I have an essay up on Culture 11 about Jeff Parker, kids comics, and the general idiocy of super-hero comics for adults.

In the last twenty-five years or so, though, the Code’s influence has waned sharply, and superhero comics have marched from G, past PG, to at least PG-13 — and some particularly unpleasant PG-13 at that. In DC’s 1988 Killing Joke, Batgirl — Batgirl, mind you — is shot in the stomach, turning her into a paraplegic, and then the Joker strips her and takes nudie pictures to show to her father. (When Alan Moore, the writer, spoke to editor Len Wein to ask if this plot point was okay, Wein reportedly responded, “Yeah, okay, cripple the bitch.”) In 2004’s Identity Crisis, Sue Dibny, the wife of the Elongated Man — of the Elongated Man, mind you — was raped. And then she was murdered. Oh, yeah, and she was pregnant at the time. Meanwhile, over at Marvel, one of their most successful projects has been Marvel Zombies, a group of miniseries and one-shots set on an alternate world where all the superheroes are turned into undead monsters who eat every civilian on earth. While we were in a comic shop, my son saw one of these uplifting tales on the shelf and asked, with mild concern, “Daddy, why do all the superheroes look scary on that cover?” “Oh,” I said. “That. We’re leaving now.”

Hop on over and read the whole thing as they say in the business.

Back yet? Okay. So I was talking about this piece a little with my friend Bert Stabler, and he asked me if I thought the Comics Code had been a good thing, inasmuch as it for years it forced comics to keep to G (or at least PG) content.

I had to stop and think about that for a bit. Ultimately, I decided that I don’t believe the Comics Code was positive…in fact, it seems to me that the reason we have adult storylines inappropriately and (most often) idiotically grafted onto super-hero comics is because of the Comics Code. Before the Code, it seems like a much greater range of comics genres were viable (horror and crime, for example.) The Code made these more or less impossible to sustain, so that all was left were the genres that were aimed at kids (super-heroes and stuff like Archie, basically.) There was still a demand for more mature material, though, especially as comics audiences aged. So you end up with a situation where the majority of comics fans are committed to the super-hero genre, and at the same time they demand more mature material. And so you get a goofy character clearly invented for kids — like, say, Batgirl — being brutally crippled and sexually assaulted, or spitting out obscenities, or whatever. Which really, to me, seems much more unpleasant than some bloody decapitation in a horror comic that’s straightforwardly intended for an older audience.

So I guess to me the Comics Code actually seems to me to be a good example of why censorship can have unintended and unfortunate consequences. I suspect that if it the Code had never existed, super-heroes would still be much more clearly for kids. And (despite my love of Watchmen) I think that would overall be a good thing.

I’d be curious what other folks think, though. I’m not incredibly conversant with all the ins and outs of Code history, so it’d be interesting to hear from folks with a bit more of a background, if any cared to comment.

Update: Bill Randall offers some thoughts.

So probably my favorite part of the brouhaha over my dislike of 100 Bullets was that I got in a flamewar with mediocre mainstream scripter Mark Waid. Here’s our back and forth:

Mark:
I, on the other hand, unlike Ross, am happy to just flat-out insult, because this kind of nonsense blogpost, shat out by a self-styled guardian of culture who thinks “mediums” is the plural of “medium,” is largely a waste of electrons and does nothing to elevate any sort of discourse. If there were a FailBlog.org site for reviews, this would lead the list.

The only fair yardstick against which any work of art can be measured is how well it accomplished whatever the hell it set out to accomplish. Every critic’s mileage will vary, but the critics who tend to be worth listening to are the ones who demonstrate, at the very least, enough critical acumen to be able to tell the difference between Ed Risso and Dave Johnson. Particularly when Dave Johnson’s signature is about the size of a matchbook.

Me:
Holy crap. Mark Waid cares enough to post. Hey Mark! I was just reading some of your amazingly mediocre efforts on Justice League. You are the last person whose opinion about writing I would take…I may even keep using “mediums” as the plural just to distance myself from your lameness. Cheers!

Mark then went over to Heidi’s comments to say:

Wow. Just left a reply on the guy’s blog because, as a friend of Dave’s, I was pissed–but I realize now that was a waste of time. He’s just another yutz with a keyboard. But I hope he enjoys the little moment in the sun we’ve given him!

