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]

Darkwing Duck #18

Publishing | BOOM!’s Disney comics officially end in October with the publication of DuckTales #6 and Darkwing Duck #18, for which the solicitation says, “This is it fans, the last Disney single issue from KABOOM! has arrived. It’s the end of an era as we say goodbye to Disney at KABOOM!” [Comics Continuum, via]

Conventions | The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in New York will hold the 10th annual MoCCA Fest on April 28-29, the same weekend the Stumptown Festival will occur in Portland, Ore. Heidi MacDonald has commentary. [Convention Scene]

Creators | Brian Heater talks to artist Joseph Remnant about illustrating Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland after Pekar passed away last year. [The Daily Cross Hatch]

Comics | Robert Stanley Martin has posted the results of the Hooded Utilitarian’s International Best Comics Poll, which were voted on by 211 editors, journalists, academics and retailers (including Robot 6 contributors Sean T. Collins, Chris Mautner and Matt Seneca). Topping the list is Peanuts, followed by Krazy Kat, Calvin and Hobbes, Watchmen and Maus. [The Hooded Utilitarian]

Organizations | Derek McCaw interviews Dr. Mauricio Heilbron, the Hero Initiative’s medical consultant. [Fanboy Planet]

FreakAngels

Webcomics | Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield’s long-running FreakAngels webcomic has reached its conclusion. [Warren Ellis]

Webcomics | Doug TenNapel has brought his webcomic Ratfist to an end after 150 episodes, and he reveals that a print version is in the works. [Ratfist]

Retailers | San Francisco-based toy and comics retailer Neon Monster will close down its brick-and-mortar shop on Aug. 7 and its online store on Aug. 14. [Neon Monster, via Twitter]

Reviews | Cartoon Brew rounds up commentary on BOOM!’s third DuckTales comic book in a post titled “Is This the Worst Disney Comic of All-Time?” Per CB poster Amid: “Panels are flipped and repeated, characters speak to other characters that aren’t even drawn into the comic, backgrounds appear to be drawn by a twelve-year-old in MS Paint, and even the cover is an uninspired swipe of an earlier Daan Jippes cover.” The comic even inspired one fan to write a song about it. [Cartoon Brew]

Manga | The four-woman manga supergroup CLAMP is resuming work on Legal Drug after an eight-year hiatus. The series was published in the U.S. by Tokyopop, and there is no word yet on whether the new volumes will be published here. [Anime News Network]

Comics | Sean Kleefeld shows off some new pieces of original comics art he just picked up. [Kleefeld on Comics]

Fandom | Chad Rouch remembers the day his brother tossed Captain America’s shield out of a moving car. [Orlando Sentinel]

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.)

Since I’m writing for the thing, I may not be in the best position to comment about it, but quite aside from my own minor role in the proceedings, the move is a welcome and long-overdue one. The Journal is the most important publication of comics news and criticism in the medium’s history — it all but singlehandedly made the case that comics can and should be capital-A Art for years, an argument that at this point it can be said to have won handily. It also pushed hard (belligerently, some might say) to hold the medium to higher aesthetic standards, and the industry to higher ethical ones. But its online presence has always been comparatively rudderless and ad-hoc. For years, Dirk Deppey’s Journalista linkblog was the magazine’s primary voice online; since I think none of those years corresponded with Deppey’s tenure atop the Journal‘s print incarnation, the two outlet’s editorial voices never quite jibed. In the absence of a strong vision like what Groth’s was for years in the print version, off-brand aspects of the magazine’s website — its Mos Eisley-esque message board; Noah Berlatsky’s pugnacious Hooded Utilitarian group blog — filled the void, to the dismay of many readers and creators, and even to the dismay of the people involved in those aspects of the site themselves. The problem was compounded when the Journal radically reduced its print output (it is currently an annual), leaving a relaunched website plagued by unwieldy design, hazy editorial focus, and sporadic posting by its contributors to pick up the slack. With the recent shutdown of Journalista, HU, and the relatively new group blog The Panelists, it was clear some kind of major change, likely one devoted to streamlining and focusing the magazine’s editorial output online, was in the offing. Handing the Journal‘s website to an experienced print/web editorial team with a clear vision of comics and how to talk about them, one that moreover has been on the leading edge of comics criticism for some years now, is a major step in the right direction.

It’s funny: I think that since about 2007 or so I’ve been saying in “how do you solve a problem like the Journal” conversations that if I were God-Emperor of Comics, I’d just hand the thing to Hodler and Nadel. For nearly that long, I’ve been saying that its website should basically be Pitchfork for comics: an easy-to-navigate, accessible-to-newcomers, unafraid-to-ruffle-some-feathers, go-to site for people interested in a certain form of artistic expression. And lo, that’s basically what has come to pass.

For much more on the move, see Tom Spurgeon’s excellent interview with Tim Hodler and Dan Nadel. As a former editor of TCJ himself, Tom’s able to work the unique contours of the matter better than most. And as Spurge also points out, this means The Comics Journal message board is dead. Here’s how Tom reacts:

I’m happy to see the message board gone. I feel much more responsible for the dark side of comics culture that festered there than I do any sense of community it may have fostered, more than I do whatever exposure to little-known works it may have facilitated. It was a place that had some virtues but mostly, I think, it was a place where unhappy people went to be even less happy. Its time has more than passed, and like many of the people that once gave entire working afternoons to stringing along five or six life-and-death rage-sessions at a time, I don’t think I’d been there more than a half-dozen times in the last three years. It may be the thing in life I spent the most time doing from which I keep the least amount of positive memories. I wish the board could have been a whole lot better. It always made me feel like we had done something horribly wrong in putting it up in the first place. Its departure is a load off my mind.

