Best Online Comics Criticism 2014

Posted on January 26, 2015 by Ng Suat Tong

2014 was a pretty bad year for comics criticism. On the basis of my simple survey there was hardly anything of note from the first third of 2014 as far as comics criticism was concerned (though things did pick up in the latter half of 2014). So if you find me clutching at straws in some of the entries below, well, you know the reason why.

Apart from the perennial issues of racism and sexism in superhero comics (or maybe in general?) there weren’t many critical controversies in 2014. I can’t say that this failure to engage with fellow critics and their ideas is a positive sign of health; especially if this reticence is symptomatic of intellectual torpor or a lack of breath in comics thinking.

[Your annual Comics Criticism Metaphor]

Needless to say, the selection below is incomplete and careful readers of comics criticism (?) should list any notable articles they’ve read in 2014 in the comments section.

(1) Listed by author in alphabetical order.

Merve Emre and Christian Nakarado on architecture in the comics of David Mazzucchelli and Chris Ware.

Brian Cremins on transcendental style in the comics of Julia Gfrörer and Jessi Zabarsky. Or consider the first part of his lecture on “Comics Books and Visual Literacy”; both of which are related to his long term work on nostalgia and comics. Or consider his “How to Read The Curse of the Werewolf.”

Julia Gfrörer – “Shadow Puppets”

R. C. Harvey – “Understanding Barnaby”. This may be the most comprehensive analysis of Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby available online.

An alternative selection might be Harvey’s piece titled, “The Perversion of the Graphic Novel and Its Refinement” This one is about comics biographies and a reiteration of Harvey’s version of “comics fascism” (i.e. the essential nature of visual-verbal blending). His most notable target in the past has been Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant but he hasn’t rehearsed this pet peeve in quite a while. Here he is on a stumbling block in comic biographies:

“Generally speaking, a biography’s impulse is to include all the chief details of the subject’s life. As we see in SuperZelda, the effort to include all such matters in graphic novel form effectively destroys the form. Unless the biographer expands the number of pages in his/her work to gigantic dimension, the natural impulse—the best way to achieve a manageable length—is to resort to words for telling the story, and in obeying that impulse, the biographer inevitably uses pictures only to make the pages look pretty. As a result, the pictures don’t add any narrative content. The comics form works best as a form when it can portray at some length an incident or event, an impossibility if the over-all objective is to cover all the chief events in a person’s life in as few pages as possible.”

Jeet Heer on Herblock’s legacy and deification in a new HBO documentary. Or consider part of his ongoing work on Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie.

Adrian Hill – “Falling into Place.” On Malcom Mc Neill and William S. Burrough’s Ah Pook is Here.

Ryan Holmberg – “Matsumoto Katsuji and the American Root of Kawaii.” Or his article on Enka Gekiga: Hiyashi Seiichi’s Pop Music Manga.

Illogical Volume on Pax Americana – “An Experiment in Assisted Re-Viewing.” Or consider David Uzumeri‘s annotations for the same comic.

Domingos Isabelinho – Chester Brown as a Gothic Artist.

Etelka Lehoczky on S. Clay Wilson’s Pirates in the Heartland.

Joe McCulloch on Recidivist Vol. IV.

Tahneer Oksman on Julie Delporte’s Everywhere Antennas.

Ken Parille – “Don’t Move: The Still Life of Peter Morisi”

Megan Purdy – “Love Is Far, You Can Wait for It”

Abraham Riesman – “The Secret History and Uncertain Future of Comics Character John Constantine.” I don’t know if this article offers a tremendous amount of new insights into the character but it’s probably as good an overview of the character in toto as you’ll find online. I’m going to guess that it was the editor who decided to put the words “comics character” in the title of the piece (maybe even the words “uncertain future”).

Jonathan Rosenbaum – “Peanuts, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” (this was published in 2013 but only appeared online in 2014).

Nicole Rudick on Julia Gfrörer’s Black Is the Color.

Joanna Scutts – “War in Panorama” (on Joe Sacco’s The Great War).

Matt Seneca on Richard Maguire’s Here.

Bob Temuka – “Superdeath”

Nicholas Theisen on Hannah Miodrag’s Comics and Language.

Paul Williams on Martin Vaughn-James’ The Projector. This one comes from a new-ish blog about 70s comics. There really isn’t much writing on this particular comic out there.

Matthias Wivel – “The Cage Stands As Before: The Comics of Yvan Alagbé”

(2) Notable Guest Articles on The Hooded Utilitarian

Brian Cremins – “Walt Kelly and Me”

Shaenon Garrity on Bloom County – “The Truth, Steve.” This is a nice summary of Bloom County‘s place in the comic strip firmament. I liked it better than Calvin and Hobbes back in the 80s anyway.

Michael A. Johnson on the ethics of war photography in War Photographer.

Kate Polak on empathy in J. P. Stassen’s Deogratias. In relation to this, also read Michelle Bumatay‘s review of La Fantaisie des Dieux: Rwanda 1994 which is published at her personal blog.

Pogo Watermelon

(3) Notable Controversies

R Fiore on Walt Kelly’s Pogo: The Complete Dell Comics: “Sometimes a Watermelon is just a Watermelon.” Also see Noah’s reply here and Brian Cremins article noted above.

One of those pieces which I expected to elicit more discussion but didn’t. Part of the problem is that almost no one has read or has any interest in the earliest incarnation of Pogo. The comments section remains interesting however.

As comics criticism has gained sophistication over the years, it’s become easier to identify the politics of various “heritage” comics critics. Fiore, for example, falls somewhere along the spectrum of Neo-Liberal to Neo-Con. Which generally marks him out for ideological disagreements with the editor of this blog and many of its contributors. Noah would no doubt find it disgusting that some people find Fiore’s piece worthy of consideration for a place on this list.

