Kevin Harley

Norwich, England
P280@CPCMB.EAST-ANGLIA.AC.UK

 

Sabin, Roger. Adult Comics: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

 

It’s a long and sordid tale, the history of adult comics. This particular hotbed of intrigue has everything for the perfect television mini-series; suspense, prejudice, passion, censorship, homophobia, Anglo-American cultural relations, exploitation of creative individuals by massive and all-powerful media industries–even, gasp, communism. One wonders why the TV version has yet to be made. In its absence, Roger Sabin’s Adult Comics sets itself the formidable task of presenting this largely untold tale.

 

Sometime in the mid-1980s, the British media suddenly became aggitated over the phenomenon of so-called ‘adult comics.’ Many argued that comics were laying claim to a hitherto absent literary legitimacy, largely through the use of the term “graphic novel” to denote the departure these “new comics” made from the supposedly childish orientations of their predecessors. The media response to this ostensible trend was divided between approval and outrage, but nearly everyone adhered to a suitably comic-book language of wild hyperbole.

 

Among enthusiasts, the general attitude was one of terrific excitement about comics that–wow!–used cats and mice to tell the story of the Holocaust, or–gasp!– looked closely at both the politics and psychoses of superheroes, when the industry was presumed to have hitherto kept its heroes’ reputations untarnished. What’s more, these things called “graphic novels” were full-color, fully painted works of art which–hey!–you did not need to feel ashamed to read in a public place, even if you did look as if you were scouring the porn shelf to get to them (Sabin 72). It was finally safe for comics’ fans to come out and admit to their unspoken love.

 

Others, however, were more hostile. David Lister set the resurgence of comic book popularity in the context of The Novel’s imminent death.¹ Given the supposedly three minute culture in which “we” live, a visually based narrative media (as if television weren’t bad enough!) could only signal a turn for the worse. Lister refused to allow comics to hide behind the cloak of the term “graphic novel,” since this was of course an attempt to disguise the fact that the things were still “merely . . . a diverting entertainment for children.”

 

One can readily set this whole debate over adult comics during the mid-80s in the general context of a series of debates over what constitutes culture. As Sabin notes, the growing popularity of Cultural Studies within British universities, and the faddishness of applying the term “postmodern” to anything that might be seen as challenging high/low culture boundaries, provided a perfect context for the adult comics hype to generate both excitement and outrage amongst its many commentators. Add to this the widely circulating arguments about whether visual literacy could be considered equal to textual literacy, and it is easy to see why the spark over comics briefly became a fire.

 

Stepping in before the embers get cold, Sabin offers Adult Comics primarily as a “primer-textbook” for university teachers who know little about the medium and its histories, but might consider including comics on their syllabi. After all, as a medium it lends itself to all manner of disciplines, perfect fodder for the interdisciplinary age. Media studies, popular culture studies, literature, art history, and even history itself, could all be suitable disciplinary venues for the teaching of comics. Many comics offer themselves as history texts, and many flaunt such a high level of aesthetic-theoretical sophistication that their gradual assimilation into the hallowed halls of academia should not really surprise anybody.

 

In his effort to seize on the moment of comics’ potential legitimization, Sabin casts himself in the role of demythologiser, trampling all over the rubbish that the mainstream British press has been churning out ever since comics became an issue. The death of the novel? Well, popular novels still sell pretty well. The first adult comics? They’ve been going strong since the nineteenth-century, mate, and other countries accepted them long before the English and American press leapt on the bandwagon. The collapse of high/low culture boundaries? A story as old as culture itself. Graphic novels? Been around since the 1940s, and besides they’re called albums in Europe. Etc etc etc. . . .

 

So why, according to Sabin, did the mid-80s see such an explosion of interest in adult comics? There were, he says, basically three groups whose interests converged to produce a dramatic, if short-lived comics boom. Firstly, publishers saw the opportunity for a period of more aggressive production and distribution. Secondly, the media sniffed out a suitably scandalous decline-of-civilization story and got terribly excited about it for a while. Thirdly, creators (as they are known) were able to push the comic book institutions they worked in for better deals than before, now that their names were on the covers and people were actually buying the damn things. All these groups sought to benefit from a public who, as Sabin argues, knew nothing about what they were being sold. “This void made it easy for those with a vested interest in rewriting history: for them, other peoples’ ignorance was bliss. Adult comics had no history, which is why an invented one was so powerful.”