If you’ve never been there, I can hear you asking already: Was it really that bad? In a word, yes. Actually, in another word: worse. The fact that I’m saying this despite the formative role that board played in getting me thinking and writing seriously about comics, and despite the lasting friendships I formed there (Spurge included), should tell you something. The sheer volume of nastiness and trollery was unrivaled, and all the more disconcerting given that this wasn’t some battle board where Thor and Superman fans were duking it out for supremacy and where you’d therefore expect some smackdowns, but a place that could otherwise have been utilized for intelligent discussion of The ACME Novelty Library and what have you. There came a time that I realized that every visit to that godforsaken board made me enjoy comics less. What a terrible thing to be able to say about the reader-interaction forum for the greatest magazine about comics ever. The new regime’s messboard mercy-killing is a major mitzvah in and of itself. I’m looking forward to seeing what else they can do.

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 …

When I was first invited to attend this shindig I was rather excited — one might even say giddy — at the prospect. First of all there’s the honor of being asked to contribute, but I also hoped there would be a good deal of animated conversations — that I and my fellow judges would heatedly defend or deride the choices being offered and a healthy, robust debate would ensue. I even made the suggestion to Suat that he set up a Google group to facilitate said discussion.

Needless to say it never occurred. We merely sent our choices to Suat every so often, made our final votes, consolidated them slightly when necessary and that was that. I can’t honestly say I’m terribly surprised. Enthusiasm wanes even in the best of times and it was hard enough to remember to make a decent enough list of links to send to Suat and company every couple of months, let alone write a treatise on why so-and-so’s essay was the bee’s knees. This honestly isn’t meant as a complaint so much as it is an observation — it’s not like I did anything to encourage discussion.

While I did try to branch out to sites and critics I wasn’t as familiar with, for the most part I stayed within my circle of familiarity, as I suspect a number of the judges did. My criteria for what got my attention and what didn’t wasn’t very stringent. I was simply looking for work that was very well written and had something insightful to say about the work (or works) it was discussing.

So without further ado, here are my thoughts on this year’s winners and who I voted for:

1. “The Other Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name”, by Jason Thompson (6 votes) – I voted for this one, although I also considered voting for Thompson’s essay on morality in action manga instead. In the end though, I think I was simply impressed with how Thompson was able to address an uncomfortable and taboo subject (the popularity of incest manga) and provide more than just a Readers Digest-style overview of the genre, adding insight and some sharp analysis.

2 (tie). “Ayako”, by Katherine Dacey (5 votes). My original vote was for Dacey’s piece on Sexy Voice and Robot with Harriet the Spy, which I think is a brilliant comparison and the sort of left-field thinking that makes me appreciate her writing as much as I do. Her review of Ayako was the clear front-runner among the judges though, and in the end I was willing to alter my vote because, while I prefer the other essay, the latter remains a strong review that

2 (tie). “The Problem with American Vampires Is That They Just Don’t Think”, by Joe McCulloch (5 votes). I voted for this one. Obviously I’m horribly biased as I consider Joe a friend, but I do honestly think it’s a fine piece of criticism that goes beyond the usual liked it/didn’t like it reviews that typically appear online.

4. “Born Again Again”, by Craig Fischer (4 votes). Voted for this one too. Good criticism should see connections and provide new ways of thinking about an artist’s oeuvre. Fischer’s piece on David Mazzuchelli did that for me in spades. He’s one of the few critics that really understands how to write about the visual aspects of comics, which for some reason always seems to be a tricky proposition.

5 (tie). “Tintinopolis”, by David Bordwell (3 votes). Didn’t vote for this one, though it’s an excellent essay and certainly deserves to be on the final list.

5 (tie). “The Mirror of Male-Love Love”, by Dirk Deppey (3 votes). Didn’t vote for this one either, though it was on my short list. I’m not sure why it didn’t make the final cut.

5 (tie). “Casper, Formalism, and the ‘Great’ Search Party”, by Ken Parille (3 votes). Voted for this. I’m a formalist at heart and I love essays that break down and closely examine the distinct parts of a particular comic, as Parille’s essay does rather well.

And, not that you asked for it, but here are the other pieces I voted for:

Brian Chippendale on the Avengers. I love reviews that can bring the snark without sacrificing any insight for the sake of a cheap shot. I’m also always interested in reading what creators have to say about other comics. Particularly when they’re as funny and sharp as Chippendale is.

Jog and Matt Seneca talk Kirby and Steranko. OK, this was total cheating on my part, as I had already voted for Jog once before, but I really enjoyed the hell out of this dialogue. Seneca came out of nowhere to become one of the most noteworthy critics around, and reading him and Joe go back and forth about two important artists was (Aside note: what’s amazing to me is the number of Seneca’s posts that were nominated during the year and yet he still didn’t manage to make the final round.)

