Interview with Prof. Dr. Daniel Stein

As a part of our class about North American comics, we were able to interview a person who works in comic studies: Prof. Dr. Daniel Stein – a perfect partner for our class. Fortunately he was willing to answer some questions regarding comics, society, media and serialization. His very detailed answers are especially interesting to people who might ask themselves why academics deal with comics at all and what makes that field so interesting.

Amongst other things, Daniel Stein, Professor for North American Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Siegen, works with comics and serialization in an academic context. His interests are reflected in his courses such as Contemporary Graphic Novels, Graphic Narrative: Theory and Analysis, Graphic Narratives of Black History & The Graphic Novel in North America and Great Britain. His publications like The Long Shadow of Wilhelm Busch: 'Max & Moritz' and German Comics or The Comic Modernism of George Herriman show his affection for the topic.

More information on Daniel Stein and his current projects can be found here:

https://www.uni-siegen.de/phil/anglistik/mitarbeiter/stein_daniel/index.html?lang=de

In our class we are focusing on comic books within a North American framework. Your research and teaching also focus on North America Studies and comics. Why did you choose to specialize in this framework?

Like most people working with comics, I used to read them as a kid, especially European albums like Tintin and Asterix & Obelix, which my brother and I devoured whenever we visited family friends who had a large collection, and also Disneys Lustige Taschenbücher, which I used to buy at our local mom & pop store. Comics became an academic interest when I came across George Herriman’s fantastic newspaper strip Krazy Kat from the first half of the twentieth century, which led to the first piece about comics I wrote and which fascinated me because it combined a certain “literariness” that felt familiar to a literature-trained person like myself with a dazzling array of visual quirks. In addition, I felt drawn to that strip, and many others, because they seemed to encapsulate crucial facets of American culture that needed explaining, like Herriman’s ambiguous depictions of race and gender. Around the same time, I was looking for corpus as the basis for a project (with Frank Kelleter) on popular serial storytelling as part of a grant proposal for a Research Unit initially based in Göttingen (“Popular Seriality: Aesthetics and Practice”), and superhero comics seemed to be a natural choice. This was around 2007, when the current boom in comics scholarship was just beginning, and what struck me as particularly odd was that German Americanists had almost completely ignored US comics until then. That served as another motivation to specialize on comics.

In one of your current projects, the Summer School for Transnational Graphic Narratives, you deal with global structures and practices of graphic narratives without regarding their national or cultural heritage. What might be the advantages and challenges of this approach?

My interest in taking a transnational approach to graphic narratives came when I tried to bring my knowledge of German graphic narratives into a conversation with my American Studies interests, for example when I realized that Rudolph Dirks newspaper strip Katzenjammer Kids was inspired by Wilhelm Busch and when I later realized that American superheroes had been reimagined in and through Japanese manga. One advantage of approaching comics within a transnational framework is that you can think outside of the disciplinary box – you can forget for a moment that as, an Americanist, you are supposed to work primarily on North American texts and issues, and explore works and issues you would not normally explore. In addition, I would argue that this approach should not disregard notions of national or cultural heritage, but should rather critically reexamine these notions through the lens of the transnational. A distinct disadvantage is that there is always the danger of ending up as a dilettante, which is why I tend to stick with graphic narratives that are close enough to my American Studies or German expertise. Of course, that makes my approach vulnerable to critique (e.g. of being US-centric, or Euro-centric, which is what some reviewers correctly noted about the essay collection on transnational graphic narrative I co-edited with my friends Shane Denson and Christina Meyer). The Summer School is an attempt to overcome the necessary limitations of single scholars and open up a conversation across national, cultural, linguistic, and disciplinary borders. Whether there will be enough common ground to allow for meaningful discussion and analysis remains to be seen, but on the basis of the many great proposals we have received, I am very optimistic. I should note that the study of comics beyond national borders has a history on which Shane, Christina, and I built with our book and that Lukas Etter and I seek to continue with our summer school. This history includes the pioneering work of John A. Lent, including the International Journal of Comic Art, which he founded in 1999 and which has featured essays on graphic narratives from every corner of the world.

Since you have a lot of experience in the field of comics and graphic novels, the next question might seem generic but what is your favorite comic, graphic novel or comic book character and why?

That’s a difficult question to answer because it implies that there must be one favorite character or work. I tend to like a lot of different things. I’ve already mentioned Krazy Kat, which I continue to treasure as one of the most astonishing achievements of US-American modernism, but I have also enjoyed many other comics in the past, including Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner, John Lewis, Nate Powell, and Andrew Aydin’s March trilogy, Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons! and Roberta Gregory’s Bitchy Bitch, as well as work by Craig Thompson, Charles Burns, Derek Kirk Kim, Adrian Tomine, the Hernandez brothers, Keith Knight, and many others. I was also stunned by Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen, and in Germany, it’s Flix, Ulli Lust, Reinhard Kleist, and Uli Oesterle. A few weeks ago, I read Damian Duffy and John Jennings’s graphic adaptation of Octavia Butler’s science-fiction novel The Kindred, a harrowing and, at the same time, beautiful story of time travel back to the time of slavery in the antebellum American South.

