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Hello and welcome to Material Girls, a pop culture podcast that uses critical theory to understand the zeitgeist. I'm Marcel Kosman. I'm Hannah McGregor. And I'm Neil Barnholden. So excited. That's right, listeners. We have a special guest this week, and to the delight of many, including Hannah, its longtime friend of the Witch Please Media Empire, Neil Barnholden.
Neil, pronouns he him, is a teacher at the University of Alberta who researches the material history of comics. Welcome back to the Media Empire, Neil. Hi, everybody. It's great to be back. Thanks so much for having me on your podcast. For those of you who weren't listeners to the original run of Witch Please, our... previous podcast, if you're just a Material Girls listener, Neil was a frequent and beloved guest on Witch Plays ever since he, I think...
What a contest to be on the podcast. That's right. Yeah, it was a Twitter contest for the tagline, right? That's right. Yeah, you came up with Later Witches. That's right. And then on that first guest episode, we found out that Neil had a film degree. And after I finished yelling at him for a while we decided to have him back on the episodes where we talked about films.
But we're not going to talk about films today. Yeah, no, weirdly enough. Turns out Neil has a whole host of interests. A well-read scholar, if you will. For now, I want us to talk just quickly, briefly, and fondly about our favorite memes. My favorite meme is the...
I'm going to call it panels. I'm giving the game away here. But it's the two panels of the guy deciding between two buttons. So the first panel is usually the two options. And then the second one is the character just visibly sweating about having to meet the choice between them. I love it so much.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's good. I've used it as a decision-making tool in the past. When you realize what those two buttons are suddenly like, wait a minute, this is no choice. This is ridiculous. You know, that drill tweet. That's like, I need help with my budget. And it's like rent, $500. Groceries, $150. Scented candles, $2,500. Please help my family is dying. I don't know that one.
It's so funny. It's a classic drill tweet. And the phrase, please help my family is dying, has like been meme-ified. And my favorite meme is every Drill tweet and then the way in which it circulates afterwards. For those of you who are not familiar, Drill was a Twitter personality from the sort of like weird Twitter corner of things, you know, alongside Patricia Lockwood.
as one of the great all-time tweeters. Here's a little secret, everybody. I'm working on a book with my friend Amy about the aesthetics of weird Twitter. Oh, fun. So we've been reading and talking about a lot of drill tweets. But truly, please help my family is dying. I think about it a lot. Marcel? Oh my gosh. I love memes so much. And on more than one occasion, friends have said that my love language is sending astrology memes. And so I would say I don't have one particular format.
It's just any time you put astrology content into meme form, I'm 100% all there. Why are we talking about memes? Oh, hey, hey, hey, hey, hang on. What? We got to go to our next segment first. All right. Our first segment. as always, is why this, why now? Wherein we ask the materialist question, what are or were the historical, ideological, and material conditions for our object of study to become zeitgeisty.
Our good friend Neil has a wonderful new book out called From Gum Wrappers to Richie Rich, The Materiality of Cheap Comics. And so we thought that we should really bring him on the podcast to talk about something. Who cares what? What a great opportunity to get.
Absolutely. So we're going to talk about the book, I assume, in some capacity. But what's our objective study here? Is it gum wrappers, cheap comics, Richie Rich, some... iconic figure not named in the title of the book which i'm sorry neil i haven't read it yet so i don't i don't know what else is happening in there so today we're going to talk about comics in
sort of general, but we're also going to talk about memes. But before we talk about memes, we've got to talk about comics. It's a little bit of a hodgepodge. Neil, this is where I really heavily am going to rely on your expertise, okay? Why did I... invite you on here sure would you perhaps like a brief overview of comics as a medium yes yeah and to help you and me and our listeners and everybody
Marcel and I are going to, at random without prompting, read out quotes from your book. Okay, I'm going to start. Neil, you write, quote, Although it was technologically possible to create comic books by the 1870s, the actual print format would emerge in a later cultural and commercial context. end quote, Barnholden 7. Now, there is a lot of cultural context that we could talk about, but since the three of us are all periodical scholars, I would love for us to nerd out about.
pulp paper and staples. But you know what? You're given the origin history of comics, so you just follow your heart. Can we start with pulp paper? I think we need to start with the definition. All right, for sure. And this is actually where the book starts. So in brief, it was defined by the U.S. Senate subcommittee as these pamphlets. They consist of thin.
32 pages. It says that they often have a lurid cover of some kind and that on the inside there's always a story being told by a combination of pictures and words sort of combined in this particular sense that we think of. Line drawings, for some reason they specify color. I'm not exactly sure why, but it's definitely a part of comic books. This might also be a good point to say that
One thing that's really confusing about comics is that we sort of casually say comics. But one of the important distinctions that I make in the book is that comic strips and comic books have... Really different histories and super different places in American culture. Like comic strips, people get rich doing comic strips. Nobody gets rich doing comics.
Comic strips, they appear in the newspaper. There's a sense that they're kind of like family entertainment for everybody. Comic books are this sort of disreputable... childish kind of thing the fact that the word lurid appears in their description i think is not a coincidence but yeah comic strips they're the more mainstream and much more financially remunerative things. So whenever you read a biography of anybody who works in comic books, their dream is to write a comic strip.
Almost always. But we just kind of say comics casually, right? You can think about the cultural place as something like peanuts in American culture. Okay. It's not disreputable. Okay, so the publishing history. surely of comic strips and comic books is different and part of this distinction. And then as is the actual like material. that they take. So do we want to talk about pulp paper and staples? I haven't read the script. I don't know if it's important.
