Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes

Walt Disney’s Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes
by Carl Barks
Fantagraphics Books, 240 pages, $24.99.

Is Barks overrated? Is he really the comics master that people claim he is or was it simply that most of his contemporaries — especially where Disney comics were concerned — were so dull in comparison? Did the mystique surrounding Barks — the fact that he worked anonymously for so long — stoke his legend? In praising Barks, are we merely praising the surface elements of his work and ignoring whether his stories are stand up to the sort of strong critical scrutiny? Does mere nostalgia drive the bulk of our interest in his work? As one person put it on Twitter: “Is the worship of Barks just another case of comics culture’s elevation of craft over everything?”

I really don’t think so. Certainly it’s easy to get lost in the surface elements of Barks’ comics — the simple, clean lines, the skilled detail in depicting other cultures and lost civilizations, the slapstick humor. I suppose to some extent there might be a few people who come to Barks expecting to have their molecules re-arranged and will walk away sorely disappointed and wondering what all the fuss was about.

But like Herge, another exemplary creator who made comics primarily for kids and later found an audience of devoted adults, Barks’ duck stories are richer, more compelling and smarter than a cursory glance might suggest. The key I think, is that the craft is in service to the stories. Unlike, say, Neal Adams or Jim Aparo — artists whose enjoyment was largely if not solely dependent upon their facility in rendering and layout pyrotechnics, and rarely upon merits of the story being told — Barks’ real skill was as a storyteller. Everything was in service to the greater good of the story, which in turn helped ensure the stories themselves were praiseworthy.

At any rate, now we can all judge for ourselves. After decades of Barks’ work being given to us in either sloppy, piecemeal fashion or hard-to-find, incredibly pricy oversize volumes, Fantagraphics has taken it upon themselves to release Barks’ complete duck stories in easy-to-peruse, relatively inexpensive hardcover books, the first of which, Lost in the Andes, is now available.

Rather than start at the beginning, editor Gary Groth opted to begin in the middle with what’s largely considered Barks’ best work and backtrack at some later date. Which means that Andes is technically the seventh volume in the eventual series, but never mind. It’s a smart idea to begin with some greatest hits and Andes has its fair share, most notably the title story, which finds Donald and his nephews traveling to South America to find the source of some peculiar square eggs and stumbling upon a literally square lost city. One where everyone talks like Col. Sanders.

The ducks also battle a witch bent on destroying Christmas, race the insufferable Gladstone Gander to the South Seas, face off against zombies (the old witch-doctor kind) in Africa and test out toys for Santa Claus. In between all those adventures there’s some really funny strips that are marvelous in their frantic construction build up of gag upon, like one where Donald suffers from constant nightmares and finds an unlikely cure when his machismo is in danger.

Most reprint projects worth their salt these days require some thoughtful essays and supplemental materials and Lost in the Andes is no different. Barks scholar Donald Ault provides a well-written biography of Barks and his significance for the introduction, and a number of critics including Rich Kreiner, R. Fiore and Craig Fischer provide some essays and commentaries on the various stories at the back of the book. I am a little wary when pundits discuss the overarching themes and deeper meanings in Barks’ work. While I’m sure that such themes are present, however marginally, I worry that expounding upon them tends risks overstating or inflating their significance, thereby running the risk of robbing these tales of some of their charm and leading to some of the skeptical questions posed in my introduction. Few worries here though, as most of the essays are sharp and insightful without feeling the need to place the work in question on an academic pedestal.

In short, this is exactly the book that Barks fans and the curious have been waiting for. No doubt there will continue to be those who find the claims for Barks’ greatness dubious and question the desire to hold aloft work that had little aim beyond wanting to amuse and entertain young readers and perhaps the occasional adult. But even held to that simple standard, Barks remains an exemplary cartoonist. His work is thrilling, funny and rather knowing about human nature without ever seeming trite or obvious, and despite the occasional pop culture reference it hasn’t aged much over the decades either.

How good was Carl Barks? Pretty goddamned good.

If you were to list the five most important cartoonists in the history of comics, the chances are good Robert Crumb would be on the list. If you were to list the five most important editor/publishers in the history of comics, the chances are good Gary Groth of Fantagraphics would be on that list. For a lot of people, they’d each be at the top. So if you are a comics reader and you can think of a better way to spend your afternoon than reading a 13,000 word interview with Crumb by Groth for The Comics Journal, then please, become my personal planner, because your life must be freaking awesome.

The thing is damn near solid gold, but a highlight reel might run as follows:

• The opening letter from Crumb, explaining his decision not to attend a Sydney, Australia arts festival following what appears to have been a really naked act of anti-Crumb yellow journalism by the Rupert Murdoch-owned Telegraph

• Groth and Crumb playing an all-pessimism version of “can you top this?” when it comes to their outlook on the political future of the civilized world

• Crumb revealing that he and his son Jesse are no longer on speaking terms, and his feelings on his daughter Sophie’s drug use

• Crumb on how pot and LSD made him a lousier artist in the early ’70s

• Guest questions from cartoonists Jaime Hernandez, Gilbert Hernandez, Tony Millionaire, Megan Kelso, Drew Friedman, Gilbert Shelton, Jim Woodring, Lewis Trondheim, Kim Dietch, Bill Griffith, Arnold Roth, and Crumb’s longtime nemesis Trina Robbins

• A relatively lengthy debate over whether President Barack Obama has rolled over to corporate interests (Groth’s position) or legitimately fought against them and simply been bested by their power (Crumb’s take)

• Crumb characterizing his late-’60s turn toward raunchy and offensive content as a deliberate attempt to make himself less popular

• Why Crumb’s sexy women seldom find themselves in “serious” stories as opposed to satirical or scatological ones

• Pens vs. brushes

• Early vs. late Janis Joplin

• Whether spending all that time drawing The Book of Genesis was worth it

• The reason he’s not drawing nearly as much as he used to

Depressing, elating, and hilarious in equal measure, it’s your must-read of the day.

Sparkplug Books

Publishing | Emily Nilsson, wife of Sparkplug Books publisher Dylan Williams, said she plans to continue running the publishing company after the death of her husband. “We need your support now as much as ever,” she said in a post on the Sparkplug blog. “We are grieving at the same time as we are trying to keep business afloat, and trying not to overstrain ourselves. We want to publish again soon but that is a step we will consider more once we get through the next few months.” Nilsson, Virginia Paine and Tom Neely will continue to run Sparkplug, with plans to continue online sales and attend conventions like the upcoming MIX in Minneapolis next month and the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival in December. Williams passed away in September due to complications from cancer. [Sparkplug]

Legal | Michael George, the former comics retailer found guilty of murder for the second time, is in the Macomb County (Mich.) jail after his bond was revoked following Tuesday’s verdict. George was found guilty of murdering his first wife Barbara in the back of their comic book store in 1990. “The family’s ecstatic,” said Barbara’s brother Joe Kowynia. “There’s no way a jury is going to get this wrong twice. I feel sorry for my nieces, this is long overdue. Now that this is over, Barb can rest in peace. And we can move on and he can rot in jail.” [Detroit Free Press]

Creators | Brian Heater talks to Art Spiegelman about MetaMaus, his book about the making of Maus. [Publishers Weekly]

Marjane Satrapi

Controversy | Nessma TV president Nebil Karoui apologized for airing the animated version of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis in Tunisia, as one scene from the movie led to an attempted arson attack by a mob at the station. The offending scene concerns an old, bearded image of God, of whom all depictions are forbidden by Islam. “I am sorry for all the people who were disturbed by this sequence, which also shocked me,” Karoui said. “I believe that to have broadcast this sequence was a mistake. We never had the intention of attacking sacred values.” [Independent Online]

Comics | Brian Truitt talks to writers Stan Lee and Terry Dougas about Romeo and Juliet: The War, their upcoming science fiction-via-Shakespeare graphic novel. [USA Today]

Comics | Fantagraphics publisher Gary Groth talks to Geoff Boucher about the publisher’s upcoming Carl Barks collections. [Hero Complex]

Robert Kirkman

Creators | Robert Kirkman discusses the upcoming second season of AMC’s The Walking Dead, the comic series, various Skybound projects and more. [Fangoria]

Creators | Mike Allred talks about his as-yet-unfinished and out-of-print Golden Plates series, which adapts the Book of Mormon into comic book form. [Slate]

Creators | Alan Moore discusses his current non-comics projects, including the novel Jerusalem, as well as his feelings on comics: “At the moment I feel an awful lot of my comic career is behind me, particularly all of the superhero stuff – the stuff that’s owned by American corporations. I want to distance myself from that, so the stuff I’m proudest of is what I own: From Hell, Lost Girls, The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I don’t read my earlier work because there are too many unpleasant associations with it. I don’t have a copy of Watchmen in the house. I’m glad the work is out there in the world, having an effect, but it’s like I’ve gone through a messy divorce.” [Metro]

DC Comics

Commentary | Tom Spurgeon shares nine thoughts on “potential advantages [DC Comics] might enjoy moving forward,” as they move into the second month of the New 52 relaunch. [The Comics Reporter]

Retailing | Caleb Goellner speaks with comics retailers about how they’re coping with the current marketplace and economic factors, and how customers can help shops remain stable during tough times. [ComicsAlliance]

Comics | The Washington Post’s Wonkblog has an early look at Health Care Reform: What It Is, Why It’s Necessary, How It Works, possibly the wonkiest graphic novel ever, written by MIT professor and health-reform architect Jonathan Gruber and illustrated by Nathan Schreiber. [Wonkblog]

from Corpse on the Imjin by Harvey Kurtzman

On the same day that Fantagraphics announced The Complete Zap Comix, the publisher revealed it will bring yet another treasure trove of groundbreaking comics back to the stands. At its panel at Comic-Con International and in an interview with The Comics Reporter’s Tom Spurgeon, Fantagraphics announced it had acquired the rights to publish the EC Comics library from the representatives of its late publisher, William M. Gaines.

