But I was snapped back into attention when someone casually commented that such-and-such a moment was “the beginning of the cultural legitimation of the geek,” and everyone nodded their heads at this sage insight.

This kind of comment has become common sense, thanks to thirty years of “Revenge of the Nerds” and “geek chic” headlines. We all “know” that computers, the Internet, and successful sci-fi, fantasy, and comic-book movies have made geeks chic. We all “know” that we should be nice to nerds because someday we’ll be working for one.<1> Indeed, we all “know” that nerd and geek are just meaningless labels because everyone’s a geek now, right?

But it’s the kind of comment I’ve become really sensitive to from paying close attention to how people actually use these labels.<2> Increasingly, I’m convinced that this whole idea is a myth. That’s not to deny all of the individual facts, but only the grand conclusions drawn from them. That’s because there’s no stable referent behind words like nerd and geek. They’re more like tokens in a game, and what they mean depends on what’s at stake at any given moment.

The idea that the “triumph of the nerds” discourse is a media construction doesn’t quite hold water, either. There certainly does seem to be more media interest in geeky subjects today, but mainstream media outlets are no more consistent in their coverage of them than ordinary people are. Two stories in the past couple of days reminded me that it’s not all thick glasses frames and POW! BAM! comic-book headlines in MSMland.

First, Toronto’s Globe and Mail broke the story that Naval intelligence officer and accused spy SLt. Jeffrey Delisle–wait for it–played video games online and bought cheezy replica mediaeval weapons. And he let his kids play video games, too. Lock him up and throw away the key! I’ll admit that I hadn’t been following this story closely, but I can’t find any indication in the Globe’s reporting that anyone alleges that Delisle was funnelling state secrets to Chinese goldfarmers in order to soup up his WoW character. It’s more like they tracked down his ex-wife, and this was the most shocking thing they got from the interview. Granted, it sounds like maybe he had a bit of a problem, but then again you don’t necessarily want to take an ex’s side of things at face value, do you? In any case, this story–and its framing–serves no purpose but to make Delisle seems like a deviant and a weirdo for being a gamer.

Second, the Mary Sue reports that The New York Times’s reviewed Game of Thrones on the assumption that no one could ever like it. Indeed, the review tells us precious little about how the new season is, focusing instead on why ordinary TV viewers can’t be expected to devote their limited supply of neurons to a show with too many characters. Critic Neil Gerzlinger, who mostly seems still broken up over Ned Stark dying, not only has trouble imagining what audiences might like about the (book and TV) series but refuses to acknowledge that lots of people do like it. The show’s audience, according to Gerzling, will never expand beyond people “addicted” to the novels and “Dungeons and Dragons types.” Lurking behind this phrasing is yet another sneer at the Cheetoh-fingered basement dwellers.<3>

In some ways, this kind of coverage returns us to the original meaning of the word geek–that is, a carnival freak. But everyone’s a geek now, right?

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1. This quote is, interestingly enough, misattributed to Bill Gates. Its true author is conservative pundit Charles J. Sykes.
2. See, e.g., Will the “Real” Nerds Please Stand Up? and A Fan by Any Other Name. \r
3. With that in mind, I am really interested in Wil Wheaton’s new show on YouTube / Felicia Day’s Geek and Sundry, Tabletop. As Wheaton explained in a blog post the show is intended to showcase gaming (in this case Euro-ish boardgames) as a totally normal pastime for totally normal people. Of course, putting this message on a YouTube channel that is explicitly marketed to “geeks,” however people hear and understand that, would seem to suggest a preaching-to-the-choir situation. \r

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to talk about this post, please feel free to tweet me @wooesque, find me on Google+, or email me at bmw@benjaminwoo.net.

The event was a huge success; the shop was packed to the rafters with guests, volunteers, comic fans and newcomers alike. We had book signings, cupcakes, giveaways and an atmosphere unlike any other. I’d been hyping the event online through various social media, and some blogs were kind enough to post links to it and promote it. When people really took notice, though, was afterward. I put up a selection of photos taken during the event, and my inbox lit up overnight. A dozen-odd staff members and regular customers of shops all over the world were shocked at just how well-attended it was.

We can learn a lot from this initiative, both about how the comic industry might respond to the challenges they’re currently facing and about nerd culture can become a more inclusive, welcoming space. In fact, I think those two goals are pretty closely are pretty closely related.

Why Comic-Bookstores (Still) Matter

Doing my research on nerd culture, I’ve had the weird experience of becoming a partisan for specialty retailers. I say weird because my institutional context and intellectual tradition are very suspicious of anyone making money off of culture—unless the money comes from a government grant.<1>

However, the more I hung around comic-bookstores and game shops for my fieldwork, the more convinced I became that they’re worth defending. Not because they’re perfect—or even necessarily all that great—but because they’re part of the infrastructure that fan communities are built on top of.

