Over on his blog, Bill Maher has made some incendiary comments about comics after the death of Stan Lee. (http://www.real-time-with-bill-maher-blog.com/index/2018/11/16/adulting )
Clearly Maher is trying to undermine Lee’s legacy to get under everyone’s skin (that’s his schtick), and drive traffic to his site and generate buzz for himself. So I unfortunately have to take the bait because he does call out professors who deal with comics…and I’m a professor who deals with comics- as he states one of “the dumb people.”
In his post Maher makes a very common error in talking about comics and confusing the genre for medium. It just so happens that I’ve been talking to my students about this this week in our Intro to the Humanities class. When we throw out the medium because of how it’s employed by a particular genre, it’s like throwing out our television because we don’t like Jersey Shore.
The medium is the vehicle for transmitting the content. Reducing the medium and people who work hard in the field (as creators and scholars and publishers) is incredibly naïve, and making it fairly obvious that Maher is as narrow-minded as the bigots he projects himself as being against. Because he’s clearly never seen a comic outside of the mainstream comics that he’s criticizing. He’s just working on his assumptions.
Other commenters have suggested he read Maus and Spiegelman’s books are a good entry point into comics outside of what people stereotypically regard as “comics.” I more immediately thought of Alison Bechdel’s work, but there are literally thousands of comics that do fit better the category of literature than the “kid stuff” to which he is referring. Comics, as a system of communication- as a language- can say anything that someone wielding pen and paper (or digital tablet) wants it to- just like comedy (that Bill Maher never grew out of).
Maher is simply over-simplifying. He’s doing it for his own ends- to generate controversy by attempting to undermine a figure like Stan Lee who is much admired by many mainstream comics fans, but who does not form the nucleus around which comics as a field as a whole is centered. He really doesn’t care about comics or about this conversation.
As an educator in academia who is invested in comics, though, the debate is tiresome. Maher said, “…adults decided they didn’t have to give up kid stuff. And so they pretended comic books were actually sophisticated literature. And because America has over 4,500 colleges – which means we need more professors than we have smart people – some dumb people got to be professors by writing theses with titles like Otherness and Heterodoxy in the Silver Surfer.”
I can’t find this article so I can only guess that he made it up, but what I find interesting is that Maher who seems to project himself as a champion of thinking and knowledge is making an anti-intellectual claim here that has been made against all fields of academia for the history of American academia. So he makes a call for us being smarter yet undermines those of us working in Higher Ed.
While academia has somewhat opened its doors to researching the relevance of popular culture, scholars who choose to focus on this continue to be assailed as “less-than” when compared to experts in other fields of knowledge. This stance is near-sighted and often has classist roots- as to say that which is of the common people must be inferior to our “high class” art. It seems to be a fairly conservative view of the world and ignores how much people are in fact influenced by popular culture like comics, video games, and television- which now occupy the space in which literary books and the works of Shakespeare also existed. As human culture changes, so to must academia.
And to be clear, academia does not “accept” comics, as Maher claims. If you are a comics scholar or creator you are generally accepting the role of step-child if you are ever welcomed into an academic institution. A guest speaker I had speak at my History of Comics seminar at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC told me that while she was doing art historical research on the comics artist Winsor McCay, her advisor insisted she pursue more “fine art” research so that she doesn’t get pigeon-holed. Academia looks down on comics still just like Maher.
Yet when he accuses comics as the entertainment medium as being responsible for Trump being president, if he wants to throw a whole medium on the fire, maybe he should look at his own field. Polarizing news outlets and comedians posing as political and/or intellectual gurus are driving our national zeitgeist into the gaping maw of Trumpism far more than a bunch of superheroes who help people take off the edge of what’s left of the American dream.
Excellent.
Excellent arguement, Adam. He has an opinion, but by no means should he be considered an authority.