The power of fun

FOR at least 20 years, comics and cartoons have been recognized as lingua franca in the work of contemporary artists. They’re everywhere you look, both as fundamental influence and outright appropriation, and there are lots of reasons why.

For one, art has become a global conversation. Comics, born a century ago, are among the oldest and most established forms of mass art. Their raw symbolism and satirical stylization provide a comprehensible form of communication across cultures.

For another, comics fit the contemporary zeitgeist. In their brash forms, raucous colors, accessible formats and eccentric narratives, they speak to their audience from inside a madhouse -- as art critic Amy Goldin once deftly put it -- “inmate to inmate.” They’re democratic, inclusive and do not condescend.

They are also largely unexplored as an artistic form, except by practitioners. Comics have fervent enthusiasts, avid collectors and serious scholars, but these tend to fall outside traditional art-world enclaves. At least, they have until now.

At long last, a historical survey has been organized that does justice to the venerable genre of comic art. “Masters of American Comics,” a joint project of the UCLA Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, bills itself as the first major art museum show to examine the 20th century development of comic strips and comic books. It opened to the public Sunday at the two locations, and after it closes in March will begin a national tour.

The show is huge, assembling more than 900 drawings, strips and books. Independent scholars John Carlin and Brian Walker are the show’s guest curators, and they worked with Cynthia Burlingham, director of UCLA’s Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, and MOCA curator Michael Darling. They’ve compiled an enormous amount of material. It’s exhaustive -- and even a bit exhausting.

Of course, I saw the two parts back to back, which few visitors are likely to do. (In Milwaukee it will be seen at a single venue, and on the East Coast it will be divided between museums in Newark, N.J., and New York City.) There is value to seeing both parts in sequence, however, because comic artists -- like all artists -- are obsessed with the history of their art. They often refer to their predecessors.

Take the drawings made by Jack Kirby (1917-1994) for “an amazing tale of the fourth dimension” at MOCA. Given their goofy riffs on weird bodily transformations in a strange landscape of otherworldly time and space, you immediately think of Nuclear Age science fiction stories and older Surrealist painting. But if you’ve already been to the Hammer, where the first half of the show is installed, you will also recognize that Kirby is nodding toward the pioneer comic artist, Winsor McCay (circa 1869-1934). Working for the New York Herald newspaper between 1905 and 1911, McCay took readers on mind-bending trips that look like the world seen in the disorienting reflections of a fun-house mirror.

McCay was an astonishing artist. Like all comics, his “Little Nemo in Slumberland” and “Dream of the Rarebit Fiend” divide the page into a sequence of panels, each containing an individual drawing. Read the panels in sequence and they combine to tell a story.

Yet McCay also crossed his linear narrative with a playful interest in the two-dimensional design of the page. The sheet is conceived as an abstract field. Story and picture, idea and newspaper page fuse with one another. Simultaneously, they struggle against common assumptions about what a story or picture is.

It’s worth noting that Nemo and the Rarebit Fiend both occupy the world of dreams. McCay was drawing these cartoons in the immediate aftermath of Sigmund Freud’s groundbreaking analysis of dreams and the unconscious. The world of surface appearances was not all it seemed to be. His comics helped popularize these advanced theoretical propositions -- in visually exciting ways -- more than a dozen years before poet Andre Breton wrote his Surrealist Manifesto. Breton cited the odd phrase, “There is a man cut in two by the window,” that popped into his head as the inexplicable inspiration for his 1924 Surrealist decree. He could almost have been describing McCay’s 1905 “Little Sammy Sneeze”: The black border surrounding the comic shatters into a jagged pile of broken shards from the force of the young man’s achoo!

At the Hammer and MOCA, the exhibition installation helpfully distinguishes between the artists’ handmade drawings, which went into one end of the mass production machinery, and the printed comics that came out the other end. Usually the drawings are framed and hang on the wall, as one would expect drawings to be shown in an art museum. Display cases hold the printed newspaper sheets and, later, comic books. (The angled design of the cases appropriately recalls a reading lectern.) Sometimes the drawing hangs above the same printed page in the display case, nicely allowing for a direct comparison of the changes wrought in the industrial printing process.

McCay’s line drawings in black ink are elegant and precise. When color is added in the printing process, the fine mesh of colored dots adds an atmospheric richness. Areas of solid black that are bold and dramatic in the drawing soften on the printed page, becoming luxurious interludes among the colorful surroundings. McCay designed his sheets to accommodate the possibilities available with the mechanical press, as surely as Albrecht Durer did in his woodblock engraving studio 400 years before.

Kirby consolidated the shift from newspaper strip to comic book. He built on the bridge erected by his talented, immediate predecessor, Will Eisner (1917-2005). However, unlike McCay and Eisner, who essentially worked alone, Kirby assumed the role of artist in a larger collaborative team. He drew the pictures, but his comic books were produced with the help of a writer who planned out stories, an “inker” who turned Kirby’s remarkable pencil drawings into colored sheets for printing and a scribe who filled in the words.

