Jared Gardner on the Archival Nature of Comics
In “Archives, Collectors, and the New Media Work of Comics,” Jared Gardner effectively argues that comics, comics culture, and comics readers are all, to some degree, archival in nature – that comics speak to the very concept of archiving quite innately. #comicsstudies 1/9
Gardner’s paper is collected in the now somewhat legendary 2006 Graphic Narrative Special Issue of Modern Fiction Studies, an issue that made a pivotal contribution to the comics-as-literature movement within the academy. 2/9
Gardner starts by noting that “Archives are everywhere in the contemporary graphic novel.” Within a period ranging from roughly 1995-2005, Gardner identifies archival collecting as a narrative theme employed in key comics works by Seth, Spiegelman, Clowes, Ware, Katchor, and Deitch. 3/9
So what is the fascination? Gardner notes that “Not surprisingly, perhaps, many of those working in the form today are themselves compulsive collectors.” He points to Clowes, Ware, Crumb, Brunetti and Pekar as key examples here – authors writing what they know. 4/9
He also notes that comics readers are often archivists by virtue of reading and collecting. “The desire to possess comics—to hunt down every stray work by a favorite creator, to contain and reassemble the scattered pieces of a fragmentary comics universe—is a familiar one for many readers” 5/9
From here, Gardner moves to explore the ways in which comics themselves are uniquely positioned to represent archives. “For both, comic writing is the only medium capable of archivism, the only one capable of allowing the shades of the past overlap with and speak to the impulses of the present.” 6/9
“Like the archive, the comics form retains that which cannot be reconciled to linear narrative—the excess that refuses cause-and-effect argument, the trace that threatens to unsettle the present’s narrative of its own past (and thereby of itself).” 7/9
Thus comics are – simply put – very archival in nature. Their authors and readers are often archivists, to some degree, while the medium itself – by virtue of assembling fragments (panels or pages) into a sort of intentionally incomplete narrative – simulates the navigation of an archive. 8/9
Gardner ends with a look toward the future that comics is right-now experiencing. “In the hundred-year history of the form, we have never been in greater need of its unique tools for collecting, navigating, and responding to the “ghost world” that is—for better and worse—home.” 9/9