Yeah, I think we should talk about them. Like you were suggesting, Hannah, we got to talk about colonialism to talk about pulp paper. Oh, we absolutely need to talk about colonialism to talk about pulp paper. So what's pulp paper, Neil?
So pulp paper, so previous to the kind of early 19th century, paper was made out of linen and fibers. So you hear about the institution of... rag pickers right people who get fabric old fabric off of the street or out of people's homes or whatever and it gets recycled into uh paper and if you ever have a book from the 18th century it's usually
kind of noticeable if you run your fingers over it. It's usually really good paper. It lasts for a really long time. In, I think it's the 1820s or 30s, in Germany, there's a process invented where they can make way cheaper paper. by basically shredding wood, melting wood, kind of softening it up into this substance called pulp, right? And making way cheaper paper that is way worse quality. The price of paper, I think, goes down.
to a 50th of its original cost over the span of the 19th century. Whoa. Which is how you get like newspapers, magazines, cheap books, cheap literature, and eventually comic books. Yeah. But I do feel like, be remiss to mention here, the reason that this is a cheaper method of making paper is because of the colonialism, the colonization of North America, which gives access to... huge amounts of softwood lumber with huge consequences for almost the entire history of Canada.
I'm from British Columbia, and I'd say most of the reason that British Columbia exists as a province is because of the forestry industry. Yeah, wow. And it's because of softwood lumber. It's because of the demand for paper. So that's... pulp paper. What about staples? I know that you said that the definition specifies wire binding, but I think we all know comics as being stapled. So apparently that shifted at some point.
You know, again, before the late 19th century, the way that books and periodicals were made, you'd have signatures, you'd have the folded over piece of paper, and they would be stitched in some way. And staples were invented to be a cheaper way to bind paper together for books. Except it turned out that's a really terrible way to make books because you end up with books that rust and you end up with books where the wire gets brittle. It turns out to be a terrible way to do it.
It is much cheaper, and so it became used for cheap pamphlets. Right. So by kind of the 1880s, the thing that's frustrating about the history of Staples, we don't exactly know who invented them or exactly where. There's some patents, but they don't seem to be the first person to have come up with this idea. But it is really interesting because it's a way of binding together paper that is so much cheaper than stitching it together, even once stitching machines kind of become really efficient.
This, I think, is maybe a helpful reminder that comic books, which were stapled, that these were ephemeral. They were printed and circulated as ephemeral objects. They were not intended to be preserved.
We've got this sense of the paper that comics are made out of and the way that comics are bound. You also write in your book, quote, The size of the resulting magazine is significant because contemporary pulp periodicals were approximately the same size, giving the products a cultural legibility as well as the ability to be displayed in the same retail space. So we've got this emerging sort of materiality of like pulp cheap magazines. And then we've got comics emerging with roughly the same.
So what's the significance here of the sizing of comics and the fact that they sort of looked and were materially similar to pulp magazines of the period? Well, what's interesting about it is that comics go from being comic strips that use the distribution system of newspapers, which I sort of sketched out, and then they move into the sphere of magazines, and particularly pulp magazines.
And it's a physical similarity, but part of that is also that in a business sense, it's literally pulp corporations that are publishing comics. Most early comic book companies are actually just subdivisions of...
existing pulp magazine publishers. But what's significant about that is in terms of circulation, the way that they're read is the same as magazines, which is to say you go to a store... right you go to a store that sells magazines it's probably a newsstand so it's probably business within another business or within another building or whatever
They're kind of a little bit more public in that sense, but they're also a little bit more private. The newspaper is supposed to be this kind of domestic institution. The family reads the newspaper. But pulp magazines have this sort of disreputable idea that they have a kind of furtiveness to them in a certain sense.
If you want to think about it this way, you can secretly read a magazine in a way that secretly reading a newspaper is a lot more difficult. It's really hard. Newspapers are too big to read sneakily. Really difficult. So the earliest comics are massive. They look like newspaper comics.
sections, but they really quickly shrink down and they become a kind of magazine. And basically, if you want to think about it this way, they're sort of the equivalent of pulp magazines, but they also are for an audience of younger readers. Oh, yeah. So it's like...
lurid, tawdry material for kids. I'm ready. I'm ready to clutch my pearls. And Marcel can talk all about this, this idea of how pulps became disreputable, how they became decriminalized. But I think you can pretty much say that they're lowbrow. in a way that newspapers are not quite.
I did once get called out by a student in my class for using the term lowbrow because it is a term that comes with a bunch of racist and ableist baggage. So I think it might be worth... quickly noting that when periodical scholars use the term lowbrow, we do so consciously. of that history that like when we say that something was lowbrow, we are specifically referring to something that was categorized as being for people who were of.
so-called lesser intelligence, people who were racialized, people who maybe had learning disabilities or who lacked the same access to education that people who were considered middle-brow had access to. better, highbrow. Highbrow, whoa. But I also wanted to point out here that part of what Marcel is describing about the way that lowbrow gets racialized, the way that it gets classed, even the way that it gets gendered, it's also all infantilism.
Right. It's all treating those readers as childish in some way. So when it's literally children, you maybe have this kind of perfect storm of these people are so impressionable. They shouldn't be reading this trash. So we've got a sense of like. Comic reading gets criminalized out of a sort of paternalistic sense that children and people who aren't rich, Ivy League-educated white men need to be like...
