So Comics Journal contributor, blogger and all-around comics gadfly Noah Berlatsky decided, based on Tucker Stone’s recommendation, to try the Vertigo crime series 100 Bullets. He didn’t like it much, especially Eduardo Risso’s art work:

In the first place, Eduardo Risso’s art is lousy. The figures are stiff, the anatomy is shaky, the layouts are cluttered and confusing, and the coloring (by Grant Goleash) is more muddy than moody. If you’re going for stylish noir, it’s really important that the art be…well, stylish. You want Alex Toth or Howard Chaykin; bold blacks and whites, dramatic page design — the art should scream sex and danger and class. Risso just doesn’t have the chops. I mean, look at that page below.

The image he then shows is one posted above, which, I believe, is the cover to issue number 5 of the series (or thereabouts).

What is wrong with that woman’s neck? Is this supposed to be a Parmigianino tribute or something? And the proportions are all completely off; her legs are lengthened to make her look sexier, I guess, but it ends up looking like she’s been assembled from mis-matched doll parts. And the ugly red insets segmented up almost at random…what the hell? That’s not dramatic: it just looks dumb.

Except of course, the cover wasn’t by Eduardo Risso, but Dave Johnson, who does all the covers for the Bullets comics and trades, in the same way that James Jean does for Fables. Oops. (more…)

“Why do you write about this stuff if you hate it so much?”

“I really wish you’d write about stuff you like instead.”

“Why are you so mean?”

No doubt Tucker Stone has heard all of the above and probably worse at one point or another. Over at his Web site The Factual Opinion and in his weekly column, This Ship Is Totally Sinking, at Comixology, Stone has mad a name for himself via his snarky, scorched Earth policy towards mainstream comics, sinking his fangs into tripe like Nightwing and Thunderbolts, declaring it tastes awful and then moving on to the next book in the pile. It’s an critical attitude that’s earned him a number of fans, myself included, but also a number of angry, and perhaps to some degree confused, detractors.

I tend to think there’s considerable value in snark, especially if it’s informed snark. Stone — as well as his wife Nina, who does the “Virgin Read” column for the Factual site — writes with a good deal of humor and insight and I envy his ability to cut to the quick of what marks a particular issue succeed or fail in just a few sentences.

I also think there’s a method to his madness here, beyond simply making fun of bad comics. In critiquing what’s wrong with, say, New Avengers, he’s actually talking about what’s wrong with the comic industry as a whole. He’s critiquing the specific to make a larger statement about the whole.

I talked to Tucker and Nina Stone back in August from their New York City home. I want to thank them not only for taking the time to talk, but also for going back and helping edit this interview extensively when it turned out my phone is a piece of crap and only caught every other sentence. Their help filling in holes was much appreciated.

Q: Tucker, tell me a little bit about yourself – your background, and how you got interested in comics. That sort of thing.

TS: I was an Army brat. I grew up in Texas, Kansas, West Berlin, back when there was a West Berlin. I don’t remember reading a lot of comics as a kid. I’m trying to remember how I actually got into comics–I think we were at a used bookstore that my mom went to. My Dad got out of the service and we had moved to Georgia. I got an issue of the Detroit Justice League at some used bookstore and just thought it was the best thing ever. That and Detective Comics, when Batman got in a fight with the Corrosive Man. I mostly just collected superhero comics until at some point I got a driver’s license and started dating. Then I was completely done with them.

I didn’t come back to comics until I was in college. I remember I read in the newspaper that they were going to do a sequel to Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns and I thought “that might be interesting.” Of course, I didn’t like it, at all.  But, somehow that got me back into the stores. I don’t know if it was the Jimmy Corrigan book – I don’t think that was out yet – but there was some issue of Acme Novelty Library, some Chris Ware stuff, so I started getting into random shit like that.