Kirby invented mythic characters such as Captain America and the Silver Surfer, many for Marvel Comics. It’s tempting to see his celebrated creation of the popular superheroes known as the “Fantastic Four” as a sly reflection of the four-man team that produced the Marvel comic books. Kirby, the writer, the inker and the letterer constitute their own fantastic four. These books are among the ones that later served as models for Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein; notably, he returned the collaborative manufacture of the industrial comic form to the traditional hand-production of the singular artist, working alone in the studio.

The exhibition overflows with provocative insights and associations. The curators have sifted through 20th century history and selected 15 artists, each of whom made a major contribution to the evolving form. Aficionados might bicker, but it’s a reliable canon of masters. Eight are at the Hammer, seven at MOCA.

German emigre Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956) experimented with designs familiar from advanced Modern painting during a remarkable nine-month stint at the Chicago Tribune. “Krazy Kat” was the masterpiece of George Herriman (1880-1944), the first great African American artist of the 20th century. Frank King (1883-1969) created fictional characters that aged in real time in “Gasoline Alley,” while E.C. Segar (1894-1938) introduced psychological complexity to the cartoon cast of “Thimble Theatre.”

Chester Gould (1900-1985) used a blunt, powerful graphic style to interject shocking violence into a hitherto playful form, courtesy of “Dick Tracy.” Perhaps the sexiest, most seductive draftsman the genre has seen was Milton Caniff (1907-1988), whose exquisitely drawn “Terry and the Pirates” (and, later, “Steve Canyon”) brought adult elements that Eisner would later transform into wild images not meant for children. Kids are so central to comics that it’s surprising they didn’t become the sole subject matter of an important strip until “Peanuts,” in which Charles M. Schulz (1922-2000) made them surrogates for adult neuroses.

Newspaper comics dominate the first half of the show. The second half features comic books and, in the wake of Art Spiegelman’s 1992 Pulitzer Prize for “Maus,” what have come to be called graphic novels. (“Maus” had Jews drawn as mice -- “vermin” -- and Nazis as cats, giving a harrowing spin to the old cat-and-mouse game in Herriman’s “Krazy Kat.”) Harvey Kurtzman (1924-1993) initiated the comics’ dark side, and his “MAD” series opened up the raucous social satire that R. Crumb (b. 1943) expanded into underground “comix” of the 1960s.

Crumb’s independent distribution gave him a creative freedom commonly associated with high art, which resonated against the low art aura of the comic book form. Gary Panter (b. 1950) switched the comic underground from hippie to punk, sampling existing graphic styles the way a DJ samples music. Chris Ware (b. 1967) recognized that the underground had finally disappeared, and he entered the mainstream art world: His autobiographical series featuring Midwestern antihero “Jimmy Corrigan” was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial.

The Hammer lends itself to a chronological installation better than MOCA’s nonlinear galleries do, but in both each artist is shown separately in a dedicated space. “Masters of American Comics” is like an assembly of 15 career retrospectives. It’s a lot to take in.

Conceptual art long ago prepared gallery visitors for the uncomfortable prospect of reading while standing up, but given the show’s daunting size I’d suggest comfortable shoes. In a few places display cases are positioned against walls, which makes scrutiny of drawings hanging above them difficult. And there’s a design flaw built into the handsome, minimalist-style cases: No reveal was left at the base, which means stubbed toes and precarious leaning over displays.

But it’s certainly worth the trouble. “Masters of American Comics,” in addition to offering exceptional art, also stands as a marker for a fundamental change in American art institutions. Comic artists obviously didn’t need art museums to flourish, but the reverse is no longer true. Art museums need comic art.

Partly this shift is a function of changes in technology. The digital age is superseding industrial culture. The arrival of new forms always forces us to look at the artifacts of a receding culture in new ways, and that is one essential task for an art museum.

More important, old and oppressive arguments over high art and low art are passing away. This show replaces them with a productive debate over quality -- over which art in a given genre is great, and why. Museum exhibitions don’t get more traditional. That the shift in material would come first from major art museums in Los Angeles, where democratic American art culture was born and thrives, is no surprise.

*

‘Masters of American Comics’

What: Comic strips from the first half of the 20th century

Where: Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood

When: 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays; 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays; 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays. Closed Mondays.

Ends: March 12

Price: $5; free on Thursdays

Contact: (310) 443-7000, www.hammer.ucla.edu

Also

What: Comic books, ‘40s onward

Where: MOCA, 250 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

When: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays and Fridays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays. Closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

Ends: March 12

Price: $8

Contact: (213) 626-6222, www.moca.org