Protect it. Yeah. So with all of this in mind, then, Neil, how would you say or could you describe for us the way in which comics were both developed and proliferated in light of that period of criminalization? There's kind of two ways that you can think about this. And I also want to say we're kind of shortcoming this, but the reason we say the criminalization is that literally different kinds of comics were outlawed. And in Canada, just straightforwardly.
not legal to sell them or import them. Yeah. Right. They were considered obscene. Yeah, exactly. So since then, if you want to be cynical about it, since then what happened is that comics sort of sold out into middle-brow taste. They adopted the... so-called literary standards of genre realism these things that i'm putting heavy quotes on but if you want to think about them as kind of coming to imitate those things they became graphic novels and if you want to be cynical about it
Graphic novels are significant because they let comics into bookstores where middle-class people can spend even more money on even more objects that are worth more extraction from the reader. Yeah. And they're not ephemeral. No longer. So like a graphic novel, there's no, you know, nary a staple in sight. Exactly. No. It's not going to rust. It can become part of your class performing book collection. If a comic book is a kind of magazine.
a graphic novel is a kind of book, right? It's very confusing because they're called comic books. Well, somebody should fix that. And if you want to be less cynical about it, what happens to comics is that they sort of... regain a diversity of genre and creators. So they sort of become very anudine. They become very associated with the least offensive literature that you could possibly imagine. no risks taken, very conservative in all senses, politically and also artistically.
And eventually they regain a diversity of creators. They get a wider audience. Eventually the internet is created and the cost of making comics becomes so low that essentially you can have a much more diverse group of people in terms of gender, in terms of race, in terms of ability. So clearly comics have come a long way from the quote,
thin, 32-page pamphlets, usually trimmed to 7 by 10 and a half inches, end quote, Barnholden III, in your book. So if we don't have that, like, really clear material definition anymore... what would you say are the defining characteristics of a comic? So I'm going to give you two definitions, and they're both totally useless, but in different ways. They're mutually exclusive.
The uselessness is mutually exclusive in two different ways? Exactly. Oh, boy. On the one hand, I think you could define comics, take a totally descriptivist. tone here and say that comics are what society treats as comics. They're what readers treat as comics. Neil. Oh boy. Obvious. useless in a particular way right the reason that that's so appealing i think is because if you try to create a prescriptivist definition of comics you run into
Massive amounts of problems which basically amount to you include a bunch of stuff that no reasonable person would ever think of as comics and you exclude a bunch of stuff that everyone thinks of as comics. Can you give us an example? So for example, the famous definition of comics.
juxtaposed words and images in some kind of sequence, right? That's Scott McCloud, right? Yeah, that is Scott McCloud. And McCloud points out, and he's quite right about this, that that means, like, is the Bayou Tapestry a comic? Yes. Are Egyptian hieroglyphs a comic? Yep.
No. Right? Yeah. So now we have to be descriptivist, right? And we have to say, well, no one has ever considered those to be comics, right? So it's a huge problem. The other thing is that that definition also says, like, is the family circus a comic? It's not a series of pictures, right? Because it's just one panel. Yeah, and if you're trying to say the Bayou Tapestry is a comic and the Family Circus isn't a comic, I think you've gone pretty far astray from why we're talking about comics, right?
Right. So it's very difficult. So I think it's a good idea to juggle the two definitions. In the book, I really try to use a descriptivist definition, but that's also partially because I'm only talking about this period in the 20th century where comics have a pretty fixed social definition. The prescriptivist one is the words and pictures juxtaposed. I think that, to me, a more reasonable prescriptivist definition would be...
an image that we read as having some kind of juxtaposition to words or images, right? And I want to throw in a historical thing there because I think it gets really weird if you take it too far back into the past. Just a little tweak to it. Boy, Neil, you should really write a book and redefine what counts as comics. It's all in the book. Actually, in all seriousness, as a comic scholar, I find myself super uninterested in...
Let's cook up a definition that includes everything, excludes the right things. It's just not super interesting to me. I mean, definition making is usually an exercise in helping you sort of understand a thing. Like I often make my students define what a book is, but it's not because I want us to come up with a definition of a book. It's because I want us to spend time.
really getting at the instability of a thing that we might mistake for being stable. Yeah. And I think it rapidly can turn into the wrong side of that is where you're turning into kind of gatekeeping things or saying like, Even though you wanted this to be a comic, it technically isn't. It's just like, what's the point of this, right? Okay, this is the perfect place for us to do a little pivot now to memes. So we have...
A sense of the history of comics and the capacious, multi-definitional premise of the medium. So let's turn to memes. And did you guys know? Did you guys know that some of our favorite contemporary memes are actually comics panels that have been removed from their original context? Did you know?
Yeah, it did. Like that little dog. I got to say that little dog drinking coffee in the house on fire saying this is fine. That's right. That's right. That little dog. The panel of Batman slapping Robin across the face. Iconic. Absolutely. Marcel, I need you to clarify your point, though, here, because I can think of way more memes that don't come from comics than memes that do. So, like, what argument are you...
leading us towards. Here's what I'm thinking. We have this longstanding and enduringly popular literary medium, comics. which I'm thinking has normalized the reading conventions of interpreting an image and text pairing both in... and out of context. So in other words, I think that the popularity of comics explains, at least in part, the proliferation of internet memes. I love that. Are you perhaps arguing that we could say that memes are a form of comic?
I Googled this to see if there was some kind of consensus. Sometimes you just got to check. You just got to check if it's a thought everybody else already had. I was very surprised to see that there was not a consensus. It was like, oh, okay, well, because there seemed to be prescriptivists.
And descriptivists, that seems maybe we can break down the disagreement that happens on like Quora and Reddit between these two camps of people. So there are prescriptivists who are like, no, and descriptivists who are like, obviously. Neil, I'm going to turn Hannah's question to you to think through on my behalf. Pretty please. It's a meme a comic. Discuss.
