Harvey Pekar on the potential of comics

Comics is as good, as expressive, as versatile an artistic medium as any other, including the novel, theater, and film. You can write as well in comics as in any other form. Comic book writing is very similar to writing drama: you write dialogue and directions, to the actors and director in one case, to the illustrator in another. You can write any way you want in comics and you can draw any way you want. using any style you like.

Here's a paradox: haiku, a Japanese poetry form in which the writer is allowed only 17 syllables, is thought of as a fine art, but comics is regarded as intrinsically limited even though it allows for far greater expressive freedom than haiku. Why is this? I think it's because haiku has traditionally attracted gifted and serious writers, while comics, aimed at a lowest common denominator audience, has, for the most part, been done by commercial hacks. Good, talented artists can make an art form respectable; lousy ones can bring it into disrepute. Comics have a far greater aesthetic potential than is generally realized: if more gifted people employed the medium, this would become evident, and comics would be taken far more seriously.

Charles Schulz has been quoted in Twisted Image #6 as saying: "I really think I know as much, if not more, about drawing comics as anyone in the business. I think Snoopy is as good a comic character as any that's been invented. So's Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, and Peppermint Patty. But I'm no Andrew Wyeth; I'm no Leo Tolstoy. We're restricted by what we are. Our medium will always hold us back. The same way as a burlesque comedian can never be Hamlet."

Schulz should blame his limitations on himself, not his medium. Let's look at his work. He is one the more important cartoonists to come to the fore since 1950, but that's not saying much since a large percentage of the comic-book and strip art printed since then has been garbage, often done by people with juvenile intellects for people with juvenile intellects. Schulz's work is clever and amusing; he gets laughs by having his unusually articulate child and animal characters struggle with sometimes serious psychological problems. OK, where does he fall short? For one thing, he trivializes his own insights. The kind of hang-ups his characters have can really cause people a lot of pain, but by instilling these problems into cute little kids who are drawn extremely simply, Schulz minimizes their seriousness. His near stick-figure drawing has its charm, but also has a limited emotive range.

It's possible portray people in comics with serious psychological and social problems convincingly, powerfully, and at the same time humorously, without making the concessions Schulz has made. Not only is it possible, it's been done by a variety of comic-book and strip artists including Ring Lardner, Gene Ahern, Robert Crumb, Bill Griffith, and Justin Green.

Granted, the strip format that Schulz uses limits him; he only has a few panels a day to work with, so he tends to tell gags rather than get into something more profound. His panels have to be small and uniform in size; this limits the power and artistic variety of his work. But, hey, no one forced Schulz to use comics the way he's using them. He's done a good job, given his limitations, but it's possible to do far more. People can be portrayed as realistically as possible in comics. Comics are words and pictures; you can do anything with words and pictures.

Where do comics come from, what are their antecedents? Some antecedents are pretty distinguished, like the earthy, often very funny work of 16th-century Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel. Some of his pieces could be called cartoons even if they're usually considered "fine art."

The Japanese scrolls of several hundred years ago, also considered fine art, told stories using words and pictures in much the same way comics do today.

William Hogarth used sets of pictures such as The Rake's Progress to tell stories in the 18th century.

The fact that Bruegel, Hogarth, and the creators of the Japanese scrolls weren't commercial hacks doesn't mean that their work has no relation to comics. Comics don't have to be lousy.

In the 19th century, cartooning and caricature were not kid stuff, as witness the brilliant efforts of Honore Daumier, a political and social critic, and of Thomas Nast, whose editorial cartoons helped bring down New York's notorious Tweed Ring.

By the end of the 19th century, comics had become extremely popular in the US; they were big money-makers, as the battle between the New York World and New York Journal over legal rights to the Yellow Kid feature indicated. Though newspaper strips between 1900 and 1940 were aimed at middle-class and working-class people, not intellectuals, a number of them were aesthetically quite good, some even brilliant. Winsor McCay was employing surrealism in Little Nemo before fine artists de Chirico and Chagall. Lionel Feininger became a highly regarded fine artist around 1915, but his 1906 comic feature The Kinder Kids ranks among his greatest achievements.

During the '20s and '30s, a number of newspaper comics features came to the fore which were aimed at and were often about middle-class and lower-class people. The writing was relatively simple and informal, yet some were aesthetically successful even judged by pretty rigorous standards. I refer to comics like Popeye by Elzie C. Segar, Our Boarding House by Gene Ahern, Moon Mullins by Frank Willard, You Know Me, Al (written by Ring Lardner); Alley Oop by V.T. Hamlin, J.R. Williams's features such as Out Our Way and Bull of the Woods, Al Capp's Li'l Abner, and Gasoline Alley, whose creator, Frank King, was not only a very good writer, but a splendid artist (in some of King's color pages, he brilliantly synthesized contemporary fine art and cartooning techniques). In addition to this, some one-panel magazine cartoonists, such as those who worked for The New Yorker, evolved clever and amusing approaches.

[It goes on, and mostly talks about comic books, but his point has pretty much been made. Comics should be respected more than they are, but they aren't because not enough great artists and writers have worked on them. I agree with the first half of that, and disagree with the second. I don't think it's fair to throw so many great artists and writers under the bus just to elevate a medium. Comics is as great of a medium as it is because of those who created them, not despite them.]