Read the following
excerpt from Douglas Wolk's
Reading Comics
about the question of whether comics (it sounds strange to make it
singular, I know) is a medium or a genre. What is the difference between
a medium and a genre? Why does Wolk suggest it matters which one we
label comics? What does he mean by "highbrow" comics? Can we put a
work like Spiegelman's
Maus, with which we will begin the semester, and
Archie (seen above) alongside one another?
A medium is the way in which a story is told. Mediums include film, novels, comics and much more. A genre is a particular type of film, novel or comic. A story can be told through the medium of film, in the genre of Comedy for example.
ReplyDeleteIn saying that comics is a genre, it attributes a certain expectation for what a comic is or should be. This expectation is typically of a childish picture book full of superheroes punching things. It is as if a certain type of film were defined all movies . If, for example, all movies were expected to be similar to Dumb and Dumber. It limits the exposure to comics to the preconceived notion of what a comic is. This can cause many to miss many great works, simply because they don't understand that not all comics are about Batman.
Archie and Maus can absolutely stand beside each other as works in the medium of comics. Just as the film Grease and the film Schindler's List can stand beside each other as works in the medium of film. The story told by the medium has no impact on the type of medium that is being portrayed.
Mediums are ways or forms in which stories are told, whereas a genre is the type of story being portrayed.
ReplyDeleteI personally believe that comics are a medium and not a genre. I look at comics as a way to portray a story. For example, Spiderman is a story that began as a comic and translated to film. Therefore, the STORY of Spiderman would equate to the genre (fantasy) and the medium would equate to whether it was a film or comic form.
It will be interesting to see how what we read comes out in it's medium form and what it would look like had it been in a different form, such as novel, film, etc.
The way that I look at a medium is that it is there are multiple ways to tell a story. You have video, audio, novels, or even comics. Genres are the thing that take it that extra step further in defining where it belongs. What he means by highbrow comics is maybe a more so sophisticated way of presenting a comic. By this I mean it requires more thought than a standard comic. I think all comics have their own style so all of them should be presented differently to appeal to different crowds that would enjoy them.
ReplyDeleteA medium is any means of creating an art form that has it's own customs, tools, advantages, disadvantages, rules, conventions and genres. A genre is one aspect of a medium and a medium uses genre as a means to create, in a sense. A genre is more a way of framing a creation in a package of some sort that is easily identifiable. Science fiction, fantasy, literary fiction, mystery, romance-these are all genres. A medium would be writing, sculpting, musical expression, comics etc. Comics are comics regardless of the genre or artistic merit. Archie and Maus are both comics, they are completely different and likely have different audiences, but they both use the conventions that comics consist of.
ReplyDeleteAccording to Wolk, a medium refers to a form of expression with broad rules. A genre refers to a story which subscribes to a set of more specific conventions. Calling comics a genre also maintains associations with financially successful genre comics, and with that label notions of popular mass media instead of art. Wolk maintains that even genre comics are comics and labeling some comics “highbrow,” as more culturally significant or literary than other comics, reveals more about the reviewer than the work. Can one place Maus alongside Archie? Yes. One could start broadly: they are cultural productions, printed, modern, 20th century?, illustrated. If these became the only surviving artifacts of our culture, then these pieces might be placed together and mined profitably by future critics, historians, whoever. In a lot of ways these pieces make sense together, if one is interested in them in a broad way. If one is interested in recursive ethnographic documents about second-generation trauma, then Archie probably doesn’t belong. If one is interested in depictions of heterosexual love in 1940s America, then Maus becomes less appropriate.
ReplyDeleteAs an art student, I find comics as a genre rather than medium. While it can be a medium for storytelling, I refer to medium most of the time as the technique or material used to create the work. So in comics, I see the medium as ink, print, graphite, screen-print, etc. for whatever material was used to create the comic.
ReplyDeleteThe genre refers to the style in which the visual data is relayed to an audience. Plus, there are sub genres staring from the broadest definition of art, to the most specific genre of comics.
With that said, within the genre of comics, Maus and Archie can stand together, as sequential images accompanied by words. When specified deeper however, Maus tends to be taken more seriously, dealing with a sensativesubject, than Archie, which is considered most commonly as entertainment and short-term humor, and therefore don't really belong on the same sub-genre of high-brow/low-brow comics.