Producing comics culture: a sociological approach to the study of comics

Abstract

This paper introduces a sociological approach to the study of art and literature and demonstrates its value as a methodological intervention in the field of comics studies. Known as the ‘production of culture’ perspective, this approach argues that all artistic work – including comics – is the product of collective, often routinized, human activity. Therefore, it is not sufficient merely to study the text and/or the artist to whom the work is directly attributed. Rather, to fully understand any artistic work, one must also study the larger social and organizational context of its production and dissemination. In the first part of the paper, I will provide an overview of the production of culture approach, discussing some of its foundational theorists and their respective intellectual contributions. Sociologists covered will include Howard Becker, Pierre Bourdieu, and Richard A. Peterson. In the second part of the paper, I will present an example of how this approach may be applied in scholarly practice. Using the transnational comics publishing industry in Japan and the United States as a case study, I will show how the conditions and mode of production help to determine the particular sorts of texts that are actually created. Finally, I will conclude with a discussion of the limitations of the production of culture approach and possible directions for future research.

Keywords:

• cultural production
• methodology
• manga
• trasnationalism
• Japan–US relations
• Pierre Bourdieu
• Richard A. Peterson

Notes

1. Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga was first published from 1986 to 1988 in Japan by Shogakukan as Saru demo Egakeru Manga Kyoushitsu. Literally translated, the title means ‘Manga that Even a Monkey Can Draw Classroom’. Except where otherwise stated, however, this article references the abridged 2002 English-language edition published by Viz Media.

2. Although examples of humorous artwork from Japan date back over 1000 years, the first recorded use of the word ‘manga’ is attributed to Hokusai Katsushika, the woodblock print artist best known for his classic nineteenth-century image of Mt Fuji (Schodt 1983). However, the modern medium now known as manga is not descended directly from the work of Hokusai. After the forced opening of Japan in 1853, Western culture – including comics – soon followed. Political cartoons and short comic strips were common by the 1920s, and in the 1930s chapter-length comics called ‘story manga’ were being pioneered (Gravett 2004, Schodt 1983). Post-World War II, Osamu Tezuka, nicknamed manga no kamisama [God of Manga], pioneered the cinematic visual narrative style of story manga now widely considered synonymous around the world with the word ‘manga’ (Gravett 2004, Schodt 1983). Because it is now common in the English language to refer to comics produced in Japan as manga, I do likewise for the purposes of this article, but it would be entirely appropriate also simply to call the medium comics, or graphic novels when published in book form. I use manga here as an example of cultural production, but manga in and of itself is not a medium separate from comics, nor is cultural production unique to manga.

3. Other examples of research falling broadly within a production of culture perspective described by Hesmondhalgh (2007) in The Cultural Industries take the news media as their primary medium of study. These include what he terms ‘political economy’ approaches by communication scholar McChesney (2004) and others, as well as ‘radical media sociology/media studies’ approaches by Gans (1979), Gitlin (1983), and Tuchman (1978). Miège (1987), however, argues that there are fundamental structural differences between media corporations specializing in broadcasting, such as the news industry, and those specializing in publishing, such as the book and music industries. As these differences would certainly influence methodology in practice and the production of comics clearly falls into the latter publishing category, I have chosen to focus exclusively upon those examples of production of culture scholarship which are publishing-oriented.

4. Bourdieu (1984) also introduces the term ‘cultural intermediaries’ in Distinction, his study of consumption. According to Bourdieu, the term encompasses ‘all the occupations involving presentation and representation (sales, marketing, advertising, public relations, fashion, decoration and so forth) and in all the institutions providing symbolic goods and services…in cultural production and organization which have expanded considerably in recent years’ (1984, p. 359 quoted in Negus 2002). By implication, the cultural intermediary is understood to exist between the creator and the consumer. This is not a useful intervention; in the case of comics, for example, it draws artificial distinctions between the meaning-making of the writer and illustrator on one hand, and the editor and publisher on the other. Such a schema underestimates the creative contributions of different sets of occupations toward any finished cultural object and privileges the ideology of the heroic creative individual which the sociology of culture as an academic project – and Bourdieu (1996) himself – works to counter. For these reasons, I will not otherwise offer a treatment of cultural intermediaries in this paper. Indeed, perhaps troubled by the implications, Bourdieu seems to have abandoned the concept altogether in his later works about cultural production (Bourdieu 1993, 1996).

5. The proliferation of new forms of Bourdieuian capital in academic scholarship is of limited use at best. While I concede that concepts related to the physicality of the human body, such as ‘aesthetic capital’ (e.g. Anderson et al. 2010) and ‘bodily capital’ (e.g. Wacquant 1995) might be useful in some fields, others, such as ‘subcultural capital’ (Thornton 1995), contribute nothing to field theory not already covered by the three forms already outlined in the article. In fact, even Bourdieu (1991) himself, later in his career, succumbed to the temptation to amend his typology, and likewise his ‘linguistic capital’ does not add a particularly meaningful analytical distinction. In the latter two cases it is not clear how such ‘subcultural capital’ and ‘linguistic capital’ are to be distinguished from a mixture of cultural and symbolic capital – and the economic capital used to purchase the other two – within the context of specific fields. In the case of subcultural fields, after all, Frank (1997) argues that, fundamentally, subculture is expressed through capitalist consumption, i.e. the deployment of economic and cultural capital for the purchase of symbolic capital, in Bourdieu's terms.

6. In later articles (Peterson 1985, Peterson and Anand 2004), Peterson revises his thinking and increases the number of factors constraining or facilitating the production of culture from five to six, dividing ‘organizational structure’ into ‘industry structure’ and ‘organization structure’. This decision is not an improvement, given that not all cultural production requires either formal organization or industry structure. The concept of ‘organizational structure’ encompasses a far greater range of social configurations, both formal and informal, and in this flexibility is more useful methodologically. Therefore, I discuss ‘five’ constraints, not ‘six’, in this paper.

7. A partial exception is Dandridge (2008), a graduate student at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, whose unpublished MA thesis on Astérix le Gaulois cites one of Peterson's early articles on the production of culture. However, she does not utilize his work on the constraints of the production of culture specifically; instead, she simply cites him for the same reason that I cite Becker (1982) here in this paper – to underscore the necessarily social origin of all cultural objects.