It has at last become possible to talk of serious comics artists without sounding oxymoronic. A modern disdain for narrative content and a class-based prejudice against commercial media prevented the great innovators of the comic-strip form from being valued as artists for most of this century As modernism wanes, however, not only are classic comics artists such as George Herriman (Krazy Kat) and Winsor McCay (Little Nemo) coming in for reappraisal, but their contemporary equivalents have attracted heretofore unseen attention from the academic and museum communities.

The comic strip is, in the words of Lorenzo Mattotti, an “impure art form,” a hybrid. Artists self-consciously applying themselves to this form have come to refer to the work as Comix. “At least,” says one of the artists, “it's a misspelling rather than a misnomer, and it implies the co-mixing of words and pictures central to the medium.” Given the space constraints of the comix panel, a comix artist must practice a verbal concision comparable to that found in haiku poetry. To visualize the flow of the story across the page, he or she requires the skills of both a master cinematographer and a graphic designer.

Comix artists, who are instinctively “drawn to text,” make natural book illustrators. For most of the artists in the present group, book illustration periodically provides a welcome respite from self-generated comix. The artist can deal with many of the same aesthetic issues, without the added burden of writing. Not surprisingly, these artists tend to feel that they are more acutely aware of the text than an ordinary artist or illustrator could be. Several make the seemingly paradoxical claim that by illustrating the text more profusely, they are actually being less intrusive. “A conventional illustrator picks a handful of salient scenes or moments to illustrate,” explains Art Spiegelman. “By being so selective, he is imposing his own vision on the text. Over-illustrating, on the other hand, to some extend cancels out the effect of the illustrations, makes them invisible.”

Co-curated by Spiegelman, Pulitzer-Prize-winning creator of Maus, the current exhibition brings together a body of work by five artists who collectively synopsize a twenty-five year history of comix in America and Europe. The selection begins with the work of Robert Crumb, who in the late '60s, together with Spiegelman and others, removed comics from the realm of the funny pages and infused the art form with a more sophisticated aesthetic and serious, often personal subject matter. Similar innovations came to Europe about ten years later, where they were developed in France by Jacques Tardi, in Spain by Javier Mariscal and in Italy by Lorenzo Mattotti. Matters came full circle when, in the 1980s, the work of the Europeans was introduced to the United States by Spiegelman's Raw Magazine.

R. Crumb is widely recognized as the father of underground comix. The implicit subversiveness of comics had, as far back as the 1950s, subjected the industry to a round of censorious Congressional hearings, and by the 1960s the genre's satirical branch has flowered luxuriantly in Mad Magazine. Wed to the counter-culture's wholehearted rejection of bourgeois morality, this iconoclastic sensibility found its ideal outlet in such Crumb heroes as Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural. Crumb's Zap comix and later Arcade (named after Crumb's childhood sketchbook and edited by Art Spiegelman and Bill Griffith) were aimed directly at a community of like-minded peers, with no concessions to the commercial marketplace. For Crumb, Spiegelman and their colleagues, comix was a vocational choice as pure as (at the time, perhaps purer than) fine art. Financial success, when it belatedly came, was greeted with reactions ranging from hostility to, at best, ambivalence.

The confessional, Angst-ridden mode of American underground comix was, from the outset, alien to its European offshoots. In the early years of this century, many highly respected artists contributed to such magazines as the British Punch, France's L'Assiette au Beurre and Germany's Simplicissimus, and perhaps as a result the distinction between high art and low was less rigidly drawn than in the United States. This tradition not only inclined European comix artists towards more accomplished graphics, it to a degree staunched the innate rebelliousness that had fueled the American comix revolution. The lack of a readymade market for Crumb's and Spiegelman's work in the 1960s and early '70s gave them a devil-may-care attitude with regard to subject matter, whereas their French counterparts, for example, were easily absorbed into a pre-existing distribution network for book-length comics.

Jacques Tardi was one of the artists who helped turn the French adolescent comics magazine Pilote in a more sophisticated direction, and he was also cornerstone of A Suivre, a forum for adult themes put out by the publisher of the popular children's comic Tintin. Tardi became famous for a series, inspired by turn-of-the-century Feuilleton, featuring the heroine Adèle Blanc-Sec. By the late 1970s, the comix revolution had erupted in Spain, which following Francisco Franco's death was undergoing a cultural renaissance. Javier Mariscal—whose minimalistic comix read like a quirky synthesis of Crumb, Herriman and Saul Steinberg—became something of a one-man institution, designing everything from shopping bags to furniture (he was the only Spanish member of the Italian design collective Memphis). Cobi, his famous mascot for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, has even been reproduced on keychains and is the subject of a lavish monograph. In his effortless glide from the applied to the fine arts and his facility in many media, Mariscal has much in common with his slightly younger Italian colleague, Lorenzo Mattotti. Trained as a set designer, Mattotti has found acclaim as a painter, fashion illustrator and poster artist, as well as for lush, surrealistic comix-books such as his 1986 classic Fires.

