Lines of Sight
a visual sequential arts magazine

Contents

From the Publisher

The Declamations of Independence

Independent film has become a much-ballyhooed subject in the past five years. Alleged independent filmmakers across the world have touted their material as an alternative to vapid Hollywood films. Is it merely lip service or is it genuine innovation? by Omar Willey

Seamless Recursive Autonoma: an interview with Paul Berger

Photographer Paul Berger has been creating amazing work in sequential photography and digital imaging for over twenty years, inclueding his masterful satire on news magazines, Seattle Subtext. Berger talks about his work as photographer curator and teacher, and about his collection of trading cards. by Omar Willey

Against Collecting

Are you old enough to remember when comic books were affordable? Have you ever wondered why their price has tripled in the past ten years? Maybe it's because you aren't buying ocmics anymore, but something more sinister. by Omar Willey

The Future of the Graphic Novel

Graphic novels are often hailed as the saviors of the comic book industry, but mainstream publishers have not produced a worthy graphic novel in a decade and the "alternatives" are failing. Is there a future for the graphic novel? by Jon Day

I know that publishing this magazine is a completely hopeless venture. It is futile. It has no audience. Its subject has no general interest to any layperson. Photography? What's to understand about that? Comics? That's kids' stuff; I only watch comic bo oks on the big screen. Cinema? Anyone can be a film critic. Such will probably be the general responses I hear from anyone who asks about my magazine.

Publishing a magazine is a little like singing in the shower. It remains an insignificant and absurd attempt to say something publicly that no public cares about. No one gives a goddamn about anything except prefabricated public personalities and hearing the same dull gossip and trite stories. Anyone who writes or publishes and believes otherwise is a complete fool.

Millions still read People magazine and the National Enquirer. Old pseudo-intellectuals read The Village Voice or the ever-further-to-the-right-drifting New Republic. The hipper ones (the ones who think they're hip) read Mo ndo 2000 or Wired. These all suck. They are all dedicated to a cult of image and a canon of moribund traditions, or in the case of the poser/hipster, to both simultaneously.

One reaction to this pastiche nihilism is to turn inward, to withdraw from the dirty world like a bourgeois Buddhist and spend life navel gazing. Much small press work shows that trend clearly: witness the proliferation of autobiographical comic books, o r any issue of The Comics Journal. The other variation on this theme is to "write for yourself." If one truly writes "for oneself," one does not bother to publish. Publishing would merely kill trees for vanity. Another motive must be present.

What is it, then? Why bother to publish? Why bother to write? The answer is always the same: there is no reason. Publishing is not a reasonable affair. It is a matter of hope and nothing more. One hopes, in spite of all experience and evidence, that what one does will positively affect someone, somewhere, someday. It is a labor without result, a possibility without chance.

Most of my readers know little about photography. Some readers know a little about comics. Some know a little about cinema. Very few readers know much about all three. I have faith that all my readers are intelligent persons with an interest in these sub jects, and are willing to read lucid, thoughtful articles about them. Unintelligent magazines have poorly served intelligent readers for too long. Consequently, intelligent readers have lost interest in reading about photography, comics and cinema.

I hope, in good faith, that the magazine you are now reading will rekindle your interest, or spark an interest where you formerly had none. The range of articles may seem broad, even occasionally tangential, but all intend to be meaningful and provocativ e. Visual sequential art is a vastly overlooked field, dangerously so. I believe that is changeable. By all means, let us know how we are doing, and what you would like to see in this magazine. I hope Lines of Sight will help open your eyes to what I think is the most interesting art of the century.

In the past few years it has become a fashionable pose. Now, more than ever, producers everywhere tout their "independent" films. Even a casual survey of the latest "independent" films shows quite clearly that the word has become a mere marketing tool. W hen one can pick up a newspaper and read that studio executives have proclaimed that any film showing on fewer than 500 screens is an independent film, the term has clearly reached the point of grotesque parody.

An independent film is a film made beyond the bounds of the studio system. To be an honestly independent film, it seems to me, a film must be independent of the studio methods of production, distribution and exhibition. This is fairly patent. What is not quite so patent, but far more important, is that the studio system of production creates a certain type of product.

At the height of the old system, studios often produced nearly a film per week for theatrical exhibitors. This steady output of films meant that studios had to have a reliable formula for filmmaking. Had it not chosen to rely upon a single, simple narrat ive style for feature production, the studio system could never have been successful. Predictability creates the market. No matter how the studios themselves change, the same narrative style remains essentially unchanged since it first appeared in Cecil B . DeMille's The Cheat in 1915. In fact, so dominant is that style that it is considered the natural, if not the only, way to tell a film story. All other types of stories and storytelling are proscribed or ignored.

