Here’s my final list of 10 favorite articles. I’d like to say there was some coherent criteria I was working from, but mostly these are pieces that held my interest. Some of them increased my interest in a work I’ve already read, some of them made me want to read a work I haven’t read, and some of them just increased my enjoyment/knowledge of comics in general. I veered very much to the critical review type of article, as opposed to some of the historical-type articles that were nominated. I hope you’ll read all of these, I think they are worth the time.

In alphabetical (author last name) order:

Rob Clough on Kevin Huizenga’s Ganges #3

Katherine Dacey on Osamu Tezuka’s Ayako

Craig Fischer on David Mazzucchelli

Ryan Holmberg on the works of Yokoyama Yuichi

Joe McCulloch: “The Problem with American Vampires Is That They Just Don’t Think” (essay on thought balloons)

Ken Parille on Charles Bursn’ X’ed Out

Matt Seneca on Roy Crane’s Captain Easy

Jason Thompson on Morality in Action Manga

Matthias Wivel on Herge’s Tintin

Valentina Zanca on Dino Buzzatti’s Poem Strip

Sorry there’s no commentary on each, I didn’t have the time this week.

Over at The Hooded Utilitarian my translation of Fabrice Neaud’s “Conte Démoniaque: La fin des temps” from Critix 2 (1997): 37-53. It’s a engrossing article about Aristophane’s Conte Démoniaque, a long and brilliant French comic that takes place in hell.

I’ve been going through a bunch of blog posts I had saved in my Delicious account for future reading or blogging, and one that caught my eye in regards to this book is Ken Parille’s post about “analytical criticism.” I’ll quote his elaboration:

What matters to me is: does the critic help me to understand something about the comic I likely couldn’t/didn’t figure out myself? does the critic’s reading help me to pay attention to other comics in a new/different way? does the critic challenge conventional wisdom about reading/interpretation that goes beyond praise or condemnation and into thoughtful analysis? Often, if I come away from critical writing with one new concept or way of thinking, that’s enough.

This is the type of criticism mostly missing from the anthology. I did not, for the most part, walk away feeling like the answer to any of these questions was a resounding “yes!” And that left me saddened a bit, by a book that puts itself out as the best comics criticism has to offer.

I’d love to see someone/more people/more blogs take on some of Ken’s ideas, such as:

1. a recurring feature in which different writers analyze at length an influential comic of, say, the last 10 years. It should be heavily illustrated with examples, something I’d like to see much more of in writing about comics in general — people digging deep into images

Maybe I’ll have to start.

[Edit: Looks like I already quoted that section from Parille's post in a previous post over 2 years ago. Oh well, it bears repeating.]

A book like The Best American Comics Criticism invites argument. If you put “best” in your title, argument will follow. I’ve got arguments, but I wanted to start by praising both the editor, Ben Schwartz, and the publisher, Fantagraphics, for making the effort. I firmly believe there is a lot of good comics criticism (or just, writing about comics) out there, writing that spans the past few decades, multiple languages/countries/traditions (okay, I’m guess on those languages which I lack the literacy to engage with (ie anything not English or French)), format of publication, and topic. Unfortunately, I’m not sure this book makes the case.

You can engage a book like this on two levels: as a collection or as individual pieces. They are necessarily intertwined, so I will address both in a mishmash fashion. This ended up losing my interest the more I wrote about it. There’s a point where the trouble of refining the writing and argument seems not worth the trouble, and where engaging individual pieces to point out why I think they aren’t successful feels pointless.