So I feel like this is probably a useful thing to say, right? A meme is this kind of small unit of meaning. It gets repeated over and over again. It's a little bit like a cliche, which... comes from the history of printing, right? It's a phrase that gets used so often that you have a little pre-printed thing for it. It's like clip art, basically, right? But it's obviously, in the case of memes, usually taken from something, so there's an element of reference.
But visual memes, I think in particular, super often, there's no definition of comics that wouldn't also include visual memes. And like I just suggested... If there's a way of reading where you look at, you know, a family circus or a far side and it's just a drawing and then underneath it, there's just words. Maybe it's supposed to be a character speaking. Maybe it's a description of what's happening. If you could read that as a comic.
that encompasses so many visual memes. Totally. It's a pretty good argument to make that at least a huge chunk of the way that we read memes is the same way that we read comics. And I agree with you. Historically, they've got to be related to each other.
I like this distinction, though, between like, you know, a meme's not a comic. It's its own... medium with its own history and some logics that have to do with the sort of repetition with difference and sort of collective play via Web 2.0 that, you know, is distinct. the reading norms that we bring to visual memes, which are, you know, the majority of memes are comic reading skills. That's right. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned The New Yorker, and there is something worth pointing out here also about one of the reasons that comic strips and comic books were both marginally disreputable is actually the mixture of text and image. And The New Yorker has always had cartoons in it. The New Yorker, like the quintessential middlebrow publication. But those cartoons have always minimized the intermixture of those two things. They tend not to have word panels.
And often they're wordless. They're just a picture. Right. So there is some idea that... There is something classed about the way that memes are maybe occupying the same strata of culture as comics once did this kind of... I don't know what you want to say. It's too easy to mix those two things. It's not subtle enough. Maybe it's like it doesn't meet those qualities of middle brow or high brow art.
Let's not forget, we also have multi-panel memes, right? There's like the Drake meme, the men throwing chairs meme. Yeah, and it seems impossible to say that those aren't comics. And I also, this is just something implicit, but I think it's a... really good idea to think about this there's no rule and no definition of comics that says it has to be a drawn picture and there is a history of comics made out of printed photographs it's called fumetti
It's much more popular in Italy than it has been in the rest of the world. But there is not a rule that says you can't make a comic from a series of photographs or a series of images that are drawn. And that's a comic. All right, let's recap. Neil, you gave us a history of comics and some context for why internet memes might themselves be legible as comics. And Marcel, you're saying that you think comics are at least partly responsible for giving readers the interpretive capacity.
to understand image and text pairings outside of their original context, as well as within context of a narrative. Yes, exactly. Great. That all makes sense to me. Do you think? Do we even need a theory section? Maybe just, like, skip it? Hi, Coach here. Yes, you need a theory section. Please, God, please. Fine. Okay. Fine. Well, if Coach wants a theory section, let's give them a theory section.
Here we are. Next segment. The theory we need. Marcel, what theory do we need? What are you going to give us to texture this conversation about memes and comics? So I think that we should talk about the memification of comics using the lens of what Paul Davis calls the culture text. Now, Neil, I know for a fact...
that you drew on Davis's use of culture text for your book, in particular, a chapter that I read very closely. How would you explain for, say, both your readers and also the listeners of this fine piece of audio? what a culture text is. So Paul Davis says that a culture text is the distinction between a fixed original work of literature, it's whatever the author wrote, maybe the author...
tinkers with it in some way or whatever. The culture text is the sort of some body of adaptations, parodies, edits, I guess, reuses. Fan culture, right? Fanfic would also be counted as part of this culture text. Rewritings by other people. So Davis likens this to, this is the opposite of folk culture, where you have a story that sort of nebulously belongs to everyone and gets told in different ways, everyone who retells it.
makes it their own, and then someone comes along and writes it down and fixes it, right? This is the opposite of that. And the example that he uses is Charles Dickens' novel, A Christmas Carol. So part of his suggestion here is this isn't kind of merely like an interesting piece of trivia that some texts have a lot of adaptations, but that, for example, A Christmas Carol comes to be about different things.
through its huge body of adaptations, through its huge body of references and reworkings and things like that. So his argument is that for literary text, meaning comes about because of the interaction between the text and the culture text. We can't just treat it in isolation like Dickens wrote it and we're just reading his words and we have no other source of meaning for A Christmas Carol, for example. You simply must consider the Muppets in order to understand. Yes.
So we actually just did an episode about paratext and, you know, which similarly like Jeanette is arguing with the idea of the paratext that you can't. just sort of take a text as though it exists in a vacuum. You have to consider not only the material form that, you know, encounter in, but like all of the other, you know, the promotion, the cultural conversation surrounding it. So like...
What's the difference between paratext and culture text? Well, I think that for Davis the distinction is that a culture text are actual retellings. They're actually reusing parts of the text. So it's a little bit different than Jeanette's idea of framing the text in different ways or different frames to it. So Muppet Christmas Carol is a great example, right? It's not really paratext to a Christmas Carol. It's actually its own text.
But it's clearly a version of another fixed text that is whatever Charles Dickens wrote. So a culture text is like the entire body of adaptations considered as a whole. If you want to think about it this way, it's the afterlife of the text. So it's like how it continues to circulate through the world after its original publication. Yeah, that's a good way of thinking of it. So an adaptation would be part of the culture text, but a culture text does not presuppose that a text has been adapted.
It doesn't have to be an adaptation, but I think it has to be some kind of a retell. It could be a parody. It could be something like taking iconography from a story and removing it from the original text, reusing it or something like that. Right. So if we think about... the Harry Potter font every time you use the Harry Potter font for something, you know, the like Warner Brothers iconic Harry Potter font. It's like, and so it's like.