I moved to New York about eight years ago and there’s all kind of places to get weird ass art comics.  I became a weekly guy again after I moved here, just because there’s so many fucking stores. That’s my background. (more…)

OK, so there was a bit of a kerfluffle on the Internet this past week regarding an otherwise extremely positive review of the book How to Make Webcomics by Johanna Draper Carlson, which included this little tidbit:

Oddly, the promotion chapter doesn’t mention either press releases or getting reviews, both sources of free coverage; instead, dealing with critics is covered in the audience chapter. The author of this section, Dave Kellett, breaks them into four categories and says, “each one can be diffused or made impotent by kindness and politeness.” So the goal here is not to listen, but to deflect. And that’s reflected in his categories; not one covers someone pointing out a legitimate flaw or place for improvement in the work. In other words, he doesn’t think critics are ever right. (The categories are the person who’s mean without meaning to be and really loves the comic; nitpickers correcting “useless details”; the hater; and the troll. This section, by the way, was the first piece of the book I read — it’s where the copy I was browsing fell open when I first picked it up. Fate!)

That prompted this reaction from one of the book’s co-author’s Scott Kurtz (creator, if you don’t know, of the popular PVP Webcomic): (more…)

It’s been a looong time since I did a “roundtable” discussion (never mind an actual column), but I thought this recent post by Comics Comics’ Tim Hodler provided a good opportunity for kickstarting the thing back up.

In his post, Hodler, talks about the journalism panel he participated in at HeroesCon and then segues into this:

If I’m going to be editing and writing comics criticism, it’s important to be able to separate personal friendships and acquaintances from my writing, and it’s already a lot more difficult to do than it was just two years ago. (Being married to a cartoonist, and not wanting to have her work unfairly linked to my opinions — we disagree on plenty, believe me — doesn’t really make it any easier.) It’s not really that difficult, but it’s an ethical distinction that I have to be vigilant about, and it’s also probably the largest single difference between how I currently approach comics and how I read and talked about them pre-CC, when I’d praise or trash comics with impunity. Now I try to make a point of not reviewing comics by people I know well, at least in print or on the blog, and I think that’s probably for the best, at least for now. The comics world is a small world, though, and that policy won’t work forever.

That got me thinking. Comics is indeed a small pond, and it’s almost impossible to avoid some sort of conflict of interest somewhere down the road. How does a good critic handle this sort of situation? If you have friends or family who make comics, do you avoid critiquing their work? Do you avoid cons or meeting professionals at all for fear of “tainting yourself” (I heard somewhere the New York Times will not let you review a book if you’ve ever met the author, even if it was just to shake their hand). Should the critic try to keep the creator’s feelings in mind, regardless of how bad it is, when reviewing a work or is a scorched Earth attitude the best policy? How do you honestly engage the work if you’re friends (or at least on good terms with) the person whose work you’re critiquing?

I decided to take my questions to the blogosphere and see what some noteworthy comics critics and tastemakers had to say about the subject. Read on to see their responses. (more…)

The following doesn’t necessarily pertain to criticism or critical theory directly, but it has some bearing on the subject, so I thought I’d shoehorn it into a column. My apologies if the very idea of such a thing fills you with discontent and a weary heart.

Last week, Heidi MacDonald caught the news on the Comics Journal message board that the latest volume of the widely acclaimed, Sammy Harkham-edited art comix-anthology known as Kramers Ergot will be priced at a staggering $125 (or about $78 if you order it on Amazon).

Why so expensive? Well, it’s not for the page count, which will actually be considerably less than previous editions — only 96 pages. No, the reason Volume 7 will be so costly is because of the size. This book resemble that of the Little Nemo and Gasoline Alley books that Sunday Press put out recently. Here’s Harkham talking about it in a recent City Pages interview:

“You’ve seen that Little Nemo book?” he asks, hands spreading reflexively to encompass the famous, full-page scope of Winsor McKay’s early-20th-century newspaper strip. “Issue number seven is going to be like that. Big—big—16 by 21! Every artist gets three pages. That’s it. But with that assignment, an artist is going to make work that wouldn’t exist otherwise. I’m so excited.

“The Clowes strip in this? Mind-blowing! Mind-blowing! And it’ll never be shown anywhere else. It’s going to be expensive. It’ll cost around $60,000 to make and sell for $80. We’re going to go to Singapore and watch them print it. But if there isn’t a clunker in the book, it’ll be worth it. I’ve found that anything I find mysterious or exciting, anything really special? People always pick up on that.” (more…)

Charles Hatfield and Craig Fischer had already proven themselves through their writing, both in the pages of The Comics Journal and in the academic world where they make their daily bread, to be insightful, sharp critics with lots of worthwhile things to say about the comics medium. That they would team up, in blogging form, came, to those who had read their work before, as an inspired decision.

