Everyone’s talking about Before Watchmen, the seven Watchmen prequel miniseries announced by DC this week. As with pretty much everything in the world of comics, opinions are divided and being fiercely argued where anyone will listen—and even places where they won’t. (The Beat and ComicsAlliance round up the serious and snide reactions.)

I guess because Alan Moore is widely enough respected, has been public enough about his falling out over the Watchmen rights, and is enough of a crank that DC knew they had a public relations problem on this one from word go. I can’t think why else they would devote so much of their PR to justifying Before Watchmen’s right to exist. That’s just a bad foot to put forward.

Susana Polo of The Mary Sue argues that Before Watchmen represents everything that’s wrong with the comics industry today. That’s maybe an overstatement, as there’s lots more things wrong with comics, but I take her point. In particular, she notes that this is an inevitable result of the fact that DC (and Marvel) are not really in the business of making comic books; they’re the custodians of intellectual property for Warner Bros. (and Disney).

Notice how Before Watchmen’s defenders talk about the project:

Comic books are perhaps the largest and longest running form of collaborative fiction. Collaborative storytelling is what keeps these fictional universes current and relevant. –DiDio and Lee in the original release

The whole point of having great characters is the opportunity to explore them more deeply with time, re-interpreting them for each new age. DC allowed these characters sit on a shelf for over two decades as a show of respect, and that is salutary, but there comes a time when good characters have to re-enter the world to teach us something about ourselves in the present.–Dr. Manhattan and Nite Owl writer J. Michael Straczynski at Newsarama

The challenge is to make the stories modern and relevant to 2012 […] by adding to the mythos and not to detract from it. –“Crimson Corsair” illustrator John Higgins at HuffPo

In an age when the comic book industry is not at its finest, every comic book company should do all they can to exploit (I mean that in the literal definition, not the negative context it often bares) their properties[. …] It’s good to see new creators taking on these characters. It’s good to have fresh voices reaching into these characters. If a character is compelling, there should always be more stories to tell. –Newsarama editor Lucas Siegel

In each of these cases, the argument is based on an idea that Watchmen is a set of characters–i.e., intellectual properties–that simply can’t be allowed to lie fallow, whether for economic (Siegel) or artistic (everybody else) reasons. Compare this with Marc Hirsh writing at NPR’s Monkey See blog:

In other words, not only was Watchmen never intended to be an ongoing series, that’s precisely why the story was done as Watchmen and not just the Charlton heroes in the first place. It was produced as a single-shot, twelve-issue story using characters that had never existed prior to its publication and were never supposed to be used after. It was a self-contained novel with a beginning, a middle and an end, written with exactly that structure in mind.

I think this is the major divide between the two camps on Before Watchmen. There are a lot of important issues about creator’s rights–and especially moral rights–involved, too. But how you go about evaluating those arguments and applying them to specific cases is a result of your basic assumptions of what a contemporary American comic is: Is it an “artistic” work or a vehicle for a character-cum-brand?

I don’t know that I’d say Watchmen is the best comic / graphic novel ever. It’s not one of my favourites. But I certainly think it’s more than a collection of “characters.”

A student of mine wants to read 5 key communication books. I have a list, but what would you suggest? (#nocanonwars) @ScottTimcke

My colleague and friend, Scott Timcke, recently posed a challenge on twitter to list five “key books” in communication studies. This can’t be a “best of” list, though, as the field of communication is too broad and/or balkanized for any five books to be key–or even relevant–to all, most, or many of us. I started out trying to think of “foundational” texts but abandoned that tack when my mind kept turning to books I’d never actually read in their entirety (sorry, George Herbert Mead). So, what follows is an idiosyncratic list of five books that have really influenced how I think about media, communication, and cultural studies.

• John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)

• Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, [1958] 1983)

• Mark Kingwell, A Civil Tongue: Justice, Dialogue, and the Politics of Pluralism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995)

• Russell Keat, Cultural Goods and the Limits of the Market (Houndsmills, Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 2000)

• Nick Couldry, Listening Beyond the Echoes: Media, Ethics, and Agency in an Uncertain World (Boulder, CO: Paradigm)

What are five great books in your field? Post them on twitter with the hashtag #nocanonwars.

