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From: hutch@shark.UUCP (Stephen Hutchison)
Newsgroups: net.comics
Subject: Re: What comics are for
Message-ID: <842@shark.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 21-Jun-84 11:59:52 EDT
Article-I.D.: shark.842
Posted: Thu Jun 21 11:59:52 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 23-Jun-84 03:22:41 EDT
References: <4020@yale-comix.UUCP>
Organization: Tektronix, Wilsonville OR
Lines: 46



| Let's face it.  If I want Hamlet, I'll read Shakespeare.  If I need a
| bit of existential angst, I'll go to Camus, or Sartre.   Why should I
| read Ms. Tree or Sommerset Holmes when I can find the same thing done
| better in Greene? One of the most embarassing bit of comics I can
| remember is Eisner's "proof" that you could indeed do Hamlet in comics.
| This is easily the worst thing he has ever produced, and it seems to me
| rather sad that the man who gave us P'gell and Denny Colt, the Octopus
| and that charming man who could fly felt obligated to prove that his
| chosen form of fiction was just as respectable as Shakespeare's.
|  -- Joanne F

I disagree on at least three points.  First, comics are a medium of
communication.  They are not "toy entertainment" and by insisting that
they must only be trivial amusements to be discarded, you insist that
the artists and writers must only present triviality.

What Eisner was trying to do was NOT a proof that his chosen form of
fiction was as respectable as Shakespeare's;  he was trying to show
that Shakespeare's work could be adapted in a new way to the medium of
comics.  He was successful, although he probably should have chosen
Macbeth or Midsummer Night's Dream instead; Hamlet is so pretentious
and gloomy that it barely comes off anyway.  If you were embarrassed it
was due entirely to your own shortcoming: a limited view of how "art"
can be expressed.

I can enjoy reading Ms Tree or Somerset Holmes precisely because I CAN'T
find the SAME thing done better in Greene.  That is, a graphical depiction
communicating in images and a few words of a sort of other world, where
everything is in shades of ochre and grey, suffocating yet intriguing.
Writers have to use thousands of words to communicate the same thing that
these pictures communicate in a few pages.

For a real eye-opener, examine the comics medium in Japan.  They have
no silly pretentious Western ideas about "ahht" and no feelings of
cultural inferiority to inspire the existance of slugs like Gary Groth.
(Slugs, for those of you who are not resident in the Pacific Northwest,
are large snails without shells, which destroy gardens and which, when
salt is poured on them, become even more disgusting than before, as they
dissolve into slime.)

They DO have a strong fan movement.  In fact, comics artists in Japan are
given the kind of acclaim that rock stars are given in America.

Hutch  (I recommend "I Saw It" to anyone who wants to read REAL angst.)