If I made a meme, for example, that was like, the girl who had a hard semester. Yeah, because I think the key about it is that the culture text is what readers of the text are doing to the text. Okay. As they take parts of it, as they make it their own in some way. So adaptation, obviously, but not just adaptation. What's the relationship between culture, text, and fan works? Okay, so I think that Davis doesn't address this at all, so I'm just going to... Great.
He wrote that initial essay in 1990. Like fans didn't have the internet. Fans didn't exist. 1990, no such thing as fans. We're simply going to have to move on. But I would say like fan works 100% part of the culture text. And I'm sure. I can't think of examples off the top of my head but there's so many instances where
that distinction between, oh, it's fanfic if a corporation controls it and fans make work out of it. It's not fanfic if nobody controls it and everybody makes work out of it. Like Christmas Carol, it's all Christmas Carol fanfic, right? Yeah. Neil, in your book, you use the example of the comic book character Richie Rich as a culture text.
I won't ask you to get into the specifics of how Richie Rich was adapted in case maybe we decide to revisit that as a topic for an episode in maybe five years from now. Who can predict the future? But the reason why I think it's... still interesting and relevant is because, as you point out in your book, Richie Rich as a culture text is quite different from A Christmas Carol's.
culture text which we've just been discussing so richie rich who is this comic book character this tiny blonde child who is extremely wealthy and who proliferated in comic books throughout Like up until the 1970s? The 70s is the peak. He's from the 1950s and it's all over by the 1990s. Gotcha. So the 70s is conveniently the peak. So this...
character went on, as you describe in your book, to have a whole new life in the 21st century. So I'm going to ask Hannah to please read this good long quotation from your book so that we can maybe think through some of the ways that comics also produce culture texts. Okay, here we go. Quote.
While the uptake of Richie Rich is nothing like the elaborate continuing life of A Christmas Carol, it consists of a development, the rejection of the text's ambiguities, suggestive less of later ironies and more of immediate... repurposing the landscape of parodies, jokes, and tweets that make up the hostile reading.
is an ongoing adaptation of Richie Rich, playing off an existing element of the stories by closing off one dimension of the relatively complex narrative. Unlike A Christmas Carol, what is adapted with Richie Rich is a... set of recurring ideas rather than any one fixed narrative.
In the hostile reading, references to specific Richie Rich narratives are far and few between. What is referenced when Richie Rich is invoked, in parodies, in casual conversation, is not the sum of the stories that a human could read. find through reading Richie Rich, end quote.
Neil, I need you to explain this to me. What's the hostile reading and what is being referenced when Richie Rich is invoked? So what interested me about Richie Rich that is, first of all, kind of interesting is that there has not really been any popular adaptation of Richie Rich. for a very long time, for three decades since the Macaulay Culkin movie. Oh, I was going to say, wasn't there a movie? But yes, I guess that was three decades ago. Exactly.
There was a series on Netflix which I think is almost not an adaptation of Richie Rich, but let's not even get into it. But what interests me is that the way that Richie Rich appears in jokes and parodies or whatever is extremely mean-spirited. Which is interesting because the original character is much more sympathetic than you would believe from the culture text. It's a little bit like, when I say it's the inverse of A Christmas Carol, one thing that I mean is that the idea of Scrooge.
sort of operates as the inverse of the idea of Richie Rich. Richie Rich is this rich jerk who never learns to be any better. There's no lesson. He's just a huge smug jerk. That's the hostile reading. That's the hostile reading of Richie Rich. It's like little Lord Fauntleroy. Like the idea of being a little Lord Fauntleroy is like, you're spoiled and silly. And it's like, oh, the actual story is like a...
rich kid with a heart of gold. It's very similar, and I think he's totally a direct descendant of the character of Little Lord Faenborai. Interesting. And what I personally mean in that quote is that when people adapt Richie Rich or reference Richie Rich, there's no real story to adapt. There's no structure. There's no series of events. When you adapt A Christmas Carol, you kind of know what the characters are going to be doing.
The three ghosts are going to visit someone, right? That kind of thing. And what is being referenced when Ruchi Rich comes up usually, it's a certain set of meanings that sort of clustered around about 2015 during the U.S. presidential election were coming up. And I might as well just say it, but it's Trump. It's Donald Trump who is primarily being invoked this way.
Can I just jump in here and say that this was going to be the original topic of the episode, but I had initially drafted this episode before the 2024 U.S. presidential election. And so the topic soured a little bit. Anyway, Neil, if you want. to continue, please, to explain how Richie Rich functions as a culture text for us.
So like I say, basically, I think Richard Schwung says as a culture text, usually a reference to Donald Trump, but sometimes just a more general sense of unearned and immoral kind of wealth, right? The idea of a character who's smugly, unbelievably wealthy. undeservedly so right not that kind of scrooge miserliness right but a sort of
flashy spendthrift sort of quality, right? And just to remind everybody, spendthrift means that you spend a lot of money. Like you throw around money quite a bit. But it's interesting to me because this use of Richie Rich, I think the... meme-ification or whatever of Richie Rich. is a great example of taking a kind of iconic character out of context, right? So there is no narrative of Richie Rich that people are referencing. If you read old Richie Rich comics, they tend to be...
kind of broad comedy or kind of adventure stories. There's a lot of stories where Richie Rich is like menaced by various monsters and things. Does he fight the monsters with money? Usually not. I get the sense that the writers of Richie Rich got tired of the idea that it was just stories about him having money. It's tiresome, right? The thing that interests me about it is...