The situation is particularly acute in the comic-book industry, which is a production oligopoly and a distribution monopoly. Stores have come under a lot of pressure from declining and fragmenting readership, as well as new competition with digitally distributed comics (whether legal or pirated). Current estimates suggest that the number of Direct Market comic shops in the US has declined by roughly one-half over the last twenty years.<2> Meanwhile, hopes that the manga boom or tie-ins from the big, Hollywood superhero movies would introduce bring new readers into comic-bookstores have proven largely illusory.

Some are willing to say good riddance, perhaps believing that, freed from the Direct Market, comics might once again become a mass medium with a broad, financially stable audience. We have websites and forums and social media now, after all. New media have proven themselves to be great tools for extending fan communities–especially for folks who don’t have a comic shop in their town or can’t travel to conventions. That much is clear.

But it’s too early to say what would happen to our fan communities–let alone to the creative workers who currently rely on the Direct Market to publish and/or distribute their stories–if we threw specialty retailers (and other important local institutions) onto the garbage heap of history, as though Amazon or Comixology could pick up right where they left off.

Making Communities

Community is maybe an over-used word. That’s partly because it has an almost entirely positive connotation,<3> and partly because it’s so wonderfully vague. In fact, community is a subjective experience more than anything else, and it’s produced when people orient to something as if it were a community. Community isn’t a thing; it’s something we do.

One thing that struck me during my research was that the game stores I studied were much more intentional about cultivating in-store communities than the comic shops were. There are a couple obvious reasons for this. They tend to have more space, and their owners believe that “supporting” the games they sell means organizing events for their players. These weekly or monthly game days and tournaments provide a focus for local gamers. Some players of the D&D miniatures game that I talked to, for example, said they played an online version of the game a couple times a week, but the monthly tournament at the store was pretty much the only time they got their miniatures out and played with other people. Thus, game stores are important venues for gathering and interacting, for creating a community of players that might not otherwise exist.

By contrast, the comic-bookstore owners and staff I talked to viewed shopping for comics as itself a social activity. Furthermore, many (though by no means all) of them profess a belief that the audience for comics is determined by external factors over which they have no influence–in the parlance of Actor-Network Theory, it appears as a “black box” to them.

Thus, they mostly let things play out naturally amongst the “Wednesdays Warriors.” And there’s lots to like about the informal chit-chat and debating that happens in most comic shops. However, the tendency to turn these conversations into trivia and referencing contests and to treat subjective, personal taste as objective facts makes it pretty easy to feel like an outsider in that space.

Just getting comics into people’s hands won’t build the audience for comic books. For that, we need to get them involved and invested in comic-book culture, and that means making comic-book culture a better place to be in.

Opening the Doors

This is also my not-too-subtle way of looping back to the issue of sexism in nerd culture, and maybe starting to think about what we can do about it.

After I posted my recent article on Cross Assault and nerd sexism, one of other players in my gaming emailed to share some of her experiences and to ask what I thought was the way forward. At first, I copped out and gave the “no quick fixes, more discussion” non-answer I’ve gotten used to providing as an academic. But that was, rightfully, not very satisfying to either of us. As we talked about it, I was reminded of something a comic shop owner said to me:

I remember a conversation I had with a guy in the bar where I used to drink when I was a young man. This would have been at least in the 1980s. And it was at the time when a local hotel became a gay hotel. And I remember saying to the bartender, “Well, how does a hotel turn gay?” And he said, “Well, it’s easy. They just hire gay staff.” And it sort of dawned on me, “Well, duh. You know, if I want girls to come in the store, I should hire some girls–or, women.” By exercising common sense and having a mix of genders in the store, you sort of take away from that sort of frat club atmosphere that develops when just guys are working together. And so it’s good for the store, and it definitely makes it a lot more accessible for women.

It seems simple–maybe even simplistic–but I think this is right on the money. What we need is people who are already well positioned in the culture–in the industries that support it, in the media that talk about it, and in local communities–to show leadership and help make sure that nerd culture is a safe space for everyone who wants to participate. Because nerd culture has heretofore been predominantly male–or, at least, its institutions have–that means a lot of men are going to have to take ownership in this process alongside the women who are already doing so much to remind us all that girl geeks deserve better from our fandoms. That feels weirdly anti-feminist, as though women need men to fix things for them. But when men are (part of) the problem,<4> then owning up to our role, correcting what we can, and getting out of the way when appropriate is the right thing for gentleman geeks to do.

