Comic Book Resources

Everyone's A Critic: A round-up of comic book reviews and thinkpieces

Pim & Francie In Golden Days

• The Comics Comics crew are having another cage match, although this time they're calling it a round table, about Al Columbia's Pim & Francie book.

• Curt Purcell continues his examination of the Blackest Night event, this time looking at some of the tie-in books.

• Ng Suat Tong examines the pleasures of owning original art and how that can change our appreciation for a particular cartoonist.

• Also at HU, Noah Berlatsky looks at the psychosexual underpinnings of the superhero genre, and how it's shifted over time.

• NPR's Glen Weldon talks about why Neil Gaiman's Sandman series matters: "[It] remains one of the most literate, imaginative and intricately plotted accomplishments in long-form comics storytelling out there."

• Sandy Bilus recommends Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms: "The book never feels preachy, but it certainly forces the reader to focus on this issue and raises his or her level of understanding about what the people of Hiroshima have endured."

• Joe McCulloch compares/contrasts the new Astro Boy movie with the original Tezuka manga.

• Johanna Draper Carlson reviews the first volume of The Lizard Prince: "This manga, a romance in a magical fantasy setting, has enough humor to make it an enjoyable read for the young and young-thinking."

• Tangognat on Vol. 5 of 2oth Century Boys: "Everytime I pick this series up I’m reminded again how great it is."

SPX '09 | The Critics Roundtable, transcribed

Here's what we talk about when we talk about comics.

In front of a packed house at September's Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Maryland, a group of critics from around the comics Internet and beyond talked shop at the annual Critics Roundtable panel. Moderated by Bill Kartalopolous, the panel featured Comics Journal founder Gary Groth, New York Times critic Douglas Wolk, bloggers Joe "Jog" McCulloch, Tucker Stone, and Rob Clough, and a pair of Robot 6ers, Chris Mautner and myself. I'm happy to present a transcript of the panel below.

Sure, I'm a little biased, but I think it's a fascinating discussion. The topics include the differences between print and online criticism, the notion of "the critical discourse," negative critiques and much more. For some panelists, things have already changed since the panel took place: Groth, who gets quizzed on why he isn't a bigger contributor to the comics Internet, is getting ready to jump in with both feet with the relaunched Comics Journal, of which Clough is going to be a part; while my membership in Robot 6 wasn't even a glimmer in JK Parkin's eye yet. And with a good deal of familiarity between the critics -- I believe seven out of eight have written for the Journal and half write for The Savage Critic(s) -- the back-and-forth was fluid.

If you'd like to listen along, you can download this mp3 recording of the panel. It's worth it just to hear the chaos surrounding Tucker's bathroom break.

Click the jump to read the transcript. Now, without further ado...

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Comics Journal to beef up print, Web presence

The Comics Journal #300

Tom Spurgeon broke the news yesterday that The Comics Journal, Fantagraphics' long-standing magazine of comics news and criticism, will be altering their coverage and format following the release of their 300th issue.

The announcement came via a letter sent to subscribers that Spurgeon posted online. In it, the staff unveiled a two-fold plan which entailed enhancing the magazine's Web site considerably and turning the print publication into an elaborate, twice-yearly affair.

Acknowledging the changing role the Internet has played in comics coverage, the letter states the current TCJ site will become "full-service," with daily updates, and deliver "everything you love about the magazine," including the interviews, news and "real journalism" the magazine has become known for. The site is currently best known as the home of Online Editor Dirk Deppey's daily Journalista column.

As for the print magazine, it will become "considerably larger and more elaborate" than the current iteration, and will only come out semi-annually. While the price of the new magazine is still up in the air, individual issues will cost more than they do now, though the letter promises that a single issue will never cost more than $19.99.

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Everyone's A Critic: A round-up of comic book reviews and thinkpieces

Exit Wounds

• Eddie Campbell has been offering one great critique after another lately, first on
Asterios Polyp and David Mazzuchelli's ability to convey a sense of place, and then on Rutu Modan's Exit Wounds ("The impressive thing about Exit Wounds is that there is a keen organizing intelligence at work at every single level of it, from top to bottom."

• Jeet Heer ruminates on the concept of the "proto-graphic novel," i.e. graphic novels that were published before the term became ubiquitous.

• It's a few days old, but this review of R. Crumb's Genesis adaptation by Bill Kartalopoulos is still well worth your time.

• I don't always link to Tucker Stone's "Comics of the Weak" round-up, but this one's worth noting, as he mimics the prose of "controversial French writer Michel Houllebecq," which leads to bits like this one on Batman:

Gotham City has but two types of people-those who wreak violence, and those who have violence wreaked upon them. The first type are all men, for the most part, although the occasional lesbian is permitted participation, as long as she has previously received approval from whomever currently holds the title of most cruel. (Said participation is usually considered an important story point, further cementing the little respect or interest that these stories have for women--there are few other places in fiction where "the bitch can stay" is considered interesting or dynamic.

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'Fahrenheit' review gets folks hot under the collar

Fahrenheit 451

Writing for Slate, Sarah Boxer (who, it should be noted, is a cartoonist in her own right) penned a review of Tim Hamilton's adaptation of the Ray Bradbury classic Fahrenheit 451 that — initially at least — seems flummoxed by the whole "graphic novel boom" thing:

It's hard to know what on earth Bradbury was thinking. Did he just give in to the enemy? And what was the artist, Hamilton, thinking, when he illustrated the fire chief's rant with his own tableau of degraded books: Hamlet for Dimwits, Time magazine, and, yes, two Classic Comics editions, Moby Dick and Treasure Island. (Hamilton himself illustrated a comic-book version of Treasure Island before taking on Fahrenheit 451.) It's as if author and artist were vigorously waving a white flag and shouting, "We couldn't beat 'em, so we joined 'em!"

