And, more seriously, a mythic approach or a different form can allow for a whole new way of understanding a subject --Chester Brown's Louis Riel graphic novel, for example, is way more accessible than dense and vaguely obscurantist Canadian histories on the same topic.

I'm not advocating elevating comics to high art. I've been around long enough to know that being canonized isn't all it's cracked up to be. But I do think that high art has a lot more in common with the gutter than with respectable, middlebrow art. Van Gogh sold one painting in his life and was considered a crappy painter, so crappy he had to take his ass to the sticks. Herman Melville's novels were such a failure that he quit writing them. Emily Dickinson? Shut-in. Nijinsky? Booed off the very stage he was humping fifteen minutes into Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." And as with James Tiptree, jr., there's a passel of English Victorian novelists with male pseudonyms, including all three Brontes. High art is often disdained as something a child could do, as mocking the audience, as degenerate, as gutter trash. I guess that's part of why the phrase, "gutter culture" makes me a little itchy, even though I know here at the Cultural Gutter we're reclaiming it.

Labels: interweb, manifestos