8: International
Journal of Comic Art
Interview with Dr. John A. Lent, Editor-in-Chief
The subject of our program is the scholarly journal
International Journal of Comic Art. Published twice a year, the purpose
of the journal is to publish scholarly and readable research about comic books,
newspaper and magazine comic strips, caricature, political cartoons, humorous
art, animation, and humor and cartoon magazines. Topic coverage is truly
international; members of the editorial board represent 40 countries.
Each semi-annual issue runs approximately 500 pages, so the
International Journal of Comic Art contains 1000 pages per volume at the
modest cost to libraries of $45 per year. Content consists of research articles,
interviews, book reviews, exhibition reviews, and a portfolio of comic art. The
journal is printed sharply in black ink on white paper. Production quality is
very good, and many articles are enhanced with black & white reproductions of
comic art.
The Editor-in-Chief and founder of the
International Journal of Comic Art
is Professor John A. Lent. Dr. Lent has published numerous books on the mass
media in countries around the world, and is a professor in Temple University’s
Department of Broadcasting, Telecommunications and Mass Media.
Steve:
Professor Lent, welcome to Periodical Radio.
Dr. Lent:
Thank you.
Steve:
You founded the International Journal of
Comic Art in 1998. Why is a scholarly journal on comic art important?
Dr. Lent:
It’s important because there isn’t one, or there wasn’t one before
International Journal of Comic Art.
There was a periodical that was like an academic journal called in
Ink which lasted a couple of years
down at Ohio State. The other reason was because the field was starting to grow
in the 1990’s, and the young scholars were lamenting the fact they had no place
to publish. Most of the academic journals were hesitant to publish anything on
comic art. There was a type of snobbishness which still exists in some circles
in academia concerning comic art. So the idea was to try to offset some of this
and come out with an outlet for the young scholars. But it wasn’t just for the
young scholars, it was for, you know we also have people writing for the journal
who are fans, or working in the field in other ways.
Steve:
I see, so the field of studying comic art is growing, but it is relatively
recent as a discipline?
Dr. Lent:
It’s very recent. But of course there were isolated cases of people writing in
comic art, going back decades. There were Ph.D. dissertations as early as forty,
fifty, maybe even longer, years ago. But these were all isolated. In the 1940’s
and ‘50’s there was some activity in scholarship, but most of it had to do with
the anti-comics crusade that was led by Dr. Fredric Wertham and also by Senator
Estes Kefauver. At that time there were people in education, in sociology,
psychology who were writing about it, but writing about comic books as causes of
juvenile delinquency, etc. In the United States, it was really in the 1990’s
that the field starts to open up. In Europe there were people doing scholarship
in the 1960’s and 1970’s.
Steve:
What does comic art do that other forms expression don’t do, or at least don’t
do as well?
Dr. Lent:
Well, first of all, it’s rather unique because it is a blend of visual and
verbal. Many other forms of expression are not that. But I think it’s effective
because of the fact that in a very short space, especially at a time when the
attention span of readers seems to be rather short, that in a short space a
story can be told with all sorts of nuances, etc., that maybe other art forms
cannot do.
Steve:
I see. Professor Lent, there’s a portfolio section in the
International Journal of Comic Art.
Can you describe it and tell us how you select its content?
Dr. Lent:
Well, Portfolio is just a short section at the end of the journal to exhibit
some of the cartoons of artists from around the world. I select it by what is
sent to me, and also from works that have been given to me by some of the
cartoonists I’ve interviewed. I’ve interviewed cartoonists on every continent,
in the hundreds and hundreds over the last twenty years, and many of them have
made their work available. The cartoonists are very generous individuals. The
fact that someone from academia is coming to interview them, or talk with them,
in many cases this is something that they’re pleased about, because they had
been ignored for so many years. So it’s really a showcase of some comic art, but
it doesn’t pretend to select the best or even representative comic art. It’s
what is sent to us. It’s what we have in hand.
Steve:
And it’s presented without commentary, correct?
Dr. Lent:
Right, yes.
