Cultures of Comics Work

Casey Brienza, Paddy Johnston, Casey Brienza, Paddy Johnston

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137554772
• eBook ISBN: 9781137550903
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Social Sciences

This anthology explores tensions between the individualistic artistic ideals and the collective industrial realities of contemporary cultural production with eighteen all-new chapters presenting pioneering empirical research on the complexities and controversies of comics work.

Art Spiegelman. Alan Moore. Osamu Tezuka. Neil Gaiman. Names such as these have become synonymous with the medium of comics. Meanwhile, the large numbers of people without whose collective action no comic book would ever exist in the first place are routinely overlooked. Cultures of Comics Work unveils this hidden, global industrial labor of writers, illustrators, graphic designers, letterers, editors, printers, typesetters, publicists, publishers, distributors, translators, retailers, and countless others both directly and indirectly involved in the creative production of what is commonly thought of as the comic book. Drawing upon diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives, an international and interdisciplinary cohort of cutting-edge researchers and practitioners intervenes in debates about cultural work and paves innovative directions for comics scholarship.

© The Author(s) 2016

Casey Brienza and Paddy Johnston (eds.)Cultures of Comics WorkPalgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels10.1057/978-1-137-55090-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Understanding Comics Work

Casey Brienza¹ and Paddy Johnston²

(1)

City, University of London, London, UK

(2)

University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

End Abstract

How are we to understand a work of comics art without any knowledge of the myriad varieties of cultural work that went into its creation, and how might each better inform our understandings of the other? This book is an exploration and interrogation of these two questions. In the comics art world—a world that is still being mapped out and defined with retroactive applications to the comics canon by comics scholars across various disciplines and departmental affiliations—there exists a tendency to canonize the writer and to advance a narrow, auteurist vision of production when analyzing and studying comics. Scholars, cartoonists, and comics fans alike will be familiar with Alan Moore, Osamu Tezuka, Neil Gaiman, Marjane Satrapi, Chris Ware, Alison Bechdel, Carl Barks, Charles Schulz, and Hergé—but a few of the names that loom large in the intellectual firmament of comics studies. But they are little to no knowledge of these creators’ collaborating artists, pencillers, letterers, flatters, inkers, cover designers, editors, publicists, typesetters, translators, distributors, or retailers. These roles, an indicative but not exhaustive list of the duties that can be undertaken in the journey of a comic from its conception all the way the hands of a reader, are, no doubt, work. All of these are roles that can be done in exchange for money and/or goods in the capitalist labor market, and all are examples of what, in the title of this book, we term “comics work.”

Why, then, when they are numerous, essential, and inescapable, are such roles routinely overlooked and forgotten in the study of comics, if not treated with outright suspicion? The idea of the auteur is a powerful romantic ideal, ubiquitous across fields of cultural production ranging from fine art to prose literature to cinema. After all, no hand but that of the author is credited with having created a Booker Prize-winning novel on its cover; no name but that of the painter accompanies their painting in neat type on an adjacent card when hung in a gallery. Scholars of comics, typically from literature, film studies, or art history disciplines, naturally draw upon their pre-existing theoretical and methodological training to apply established theories of authorship to comics for the purposes of formalist or textual-level analysis. This has created a solid basis for a field of inquiry and established vibrant and international comics studies. However, thus far, there has been very little engagement with the myriad labors that happen to create a comic, despite recent calls for a sociological approach to the study of comics (Brienza 2010, 2012, 2013; Lopes 2009; Murray 2013) and nascent attempts to begin understanding and analyzing comics at a much deeper and greater level than their textual and material surfaces, such as through methodological surveys of working conditions and patterns (e.g. Woo 2015b); analyses of comics retailing as cultural work (e.g. Miller 2013); and politically driven analyses of contemporary economies and their effects on the production of comics (e.g. Johnston 2015). These moves are, however, scattered and few and far between, and the criticism of comics scholarship as being text focused and driven by the methodologies of literary criticism is now a familiar one, which makes the intervention of a book such as this one particularly timely. This book, therefore, does not ask why such labors are largely overlooked and obscured. Instead, it focuses mainly on how such roles have had a significant and pivotal impact on the comics they have helped to create. This “comics work” unites the work of this book’s 18 chapters and, we hope, will provide a foundation for future research.

