WHEN GARY MET FEIFFER

Although in the preceding essay I pronounced Jules Feiffer the first pluralist comics-critic by virtue of his remarks in THE GREAT COMIC BOOK HEROES, I also critiqued him for being overly dependent upon the crude hermeneutic tools of Sigmund Freud. But perhaps his greatest fault is this:

Arch-elitist Gary Groth liked his work.

Therefore, how good could it be?

I'm being somewhat facetious here, but not entirely. Marxist critics are well acquainted with the process by which a hypothetical "dominant" can suborn and adapt elements of revolutionary concepts and feed them back to the proletariat as a means of controlling the masses. For example, if the hippie subculture of the 1960s attempts to rebel against The Man, The Man gets his TV station to put out THE MOD SQUAD.

Of course, Marxist rhetoriticians took hold of this same process of deliberate misprision and used it for their own purposes. Thus, even though Feiffer's project is to invalidate the elitism of Frederic Wertham (not that he Feiffer calls it that), Gary Groth's 2002 introduction to Fantagraphics' reprint of TGCBH ignores this and uses Feiffer's nostalgic reminiscences as a club for attacking a different species of pluralists.

"...in 1965 no one wrote about comic books, much less superhero comics. Today our budding academicians subject superheroes to Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derridaean philosophical speculation. Thankfully, Feiffer knew better than to apply ponderous theoretical models to the superhero comics he enjoyed in his youth... And when he theorizes, when he describes the anti-social virtues of junk, for instance, it's eminently rooted in human experience-- his experience."

I'm not quite sure why Groth would Feiffer say "knew better" than to apply ponderous theories to superhero comics: if no one was doing it, why would one "know better" than to do what no one else was doing? But Groth's wrong to say that there were no "ponderous theories" before the academicians. I don't know precisely by what logic Groth disincluded both Frederic Wertham and Gershon Legman, both of whose works I'm sure Groth knew about in 2002, and whose theories (which *I* would certainly deem "ponderous") had not by any stretch been utterly forgotten in '65. I tend to think that the real reason that Groth leaves out reference to either writer-- one of whom, Wertham, was specifically refuted in TGCBH-- was because he felt far more threatenened by modern academicians than by the now-mostly-defunct projects of Wertham and Legman.

I've seen and heard my share of bad theorizing about comic books, superhero and otherwise. But I suspect Groth's real problem with them pointy-headed academicians is that their analyses, good or bad, might be seen as validation of junky comics.

That's why, in my previous essay, I find fault with Feiffer's unwillingness to analyze superhero comics in much depth. Once Feiffer has defined said junk-comics as being totally defined by the "pleasure principle," he doesn't devote any further thought to what they are or what makes them appealing. That's somewhat excuseable in Feiffer, whose only project in TGCBH is to write an apologia for his nostalgia. But Groth has never had Feiffer's interest in theorizing about the "anti-social virtues of junk," and has generally spoken of the comic-related passions of his youth with intellectual disdain. That's his privilege, but the wise reader should be aware of Groth's position as an "advocacy" (his term) critic, and how deftly he tries to turn Feiffer's somewhat-simplistic but inescapably pluralist theory into Yet Another Defense for (wait for it)...

BLOODY COMIC BOOK ELITISMMMMMMM!