The stories of Richie Rich are more complicated. They have more ambiguity. They have Richie Rich having a series of emotions, not just being a smug, rich jerk. But the covers of Richie Rich comics are almost entirely that. So my theory in this book is that people are mostly remembering the covers of Richie Rich comics. And part of that has everything to do with the way that Richie Rich comics circulated.
in supermarkets, in newsstands, in these kind of mass media spaces that don't quite have an analog in the 21st century. But I think there's a reason why this is the afterlife of the character.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, right? It's like the relationship between comic covers and the content of comics is often there's quite a lot of distance. Like if you are a comic reader, you know that like the cover will often... make promises that the content is absolutely not going to pay off because the covers operating as advertising.
Yeah, and there's a really strong distinction in the case of Richie Rich that if you're going to use a material analog like Archie, there isn't the same kind of huge gulf between the image of Archie and what's actually in the Archie stories. Not that different. There is a really big one with Richie Rich. So I think I'm going to quote myself since I talk about this. But what we're talking about is branding. Allow me to quote myself. Quote.
The brand of Richie Rich, as distinct from his narrative or any narrative about him, I guess, is itself allowed by the material context of Richie Rich's circulation as a physical product in historical context. Stories that are also products turn the characters into brands. Distant reading enables us to perceive the brand, what all those humans in all those grocery stores simultaneously know about Richie Rich.
The materiality of Richie Rich as ultimately a product in a supermarket is revealed by this analysis, and this method of physical circulation and material context reveals a different aspect of this text. End quote. So something that I wanted to add into that quote while I was reading it.
Is the idea that the brand is the association that we have with a character or an image and a set of values, right? A set of ideas, a set of maybe even ethical or moral values versus the way that a narrative is always a pretty complicated negotiation.
values and ideas or even these fairly simple comics so we're really making this distinction here that when people talk about richie rich when they adapt richie rich they're not talking about a story about richie rich they're just talking about this kind of image a non-narrative image of a like richie rich in a swimming pool full of diamonds that kind of thing yeah so the circumstances between a christmas carol as culture text and richie rich as
culture texts are profoundly different. But in both cases, we see sort of the possibilities of reading a text distantly, like stepping back and seeing the way that it sort of... been adapted or been repurposed over time. And so how it's been made culturally meaningful in new ways. It's just like the narrative versus the brand that we're looking at.
And this, I think, is helpful to us in understanding internet memes in general and meme-ified comics in particular. Helpful how? Can you please explain that? Like with a thesis? Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Why not? Okay. Acast recommends. I don't think there was a family that wasn't involved in it in some way. Everyone was a suspect.
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ACAST is the home of podcasting, including such shows as The Logbooks, The High Performance Podcast, and The One You're Listening To Right Now. For our final segment in this essay, I will. Marcel will take some of our ideas out of context and juxtapose them, ideally with images, to make a thesis. Will it be funny? Let's find out.
In our conversation about the Richie Rich culture text, Neil pointed out that the Richie Rich comics circulated in a way that has no comparable analog in the 21st century. That is, the comics were shelved in... grocery stores, and on newsstands, with lurid covers designed to attract buyers, irrespective of the accuracy of the image on the cover in relation to the narrative within.
This seems to me a helpful point given how common it is to first encounter a physical object online in the 21st century. we are so thoroughly online that we implicitly rely on snapshots of the thing that we might buy or buy into, if it's an idea, without necessarily needing to hold it in our hands first. But that doesn't mean that those snapshots
aren't also themselves meaningful to us. The dog in the burning house, for example, which Hannah has in plushy form, currently providing them with back support as we record, comes from the webcomic Gun Show by Casey Green. Most of us who are fond of the meme have never actually read that panel in the context of the strip from which it was pulled. In an interview with NPR's All Things Considered, Green explains that he made that specific comic strip, which is called...
on fire when he was trying to get his antidepressants right. So a close reading of the comic strip with the creator's added background context gives us a lot to think about. Interpreting the comics representation of mental health, for example, or medication or stigma, etc. And as a culture text, the this is fine panel in meme form.
is meaningful in countless ways. The state of our political systems, the current climate catastrophe, how our semester might be going during our first year of university, any number of things. So the memed panel of the little dog in the burning kitchen saying, this is fine, isn't wrong when taken out of context, but rather it just means differently.
In this essay... You might almost say it memes differently. Absolutely not, Neil. Shame on you, Neil. I really wish you'd had a cigar in that moment. Okay, Marcel. I really want to dig into this thesis because I like it a lot. And I like thinking about how it is we encounter culture.
You know, we talk a lot in, I teach in a publishing program, when students are learning the principles of book cover design, they are told over and over again, people will see this for the first time as a thumbnail on them. their phone. And so the norms of how book covers are designed have been redeveloped according to the logic of how you're going to encounter it.
I would be really interested in thinking about like contextualization and decontextualization. Right. So like, what is the relationship between say the way that we. collectively picked up sort of a sense of or created a culture text of Richie Rich as this sort of figure that we mostly saw on the covers of comic books. In the grocery store or the drugstore, I guess. Those are the places I usually see comic books. You see them online. I see them online. Correct. That compared to...
Like what it means to encounter a comic as one panel that has been isolated out of it and has turned into a meme. Like how are those similar and different? So you bringing up the idea of book covers appearing first as thumbnails, right? So like, does the concept of the thumbnail come from the idea of judging a book by its cover in the first place, right? Obviously, what we're thinking through here is like...
