COLD COMFORT COMICS

A lot of thoughts, both even-handed and oddly-formed, have appeared in response to Curt Purcell's blogpost, "Can Comics Be Scary?" Inasmuch as a number of comics-fans do testify to memories of comics that scared them (and many have done so long before the era of blogging), I'm going to nitpick Curt's title and say that it shouldn't be about whether comics can be scary but under what circumstances are they scary, and to what audience. The factor of a willing audience is one I touched on fleetingly in the post I made in the comments-section:

I think I have a way to logically put paid to the notion that the square panels & borders make all that much difference to the reader amenable to the horror-comics experience-- and my logic involves sex.

The apparent continued success of the porn comics market, as testified by the continuance of the Eros Comix brand and assorted others, demonstrates that those readers who really want to get into sexually-explicit comic books can do without their, er, responses being inhibited by panel borders and page-turning.

So if the porn-lovers can conjure in their minds a kinetic experience even in the less-than-kinetic medium of comic books--

Why should horror lovers be any less capable of such mental magic?

One could certainly hypothesize at length about what kinds of mental adjustments a willing audience-member must make to let himself be pulled into the horror within the bland white panel borders, but at base I don't think it's all that different from doing so with prose horror. Much has been made (not so much on Curt's blog) of the notion that when a willing reader gets freaked by the descriptions of a Stephen King tale, he's in part conjuring up the horrors suggested by the words, and perhaps even improving upon them in his own mind. But I don't see why the same amplificative process can't take place for a comics-reader, and in truth I think that it does for those capable of such amplification. Should a reader testify that he was freaked by the sight of the dismembered body of the evil ballplayer in EC's "Foul Play," I submit that it's not because the horror of the Jack Davis drawings leaped out at him, as similar sights in a George Romero flick might do, but that the reader has amplified the body's depictions into something near-tangible in his own mind. I submit that this is essentially the same process one goes through when a reader of SALEM'S LOT extrapolates King's prose description of his Nosferatu-wannabe Kurt Barlow into a mental reality. I doubt that any lover of prose horror has ever complained that the white borders of a book's pages distracted him from his desired frisson, and I'd argue that people who think comics-borders are a big problem are over-intellectualizing the semiotic process, are unsympathetic to the horror-experience, or both.

Over-intellectualizers tend to underestimate the facillity of the human mind to compensate for the shortcomings of any medium in the quest for a particular "kinetic experience," as my counter-example of the effects of sex-comics should make clear. They also serve as a counter-example to this blogpost by Tom Spurgeon:

Since everything's possible, the better question might be why aren't more comics scary? The answer to that is that people don't want them to be. 1) The primary genre in comics is about comfort rather than fear, so it's what many people come to them expecting and as a resulting function of the market what we find scary in a modern sense has been largely unexplored. 2) The medium puts tools in the hands of the reader that they can more easily avoid being scared if they wish it, and they frequently do. 3) How most people measure scary is through the effects brought about by scary films, and the differences in the way identification works in comics as opposed to film puts comics in a bind when it comes to duplicating those effects.

The (3) comment about the competition from scary films is one many respondents have made but seems basically irrelevant to the question I reformulated above. Since Tom's blog doesn't allow responses I couldn't ask him what he means by the "tools" referenced in the (2) comment. By tool does he mean the hand of the reader itself, that puts down the comic if he's not scared enough. Maybe he'll address this somewhere, as I honestly don't get his point.

That brings us to (1), which is-- sigh-- another attack on the "primary genre in comics." "Comfort rather than fear," Tom? What are you think is the reigning form of superhero comics these days: THE BATMAN ADVENTURES? In the last year two of the biggest "events" from the Big Two mainstream companies have concerned the "dark reign" of a sadistic super-villain who becomes Marvel's version of Donald Rumsfeld, while the other, as Curt Purcell covered in depth, dealt with the unfortunate tendency of various DC villains and heroes to recrudesce as rotting zombies.

Cold comfort, indeed. I think one can argue that the average consumer of sex comics, whether those of Eros or another publisher, might be a better example of the consumer entirely preoccupied with a "comforting" kinetic experience and nothing more.

This figures in with some of my "adult pulp" posts as well, as will be seen in a later essay.