Later on she adds:

Graphic novels may win some new readers, but the text is almost always shortened to make way for pictures, and what survives of it is radically different: It's mostly dialogue, like a screenplay. In the graphic-novel version of Fahrenheit 451, almost all of the words are spoken. Even the pictures confirm that the novel has become a script.

By the end of the review,  however,  she turns around and suggests that Hamilton's adaptation was more in keeping with Bradbury's own interests in the medium and the book's larger themes. It's all very confusing.

Still, who reads all the way through an article these days? The damage was done and the review was muddled and grumpy enough to incite a firestorm in the comments section:

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Everyone's A Critic: A round-up of comic book reviews and thinkpieces

• Andrew Rilstone's 60-page zine on Watchmen, Who Sent the Sentinels, has been garnering quite a bit of attention, mainly because of passages like this:

Who Sent the Sentinels

I've never stopped being surprised that something as geeky as Watchmen is so popular with people who are not geeks. How can a book which so full of superhero in-jokes be so much admired by people who have never read a superhero story -- by people who purport to dislike superhero stories -- by people who sometimes end up denying that Watchmen has got superheroes in it... Maybe Watchmen manages to generate its ironic double-vision internally: the text itself tells you both what superheroes are meant to be like, and what these superheroes are actually like, and it would do so even if there had never been another superhero comic in the world... Or maybe the people who were so enthusiastic about Watchmen were unaware of the idea of superheros, and read the story simply as a story - with an un-ironic single vision.

In which case they'd be reading a different comic to me and it wouldn't be surprising if they assessed it differently.

I've barely had a chance to do more than scrape the surface of this thing but I like what I've perused so far.

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Everyone's A Critic: A round-up of comic book reviews and thinkpieces.

The Color of Earth

Moving quickly, while I'm on break:

* Good Comics for Kids holds an interesting roundtable discussion of Kim Dong Hwa's The Color of Earth.

* Speaking of roundtables, man, I wish I had gone to TCAF just to catch this panel.

* Time for another lengthy and fascinating essay from Even A Monkey Can Draw Manga co-author Kentaro Takekuma. This time he examines the work of Akira creator Katsuhiro Otomo.

* John K. talks about the whys and wherefores of good composition, using Yogi Bear and N.C. Wyeth as examples.

* Noah Berlatsky tears apart Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. Tom Crippen stitches it back together.

* The Guardian's Rory McLean reviews Burma Chronicles.

* How long does it take you to read a standard comic book page. Neil Cohn ponders this question.

Everyone's a Critic: A round-up of comic reviews and thinkpieces

A Comic Studies Reader

* Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester talk about their latest book, The Comic Studies Reader, among a myriad number of other things, on the Inkstuds podcast.

* Speaking of podcasts, The Comics Journal has posted a panel discussion between Dark Horse editors Philip Simon and Carl Horn, Funimation’s Adam Sheenan and Japanamerica author Roland Kelts on the state of the manga and anime industries that took place during Sakura-Con in Seattle.

* There's a new site in town, Comic Book Critics, which collects reviews of various comics and then assigns them a score from 1-10 based on the consensus, a la Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic.

* Mark Seigel and the rest of the First Second staff review the new Scott Pilgim book, comic book style!

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Robot Love | I ♥ discussing comics

Editor’s Note: With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, we’ve declared this the week of Robot Love and resurrected I ♥ Comics. In one of our favorite features, various comics creators, bloggers, retailers and fans discuss the things they love about the medium.

Today’s guest contributor is blogger and critic Tucker Stone, who writes a weekly column for Comixology called "This Ship Is Totally Sinking" and blogs at The Factual Opinion.

by Tucker Stone

Hmmph. I used to think the easiest answer to a question like this—a question that demands a sort of explanation of how far you want to go with your definition of the word love—is just to throw out a pat “I love comics” one and leave it at that. I used to think that, and “used to” can both mean that A) I don’t think that anymore or B) I’ll think it again later. So yeah, what do I love about comics?

I used to take these religion classes in college with this woman who had gotten herself a good bit of the Worldwide Acclaim through being listed as one of the world’s most effective English-speaking preachers. She was, if I remember correctly, the only one on the list who wasn’t a dude, and one of the few Americans. I didn’t take her classes because of that—that’s not the sort of list that would have crossed my Doom Patrol covered desk when I was trying to find a college that would take me away from frying chicken. But I ended up taking her classes, and it was one of the more challenging experiences of my life, that is if you gauge “challenging” by “things that mostly involve thinking and talking” instead of, you know, something that involves heavy lifting or lightning reflexes. Her classes filled up fast—religion majors got first crack, then the regular student body and any empty seats were taken by non-students, most of whom were her former parishioners who showed up since she’d discontinued her regular preaching upon entering the education field. (In other words, they missed her enough to pay to be around her.) I’m sitting there in class one day, and this really nice old lady piped up in the middle of a discussion on the Book of Job, which is what the entire semester focused on, and said that no, she’d never—not once—had a moment in her life where her faith had been tested. Never had a moment of doubt. Never a moment of question. Not one. She was really firm about it, in that nice old lady voice of hers.

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Just Past the Horizon: Mary Who?

Today I address the subject of "Mary Sues." I promise profanity beneath the cut.
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