I just read a book called KRAZY! The Delerious World Of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art. It’s an exhibition catalogue of a show at the Vancouver Art Gallery in British Columbia in 2008 and represents yet another example of the respectability and acceptance of the art of comics. Quoting Paul Gravett (p.40) from another exhibition catalogue that includes comics RUDE BRITANNIA: British Comic Art at Tate Britain, London, 9 June-5 September 2010, published by Tate Publishing:
Within the traditional hierarchy of the high and low visual arts, cartooning, in the sense of the art of writing and drawing comedy, has tended to come low on the ladder of esteem, lower than illustration and lower even than advertising. What’s more, within cartooning itself the comics have usually been relegated to the very bottom rung below the somewhat classier categories, in descending order, of caricatures, political cartoons, and social or gag cartoons.
Gravett cites works such as The Beano, Jackie, Viz, When The Wind Blows by Raymond Briggs and Tamara Drewe by Posy Simmonds as significant British works in what he calls ‘the progress of comics’.
The KRAZY! exhibition catalogue with cover illustration by Daniel Clowes.
Art Spiegelman and Seth curated the selection of comics and graphic novels, Kiyoshi Kusumi and Toshiya Ueno selected the manga and anime entries and curator of the exhibition Bruce Grenville the visual art category. Each has selections that are predictable and surprising.
The comics category in the catalogue begins with George Herriman’s strip Krazy Kat. There follows Harvey Kurtzman’s war comic Corpse On The Imjin!, Justin Green’s Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, Jerry Moriarty’s Jack Survives, Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons, Chris Ware’s Thanksgiving, Kevin Huizenga’s Jeepers Jacobs and Seth’s George Sprott(1894-1975). In the graphic novels section are Milt Gross’s He Done Her Wrong: The Great American Novel, Philip Guston’s Poor Richard, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Kim Deitch’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Daniel Clowes’s David Boring, Chester Brown’s Louis Riel: A Comic Strip Biography, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic and Shaun Tan’s The Arrival.
The manga listing includes Stop!! Hibari-Kun! by Hisashi Eguchi, The Five Star Stories by Mamoru Nagano, Black & White by Taiyo Matsumoto, Pure Trance by Junko Mizuno, Afro Samurai by Takashi Okazaki, Sakuran by Moyoco Anno, New Engineering by Yuichi Yokoyama and Mu: For Sale by Hitoshi Odajima. Visual artists whose work is displayed are Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Marcel Broodthaers, Raymond Pettibon, Pierre Huyghe & Philippe Parreno, Cao Fei, Chiho Aoshima, Christian Marclay and Mr.
The theme of the exhibition was the creation of commonalities between animation, comics, computer games and visual art and the grouping of them under the umbrella of visual culture. What I find more fascinating, however, is the ‘the progress of comics’ notion, with the medium once again installed in the ‘gallery’ and associated with ‘art’ and KRAZY! represents another step in the acceptance of the art of comics in the art world and the public acceptance of that. The race goes on but there is still some distance left to run.
