Course they have mate...
Perhaps
most enticing of all, the show knows when not to confine itself to
comics. In something I'd never heard before, we're told the
hard-drinking wastrel Ally Sloper was not just one of the first comic
characters but first comics brands, also appearing on stage, screen
and here as a somewhat disturbing ventriloquist puppet (below).
There's similar examples from later eras.
Black-hearted
Brigands Abroad (Reclaiming the Colonies)
A
whole room is given to heroes, and it’s interesting how this
inevitably slips into the story of the British invasion of America.
(Characterised as “extraordinary” and “radical”.) And of
course there’s a Stan-Lee-style prize for spotting what links the
two. Our mark was made on the most hero-centric genre of all,
superheroes, precisely because heroes were what we didn’t
deal in. What we had that was saleable was what the show describes as
“a heritage of rebelliousness”, a rich history of anti-heroes,
even when they weren’t out-and-out black-hearted brigands. (The
show includes, for example, a Dick Turpin comic from 1948 next to a
penny dreadful featuring him from eighty years earlier.) For the
American superhero publishers, we were sexy because we were bad.
Centuries after the colonial era, we were still offloading our
trouble-makers abroad.
But
then, at least up until the arrival of the infamous Comics Code
Authority, weren't American comics gaudier and wilder, with all the
salacious crime and horror titles? Or even after then. Didn't Marvel
essentially invent flawed and anti-heroes, such as the Hulk or the
Thing? Didn't underground comics export from America to Britain?
To
which the short answer is yes. But remember the stories of the
Beatles first arriving in America, the source of the music which had
so inspired them, and finding the place strangely straight-laced. And
that music had been made in America. But it was
made by currents which didn't make it to the surface of society,
which either never had or which had by that point been buried again.
It took someone from elsewhere to take up that music and return it to
America before the home-grown variants could arise. And the British
comics invasion worked much like that, re-introducing stuff which
seemed obvious to us but at home had been forgotten. Alan Moore, such
a spearhead of that invasion, later commented “I couldn't have done
that if I hadn't been a traditionalist”.
Talking
About Sex
If
you want something to truly date the Sixties/ Seventies underground,
and don't really want to bring up their infamous uncritical support
for the Viet Cong, your best choice is their sexual politics. Or lack
of them. A telling example is John Kent's 'Varoomshka'
(1972, above), it's cover-girl heroine obligingly disrobing while she
cries cheerily “this strip is purely political”. Politicians of
the day look on in shock and disgust.
Of
course we see such an image with hindsight. But its almost absurdly
easy to see the chain between it and Conrad Frost's 'The
Life of George and Lynn', (scathingly dubbed 'The
Perpetually Naked Middle Class Bastards' by Brendan
McCarthy), which debuted in 'The Sun' a mere five
years later. (A task made easier by them both being in the same show,
of course.) Perhaps the only difference between Varoomshka's “purely
political” gesture and the cover of last week's 'Zoo'
magazine is that one is a drawing and the other a photo.
And
yet if you're interested in cultural or sub-cultural history, this is
just what makes porn such a useful barometer. As the show says “there
is something about the lens of desire that is particularly revealing
about a culture”. Its precisely because sex and sexuality are
defined as something natural and unmediated, that leads to its
cultural content rises to the surface more openly. After all, what is
there to be guarded about? It's all just innate and biological, isn't
it? And this is strongest in Sixties/Seventies subculture, which
often blithely assumed we could revert to some 'true' nature outside
the norms of society. This hopeless simplemindedness is more
flagrantly on show than Varoomshka's nipples.
Then
again, at the other end of the scale... Underground and alternative
comics worked better as negative and disrupting forces, upending
popular assumptions - and sexuality may be no exception.
'Sourcream' (1979) was a women's comic who
depicted sexual matters in a simple, de-eroticised child-like style
which matched their frankness of content. A strip like 'Which
Contraceptive?' could scarcely be any more demystifying.
(Matching many punk songs of the era, such as the Snivelling Shits'
'I Can't Come' or the Dead Kennedy's 'Too
Drunk to Fuck'.)
However,
let's back up a little. That distinction between picture and photo
that separates 'Varomooshka' from 'Zoo',
is it actually so trivial? The prevalent trend in pornography has
been towards photography, with perhaps only technological limitations
ever holding it back. But I've never been sure why people are always
so keen for porn to be 'real' when it's a genre that couldn't be any
more about fantasy. Doesn't it work better when combining sensual
thrill with aesthetic buzz, like a cocktail drug? Take Ron Embletons
'Oh, Wicked Wanda' (1983, below), with what the
show describes as “colours so lavish and sensual that you could
almost taste them”. (Disclaimers: Whether this strip would have
progressive sexual politics is of course another thing. It was
published by 'Penthouse', after all. Also, to
spare the blushes of gentle readers, I have also chosen a more
family-friendly sample than the one from the show.)
Can Comics Be Magic?