The Twitter review round-up of the Ax anthology. On retrospect, I probably should have switched my vote here for Andrei Molotiu’s excellent piece on Steve Ditko, which I had completely forgotten about for reasons I can’t possibly fathom. At the time though, I was quite enamoured with this unique manner of roundtable discussion and that, despite the 140 character limit, managed to provide a good overview of the anthology and its strengths and weaknesses. Moreover, 2010 seemed to me to be a year where the critical discourse was as much reflected by online discussions and conversations as much as it was by the one-person, one-perspective essay, and I wanted to reflect that in my final vote somehow.

Abhay Khosla rambling about webcomics. Abhay will get my vote just about any year. I am always impressed at how he can seemingly let segue follow seque and yet still tie it up into a cohesive, discerning read, in this case on the plethora of webcomics out there and how that sheer amount of material can leave you, well, overstimulated and anxious. Plus, the dude’s really funny.

Michel Fiffe and Tucker Stone on Love and Rockets #3. See my comments on the Twitter/Ax thing. Plus, it’s one of the best pieces of writing on one of the best comics of the year.

In the end, there were a lot of good essays to pick from this year, so that narrowing it down to a specially chosen few was difficult. Hopefully, that suggests that good comics criticism is alive and well on the Internet. Or maybe I just have trouble making tough decisions. Or both.

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.

Certainly this work, at least the opinion-based criticism apart of it, can be done for free. I do the vast majority of my writing-about-comics for free on my personal blog, for example, and the majority of that is indeed criticism rather than just linkblogging. (And I’m proud of what I do there, and here for that matter; for whatever it’s worth, this post doesn’t stem from any perceived need to defend myself or Robot 6.) Indeed, because I’m doing it for free and don’t expect or require advertising revenue, I’m free to go negative when warranted. However, as many commenters have pointed out, the bigger news outlets are not as lucky — they have complex, intimate relationships with the companies they cover, who provide them with a combination of advertising revenue and access that can be next to impossible to do without. And yes, big-name companies and creators absolutely retaliate against perceived negative reviews or commentary by those sites. Not all of them, and not all the time, but they do. That’s something they think about.

And that’s a big reason why, contrary to what Bendis is arguing, money is much more important to the journalism equation. If you’re going to dig into the industry, you’re going to require financial stability as a buffer against potential repercussions for what you dig up; if you’re going to critique it, you need to be able to stand by that critique when the people you’re critiquing are demanding you be punished for it. And on an even more basic level, true investigative journalism requires time and resources that you can’t generate simply because you really love writing about comics. The reason why the Huffington Post is now duking it out with the venerable New York Times for news supremacy isn’t because Ariana Huffington assembled a crack squad of volunteers, it’s because she’s rich and she threw a ton of money at it, to the point where she’s now wooing columnists and reporters away from Newsweek and such. (The bikini candids help too, admittedly.) For that matter, that’s the same reason why the Times can do the job it does: It pays talented people well, so they can afford to use those talents at length. Even in my case, last year I wrote an oral history of Marvel Comics for Maxim magazine that involved a 15,000-word first draft and interviews with everyone from Joe Simon and Stan Lee to Joe Quesada and Grant Morrison. The reason I could do that was because I could afford to since I was being well paid — the months I spent working on that, the hours I spent on the phone with sources or doing transcripts or editing, was not at the expense of other, paying work I’d need to do to stay afloat.

It’s a very tough row to hoe. In the end, good work requires investment. And in general, this isn’t an investment this industry — its practitioners and its observers alike — seem willing or able to make, many exceptions, and Bendis’s wishes, notwithstanding.

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 and for clarification I go to almost every cut-and-paste comics blog

–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!)

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.

This weekend, Marc-Oliver Frisch managed to thread the needle of these two overlapping questions. On his personal blog, Frisch, best known as the DC number-cruncher for The Beat, posted a list of “10 Things Superhero Comics Do Better Than Any Other Genre in Any Other Storytelling Form”…and then announced he wouldn’t talk about superhero comics on his blog at all for an entire year.

Both ends of the post strike me as pretty provocative. Some of Frisch’s contentions are a little flimsy, I’d say — anyone who thinks superhero comics “Let Creators Explore the Limits of Their Imagination Without Being Hampered by Logic or Plausibility” or depict “Brightly Colored Folks Punching and Throwing Lightning Bolts at Each Other” better than anything else on the planet hasn’t played Super Mario Galaxy 2, for example.

But if you tone down the superlatives just a bit, you’re left with some sterling analysis. Check out these bits, arguing in favor of the superhero universes’ never-ending storylines and patchwork construction:

You can call the fact that nothing ever truly fades away in superhero comics tiresome, or creatively bankrupt, or kind of creepy psychologically, or you can sit back and enjoy them as a narrative perpetual-motion machine that can at times be entirely self-sufficient and feed on nothing but its own history to keep going.

[...]

I tend to groan and throw a coin into the piggy bank whenever the cliché of “playing in the sandbox” comes up in a creator interview, but if we’re honest for a moment, it’s absolutely true: The Marvel Universe and the DC Universe and the characters who populate them are fictional constructs thought up and realized in collaboration, passed on, left behind, inherited and remade, time and again.

And that’s a huge part of their appeal. It tends to make even the least among those constructs fascinating by association, and it tends to make the Marvel and DC worlds more than the sum of their parts.

I actually think these aspects of superhero comics make them far more interesting on a formal level, even if they’re occasionally, even frequently, stifling in the context of a single issue or storyline.

