The Secret Origins of Comics Studies ed. by Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan
It is almost cliché to observe that Comics Studies (with a capital "c" and "s"!) is having a moment. After decades laboring on the margins of academia's established disciplines, the field has finally elbowed its way to the faculty-meeting table, with monographs, journals, conferences, learned societies, and even a degree program or two to show for it. Not long ago, an article in Canada's National Post went so far as to proclaim that Comics Studies' "battle" for scholarly legitimacy "has been fought, and won."1 Coming off a period of expansion, then, this is a particularly opportune time for taking stock. Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan's new edited collection The Secret Origins of Comics Studies promises to do just that.
Charles Hatfield's introduction sets the volume's parameters out in broad strokes with a capsule history of comics scholarship in the United States, a narrative several other contributors return to in greater detail. Chapters are organized around particular disciplinary traditions (such as the contributions of education scholars, librarians and archivists, psychologists and psychiatrists, or gender studies scholars), theoretical or methodological sensibilities (for example, the sets of chapters on history or formalist theory), or specific topical focuses (for example, myths or manga). The final five chapters focus on the infrastructures that support a field of scholarly inquiry, profiling organizations, galleries, conferences, journals, and book publishers. The collection also contains two sets of sidebars: one briefly introduces topics the editors presumably felt wouldn't carry an entire chapter and one gives "pioneering" scholars like David Kunzle and John Lent space to share reminiscences from their experiences in the field.
Secret Origins should probably be received in the context of Smith and Duncan's previous collaborations, The Power of Comics: History, Form, and Culture and Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods.2 The former introduced comic books as a subject of scholarly inquiry, while the latter offered a menu of ways they could be analyzed. Secret Origins shares their interest in socializing students to the field of Comics Studies and is to be commended for continuing to push back against the blinders we sometimes place on ourselves about how to study comic books and graphic novels. It certainly presents an important corrective to a naïve view that Graphic Narrative sprang fully formed from Art Spiegelman or Alan Moore's skull sometime around 1986. As Ian Gordon argues towards the end of his chapter on ideology critique, maintaining such historical consciousness is a crucial task for any field:
If the origins of comics scholarship are 'secret' it is perhaps because not enough of this work has been read.… Not all this work offers a payoff intellectually, but a field that does not know and read its own history is impoverished.
(128–29) [End Page 395]
But how shall we tell that history? In "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," Michel Foucault discusses two possible approaches: one searches for origins, where it hopes to discover the essence of the present in its emergence; the other, a genealogical method, traces the false starts, dead ends, and revisions that invariably attend to any object as it passes through time. The former commemorates the past, while the latter de-naturalizes the present.3 Secret Origins attempts to do both, a tension that even plays out in the blurbs on the cover.
Richard Reynolds commends "this landmark book" for forging a "coherent narrative out of the complex and multi-threaded history—and pre-history—of comics studies." The chapters feature an abundance of forebears and forerunners, and collecting their recollections is a vital act of preservation. However, the book does not ultimately form an authoritative history of comics scholarship, and it doesn't construct a "grand tradition" around which professional self-understanding and identity will emerge. Indeed, several chapters fall back on chronicling milestones and personalities without much analysis: "So-and-so was also another important person in this area" is a typical topic sentence of too many paragraphs and sections. And, while the book offers several plausible beginnings for the field—in the self-theorizing discourse of cartoonists, in fandom, and in the Popular Culture Association—the story of how we got from there to here remains elusive.
So, perhaps the volume works better as a toolkit for assembling a critical genealogy of Comics Studies. Ben Saunders writes in his blurb that the book "explores the circumstances that made our present moment possible while paying a generous and necessary tribute to many early pioneers of the field." By highlighting the contributions of psychologists, education scholars, art historians, and communications researchers alongside various kinds of literary theorists, Secret Origins helps us imagine alternative trajectories for Comics Studies, although I'm not sure it goes far enough in exploring the consequences of the field taking one path rather than another. Similarly, the book presents itself as global in scope—the cover shows some of comics studies' pioneers in front of the flags of their home countries, creating the impression that comics studies is a world-wide endeavor, as indeed it is—but with the notable exception of chapters by Barbara Postema, Ann Miller, Nicholas Theisen, and Julia Round and Chris Murray, a book that could have served as a gateway to a broader universe of scholarship remains largely focused on Anglophone scholarship and the United States, in particular.
Of course, no single text can cover everything, and Smith and Duncan acknowledge some absences in their introduction. The question is how to deal with these gaps. The celebratory tone threatens to paper them over, creating Reynolds's "coherent narrative" out of a more complex history of roads-not-taken. That it never quite does this is to the editors' and authors' credit. In sum, The Secret Origins of Comics Studies is a richly annotated bibliography of Comics Studies' first century (give or take). Due to a fair amount of repetition between chapters, Secret Origins seems designed to reward dipping in and out of the volume rather than a cover-to-cover read. Much like Smith and Duncan's previous volumes, it will probably find its niche as a guide to students who are just entering the field or in the classroom as a supporting companion for a survey course. [End Page 396]
Benjamin Woo is assistant professor of communication and media studies at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada). He is the director of the Comic Cons Research Project, the author of Getting a Life: The Social Worlds of Geek Culture, co-author of The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books, and co-editor of Scene Thinking: Cultural Studies from the Scenes Perspective.
NOTES
1. Douglas Quan, "How Comics Became Literature—and Entered Serious World of Academics: 'The Battle Has Been Fought, and Won,'" The National Post, Jan. 22, 2016. http://nationalpost.com/news/canada/comics-enter-the-serious-world-of-academics-laughing.
2. Randy Duncan and Matthew J Smith, The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture (London: Bloomsbury, 2009); Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan, eds., Critical Approaches to Comics: Theory and Methods (New York: Routledge, 2012).
3. Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139–64.