Not only are most current "independent" films financed in some part by studios, not only are most distributed by studios and exhibited by large chains, but virtually all of them also adhere closely, if not slavishly, to the Hollywood narrative style. It is perfectly fitting that the studios themselves have manufactured the present definition of independent film, to market that which falls outside their standard mass marketing schemes, to create a category for that which innately defies categories. Filmma kers who claim to be independent have submissively accepted the terms of the studios. This is pure arrogance on the part of the studios, and pure foolishness on the part of the filmmakers.

It is time to call off the charade. The time is overdue to reclaim independence from studio acquisition executives.

The tradition of truly independent film in the United States has a rather fragmentary history. Partly this is because of the economic dominance of the studio product, but the main factor, I think, is that Americans have shown almost complete indifference to anything else. Whereas France had an active, vocal critical movement to support its film artists as early as 1920, the United States had nothing of the sort to oppose the studio system of the first half of the century. To this very day, most all Ameri can critics, producers and audiences remain completely unaware of the traditions of alternative independent cinema.

Any film not made independently of the aesthetics of the studio system and its mode of production, distribution and exhibition is not an independent film. Simple. There is no reason to mystify the term, unless of course, the sole reason for using the ter m is to sell something as product to an ignorant public. Filmmakers who reject the studio style cannot expect to compete with the studio system. Nor should they try. Nor can they expect its support at any point. Independent filmmakers must create and show their work in a completely different context from studio-style films. This has been done successfully in many ways, and continues a tradition that stems from Robert Florey, James Watson and Melville Webber, Len Lye, Maya Deren and other remarkable indepe ndent film artists around the world.

Being independent, even fiercely independent, does not guarantee quality or interest. There is a large body of truly independent work in this country, exclusive neither of talent or of personality. Much of it is quite bad and rather dull. But at least th ese independent films distinguish themselves from formulaic studio pictures, and from the equally formulaic "independent" films of the past decade. These recent "independent" films are in essence no different from the productions of major studios. The onl y real difference is budgetary. It is time to stop using the word independent to monger rubbish that has little if anything to do with the American independent tradition.

To paraphrase William Carlos Williams, it is common enough to praise the geniuses of the past while completely overlooking the genius in one's own backyard. Art historians are certainly as culpable for this as any one; indeed, more culpable. Any new form of expression tends to be viewed with immense disdain and the arrogance that goes along with a lack of understanding.

Photography has survived numerous battles about whether or not it is an art, and still continues to produce many geniuses. And, accordingly, these geniuses are overlooked in favor of those photographers who have entered the art history canon: Ansel Adams , Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand etc. This of course contributes to further myth about photography being at a standstill.

Paul Berger is a genius in the backyard, and his work is certainly not at a standstill. From his first major work in sequential photography, Mathematics, in 1976, to his recent World Info, Berger has produced some of the most remarkable ima ges and ideas in contemporary photography. Whether it be his experiments in infinitely alterable sequences, such as his Cards series, or his masterful study of the mainstream news media, Seattle Subtext, Berger's work is always thought-provo king and powerful.

I spoke with Berger in his office at the University of Washington, about his role as teacher and photographer, and to get his thoughts upon his work and photography in the public image.

Omar Willey: From the point of view of a photographerÑnot necessarily as a teacher of photographyÑ how would you go about explaining the strategy of photograph-taking. For instance, how do you explain to a layman the reading, the way of looking at a photo graph?

Paul Berger: For the average person looking at a photograph, the place to wade into it is to notice the dynamic: what part shows you a specific space at a specific timeÑthe historical aspectÑand what part shows you the hand of the photographer, what makes it look nice or casual or surprising? The average person should always have these questions. What is this purporting to show? What slippage is there between it being a document and something that makes it imply something that isn't necessarily true? In t hose terms it's a way to start to understand someone's bias.

There's a nice statement by the photographer Brassai. I don't remember it word for word, but basically it's the idea that the photograph has a sort of dual identity. There's a duality between it being a picture, but also being a picture anchored in a spec ific time. The layman tends to use the camera to note important parts of their lives. The historic part is front and center. The picture aspect of it is usually not addressed, even though there are recognizable genres within their pictures. Photography un like most other arts has an extremely high "use value" that affects art photography and the rest of photography in complex ways. Artists being artists sometimes fail to realize that, often attempt to skew it extremely one way or the other, creating someth ing that tries to be either utterly dispassionate and totally historical, or the other extreme where it's a totally aestheticized space with almost no reference to reality directly.