We studied the importance of comics in politics and their societal influence through time, for example the role for propaganda during World War II. Do you think that nowadays, comics can still convey cultural or political messages? (for example: environmental comic books or superheroes characters)

Yes, I believe so. I’d say that any medium can convey cultural or political messages, even though some media may be more present and pertinent at one time or another. Comics are taken seriously now both in academia in beyond, often under the label of “graphic novels” (which is, in some cases at least, a misnomer), and many readers are willing to seek out graphic narratives (a term prefer over graphic novel) that deal with social and political issues. Art Spiegelman’s MAUS was very influential in this respect, changing people’s perceptions of what graphic narrative can do. But think also of Joe Sacco’s comics journalism, Jacques Tardi’s stories about WWI, or the whole graphic medicine movement (http://www.graphicmedicine.org/). I have already mentioned graphic narratives about slavery (Nat Turner, Kindred) and the American civil rights movement (March), and there is actually quite a lot of work out there concerning gender issues and feminist perspectives (Alison Bechdel most prominently). In Germany, I would point to Ralf Palandt’s edited volume Rechtsextremismus, Rassismus und Antisemitismus in Comics (2011), which reminds us that comics can offer an outlet for un-democratic or even anti-democratic politics as well. Then there is political cartooning, of course, which some scholars distinguish from comics because it is usually a non-sequential, single-panel form, but which I would certainly include in my understanding of graphic narrative. Today, many political cartoons circulate throughout social media, where especially since the last presidential election we have seen quite an increase of superhero-themed memes attacking and/or ridiculing Trump. And even though superhero comics are often seen as escapist entertainment or youth fantasy, there is quite a substantial history of dealing with political issues in this genre, from World War II and Vietnam to 9/11 and the wars that followed the terrorist attacks. Comics not only continue to address social and political issues; they do so in a particular fashion, using the affordances of the medium to cover a broad range of issues.

Yet, one might still think that comics have lost their overall influence on society since many people don't read comic books anymore. Would you agree with this statement?

Well, my students seem to enjoy analyzing comics a lot; at least, that’s the feeling I get whenever I teach graphic narratives, and this feeling is supported by the large number of BA and MA theses on comics I have been able to supervise in the past few years. In addition, comics are making a major inroad into the school curricula, so they might end up influencing the young people who encounter them there. Comics may no longer be a mass medium in the sense that millions of people consume them extensively, but I do believe that their impact has not necessarily lessened because of this. They are, for instance, much more widely recognized in the mainstream media, as well as the feuilleton, and they are “respectable” enough to attract major funding for research. Obviously, manga continue to be popular as well, and even though Superhero comics are not selling too well these days, the superhero narrative and aesthetic are ever-present on television and in the movie theaters, having very much become an integral part of many people’s lives.

You organized a workshop on "Old and New media". Do you think that in this digital age, comics can still have a place in popular culture? How? Do you think that they can find a renewal in new media? (e.g. independent graphic artists that are publishing their panels on Facebook, like "Sarah's Scribble")

The workshop was part of a conference organized by my Göttingen colleague Babette Bärbel Tischleder, and my task was mostly to moderate that session. But the question is an important one and deserves an answer. For one, I’d say that comics have actually become more present because of digitization since the Internet has proven to be a fertile ground for all kinds of archiving practices beyond the purview of established institutions. Comics fans have always been extremely vocal and active, and so it’s no surprise that we can now get a better sense of the history of the medium, and also of sprawling serial genres like superhero comics, than ever before. I’ve argued elsewhere that one part of this development is an increased interest in musealizing the past (a concept I take from Andreas Huyssen) and not so much an investment with the future. Webcomics, which one would think may point to the future of the medium, are still having a hard time finding their audience, perhaps because there is (or seems to be) something about comics as a medium that has a strong affinity to print: a materiality that loses some of its appeal when transformed into various kinds of digital representations. But that does not mean that comics will necessarily become an old, perhaps even extinct, medium. Jared Gardner, for instance, has smartly suggested in his book Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling (2012) that the way in which comics integrate images and words and in which the address the reader has become our standard way of engaging with media in the digital world. That’s a question that many of the people I get to work with as part of the Siegen Research Initiative on Popular Cultures (http://popkultur.uni-siegen.de/).

Serialization plays an important part in the comic book industry as well as for comic book movie adaptations. However, serialization also bears the risk of mundane content caused by a lack of new ideas. How does the industry manage to keep people attracted for so long? Or: What are the important factors to make serialization work?

This is indeed a central question when it comes to comics, and it’s crucial in other forms of popular serial storytelling (television, computer games) as well. Because it is so central, it is also difficult to answer concisely – in the Research Unit “Popular Seriality – Aesthetics and Practice,” more than a dozen scholars and many more associated fellows spent six years grappling with the aesthetics and practices of serialization (good introductions are the two essay volumes that came out of this unit, Populäre Serialität, from 2012, and Media of Serial Narrative, from 2017, both edited by Frank Kelleter). A short attempt at an answer would be to note that serial narratives are unfinished, and sometimes explicitly open-ended narratives, which brings all kinds of opportunities – e.g. for fans to intervene in the ongoing storytelling; for writers, creators, and editors to react to the series’ reception as well as to real-world events outside of the narrative – but also creates problems concerning the narrative management of accumulating story backlog (continuity vs. reboots) and the continuing need to repeat whatever makes a series successful while also incorporating new ideas. Umberto Eco famously described this as a dialectics of repetition and variation, and some series obviously do this better than others.

*Note: Since the interview took place via e-mail we could not generate follow-up questions. That’s why sometimes the topics seem to change a bit abruptly.