Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature

Abstract

Charles Hatfield, Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2005). 182 pp. ISBN 978-1578067190 (paperback, $22.00) The growing significance of comics and graphic novels within academe has led to an increasing number of critical interventions and attempts to think through both formal and socio-political aspects of the genre. Charles Hatfield's study might be said to belong to the 'emerging literature' of comics criticism, keen to emphasise both the importance of the economic and logistical basis of comics' production and distribution, on the one hand, and the medium's capacity for sophisticated and serious artistic expression, on the other. The book's often casual prose, its author's obvious expertise concerning underground comics (or 'comix', as he terms them) and, indeed, the study's title all signal the desire to situate the award-laden, commercially successful and academically respectable graphic novel within a tradition of the 'alternative comic' going back to the late 1960s and the work of Robert Crumb and his contemporaries. The early chapters explore the tradition of comic book publishing and post-1968 developments towards more adult-oriented and idiosyncratic work. They also consider the formal qualities specific to comics that shape reading protocols and interpretation in general. Subsequent chapters offer readings of key alternative comics, including Gilbert Hernandez's Heartbreak Soup, which appeared in Love and Rockets, Harvey Pekar's American Splendour and of course Art Spiegelman's Maus. Hatfield offers much that is useful in his consideration of the rise of alternative comics from a point of view that is both materialist and formalist. The main contention is that more recent acclaimed graphic novels should be approached with careful attention to their special mix of text and image and their origin, usually in serialised form, in low-circulation comics, rather than being seen as literature per se. The first two chapters build generally convincing arguments for the importance of these features. Hatfield's assured technical discussion of composition and temporal sequencing, including 'uncued closure' (the comic equivalent of film's 'jump cuts'), in comics is particularly valuable, drawing as it does on a wide range of relevant examples with plenty of illustrations from sources. This technical sophistication is often in evidence in the explorations of community in Hernandez's work, and of problems of self-representation in Pekar and Spiegelman, and Hatfield is clearly a fervent admirer and enthusiastic defender of each of them. …

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