Steve:
I was very impressed at the international coverage. Some publications claim to
be international, but they’re not truly global. You mentioned that you’ve had
contacts with cartoonists around the world for the last 20 years. What else
gives the journal its true international flavor?
Dr. Lent:
First of all, the reason I made it international was because of the very narrow
focus of those who do, or have in the past studied comic art. So much of what
was being looked at, even in the early and mid 1990’s, so much of it was
American superhero, so that no one knew about the comic art of other parts of
the world. Certainly most Americans did not, and even most people working in
American scholarship. I recall in the mid-1990’s up through 1997 or 1999, taking
some of my Ph.D. students, because I’d groomed a number of Ph.D. students in the
1980’s to work on Ph.D. dissertations in comic art. We would present at the
Popular Culture Association and other conferences. There might be a full room
for the panel that had to do with some very small aspect one of the superheroes,
and then when we would present our panel on Asia comics, it might dwindle down
to five or eight people, and no one seemed to be interested. I even wrote a
little essay at that time, in the mid-1990’s, saying that it was time that the
field of scholarship recognizes that there’s something out there besides
American superheroes. So that was the idea, definitely, and the word
“international” was put into the title of the journal right from the beginning.
Then besides using contacts that I’ve had over the years, I’ve certainly looked
for these papers when I’ve gone to conferences. They’re rare, but when I find
them then I ask the contributors to send them in. And I also ask in some cases
cartoonists in various parts of the world to write for us, which they’ve done.
The idea was to make it international because there was a void in this area, and
that void is starting to be filled now. We’re starting to see in the last few
years other people write articles and books on comics in other parts of the
world, and some Americans are doing this now, too.
Steve:
What led you personally to have such an international perspective, to be so
interested in other countries and what was going on in other countries?
Dr. Lent:
I guess I’ve that interest since I was in grade school. I lived in a very small
village in a coal mining region of western Pennsylvania, and there weren’t any
books or other types of things there. The only people who had contact with the
outside world were those who had immigrated there from Europe, or those who’d
come back from World War II, who had served in the South Pacific or in Europe.
But I had a fascination with international dimensions, and I explored this later
on after I’d graduated from university. In the 1960’s, I started traveling quite
a bit. In 1964, I went to the Philippines on a Fulbright, and started studying
mass communications in Asia. From that I started writing books and editing books
and articles on various aspects of Asian mass communications, and eventually on
the comic art dimension.
Steve:
I see. I’d like to change gears just a little bit now. The current issue of the
journal [v.8, no.2, Fall 2006] has an editor’s note from you describing why the
journal does not have traditional peer review. Could you summarize for us what
you say in that editor’s note about peer review?
Dr. Lent:
Well first of all, I don’t want that to seem like an arrogant statement on my
part, or anything that would insinuate that we’re above that. We’re not. It’s
just that over the years, I personally have been involved in the peer review
process, enjoying the reviewing myself, and also having my own works reviewed.
It’s been such a clumsy and inefficient system in so many cases. I remember one
article that had been peer reviewed, it took eight or nine years for it to get
through the process. It was on press freedom in the Philippines. Eventually was
not published. There was no longer any press freedom in the Philippines. I have
a book now that went through this whole process, and then hanging out at the
publishers on cartooning in Africa that’s been sitting at the publisher’s place
now for five years. It will be five years in July. I’ve updated it two or three
times. I find that very offensive. I find it also unfair to the authors, who
work hard to do these studies and many of them are timely types of studies. And
then they sit in some editorial office or sit on some professor’s desk who might
have the time to get it read. I’ve done it myself, where I’ve put things aside,
and didn’t read them as quickly as I should have. So one of points that I
mentioned in there was the timeliness aspect. The
International Journal of Comic Art
prides itself on bringing out articles within six months. If you submit an
article now, and it seems like it’s something that we’re interested in, it will
be published in the next issue, six months later. So that’s one factor. The
second factor is that the International
Journal of Comic Art as is the other journal that I edit and publish, called
Asian Cinema, are published out of my
house. They’re not published by Blackwell or any of these types of companies. So
to get involved in that whole peer review process would require a lot of work on
our part, and then waiting and prodding the reviewers to get their reviews to us
and that sort of thing, again delaying the whole process. I’ve been asked to
consider selling the International
Journal of Comic Art, and also Asian
Cinema. Sage was interested in one of them. I don’t want to do that,
because, again, I don’t want these journals in the hands of corporate America. I
want to keep them in our, in my hands, and our editorial staff’s hands, with the
idea we keep editorial autonomy, so we can publish whatever we want. The other
thing is that oftentimes with these outside publishers and even with the peer
process, people say, “Well, it should be cut down to ten or fifteen pages.” We
don’t do that. If it’s a good article and it’s not wordy, we’ve run articles
that were thirty pages. Why not? We’ve also run articles that were much shorter.
