Four Color Comics

I went last month with my brother Andy to the recently closed Masters of American Comics exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum. It seemed like we were going to have to skip it due to too tight scheduling, but we let everything else go and took the hour-plus drive up to Milwaukee to see it, and I’m so glad we did. The exhibit will be opening in two separate (but equal) pieces September 15^th at the Jewish Museum in New York & the Newark Museum (unsurprisingly) in Newark. I highly recommend a look-see if at all possible…

As classy and sophisticated as I like to pretend to be, I generally do not overly enjoy museum exhibits. This is not a matter of not liking art (which I genuinely do), or modern art (which I certainly want to and believe I do), or hushed public places (which I absolutely do, having worked in a library for approximately 5 years of my life). My problem is more something to do with personal versus public pacing. First of all, I rarely, if ever, find myself at an exhibit by myself, so I am, to a certain extent, at the whim of whoever I am with as far as time spent at the gallery. Of course, parties must split up some or all the time when exploring a museum, based on personal interests, but falling two or three rooms behind (or ahead) makes for an awkward museum experience. Then there is also the timing interaction with complete strangers. If I take too much (or too little) chin-stroking time at piece after piece I am constantly having to dosado with complete strangers to get the experience I want out of the exhibit. Going into this exhibit, in particular, I thought this would be a serious concern, because all of the pieces were comic strips, a very personal medium, almost always experienced at ones own pace (except for the times when your dad has presented you with the funny pages, demanding that you give Shoe a really good read and he stares at you grinning gape-mouthed, quietly laughing and waiting for you to get to the line).

As I entered the special exhibit hall in Milwaukee’s beautiful art museum on the lake, this problem of pacing started creeping up. As I began getting impatient with Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland and the Rarebit Fiend, both of which consist exclusively of characters experiencing strange dream scenarios that become more and more bizarre until the protagonist awakens in the bottom right frame, safe and sound in bed – in Nemo’s case fallen off the bed, and in the rarebit fiend’s promising never again to partake in a midnight snack. Particularly in the case of these earliest strips, the humor seemed antiquated and the strips validity doubtful. I found myself wondering if anyone had ever found such clichés funny, and even if these were what the clichés had come from, why anyone would have ever read more than two or three of them. Then I think of my dad, who watches countless reruns of Becker on late-night TV and can find nothing humorous at all in the SNL “More Cowbell” skit they play before the bottom of the 9^th at Milwaukee Brewers games.

As I slowly started to settle into the pacing of the show (and letting myself occasionally, or not so occasionally completely block out people’s views of exhibits, because I needed to spend more time reading the entire strips) I began to find a lot of what I was hoping to find in the exhibit, namely, fine art in the comic strip. This is not to say that I hadn’t found this before, or that this was necessarily the way to experience it, but what the exhibit provides, is a wonderfully complimentary showing of a handful of early great comic artists.

The exhibit commentary (most of which was written, I believe, by co-curators John Carlin and Brian Walker) is simultaneously helpful and belittling for an understanding of comic art. It seems that the commentary provided for particularly the early comic artists is only thought of in terms of other art forms, rather than commented on in their own right. Therfore, Winsor McCay is called the D.W. Griffith of comics, because he was among the first to find the ability to think outside the frame and Milton Caniff (artist & author of Steve Canyon, among others) the Alfred Hitchcock. The curators only seem to be able to discuss (particularly) these early cartoonists in terms of the media of either film or fine art (that is, painting or drawing). The discussion of the complex blending of word and image is not a concept to be found in this exhibit, but a worthy exhibit it is, nonetheless.

I found myself gaping slowly past Will Eisner’s The Spirit, Caniff’s Steve Canyon, and Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, enjoying the strips not so much for the actual content, but for their place in a longer line of the tradition of the comic strip. Approaching any of these works separately (even Frank King’s Gasoline Alley, a strip I’ve long known is an important part of the history, but have never personally appreciated until seeing it placed in this show) I might have overlooked the noticeable progression in the art form, the way in which each artist built off the last, and importantly progressed from it.

Seeing artists’ works I’d long known and loved, such as Schulz’ Peanuts (which rightfully already has it’s own museum in Santa Rosa, CA), George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, or Jack Kirby’s Captain America or early Avengers works placed (art) historically amongst artists I didn’t know (or appreciate) as well gave me leverage not only into the works of these new artists, but also a better understanding of the one’s I’d known all along. The exhibit is especially well presented in its presentation of the progression of the art form. The text that accompanies the works is particularly insightful in its thoughts about how quickly the art form had to progress, from its classic form, to the modern and into the postmodern. Perhaps this is part of the reason that Carlin and Walker so often discuss their exhibit in terms of the other media developing alongside it.

I believe it is with the most recent strips that the exhibit does its best work. Not only does the exhibit succeed in placing postmodern cartoonists, such as Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, and Gary Panter, rightfully in their place as the next generation of these great cartoonists, but it also poses interesting questions about where the art form is going. The work of the most recent artists incorporates the work of earlier cartoonists in the exhibit. Sometimes this happens explicitly (as in Spiegelman’s taking actual Steve Canyon images and feverishly replaying and layering them through the course of a strip) and other times through the influences of earlier artists (such as the echoes of Harvey Kurtzman and R. Crumb found in Panter).

All in all, the exhibit is fascinating and illuminating. It goes a long way in bringing the comic art into its own rightful spot in art history and hopefully exposes a new audience to an alternative art form it might have previously overlooked.