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.

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

TCJ #293 is (more or less) out. I’ve got a couple of long reviews (of Alan Moore’s Wildstorm comics and Hideo Azuma’s Disappearance Diary) and a couple of short reviews (of the shojo title Nightmares for Sale and Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner. I believe that’s a four-for-four negative review ration there, so check it out if snark is what you want.

Also, and more productively, HU’s own Tom Crippen has a lengthy interview with Alex Robinson. So go forth and purchase, or at least browse in a store near you. (And TCJ is now available in at least some bookstores, for those of you who don’t want to darken the Direct Market’s door….)

Just so regular hooded fans don’t get worried, Tom’s got some real life stuff to take care of, and won’t be around for a month or so. So you’re stuck with just me again for a while.

I’ve got a new column up at Comixology about David Heatley. One of the books I talk about is a little known anthology he edited (and which I participated in.) Comixology has a couple images from that book, but I thought I’d add a few more here for those who are interested:

by and ©Patrick Dunne

by and ©Michael Heatley

by and ©Juan Eclarinal

by and ©Donei Ebenezer