Some blood has already been spilled about the title of the book itself. I’m in agreement with Noah, that the title is a misrepresentation of the contents. In his introduction Schwartz actually apologies for the misrepresentation of the title… because not all the authors are “American.” It’s almost funny…

Schwartz’s purported theme for the book is the rise of the “lit comics”, the tipping point of which he marks as the publication of Jimmy Corrigan and David Boring (David Boring? Really? I don’t remember that having quite the same impact as Jimmy Corrigan). Setting aside the title issues, there is so much in here that seems unrelated or at least only tangentially related to that topic. How do three pieces related to Ditko relate to the rise of lit comics? Maybe I’m missing the connection if there is one. The argument in the introduction seems to be that: the rise of lit comics lead to a re-appraisal of older comics such as Ditko, Herriman, King, and Stanley. But how does that work? Is this merely popular lit comic artists infecting others with their enthusiasm enough that reprints are done? This seems to be the case for the Gasoline Alley reprint project. How do these old comic strips work in relation to contemporary lit comics? The context of both is quite different (or is it? Ware has been (is he still?) serializing his stories in alt weeklies for years). I’d have liked to see some evocation of this storyline, since it is so important to the overall editorial narrative.

A number of the included pieces feel like stunt casting to me, rather than a case of being chosen as “best” or even “good” criticism. Having recognizable comic artist/writer names in a book is surely good from a marketing standpoint, and the literary names add some cache for the lit comics narrative, but… Did we need the boring piece by Alan Moore (one of those non-Americans)? Did we need Peter Bagge writing on Spider-man? John Updike is known for his early love of comics, but his included piece on Thurber is little more than descriptions of images and quoted captions. Franzen’s Peanuts piece, originally an introduction to one of the Complete volumes, reads like one introduction among many, not saying anything particularly notable about Peanuts or Schulz. Are these really included because the criticism is worthwhile? engaging? well-written? insightful?

Many of the other inclusions raise the question of what is actually meant by “criticism.” The first part of the book has a number of historical pieces that seem lacking in what I would consider a critical attention. I don’t see history necessarily as criticism. One can use history for critical purposes. One can include criticism in historical narrative and analysis, but they are not identical. Excerpts from comics history by Gerard Jones and David Hadju both felt light on criticism (having not read either book, I can’t say if that holds true for the books as a whole, but certainly for the included chapters). Jeet Heer’s piece on Gasoline Alley is almost wholey history and biography containing only brief glimpses of critical engagement with the strip. He hints at gender issues and misogyny on the strip but does not elaborate: a missed opportunity. It probably wouldn’t fit in with the almost hagiographic writing that serves as introductions to the collected strips, anyway.

While I can see the potential for interviews as criticism (some good conversation in re that here) the pieces selected here are, for the most part, biography and history (and not very interesting at that). An interview with Howard Chaykin about Eisner is so gossipy. The interviews with Satrapi, Tatsumi, and Elder are primarily biography with history thrown in for Tatsumi and Elder. The two more conversational pieces, Lethem and Clowes, and Nadel and Harkham, reach closer to criticism, particularly the former which is bolstered by Lethem’s insightful commentary (a case where the inclusion of a literary author does pay off). The latter serves as a fitting bookend for Schwartz’s “lit comics” narrative, taking on, as it does, the lit comics/art comics divide. Nadel makes a number of interesting points that would have served well from an expansion. As is too often the case where interviews tends towards criticism, comments are thrown out in conversation that almost demand elaboration and deeper engagement.

I’d suggest that this collection might have more aptly been titled “Writing About Comics” rather than “Comics Criticism.”

As for the more less-arguable pieces of criticism, I totally agree with the inclusion of a piece from Wolk’s Reading Comics (despite my arguments with that book as a whole), but his rather lackluster piece on Eisner and Miller seems included there to fit in with the other Eisner/Miller pieces rather than for its relation to lit comics. Surely his piece on Jaime is more “lit comics” and, in my opinion, a more interesting piece of criticism.

The three pieces about (or sort of about) Ditko are also a strange inclusion not only in their relation to lit comics, but because they are all so dull. Donald Phelps, for instance, who is represented by three separate essays, is much better served by his piece on Lynda Barry than the one on Ditko. Fiore’s piece on 9/11 comics seems to be about comics only as an excuse to write about politics. It engages very little with the comics themselves in any specific way, more cultural criticism than comics criticism. Schwartz’s piece on Harold Gray and Little Orphan Annie is mostly biography and plot summaries, which confirmed my skepticism at a “best” volume including a piece by the editor himself.

