I had mentioned earlier that Panel #9 was not what I
expected, but it was still interesting, and I want to explain a little more
about that.
Part of my confusion was a misunderstanding of how the
panels were arranged. There was an overall title, which in this case was
"Self, Memory, Perception". Below that were the names of a moderator
and three participants with papers they had authored. I guess I thought that
the names of the papers were there more as identifiers -- this is why we are
having them talk about this -- but actually each author presented from their
paper, and then after all three had done so, the moderator opened it up to
questions.
So, since I had recently been thinking about how our
memories affected our self-perception, and having drawn one of my memories and
gained some new insights via that process, that was what drew me to the panel,
with hopes that there would be more on the therapeutic aspects.
(That train of thought was pretty well covered in http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2013/05/badly-drawn-girl-my-first-comic.html,
though the link to the comic itself no longer works, having only been good for
thirty days.)
Anyway, that is not what the panel was really about. The
individual parts were as follows:
Real Memories, Surreal Experiences: Autobiographical
Tensions in David B.'s L'Ascension du haut mal, presented by Jennifer
Anderson Bliss of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
The Rewriting Ethos of Vertigo Comics, or, Critical
Perspectives on Memory-Making, Canonization, and the Logic of Fields, presented
by Christophe Dony, Université de Liège, Belgium
The Spatiality of Voice: How Joe Sacco's Palestine
Takes Up the Ethos of New Journalism, presented by Josina Robb, University of
Winnipeg, Canada
They all had their own points of interest, and at least a
few things that I want to read now, but the one that stuck with me most was
Dony's presentation about Vertigo.
Although I had read a few titles, I hadn't really
thought about their specific impact until January, when Twitter erupted over Karen
Berger leaving. There is a pretty good article on that at http://sequart.org/magazine/17537/karen-berger-to-leave-dc/.
Much of the reaction then was a sense of loss about
someone who had treated creators so well, and certainly about the impact of raising
the expectations of what comics could do, along with their respectability. Here
was a new focus on how Vertigo drew from past traditions, with many of the
titles reviving previous characters.
This was especially interesting because something that
had been frustrating me a lot with movies is that everything has to be an
existing property, where it's a remake or reboot or sequel or adaptation. That
has seemed very cynical to me, where they don't trust themselves to make
anything good, or trust the audience to try anything new, and it results in a
lot of movies that I have no interest in seeing.
Here was Vertigo, pioneer of originality and innovation,
and they were in fact doing reboots, and Dony was absolutely right, I had just
never thought of it like that.
I think the difference was largely in the support of the
creators. First of all, many of them were allowed to do their own new things
along with the work on existing titles, and a move towards creator-owned, but
more than that I think it was the freedom within whatever title they were
working on.
I mean, Vertigo was not afraid to try new things itself,
with ongoing limited run series, and different art styles with different looks,
and respecting its pulp roots without letting go of intelligence or quality, so
there was that, but mainly the memories of the artists seemed to be a delight
in the creative freedom. At least that was the impression that I got.
And that was something that came through in some of the
other panels too. There are very creative and independent writers who have been
able to feel very comfortable working with DC or Marvel, because they are being
respected, and able to do work that is satisfying. And perhaps there is a wide
variation among editors, or there are pendulum shifts, because we have a
completely different example recently with Paul Jenkins leaving the Big 2 to
work for Boom!
So, that's what I've been thinking about. I don't know
that I have any good answers. I believe in art for art's sake. I also know that
people need to eat, and businesses need to pay their employees, and so there
has to be some practicality too.
But then you think about a fast food franchise, and fast
food was ultimately about removing the variables, so you didn't need anyone who
was highly trained or at all individualistic, allowing you to keep costs down,
keep every human involved replaceable, and make sure that you have a product of
remarkable consistency and sameness, and "franchise" seems like a really
bad word to apply to any artistic endeavor.
Sometimes it works out, but there are pitfalls. Do a lot
of franchises only have two good movies in them, or did they have four, but you
can't keep the actors committed, and that's why the third installment ends up
bloated?
And in it's own way, that just reminded me with some of
the issues related to having unending titles, so I am going to post this one
again just for fun:
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