This is the first of a new series of interviews in which we invite people working in the contemporary field to tell us about their work and share their sense of what's interesting. Dr Harriet Earle is currently an Associate Lecturer at Birkbeck, whose book on trauma and conflict in comics will be published in 2017.
CCL: Do you think there is now a comics canon? (Or would you use a different term?) If so, what's in it? And who makes it? — artists, publishers, fans, academics? Is there, for instance, a distinct academic canon of comics that is different from other canons?
Harriet: Canon is a good word – we can use that. As for what’s in it… all the comics that even non-comics-readers have heard of! Spiegelman’s Maus, Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen, and Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns are three key texts that were all published in 1986 – something of a big year for comics – and a good starting point for any discussion of the canon. More recent additions would include Thompson’s Blankets, Bechdel’s Fun Home and Gaiman et al’s (mind-blowingly brilliant) series The Sandman. There are some artists whose entire corpus is worthy of a place in the canon: Sacco and his comics journalism, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Chris Ware, Frank Miller and Bryan Talbot.
As for who makes it? Who makes any canon? It’s a tricky question because there are so many threads to it. However, with comics I think there’s another angle that does particularly interesting things to the comics canon – awards. There are many comics awards that are prestigious within the field but these are rarely mentioned anywhere except the jackets of the books (and comics-specific press coverage). What people do hear about is when a comic is honoured in a non-comics specific forum. Maus won a Pulitzer in 1992, Watchmen was the only graphic novel to appear on Time's 2005 "All-Time 100 Greatest Novels" list and Persepolis ranked #5 on Newsweek’s list of the ten best fiction books of the decade. This is not to say they aren’t well-crafted narratives that deserve recognition, but the recognition they do get seems above and beyond that which, say, an Eisner Award winner would receive because they have broken out of their own category.
As for a distinct academic canon – I don’t know if it would differ too greatly from the ‘general’ comics canon. We’re still squeamish about giving superhero narratives too much kudos (despite there being some brilliant superhero comics out there – Magneto: Testament, Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth and Tank Girl) so these tend to be missing (or at least under-represented) in the canon. Other than that, I don’t see much of a difference between the two.
CCL: Do you have any frustrations or problems with the comics canon? Are there things you would like to see in it that aren't, or vice versa?
Harriet: There are always problems with canons. I’m not sure there’s a non-problematic way to create a canon. As for the comics canon, I have a lot of issues with it. As with most literary canons, the majority of texts are by (typically white) men. Women and people of colour never seem to figure too highly in any canon, comics is no exception. The recent furore over the Angoulême Grand Prix is a good example of the issue – in 46 years of the Festival International De La Bande Dessinée only one woman has ever won. This year, there was outcry and the Festival’s president made some ill-advised comments on the issue that rather added to the problem. Though there are some non-white-non-male artists who are highly regarded and feature in most lists of ‘great’ comics, it never seems fair to me. There’s a sense of ‘tokenism’. I would love to see more minority artists getting recognition on the same level as their white-male counterparts but without all that weird qualifying language that goes with it. For example, Alison Bechdel is often referred to as ‘queer comics artist Bechdel’, as if her inclusion is justified by her sexuality, which ticks a certain box. I’m all for abolishing canons. It would never work – some texts are always going to be held in higher regard that others for reasons that may or may not be reasonable – but how great it would be! The whole field would become fair game for study and debate on an equal playing field, rather than everyone congregating around a small number of texts that are then ‘done’ to death.
CCL: Comic book studies seems to be growing, with events like Transitions, Comica and more. What do you think is the big advance that has been made in this field in the last decade or so? And what do you think is still the biggest gap or the critical issue or method you would like to see more of in this field?
Harriet: In terms of comics in ‘the world’, I think the inclusion of ‘graphic novels’ sections in Waterstones has helped massively. That awkward stereotype of the greasy nerd poring over comics in a shop full of similarly greasy males… that’s not accurate at all but such stereotypes are hard to shake off. Geek culture has become much more visible and ‘accepted’ since programmes like The Big Bang Theory and the massive surge in superhero films. Now that people on TV like it, we’re allowed to like it. Comics leaping into bookshops gave them an aura of legitimacy and helped to really make the general readership see that comics are not for weirdos but are often brilliantly written, nuanced works of narrative art.
