Defining Limits

TCJ: I want to take a step away from your career path for a few minutes and ask you about comics in general. You're one of the few cartoonists I'm aware of who seems interested in theory, so I was hoping we could maybe use that as a springboard.

The Journal recently ran your Scott McCloud article, a piece you had originally written for a McCloud issue a few years earlier.

HORROCKS: The idea of that special issue of the Journal was that each contributor would do at least one chapter of Understanding Comics. I picked the first one, the one in which he defines comics, because for some reason I'd grappled with that more than any of the others. But I also found that chapter in some ways the most inspiring of the book because what he does is create a new way of how comics fit into the world. By a kind of theoretical sleight of hand, he allows us to look at a whole lot of other stuff as comics. And also his whole thing that comics can be very different to what we are used to, just by defining them formally rather than as a cultural phenomenon.

TCJ: You talk a lot about Understanding Comics as a polemic without letting on if it's a polemic you find useful.

HORROCKS: There are lots of ways of defining comics, and they're all useful. Ultimately that's what I'm arguing. Where there's a big danger with Understanding Comics is when people treat Scott's definition of comics as the definition of comics. Because it has enormous limitations and it has boundaries built into it. It does act as a constraint as well as a liberation.

He presents Understanding Comics' theory so effectively. He presents it as a huge liberation: "We're liberating ourselves from the constraints we've labored under all of these years because of the way we've defined comics very narrowly. And now we can see comics as being anything at all." But actually, when you look more closely at his definition, that's not quite right. Because there are a lot of things that he says aren't comics. So if you want to do comics, stay away from those things. Scott's such a sweet, accommodating guy who wants people to do whatever they want. It's not like he's going to say, "Don't you dare do this kind of thing." He's going to say, "Sure -- do that stuff. Although then it won't be comics." But a lot of things he was ruling out are things that I'm actually very interested in as someone who makes comics.

TCJ: Can you talk about some of the different ways of thinking about comics?

HORROCKS: Well, when I was teaching there were a few times when I dedicated a whole session in the course to discussing with the class: What is comics? What are comics? I wouldn't prompt them. I wouldn't say, "Here's one way of defining comics." I would leave it purely up to them. Through the discussion, we would usually end up with a bunch of variations on three different ways of defining comics. One of them was Scott's, that it's a sequence of pictures that tell a story -- some variation of Will Eisner's idea of sequential art. That was one category of definition. The next category was something that highlighted the combination of words and pictures. So more like Art Spiegelman's thing of com-mix.

TCJ: Or R.C. Harvey's verbal-visual blend.

HORROCKS: Although I must say that again I try to point to the fact that even Harvey -- subconsciously -- I think he's still basically foregrounding the visual narrative. But yeah. He's forever going on about how comics are an equal blending of words and pictures. And his way of judging them critically is how much they are an equal blend of words of pictures. [Laughs.] You didn't ask me that.

TCJ: Well, no, but I don't think we have any disagreement about that. You're right. Bob does do that. "This is what comics is, and the comics that do this are the best comics of all." I think that's something people find tiresome or inflexible about his critical viewpoint. Plus, it runs very much counter to the whole, general assumption of literary standards that people bring to comics. Which might be a good thing, actually.

HORROCKS: Well, I don't think it is. It's quite an old-fashioned essentialist way of looking at art, where you define the form and then find the essence of the form and then that becomes the critical standard: how well it utilizes the essence of the form. That just seems to me like something that was a popular notion 60 years ago and it's just not very useful. I don't find it useful, especially when you see him apply it to particular cartoonists. He winds up giving a wonderful mark to some dreadful cartooning purely because it's an equal balance between words and pictures.

And when you closely read his analysis of certain strips that he thinks fail against that criterion, you see that actually he's not really looking for an equal balance. He's looking for a situation in which the words do one thing and the pictures do another. He feels uncomfortable when comics break the "show don't tell" rule. For example, I remember in one of his books where he talks about Alex Raymond's Secret Agent X-9. He shows a strip that is a very odd strip because every important event is consigned to a caption. You get this odd, staccato cutting between moment and moment. One moment they're zooming along in the car and it's fine. And then you get a caption that describes a bullet hitting the car, the car having to stop and the heroes being left behind as the bad guys race away. Oh, and one of them has been injured. Then there's this picture of them stopped on the side of the road, with one guy saying to the other guy, "Are you all right?" So the whole climax of the chase scene is slammed into this caption and you don't get to see it. And Harvey criticizes the strip on that basis and says that it's bad comics and bad cartooning. But I feel uneasy about that.

