All Posts Kelly Cooper started a new column at Comixpedia called “The Webcomic Reader”. It is described as a place where “she explores this thing called ‘literary criticism’ and how it applies to webcomics.”
I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes, as any movement towards more comics criticism seems like a good idea to me. She starts out by looking at definitions of terms like “literary criticism” and “genre.”
Technorati Tags: comics criticism
January 24th, 2006
Derik– I saw that you posted this comment over under Kelly’s article: “…if you are going to apply criticism to comics, make sure you read some works that are actually discussing comics criticism. You can apply a lot of literary criticism to comics, but so could you apply art criticism and even some film criticism. In the end you need to look at the elements of comics that make them comics and not novels or movies.”
Actually, I think there’s too much emphasis on attempting to sort out comics from other artforms, and not enough attention to understanding how comics are similar to and related to them.
For instance, in McCloud’s UC, a number of his concepts about word and picture relationships and picture-to-picture relationships are closely parallelled to cinematic concepts, but he doesn’t appear to recognize the fact or account for it.
A comics page is essentially a complex, subdivided painting. It is vital for artists to understand in what ways it is perceived as a painting, versus the ways that it’s conventions are recognized and it is perceived as juxtaposed images.
The playrighting aspect of comics creation is also important, of course; and comics manifest rhythmic qualities that could meaningfully be equated to music.
For comics to “go it alone” in developing aesthetic theory is like going into a boxing match with your shoelaces tied together and one hand tied behind your back. There’s so much knowledge that you’re forced to jetison that it really represents a step back. Comics don’t exist in a vacuum, they live side-by-side with the rest of our rich cultural heritage. Comics theory, in turn, should engage the larger aesthetic dialog, not isolate itself from it.
I think Maroon is awesome, by the way!
Joe, you’ll note I didn’t say to throw out all the other related criticism/language/theory/etc. Only that, “in the end”, you need to look at comics as comics. I actually brought up art and film criticism, because Kelly seemed so focused on literary criticism.
My thinking on the subject is colored by the way I read so many people writing about comics and they talk about the story. Maybe they say something about the style of the drawing, but rarely does it get down to things like: word/image interaction, panels/layouts, and the way the narrative is broken down into distinct yet linked images.
I don’t think comics criticism should be isolated from other arts (who could you?), but I don’t think it should be wholly subordinated to other critical theories and terminologies.
Thanks for the comment. And I’m glad you like Maroon. Some of the upcoming strips should be quite exciting (or interesting if not necessarily “exciting” in an action-packed way).