Of course the last point concerning with the peer review process is that I don’t
believe that it’s always a fair process. I think a lot of times it’s a process
that includes cliques, the guru of the month type of thing, where you have
favorite people out there who supposedly are the big thinkers in the field, etc.
And everyone bows to those people and they end up getting these manuscripts
they’re too busy to do anything with, and that sort of thing. Then there’s
documented evidence that there’s been jealousy in some of these peer review
processes. I quote in that piece in the
International Journal of Comic Art an article from the
Wall Street Journal, where a couple
of medical scientists had come up with some new evidence concerning Alzheimer’s
disease. They felt their article was being slowed up in the peer review process
because those who were in charge of the journal and others did not want that
type of information out, that went against the type of evidence that was there
already. To me, that’s unfair and it’s almost criminal, it’s academically
criminal to do things like that. I think sometimes the peer review process is a
process whereby, you know, if the editor is very busy, would just say to the
first person in the office next door, “Will you take a look at this?” I don’t
believe that’s a very accurate peer review process, either. I’ve had many
articles of my own over the years that I know were read by people who knew
absolutely nothing about the topic. Then of course we have to remember, comic
art is a new field of study. As a new field of study, I don’t think the articles
should be sent to people who know nothing about it. Most of the people who know
something about comic art are either on our editorial board, or they’re people
who go to the conferences that I frequent, and where I pick up some of these
papers. So some of these papers are almost peer reviewed, anyway, because
they’re being presented at conferences where they’re getting feedback from the
main scholars in the field who are in the audience. Those are some of the points
I was trying to make in that little essay.
Steve:
Well thank you very much, very well stated. I have a little bit of a follow-up
question on the length of the articles and the length of the issues. You
mentioned that you don’t have a strict limit, and the price of your journal is
very modest. At $45 for libraries it’s very low cost for a journal of its type.
How do you afford to have so many pages, almost a thousand pages per volume per
year at that price? How do you do that?
Dr. Lent:
We cut out all the middle people. There’s no publisher. The publisher’s not
taking, you know, they’re not raking in a lot of money for not doing that much,
anyway. We’re not using distributors, who rake fifty or sixty percent off the
top. There have been a few occasions at the beginning where we were having some
of our issue distributed by Bud Plant, which is a major distributor of popular
culture, mainly comic artwork. But even with him giving us a discount, he was
taking fifty percent. So we don’t have those charges, and of course we’re not
paying labor charges. There are only really, except for the contributors, and of
course they’re very important, but the contributors are sending these articles
in, and I do all the editing. All the editing is done by me. I was trained in
journalism. I pride myself in my editing, and to a certain degree I like to
edit. I do all this by hand, all these manuscripts are printed from the e-mail
or whatever, and then I edit them. Then my wife, who’s the assistant editor,
puts them into the computer. Then a third person who’s another assistant editor
does the formatting. We have a printer in Detroit who isn’t charging that much,
either. It’s mainly cutting out the middle people, cutting out the distributor,
not using a traditional publisher and of course not paying labor. This is a work
of passion, this is not a work of profit.