Update: When I went to post this to twitter, I came up with this syntax for putting up your five:

What are five great books in your field or specialism? Tweet them like #My5books ($area): book_1, book_2, … book_5 #nocanonwars @wooesque

Hand of Fire is not a biography of Kirby, nor is it exactly a critical appreciation (for those, see the books appendix), as Hatfield focuses on a narrow slice of Kirby’s oeuvre (of the six “periods” of his career (21–33), only two are discussed in significant detail). Instead, Hatfield asks us to consider a smaller sampling of examples in light of a couple of main points.

The book’s major argument and contribution is Hatfield’s concept of comics art as “narrative drawing.” Writers have arguably driven the recent transformation and consecration of the “American” comic book cum graphic novel as art form. Hatfield develops a more complex idea of authorship, one which recognizes the contribution of visual artist to the finished work:

Cartooning, as I define it, is emphatically not the same as illustrating a prior text; Kirby generated stories through drawing. His stories and characters were affordances to his graphic sense; vice versa, his graphics were inspired by imagined narratives.

Comic-book artists are not merely “illustrators”; they decisively shape the “text” and, consequently, the reader’s experience.

In the “Marvel method” of production, developed in Stan Lee’s collaborations with Kirby and Steve Ditko, artists worked from a story outline but made all of the decisions about breaking down, pacing, and laying out that story themselves, and the writer later returned to add captions and dialogue. Over time, Kirby was given ever freer reign by Stan Lee, who was increasingly disinterested in day-to-day editorial oversight, and became more and more responsible for what actually ended up on the page. According to Hatfield, Lee was a unifying presence without whom Marvel Comics as we know it would not exist, but Kirby should be seen as the primary author of the Marvel universe.

Kirby serves as an extreme case for this line of argument. Despite being celebrated as the “King of Comics” and his unmistakeable style, Kirby was–as Hatfield takes pains to remind us–the quintessential work-for-hire cartoonist. Over his forty-year career in comics, he produced an estimated 21,000 pages of comic art (7), and while on contract to DC in the 1970s was required to draw 15 pages a week (176). Yet, in the midst of this prodigious workload, Kirby improvised characters, concepts, and stories that are still inspiring readers and creators today–and still generating revenue for DC and Marvel (and their respective corporate owners, Warner Bros. and Disney). Borrowing from Bourdieu, Hatfield argues that Kirby managed to carve out a sphere of “relative autonomy” within a very heteronomous form of mass-media production.

The first four chapters develop this argument about authorship through Kirby’s working methods and career. Afterwards, the book loses some of its structural coherence. A chapter on the “technological sublime” in Kirby’s work, two on the Fourth World saga, and one on Kirby’s return to a very different Marvel Comics in the ‘70s follow. They’re interesting and important contributions in their own right, but also could conceivably have worked as standalone essays. The book’s real strength is the first part and the way Hatfield uses Jack Kirby and his wonderful, crazy art to redefine what it means to be a “Great Comics Artist.”

Meanwhile, I’ve written a guest post for the Comics Forum blog called “Beyond Our Borders: Mapping the Space of Comics.” Comics Forum is an academic conference under the directorship of Ian Hague and attached to the Thought Bubble Festival in Leeds. I met Ian when I was in England this summer, and he invited me to write something up for the blog, which is a great space for scholars and fans to talk to one another.

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I’ve embarked on yet another facelift for the ol’ website. Expect some adjustments in the next little while. Of note, however, are two new widgets on the right-hand sidebar: a list of selected publications available online (including my latest, “The Android’s Dungeon,” which is forthcoming in The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics) and my twitter feed (which I hope to make more use of here).

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It’s time to welcome another alum of the late, great SFU Cultural Studies Reading Group to the ranks of the academic bloggers: Dylan Mulvin, everybody.

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Stylish! Via The Mary Sue.

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After a couple years out of the classroom, I’m working as a TA again this semester in a second-year qualitative research methods class. I swear I never thought this stuff was interesting until I stopped having to take methods classes myself.