The discussion surrounding this piece also demonstrates the sharp divide that has occurred in the last decade or so. Fiore is venerated among many old time readers and writers of comics criticism but he’s quite the unknown among the younger set. His views frequently come across as old fashioned and conservative within the “art” comics community and they are often given short shrift and scant respect. In one corner we find the TCJ stalwarts who consider Fiore “one of the ten best writers to ever cover the medium“, and in the other a progressively engaged community which finds his thoughts increasingly out of touch. This could be taken as a sign of (comics) critical health.

Best Online Comics Criticism 2013

Posted on February 6, 2014 by Ng Suat Tong

This is late because I was feeling lazy. Also, who needs comics criticism anyway?

The following list is meant to be as inclusive as possible in terms of subject matter, stylistic tone, and ideas. I don’t have to agree with all of the opinions expressed in these pieces for them to be included. After a few years producing this list with other comics critics, I’m trying to anticipate the type of articles others might find attractive. This is probably a foolish endeavor but there you have it.

The list was at least twice as long before being whittled down to the links recorded below. Also, just to pre-empt anyone stating the obvious, there’s not much manga criticism listed below. Anyone with recommendations from that side of the pond should make them known in comments.

I’ve listed a few Hooded Utilitarian pieces here but have restricted myself to writers who are not (or were not) regular contributors. If you think these articles are unworthy of attention, just say so in comments as well. HU regulars have otherwise been ignored in this survey.

[Ozymandias: Megalomaniac and Comics Critic]

Listed by author (in alphabetical order).

Darryl Ayo on Jason Karns’ Fukitor (and the banal subversiveness of geriatric alternative cartoonists). This was a comment made during the Jason Karns’ affair at TCJ.com. Memories of it should have faded with time but this link is for posterity. A lot of tight slaps in this one. Oh, there’s some good work done by Jacob Canfield at the top of the comments thread as well, quietly chipping away before the pile on started.

James Baker – “Satirising a Prince, or Making Light of a Culture of Errors.”

David M. Ball on Ivan Brunetti’s Aesthetics: A Memoir

Eric Berlatsky – “Between Supermen”

Eddie Campbell – “The Literaries”

Articles on superheroes will always be more popular but I doubt if there have been many articles in 2013 relating to the art of comics which have been more celebrated than Campbell’s tangential attack on the writers of this site. While the majority of writers on HU disagreed with the findings of Campbell’s article, it’s pretty clear to me that it has been enormously galvanizing and influential for many critics who haven’t thought long and hard about the form about which they write. One might even call it a “spiritual” injection for some members of the comics critical community.

Ken Chen – “The Devil You Know” (on Hellblazer and John Constantine)

Hilary Chute – “Secret Labor: Sketching the connection between poetry and comics” (see also Noah’s response to the article).

Rob Clough – “Coming of Ages: New School”

Brian Cremins – “Nostalgia and Strange Tales #180″

Joseph Epstein – “Man With a Line – The gimlet eye of Saul Steinberg.”

Craig Fischer – “My Friend Dave.” This was Fischer’s “big” piece for 2013 and needs no introduction. I would also like to highlight his article on Michel Rabagliati’s Paul. It takes a kind of genius to elevate the pedestrian to something worth reading. I’ve read all of one big comic by Rabagliati and a few of his short stories. Nothing in Fischer’s article has altered my view of his work. Fischer’s first pictorial example of the vacuum mimicking the effect of a Dilatation and Curettage seems utterly hackneyed and reminded me of the clumsiness which confronted me when I read Paul Has A Summer Job. That comic seemed like the perfect combination of sentimentality and emotional distance, a remarkable feat if you think about it. Still to write at such length, in such detail, and with such passion about a comic deserves some sort of recognition. If only all comics were treated in this fashion, that would be the beginning of wisdom (or least the beginning of a discussion).

Paul Gravett – “The Principality of Lichtenstein: From ‘WHAAM!’ to ‘WHAAT?'”

Gary Groth – “Entertaining Comics”

Jesse Hamm – “Toth’s Line” (Parts 1 and 2)

Jeet Heer – “Hitler’s Cartoon Problem and the Art Controversy”

John Hogan – “ART…It’s Wacky! Conceptual Comics and Comic Conceptualism in the work of Mark Newgarden and Richard Prince”

Ryan Holmberg – “Tezuka Osamu Outwits the Phantom Blot.” For those not enthused by the manga of Tezuka there’s also his take on “The Name Garo: Shirato Sanpei and the Indo-Manga Connection”

Kevin Huizenga on Palookaville #21

Sarah Horrocks – “Suehiro Maruo’s The Laughing Vampire and the Aesthetics of Horror in Comics”. Horrocks is one of the more interesting “new”voices to have appeared on the comics criticism scene this year. She distinguishes herself by a sharp attention to the image in comics.

Horrocks is a firm believer in Twitter/Tumblr comics criticism. The revolutions began in March 2006 and February 2007 respectively. Sites like TCJ.com (and the one you are reading now) are like old jalopies moving at snail speed and utterly irrelevant:

“Many artists, not all, need attention and smart feedback through social media in real time…It’s like I can throw up a dirge of pages from different artists, created connections, and canon in real time while writing critically about said connections and contexts.”

“I’d actually like to see more like REALLY long form works in criticism. Like go into books or even ebooks, and hit off on criticism that actually takes the time to really get to know a work. The 1500 to 3000 word article seems like an anachronism that only continues to exist because that’s the way it’s been for a minute. I don’t think that’s really what the audience wants. It’s too short to say much, and it’s too long to spur conversation–beyond the dedicated who like to type long winded responses to things–holdouts from message boards that no longer exist.”

The age of paper (developed 2nd century AD) never existed. Time to consign the highly absorbent print TCJ to the toilet roll rack. The rest of the writers here will be grabbing their ear trumpets and shuffling off to the the nearest old age home in due time.

