I found this essay, “Tell, Don’t Show,” on the old adage that one should “show not tell,” a really engaging and insightful piece. Bordwell makes the case where “telling” can be a more powerful and effective means to convey narrative than “showing.”

The HBO tv series “In Treatment,” is another great example of this. The show, consists (almost completely) of 30 minute episodes of a psychologist and a patient talking. Almost all the episodes take place in the same room (the psychologist’s office) and none of them (that I’ve seen) include any sort of flashback. Rather, we see a lot of the patients narrating past events. Like Bordwell’s “Persona” example, the act of narrating becomes a major level of narrative in itself, in conjunction with the content of the narration. The story is as much about how the characters feel about the narration and how they tell it (omissions, digressions) as the narration itself. And, at least in this case, it is engaging and entertaining. (Season 1 is out on DVD with Season 2 coming in the very near future. Recommended.)

This got me thinking (naturally) about comics. Comics are a “visual medium”, as people like to say, so I think the tendency is to use images of the narrated content rather than the narration itself. There is the old conventional of having a little head of the narrator in the upper corner of the panel next to a narrative caption, with the panel itself mostly containing an image that corresponds to the narration. Can comics effectively convey the same sense of multi-leveled narrating/narration as film/video?

In some cases, film has the advantage. A lot of comic artists just don’t have the style/skill to show the subtlety of expression and gesture that can be easily captured on film. On the other hand, the stillness of comics allows a reader to linger over the images, with more time to appreciate subtleties that are of a different sort, such as stylistic variations, representational levels, visual detail. If the artist works at it, the images of the narrating could be engaging and add depth to the narration, but too often you see lazy work of “talking heads” whose only real effort at maintaining visual interest is constant changing of the perspectival angle on the character(s). These shifts in perspective usually seem less motivated by narrative need than as a cheap way to avoid visual repetition.

Passionate Journey is my favorite of the three or four of his books that I’ve read. In rereading it, I appreciate not only the technical skill, but also the narrative itself. The book follows a man as he wanders and lives life. There’s little to be said of plot. He arrives by train in a city, and the images convey his wonder and the pleasure he seems to take in everything: food, drink, dancing, women, buildings, speeches, reading, playing with children, throwing snowballs even. Masereel conveys much joy in his images as the man takes on life with gusto. The “passionate” used in the title is manifest without words, with only the sharp blacks and whites to communicate. The literal translation of the original title “Mein Stundenbuch” is more like “My Book of Hours,” a title which I think would have been better used, as it adds a certain level of meaning to the book. While Masereel seemed clearly, at the least, anti-clerical (note a page where the protagonist seems to fart in the direction of a priest), using the term for a prayer book, sets up the book as a spiritual book of a less religious nature, a book grounded in the appreciation of this life rather than the next.

Note how the figure is walking, head held high, a posture he takes frequently in this book.

The narrative is not all joy, as life goes, the protagonist falls in love and is rejected, then seems to have his money stolen while with a prostitute he had picked up. In an odd sequence, my reading is that he rescues a young girl from a man who is beating her. We see her as a child in two or three pages, then she seems to be grown up and, a page later, is standing naked in front of him (there appears to be a canvas in the background, so it is not clear if she is modeling for him or if it is a sexual encounter (though even in the former case we might assume the latter). Then the woman dies three pages later, leaving the man grief stricken. The ambiguity of this sequence (is the girl not as young as she appears at first? has a lot of time passed in between the pages?) is part and parcel with these silent narratives.

While there are some points in Passionate Journey where Masereel builds a scene out of multiple image pages, in most cases, the narrative is built of images that take place in separate places at separate times. Masereel ties it all together with his hatless protagonist who appears in every scene. Through that character we can see each image as taking place in a succeeding moment of time.

These visual leaps in time are something that separates Masereel’s books from most comics, particular the comics contemporary to his work. A lot of the early comic strip are very focused on a shorter and closer sequencing of time, think of Little Nemo’s transformations or the early gag strips. Even later comic strips tend to pay a closer attention and give more direct pointers to the sequencing of time and place in a narrative. Masereel’s work is, in this respect, closer in alignment to all the varieties of comics avant la lettre like Hogarth’s “A Rake’s Progress.”