Conclusion

Many people’s image of comic-book culture is still shaped by the speculator boom of the ‘90s. To be a comic fan, they think, is to be a comic collector. We’ve got to ditch the collector mentality–and not in favour of some idea of comics as “Art” or “Literature” (as much as I love many comics made with that goal). No, we’ve got to recover the joys of connecting with others around comics, and make that central to comic-book culture. When people orient themselves to a comic-book community rather than to individual books or characters, they’ll feel personally, emotionally invested in it.<5> They’ll make comic-book culture a good place to be.

And there’s an important role for comic-bookstores to play in building up an inclusive community of comic readers, fans, and creators. Free Comic Book Day is a good start, but many of the FCBD events I’ve visited are little more than sales–they may clear out some space in the store but I’m not sure how many new comics readers they attract.<6> And here’s where Ladies’ Night at Strange Adventures is an instructive template–both in holding an attractive community event in a comic shop and in extending a welcome to an often under-served component of the comics audience.

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1. Not that I’m against the government subsidizing culture, mind. I just worry that government tends to subsidize high and upper-middle cultural products while neglecting many that are equally marginal or niche (and, thus, need at least policy and infrastuctural support if not direct financial support) because they’re “popular.” \r
2. See my article “The Android’s Dungeon,” 127, 135n4. \r
3. Raymond Williams, “The Importance of Community,” in Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism (London: Verso, 1989), 112. \r
4. When I say men are part of the problem, I don’t mean that every man is sexist, or even that a significant proportion are consciously or explicitly acting in sexist ways. But we are involved every day in a culture that, in a mix of intended and unintended consequences, produces outcomes that can only be described as sexist. Comic artist Paul Duffield has recently tackled this issue in a really thoughtful way. \r
5. And encouraging people to identify with a community–thereby increasing the going rate for “integrity-dollars”–may be the most effective long-term strategy for pushing back against comics piracy. \r
6. In one store I visited on FCBD, some kids came through carrying bags from a handful of other comic shops all over town. Is this a win? I’m not sure. \r

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to talk about this post, please feel free to tweet me @wooesque, find me on Google+, or email me at bmw@benjaminwoo.net.

ᔥ bethszimmerman.com ↬ Google Image Search ↬ Warner Bros. Pictures ↬ the Universe ↬ God Almighty

I don’t remember how I found this article from the Times about two new initiatives to develop best practices in the online content-aggregation biz. I guess that’s pretty ironic.

Nonetheless, the wannabe typography nerd in me, who loves interrobangs and double daggers and all sorts of puzzling symbols, was rather taken with The Curator’s Code, brainchild of Brain Pickings’ Maria Popova.

The idea is to codify the practice of giving credit to others for having rustled up content that you yourself are now sharing, with typographical symbols representing direct and indirect discovery—that’s from the unified Canadian aboriginal syllabary (ᔥ) and a rightwards arrow with loop (↬), respectively.<1> Certainly, having a single character to replace “via,” “hat tip,” &c. is a boon to conscientious Twitter users.

Marco Arment, creator of the app that’s responsible for me often forgetting where I first encountered articles, posted a great commentary (ᔥ Daring Fireball). He obliquely returns to the subject of an earlier article to note that educating people about linking probably won’t change their behaviour because the “problems with online attribution aren’t due to a lack of syntax: they’re due to the economics and realities of online publishing.”

But where this gets really interesting to me is when the debate turns to the value of a “curator’s” labour, voice and brand in the current online environment:

But regardless of how much time it takes to find interesting links every day, I don’t think most intermediaries deserve credit for simply sharing a link to someone else’s work.

Reliably linking to great work is a good way to build an audience for your site. That’s your compensation.

But if another link-blogger posts a link they found from your link-blog, I don’t think they need to credit you. Discovering something doesn’t transfer any ownership to you. Therefore, I don’t think anyone needs to give you credit for showing them the way to something great, since it’s not yours. Some might as a courtesy, but it shouldn’t be considered an obligation. (2012, under “Credit for discovery”)

Popova, who notes in the donation text on Brain Pickings that it takes “450+ hours a month to curate and edit” the site, responded yesterday on twitter:

I greatly respect @marcoarment’s work and mind, but wholeheartedly disagree here http://t.co/ZmnS01qE Discovery IS authorship, of curiosity! @brainpicker

As the Times article suggests, aggregation is a big deal these days. When we call it “curation,” it begins to connect to a wider trend in our society of endowing authority to consumption and lifestyle experts–what Pierre Bourdieu (1984) referred to as “cultural intermediaries” and the “new petite bourgeoisie.”

