Hello, I normally just go to /co/ but I have a question for you on /lit/.
In High School there was this guy who hated comics, when I asked why he said some nonsense about how visuals were somehow inferior and therefore lacked any real artistic merit. To this day I still don't understand this reasoning, how can drawings and writing be considered good art when seperate but not when they're combined? What do you think?
I'd ask this on /co/ but obviously everyone there already agree that comics have artistic merit.
>>7652336
I don't think visuals are inherently less artistic than the written word, but when it's easier for the masses to consume, there's bound to be more shit being produced. Sure there are many exceptions of artful comics, but the amount of cliched shit is overwhelming it. You can say the same things about books, but the libraries of great classics are too big.
Superhero shit is retarded.
Same reason vidya is lowbrow: an almost complete lack of culture and education
>>7652350
>>7652360
Fuck off from 4chan. Were based on /a/nime's.
>>7652350
That is known as capeshit. Some of the satires/spoofs/critiques of capeshit aren't bad. For example The Boys or The Filth.
>>7652349
>You can say the same things about books, but the libraries of great classics are too big.
So basically this attitude stems from the fact that it's easier to cherry pick amongst the vast amounts of garbage books and still come out with a giant selection of decent material, as opposed to the relatively small amount of comics that exist in total?
So if there were more comics than books, then we'd be having this conversation is reverse?
>>7652394
Anime's and comics are 4Chan. If they were bad then you can go to Reddit.
>>7652397
ah, bait
The writing is marginalized via compression in order to fit the structure of comics, which virtually akways seems to defer to delivering narrative, at the expense of the work as a whole in terms of its literary value.
While I think it offers a unique synthesis of the textual-visual, to compare it to either is to invoke the long shadows that either artforms cast. It's a neat form but it just seems structurally enclosed and perhaps as a consequence decidedly pop-ish.
>>7652382
It's not really the amount of books more than the fact that literature has held itself as a definining artform of human culture for a couple thousand years.
>>7652349
Tbqh you must be some sort of retard if you think you can possibly understand a medieval painting without actually getting a PhD on medieval aesthetics and symbolism, for example. You only think you understand those paintings because you can recognize it's elements and (sometimes) what's going on, but let me tell you this son, these people loved their symbols and were taught this from the childhoods by priests / landlords / whatever, so, you can't really claim you understand them.
>>7652360
From Hell gets painful to read with it's huge monologues about the history of London, the Moon Goddess and why kill hookers.
>>7652336
Because YAs like to tier things, it makes the complicated systems of how we live life easier to follow and unstand at the start of adulthood. Things are rated Good to Bad and this becomes worldview, then you grow out of it and take each thing as it comes and decide at the time whether you liked it or not without resort to lists of allowed things made up by other people.
>>7652401
/A/ was first. I was just pointing out the hypocrisy.
>>7652426
>4Chan
>/A/
b8
>>7652407
Your problem is thinking writing only applies to dialogues and that the narrative isn't being built by the images as well.
Also, decompression has been the main issue in the last decade in comics, not compression. Dialogues in comic form simply don't work as Morrison grandiloquent monologues (on one end, and bearable to a point) or Bendis quipfests (on the other, completely unbearable)
>>7652418
But paintings for a while weren't easy to consume. You couldn't just look at it on the internet, you had to visit the painting IRL.
Now painting sucks because people just post it on facebook, make an inane comments, and then go back to jerking off.
>>7652418
>From Hell gets painful to read with it's huge monologues about the history of London, the Moon Goddess and why kill hookers.
I'm not saying that education/culture are completely absent nor that if they happen to be present that they guarantee a straight road to highbrow status.
What I mean to say is that a scene which is by majority devoid of education/culture will very very rarely produce anything truly highbrow.
>>7652336
Intrinsic value doesn't exist; everything is as worthless as everything.
>>7652436
I admit. I don't know a lot about anime and comics but a lot of people enjoy it and you shouldn't mock their tastes. This is what usually happens.
>I like this
>go back 2 Reddit
>I'm not a Redditor though
That's the point I'm trying to make.
>Why would books inherently be better than comics.
Because one can do with words what can be done through the visual arts, with a sufficiently talented writer.
This is why the best graphic novels, or even plain old comics, include a writer separate and distinct from the artist.
There may be an occasional polymath who can do both, but the time and effort required to master one usually excludes more than a passing understanding of the other.
I'm not in favor of a pissing contest between the creative arts. I'll just emphasize that a talented writer paired with a talented artist equals something sublime.
