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In an interview conducted in the early '70s, Frank Zappa was asked why he thought Grand Funk Railroad was "less than ideal" listening for young people. "Just a minute," he responded with his usual brand of caustic venom, "I don't want that statement attributed to me. I never said that Grand Funk Railroad was less than ideal. To people who like Grand Funk Railroad, they are ideal." Further, in Nigey Lennon's tell-all memoir of her years with Zappa, Being Frank, she quotes the composer as saying "If a song sounds good to you, then it's a good song."

Such a lack of critical standards (and don't let's start on D.H. Lawrence's similar theory of artistic merit) may work in the short term and on a purely subjective basis, but as a means of determining what art should survive beyond the here-and-now (thereby graduating from mere entertainment to something of long-term cultural importance -- a dubious process to begin with), it stinks. A Snickers bar is certainly tasty, but no one would confuse it with a fine meal. So Journal and Sequential Tart aside, where are the cultural critics for comics, and why haven't movements -- so prevalent in all other aspects of the arts -- been identified and argued in comics-based university courses, scholarly journal letters pages and chic coffee houses in the Village and Berkeley?

A few weeks ago on the TCJ Message Board someone invoked Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word. (Having not read much new journalism since my college newspaper heyday in the late '80s, the idea of re-reading this treatise on the mores of art theory and criticism and the culturati that spawned them seemed appealing, particularly given the nature of my current job.) It seems to me that comics are in desperate need of prominent, "moment"-defining critics or theorists like Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg: people who, as a result of their appreciation for and associations with an artistic movement are uniquely qualified to write about and indeed represent it to the rest of the world (Wolfe's "le monde"-- although in Wolfe that tends to be limited to the Bourgeois few who care about matters artistic, those within and aspiring to the Hamptons crowd). Comics has no such standard bearer. Of the few artists who might qualify, Spiegelman is too tangential a comics figure in that he isn't particularly affiliated with any movement, and is arguably more of a fine art caste than a comics guy at this point; McCloud is a fine theorist in that he has popularized the notion that comics are more than a series of pretty pictures, but he's no spokesman for the medium (nor would he want to be, I imagine); Will Eisner is far too old and bald. Of the few "experts" who have written scholarly works on comics, none seem adequate: Maurice Horn's work is (and I am being kind) something less than encyclopedic; Mike Richardson's Between the Panels is nicely packaged, but omits such figures as Los Bros -- not a good indicator of his potential as a comics ambassador or historian; Folks like William W. Savage, Jr. (whose Comic Books and America: 1945-1954 goes for the easy answers concerning Wertham and societal opinion, but is decent besides) should be encouraged but not elevated to the status of mouthpiece for the medium. No one who has stepped up to the plate has smacked one out of the park, and frankly I'd settle for a sliding double. (see first sidebar, left)

It should be noted, I suppose, that a medium rarely chooses its champion (although I'd dearly love to see a gladiator-style series of bloody-knuckled fisticuffs between the prominent publishers, critics and creators in comics to determine ambassador status). More often than not such champions emerge unsolicited from the writerly ranks of another discipline: note Kingsley Amis' New Maps of Hell, which in 1960 helped legitimize the then-burgeoning ("But when hasn't sci-fi been burgeoning?" Amis would ask) science fiction movement in literary -- i.e., non-genre-based literary -- circles. Wolfe's Painted Word may be a bad example in that it is typically venomous in its depiction of the class stratification of the world of fine art. How would such an analysis of comics work? Schulz, Groening, maybe McFarlane but certainly Stan Lee are the Moneymen, occupying the loftiest "status-sphere" in the comics cosmology (because, as Wolfe might say, that is the point, my dear); next -- or, more accurately, beneath -- would be the Art (no, not "art," Art) elite: Spiegelman, Crumb, Moebius, Hergé, Trudeau, Kirby; next, the Contenders and Pretenders -- artists of certain talent and reputation but lacking a smash hit (a Peanuts or Simpsons, say) to elevate oneself beyond mere comicdom: Ware, Clowes, Los Bros Hernandez, Mignola, Miller, Millionaire; the Bohemian Underclass: Jack Jackson, Spain, Kim Deitch... but all this is academic. Despite his personal interest in cartooning as a communicative tool (as evidenced by his frequent New Yorker-esque doodles in collections of his essays), Wolfe has made no move toward comics as a subject. Neither has any other serious essayist or cultural critic outside of comics, despite the acceptance of more and more pop content into the rarified air of contemporary lit/culture syllabi on American campuses. There is little question that we operate below the radar of the fine arts. The only question worth asking is why.

Most major movements in art gain widespread acceptance as a result of that movement's personification in several, or more often one, artist. Braque's work was in many ways as revolutionary as Picasso's, but Braque is not the man whose life is chronicled in multiple biographies, nor will he ever be the focus of a biographer as dutiful as Richardson is to Picasso (or Ellmann was to Joyce, or so on throughout the acceptable arts). There are minor exceptions in comics, largely comprised of the moneyed and elite from the Wolfean exercise above, but grateful as we are for these offerings, the quality of the work is not the same -- the tone is lighter, the research somehow less strenuous -- because, after all, it's just comics. (see second sidebar, left) Just as Picasso is Cubism, Crumb is the undergrounds; Schulz is strip cartoons; Spiegelman is historical biography -- however, no biographies or media attention is paid them commensurate with their status as "leaders" of "movements" (excepting the minor hoopla over Zwigoff's Crumb which, however well-deserved, did not signal a major societal shift toward acceptance of comics as a legitimate kid brother to, say, film or photography or painting). No one within comics would argue the basic truth in each oversimplification beyond the fact that each is needlessly exclusionary; no one outside of comics would argue at all -- but the number of people capable of even recognizing the name Spiegelman outside of comics (and perhaps the New Yorker's cover-savvy readership) is not statistically significant.

Perhaps rather than bemoaning the fact that comics aren't vivisected in the TLS and NYRoB or covered on Entertainment Tonight (other than when Todd buys baseballs), we should be reveling in the relative freedom afforded by anonymity, scholarly or otherwise. Despite his "most beloved disgusting pig" status in Hollywood, John Waters would be lynched if he filmed one third of what Ivan Brunetti blesses us with in Schizo. All I know is I get tired of explaining to civilians (and in-laws) just what the hell I do all day.

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