I posted a link to my follow-up post on Heidi’s comments, prompting the following exchange
:

Mark:
“Hey all. I’ve got a follow up post here:”

Or, to put it another way, “HEY!!!! LOOK AT ME, EVERYBODY!!!!!!”

I repeat: I hope this halfwit is enjoying his moment in the sun, since it’s probably the only one he’ll ever get. C’mon, everybody…let the baby have his bottle. Move along. Nothin’ to see here.

Me:
Hey Mark! I’m on my tenth or eleventh Internet brouhaha at this point, actually. But, yes, I’m enjoying the moment, as I hope you’ve enjoyed your run of sub-Claremont hackery. Really, seeing you pop up and offer aesthetic opinions is like that old Dr. Johnson joke about the dog walking on hind legs…you don’t do it especially well, but it’s surprising to see you do it at all.

It’s probably wrong to have enjoyed that quite so much…but so it goes.

Anyway, I thought that as long as I’d raised the issue, I should maybe go back and reread something of Waid’s and see if it was as tedious as I (vaguely) remembered. The one entire book of his I”ve got lying around is “Justice League: Midsummer Nightmare”, written with Fabian Nicieza. I bought it because it’s a prequel of sorts to the Grant Morrison run on JLA. I didn’t remember it as being especially good, but I thought I’d give it another whirl.

Or try to. I had to give up; it’s largely unreadable. The initial idea (everybody on earth is getting super-powers) is okay, but the execution is phenomenally dreary. In an intro, Grant Morrison praises this book for turning its back on the bad-old-nastiness of dark gritty comics from the 80s and 90s, and ushering a new silver age full of fun! and excitement! In fact, though, this isn’t Dark Age, or Silver Age, but a Color-of-Lukewarm-Porridge Age. This is where bits and pieces of comic stories past come to die; zombified tropes wander about, robbed of all meaning and purpose, dumbly watching their own brains leach through their fingers. The putative plot is that Dr. Destiny has brainwashed the JLA, making them forget that they are heroes. This is an excuse to have Wally West (the Flash) be late to stuff (the irony!); to make Diane Prince/Wonder Woman be the head of a girl’s school (does that even qualify as irony?); to have Batman’s parents resurrected (again) before he relives the tragedy of their death (again), and to have the Martian Manhunter lose his family (again). Meanwhile, Kyle Rainer (Green Lantern) is a comic book writer and we get an extended running gag about his being behind deadline — because we have never, ever, in a comic book, seen a story about a comic book writer being harassed by his editor. No, really, we haven’t. Oh, yes, and towards the end, all the super-heroes have to confront their Deepest Fears. It’s so Jungian.

The worst part isn’t so much the inanity, though, as the utter joylessness of the exercise. I’m not a huge Chris Claremont fan, but his X-Men stories are just miles better than this. I remember, for example, one sequence where Jean Grey has been kidnapped while wearing a cocktail dress; she’s trying to tear it so she can run — so Wolverine volunteers to help and slashes it off at mini-skirt length. I think she says “Not so flaming short!” and Wolverine looks exceedingly smug. Not great art, or anything, but you get the sense that Claremont is paying attention to the characters — he’s noticed what Jean is wearing, and has a good enough sense of her and of Wolverine to be able to have them interact around a throw-away detail. It’s cute and a little sexy and I still remember it some 20 years after I first read the thing.

All the interaction in this story, on the other hand, seem leadenly smug; Flash and Green Lantern joshing like teens on a B-grade sit-com (“Big doings gang! Scoop any answers!”), the de rigeur Justice League everybody-burbling-on-about-how-wonderful-everybody-else-is, the insufferable, ritualized, repeated moments of self-actualization (Diana: How can I trust you Mr. Kent?” Superman: You know you can. You know.”) We’ve still got the over-the-top angst of Marvel team books (The Manhunter’s wife and daughter killed again right before his eyes purely to give somebody — anybody– an amped up tragic backstory, would be repulsive if it weren’t so tediously predictable), but we’ve dumped the soap-opera trappings — flirting, personal tension — which made it possible, occasionally, to care about the characters. It’s the worst of all worlds; melodrama with mannequins.

