criticism
Comics A.M. | ‘Spider-Island’ tops sluggish July; BOOM!’s Disney titles end in October
Amazing Spider-Man #666
Publishing | Sales of comic books and graphic novels in July fell 6.17 percent versus July 2010, with dollar sales of comic books sold through Diamond Comic Distributors falling 4.27 percent and graphic novels falling 10.10 percent year-over-year. Unit sales for comics were only down slightly, at .52 percent, which ICv2 points out “indicates that comic book cover prices have in fact declined. The problem is that circulation numbers have not risen enough to make up for the decline in revenue from lower cover prices.” Marvel’s Amazing Spider-Man #666, which kicked off the “Spider-Island” event, was the best-selling comic of the month, while League of Extraordinary Gentlemen III Century #2 from Top Shelf topped the graphic novel chart. John Jackson Miller has commentary.
Marvel saw a slight increase in its dollar market share for July when compared to June, while DC’s jumped from 28.03 percent in June to 30.55 percent in July. IDW, the No. 5 publisher in terms of dollar share in June, moved to the No. 3 position in July. The top seven publishers were rounded out by Image, Dark Horse, Dynamite and BOOM! [ICv2]
- August 8, 2011 @ 06:55 AM by Brigid Alverson and JK Parkin
Under new management: The Comics Journal revamps, relaunches its website
The Comics Journal, a venerable, influential and controversial mainstay of comics journalism that had developed an air of the walking wounded in recent years, has radically revamped and relaunched its online presence. Its new editors are Dan Nadel and Tim Hodler, best known as the minds behind Comics Comics magazine and, in Nadel’s case, the art-comics publisher PictureBox Inc.
The print version of the Journal will continue to be helmed by founding editor and Fantagraphics co-publisher Gary Groth, acting in a more hands-on capacity as of the forthcoming Issue #301 than he has in years, by the sound of it. Kristy Valenti serves as editorial coordinator. Contributors to the new TCJ.com include Frank Santoro, Jeet Heer, Joe “Jog” McCulloch, Ken Parille, Ryan Holmberg, Rob Clough, Richard Gehr, R.C. Harvey, R. Fiore, Vanessa Davis, Bob Levin, Patrick Rosenkranz, Nicole Rudick, Dash Shaw, Jason T. Miles, Andrew Leland, Naomi Fry, Jesse Pearson, Tom De Haven, Shaenon Garrity, Matt Seneca, Tucker Stone and Hillary Chute. On a Robot 6-related note, my colleague Chris Mautner and I will also be contributing.
A look at the new site reveals a multifaceted approach, with reviews, columns, interviews, lengthy features and essays (the current lead feature is a look at the legacy of, and turmoil surrounding, Frank Frazetta by writer Bob Levin), an events calendar, selected highlights from the magazine’s archives, and more. The biggest news, perhaps, is that Hodler and Nadel plan to have literally the entire 300-issue Comics Journal archive scanned and posted online by the end of this year and made available in its entirety to the print magazine’s subscribers. Click here for Hodler and Nadel’s welcome letter, in which they explain some of the changes and reveal a bit of what’s ahead. (And click here for their farewell letter to Comics Comics.)
- March 7, 2011 @ 08:00 AM by Sean T. Collins
Best Online Comics Criticism 2010
If you’ve made your way around the Interwebs at all over the past few days (or at least the comic-book derived portion of such) you may have noticed a couple of posts devoted to what’s being called the “Best Online Comics Criticism of 2010.” And, unless your memory is as faulty as mine, you may also recall similar lists being made around the same time last year, as this is an annual event created and overseen by the esteemed critic (and Hooded Utilitarian contributor) Ng Suat Tong.
Suat was kind enough back in January of ’09 to invite me to be one of the judges for this year’s round-up. the other judges consisting of Tim Hodler, Johanna Draper Carlson, Melinda Beasi, Derik Badman, Shannon Garrity and Bill Randall. I’ll go through this year’s winners, with my personal commentary in a minute, but if you’re the impatient type, you can see the final results here and here.
First, some brief observances …
- January 22, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by Chris Mautner
Quote of the day | Bendis on comics journalism, again
Brian Michael Bendis
and quite a few writers complained to me today that they would write better but they aren’t getting paid to do it.
having lived the first 10 years of my career making no money and having lived with artists and writers who have done the same… I don’t care about that.
you either work really hard and really try to make something worthwhile or you don’t. money has nothing to do with it. if you find a way to make money doing it fantastic. that I lived for many years under the impression that I was never ever ever going to make a dime. and so did a great many of my peers. money and the quality of your work should have nothing to do with each other. it just an excuse to fail.
–Brian Michael Bendis on his message board today (echoing comments he made on Twitter earlier on), elaborating on his call yesterday for more in-depth comics criticism and journalism.