Known for pushing comics’ boundaries of formal innovation and craft as well as raw content before anti-comics hysteria and the creation of the Comics Code helped stifle the publisher in the mid-’50s, EC has generally been reprinted in formats that center on its (in)famous horror, crime, science fiction, and war anthology series, such as Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, The Haunt of Fear, Crime SuspenStories, Weird Science, Weird Fantasy, Two-Fisted Tales, and Frontline Combat. What sets the Fantagraphics reprint project apart is that individual creators’ work will be culled from the series in which it appeared and presented in a series of black-and-white solo spotlight volumes. The first four books announced will collect war stories written by Harvey Kurtzman (Corpse on the Imjin and Other Stories, featuring art by Kurtzman, Gene Colan, Russ Heath, and Joe Kubert), suspense stories by Wally Wood (Came the Dawn and Other Stories), horror stories by written by Al Feldstein and illustrated by Jack Davis, and science fiction stories by Al Williamson.

Click on over to The Comics Reporter for more details, including an interview with editor and co-publisher Gary Groth.

Gary Groth in action

…so I’m not even going to try. Instead I’m just going to link you to Alex Dueben’s thusly titled interview with Fantagraphics Co-Publisher and The Comics Journal Editor Gary Groth over on the CBR mothership, in which the trailblazing alternative-comics publisher and critic tackles a wide variety of the biz’s big topics. Here are a few choice nuggets:

On Fantagraphics shifting to digital:

To one degree or another, all of our books can be read on a screen.

We’re cognizant of that and we’re certainly moving in that direction. I think what the future is going to hold is that books are going to be on multiple platforms, in digital and in print. I don’t think one is going to necessarily overshadow the other. They can be available in various formats. We’ve been literally working on the digital formats for the last year, just working out all the bugs and talking to the various platforms. I’m sure by this time next year, a lot of our books, if not the majority of them, are going to be available digitally.

On the Borders bankruptcy and its affect on graphic novel sales:

I don’t think it’s affected us. I think whenever something happens like when Borders closes, something comes and fills that gap, even if that something is only Amazon. Borders didn’t affect us at all, because Borders didn’t buy many of our books. As you probably know, the book buyer at Borders was apparently obsessed with manga and bought almost exclusively manga. Of course it would have been nice to have been sold in Borders for all those years, but we weren’t. Trying to be sold in Borders was like beating our heads against a brick wall, so when they went under, we didn’t suffer at all. Barnes and Noble is still strong. We’re strong with independents. There are a number of chain stores in the South that we sell pretty well to, like Books-A-Million. Amazon is either the first or second largest seller of our books.

On whether he has any advice for DC regarding their line-wide relaunch:

[Laughs] I don’t think I do. Good fucking luck.

I’m not even sure what that’s supposed to accomplish. It seems like a pitiful attempt to con more people into buying the same old shit. I probably shouldn’t be so cynical. I’m sure that some brilliant talent could breathe some life into this stuff. Like I said, I’m not one to talk. I haven’t read this stuff, but it just seems so completely uninteresting to me, and in a way, it’s idiomatically alien to me. We get a box of comics from DC every so often and I’ll look through it. Stylistically, the work kind of repels me. It’s too frenetic and manga-influenced. I’m way too old for that stuff. I wish I could be a more cogent commentator on that stuff, but then I’d have to devote time to actually looking at it.

On why Disney is publishing its complete Floyd Gottfredson/Mickey Mouse and Carl Barks/Donald Duck/Uncle Scrooge comics through Fantagraphics instead of its subsidiary, Marvel:

I haven’t the slightest idea. It was never brought up. I’ve literally never asked them, “Why would you want us to publish them rather than Marvel,” so anything I give you would be an inference. When I was negotiating with them, to tell you the truth, I hadn’t even thought about it.

There’s much more where that came from, including discussions of the death of the alternative comic book, the Kirby and Siegel/Shuster lawsuits, Disney’s role in extending copyright, the Fantagraphics brick-and-mortar store, the Golden Age of Reprints, the relaunch of The Comics Journal, and the great undiscovered cartoonists. Read the whole thing.

“It wasn’t possible for a man like Stan Lee to come up with new things — or old things for that matter. Stan Lee wasn’t a guy that read or that told stories. Stan Lee was a guy that knew where the papers were or who was coming to visit that day. Stan Lee is essentially an office worker, OK? I’m essentially something else: I’m a storyteller.”

“On The Fantastic Four, I’d tell him what I was going to do, what the story was going to be, and I’d bring it in — that’s all.”

“I created Spider-Man. We decided to give it to Steve Ditko. I drew the first Spider-Man cover. I created the character. I created the costume. I created all those books, but I couldn’t do them all.”

If you listen closely, you can still hear comics’ collective jaw dropping upon reading the above quotes, and many more like them besides, from Jack Kirby’s bombshell 1990 interview in The Comics Journal, conducted by editor and publisher Gary Groth. And now that the Journal has posted the interview online in its entirety, jaws will likely drop all over again.

It’s a fascinating document. Here you have the King of Comics himself, angry and exhausted from years of feuding with Marvel over credit and access to his original art, feeling personally slighted by the company’s other guiding light and figurehead Stan Lee, lashing out with the kind of bombast usually reserved for his spectacularly cosmic comics. In the course of recounting his career (with a little help from his wife Roz), Kirby basically takes sole credit for the creation of the entire Marvel Universe, from the Fantastic Four to Thor to the Hulk to the Avengers to even Spider-Man, relegating Lee to the role of an office boy and credit thief whose only contribution to most of the comics for which the pair shared billing was slapping his name on them and collecting checks.

Kirby’s boldest claims here have proven tough for even his most ardent defenders to swallow — and indeed he goes much further here in asserting sole authorship of the Lee/Kirby co-creations than he ever had in the past — but what his recollections may lack in historical accuracy they gain in evincing the passion he still felt for the work, the degree to which Marvel and Lee’s treatment of him hurt, and, as always, the astonishing imaginative power with which he infused every character he touched. Read the whole thing.

Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark

Broadway | Michael Cohl and Jeremiah Harris, producers of the troubled Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, talk candidly about the $70-million musical — or “$65 plus plus,” as Cohl says — as it shuts down for more than three weeks for a sweeping overhaul. Will the production, plagued by delays, technical mishaps, injuries and negative reviews, hurt their reputation? “It might,” Cohl concedes. “It’s a matter of the respect of those whose opinions I care about. Most will recognize that Jere and I stepped in dog poo and are trying to clean it up and pull off a miracle. We might not.”

In related news, Christopher Tierney, the actor who was seriously injured on Dec. 20 after plummeting 30 feet during a performance, will rejoin rehearsals on Monday. [Bloomberg, The Hollywood Reporter]

Naruto, Vol. 50

Publishing | The 50th volume of Masashi Kissimoto’s insanely popular Naruto remained atop the bestseller list of graphic novels in bookstores for a second month, according to Nielsen BookScan. It’s also worth noting that the Top 20 for March included all six volumes of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series, and the return of return of perennial bestseller Watchmen. [ICv2.com]

Publishing | Gary Groth responds at length to Jim Shooter’s recent recollections of the dispute between Marvel and Jack Kirby in the 1980s over the company’s refusal to return his original art: “Shooter’s two blog entries purporting to accurately describe Kirby’s dispute with Marvel are such falsified claptrap that they reminded me of Mary McCarthy’s infamous quip about Lillian Hellman’s writing, made in an eerily similar context — that every word is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” [The Comics Journal]

Creators | Sam Adams interviews cartoonist Ben Katchor about The Cardboard Valise, his early comic-strip experiences and influences, and much more. [The A.V. Club]

27: First Set

Creators | Collaborators Charles Soule, Renzo Podesta and W. Scott Forbes discuss their Image series 27. [USA Today]

Creators | Periscope Studio members Steve Lieber, David Hahn and Dylan Meconis talk about using the Wacom Cintiq for their work. [Computer Graphics World]

Creators | Writer Jai Nitz chats about writing some of Dynamite Entertainment’s Green Hornet titles. [The Oklahoman]

Comics | Cyriaque Lamar previews 18 sci-fi comics debuting over the summer. [io9.com]

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.

