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Post by Deleted on Oct 24, 2017 15:04:36 GMT -5
Huh. I don't really differentiate between "craft" and "content." And I'm not quite sure what an "iconoclastic" example would be... I guess I view comics as a series of specific authorial choices, and EVERY aspect of comics - including insane formalist stuff like Elvis Road - is part of"craft" to me. Some of the examples McCloud gives: Classicist-Hal Foster, Colleen Doran. P. Craig Russell Animist-Lynn Johnston, Jack Kirby, Dan DeCarlo Formalist-art spiegleman, Kevin Huizenga, Daniel Merlin Goodbrey (McCloud considers himself a formalist as well) Iconoclast-Julie Doucet, Jacques Tardi, Robert Crumb, Dave McKean he does point out some have a lot of cross-over for instance he says Milton Caniiff has a strong animist focus on story but his compostions show a strong classicist style and the spiegleman is a formalist with a strong Iconoclast streak, Charles Burn is iconoclast in bent but has strong Classicist leanings in the art, and Jim Woodring combines formalist and animist traits (an unusual combination). Not every creator is in 1 camp, but most have 1 tribe that is dominant while the other influences are there to a lesser degree. I've read Kieron Gillen ruminate on formalism a lot in his newsletter and Fraction as well, and that particular generation of creators seems to have a very strong formalist bent. -M
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Post by Reptisaurus! on Oct 25, 2017 17:18:01 GMT -5
Test
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Post by Reptisaurus! on Oct 25, 2017 17:22:51 GMT -5
Ok, so I can't reply because it says "Bad Gateway."
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Post by berkley on Oct 25, 2017 23:26:07 GMT -5
Huh. I don't really differentiate between "craft" and "content." And I'm not quite sure what an "iconoclastic" example would be... I guess I view comics as a series of specific authorial choices, and EVERY aspect of comics - including insane formalist stuff like Elvis Road - is part of"craft" to me. Some of the examples McCloud gives: Classicist-Hal Foster, Colleen Doran. P. Craig Russell Animist-Lynn Johnston, Jack Kirby, Dan DeCarlo Formalist-art spiegleman, Kevin Huizenga, Daniel Merlin Goodbrey (McCloud considers himself a formalist as well) Iconoclast-Julie Doucet, Jacques Tardi, Robert Crumb, Dave McKean he does point out some have a lot of cross-over for instance he says Milton Caniiff has a strong animist focus on story but his compostions show a strong classicist style and the spiegleman is a formalist with a strong Iconoclast streak, Charles Burn is iconoclast in bent but has strong Classicist leanings in the art, and Jim Woodring combines formalist and animist traits (an unusual combination). Not every creator is in 1 camp, but most have 1 tribe that is dominant while the other influences are there to a lesser degree. I've read Kieron Gillen ruminate on formalism a lot in his newsletter and Fraction as well, and that particular generation of creators seems to have a very strong formalist bent. -M OK, I thought those descriptions of the four categories were kind of vague but with the aid of the examples I think I can see what he was trying to say.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 25, 2017 23:37:21 GMT -5
berkley Here's a little more in depth explanation of the four tribes... they're from a blogger writing about McCloud circa 2010, but pretty much quote and/or paraphrase McCloud's explanations from the text in panels I couldn't find images of online (my scanner is buried in the room revamp upstairs right now or I would scan the relevant panels for you). -M
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Post by Reptisaurus! on Oct 29, 2017 22:06:19 GMT -5
So let me try this again -
I can get behind this as a thought experiment maybe a little, but I really don't like it as an attempt at serious criticism...
(A) I don't like classification systems in general - My background is criticism/reviews and I really think every work needs to be engaged on it's own merits. (My theory of criticism - You invent critical standards and you apply them!) And that goes way more for whole bodies of work.
(B) I don't like THESE PARTICULAR classification systems - I guess they all deal with how artist's view their own work, but they don't seem particularly contradictory. Lots of artists have very strong tendencies in two or three of these categories (especially those with longer careers!) and if EVERY person on your classification system is "A Little From Column "A" a Little from Column "B" that suggests a poor classification system. If your system is reliably inexact, who cares.
(C) Even if we accept classifications for artists as a whole as a good idea (I don't) or these particular classifications as workable (again, nahhh) I think quite a few of the examples of artist given were mis-classified. To wit -
A Distant Soil is very much content focused, even if it's never 100% transparent. Still, it seems more focused on world building rather than frou-frou pretty art, making it more Animist than Classicist.
For Better or For Worse was pretty damn subversive - "The Iconoclasts value truth and experience in art. To them art must be authentic, must show life as it is. They take aim at artistic conventions that gloss over the imperfections and disappointments at life." is a pretty damn good description of what Johnson's doing.
Or do iconoclasts have to draw a bunch of vaginas and penii? Is that part of it?
Kirby wasn't a particularly verbal guy - And I think that limits the clarity of his '70s content, and in the '60s... Well, Kirby and Lee were obviously telling completely different stories about 10% of the time. BUT had a really strong formalist streak and any classification system that DOESN'T call him an iconoclast is. . . . dubious.
art spiegelman might be a formalist at core, but the less abstract his work is the better it is. Y'all know I'm right.
Kevin Huizenga's stuff is deeply concerned with the rhythms of day-to-day life. I'd call him an iconoclast even more than a formalist at this point. (This might have not been true when Making Comics was published! I was surprised that Huizenga was even a thing in 2005.)
I don't know who Daniel Merling Goodbrey is!
I'm not a huge Jaque Tardi guy, but his stuff is SO classically beautiful. How is he not a Classicist?s
Did... did they just say that Dave McKean was NOT a formalist? Cages might be 50/50 Formalist/Iconoclastic, but everything else he's done is formalist with a strong classicist edge. (The beauty of the drawing might be obscured by the collage format a little, but it is there!)
And Crumb I would call LESS of an iconoclast than any of the other categories. His stuff is very much "about" being a comic - It's not designed to show us "real life" it feels purposefully artificial. That doesn't feel like an iconoclast to me. But his work has definitely reflected the other three categories at different times - His stuff can be very, very beautiful or completely formalist surrreal or he can draw the Bible which is all about re-framing the content.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 9, 2017 15:09:12 GMT -5
This is from Kieron Gillen's newsletter this week and maybe gives a little insight into how a formalist creator thinks about the process of creating a comic...
-M
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Post by Deleted on Nov 9, 2017 15:41:46 GMT -5
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Post by berkley on Oct 11, 2020 18:05:23 GMT -5
Looking at this again, I'm not sure McCloud is on the right track with his four categories: for example, the 4th, "iconoclast", seems to be a sub-category of the 2nd, "animist", since McCloud describes its as a certain kind of content rather than something else altogether. And "classicist" seems to ficus entirely on the artwork while saying nothing about the writing, so it would seem that every classicist would also have to be something else as well, as a writer.
As for "formalist", I wouldn't say that Gillen or Hickamn or any of the others are strictly experimentalists to the exclusion of any concern whatsoever with content - especially and most obviously when doing work for hire with pre-existing characters or concepts.
And we shouldn't necessarily assume that a creator like Kirby is a strict "animist", blinding ourselves to the very far-reaching formal innovations he introduced both with The New Gods and, in a completely diffeent way, with The Eternals.
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