—John David Ebert, Giant Humans, Tiny Worlds: Adventures in the Universe of Graphic Novels
Speaking of British Invasion comics, as we were yesterday, and of Justin Murphy’s Salon des Cancelés, as we were last week, I give you this quotation—and I semi-apologize for the bad phone scan, but I’m not typing all that out.
Ebert is a popular YouTube theorist and an author of both traditionally- and independently- published books. I first heard of him only last month, and then I noticed he was ubiquitous on the independent intellectual side of the online world. I even heard reference to him in the polite purlieus of BookTube—amid the theory, he has good videos on Pynchon and McCarthy. Has he actually been cancelé? As far as I can tell, it’s more that he doesn’t engage with culture on the now-requisite sociopolitical level. Like certain old-fashioned liberals, he both talks to anyone of any ideological persuasion and takes a hard line on free speech; but his own politics, as far as I can tell, are simply what “liberal” used to be, when liberalism was much more open to material like Jung than it is currently, now that the main agenda appears to be gentrifying Marxism and separatist identity politics for the benefit of corporatism, not that they didn’t used to manipulate headier stuff to similar ends (power does what it can with what it finds to hand—no art or philosophy is perfectly safe, though no art or philosophy is totally compromised either).
Anyway, alert to signs of life in independent publishing, I decided to check out one of his many books, and where better to begin than the one on graphic novels, a special if vexed interest of mine. He interprets the graphic novel—an evolved comic book that, like other evolving lifeforms, grew a spine—as a typical product of a late-stage civilization, a visual narrative about “the soul’s conquest of evil.” Ebert adduces precursors like The Books of the Netherworld in 1500 BCE Egypt and the palm-leaf manuscripts of the late Mughal period in India, periods when an exhausted high culture’s final expressions came in the forms of lively picture stories. He further argues that the graphic novel is an essentially adolescent form concerned with “the quest of the self to construct an identity in an age of liquid signifiers,” which fits with the well-known fact that the two most prominent genres of American graphic novel are the memoir and the superhero saga, both of them focusing on the bildung of a young protagonist. In his “World Clock” survey of 24 graphic novels, Ebert makes one excursion to Europe—to talk Moebius—and two to the U.S. indie scene—Charles Burns, Chris Ware (whose Jimmy Corrigan he overpraises as the graphic Ulysses)—but he mostly dwells on the Anglo-American mainstream and the superhero genre he interprets as a psychological immune system of postmodern myths to guard the metropole. Interested only in the post-1970s so-called Dark Age of Superhero Comics, the epoch of the genre’s maturation, Ebert sees the superhero as protecting and assembling a postmodern world in the ruins of those modern master narratives in which no one can believe:
In a way, every graphic novel is always already situated on the inside of the world space that Thomas Pynchon, as a great visionary artist foreseeing what was coming, had already imagined in his novel Gravity’s Rainbow, a work of literature that forms a transition—in a manner similar to the way that Don Quixote was transitioning from the horizon of the Medieval world to that of Modernity—from the world space of the utopian novel to the crumbling world ruins of the graphic novel which situates its various giant humans amongst the strewn rocks and shattered rubble of its collapsed structures.
He unsparingly observes the rise and fall of the ’80s generation writers, as it’s clear that the work of Moore, Miller, and Gaiman isn’t by the 21st century what it once was—the form’s adolescence strikes again. (I was surprised by the book’s relative lack of Morrison, represented only by Arkham Asylum and We3, given the shared ground of occultism.) Ebert has a habit of imposing theory on his chosen critical objects rather than unfolding significance from the specificity of the text—is Watchmen really about the resurfacing of Meso-American cultural practices according to which the mask consumes its wearer?—but he’s always psychedelic and often gets the balance right.
The passage above interests me because, though I’ve never been a Heideggerean, it finds that uncanny core in Sandman that Gaiman never really reached again. Also because I once wrote a paper on the politics of Sandman that centered on “Thermidor.” This was 2007, and I couched it as a critique of American liberalism’s Bush-era self-congratulating self-designation as “the reality-based community.” In my reading, Gaiman exposes this faith in reason’s untrammeled access to reality as itself a modern myth—a deadly one at that. On the other hand, Gaiman’s overall point in Sandman is that the new god is a better (because more humane) one than the old, so the Enlightenment faith in progress, and the Christian narrative it arguably reprises, survives in his epic. I think the line in my paper went something like this: “To oppose the Terror is not to oppose the Revolution.” I wouldn’t put it that way now, but I also wouldn’t rule out a priori our making a future better than the past.