What is Comics Work?

While each and every worker who performs any one of the tasks listed above, such as inking or distribution, is, in our view, a cultural worker and a comics worker, this fact in and of itself does not, however, provide a proper definition of comics work. We thus define comics work as any labor within the field of the cultural production of comics that contributes to or informs a comic’s production. In Becker’s terms, comics will show “signs of the cooperation” (1982, 1) between the numerous parties involved in its production, and these signs are the outward, visible manifestations of comics work. However, to reveal and interpret these signs, comics work must be understood not just as that which creates obvious visual and material signs but as that which operates—often invisibly—behind the scenes to enable these signs and to build a comic and its message and meaning from these signs.

Our definition of comics work is therefore a broad, expansive, and inclusive one, as is the nature of such a definition and what we seek to advance with it: that is, to reveal and expose the labors behind comics that are routinely and systematically overlooked, not just by scholars but also by fans, critics, and even by creators themselves. These labors are, without doubt, myriad. Comics work is, therefore, a somewhat loaded term, and it would not be possible to fully understand how the term has been applied here without some consideration of the research on cultural work in other media fields.

Comics as Cultural Work

The theme month on comics and cultural work hosted on Comics Forum in 2013 might be thought of as a short prequel to this book (Brienza 2013), so it is important to provide an account of its intellectual genesis before proceeding. This theme month refers to a polemical article calling for a sociological approach to the study of comics focused on production that had been hitherto nonexistent in critical approaches to comics (Brienza 2010). In this article, Brienza presents Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of the field of cultural production (as defined in Bourdieu 1993) and Richard A. Peterson’s production of culture perspective (1982) as the initial foundations for her sociological approach to the study of comics. Bourdieu’s concepts are acknowledged as advantageous for researchers in comics who wish to assess them in terms of power, ideology, and institutional transformations, as well as to broaden the remit of comics studies to encompass large-scale social contexts. Brienza uses Peterson’s production of culture perspective to address Bourdieu’s shortcomings, namely that large-scale theories are often difficult to apply to smaller-scale and more localized examples of practical and material effects on the production of comics, such as the introduction of offset printing. The production of culture perspective directly addresses these concerns, presenting five constraints on production: law, technology, the market, organizational structure, and occupational careers. By assessing each of these constraints in turn and using them to provide clarity, specificity, and details that underpin her approach to the study of comics and employing case studies based on manga publishing in America and Japan, the article illustrates the potential reach of this sociological approach as one that could apply to Japanese manga, Franco-Belgian bande dessinée, and Anglo-American comics in equal measure.

Following this article, the Comics Forum website hosted a discussion around the methodology of sociological approaches (Locke 2012; Brienza 2012). A year or so later, it hosted the aforementioned theme month on comics and cultural work. Those four articles are early examples of our comics work approach: the concept of the “day job” (Johnston 2013); divisions of types of labor and creativity under capitalism (Woo 2013); and the material and economic factors at work in comics retail and distribution (Miller 2013). Brienza’s conclusion to the theme month is open-ended, calling for more contributions to comics scholarship of this type. She has asked rhetorically—and repeatedly (2010, 2012)—whether “a full appreciation of the sequential art medium itself demand[s] anything less than every conceivable way of knowing it?” This book’s position on that question should be obvious.