Steve:
Some editors with a similar perspective as yours, and I’ve talked with them for
Periodical Radio recently, have taken the approach of doing what’s called an
Open Access journal, where the entire journal is online and freely available to
people. But you have a print journal. What are your feelings about that, do you
see value in having it a printed journal versus being online?
Dr. Lent:
I’m a print person. I’m not an online person, I don’t particularly like to use
online. I do. I’m not technophobia, it’s just I’m not…I like to feel the paper,
I like the smell of paper. It’s a tradition. I still believe that it’s important
to have the printed version. Art Spiegelman is one of the people on our board,
and I saw him not long ago at a conference and he was telling me, you know, I
have your journal in my bag here that I’m reading on my tour signing books. He
was carrying it that way. Now someone could say, I could just also carry it in a
computer, but he didn’t. He seemed to be one of the people who also likes to be
able to read it on a plane or wherever. I want to keep it in print form, and I
don’t put it online because if I put it online, then there’d be no reason to
have the print version, because you could get it online.
Steve:
In the purpose of the journal, at the front, it specifically states that the
research must be readable. Why was that important to state?
Dr. Lent:
[chuckle] It’s important because so much of the academic literature is written
in acadamese that is full of so much gobbledygook and stuff to try to impress
rather than to express, that I didn’t want to do that. Occasionally we end up
with a piece or two like that, but that’s one of the….and I rewrite. I never
change any author’s thoughts or anything, but if it’s poorly written, I’ll take
the time to rewrite some of these sentences to try and make them more readable.
I guess it’s from personal experience of being in the field of journalism for
years subscribing to Journalism Quarterly,
which I’d contributed a number of articles to earlier on, and they were
published. But picking up Journalism
Quarterly written by journalism professors was not readable. I always
describe many of those articles in academic journals as articles where you have
a short introduction, maybe a short literature review, a large section talking
about methodology, making sure that every knows that you know computers and that
you know Chi Squares and all that sort of thing, and then almost as an
afterthought, “Oops, here we found some findings, too, and here’s our
interpretation of them.” That’s an exaggeration, obviously, but I think so much
of it is written in that fashion, it’s not readable. So this is one of the aims
of this journal, that it be readable, and also because we’re hoping that it’s
not just someone working on a Ph.D. who would be reading our journal, that there
be other people reading it, also.
Steve:
I see. What do you enjoy most about editing the journal?
Dr. Lent:
Um, I guess…let’s see. Well, when it comes out, obviously. I guess the part I
enjoy the most is finding new materials, learning more about it. It’s a learning
process, learning about cartoons and comics and animation in other parts of the
world that I didn’t know about, or that I didn’t know aspects of. It’s the same
way that I teach. I teach with the idea that I also learn, that if I’m not
learning, then I’m probably not teaching very well. I learn from keeping up and
also from what students may contribute from their own research. So I’m learning.
This is the main thing I think I enjoy about it. Some of the editing I enjoy,
but some of it I also find very grueling.
Steve:
What’s grueling, what are the greatest challenges, the grueling aspects?
Dr. Lent:
Well a lot of it is written by. . .for instance I’ve asked, and I’m not going to
indicate countries or anything, but I’ve asked people from countries, for
instance, who don’t know English very well, to write something because we’d
never had anything on that country, for instance, and this is a person who’s
studying it. But the person only knows whatever language is their own, whether
Indonesian, or Korean, or whatever. Then that means it’s going to take a long
time to edit that manuscript. Some manuscripts take me whole day, six to eight
hours to edit because they need a lot of work.
Steve:
Well, Professor Lent, I could ask more questions, but I’m afraid we’re out of
time. This has been very, very interesting, and I thank you very much for our
interview.
Dr. Lent:
Thank you very much. Doing this type of show is very important to the field of
bibliography, so I appreciate it. Thank you.
Steve:
Information on how to subscribe to the
International Journal of Comic Art
is online at
http://www.ijoca.com.
Thank you for listening to this installment of Periodical Radio. I'm your host,
Steve Black.