Then there’s Frisch’s farewell to superhero blogging. I know there are other critics out there with a hands-off approach to the genre — The Comics Journal’s Rob Clough comes to mind — and in the past I’ve always found that sort of self-limitation, well, limiting. If I find I have something to say about, f’rex, The Mystic Hands of Doctor Strange, shouldn’t I say it?

But sometimes imposing parameters on your writing, paradoxically, helps it blossom. By cutting his personal blog off from the easy go-to topic of the superhero serials, Frisch frees himself up to discuss…everything else. And there’s a whole lot of “everything else,” much of it worth discussing more often.

What do you make of Frisch’s post? Do you agree with his ten arguments in favor of the strength of superhero comics? And do you agree with his subsequent decision to ignore the genre entirely to explore the rest of the medium instead?

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:

Because you know who’s unlikable? Oedipus! Medea! Hamlet! Macbeth! Captain Ahab! Three out of the four brothers Karamazov (probably a different three for every reader but)! Pretty much every character from the novels of Jim Thompson, the movies of Stanley Kubrick, and the poems of T.S. Eliot! I haven’t even mentioned the comics yet, but it is clear that the form boasts a very long, venerable, and distinguished tradition of characters that don’t invite “emotional investment” (from Otto Soglow’s Little King to Mark Newgarden’s Little Nun). Not everything good in art depends upon triggering the reader’s sympathies—and emotionally attaching yourself to fictional characters is not art’s only valid response.

Obviously comics have a grand tradition of anti-heroes, or at the very least characters with a nasty or unpleasant streak, who nonetheless come across as pretty cool or sympathetic in other ways. But unlike, say, Wolverine or John Constantine, Wilson doesn’t have any of the hallmarks of badassery. He’s just flat-out repulsive. But so what? Can’t using a repulsive person as your main character open up a whole new set of story opportunities and emotional responses?

To take this back to Lost for a second — because it’s that kind of week, after all — I was always taken aback by the fervor of the show’s anti-Jack fans. All the things about him they cited as reasons he was the series’ most annoying character — his stubbornness, his failures, his insistence on taking charge and making decisions he was ill-equipped to make — made him the series’ most fascinating character to me. His journey from clear-cut square-jawed hero (albeit with daddy issues) to suicidal perpetual screw-up struck me as a hugely gutsy and rewarding choice by the show’s writers. It didn’t matter to me that I wouldn’t want to hang out with him, or follow him across the jungle; as Hodler says, that kind of thing isn’t the be-all and end-all of fiction.

So what say you, Robot 6 readers? Are you willing to give comics about creeps a chance? Or do you think comics work better when you’re able to truly feel for their characters?

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?

I’ll tell you what my big question is: Why do superheroes dominate the online conversation the way they do? Last week saw the release of Jim Woodring’s Weathercraft and Tim Hensley’s Wally Gropius, two gorgeous and weird books that truly make use of the stuff of comics and contain the kind of material you can mentally gnaw on for days on end, but I guarantee you that no matter which comics blogs you read, you read more about Paul Levitz’s return to the Legion of Superheroes. And chances are good that if you’ve read about Daniel Clowes’s Wilson, what you read prominently featured that page where the character makes fun of The Dark Knight. What gives? If you want to make the argument that sheer numbers justify the choice of what bloggers and comics sites cover, I suppose that’s your prerogative. And don’t get me wrong — I read and enjoy multiple superhero comics every single week, and have lots to say about a lot of them. I also understand the need to make a living, which in Internet terms means unique pageviews.

But so much of the comics Internet consists of individual or group blogs where, presumably, there’s no editorial mandate to maximize hits. Indeed, the major selling point of the blogosphere is its lack of the traditional gatekeepers and incentive structures that bedevil mainstream journalism. Meanwhile, even the big group blogs owned by major communications corporations tend to be personality-driven, reflecting the interests and styles of their writers to a refreshing degree — and those writers tend to be interested in all sorts of comics, in their spare time at least. So yes, the nature of the coverage is often idiosyncratic, which is great. But why is that the comics being covered differ so little from what you’d read about on Marvel.com or The Source? Should those of us in the position to do so make an effort to broaden the scope of what we’re presenting to our readers as the comics worth buying, reading, and talking about?

So that’s my argument I’d like to be having. What are yours? Tell us in the comments — maybe we can start having them right away!

[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.

First of all, amen. If anything, I feel sorry for people who write off an entire swathe of comics, including the gorgeously crafted and emotionally devastating work of guys like Clowes and Chris Ware (to name the two best-known and most frequently lambasted creators) as woe-is-me whining. What I don’t feel is the need to seriously engage those people.

But this got me to thinking about how there are a small handful of similar arguments about comics I could happily go my whole life without ever encountering again. “Superhero comics are just quasi-fascist male adolescent power fantasies” and “Manga isn’t real comics, it’s just big-eyed panty-flashing speed-lined nonsense for people who fetishize Japan” round out my Unholy Trinity of lame arguments that ignorantly pooh-pooh whole segments of the industry. But the list could go on: People who treat the DC/Marvel rivalry like a titanic clash of good vs. evil, webcomics triumphalism, manga triumphalism, superheroes as modern myths, and “the New Mainstream” can all go jump in a lake.

Chances are that if you’re reading this blog, you’ve discussed comics enough to repeatedly run into opinions that make you want to chew your own foot off. Go ahead and share them in the comments. We can’t promise we won’t use them ourselves, but we’ll at least know you won’t be listening when we do.