This isn’t quite what he’s talking about, but I did want to say a few words about this aspect of Bendis’s critique specifically. True, many artists in every art form toil primarily for love of the game, out of an innate need to create rather than out of hope for monetary reward. But journalism about and criticism of comics of the sort Bendis is calling for makes making comics, never the world’s most lucrative profession for the vast majority of people who participate in it, look like the California Gold Rush of 1848 by comparison. In a way, it stands to reason: Given the comparatively small number of paying gigs in comics, and the comparatively small audience for the product of those gigs, the number of paying gigs for comics criticism and journalism of any kind — including copy-and-paste and pseudo-hip snark, let alone in-depth investigative reporting and pages-long close reading of creators’ work — is going to be vanishingly low.
- September 24, 2010 @ 02:30 PM by Sean T. Collins
Quote of the day | Brian Michael Bendis vs. the comics blogosphere
comics as an art form is in fantastic shape. the only things missing? thoughtful longform investigative journalism and critique. all we get nowadays are knee-jerk reviews and cut and paste blogging. which I have no problem with but it’s ALL we get. on a slow news week like this one I would love to see some of our better reporters rolling up her sleeves and helping the medium thrive. even reviews of trade paperbacks and graphic novels have seemed to have fallen by the wayside even though the sales are crazy large.
you’ll forgive me but I think that a snarky pseudo-hip attitude towards mainstream comics is uninteresting. if you’re a cut-and-paste blogger or comics journalist and I just annoyed the shit out of you… prove me wrong.
I am enjoying the e-mails from professionals agreeing with me but not wanting to stir the pot
Cut and paste blogging is cut and pastes from an article from another source… then adding a line of comment & signing their name to it.
I’m sorry I got on my high horse, I just do love this medium and I know a lot of you out there do as well. I miss amazing heroes
–Brian Michael Bendis, the industry’s most popular writer, taking aim at a lot of people who write about the industry, on Twitter today. Shots fired! Shots fired!
(And now, by cutting-and-pasting his tweets, adding a line of comment, and signing my name to it, I’ve become part of the problem. Dammit!)
- September 23, 2010 @ 02:01 PM by Sean T. Collins
The last word on superhero comics?
from Final Crisis by Doug Mahnke
Last week, Tom Spurgeon took a page from Monty Python and said he’d like to have an argument: “What are all these superhero comics really saying?” Given the genre’s domination of both the Direct Market and the comics internet, Spurgeon said he wanted to see a more in-depth discussion of what the heck is going on in these weird and wild comics, particularly regarding their heroes’ behavior and any potential larger message beyond “superheroes are awesome.”
In response, I proposed an argument of my own: “Why do superheroes dominate the online conversation the way they do?” In light of how many comics commentators and critics clearly read a wide variety of comics, or at least have been known to from time to time, I’m perplexed by why The Rise of Arsenal gets so much more airtime than Art in Time or 20th Century Boys.
- June 1, 2010 @ 12:00 PM by Sean T. Collins
Do you need to like a character to like the comic he’s in?
from Wilson by Daniel Clowes
“Likable characters are for weak-minded narcissists.” So says Daniel Clowes, the author of the recently released Wilson — and given that the book and its irascible protagonist have proven about as divisive as the Lost finale, his tongue may be only partially in cheek. The titular character in Clowes’s novel is a self-described people person who’s constantly decrying the way culture and technology fragment and divide society, but he does this in the nastiest and most insulting way possible to everyone he knows, leaving him no better off than the IT workers, superhero-blockbuster fans and so on he lambastes. He’s a tough character to like.
But does that mean Wilson is a tough book to like? Isn’t there such a thing as an unlikable character you love to read about nonetheless? Tim Hodler of Comics Comics says no and yes, respectively. In a post on the book, Hodler argues that the response to Wilson, particularly the negative response, has centered far too much on Wilson’s unlikability, ignoring the way other art forms have showcased jerks for centuries to memorable effect:
- May 25, 2010 @ 02:16 PM by Sean T. Collins
What comics arguments do you want to hear more often?
Hulk vs. Superman by Mike Deodato Jr.
When you think about it, it only makes sense: Because the comics conversation is so dominated by old arguments, it can be tough to make room for new ones. That’s the thesis of a new post by The Comics Reporter’s Tom Spurgeon listing “Three Arguments We Could Be Having.” After we here at Robot 6 pivoted off Spurgeon’s interview with Noah Berlatsky to list the comics arguments we’d prefer never to hear again, Spurge is returning the favor by suggesting three he thinks we’d be better off having in their place: “1) Does reprinting archival comics have a moral component?; 2) Why are so many Direct Market shops still female unfriendly?; 3) What are all these superhero comics really saying?”