OW: I remember a picture from the McCarthy era of the Secretary of the Army where he was trying to prove that the Secretary was a communist. He took a photograph that shows the Secretary greeting a Soviet commander as the commander was coming off a plane. All you see in the photograph is the Secretary, looking solicitous, and the Commander and the plane in the background. A sure proof that they must be associates. But McCarthy had cropped the picture, so that you cannot see the armed guards and the stern- faced advisors in the background, which doesn't make it look at all like he's happy to be there. Luckily someone recovered the original photograph.

There's a political use to the photograph as a document. I remember John Berger (no relation, I'm sure) talking about it in Another Way of Seeing, where he said that the ambiguity between the photograph as a document and as a composition allows fo r any photograph to be put to a use totally at odds with the purpose of the photograph, especially when it's linked with words, which limits the number of interpretations.

Berger: Well, the idea is the difference between the intent and the effect of something is a problem in any art to some degree, but a photograph especially. Because of the way a photograph is made, it renders a cat on a table just as faithfully as an assa ssination. The picture plane makes things equal. Photography more often than other arts has this skewing of intent.

There are more subtle ways it works, too. Specifically, because the photo is so explicitly time-dated, if you look at a photo from say sixty or seventy years ago, you'll probably be struck first and foremost by the clothes that people are wearing and the cars or horses, the landscape. That's kind of the first thing you see is the time become visible. Without intending to do that photographs do that explicitly.

OW: That's an interesting bridge to the exhibit you curated at the Henry Art Gallery in 1983, Radical Rational Space Time. You wrote an essay in that book called "Doubling: This Then That" which deals with that very passage of time. Primarily you w ere dealing with photographic pairs which vary immensely in subject.

Berger: That exhibition considered different kinds of strategies, some of them in a grid, others definitely looser. Using Muybridge as the founder, the jumping-off point, there were some straight temporal pairs, as in the Rephotographic Survey Project ove r roughly 100 years, and then the Frank Gohlke pairs over one year, and Eve Sonneman, dealing with just seconds apart. The idea of time, in the RSP survey particularly, was that the photographer like a scientist was measuring the land, taking a measure of it. Now, of course, the irony here is that though these photographs were meant to be as dispassionate as a scientific measurement, they played very much into the desires of the time to prove one thing or another. For starters, like any bureaucratic organ ization, they wanted to prove that this survey should go on. So they wanted to deliver pictures that were stunning in some way. So as by-products of the surveys, for example, William Henry Jackson's photographs of Yosemite were used to lobby for the creat ion of the national parks system. They related to landscape painting at the time, but it was intelligible on the level that these lands were our belonging.

OW: There's definitely a sense of ownership in the pictures.

Berger: Oh, definitely. The Rephotographic Survey Project was also a project of the USGS, by a geologist, that a hundred years, even though it's not much geological time, for certain things, certain things would be visible. But the RSP people were very mu ch pursuing an art idea, even though Mark Klett was trained as a geographer. The first thing you think about in the pairs is the before and after aspect. You expect a hundred years is a lot of time, there should be some difference or you overlay the idea that it must have been more pastoral then, or that it used to look nice then and now it's all screwed up or whateverÑstereotypical ideas about what a hundred years would show. In fact, when you look through them, they're really all over the place. There a re a few where there is almost no change or the change is almost insignificant (the picture with a missing boulder), some actually reverse what you might expect, and there are a couple of ironic pictures, such as one where the picture is virtually identic al but the name of the lake and the mountain had been changed. Some of them start to look strange, because the contemporary picture looks like an odd photo, one you wouldn't choose to make. Which then becomes another irony, because that seems like a very contemporary thing to do, to obscure the composition.

OW: It's a very difficult thing to answer someone when they ask what they are supposed to be seeing in the RSP photos. I think that's largely because they're unaware of the historical dimension of photography.

Berger: It's also difficult to show those reproductions when you can only show two. Which two do you show? It's the body of the work that really matters.

OW: It's a different type of concern when it's a large-scale project like that, instead of it being the work of a single photographer taking two pictures of the same place. You really notice that in the work of Bill Ganzel. His work seems much more person al.

Berger: It's also much more loose. You could question sometimes how he tries in some cases to make his subjects take a similar pose as in the original photos. That was a group that does need text. It really fleshes out when you find that Vernon Leonard, t he guy who had the "Oregon or Bust" sign on his car, is back in South Dakota, or the Migrant MotherÑ

OW: A totally iconic photograph in historyÑ

Berger: Yes. The icon had cancer and was trying to raise money. She died shortly thereafter. And the Texas woman, standing by her door, who was in just as bad a shape as in the Depression when the first picture was taken. So you think the Depression is go ne, things have got better, but in this case that's untrue.