Over on the CBR mothership, Shaun Manning interviews Fantagraphics co-publisher Gary Groth about his upcoming reprints of the Mickey Mouse comic strips by artist Floyd Gottfredson, kicking off with Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse, vol. 1: The Race to Death Valley in May. With his trademark blend of erudition and bluntness, Groth details the nuts and bolts of the whole project: The reason Mickey Mouse’s comic strip was an action-adventure serial to begin with, Mickey’s surprisingly feisty personality, the basics on the first few storylines being collected, the essays and other supplemental materials being included in the package, the eventual inclusion of racist material and other items of potential controversy, how big the books will be, and even a bit about Fantagraphics’ parallel plan to release the complete Carl Barks Disney Ducks comics. But I’m sure Groth wouldn’t mind if I said that the real star attraction for the piece are the actual Gottfredson strips used to illustrate it. Simply put, my jaw literally dropped once I opened up these action-packed images, so impressed was I by their power and grace. And since most of Gottfredson’s work has been reprinted rarely, if that, chances are you’ll be bowled over too. Click on over and check them out for yourself.

In what is sure to be one of the most acclaimed comics events of 2011, Fantagraphics has announced that they will be publishing a definitive collection of Carl Barks’ seminal run of Donald Duck comic stories. In an exclusive interview with Robot 6, Fantagraphics co-publisher Gary Groth revealed that the company – which announced their plans to publish Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse comics last summer – had acquired the rights to reprint Barks’ work from Disney and that the first volume will be released in fall of this year. The comics will be published in hardcover volumes, with two volumes coming out every year, at a price of about $25 per volume.

Although the stories will be printed in chronological order, the first volume, “Lost in the Andes,” will cover the beginning of Barks’ “peak” period, circa about 1948. The second volume, “Only a Poor Old Man,” will cover roughly the years 1952-54 and feature the first Uncle Scrooge story. Later volumes will fill in the missing gaps, including his earlier work, in a process somewhat similar to Fantagraphics’ publication of George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat.”

For those who aren’t familiar with the name, the Barks library has been one of the great missing links in a time that many have dubbed the “golden age of reprints.”  Acclaimed around the globe for his rich storytelling and characterization, as well as excellent craftsmanship, Barks has long been regarded as one of the great cartoonists of the 20th century, equal to luminaries like Charles Schulz, Robert Crumb and Harvey Kurtzman. He’s been one of the few major American cartoonists whose work has, up till now, not been collected in a comprehensive, manner respectful of his talent (at least not in North America), however, so this announcement comes as extremely good news for any who read and love good comics, let alone are familiar with Barks’ work.

Fantagraphics will release an official announcement about the project tomorrow. In the meantime, click on the link to read our exclusive interview with Gary Groth:

Q: For readers who are not familiar with Carl Barks, can you provide a brief description of who he was and why he’s so significant? What is his influence and importance as an artist?

From 'Lost in the Andes'

A: Sure. He was certainly among the greatest comic book artists of the 20^th century. He’s one of the few cartoonists who transcended the commercial parameters of those who worked in the comic book industry from its beginning in the late 30s through the end of the century. I can only think of a few other ones who truly transcended that commercial arena — John Stanley, Harvey Kurtzman, Bernie Krigstein — but I think Barks did it the most successfully of all of them.

He started working for Disney in the late ‘30s as an in-betweener in their animation department. And he started drawing comics in 1942 almost by accident. He moved from being an in-betweener to being a gag man and they needed someone to help co-draw a Donald Duck comic, which he did and then he quit the Disney animation studio and needed work because his only source of income at that time was a chicken farm. So he asked Western Publishing if he could do some Duck stories and they apparently needed someone to do some new Duck stories and they gave him the assignment.

So he drew Donald Duck from 1942 to approximately 1966. Over that time he became one of the greatest cartoonists of the 20^th century. Not only could he draw beautifully and tell a story, but also he invested the duck characters with such depth and humanity and warmth, that it was just an amazing feat. That I think was his real contribution that he gave the Duck characters – he combined imagination and invention and humanity to his stories that no one drawing corporate characters had ever done.

Q: What do you think made him so unique as an artist as opposed to many of the other people working in Disney comics at the time? The amazing thing about Barks to me is the sheer amount of love that’s generated for him by fans. Even compared to some of the people you’ve mentioned. Harvey Kurtzman has his fans, but especially overseas, the sheer amount of papers, essays and web sites devoted to Barks would be surprising to someone who might be coming to him cold.

A: Right. Well, he’s much better known and beloved than he is here. Over here it’s more the specialist and the cognoscenti who are aware of him. Over there he sells and is more appreciated by a larger and wider readership. Which of course we’re hoping to expand to the U.S.

'Ornamentally Yours'

Q: Why do you think that is, that he hasn’t generated as much attention here?

A: Part of it might just be because of the general indifference or contempt with which comics are seen in this country, or at least were seen throughout most of his career. That’s obviously started to change in the last decade or so but Barks missed that window of opportunity. He died in 2000, the same year as Charles Schulz and Gil Kane. He was 99 when he died so his career literally spans the entire 20^th century. He was born in 1901.

I have no idea why they appreciate cartoonists and comics more over there than they do here. I wish I knew.

Q: This is a pretty huge feather in your cap. This is one of the big gets.

A: Yeah, I think it’s right up there with Charles Schulz. I think he’s as great a cartoonist as Schulz is, and maybe George Herriman. So yeah, it’s a dream come true. It’s something I hadn’t thought was even possible until a couple of years ago.

Q: How did this come about then?

A: It’s pretty simple. Gemstone, which was Diamond’s publishing arm, was evidentially contracted to publish a lot of Barks material and had published Barks throughout the years, but in various formats that I don’t think made much of an impression.

When Gemstone went out of business about three years ago, being the opportunist I am I saw a possibility. I got hold of Disney and that’s where we also cut the deal for Gottfredson. It was the same impetus — I saw that they had lost a publisher and I thought it would be perfect for us for all the obvious reasons. I’ve loved Barks’ work since I was a teen-ager and discovered him. I thought we could do the right job. I’ve always lamented what lousy job publishers have done with Carl Barks. I like the Another Rainbow editions, but they are purely collector editions made for guys like you and me.  What I want to do is publish books that will find a general readership, because he deserves one. He deserves as wide a readership as possible. He’s accessible enough. He’s not one of those arcane, obscure cartoonists that the general public wouldn’t understand. His stuff can be read by children or adults, it can be understood on different levels. One of my goals is to publish it in a format that will reach that wider readership. I’m hoping parents buy it, read it themselves and also give it to their kids to read.

To tie up that story, I contacted Disney and it took a couple of years to agree to a publishing contract. At first they told me they were going to publish it themselves, and I tried to talk them out of that without initial success. And then literally like a year later they called me back and said, “we decided not to publish it ourselves and that you’d be the right people to do it.”

Q: What has it been like working with Disney? Do they have a strong appreciation for Barks?

A: Yes, I think they do. At least the people I’m working with do. Now obviously the people I’m working with have highers-up who may not fully understand or appreciate who Barks was, but all the people I’m working with at Disney do. They’re well versed in Barks and understand his significance in the comics pantheon. The hardest thing I had to do was find somebody at Disney to talk to. That literally took me about a year. Once I did that it was pretty smooth sailing. I’ve been working with them pretty closely, I’ve been submitting proposals and formats and content and I have to say everything’s gone really, really smoothly. I’m hoping for the best.

Q: Let’s go on to the books themselves. Can you tell me a little bit about the format, size and design? Who will be designing these books?

A: I think Jacob Covey is going to be designing them. He’s our lead designer here. In fact literally at this very moment he’s designing “Mickey Mouse Vol. 1.” He’s designed a number of books for us, as you probably already know, like “Popeye” and “Dennis the Menace.” He edited and designed “Beasts!” So he was my first choice to design the books.

They’re going to be reproduced – I don’t have the exact size – but they’re going to be reproduced at about 90 percent of comic book size. I don’t have that size off the top of my head, but it’s approximately 90-92 percent of comic book size. We are going to be recoloring every page. We’re using the original comics as our color guide. We’re going to be trying as best we can to reproduce the same colors. The reason we didn’t scan the comic books is we didn’t want it to be a facsimile edition like some of our reprints are. When you do that, it’s obvious that you are reproducing from the comic and there is a specific reason you do that, because you want to capture that old comic book look. Neither Disney nor we wanted to do that, but we both thought it would be best reproduced in color, so the question was how do you go about doing the color? So we’re using the original comics coloring, which is quite good, as a color guide, and an artist by the name of Rich Tommaso is going to be recoloring every page.

