Philosophy of Comics

An Introduction

Sam Cowling, Wesley Cray

• Editore: Bloomsbury Academic
• Anno: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350098480
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Filosofia
• Categoria: Estetica in filosofia

What exactly are comics? Can they be art, literature, or even pornography? How should we understand the characters, stories, and genres that shape them? Thinking about comics raises a bewildering range of questions about representation, narrative, and value. Philosophy of Comics is an introduction to these philosophical questions. In exploring the history and variety of the comics medium, Sam Cowling and Wesley D. Cray chart a path through the emerging field of the philosophy of comics. Drawing from a diverse range of forms and genres and informed by case studies of classic comics such as Watchmen, Tales from the Crypt, and Fun Home, Cowling and Cray explore ethical, aesthetic, and ontological puzzles, including: - What does it take to create-or destroy-a fictional character like Superman?
- Can all comics be adapted into films, or are some comics impossible to adapt?
- Is there really a genre of "superhero comics"?
- When are comics obscene, pornographic, and why does it matter? At a time of rapidly growing interest in graphic storytelling, this is an ideal introduction to the philosophy of comics and some of its most central and puzzling questions.

1

Introduction

Chapter Outline

1. Philosophy through Comics

2. Philosophy of Comics

3. Philosophy and Comics Studies

4. How This Book Works

5. Recommended Readings

1. Philosophy through Comics

A young girl runs into the longing arms of her parents while a statuesque man in a suit and hat stares on, beholding his success in saving her. While these characters might as well be standing on a city sidewalk, this action unfolds on a featureless white rectangle that seems to hover in space. The rectangle is surrounded by massive bands of text including words and phrases like “reason,” “justice,” and “retaliatory force.” At the degrading edge of the rectangle, two figures, drawn in heavy blacks, desperately hang on for dear life. In the next panel, they beg for mercy and forgiveness while plummeting into a cluster of words like “injustice” and “corruption” which are piled up like a kind of typesetting car crash. The man in the suit and hat stands above, looking in the opposite direction, indifferent to their cries. Pages earlier, he shot one of their gang and ignored their pleas for help while saving the young girl from their kidnapping and ransom attempt.

Figure 1.1 Mr. A (1973), Steve Ditko. Mr. A looks at reunited family while criminals plummet into the abyss of text.

This is one of many remarkable moments in Steve Ditko’s uncom­promising superhero comic Mr. A (1973), and the moral questions it raises are difficult ones. What do we owe to evil doers? When and to what extent is punishment rational? What actions are permitted when we attempt to save someone’s life? Historically, addressing these and other fundamental ethical questions has been a central concern of philosophers. It’s easy, too, to see why philosophers would have much to say about the moral principles implicit in Ditko’s heroic depiction of Mr. A. They’re not exactly uncontroversial, after all.

One intellectual project at the intersection of philosophy and comics—call it philosophy through comics—uses comics like Mr. A to present, understand, and answer philosophical questions. Philosophy through comics takes seriously the possibility that comics can provide us with tools or insights useful for tackling ethical, epistemological, and other issues within philosophy. Apart from its distinctive focus on the medium of comics, philosophy through comics is therefore quite similar to other projects like philosophy through film or philosophy through science fiction that use works within a specific medium or an entire genre as a launching point for philosophical inquiry.

An importantly different project at the intersection of philosophy and comics—the one with which this book is concerned—is the philosophy of comics, which applies philosophical methods in order to better understand the medium of comics. Where philosophy through comics uses comics as a means toward more general philosophical ends, philosophy of comics seeks to provide a philosophical theory of what comics are, what is distinctive about how comics work, and why comics matter. Just as other areas of philosophy take aim at specific topics like law, love, commerce, the environment, and pretty much any other subject, the philosophy of comics takes comics and the practices surrounding them as central objects of inquiry. As we’ll see, this project requires delving into a wide variety of philosophical issues and areas, but the main aim is clear: to provide philosophically sound answers to the complex and diverse questions that might be raised about comics.

With this distinction between projects in mind, someone doing philosophy through comics might look at Mr. A and pose questions like the following:

• What account of rationality would vindicate Mr. A’s view that reason requires him to kill the kidnappers?

• Does our willingness or reluctance to view Mr. A as a hero indicate that his methods are morally objectionable?

• Is the implicit premise of Mr. A that criminals are beyond redemption remotely plausible?