Indeed, the net result, Thought Balloonists, has proven since its inception earlier this year to be one of the must-stop places on the Web for good, meaty critical thinking about comics. What the also offers, however, is a sort of conversational give and take that very few critical blogs — comics or otherwise — seem to have adopted.

This interview was conducted via email over the course of the past month (give or take a few days). My thanks to both Mssrs. Hatfield and Fischer for their time and patience . (more…)

Everyone in my house is ill with high fevers this weekend (except me … so far), so just a quick recap this time on the whole canon issue that I discussed two columns ago.

Timothy Callahan (author of Grant Morrison: The Early Years) used my column as a springboard to talk about his own feelings regarding the subject and attempted to come up with his own master list, dividing his choices up by time period and influence. (more…)

It was Katherine Dacey’s enthusiastic review of Town of Evening Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms that first caught my attention. I was already planning on tracking down and buying the book — so glowing had the critical consensus been up till that point — but I was taken not only by Dacey’s ability to draw allusions to cultural touchstones outside of manga (R.G. Collingwood no less!) but also her passion and sincere enthusiasm for the book shone through but never once turned her prose into fannish mush.

As Senior Manga Editor for Pop Culture Shock, Dacey comes to the comics world from a different angle — having entered through the manga door she doesn’t have the baggage that many of us shoulder when trying to talk about our favorite comics. In other words, she’s got a unique perspective on not just manga, but the comics industry in general that’s worth taking in. That, plus the fact that she’s an incredibly smart and perceptive critic, made this interview a pleasure to conduct. (more…)

Every once in a while I come across a column or essay that makes me sit up and take notice. Usually because every fiber in my being cries out, “No. Nope. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.”

Jennifer de Guzman’s column last weekend for the soon to be no more Comic World News was one of those instances. Not that it was incoherent or poorly written. I just flat-out don’t agree with it. (more…)

Not enough time this week for anything more than a link round-up. Still, there’s been plenty of interesting discussions and postings going on over the past few weeks. Here’s just a few of them.

* I didn’t get his email in time for the last column, but Tom Spurgeon had an excellent pick for best critical piece of 2007.

* Speaking of Spurgeon, he recently took part in a fascinating round-table talk with Dan Nadel and Jeet Heer for the radio InkStuds program about comics and art. That exchange led Tom to wonder about his own critical facilties:

I wonder sometimes if I have a sharp enough, fully-realized enough view of the art form to be as specific and discerning as I need to be when it comes to fashioning an initial take on the comics I’m confronting. In short, I think I may like too many comics. This was an advantage ten years ago when liking a lot of comics allowed one to string together the best works from a lot of places into the most positive face for a struggling art form. It was easier to make those individual distinctions back then because good comics were so much more rare and thus stood out with greater clarity against the heaving background of awfulness that was the art form. (more…)

We’re being innundated with assorted top-10, “best of year” lists right now — and that’s fine with me. I like them. As long as you don’t take these things too seriously (or personally for that matter) year-end lists can be a great way to a) take the pulse of the culture — what they value, what they don’t; and b) force you to reasess your own tastes. What did you like and why? Why exactly do you disagree with Joe Blogger’s preferences?

So I thought for this, the first column of January, I’d turn the tables a bit and ask the tastemakers what they thought was the best piece of comics criticism, either online or off, that they read in 2007. Here’s what they had to say: (more…)

Q: The blog has really opened doors for you. You’ve developed a real loyal following. I remember Dan Nadel at SPX calling you out, and people like Chris Butcher mention you when asked what their favorite blog is. There are a lot of people in the blogosphere, tastemakers who seem to really appreciate your site a lot. Are you surprised by the success you’ve had with it?

A: I hear sometimes from other sources – I heard this more back when I was starting blogging so maybe it was something of a blogging theme – that it was maybe not so healthy to even assume you have an audience or make any concession to an audience at all or believe the audience is there. You should only write for yourself, period. I guess I never entirely bought into that because even in the very earliest months of my site I’d be writing things with no one having any reason to read them, I’d pretend to have an audience. I’d be writing “And so readers” I didn’t think I had any goddamned readers!

