Serious respect for the funnies

In the realm of alternative comics, few artists have had greater influence than Art Spiegelman, Robert Crumb, Gary Panter and Chris Ware. With their library of cutting-edge titles -- among them “Maus,” “Mr. Natural,” “Jimbo” and “Quimby the Mouse,” respectively -- the four can arguably be credited with ushering comics into their current era of literary and artistic respectability.

As a result, they are among the 15 elite artists featured in “Masters of American Comics,” a two-part exhibition opening at Los Angeles’ Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art on Nov. 20.

“All of these artists added or changed the language of the comics medium,” exhibition co-curator John Carlin says of the show’s four living artists. “I think 200 years from now people will find interesting things about America in mid-century from R. Crumb they might not see from mainstream media, and I feel the same way about Chris Ware’s work -- that when people look at the beginning of the 21st century, his work will tell us about the inner life of people and what it felt like to be alive.”

The exhibition is organized chronologically and looks at the development of comic strips and books from the early 20th century to the present through more than 900 works, including drawings, proofs, newspaper pages and books. Comic strips from the first half of the 20th century will be shown at the Hammer; works from the 1940s onward will be at MOCA.

To gather the necessary material, the bulk of which is in private collections, Carlin turned to Brian Walker, who with 30 years of experience mounting comics art exhibitions, jumped at the opportunity to be a co-curator. “The contemporary artists are once again reinventing the form,” says Walker, son of cartoonist Mort Walker and part of the team that now produces “Hi and Lois” and “Beetle Bailey.” “I’m convinced as we go forward that one day comic artists will not only be recognized as on par with the great visual artists but also the masters of literature.”

Carlin says that the list of living artists the curators, with the help of his longtime friend Spiegelman, finally settled on was by no means exhaustive but rather meant to be seen as a first attempt by two major cultural institutions to begin a discussion about “who’s missing, what the relationship of this medium is to other mediums and in which direction is the medium going.”

Art Spiegelman, ‘Maus’

Based on Carlin’s criteria for inclusion -- changing the language of the discourse -- Art Spiegelman received a perpetual hall pass in 1992 when his groundbreaking two-volume graphic novel, “Maus,” a Holocaust narrative that portrayed Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, earned him a special Pulitzer Prize, a first for the genre.

“ ‘Maus’ is a singularly masterful piece of work,” says Gary Groth, executive editor of “The Comics Journal” and a longtime advocate of comics as an art form. “I don’t think Spiegelman has done anything before or since to rival it.”

After receiving the Pulitzer, Spiegelman took his new credibility to the New Yorker, where he became one of the magazine’s more visible artists. That paved the way for other cartoonists to appear there, including Adriane Tomine, as well as Crumb, Panter and Ware. The latter three, along with Lynda Barry, Bill Griffith and Julie Doucet, were all published in Spiegelman’s avant-garde “Raw” anthology, which he founded in 1980 with his wife, New Yorker art director Francoise Mouly.

In 2003, Spiegelman split from the New Yorker after what he called “10 years of leaving.” “As fortunate as I was to be allowed in the New Yorker, the frustration of trying to meet someone’s demands other than my own kept coming to the foreground,” says Spiegelman, 57, from his Soho studio. “And after Sept. 11, I decided that I really needed to do comics work, and that work just didn’t seem to have anything to do with where the New Yorker was at.”

The newfound freedom allowed Spiegelman to concentrate on “In the Shadow of No Towers,” his eyewitness account and emotional response to the destruction of the World Trade Center, published last year by Pantheon Books.

“Clearly, it’s no longer an uphill battle to get published,” says Spiegelman, who notes that all the publishing houses contacted initially passed on “Maus.” “Now every publisher in New York is interested in having graphic novels of one kind or another.” Spiegelman says the “Masters” exhibition is able to take place because the high-low divide in art isn’t as compelling as it used to be: “Because of what’s happening to comics on many fronts, this is a ratification of interest and embrace that allows what I call the hunchback, twisted dwarf cousin of the arts to hobble into the room and take its place at the table.”

R. Crumb, Comix for adults

If Spiegelman serves as the face and voice of comics to the cultural elite, Robert Crumb can be counted on to let his art do the talking, and in his own satirical voice. To avoid distractions, Crumb, 62, is known for declining interviews and has sequestered himself in a village near Montpellier in the south of France, where he’s working on his most ambitious project to date, an illustrated Book of Genesis. The completed work is expected to number about 200 pages.

“Robert is drawing it exactly from the original text,” says Crumb’s wife of 27 years, Aline Kominsky-Crumb. “It’s violent, it’s amazing and it’s some of the most incredible drawing I’ve seen him do in his life.”

That’s saying a lot given that Crumb’s career spans five decades and includes such pop culture creations as Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural, Devil Girl and his drawing of the “Keep on Truckin’ ” guys from Zap Comix No. 1, an image that spawned a million mud flaps.

