University of Wisconsin, Madison

The Art Department, 4D area

At a Cross-Road with Comics:

Reflections on my Work and Contemporary Dialogues in Art

Joshua Duncan

Professor Lynda Barry

Professor Gail Geiger

Professor Stephen Hilyard

Professor Doug Rosenberg

March 16, 2015

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At a Cross-Road with Comics:

Reflections on my Work and Contemporary Dialogues in Art

When examining my own art, I find myself in a peculiar scenario which Nam June Paik

has helped me better understand through his illustration of his place as a video artist. As Paik

said, “I think video is half in the art world and half out,” and drew a diagram placing himself at

the intersection between Art and Information [which I recreated in figure 1]. One reason Paik

saw things this way is because avant-garde video art of the 60s and 70s appropriated information

from TV, which was then re-presented in the context of art spaces, creating a feedback loop

between art and the mass-information culture.

Similarly, comic artists have their own sub-culture, and writings on comics focus on that

community’s history, innovations, and aspirations for the medium. It is rare to find a comic artist

or scholar operating within “the art world,” and thus finding overlap between the writings of art

world scholars and comic world scholars is a challenge. Many of my comics have a place within

the comics world, yet bringing this work into the context of a gallery setting asking myself how
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my comics and videos relate has proved a puzzle. Complicating matters further is my

compulsion to use Christian imagery in both sketches and video.

The first question, posed by Professor Lynda Barry, asks me to imagine myself in a

hypothetical situation in which I was free to make work without having to answer to either a

pastor or an art professor, each with different ideas about art and religious images. The question

asks me how, if I wanted to make intensive work responding to Giovanni Bellini’s Christ in

Gethsemane, I would go about it [Figure 2].

Simply put, I would start by cartooning. The reason I would use the word “cartooning” as

opposed to “sketching” is my purpose would not be to recreate Giovanni’s composition through

labor-intensive drawing, but to quickly understand how the figures are placed and what this

might be communicating about their emotions. Ivan Brunetti’s preferred the term “cartoon” over

what he thought was the more pretentious “comic art,” and his understanding of a cartoon is

helpful: a cartoon is more like a character in a language than a drawing. Like an emoticon, a

cartoon is both image and language at once.

After researching every other depiction of this event I could find, whether in old master

paintings or cheesy children’s cartoons, I would try to understand how artists had interpreted this
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powerful emotional scene from the narrative of Christ and how I might approach it differently. I

might go as far as to create more polished compositional drawings, trying to express something

about the narrative I thought was lacking in other representations. My sketchbooks show

numerous examples of where I have undertaken this exact process [Figure 3]. Generally, though

this process bears similarity to how a realist painter would choose a single composition before

beginning a laborious painting, I would have much more interest in walking through the

moments in time before and after the singular event. Comic artists often are aware of what is left

out in the moments between panels, requiring the imagination to fill the gap and connect the

separate images.
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If I didn’t have inspiration to make a more finished piece, my sketches would lie and wait for a

time to be referenced later. In the case of Christ in Gethsemane I did have an impulse to create

something when I heard a line “Oh my gosh, do I pray!” in the viral video “He-Man Sings.” This

line brought to mind an animated cartoon of Christ praying in Gethsemane from my childhood,

produced by Hannah-Barbera, the same animation studio behind the He-Man scenes appropriated

by the makers of the viral video.

Essentially, I don’t know how to “sketch out ideas” in video format. By drawing and

thinking through scenes like a comic artist, with an emphasis on emotion and physical expression

in the tradition of Will Eisner, I can work my ideas about an image or narrative which has a

personal power over my thinking. In contrast, the videos seem to come later, generally when I

see technology allowing me to make something bizarre that I’ve thought of. My sketches are

emotionally sincere, literal, and interested in narrative, while the videos are impulsive,

technological, and generally reproduce a pre-existing meme or trend in video. It is the videos that

have posed the most questions about what constitutes sacrilege or blasphemy. By the time I made

“Heyeayeayeaster” in 2013, I was aware enough of this that I included the high priest yelling

“Blasphemy!” while watching the same video he is in. On one hand, this is a “gag” at the
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expense of those who might be so offended by the video, that they might react to it in the same

way that those who accused Jesus Christ of blasphemy did. On the other hand, it expresses my

own sense of doubt about the appropriateness of what I’m doing by mixing a sacred subject with

a profane pop-culture gag. The ability for the work to be interpreted in different ways by

different audiences, and my own inability to control or adequately express the “meaning” of the

piece is the aspect of my work I have seen discussed in texts describing postmodern art,

particularly by Margot Lovejoy.