On TV and in magazines, they give fashion advice, redecorate your house, tell you what wines to appreciate and what food to serve them with. The trendy neighbourhoods of our “creative cities” are chock-full of boutique stores whose business model rests on the curatorial acumen of their owners.<2> And, online, a lot of traffic is generated, trapped, and pushed around by content aggregators that are located somewhere on the “continuum between 100% original reporting and zero value being added to the source content” (Arment 2012, under “Aggregation, over-quoting, and rewriting”).

There’s no doubt that the immaterial labour of linking and sharing adds value to the product in question. That’s not only true in some kind of existential way but also quite literally in the case of advertising-supported media. But is it, as Popova suggests, the creation of some new thing (“curiosity”)?

I’d suggest that it resembles the immaterial labour of the fan rather than that of the author.<3> That is to say, curating is a distinct practice from authorship. They are articulated together and require one another, but they’re not the same thing and conflating them is unhelpful.

But all this is really a matter of selling past the close. One doesn’t need to believe that linking is tantamount to creating a derivative cultural commodity in order for one to give a tip of the rightwards arrow with loop.

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1. Depending on your computer’s support for Unicode, these symbols may or may not show up. If they don’t, check out curatorscode.org to see what they look like. \r
2. I’d also argue this is true of the specialty retailers and organizations I’ve studied doing my research on the nerd-culture scene (Woo, forthcoming 2012). \r
3. Sarah Thornton’s 1996 discussion of “hipness” as a form of “subcultural capital” amongst British ravers, DJs, and club promoters might be apposite here.

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to talk about this post, please feel free to tweet me @wooesque, find me on Google+, or email me at bmw@benjaminwoo.net.

Manager: Nerds start when they’re kids, and they end when they die.

BMW: Okay. Um—

Manager: Or when they get married.

Customer A: Yeah.

Customer B: And have to sell their collections because their wife doesn’t like looking at the miniatures.

Customer A: No, that’s true.

Customer B: ((shrill voice)) “You spent how much money on these!?”

Manager: So, like, the marriage age is the time that you start having … Like, you have a little garden of nerds. They start [as] little children, and then women come in and they kill lots of them. And some of them keep growing into big nerds, but many of them are taken away and re-planted in the married-with-kids garden.

Customer B: It’s a sad garden.

Manager: It’s a ((laughs)) fucking sad garden.

Customer B: Full of wilted flowers.

Manager: Full of wilted flowers that are stomped on by little children who don’t care.

Them’s Fightin’ Games

I’m not a video gamer,<1> but I read this editorial by Ben Kuchera in the Penny Arcade Report with the peculiar mix of interest and shame that the internet so reliably provides. It’s on the Cross Assault controversy–that’s a reality webseries about competitive players of fighting games that has run into a little problem: Not everyone shares these players’ sense of appropriate decorum. The series opened a window onto the sexist language and harassing behaviour that, according to its self-appointed spokesperson, Aris Bakhtanians, is integral to the fighting game community.

Isaiah Taylor has been critical of the way that media outlets–including games journalists–have covered the story:

Don’t think you can come down to our little circus show and point in disgust and think some bones won’t be thrown back at you[. …] I’m taking issue with why you’re visiting our “back alley.” I love the fact that you got a hot tip on this juicy story. I like that you felt just as uncomfortable as I did and are working hard to rid all communities of this kind of behavior. My question is, when will I see you again? EVO? Are you even interested in our culture besides one or two in-depth articles a year?

As a social scientist, I’m pretty sympathetic to this argument. But, while Taylor says he opposes the kind of behaviour being touted as representative of fighting game players, it’s not really clear to me how he thinks the fighting game community, gamers in general, nerds, or just plain decent folks ought to respond when something like this happens–other than personal confrontations.<2>

We can only get beyond the freak-show treatment if we try to understand where this behaviour comes from. Not excuse it–there’s no excuse–but to figure out why more or less reasonable people can perceive this as an okay way to conduct themselves.<3>

There are lots of good reasons for the outside observer to write nerd and geek cultures off as irredeemably sexist. You put a bunch of omega males in a social context where they have the ability to assert dominance over others, you’re going to get some ugly behaviour. Since anyone reading this has an internet connection, I feel safe assuming we’ve all seen examples of that ugly behaviour online.

Men Who Hate Women?

My own experience in nerd culture has been pretty good. I know lots of good, thoughtful, compassionate, nice people. Almost everyone I’ve talked to during my research–when reflecting deliberately and carefully on the issue–has recognized that the culture has been dominated by men, that there are problems with that, and that we should all pull together to try to make it better. Most of the store managers and group organizers I interviewed believed that the proportion of women shopping in their stores and participating at their events had increased, so–to coin a phrase–it gets better.