You look at something like this, and you really say, it’s all over for super-heroes isn’t it? They’ve completely lost all purpose or point. We should have just stopped after this…but instead we’ve got another ten years of dragging the same hollowed out characters through the same stupid paces. Super-hero comics have entered their second infancy; drooling, befouling themselves, cackling toothlessly, passing in and out of half-formed, repetitive dreams. This comic reeks of stale bedpans, decay, and a hopeless, numbing idiocy.

I should talk about the art now, I guess…but I don’t think I have the heart. In fact, I think I’m going to have to maybe stop writing about mainstream titles for at least a while; it’s just too depressing. I don’t know how Tucker does it every week. You’re a stronger man than me, my friend.

Update: Mark Waid takes another swing at me on Newsarama:

No one was really interested in rebutting his critique because no one took it seriously. If I were to go into a long rant about how much I hated British Invasion music based largely on the argument that the Rolling Stones sucked–and then I played clips of the Beatles to back up my point–my credibility would be eye-rollingly weak, and it would be pretty embarrassing to watch me get all huffy that no one was willing to listen to anything else I had to say on the subject. You want a rebuttal? Here’s a rebuttal: why should anyone waste their time arguing the finer points of art with a guy who can’t distinguish between Ed Risso and Dave Johnson?

It’s not that he had a momentary brain-blip; it’s not that he got the two confused. It’s that he literally cannot tell the difference between two professional artists, even when they have signed their work. Failblog.org stuff. That’s the story, and that’s what got everyone’s attention.

Mark Waid,
Sub-Claremont Hack

Me:

Mark; you seem to have read my post on our flame-war, and were at least moderately amused. Given that, I can’t really continue to slang you, much as I am tempted. It’s been fun, and maybe we’ll get a chance to do it again some time. In the meantime, good luck to you.

I’m kind of interested in this new conservative website Culture 11, mostly because they are paying me to write for them occasionally, but partly because they seem interested in engaging with non-like-minded folks like me.

Anyway, I just found an article on Christian music and politics that I thought was kind of interesting. It’s by a fellow named Matthew Stokes, and it read in part:

Do we want artists who oppose, say, the Iraq War with a Christian conscience? I’m not opposed to songs in that vein, actually, but find me a Christian artist who opposes the war without falling back on Moveon.org platitudes and is willing to acknowledge that terrorism in the present age is a real issue. Of course I want Christian artists willing to shine “the light of God on the darkness of racism,” but let’s make sure that it doesn’t turn in to white guilt lectures or typical academic claptrap. And by all means, speak the truth about the realities of poverty and corruption, but let’s always make sure that the facts are straight and we aren’t engaging in class warfare and we aren’t resorting to the State as the solution to these problems. And for heaven’s sake, if Spencer wants to reference Steve Earle, fine, but Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger? I admit they were great songwriters, but let’s avoid the apologists for Stalin and, in Seeger’s case, Hitler. Seriously. And while we’re at it, so what if kids hear that MLK was an adulterer – he was. Does that discount his work? Not in the least; he was a marvelous Christian leader in many, many respects. But if we’re talking about Christians and social change, Charles Wesley and William Wilberforce did a far better job of holding up both the Gospel and the issue of social reforms. And since when is “social Gospel” a slur? I always thought activist Christians had embraced the term. I’ve got a stack of books suggesting that they have and continue to do so.

Anyway, I wrote an (anonymous) response in comments which I’d reproduce here for both of my readers who look at my non-comics related posts….

I’m not a fan of your politics, but I think your general point is correct; there is no engagement without politics of some sort. On the other hand, though music may have politics, it isn’t itself politics — at times here you sound like you want position papers. The radio is not, and shouldn’t be, the Heritage Foundation.

Pete Seeger apologized for Hitler? I’d like to see the link on that, then. And he has since repudiated Stalin, I think quite sincerely.

Merle Haggard is a sometimes (though not always) thoughtful and Christian songwriter who certainly isn’t a leftist Democrat. I don’t think he’s an especial fan of the war, though his songs about it tend to be somewhat elliptical.

Still, the parts of the music industry that are most obsessed with politics at the moment are probably rap and metal. Rap’s a good place to go for discussions of race that aren’t about white guilt or academic claptrap. They tend to be about practical matters, like police harassment, poverty, educational disparities, stuff like that. There’s also black nationalism — which is not at all Democratic Party line, and which (as I think Eugene Genovese tends to point out) is in fact quite conservative in certain ways. Not least in the subordinate position often reserved for women, unfortunately.

