Making the New Look Old: ISU Professor Examines Anachronism in Contemporary Comics

Out with the new, in with the old—or at least, make the new look old. 

That’s the idea behind ISU English Professor Matthew Levay’s new book, The New Old Style: Anachronism in Contemporary Comics, which explores comics, history, and artistic engagement with the past. The book appeared this August with the University of Nebraska Press, as part of their series “Encapsulations: Critical Comics Studies.” According to the publisher, books in the series share “an emphasis on expanding the critical range and depth of comics studies.”

Levay’s book begins from a simple observation: why are so many recent comics designed to appear much older than they actually are, imitating the visual styles of the early twentieth century rather than matching the look of other contemporary comics? 

The New Old Style argues that the answer is surprisingly complex, as cartoonists use the styles of earlier periods to interrogate the historical moments in which those styles appeared. Levay shows how these comics are not just examples of homage–”they aren’t simply trying to honor past artists and time periods,” he explains–but are instead profound moments of critical reassessment.

Examining a wide array of North American comics produced since the early 1970s, The New Old Style characterizes the cartoonists under discussion as practitioners of what Levay calls “the anachronistic aesthetic.” These artists, Levay argues, use past styles rather than simply celebrating them, in an attempt to get readers to question how they might engage with the past more critically, and therefore more productively. 

That kind of questioning has long animated Levay’s research, which focuses on the intersection between popular culture and the avant-garde in the early twentieth century. “The goal of my research has always been to understand the expressive culture of that moment in time as fully as possible,” Levay says. “I’m fascinated by the attempt to recover the kinds of expressions–from novels and magazines to films and comics–that filled people’s daily lives, which means considering popular works and forms just as attentively as I would a novel or poem that’s been taught in schools for generations.”

The New Old Style represents a new facet of that research, as Levay asks why artists return to the early twentieth century, when comics were still a relatively new medium, when imagining the kinds of formal experiments they might conduct in the future. As he puts it: “Why do cartoonists look to the past when trying to imagine a better future for the comics medium? What unfinished business do artists and readers have with comics’ history, and how can addressing it in the present give comics a path forward? In grappling with these questions, my book participates in a broader conversation about how the study of a popular medium like comics can help us better understand our relationship to the past–what we hope to change, and what we hope to preserve–and how art can help us access that past in ways other forms simply can’t.”

Levay already sees this conversation happening in ISU classrooms, where he teaches comics alongside novels, poems, and films in introductory and upper-level English courses, as well as in his seminar for the University Honors Program, “What Comics Can Do.” As he explains, “students across ISU are eager to talk about popular media like comics because they know just how profoundly popular culture affects their lives. We spend our days surrounded by these works, so we know, intuitively, that studying them can help us understand the world around us in crucial ways.”

The New Old Style is now available in print and digital formats through the University of Nebraska Press website.