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.

from Young Lions by Blaise Larmee

from Uzumaki by Junji Ito

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)

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:

The aforementioned moments are just that: moments. Dazzling fragments of films that tend to be visually adept and dramatically inert or vice versa. Even at the peak of their creative powers, big-budget comic book films are usually more alike than different. And over time, they seem to blur into one endless, roiling mass of cackling villains, stalwart knights, tough/sexy dames, and pyrotechnic showdowns that invariably feature armored vehicles (or armor-encased men) bashing into each other. When such movies accumulate praise, it’s encrusted with implied asterisks: “The best superhero film ever made,” say, or “The best Batman film since Tim Burton’s original.” If the Hollywood studio assembly line is high school in a John Hughes movie, superhero films are the jocks — benighted beneficiaries of grade inflation and reflexive fan boosterism. (Critics who don’t like a particular superhero film — any superhero film — are apt to be simultaneously blasted in online comments threads as aesthetic turistas ill-equipped to judge the work’s true depth and snooty killjoys who expect too much and need to lighten the hell up. Neat trick.)

He then goes on to dismantle the vast majority of superhero movies in methodical fashion. I was particularly impressed by his comparison of the relatively uniform approach of big-budget superhero movies to the much wider variety of tones and takes see in the horror subgenre of zombie movies.

Every superhero fan seems to have a different set of favorites and goats. Personally, I think Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman is far and away the best, most interesting, most entertaining, most defiantly weird superhero movie, while the much-lauded Spider-Man 2 leaves me cold — and that puts me in an opposite camp from Seitz, who reverses that ranking. Like Seitz, I think Ang Lee’s Hulk and Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns, two genuinely adult takes on the superhero concept, are interesting failures, but the “failure” outweighs the “interesting” for me in both cases. So there’s much to disagree with here on the specifics. But in general, Seitz’s argument — that superhero movies as a group are stylistically, visually, and dramatically conservative and rote, even when compared to their comic-book origins — strikes me as persuasive.

Of course, the above page from Daniel Clowes’s brutally black comedy Wilson (via Matthew Perpetua) takes a much harsher approach…

What say you?

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.

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.”).

Khosla admits manga and alternative comics treated him fine, then focuses his dismay on superhero comics. After noting that a decade of supercomics that drew on outside influences and pulled in creators from other genres and fields nonetheless led to a landscape dotted with mega-crossovers, deaths and rebirths, gimmick covers, and similar ’90s-style shenanigans, he concludes:

Is it just we’ve all gotten too old, too jaded? That’s the answer others are settling on, but I don’t think that’s it for me. I’m the target audience for movies about robots; Transformers 2 was partially my fault. I played a video game this year because it had the Ghostbusters in it. Besides MAD MEN and the fucking amazing 3rd season of THE THICK OF IT (holy shit!), my favorite TV show right now is LOST. I am a giant nerd, and my nerdy enthusiasms are still all the way to 11. I don’t think it’s me; fuck, I wish it were me; why can’t it be me??

The amen chorus that arises in the comment thread for the post, not to mention all the similarly themed essays Khosla links to, indicate that this argument — that comics, specifically superhero comics, let their readers down in ’09 — struck quite a nerve.

But are Khosla & Co. really putting their collective finger on comics’ flatlining pulse? Or are they simply experiencing run-of-the-mill burnout based on their own reading habits? Khosla’s fellow Savage, Jeff Lester, argues for the latter. He writes:

I think I might be able to shed some light on this, since I burnt out a few years back and have been pondering the situation, on and off, since then. My take on it is simply: we just put the wraps on the greatest decade the medium has ever had here in the USA. For readers and fans of the medium, it’s the first time in memory our reach may have exceeded our grasp. Is it any wonder the people following the medium may be a little exhausted and fatigued?

To put it another way: if you were a fan of candy, and you ended up locked in the biggest candy store in the world, and were able to eat as much as you wanted, would you then turn around later, and blame the candy for not tasting as good as when you were first locked in? Would you suggest something had clearly gone wrong later in the candy production process since the stuff you were eating now was making you feel ill but the earlier candy hadn’t? Obviously, aesthetic experience doesn’t map to sensual experience in such an easy one-to-one way but aesthetic oversaturation is possible as anyone who’s been to Burning Man or the Louvre will tell you.

The latest Savage to weigh in, David Uzumeri, may or may not agree with Lester’s read on things. The main takeaway from Uzumeri’s post on the topic is that, quite frankly, he’s having none of the idea that this was a lousy year for comics because so many of the comics he read were just too damn good:

This current trending topic, about how 2009 was a lame year for comics (especially superhero/mainstream/adventure comics), just doesn’t resonate with me at all. I enjoyed a huge amount of comics this year, many of which were from creators I really didn’t expect to become such an ardent fan of, and while most of my non-superheroes comic reading was either manga or stuff released previous to 2009, it all still coalesced into a year of reading really fantastic comics.

After running down the non-superhero books he enjoyed, a group fueled by his discovery of manga this year, Uzumeri goes on to take issue with the notion that superhero books were in fact uniquely dispiriting this year at all:

Even outside of my wheelhouse of superheroes, I had a really great year pushing my boundaries past the stuff I usually read. But this is what people are complaining about, isn’t it: that the shared-universe superhero comics aren’t holding their interest anymore, that they’re going to MOME or Prince Valiant reprints or Johnny Ryan or Daniel Clowes or Naoki Urasawa or Kate Beaton or whatever for their fix.

