Comic critics Charles Hatfield and Craig Fischer have started a blog devoted to … well, comics criticism:
We take comics in the ecumenical sense here, to mean comic books, albums, graphic novels, strips and just about every type of still cartooning, both in print and online. Though sequential art is, we suppose, the core of what interests us, we’ll also make room for single-panel cartooning. And we’ll take liberties for the occasional sideways venture into stuff that, while not comics per se, borders or overlaps comics (artists’ books, children’s picture books, illustration, animation, visual poetry, interesting graphic design work, et cetera). Thought Balloonists is, in short, about comics, narrative art, and whatever else brushes up against those subjects. To hell with rule-makers.
We should add that our emphasis here is on reflection and conversation, not so much on timeliness or thumbs up/down advice about the week’s shopping. Yes, most of what we talk about will be recent, and we do hope that, as we go on, we’ll be able to cover a growing number of new and pending releases; the main thing we’re after, though, is a sustained critical back-and-forth, a dialog between the two of us (and between us and our readers — please do feel free to comment!).
They’re off to a great start with their back and forth assessment of Shaun Tan’s The Arrival.