What we end up with, throughout this book, is something more akin to a filmic montage, than to most comics. Masereel is unafraid to leave ambiguity in his narrative, an element that most comics seem unwilling to do, favoring the “clear” narrative that doesn’t require too much interpretation on the part of the reader.

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.]

I tried to take a lot of pictures, some less successful than others. You can find almost all of these works on the museum’s website, which thankfully for me, has an interface where you click on a map and it shows you what works are currently on display in the selected room. I wouldn’t have known what a few of these paintings were otherwise as I didn’t take any notes with my photos.

Nocturne by Whistler

A horrible photo of a beautiful painting. The painting itself is blurry and abstracted with hints of landscape elements. I’d love to see a whole exhibit of night paintings.

Peace by Puvis de Chavannes (detail)

A detail of an otherwise quite unattractive painting. The primary foreground figures were very stiff, but these background figures, drawn with much less detail in a freer gesture, had a lot of life and movement to them.

Faust and Marguerite by Hendrik Jan August Leys (details)

Another painting that I mostly was not interested in, but this small section in the background has a great depth to it. Also note the little orange flickers of candles.

Winter Landscape by Cezanne (detail)

I loved the application of color in this Cezanne landscape, but even more striking is the way he has left large portions of the canvas unpainted. One is tempted to think the painting is unfinished, until you really consider the composition. This detail doesn’t really do that effect justice. You can see the full painting here.

After the Bath by Degas (detail)

The abstract and dynamic black stroke here is the head of the woman who is the main subject of the painting. I just wanted to capture the heaviness of the bottom curve.

The Soothsayer's Recompense by De Chirico

I was thrilled to come upon this De Chirico, one of his metaphysical paintings featuring the figure of Ariadne. I didn’t even know the musuem had one of these. Quite representative of the period for De Chirico. I picked up an exhibit catalog in the museum store all about De Chirico’s use of the Ariadne character/myth so I’ll probably be writing more about this at another time.

The Fatal Temple by De Chirico

Another smaller De Chirico. A horrible photo of a very unusual painting. It’s very flat and almost divided into panels.

View through the Large Glass

I just wanted to get a shot of the view through Duchamp’s Large Glass out into the courtyard. As I understand it (from Duchamp biographies I’ve read): Originally, a sculpture by a South American artist Duchamp had some kind of relationship with sat out there. When the Arensberg’s were deciding where to donate their large collection of Duchamp’s works, with the participation of Duchamp himself. Part of the stipulation was that the window seen in the photo above be added to the room so that the viewer could look through the Large Glass at the no-longer there sculpture.

The Crucifixion, with the Virgin and Saint John the Evangelist Mourning by Rogier van der Weyden (detail)

The Van Der Weyden diptych (of which the above is a detail) is hung in a room with a few rows of small square wooden stools in front of it. It’s an amazingly beautiful painting, that perhaps gives some feel of the religious experience delivered by medieval altarpieces. I just took a detail to try to capture the lush cloth on the garments of Mary and Saint John, as well as the subtle coloring.

Best for last, my favorite part of the museum, is the room (plus one painting at the entrance to the room) of Cy Twombly’s series of 10 paintings, Fifty Days at Iliam.

This series seems to embody so many things I look for and appreciate in paintings/art: sequence, space, limited color, narrative, literary references, text. And, as I mentioned when discussing Newman’s Stations of the Cross, there is wonderful power to paintings shown in this type of enclosed and personal (personal to the paintings, that is) space. So here’s a bunch of photos of the room, individual paintings, and a bunch of details. Here is the museum’s page with images of the full paintings. Click on the first image below, then click on the right side of it to cycle through the rest.