Tackling such questions is one of several ways we might hope to make progress in assessing philosophical theories about topics like reason, justice, and punishment. In contrast, when doing the philosophy of comics, quite different questions—ones specific to comics—are front and center:

• How are text and image related in these bizarre panels? For example, is it true in Ditko’s story that there are huge words floating behind Mr. A?

• Is a comic with these sorts of moral commitments rightly classified as a superhero comic or does it belong to a different genre?

• How much should Ditko’s own views and intentions affect our interpretation of comics like Mr. A?

Questions of these sorts, if properly addressed, promise to shed much light on the comics medium.

Although philosophy through comics and philosophy of comics can and do overlap, appreciating the difference between the two is an important part of understanding each. But we also need answers to two further questions: Where does the philosophy of comics fit within the discipline of philosophy? And what is the connection between the philosophy of comics and the field of comics studies? We take up these two questions in the next couple of sections. Along the way, we’ll introduce some key concepts and some of the methodological commitments that will play an important role throughout this book.

2. Philosophy of Comics

As a discipline or field of study, philosophy is notoriously difficult to define. Perhaps the most famous definition owes to Wilfrid Sellars: “The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term” (1962: 35). While this might be accurate, it also might not be terribly informative. What, for example, does it mean for things to “hang together” and how should we go about the pursuit of understanding? Does, say, scientific experiment or writing poetry count?

However we might define philosophy as a discipline, it remains fairly standard practice to divide it into subdisciplines on the basis of subject matter. Different subdisciplines like ethics, epistemology, and logic are therefore driven by questions concerned with different subjects. So, for example, ethics is concerned with goodness, moral value, right action, and other moral notions and therefore addresses questions about how we ought to act and what kinds of things are morally valuable. Similarly, epistemology, a different sub-discipline, is concerned with knowledge, justification, evidence, and so on. It therefore tackles questions regarding what, if anything, we are justified in believing and where the limits of human knowledge lie. Subdisciplines of philosophy are numerous and for almost any subject matter you might think up, there is some portion of philosophy that addresses it directly or indirectly. Despite this, there is no universally accepted way of dividing up all of philosophy and no matter how one might hope to do so, overlaps and intersections are unavoidable. Some of these are obvious. For example, when we investigate the epistemology of ethics, which asks how we acquire moral knowledge, we will find ourselves engaged in epistemology and, to at least some degree, ethics. Some overlaps and intersections are less obvious. It is, for instance, all but impossible to do political philosophy without, at the same time, doing ethics—for example, by accepting or rejecting claims about how citizens and states ought to treat one another.

One of the broad conclusions of this book is that the philosophy of comics has substantial intersections across much of philosophy—more, we think, than has yet been acknowledged by the vast majority of philosophers. Despite this, it remains commonplace to view the philosophy of comics as falling within the philosophy of art, which is the subdiscipline of philosophy concerned with—well, art. According to some, it would be more apt to say that the philosophy of comics falls within the subdiscipline of aesthetics, but this is a point of philosophical controversy. (On the aesthetics versus philosophy of art distinction, see Hick (2012: 3–4).) Depending upon one’s philosophical views, aesthetics might be narrower than, broader than, or just the same thing as the philosophy of art. If that seems a bit puzzling to you, you’re not alone. Here, however, we will simply sidestep this controversy and mark our preference for talking about the philosophy of art rather than aesthetics (though we’ll sometimes talk about aesthetic properties; more on that later).

There are good reasons for questioning whether the philosophy of comics is most naturally viewed as a part of the philosophy of art. Some of these reasons are straightforward: it is unclear whether all comics are works of art. Some comics are advertising, instruction manuals, or pornography that arguably fall short of being art. And, if the philosophy of comics is taken to be a part of the philosophy of art, then there would be some comics—namely, those comics that are not artworks—that the philosophy of comics would not be concerned with understanding. But, of course, the philosophy of comics is concerned with those comics and any other ones regardless of whether or not one counts them as art. So the philosophy of comics seems at once narrower and broader than the philosophy of art, in that it focuses primarily not on artworks but on a class of things that happen to be art, sometimes.

