London Times on comics

The Times of London covers a museum exhibition on Herge's Tintin. It avoids most of the silliness American MSM constantly includes in any piece on comics. Here's the link.

"The world is divided, of course, into two cultural camps, and the chasm, perhaps, will now only deepen. I refer not to any religious or political arguments that might be plaguing the globe. No, I mean simply this: Tintin or Asterix? You can’t love both. You have to choose. That’s the way I’ve always seen it, anyway; and up until recently it seemed as if the Asterixers might be in the lead, what with The Mirror World of Asterix, a vast exhibition of the work of Goscinny and Uderzo held in Brussels last year." Well, that may be how it works in Europe. Here I always thought the dividing point was 3 Stooges vs. Marx Brothers.

But now we Tintinites (or Tintinophiles, or Hergélogues, as we are sometimes called) can hold our heads high. The Centre Pompidou in Paris, home of France’s Musée National d’Art Moderne — its collection including works by Picasso, Kandinsky, Matisse, Miró, you know the drill — has chosen to mark its 30th anniversary with a show of another 20th century master: Georges Remi, who reversed his initials to become (say it with a French accent) Hergé. ...

There are some readers who might think that things have come to a pretty pass when comic strips, as Hergé’s work might simply be called, get shown at the Pompidou. There was some fuss, you may recall, when an exhibition of the art of Walt Disney, Il était une fois Walt Disney, opened at the Grand Palais in Paris in September (it runs until January, just like the Velázquez and the Holbein in London). Never mind the French casting away their usual scorn for American “culture”, what was on display were cartoons. Is this art? We may refer to the Leonardo cartoon, but we don’t mean it that way. We don’t mean talking mice. This kind of thing can only show that the end times, artistically speaking, are nigh.

So some might say, but it’s hard to get away from the fact that what’s now increasingly called graphic art (though not necessarily by the artists who practise it; they generally prefer to call them comics) has an increasingly respectable profile. For many non-specialist readers, Art Spiegelman’s Maus led the way. A depiction of Spiegelman’s father’s experience of the Holocaust, and the author’s own troubled relationship with his father, this was a memoir like no other. Published as a book in 1986, its second volume won its author a Pulitzer Prize six years later. It was Spiegelman, surely, who led the way for artist-writers such as Marjane Satrapi and Alison Bechdel, whose illustrated memoirs transcend any genres."

Not Bad. The "you probably thought comics were crap BUT ..." moment was still there, but handled better than usual. (and yes, it still has the obligatory Spiegelman paragraph) What I found interesting was the "transcend any genres" line. Were they "transcending" the illustrated memoir genre? How so? Or were they transcending the comic form? If so, the Times has just fallen into the trap of confusing a medium with a genre -- something that constantly happens within discussions on comics. And there's a presumption that if something is good in comics, it must "transcend" the form, rather than be part of it.