Who is Paul Buhle? Beloved by those who know him, his abundantly good qualities are legendary. A preeminent American historian, his studies of the American left, American popular culture, and Jews in American popular culture are required reading for those with interest in popular struggle and the politics of working Americans.
But here’s the really cool thing about Paul: he cares about comic artists. Over the years, he has directed considerable energy, intelligence, and skills into finding money for comic artists to work on projects normally marginalized in mainstream consciousness, such as graphic histories of the Beats and the Wobblies, and graphic biographies of Che Guevara and Emma Goldman.
Since retiring last year from Brown University, Buhle seems to be busier than ever. His job is tougher now that the recession is choking publishers, but Buhle isn’t one to stop. He did, however, take time for an email interview with ITCH, and even generously offered some reflections on the quality of the questions! Call it our meta-interview. He wrote,
These are wonderful questions, or seem so to me, because I don’t ponder the issues often enough. I seem to be so busy doing, there is little pause to consider. Even now, when I am purportedly retired. Ideas come to me in the middle of the night and I leap toward them. Then often stumble because I can’t get the needed money for the artists. But I pick myself up and keep working, sometimes getting lucky, after much outlining and re-outlining, consultations with artists and publishers, etc.
You’ve remarked that I am somewhat unusual as a historian of comics and a producer of them as well. Actually, the majority of useful scholarship on comic art, so far, has been “amateur,” i.e., done by people outside the academy, either by fans or by artists themselves, and often published obscurely or at least in non-scholarly venues.
The trickle of academically-based scholarship, produced for journals or for professional conferences, has become, if not a flood, a steady stream and for good reasons. “The Graphic Novel” is a great title for a college course, either for a big lecture class (the professor who took over my office at Brown is teaching one of those, and hundreds of students want in) or as a seminar. But so far, the subject is taught mainly in English departments (or American Studies, my own hangout) from a primarily “literary” standpoint; or somewhat more rarely, in art schools, again not mostly from the angle of historical development.
The scholarship on non-fiction graphic works hardly exists outside reviews, doubtless because the field of these kinds of works remains small. I hope that it becomes larger soon.
Comics have not been “taken seriously,” especially in the US, until very recently. Serious, sympathetic scholars, whether ensconced in academic life or not, offer a valuable service for comic artists by TAKING THEM SERIOUSLY as artists; but also as popularizers who write about comic art for audiences near and far. The deep reality of comic art is that it remains doomed to a series of internal divisions so great that one set of readers hardly knows about another set, artists themselves barely more knowledgeable. Good criticism, wherever offered, can help bridge those gaps.
Long live good criticism! Now, on to our interview:
Let’s talk about your roots. Was there a particular comics artist or writer who produced a life-long love and appreciation of the medium in you?
One always wonders about childhood and early reading. My sisters taught me how to read, before first grade, by looking at comics (they were four years older), and it was probably the Funny Animals that attracted me most, Classics Illustrated next, Westerns attracted me least. Little Lulu was also very funny, and a few years later, I stumbled across, first, Pogo collections, then Jules Feiffer collections in a campus bookstore/drugstore across the street from the First Congregational Church that I was fleeing on Sunday mornings.
However, I was no more than 10 when I discovered MAD COMICS, and that set me on a life-long pursuit of re-reading the four first paperbacks of reprints from MAD, not a few times but hundreds of times. Neither MAD MAGAZINE nor HUMBUG compared to the intensity of those four volumes. I could almost say that they gave me a way of seeing the world, reality behind the appearance (that is, commercial appearance). I was not the only one, of course. And MAD MAGAZINE, albeit in diluted form, had that effect on tens of thousands of people younger than me.
Who do you think is the greatest comic artist of all time?
Greatest all time comic artists? A question that invites an arbitrary answer, so I stress that I speak only for myself and at that, I would point not to one but several, noting that different artists have done brilliantly in different historical epochs. Even with these caveats, perhaps it would be better to speak of “favorites.” William M. Gaines pointed to Will Elder as the true visual genius of MAD, and he would probably be the first choice, from my age 10 to my age 65. The sight gags, little signs, etc, and brilliant composition none better.
Of course, how could I place Robert Crumb in second place? And I don’t. He is up there with Bosch, Brueghel, Courbet, Picasso and anybody else’s idea of great art, an unparalleled genius of the field as well as a friend for something approaching forty years, i.e., most of our lives.
Now we turn to others that I could call “my” artists because I work with them as steadily as opportunity allows. Each is touched with genius, but in different ways, naturally. Just to name a few, Sabrina Jones, Sharon Rudahl, Peter Kuper, Spain Rodriguez. Their work has brought out so much of comic art’s potential to me.
What inspired you to teach comics?
Doubtless the memory that I had learned so much from comics myself, and that young people seem especially receptive to comic art and its perceptions, genius-insights delivered within the vernacular. Comics were one way, if not the only way, to reach the nineteen year old. They were more “mine” than the video clips and music that I regularly played in my largest lecture class, “The Sixties Without Apology.”
Out of all your books, is there one that is particularly special to you?
So many of my books are precious to me for different reasons that it is almost impossible to choose. A People’s History of American Empire, the Zinn adaptation scripted by Dave Wagner and drawn by Mike Konopacki, has reached tens of thousands of readers in English and several translations, delivering a message that could be not delivered in any other way. But Che, draw by Spain Rodriguez, has about ten translated versions, all the way to Malaysia, imagine that! And I could say something special, deeply meaningful to me, about all the books that I have made possible, one way or another. Perhaps Wobblies! will always be remembered by me as the first (since I published Radical America Komiks in 1969), the opening to a different task in my life. That one-because it was so good and because it gathered an atelier of radical artists around the task-made the subsequent ones possible.
When will we see a comics history of comics history?
I’ve been discussing, with Harvey Pekar, a comic-history of comics, for perhaps a year now. It can’t be a universal history, that would be impossibly huge, and how to limit it is a problem; my disinclination towards superheroes would be another problem. But Harvey and I keep pondering. If we had a publisher, it would happen if we could pay the artists.
—
beth