Illogical Volume on The Lovely Horrible Stuff

Nicholas Labarre – “Incomplete descriptions in Raymond’s Secret Agent X-9”

William Leung – “Who Whitewashes the Watchmen?”

This was one of the most popular pieces on HU in 2013—a thorough evisceration of an artistic abomination. It’s also the most detailed analysis of Before Watchmen I’ve seen.

Bob Levin – “Ware and ‘When’ (and What About It)”

Robert Loss – “Real Basic Reality, Like AAAAAAAAAARGHHHH!”: Notes from Mark Beyer: With/Without Text. Also see his article titled, “Neil Gaiman’s “Façade” and Patronal Feminism”

David Mandl on Anarchy Comics: The Complete Collection

Joe McCulloch on Jim Woodring’s Fran. Purely from the perspective of style, I think this is probably Joe’s best written article of 2013.

Adam McGovern on Frank Santoro’s Pompeii. The praise is high (“Santoro’s work resembles the preliminary sketches of the finest canonical painters…”) and some might say questionable, but this is one of the more passionate and beautiful descriptions of a comic I’ve read this year. Dissuade me if you must.

Hannah Miodrag – “Narrative Breakdown in The Long and Unearned Life of Roland Gethers.”

Adrielle Mitchell – “Do Alienation Theories shed Light on Contemporary Comics?”

Andrei Molotiu – “Might as well be abstract, Part 3”

Novi Magazine – “Critiquing Impressions of Feminine Storytelling: In Defense of Moto Hagio’s Heart of Thomas”

Osvaldo Oyola Ortega – “Queer Silence and the Killing Joke”

Ken Parille – “Red People for a Red Planet” – This one can be fairly summarized as a classic Parille close reading special. He also had an interesting take on Frederic Wertham and the State of Comics Criticism.

Janean Patience and Jog on Marhsall Law (Parts One, Two, and Three). Patience also writes affectionately about the old black and white Matt Wagner Grendels here. But let’s be honest, it only gets good with Devil by the Deed.

Jed Perl – “Art Spiegelman is Comic’s Most Pretentious Faux-Artist.” I think Spiegelman has the “pretentious” part down pat but isn’t calling him a “faux-artist” a tad too cruel…? It’s all been said before but I don’t think in quite so prominent a venue.

Sean Rogers – Review of Hand-Drying in America and Other Stories. I think this review probably has the edge over his article on Tom Kaczynski’s Beta Testing the Apocalypse.

Nicole Rudick – “Life on Mars: Gary Panter’s Dal Tokyo.”

Tom Scioli – “Silver Surfer #1: An Examination”

This one has some nice readings with a few reservations. I don’t think the Silver Surfer would have been improved with a “sidekick”. I also understand that Stan Lee is a hate figure in the alternative comics-verse and I’m happy with people sticking it to Lee and his overwrought writing and hucksterism, but I wish they would see fit to use the same brush when describing Kirby’s prose and frequently ridiculous plots in his latter years. Kirby is the aggrieved party in his disputes with Marvel but that has no bearing on how we should assess the comics. It may be an instantly forgettable comic but I’d take Silver Surfer #1 over anything with the Black Racer in it for sure. Scioli had another article of note in 2013 titled “Whatever Happened to Barry Windsor-Smith in the Comics Conversation.”

Robert Steibel – “Do I have the guts to defy Odin once again?”

The biggest comments war on TCJ.com in 2013 (outside the Jason Karns affair) concerned something quite familiar. Steibel usually writes at Kirby Dynamics on the Kirby Museum site, and I do believe that at least one of his pieces has gone through the nomination process in past years. Once you’re aware of Steibel’s loyalties, you can more or less sit back and enjoy the hagiography. This one is listed here because it very much represents a blast from the past (or maybe a past that never left us) – the Spotless cartooning icon vs. his Satanic majesty (Stan Lee for those not keeping up with revisionist history). The Odin of the title is a sly reference to Lee who is the All Father without actually being the main star of the comic. Objectivity? I say thee nay!!

J. Ryan Stradal – “The Details of a Passing Landscape: Ben Katchor’s Hand-Drying in America.”

Barbara Uhlig – “‘Chercher dans le Noir’ – the gap as motif in Caboto.” Also see Uhlig’s related article, “The dissolution of the pictorial content in Hugo Pratt’s ‘Corto Maltese’ and Lorenzo Mattotti’s ‘Fires’”

Emily Villano on Anything That Loves

Qiana Whitted – “Sound and Silence in the Jim Crow South”

Peter Wilkins – “Anthropomorphism and Allegory in Renee French’s Micrographica”

Kristian Williams – “Sacrificing Others: Watchmen, Fail-Safe, and Eichmann in Jerusalem“.

Paul Williams – “Literary Impressionism and Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth”

Matthias Wivel – “Institution and Individual”

Andi Zeisler – Deer Dogs and Moosefingers: Lisa Hanawalt’s “My Dirty Dumb Eyes”

Best Online Comics Criticism 2012 – The Final List

Posted on May 14, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

Late is better than never. Presumably.

The truth is that I almost chucked this whole thing into the trash heap because of a number of last minute exits from the voting process. I lost 3 judges in the early months of 2013 but, thankfully, Jacob Canfield stepped in at the last minute to give this year’s judging an extra voice and hopefully more diversity in taste. So diverse in fact that there was very little agreement as to which articles should make it to the final list in the initial voting.

The jurors this year were Jacob Canfield, Ken Parille, Caroline Small, and myself.

Looking back on the final list for 2010, I have to say that, in general, I’m happier with the final selection this year. Part of this is no doubt due to the fact that this is the first year I’m actually participating in the voting (while restricting the number of votes I actually use). The voting process for 2011 was a wash but my personal feeling is that 2012 was a better year for comics criticism than 2010. Perhaps readers here will pipe in with their own thoughts.