Fifty Days at Illium (room)

Fifty Days at Illium (room)-2

Fifty Days at Illium (room)-3

Fifty Days at Illium (room)-4

Shield of Achilles by Twombly (detail)

Heroes of the Achaeans by Twombly

The Fire that Consumes All before It (detail)

Heroes of the Ilians (detail)

Ilians in Battle (detail)

Shades of Eternal Night (detail)

Since most of my work is online only, when I decided I’d try exhibiting, I didn’t have much in the way of print comics to show. I had copies of my Three Minis Wrapped in a Micro set. I’m pretty happy with the results (though I wish the DeChirico one were drawn better), so in that respect, the con as a source of minicomic making motivation was a success. I also worked up a minicomic of my “Flying Chief” piece from the Abstract Comics anthology, since I figured most people haven’t read the book and many might be intrigued enough to check out a small segment of it. As a way to plug my website I also got a bunch of tiny Moo cards made featured 10 different cropped images from my comics. Those turned out really nice, too.

I’ve got a good day job, so this wasn’t about trying to make money, or even trying to break even, I was just hoping to get some comics out there, so I priced my comics fairly cheap, rounding up the cost of the comic to the next dollar. In retrospect, I think I should have priced them even cheaper and just gone with the “losing money in favor of exposure” proposition.

I made a bunch of signs on orange paper that gave the comics name, format, price, and a really brief description, so people might have an idea of what they were. I also brought along a copy of the Abstract Comics anthology for people to browse and a copy of the print-on-demand book of Things Change (with a note that the whole thing can be downloaded free online.

My table from my side of it.

The con was in the Rotunda, a community center like place near the University of Pennsylvania in West Philadelphia. There was a full house of tables filling the room. It was hot and stinky in there (of course! it’s a comics show), but I was extraordinarily lucky enough to be the guy literally sitting in front of what I think was the only air conditioner in the room. I stayed cool the whole day and didn’t even notice the smell. (Thanks, Pat for that location!)

When I go to cons I always hate the feeling of passing by a table and seeing a desperate looking artist looking up at me hoping I’ll look at or (after I look at) buy their work. I didn’t want to have that desperation. I don’t think I did. I tried to chat with people who actually picked up work. Telling people that my abstract “Spill” comic is images taken from the oil spill video feed seemed to garner interest. As did the Abstract Comics anthology (a few people either had it and loved it or were wanting to get a copy after seeing it). I think I had too much on my table and would, in the future, pare down the offerings to fewer items so that people could more easily scan the table and focus on individual works. Setting out just my “20 Days”, “Three Minis”, and “Flying Chief” probably would have been the best way to go, with a copy of each for browsing and one spread open to a representative page.

I didn’t end up selling a lot of comics. It made me realize how much my work is on the alternative side of “alternative” comics. I did trade a few, and I ended up giving out a couple to some people who seemed interested or who I thought might be interested. Though, again, not a lot of potential there either. So I’ve still got a lot of minicomics left. Which is either depressing or not depending on how much shelter I take in my sense of the aesthetic worth for my work, or how much ill I want to think of the attendee’s taste.

Comics shows are also about socializing, never my strong suit with people I don’t know (particularly in a face-to-face context). Limited success on that front, especially since I came to the show not really knowing any local comic artists (other than brief online interactions with a couple folks). I did participate in the comics jams that were going around the show: gridded out pages where each person fills in a panel. Luckily, I had a few sharpies in my bag to draw with.

One of the best parts of comics shows is finding new and interesting work. PACC was kind of a bust for me in that respect too. A lot of work that looked either conceptually or technically lacking. I had some other people tell me that too, so it’s not just me. The little interesting work that was there was stuff I’m already familiar with, like the publisher Secret Acres. I ended up buying only one comic, traded for a couple items, had one given to me, and found a couple things in my stuff when I got home (I guess they were dropped in the box under my table at some point, cause I don’t remember picking them up).

