This blog is about art matters and books. The ‘intellectual’ mediums (movies, theatre, opera, literary novels) and the media once reviled as ‘lowbrow’- comics, TV, genre lit, both interest me. Do they intersect? For me, they do, and for many they always have. An influence on my thinking about pop culture was Hermenaut, a now defunct ‘Digest of Heady Philosophy’, edited by Joshua Glenn.
In the 90s, a number of zines and small journals popped up in a final flowering of magazine culture before the internet decentralized it. Pamphlets and periodicals go back centuries to Hazlitt and Lamb and Thomas Paine, but it seems fair to say they reached their heyday in the 20th Century. There have always been higher minded journals, but with dime novels and pulps and then the comic book boom, the divide between high and low art began to close. By the mid 50s, with the popularization of paperback books pulp fiction was well established, if frowned on by the dominant puritan culture. Self-publishing had started, too. Superman, in fact, started in early form as a zine.
I found my way as a kid from from the well meant but terminally inauthentic Edgar Allen Poe Classics Comics my parents brought me, to hidden gems of Dell Comics (Little Lulu, most widely read feminist literature of the 50s, prove me wrong), to Marvels. As many did, I was some how bound to the magic feel, and even smell, of ostensibly disposable pamphlets and began to collect all types as a young adult. I think the transgressive attitude, imposed by censors and internalized by their creators, is a big part of the appeal. Raw Magazine and Love & Rockets ( long running, punk inflected comic book, self published by the Hernandez Bros.) was the tipping point where I left mainstream comics and magazines, and began searching out small press items. Zines, including art books, were a natural progression. I was then working on a zine with other students, Another Voice in Laramie, Wy. as a cartoonist.
It was in Granta, a fairly well circulated literary journal where one could find ads for subscriptions to other, more obscure journals, that I found Hermenaut, and subscribed.
Hermenaut wielded the academic philosophical critique of the Frankfurt School on pop culture icons. Recently I found an older issue, #10 “Pop Culture”, online and bought it, and enjoyed it for engaging mix of high culture and low, expressed in one article, “Surfin’ Satori”, an analysis of restless channel surfing from a philosophical viewpoint, in the form of an advice column, by Mister Way, a pseudonym.
It completely summarizes the Hermenaut history and editorial mission: articles on Bruce Lee; Marlo Thomas and Mary Tyler Moore sitcoms, heavily steeped in irony- Hermenaut is nothing if not ironic. The next issue ( #11/12), begins a transition to ‘little magazine’ or journal. These categories are mutable, as Glenn himself notes, but it was perfect bound and carried a certain intellectual heft. Glenn notes that the word ‘zine’ derives not from ‘magazine’ but from ‘fanzine’, but I think now the former applies quite often, exemplified by this and later issues. The issue focuses on “Camp” (irony weaponized), and is close to indispensable to me even now, offering useful definitions of camp ( as opposed to irony and kitsch, cheese and sarcasm, with which it is often confused.) Not all pop culture is enjoyed ironically, and not all irony is camp.
Long story short, I’ve gone from low culture interpretations of high culture (Classics comics), to high culture interpretations of low culture ( I’m making progress, Mom and Dad!) Low culture is associated with the exploited, in Marxist cultural criticism (Clement Greenberg) and with fascism in Theodor Adorno (patron saint of Hermenaut ). It is not easy for someone with my lack of basic academic philosophy grounding to understand, but his critique of pop culture as a method of softening bourgeois brains for fascist indoctrination is in the intro to #10, and implied in Greenberg, ”Avant Garde and Kitsch”. The Adorno link seems to carry a significant amount of ironic detachment, as Adorno was not a big fan of pop culture, reviling classic swing (then, more of a antecedent to Rock and Roll than the nostalgic public radio celebration it’s become) in favor of Schoenberg’s 12 tone classical compositions.
Hermenaut, by contrast, has always projected a love of low culture. “Fake Authenticity” (#15) posited a parodistic correspondence between the existentialist writer Samuel Becket and minimalist cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller, of ‘Nancy’. This is one of the earliest commentaries on the ‘sublime’ (or is it just ‘dumb’?) comic strip which has beguiled the low culture intelligentsia ( low culture has an intelligentsia?! Greenberg would be rolling over in his grave) since Mark Newgarden, in Raw, created a formalist parody, which itself ascends to the realm of camp. Hermenaut defines camp as ‘engaged irony’. Eventually Hermenaut went belly up and stiffed me on one or two issues. Glenn’s HiLo website is not as good for bluffing your way through philosophy 101, but a nice catalog of obscure pop culture. There is quite a bit on the history of American zines, which ignores the British contributions in the areas of football zines, which had a big influence on punk music zines, which in turn influenced their US brethren.
Since then I’ve always subscribed to obscure mags or sought them out in back issues. The Ganzfeld, early McSweeney’s, Pressing Matters, a printmaking magazine, and Comic Art Quarterly have been obsessions, all closer to ‘little magazines’, but The Comics Journal, like Hermenaut, started as a true zine. Comics, a stepchild of art and commerce, have often been seen as fellow travelers with zines and small press journals.
It’s getting harder to find truly unique, experimental journals, zines and comics. The heyday may be over. They don’t seem to hold the same cachet for present generations as they did for Boomers, who grew up when newsstands were still viable.
There will always be someone trying to start a journal, if only online. There will always be people like me who scoop them up in hopes of finding gold. I continue to keep an eye peeled for renegade newsprint. This weekend, I went to DeCAF, the Denver Comic Arts Festival above the Schoolyard Beer Garden on Acoma St. It was a good venue for it, and pretty well attended. There were self published comics, zines and graphics including activist and transgender publications, poetry and of course, humor.
I have often found art zines and poetry at these events, this time, I stuck mainly to comics. I picked up self published graphic novels by nationally known and honored artists such as Maria and Peter Hoey, and comics by local cartoonists such as Evan Hicks.
Perhaps epitomizing the vibe of strange individual visions that zines and minis project, I got an extremely obscure collection of Japanese insect graphics and comics from the 20s, 30s and 40s with collages of same by French collage artist Samplerman, from local zine retailer Wigshop. This, and many publications, walk a fine line between the zine and mini comics world, and a more intellectual approach that has always characterized journals and even ‘high’ art. Juliette Collet’s zines of random surreal thought and images, and Yuichi Yokohama’s onomatopoeia-centric Sandbox, published by Latvian zine kings Kus! are good examples.
I walked out with a pretty good stack for $75. The event showed that the Denver comics and zine scene is still vibrant. It’s great to see, as I’ve gotten many back issues online, but walking in to a store and buying a non literary zine or journal now is unheard of ( except here). For a great anthology of zines and mini comics, you can still pick up the scintillating Alive Outside edited by Canadian zine and comics apostle Marc Bell at Copacetic.com.
White Christian fascists who worship Orange Jesus can threaten and censor libraries ( or try, redoubtable DPL had a table there, and are now the hosts of the Denver Zine Library) but they will never squash zines, the tiny bibles of freedom of speech, since the 18th Century.
#zines #DPL #minicomics #comics #DenverComicsArtFestival #freespeech #resist #littlemagazines
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