The reason why I would be willing to make the videos in this series while having

reservations over their appropriateness relates to my changing attitudes on art. Prior to 2010, I

would have argued that the only art worth doing is a realistic art that took a lot of work to make,

and even wrote a short essay at one point arguing that Andreas Serrano’s photograph of a

crucifix submerged in urine was offensively stupid anti-art, and did not even feel the need to

look up the work when writing about it. This line of thinking was challenged when I realized the

controversy surrounding Michelangelo’s frescoes of God the Father on the Sistine Chapel

ceiling, which are both the universal example of an “artistic masterpiece” and exactly what

children are taught not to try and draw in most Protestant churches: the unimaginable image of

God.

My life-long love of cartoons, relegated to the backburner as I pursued gaining skills in

representational drawing, returned to the front of my mind when I realized that the depiction of

God in a low-budget children’s cartoon had profoundly affected my thinking on this topic:

because they had to tell a story in which God was a character in the story of Job whose face

couldn’t be shown, the creators of the Japanese animated series Superbook solved the problem

by depicting God as a man with a beard whose face was hidden in a small cartoon cloud. As a
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child, I laughed at this image, yet from that point on it was the only way I could “picture” the

characters in the story of Job without thinking about a Divine face that cannot be seen.

Because I came to realize the immense power of cartoons in forming my thinking and

imagination, I began to use cartoons in both my sketchbook and appropriated cartoons in my

videos to depict religious subjects mixed with pop culture references.

Professor Barry’s hypothetical asks me to imagine how my work might change if I could

not consult a Christian pastor, but was left to figure out the answers on my own. In answer, I

would continue to pursue this line of experimental work juxtaposing Christian subjects with

cartoons and other images from the postmodern culture, because the concerns of those who

discuss “art for the church” do not address my concerns, where the purpose is to make art which

allows me to personally work through the imagery I am faced with in a postmodern society.

If it is contended that this work inappropriately mixes the sacred with the profane, I

would argue that a painting by Michelangelo or the politically conservative moral paintings of

Mormon artist Jon McNaughton pose the exact same questions for a believing Christian (What

constitutes blasphemy, sacrilege, or heresy?). Figurative paintings, of course, have an aura of

respectability in conservative circles that protects them from the same line of questioning that

avant-garde works face. Charles Hartfield discusses a similar bias against comics in his book on

the history of alternative comics:

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[In] Leslie Fiedler’s bravura essay, “The Middle Against Both Ends,” in part of

an ironic defense of the medium: Fiedler famously claimed that comic books,

as a lowbrow form, attracted the same sort of middle-brow scorn as did

avant-garde or high-brow art; that both kinds of attack were grounded in the

middle-brow’s “fear of difference.” In so saying, of course, he was joining a

midcentury discussion of taste framed by such critics as Clement Greenburg

and Dwight MacDonald, knows for their Olympian disdain of the middlebrow.

[xii]

This willingness to make videos densely layered with appropriated footage has led to a

body of work which I can easily bring into the context of an art space. The Christian content,

while somewhat uncommon in postmodern art, is not unheard of and does relate to various topics

of discussion. For example, several have made connections with the Danish cartoonists and

Charlie Hebdo, whose depictions of Mohammad prompted violent retaliation.