Comics Section:

The first thing someone gave me when I walked around the show was “Make a One Page Book” by Claire Folkman (print out your own online), a single page photocopy that shows instructions on how to fold and cut the page into a small 8 page book (kind of like a lot of the little minis Warren Craghead makes). The part that really got me was that when you have the book made, the pages are… step-by-step instructions on how to take a piece of paper and make it into a little book. I love the self-referential aspect and the way the process leads into an invitation to create and perpetuate the process. Very clever. Looks like Folkman offers a lot of her webcomics in a pdf version for folding into a book. I tried this with my “Three Minis”, but mine really needed double-sided laser printing to get the right effect and not lose content in the margins (most printers won’t print as far to the margins as my comic required). This way’s simpler, if less refined.

The one book I bought was Dina L Kelberman’s Important Comics, which I’d seen online previously. It’s a small 42 page color book of small comics that I believe were originally sent out to Kelberman’s email list. The comics fail to impress narratively, conceptually, or thematically, they’re little absurdities or gags that aren’t particularly funny, primarily featuring geometric stick figures talking. Autobiographical origins seem to linger in the background of many of them, though you can’t say that any of the little figures really come through as characters or author stand-ins. So, while certain pleasures are not to be found here, Kelberman’s book caught my eye because of the materiality of the images. Aesthetically, this is a lovely book to just look at.

Most comics have a flat printed, two-dimensional, uni-media aesthetic, a historical necessity that has become not only traditional but also an aesthetic ground zero. Kelberman’s comics, on the other hand, look dimensional, textured. Comics in this collection appear on the back of receipts, on movie tickets, on paper cut into shapes, notebooks, and lined pieces of paper. Colors are made with pencil, marker, ink, paint, and crayon, colors that are vibrant and varied, often eschewing the convention of black line filled with color. The materiality of the comics is present in all these things and in whited-out patches of textured paint. The panels of the comics are often formed into shapes, or have a wide variety of border weight, type, or color. The lettering also takes part in this variety, from a conventional comic-y san-serif, to cursive script or large block letters that look ripped out of a notebook doodle.

Kelberman shows a lot of promise in this book, I hope she finds something interesting to do with what is clearly a great sense of design. I’ve already ordered her more recent series to see what she’s doing next. comics section, yes?).

Ian Harker, editor of the free comics newspaper Secret Prison, had the latest issue (#2) which I am in. I think it’s an improvement over issue 1, I guess he got more submissions this time, so he could be more selective. The cover and color feature are by Benjamin Marra, who I just don’t get the draw of, but I know people love his work, so that might attract some extra attention to the paper. I also got two of Ian’s comics, “The CIty” and “Rockbox”.

“Rockbox” is a larger comic printed in black on day-glow green paper and a yellow cover with a little rectangular red sticker on it reading: “Mangaka: Ian Harker”. That’s the front cover, until you realize he’s printed this like a manga (the “mangaka” is your clue) where one reads right to left. Flipping it over, a small slip of paper with reading instructions is inserted into the comic. Each page of the comic is done with the panels as if they were printed on a rectangular prism, the reader able to see two sides at once. You read through the comic first reading the panels on the right facet of the prism, then going back through again reading the panels on the left facet. It took me two tries to understand this. The first page only shows the the right facet and the last page only shows the left facet. In between the pages slowly shift from showing more of the right facet to showing more of the left facet. The facet that is less shown is more foreshortened, forcing Harker to make the panels starker and less informative. As such, he enforces a sense of rising and falling pacing, where the beginning the comic has larger panel with more information, the middle has smaller panels with less information, and then the end again has larger/more. The story itself is more like a scene from something larger, than much of a story. Golgo 13 (from the very famous manga) seems to be following a guy that looks like a robot (or he’s just a guy with odd taste in facial wear) who is checking into a hotel. Golgo 13 follows him upstairs, there is a shoot-out. Most interesting for the formal elements, both the structure of the pages/pacing and the way Harker has positioned the comic as a kind of minicomic manga.