In other words, while the current golden age of reprints is a boon to all fans of the medium, what do its practitioners owe the creators of the comics they’re reprinting in terms of not just royalties, but also the best possible packaging and analysis of the material? Everyone’s got horror stories about some creepy store where the wares or employees make it a “shop at your own risk” situation for women and girls — why has that not translated to industry-wide action on those affronted consumers’ behalf? Should superhero comics be expected to have more of a message than “superheroes are awesome,” and if that is the message you go with, shouldn’t that be reflected across the board instead of occasionally having them indulge in really nasty behavior or suffer jarringly grim setbacks to get across the importance of a particular storyline?
- May 24, 2010 @ 02:45 PM by Sean T. Collins
What comics arguments do you never want to hear again?
Sometimes an interview can be interesting because of the questions the interview subject doesn’t answer. Case in point: Blogger and critic Noah Berlatsky’s interview with The Comics Reporter’s Tom Spurgeon. Pivoting off a recent Savage Critics roundtable on Daniel Clowes’s divisive black-comedy graphic novel Wilson, Berlatksy sets Spurgeon up with a characterization of literary comics of the sort Clowes creates as self-pitying, misanthropic, pessimistic, and tedious. It’s a characterization Spurgeon’s having none of:
[Berlatsky:] …there’s a default stance in certain regions of lit comics land which is basically: “life sucks and people are awful.” Which I think is glib and overdone and tedious, a, and which, b, can be made even more irritating by the fact that the people promulgating it are, you know, fairly successful, and (what with various autobiographical elements thrown in) the result often looks like a lot of self-pity over not very much.
So…I’m wondering how strongly you would push back against that characterization of lit comics in general…and also whether you feel it is or is not ever appropriate to think about a creator’s biography in relation to his or her work in that way.
[Spurgeon:] At this point I wouldn’t push back at all against the stance that says the default mode in lit comics land is basically “life sucks and people are awful” because it’s no longer an argument I take seriously. I don’t think it’s true by any reasonable measure and I’m done with entertaining the notion until someone presents the argument in a much more effective or compelling fashion than what always sounds to me like some angry, lonely, re-written Usenet post from 1997.
- May 19, 2010 @ 11:36 AM by Sean T. Collins
Three reviews worth a thousand words
from Blue Spring by Taiyo Matsumoto
A great comic review can make you feel like you’ve read the book without showing you so much as a panel…but, y’know, showing a panel really can’t hurt. And three recent reviews — Tucker Stone on Taiyo Matsumoto’s Blue Spring, Charles Hatfield on Blaise Larmee’s Young Lions, and Noah Berlatsky on Junji Ito’s Uzumaki — really struck me with their well-selected spot art. A glance at each review’s illustrations — dynamic, sexy, and horrific respectively — can probably tell you whether these books are the kind of thing you wanna check out, which is great, because each review is a solid examination of what makes them worth checking out in the first place. Click the links, feast your eyes, and see what you think.
- May 18, 2010 @ 01:30 PM by Sean T. Collins
At least there’s one superhero movie that doesn’t suck…
Is the superhero genre a cinematic dead-end? Since Salon’s Matt Zoller Seitz made the case last week, the topic has been much on the minds of the comics commentariat. Recently, Tom Spurgeon, Tim O’Neil, Charles Hatfield and yours truly have all weighed in on the matter, focusing on aspects like the power of individual moments or performances vs. that of the story as a whole, the storytelling techniques mandated by Hollywood’s need to get a return on the massive investments required for the genre, the question of why fans get so worked up for the movies when they have any number of (usually superior) comics about the same characters to read, and personal film-by-film rundowns of the genre’s high and low points.
Of course, this was all before I saw Black20′s magnificent made-up mash-up trailer for Iron Man IV. Now, it’s possible that this is a parody of super-sequels’ tendency to over-stuff themselves with new characters, extra villains and half a dozen subplots. On the other hand, when you’re presented with an Iron Man movie starring Robert Downey Jr., Fred Gwynne, Jim Carrey, James Brown, Vanilla Ice, Carl Weathers, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Barack Obama, M. Bison, Mickey Rourke, Dolph Lundgren, David Arquette, Sylvester Stallone, Talia Shire, Don Cheadle, Terrence Howard, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Johnny 5, who’s gonna complain? If you can make it through the 2:19 mark without laughing out loud, maybe you’re a superhero.