Carl Barks

Q: That’s interesting because I was going to ask you if you were going to be using the European collections as a guide because I know some of the recoloring for those books came under controversy because they were very Photoshop-heavy.

A: Personally, I can’t stand that kind of recoloring, where it looks like what used to be called airbrushed, with the gradations of tone and the sculpting and modeling and so forth. To me, that’s a betrayal of how they were originally published and how Barks drew them for reproduction. So we’re going to go with flat colors, but they’re going to be somewhat muted. What we’re trying to do is to reproduce as best we can not only the color scheme, but the chromatic intensity of the colors, so they’re not going to be bright and garish. We’re going to reproduce them on an uncoated stock. It’s obviously going to be heavier than the newsprint they were published on, but it’s going to be uncoated so it will be a very muted stock and the colors will be – they won’t pop off the page like they would with a glossy approach. The colors will be secondary to the actual art.

Q: How much will the individual volumes sell for?

A: I think the retail price is $24.99. They will be hardcover. They will be approximately 240 pages per volume, with a good 200 of those being comics and the rest being some text material — supportive, historical and aesthetic appreciations.

One important fact is that we’re starting with the material he did in 1948, so the first volume is going to be titled “Lost in the Andes.” Now, you know Barks’ work, right?

Q: I’m not as familiar as you obviously are. I’ve read his work but you tend to read him if you’re an American in dribs and drabs. So I have a couple volumes of this and that but I wouldn’t call myself an expert by any means.

A: OK. Well then let me explain. He started doing Donald Duck in 1942. He did it through ’66. I think his peak period was somewhere from ’47 or ’48 and ’56. That’s my opinion and there’s a reasonable consensus among Barks experts – by no means a 100 percent consensus — but that’s generally perceived as his peak period. The first Uncle Scrooge story appeared in 1952. And he was just really cooking at that point. He had learned how to do comics. There was a bit of a learning curve although he was good from the get go. He just mastered narrative. He mastered how to incorporate gags into a narrative. He invested more and more of himself into the work. I think part of the reason the work is so good is because he lived a life before he started drawing the ducks. He started drawing the ducks when he was about 40. By then he was a lumberjack, he worked in a lumber mill, he worked on a riveting gang, he worked on a ranch, a farm. He just did a lot of life experience. From which he got a lot of material for the adventures he wrote.

So we’re going to start with 1948, the first volume will be called “Lost in the Andes.” It will have that titled strip in it. We’re going to mess around a little bit. I think the second volume is going to be titled “Poor Old Man,” which is the first Uncle Scrooge story. That will be 1952 to about 1954.

What I’ve done is I have mapped out the entire Barks collection chronologically. Eventually when we publish however many volumes it will be, which could be – let’s see, he did 6,000 pages – it will be almost 30 volumes of books. Eventually once we publish all of those, someone will be able to put every book in chronological order on a shelf. We’re starting with what will be the seventh volume in the series. It will be our first published volume. I know that will be a little confusing, but our first published volume will actually be the seventh volume in the series.

Q: So you’re not starting with the very first Barks comics, you’re starting a little later?

A: Exactly. The first one was in 1942. The first story was called “Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold.”

Q: Now what was the thinking behind that decision?

A: Well, I wanted to start off with the best stuff. That’s primarily it; I wanted to hook people on the best Barks. “Lost in the Andes” I think, is one of his best stories. It’s an iconic story. Among people who know Barks it’s their favorite.

Q: Is that the one with the square eggs?

A: Exactly. This is a slightly sentimental point, and it didn’t hinge on this, but it was also Barks’ favorite story, so I thought that was a nice gesture. It also just happens to be one of the best stories he did. And as you probably know he did the long stories that appeared in “Four Color Comics.” They were usually between 20 and 32 pages in length, and then he did the 10 pagers that appeared in “Walt Disney Comics and Stories.” So each volume will contain some of both.

Q: I was going to ask about that, because he did work over so many different titles, how you were going to accommodate that, if you were going to do one series first and then put the others out.

A: No, we’re doing it strictly chronologically. So this volume will contain two of the long stories and the rest of them will be the 10 pagers. It includes “Voodoo Hoodoo,” “Race to the South Seas” and “The Golden Christmas Tree,” which are all long stories. They’re all between 20 and 32 pages and the rest will all be 10 page stories.

My original thought was to do the 30 volumes and have a lead story that was a long story in each one and then fill the rest of the book up with shorter pieces. I actually consulted with five Barks scholars throughout the world because I couldn’t quite figure out if I used that as a template — if I used the longer stories as an anchor for the books — I couldn’t figure out how to organize everything else, how to choose stories that would then fill them. You couldn’t do it chronologically because he stopped doing the long stories sometime in the ‘50s. There was a period where he did a lot of long stories in, like, two years, so I couldn’t figure out how to do that and I was finally convinced that I should just do it chronologically, which made my job a lot easier.

Q: What kind of historical information will you be including in the volumes?

A: Well, I don’t want to have too much text in each volume. There’s going to be a biography of Barks that I might rerun in every volume. And then I’m going to get three or four separate pieces that just discuss the particular stories that are in each volume and give a little historical context to the stories. So there will be between three and five text pieces looking at the stories from various angles, maybe sociological, maybe aesthetic. Not so much that it overwhelms the reader but enough to give them context as to what these things are and who Carl Barks is and why they’re as good as they are.

Q: Do you have anyone lined up so far? Any names you can name?

A: The only person I have really lined up is Donald Ault, who’s going to be writing the biography of Barks. Don edited a book called “Conversations with Carl Barks” that University Press of Mississippi published a couple of years ago. He’s been a Barks fan and admirer for quite a few years – 30 or 40 years. He really knows his stuff. He knows more than I do and he’s one of the people I’ve been consulting on this. He’s really very good and knows and loves Barks and is a good writer so he’ll be doing the biography.

Q: What about in terms of ancillary art material? Sometimes in these collections they’ll publish sketchbook material or other unpublished art.

A: I haven’t gotten quite far enough to know for sure but my impression is if the rights are clear, which I think that they are because I think everything is owned by Disney (which makes my job easier) I think we’ll probably be including a lot of photographs and sketches, model sheets he did and things like that. So there will be a lot of miscellaneous stuff will be included with the text. We’re aiming this for a general readership, so I don’t want this to get too wordy.

Q: Along those lines, let me ask in terms of marketing and promotion, how are you planning on reaching that ideal readership? What are your plans? Is there anything you’re doing that might be noteworthy or different from how you’ve promoted your other reprint projects?

A: You know, those are great questions, but they’re great questions for Eric [Reynolds]. He and I and Disney have been exchanging emails about this but frankly I haven’t been paying that close attention to it. My main job has been to get the editorial down. So it would be best if I didn’t give you some half-assed answer about that. We’re hoping to get into Disney stores and Disney theme parks and all that. They have a very systematic grasp of where that is in the process right now.

Q: What’s the schedule for this? How many volumes do you plan to release in a year?

A: Two a year. The first one will be October or November of this year. Just in time for Christmas.

Q: And then it will be one in the spring and one in the fall?

A: Exactly. Two a year from then on, just like Peanuts and Mickey. Mickey, Charlie and Donald.

Q: The mighty triumvirate.

A: Yeah, right. I discovered Barks when I was 16. I was already deeply into comics and then a friend of mine turned me on to it and I kind of flipped out, started buying every back issue of Barks I could find and read them into my 20s and probably had 2/3rds of Barks, but at some point you stop reading him and you move on cause there’s so much else to read. So for the past few months I’ve been re-reading him. I’ve probably re-read about 700 or 800 pages of Barks in the last few months. It’s just amazing.

Q: The thought occurred to me that most young people aren’t aware of Donald Duck because he’s not as prominent a Disney character any more as Belle or the Little Mermaid are for modern generations. And beyond that you’ve got the issue of trying to convince parents and adults that these children’s stories about ducks in sailor suits are some of the greatest comics around. Do you feel like you have a lot of convincing to do?

A: I have to say I hadn’t thought of it from that angle. I guess not. There’s a sense in which we do because we’re dealing with two things that are a bit of a hard sell, comics and print. (laughter) Luckily we’re not Random House, we don’t have to sell 300,000 copies either. For us, I think we’ll sell quite a lot of copies but however many copies we sell constitute a mass market these days I’m not sure. In a sense sure, we have to convince people, but that’s our job. To some extent that was even true of Peanuts. The strip itself had become such a tiny proportion of its worldwide sales after merchandising, it was almost as if we had to reacquaint people with the strip.