James Elkins’ On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art was influential in

my thinking about how religious art can function in contemporary academic discussions. He

identified four types of “religious art,” ending with objects from pop culture like the Japanese

Tamagotchi toys from the 90s. He identified these toys as a kind of religious object because they

functioned by having children pretend they were caring for a real digital pet, who required

attention to stay alive. While I was inspired by Elkin’s idea of a mass-produced children’s toy

having what I’d characterize as accidental religious meaning, I had no personal connection with

Tamagotchi and thought that the Internet was a much more prevalent and fertile place for

research. I began to actively look for videos and images on the internet which have a “religious”

character. When I was shown the viral video “Carameldansen,” I was interested in both the
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complex history behind its creation and how it brought together multiple pop culture sources,

and in how thousands of people reacted to it by making their own versions of the animation. I

interpreted this as an Otaku sub-culture phenomenon: by drawing various characters doing this

dance, the various creators were expressing their sincere devotion and appreciation to these

fictional characters. This layer of meaning might only be appreciated by those familiar with the

meme when I modeled “Carameldansen Christ” on the meme. It is noteworthy that my first

endeavor as a “postmodern video artist” involved cartooning a 9-frame animation, because so

much of the tension in my work is whether my cartooning can exist in an art world context.

The discussions I have participated in with peers and instructors have brought up this

point: much of my comic work looks like it was made to be comic work, and not made for an art

gallery. I desire to be a cartoonist actively making comics. Just as a concern like “Is this work

appropriate for a church?” would not be enough to stop me from making what I make, a concern

like “Is this work appropriate for an art gallery?” is not enough to stop me from being a

cartoonist. That being said, I do have an interest the academic art world and desire to make a

significant contribution to the study of 20th and 21st century art. How I might do this while

working as a cartoonist, and the difficulty I’ve faced in how to present my comics in a context

that is foreign to most comic artists, is not a problem unique to myself.

This problem leads directly to the thrust of the second question I face, posed by Professor

Doug Rosenberg, which asked how my art history cartoons might be distinguished from Classics
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Illustrated, how they might contribute something new about the potential of comics/cartoons in

the context of the “fine arts.”

There are at least two motivations which prompted my comics adapting primary sources

and documents from art history and creating “flashcards” of various individuals: first, a personal,

emotional response to reading about these individuals in art history classes in which I identified

with them as people rather than as rarified historical figures; second, a desire to make comics “in

dialogue” with art discussions by making comics which were literally about art history. Upon

reflection, this “solution” to the problem of how to make comics about ongoing dialogues in art

is something of an obvious approach. While making the flashcards for Raphael and Bellori, I was

thinking about Cindy Sherman’s series of history portraits: in contrast to Raphael’s idea of

painting the portrait of a woman by combining the most beautiful parts of multiple women,

Sherman cast herself as a characters in Renaissance-era portraits, which was presented by my

instructors as a postmodern critique of the male gaze. By simplifying the Renaissance artists,

historians, and patrons to the point where they could be fit on a small flash card, their concepts,

debates, and accomplishments were caricatured just as I caricatured their faces. By reducing

Bellori’s erudite prose in defense of what he considered to be the highest form of art down to

“Mannerism stinks!” in the cartoon, I perceived this as a jab at Bellori’s expense. Unlike

Sherman’s photography series, however, my cartoons have an educational function, which has

drawn comparison to other educational comics for kids.

As stated previously, I feel as though I straddle between a comics world and a

postmodern art world, and as defined by Lovejoy, a postmodern artist is one who wrestles with

the newest technology, as opposed to artists who flee from technology and develop skills in a
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traditional craft. A better understanding of how other comic artists have tackled historical

subjects might help at this point.

First, there are comics about historical subjects which are done for personal artistic

purposes. These are comparable to “Hollywood treatments” which sacrifice historical accuracy

for the sake of “telling a story,” (e.g. Braveheart). Rembrandt by Typex fits this mold, casting

Rembrandt as a volatile personality; the author goes as far as to say this should be seen as

Typex’s Rembrandt. This category should be understood as general enough to include any book-

length historical comic, even one more strict about historical accuracy, so long as it uses a

narrative format.

Second, there are comics intended for children with the specific goal of being used as an

educational material in a classroom setting. While there is diversity in drawing style and tone,

they generally present a positive portrait of the historical figure. Particularly influential in my

schooling were the Getting to Know the World’s Greatest Artists books, by Mike Venezia. The

biographies were written at the grade-school level, and were illustrated by a series of gags

referencing events in the artists’ lives. The only way to get the joke was to read the text and see

what it was referring to. The gags departed from strict adherence to historical accuracy, putting

the artists in imaginative situations to reward children for reading the biographical texts.
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Third, there are comics for adults about history without narrative aspirations. For

example, Kate Beaton’s Hark! A Vagrant features various historical entities as guest characters.

