University Press of Mississippi Has Comics Covered

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on February 7, 2006 Sign up now!

by Peter Sanderson. PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 2/7/2006

Since its founding in the 1970s, the University Press of Mississippi has been committed to publishing scholarly works on popular culture. This includes the comics medium. The press, says UPM publicist Clifton Prince, "offers books about the comics as a way of bringing in-depth, rigorous, scholarly analysis to a form that is widely read and widely disseminated."

Among the company's recent titles, Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium (2004), edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, provides evidence that serious critical writing about comics goes back over a century. This anthology of essays starts with Sidney Fairfield denouncing "The Tyranny of the Pictorial" in 1895, contending that "the written word is the... highest expression of thought," making illustrations superfluous. Cultural prejudices were so strong that Dorothy Parker, confessing in 1943 to loving comic strips, admits that it's like saying, "I've been shooting cocaine into my arms for the past twenty-five years." Others were braver, including critic Gilbert Seldes's The Krazy Kat That Walks by Himself (1924), a brilliant celebration of Krazy Kat creator George Herriman's work that's justifiably famed. Included among other pioneers of comics criticism are poet E.E. Cummings and novelist Thomas Mann, concluding with novelist Umberto Eco's 1962 explanation of why Superman, as a mythic icon, must exist in an eternal present, never aging.

Comics as Philosophy (2005), edited by Jeff McLaughlin, can serve as a companion book, collecting essays by contemporary writers. Contributors utilize Plato to interpret Spider-Man, apply Sartre to Dan Clowes's Ghost World and link Alan Moore's Watchmen with existentialism.

Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (2005) by scholar and Comics Journal contributor Charles Hatfield is not a comprehensive survey of this movement, but rather, as Hatfield says, his book is "a progress report" on an evolving field. His centerpiece is a detailed analysis of Gilbert Hernandez's Heartbreak Soup series. Hatfield explores a variety of creative issues, such as the representation of the self in autobiographical works by cartoon figures (as in Harvey Pekar's American Splendor) or even by a photograph (in the conclusion of "Maus").

In Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture (2005), academic Bart Beaty attempts the formidable task of rehabilitating the reputation of the psychiatrist who is today accused of attempting to destroy the comic book industry a half century ago. Beaty argues that Wertham, whose book Seduction of the Innocents accused comics of contributing to juvenile delinquency in the late 1950s, was a genuinely progressive social reformer, with good reason to be concerned that comics were contributory causes to juvenile delinquency.

Beaty makes the case that comics historians have grossly caricatured his views. It's unlikely that comics enthusiasts will change their minds about Wertham. However, they will be justly horrified by Beaty's vivid description of the anti-comics movement of the 1950s, which proposed laws to ban comic books. He points out that such acclaimed cartoonists as Milton Caniff, Walt Kelly and even Gilbert Seldes actually sided with those who would have smothered the nascent comic book industry long before it attained maturity.

Among standout works in the press's backlist is comics historian Robert C. Harvey's The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History (1995), which provides illuminating step-by-step analyses of the graphic storytelling techniques of various major comics artists. The book draws from a wide range of examples, including Will Eisner's The Spirit and Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers's work on Batman. Harvey also collaborated with cartoonist Gus Arriola on Accidental Ambassador Gordo: The Comic Strip Art of Gus Arriola (2000), a book on the continually inventive yet underappreciated Gordo comic strip of the 1960s.

Richard Reynolds gives superhero comics the serious attention they deserve in his concise Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology (1994). The book focuses attention not only on those usual suspects, Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen, but also on Chris Claremont and John Byrne's Dark Phoenix Saga from The Uncanny X-Men.

Since 2000 the University Press of Mississippi has published a remarkable continuing series, Conversations with Comic Artists, each volume of which brings together interviews from various sources with a giant of the art form. So far the series includes books devoted to Charles M. Schulz (2000), Carl Barks (2002), R. Crumb (2004), Milton Caniff (2005), Mort Walker (2005), Chuck Jones (2005) and Walt Disney (2006).

As the last two names show, the company does not limit its interest in cartoon art to comic books. Lately it has even published two books on animation history for a general audience. The Magic Behind the Voices: A Who's Who of Cartoon Voice Actors (2004) by Tim Lawson and Alisa Persons provides entertaining biographical essays on numerous key figures, including Daws Butler and Mel Blanc. Living Life Inside the Lines: Tales from the Golden Age of Animation (2005) is the autobiography of Martha Sigall, who worked in the ink and paint department of Warners' and MGM's animation studios during their golden age.

As for the future, in July the press will publish Thomas Andrae's critical study Carl Barks and the Disney Comic Book: Unmasking the Myth of Modernity. Following in the fall will be Thierry Groensteen's The System of the Comics, a book about the medium's formal conventions.

Spring 2007 will bring a Conversations book on Art Spiegelman, as well as two books devoted to the true father of the graphic novel, the 19th-century cartoonist Rodolphe Topfler. One is a critical study of his work, and the other will collect of all 16 of his "picture stories," for the first time in English. Conversations with Chris Ware will follow some time after that.

Finally, comics fans exploring the press's catalogue might end by reading Matthew J. Pustz's Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers (1999). After they finish studying the comics medium, they can study themselves.