The importance of visual culture, the importance of being able to interpret based on visual cues that operate both subconsciously as well as consciously. I'm hypothesizing that that comes out of our ability to read and interpret text from comics, right? Well, I think one thing that's an interesting distinction to make, as Hannah's suggesting, is that book covers, like magazine covers, are packaging for a narrative. Paratext. Yeah, exactly. Paratext. Literally. And you almost never see...
memes that are made out of comic book covers. They're almost always extracted from inside a narrative of some kind. So when we talk about the context, there is a context. Right. I just think that's really interesting that like there are chunks of a narrative rather than the packaging of the narrative, right? Like the cover of Richie Rich comics.
was designed as promotion. Right? The goal is to have people pick it up. Yeah. And then as they flip through it... maybe in line they're like oh this story is actually good i'll buy it yeah yeah and it's sort of it is it is a brand and literally the logo of comic books uh the reason that the logo of comic books is usually takes up the top third
of the cover is because of how magazine racks used to look where they would have overlapping covers and you would only be able to see the logo. Right. So like it's literally the brand. And that's why like popular authors like Stephen King, for example, you'll see like Stephen King is like one third of the book cover and then the title of the book appears like.
In teeny tiny print underneath a picture. Yeah. It's like, what is the brand here? It's Stephen King. It's not the title of the book, right? And similarly with Richie Rich, the brand isn't the story. It's the iconic character, right? Yeah. Okay. Okay.
So branding, you know, already really key in the era of encountering comics in material spaces. And arguably the sort of creation of a... identifiable and consistent brand has become more significant in our hyper-digital era when we are encountering things in two dimensions on a screen. And so having a very strong visual brand becomes ever more important, right? You need people to be able to intuit the brand.
instantly just from glancing at the thing. So we're being trained in norms of visual reading that are new, right? That are distinct from the norms of how we read. pre-internet. I feel like reading memes is part of that literacy, right? For example, the ability to see a meme once and recognize that it is a meme. even though you've only seen one iteration of it, to be able to look at it and know that this is not a one-off, like just somebody's comic strip, that this is like...
something that is circulating as a meme. And in particular, being able to do that, even if you don't understand what the message of the meme is, right? That happens to me all the time where I'm like, I don't know what they're talking about. But I get that it's a meme.
And then that process of understanding becoming more clear, the more of those same memes I encounter, I find that that happens to me more often now where I'm like, I don't know what this is about. Oh. Well, and do you think part of that also has to do with the internet's kind of... bricolage culture of totally sharing bits and pieces out of context like on the internet you expect to see things without a lot of contextual framing in a way that
I do think is pretty distinct to the internet, that old magazines used to collect things and present summaries and tidbits or whatever, but the framing of it was much more elaborate. So do you think, Neil, that the way that Richie Rich as a brand became a culture text is itself distinct to... internet memification culture? I think it's a little bit distinct, but I do think because of the chronology involved, I do think it's kind of...
the internet's uptake of something that was kind of already happening. Like my sense of it, and this is, I think, one of the big insights of the idea of the culture text is that people were already reading the character this way. Right, right. So the culture... memory of the character is not what the corporation that controlled him would want it to be. Gotcha.
So when the internet came about, it's sort of like the common language is already there. And when you share a picture of Richie Rich, a lot of the instances that I found using Richie Rich to comment on politics would just be a picture of Richie Rich. tweeted out like during a debate. Right. So there's, there's no direct link there. It's just that we all understand sort of what's happening here in a way that if you use a different character, maybe it doesn't work. Right.
So in a new context, it becomes meaningful. Yeah. Yeah. Huh. But I do think with 32 Rich, it's reflecting a shift that is a little bit pre-internet. I don't think that's the case for all of these examples. Like the Casey Green's dog, obviously that is purely internet era. That's a pure internet meme. So if we were to use the... The reading, the sort of critical lens of culture text to talk about the this is fine dog. Would its memification be part of its culture text? Is memification adaptation?
Yeah, I think so, for sure. I think so. But now I'm also thinking about branding and does the mummification of that panel, it affects the...
the little dog, because Hannah, you have the plushie of the dog. But are you a regular reader of Gun Show? No, it doesn't tie into branding very effectively, does it? Because the decontextualization, and we know this from like... artists complaining about this images from their work will get plucked up by the internet and recirculated in a way that totally decontextualizes it from their work and they're like trying very hard to make money
on the internet like through being creators right which like demands a certain level of like sharing stuff for free and then hoping that people will follow it back to you and it's like when it becomes a meme and starts circulating outside of the context of you as a creator it's not branding for you right anymore unless you are savvy and turn around
And make a product. And make a product that people can own that signifies the brand that your decontextualized narrative has become. Well, and my understanding of the economic structure of webcomics in particular. is that the webcomic is a lost leader.
for merchandise tied into the webcomic, right? So the webcomic itself is promotion of, you know, if you're a fan, you'll buy a collected edition, you'll buy a plushie, you'll buy whatever, you'll do like a Patreon thing or whatever, but you just give the story away. It's the non- narrative adaptations of it that you make money on. That it like leads you further away from the narrative and into the brand, the like iconography.
and the ability to actually like trade in on the iconography. And I think maybe the reason that comics that predate the internet, like it's interesting that all of the comics memes we're talking about aside from the, this is fine dog predate the internet itself. So it's like a real. found imagery kind of thing. It's really bricolage of like going back into the past. I think the reason that works is just because the internet is already so invested in the visuality, right? The quick.