And a lot of metal, of course, is quite pro-war — though not, perhaps, exactly in the manner that you’d wish. (There is a fair bit of Christian metal too, incidentally. Mortification is a band that’s pretty good.)

I posted about Brad Meltzer’s Justice League recently, so I thought I’d go back and reread some of the Grant Morrison run on the title and see how that holds up.

The first volume, “New World Order” — in which the JLA fights a bunch of evil, shape-shifting super-powered Martians — is uneven. The big strike against it is the drawing. Even by mainstream standards, Howard Porter is a shockingly bad artist. I think he’s trying to be influenced by manga, maybe, but jeez, what a disaster. It looks like someone vomited slick primary colors all over a bunch of spastic mannikins. And that’s not even mentioning the layout; all overlapping panels, slapped down almost at random. Really, who gave this guy a job? Blech.

Grant Morrison’s script is a lot better than that, though it has its troubles too. Basically, there’s a certain amount of “hooooo-boy, the League is sure cool isn’t it?” which grows awfully tedious awfully quickly. In that vein, too, there’s a certain amount of telling-not-showing how awesome everyone is. Batman talks at one point about what a tactical genius the Martian Manhunter is, for example, but there’s not really anything in the comic — or indeed, in any comic I’ve seen — that backs that up. Flash mutters to himself about the need to come up with some super-clever tactic to defeat his super-fast, military genius opponent… but in the end he subdues the bad guy by running really fast and hitting him. Also the plot doesn’t entirely hang together. When did the Manhunter switch places with the bad guy, anyway? And why are none of the super-heroes affected by the Martian mind-control? And having character after character realize that they’re fighting Martians (who can be defeated with fire) is a little clunky. And the last scenes, in which the people of earth are inspired by Superman to fight the Martians by lighting pieces of paper and holding them over their heads and looking really serious, as if the entire world has been transformed into one multi-ethnic Rush concert…well, it’s not Morrison’s best moment, let’s say.

Still, it’s not all bad. Morrison is clearly having a ton of fun with the Batman-as-snarky-unstoppable-force, sneering at all the wimpy super-powered whiners around him. This reached a reductio ad absurdum in All Star Batman and Robin, of course, but when it’s played slightly more subtly, as here, it can be entertaining. The panel where Bats wanders in dragging a heap of Martians behind him as Green Lantern (the Kyle Rainer one) mutters, ”only four, Batman? you’re slowing down.” is probably my favorite bit in the book…followed closely by Aquaman declaring, “the sea is my responsibility!” and Wonder Woman immediately informing him that he’s a pompous blowhard.

The thing is, though, that they’re all kind of pompous blowhards. Morrison’s JLA is, by design, invincible — they’re more super than super, more cosmic than the cosmos, they’re just undefeatably, unstoppably awesome. The series is over-inflated; so pumped up it’s ready to pop. There’s certainly a kind of enjoyment in it; it’s fun to see sparks flying and non-stop action and bombastic titanicness. But you lose something too — it’s hard for the heroes to really seem all that heroic, basically. For example, Metamorpho (who I guess was in the previous incarnation of the team) sacrifice’s himself in a desperate effort to save Nuclon and some girl with ice powers; you get to really see him sweat doing it, too — in the way the Lee/Ditko/Romero Spider-Man would really sweat. He’s falling from outer space and trying to make teflon coating, but he can’t figure out how the polymer chains works. He seems like he doesn’t have all the answers, and it makes him extremely sympathetic.

Morrison’s core JLA team, on the other hand, is always not just triumphant but triumphal. Whether it’s Kyle nattering on about how amazing Wonder Woman is, or everybody talking about how great Superman is, the self-congratulation floats about as thickly as locker-room miasma. It’s this insular, clubhouse aura that is the bane of super-hero comics today; Morrison’s super-heroes are, basically, super-fans. You can see why this appeals to the real life super-fans, of course. And you can also see why everyone else on earth was indecently eager to side with the Martians.

So for those who missed it, my off-the-cuff snarky post about disliking the first volume of 100 Bullets sparked off a snarky rebuttal by Heidi at the Beat, and then a subsequent feeding frenzy.

Most of said frenzy focused on my misidentification of the artist for the cover below:

I originally said it was done by Eduardo Risso, the interior artist; instead, apparently, it was done by a fellow of the name of Dave Johnson.

