Public Intellectual
Written in April of 2006
The other week, during a speech at SXSW, Bruce Sterling accused me of "becoming a public intellectual." Which is a terrible thing for one writer to say about another, because it causes you to re-examine what you've been saying for signs of, I don't know, actual intellectual content.
I remember one of those weird faux-reporter people from the US-Walter Cronkite, maybe-talking about how he thought the Master And Commander books were "crack cocaine for intellectuals." By his definition, then, people who read the news on commercial television for a living are intellectuals.
Umberto Eco: now there's a public intellectual. Here's a strange thing for you. Italy is about as intellectually debased as a European country can get. It supports five daily national newspapers devoted entirely to football. Its prime minister own TV stations. You whining Yanks complain about Fox News, but imagine a situation where George Bush owned CBS. That's where the Italians are. I think pretty much every English-speaking Italian I've met told me that at least one impetus to learning the language was so that they could listen to BBC news, the first unbiased news source they ever experienced. The current Italian election campaign is high comedy-if you happen not to live there-with Berlusconi pulling stunts that'd make Richard Nixon wriggle in his grave with envy.
And yet Umberto Eco, professor of semiotics and world-renowned author, has a regular newspaper column. And he's not unique. Eco himself had said that he's simply following a tradition of Italian intellectuals speaking in public. In a country that mad, intelligent men and women understand that part of their job is to speak to the public.
And we're not talking about mysterious pronouncements from the dusty depths of academe. Like the best fiction, this is an element of pure reportage: conscious people telling you where they think they are today and what they think it looks like.
Today, for me, this ties into a query left on The Engine last night, relating to Grant Morrison's The Invisibles. The question was simply this: why aren't there any other books like this? From one angle, The Invisibles was a snapshot of the counterculture at the millennium. It was Grant's perception of where he stood 1994-2000 and what he thought it looked like. And, in commercial comics (putting to one side for the moment actual journalism-comics like Joe Sacco's bibliography or the work of Marjane Satrapi)-yes, for the last few years, it's been hard to find works like that.
For one thing: frankly, doing any highly-structured piece of social fiction longer than 1000 pages just kicks the shit out of you. For another, you mine a lot of material out of the world, and you have to wait for the world to change appreciably in order to have anything new to say about the condition.
On top of that, a lot of us have been taken up with the business of a new century: which is to say, there's been work to do in tying off the stump of the old century and getting a good look at it. And that's still ongoing business. Even now, DCs superhero title Infinite Crisis is getting its arms around DCs first century of operation, organising and understanding the myriad changes its story went through and attempting to settle its affairs before moving forward.
This business of looking back and getting a perspective of a century in the medium, though, means that we're not moving forward yet (I restrict this to commercial "mainstream" comics, if for no other reasons that it's where the economics flow from and that it's what most of you are interested in). We're not in the situation of the '90s where people in the position of Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Garth Ennis, Peter Milligan are passing on new information and presenting new perceptions in the course of their work. In some sense, these were the "public intellectuals" of comics; people with something to say, who said it through story. People with themes, and intent, and knowledge to pass on.
Of the current crop of working writers, Brian Vaughan seems closest to that tradition (if you want to call it that). In Ex Machina, he clearly has something to say about the American political condition. I think it's possibly an aspect of his particular take on things that it doesn't come out with a single direct clarity of purpose to me. It's hard to come away with a single statement from the work aside from "this is all more complex and more fucked-up than you expect"-which may well be his intent. As a writer, he's a terrific second guitarist on Ex Machina: in Ronnie Wood's phrase, "he knows how to keep a track cooking." And Ron was talking about Johnny Marr, so that's not a pejorative, you know? I don't think anyone's writing better cliffhanger pages than Vaughan right now. On a personal level, I'd like him to step out from behind his artists and rip out a big swaggering riff every now and then. But that's just me, and his modest, unshowy style (much like Greg Rucka or Geoff Johns) may be more suited to his time.
I like that he's got something to say outside just working the plot.
Especially in a period where readers seem to have mistaken plot for the whole of writing. Those readers are well-served by countless writers, many of whom have devoted themselves to mastery of the craft aspect and produce some excellent comics. I look for something else. I try to be something else, when I write Transmetropolitan or Desolation Jones or Fell. But, certainly, when I look for something to read, I want it to be something from someone who's aware of their world and is telling me something new about what's in it and how they perceive it.
"Public intellectuals" is a clunky term with lots of weird baggage.
But it'll do for this minute. Quit muttering and tell me where you think you are today, and what you think it looks like.
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"Cultural leper" is actually a good metaphor for "comics writer" shunned by normal people, but leaving little bits of myself everywhere.
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I PERSONALLY THINK I WOULD MAKE AN EXCELLENT
President of Earth. Though I think I
PREFER THE TERM PARAMOUNT LEADER.
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