I think Harvey pretends, as any essentialist critic has a tendency to do, that he's found some scientific basis on which to judge something. And he actually argues in his books that this is an objective criterion. Well, it's not an objective criterion. That's the whole point of my essay, to say that none of these things are objective at all. It's completely made up and it's driven by other agendas as well as the ones on the surface.

TCJ: What do you think Harvey's driving at?

HORROCKS: It's a particular aesthetic. He's got a particular aesthetic. In that particular case, with the Alex Raymond story, he feels that it's failed against that particular aesthetic. That's what it is. It's an aesthetic. It's not an objective criterion.

TCJ: So you have sequential art and words and pictures. What's the third definition of comics?

HORROCKS: The third definition is probably the most common and the most influential. And that is defining comics as some sort of cultural phenomenon. Those are all of those definitions that are based on how they look, the kinds of stories they tell, the kinds of formats they use, the kinds of readers they tend to find, the kind of market they tend to go to. Everyone who assumes that comics equals Superman and Donald Duck are defining it as a particular kind of cultural phenomenon. In fact, a lot of comics histories do the same thing, especially the early ones. The ones who say, "A comic book is ... " and then they start telling you the dimensions of the magazine. The first comic book was the first comic that had those dimensions. But I actually think that those are equally valid ways of defining comics, and often very useful ways.

TCJ: McCloud's essentialism plays into what he finds exciting about comics and the things he likes to explore in his comics. Is there something about another definition that has actually had an effect on your work or the way that you've approached a certain project?

HORROCKS: All of those ways of defining comics I find exciting and useful. Because Scott's definition allows me to look at a painting by Colin McCahon -- he's one of my favorite New Zealand painters and a lot of his paintings I read as comics. By Scott McCloud's definition, they most certainly are. As a cartoonist, they fascinate me. They really interest me. He does things with comics that almost no other cartoonist ever does. But at the same time, I also find his paintings interesting as combinations of words and pictures.

He has some paintings that wouldn't fit Scott's definition because they are a single panel. And he has some paintings that wouldn't fit Scott's definition because they don't include pictures. They just include words.

TCJ: One thing that's interesting beyond the historical puffery that happens is that looking at comics a certain way allows you to look at a lot of art as comics -- comics becomes a process of experiencing art rather than a type of art.

HORROCKS: I'm completely uninterested in the historical puffery thing. I have no interest in waging a war to make comics legitimate. I just don't care. I don't mind if they're made legitimate. I mean, there are some cartoonists who hate art-gallery shows about comics because they think it's buying into the whole art-scene culture. And they have a valid concern. But ultimately, personally, I don't care. I know enough painters and I have enough to do with that world that I know there's a lot of really exciting stuff happening there, too.

TCJ: So what is it that's appealing about being able to see those things as comics?

HORROCKS: Because it opens up different ways of approaching my own comics. Colin McCahon, in his paintings, he uses words in the most extraordinary way graphically. He letters them, and his lettering is often very rough, apparently crude, thick brushstrokes, which are often inspired by things that he's just seen around on the streets. In New Zealand, there's a kind of general store that is called a Dairy. They will often have a blackboard which they paint on, using white paint on the blackboard. They paint: "Apples, $3 a kilo" or something. They'll list stuff they have for sale. And that's the kind of lettering that McCahon was really interested in. Lettering in comics is so incredibly uninspiring. There are so few people who really explore anything like the potential for using words graphically. Including myself.

TCJ: It gives you access to other artists who use different tools.

HORROCKS: And let's face it. There is an extremely rich history of comics. It's a very rich cultural landscape to explore. But it's only one very small part of a much bigger cultural landscape, which includes some extraordinary work that most cartoonists don't even look at. In a funny way, sometimes it's easier to look at, say, Picasso and explore it and find something useful in his work if I think of it as comics.

For comics as a whole, as a scene or a community or whatever, that was one of the things I thought was most exciting about Scott's book -- that he found a way to open up the eyes of the comics world to the rest of the art world by saying, "Hey, look at all of those cool comics out there!" It's like that story about Spiegelman. He had a real reverse snobbery about fine art until someone took him to an art show and said, "Look at Picasso. Look at what a great cartoonist he was." And Spiegelman was like, "You're right. That's a good comic."

[To read the rest of this interview, please see The Comics Journal #243.]

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