And I don’t get that at all.

2009 was, for me, a banner year for superhero comics.

Final Crisis, Green Lantern, Ghost Rider, Punisher, Batman & Robin, Seaguy, Detective Comics, Ultimate Comics Spider-Man, Invincible Iron Man, DC’s Superman line, Marvel’s cosmic line — all are singled out by Uzumeri for praise.

Full disclosure: I side with the optimists on this one. For one thing, as Lester pointed out, it’s no surprise when after years of consuming a particular kind of art — and with superhero comics, we can be talking “since elementary school” in many cases — your tastes change and your interests diverge. For another, writing off manga, alternative comics, and the like in an aside, as does Khosla, mightily stacks the deck. If you find your nerd buttons aren’t being pressed by Blackest Night and Dark Reign, surely 20th Century Boys or The Abominable Charles Christopher or The Mourning Star have a chance of fitting the bill. It’s a big medium out there. Or as Sean Witzke succinctly tweeted:

Just because YOU have nothing to say doesn’t mean there isn’t anything to say. It means you’re burnt out. Buy some manga, shut up.

I don’t know if I’d go quite that far, but point taken.

And finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, like Uzumeri I disagree with the idea that superhero comics were spectacularly bad this year as opposed to any other year. There’s always plenty of dreck out there, and perhaps the whole “line-wide direction” publishing model increases your chances of coming across a lot of stuff you don’t care for (though it could obviously work the other way too). But speaking conservatively, surely there are half a dozen superhero books out there that can be enjoyed on their own terms, offering different flavors of the genre to those who crave them. My fandom doesn’t date back to childhood necessarily, but I’m still a pretty big superhero nerd, yet I’m also a pretty big snob — and from Invincible to Invincible Iron Man, B.P.R.D. to Batman & Robin, I was able to find and enjoy superhero comics that threaded that needle admirably. And that’s to say nothing of everything else I loved this year, from Pluto to Pim & Francie.

So what do you say, Roboteers? Did 2009 rock your world or leave you flat?

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!

Civil War #1

Although it would be hard to look at the last ten years of comics and see much of the decade’s woes frankly expressed, it’s not hard to see the seams of conflict that float beneath them. Marvel spent its time messing around with the same sort of surface-y relevance that used to be the purview of the 70′s clunky DC Comics about race relations and drug abuse comics, with stories like Civil War that could be seen as an exaggerated version of Red Staters versus Blue Staters. (Or Secret Invasion‘s religious nuts are a-coming. Or Dark Reign, which was probably planned by a group who assumed America wasn’t gonna Choose Hopefully.)

DC went in a different direction, embracing the public’s love for nostalgia mixed with Will Ferrell’s adult man-child films, and started telling various kids’ Crisis stories with hard R plot twists. Manga publishers underestimated their audience, then overestimated it, and are now currently in the throes of figuring out how big, exactly, it is. Companies like Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly kept their toes in the new, but found that the market for high-priced reprints of classic comics was strong enough to make a Comics Criterion Collection viable.

And down at the bottom, abandoned by a distribution center that didn’t care, tiny publishing houses carved out a business carrying unedited works of self-expression, depending on the Ignored Masterpiece rating doled out by the blogosphere to sell off their 200-count print-run. Webcomics became an actual opportunity for creators to make a living outside of the direct market.

Now, the meat of the piece ends up being, more or less, that critical discourse is irrelevant (this is a theme of Tucker’s), and that the real movers and shakers of comics in the ’00s were the readers who suddenly made a wide variety of modes of expression in this medium viable simply by buying and reading what they enjoyed. But if you ask me, Tucker’s deadly accurate encapsulations of Marvel, DC, manga, alternative comics, reprints, artcomix, and webcomics sorta invalidate the argument that arguments are invalid. (The Criterion Collection comparison is a killer.) Read the whole thing — including the rather glorious concluding list of good ol’ fashioned good comics — and see what you think.

Me

As the newest member of the Robot 6 crew, I realize I’m still something of a stranger in these parts. I’m a phantom who pops up every now and then to write something about the Con War, and like that — poof! — I’m gone. Who is this “Sean T. Collins,” if that is my real name?

Well, if you really wanna know what makes me tick as a person who writes about comics for a living (or, more accurately, “a living”), check out the lengthy interview Christopher Allen conducted with me over at Comic Book Galaxy’s group blog Trouble with Comics. It tackles pretty much my whole history as a critic, such as it is and such as I am, and sounds me out on a variety of pertinent issues, from the evolution of the comics blogosphere to the usefulness of comparing comics to other art forms like music to whether or not scorched-earth criticism is valid:

[Chris:] I’m curious about the disinclination towards snark. Not that you should do anything you don’t feel, but doesn’t highly intelligent snark, or let’s call it no-holds-barred criticism a la Abhay Khosla or Tucker Stone, have its place? Isn’t it just as valid, as long as the arguments are reasoned and thought-provoking, no matter how harsh?

[Sean:] It may be valid, it may not be valid. It depends on the piece. What I can tell you is that valid or not, it’s not interesting to me, and it’s frequently actively annoying. I also think the harshness quickly becomes an end in itself, so in that sense, I grow suspicious of its validity pretty quickly, I guess you could say. I’ve done it in the past and I reserve the right to do it again, because grown-ups can change their minds about these things, that’s part of the fun of being a grown-up, but for now, it is not for me as a critic or a reader of criticism.