There are a number of pieces that are the type of criticism which gets me interested and excited about the works under discussion. Ken Parille’s piece on David Boring had me rereading that work, which I didn’t have enthusiastic memories of. Seth’s piece on John Stanley got me interested in those comics, though, having read some of the Stanley pieces Seth discusses in an issue of The Comics Journal, I’m not sure the interest was repaid. Sarah Boxer on Krazy Kat and Herriman, Chris Ware on Topffer, R.C. Harvey on Fun Home, all choice pieces in the collection. And Dan Nadel’s piece on the Masters of American Comics show still stands there asking for engagement (though I don’t think there has been much). But, in the end, there weren’t enough pieces that got me excited about the artists or works under discussion. I want that from criticism. I want to see the work in a new light, to understand it better, or differently. I didn’t get enough of that here.

In the introduction, Schwartz notes that publisher Gary Groth was not sure it would be possible to fill a book such as this. My feeling is that Schwartz didn’t do a great job of proving him wrong, but it’s not because there isn’t enough great comics criticism to fill a book.

Addendum: I shouldn’t be surprised that the collection is rather The Comics Journal centric, but it does have an odd incestual feel to it. Fantagraphics should do a greatest hits from The Comics Journal book that isn’t interviews (the only thing they ever seem to reprint from the magazine).

Nitpick: No captions under the images! That’s ridiculously annoying, the book designer dropped the ball on that one.

Edit 8/9/10: After posting this I remembered another issue I wanted to address: how few of the pieces really engage with the art, the images. So much of the criticism revolves around history, biography, story, and theme, that there often is little direct analysis of the images themselves. There are exceptions (like most of the aforementioned pieces that I thought were the best of the book.

Dr. Lent’s interests in comics are significantly different than mine. He is much more focused on history, sociology, and politics (he is in the Mass Media department, after all) than I will ever be. I’m excited to hear more about these issues, though, thankfully my paper can be on any comic art related topic, so I can still write on formalistic and/or narratological aspects of comics. The class will include lectures on a wide range of international comics as well as animation.

In other arenas, there has been an excess of interesting discussion about comics criticism in the past few weeks online. Most of it is coming from the ever engaging Hooded Utilitarians. In case you missed it:

Best Online Comics Criticism 2009 (Hooded Utilitarian, organized by Ng Suat Tong)

Judges (links to their individual choices):
Noah Berlatsky
Frank Santoro
Tucker Stone
Matthias Wivel
Ng Suat Tong (who hasn’t chimed in on an individual level)
Brigid Alverson (who was asked to participate but didn’t have time by the deadline)

I was surprised and delighted that Frank and Tucker both voted for my piece on a page from Rubber Blanket. (Thanks, guys!)

It’s well worth your time, if you haven’t already, to go through those links and read the various nominated posts/reviews/essays. Lots to read that you might have missed over the past year. And even if you did read the work already, much of it is worth rereading. (The two nominated pieces on Crumb’s Genesis were a propos to me as I’ve been reading that volume this week.)

I wish I had kept track of criticism I really enjoyed over the past year, but I neglected to do so (I actually planned to after being asked to contribute to a best of criticism for 2008). But a 2010 “best of” is already in planning, so I’ll be keeping closer tabs this year.

The Utilitarian’s roundtable on the manga xxxHolic also drew out some interesting comments on criticism (and manga criticism in particular). This post (and more importantly the comments) is a good place to start as any. Also don’t neglect to follow some of the manga criticism links Utilitarian vommarlowe offers. A series of three posts on a manga series I’ve never heard of were quite the interesting close reading of a few pages.