 

Which, of course, leaves a space for Sabin to step in and reveal the truth about the history of a medium much-maligned and under-studied. Appropriately, his demythologising begins with the title of his own book. What is meant by this rather ambiguous term, “adult comics”? It is a term that, as Sabin notes, teases at the ambivalence, in British society at least, over the fault-line that divides most people’s childhood from their adulthood. But is this really a very secure or stable boundary? Obviously many “adults” read comics that are marketed for children, and many children would probably not have too much difficulty getting their hands on so-called adult comics.

 

Whilst Sabin usefully raises this as a problem, his book is not up to the challenge of dealing with it. Given the fact that he has such an enormous history to recover, it’s true that one really cannot expect a lengthy treatise on adult/child distinctions in British society. But it is galling when Sabin tries to tidy up the ambivalences by recasting the adult/child distinction in such terms as “mature” and “adolescent,” as though these were somehow more helpful. Discussing similarities and differences between various types of so-called adult comics, Sabin comments that the “only thing . . . all the comics had in common was their adult nature,” which, he says, distinguishes them from the “traditional adolescent fare.” To depend on such undefined terms for one’s evaluative criteria creates all manner of anomalies, and reinforces some unjustified prejudices. A comment on Tim Burton’s Batman movie is typical. According to Sabin, the film’s release with a “12” certificate rather than a “15” could rightly have been read as a disappointing signal by audiences hoping for something more sophisticated. But why should the age of the viewers at which a work is pitched be taken as an index of its sophistication?

 

This is not the only example of a lack of terminological and conceptual clarity in Adult Comics. Similar instances arise from Sabin’s obvious contempt for ‘fandom’ and for superhero comics. In his view, the latter pander to the “adolescent,” “male-power fantasies” of the former; the entire genre of superhero comics is dismissed as juvenile fodder either for those in their early teens or for older men who don’t want to leave their early teens behind. All these “fanboys” are to Sabin suspect persons, “anal-retentive, adolescent, and emotionally arrested.” The whole account depends on our accepting “adolescent” as a pejorative term: superhero fans are largely adolescent, therefore superhero comics are bad and their adult readers must be stunted.

 

Indeed, Sabin’s approach in general avoids an engagement with fandom, offering a narrative not so much of specific patterns of reception and appropriation as of sweeping “historical and cultural imperatives.” At the same time, however, his own chapter on “Fandom and Direct Sales” makes clear that it was to some considerable degree the strategic activities and choices of fans that drove the emergence of the graphic novel and opened doorways into the industry for new and more ambitious creators. In view of his own research, it seems odd that Sabin would resist viewing “fanboys” and their strategies of reception as anything less than imperative cultural and historical phenomena where the development of comics is concerned.

 

This blind spot in Sabin’s analysis is particularly unfortunate given that fandom and fan cultures are areas that have generated much critical literature recently. The essayists in The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media² seek to clear a cultural space for the respectful analysis of popular culture fans with many different generic interests. Jensen’s essay, for example, argues that media commentaries or critical writing on fans is frequently marred by a “them” and “us” mentality, in which critics regard themselves as intrinsically superior to fans. This is probably because the genre to which the fans in question attach themselves has been perceived as an inferior one anyway, and possibly because it is presumed that fan-affiliations are singular: one fan, one genre. Sabin makes exactly this assumption when he suggests that a fan of Daredevil is unlikely to get very excited about Raw! (a collection of avant-garde comic strip work, edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly), or vice versa. Sabin quotes no ethnographic evidence for this, and I could cite myself and many others as contradictions to the supposed rule. The superhero fanboys are not, I suspect, as discrete or as homogeneously imbecilic a group as Sabin is determined to make them out.

 

Nor, it seems to me, are the superhero comics deserving of such a cursory and dismissive analysis. Unless we accept Sabin’s view that all the adults who read these texts are dull-witted, then there must be something other than self- reflexivity and lots of violence that earned the 1980s superheroes the label “adult.” Until Sabin’s claim to have looked “in detail” at the big three sellers in Britain during this period (Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, and Maus) is lived up to–and his one paragraph on each hardly accomplishes that–then we won’t know.

