Comic books, pop music, and validity in all forms

At the coffee shop where I hang out I get fairly constant stream of questions from a bevy of surly twentysomethings about what I’ve read recently, or if any of it was good. These kids (many of whom I happen to adore, though that doesn’t keep them from being irritating little shits sometimes) have spent all their literary lives so far sifting through Keates, Byron, Fitzgerald, Shakespeare, Dickens, Dickinson, and Wolfe searching for depth, meaning, and, above all, Art. So when I return a response of “Have you checked out Watchmen yet?” or “I read a really great Hellboy collection recently,” or “You should borrow my copy of The Crow,” or “Did I tell you about that graphic novel Blankets?” or “Have you read any of Miller’s Dark Knight stuff, or flipped through Sin City?” or “I’ve got this great Eisner winner, Maus, that you should read,” all they have to say back is either “Nah, I’m not a comic book kind of person,” or, worse, “C’mon, Alli, you know I don’t read that kind of crap.” This is pretty much the same response I got from English Lit majors in college when they were confronted with my comic book addiction; when I was excited to see Hellboy assigned as a textbook for a SF class, many of my fellow students were disgusted.

I thought we had moved past that attitude. I was wrong.

Pop art is still totally dismissed as art, whether it’s popular fiction (i.e., Stephen King,) popular poetry (i.e., song lyrics,) popular music (i.e., any music composed for mass consumption, including film scores,) or popular art (take your pick of movies, TV shows or comics), if it starts with “pop” or “popular” before its medium it’s considered below the notice of the discerning classes of society (i.e., anyone who has graduated high school.)

Don’t believe me? Listen to the words of a pop artist who knows the kind of mountain he’s attempting to climb: Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys wrote a poem about being in love, put it to music, and included the line “I poured my aching heart into a pop song, I couldn’t get the hang of poetry.” Personally, I think Turner has the hang of poetry, Stephen King has the hang of fiction, John Williams has the hang of music and Mike Mignola has the hang of both written and illustrated art.

In a recent discussion with the editors of AFLM I ended up putting together a pretty passionate defense of pop art as a whole, and it went along these lines: art is supposed to change the people who encounter it, it doesn’t have to mean something to everyone but it does have to mean something important to someone – so all those kids out there who really give a damn about Twilight validate it as art; every kid who didn’t commit suicide in the late 90’s because of the pop-punk Blink 182 missive “Adam’s Song” places the band on a pedestal that no one can remove them from; every kid from 1985 up until now who came to believe in heroes and in being your own hero because of a Frank Miller Batman comic book is proof that Miller is an artist beyond question.

Now, does that mean that all pop art is good art? Of course not, at least not for everyone, just like the literary cannon isn’t good literature for everyone; for instance I hate stream-of-consciousness and no one will ever be able to convince me that As I Lay Dying is a good novel, no matter how many snooty lit majors try to convince me that it’s brilliant art; just like I’ll never be able to convince them that Maus is a fantastic visual novel that should be taught in high schools throughout the world.

I know that this argument is getting into the sticky realm of subjectivity in art that can only end in either agreeing to disagree about what art is or in putting down a definition that I believe is too limiting to really encompass all of what art is, so I’ll leave you readers with a couple of things to mull over.

First: the vast realm of “Art” is hard to define specifically because it is possible for so many people to define so many different things as art that no one definition can really cover all aspects in depth, which is great because it gives liberal arts something to argue about for the next few centuries.

Second: as a child, Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes had a greater impact on my personality, morality, imagination and values than anything other than my immediate family. Watterson was aware of the pop nature of his art and wrote about it in his comics, making the argument that even though he was just a comic writer he was still an artist. This argument was made as eloquently in four-panel strips full of brilliant, cutting prose as it was in the sprawling detail and watercolors of his half-page Sunday masterpieces. So to the arguing Art fiends in coffee shops and colleges everywhere, I leave you with Calvin’s final words as a talisman to carry in the search to find and define art: “It’s a magical world, Hobbes, Ol’ buddy… Let’s go exploring!”