The Comic Arts Conference San Diego, California, August 18, 1993 First, let me recommend Road Scholar, the Andrei Codrescu movie. It's 11:30 here in San Diego, and I've just come back from that; I went there instead of the Diamond party. There are a lot of parties this year. In the words of Andrei Codrescu, "When the Americans left the Earth, they left some very strange artifacts." The Comic Arts Conference is a very small affair, very much unlike the massive Comic Convention. There were no more than 25 people in either of the two rooms, and everyone got to know each other. The Comic Arts Conference is an attempt to bring comics scholars together with comics professionals to exchange papers and discuss critical analysis in respect to the comics art, or sequential art. I dressed for the occasion. Rather than the jeans and squid shirt I'll be wearing for the Convention, I put on my best trendy black pants, nude psychedelic shirt, flowery tie, and mushroom hat. I popped a stolen color '486 into a bag and bussed down to the Horton Grand Hotel. I even, heaven forbid, bought a watch. This from the person who has Mr. Nobody quoted on his front door: "Aristotle and Newton were useless farts who made a machine of this whirling, wonderful world. Let's stop all the clocks and kiss the walls goodbye." This is the Conference's second year. When I arrived, I had to state whether I was a graduate student or a professional. Since I'm not a graduate student, I was registered as a professional. Anyone was welcome to attend; the only difference between the two is that students get in for $10; professionals for $20. Whipping out the portable in a vain attempt to get some real world work done immediately enjoined a conversation about comics and the electronic media. This is a serious group here, folks. Those interested in combining comics and multimedia might want to contact Howard Byer, of COMIX in Philadelphia. You can reach him at 2212 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103. Likewise, the clothes brought some attention. Anyone interested in submitting abstracts or articles for an academic Rocky Horror book should contact Solomon Davidoff at [d--nc--r] at [halifax.syncomas.com.] There were two tracks to the Conference. As a mere superhero in training, I was only able to attend one room at a time, and missed Donna Barr's comments on Confucius and the British Underground. Comic Strips Tony Harkins of the University of Wisconsin at Madison delved into the lack of variety of gender roles in the context of marriage in 1950's strips. Comics almost universally presented a very stereotyped view of marriage. Strong bachelors became hen-pecked husbands, losing height and gaining girth, while women went from helpless girl to scheming wife. His thesis is that there was a lot expected of marriages in that time, and people could easily feel guilty that their married life didn't live up to the standard. Comics presented an exaggerated bad marriage that made everyone who read the strips feel good about themselves. Touching an American Nerve: Shmoos, Al Capp, and Postwar American Culture Shmoos, those Suicide Saviors of the postwar era, were the first real example of extensive marketing. For those of you who don't remember, Shmoos were creatures of Al Capp's Dogpatch. They loved helping people so much that they die on the spot just so you could eat them. They tasted like whatever you wanted: steak, pork, chicken; their skin could be made into leather for clothes or boards for building. Shmoo products-dolls, trinkets, ashtrays-became a major consumer item. Shmoo dolls were dropped on Berlin during the Berlin airlift. Certainly, comic strips had associated products before the War. But the Shmoo represented a turning point in marketing's reaction. Madison Avenue and Al Capp milked the Shmoo craze literally for all it was worth before killing off the Shmoo. Oddly enough, it was pointed out that this was right in the time that advertising was going from being an art to being a science. Advertisers were learning what made the consumer buy. Children were a major target, as was the media-the media might be able to start fads, and could certainly help fuel them. Literacy Through Comics Ivan Kalmar of the University of Toronto, has performed literacy studies with pre-reading level children and comics. These studies indicate the possibility that comics-the combination of words and pictures-enhance a child's desire to read. Professor Kalmar was particularly intrigued by the hold that special effects have on children. This may be a young child's first concrete encounter with abstraction of non-meaning sounds to the alphabet. Bondage Fantasies and Golden Age Wonder Woman Wonder Woman may have been the first attempt at using comics to sell social values. William Marston saw, in the traditional male power fantasies of early comics, the possibility of teaching girls and young