kind of visual image that immediately makes sense. It's somehow immediately legible. You can change the text, but it makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. And it makes sense in turn that the internet has become... a space in which comic making as an art has been able to proliferate enormously like which is not the case with all pre-internet art forms that like comic art like exploded in the late 20th early 21st century and that had a lot to do with like the increasing ever presence of a visual medium that
encourages consumption in a serialized mode short form serialized narratives right like all of these pieces of how the internet operates really let comics move from being a still comparatively peripheral form to being one that like dominates a lot of our visual culture yeah Yes, I taught a class a year ago or so about the history of comics. And we basically went from these kind of 19th century newspaper examples up into the 21st century. And part of what's really interesting is that.
the corporations and the physical media of kind of mainstream comics really became graphic novels, really sought that kind of legitimacy of book culture at almost... Like just about 10 years or so before the internet made it so that it's actually comic strips again that are by far the majority of this kind of.
most comics now are web comics. And web comics are, like Hannah's saying, by far the majority of comics created are web comics. I talk about comic books, but the truth is that the pamphlets basically sell nothing. to anyone. They're so marginal in terms of culture now. Compared to webcomics, they're nothing. So it is really interesting to me that it's like rise of the graphic novel and then the sort of...
dark horse of web comics revives comic strips at the same time that, you know, newspapers basically just give up and die. Yeah. Yeah. Let's do a little Herald. Let's call back the cynical reading and idealistic reading. So Neil, as the guy with the comics degree, where would you say that we are at in terms of... comics development i want the cynical reading and the idealistic reading well i'll give them to you they're in the reverse order that i did last time
I love that you remember. I think it really has everything to do with the idea of the double-edged sword of the internet, where access on the idealistic side, access is very low-priced compared to mass media of the past. easy for a larger more diverse group of people in every sense to get their work out there potentially in front of a larger number of audiences it's no longer
broadcast media that are exclusively controlled by a very small group of people who kind of gatekeep the content. And I think that on the one hand, it's great that the internet culture, for example, prevents Richie Rich's meaning from being entirely controlled by, say, a specific corporation. It's kind of great that people can, I guess I'm going to use more French terminology here, detour.
these comics, right? Okay. Like deauthorize? Yeah, deturning is situationists, right? It's like taking something out of context and making it mean something. It's very much like the culture text kind of idea. But the other edge of that sword is that the internet is still at the behest of large corporations. They do still have this huge ability to control things. They can still mobilize legal apparatuses to stop people from doing this.
Richie Rich is defunct. The company that owns him doesn't seem to care to do anything with him. So it's sort of a bad example of this. But you can think of things like Disney, for example, the way that they police the use of their images, right? And smaller creators don't have the ability to do that. So it's great to say, oh, anybody can put their webcomic up online, but only the rich and powerful have the ability to actually exert any control over.
Not just the meaning of that text, but as Hannah suggests, the circulation of it. The counter example I was going to bring up about, we were talking about Casey Green. In one way, it's kind of utopian to think that someone makes a comic about their own relationship to mental health and it comes to mean so many things to so many people. The counter example that I bring up is like the character of Pepe the Frog. Oh, yeah.
who is from a webcomic created by Matt Fury, who very much does not agree with the ideologies that that character has come to stand in for the culture text, and has spent a huge amount of time and effort to the extent of... like, diegetically killing that character off in order to try to kind of stop this from happening. Desperate attempt to reclaim control. Yeah, and I can't help but think that if Matt Fury was a corporation...
You would still have that power to be able to actually do something about this. That's right. That's right. So I'm going to say that's the idealistic and the cynical take. It's really two edges of the same sword. We all know this about the internet. It's much more democratic. It's not. Very democratic. Beautifully said, Neil. Beautiful. Thanks. Material Girls is an imprint of Witch Please Productions and is distributed by ACAST.
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Ed's at OhWitchPlease and on TikTok at OhWitchPleasePod. Neil, where can people find out more about your work? Well, you can always buy my book. It's called From Gum Wrappers to Richie Rich, The Materiality of Cheap Comics. We didn't talk about this in the podcast at all, but the gum wrappers thing, the bubble gum wrappers, is actually the culmination of the book. The only social media that I'm on is Blue Sky, where I'm on under my very distinctive name, if you could spell it right.
That's great. And I'm also a challenge to you, the listener. And I'm also on Instagram as ominous Garfield. Also a challenge to you, the listener. Thanks so much for having me. It was absolutely our pleasure, Neil. Side note, listeners, if you feel like this simply wasn't enough time with Neil, here's another plug to head to patreon.com slash ohwitchplease for a bonus episode we did with Neil in 2021 about the images in the Wizarding...
world of Harry Potter. There, you'll also find a holiday special from our archives and an unedited episode from our OG run about fantastic beasts and where to find them, both of which feature the one and only Neil Barnholden. As always, thanks to Auto Syndicate for the use of our theme song, Shopping Mall. And of course, thanks to the whole Witch Please Productions team, our digital content coordinator, Gabby Iori.
our social media manager and marketing designer, Zoe Mix, our sound engineer, Malika Gumpankham, and our executive producer, Hannah Rehack, a.k.a. Coach. At the end of every episode, we will thank everyone who has joined our Patreon or boosted their tier to help make our work possible. Patreon support is the way we pay our incredible team. So when we say thank you, we really mean it. You make this show possible. Our enormous gratitude goes out to Marianne H, Heather S, Sarah.
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I'm journalist Luke Jones and for almost two years I've been investigating a shocking story that has left deep scars on generations of women and girls from Pitcairn. People will get away with what they... can get away with. In the Pitcairn trials I'll be uncovering a story of abuse and the fight for justice that has brought a unique Pacific island to the brink of extinction. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.
ACAST is the home of podcasting, including such shows as The Logbooks, The High Performance Podcast, and The One You're Listening To Right Now.