The Tomb of the Unknown Writer
One exciting thing about mainstream comics, at least when thinking about comics, is that the scale (large enough to need an intense division of labor, small enough that this division is easily categorized) of their production brings into focus many of the embedded contradictions permeating culture and the systems that generate it. One such contradictory notion is that of the author.
From the creation of Batman (with Bob Kane assuming the credit of Bill Figer and countless ghost artists) to the Marvel Universe, retroactively to Marvelman/Miracleman, the problem of authorship appears as a distinct and terrible complication whenever the comics industry moves into a new phase. A new creator to be sealed into the walls of The House of Ideas, their blood mixed with the mortar so that the bricks would remain firm by their presence. A presence that haunts the edifice throughout the intermediate period.
Every time we struggle to credit the appropriate member of the creative team for their contributions (or that member decries their contributions as ignored or misattributed — often to the writer or even to the publishers), when creators turn out to be sex pests or abusive, especially in ways germine to their work, tainting not only their creations, but also their collaborations, or when characters act out of sync with their history, these are all problems rooted in the author as an ontological reality.
There have been some attempts at addressing the grievances: using gestalt names for the creative team (remember Brullips?) or having reviewers write consciously about the art, if only to fill a few paragraphs. All well intentioned ways to mediate the issue, that avoid touching on anything fundamental. Pinches of salt and small bottles of holy waters to keep the spirits at bay, while the grave sin anchoring them here remains unrepented.
At times a map is useful in trying to navigate between the walls of mainstream comics. Especially when doing it haphazardly, without protection and without commanding great critical skill. One such map is Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author.
A short aside
Driven into derision by being invoked to ease people’s consciousness whenever a celebrated creator is proved to be the author of acts we don’t ascribe to and don’t want to condone via our patronage, Death of the Author remains a powerful tool to understand our moment in time. Because simply saying that the essay states we shouldn’t take into account an author’s biography when ascertaining the meaning of a text is a gross vulgarization of its scope and stake. In fact most of the discourse surrounding the conceptual death of the author is rather a relitigation of the Picard Affair, when Sorbonne’s Jean-Luc Picard argued that the New Criticism championed by Barthes lacked objectivity and so let the critic posit anything about the work in question. Barthes more or less settled the affair with 1966’s Criticism and Truth, arguing that the so-called objectivity of “the old criticism” merely masks the ideology of the hegemonic forces in society.
Inasmuch as the (in)famous essay is interesting for the scholars of Barthes it’s not that it develops new critical theories, rather that it appears to show the critic moving away from the structuralist way of conceiving of language and meaning. If before he was trying to develop a science of criticism informed by the linguistics of Saussure, after being introduced to theories of language developed by Bakhtin and taking on the challenges of Derida’s philosophy he started to discover the pleasures of the text in the act of reading. In any case, the author was already dead, at least in the way the essay is usually explained.
What’s interesting to me here is that after Barthes demystified various modes of writing in Writing Degree Zero, then in Critical Essays and Criticism and Truth uncovered the ideological stake behind the “old”, “objective” mode of criticism, in Death of the Author Barthes presents the author himself as an ideological construct of modernity, something to stabilize the meaning behind a work and to make it ownable.
Because when we read a text, we’re not confronted with “a line of words, releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the AuthorGod)”. The act of writing might feel like translating internal ”passions, humors, sentiments, impressions”, but the final text is produced by accessing a “dictionary whose words can be explained (defined) only by other words, and so on ad infinitum”. The work “consists of multiple writings, issuing from several cultures and entering into dialogue with each other, into parody, into contestation”. Confronting the work we are met with “a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture”, which are all given unity, if only temporarily, in the person of the reader.
If the person writing is merely accessing, knowingly or unknowingly, writings that came before them and the actual meaning of the work appears only when read, when the reader brings to the table their own experiences and history and knowledge of other writings, how could a work be owned?
So to stabilize the meaning of a work, to resolve this multiplicity of writings that feeds into it, is to make the work consumable. Or as Barthes very evocatively states it, is to conquer the work. The agent of this conquering is the critic, since the critic explains the work and creates the author (usually by relying on his biography, but even New Criticism takes a part in this construction in its own way). Of course, the act of explaining, of fixing the meaning, of constructing the author which anchors this meaning, is much more important than it being performed by someone who calls themselves a critic. But the means of doing this are those developed by them.
And if to uncover the intertextuality of prose novels, to kill their Authors as fonts of originality and stability and legitimacy of ownership (how could we own someone else’s “passions, humors, sentiments, impressions”), requires some subtlety of thought, this is an explicit feature in the case of mainstream comics.
Back to comics
One of the clearest examples of this construction of the author as a way to afix ownership is the recently released James Bond: The Complete Warren Ellis Hardcover Omnibus. The elegant trade dress boasts in large letters “Ian Fleming’s” above a gigantic “James Bond 007”, a harsh red highlight reads “The Complete Warren Ellis Omnibus” while in the lower-right corner with shy sentence case letters we find the book announced as “a Dynamite thriller” and finally Ellis’ name is repeated, this time joined by the artist Jason Masters, both of their names in bold letters. There is at play here a clear visual hierarchy employing all principles of design, from contrasting dimensions, to repetition, to emphasis. A hierarchy that makes us forget that James Bond isn’t the property of Ian Fleming, that this here volume isn’t owned by Warren Ellis and that it isn’t even primarily the product of Ellis’ labor — not only as Masters is taking a secondary and less emphasised place, but also because Simon Bowland’s lettering, Guy Major’s coloring and Rachel Pinnelas’s editing aren’t mentioned anywhere upfront. We’d have to read the fine print inside the volume to realize that this is first and foremost a collaboration between Dynamite Entertainment and two other organizations tasked with maintaining the rights over Ian Flemming’s body of work and commissioning new content derived from it.
There is a sleight of hand here. We read ”Warren Ellis” as a signifier for the author of the volume, carrying over for Ian Fleming as the person responsible for a text, but what these names actually point to are Dynamite Entertainment, Ian Fleming Publication Ltd. and The Ian Fleming Estate. In the system of commercial entertainment the credited author is a fiction that serves to obfuscate the true relations of ownership.
There’s probably no coincidence, since most of his career is dedicated to uncovering, exploring and making explicit the intertextuality of all texts, that no one better understood this relationship between authorship and ownership than Alan Moore. His refusal to have his name plastered over the credits of movies and TV shows has been presented as a cantankerous refusal to play ball, the egotistical reflex of someone unreasonably hard to please, seeking attention. And this idea has often been used by the publishers, by fans, even by some critics to further solidify his persona into a very classical vision of the unruly genius author.
To the extent that such attitudes motivate his decisions, they are secondary to the problem of ownership and his refusal to participate in this act of mystification: to link his authorship to a work he has no ownership over, thus giving legitimacy to the whole situation. Instead, Moore is acutely aware of the currency his name carries and tries to use it to help creators who never had his fortunes. He never quite articulates it in the terms proposed by this essay, but he’s always been sensitive to the notion of creator’s rights and consistent in his stance on authorship at least since the LoEG movie debacle. And in an interview for The Beat in 2006 he writes that:
“[b]y asking DC to take my name off V for Vendetta and stop giving me the money for V for Vendetta, all I’m asking for is for them to treat me in the same way they’ve been completely happy to treat hundreds of much greater comics creators than I over the decades.”.
This all makes his credit in the Marvel reprints of Miracleman as “The Original Writer” particularly poignant. It shows that the whole enterprise of commercial comics needs the figure of an author in order to function and not collapse under its many ethical faults. And it would conjure the author through his absence.
To be continued?
