All PostsOver at Comics212 Christopher Butcher asks:
What’s more important, art or story?
Further, can a [comics] work be great if its narrative concerns are secondary to its artistic concerns?
Provide examples to support your argument.
I’d say neither are more important. Ideally they would be equally important and work together for the betterment of the work as a whole. But, the nature of comics puts the brunt of the narrative work on the art (except for rare text-heavy cases like Gemma Bovery or Blackmark). If the art and the way the art creates the narrative is visually evocative or aesthetically pleasing, it is easier to overlook a really cliched, boring, or lacking story. The visual aspects of the comics have to have something worthwhile in them for me to look past the story, though.
Take Jack Kirby. Stan Lee’s Fantastic Four stories aren’t particularly great, but I read one of those Essential Fantastic Four books for Kirby’s art and visual narrative style. The way he draws and the dynamic way he composed panels is interesting enough to overlook the often empty stories and Lee’s overdone text.
Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon is particularly beautiful with its art and particularly clumsy and cliched with its story, but I still read all five of Checker’s reprint volumes and enjoyed them.
The way the art thematically integrates with the story is also important. Would Porcellino’s art work in a superhero comic? I doubt it. Could Kirby draw a beautiful haiku-esque work like the latest Porcellino mini (“The ones that everybody knows”)? No way.
As for the second question, yes, I think narrative concerns can be subsumed to artistic concerns and still create a great work. I’m not sure I can name a lot of great examples, as I think it is still more a possibility than an actuality, but there are works that point the way. Personally I think Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo is more about artistic concerns than narrative. Ditto with a lot of the great artists from the post-WWII age like Krigstein or Toth. The greatness is found much more in the art than the narrative. More recently a lot of the Fort Thunder-esque works (Mat Brinkman for example) might fall into this category. The rising tide of abstract comics would also land here, Andre Molotiu’s work for example.
This off-the-cuff answer is rather lacking, particularly due to semantics issues regarding the terms “story” and “narrative.”