It is a surprise. I think people just got to like what they saw. I think a farily big portion of it was I had a pretty regular output, decent stuff coming out pretty often that people found my site as reliable and kept sticking with it, reading it, wondering what I had to say. I’m really, really thankful that so many people say kind things. It’s really flattering to be honest. I didn’t expect the success I had but I didn’t really know what to expect because I’d never done anything like that. I’m really grateful for all of my readers. (more…)

Originally I was going to try to break this interview down into only two posts. Time, family and holiday obligations have prevented me from doing so, unfortunately, so I’m going to have to do this in three parts. Rather than make you all wait another two weeks, however, I’ll simply post part three tomorrow.

Q: You have very broad tastes. Do you feel that gives you a unique perspective? What’s the benefit of having such catholic tastes and is there any drawback?

A: I can think a possible drawback would be you go a little bit toward everything. There’s a risk that you might not know about these things and badly misinterpret things that someone who’s more deeply into these sort of genres or areas of comics would be. You can be very broad and very shallow. That’s very much a risk I think.

The stuff I cover on my site, like I said before, I feel like it’s an expression of my own reading habits. I guess it just developed like that. I just like a lot of different kinds of things, and I think it’s forced me to be very studious. To really look into the histories of these books. It’s a good thing I have the Internet because I can cross-reference a lot of these things besides reading old magazines and flipping through issues of the Comics Journal, which is a valuable pursuit in and of itself. (more…)

One of my first stops on the Internet every morning is Jog The Blog. Jog, or Joe McCulloch, (since that’s his real name) is rightfully considered to be one of the smartest and best online critics working these days, consistently writing about a broad range of comics in an engaging and witty style that really gets to the core of what a particular work is about. I’ll often come away from a book thinking “Yeah, I got what that was about,” only to read Joe’s review and realize no, I didn’t get it at all.

I consider myself lucky, actually, since Joe lives about an hour away from me and works in the same small city I do. It’s nice to have friends you can talk about comics with over a burrito and vanilla latte.

But what’s the use of friendship if you can’t exploit it for the purposes of your biweekly comics column? With that in mind, I called up Joe and asked if he’d be willing to talk about the history of his blog, his own interest in comics and his view of the current scene (if I can use such a hackneyed and overly simplistic phrase). Part One deals pretty much exclusively with his own personal history of reading comics and how the blog came to be. Part two (and three if warranted) will deal with more contemporary and philosophical issues surrounding comics criticism.

I’d like to thank Joe extensively for taking time out to talk. Next burrito’s on me.

Q: Well, the first question I should really ask you, since it seems to be the first one everyone asks whenever they meet you is, how did the alias Jog come about?

A: It’s really served me well I think, because I get a great feeling in my heart when people greet me in real life as Jog. This happened at a library recently. You can just hear them pronouncing the quotes around “Jog.” It’s good when you hear quotes being pronounced. (more…)

I’m too sluggish from all the turkey to offer anything remotely resembling an intelligent opinion today. Thankfully, there have been enough thoughtful reviews and essays out on the comics blogosphere over the past few weeks to make up for my lack of loquaciousness. (more…)

I’ve been talking quite a lot in this column about the problems in attempting to write in a knowledgeable and understandable fashion about what makes a comic work or not work. One of the memes floating around the blogosphere these days, as I noted previously, is that most comics critics don’t discuss the art work very much because they don’t have the familiarity or background necessary to do so. They lack the sort of vocabulary that say, your average art history major, would be able to provide.

I’m not 100 percent certain that’s true or not, but either way, it, to my mind, begs the question: do we need our own unique vocabulary? We borrow a lot of terms from film criticism and other forms of criticism, but is that cheating? Are we merely slapping terms that don’t really apply to the books we’re attempting to describe? Comics are a unique art form, do we need to start creating and applying our own unique critical terms in reviewing and describing them? If so, how do go about doing so in an organic, applicable fashion (i.e. not just make up a bunch of words at random)? Has this sort of vocabulary-building already happened, and if so how? Or is this a really asinine question and not something any sensible person should spend their time worrying about?

