Post-Bang Covers New World of Graphic Novels

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on June 10, 2008 Sign up now!

by Peter Sanderson -- Publishers Weekly, 6/9/2008 5:52:00 PM

On Friday, June 7, the day before the annual MoCCA Art Festival, a symposium titled “Post-Bang: Comics After the Big Bang” was held at the Cantor Film Center at New York University in Manhattan. The Big Bang metaphor was intended to describe the relatively recent cultural paradigm shift whereby comics have become widely recognized as a serious art form. The symposium was co-sponsored by the New York Institute of the Humanities at NYU and by the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) and was curated by Art Spiegelman and Kent Worcester.

The first panel was “Comics and Canon Formation,” moderated by Rob Storr, dean of the Yale School of Art. It featured John Carlin, one of the organizers of the 2006-2007 museum exhibition “Masters of American Comics,” which focused on 15 leading cartoonists. In the panel, Carlin asserted that he intended his selection for that exhibition to stir controversy and wanted people to debate whether other artists were just as worthy of inclusion. PanelistDan Nadel, publisher of indie art comics house PictureBox, contended that choosing such a canon of 15 instead tends to shut down any such debate, and that there are many comics creators whose work awaits rediscovery and re-evaluation.

Next came “Comics and Kid’s Lit,” moderated by the New Yorker’s Francoise Mouly, with panelists Lise von Drasek, Leonard Marcus, Mo Willems and Sara Varon. This was followed by “Comics and the Literary Establishment,” moderated by Jeet Heer. PWCW's own Douglas Wolk and Harvard scholar Hillary Chute made the point that the “language” of comics criticism was still in an early stage of development and that writers tended to borrow their terminology from film and literary criticism. David Hajdu, author of The Ten-Cent Plague, observed that many of the 1940s and 1950s cartoonists he interviewed for The Ten-Cent Plague admired illustrators and didn’t fully appreciate their own medium, comics.

Moderator Kent Worcester presided over “Comics and the Internet,” featuring New York Times writer Sarah Boxer and Web comics creators Shannon Garrity and Hope Larson. This panel addressed the dilemma of making money off Web comics, since micropayments hadn’t proven the solution. The panelists agreed that selling merchandise like T-shirts and repackaging their strips in book form worked. However, they noted, this prevents them from using the Web as an “infinite canvas,” since their strips have to conform to conventional formats in order to be published in books.

In the early evening two of the “Masters,” Art Spiegelman and Gary Panter, reminisced about their careers and about artists who had influenced them, ranging from Robert Crumb to the fine art world’s cartoon-influenced Philip Guston.

Toward the end, one audience member asked, “If LSD had never been invented, how would your comics be different?”

“That’s a tricky question,” Spiegelman replied. “There still would’ve been mushrooms, I guess,” offered Panter.

The symposium closed with Hillary Chute interviewing celebrated cartoonist Lynda Barry.

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