Enjoyed @NYTOpinionator’s recent debate on naturalism—viz., http://t.co/c4sH45vq http://t.co/80aqEaXf http://t.co/PWq0usxQ #methods #cmns262
@wooesque

Williams’s follow-up shows performative contradictions present in hardcore naturalism as much as radical pomo skepticism. #methods #cmns262
@wooesque

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Thanks for playing!

Although I’m grousing, I had a great trip. Both conferences I attended were extremely interesting in themselves, and it was particularly delightful to dip my toe into another scholarly community.

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As previously mentioned, I started off at the Joint International Conference of Graphic Novels, Bandes dessinées and Comics, which was jointly sponsored by the journals, Studies in Comics, European Comic Art, and the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. There were two major themes for the conference, space & time and audiences & readership. I spent most of time in the latter stream of panels, and given the formalist and humanistic tenor of most comics studies, it was a breath of fresh air.

It was particularly nice to see some empirical research on comics readers, such as Liam Burke’s survey of Thor and Green Lantern movie audiences, which found that half of those who identified as comic fans don’t actually read comics while 10% of people who identify as non-fans do, and Shari Sabeti’s work with an extracurricular graphic novel–reading club in a Scottish secondary school. Very interesting secondary analyses of data—for example, of press and citizen reviews of Joe Sacco’s Palestine (Martin Barker), of letters to the editor of Superman (Ian Gordon), or of previous interview studies of comics fans (Simon Locke)—were also presented. I think social-scientific approaches to comics and concern with the real people involved at either end of the industry still has a long way to go, but it’s clear that there is some very interesting work being done in this area that will challenge a lot of the assumptions that we have extracted from isolated readings of texts or ported over from the lore of fandom.

Excepting a lack of delegate wi-fi access, a kooky kabbalistic keynote, and a terrible beeping noise outside my dorm room, I think the conference (or, rather, its first half: I couldn’t stay for the meeting of the International Bande dessinée Society in the second half) came off rather well.

An expanded version of my paper, “The Android’s Dungeon,” will be published this December in a special issue of the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics on the theme of audiences and readership.

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From Manchester, I took a short train ride to Leeds to the Moral Economies of Creative Labour conference, organized by members of the Leeds University Institute of Communication Studies and the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change.

The conference brought together the kind of social/cultural theory I’m used to seeing in communication studies with perspectives from political and moral philosophy, which is much less common, to talk about creative work and the cultural industries. There was also a strong empirical core to many of the papers I saw.

One interesting theme to emerge was the role of universities in shaping the place of creative labour in our societies.

On the one hand, unpaid work placements and internships were an important issue for several presenters. Sabina Siebert, for example, noted that it was becoming common for aspiring journalists to devote as much as 18 months of unpaid labour to media companies, and fewer then half of them get a job out of it at the end. David Hesmondhalgh drew attention to universities’ complicity in organizing the market for unpaid work through co-op schemes.

On the other hand, academic labour was frequently referenced during question and discussion periods as presenters sought illustrations of their arguments about knowledge work in general. I wonder if this hard-nosed look at creative and cultural labour is only possible now that our own positions as academics have been suitably professionalized, “precariatized,” and demystified.

I was on a panel more closely focussed on Alasdair MacIntyre’s theory of practices and its application to cultural work. Mark Banks opened, discussing the relative merits of MacIntyrean and Bourdieusian interpretations of jazz musicians’ descriptions of their practice. I talked about audience practices as a normative foundation for cultural policy. Finally, Luke Jaaniste reflected on the competing demands of “practice” and “institution” on cultural practitioners.

I was particularly thrilled to see the keynote by Russell Keat, who is an emeritus professor at Edinburgh and whose book, Cultural Goods and the Limits of the Market, has been really important to me in the last couple years. Andrew Sayer’s closing keynote, which discussed at the idea of “contributive justice” and the division of good and bad work amongst workers and jobs, was also a highlight.

My talk is up at Scribd, and the slides can be viewed at SlideShare.