OW: It's a very different sense of time from the RSP photographs.

Berger: Right. The RSP photographs, because they exceed a human lifetime often become cryptic for that reason. In the Ganzel pictures, you get this great encapsulation of what probably happens when you see your parents grow older.

OW: In both projects, you're dealing with a type of sequential photography, but it's an implied sequence, because it isn't specifically designed by one artist over time. Whereas Eve Sonneman, or Frank GohlkeÑthey are designed by one person. Do you find th at concentrating on a single image, taken out of sequence, taken out of context, makes photographic interpretation more difficult?

Berger: I don't know that it makes it more difficult. It makes sense culturally that that would happen. Again, because of the mechanics of roll filmÑwhich is a roll, a sequence of 24 pictures or whateverÑthat do have a relationship, one might see a sequen ce. With the familiar snapsnot, it shows a sequence of maybe four months of the taker's life. But generally one wants either the best picture for their personal history (the best picture of Gran'ma) or what they consider the nicest looking picture in a st ereotypical way, although the way you could read that roll may be a lot more interesting than trying to decide what the best picture is.

OW: Sort of what Bernadette Mayer did with her "Memory" installation, taking a series of snapshots to preserve moments but without throwing any of them out.

Berger: I think that it's very rare for a person to walk into a room and see one image on the wall. Most times they're looking through a magazine where they're seeing a whole bunch of images, though not necessarily designed as a sequenceÑalthough you stu mble across some that are, like an article that contains four or five photographs about Bosnia, or whatever. But in a sense without your wanting to, you're put in a position of analyzing the magazine, how the magazines uses pictures. You've experienced it whether you reflect on it or not, so the combination of when is it an ad, when is it an editorialÑall those things kind of get mixed together.

OW: My interest is in sequential photography, more than single image photography because it seems less manipulative in a sense. You think more about narrative, about how a single image falls into a context more than a single photo. It's a lot easier to ma nipulate a single image by putting a piece of text beneath it and forcing an interpretation, much more so than in a sequence. In your own sequential work, how do you juggle that relationship between images?

Berger: Well, usually there are other things that help frame it. I've never done anything that's a sequence that's just a serial presentation of a number of pictures. There's always some structure, whether it's a continuity of background, like in the M athematics series, where they're all floated in a black void, or a physical structure, like the digital series I'm doing now where the entire sequence takes place against a graph paper. OW: It seems in everything I've seen of yours from Mathematics all the way up to Cards you work a lot more with text than other photographers.

Berger: Less so now, although other elements that are text-like or that aren't explicit picture space, like the television frames.

OW: After you did Mathematics you did a series, Camera Texture Picture, that's very comic strip-like, very simply arranged from left to right, not nearly as complex as your later work. How did you hit on that as the structure that would fit the series?

Berger: That came really from the Mathematics pictures, where I was exposing individual frames, but overlapping, where it wasn't really a multiple exposure. I was interested in photographing spaces that had already been designed once. When I tried using that in relation to the regular world, it became too complex very quickly. So I tried photographing television, because it was easier to manipulate physically and because television itself was a site that I was interested in because of what it means socially. I thought of those constructions in terms of the double-page spread, though the comic strip is legitimate. But the format really was arbitrary. When I jumped to Seattle Subtext, which had the structure of a stripped-down news magazine, t he structure was directly related to what the imagery was about.

OW: I think it's an absolute miracle of a book. It definitely proved to me that the type of photography you do is much more suitable to book format than a gallery wall. Particularly in Seattle Subtext, the act of holding the book, the act of readin g creates a context that is utterly ironic compared to what you're seeing as you read. In Seattle Subtext it seemed to me that you were conjuring up the external form and conventional layout of a magazine and putting it to a totally different purpo se. How would you contrast your version with a regular magazine?

Berger: Okay, the first level, when you look at itÑanyone who's ever seen an issue of Time magazineÑit immediately evokes that magazine. The actual structure was from Newsweek. In 1981 or 1982 when I was shooting, the width of a column in Newsweek was almost exactly the width of a 2 1/4" strip of film. So it was a direct graphic substitution, using a sort of overlap, as in the Mathematics series.

There are two really basic changes: there are photographic plates where there wouldn't normally be plates, photographs used the way captions would be used; and there are vertical strips, which would normally be just text, using a sort of video text, whic h was either literally text from a video, or video images that were layered together like a text. The second level is that what Time magazine is famous for is breaking news down into these kind of standardized parts, and impersonal writing that seemed as if one person could be writing all the text. So although Seattle Subtext starts wit h categories that really are in Time or Newsweek, once you get to the middle, it starts to change. Same typeface and all that, but categories that don't appear in Newsweek, like "Reading," "Memory," and so forth.

