Hello and welcome to my own little corner of Blog@. Mind the boxes, I haven’t completely unpacked yet.

As JK said the other day, Everyone’s A Critic will be a weekly column devoted exclusively to the subject of comic book criticism. Wait; don’t hit that back button just yet. There’s good stuff down below, I promise.

I’ve been stewing over the idea for this column in the rusty kettle I call my brain for quite some time now, though it took the announced release of Comic Foundry magazine and its declared “no review” policy to push me into action.

What does it mean when a magazine devoted to comics culture decides not to run any reviews? Are we so chock full of people spouting off their opinions on the Internet that such a service is rendered negligible in print? What do we expect out of comics criticism anyway? Just “liked it/hated it” reviews or something else? What separates a well-written review from a poor one and how do we talk about comics that’s different from how we talk about film or music? Most importantly, how should we be talking about comics, if at all?

These are the sorts of ideas that swirl around in my head at night when I should be going to sleep. I’m betting (ok, hoping) they flail around in your own brain at least once or twice, perhaps while you’re eating lunch (you really need your sleep).

This column will attempt to, if not answer, at least delve into such questions in a variety of ways. Every so often, I’ll have in-depth interviews with notable comics critics and pundits both online and off. I’ll also offer my own lengthy thoughts on subjects like those listed above which will hopefully add to the discussion in a meaningful way. Thirdly, I’ll be occasionally pointing toward reviews I think are worth checking out in a loving, “Meanwhile”-styled fashion. Those will be the weeks I’m feeling lazy and hung-over.

Luckily for me, the debut of this column happily coincides with the recent relaunch of Brian Hibbs’ Savage Critics site. And what a relaunch it is. Mr. Hibbs has gathered together some of the finest comics critics around – Douglas Wolk, Jog, Abhay Khosla (!), Johanna Draper-Carlson, Jeff Lester, Diana Kingston-Gabal and are own, dear Graeme McMillan all wrapped up in one Web site, devoted entirely to reviewing comics. Somebody pinch me.

How did Brian Hibbs manage such a neat hat trick? I called him on the phone to find out:

Q: Can you give me a bit of back-story about how Savage Critic started originally?
A: It was originally on CompuServe, which was in those early days of the Internet; CompuServe was a very, very active forum for comics discussion. I mentioned in passing to someone, I don’t even remember whom anymore. That I basically read every comic that comes out every week. It was part of my function as a retailer so that I’m at least aware of what’s going on in books and I can have an opinion, yadda, yadda, yadda. And somebody, possibly several somebodies went “There’s no way you read every comic coming out. It’s just not possible.”

So I started Savage Critic as an exercise to show that I was reading every single book by giving it at least a cursory reading of some kind. There were like 12 or 13 categories when we first started. There were a lot fewer comics back then too. People responded to it and really liked it and asked me to keep doing it though I never intended it to be a regular ongoing thing. I thought it was going to be a one-off kind of deal. People really seemed to like it and asked for more so I did it again and again and again and eventually it just started developing into a weekly thing where I was regularly doing it and going from one word reviews to longer and longer and longer pieces about stuff.

At some point I think we all realized that the real Internet was out there as opposed to just CompuServe or Delphi, those gated Internet portals and that we were all going to go off to the real Internet rather than the little gated ones. And at that point I was just like, “I don’t have time to do this, and there’s really not a place for me to put it, so I’m going to just stop doing this. I’m not going to do this anymore.

Flash forward a couple of years. Again we were realizing the Internet was becoming a big thing and not just something that those of us at 2 o’clock in the morning were wasting time on. And I recognized that I needed to have a Web site for the store. We didn’t want to have a commercial Web site where the goal is to sell people stuff. We just wanted to have a business card site. But I also wanted to have some content on there so people have a reason to actually look at it as opposed to just coming once and then never coming back again.

And so I decided to revive the critic at that point, covering as much as I could each week of everything that had come out. I started burning out on it again and I asked Jeff Lester if he wanted to come in and help so he did, and then I really started burning out and Jeff was doing all the reviews and I felt so bad about that I thought “We’ve gotta find someone else,” and so we invited Graeme in and we went from there. That’s the short version.

Q: How did you get the idea to relaunch the site?
A: Basically, I was realizing that I barely had time to put in more than a review a week or a review every other week. Graeme was doing all the heavy lifting with daily reviews. Jeff was trying to retire though it looks like we talked him out of it. I just looked at it and went, we’ve gotta get more people in here. It was actually Jeff’s idea to bring in a whole lot of people and bring in all-star people.

Q: How did you come up with a basic list of whom you wanted for the site?
A: We talked about the guys we liked reading, or we thought were influential, including people we don’t agree with, which I think is a good thing to have, a little difference of opinion on the site.

Q: Were there people that you wanted who weren’t able to do it? How did you approach people?
A: There were two or three people that we approached that just didn’t have the time or inclination. As for how we approached people, we just sent them an email.