There
being a room devoted to magic, that's not something I would
necessarily have bet money on before entering. When they state “some
of Britain's key comics talents are practising magicians” you are
tempted to ask if by “some” they actually mean “two”. And the
phrase “magic is hugely important in British culture” feels
little like one of those statements you make hoping no-one actually
calls you on it.
However,
the show may be on stronger ground when it states “comics have lent
themselves so well to dreamlike and transcendental states”. In
fact, in my youth I dimly conceived of British comics existing in
some schizo state. At times they'd seem populated entirely by
square-jawed chaps winning the war by not showing any emotion, or
footballers who strangely didn't seem to share the working class
origins of footballers on the telly. But seconds later they seemed to
flip, and would suddenly be brimming with enticing strangeness, with
characters such as the positively deranged Adam Eterno or the
sinister Black Sapper. Yet there never seemed a way of separating
them, of getting one without being saddled with the other. It seems
explicable enough how they could be so staid. The real question is –
how could they simultaneously be so mad?
Perhaps
there is something innately strange about the world of comics, rather
than it being a mnaifestation of British culture. Think of the old DC
Comics, ostensibly the upright goody-goody imprint which got upended
by the hipper Marvel. And how downright bonkers they could become,
with villains who could control anything or anyone provided it was
coloured blue, with robot duplicates which turned out to be robot
duplicates of robot duplicates and such like.
Perhaps
the show has it upside down. When comics were really
strange was before they were made by drug-crazed
hippies, Northampton maguses or students of chaos magic but by hacks
on scale pay and instant coffee. Take for example the pages by DC
Thompson artist Dudley Watkins, who worked on both 'Desperate Dan' and 'Lord Snooty'. Devoutly religious and teetotal, he was still a source
of some of the most left-field images and ideas you're ever likely to
encounter.
In
other words, it all happened when it normally does – when no-one
was really watching. The act of observing normalises what is
observed, suddenly it feels self-conscious and starts to follow
rules. Clearly, speed of production had much to do with it.
Surrealist techniques such as stream-of-consciousness were emulated
almost by accident, because dream logic and the association of ideas
assembled faster than a coherent plotline.
But
there's something bigger. In the quote up top, Laurie Penny comments
on the way comics “play with time and form” as something which
makes them a radical medium. There's an inherent formalism to comics,
which lies latent even in the comics which don't actively try to
exploit it. The form is there on the paper, inextricably interwoven
with the content. Comics are composed of language, while film or
theatre merely use it. The naturalistic illusion becomes a bit of a
non-starter, so things head in the opposite direction. And that
direction is the association of ideas. Surrealism's spark came from
juxtapositions. There is nothing very odd about telephones, and
nothing particularly unusual about lobsters – yet a lobster
telephone becomes a surreal object. And those formal qualities of
comics make them inherently juxtapositional, lining up images
alongside one another. (Think for example of the way Jeff Keen's paintings combined the two.)
Anarchy
Amid the Short Loan?
Let's
go back to that image of the Moebius strip. It suggests comics have
something of a through line, albeit a bendy and stretchy one. The
show takes a take not just on comics history but on what comics
are, and its to do with that word 'anarchy' up
there in the title. That dummy of Ali Sloper, drunken and indolent,
the leery antithesis of Victorian thrift and industry, becomes
something of a totem.
Comics
are either like 'Action' (above) - cheap,
seditious pulps you kept under your schooldesk to stop your teacher
confiscating them - or like 'Nasty Tales' (below),
underground, inherently antagonistic to the Establishment, more
likely to be found in the dock than at an awards ceremony. Comics are
gaudy, disreputable and – above all – popular. The point isn't
just that you can use comics to explore ideas outside of the
political mainstream, but that comics as a medium are antithetical to
the dusty shelf.
In
a way it's an action replay of British creators being given American
heroes precisely so they could mess with them. What's going to
interest the British Library is precisely what makes comics unique or
different, otherwise they may as well just stick to their books. And
this can often be a useful filter. For the longest time comics were
full of creators trying desperately to be 'mature', by which they
tended to mean aspiring to the smart or sophisticated. But the
smartypants stuff only ever worked on comics fans. A comics artist
might – to pull an example right out of the blue – enthrall fans
by aping the Pre-Raphaelite painters. But he's scarcely likely to
pique the interest of a gallery curator, who could just go and book
an exhibition of the real thing. Meanwhile, Dudley Watkins has
something you won't find elsewhere.
And
it's not merely a romanticism. When public information strips try to
ape the comics form, they often betray themselves by looking stiff
and staid, by lacking the dynamics that bring a comics page to life.
They're like teachers trying to utilise playground slang, like vicars
trying to rap their sermons. Some of these are on show in this
exhibition, sticking out like thumbs.
But
on the other hand its scarcely an eternal truth. As the saying goes,
everyone loves you when you're dead. It only takes for someone to pop
their clogs and all their positive features – until so recently
taken for granted – start to stand out. And, from the Victorians
who sought to collect and catalogue the folk culture their world was
destroying, does anything get celebrated more than a dying culture?
