Benjamin Woo

In The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books, Bart Beaty and Benjamin Woo write, “Each of us probably has our own sense of what are the best or most important comics, but the canon is the one backed by institutional power: by reviewers and critics, by museums and galleries, and by scholars and educational institutions. While academics may have questionable influence in determining a work’s reputation, they have an unparalleled ability to cement it by the choices they make of what works to study and to teach” (pg. 4). They continue, “Because comics is a historically marginal art form with a poorly developed critical infrastructure, comics studies has taken its cues from other arts-based disciplines…Comics and comics studies – like film and film studies before them – have attempted (with mixed success) to imitate the values and discourses of literature and painting in order to legitimate their field” (pg. 5). To this end, they examine work by Art Spiegelman, Robert Crumb, Jack Kirby, Alan Moore, and others.
Of Spiegelman, Beaty and Woo write the he “had the good fortune to release his self-referential Holocaust memoir into a particularly receptive context. Debates in the 1980s had brought representation, memory, and testimony to the fore among academic critics, and Maus, with its self-referential considerations of these subjects, because an extremely plausible text for scholars interested in these questions” (pg. 20). In this way, “Working in a form without a well-established canon or critical apparatus, Spiegelman was able to create his own context and locate his work in a selective tradition of cartooning that rendered it intelligible to audiences outside the comics world and its avant-garde scene” (pg. 20). Discussing R. Crumb, they write, “The danger presented by Crumb is threefold. First, there are the representational politics of the works themselves. Second, setting aside our own feelings about them, there are ethical, pedagogical, and practical problems teaching works that even appear to endorse the beliefs about women and minorities that Crumb seems to. Third, because comics remain in a somewhat precarious position vis-à-vis literary scholarship, there seems to be an inherent danger in drawing attention to the fact that one of the most celebrated artists working in the field produces such objectionable material” (pg. 35). Addressing representation, Beaty and Woo write, “Comics has a problem with diversity…Notwithstanding claims that the pre-Comics Code period was one of progressive experimentation or that the formal properties of sequential comics tend to undermine racial stereotyping, comic books feature a disproportionate number of characters who are white men, and the representations of women and nonwhite characters are often less than ideal” (pg. 97).… (mehr)