OW: The most remarkable thing about it to me are the Display pages.

Berger: That's kind of the third level. On a personal level, it's from that Ronald Reagan photograph where it seems to me there was a clear instance of a photograph to prove something that was exactly the opposite of what the situation was. There's no dig ital enhancement, no airbrushing, no cropping or anything like that, but in the sequence of what really happened you couldn't have found any picture less representative of what actually occurred.

Going from that general premise, the Display pages occur between double page sections such that the one on the left hand side is like a thumbnail of the double page section you've just come from, and the one on the right hand side shows a thumbnail sketc h of the section you're about to turn to. There the place where the text would normally be were the actual printouts, listings from a database that I actually had of the video snippets I was pulling imagery from. The idea there was that the raw material ( literally) showed all the possible things I could have chosen from, and a thumbnail suggestion of what the page could be like, before you see the final thing. That's the actual "subtext" part of the magazine, which you don't see in a magazineÑthe parts th at were edited outÑand gives you some sense that there's another version, another way of thinking about it.

OW: The thing I notice most about the Display pages is that it seems like you are going out of your way, as a strategy, to point out the layout itself, the bare composition of how a magazine is put together, as a diagram of choices that a reader himself m ight make. Not only about what a reader has already read, but what he might read as well.

Berger: It was very important that the thumbnails of both the pages not be the same. They couldn't be totally different, but they'd have to be suggestive of a version, a simpler, smaller version, not as complex. Of course at the very the end of the book, there's a complete reversal of the meaning of the categories. The last one is "World," but it's literally my family snapshots.

OW: One photo that really stands out, in the "Photography" section of Seattle Subtext, is the photograph of the park, with the caption that says "A park in Paris, no, I think it's in Italy," and underneath the writing is not even in Italian, but translate d into French. It's like a parody of the objective captions in news magazines.

Berger: Yes, the captions were a lot of fun to do.

OW: Well, to put the book in context, it seems that the book is an exploration of the way a person perceives media. Namely, it's a direct attempt to draw the reader into being active, instead of the simple, passive way one usually receives information.

Berger: Kind of fleshing out some of the structure again, for instance, you wouldn't see a national magazine called Seattle Subtext, so there's a definite attempt to tool it to the reader. Actually, the subtitle, Seamless Recursive Autonoma is kind of a chant. OW: Oh, that idea of autonoma, did that come out of your Mathematics series originally? Berger: Yes, it actually came from one of the mathematicians I met who was involved in autonoma theory, where there are machines or boxes, non-trivial, where the machine would give you unexpected results. And recursion too came from mathematics. The text at the very end of Seattle Subtext in fact was from her thesis, where her text was in a field as abstract as you could possibly imagine, yet the imagery is very concrete.

OW: Seattle Subtext is very much the diametrical opposite of the regular media, which is impersonal, abstract and detached. Here the very narrative structure is to draw you into something that's very personal, going so far as to include autobiograp hical shots or even shots from your earlier Mathematics series. Even the subtitle of the picture is like the recall of a memory, "This is where I took this," which is almost completely opposite with the use of captions in standard media, where it's not "This is where I took this" but rather "This is what this means." Yours serves a more interpretive function.

OW: Okay, you went from this to curating the Radical Rational Space Time exhibit in 1983. After that, you did Print Out, your exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum in 1986. Now, this was your first experiment with digital imaging?

Berger: Well, I'd started doing it really with Seattle Subtext, but very cursory. Print Out was digital and straight photography combined. In a very crude system, the Apple II days. The camera was set up on a tripod and you'd unplug the vide o and plug in the computer to produce multiple exposures.

OW: And at this time, you were in an exhibit called Stills: Cinema and Video Transformed, which used a couple of your selections from Camera Text Picture and Print Out. Berger: Yes.

OW: How do you feel about using the video image as your source rather than the traditional negative? Does that add more difficulty or another layer of irony to the interpretation of a photograph?

Berger: It can. There's a little difference at that point between two-dimensional and 3-D imaging, because with 3-D imaging you can have something compelling as shapes or forms that is wrapped completely by things that are impossible or ridiculous. You ca n have something that's utterly convincing as a form in 3-D space, but it's a mahogany pistol or something otherwise silly.

OW: What's the difference between your own method of working, where you choose images to incorporate into your own work, and your method of working as a curator, where you choose other photographer's images for an exhibit?

