Comment: Whaam Rap

Roy Lichtenstein once turned comic art into pop art. Now, with two European museums bolstering their comic archives, is the art form receiving its due recognition in the annals of modern art?
21 February 2005

POP ART PRODUCTIONS

Last summer, I went to a Roy Lichtenstein retrospective. I had a passing interest in the artist because of the way he took inspiration from comic books, but I'd never had the opportunity to see so much of his work gathered in one place. Needless to say, I'm glad I went, and felt like I learned something. Not just about the close relationship between comic books and art, but also about the relationship between comic books and the wider world.

If you've not heard of him before, Lichtenstein was part of the pop-art movement from the 60s. In 1961 he began to paint large-scale copies of panels from comic books, typically from the romance or military genre, complete with speech bubbles and sound effects. Lichtenstein even hand-painted the "benday dots" with which variations of shade are conveyed on the printed page. Perhaps his most famous work is 'Whaam' (1963), a reproduction of a comic-book frame featuring the explosive finale to an aerial dogfight.

The highlight of the retrospective was a display case where Lichtenstein's sketchbooks were arranged side by side with the original comic books that he had worked from. It was something I found very surprising, though perhaps obvious in hindsight, that Lichtenstein had taken inspiration from artists I was already familiar with.

There in the display case were comics drawn by John Romita Sr, who'd been drawing romance stories long before SPIDER-MAN, and Joe Kubert, who plied his trade in war stories featuring characters like SGT ROCK and BLACKHAWK. They had produced artwork that Lichtenstein thought worthy of replicating - and a trashy, disposable medium was then elevated to 'serious' art - though some might've called it outright theft.

When this first occurred in the 60s, the comics companies were not the least bit offended by the appropriation of their tropes and imagery. Some even tried to cash in on it. Ever the showman, Stan Lee changed the name of 'Marvel Comics Group' in 1965 to 'Marvel Pop Art Productions'. It seemed like a smart decision - Marvel comics were immensely popular on college campuses, and the Pop Art movement was in full swing - but thousands of protests by their readers led to the change being reversed only four months later. But Smilin' Stan isn't the last person to try to capitalise on the association. At the Lichtenstein retrospective, a significant proportion of the demographic in attendance were parents and children. There was also a special room set aside for kids to participate in an art workshop and other activities related to pop art and comic books. It seemed that both parents and the curators of the exhibition had realised that Lichtenstein's interest in popular culture, and sequential art in particular, was an effective way of bringing modern art to a wider (and younger) audience.

This indicated to me a deeper acceptance of comic books by the mainstream, further evidence of which is becoming more and more commonplace. BBC Radio 4 recently broadcast an interview series that featured Alan Moore sandwiched between Stewart Lee, comedian and writer of JERRY SPRINGER: THE OPERA, and Brian Eno, the avant-garde musician who invented electronica.

Elsewhere, we have a character from popular teen drama THE OC namechecking Brian Michael Bendis and paying a visit to the offices of WildStorm. Further beyond that, we have comic book characters taking up permanent residence at the multiplex, a crossover that has evolved to the point where filmmakers don't even bother licensing existing superheroes anymore, they start from scratch and originate their own, as in Brad Bird's THE INCREDIBLES and Will Smith's forthcoming TONIGHT HE COMES.

THE MYLAR BAG OF HISTORY

With these cultural shifts happening thick and fast, it becomes more important to preserve the early history of the medium, so a definite historical line can be traced from the past to the present. It can't be left it the companies themselves to archive material, since they don't have the resources, and certain works are only preserved according to the demands of the marketplace. Fortunately, independent and professional archiving efforts are already underway with two major museums in France and Britain.

In January 2005, Marvel donated large parts of its back catalogue to France's National Centre for Comics. Nearly 1,800 boxes containing 275,000 books have already been handed over, with another 8,000 books - the oldest and most valuable - to be delivered after Marvel has scanned them into their digital archives. The collection spans a thirty-year period between the 1950s and 1970s, and is believed to represent nearly 80% of their output over this time, including key books from the Timely and Atlas era of publishing.

Some controversy has surrounded the donation; the agreement between the museum and Marvel stipulates that duplicate copies - of which there are many - cannot be bartered, sold or given away, but they can be destroyed. But despite this sticking point (the stuff of nightmares to any self-respecting fanboy), the presence of duplicates allows for the comics to be sorted into five identical collections that will be distributed to museums throughout Europe.

Here in Britain the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum has a small but growing repository of comics, the Ian Rakoff Collection, which was acquired by the V&A in 1990. The collection stretches to about 17,000 items, is accessible to the public, and covers the entire spectrum in the development of sequential art. From SUPERMAN to LOVE AND ROCKETS; from ROY ROGERS to Robert Crumb; from SHEENA THE SHE-DEVIL to Tijuana Bibles; this collection has it all.

A journalist named Tom Morton recently wrote about the V&A's archive and was moved to comment about a curious omission from the history of comics, a figure that has stood tall and been most prominent throughout its tumultuous history - the fan.

"Comics publishers engage with their audience in a way that would be unimaginable to, say, a commercial fine art gallery or a literary imprint, through everything from conventions to letters' pages to online forums, where fans exercise considerable influence over the future of particular titles, and even the future of the form...

"'Relational Aesthetics' may be an art world buzz-phrase at the moment (referring to a set of practices in which the viewer participates in the creation of an artwork), but comics publishers, writers and artists have been involving their audience in the process of cultural production for decades."

That explains why readers get so upset over 'event' comics like IDENTITY CRISIS or AVENGERS DISSASSEMBLED, and it's an insight that was facilitated by the kind of resources and expertise that only a cultural institution like the V&A can provide. It's a promising sign for the future. Someday soon, in addition to the delights of attending a retrospective of modern art by the likes of Lichtenstein, we will also be able to attend exhibitions of seminal comic books from decades long past. And it's not a case of one medium being more culturally valuable than the other. It's a case of two mediums existing side by side, as equals, and our lives are all the richer for it.

Bulent Yusuf is a freelance writer based in London.

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