For comics in ‘academia’, the question of legitimacy still hovers. Most people agree that comics studies is ‘a thing’ and that this form is worthy of academic interest but there are still those who peer down their noses at us. I’ve had some interesting moments at literature conferences. Unfortunately, it still feels like comics studies has to prove itself. We can’t concentrate on the actual teaching and research of comics because we’re still explaining what we’re doing and why. This has become much better in recent years and I hope will continue to improve – but so far, there’s work to be done.
CCL: You also work on other media beside comics – as for instance in your recent paper on Siri Hustvedt at Birkbeck. What areas in literary studies, or simply what writers, are most interesting to you at the moment?
Harriet: I’m always keen to write about Freud. I find his work completely fascinating – every time I read an essay for the first time it gets my mind ticking ‘How can I work with this?’ I particularly enjoy finding ways to negotiate the problems with contemporary readings of Freudian theory and placing his work in dialogue with contemporary theorists, a focus I’ve adopted for my thesis and first monograph.
My monograph, Comics, Trauma and the New Art of War, focuses on conflict trauma and the specific ways in which the comics form is uniquely able to represent traumatic affect. I’ve taken this methodology into my subsequent research, which is largely concerned with psychological issues in some way. I have two articles forthcoming: one in the Journal of Popular Culture on American Horror Story: Asylum, looking at the space of the asylum as a crucible of contemporary sexual anxiety, and another in Film International on the creation of the female body as a traumatic wound in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist. I’m also starting to create a plan of attack for my second research project, which is to be on representations of sex and sexual violence in popular culture. I want to set these two different ‘events’ against each other and demonstrate the differences in representational strategy and formal presentation across ‘consent lines’ if you will. It’s not the most palatable topic but one that is rife in contemporary comics, tv and film (as well as geek and gamer culture) and there’s a lot to be said on the topic.
As an aside to the material I work on, I love to read almost anything. At the moment, I’m captivated by John Irving’s novels. I’ve been working through them all over the past few years and they are wonderful. However, I’m not planning to publish on his work – I’m going to keep them for personal enjoyment instead.
CCL: There is a lot of discussion out there on the state of the academic humanities, at a time when they are affected by politics, changing funding structures, new structures of publishing and so on. So I'd like to get your angle as an early career scholar in the contemporary field – perhaps even more specifically, the comics field. Does this present particular challenges at the present, in terms of the job market, pressure to publish, balancing teaching with research, and so on?
Harriet: This question terrifies me – the whole topic fills me with dread. I am voraciously reading everything I can to see how all these changes are going to affect me. Partly I’m annoyed – I had just got a handle on how everything slotted together and how the well-oiled machine of HE worked. Now, with a rhetoric of marketization and massification, I worry about how the arts and humanities will fit into this. I don’t worry that we’re going to be removed because that would be absurd. Literary studies is a fantastic field and one that has captivated students for centuries so to remove it would be a fairly strange decision. What worries me is the emphasis on ‘impact’ and ‘public engagement’. I’m more than happy to argue that my research is important and tells us key things about our engagement with popular culture but how am I supposed to compete with, say, someone working in public health, new dynamic technologies or any other STEM field. I know this isn’t how it would be in reality but with so much focus on the value and wonder of STEM, it’s hard not to feel like the arts and humanities are doomed.
I don’t think it would be bold of me to say that all academics feel tremendous publication pressure and that research-teaching balance is an odd concept seen on paper but not always in reality. Anecdotally, I recently overheard two lecturers talking in a coffee shop queue and one said “I research 100% of the time and plan my lectures in the other 75%” – hopefully not a maths lecturer but the point is there. I’m keen to develop a good ‘writing method’ – to write and publish articles that are both timely and a good fit for my REF submission when the time comes. Quality over quantity is a good aim, I think.
Image: TG02 by Philip Bond, used under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 licence.
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