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
(Romeo and Juliet II.2, 45–46)

One of the things that’s been really fun about my recent interviews has been talking with people about how they use words like nerd, geek, and fan. Despite my own (admittedly nerdish) tendencies towards superstandard English and linguistic prescriptivism, as someone trying to put together a picture of contemporary nerd culture, I have to be open to how these words are used in practice to classify the social world. In truth, the point is not to develop ironclad definitions of them but, by asking people to reflect on how they use these labels (among others), I’m hoping to bring to the surface the kinds of reasoning that go in to defining the boundaries of geek culture.

via Great White Snark

I’m still in the early stages of this research, but I’ve observed two distinct ways of defining the meanings of these labels: (1) content and (2) intensity. That is to say, it matters both what you’re interested in and how you go about pursuing that interest.

For some of my interviewees, either (1) or (2) is more properly attached to either nerd or geek. For others, both dimensions are part of your geek cred, whatever words you choose to use. These definitional strategies don’t always produce neat and tidy results, leading some interviewees, for example, to aver that nerds are those who are obsessed with something, where that something could be anything, while geeks have an enthusiastic but more normal interest in nerdy subjects like science-fiction, comic books, and games. Or again, one could be a fan of anything but only belongs to fandom if the thing of which you are a fan is properly fannish. And, of course, not all fandoms are necessarily part of geek culture: No matter how much you may geek out about it, if it isn’t nerdy then you aren’t a geek.

I’m thinking more of these definitional issues thanks to Brett Schenker’s new column at Graphic Policy where he’s datamining Facebook for information about comic fans. In his first post, he described the age, gender composition, levels of educational attainment, relationship status, and “gender interest” of comic fans on Facebook. In the second, he’s returned to the same statistics, but has somewhat altered his criteria for selecting his data set.

Inclusion is based on the “likes” people are themselves listing on Facebook, and this seems like a really great way to sidestep the problems of the researcher having to decide who’s in and who’s out. The first post is based on American Facebook users who indicate that they like one of nine identifiers. Says Schenker, “Going above this nine added to the universe, but not to the point that it mattered much.  In my eyes, this nine were some of the top identifiers covering fans of mainstream comics and indie comics.”

In the second post, the number of identifiers has been increased to 28, although that has not jumped the size of the data set up by very much. Schenker doesn’t list what his identifiers are but explains his thinking in choosing them: “they are general comic book companies/publishers/lines and what I’ll call the ‘medium,’ so manga, comic books, graphic novels, etc.  I stayed away from individual books and personalities as well as related comic book tie-ins like movies, video games and toys.”

This reflects to a certain degree something I’ve seen in my interviews with people who describe themselves of fans. The term is more easily applied to the works of an author or a (sub)genre—i.e., “I’m a fan of Stephen Hunt,” or, “I’m a fan of steampunk.” Applying the term to an individual work is a bit trickier, unless that work has become something of a cultural phenomenon with a significantly large base of readers to sustain interest in it over time. One might be a fan of Tolkien, High Fantasy, or The Lord of the Rings, but one is probably not going to call oneself a fan of Generic High Fantasy Tolkien Rip-Off Novel, even if you really like it.

What this suggests to me is that we have to be very careful in how we deploy the word fan. There certainly was a time when it seemed that comics were a niche enough interest that, well, to know them was to love them. Is this still the case? I’m not entirely sure. But we should be clear that comic fans and the audience for comic books are not identical terms. In excluding people who identify themselves as liking individual works or as fans of creators, we‘re privileging a certain way of engaging with comics (definitional strategy [2]) over engagement simpliciter (definition strategy [1]).

However, I note that his first posts—on video games, fandom, and nerds—are totally biting my style. “Zinda, his face black, his eyes red!”

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ComicsAlliance is reporting that Superman, Mr. Truth, Justice, and the American way his own self, has formally renounced his US citizenship in this week’s Action Comics 900. One assumes that the point of this is to make the forthcoming Superman movie by Zack Snyder an easier sell in the global marketplace, the predictable right-wing media backlash guaranteeing that everyone hears about it ahead of time even though it takes place in the comics.

