Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels by Roger Sabin (Phaidon) reviewed by Guy Lawley

Illo #1: from the cover of the book

From a book with a title like Comics, Comix and Graphic Novelsand a price tag of �39.99, you probably feel entitled to a pretty comprehensive overview of the subject. Luckily, that’s what Roger Sabin was commissioned to write, and that is what he delivered. With 240 big pages, packed with colour illustrations, and Sabin’s authoritative text, anyone who decides they have a spare forty quid to invest in this tome is unlikely to feel disappointed.

His previous book on comics, Adult Comics (Routledge, 1993) was more focused, as the name suggests. Coming after the 1986/87 release of the Dark Knight/Maus/Watchmen “Big Three”, Adult Comics was a book with a mission. Sabin set out to reveal the current hype for what it was, and show that comics for grown-ups had been around since the beginning of the comic strip itself, not merely since 1986. After a survey of the comics culture of the US, UK, Europe and Japan, Sabin concluded that it was the predominance of comics for children that was in fact the aberrant situation. The success of Adult Comics led to this new book in art publisher Phaidon’s lavish hardback line. Its intention is to serve as an introduction to and reference book on comics for a general reader working in, studying or simply with an interest in the visual arts. The true experts amongst you may therefore find some parts of Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels a little thin, particularly in your specialist Mastermind area, but as an overview it is difficult to fault in any major way.

Illo #2: from Art Spiegelman’s “The Malpractice Suite”
An experimental piece from Arcade (1976)

Where the book scores particularly well is in the attention given to the Underground in Chapter 5, and small press/self-published comics, which have their very own substantial entry in Chapter 8. Sabin covers the established stars of what we might call The Left Field, such as Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, Rick Griffin, Los Bros Hernandez, Spiegelman, Charles Burns and Dave Sim, but also gives substantial space to less widely appreciated creators like Peter Bagge, Daniel Clowes, Chester Brown, Julie Doucet, Eddie Campbell and Birmingham’s own Hunt Emerson. Sabin also finds room for such diverse entries as Mike Diana, Joe Matt, Joe Sacco, Ed Pinsent, Sleaze Castle, Bugs and Drugs, the London Cartoon Centre�s Cunty and several others. This is a particular interest of his, and it’s a real pleasure to see a high profile, full-colour book giving this side of the medium pretty much equal space to the superhero genre.

Illo #3 from 1973: Art by Dave Gibbons
A comic to celebrate the acquittal of Nasty Tales in the courts

An especially welcome surprise is the number of pages devoted to the British Underground, with a big chunk of Chapter 5 given over to I.T., Oz, and Nasty Tales, as well as Brainstorm Comics (early Bryan Talbot), the produce of the Birmingham Arts Lab, and others. Nor are later mainstream or “ground level” UK comics like Deadline and 2000AD neglected. This UK bias is partly a reflection of both publisher and author being English, of course, but they still could have gone for a more US-based approach in search of transatlantic sales, so all credit where it’s due to both parties for not sidelining our homegrown culture. After all, if the post-‘86 comics landscape has one overwhelmingly obvious feature it is surely that in this business, The Brits Are The Best.

I can’t leave this overwhelmingly impressive book without pointing out a few shortcomings. Firstly, in his otherwise comprehensive discussion of the origins and antecedents of the comic strip, Sabin unaccountably leaves out the 19th century Swiss illustrator Rodolphe Töpffer, who was probably the very first to tell stories in sequence of simple cartoon drawings, which only lacked the word balloon to be just like modern comic strips (each picture had a caption, much like Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant). This is a surprising omission since Sabin is clearly aware of Töpffer, who is acknowledged in Adult Comics.

Illo #4 from Chester Brown’s The Playboy

Secondly, Justin Green is listed as an Underground creator, but his highly influential Binky Brown Meets The Holy Virgin Mary is not mentioned. This comic influenced Crumb to let loose his personal demons in print, and directly or indirectly is the main progenitor of the whole warts-and-all autobiographical/confessional strip, which has flowered into such a large segment of the alternative market in recent years (Chester Brown, Joe Matt, Seth, etc. etc.). It’s also an astonishing comic in its own right; Justin Green had a childhood and adolescence far more disturbed and “out there” than most of those who followed his lead with their frankly often unremarkable “confessions”.

A word on the visual presentation: on the whole it is superb, with literally hundreds of panels, covers and pages very well photographed and printed; there is much to enjoy looking at and much of it is also readable which is of course a nice bonus. The choice of visuals was however left in the hands of a photographer and an art director. The author then wrote captions to fit the chosen pictures. The value of the book may have been further enhanced if Sabin had been able to take a more direct role in choosing his own illustrations. A simple example: half of Page 158 is taken up by the cover of X-Men 93, the last reprint issue of the title before it went on a brief hiatus, relaunching with new material in Issue 94. Sabin’s text and the caption to this large illustration are of course stressing the relaunch, and the role of the new X-Men in changing the landscape of the US mainstream, so a cover repro of Giant-Size X-Men 1 or X-Men 94 would have been appropriate. This can hardly be called nit-picking when the comics in question redefined a huge area of the business and the artform; something no-one could accuse X-Men 93 of. There are probably a few other examples (such as the appearance of a Steranko double-page spread from 1968 in the middle of Sabin’s discussion of Captain America’s 1940s origins) but I must stress that on the whole the illustrations are very well presented; it’s a shame to have to point out that even this high degree of quality could have been improved upon, and it seem unlikely that a second edition will be given the chance to do so... unless the book sells like hot cakes and Phaidon are extraordinarily responsive to friendly criticism!

I have a query on behalf of a Comics Forum contributor. Sabin notes the relationship between early 1930s Superman strips and the then-current idealism of the quasi-socialist Roosevelt New Deal. This theme was developed at length in an article in Comics Forum 6, written by Kent Worcester and commissioned by myself; is Comics Forum due a footnote here, or did Sabin come up with the notion independently? [Sabin tells us that the notion had been current for some years—so no immediate debt to Forum there-ed.]

Illo #5: Art “probably John Costanza”

Finally, a minor gripe of my own; Sabin is good on the social and political concerns of the Undergrounds, and he notes briefly how these ideas spread into the mainstream in Steve Gerber’s Howard The Duck. However there is a whole chapter missing here, about how the wider awareness of social and political ills in the 1960s and 70s (Vietnam, racism and civil rights, feminism, etc.) and related cultural changes (teenage economic power, drug use, sexual freedom, the counter-culture in general, hippy idealism, rock music and so on) not only led to the Underground explosion, but also gradually edged its way into the mainstream of comics. An older generation of writers like Stan Lee and Bob Kanigher could not ignore these issues, and younger generations of US scripters (e.g. Roy Thomas, Mike Friedrich, Steve Skeates, then Steves Englehart and Gerber, Don McCregor) brought them even more strongly into their work. This latter bunch, succeeded by the likes of Howard Chaykin, Alan Moore etc. were of course directly influenced by the Underground comix themselves. At 2000AD and Warrior, other UK creators revealed at least a broad similarity of concerns, and many of them got their first work published in the later UK Undergrounds or alternative press. Most of these writers and artists went on to reinvigorate the US mainstream too. A direct line of succession from the Underground Press to, say, Vertigo Comics via Swamp Thing can thus be traced. The enrichment of the mainstream by these ideas led also to the enjoyable silliness of such “hip” comics as the Teen Titans of the late sixties, Brother Power the Geek and Luke Cage, Powerman (among many others). The twists and turns of this rich inheritance have yet to be documented anywhere near fully, even in Roger Sabin’s excellent book.

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