As for the final list, let me just remind everyone again that there is nothing less dependable than collective taste.

Three Votes Received

Craig Fischer – “Taniguchi Blossoms”

Fischer received a vote each for “The Lives of Insects: On Photography and Comics” and “Devils and Machines: On Jonah Hex and All Star Western” as well. So the final choice here is a bit of a compromise. Of these three articles, I would say that Fischer’s piece on the intersection(s) between photography and comics has the most to say about the art form. It is divided into 3 sections, moving from traditional photo comics, to the synthesis of both art forms and hence to the photo comic as “found” object (hinging on the indefinability of comics). I have little little doubt it was the most poorly received of the three in view of its intellectual content and semi-obscure sources.

“Taniguchi Blossoms” is a close and passionate reading of one of Jiro Taniguchi best comics, The Walking Man. The pleasurable emotions Fischer derived from that manga are communicated with a deft touch, though I will say that I disagree with his concluding comments where he cites Taniguchi’s A Zoo in Winter as another example of “the frisson between the perfection of [Taniguchi’s] diagrammatic art and the pressed by percolating emotion of the characters.” That latter manga has an obviousness and predictability which I associate with pot boiler Japanese romances.

Matthias Wivel – “New Yorker Cartoons: A Legacy of Mediocrity”

Wivel also received a vote for his article, “Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes.” The Barks-Donald Duck essay is a detailed run down of the comics being reprinted, giving historical background and story detail, before throwing light on past editorializing and the issue of recoloring.

The New Yorker article seems to be the more interesting selection, not least for the thoroughness of its negative criticism. It probably helps that I personally find The New Yorker to be a bright shining repository of shallow cartooning (with the usual exceptions). The publication targeted is certainly august, pays well, and is seen by many as the holy grail of paid cartooning work. It has attracted very little cogent negativity over the years. The article is a welcome corrective.

Two Votes Received

Corey Creekmur – “Remembering Locas”

This was part of a Locas roundtable in early 2012. The title is self-explanatory and takes in the long tradition of continuity and fan memory in comics with special emphasis on the intricacies of this mechanism in Locas. Creekmur extends this act of remembrance to all aspects of the work: the publisher-gods; the demands on Jaime’s readers; the action of memory and time on the characters; the essence of nostalgia in Locas; the purposeful and inescapable recollections on the part of the artist.

Heather Love – “The Mom Problem”

This is a lengthy article at Public Books about Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? I think it is safe to say that of the dozens of articles written about that comic in 2012, this is one of the better ones, providing basic background information before moving on to more detailed analysis. The focus here is less on Bechdel’s command of comic language but the Freudian aspects of Bechdel’s relationships and the structural importance Donald Winnicott’s work plays in the comic.

The article is a useful example of the dichotomy between comic criticism written for an intellectually serious site meant for general readers and that for a specialist comics site. While the latter sites often contain a mixture of traditional literary and more comic-based readings, it is only in recent years that more extensive, less technical reviews have appeared in the other type of publication.

Sean Rogers – “Flex Mentallo and the Morrison Problem”

Rogers is one of the best new(-ish) writers that the editors of TCJ.com have decided to employ and his article on Grant Morrison probably his most discussed piece of comics criticism. Bad Morrison (of which there is plenty) is certainly all too easily maligned, but what of the more “canonical” works (Animal Man, Doom Patrol, All-Star Superman etc.) For Rogers, the problems with Flex Mentallo are representative of a much deeper rot and Morrison’s soulless insularity.

Peter Wilkins – “Pluto: Robots and Aesthetic Experience”

This article was cited by Caro as “probably” being her favorite. The title is once again self-explanatory. The article succinctly ponders the nature of humanity, intelligence, and the aesthetic imperative. It ends with an insoluble question concerning the transaction between violence and art.

_______

A short comment on a notable omission.

2012 was probably the best year on record for TCJ.com in terms of comics criticism so it’s a bit strange that so few pieces managed to get enough votes to pull through to the final list. Part of this has to do with the fact many of the more impressive critical endeavors at TCJ.com this year were the result of accretion and accumulation. I would say that the best writing on Chris Ware’s Building Stories in 2012 was probably at the roundtable at TCJ.com. There was a more superficial blessing to be had as well. In contrast to many of the mainstream reviewers, most of the writers eschewed boosterism while remaining overwhelmingly positive. For this small mercy, I am grateful.

Articles at TCJ.com which received a single vote include Joshua Glen on “The Pathological Culture of Dal Tokyo“, Glen Gold on the Hand of Fire roundtable, Jeet Heer on Crumb, Ryan Holmberg on Tezuka Osamu, Dan Nadel on Born Again, Nicole Rudick on Frank Santoro’s Pompeii, and Dash Shaw on Jeffrey Brown’s Cat Comics.

Of these, I would single out Ryan Holmberg’s articles on manga at TCJ.com for special mention. His work follows in the long line of comics historical scholarship which has been the primary mode of engagement for much of the history of comics criticism. The exception in this case being that the subjects being discussed—vintage manga—have never had a “popular voice” in the English language.

Most of the judges won’t have time to write about their choices this year so I’ll list one other writer who was considered during the voting process. Two articles by Nicolas Labarre found favor with one of the judges. One on City of Glass at Comics Forum and the other on Art and Illusion in Blutch’s Mitchum at The Comics Grid.
_____
Update: Judge Jacob Canfield discusses his selections here.

Best Online Comics Criticism 2012 – 4th Quarter Nominations

Posted on January 4, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

(A call for nominations and submissions.)

This is the final list of nominations for 2012. The judges are now deliberating on the nominations and we should have the list of articles with the highest number of votes by the end of January.