Anyway, many commenters (and Heidi) felt strongly that if I couldn’t tell Eduardo Risso from Dave Johnson, I didn’t deserve to call myself a comics critic. Very different artists, both long time greats of the industry, etc. etc. Heidi said my opinion was “uninformed”, and who has time for uninformed opinions?

But is my opinion really uninformed? By what standards? Why do I need to know who these guys are in order to judge one (1) trade paperback and talk in more depth about one (1) cover? Indeed, besides the misattribution, what did I say, specifically, about that one cover that was incorrect? Here’s the passage:

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.

Between my blog and Heidi’s, there were about sixty commenters; maybe more. Several people objected to the word “dumb” on the ground that…well, Dave Johnson’s great. Mark Waid weighed in to say he was friends with Dave, and the plural of medium is not “mediums” and that culture is coming to an end because some schmuck on the internet disagrees with him. But nobody — not one person — argued that the cover was good. Nobody said, “you know, her neck really is in exactly the right proportion.” Nobody said, “those floating red panels — that’s great layout!” So apparently, the cover is indefensible — or, at the very least, nobody tried to defend it.

Instead, everyone preferred to talk about connoiseurship. Connoiseurship is, of course, the process of showing that you’re an elite by dropping trou and pulling out the uber-knowledge. It’s the James Bond approach to criticism — “yes, this is a ’69 chablis,” or whatever. It’s basically about having a huge reservoir of trivia which you can use to demonstrate that you’re part of an in-group.

A lot of criticism, in any media (or mediums, I guess), is not about whether or not you’re actually entertained, or what you think about a piece. In one way or another, it’s about connoiseurship — or, as they say:

How many artists does it take to put together a trade of 100 Bullets?

Come on, Noah…don’t you know?

The simple fact is, I don’t know. And I don’t know because, quite frankly, contemporary mainstream comic art bores me to tears. Show me twelve different middle-drawer contemporary mainstream comic artists, and I’ll show you an indifferent, clumsy, poorly designed wasteland. I don’t know the difference between Risso and Johnson because I. Don’t. Care.

But, if I don’t care, doesn’t that disqualify me? How dare I express and opinion? Why did I read the book? Horror of horrors, and etc.

Here’s the thing. If you insist that only people who care criticize books, you tend to end up with only positive reviews — because people who don’t care (like me) don’t usually spend all their waking hours reading and researching the stuff they dislike. If you insist that only people who care criticize books, you rapidly get into a self-reinforcing, insular feedback loop, where in order to talk about the medium, you have to be invested in a particular way which ensures that you’ll only talk about the medium in a particular way. If you go down this path far enough, you turn into contemporary poetry, where the only people who want to read it are the poets themselves. And maybe their mothers. Oh, yeah, and grant committees.

The comics we’re talking about here aren’t arcane. They’re not difficult to follow. This is basic pulp noir. It’s a popular medium. I don’t need to be “informed” about who Dave Johnson is to understand pulp noir. I don’t need to know what awards Eduardo Risso has won to evaluate pulp noir. It’s fucking pulp noir. And you know what? Both of these artists do lousy pulp noir in similar ways because they’re both mainstream comics artists. And, late-breaking bulletin — their work isn’t incredibly different. Unless, of course, all you do all day everyday is look at boring contemporary mainstream comics art. In which case — hallelujah! — you too can be a comics critic.

Update: Well, Heidi at the Beat closed down the comments thread over there this morning because of my rudeness. I was a little startled; I hadn’t actually flamed anyone but Mark Waid, who seemed to be raring for a fight; otherwise everything seemed quite civil: I quite enjoyed the posts towards the end even. But maybe my time on the TCJ message board has just ruined my sense of appropriate behavior. Or perhaps Heidi was just sick of me — and who can blame her?

Anyway, I hope folks are scrolling down through the comments here. Tucker and Matthew Brady do both mount defenses of the cover in question, Derik admits he doesn’t know who Mark Waid is, various people try to make me sneer at non-horror buffs…it’s pretty entertaining. And if you want to post, you can be just about as rude to me as you’d like. I won’t shut you down…though I might flame you back.

Update: And Chris Mautner weighs in at Newsarama
I’ve got to say, if I’d know that vast Internet fame awaited me as soon as I misidentified a mainstream artist, I would have done it much sooner.