The answer is yes. A dead culture does.
And
there's nothing more dead than the notion of a broad popular culture
existing in perfect opposition to power. Except perhaps the idea of
comics as a popular, accessible medium. Those massed mannequins in
the 'V' masks with throng the show (below), they're
not here for a celebration. They're here for a wake.
And
a perfect illustration of the way comics just aren't cheap, cheery
and popular any more could be found by sampling the wares at the Comiket independent comics fair organised in conjunction with this
very show. Comics are now a craft industry, a personal statement, a
labour of love. Let's be clear - there's absolutely nothing wrong
with any of that. I was an active part of that scene for many years,
and enjoyed being so. Its appeal lies in the way its so unlike the
corporatised, commodified world we inhabit the rest of the time. It's
a scene where people do the things they want when they want to, and
if anyone else likes any of it that's a plus. But it's quite a
different appeal to a comics at war with a narrowly defined
Establishment. It's more like a pocket universe where things are
nicer.
At
points the show tries to pin these new comics to the same big Moebius
strip, like they're the latest twist in this one long line. It uses
the term “every day life in comics” but let's call them Real Life
stories (a catch-all term to incorporate biography, autobiography,
virtual autobiography where the author has a comics avatar with a
different name, metafictional autobiography, and all the rest). These
are at absolute odds with the broad sweeps by which the archetypal
comics of old were drawn. It never mattered much if, say,
musclebound-gent-in-loincloth Morgan the Mighty bore a suspicious
resemblance to Tarzan. The point was that the gentleman savage was
just the sort of character you expected to turn up in a comic. There
was no formal relationship between the black-clad anti-hero the Black
Sapper and the black-clad anti-hero Dick Turpin, but they seemed
cousins somehow – branches from the same twisted tree.
Real
Life stories, conversely, prize uniqueness by their very nature.
Implicit in Real Life's commonly seem phrase “this happened to me”
is “it didn't to you”. It's not just that these comics are less
political, even though they often are. If you look at some of the
contemporary political comics artists, such as Edd Baldry or Isy
Morgenmuffel (neither represented in the exhibition) they write about
their political activism, but only as a feature in their lives –
among going on holiday and watching DVD box sets. Which is a quite
different approach to, for example, the World War Three collective. Who operated as... well, as a collective, with
a loose but definite house style.
There's
a disconnect, a growing divergence between appearance and content.
Just as comics have become more individualised, more 'arty' they've
also become more associated in the public mind with the crowd, with
all that is bawdy and rambunctious. Notably the recent Tate exhibition 'Rude Britannia', while not a
dedicated comics exhibition, assumed comics quite naturally belonged
under its populist header.
Because
of course its not just a type of comics that's dying off. We now
celebrate the virtual crowd precisely because any real crowd is so
quickly kettled by police, so soon demonised on the evening news. If
an actual gang of masked hoodies gathered outside the front of the
British Library, they'd probably be served a disposal order. So the
'V'-mask figures in the show come to be as much
figures of fantasy as schoolkids in shorts and stripy jumpers. The
less the signified, the greater the need for the signifier.
Overall,
two words out of three in the title are well-placed – even if
'anarchy' isn't really earned. Which perhaps isn't bad odds. Could
things have been done differently? Of course! Could they have been
done better? Possibly. Perhaps a chronological structure,
highlighting how comics have changed over the years, might have both
emphasised what a durable medium they are and – perhaps more
importantly - mitigated against any tendency to universalise. Plus,
as the British Library like to go to town on set design, they would
have scope to give each area its own identifying style. To pursue the
painting analogy, a catch-all exhibition of painting would be more
likely to show how Impressionism led to Post-Impressionism then
Fauvism, rather that sticking all the still lifes in one room and the
sea scenes in another.
But
of course, as said, a single one-stop show isn't going to get the
span of it. It could be said what we really need we do sort of have. The London Cartoon Museum, with its varied permanent collection and rotating
special exhibitions, is by its nature not stuck with trying to sum
comics up in one shot. If its a somewhat 'Blue
Peter'-ish venue, that's in equal parts charming and
frustrating. It may just be looking a gift horse in the mouth to say
but, if it was bigger, we could import some of those classic
continental comics exhibitions.
Coming
soon: Okay, I did rashly promise I'd catch up on all my exhibition reviews. But it then occurred to me there might be more than the standard two
or three people who'd be interested in what I had to say about this
one. At least I kept to time-honoured tradition, and didn't get a
chance to post this till the show was over. Should an unexpected
tranche of time come my way, I may follow up with something on the
Tate's 'British Folk Art' show. The two make up a
pair, at least in my mind...
Hi Gavin
ReplyDeleteI'm looking into the history of small press comics in the UK and would be interested to read your history from Zum #1 & 3. Do you still have the text available?
Not sure how to contact you, so hope this gets to you.
Cheers
Damon
info@damonherd.com
Reply incoming! Please post another comment here if you don't get it.
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