So I don’t know. I guess there are probably a sufficient number of people of a certain generation who remember Donald Duck as a cartoon character or comic character that they’re going to be picking it up. I hope they’ll pass it on to their kids.

“5 years, 20 volumes, 72 artists, and 2,352 pages of comics.” Strictly by the numbers — taken from the Editor’s Notes that kick off Mome Vol. 20: Fall 2010, on sale this month — Fantagraphics’ signature anthology is a force to be reckoned with. Launched in 2005 with the intention of providing a regular home for new work by promising young cartoonists like Gabrielle Bell, Jeffrey Brown, Anders Nilsen, Paul Hornschemeier, and Sophie Crumb, it rapidly evolved into something else, something arguably more: a showcase for alternative comics of nearly every style and stripe. During its five-year history, Mome‘s diverse accomplishments have included publishing work from European greats like David B. and Lewis Trondheim, serializing Tim Hensley’s acclaimed graphic novel Wally Gropius, reintroducing Al Columbia to the comics scene prior to the release of his landmark Pim & Francie, giving Dash Shaw yet another forum for his experimental take on science fiction, providing an unlikely venue for underground legend Gilbert Shelton, showcasing up-and-comers like Jon Vermilyea and Nate Neal…and, like all anthologies, starting a good deal of debate over which contributors were any good at all. With its like-clockwork quarterly schedule, Mome is a go-to destination for finding out what’s going on at comics’ cutting edge.

Eric Reynolds by Jaime Hernandez

Presiding over all this has been editor Eric Reynolds, who inherited full control of the anthology from original co-editor and co-publisher Gary Groth. When last I spoke to Reynolds about Mome in October of 2007, he was prepping Vol. 10, which sported a new look, new work from Columbia, and the second half of a story by altcomix titan Jim Woodring. Three years and ten issues later, the series has gotten a full-on makeover from designer Adam Grano, and is in the midst of some of its most challenging work ever from Shaw, Josh Simmons, Derek Van Gieson and more. What has changed, what has remained constant, and what lies in store? Reynolds spoke with Robot 6 about all this and more in a fifth-anniversary interview.

If I’d ask you five years ago to describe what Mome Vol. 20 would look like, what would you have said?

I would’ve said there’s no way this thing’s going to last 20 issues. Really, I’m sure I would have had no other answer.

This may be a weird question, then, but how does that sort of belief — the belief that this thing we’re about to do doesn’t stand a chance of lasting very long — affect doing that thing in the first place? What were you hoping for, in terms of how long it lasted? Or did you not really care?

I honestly don’t know what I was hoping for. I’m sure I was hoping it could last 20 issues, but realistically, how could I have expected it? Look at any other anthology that’s ever been. I’m not sure there’s ever been one in alternative comics that’s published more pages of comics than Mome. We’re at around 2,350 pages of comics thru issue 20. What are the most successful comix anthologies of all-time? RAW? Zap? Weirdo? Zero Zero? Arcade? Kramers? None ever approached that many pages. So I don’t think I had a fatalistic attitude going in; it was more of a realistic one. I mean, I know enough from working at Fanta that there are few book series we’ve ever launched that could sustain 20 volumes. I thought we’d have a decent run but I just don’t think I could have anticipated 20 issues.

Mome Vol. 1

It’s probably been a while since you’ve been asked this one, but what was the thinking behind the launch of Mome?

Well, there were a lot of specific ideas behind it that I think is well-traveled territory, but really, I just felt like there was a need for an ongoing anthology that came out frequently enough to give a number of cartoonists a platform to publish stories regularly. The periodical market was already shrinking rapidly, and I thought and continue to think that this was not a good thing, creatively-speaking. Virtually every towering alternative cartooning figure I can think of, from Spiegelman to Crumb to Los Bros to Clowes to Ware to Sacco to Chester Brown, etc., honed their craft and found their voice by doing comic books and contributing to anthologies. I knew we were past the point where we were going to be starting too many comic book series anymore and thought an anthology could help fill that void a bit. I had been thinking about it for awhile, and one day Gary and I just started talking about it and decided to do it.

Mome was originally conceived of as featuring a fixed roster of young cartoonists whom we could watch develop over time. That version of the series didn’t last very long at all, and since then there have been, I think, several “eras” for the book: An SNL-style “regular cast plus guest star” model, a period where things felt more like underground comics than alternative comics, a period featuring a lot of experimental takes on genre, a slightly edgier feel in the last few issues…If I’m mischaracterizing anything I apologize, but I was wondering how the evolution of the book looked from your vantage point.

You probably have a clearer perspective on it than I do. To me, they tend to blend together at this point. The evolution has been subtle and organic and rarely conscious. I can understand the perception of the eras you’ve defined, but it wasn’t conscious, per se, and I’m not sure I could’ve ever come up with them on my own.

That makes sense, but were there ever any conscious moves on your part to introduce a sensibility or approach you felt was missing? Like “Hey, you know what we need?”

from Mome Vol. 10 by Tim Hensley

Well, sure. But not in a broad, overarching sense. For better or worse, it’s really more like, “Boy, I really like this, we need this,” from issue to issue as opposed to trying to reinvent the entire Mome wheel periodically. I’m not that smart, Sean.

The “name names” portion of the interview: Whose work in Mome are you proudest of?

I’m probably most proud of Tim Hensley, because I’ve been a pretty big fan of his for going on 20 years now — I think he was the only early Mome contributor that had also done work for my Dirty Stories anthologies of the mid-1990s — and I don’t think Wally Gropius would exist if we hadn’t asked him to contribute to Mome. I don’t think Wally was really swimming around in Tim’s head until he was specifically asked to contribute X number of pages to Mome per issue and he had to come up with something. And I think that book is one of the great graphic novels of the 2000s, so I can’t help but take some pride in that even though it’s all Tim’s work.

I figured he’d be high on your list. One of the coolest things about that comic is that I think it caught a lot of people by surprise. In the individual installments, I know a lot of people who just thought “Oh, that’s a funny Archie parody” or whatever. It wasn’t until the collection hit that a lot of people cottoned to what he was up to. For me, it was the incest strip that did it. How early on did you know he was up to something special?

Oh, right away. Page 1. It was clear he was embarking on his Magnum Opus. I’m not trying to sound like Mr. Know-it-All, like I knew this was going to set the world on fire. His work just really resonates with me, I love literally everything about it, it’s as close to perfect a comic as anything I can think of in regard to my own, undefined, unconscious Platonic ideal of what makes a good comic. The rest of the world, to a man, could hate it and it would do nothing to shake my faith in it, because I know how much *I* value it. The only thing I’ve read this year that is on that same plane for me, as a fan, has been Jaime [Hernandez]‘s stuff in the new Love and Rockets, [Daniel] Clowes’s Wilson, and [Charles] Burns’s X’ed Out. For whatever reason, these comics are just right in my wheelhouse.

Dirty Stories Vol. 2, edited by Reynolds

Now that you mention it, how did your experience with Dirty Stories affect your work with Mome? Tom Spurgeon suggested recently that Vol. 19′s strips are the best reminder yet that you were the editor of both books…

That sort of makes sense because 19 is definitely my favorite issue so far and the issue that I think most closely reflects my own tastes as a comics fan. I’m not sure how DS affected my work with Mome, really, other than to give me the confidence that I could do something that others might want to read. They’re pretty different titles, though. I was very young when I did Dirty Stories and had a much more reactionary, transgressive streak in me than I do now. Dirty Stories came from a very punk mindset. Mome was a much more idealistic endeavor.

from Mome Vol. 10 by Dash Shaw

What other contributors have you been really happy with?

I’ve been extremely proud of what Dash Shaw has done in Mome. I think he’s been the perfect Mome contributor in many ways, actively utilizing the format to experiment in a myriad of ways.

He’s sort of a cartoonist who’s never done the same thing twice, isn’t he? I mean, the growth from, like, Love Eats Brains to Bottomless Belly Button…

Yeah, exactly. Trying different genres, experimenting with fiction and nonfiction, playing with color, with technique, and having no fear…The guy is really something else.

from Mome Vol. 10 by Tom Kaczynski

I could list any number of cartoonists and what I’ve liked about their work, but one other who comes to mind that I’ve been really proud of is Tom Kaczynski. He was someone I met through Gabrielle Bell and I liked his work from the get go but it’s only as I’ve gotten to know him a little bit better and read his contributions to Mome that I’ve discovered what a smart, thoughtful guy he is. And he has the cartooning chops to match what’s going on in his head. I have a feeling there are very few rooms that Tom walks into where he isn’t the smartest one in it. The sociopolitical themes he wrestles in his work would in the hands of a lesser cartoonist come off as preachy or dogmatic, but he manages to never do that. I think he has only important work in him.

from Mome Vol. 1 by David Heatley

Did any of your contributors let you down?