Jenna Brager on Madeleine L’Engle and Hope Larson’s A Wrinkle in Time.

Jacob Canfield – “Subversion, Satire, and Shut the Fuck Up: Deflection and Lazy Thinking in Comics Critcism”.

Brian Cremins – Captain Marvel, The Master, and the Feminine Embrace.

Michael Dirda – “A Duckburg Holiday”. I don’t think Michael Dirda does that many comics reviews so I’m including it here more as a formality. It’s probably more competent than great.

Elisabeth El Refaie – “Visual authentication strategies in autobiographical comics”.

Emma (of Get Me Some Action Comics) on Sex in The Walking Dead.

Glen David Gold – “The Lure of the Oeuthre: On Charles Portis and Flannery O’Connor”.

Nicholas Labarre on Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli’s City of Glass.

David Large – Palimpsests and Intertexts: The Unwritten.

Peter Tieryas Liu On Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco’s Days of Destuction, Days of Revolt.

Adrielle Mitchell – “Is Comics Scholarship Ekphrasis?”

Andrei Molotiu – “Abstract Comics and Systems Theory”

Rick Moody – “Fugue for Centrifuges: On Chris Ware’s Building Stories” (Nominated by a jury member)

Jason Thompson on The Heart of Thomas.

Gabriel Winslow-Yost on the works of Chris Ware.

The Comics Journal

Craig Fischer – “The Lives of Insects: On Photography and Comics”

Katie Haegele on Ron Regé, Jr.’s The Cartoon Utopia.

Nicole Rudick on Frank Santoro’s Pompeii

A selection of Building Stories Essays by Martha Kuhlman, Katherine Roeder, Daniel Worden, David Ball, Matt Godbey, Margaret Fink, Georgiana Banta, Joanna Davis-Mcelligatt, Shawn Gilmore, Peter Sattler, Paul Karasik, and Craig Fischer.

The individual essays are linked to here for the judges to peruse. Since this process is only selecting individual pieces of comics criticism, the roundtable as a whole is not eligible for consideration.

Also see:

First Quarter Nominations

Second Quarter Nominations

Third Quarter Nominations

Best Online Comics Criticism 2012 – 3rd Quarter Nominations

Posted on October 11, 2012 by Ng Suat Tong

(A call for nominations and submissions.)

This is part of an ongoing quarterly process to find the best online comics criticism of 2012. Five comics critics have kindly agreed to adjudicate and create a final list based on the long list of nominations. Nominations from previous quarters can be found here and here.

We’ve just ended a lengthy Hate Anniversary at HU and judging from the results, it would appear that “hate” is both entertaining and popular. On the other hand, it does seem that “hate” isn’t as easy it appears. My feeling is that while the criticism generated in the last few weeks has been useful and informative, less of lasting worth (to comics) has emerged than in previous HU roundtables. In fact, I would not hesitate to say that one of the worst pieces of comics criticism I have read this year emerged during this roundtable.

The usual reasons—as listed by Noah in his introduction to “hate”—apply. I am also puzzled as to the repeated justifications for “hate” in those articles. Rather, writers should be apologizing to readers and consumers (like myself) for loving so much dreck. There’s always the small possibility that the world of comics criticism is, for the most parts, a happy-clappy world of positive energy with practitioners ill-suited to the arts of ridicule and general nastiness. The preponderance of words of affirmation in this year’s nomination list is evidence of the same. There are far worse things then this to be accused of.

[Geoff Johns and Doug Mahnke’s Allegory of Criticism.]

There were a number of good articles on HU this last quarter but I won’t be nominating most of them due to a conflict of interest. Readers (but not contributors) of HU should submit their own nominations for this quarterly process.

***

Jordi Canyissa – “Pictureless Comics: the Feinte Trinité Challenge”

Jared Gardner on Joe Sacco – “Comics Journalism, Comics Activism”. This one was recommended by Noah. I will add here that I’m definitely not sold on the idea (suggested in the text) that Sacco is under appreciated or polarizing. If anything, there’s almost universal support for his political positions and comics within the comics critical sphere. He certainly hasn’t been kicked around like Norman Finkelstein for example. This might actually reflect well on comics critics for once but I’m more inclined to put this down to a lack of diversity in opinion.

Laurence Grove – “A note on the woman who gave birth to rabbits one hundreds years before Töpffer.” (According to the author, the article has appeared as “A Note on the Emblematic Woman who Gave Birth to Rabbits”, ed. Alison Adams and Philip Ford, in ‘Le Livre demeure’: Studies in Book History in Honour of Alison Saunders (Geneva: Droz, 2011), pp. 147-156.)

Dustin Harbin on Steven Weissman’s Barack Hussein Obama.

Jeet Heer on Building Stories (“When is a book like a building? When Chris Ware is the author.”)

Christopher J. Hayton and David L. Albright – “The Military Vanguard for Desegregation” (from ImageTexT)

Nicolas Labarre – Irony in The Dark Knight Returns.

A. David Lewis (writer) and Miriam Libicki (artist) on Harvey Pekar’s Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me. This is a useful Jewish perspective on a comic about Jewish matters. The problem as with most drawn reviews of comics is that it really doesn’t use the tools of the medium in any useful sense. Much of it reads as if it was adapted from a prose form review as opposed to a comics script. This review didn’t need to be a comic.

Heather Love on Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother (“The Mom Problem”).

Mindless Ones on League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Parts 1 and 2

Adrielle Mitchell on the relationship between Comics Studies and Comics. (“Mutualistic, Commensal or Parasitic?”)

Alyssa Rosenberg on Doonesbury.

Marc Sobel on Alan Moore’s “The Hasty Smear of My Smile”. Part of a guest written series on Alan Moore’s short form works at Comics Forum.

Steven Surdiacourt – Graphic Poetry: An (im)possible form?

