Genre in Comics

Now that I've given my little rant on genre in the realm of literature, I'd like to talk about how this relates to comics. However, I can't talk about the field of comics as a whole, since there are many different subdivisions, each with their own perceptions on what comics do and where they should be going. I'm going to lump the whole medium into two categories:

1. Mainstream comics: Take note - when I say "mainstream" I am more talking about style than I am about sales. If it has the feel of a network television show, it's a mainstream comic. A mainstream comic isn't just one that includes superheroes, it's a comic that's hip, accessible, gritty, or what have you, so this camp consists of Y: THE LAST MAN as much as it does SPIDER-MAN. Most of the comics on Image, books like SCOTT PILGRIM at Oni, virtually everything on the Vertigo line, and oh, did I mention Marvel and DC?

2. Serious comics: Okay - I confess I couldn't find a good name for this camp within comics. "Underground" or "indie" seem like the most likely choices, and yet many comics like Maus or Persepolis have sold in the millions, which is hardly "underground", and with guys like Harvey Pekar and the Hernandez bros getting deals with DC and Pantheon, these books are hardly independent either. What I'm referring to is a camp within comics that consists of people at publishers like Fantagraphics and Drawn and Quarterly. Guys like Dan Clowes, James Sturm, Craig Thompson, Jason Lutes, and Art Spiegelman, who are all essentially attempting serious literary fiction within comics. These are the kinds of books that Time Magazine typically writes about.

Clearly, not everybody fits into one camp or the other. Scott McCloud is a guy that seems to hang out with the serious crowd, and yet he flirted with mainstream ideas in his sci-fi/superhero comic ZOT and even hangs out with Kurt Busiek. The Hernandez bros were always exclusively independent and yet Jaime had a lightheartedness to his early work and included a few superhero characters in LOVE & ROCKETS. Alan Moore has constantly drifted between the two, doing big mainstream books for DC in the 80's, subsequently doing serious work in the Doystevskian graphic novel A Small Killing, and then going back to doing mainstream work for Image and Wildstorm.

But, on the whole, people choose their camps and stick with em. Mark Millar's much more likely to be going out drinking with Garth Ennis and Brian Bendis at cons than he is with Chris Ware, and conversely somebody like Adrian Tomine is much more likely to write the introduction to a book by Lynda Barry than somebody like Robert Kirkman.

Aside from these "who sits with who" cafeteria type divisions, there is a clear distinction between the two camps in their perceptions of genre.

The serious comics camp tends to stick to, well, serious fiction. There's the autobiographical comics of Harvey Pekar, the slice of life stories seen in Adrian Tomine's OPTIC NERVE and the Hernandez brothers LOVE AND ROCKETS, and memoirs that range from the historical (Maus and Persepolis) to the deeply personal and confessional (Craig Thompson's Blankets and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home). While some of these stories border on the fantastical, they rarely, if ever feature elements of genres such as detective fiction, spy fiction, or the superhero.

The mainstream comics crowd tends to go for much bigger stories than the relatively austere, serious crowd does. Rarely will you see a comic from guys like Brian Bendis, Mark Millar, or Greg Rucka that doesn't feature big action, crime elements, violence, chases, explosions, and whatever else that could get your blood pumping. The visceral is favored over the mundane, the fast pace over the snail crawl, and action over introspection. Don't expect any of these guys to write any of these guys to write stories about guys that work in convenience stores.

What's interesting about these two camps is how little crossing over there is, despite the fact that some mainstream writers have the potential to do great general fiction and visa versa.

Garth Ennis, for instance, demonstrates a really firm grasp of characterization as well as some of the best, most naturalistic dialogue in the business. Both of these qualities make him seem completely prime for a personal, non-genre related story, and yet the vast majority of his published works are war fiction, Westerns, or over the top superhero parodies. Just as well, Bendis's flair for chitter chatter and drama of ordinary people that comes up in ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN makes him seem like a great candidate to do the same. And yet, on the rare occasion when he does something that's not a Marvel comic, it's much more likely to be a crime comic than anything else.

To my knowledge, serious camp doesn't seem to decry genre elements so much as it avoids them. It's possible that people like Tomine and Spiegelman are all, at heart, huge Raymond Chandler fans, and that it just never comes up in their work. Many have, however, mentioned several times in interviews that they really dislike superhero comics. They don't like superheroes, they don't read them, and they certainly don't have any interest in writing or drawing them.

While I think it's becoming increasingly common to go from one camp to the other
(Brian Wood publishes both realistic fiction like Demo and Local as well as big sci-fi or action stuff like DMZ and NORTHLANDERS, Warren Ellis writes all kinds of sci-fi but also fits in a historical graphic novel like Crecy), for the most part, most creators stick to one or the other. Hell, most creators act like the other camp doesn't exist.

Personally, I'd like to see it more often. Let's see the folks at Drawn and Quarterly flirt with genre elements a little bit. Let's see somebody at Fantagraphics actually accept an invitation to work at Marvel. And let's see some of the Marvel and DC crowd do stories that don't feel like wannabe television shows for once.