Artsy Comics Are Alienating Readers

Love them or hate them, people react to cartoons. Comic strips like “The Far Side,” “Peanuts” and “Doonesbury” inspire devotional cults. Political cartoons, such as the recent Danish Mohammed illustrations and my own post-9/11 Bush-bashing scribbles, can arouse hateful mobs. What’s weird is when cartoons elicit no reaction at all.

Which is what has (not) happened since 2005, when The New York Times began running “The Funny Pages,” a literary supplement to its Sunday Magazine section that includes a full-page comic strip in every issue. First up was “Building Stories,” a graphic novel by Chris Ware serialized in 30 weekly installments. To call Ware an award-winning graphic artist is like calling a cockroach prolific; the only accolade he hasn’t won is the Nobel. Yet.

Comic book fans had hoped that The Funny Pages would convince normal adults, who limit their graphic art consumption to political cartoons and comic strips, to buy graphic novels. (Articles espousing comics-as-art typically bear the headline “Comics: Not Just for Kids Anymore.”) I don’t know why anyone cares about what other people read, watch or listen to. It’s not like reading is a communal activity. But grown men (they are mostly men, often so grown as to be terrifying) crave “mainstream acceptance” of their comics habit even more than sexual companionship.

Anticipation yielded to disappointment as Ware, in his typically mannered and obtuse style, rendered the paint-drying anti-drama of a dowdy middle-aged, one-legged (<--call her Ahab, in search of the Great White Male) spinster wallowing in self-inflicted depression in a hundred thousand earth-toned squares. Unless you count phony, plot-less, generalized angst, nothing happened in "Building Stories." Ever.
Ware’s word balloons were so small that many mistook them as evidence of his contempt for his audience. Those who scrounged up magnifying glasses learned the sad truth: just like Michael Stipe’s mumbled lyrics on early R.E.M. albums, hyper-reduction was Ware’s attempt to cover up his inability to write dialogue.

Nothing wrong with working around your weaknesses, right? But cartoons need great writing more than they need great art. Which is why Gary Larsen is better than Winsor McCay. “Little Nemo” was high art. “The Far Side” is hilarious.
Seven months passed. (To those who didn’t give up on “Building Stories,” it felt like seven years.) Disappointment yielded to apathy. Fixtures of the tiny world of “art comics” Jaime Hernandez, Seth and Megan Kelso followed with their serialized graphic novellas. Daniel Clowes’ “Mister Wonderful” treads standard art-comics territory: unattractive boy meets dowdy girl, insecure girl meets shoe-gazing boy, reader prays for Al Qaeda to blow up their café.

For whatever it’s worth, Clowes’ entry is the best of a crapulent lot. The life of an artist is a lonely one, sometimes it’s hard to get laid, people are mean to dorks. Who cares?

Among that class of New Yorkers for whom the Times is required reading, no one talks about The Funny Pages. Even cartoonists, who argue about every aspect of the medium until their spouses eventually divorce them, care about the high-profile feature about as much as the average American thinks about the latest Baghdad car bomb. The Times‘ experiment to “engage our readers in some ways we haven’t yet tried–and to acknowledge that it takes many different types of writing to tell the story of our time” has received the harshest possible verdict: indifference.

An online poll by the media blog Gawker asked 1,680 readers whether they found The Funny Pages “funny.” 92 percent voted “no.” Granted, Internet surveys are unreliable. Still, I want to know: Where’d they find the 8 percent?

Part of the problem is serialization. Nowadays we don’t want to wait a whole week for the next part of a story. (When I hear about a cool new TV series, I wait for it to get canceled so I can watch it all at once on DVD.) But the Times‘ main error has been its choice of cartoonists, art school graduates with little to say but draw real purty. Comics are about telling stories–not trying to dazzle, as Ware does, with innovative (but confusing) graphic design. Comic bookshops are bursting with exciting books by creative storytellers that deserve a wider audience, and that the 1.6 million readers of the Times Magazine might actually enjoy (or hate, which would be an improvement over the current yawnfest).

“Why,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist asked me recently, “are these graphic novelists so empty? They’re void…nil.” A lot of newer cartoons, I protested, do feature characters motivated by bigger concerns than their feelings of awkwardness and alienation. But they appear in alternative weekly newspapers and in books put out by independent publishers. The Times, and comics anthologies that reflect the official social imprimatur of the journalistic elite, like “The Best American Comics 2007” (edited, naturally, by Chris Ware and featuring his friends), censor important comics.

“I found myself drawn to this…group of work,” writes the New York Times Book Review about “Best American Comics,” “mostly because I couldn’t understand much of it, and, O.K., I worried whether this was a failing of mine or the artists’.” This was, incredibly, from a positive review.

Memo to Times Book Review critic: Cartoons are a form of communication. When a reader doesn’t understand a cartoon, it isn’t because he is stupid. It is because the cartoonist has failed.

Comics Journal critic Noah Berlatsky thinks the current crop of art comics stars are obsessed with trying to overcome some perception that the medium is all about caped superheroes like Superman and Batman. “Alt comics have a huge chip on their shoulders, and they have responded by rejecting everything superhero in favor of Serious Art–which, alas, often means seriously boring art.”

Whatever the reason, the literary establishment’s insistence on promoting dull cartoons is destroying the chance for comics to become more than what they are today–a small, barely noteworthy, niche.