Matthias Wivel – “New Yorker Cartoons – A Legacy of Mediocrity” (as published on HU).

Frank M. Young on John Stanley’s Little Lulu Fairy Tale Meta-Stories. I’m including this article here despite the rather ridiculous comment near the start that Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant and the Tarzan newspaper strip aren’t comics. It’s an argument from the Land that Time Forgot which Young explains in detail in the following short summary:

“But part of the distinct recipe of comics is the speech or thought balloon. It is a narrative device unique to the form. The creation of this tool, in the 19th century, gave comics the one thing that set them apart from prose, paintings, plays, movies, video games, TV shows and any other visual-verbal container for a flowing narrative.”

The real question here is whether an outdated and eccentric idea about comics should detract from the piece.

From The Comics Journal

Rob Clough on Dan Zettwoch’s Birdseye Bristoe.

Craig Fischer – “Devils and Machines: On Jonah Hex and All Star Western”

Richard Gehr on The Carter Family.

Joshua Glenn – The Pathological Culture of Dal Tokyo.

Ryan Holmberg – “Tezuka Osamu and American Comics”

Bob Levin – “To Hell and Back”

Dan Nadel on David Mazzucchelli’s Daredevil: Born Again Artist’s Edition.

Sean Rogers – “Flex Mentallo and the Morrison Problem”

Carter Scholz on Dal Tokyo.

Best Online Comics Criticism 2012 – 2nd Quarter Nominations

Posted on July 2, 2012 by Ng Suat Tong

(Honoring online comics criticism written or published in 2012. A call for nominations and submissions.)

This is part of a semi-annual process to choose the best online comics criticism. The first quarter nominations can be found here.

When I survey the field of comics criticism, it sometimes occurs to me that the popularity of a piece is frequently inversely related to the amount of effort and thought put into writing it. Why then do individuals continue to produce long thoughtful articles? The truth is that they don’t or rather not with the kind of frequency the form actually needs, and especially not when the work is done gratis. But putting these things aside, perhaps it is in the nature of these writers to go to such lengths. We can put some of this serious writing down to a sense of personal endeavor, academic training, and the intense hobbyist with a competitive spirit.

There is also the question of critical communities. If a community favors the latest costume changes, creative team shifts, and the latest news from the big two then news hungry one-upmanship will probably be the norm. If the central idea of a community is to contribute to a critical project centered on comics (social, aesthetic etc.), then the tone of the articles will follow suit. The quality of the articles will be dependent on the taste and discipline of the editor and the commitment of a core team of writers; both these factors engendering a critical climate in which only writing of a certain quality is to be expected of all who contribute. A piece meal promotion of more elevated writing will depend far too much on the individual writer’s proclivities and drive to sustain quality (a central problem with an earlier incarnation of TCJ.com.) This is especially true for comics criticism where amateur sites have a disproportionate influence and editorial influence severely curtailed.

Reiteration: Readers should feel free to submit their nominations in the comments section of this article. Alternatively I can be reached at suattong at gmail dot com. Web editors should feel free to submit work from their own sites. I will screen these recommendations and select those which I feel are the best fit for the list. There will be no automatic inclusions based on these public submissions. Only articles published online for the first time between January 2012 and December 2012 will be considered. I have included some Hooded Utilitarian articles in the selection, mainly from people who I have little to no contact with. Readers (but not contributors) of HU should submit their own nominations for this quarterly process.

[Matt Seneca burning some pompous rubbish…apparently]

Sarah Boxer on Krazy Kriticism. At one point in her article, Boxer writes:

Now that Krazy Kritics have gotten their dearest wish — all of the SundayKrazys published in book form — what will happen to Kriticism? Will it yield to real criticism?…One essay in Yoe’s collection, Douglas Wolk’s “The Gift,” offers a ray of hope. Wolk finds something new to analyze in the strip — its peculiar pace: “The real comedy of Krazy Kat is almost always slower than its surface humor, which is appropriate for a strip whose central joke is miscommunication on a grand scale. The one way you can’t read it for pleasure is quickly.”

While Boxer offers a nice survey of Krazy Kat criticism, this revelation seems more like stating the obvious than anything novel. Not that stating the obvious isn’t useful but it should be correctly labeled as such. Her more interesting point, I think, is that Krazy Kat lacks development, a claim which I think is not indisputable but worth discussing.

Steven Brower on Kirby’s collages.

Robb Fritz – Moves Like Snoopy. Fritz’s article doesn’t have the beauty of language which I usually associate with nostalgia-tinged pieces and a lot of the interest in it stems from the collection of quotations from various sources. You can certainly see the seams where the research was fitfully stitched in. It didn’t work for me but that doesn’t mean it won’t work for some.

Kelly Gerald on Flannery O’Connor and the Habit of Art. This is actually an excerpt from the afterword to an upcoming collection of cartoons by Flannery O’Connor. I suppose this only goes to show that people put in an effort when they’re in print (and presumably paid for it.)

Lee Konstantinou on Metamaus (“Never Again, Again”)

Bob Levin on Manny and Bill, Willie and Joe.

Farhad Manjoo on Editorial Cartoons. The news that editorial cartoons are “stale, simplistic, and just not funny” is about as fresh as the idea that superhero comics suck. Manjoo’s insights into the inferiority of Matt Wuerker’s (Pulitzer prize winner) cartoons are also not particularly challenging. Furthermore, the suggestion that political cartoons should be excluded from the Pulitzer PR game is somewhat nonsensical. If the Pulitzer committee was seriously interested in offering prizes only to the best works of American literature and journalism in any one year, they would put serious consideration into adopting and liberally using a “No prize this year” category. As it is, they don’t. Nonetheless, I’m putting this here simply because someone outside the comics reading room finally noticed the obvious. It should also be noted that he does offer some other poor alternatives to political cartoons.