As a parting and related comment, I recommend your attention to a piece of criticism from the tale end of 2008: Domingos Isabelinho on Francis Bacon’s Triptych May-June 1973. How can you resist a piece that starts: “Simply put, Francis Bacon’s Triptych May – June 1973 is the best comic ever made.” And with Isabelinho you know he’s going to back it up. It’s a dense, brief post that sends me out to various other readings. If you aren’t following his blog, The Crib Sheet, I highly recommend you do. You might also read his post on Hokusai’s One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji.

June 2009
24p., 5.5 x 8.5″
black and white, photocopied

A selection of written pieces previously published online, includes essays on “Flies on the Ceiling” by Jaime Hernandez, “Discovering America” by David Mazzucchelli, “Chimera” by Frank Santoro, “The Walking Man” by Jiro Taniguchi, and “Bleu” by Lewis Trondheim.

Download PDF Version (FREE) (1MB)

I hope the title of Douglas Wolk’s book was forced on him by the publisher, because not only is it a misnomer for what is contained within but it is kind of pretentious to boot. I am referring to the subtitle, not the main title. “Reading Comics” is a fine and concise name for a collection of comics reviews/criticism. That subtitle promises a lot that it doesn’t deliver.

Douglas Wolk is an excellent critic of comics. His reviews in Salon (where a number of the chapters in this book originally appeared) have always been a rare bright spot of critical reviews of comics in a non-comics publication. He writes about comics in a way that is accessible to non-comics readers but can still retain the interest of the comics aficionado. He has a tendency to focus on thematic concerns and metaphoric readings with less attention to the formal elements of the comics–not necessarily a weakness, just a stylistic method that probably works well for the general reader (slightly less so for someone like me who wants to hear about the formal stuff).

The good news is that about 270 of this book’s 400 pages are taken up by a section titled “Reviews and Commentary” that features Wolk’s writing on specific comics or creators: Moore, Morrison, Sim, Ware, C. Brown, McNeil, David B., Los Hernandez Bros, Larson, Huizenga, and more. This large portion of the book is an enjoyable read that will get you rereading comics or trying out new ones (Wolk actually gets me interested, on some level, in Tomb of Dracula). His chapter on Jaime Hernandez, originally two reviews of Locas and Ghost of Hoppers, really draws out what is so extraordinary about that series of works. Long chapters on Moore and Morrison are worth reading for those interested in the two British authors.

The bad news is the confused chapters that make up the first 130 pages of the book, called “Theory and History.” Wolk would have been better off sticking with the reviews. The history parts seem adequate enough in their brevity, though I’ve no real knowledge to compare them to. He broadly paints the history of the mainstream versus independent comics schism, the direct comics market, and the Comics Code. When discussing the subcultural elements of comics fandom, he hits the marks, but it all seems rather haphazard and directed at an ambiguous audience. If his audience is existing comics readers, then much of this will seem obvious, yet if the audience is beginners to comics, the idea of discussing all these very “in group” type things seems pointless and probably a real turn off.

His focus on the binary of “mainstream”/”art comics” is extremely problematic (including the confused overlap with mainstream/independent). On one level, I can’t imagine why the general reader would care about such things, and similarly why anyone would want to make them knowledgeable about such insider-y and useless distinctions. Just the term “mainstream” itself grates, for its illogic. But also, Wolk’s idea of “art comics” relies on his idea of style being “at least as important” as content and on the use of deliberately “ugly” art. His argument for art comics as style over content seems so indistinct. Couldn’t one easily say that the so-called “mainstream” superhero comics are an example of style over content? Wolk frequently returns to the idea of “ugly” art in comics, yet, despite his attempted forays into aesthetics (like Kant), he never makes any good claim for what “ugly” means. He says that “it’s a result of a conscious choice to incorporate a lot of distortion and avoid conventional prettiness in style.” The former quality is inherent to almost all comics from Fisher to Schulz to Kirby to Ware. And it becomes clear from Wolk’s text that he equates the latter quality with the generic superhero style.

