The Uncanny X-History: A Curator Visits Comic-Con International

By Tyler Stallings

Marcel Duchamp’s essential gesture was to suggest that intention and context determined whether an object were art, such as his infamous ready-made Fountain (Urinal) of 1917. Since the late 1950s Allan Kaprow, originator of the Happening, has promoted the un-artist, doing away with the object altogether and suggesting that intention alone can determine an action to be art, such as brushing one’s teeth or simply thinking. If you agree, then the progressive art of the 20th Century is less about visual experience and more about the embodiment of philosophical ideas. Me, well, it’s my job as a museum curator to help you see those invisible sculptures—the columns of air—I’m pointing to, right in front of your mind.

I used to have other hallucinations, induced by another art history, one that came from movies and comic books. When I was 10, before Duchamp was my superhero, I dressed in a homemade red mask and towel cape. I would ride my bike around the neighborhood and wait for other kids to spot me, and then pedal off furiously, fantasizing that they were after me. If caught, my imaginary laser vision would cut to them to pieces. Even into my teenage years, I awaited a call from The Uncanny X-Men’s Professor Xavier, so that I could leave Kentucky and join his exclusive School for Gifted Youngsters, where he taught young mutants to control their powers along with their acne.

This past summer, still juggling this art-historical schizophrenia, I headed down to San Diego for the annual Comic-Con International, dodging columns of air that someone else created along the 5 freeway.

With Duchamp in mind, I am in search of the radical gestures that are now altering the course of comic books. They are being transformed from escapist pulp for teenage boys, with both bad stories and bad art, into artfully crafted books that for the most part still tell stories of superheroes, but now with more tragic dimensions. Their loneliness, money problems, girl/boyfriend problems and the shift from industrial-age powers, such as Iron Man’s full-body prophylactic of metal, to those of messed-up DNA,  make for more complex identities. Just as we mere mortals going through the daily grind question who we are, so do they.

Once inside the Convention Center’s expo hall, I begin walking up and down aisle after aisle of publishers and merchandisers, sidestepping the giddiness of some 45,000 attendees. I pass the massive Marvel pavilion, then Image Comics, which exploded onto the scene in the early ’90s, and then Indy Island, where the independents have landed. One of the Island’s flashier booths is that of Gettosake Comics, which aims to create comics for the hip-hop generation. The first wave includes Chocolate Thunder, the only black superhero comic that I will see at the convention.

Up another aisle, in the merchandise section, I stop at Comicbookart.com and sift through blueline composition sheets on which artists have drawn their color covers and black and white panel art. It’s odd to see pages of a comic book taken out of their usual 32-page context. Comicbookart.com is trying to make the pages stand alone by making them look like “Art.” This is being done through the delicate surgery of separating text from image, the very combination that gives comic books their uniqueness. One blueline depicts a Wolverine-like character in muddy, brown hues, creating a demonic atmosphere akin to a German Expressionist painting. I look on the back and discover that it’s a cover for an Ozzy Osbourne comic book. Despite the image now being attached to a reference outside of itself, the absence of pasted-in speech balloons and title overlays — although there are mundane editorial comments in the margins such as “Make this bigger” — produces the same kind of risky narrative breakdown that that can occur when viewing a painting.

What is most interesting about the cover is that it’s rendered with painterly strokes rather than unmodulated blocks of color. The clean lines of, say, Superman are not apparent. It represents changes in the comic book world that have permitted strong individual voices to develop in both stories and art, and, at least in my fantasies, brought comic books closer to being acquisitioned by any of the several contemporary art museums across the country.

R.C. Harvey, a preeminent historian of comic books who has been lecturing upstairs above the expo hall, might summarize as follows: The rise of the direct-sale comic book store in the mid-1980s allowed independent publishers to sell enough comic books to survive. This sustainability in turn gave rise to the artist-writer, and the possibility of being in control of an overall vision. Up until that time, artists and writers were usually departmentalized in an effort to streamline the process, so that more comics could be produced. Also, new publishers such as Image Comics have permitted their artists and writers to keep the rights to their creations, which, along with merchandising in the form of action figures and collector’s cards, has made it possible for them to make a living — some even becoming millionaires and mini-industries, such as Image’s Todd McFarlane, creator of Hell Spawn and the Spawn comics.

Publishers also began using printing techniques that allowed for more subtlety in color, and the comics were often perfect-bound. (Such practices have been followed in Europe for decades, and have had the effect of raising comics to a high art.) So it’s only in the last 15 years that a broad spectrum of independent voices and craftsmanship has developed in comic books in the United States. It’s akin to what happened 150 years ago in the European art world, when painters and sculptors got out from under the thumbs of church and state, or Marvel and DC in this case, and with the patronage of the rising middle-class, or the fans, could eventually pursue independent visions.

####

Suddenly my art history lesson is interrupted by Hell Spawn, who has escaped from McFarlene’s imagination and is walking toward me. (Simply thinking can produce artworks, after all.) His muscle tissue is exposed, glistening red, and punctured by razor-sharp bones. His body has an aspect of hysteria, as if it can barely contain itself from exploding — perhaps it is battling the terrors of frilliness, which is in abundance at Comic-Con, with little girls dressed as ultra-feminine Japanese anime heroines. Seeing my press badge and camera, Hell Spawn stops and poses for a photograph. Later he tells me his “real life” name, “Jeff, from Colorado,” omitting his last name perhaps in an effort to maintain a fantasy of secret identity. Allan Kaprow might view his efforts as an interesting blurring of life and art. Admittedly, sheer fandom enthusiasm like Jeff’s is part of why I’ve come to Comic-Con. How nice it would be to tour the Basel Art Fair, walking past booths of works by Pablo Picasso, Anselm Kiefer or Cindy Sherman, and suddenly see down an aisle a fan costumed like Matthew Barney’s gender-bending Cremaster satyr.

Jeff Hell Spawn walks off toward the DC Comics pavilion, seeing a friend dressed as Batman, and I fantasize about his home life: With his kids playing out in the yard, he’s down in the basement assembling his craft store materials into Hell Spawn rather than into a potpourri wreath, though both require the creative instincts of Dr. Frankenstein. In retrospect, it is apparent that Jeff’s bloody muscles are streaks of hot glue laid over football padding. He smiles as he works, exhilarated that his new body is bound only by his imagination. For one glorious weekend in San Diego, he will X out his previous identity and be born into an image of his own making. However, it’s unclear to me whether he’s expressing himself or is just a walking advertisement for Image Comics, donning bloody muscles instead of a Nike swoosh — or maybe both, impossible not to do when art and commerce intertwine at an event like Comic-Con.

The art world is still reluctant to fully admit to such interdependence, as the main selling point of the fine artist is that he or she is untainted by the base concern of making a living wage. So the full-throttle enthusiasm of fans seeking merchandise will have to wait. In the meantime, I will attempt to reconcile my split personalities by creating my own 32 pages rather than settling for 15 minutes. Imagine: The Uncanny Museum Curator dons a now-tattered red towel and then brushes his teeth.

###