“The City” is a small square comic that reads like a chapter of Moebius’ The Airtight Garage as drawn by Gary Panter and Ron Rege featuring another Golgo 13-esque character. The story is minimal, again, more scene than story. It’s starts in media res and action follows action, ending in a page of abstraction rather than any conventional resolution. The comic is interesting as long as it takes you to read, but not longer, and I wonder if the draw for Harker is more about the process than the product. “The City” is a later work than “Rockbox” and you can see in the comparison how much his drawing, line, and compositions have advanced in the time.

Harker’s single page piece in Secret Prison #2 continues with the Golgo 13 theme. This time the page is designed as a series of stacked cubes with panels on them. The panels seem almost randomly sequenced, but can be pieced together as a kind of ur-plot of how I imagine Golgo 13 stories go: guns, women, smoking, assassination, sex. The art is all angles and straight lines, which inside the cubed panels really flattens out the whole page, adding to a greater sense of abstract design as would not be achieved if the cubed straight panels contained a more curved and lush drawing (which would not work as well, I think).

And that’s it.

Overall, I’m not sure it was worth the trouble, time, or money. I’m probably better off just walking around giving out comics than sitting in one place trying to sell them. That’s what the internet’s for, right?

So it felt like a victory to get these final volumes of Mushishi. I even ordered it the same week it came out because I was so excited to read them. But now that I’ve read them, I’m let down.

In my last post on the series I noted:

On this most recent read through the series I did notice more plot threads that connect different stories in the series. I’m not sure they amount to any sort of overarching plot, but maybe, in the end, Urushibara goes somewhere with it.

Alas, in the end, she didn’t go anywhere at all. Perhaps it would have been better if the series had been cancelled, then I could imagine those missing volumes as some improvement on what came before. Instead, these last volumes feel like Urushibara was stuck in a rut. She never abandons the strict episodic nature of the series, which could be fine except she never finds anywhere new to go with the stories. The metaphorical and emotional underpinnings of the mushi stories are not expanded on any by the addition of these volumes. The protagonist, Ginko, is not grown in any way. The art does not improve or change.

Aria provides a good comparison in this respect. It is similarly a work that is not primarily concerned with an overarching narrative (beyond the protagonist’s professional schooling/advancement), but over the course of the series there are new characters and the old characters change some, and stories call back to previous ones. There is forward movement rather than a standstill.

Mushishi makes a great case for the idea that some series need to be short.

He's fully satisfied with these.

Hergé: …I am quite happy with the panel showing the panic in the ranks of the pillagers [above left]. It’s one of the two panels that satisfy me fully: in a single panel, a series of movements, broken down and distributed among several characters. It could have been the same individual, lying down first, then getting up slowly, hesitating and finally running away. It’s basically, if you will, a shortcut through space and time.

Sadoul: What is the other drawing you’re happy with?

Hergé: It’s in Red Rackham’s Treasure [above right]. Everything is condensed, too, but in a different way. By looking at the drawing itself, which shows the captain walking barefoot on the beach while his companions are pushing the dinghy ashore, the spectator/reader mentally reconstructs what happened before: the “Sirius” has dropped anchor, a dinghy was lowered in the water, Tintin and his companions boarded; they rowed and finally reached the island where the captain just set foot. All this, which preceded the action depicted in the drawing, is expressed within that same panel. This drawing is based on a principle different from Crab’s – which I just described – where the effect is the result of both the simultaneity and the succession of movement. In this one, on the contrary, this is an unconscious reconstruction, by the reader, of movements which happened prior to the drawing. It’s like a self-generated mental flashback. Although the reader doesn’t realize it, he/she is unconsciously subjected to this entire analysis.

Sadoul, Numa. “The Hergé Interview.” The Comics Journal 250 (Feb 2003): 201.