As far as who let me down…I don’t really want to go there and nobody immediately came to mind, even, although thinking about it a bit I would have to say the biggest disappointment is that David Heatley never finished Overpeck. I think that was shaping up to be a tremendously weird and powerful story and I was eager to see where it was headed.

That’s a great call. And not just because what he ended up doing instead was so divisive, but because I really did feel that that was his best work yet. What happened there — is it something you can go into?

I’m not even sure I remember the specifics. I know I tried very hard to convince him to continue it. If I recall, he had gotten his book deal to do My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down and with it there may have been a deal or an option for Overpeck, as well, and he decided he didn’t want to tip his hand any further and simply wait for the collection to publish it. Which was fine, it was his decision, but I just really liked the work and wanted to see it finish in Mome. I haven’t talked to David in quite a long time, so I have no idea if it’s still in the cards or what.

from Mome Vol. 13 by Gilbert Shelton & Pic

Who was your biggest get?

I guess I’d have to say David B., Jim Woodring, Al Columbia or Gilbert Shelton. David B. was really key because I think he was the first truly established cartoonist to consent to being in Mome, it was very early on (issue 3) and I think he lent some much-needed legitimacy to what we were doing. I was grateful to Al and Jim, two guys I’d known for over 15 years, to trust me enough to let me run their work, because they could have published anywhere they wanted, I’m sure. Personally, I was probably most excited to have Gilbert Shelton. I get the impression that his pieces didn’t go over so well with a lot of Mome readers but holy fucking shit it’s Gilbert Shelton! I knew he would be a weird fit for Mome in some ways but I saw it as a real chance to introduce him to a new generation of cartoonists. I think it’s not unreasonable to say that Shelton has kind of fallen off the radar when it comes to discussing a pantheon of the all-time greats. Most of his work over the last couple decades from Knockabout and Rip Off seemed to be off the radar of most alt-comix readers. So, as silly as it might sound, I thought he might stand to benefit from Mome as much as any of the younger folks, and certainly more than, say, David B. or Jim Woodring. I also thought his strip was very funny and contemporary despite the superficial hippie trappings that seem to put some folks off. I think if he drew his characters to look like urban hipsters folks would have loved it, which is kind of depressing.

Are there any cartoonists you think of as “the ones that got away,” who you wanted to get in the book but couldn’t?

There were a few folks who were initially slated to be in Mome‘s initial core group but had to back out for whatever reasons prior to the first issue. Marc Bell was one, I think Kevin Huizenga was another. I would have been thrilled to publish them in there but it didn’t work out.

At Comic Con this year, Brian Ralph told me that he was bummed at the time Mome started because he wasn’t asked to contribute. Brian would have been an awesome guy for Mome, so now I’m bummed that I didn’t.

from Mome Vol. 1 by Jonathan Bennett

I also really miss Jonathan Bennett being in Mome, which I know he knows. I love his work and it felt like he was in a very strong creative groove with the first several issues of Mome and that the best was still yet to come. I think he’s a tremendously underrated cartoonist, an impeccable craftsman with a very strong voice. But his career as a graphic designer really took off shortly after Mome began and he hasn’t been able to create many comics the last few years. Whether it’s for Mome or otherwise, I really hope he gets back to them because he’s really, really good.

Do you get a lot of feedback from the artists in Mome about the other artists in Mome? How does their juxtaposition with one another affect the reception of their work, do you think? Have any of them ever offered their thoughts on that?

You’d have to ask them, I guess. I mean, yes, I have gotten and do get feedback from some of the artists about what they like and don’t like, and I always enjoy that. But I couldn’t tell you much more, specifically. It’s not like we all work in a big clubhouse. In fact, I’m often lousy at communicating with Mome artists, which I’m really embarrassed to say, it’s really something I wish I was better at. I’d like to think they and the readers enjoy the juxtapositions, and I always try to create interesting juxtapositions within each issue. Rob Clough has a real knack for picking up on those things whenever he reviews Mome.

One thing I’ve been curious about for a long time is what Mome‘s audience is like, since it’s a format that’s very different than anything else out there. Is it people getting every single issue? Subscribers? People who pick individual volumes up depending on who’s in them? The audience for the literary journals that inspired it?

I really have no idea. I just don’t. I mean, I know where we sell the books, but I don’t know who the consumers are, per se. And where we sell Mome is not appreciably different than where we sell most of our books. About half go thru W.W. Norton to bookstores and Amazon and half go thru Diamond to specialty shops. We do have a subscriber base although it’s farily minimal, maybe a couple of hundred people.

One slight trend I’ve noticed and which has been pretty gratifying is that a lot of cartooning students tell me they read it. I’ve taken trips in the last couple of years to places like MCAD and CCS and I’m really gratified to have a surprising number of aspiring cartoonists tell me how much they really enjoy it. I like that. When we started Mome, the idea was essentially to help the cartoonists who were in it. If it actually somehow serves as some kind of inspiration or influence to cartoonists who aren’t even in it, then that’s a really great fringe benefit that never even occurred to me as a possibility when we started.

That’s interesting. It’s not as though I have any contact with cartooning students whatsoever, but i wonder if it’s seen as sort of the Big Leagues, the way people at the sketch and improv institutions in New York and Chicago and L.A. and so on see Saturday Night Live. That’s why I’ve pitched to it, I could tell you that much.

Maybe. I imagine it’s maybe something they see as both the Big Leagues but yet also attainable, if that makes sense.

If I’m not mistaken, Vol. 20 marks your debut as the sole editor of the series.

I’ve actually been the sole editor for quite awhile. I forget what issue Gary’s name came off the masthead but it’s been several.

Oh, look at that — it was Vol. 17, Winter 2010. How had you and Gary split the work, and what’s changed now?

This might sound self-serving, I really don’t mean it to, but I was always doing the heavy lifting on Mome even though we consulted together on everything early on. Gary always has too much to do. It got to the point where I was making a lot of decisions without even consulting Gary because he’s a Very Busy Man and I didn’t want to bother him with too many details, and at some point he suggested to me that I take his name off the masthead because he felt guilty about taking co-credit. So I did. The division of labor early on was simply that we both invited cartoonists to contribute and that I did most of the nuts and bolts assembly of the book while he contributed the interview every issue. It was a lot of fun because even though I work ten feet apart from Gary we hadn’t really collaborated on a project like this since I was an editor for The Comics Journal in the early-to-mid 1990s.

Mome Vol. 10

This issue sees a redesign, the biggest since Jordan Crane designed the very first installment. I know the layout was altered at issue #10, removing the two-tone wallpaper-style patterns and moving the title from a bar at the bottom to a box in the upper left, but the logo remained the same. Why change what turned out to be a pretty iconic design?

Well, I guess it came down to, “Why not?” It’s not like Mome has ever been hugely successful, and it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise when I say that after 20 issues, sales have flattened out a bit. Adam Grano has been doing the production and design for Mome since almost the very beginning, adhering to Jordan’s template. He’s done a great, unsung job considering — let’s face it — it can’t be as creatively satisfying adhering to someone else’s template is it would be to create your own. So when Adam proposed redesigning the series a few issues back, even though the obsessive-compulsive in me resisted the idea, the more I thought about it and the more it seemed like a good idea. So I gave him the green light for issue 20, which seemed like a good “anniversary” issue to do it with. We’d made a slight design change with issue 10, eliminating the title bar across the bottom and eschewing the patterned backgrounds, so 20 seemed like a good place to mix it up even further. It enabled Adam to put his stamp on it a bit. If Mome was a tremendous commercial success I would’ve likely been more resistant to it. I love The Believer and love that they’ve stuck to their template for 70-some issues now. Charles Burns is their David Levine. I love that kind of continuity personally. But it felt right to resist those inclinations and try something different.

Anthologies are a dicey business in comics. To what do you attribute Mome‘s longevity?

Just enough sales. I realize you’re really asking me, “To what do you attribute just enough sales to?” and to that end I really have no idea. I’m just grateful it’s hung on.

Fair enough! Speaking of anthologies, though, where do you see Mome in relation to some of the other approaches to that format over recent years — Kramers Ergot or Papercutter or D&Q Showcase?

Well, I’ll be the first to admit that Mome is hardly as tightly-curated or as well-conceived as the last few Kramers. That’s like the gold standard for anthologies at this point. But one of the great benefits of Mome is, for me, its frequency. I very purposefully created with Jordan Crane a template that would enable me to be able to get issues out every three months. I work on Mome as a labor of love, I do it on the side for no pay, and to be able to do that, I simply couldn’t be as hands-on and as detail-oriented as Sammy [Harkham] has been with Kramers. You’ll never see me flying to Malaysia to watch Mome come off the press. I wish that wasn’t the case, but I would’ve burned out after a few issues. So I see Mome‘s great strength as being its periodicity, as superficial as that might sound, but it really was a key component of the idea behind it, that by doing four issues a year with four deadlines, the contributors might be pushed to create more pages than they otherwise would, and try things they might not otherwise have done.