Clarification: In a previous column about the newspaper business, I wrote: “In his book ‘The Vanishing Newspaper’ Philip Meyer predicts that 2043 will mark the death of printed newspapers in the United States, ‘as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition.'” Meyer e-mailed me to inform me that those words never appeared in his book, but from a speech by Rupert Murdoch to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 2005.

Meyer says that, in his book, he said that “a straight-line projection of the declining percentage of adults who report reading a newspaper ‘every day’ brings their number to the zero point in 2043. But to take that as a prediction would require assuming that no one will do anything to change the equation and that newspapers will relentlessly keep turning out their products until there is only one daily reader left. Publishers tend to be stubborn, but not that stubborn!”

Fair enough. But if a columnist can’t trust the BBC and The Economist–both of whom misquoted Meyer–who can he trust?

COPYRIGHT 2007 TED RALL

Let’s Fight a Doomed War in Afghanistan, Not Iraq!

NEW YORK–There is too a difference between the two major parties. Republicans want us to spend, die and lose in Iraq. Democrats want us to spend, die and lose in Afghanistan.

There’s a difference between the two major wars, too. Afghanistan is even less justifiable than Iraq. It’s also less winnable.

The lily-livered libbies’ “Bush took his eye off the ball in Afghanistan when he invaded Iraq” meme is back.

“Six years after we took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan–the origin of the 9/11 attacks–we still don’t have our priorities straight,” Barack Obama said in Des Moines this week. That followed an October speech in New Hampshire in which he described George W. Bush’s response to 9/11 as “perfectly reasonable.”

“I supported the invasion of Afghanistan because the Taliban had been supportive and the base camp for Al Qaeda,” Obama said. “So I had no problem with that.”

In fact, Afghanistan had nothing to do with 9/11. The Taliban were not involved. The “base camp” for Al Qaeda was, and is, in Pakistan. (Different country! Look it up.)
Democrats, reports Tom Curry of MSNBC, have embraced an election-year “out of Iraq, shift to Afghanistan” strategy. It’s a drone of rhetorical distraction worthy of Karl Rove, and one not one mainstream media outlet has bothered to question. Obama and his fellow Democrats (John Edwards is a laudable exception to the lunacy) say they were for Bush’s first war–the one he lost because he didn’t spend enough money or enough lives–before they were against the second one.

Obama’s hoary sports metaphor, regurgitated since 2005 by Howard Dean, John Kerry, Joe Biden, Harry Reid and virtually every other luminary of the lame left, followed a December 17th vote by Congressional Democrats (201 to 30) to send $30 billion for war against Afghanistan, but nothing for Iraq. No wimps here!

“Afghanistan is the primary front of the fight against Islamic extremism, but for too long we have taken our eye off the ball,” parroted Rep. Ike Skelton, Democratic chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

In fact, Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan the whole time U.S. forces were “looking” for him in Afghanistan. So was Al Qaeda, and most of its training camps. The money for 9/11 came from Saudi Arabia. The hijackers came from Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Hey, never let the truth get in the way of a good sound byte.

I’m not convinced the military can fight terrorists. Blowing up schools and weddings is a lousy way to fight Islamic extremism. The history of counterinsurgency shows that it’s easier to kill your enemies with an open mind than with bombs. But if you’re determined to go the military route, you’d be better off taking on Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt–in that order.

The New York Times, comrades in clueless centrism with the (oxymoron alert–>) Democratic leadership, reported that the normally implacable Bush Administration is gripped by “a growing apprehension that one of the administration’s most important legacies–the routing of Taliban and Qaeda forces in Afghanistan after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001–may slip away.”

Then the paper editorialized: “Unless the United States and Europe come up with a better strategy–and invest more money, attention and troops–the ‘good war’ will go irretrievably bad.”

Ugh. “Good war,” indeed. Doesn’t anyone care that Afghanistan and Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are entirely separate countries?

Committees are being empanelled to analyze why Afghanistan is a mess of warlords, opium farmers and suicide bombers. Could it be the decision to send one-tenth as many troops as Iraq to a nation the same size, but with more daunting terrain and a fierce population of warriors renowned for slaughtering invaders? Was it a PR mistake to replace the Taliban, who stoned rapists and murderers to death, with the Northern Alliance government, whose officials are rapists and murderers? Did the lack of reconstruction increase resentment? How about the grinding poverty, which the U.S. invasion made worse?

Yes.

But here’s what we keep hearing instead: “I have a real concern that given our preoccupation in Iraq, we’ve not devoted sufficient troops and funding to Afghanistan to ensure success in that mission,” said Skelton, the Congressional Democrat.

The cold, hard truth is that Afghanistan can’t be won. Not with more money, and not with the 6,000 more troops Obama wants to send there. Not with 60,000, or 600,000.

With the recent exception of 9/11, America’s wars have been fought overseas. We have a deadline: we can’t stay over there forever. The Afghans, on the other hand, live there. They have time–all the time in the world. They know that all they have to do is wait us out, and hassle our forces in the meantime. They’re damned good at it–ask the Brits and Russians.

Not everyone is falling for the Democrats’ “forget their war, let’s fight our war” spiel, though. A letter to the editor of the Times began: “I hope that when the Bush administration and NATO conclude their analyses of the Afghanistan mission they will reach one inescapable, common-sense conclusion: that Western-style democracy cannot be militarily imposed on a culture that is based on tribal loyalties. Maybe at that point, our nation and the world will be able to finally use our economic and human resources in a more efficient manner.”

The letter writer’s name was Bill Gottdenker. Too bad he’s not running for president.

(C) 2007 Ted Rall, All Rights Reserved.