The big show we planned to take in was the Yves Klein retrospective at the Hirshhorn: Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers (there through September 12). I’ve been a fan of Klein’s work for a long time, I have a bunch of monographs, but this was the first time I saw more than one of his pieces at a time. The Hirshhorn itself is a large circular structure with a central courtyard. The show took up the main section of the second floor, and, because of the circular path, allowed for a clear chronological movement through the exhibit. The sheer amount and variety of work on display was impressive. They managed to gather examples (often many examples) from all Klein’s types of works, monochromes, anthropometries, sponge sculptures, film, writings, drawings, fire paintings, architectural designs, etc. It truly is a complete retrospective. The only piece I noticed the absence of was the lack of any audio of the “Monotone Symphony.” Much credit to the curators who focused on Klein’s writings as the primary text used throughout the exhibit. Placards noted names, dates, and media, but almost all the explanatory or critical commentary was provided by quotes from Klein’s own writings. Klein wrote throughout his life about his work, often in an almost poetically lyrical way, so the quotations acted both as part of the exhibit’s works and as guideposts for Klein’s historical development and ways of looking at/thinking of the works on view. Seeing all these works together really made the connection for me to Klein’s various series in relation to their basic elementary thematics: water, air, fire, earth. The fire paintings have always felt a little out of place for me in his oeuvre, but, in connection with the watery blue monochromes, the earthy sponges and resin covered paintings, as well as the airy immaterial works, they felt much more part of a whole in an almost pre-Socratic philosophic context. The show was impressive, I highly recommend it if you can get to the museum. There are a lot of materials online about the exhibit (kudos to the Hirshhorn on that), including audio recordings of gallery talks, a whole series of photos on Flickr, and videos on YouTube. Unfortunately, no photos were allowed in the exhibit, so I didn’t get any photos of my own, but here’s one of the fire paintings:

Fire Painting (F25)

The Hirshhorn had a permanent collection on another floor which included a number of interesting pieces. The dark room of almost completely abstract “Seascape” photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto were beautiful and seemed to glow in the darkness. They also had a nice Motherwell, which I snapped a picture of:

And a couple Francis Bacon’s, a painter I’ve been wanting to learn more about (spurred on by Domingos’ praise of him):

We also visited the Museum of American Art, which had a Norman Rockwell exhibit up (the one from the collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg). A lot of his works gain so much when you see them in person, rather than reprinted, as you can see the brushstrokes and texture. If at times he is far too clichéd or hokey, many times his work was quite interesting and engaging. Also, his charcoal/pencil prep drawings were beautiful in their own right. I was thrilled to find a large Jenny Holzer light piece, which I spent time reading (it slowly spun out a series of statements around a column of lights), as well as a Mark Tansey painting “Interception” (1996):

Though my favorite painting in the whole museum was this lovely Milton Avery painting entitled “Spring Orchard” (1959):

I stood and stared at this one for quite awhile.

The National Gallery also had a bunch of great works. I was really impressed with Barnet Newman’s Stations of the Cross. I’m not normally a fan of his work, but this series of large abstract canvases had their own room in the bottom floor or the East building. Being able to take in a series of paintings on their own, without other works (and often other people) getting in the way, is a great way to be able to really appreciate them. The room containing a series of Twombly paintings in the Philadelphia Museum of Art is my favorite place in the whole museum partially for that reason. You can sit and contemplate the paintings or you can walk around and consider the sequencing, the relations, the repetitions. I think Newman’s paintings really gained something for me when put into this kind of sequence. By themselves each of the Stations of the Cross are not particularly noteworthy, but in a series there is much to appreciate by way of difference/repetition. In a way it’s an abstract comic. Here are a couple images from the series:

Stations of the Cross no.1

Stations of the Cross no.2

Stations of the Cross no.3

Way at the top of the same building was a room of Mark Rothko paintings. I’m not sure if they were intended as a sequence or series, though they at least read as variations on a theme. The room had a half dozen or so paintings that were black on black, or dark brown on black, or purple on black… it’s hard to say. They were very dark and subtle in tonal variation, both reflective and opaque, with a shifting sense of depth. The room was dim and there was music playing, music that was written for the Rothko chapel in Texas. I sat and stared at a couple of the paintings and they were really moving, moreso than any Rothko painting I’ve looked at before, (Or maybe I never took the time, since they are usually just placed there in between other paintings).

No.2

No.5

I’m sure I’ve forgotten something, but those are the works that stuck with me.

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.