Cultural Work, Convergence, and the Creative Industries

The work of the likes of Bourdieu, Becker, and Peterson are undoubtedly key to the focus of this book, and many of the authors make direct reference to them. However, comics work also draws upon more recent studies in the areas of cultural, or “creative,” work. The creative industries have become an area of intense focus by sociologists and media scholars of late, as work in the creative industries has undergone numerous changes in response to socioeconomic and political factors that govern the lives of creative workers. Mark Deuze’s Media Work (2008), Stephanie Taylor and Karen Littleton’s Contemporary Identities of Creativity and Creative Work (2012), Angela McRobbie’s Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries (2014), and David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker’s Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries (2011) are four prominent examples of new and influential studies of the creative industries that have been published in recent years. They focus on industries such as fashion, television production, journalism, music, fine art, advertising, theater, and freelance writing, extrapolating assertions about the wider cultural economy from case studies in these areas that often involve extensive fieldwork, interviews, and firsthand accounts by practitioners and participants in the creative economy. Hesmondhalgh and Baker, in particular, provide useful templates for attempting to define and understand cultural work and its particular qualities. Their definition (2011, 9) of cultural work, driven by symbolic actions of those engaged in creative labor, bears repeating here. They define cultural work as

those jobs, centred on the activity of symbol-making, which are to be found in large numbers in the cultural industries. [These jobs include, but are not limited to,] primary creative personnel such as writers, actors, directors, musicians; craft and technical workers such as camera operators, film editors and sound engineers; creative managers such as television producers, magazine editors and A&R personnel; administrators; executives; and unskilled labour.

Cultural work is thus understood as any work within the creative industries—any work which, to return to Becker’s notion of an art object as the product of cooperation, makes some contribution, however small, to the eventual products and symbols of creativity. By extension, then, comics work is a subset of cultural work as well as a type of cultural work specific to the comics industry.

Also of importance in this context are the radical changes to the production and consumption of all global media by rapid technological change, globalization, and late capitalism. Workers in the creative industries have had to adapt their approaches and working patterns and have in many cases had their working conditions radically altered. As noted by Hesmondhalgh and Baker (2011) and others in their studies of such workers, precarious freelance work on insecure contracts is now rife. Similar working conditions or issues in the comics industry are beginning to be explored (Woo 2015a, b), and comics work seeks to understand these conditions and the nexus of issues raised by them—including not just how, but why, people choose to undertake comics work.

Media convergence (Jenkins 2008) is responsible for a growing participatory culture (Jenkins et al. 2013) and a blurring of the line between fan and creator and between producer and consumer. Henry Jenkins is once again a key figure in the study of creative labor when approached in the context of digital change and the growth of participatory culture and has written extensively on fan culture, literature (specifically Moby Dick), and film franchises. Significantly for this book and for our concept of comics work, Jenkins has also worked with cartoonist and comics theorist Scott McCloud to bring the concepts of convergence and participation into comics criticism. In a recent talk at MIT (Jenkins 2014), McCloud and Jenkins reexamined McCloud’s 2000 book Reinventing Comics, in which he made a number of predictions about the future of comics, such as that comics would move almost entirely online with an enhanced and diversified reading experience for consumers. Reinventing Comics had not, they concluded, accounted for cultural changes resulting in the converging labor of fans and the growth of participation of consumers, nor had it anticipated the proliferation of content becoming free at the point of delivery (examined closely in Lovell 2013). These changes are significant for all forms of cultural work, and comics work as a concept must also account for such convergences; for example, crowdfunding (whether project based through a site such as Kickstarter or on an ongoing basis through a subscription site such as Patreon) offers new opportunities for fans to contribute to the production of a comic. As the majority of the chapters of this book demonstrate in one way or another, convergence is increasingly relevant to comics work and future developments in the field.

Toward an Understanding of Comics Work

Comics work is a concept rooted in cultural studies and sociology and one that is agnostic toward many of the shibboleths of the study of comics while also having the ability to work around and within them. For example, the graphic novel, as a term, format, and literary form carries much weight within comics studies; nu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Understanding Comics Work
• 1. Locating Labor
• 2. Illustrating Workers
• 3. Pushing the Boundaries
• Backmatter