Inside outside in: A second look at Reading Comics

(This is part of The Valve's symposium on Douglas Wolk's Reading Comics. If you haven't read Reading Comics, you may still be familiar with Douglas as a contributor to The Savage Critic(s).)

One of the most irritating kinds of review is the kind that consists of a detailed outline of the book the critic wishes the author had written instead of the book he or she actually wrote. I tried not to do that when I was reviewing Reading Comics, and not just because it's an inherently irritating habit. There was too much about Reading Comics that I liked for it to be worthwhile dwelling on the might-have-beens, especially in a review intended for a general audience. But here, seeing as I'm on my own blog, speaking to an audience I can presume is familiar with comics and at least somewhat familiar with comics criticism, and no longer obliged to review the book so much as talk about it, I feel less constrained.

Early on in Reading Comics (p18 of the hardback edition), Wolk lays out what he's going to be talking about, and (more importantly for the moment) what he's not going to be talking about:

"I'm basically going to avoid discussing manga... altogether, partly because manga seems to operate by a slightly different set of rules, but mostly because I simply don't have the taste for most of it, and I'm not going to go on about stuff I don't 'get'. I'm also going to deal here only with work published in English and available without much difficulty in the United States, which rules out most of the enormous body of European comics and a lot of worthy British material."

I want to stress, first of all, that this is a legitimate move, especially considering Wolk's self-described aims with Reading Comics ("I wanted my book to be much more subjective, using much more my own voice.... I wanted the tone of the book to be much more personal and much more me"). Since Wolk is not trying to be definitive, and is specifically trying not to be academic, it makes sense for him to focus on the work that excites him and that he has something to say about rather than trying to talk about work he doesn't really appreciate or understand.

And yet...

It's certainly true that manga does operate by "a slightly different set of rules". Actually, that is if anything an understatement: manga's quasi-abstract emotional iconography, splashy panel layouts combined with the use of visual cues in the art to direct the reader's eye, emotional expressionism, convoluted plots and premises, speech bubble placement, distinctive story pacing... and so on and so forth... amount to not just "a slightly different set of rules" but effectively a different visual and narrative language. A lot of ink and electrons have been spilled over the past ten years on the subject of the immense popularity of manga among young people in the USA, and how American comics publishers might turn this to their advantage; none of the attempts to do so have borne much fruit, for the simple reason that the differences between manga and American comics are structural and cultural, not merely aesthetic. Being comfortable with the visual and narrative language of manga doesn't mean you're going to be comfortable with the visual and narrative language of American comics, even when those American comics are telling very similar kinds of stories and have a superficially "manga-esque" visual gloss. Or, more simply: you can put icing on a hamburger, but that won't make it a cake.

(The distinctness of the visual and narrative techniques used by Franco-Belgian comics creators is less obvious, but as I discovered after a longish period of reading nothing but Franco-Belgian comics, they, too, have their own language which is subtly different from that used by American creators. And again, the differences are structural and cultural, resulting from different publishing models and from the creators being raised and immersed in a different way of looking at the world.)

So it's not really surprising that people who are deeply devoted to American comics sometimes have trouble "getting" manga, or vice versa. They're subsets of the same medium, sure, but there's a pretty wide gulf between them -- especially when you consider the most "mainstream" examples of both. (Cultures being porous things, there are some places where influences passing from East to West and back again have resulted in a narrower gap.) Chris Butcher recently said "...there’s nothing fundamentally different between the concepts of Spider-Man and Naruto, once you boil the east and west out of them", but I have to respectfully disagree. I don't think it's possible to "boil the east and west" out of either of those works without boiling away the flavour. Naruto is positively steeped in Japanese folklore, mythology and mores; Spider-Man, like most superhero comics, is profoundly informed by American individualism. Both are very firmly situated in their respective visual-narrative traditions.

Which brings me, somewhat belatedly, to the point I wanted to make.

Reading Comics is fundamentally a book about American comics. But, more than that, it's a book about American comics as seen by an American critic, virtually unsupplemented by perspectives on comics from outside America -- by which I mean both perspectives on "comics from outside America", and "perspectives on comics" from outside America. It's a report from inside a particular culture by a native of that culture, and while that does result in unique insights that outsiders would undoubtedly miss, it inherently limits the scope of his project.

One of the criticisms I've seen levelled against Wolk is the way he divides up the American comics scene into "mainstream" and "indie" -- a common distinction in the US comics subculture, but arguably not a very useful one. And on foot of this criticism, it strikes me that the trouble with an insider's-eye-view survey like Reading Comics is that insiders are prone to suffer from the narcissism of small differences -- which can make it difficult, if not impossible, for the insider to see which elements of his or her culture are unique and peculiar and which are universal. The fixation on the differences between this group of American comics creators as opposed to that group of American comics creators blinds Wolk to the similarities, to what they all have in common. And so, while Reading Comics is essentially about American comics, it is not -- cannot be -- about what makes American comics what they are. That would require a broader perspective than Wolk's experience allows him to provide.

In manga, and Japanese art generally, much use is made of ma, or "negative space": the famous painting "Great Wave Off Kanagawa" by Hokusai is probably the clearest example. The wave is defined by the space around the wave. Likewise, the three great comics traditions -- American, Franco-Belgian, and Japanese -- are defined as much by what each of them doesn't do as by what they do. But it's almost impossible to see the negative space of the tradition most familiar to you if your experience has trained you to focus on what is there as opposed to what is not. And if your experience has trained you to focus on what is there, your inability to see the space that surrounds it will prevent you from seeing it properly; you will be unable to see it in the way that you could if you were aware of it not just as a concrete object but as a displacement of space, a set of relations, a thing that can be defined both by what it is and by what it is not.

There are assumptions embedded in the American way of making comics that are easily mistaken for inherent qualities of the form -- but they're not inherent: they're just taken for granted by American creators because a convention you've gotten used to stops looking like a convention and takes on the appearance of a natural law. Some of these conventions are shortcomings; some are strengths; some are merely neutral characteristics; none of them are universal. But there's no way to know that without reading comics from outside the American tradition.

So I wish Wolk read manga -- not just because he's missing out on a lot of great storytelling; not just because I'd love to see his comments on Blade of the Immortal or Apollo's Song or To Terra...; not even because manga has influenced American comics to a startling extent. (Consider just one example: without Lone Wolf and Cub, there is no Ronin; without Ronin, there is no The Dark Knight Returns; without The Dark Knight Returns, the past 20 years of superhero comics would look completely different.) I wish Wolk read manga because I think if he did, he'd be able to see American comics that bit more clearly. What do they know of American comics that only American comics know?