Further scintillating and provocative commentary, and overuse of the words “in terms of” and “engender,” can be found at the link.

Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim Vol. 1

So let’s start by getting those complaints out of the way, since they’re the most subjective. The list’s own introduction cites a quartet of comics that just missed the cut — Scott Pilgrim, Astro City, The Walking Dead and the work of Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez — and I could see reasonable cases being made for three of the four, not that I’d necessarily agree with them. Given the mainstream-accessible tenor of the list, I also think you can get enough of a sense of the standards being applied to argue for several obvious oversights: David B.’s Epileptic, Phoebe Gloeckner’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl and Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde, for example. Moreover, the titles selected for particular creators can leave you scratching your head: One! Hundred! Demons! instead of What It Is, the gag/parody-centric Acme Novelty Library oversized hardcover rather than Jimmy Corrigan, Rick Geary’s The Mystery of Mary Rogers instead of, well, any of Geary’s other old-time crime books. Finally, in some cases, I think the selected books are bettered by other, similar efforts: I’d have picked B.P.R.D. over The Goon for quirky horror-action, for example, or The Walking Dead over Y: The Last Man for lengthy post-apocalyptic serials, or Shortcomings over Box Office Poison for slice-of-life drama.

Yoshihiro Tatsumi's A Drifting Life

But the list has far more fundamental problems than its individual selections. The one that’s getting the most attention around the comics Internet, of course, is the complete absence of manga. I’ll be the first to apologize if a separate, all-manga list is forthcoming. But as it stands now, the lack of a single Japanese comic on a best-of list for a decade during which such comics reached unprecedented popularity in the North American market — and during which an equally unprecedented number of acclaimed titles from nearly every time period and genre have finally seen the light of English translation and publication — is utterly egregious. Even if you put aside the treasure trove of reprints of classic titles that have reached our shores, recent work by Naoki Urasawa, Yuichi Yokoyama, Ai Yazawa, Makoto Yukimura, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Junji Ito, Jiro Taniguchi, Taiyo Matsumoto and countless other creators surely merits at least one slot on the list. And that’s to say nothing of the rock-solid entertainment provided by mainstream hits from Naruto to Death Note — would they look all that out of place on a list that includes All-Star Superman, DC: The New Frontier and the Bendis/Maleev Daredevil run?

Kramers Ergot 4 cover by Mat Brinkman

Equally notable, to me at least, is the conservative nature of the list’s “alternative” picks. Yes, there are a couple of left-field choices — Geary’s inclusion was a surprise, as was Michael Kupperman’s weird, wonderful Tales Designed to Thrizzle. But in the main, the books and authors selected from the world of alt / art / indie / underground / whatever comics are a tastefully literary bunch, focusing on New Yorker-friendly storytelling modes like memoir, current events, biography, bildungsroman, and slice-of-life. By my count, Chris Ware, David Mazzucchelli, Charles Burns, Craig Thompson, Daniel Clowes, Alison Bechdel, Seth, James Sturm, Marjane Satrapi, Jason, Alex Robinson and even Kupperman have all either been published by a major New York book publisher or appeared in the pages of The New York Times. Meanwhile, just to name one example, the entire underground tradition emanating from Providence, Rhode Island, centered on the Fort Thunder collective, and spawning a lineage published at various times through Highwater, Paper Rodeo, Red Ink, Bodega, Buenaventura and PictureBox is totally missing; not even its representative landmark anthologies Kramers Ergot 4 and Kramers Ergot 7 made the cut. Plus, the Burns and Clowes books excepted, you’re also not seeing the wave of altcomix reclamations of genre fiction, from Paul Pope to Powr Mastrs to Prison Pit. From minicomics to markmaking, sequential art’s avant garde — not to mention its generational vanguard — is pretty much persona non grata here.

Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus Vol. 1

This makes the list’s one attempt to spotlight a publishing subgenre, reprints, all the more frustrating. The A.V. Club’s separate Best Reprints list cites five noteworthy projects, none of which I’m about to quibble with — the one-volume Bone cemented Jeff Smith’s place in kids’-comics history, and Fantagraphics’ exquisitely designed Peanuts and Krazy & Ignatz collections put the two greatest comic strips of all time (your ranking may vary) at the forefront of the publishing agenda of the decade’s most important publisher, after all. But the ’00s were a true Golden Age of Reprints, during which reprinted material had an ongoing and active role in the here-and-now development of comics. I, for one, can still feel the breeze from all the eyes opened by Dan Nadel’s Art Out of Time anthology, Nadel and Glenn Bray’s Rory Hayes collection Where Demented Wented, and Paul Karasik’s two surprise-hit Fletcher Hanks books. DC did a sensational job with its Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus series, re-releasing arguably the great comics work by arguably the great comics creator at the precise time that its currency in comics was reaching an all-time peak. Manga’s sales-chart dominance was complemented beautifully by Drawn & Quarterly’s Adrian Tomine-overseen reprints of Tatsumi’s landmark short stories, and by the jaw-droppingly wide-ranging run of reprints starring the god of manga himself, Osamu Tezuka, from publishers like Vertical and Viz. with the unlimited real estate of the Internet at your disposal, capping your Best Reprints list at a mere five in the face of such an embarrassment of riches raises more questions than it answers.

