During last year’s meetings of the Modern Language Association, in Chicago, I sat with a colleague at one of the hotel bars after a long day spent interviewing prospective candidates for a position in our department. When two young job seekers wandered past and noticed that I was wearing cowboy boots, one subtly hitched his neck at me and whispered to his friend, “tenured.”
If it is true that only a tenured full professor would wear cowboy boots to the MLA, it is doubly so that only a scholar in my privileged position would risk writing a book about Archie Comics. I had deposited that book with my editors at Rutgers University Press only days before leaving for Chicago, and I was in a celebratory mood.
Despite the significant advances made by scholars working in comics studies over the past two decades, it remains a precarious area of study. When I was in the same (conservative) shoes as these job seekers, the MLA did not even welcome panels and papers on comics (they have only had a discussion area since 2009). My own dissertation adviser had sagely counseled me not to endanger my career before it had even started by writing in an area that many still regard as frivolous. On the job market, I wasn’t a scholar of comic books from the 1950s, but a historian of postwar anti-mass-culture crusades. My next book would be about television, I lied.
What is true is that scholarship in the humanities takes conventional forms. Monographs in literary studies are often 80,000 words with five or six chapters, examining several “important” works. Notions of greatness are deeply inculcated and taken for granted, even as that category continues to expand, and scholars know the appropriate way to write about them. With few exceptions, therefore, scholarly works are never more insightful or enjoyable than the texts that they seek to analyze.
Sadly, comics studies have largely replicated that dominant literary model. Still, something is better than nothing. Although comics are broadly interdisciplinary, it has been departments of literature that have most warmly welcomed comics scholarship. Just as film studies emerged in the 1960s as a discipline when it focused on avant-garde European art films, comics studies has largely found its footing by addressing the least typical texts in the field. Art Spiegelman is our Federico Fellini, Marjane Satrapi is our Maya Deren. Their accomplishments are so obviously akin to literary traditions (the “graphic novel”) that they can be taught alongside modern and postmodern fiction, and studied using similar tools.
When editors at Rutgers University Press announced their intention to create the Comics Culture series in 2011, the series editor, Corey Creekmur, wrote that they were seeking “focused monographs on major comics creators, characters, or works.” Initially, that did not appeal to me. In one of my earlier monographs, Comics Versus Art, I had elaborated the ways in which I thought the scholarly study of comics had been diminished by the unstated but omnipresent need of scholars to replicate in miniature the dominant field of literary studies. Our focus on major works within a minor field threatened to stifle any groundbreaking intellectual contributions to theory or methodology before they had even been made.
Yet something else that Creekmur wrote caught my eye. “Ideally,” he wrote, “each volume will be responsibly informative as well as critically adventurous. We are especially interested in encouraging established critics like yourself to stretch your boundaries to explore a topic that may not be entirely familiar territory.”
Could that actually be true? To an initially skeptical press, I proposed a book on Archie Comics, the most popular but least consecrated comics of the 1960s.
In 1969, the best-selling comic book in the United States was Archie, and titles featuring Jughead, Betty, and Veronica filled out the rest of the top spots on the sales charts. Despite this fact, and despite the ubiquity of the characters in American popular culture for almost 75 years, virtually nothing had been written on the comics. They were the exemplars of frivolous, mindless, repetitive mass culture — unsophisticated and utterly without artistic or critical merit. They were, I thought, perfect fodder for someone hoping to challenge the norms of literary studies.
Complications arose almost immediately. How, I wondered, could I possibly write 80,000 words on a work that was deliberately insubstantial? I learned that there is a reason that Shakespeare is so well-studied: A lot can be said about his work. But Archie is no Hamlet. Brainstorming potential Archie chapters, I got to “Heteronormativity in Riverdale — the Archie/Betty/Veronica Love Triangle” and immediately ran out of gas. The well-established conventions of the scholarly monograph were clearly a terrible fit for my subject.
I am indebted to my colleague, the poet Christian Bök, for helping me see that the solution to the Archie problem could be found in models provided by poetry, not scholarship. If scholarly texts are generally less interesting than the works that they study, what would be the value of a book that is less interesting than an Archie Comic?
The solution, ironically, was to model my own book on the Archie comics themselves. Since a long Archie story is six pages, and a gag might be only a single panel, Bök suggested that I also write many short chapters — like poems — rather than a small handful of long chapters. Moreover, since every Archie story is set in the eternal “now” and no story continues any other, every Archie story could be the first Archie story. My book would be written as if every chapter could be the first chapter — no chapter would lead into the next.
That is what I produced. Twelve-Cent Archie is a study of the Archie Comics from 1961 to 1969. It contains 100 chapters, which range in length from two sentences (on the significance of Veronica’s perpetually unseen mother) to about six pages (the aforementioned love triangle). It seeks to model a method for writing about unheralded works by adopting the distinctive strategies of those works.
If one of the reasons that Archie Comics have not been celebrated is that they are too short and too repetitive to be studied by literary scholars as “graphic novels,” I wondered whether the key to making comics studies a distinct area of scholarship might not be found by embracing all of the elements that have historically been used to denigrate the comics form. In other words, I wholeheartedly embraced the presumed frivolousness of the comic-book format to ironically plumb its depths.
To work in comics studies is to remain ever aware that in an era of perpetual hiring crisis in the humanities, despite the fact that comics classes are filled to bursting wherever they are offered, no English department is hiring in this area. I regret that, tactically, the safest road for my own graduate students is to ignore my own example and to conform to the established expectations of scholarly publications.
Writing Twelve-Cent Archie has reminded me that, like wearing cowboy boots to the MLA, the unconventional book on a frivolous topic is something reserved for the tenured. And more’s the pity.