Widely acknowledged as the father of the underground comix movement, Crumb’s self-expressive stories have dealt with LSD-induced fantasies, misogyny and plenty of sex, taking the medium well out of the arena of children.

“Many of Robert’s fans love his work for his transgressions, but for me it is the opposite -- I came to love his work in spite of his transgressions,” says Mouly, who wrote an essay on Crumb to the “Masters” catalog. “People like the fact that he breaks taboos and boundaries.”

“What allowed me to get by my first recoil is that his drawing is so darn attractive,” Mouly adds by phone from her New York office. “He really has the 100% ability to bring things to life on the page with simple pen lines, and his storytelling is so fluid, panel to panel, that it’s very hard not to read his work once it’s put in front of your eyes.”

Gary Panter, an artist’s artist

Gary Panter’s “ratty-lined” images are synonymous with Los Angeles’ late 1970s punk ethos era, from his oft-bootlegged logo for the Screamers techno-punk band to his post-nuclear punk rock cartoon character Jimbo in Slash magazine.

“When I saw Gary’s work in Slash, I thought, ‘This is the next step; these are punk comics,’ ” says alternative comics artist Charles Burns, creator of the recently released “Black Hole” graphic novel. “He had stepped away from the tightly rendered underground comics that had been around for a while and was moving toward rough and raw imagery that was more reflective of the punk culture.”

Panter acknowledges that he gets a little tired of the “king of the ratty line” moniker and notes that his artwork is much tighter in his latest book, “Jimbo in Purgatory,” his reinterpretation of Dante’s “Purgatorio.” “I do very crude stuff, and I do very refined stuff,” he says. “My thing has always been to let the style serve the idea rather than the other way around.”

Panter, 54, who now lives in Brooklyn, has never relied on comics for his livelihood, unlike most of the other artists in the show. For that, he turns to fine art -- he also is a painter -- and to commercial work, including the cover for the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s debut album, illustrations for Time, Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly, and a multiple Emmy Award-winning gig as head set designer for the “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” television show.

“Comics are really just an expensive hobby,” Panter says in his East Texas drawl. “There’s not really any money to be made in comics for me. My stuff is experimental and contrarian, so it’s not going to be very popular.”

Panter modestly insists that he can’t have more than 8,000 to 10,000 fans. But even if that low estimate is accurate, he says, a disproportionate number are fellow artists, making his arc of influence deceptively far-reaching. Chris Ware cites Panter as an influence, as does a longtime friend who parlayed his own squiggly lines into television’s animated first family.

“Jimbo was definitely an influence on Bart Simpson; just check out their jagged haircuts,” says Matt Groening, who used to pal around with Panter when both lived in L.A. in the early 1980s.

“Gary can do anything with a brush or a pen, and to me he’s right up there with Picasso, that’s how staggering his talent is,” Groening adds. “But he’s working in this degenerate art form, comics, so it’s taken a lot longer for him to be recognized as the genius he is by the mainstream art world.”

Chris Ware, next generation

Where Panter’s comics work can be dense and requires effort to wade through, Chris Ware’s, with its precise line and cogent storytelling, is architecturally gorgeous and almost instantly accessible.

At 37, Ware jump-started the New York Times Magazine’s new weekly comics feature in September with his “Building Stories” serial and has landed on the cover of the New Yorker and a new Penguin Classic trade paperback of Voltaire’s “Candide” in recent months. His 2000 graphic novel “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth” was followed this year by “The Acme Novelty Library,” a collection of comics and graphic stories.

“I really couldn’t be more surprised or more grateful at the rather disproportionate amount of kind words I’ve received over the past five years, and consider myself one of the luckiest people around for it,” says Ware, who is based in Chicago, in an e-mail. “At the same time, I worry about squandering my time more than ever before.”

Still, like his mentor Spiegelman, Ware finds time to canvass the country spreading the comics gospel through lectures and other speaking engagements. At Open Source Radio in Cambridge, Mass., last month, Ware espoused disdain for the term “graphic novel” and respect for his medium’s history. “The whole graphic novel thing, as [comics artist] Dan Clowes put it, makes us sound like pornographers. I actually prefer the word ‘comics’ because not only does it diffuse the whole idea that what we’re doing is different from our predecessors, but it also honors them because they really got the shaft in a lot of ways from their publishers.”

Chip Kidd, Pantheon’s editor at large for comics and graphic novels, says that “where Spiegelman has done just about the biggest public service to the comics medium of just about anybody, certainly of his generation, I would say that Chris has done the same for his generation.

“He’s not even 40 yet, and he’s produced an incredible body of work. All I can say is ‘God bless him,’ and I hope he lives until he’s 90, because if he does and he continues to work at this incredible pace, what a wealth of comics are in store.”