Berger: Well, I've only curated that one exhibit, so I can only speak to that. That one really grew out of a class I was teaching. We were looking at two side by side images, on a slide projector in class, which would change from year to year, depending o n what the subject of the class was. It really got me to thinking a lot about Muybridge and what his work really suggested, outside of the obvious. It also struck me that there are other instances of clustering of images, whether literally in a grid or a serial presentation or whateverÑother strategies by other people that I thought would be really interesting to see all together. I was pretty specifically looking for a conceptual expansion of Muybridge. Muybridge is, of course, time oriented, but there a re also ones that involve spatial array, like Bob Flick, or Bill Paris, and also ones that are conceptual/categorical, like the Bechers.

OW: Thinking about sequences as linear I'm sure comes out of the nature of the camera film roll itself, but many photographers use nonlinear approaches to sequence as well, certainly the matrix and the grid, but also the style of assemblage in Esther Para da's work or Ray Metzker's. Yet there is virtually nothing intelligent written on sequences in photography.

Berger: The French are into it a lot more, especially in its relation to cinema, but I'm not sure why that is, why there's that lack. It seems odd.

OW: It seems less consumer-oriented to me. Sequences are naturally more expensive to mount, but the irony is that museums themselves are all about collecting expensive installation, so what do they care? And I think many of us are trained badly in appreci ating photography. Inevitably we see photographs together with words, inevitably they're used for publicity. We seldom have any way to grapple really with single images, and then we're suddenly confronted with a sequence and the individual images take on an entirely different context. And like Bernie Krigstein, the comics artist said once, it's not really what is in the pictures so much as what's between the pictures that matters.

Berger: I think also part of it is that the most obvious place where people see sequences is in comic books. Unfortunately that's associated with lots of bad things, colorful costumes, kiddie trash, what have you. Again, not so much in France, but certain ly here. The other place, which I'm actually a fan of, is cards. Not the sports cards, but the non-sports cards. There's some amazing stuff there.

OW: They're less finite. The combinations are a lot more elaborate.

Berger: Actually, some of my favorites are some of the facsimile cards, like the detective/pulp magazine cards of the 30s, where you have a vernacular format that develops individually among artists, and a style emerges that's rigorous and interesting, an d gets the job done. And they make great cards. You wouldn't keep them in alphabetical or chronological order, but you do get a lot looking at them together.

OW: Another thing John Berger said that struck me was that why our public photographs don't work well is that they're unrelated to anything we ever experience directly. They're taken out of our cultural history, out of the moment, and they are, as you sai d earlier, formally stylized and occupying a sort of dead-end aesthetic, or they are completely formal exercises.

Berger: Do you know about this thing that was in Le Monde? It was also on one of the TV stations at the end of the day, and it was called "A Picture in a Minute," or something like that. What they did there was to reproduce a photo, which could be anywher e from a famous photo to something rather eclectic or weird, something one hadn't seen before but may be reminiscent of something else. Then a producer or someone would choose a well-known person, like an actor or such, to comment on it. The person didn't know the photographer, and someone else actually chose the photograph and put the person together with the photograph. So you'd see the photograph and you'd hear the person commenting on it. You'd get responses all the way from someone really trying to p enetrate the image and think about what it meant, to someone saying that it just reminded them of something else. It was really nice, because it showed photographs working in many different ways. In a very simple way, it was a powerful little deal, and in a sense working so differently from all the rest of the photographs in the newspaper, or on TV.

OW: Goodness knows how many millions of images people have seen in their lives, but the standard question about a photograph is still "Where was that taken?" It's such a trap to fall into that, to be so tied down to a place or moment to see that it's not just about that moment but rather why it was taken at that moment, what it relates to outside of that. I think public education's really failed there, particularly on a secondary or primary school level when it comes to getting students to think about med ia.

Berger: Or even just pictures in general. I had this seminal experience in fourth grade where we were doing poster painting, and this teacher brought in this reproduction that must have been Corot, of a haystack and farm. So he holds it up and says, "See, doesn't this look really sunny? But there's no sun in there, right?" And I was, like, "Wow! Why didn't you show us this before?" It was a great thing to do at that point in education, but I suppose we had other things to think aboutÉ

OW: There's no real bridge, it seems like, to the next level. If you deal with picture study at all, it's generally on the university level, and it's just as easy to get out of it there as it is to get out of studying geography. Now, you teach at the univ ersity level. Do you suppose there's any way to build a visual education into public education?

Berger: It'd be really tough. A way you might approach it would be sort of like what schools have to do now with music. I don't think it's the kind of thing where you can add one class to a teaching certificate and expect it to do any good. There have bee n some experiments with it in time. Ironically, I suppose, maybe the on-line World Wide Web material may help. Who knows?

