Portland, Ore.’s Willamette Week spotlights comics critic Douglas Wolk, author of Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean:
Wolk didn’t set out to be a comics critic. The 37-year-old writer—and occasional WW contributor, after his 2003 move to Portland—started his career as a copy editor and music writer in New York, where he started his record label, Small Beloved Cloud, played in a few bands, and once cranked out an entire issue of CMJ after the rest of the staff suddenly quit. Writing the magazine himself gave him free rein over content, so he started a column on comics.
After “retiring” to freelance full-time in 1997, he started reviewing comics for Salon.com, and new gigs just kept popping up. These days, as he divides his time between comics and music criticism, his record label, and his 2-year-old son, Wolk is as good an example as any of author Katherine Dunn’s “everyone in Portland is living a minimum of three lives” maxim.
Wolk says he isn’t sure writing about comics is something he can make a living at just yet, but it’s getting there: “My conceptual coup was a few months ago—the same morning I opened my email, and I had requests to write about comics for The Huffington Post, Shojo Beat and Penthouse. At the time, I had never seen an issue of Penthouse. I still feel like I should donate all the money I got from that gig to In Other Words.”
Wolk also contributes to the recently relaunched Savage Critic(s).