Despite similarities of attitude and intent, each of the publications featured in the present exhibition is markedly different in style and texture. Crumb's interpretation of Franz Kafka most overtly incorporates comix conventions (though he has done more traditional book illustrations as well). The collaboration was suggested by the artist's friend David Mairowitz, a Kafka scholar. From Mairowitz's rough condensation of Kafka's best-known novels, Crumb developed a working script reading Kafka closely for the first time, he discovered that the author included “an infinite amount of specific detail,” which set Crumb on an arduous quest for historical veracity. “Actually,” he confesses, “it's a lot easier making up my own stories. They're all pretty top-of-the-head.” Spontaneity is also key to Crumb's drawing approach. His publisher supplied him with a stack of pro-printed mechanical boards to help him understand the layout grid, never dreaming that the artist would go ahead and work directly on these templates. Once Crumb has visualized the story in his mind, he draws rapidly and flawlessly, with no need for preliminary sketches or plans.

Spiegelman's creative process, which generates a great flood of preparatory studies, is almost the direct antithesis of Crumb's. However, just like the Kafka book, The Wild Party involved much more work than was ever anticipated. Intended to be a “short dance” encompassing fourteen drawings, Spiegelman's illustration project eventually mushroomed into a symphony intermingling close to 100 meticulously wrought scratchboard vignettes. After spending thirteen years of his life on Maus, the artist felt a need to release all the sybaritic, decorative impulses that had of necessity been suppressed in the creation of his Holocaust saga. Joseph Moncure March's jazz-age poem The Wild Party seemed made to order. Seeking a visual equivalent for March's doggerel rhythms, Spiegelman began fiddling with the typography, and this in turn propelled him to produce a drawing for almost every twist and turn in the poem's convoluted plot. He was not nostalgically attracted to the poem (just as he favors the hard-boiled detective novels of Dashiell Hammet) for its atmosphere of curdled innocence, its replaying of the perpetual American battle between Puritanism and sensuality. Like the counter-culture comix of the 1960s, The Wild Party breaches the taboos established by bourgeois propriety. In today's more repressive environment, it serves as a reminder that we may have allowed the pendulum to swing too far.

Unlike Spiegelman, Tardi did not create the typography for Louis-Ferdinand Céline's books, but he was keenly conscious of the way text and image related to one another on the page. He was initially inspired by a series of unillustrated literary classics published by the renowned Parisian firm of Gallimard. He literally cut up Gallimard's edition of Céline's Journey to the End of the Night in order to position his drawings around the text. Tardi's illustrated version of Journey to the End of the Night (in an enlarged size that retained the original type) created a major sensation throughout France and was soon followed by a second volume in the same format, Céline's Death on the Installment Plan. Like Spiegelman, Tardi produced a dense thicket of illustrations that follow the story in almost cinematic detail, at times as if frame by frame. Both artists similarly revived the work of authors who, prior to the illustrated publications, had fallen into neglect or disfavor.

Mattotti, too, began his Pinocchio by cutting up an existing edition of Carlo Collodi's book. He was concerned not only with devising cohesive graphic units, but with keeping the pictures out of the way of the text. To this end, he conceived a number of “L” or “U”-shaped illustrations, or allowed his drawings to run along the lower portion of the page, below the type. The artist feels as well that lavish, full-page drawings of the sort with which he intermittently spiked Pinocchio and which he later used exclusively for Robert Louis Stevenson's short story, Pavilion on the Links, are relatively noninvasive. The traditional bookplates in the Stevenson story, he explains, allow one to read long passages of uninterrupted text and then break for a picture. Mattotti is more interested in creating an atmosphere that reflects the author's intent than in slavish literalism, and he will reject images that he considers too specific. Pictures, he believes, can be dangerous; he tries to avoid damaging or upstaging the text.

Mariscal chose to create an abundance of full-page illustrations for Pedro Almodóvar's Fire in the Gut as a way of mirroring the novella's antic pacing The project dates to the early 1980s, when the now famous film director was still working part-time for the telephone company. The publisher of El Víbora, Spain's avant-garde comix journal, suggested the collaboration, as the two men were friends. Mariscal recalls that they often ate dinner together, and it appears that the story for Fire in the Gut was not much different from the movie plots that Almodóvar was constantly spinning. Mariscal gravitated to the moments of heightened drama. “It was very easy,” he says. “The scenes to illustrate were dictated by the climactic episodes in the action.” Although the rhythm of the illustrations is very much influenced by Mariscal's work as a comix artist, he sought out a somewhat different style, “more realistic, more graphic.” It is clear that the artist worked closely with the author to visualize his story, yet unfortunately the project was to a degree marred by the fact that Mariscal had no input regarding the typography, design or printing of the book, which he felt was badly executed.

Like comix themselves, the books illustrated by comix artists are hybrids. Sometimes (as with the Crumb and Mariscal projects) collaboration with the author is explicit, but even when it is not, the artist treats the author as an implicit partner. These publications differ from the more rarefied “Artist's Book” in that they are not conceived as precious objects, but intended to conform to the crasser realities of commercial publishing. Depending on the degree of involvement that the artist has with typography and production, the books display varying degrees of sumptuousness and graphic cohesion. All, however, are united by the artist's unashamed service to narrative content—which, in the postmodern era, is beginning to seem less a flaw than a unique strength.