Hannah Means-Shannon – Meet the Magus Part 1 (The Birth Caul) Part 2 (Snakes and Ladders). This article is a bit of a departure for Sequart.org, a site which focuses largely (but not exclusively) on medium to long form articles on superhero and mainstream titles.

Evie Nagy on Tarpé Mills & Miss Fury (“Heroine Chic”).

Meghan O’Rourke on Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?

Katie Roiphe on Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?

Matt Seneca – Why You Hate Grant Morrison (Life on Earth Q Part 3). This piece was recommended by Noah but, in my opinion, it’s not Seneca doing what he does best. It has a kind of novelty appeal since Seneca hardly ever does negativity but he still needs a few more practice swings to get used to the feel of the hatchet.

Jason Thompson on Shigeru Mizuki. As evidenced by the poll 2 years ago, Thompson’s articles for his House of 1000 Manga column are a big favorite in the manga blogging community.

Kristy Valenti on Astro City and the White Man’s Burden.

Chip Zdarsky – Who Writes the Watchmen? From the first quarter of 2012. Nominated by Jones.

At The Hooded Utilitarian

Eric Berlatsky on Los Bros Hernandez (Parts 1 and 2).

Corey Creekmur – Remembering Locas. This is from the tail end of March but wasn’t included in the previous listing. Nominated by Jeet Heer.

Sharon Marcus – Wonder Woman vs. Wonder Woman

Andrei Molotiu – Built by a Race of Madmen. From the first quarter of 2012. Nominated by Gary Verkeerts.

Katherine Wirick on Watchmen: Heroic Proportions.

At TCJ.com

Prajna Desai on Bhimayana.

Jeet Heer – Crumb in the Beginning

Ryan Holmberg on Tezuka Osamu and The Rectification of Mickey.

Ken Parille – Six Observations about Alison Bechdel’s Graphic Archive Are You My Mother?

Dash Shaw on Jeffrey Brown’s Cat Comics.

Kent Worcester on British Comics: A Cultural History.

The Jack Kirby: Hand of Fire Roundtable (Parts one, two, and three). Organized by Jeet Heer and starring Glen Gold, Sarah Boxer, Robert Fiore, Doug Harvey, Jeet Heer, Jonathan Lethem, and Dan Nadel. I have no doubt that this roundtable will be on many people’s short list of best comics criticism for the 2012. It’s messy, sometimes incoherent, occasionally funny and, towards its close, reasonably informative. Some of the participants are true blue Kirby experts which makes it all the more disappointing they weren’t pushed in the right direction or milked more thoroughly. As James Romberger suggests in the comments of the third section of this roundtable, this should have been extensively edited so as to ensure a sensible flow of ideas (not to mention the excision of ridiculous amounts of noise). Personally, I would have preferred fully worked-out essays as opposed to a mailing list discussion.

I had hoped that TCJ.com would expend its energies on topics and comics which have had 1/100th of the exposure Kirby’s comics but I think that would be asking too much. There has been a consistent devotion to the comics of Kirby in The Comics Journal since its inception and TCJ.com and Jeet et al. merely extend this tradition. The lack of a balancing voice in the exchange is also telling. Sarah Boxer’s dissent (in the third section of this debate) while amusing hardly constitutes a proper reassessment of Kirby’s influence and real worth.

Best Online Comics Criticism 2012 – 1st Quarter Nominations

Posted on April 2, 2012 by Ng Suat Tong

(Honoring online comics criticism written or published in 2012. A call for nominations and submissions.)

Regular readers of The Hooded Utilitarian will remember a semi-annual event celebrating the best online comics criticism. Last year’s survey sank like the Titanic due to sheer lethargy on the part of all involved, most notably myself. For those of us who find it hard to get out of bed for the latest and best comics criticism, allow me to commiserate.

On previous occasions, I would ask the various judges to select quarterly nominations from which the entire group would vote at the end of the calendar year. This proved useful in the sense that it brought in nominations on topics and from sites peripheral to my usual areas of interest, but also limiting in that it was dependent on the variable submissions of the judges for that year. Even worse, when busy lives came to the fore, there were no nominations to be had. Clearly, reading comics criticism can be a tiresome business.

In order to facilitate matters, I’ve decided to take over the nomination process myself and also open it to the HU readership (which I presume is wide enough in its taste). Web editors should feel free to submit work from their own sites. I will screen these recommendations and select those which I feel are the best fit for the list. There will be no automatic inclusions based on these public submissions. Only articles published online for the first time between January 2012 and December 2012 will be considered. I have not selected any articles from the HU site for obvious reasons but invite HU readers (not contributors) to send in their recommendations.

If all goes well, we might actually have a nomination list to vote on at the end of the year. At that point, a small group of jurors will be invited to read the long list of nominees and select the eventual winners.

The following list consists of articles of note and others which I personally find uninteresting but which have attracted considerable notice online. The object of this listing is to be inclusive without excessively compromising quality.

(1) Robert Boyd on Kramers Ergot #8 and the Art School Generation.

(2) Gio Claival on the art and comics of Dino Buzzati.

(3) Craig Fischer on Jiro Taniguchi’s The Walking Man.

(4) Edward Gauvin on David B.’s The Littlest Pirate King.

(5) Bill Kartalopoulos on Joost Swarte’s Is That All There Is.

(6) China Mieville on Tintin and censorship. I feel compelled to list this here to forestall any complaints of its lack of citation. Mieville’s piece is certainly criticism (about Tintin, racism, and censorship); a breezy, informative and well written article for newbies but of slightly less worth to the average person informed about such matters. In a famine, even the local burger joint looks like haute cuisine.

(7) Amy Poodle on Superhero Horror.

(8) Daisy Rockwell on Craig Thompson’s Habibi. (Full version available at her blog). I have reservations about recommending this review. Lord knows my feelings about Habibi. A truly remarkable review would find a way to make a strong case for the intellectual strength and positive aesthetic value of Habibi. I have yet to read such an article online.