The price of comics has risen somewhat in the past twenty years. Comic books have gone from 20¢ to $200 in that time, and though one may first attribute this to inflation clearly other factors contribute. The price of paper is surely one factor. Artists' salaries are another. However, there is a much more subtle factor involved, one that seldom arises in polite conversation.

It is quite simple a factor really: consumer stupidity. People will pay $200 for a comic book with no sense that they are being ripped. Yet this in itself is not a sufficient explanation. Consumers are stupid in accordance with expectation, and this is a natural fact in any exchange, whether it be cucumbers or comics. But the price of gherkins has not risen comparatively with comic books in the past twenty years, and certainly not in the last ten. This is a special brand of consumer stupidity. It is the stupidity of collectors.

The book industry has been notorious for years for charging ridiculous amounts for out-of-print books. Art books are by far the worst for this, but even out-of-print cookbooks and horror novels have been known to fetch remarkable prices. Comic books, bei ng part of the book industry, are no different in this regard. But they are more ludicrous by far. Comic books that are only two weeks out of print often fetch three to five times their actual cover price. Imagine a one month-old issue of Vanity Fair fetc hing that amount. To draw an analogy to the book industry any further here fails miserably. The reasons of both inflations are quite different. Out-of-print art books fetch absurd prices because their runs are often limited to 10,000 or even fewer. Comic books generally have a run of five to ten times that, and can scarcely be considered "rare" in this sense. Furthermore, comic books are easily and often reprinted.

Comic books may go for exorbitant prices in such a short time because marketing gurus in comics companies know that hype sells especially well with comics readers. With an easy balance of hype and gossip about whether or not some particular book will be "collectible," marketing agents manufacture a rather bogus product, supposedly "collectible," that has millions of short-sighted and foolish readers buying something they do not want. This supposedly "collectible" product is nothing of the sort. Yet colle ctors everywhere snap it up, with the hopes of reselling their wonderful new book to another less intelligent soul laterÑperhaps in a few days or so.

It seems to go without saying that such collecting activity has nothing to do with the quality of the books collected. But obviously it needs saying. One should buy books for reading, not for impressing unwanted friends, not for selling to someone else a t an inflated price.

From the amount of hawking and scalping that goes on in the comics industryÑand believe me, in twenty years of reading comics I have seen my fair shareÑit is no surprise that there is a large and hyperactive section of the comics market that dedicates it self strictly or primarily to speculation. I am even beginning to suspect they make up a plurality of the market. Even if they do not, the speculative aspect of comics remains of heightened importance in the industry. Even casual comics collectors wonder about the monetary value of their own comics. This is nauseous. Books are for reading, not for training children to be corporate raiders. Adults have even less excuse than the children. Yet they persist.

Not surprisingly then, comics manufacturers make comics expressly for this niche. Collectible comics! Alternate covers! Holographic design! Free trading card inside! And, consumers being consumers, these comics disappear from the shelves with the rapidit y of an audience fleeing the theater after a showing of Hudson Hawk. But each of these promotional tactics costs the publishers money, not only in advertising costs but also in material cost.

There have been more and more of these promotions in the past ten years. Some are riotously successful; others are notorious failures. Regardless, each of those promotions has cost the publishers extra money that may not be commensurate with their return from the comics themselves. Since most of the money made collecting comics is made by neither publishers, distributors nor retailers, these costs turn into a lack of profit coupled with extra expenditure. The publishers then raise their prices slowly ove r time to compensate for their own ineptitude.

However, one should not blame them, but rather the audience for their publicity stunts, who willingly consent to buy whatever marketers tell them is collectible. One can only imagine such mindlessness as that of worker bees in a hive, but bees who produc e nothing so much as wax to be stuck in their ears.

Give publishers no additional costs to pass along to consumers. Demand that publishers produce material for its quality and not its marketability or resale value. Refuse to buy comics just because they have holographic covers and publishers will rein the mselves in by necessity. Marketers will not repeat stunts that do not work. Comics companies produce more crap because people continue to accept if not enjoy it. Knock it off. There is enough fertilizer.

Comics should be enjoyable. They should be informative, entertaining and thoughtful just like anything else one readsÉ It is time to hold comics publishers up to the same standards as book publishers or other magazine publishers. Or maybe I'm wrong. Mayb e people would prefer to see the New York Times or The Wall Street Journal with alternate headlines and 3-D photographs. Never mind content. Prepare for the glorious future of $5 daily newspapers.

The graphic novel is a form of comic in its relative infancy. Will Eisner coined the term when in 1978 he published A Contract with God. It generally consists of one story of 48 pages or more in length, and is called a graphic novel because, unlik e the written novel, the story consists of interwoven words and pictures. There have been many attempts to make the graphic novel into a serious art form like the novel itself, and if the future of comics is in the future of the graphic novel as many peop le say, then the future is uncertain at best.