 

But what of the comics that don’t buy into the mainstream superhero agenda? On these, Sabin’s book is superb. The attention he devotes to the underground comics and the relationship between women and comics far exceeds his sweeping judgements on superhero texts. While showing that the comic book medium and the specialist shop culture generated around it has tended effectively to exclude women, Sabin makes it clear that there are women’s comics, even if they are not part of the perceived mainstream. Like most comics, they have of course suffered at the hands of somewhat over-zealous customs officials and censors, particularly if they are so bold as to deal with such a taboo subject matter as sex in a medium which everyone knows is really only a diversion for children. “So far as the British authorities generally were concerned, men dealing with sex in comics was bad enough: women dealing with sex was beyond the pale. The worst example of censorship occurred in 1985, when Melinda Gebbie’s solo comic Frezca Zisis was declared obscene by the courts and destroyed” (289). Even recently, an erotic graphic novel written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Gebbie (Lost Girls) had trouble getting through customs in its serialized format as part of the quarterly collection of comic strip material in graphic novel format titled Taboo.

 

It is obviously true, however, that where “women’s comics” are concerned censors probably have less to answer for than the comics industry itself. Sabin notes that when the underground comics went into decline with the rest of the counter culture in the early 1970s, women’s comics were considered expendable and were “the first to go.” The specialist shops that subsequently emerged in Britain conveyed, says Sabin, a “locker-room atmosphere” that, aside from being intimidating to anyone less literate in comics than the fanboys, was far from welcoming to women. And even if comics became in some sense more “adult” by the mid to late 1980s, this rarely translated into more progressive attitudes towards women on the part of male comics writers. Indeed, as Sabin sees it, “some of the worst cases of negative representations of women in the history of comics can be identified in this period.”

 

Nevertheless, despite their marginalization by the “mainstream” writers and marketers, women’s comics make up an important part of the history of comics. And it is in recovering this and other marginalized histories that Sabin excels. He shows that whilst women have served as a primary satiric butt for comics at least since the late nineteenth century (in, for example, Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday), they were always “recognised as an audience” and, in fact, have always constituted at least a small fraction of the creators of adult comics. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, an “underground” women’s comics movement emerged in force as a critical reaction against the macho and misogynist work of creators like Robert Crumb and S. Clay Wilson. By the mid 1970s even the comics mainstream showed some signs of feeling the impact of the women’s movement, and a number of established male writers (including Alan Moore) took to writing pro-feminist narratives. Whilst women creators themselves still do not hold very prominent positions in this mainstream, Sabin lets us see their work as extending a crucial counter-tradition.

 

Sabin is also quite good at tracing the concrete histories of comic book production and distribution. Take, for example, the characteristically “convoluted” history of Bryan Talbot’s The Adventures of Luther Arkwright. This comic first appeared in the 1972 underground comic Mixed Bunch, moving from there to Near Myths in 1978, then onto Pssst! in 1982. Soon thereafter it was published in its first collected-volume format by Never Ltd., and then in 1988 as a nine-issue comic book series by Valkyrie Press. Valkyrie then republished the second volume, while volumes one and three were reprinted by Proutt, and, in 1991, the whole lot was republished, with all new covers, by Dark Horse Comics. Sabin can be commended for the thoroughness with which he has retraced these sorts of strange trajectories, but at times the minutiae can be overwhelming. Moreover, such publishing-centered approach to comics history can have the effect of submerging the cultural specificity of a text under the mere facts of its publication. Sabin describes both Dark Knight and Watchmen as “American in origin,” which is true enough as concerns their publication histories. But while Frank Miller’s Dark Knight certainly derives from an American perspective on superheroes, Moore’s Watchmen seems just as certainly to derive from a British one. Something of the cultural and ideological resonance of both texts is lost when the origins of their production are understood entirely in terms of the sites of their initial publication.

 

But even allowing for this and other shortcomings, Sabin’s book is a valuable one. Sabin has succeeded in mapping out an extensive cultural terrain on which new analysis and research might find room to develop. He has opened a host of avenues for inquiry, even if some of the most promising of these may lead readers away from his own positions. Hopefully, Adult Comics will be taken up as the “primer-textbook” of comics studies, and provide the point of departure for much future work.

 

Notes

 

1. David Lister, “Traditional novel ‘in danger’ as teenagers turn to comics”, The Independent, 9/9/1989, p. 3.

 

2. Lisa A. Lewis, ed., The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media (London: Routledge, 1992).