Chester Brown's Louis Riel

So does a refusal to rank your selections. Look, I go back and forth on the utility and desirability of year- and decade-end list making — it can devolve into a parlor game, a pageant, and/or an easy way to throw all the publishers you work with a bone pretty easily, and frequently the arguments it engenders shed more heat than light. On the other hand, it’s the most direct avenue available for systematically separating the good from the great, and explaining the difference. That’s why, unless you intend your list to be a mere shopping guide — or unless you’re writing it in a far more idiosyncratic fashion than The A.V. Club’s traditional list-by-committee — ordinal rankings are a must. By simply listing 25 books in alphabetical order, this list avoids making difficult and absolutely crucial distinctions regarding quality, dodging the hard work necessary to back those distinctions up with considered criticism. I don’t know what good a Best of the ’00s list that sits The Goon right next to Louis Riel does anybody under any circumstances, but at least a countdown would provide context; juxtaposing two books like that through sheer alphabetical accident provides us with no window into its authors’ critical worldview(s), and actually may do more harm than good in terms of articulating what matters. Frankly, I feel like it’s a cop-out.

David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp

This will get a little picayune, but that lackadaisical feel appears to have infected the writing itself, which is riddled with dubious factual claims. Superhero-comics sales went up this decade, not declined. Daniel Clowes contributed a substantial strip to The New York Times in addition to his two Eightball issues. Though Asterios Polyp was David Mazzucchelli’s first proper solo graphic novel, he’s been doing extremely personal work since the debut of Rubber Blanket in 1991 and can hardly be said to only now have “take[n] possession of his own voice.” And this could just be a typo and unclear wording respectively, but Persepolis did not come out in 2000, nor did it share a publisher with Fun Home. I can’t help but feel that an overall sharpening of the thinking behind the list might have whittled these errors away in the process.

The Onion and The A.V. Club have been covering comics for years, and not in the bang-pow sense, either. It’s clearly an art form they take as seriously as film, music, television, and prose literature. That’s what makes their list such a let-down. The first decade of the 21st century has been nothing more or less than the greatest creative flowering in comics’ history — the decade during which the concept of comics-as-art reached levels of public acceptance and internal confidence of which even the medium’s great visionaries could previously have only dreamed. The game was raised. Those of us who purport to crown the best of comics’ best-ever era need to raise our game as well.

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.

• David Welsh writes about the wonder that is Junko Mizuno.

• Katherine Dacey Rumiko Takahashi’s Rin-Ni: “Takahashi’s latest series gives ample proof that while she may have a limited repertory, she’s the undisputed master of the supernatural mystery.”

• Noah Berlatsky transcribes a lecture he gave last year on comics, homosexuality and gender. Part One. Part Two.

• Bill Sherman looks at Vol. 1 & 2 of Inio Asano’s What A Wonderful World and declares: “If [Asano] occasionally over-iterates his themes, that’s consistent with World’s cast of rudderless urbanites still in the process of figuring out where they stand in the universe.”

• Rob Clough calls Tom Gaud’s Gigantic Robot “a beautiful-looking book about ugliness that is almost meta in the self-indulgence of the format.”

• Matthew Brady on The Deformatory: “The beauty of Sophia Wiedeman’s work is that one could come up with several possible interpretations.”

• Johnny Bacardi does his usual pamphlet run-down, which is always worth reading.

• Late to the party, but still worth reading: Michael Buntag on Darwyn Cooke’s Hunter.

• Our own Sean Collins reviews the Abstract Comics anthology: “What I liked, I liked for more than just the strips themselves–I liked them for the proof they offer that comics really is still a Wild West medium in which one’s bliss can be followed even beyond the boundaries of what many or even most readers would care to define as ‘comics.’ “

Dash Shaw's Bottomless Belly Button

Sandy Bilus of I Love Rob Liefeld, the Comics Internet tips its collective hat to you. Picking up the torch from the sadly discontinued blog of Dick Hyancith, Bilus has compiled a “meta-list” of the 100 best comics of 2008, as tabulated from the personal best-of lists of dozens of critics and commentators. Behold the Top Ten:

1. Bottomless Belly Button, by Dash Shaw
2. Acme Novelty Library #19, by Chris Ware
3. All-Star Superman, by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely
4. Too Cool To Be Forgotten, by Alex Robinson
5. What It Is, by Lynda Barry
6. Ganges #2, by Kevin Huizenga
7. The Alcoholic, by Jonathan Ames and Dean Haspiel
8. Skyscrapers of the Midwest, by Joshua Cotter
9. Kramers Ergot 7, by various
10. Capacity, by Theo Ellsworth

The point system used to tabulate the list makes it easy for books that made it onto a lot of individual lists but didn’t top them to put in a strong showing; perhaps that explains the blowout victory of Bottomless Belly Button, which I recall as being widely liked but few people’s #1 pick.

For you front-of-Previews types out there, DC’s All-Star Superman is the highest ranking superhero comic, coming in at a strong #3. DC/Vertigo’s The Alcoholic is the Big Two’s next-highest representative at #7, while its labelmate Scalped comes in at #12. The top Marvel book, and second-highest superhero comic, is Omega the Unknown at #13. Manga’s top-ranking title is Travel at #16. Click the link to see what else made the grade.

Me, I’ve got some quibbles here and there, as is to be expected. But overall, if you’re looking to do some shopping this holiday season and don’t mind being a year behind, you’d be hard pressed to top this for a wishlist.