Other reasons to deny that the philosophy of comics is a part of the philosophy of art are a bit more complex and perhaps more controversial. Suppose, for example, you believe that the key philosophical questions about comics revolve around how, as a hybrid medium—one that brings together written text and (typically) drawn images—comics represent information. So understood, the philosophy of comics stands alongside other subdisciplines like the philosophy of language and the philosophy of images, which seek to understand linguistic representation (how words represent things) and pictorial representation (how pictures represent things). And, together, these three subdisciplines really fall not within the philosophy of art but in a different and rarely labeled subdiscipline that we might call the philosophy of representation.

Despite these issues in philosophical taxonomy, it is clear that holding the philosophy of comics to be a part of philosophy of art comes with certain theoretical and practical benefits. It explains and makes clear its commonalities with parallel philosophical projects like the philosophy of film and the philosophy of music—both of which share the same complicated relationship, discussed earlier, with the philosophy of art more generally. It also serves as a continuing reminder that perennial questions in the philosophy of art regarding context, interpretation, and value can and should be asked of those comics that happen to be artworks. And, more often than not, when philosophers have been interested in comics, it has been because those comics are artworks of an interesting or important variety. Depending upon the future of the philosophy of comics, there might eventually be reason to resist situating it within the philosophy of art, but, for our purposes, it is a helpful space within which to envision the work undertaken in this book.

Once we have found a place for philosophy of comics in the sprawling field of philosophy, we are still left with a looming methodological question: How should we go about doing the philosophy of comics? In trying to answer this question, the first thing to note is that there is no easy answer to the much broader question: How should we go about doing philosophy? This is due, in part, to the fact that there is no such thing as the philosophical method. There are, of course, better and worse ways to do philosophy. Everyone should agree that the method of unreflective guesswork is inferior to the provision of clear and careful arguments. But, beyond this, one finds nothing but controversy. Since it would take an entirely different book to mount a comprehensive case for the philosophical methodology we’ll rely upon here, we’ll have to settle for briefly describing our preferred way of doing philosophy and, in particular, doing the philosophy of comics.

In keeping with the contemporary analytic tradition, our focus is on explaining phenomena as clearly as we can and then offering arguments for and against competing theories that seek to explain these phenomena. We avoid, as best we can, concepts and distinctions that cannot be drawn through clear examples or, better yet, given explanations or analyses in something like everyday language. While it might be exciting or enlivening to be presented with provocative but opaque claims about comics (everything is a comic! nothing is a comic!), we believe that there are more and less plausible views about comics and that rigor and clarity in argument offer the best way to discern them. Throughout, our hope is to make genuine philosophical progress in understanding comics, but progress only occurs as part of a philosophical and intellectual community. For that reason, we’re more interested in being clear and proven wrong than being vague and immune to refutation—in part, that’s because the former option is something from which all of us might learn. We’re also quite sympathetic with cartoonist Ivan Brunetti’s observation, “Just when I think I’ve stumbled upon some philosophical truth, I remember at least one favorite cartoonist whose work violates whatever blustery principle I may have just posited” (2006: 7).

This description of philosophical methodology might be surprising for those who’ve only seen philosophy from afar, if at all. It’s easy (and kind of fun) to caricature philosophy as a discipline based upon cryptic defenses of wild theses that are philosophically attractive precisely because they’re so provocative and incredible. That is, of course, a way that someone might do philosophy, but it’s a bad way to attempt to improve our collective understanding. Moreover, we don’t deny that there might be good philosophical reasons to believe certain striking or surprising theses about comics or anything else, for that matter. For example, it is famously difficult to rebut arguments for external world skepticism—roughly, the view that we are ignorant about almost all of what we take ourselves to know. There are also powerful philosophical arguments for exotic metaphysical views that, if accepted, would likely require us to radically revise our worldview—for example by seeking to show that are no ordinary objects like tables, chairs, or even people.

For those committed to what we might call “first philosophy,” philosophical reasoning is absolutely foundational. This is because philosophical arguments can, in principle, overrule what science, common sense, and other sources of belief lead us to accept about the world. So, for those committed to first philosophy, pretty much every philosophical issue is a live one and, if we find ourselves unable to rebut the arguments on the table, we might well be rationally obligated to radically revise our worldview. Are there ...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 What Are Comics?
• 3 Comics as Artifacts—Ontology and Authenticity
• 4 Does Superman Exist?
• 5 Truth in Comics
• 6 Genre in Comics
• 7 Representing Social Categories in Comics
• 8 Are Comics Literature?
• 9 Comics, Obscenity, and Pornography
• 10 Page, Panel, Screen—Comics and Adaptation
• Afterword
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Copyright