Bart H. Beaty

Critical Survey of Graphic Novels: Heroes & Superheroes, Volume 1
Author: Bart Beaty and Stephen Weiner
Publisher: Salem Press / Grey House Publishing
Publishing Date: 2018
Pgs: 409
Dewey: PN 6725.C753 2018 v.1
Disposition: Interlibrary Loan via Northeast College Library, Universal City, TX to Irving Public Library-South Campus, Irving, TX
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REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS
Summary:
The first title in this series, Critical Survey of Graphic Novels: Heroes and Superheroes, provides in-depth insight into over 130 of the most popular and studied graphic novels. Researchers will be familiar with the characters and stories included in this collection, but will gain a deeper new understanding, as the literary nature of the stories is presented in critical format by leading writers in the field of study.
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Genre:
Comics
Graphic Novels
Trade Paperbacks
Literature
Critical Review
History
Encyclopedia

Why this book:
Case of mistaken identity. Kept reading this mainly to weed through the graphic novels and trade paperbacks that it mentions and see if I want to read any of them.
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The Page 100 Test:
Ω ◄ - struggle to finish this.
? ◄ - Just not sure about this.

The Feel:
This wasn't what I was expecting when I requested this from InterLibrary Loan. It was supposed to be an examination of Kirby's work. And while there may, MAY be some Kirby in here somewhere, this is largely just a review compendium of Graphic Novels and Trade Paperbacks. Comic book publishers have tried so hard to muddy the difference. To the degree that pamphlets are written to the Graphic Novel scale now. Leading to a plethoric tidal wave of filler in many stories that would've been awesome as a two or three pamphlet story but has to be padded out to make it six, eight, or twelve to fill the pages to get what the publisher wants out of the aftermarket.

Cover and Interior Art:
The character on the cover looks very much like a young Sam Elliot in a partial gimp suit. Every time I picked the book up I thought that...had to share.

Hmm Moments:
I forgot how good Astro city was. And I missed a bunch of issues. I'm going to have to find some of those collections.

Calling the Ball:
Spending my review talking about their reviews of other works. Effectively secondhand review of other reviews.

If Moore wasn't so far up his own ass that he couldn't see the dollar signs, we'd have a ton of more League of Extraordinary Gentlemen stories. The motif and genre are rich, deep, and pregnant with promise. Doesn't help that fanboys fan the flames of whatever tangent he's off on next, the same as they do with Miller.

Meh / PFFT Moments:
Batman laughing at the Joker's joke at the end of the Killing Joke considering all that had come before suggests his psychosis or extreme out-of-characterness.

This is a good reminder of some stories that I enjoyed and some that I hated. The collection doesn't really cast a critical eye at anything though. If a reviewer loves everything, how critical are they truly being? It does a disservice to those reading the reviews if that's how they do it—more fanservice than a critical review.

The difference in Frank Miller and Alan Moore, among many, many differences, is that I could, can, and do still read Moore's work. I may need to look back at Miller's Daredevil and see if it stands up for me or if it is more of the same. I haven't read any of that in more than 20 years. His Batman work though, the meh is strong with that one. YMMV, sorry if I offended your cult.

A Path I Can’t Follow:
Still believe that Two-Face's deconstruction in Arkham Asylum wasn't given a proper ending. His ignoring the result of his coin is extremely out of character.

Confirmation bias:
All-Star Batman is exactly what I expected it to be. I fell out of love with Frank Miller's work after Daredevil. I'm not sure if my taste changed or if he changed. A test case would be to go back and reread those Daredevil books and see, but that would mean running the risk of besmirching the way that I remember them. I know it's heresy in some quarters but he's just not my cup of tea.
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Last Page Sound:
I'm disappointed, but this is more a function of the ILL misleading me on what I was getting. Yes, it did have some Kirby stuff in it. But this is not about or involving the Fourth World Omnibus that I've discovered I'll have to read all four parts of to get the complete story...and possibly the Hunger Dogs graphic novel to complete the story. So, hooray.

Conclusions I’ve Drawn:
This did make an excellent primer on getting some more stuff on my to-read list.

