Ben Katchor's Reading List

"All the people whose books I’m choosing didn’t use pictures as a crutch. They weren’t failed or unformed writers who needed pictures. They excelled in the prose tradition and in the picture-making tradition. They used each as a corrective for the other. Things you can’t communicate with words you can show, and things you can’t show you can convey with words. That’s how movies work, that’s how theatre works, and the paper form of all that is the picture story. Töpffer’s work consists of highly sophisticated stories, 100 pages or longer. His stories are told through drawings and handwritten text combined on a page. In Western culture, there’s a great taboo against placing text within a picture, so he put the text below each picture, but they worked together. The stories are very entertaining and interesting, very dense and imbued with his handwriting. It wasn’t until the 1860s that you could make a reproducible drawing as effortlessly in print as you could on paper. Previously, another technician would take your drawing and translate it into either a wood etching or a steel engraving. With lithographic printing that step was obviated. That’s when Töpffer’s career took off. He was there at the right moment to combine pictures with text. He was the first person in Western culture to make a large body of literary picture stories. Töpffer was trained to be a writer and his father was painter, so he grew up in a picture-making culture. That’s why he was able to do both. He was a Genevan, from the French-speaking part of what became Switzerland. Because he wrote in French, the tradition he started first developed there, but was pirated all over Europe. By 1842 his work was bootlegged in America."

"He spans the worlds of words and pictures. He has a very sophisticated literary style and a breathtaking range – from a child’s scrawl to sophisticated topographical drawings. He did a strip, but I don’t think he published much in America. He had much more of a reputation in England. His strips centre on grandiose architectural scenes in lush watercolours. I would call him more the Turner of picture stories than the Michelangelo. That equation makes no sense, because pictures and words operate in different spheres of description. Pictures in space, words in time. Pictures can convey things that can only be hinted at with words. Computer code can, but not conventional language."

"He trained to be a painter, then at some point in his career he felt the fine art world was too limited. Painting of the 1950s and 60s was too limited to contain his intentions. Jerry wanted to tell stories in a way that transcended the academic disciplines. He has a highly sophisticated approach to picture-making, but he’s also interested in using compositional ideas to tell stories. Many are veiled autobiographical stories about growing up in upstate New York. That’s the theme of Jack Survives . Jack is based upon his father. Some autographic writing is driven more by text, some is driven more by pictures. Jerry Moriarty is picture-driven. His text is terse, stripped-down language, like dialogue in a play. Imagine if Beckett made a comic strip, and you’ve got the concision and humour of Jerry Moriarty. In America, the tradition of newspaper comics aimed at a general audience started around 1895. In 1939 the comic book began, aimed at adolescents and kids. Comic books gave the form a bad name. Much of what was done was simplistic hackwork with a strong violent streak. People trying to use the form for serious literary and visual stories had a hard time finding an adult audience. In the 1970s a lot of oversized visual magazines, like Interview and Wet , were published in America. Art Spiegelman had the idea of packaging picture stories in a format that had connotations of visual and literary sophistication. RAW didn’t look like a 10-cent comic book. It attracted people who read Interview magazine – graphic designers, artists. When the package changed, people looked at what we did differently."

"It’s about an imaginary urban wasteland filled with strange creatures. It’s less like a naturalistic novel or a linear narrative than a strange chain reaction, like watching a circus act or scientific demonstration with text. He invents a kind of colloquial American speech that’s very condensed and turns the syntax of normal speech on its head. Like Jerry Moriarty, Gary Panter is a trained painter. But everybody grows up immersed in popular culture. Some people leave the fine arts completely, like me. I said I never want to show in a gallery, it’s not my world, I want to be in reproduction and mass media. But some people, like Gary, kept his painting activity going. He still does cover design for albums and theatrical stuff, like the sets for [the US children’s TV programme] Pee-wee’s Playhouse . People who work in picture stories tend to be multi-media. Every mainstream publisher publishes comics now, so either comics have been co-opted or mainstream publishing has been subverted. We were once considered subversive. Mainstream publishing thought comics were junk. It used to be that the worst thing you could say about figures in a novel is that they were like comic strip characters. That was the ultimate dismissal of the author. Now we’ve come to a point where a review in The New York Times said “this novel could probably be done better as a comic strip”. It’s all been turned around."

"He’s an American who’s lived in England most of his life. His weekly strips in The Independent [newspaper] gave a view of the world through the eyes of a newborn, an absolutely unacculturated creature. Every page is a great revelation. The world is full of terrible prejudices. There are racial prejudices and there are media prejudices, and they should both be overcome. You have to see the broader picture. The medium of autographic writing is a neutral thing. You can do something really boring with it, or something really interesting. The potential is there in any medium. There are forms in popular culture that were made just to make money. Most novels are terrible – the bulk of books are commercial, Harlequin Romance-quality. But that doesn’t mean you reject literature, does it? A lot of comics are hackwork but I wouldn’t blame the whole media. You have to have both visual literacy and prose literacy. It has to do with education and the way schools are set up. Maybe you weren’t educated to understand pictures. A lot of people have lopsided backgrounds. Editors of magazines specialise in text and hire art directors who are visually literate to oversee the rest. What we need are schools that bridge these academic divides. In popular culture there aren’t divisions between disciplines. In popular arts – theatre, movies, comics – that’s the norm. Academic divisions are based on a misunderstanding of how human beings work. Specialisation says that if you can draw, you don’t have to write. If you’re musical, you’re not expected to be literary. We train people to focus on one thing and not do anything else. In Asian culture – before the introduction of movable type when they started imitating the West – how you wrote your poem was as important as the words you chose. It’s the tradition of Asian calligraphy. To me that makes perfect sense, but it got fractured in the West. In one of the obituaries of Steve Jobs , the first or second sentence explained that the design revolution he started was inspired by his study of calligraphy. The inventors of the personal computers created single-font software with little bitmap letters – they decided words didn’t need materiality. Jobs thought we shouldn’t throw out the whole expressive tradition of typography, and that’s why we all have our choice today. There was a terrible rupture in Western culture between text and picture. It’s time that we correct it."