I need to find one of those “Full-time Professional Comics Reader” jobs 😉

Ah, you gotta read it! It’s wonderful. Get the Fantagraphics Complete, cheap edition of Jaime’s work, and if you enjoy that — which I’m sure you will — then move on to his brother Gilbert, who is quite different, but also great.

I think the arbitrariness is a healthy perspective to keep in mind. That it’s always “a” canon, and never “the” canon. Not relativism, though. Pluralism.

The HU comics canon is already doing its job, btw:
Can you believe that I never read the Death of Speedy Ortiz?
When I look at the image up at the top of this page it freaks me out, there’s so much communication, on so many levels, compressed into the situation depicted and its interplay with the text.

OK, I can buy that. However, what’s interesting is the decisions we make intersubjectively, which coalesce into canons. A certain set of decisions emerge and consolidate themselves, making it hard to extract the blade and start all over again.

It would be neat to have the luxury of quantum physics, where “all possible choices” is a valid choice for some situations – “the cat is dead AND the cat is alive – until you look in the box”.

It’s an interesting point, though I think the tendency toward privileging the head disproportionately in the period is more straightforwardly an issue of emphasis — it is the area of focus and is therefore made bigger. Kind of like in a lot of caricature.

What is (good) taste?

Echo: What is a culture?

Echo: What is a discourse?

Echo: What is the sum of a billion individual, idiosyncratic humans?

I get lost in these echoes; but then I find myself in familiar landscapes:

What is a word?

What is a meaning?

For those, at least, I have a shadow of an answer. Ferdinand De Saussure said (he destroyed his writings, so we have him only by his words, as remembered by his students) of meaning, that it is in itself purely amorphous. Without any notion of form.
Our words have meanings, in the form of _arbitrary_ sections (cuts, slices) of this amorphous non-matter, meaningness.

Jumping from the shoulder of that giant; I suggest that Canons are _arbitrary_ cuts of the amorphous culture(d)ness.

A canon can tell us, in concentrate, of the culture it cuts through. It should be obvious that any canon is a subset, and an infinitesimal subset at that. Those that would confine themselves to canons – or confine support to the makers included in the canons – are suffocating themselves; the subset is not itself culture; it cannot provide that which a culture must provide.

I think canons can be OK, especially where the makers make an effort to confront the hidden curriculum they bring to the matter. That’s an exercise in trying to see one’s own neck in a mirror, most of the time, but for all it’s futility, it does make a person aware of the fact that – yes – the head is attached to the body with such a thing – which, albeit unobserved, is a neck.

Canons can also be weapons of murder.
They can be “what makes US right, and THEM wrong”.
And that sucks.

Boy is that list from Le Monde weird; much more dissonant (Astérix leading Freud by two places…) and at least as biased in favor of one linguistic area. And Camus as the de facto greatest writer of the 20th century? Hmm…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Monde's_100_Books_of_the_Century

What really doesn’t work about the new best off list is the way it’s structured. A list devoted to music structured in the same way would include individual songs, along with albums, and whole bodies of work. That kind of structure doesn’t fairly judge the work of an artist who has produced many different things which are well liked by many different people.

There’s no platonic ideal of a “best of” or canon list. Eclectic approaches are just as valid as more rigid ones. The HU list is eclectic. So was the TCJ one that preceded it. Going afield, the French newspaper Le Monde, when its editors put together a list of the best 100 books of the 20th century, also favored an eclectic approach. Looking at their list, one will find in their top 20, in addition to the novels, two philosophical works, two memoir efforts, two poetry collections, a play, and a comics album.

Canons are generally identified with classroom reading lists, and those can be pretty eclectic, too. With the syllabus for an American literature survey course, would it be strange to find one made up of, not only novels, but selections like Emerson’s essays, Whitman’s poetry, Hemingway’s short stories, a Frederick Douglass memoir, a Eugene O’Neill play, and an uncategorizable like Toomer’s Cane.

At a minimum to have any logical value a list ought to look at a creators body of work.

A creators only list would make for an interesting poll. However, I don’t know how well it would account for the fact that as much as a participant might like a certain work by a creator, he or she might dislike other efforts as much or more. All works by a creator are not equal.

With a class syllabus, a body-of-work list would be all but impossible. For example, if one studies Picasso in an art history survey class (say, one in post-Renaissance or 20th-century Western art), one is only going to be looking at a handful of efforts.

On a personal note, I wanted the consensus list to be a guide for people who don’t know much about comics. A list of individual efforts is a lot less daunting for a novice than lists of nothing but entire bodies of work. I think the latter would prove pretty alienating.

…the list in question reflects a large number of participants who are fans of 80′s superhero comic books like The Watchmen, and various things by Frank Miller. I would assume that in a few years the reputations of Alan Moore and Frank Miller will begin to align with the reputations of Don McGregor, and Michael Fleischer.

Oh, please. Watchmen, which got by far the most votes of work fitting that description, received 31 votes out of a possible 211. That’s roughly one in seven. And several who did vote for it, including myself, didn’t vote for any other ’80s superhero comics.

As for ’80s superhero comics, you’ll find all of four in the upper half of the Top 115 list: Watchmen at #4 (31 votes), Batman: The Dark Knight Returns at #18 (15 votes), The Sandman at #22 (14 votes, and it’s pushing things to call it an ’80s superhero comic), and Daredevil: Born Again at #42 (8 votes). The bottom half of the list is a grab-bag of stuff that got at most four and less than seven votes apiece. And even then, you’ll find maybe six additional efforts of that type.

No matter what your personal likes or dislikes, equating Moore’s and Miller’s achievements with McGregor’s and Fleisher’s is just ludicrous. It also reflects a very blinkered view of comics history. And with Watchmen at least, that myopia extends to the culture beyond comics as well. The establishment view is that it ranks among the best English-language novels of the last quarter-century.

You also might be interested to know that among the academics who participated–and academics do the most to determine canons over the long haul–Watchmen tied with Maus as the top vote-getter.

Mike–

I agree that the list was relatively impoverished when it came to non-English European work. If HU does this again a decade from now, we’re going to make a concerted effort to have more European (not to mention Japanese and Latin American) participants. We’re probably going to try to partner up with sites or magazines in those countries when putting it together.

Lists sometimes have the appearance of statement when in fact they are really conversation.

For mine, the bias towards American comics obscures some of the richly varied European output. And I think English-language publishing is the poorer for that. So in this sense, tastemakers matter. Though perhaps as the saying goes, all politics is local.

Your larger point is true of course, but there are problems with any such list — it’s an exercise in futility, but on the other hand I don’t see how it’s necessarily totally useless for gauging the contours of a canon, and it’s useful for discovering new works or in some cases even rethinking one’s reception of old ones, I think.