As Eisner himself says in his book Comics and Sequential Art, "The future for the graphic novel lies in the choice of worthwhile themes and innovation of expositionÉ. It would seem that the attraction to it of more sophisticated audience lies in t he hands of serious comic book artists and writers who are willing to risk trial and error." Unfortunately, mainstream comic book publishers have shied away from hiring artists who risk trial and error, and the graphic novel has floundered and reached no new, sophisticated audience for the past ten years.

Marvel Comics' The Death of Captain Marvel, which came out in 1983, was the first "mainstream" graphic novel, published by a large comics publisher. It sold quite well, and Marvel began publishing graphic novels at a quite regular rate, with twent y in three years. As usual, the other large comics publisher at the time, DC Comics, was right on their heels, publishing their first graphic novel, an original science fiction story titled Star RaidersÑalso in 1983, just shortly after Marvel's fir st graphic novel.

Unlike Marvel who depended on superhero themes, DC tended toward science fiction and fantasy. In fact, DC had a line of graphic novels that were adaptations of classic science fiction novels, the first one being Robert Bloch's Hell on Earth. Harla n Ellison's Demon with a Glass Hand followed, Robert Silverberg's Nightwings and others.

At the same time as their first graphic novel series, DC began publishing "limited series," four- to twelve-issue series which were also self-contained stories, similar to a graphic novel, but published serially. The idea of the limited series culminated in the publication of Frank Miller's Ronin, an original story that blended themes of science fiction, fantasy and history. This was DC's first attempt at experiment with content as well as form.

Nineteen eighty-six was a very important year for the graphic novel. Not only did Marvel publish Greenberg the Vampire, which was unlike anything they had previously produced, DC also came out with Frank Miller's Dark Knight. A futuristic t ale of Batman in a four-issue limited series, it was quickly followed by Watchmen, The Shadow and The Longbow Hunters, and by an entirely new publishing line: Piranha Press. DC's Piranha Press imprint published such titles as Beautiful St ories for Ugly Children, The Score, and Gregory, the story of a child in a straitjacket. These were creator-owned, author-copyrighted stories, diverse in theme, graphical style and narrative, and should have attracted some of the more sophistic ated audience Eisner mentions.

But they didn't, and as a result the major comic publishers backed away from the graphic novel. Instead of producing more adult, more sophisticated work for a wider audience, both companies retreated to reprinting old stories, usually superhero stories f rom an already existing line, and selling them as "graphic novels."

Since then, the mainstream graphic novel has been completely moribund. At their best, which is not often, mainstream graphic novels are like Ronin: their themes are mildly experimental but they are really nothing more than familiar, conventional stories for "older" comics readers. They have a sameness of theme and narrative, and make no attempt to reach an audience beyond the comic book stores that continue to specialize in superhero fantasies.

Too many so-called graphic novels are just repackaged superhero storiesÑof which there are already too many. The mainstream graphic novel is outdated. Don't get me wrong: I appreciate what DC and Marvel tried to do with their experiments. But they didn't make their experiments available to the audience they need to reach: the greater general public. Unless the graphic novel can reach the general public, it exists only in a stasis.

One graphic novel that did reach the greater general public was Art Spiegelman's Maus. Maus, based on his father's recollections of the holocaust and first serialized in RAW Magazine, gained worldwide recognition when it was reprinted in 19 86 in a graphic book format. Its use of animals to represent different ethnic groupsÑmice for Jews, cats for Germans, pigs for PolesÑwas a serious attempt at telling an unconventional story. This story reached a wide audience, a much wider and different k ind of audience than had ever read comics before. It won a Pulitzer Prize, and received reviews in high-profile magazines, like the New Yorker and New Republic. This is the wider, "sophisticated audience" that the graphic novel needs to reach if it is to have a future.

These innovative creators need our continual support. Whether it be the Hernandez Brothers with their wonderful tales of Love and Rockets, Harvey Pekar with his stories of real-life situations in American Splendor, or Jim Woodring with his tales of dreams and the fantastic in Jim, the future of comics in general and the graphic novel specifically rests in the hands of serious artists, with serious material. Graphic novels must be innovative in theme and storytelling. They must be ava ilable to everyoneÑeveryone, not just lifelong comics readers, but also people who have never read a comic book. Then and only then will the graphic novel prosper. It is time to reach a wider audience, beyond publishers and already converted comic book re aders. There is no reason why graphic novels cannot take their place on the shelves next to written novels in bookstores and libraries. The future is open.