Review of Douglas Wolk's 'Reading Comics' (very rough draft)

Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics defines the field of comic studies and provides an innovative theoretical framework for future scholarship, all the while promoting comics as a distinct combination of aesthetics and text.
Wolk divides his text into two parts; the first five chapters summarize past comics scholarship and develop his own theoretical framework, while the more extensive second section consists of a series of separate analyses of an assortment of comics creators, both artists and writers. His first chapter begins by establishing a broad definition of comics that charts the history of comics as a progression from pulp books confined by industry conventions to the current variety of creative works; Wolk concludes that comics should be understood not simply as a literary or visual form:

Comics are not prose. Comics are not movies. They are not
a text-driven medium with added pictures; they’re not the
visual equivalent of prose narrative or a static version of a
film. They are their own thing: a medium with its own
devices, its own innovators, its own clichés, its own genres
and traps and liberties. The first step toward attentively
reading and fully appreciating comics is acknowledging that.
(14)

While Wolk is by no means the first critic to contend this point, he provides an especially convincing argument, including a lighthearted dialogue in which he defends himself from Straw Men embodying possible challenges to his foundational claims. Wolk then previews his argument for comics auteurship with an exploration of the evolution of art comics as an accepted and distinct form, comparing the change in style with the parallels in mainstream comics. Using Kant’s aesthetic philosophy, Wolk suggests that, even in images that are not realistic (including what Wolk calls “ugly comics”), we can readily find aspects of the comic that are both things of “beauty” in their composition and narrative function, but also “good” – the emergence of individual style within imposed conventions.

Throughout the second part of Reading Comics, Wolk will locate the “personality” of the comic creator as central to his analysis; he admits that such personality is easier to notice in alternative and independent press comics that are scripted and drawn by a single creator than in mainstream publications produced by entire staffs of writers, artists, and editors. Wolk is quick to note, however, that many personalities can be found within mainstream comics – after all, even the loudest detractors of Rob Liefeld’s distinctive anatomies can hardly deny his influence or the instant identification of a “Rob Liefeld” comic book. As such, Wolk’s analyses each focus on a single creative personality (with the exceptions of Will Eisner and his “disciple” Frank Miller, who Wolk connects in their dramatic influence on mainstream conventions, and Craig Thompson and James Kolchalka, who represent opposite ends of the early-90s trend of autobiographical comics), ranging from the Hernandez brothers to Steve Ditko.

Early on, Wolk admits that his selection of subject “personalities” is not meant to be a representative sample of all comics, nor is he attempting to establish a comics canon; rather, his choices are “comics and cartoonists I think are interesting to discuss” (137), mostly American books (Wolk repeatedly apologizes for not considering manga in any of his discussions) and series that are widely available. Wolk’s analysis tends to focus predominately on the art and visual layout of each personality, but he includes sections on Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, and Tomb of Dracula as examples of distinct narrative personalities that connect disparate artistic accompaniment.

Reading Comics struggles to unite popular superhero monthlies and independent alternative books. Wolk laments that “the schism between the two big American schools of comics - […] ‘the mainstream’ and ‘art comics’ […] is becoming wider and bitterer” (11). Even though many of his theoretical claims reinforce the similarities between the two schools – Wolk devotes an entire chapter to dissecting the evolving style and aesthetic of mainstream superhero comics – but the distinctions between mainstream and art comics are reinforced throughout the book. At one point, Wolk notes that, no matter how similar the two might be, the distinction between them persists due to the radically different readerships and the very different expectations these readers bring to the texts.

Douglas Wolk ends his discussion of comics as comics with a brief prediction about the future of comic creators. While the current trends suggest a split between “the rough wave and the smooth wave,” between highly individual, “transgressive” minicomics and webcomics, and drawings and the “self-consiciously pretty” styles utilized by trained artists. However, Wolk finds promise not in the schism, but in the possibility of new distinct personalities, styles that are clearly the artists’ own.