Q: I’m just impressed you got people like Abhay or Douglas Wolk, who I imagine would be terribly busy.
A: I was surprised that both of them agreed, to be honest. But both of them were on my short list from the beginning.

Q: You have, as you mentioned, a pretty diverse group of critics. Was one of the ideas to get as many voices as possible?
A: Yeah, very much so. That we were covering a wide range of styles and a wide range of tastes as well.

Q: In any way is this a response to the type of reviews or comics criticism going around on the Internet right now? I wonder if this will become the one-stop place for comic reviews.
A: Well that’s our hope is that it’s the one-stop comic review, for sure. Is it a response? No, it’s not a particular response to anything.

Q: How’s the response been to the site so far?
A: Our hits are way up. People seem really excited and enthusiastic.

Q: Where are you going to take the site? Are you going to leave it be for now?
A: Well, for the moment, because I’m in the middle of the inventory thing, yes. (laughs) Definitely not adding anyone at the moment. But the long-term plan is we’ll see how this continues to work and how it continues to shake out. Hopefully at some point we’ll do a second wave. We’ll bring in another half-dozen people.

Q: Wow. That’s a lot of people.
A: Well, the goal is to have at least one review, probably two or three every single day. If nobody has to post every single week, then I think you’re going to get more enthusiastic posts. What I find, and you know this as a blogger as well, some days you wake up and you’re like, “Fuck, I’ve gotta write something and I just don’t feel like it today.” But you do it anyway and it’s not necessarily you’re best work. You’re doing it because you’re obligated to do it rather than you’re waking up going “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” You know what I mean? I tend to believe that by having an aggregate blog where we’re having an enormous number of people that we’re much more likely to have enthusiastic posts from everybody, because they’re waking up going “Yeah, I really want to post something! I want to show up these other guys!” So far in theory it’s been working pretty ok.

Q: It’s interesting because most aggregate sites are more news-oriented. This is the first one I think that’s more focused on criticism and the reviewing of comics.
A: I wouldn’t try to do a news site because that’s already well covered in this business already. I don’t think anyone’s really got the time to do that kind of work. That’s a tremendous amount of work. And it was an expansion of what we were already doing.

Q: How does the newly revamped site work? Are there any rules as far as what people can or cannot review?
A: Nope. It’s open season. It’s anything people want to talk about, even to the point where I’ve let people know if they want to discuss stuff that isn’t strictly comics but somewhat related to comics, I’m OK with that. Because again, I want people to post about stuff that they’re interested in, that they’re excited about, that they’re going to bring other people to or conversely that they’ll scare other people away from. Anything that prompts a strong reaction. The worst thing you can do is have a review site full of “Yeah that was alright.” You want to have “I loved that” or “Fuck, that was awful.”

Q: When people came to you, did they come with specific ideas or things they had in mind? I’m thinking specifically of Joe McCulloch’s column (“My Life Is Choked With Comics”).
A: Almost everybody has his or her own Web site. The challenge for a lot of people was to find something that they weren’t fitting into their own Web site. Like Douglas was saying that he wanted to have a place where he could write short, weekly comic reviews, because he didn’t have an outlet for that. He had an outlet for comics criticism in general, but he didn’t have an outlet for weekly books. So that worked really well for him. Joe found his niche. Johanna found hers, and so on.

Q: Do you think reviews affect the sales at all? Have you seen people come in the store and say “Wow, that book that Graeme reviewed sounds great, I want to pick that up”?
A: It’s really, really rare that that happens. For the most part, though not exclusively, we’re discussing this week’s comics and for the most part, people buying this week’s comics, have already bought them by the time our reviews actually go up. Or they’ve made their decision by the time the reviews go up. Particularly if you look at Graeme who will post on Wednesday morning the books that just came out, it’s not like anyone’s reading them going “Oh, well now I’m not going to buy that book.” People have their own tastes too.

I think that a place that it can help and it does occasionally is something a little more perennial that a single, new this week comic, but even then we haven’t seen a tremendous amount of … We’ve seen the occasional person picking up something because it’s gotten a good review. I’ve never been able to detect any kind of book that got a bad review. Never, not once. Even something that I think is universally panned like Countdown, the numbers are pretty consistent from issue to issue. They’re a lot lower than I think they should be or would like them to be, but the numbers aren’t affected by us going “this is a piece of shit.”

Q: That ties into something I’ve been thinking which is people normally think of reviews as guides to what to buy, but I wonder if, especially on the Internet, if it’s more like a conversation.
A: I very much think so. I think you can see it in the comics field a lot of the time, where there can be very lively conversations going on in the comments threads, particularly in Abhay’s threads, because he’s a real polarizing figure in terms of his writing style. I love it; I think he’s the funniest goddamn guy in comics.

Q: So how do you see Savage Critics adding to the discussion then?
A: I really wanted to have a site that I would go to on a regular daily basis. So that’s really my only goal there, is to be entertained when I wake up in the morning and see what people said.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 5th, 2007 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Everyone's a Critic, News & Views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.