But why does it suck in the first place?

I don’t think the answer can be reduced to simple demographic preponderance. Those numbers do mean, however, that it’s really easy to slip into thinking of the default nerd as a man. As I said, my interviewees were pretty much universally in favour of seeing more women participating in nerd culture. But when talking about nerds and geeks in the abstract, many of them–even female interviewees–switched to “he” or “guys.” That’s sexist, but it’s the jaywalking of sexism: technically wrong but we do it anyways, more for convenience than any malicious intent. When we’re thinking clearly and carefully, we’d be happy to rephrase and use language that reflects the diversity of our communities.

So, where do things go so horrifically off the rails? How do we get from casually referring to a generic gamer as “he” to constantly yelling “rape that bitch”? I don’t think I can connect all those dots–there’s undoubtedly a lot of stuff that leads any particular individual to that end point–but I want to address what I think is the most elemental form of sexism in nerd culture: the belief that women spoil the fun. It can easily seem benign, but I think it’s at the root of a lot of our problems, or at least the trouble we have talking reasonably about our problems.

The quote from my fieldnotes that I included at the beginning of this post reflects that belief particularly clearly, but I also heard similar statements from all sorts of geeks. Again and again, you hear stories of “guys” who have to sell their prized comic collections or their action figures or whatever because they’re getting married and their fiancees won’t let them in the house. Since we’ve already defined nerds as presumptively male–and because this is one thing they share with other undomesticated masculine pursuits–it’s pretty easy to endorse the cultural script of women as the old ball ‘n’ chain sapping everything enjoyable from life. Nerdy leisure activies are experienced as a realm of freedom, and women are a constraint.

Remember, too, that these are the same guys who are constrantly portrayed as pathetic and unloveable in the media and popular culture. They’re contantly told that they have to change themselves in order to please women. If they don’t, not only will they die alone but they will come in for all kinds of harassment themselves for failing to obey the norms of hegemonic masculinity.

Thus, not only women but any criticism of sexist behaviour or content can be perceived as an attack. Complaining about the way women are drawn in comic books or about people using the bad f-word on voice chat is seen as yet another case of people–women!–trying to stop us from doing the thing we love, maybe the one thing we’re good at, and to take away one of the few spaces we feel we own.<4>

Because of the language and behaviour that we let slide in geek communities, women can’t experience them as a realm of freedom; the nerds they have to deal with are a constraint. I find that really sad. But here’s the thing–and this is going to seem so obvious once I say it–women aren’t trying to keep us from having fun. They’re not trying to “kill” us. They–and everyone else who is critical of nerd sexism–are not agents of the Thought Police. They’re not trying to change us. They’re asking us to take some responsibility for our choices.

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1. But much the same could be said about pervasive sexism, racism and homophobia in comics and the comment-thread culture of denialism on any website that deigns to call a spade a spade. \r

2. “I will not support any form of what Aris did. If I see you pop-off on a stream, I will confront you and make you uncomfortable. If you come to Season’s Beatings [in my city] and take issue with my words, I will have no problem discussing this with you in person. Period.” (Taylor, para. 12) \r

3. Of course, some people are just jerks. \r

4. “The beauty of the fighting game community, and you should know this–it’s based around not being welcome. That’s the beauty of it. That’s the key essence of it. When you walk into an arcade for the first time, nobody likes you.” (Bakhtanians quoted in Kuchera, under “The Show”) Cf. my recent paper on comic-bookstores, “The Android’s Dungeon.” \r

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to talk about this post, please feel free to tweet me @wooesque, find me on Google+, or email me at bmw@benjaminwoo.net.

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.”

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to talk about this post, please feel free to tweet me @wooesque, find me on Google+, or email me at bmw@benjaminwoo.net.

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

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to talk about this post, please feel free to tweet me @wooesque, find me on Google+, or email me at bmw@benjaminwoo.net.

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.”

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to talk about this post, please feel free to tweet me @wooesque, find me on Google+, or email me at bmw@benjaminwoo.net.

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.

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to talk about this post, please feel free to tweet me @wooesque, find me on Google+, or email me at bmw@benjaminwoo.net.

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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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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 reading. If you’d like to talk about this post, please feel free to tweet me @wooesque, find me on Google+, or email me at bmw@benjaminwoo.net.

Poster design by Stuart Thursby

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to talk about this post, please feel free to tweet me @wooesque, find me on Google+, or email me at bmw@benjaminwoo.net.