Also, summary of my related flame war with Mark Waid here

Tucker spoke highly of 100 Bullets in this interview, and I’ve heard good things about it in other places, so I thought I’d give it a, er, shot.

I was pretty disappointed, though. 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. [Update: Johnny B in comments notes that the cover below is not by Risso (who I still don’t like), but rather by Dave Johnson (who,apparently, I like even less.)]

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. (I’d apologize for the book code stuck in there by my bookseller, but it actually seems like a reasonable aesthetic choice, given the context. Certainly it doesn’t drag the image down in any way.)

I wish I could say I liked Brian Azzarello’s writing better. Some of the dialogue is okay (the yuppie bar-crawler who smugly boasts about his trust-fund-greased-life is pretty funny.) But the plot is lame. For those not in the know, each story is sparked by a guy named Graves, who gives some lucky hard-luck case a gun and 100 untraceable bullets with which he/she can get revenge on some evildoer in his/her past. So Graves is like Michael Landon’s cranky cousin, basically. The whole thing seems like some gimmicky sit-com, and the episodic nature makes it hard to create the slow build of inevitable doom and corruption which haunts the best noir.

I don’t know…maybe things improve later in the series, but after one volume this really seems sub-Sin City as far as comic pulp goes. And that’s not a good thing.

Update: I force Newsarama [Update: not newsarama; but Heidi at the Beat; see comments for suitable snark from Heidi) to eat their words re:not whining about criticism. They’re especially dismissive because I didn’t instantly see the difference between Risso and Johnson. Fair enough, I guess…though the funny thing is that I did see the difference — I knew the cover was an especially poor effort, even though I didn’t instantly identify it as by a different artist. So is it really a failure of connoisseurship? Or is it a failure of geek knowledge? You make the call….

Incidentally, the page of Risso art Newsarama the Beat uses seems definitely better than the stuff in the first 100 bullets trade.

Using a simple grid is a big help — not that I”m a huge fan of grids, but when you can’t lay out a page to save your life, simple is often better. Black and white helps too, given the indifferent coloring in 100 bullets. The page doesn’t make my heart sing, exactly — I’ve been looking at Arthur Rackham silhouette work recently, which has maybe spoiled me for Risso’s take on black outlines. But, in any case, if 100 bullets looked like this page, I’d be much more inclined to buy the next couple of trades.

Update: A follow up post is here.

Update: And Chris Mautner weighs in at Newsarama; and I post about my related flame-war with Mark Waid here.

I talked about David Heatley’s “My Sexual History” in my Comixology column posted last week. The strip was reprinted in David’s new book, My Brain is Hanging Upside Down. However, David has placed little pink boxes over all the naughty bits. He explains that:

“I was getting fan mail from a couple twentysomething boys, saying, ‘Oh, your strip gave me a boner,’ and I thought, This isn’t what I had in mind. It’s really about longing and bad sex and lack of connection.” The bleep-outs “almost draw attention to it, but it’s like another layer of the narrative—me kind of covering up a little bit before publication.”

I was reading a thread on the TCJ message board where folks were discussing the pros and cons of this; the consensus seemed to be by censoring himself David was betraying his art, or at least undermining it (the word “douchebag” occurs with some frequency.)

To me, though, it seems like the self-censorship is of a piece with the tenor of the strip in general. As I said in my column, to me “My Sexual History” is distinguished by its solipsism; it’s resolute refusal to acknowledge the existence of other people as something other than bodies which exist for the pleasure of the narrator. Though it purports to be about confession and revelation, the comic seems much more about concealment — swallowing others in the shadow of one’s own ego, and thereby, in fact, hiding oneself, since most of what is important about our inner lives, after all, involves relationships to other people.

Given that, it makes sense that David would be made uncomfortable by the discovery that his readers had an emotional investment in the work, of any kind. The strip’s prurient interest seems fairly obvious — unless, of course, the whole point of the exercise was to avoid having to think about other people at all. David’s not defacing his own work so much as he’s trying to erase his readers, much as the comic itself erases, for all practical purposes, his sexual partners. Slapping pink blotches all over your drawing isn’t pretty, but if you’re goal is to create art without faith or love, a little ugliness here and there isn’t going to stop you.

************

And extra bonus link: some images from David’s little-known anthology, The New Graphics Revival, which I also discuss in that Comixology column.