Rather than attempt to form my own half-baked opinion, I decided to put togehter another roundtable and ask various intrepid bloggers and critics what they thought about the issue. Here’s what they had to say:

(more…)

Hey there cool critiquing cats and kittens. I know you’re all eager to see what I’ve cooked up for this week’s column, but I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait another seven days. As of this week, EaC is starting a biweekly schedule.

The reason is simple. Putting together the interviews and roundtable talks involve a bit more planning and forethought than I had initially anticipated. Since I regard those features as being the bread and butter of the column, I thought it best to add an extra week. Plus, I need the breathing room, as work and family have been crowding around me lately.

But lest I leave you empty-handed, here’s an actual, god-honest “obscure comic” review courtesy of Derik Badman, who decided to take on Nabiel Kanan’s out of print book, Exit.

See you next week everyone.

Like the title says, here’s a loose affiliation of stuff that’s been rumbling around in my noggin over the last few days:

You never call, you never write.
Well, Obscure Comics Month was a complete failure. I’m not terribly surprised to be honest, nor am I all that upset. I couldn’t even manage to write my own contribution (and I had a great one too, all about the genius that is R.O. Blechman), so I can imagine how difficult it must have been for those of you who were interested in the proposal as well. Getting kick-started is always tough. (more…)

Originally I was going to attempt to transcribe the comics criticism panel from last week’s SPX. However, since I seem to be incapable of operating a simple tape recorder, you’ll have to instead settle for me tearing into Heidi MacDonald’s now-infamous post (If you want to read about the panel, Sean Collins has a nice write-up here).

The post I’m referring to, of course, is her highly derided/regarded “Can’t Anyone Tell a Story?” jaunt (as well as the obligatory follow-up). I doubt it will surprise anyone here to find me decidedly in the “derided” camp. I found Heidi’s piece to be confusing, rambling, inaccurate and just plain off-base at best. And, even though you’re probably sick of the debate by now, I’m about to go into great detail to explain why.

A number of folks have already commented on it in depth, but there’s a couple of points I want to focus on, some of them actually dealing with comics criticism, some of them … not so much. I apologize in advance for the latter, and also in case I end up repeating what someone else said, just not as well. That’s been known to happen.

OK, let’s take it point by point: (more…)

Before we get to the second half of my interview with Tom (the first half being here), I just want to put in another plug for Obscure Comics Month. Don’t forget to send me your links (cmautneratcomcastdotnet).

And with that, here’s Tom Spurgeon:

Q: Tell me about some of your influences. What critics do you admire both inside and outside of comics?

A: That’s a really good question because it’s one I don’t really have an answer for. I’m not horribly well read in comics. The people that I like that write about comics — there’s nothing that connects them. I always loved Bob Fiore when I was a kid because he really mean and really to the point and really funny. There’s something really impressive about a guy who can be that consistently right on and write well, in a smooth, pleasing style. I wish that Bob had written more over the years. How many people can you say that about? It’s not many.

I really like Donald Phelps, who did Reading the Funnies, and he has a really baroque, almost aggravating prose style. But the quality of his insights, how he sees a comic is so refreshing and so out of left field that I feel it’s always worth chopping through whatever he’s put in front of me in terms of sentence structure in order to get at those wonderful insights.

I really like Bob Levin who worked for the Comics Journal.

Q: He did The Pirates and the Mouse, right?

A: He did the Pirates and the Mouse, and Outlaws, Rebels, Freethinkers and Pirates. I worked with him on those books. I edited those, probably very poorly, but Bob’s a very – again, it’s the quality of his insight. There’s a notable and idiosyncratic point of view on all of these artists. And he has wonderful taste on who he seeks to explore. He wrote this thing about Jack Katz that’s wonderful and one on S. Clay Wilson that’s great. And this kindness that he has towards the act of creating art makes Bob a really great critic. He really holds artists in high esteem and I think that shows through in his work. He really admires someone who sets out to make art and to communicate that way and has to go through what society will dump on them. That’s something I’d like to emulate in my own writing.

Anyone younger than that? All of my peers? I hate them. They’re all talentless hacks.

(more…)