What made me wish I went to WonderCon

When I saw the WonderCon '09 lineup, I didn't feel too badly about missing it.

1. I was already planning on going to the NY Comic Con, which was featuring a lot of big name talents like Bendis, Morrison, Stracyznski, etc.

2. It would have made for a pretty expensive plane ticket.

Of course, right after it happens, I hear about the awesome panel to end all awesome panels - a discussion between Matt Fraction, writer of INVINCIBLE IRON MAN and CASANOVA (two of the best comics out right now), as well as Michael Chabon, novelist extraordinaire and author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and WonderBoys.

It's funny - it seems so obvious that Chabon would be a comic book fan considering that Kavalier and Klay, his Pulitzer prize winning 650 page beast of a novel, is entirely about comic book creators in the Golden Age of comics. And yet still, I had this impression that he was somebody that had just grown up reading Superman comics and at best described his comics reading experience the way most people nowadays would describe collecting baseball cards or watching Saturday morning cartoons: Something that captured a lot of childhood's excitement and passion, but is really a thing of the past.

It was the only explanation that made sense to me. I thought - There's just no way a serious, accepted, literary author could keep up with the funny books every month! Comics are considered to be a lowbrow artform, after all. People are willing to see movies like A History of Violence, Road to Perdition, or Ghost World, but rarely show any interest in seeing the comic books they were adapted from. Hell, 90% of the people who raved about Dark Knight (and those ravings were totally legitimate) have no interest in picking up a comic book.

One time when I was working at Borders, I got to know an older employee who told me that when he was younger, he collected every Marvel comic book between 1961 and 1970. He was a totally devout enthusiast in his childhood and made an effort to collect and read any comic book he could get his hands on. WhenI asked him if he'd read any newer comics, he shook his head and said he thought they were "too adult". This is coming from a guy that read almost exclusively adult fiction.

No matter how much evidence there is to the contrary, people seem to think comic books are for kids.

Imagine my excitement when I found that Chabon, a critically acclaimed writer possessing "literary merit" is bona fide fan of current comics. Hell, he even reads IRON FIST, the lowbrow of a lowbrow artform. That's awesome. Ironically, the discussion him and Fraction had centered around the very subject I'm complaining about - the high culture and low culture division in fiction and literature, particularly the stigmatization of genre.

Reading this was like getting a huge deep breath of fresh air for me. Finally, I got to hear from writers within the establishment that had the same gripes I've had. I've always seen that writers like Philip K. Dick or Stephen King were relegated to Sci-Fi or Horror sections of bookstores, and to boot, there are many that will make the claim that the works of these writers "aren't literature."

Just what the hell does that mean?

I recall once reading something where somebody asked Orson Scott Card why Stephen King's books weren't considered literature. His response was "His works are obviously literature in the sense that people read his books and enjoy them. However, they are not literature in the sense that they are not accepted by the academic and literary elite." And that's really what this comes down to - what academia decides is and isn't art. In this case, the jury is still out on works of genre.

Personally, I don't buy the whole high art vs. low art distinction. I'm not entirely sure what people classify as "high art", but I'm going to assume that it's works that are considered to be intellectually stimulating or historically relevant. I think it's a terribly elitist assumption to assume that works that are more cerebral and require more intellectual engagement are inherently superior to works that are not. I think that "popcorn art" (be it a movie, comic book, whatever), as in works that are designed strictly to entertain, have a very important function in our culture. Imagine if everytime we got home from a long day of work we sat down and plunged through another few chapters of Ulysses before the next work day. This would probably result in a mass suicide epidemic.

But let's assume I buy into the high art/low art distinction as worthwhile. Does the presence of a detective, a talking gorilla, or God forbid, a superhero, really detract from the ability to tell an intellectually engaging story? Do these elements prevent us from telling stories that reflect human nature?

I really think not. And as Chabon and Fraction pointed out, there are writers like Vonnegut, Dickens, and Balzac, all members of the literary canon, that conformed to genre elements in some way or another.

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I'm going to cut myself off because I could probably get another 5 pages out of this. I'll be writing more about the subject of genre in subsequent posts.