For many people, seeing great art means a trip to the museum,
not a glance at the Sunday funnies. This Sunday, however, the
funnies won’t just be in the daily newspaper.
From this Sunday until March 12, 2006, the UCLA Hammer Museum
and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art will host a two-part
exhibition titled “Masters of American Comics,”
featuring the work of 15 creators over the span of the 20th
century. The Hammer will present work from the first half of the
century, while the MOCA will take the later comics.
Beginning chronologically with Winsor McCay’s 1905 comic
strip “Little Nemo in Slumberland,” the exhibit covers
everything from Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” to MAD
Magazine to “Maus,” Art Spiegelman’s harrowing
comic-book portrayal of the Holocaust.
“We’re trying to tell a story of the evolution of
this art form in the 20th century,” said Brian Walker, a
curator of the Hammer’s portion of the exhibition and a
longtime participant in the comic industry. “In a way,
we’re establishing the (comic) canon.”
Walker is the son of Mort Walker, the man behind the popular
daily strips “Beetle Bailey” and “Hi and
Lois.”
Brian Walker, who is now a contributor to those strips himself,
has spent years working toward the legitimization of comic art by
curating such showings as “100 Years of American
Comics” at the Belgian Center for Comics Art in Brussels.
“The Europeans are way ahead of Americans in terms of
exhibiting cartoon art and studying it and having museums devoted
to it, and everything like that,” Walker said.
“Americans in particular take (comics) for granted because
they’re in the newspapers every day.”
Comics splashed into art museums in 1990 when the Museum of
Modern Art in New York did a show called “High and Low:
Modern Art and Popular Culture.”
Comic artists, however, were furious to find that their work,
along with graffiti and poster art, not only constituted the
low-art portion of the exhibition, but was put in tiny cases that
paled in comparison to the prominence with which the paintings were
displayed.
Unlike the MoMA show, the goal of the Hammer/MOCA exhibit is not
so much to inspire direct comparisons with what Walker described as
“fine artists,” but to acknowledge comic artists for
their own merits.
In contrast to a painter or sculptor, who might spend weeks or
months on a single piece, comic artists are forced to craft
numerous separate drawings to meet weekly or monthly deadlines.
Schulz’s “Peanuts,” like most comic strips, ran
and continues to run seven days a week, and Jack Kirby’s work
in superhero comic books such as “Fantastic Four”
appeared on dozens of pages as a monthly serial.
In spite of the workload, comic artists developed a multitude of
styles and drawing techniques in addition to branching out into
other fields.
“Winsor McCay was also an animation pioneer ““
that’s why we have the picture of “˜Gertie the
Dinosaur,'” Walker said, referencing the groundbreaking
1914 animated film. “And (he was) a very influential
political cartoonist. It would be almost inaccurate not to show his
many sides.”
McCay was not the only comic artist who dabbled in other media.
Schulz painted many of his “Peanuts” characters, and
modern artists such as Gary Panter, whose “Jimbo” and
“Pixie Meat” comic books will be showcased at MOCA,
work in several different formats.
“Comic art is the same as fine art,” said Panter,
who has a substantial gallery of comic art and paintings on his Web
site.
“Everything I do comes out of painting and 20th-century
painting practice as applied to comics. Painting is about color and
stopping time, and there’s a few other layers to it. Comics
are about taking you somewhere and holding you there and telling
you some kind of story. You can look back and forth in a comic
book,” he added.
One striking feature now absent from modern-day newspaper strips
is the sheer size of the artwork of the older pieces. McCay’s
“Little Nemo,” for instance, sprawls out across entire
newspaper pages.
“The page was their palette. Now they put three or four
strips on one page,” Walker said. “(Past artists) were
able to do all these incredible things, that artists today,
there’s no way they can do that anymore.”
That kind of spatial freedom became available in the larger,
magazine-size comic books. The pages of comic book artists such as
Panter and Kirby have a large degree of freedom, restricted only by
a general collaboration with a writer to dictate the detail and
space devoted to each individual scene or panel.
Kirby, dubbed “King” by writer and 1960s
collaborator Stan Lee, was a master of characterization and
emphasizing the epic fight scenes of superheroes such as the
Fantastic Four and the Hulk.
“(Kirby) brings such personality and fire, and suffered so
much personal drama to get these superhero stories on the
page,” said Gerard Jones, author of “Men of
Tomorrow.” “It becomes fascinating as an art
story.”
“Men of Tomorrow” is a history of the comic book
medium, beginning with comic strips and tracing their evolution
into the format published today.
Though Kirby is the only superhero artist of the exhibit’s
15 creators, costumed characters were responsible for much of the
comic book’s rise to prominence.
“”˜Superman’ was conceived as a newspaper strip
originally,” Jones said. “The superhero was what turned
comics into first a fad, and then an institution. They’ve
provided the commercial lifeblood of comics since the late
’50s.”
However, much of the real artistic innovation has come from
outside the mainstream.
The most acclaimed comic artists of the last few decades have
been people such as Spiegelman and Robert Crumb, who are both
featured at MOCA.
Crumb helped pioneer the 1960s underground comics movement that,
according to Walker, contained a “baring-the-soul
approach” that influenced Panter and many independent
artists.
Spiegelman’s “Maus” was a pinnacle of the
medium, an intense, layered story that garnered acclaim from those
who are often the toughest audience ““ the critics.
“There’s been a lot of work in comic books since the
’80s that has really won over critics,” Jones said.
“You had the Hernandes brothers, you had
Spiegelman’s “˜Maus,’ and you had some culturally
ambitious superhero stories like Frank Miller’s “˜The
Dark Knight Returns’ and (Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’)
“˜Watchmen.’ You get people like Chris Ware who have
forced themselves into the public consciousness as legitimate
artists.”
The long history of comics has allowed people to look back at
older strips such as Milton Caniff’s “Terry and the
Pirates,” Chester Gould’s “Dick Tracy” and
Frank King’s “Gasoline Alley” to look for
artistic value in them through exhibits such as this one.
The strength of comics lies in their unique combination of words
and pictures, and the storytelling aspect of these and other early
strips was remarkably ambitious.
One “Popeye” story continued in the Sunday paper for
well over six months, beginning on Dec. 8, 1933, and finally
concluding on July 8, 1934.
“Gasoline Alley” was particularly creative,
featuring characters that aged in real time along with the
strip’s readers. One early strip presents Skeezix, the baby,
who 20 years later is depicted as having grown up.
Meanwhile, the adventure narrative “Terry and the
Pirates” actually saw characters dying, and one suspenseful
“Dick Tracy” sequence used a death trap reminiscent of
those later used in “Batman.”
Brian Walker, for one, is excited to present such an extensive
retrospective on the medium and hopes it results in greater
attention to comic art.
“Art Spiegelman started talking among museum people,
saying somebody has to do this properly to give these artists their
due,” he said. “(But) not to compare these artists to
fine artists or try to make some value judgement. They really
should stand on their own as cartoonists.”