There does seem to be a bit of a renaissance of good anthologies lately. Smoke Signals from Brooklyn’s Desert Island, Diamond Comics from Floating World in Portland, some of the stuff Sparkplug has been doing, student work from CCS and SCAD, etc. I don’t know where Mome fits in it all, really. I just hope enough people enjoy it on its own terms to justify its existence. When there isn’t enough, we’ll end it. I’m not too precious about it.

Bizarrely, I’d never thought of the anthologies of the past few years as a replacement for the solo alternative comic book until just now, when you mentioned how Mome was a response to the latter’s disappearance. Now, of course, it makes perfect sense: If you’re not one of the very few artists continuing to pursue that format, perhaps quixotically — Kevin Huizenga seems to have made the most successful go of it recently, and Michael DeForge seems to mean business about it — an anthology makes sense as a way to work frequently in print, in front of an audience. Did you get a sense from your artists that that’s how they saw it as well?

I think so, yeah. I mean, that was really the explicit intent of it being quarterly. And I think you’re right about Kevin, he’s one of the Last Men Standing as far as that goes, the exception to prove the rule. There were always anthologies, even when the periodical market was thriving, but I think they’re even more valuable now. There are just not enough publishers to support all the good cartoonists out there. I am constantly having to reject some pretty good work because we just have a ceiling of how many books we can publish a year. It’s my least favorite part of the job. Mome is at least a small way to help offset that reality.

Related question: It can be argued that web publishing can serve the same purpose that the solo series used to serve, or that the print anthologies serve today. Lately we’ve been seeing a lot more work from established alternative cartoonists going up online, from Brian Chippendale to Frank Santoro to Gabrielle Bell to everyone on Jordan Crane’s What Things Do, which is a real murderer’s row. As an editor of a print anthology dedicated to that sort of material, how do you see the rise of the alternative webcomic?

Well, it’s a good question, because you could argue quite easily that a good cartoonist could pretty easily find as large an audience — and quite possibly a significantly larger one — online as they would contributing to something like Mome. I harbor no illusions about that. But I also think there’s still something to be said for preparing your work for print, seeing it printed in ink, on paper, that validates the work.

This may “out” me as an old man clutching to dying technologies, but I grew up wit print and love its tactile thrill. What the internet now delivers in instant gratification and access it lacks in stirring that fetishistic affection in my soul for print and paper and black, black ink. Evolution has already eliminated this gene from younger generations; it was a largely 20th century anomaly in humankind. Personally, even though I don’t make a lot of minicomics or zines anymore, I would still rather do a minicomic than a webcomic. Preparing something for print and making a physical object should be a part of the whole creative experience, it seems to me. When something only exists a screen it doesn’t feel like the physical effort of drawing a comic amounted to anything real. Printing is an inherent component of the history of cartooning and comics. Removing that from the equation will make cartooning a different thing in the 21st century, as different as ragtime and electronic music. I am personally invested in keeping the tradition of hand-drawn and physically-printed cartooning alive.

That’s not at all to dismiss the Internet or webcomics, which is clearly become a vital component of the contemporary comics scene, and is probably a more valid path for many cartoonists than pursuing print, and digital will win out in the very end. I understand and accept the whole “adapt-or-die” and think about it daily in my larger position here at Fantagraphics. I love Jordan’s site and think it’s the best thing going on the web, and it bodes well for the future of webcomics. But I still, simply, see a value in print, and think both ends can coexist peacefully. I mean, I know Jordan, for all of the work he’s put into What Things Do, still ultimately sees the web as a means to end for the eventual print collections of his work. The books are still the Thing in What Things Do.

What does the future hold for Mome?

Well, I’d like to say 20 more issues, but I honestly don’t know. I take it very much issue to issue. I’m starting to put together 21 now. Tom Kaczynski and Kurt Wolfgang are back, which is exciting to me, I love those guys. I think Kurt’s the last remaining contributor whose been with Mome since issue 1. And [Wolfgang's story] Nothing Eve is going to be a fantastic book when it’s done. Sara Edward-Corbett just turned in a story that blew me away, it’s her most gorgeous piece ever, very Gorey-esque yet still unmistakably Sara. Josh Simmons’ crazy White Rhinoceros serial is just getting started. And lots of other stuff, of course.

Gary Groth and Jim Steranko by Robert Kline

He’s one of the godfathers of alternative comics now, but Gary Groth was once a fanboy like any other. Well, that’s not quite true, as the future Fantagraphics publisher was always a lot more enterprising than most. The illustration above of Groth in the home of Nick Fury artist Jim Steranko comes from Groth’s Fantastic Fanzine #11, available for perusal and full download at Comic Attack. The issue dates back to 1970 and chock full of juicy Steranko interviews, Dave Cockrum illustrations, and drawings of shirtless barbarians of both genders. We’re a long way from Ghost World, but you’ve gotta start somewhere!

(via Fantagraphics)

Gary Groth

“I had an anus-clenching moment when I read Ken [Parille]’s parodic ‘Where are your standards?’ paragraph without knowing it was parody and thought, ‘My God, [Parille and Comics Journal contributor Noah Berlatsky are] both idiots!’ You can imagine my relief when Ken revealed that it was a joke! I thought I’d created some sort of critical purgatory that I would wander around in forever in an intellectual torpor, and the only way out would be to extinguish the site. My only solace was that I might bump into Harold Bloom and we’d sit down and commiserate.”

—Comics Journal editor and Fantagraphics co-publisher Gary Groth, expressing his dismay that he can no longer tell actual posts on the Journal’s website from parodies thereof.

Go ahead, make Gary Groth's day

Fantagraphics co-founder and co-publisher Gary Groth can be scary enough even when he isn’t wielding a loaded firearm. (Don’t believe me? Then witness the savage critical beatdown he just doled out to Comics Journal contributor Noah Berlatsky. Ouch.) But in one of comics’ grander and weirder traditions, Groth and his fellow Fanta folks traipse out into the Washington State wilderness every year with enough guns to make a Tea Party jealous and open fire at whatever office detritus had the misfortune of catching their eye. Check out designer Adam Grano’s “Shootin’ Day” flickr set to witness a variety of Fantagraphics and Comics Journal employees and creators opening fire at everything from one of those good-luck cat statues to a Nagel print.

(Via Flog!)

Robert Kline art from FF #12

Before there were LJ communities, before there was DeviantArt, heck, before there was an internet, there were fanzines. And before Gary Groth was the editor of The Comics Journal, he was the editor of Fantastic Fanzine, a project he began when he was 13. At Comic Attack, Ken Meyer, Jr., reproduces all of issue 12 of FF, together with commentary on many of the creators. And if that whets your appetite, check out the earlier issue he blogged about last fall.

The Comics Journal #300

A contrarian’s contrarian known for writing pieces like an Art Spiegelman takedown titled “In the Shadow of No Talent,” Noah Berlatsky is the sort of writer whom people who’ve never read The Comics Journal but know of its fearsome reputation might conjure up as the notoriously cranky comics mag’s critical platonic ideal. In that light, the longtime Journal contributor and current Journal blogger’s essay on everything that’s wrong with the Journal‘s new web presence might be the Comics Journaliest thing ever written.

Writing at his usual blog platform The Hooded Utilitarian — which is now hosted at the Journal‘s site, TCJ.com — Berlatsky rattles off a laundry list of problems with the recently relaunched site. Gaudy ads, WordPress clutter, an “everything and the kitchen sink” approach to organizing its bloggers and their very different approaches and beats, “read more” jump-cuts that interrupt every single post mid-sentence, launching in beta, lack of promotion, frequent outages, and the already-infamous posting and yanking of TCJ #300′s content are among the many targets that draw Berlatsky’s fire.

More Journal and TCJ.com contributors chime in in the comment thread, such as as well as blogger Derik Badman, who notes the site’s user-unfriendly headline-only RSS feed, which is undetectable to some browsers.

Though Journal publisher and guiding light Gary Groth continues to dismiss the comics blogosphere even as he admits he doesn’t follow it all that closely, the problems with his publication’s entry into the digital era make me wonder if we’ve reached a “physician, heal thyself” moment.

The Comics Journal #300

What the heck happened to The Comics Journal #300? Stuffed to the gills with a murderers’ row of comics creators in cross-generational conversation (from Matt Fraction & Denny O’Neil to Art Spiegelman & Kevin Huizenga), this anniversary spectacular became a swan song of sorts when a letter to subscribers revealed that it would be the venerable comics-criticism publication’s final journal-format issue — henceforth switching to a more online-focused model with semiannual book-format print editions.