women to be strong. To escape the bonds that man's culture has placed upon them. Anyone interested is directed to William Marston's writings. He was very open about his goal with the Wonder Woman comic. Understanding Comics The highlight of the conference was a discussion, mostly between Will Eisner and Scott McCloud, of Understanding Comics. Points at issue included Scott's definition of art, his restriction of comics to comics with closure between at least two sequential images, and his strong implication that more cartoony comics were better comics. Art is very hard to define. On one hand, we want a definition of art that includes our favorite creative processes. On the other, we can easily get bogged down in a debate over a definition of art that was really just meant to facilitate discussion of a specific art form. Such as, of course, comics. Closure, in an open-ended form, can occur in single panels. Scott chose a very easy example with the Family Circus. A strong argument can be made that a majority of them are single-panel gags with no future and no past. Compare to, say, a Gary Larsen cartoon, set in a pogo factory: there's a broken window in the warehouse. Our mind fills in the past-the pogo rider poging out the window-and may even fill in the future-the pogo rider splatting on the ground (example courtesy Jim Drew). There is little difference between this kind of closure and that between two distinct panels. Scott responded that if you include that type of closure, you'll be including a lot of traditional art as well. The dividing lines between different types of art are set up by the critics, not by the creators. Scott freely admitted that his argument for cartooniness was a personal preference, and hoped that it was obvious that this was his preference. Books can't be written without opinions. If he didn't have an opinion on comics, he wouldn't have been motivated to write Understanding Comics in the first place. "Style is a result of our failure to achieve perfection." -Will Eisner The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: The Effects of Academic Study on Popular Art Forms Peter Coogan of Michigan State University (Go Spartans!) presented a chilling account of the effects of academic study on jazz, film, and literature, and drew parallels to what is happening now with comics. According to Peter, when the academic community starts studying an art form, they co- opt the form; pieces tend to be created by and for the critics-the academicians. There comes a point where boring is no longer bad. If a piece is boring, it's because you didn't understand the piece, and boring leaves the vocabulary of criticism. He believes this is the essential marker for when an art form has been co-opted by the academic community. The Comics Studies Center Peter believes strongly that if Comics Studies becomes its own discipline in an academic environment, comics as a popular art will be killed. The Comics Studies Center is an attempt to co-opt the academic process that leads to popular art becoming academic art. You can reach Peter at [c--ga--e] at [msu.edu.] The Beelzebub Comics Studies Archive I've discussed with the presenters the possibility of archiving some of these papers on the ftp and gopher site at teetot.acusd.edu. This would make these papers (and any others) available to the educational community interactively, at any time. Obviously, most of the pictures cannot be archived, due to copyright problems. Donna Barr We may see a new Desert Peach musical or play written exclusively by Donna. I'll ask her more about this tomorrow. She also has a new Stinz paperback out, from Mu. It includes an introduction by William Messner Loebs, a map of the Geisel Valley, and reprints of issues 1-3 of Stinz volume 2. According to the inside front cover, there's also a Wartime and Wedding Bells collection for Stinz from Brave New Words, and a Peach collection called Peach Slices from Aeon. These are in addition to Horsebrush and other Tales and Politics, Pilots, and Puppies. Additional Peach stories have appeared in Gay Comics 15 & 16, and Wimmen's Comics 16. Also look for The Desert Pooh if I have my way tomorrow... Role-playing fans who've been following the internet discussion about Lace & Steel: Donna has copies to sell! It's $20.00 plus whatever 4 pounds of postage is from her to you. Issue 11 of the Desert Peach is officially sold out. Last year I passed up a chance to buy it for ten dollars. I'll find out tomorrow if that was a mistake. Queues and Magazines In the midst of it all, I forgot to bring my badge with me to the conference; this means I'll be waiting in line at 10 in the morning to pick up my badge holder. If the news reports cover a machine gun murderer gone mad in San Diego, you'll know I cracked under the pressure. Otherwise, this machine gun murderer will be quite sane and hopefully giving another report tomorrow night.