>>7652445
I can recognize the art serving the narrative as well which is why I'd concede the text-pic relationship. I guess I would ask are constraints of textual information a necessary fact of the comic form? I suppose I could see why it wouldn't be so bad in deference to the visual side of it, but then there seems whole literary gestures from the Shakespearean soliloquy to the Melvillean philosophical musing that a writer wouldn't be able to take from (though there are things more easily applied like the laconic witticism of any aphorist).
But what I suppose I mean to say is that it seems that by the nature of the form in its current state it can do neither what the literary or visual arts do independently at their heights, when one aspect must be necessarily marginalized in the overarching structure to fit with the other. It's by the virtue of that fact that comics exist in the shadow of either artform.Which is fine, it doesn't have to be a contest and it surely fills its niche and there's probably a work out there that synthesizes the two to elevate it as a text-visual work but I wouldn't know otherwise since I don't follow comics desu
>>7652336
read adorno (don't think it comes in comic book form)
>>7652336
I liked the first couple volumes of The Invisibles by Grant Morrison.
Alan Moore is another great Graphic novelist.
But for the most part comics are trash, man.
For the most part comics are targeted towards an audience of children, those comics may have some intrinsic values stained within them, but when you write for children, the prose will be childish.
Of course comics could be considered good art, no one's going to say that combining art and writing has less artistic merit than an individual artwork or an individual piece of writing.
That being said, you cheapen the experience of both the art and the writing by attaching your specific opinions to either form.
Be it attaching a concrete image to the mindfulness of writing, or attaching a piece of your mind to a meaningful artwork.
The act is internecine, for the most part.
Comics are a hybrid medium, some readers just don't like that.
>>7652336
Comics obviously have artistic merit, take for instance Watchmen or Sandman. Still, I don't think I could name 10 comics that are a must-read. There's just so much shit produced in the medium that most people do well in leaving it alone.
I don't really know why but I've never read a comic that was anything other than good (say like 1984 tier). The best of them (that I have read) all had this feeling like they were written for teenagers and adults would have seriously diminished enjoyment. I've never particular enjoyed them, even as a kid, but 5ish years ago I went a long and tried to find the best of the medium to see if there was anything I was missing.
For reference I've read things like Transmetropolitan, Moore's Swampthing, Sandman, V, Watchmen ect.
>>7652707
Read Maus, Persepolis and Asterios Polyp. The ones you listed certainly can be annoying to some readers, due to their edginess.
>>7652744
Maus can also easily be described as 1984 tier. It's rather unremarkable.
On the side note I'm reading Judge Dredd and it's fucking awesomely gloriously dumb and cheesy.
Books have had a really long time for people to collective parse out the shit, and for the audience of highbrow and lowbrow works to become divided. Comics still have a lot of audience overlap between high and lowbrow works. The literary canon also gives people a sort of template for what is good, and comics don't fit nicely in always and haven't developed their own or built themselves into the canon.
>>7652336
Is that The Spot? I fucking love The Spot
i know there are amazingly literary mangas and LNs, don't know much about western comics though.
>>7652707
>Moore's Swampthing
goat comic?maybe
>>7652336
>I'd ask this on /co/ but obviously everyone there already agree that comics have artistic merit.
They will be once American comics can create successful non-superhero works.
>>7652888
They have. Many and Multiple of them over decades of work.
Probably just bait, whatever.
Actually according to science the mix of text and visuals are preferred.
It is one of the reasons instruction manuals have always been drawn.
The same problem as with video games, no artistically talented people are attracted to it as an artform.
>>7652410
Pictographs outdate literature, pleb
And it is far easier to write than to draw.
Just read manga tb h
>>7652454
Because "highbrow" literally means "references other highbrow works/culture"
And it's not like lowbrow culture is trying (failing) to be highbrow. It's its own thing, doing what it's supposed to do.
To evaluate a lowbrow work as inferior to a highbrow work solely because the cultural valences which surround the lowbrow work are not highbrow is a fundamental critical failure, and fucking stupid of you.
>>7652456
Relative value exists tho
Of course books aren't inherently better, there are things that books can't do that comics can so Comics focused to their strengths can get across information and story in different ways than books or film can.
>>7652336
>how can drawings and writing be considered good art when seperate but not when they're combined?
how can ice cream and lasagna be considered good food when seperate but not when they're combined?
Finish High School, lad.
>>7653729
Preferred for what purpose?
>science says
What studies, which scientists, what field of study
>>7653914
Preferred by the human mind for receiving information.