Nary a negative word said about any of the works contained here. And I've read more than a few of them and know for a fact that everything wasn't all wine and roses in those books. Some had failings, some severe, some were golden, but not all of them as this portrays.
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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).… (més)

In Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture, Bart Beaty argues, “The conscious and systematic exclusion of Fredric Wertham’s conception of media effects as part of deliberate strategies to codify research into a coherent field of mass culture studies… Rather, structural biases can be located in the specific social processes through which mass media research was brought into professional and academic realms by scholars working in concert with funding agencies, the broadcasting industry, and governmental committees investigating the effects of the mass media” (pg. 7). He continues, “By addressing Wertham’s specific objections to American crime comic books in the postwar period, it is possible to come to terms with the particular reasons why his work would later be dismissed” (pg. 12). Beaty bases his interpretation of Wertham on the doctor’s own writing and activism both before and following the moral panic surrounding comic books, drawing extensively on unpublished work. For his comic book historiography, he uses the work of Bradford Wright and Amy Kiste Nyberg.
Examining studies of mass culture, Beaty writes, “The argument that seeks to displace the origins of the mass culture debate far away from the traditions of American pluralism and democracy continues to find safe havens. The historiography of comic books, for instance, tends to dismiss Wertham’s critique of that industry as foreign to American ways of conceptualizing the mass media. Wertham’s view is dismissed as alien – specifically European or Germanic – critique at odds with American postwar sensibilities” (pg. 51). Discussing violence, Beaty writes, “For Wertham, good literature and art obviously did not need to contain violence, and when it did contain violence, it should be circumspect” (pg. 71). This led Wertham to praise American folk art above other forms. Wertham’s concern with violence and its impact led him to act as a witness on behalf of Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 and to contribute to a Delaware case that was combined with Brown v. Board of Education, in which he argued that segregation caused psychological damage to African American children and thus was not separate but equal (pg. 82).
Discussing comics, Beaty situates Wertham within a trend of anti-comic book publication in the 1950s, rather than singling him out as driving it. Of the doctor himself, Beaty writes, “Wertham wished to equate the fight to end segregation with the fight to clean up the comic book industry…Wertham saw both of these social crises as problems for social psychiatry that could be dealt with through principles imported from mental hygiene intended to secure the public health by preventing future harm. Both segregation and comic books, Wertham believed, were part of a larger mosaic that contributed to social inequalities” (pg. 129). Unlike others who linked fears of juvenile delinquency with a belief that aggression was a natural trait, Wertham believed it developed from external stimuli. According to Beaty, “Wertham’s conclusions about the effects of comic books, conversely, need to be understood as relating to his politically motivated and progressive ideas about the social uses of psychiatry and the possibilities of postwar liberalism in the face of an overwhelming insistence on individualistic explanations of human behavior” (pg. 143). Following the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency hearings and the creation of the Comic Book Code, the public shifted its attention to television. Beaty writes, “As early as 1950, critics had compared comic books and television as the mutually destructive twins of juvenile-targeted mass culture” (pg. 165). Further, “The rise of television in the late 1950s and 1960s clearly displaced comic books, not only as a form of entertainment for children but also as a source for concern among parents and cultural commentators” (pg. 165).
Turning to media studies, Beaty writes, “The field of mass communication research initially established itself as a unique tradition in the postwar period by narrowing its methodological scope and excluding competing and contradictory voices and approaches from the field. Wertham and the clinical method were one such exclusion” (pg. 171). Wertham turned his attention to fanzines, where, according to Beaty, he “saw the study of fanzines as an extension of his lifelong work, which was concerned with listening carefully to what children had to say about the world in which they lived” (pg. 189). In this way, “Wertham concluded that fanzines occupied a space in the history of American culture that had been unfairly overlooked by historians, psychologists, and communications scholars” (pg. 190). Beaty concludes, “Comic fans, still caught up in the desire to earn respect for the medium, have cast Wertham as the villain who doomed comic books to a permanently lower status. If comics were not respected before Wertham, they were at least popular. After Wertham, they were neither” (pg. 207). Finally, Beaty argues, “By returning Wertham to the historiography of the media-effects paradigm and critically assessing the unique foundation of his arguments against comic books, the man and the medium gain much deserved recognition for their importance in the codification of new forms of mass culture in the postwar era” (pg. 208).… (més)