In fact, this sense of superheroes as ground zero in comics (as in the basis for “conventional” and normal) infuses the first part of this book and makes for a dissatisfying read. Everything else becomes the other, discussed in how it differs from the convention. That Wolk, admittedly, avoids comic strips, manga, and (mostly, except for David B) bande dessinnee only heightens the problem. How different this book would be if comic strips were the norm or manga. This superhero/”mainstream” focus is all too prevalent in writing about comics not just from those in comics who hold on to the comics of their youth, often with a sad nostalgia, but also the mainstream (in the more normal sense of the word) press (think of all those “Biff Bam Boom: Comics have grown up” articles that still appear). In part, this accounts for my large disappointment with the first part of the book. I can picture a more general reader picking up this book and getting a distorted view of comics with all this baggage attached, when what the general reader needs is to see comics from the fresh perspective they can already have, free of the “Golden Age,” “poly-bagging,” “limited edition mini-series,” “giant crossover” subcultural quagmire. I don’t mean this to say there is no historical or aesthetic interest to much of this work, but Wolk hedges his bets on engaging this work. He spends one chapter directly discussing superheroes, but his reviews are almost all outside the “mainstream” and those which aren’t exist on the historical or contemporary margins (Tomb of Dracula, Warlock, Promethea, The Invisibles).

If this review is a bit scattershot, it is perhaps because the book itself is. The mixture of history, cultural analysis, attempts at theory, and the reviews do not blend well or provide a decent overarching coherence. If the book were just a collection of criticism/reviews that would be fine, but this book is marketed as something much different, something it just doesn’t reach.

The choices by the other participants are disappointing to me. Some of them seem to have a strange idea of what constitutes “criticism,” which is a post for another day.

There are a few gems. Bart Beaty’s Unpopular Culture should have been on my list. I never wrote about it, but I did enjoy it.

I’d like to find the time (as reading French takes at least twice as long for me as English) to read Beaty’s and Wivel’s picks: Thierry Groensteen’s Objet Culturel Non-Identifiée and L’Assocation’s third Éprouvette volume (respectively) (a cheaper way to get both volumes would help too).

I can’t argue with any of Jog’s pieces, I didn’t pick one more because I didn’t have any one to single out. His writing feels more like an ongoing continuum.

Edit: My “related posts” feature just brought up another addition to my runners-up list: Tom McCarthy’s Tintin and the Secret of Literature, which I read in 2006 but came out in the US this year.

a) Jesse Hamm on Jesse Marsh: This is an old piece of Hamm’s that he posted a couple months ago to his LiveJournal, but it’s the first criticism I’ve seen on Marsh that made me see why I should read his comics. (The piece on Marsh in the most recent Comic Art issue helped too, but it’s strong biographical focus was less to my tastes.)

b) Stephen Frug on a page from City of Glass: Great close reading of a page, including a nice comparison of the original novel to the comic adaption. (The first in a series on “100 Great Pages”.)

c) “Jaime Hernandez: Mad Love” in Reading Comics by Douglas Wolk: Wolk really gets to the many reasons to love Jaime’s Locas stories. This is the kind of comics criticism you could give to a non-comics reader and get them interested in reading a comic (I think, I haven’t tried it yet). Part of this chapter originally appeared as a review of “Ghost of Hoppers” in Salon.

d) System of Comics by Thierry Groensteen as translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen: What can I say, I love this formalistic kind of analysis. Groensteen’s concept of “braiding” is, in particular, deserving on more thought and attention. (My comments on the French edition from few years back.)

e) Noah Berlasky on a few panels from Asterix: A fine bit of close reading, something I always appreciate.

I’d love to here any suggestions from my readers…

Worth the read.

Matthew Brady offers the idea of some kind of wiki dictionary for comics terms, which is an idea I started on a few months (a year?) back. I never got far though as it was a lot of work to do.