THE POETICS OF COMICS
WHAT WE MEAN WHEN WE WRITE ABOUT “POETRY”

Austin English, on the TCJ message board, responded to my earlier posts on poetry and comics, to emphasize that he was writing about comics that he found “poetic” by virtue of their expressivity, rather than comics that used poetry or poetics or ideas about either as their jumping-off-point.

Other recent takes on poetry and comics: The great Tom Hart writes about Matt Madden’s pantoumic restructuring of one of Hart’s own comics, and, in an earlier post, offers his own sense of the poetics of comics: comics that leave enough details implied so as to more completely engage the reader.

Another Austin, Austin Leon, quotes from an essay by the equally great cartoonist, Seth, on “Peanuts” and haiku, here.

Bill Randall, whose Comics Journal essay started this all off, responds to my earlier posts, and emphasizes what for him, is important: sonic values.

These are all reasonable, and each obviously supports its respective artist’s or critic’s agenda. To that end, I wouldn’t gainsay. If something works for a terrific cartoonist or critic, more power to them. I, in fact, have my own agenda and biases.

That said, what I'm seeing are not really definitions of poetry or “the poetic” so much as qualities that each individual responds to. Hart responds to concision. English, expressiveness. Randall, sound. Seth, rhythm.

They're not wrong to respond to these qualities. But no single quality mentioned provides an adequate jumping-off-point from which to talk about the poetics of comics.

Think of it this way. While these qualities are not mutually exclusive, Hart is touching the elephant’s trunk, Randall its tail, Seth its ear, and English its leg.

Not that I’m advocating “total elephant molestation” for the better good of poetry comics. Well, okay, maybe I am. (It’s a reasonably good cause.) Clearly, no understanding of an elephant is adequate if one is describing merely one aspect of the elephant.

To complicate matters: This is just the elephant’s surface qualities. What about its insides? Bones, organs, fatty tissue, muscle, nerves, veins, etc.—none of which anyone will notice while molesting the elephant.

To complicate matters further: Poetry is not a single species. As comics has its popular genres (superheroes, romance, war, horror, etc.) and increasing numbers of alternatives (autobio, essay, comics journalism, dream comics, etc.), poetry too has an incredible number of not just forms (sonnet, pantoum, villanelle, sestina), but whole systems of values and concerns. There is language-centered writing, visual poetry (or “vispo”), confessional poetry, flarf, procedural poetry, surrealism, lyrical poetry, epic poetry, spoken word, and so on.

So when someone tells me that, based on touching the leg of a single kind of poem, they believe poetry to be “thick, heavy, stable, rooted to the ground, and rough in surface,” and that these are qualities they look for in “poetic” comics, I wonder how anyone else is going to convince them that poetry is (also) “thin, very malleable, both soft and a bit rough” (the ear of the kind of poem corresponding to elephant), to say nothing of any argument that would suggest that hummingbird or dolphin have only some or none of those qualities, and that this comic which is light and feathery and zips around is as “poetic” as the rough and heavy and grounded thing they’ve mentioned.

Should we then abandon the modifier “poetic” from our comics vocabulary? How can we continue to write about the “poetic” in comics if we can't even agree on what poetry is?

Bill Randall lays down a couple of challenges:

“I still don’t know what a comics sonnet would look like, or if comics has a form so durable.”

and

“I hope the essay doesn’t launch theory as much as praxis. Gilbert Seldes called comics a ‘lively art,’ but I think of it as a living one, still in flux and movement. My job as a critic is at best to prod, needle, and wait. If Austin English and Gary Sullivan disagree, I do hope they do it with some comics.”

To the first challenge, I would say that comics, although a younger art, does indeed have its durable forms, though they may have nothing to do with poetry. The 3 or 4 panel daily or weekly strip (“Peanuts,” “Cathy,” etc.). The squarish alt weekly comic, often subdivided into 4 panels (Ward Sutton, Tom Tomorrow, etc.) The editorial cartoon, often a single panel, with especially symbolic usage of images. And so on.

What would a comics sonnet look like? I’m not sure if Matt Madden has done a comics sonnet yet, but he’s done a pantoum and a sestina, which I’ll write about in a bit.

As to Randall’s final challenge, that he hopes to see our arguments extended into praxis, I’m all for that. I have, in fact, been doing just that for the last 10 years, and will continue to produce comics almost exclusively informed by poetry, poetics, poets, and poetry culture. (See Elsewhere issues 1-3, and my ongoing 4-panel strip in Rain Taxi.)

Meanwhile, as I continue to write about the poetics of comics, I’ll keep Randall’s challenge in mind, and bring theory in mostly to address actual recent and historical example.

For the rest of this week, I’ll focus on the aforementioned Matt Madden’s work. Tune in tomorrow morning for the first installment.

Meanwhile, if you haven’t yet read my earlier essays on the poetics of comics, take a look at my post on Richard Hahn, and my posts on the comics of Joe Brainard here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.