As mercenary as that motivation may be, I think this actually makes a lot of narrative sense—both in terms of Superman’s character and recent pushes to internationalize the DCU (such as Knight & Squire and Batman, Inc.; I’m also reminded of the period when Martian Manhunter was based out of Australia because he didn’t think enough superheroes cared about the rest of the world). Is it supposed to be a secret that he’s an alien? Are there Superbirthers in the DCU, demanding to see his long-form birth certificate?

In any case, I’ve never really thought Superman was that obviously and unavoidably American. Some commentators have raised the question of the “American” colour scheme of his costume, but I don’t recall there being a lot of yellow in the US flag. Canadians have, of course, long claimed Superman as one of ours anyway. (It is a lie.)

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P.s. This isn’t a Superman– or DC-only problem—see also Jesse’s post on the Captain America-less Canadian release of the new Avengers cartoon.

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I’ve recently decided that I am pretentious enough to carry a fountain pen around with me. When it’s not in my breast pocket, I’m told I ought to store it vertically so that it won’t leak, and so I needed a pen holder at my desk.

My dad works for a company that makes SCUBA tanks, and so we always had these butt ends, left over from the quality assurance process, around the house when I was growing up. They collected change or propped doors open. One became the base of a model of DNA I made for Biology class. I sewed a fabric lining for it and put a pad of fleece at the bottom to avoid scratches and dents. Here’s the finished product in situ:

The martini is unrelated.

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I don’t care for that Karl Lagarfeld.

First up is the Joint International Conference for Graphic Novels, Bandes dessinées, and Comics at Manchester Metropolitan University, July 5–6. I’ll be presenting in the “audiences and readership” concentration. My paper is called “The Android’s Dungeon: Comic-Book Stores as Social Settings” and draws on some of my fieldwork with local comic shops:

An adequate understanding of the readers of comic books and graphic novels must extend beyond reader–text relationships to comprise the contexts of reception. Chief among these contexts is the direct-market comic-book store. In contrast to newsstand distribution, the direct market represents the institution of comic-book collecting and connoisseurship as subcultural practices. Comics shops are not simply distribution points in a commodity chain but also a social setting that is integral to the reproduction of comic-book fandom. They occupy an ambivalent position between the comic-book industry and its consumers, and their owners must negotiate identities as fans and businesspersons. Citing findings from qualitative research conducted in three comic-book stores (part of a larger, ethnographic study of the nerd-culture scene in a Canadian city), this paper attempts to theorize these relationships: Comics shops are considered as venues for interaction among participants, as nodes in a network defined by relationships of sponsorship and promotion, as ‘interlocks’ or ‘edges’ between the contingently related fan communities served by a given store, as ‘sanctuaries’ from mainstream hierarchies of taste and status and, finally, as arenas of competition for social and (sub)cultural capital.

Immediately afterwards, I’ll be heading over to Leeds for a conference co-sponsored by the Media Industries Research Centre at the University of Leeds and the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (a joint centre between the sociology departments of Manchester University and the Open University). The conference is called Moral Economies and Creative Labour. Amongst the confirmed speakers that I am looking forward to seeing—such as David Hesmondhalgh and Andrew Sayer—I am particularly excited for a keynote from Russell Keat. His book, Cultural Goods and the Limits of the Market, which is sadly out of print and insanely expensive, really cemented for me the usefulness of MacIntyre’s moral philosophy to problems of cultural policy. I’ll be giving a paper entitled “Virtues, Vices, and Media Practices: Towards a Normative Framework for Cultural Policy”:

One important tradition in cultural theory understands the reception of cultural goods as a form of productivity. Active-audience theory usefully questioned traditional conceptions of art and culture in favour of a more democratic ethos, but its general claim for audiences’ inherent creativity or resistiveness has aged badly: it underemphasizes decisive relationships between producers and intermediaries, one the one hand, and consumers’ media practices, on the other; its populism permits the entrenchment of commercial imperatives in the cultural sector; and all audiences are not created equal. This paper examines one subcultural context, the nerd culture scene in a Canadian city, as a case study. Drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre’s theory of practices, I argue that nerds’ media-related activities cultivate certain goods and virtues but may prove vicious if their institutions become disordered. Making the former more likely than the latter is a legitimate public interest and a job for cultural policy.