(Via Topless Robot)
- May 11, 2010 @ 01:00 PM by Sean T. Collins
Critic (and superhero fan) to superhero movies: DROP DEAD
from Wilson by Daniel Clowes
“Superheroes suck!” So blares the headline for the excellent film critic Matt Zoller Seitz’s provocative Salon.com article on the movie genre that will once again conquer the world this weekend in the form of Iron Man 2. I know, I know, a lot of you are either rolling your eyes or breaking out the torches and pitchforks. But Seitz is a far cry from your usual Ebert-ian dismissal of an entire subgenre on some sort of moral or aesthetic high ground. No, he loves superheroes — and it’s because he thinks so few movies do them justice that he’s sick of their cinematic incarnations.
After first citing his lifelong love of superheroes and a trio of memorable images from recent superhero movies — the Joker sticking his head out the car window in The Dark Knight, Superman hoisting the Daily Planet’s globe in Superman Returns, Peter Parker walking down the street to “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” in Spider-Man 2 — Seitz makes his case:
- May 6, 2010 @ 02:36 PM by Sean T. Collins
NYT critic perplexed by narrative device
The New York Times doesn’t review a lot of comics, so when they set Tanya Lee Stone loose on Sarah Stewart Taylor and Ben Towle’s Amelia Earhart: This Broad Ocean, that’s news. Stone is the author of a prose biography of Earhart as well as the much-acclaimed historical work Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to Dream. But Stone’s major critique of the book is that it mixes fact and fiction without distinguishing between the two.
Taylor also creates a narrator who did not exist — Grace Goodland, a girl reporter following the events for The Trepassey Herald. Other than a few quotations — like the content of a telegram Amelia dictates to a clerk: “Thanks fatherly telegram. No washing necessary. Socks, underwear worn out” — the conversations between her and the other characters seem to be based on research, but largely invented. As an Amelia Earhart fan, I’ve always thought she was exciting enough without any assistance.
Maybe, but graphic novels tell stories, and no matter how interesting the facts may be, the creators need a narrative framework to hang those facts on. Grace Goodland is so obviously a point-of-view character that it’s hard to imagine readers in the target age group (10 to 14, say) thinking that she is a real person. Perhaps the book should have included an fact vs. fiction section in the back, a la The Magic School Bus, but teenage readers would likely find that patronizing. The book is meant to be read as a story, not a biography—the creators limit their scope to a six-day period in Earhart’s life, and they use the character of Grace to show her impact on the women of her time, something that wouldn’t have been possible in a strictly factual presentation. Sometimes fiction can convey more truth than facts, and by presenting Earhart in context, the creators provide readers with an introduction to Earhart and a jumping-off point for those who want to know more.
- March 23, 2010 @ 10:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Comics in 2009: Hot or Not?
Did the year we just left behind fail comics fans? That’s been arguably the hottest topic among comics bloggers and critics over the past month or so. Faced with the task of assembling their thoughts about the best and worst the medium brought us in the final year of the millennium’s first decade, a great many writers say that something just wasn’t right with what they read. Others, however, say the fault may not lie with comics overall, but just with the comics the first group was reading. And ground zero for the debate is the Savage Critic(s) group blog (to which I am an all too occasional contributor).
Perhaps the strongest — and certainly the strangest — articulation of the “something went wrong in ’09″ point of view was made by the inimitable critic Abhay Khosla. In a piece titled “So, Why Do Nerdy Things Work?”, Khosla took an essay ostensibly concluding a series on the pros and cons of John Rogers’s <i>Blue Beetle</i> run and used it as a springboard for discussing the year of his discontent. He kicked it off by assembling a round-up of similar skepticism:
I wasn’t very happy in 2009 anyways.
Apparently, I’m not completely alone: Messrs. Tim Callahan (“something’s missing”), Chad Nevett (“I think people are just tired… I can’t really defend things.”), David Brothers (“I’m bored to death”), Dr. Geoff Klock(“It’s diminishing returns… it is time to stop showing up on Wednesdays…”), Alan David Doane (“I have to admit that I have not been reading a lot of comic books lately”), and well… me in my last essay, according to some of you (“I’m pretty sure whoever wrote this comic is the Green River Killer, guys. I’ve been spending time in the crime lab, and I think I just cracked this mother wide open.”).
- January 5, 2010 @ 09:45 AM by Sean T. Collins
Robot 6, Comics Comics, Inkstuds, and the Best of 2009
Are you like LL Cool J in that you can’t live without your radio — but nor can you live without your comics? I know the feeling. That’s why I was so excited to be a part of the annual best-of episode of Inkstuds, the venerable comics podcast hosted by Robin McConnell. My fellow Robot 6-er Chris Mautner and I were joined by Comics Comics’ Tim Hodler to discuss Asterios Polyp, George Sprott, 20th Century Boys, Pluto, You Are There, You’ll Never Know, Multiforce, and The Photographer, and we even found the time to debate whether or not we’re in a comics Golden Age. Give it a listen!
- December 18, 2009 @ 08:45 AM by Sean T. Collins