The absurdist humor could be appreciated differently by different audiences, whether they are

familiar with the historical subject or not. Unlike Venezia’s gags for his children’s books,

Beaton’s comics could not be used as an educational text or resource, unless a teacher used it as

an illustrative device to add flavor to a lesson.

Neither Classics Illustrated nor my own history comics fit neatly into any of these

categories. In his book documenting the history and discussing the art work of Classics

Illustrated, author W.B. Jones looks back with personal nostalgia on the series, saying that they

formed his developing imagination. At the same time, Jones reveals that his fondness for them

stemmed from their deliberate purpose. Jones quotes the romantic poetry scholar, Donna
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Richardson, “Every week I’d obey the exhortation at the end of each issue: ‘Now that you

have read the Classics Illustrated edition, don’t miss the [added] enjoyment of the original,

obtainable at your school or public library’” [qtd. in p. 4]. Jones appreciates the comics

because they “embodied the Horatian ideal of mixing usefulness and pleasure…” [p. 4]. In

other words, in both the view of Jones and the original publisher Albert L. Kanter, these

comics were good comics insofar as they succeeded in their purpose to “wean young

readers from Action Comics, Detective Comics, and Marvel Comics, employing the same

medium to win new adherents to the works of Dumas, Scott, Cooper, Melville, and Dickens”

[5]. Even the company’s decision to change the titles name from Classic Comics to Classics

Illustrated is emblematic of this purpose. Jones writes this change was a deliberate effort to

disassociate Classics from other comics and instead associate themselves with illustrated

books, in the tradition of golden age illustrators like Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth. The

realistic drawing style and the decision in later comics not to rewrite the dialogue of

characters from the original source material is in keeping with this tradition.

To contrast my own work with Classics Illustrated, I would first point out that for

Kanter, these comics were a means to an end, whereas I view comics as an end in

themselves, apart from their ability to be used to educate. I do not look down on

“educational comics” as inferior comics with high literary ambitions (and as will be

discussed, both types would still struggle to find a place in the context of postmodern art).

Many significant figures in the comics world such as Will Eisner devoted decades to making

educational comics for PS magazine. I will grant that the difficulty of my own historical

comics is that they translate the historical texts in a straight-forward fashion.

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In discussions with others, I have stated how making these comics was an

educational exercise for myself as much as anyone. Perhaps my hope to “dialogue with art

history” using comics needs to develop beyond this initial approach.

By pondering on what exactly these comics are, I’ve had the thought that they are

something like what a student does when they read a text and tear it apart for relevant

information, highlighting and rephrasing key concepts. Just as there is a difference between

a student reading a text about postmodern art and taking notes, and a student making a

work of art which is postmodern—there is a difference between making comics which are

effective and interesting comics, and making comics which themselves are postmodern

works of art.

What is both exciting and daunting about this prospect is my difficulty finding a

model of a “comic artist” operating in the post-modern art world. Art history classes at UW-

Madison introduced to old masters who “secretly” drew caricatures such as Annibale

Carracci and Bernini. In contemporary times, there are recently-deceased and living

individuals like Kieth Haring and Kara Walker who are recognized as significant art world

figures, yet are rarely discussed by comics scholars. Perhaps this is due to the insular

nature of the comics sub-culture, focusing upon its own history, struggles, and artists.

One fascinating route of research might be to look at such recognized contemporary

artists through the lens of the comics world, asking why they have not been the subject of

much discussion within the comics community and how the contributions of postmodern

artists might change the comic world’s perception of itself. To undertake such research, I

would need sufficient knowledge of both worlds, which as previously stated are often

divergent in their interests and presuppositions. Fortunately, through my reading I have

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been able to identify similar patterns of thought in both comics scholarship and texts on

postmodern art. I hope to develop my artistic practice with cartooning in light of this

information.