(9) Khursten Santos – The Tale of Three Tezuka Ladies.

(10) Matt Seneca on Guido Crepax’s Valentina.

“There’s a fundamental problem underlying all erotic work done in the comics medium, one even more difficult to get past than the lack of audible sound and visible motion bedeviling the action-oriented material that dominates the form’s American market. How does one create art that reproduces a physical sensation created by bodily contact without being able to reach out and touch one’s audience? It’s the same problem that faces makers of pornography in any medium, but in comics it’s especially difficult.”

Even though the initial premise as stated in the opening paragraph is entirely false — if the difficulties faced by comics pornography were so dire, where would that place the reams of exalted illustrated smut over the centuries — this remains Seneca’s best piece so far this year. The usual Seneca traits of overwhelming love and earnest exaggeration (in this instance Crepax is compared favorably to Herriman, Joyce, and Picasso) are all on display but here sharpened by his obsession with Crepax’s Valentina.

(11) Kelly Thompson (She Has No Head! – No, It’s Not Equal). I’ve put this here because it seems to have found a place in a lot of people’s hearts, not least HU’s own dictator for life. This is a creditable article on that age old issue of women in costumes but somewhat tiresome if one has spent more than a few months reading superhero criticism — the absolute nadir of that cesspit known as comics criticism. If I was judging criticism on the basis of moral virtue, this would probably get top marks but it has little to add to the current thinking about superheroes.

(12) Kristy Valenti on Frank Miller’s Ronin.

(13) At The Comics Grid:

Kathleen Dunley on Ben Katchor and What’s Left Behind.

Nicholas Labarre on Art and Illusion in Blutch’s Mitchum.

Peter Wilkins on Pluto: Robots and Aesthetic Experience

(14) And at TCJ.com:

R. C. Harvey – Johnny Hart to Appear B.C.

Jeet Heer on Gahan Wilson’s Nuts.

Ryan Holmberg on Guns and Butter.

Jog on Franz Kafka’s The Trial: A Graphic Novel.

Bob Levin on Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular & the New Land.

Seth on his work on The Collected Doug Wright.

Matthias Wivel on Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes.

This list is limited by time and my own personal taste and habits. As such, I would encourage HU readers to submit their own recommednations in the comments section of this post. Alternatively I can be reached at suattong at gmail dot com. The lack of manga criticism in this list is particularly telling and I would be grateful to receive potential nominations in this area — reviews or essays which go beyond mere text-image summary or even textural history and which place a work into the context of real world experience and broader aesthetics, writing which pries open the hidden depths of a work

* * *

If the quality of the criticism which an artform attracts provides a glimpse at its health, then surveying the landscape of comics criticism can only be a a sobering experience. The patient while not exactly pallid looks distinctly moribund; sitting idly on the couch shoveling down crisps while shouting epithets at the latest pamphlets.

One is not so much concerned by the proliferation of sites obsessed with the marketing and economics of comics, nor the innumerable sites devoted to the idolization of cartoonists . These will always be with us and may in fact be signs of a healthy fanbase. Rather it is the stagnation of sites and writers devoted to the serious consideration of comics that should be of concern.

This may be best symbolized by the resurrection of TCJ.com – a site which is finally making an earnest attempt to emulate its illustrious print predecessor. The steady flow of interviews, reviews, and long form essays has seen the masses flocking back to the once fallen giant. This is both comforting to its old adherents and yet a standing rebuke suggesting how little has changed in comics criticism since its emergence into adolescence in the 80s and 90s.

The implication here is that the comics world is so bereft of writers of quality and of a pioneering spirit that there remains little room on the internet for more than a few sites of “serious” comics criticism, and even less that offer an alternative narrative less beholden to fandom. The hope that the internet would lead to a surge of self-publishing and hence sites consistently promulgating quality reviews and essays on comics was nothing but a pipedream. If anything, what we have is consolidation and a return to the mean. The Comics Comics project now subsumed to the new TCJ.com. The Panelists dead and now absorbed by the same. Even Sean T. Collins, Jog, Chris Mautner, Ken Parile, and Tucker Stone are now writing a significant proportion of their long form criticism for the site. Robin McConnell of Inkstuds hosts occasional critical discussions with the usual suspects listed above. The writers of The Comics Grid continue their quiet, scholarly course. There are few other umbrella organizations of note in North America as far as serious comics criticism is concerned.

This is certainly no fault of Dan Nadel and Tim Hodler who have crafted a site which has attracted the best talents to its shores. In a field where money is of secondary concern, it is the prestige, professionalism, community, and readership (the numbers and quality) which count the most. Both Nadel and Hodler should be commended for their dedication to preserving the legacy of the print Journal (with all the longstanding deficiences intact I should add).

The one bright spot in this age of digital publication is that The Comics Journal no longer holds a monopoly on the best long form reviews available on any particular comic. This situation is certainly preferable to the one in the late 80s and 90s when The Comics Journal was virtually the only game in town. That position has since been displaced by a host of blogs and newspaper websites. Think of any of the marquee comics of the past year and one will be pleasantly surprised to find that the Journal no longer holds “exclusive rights” to serious and informed discussion of those books.

What is missing however is any concentration of this talent to rival a single website like TCJ.com. Without this, and despite the efforts of a dedicated pool of link bloggers, many of these articles will remain unread and unloved. More significantly, it suggests a level of homogeneity seldom seen in other artforms (at least at this end of the spectrum). That no other site or community of critics has come close to challenging TCJ.com in attracting writers of note is a testament to the lack of depth (in numbers and intellectual concerns), diversity, and vision of purveyors of criticism; a problem exacerbated by a shrinking or stagnant comics readership.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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