So the the news that the whole thing had been posted online was met with much rejoicing… but the subsequent news that the whole thing had been yanked back behind the subscriber wall per the orders of co-publisher and editor Gary Groth was met with much head-scratching. Was this the result of an internal debate over the utility of free-content-as-marketing-device, as web editor and Journalista! blogger Dirk Deppey seemed to imply the next day? Was it a really lousy way to debut the Journal‘s impending web-based iteration, as frequent Journal contributor and future Journal blogger Noah Berlatsky lamented? Or was it a reaction to retailers upset that the product they’d shortly be trying to sell had been made available for free with no advance warning, as Johanna Draper Carlson surmised?

Well, if you had Carlson in your office pool, get ready to collect: Today on Journalista!, Deppey revealed that retailer complaints were indeed the reason for the issue’s Internet vanishing act.

“We pulled TCJ #300 offline largely due to retailer concerns over not having been given adequate warning about said plans before ordering the issue,” Deppey writes. “It was a fair point, and one that we hadn’t properly considered.” Deppey goes on to say that the issue will be back online for all in December after retailers have a proper chance to sell the print version, and that all future issues will be available online for free as planned.

So yeah, rough start for the Journal‘s bold new era. Still, it’s clear a lot of people really want to read the issue — not the worst problem in the world to have, no?

The Comics Journal #300

Kiss your productivity goodbye, comics fans: Every last page of the 300th issue of The Comics Journal has been posted online.

The Journal team had already pulled all the stops to make this anniversary issue something special even before it was announced that this would be the venerable comics-criticism publication’s final quasi-magazine-format installment. The result is a killer collection of cross-generational interviews between Art Spiegelman and Kevin Huizenga, Jean-Christophe Menu and Sammy Harkham, Frank Quitely and Dave Gibbons, David Mazzucchelli and Dash Shaw, Alison Bechdel and Danica Novgorodoff, Howard Chaykin and Ho Che Anderson, Denny O’Neil and Matt Fraction, Jaime Hernandez and Zak Sally, Ted Rall and Matt Bors, Jim Borgman and Keith Knight, and Stan Sakai and Chris Schweizer. There’s also a comics-format interview with Gary Groth by Noah Van Sciver, reviews of some of the past year or so’s most momentous comics — including Breakdowns, Acme Novelty Library #19 and Asterios Polyp — and retrospectives galore. Long story short, there’s so much stuff in there you’re probably best off calling out sick from work. Oh yeah, the print version hits stores soon. (Via Dirk Deppey)

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…

Bill Kartalopolous: Look at this crowd! And I mean the panelists. [Laughter] Ba-dum-bum-bum. Okay. Hi, my name is Bill Kartalopolous. I’m the programming coordinator here at SPX. I also teach classes about comics and illustration at Parsons, and write about comics for Publishers Review and Print magazine. Publishers Weekly is actually what it’s called, isn’t it? It could be called Publishers Review. I just look at the number on the check. Then I cry. [Laughter]

Rob Clough: Is it a handwritten check?

Bill: Yeah, right. I don’t think the signature’s even handwritten. Okay, so, this is our annual Critics Roundtable. I’m very, very excited that there’s so many notable critics here at the show this weekend that I just had to invite everyone on to the panel. I’m really briefly going to introduce everyone and mention one or two of the publications they write for. Some of them write for many, many publications, but it would take probably the remainder of the panel to communicate all of our CVs collectively. But going in, I think, alphabetical order, as I have them here: Rob Clough [prounounced "claw"]…

Rob: “Clow.” [rhymes with cow or Mao]

Bill: “Clow.” Sorry, I always do that.

Rob: And I always correct it.

Bill: Frequent comics reviewer for the seems-to-be indefinitely on hiatus Sequart website —

Rob: Coming back soon!

Bill: Coming back soon to a computer monitor near you. But now reviewing on your own High-Low blog, and writing many many reviews, as many as three a week it seems, very very frequent reviewer. We have Sean Collins, Sean T. Collins — I always do that too… [Laughter] … who maintains his own blog called Attentiondeficitdisorderly All Too Flat… ?

Sean T. Collins: Close enough.

Bill: What did I get wrong?

Sean: The “All” isn’t in there. The “All” is silent. [Laughter]

Bill: Okay, Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat. Right. But you also write for The Savage Critic group blog, and you’ve written for a number of publications, from Wizard to Maxim to many others I’m flaking on right now. A very frequent writer for all of those venues and more. Gary Groth all the way at the end, a person probably without whom many of us would not be in this room. The co-founder of The Comics Journal, co-founder and co-publisher of Fantagraphics Books, longstanding editorial director of The Comics Journal, the writer of many pieces of savage criticism that we’ve all admired over the years, setting a real standard for everyone else.

Gary Groth: Not all. [Laughter]

Bill: Not all. But someone who we’re always happy to have on this panel. We have Chris Mautner [pronounced "Mawtner"]…

Chris Mautner: “Mowtner.” [rhymes with cow-tner or Mao-tner]

Bill: “Mowtner.” It’s gonna be one of those panels. [Laughter] He’s frequently reviewed comics for the Patriot News in Harrisburg?

Chris: In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I had a column there.

Bill: And also a frequent writer for the Robot 6 blog at Comic Book Resources. And most of what you do for that is reviewing.

Chris: Reviewing, and we have some column features, regular features, and kinda daily blogging. And I also do reviews for The Comics Journal.

Bill: And immediately to your right, Joe McCulloch?

Joe McCulloch: Yes. Perfect.

Bill: Phew! AKA Jog?

Joe: Yes.

Bill: Author of the blog Jog Likes Comics?

Joe: Yes.

Bill: Okay. Also writing for Comics Comics magazine, The Savage Critic, Bookforum, among many other venues. Also recently started writing a comics column, a kind of comics and movies column, for the ComiXology website called… “The Watchman.”

Joe: [Laughs] I inherited that, yes.

Bill: I should hope so! [Laughter] Immediately to my left, Tucker Stone maintains the Factual Opinion blog, featuring many comics reviews by yourself and also by your significant other. I think those are the only two contributors, or do you have any other…

Tucker: No, we have a couple other people, but for comics it’s just my wife and I.

Bill: And you’ve also recently started doing a series of video reviews for the ComiXology website.

Tucker: I guess you could call it that.

Bill: In which you sort of performatively communicate opinions about comics and the comics industry and culture…

Tucker: Okay. [Laughter]

Bill: Okay, something like that?

Tucker: Yeah, that’s accurate.

Bill: And right over there, Douglas Wolk, a man we all know and love who writes for many many publications, including Publishers Weekly, or if you prefer, Publishers Review. [Laughter] Very frequently recently writing for The New York Times, very long pieces of comics criticism. Also the author of the book <i>Reading Comics</i>, and you’ve been in 8,000 other magazines, newspapers, websites, also The Savage Critic, et cetera.

So I think we’ve covered everyone, basically. And that’s about time… [Laughter] There are a lot of issues we could start with, and there are two that leap to mind the most. I’m not actually sure which one’s better, but they’re both related. One of the things I’m interested in, because so many of the people here on this panel write most frequently on the Internet and often for their own fora, their own blogs, or at least websites that are written collectively by a small group of people. So I’m interested in the question of how the Internet has affected comics criticism in good ways and in bad ways. That’s a very broad and general question. Since many of you are writing for the Internet, maybe the easiest place to start — anyone can jump in on this — is what you perceive as being one of the advantages of this new, pretty much dominant mass medium in our lives that’s leeching the life out of everything else. Joe, do you have any thoughts on this?

Joe: Yeah, well, one of the plus sides of the Internet, definitely, is that you can respond quickly to something — not necessarily a new book that’s come out, but something that you’re interested in and studying, so to speak. I tend to study things after I read them. So you can get things out there quickly, and then they’re out there. You could find them on search engines. Whether they could be found, or whether they’re permament, is another question, but the potential is there to access them easier than you can something that’s, say, in a bookstore, or in a magazine longbox. I think that’s a good plus. And of course this is a minus too, but you can write how you want, you can address works the way you feel like you want to, you can just change topics if you want to, you don’t have to feel constrained to write about only new things, about only a certain genre, about only a certain format.

Douglas: It enables conversations, too, which is what’s most rewarding for me — not just seeing the article but seeing the responses to it and the comments and the things that people write in response to it and other responses to that. But the conversation happens much more quickly and much more broadly than it was able to in the past, and I love that.

Sean: I guess this is a little bit obvious, but there’s no gatekeeper, there’s no editor, there’s no publisher to answer to. So, speaking for myself, and I think Joe, and probably Tucker, the Internet is where I first ever wrote about comics — I think probably, maybe on the Savage Dragon message board, and then on the Comics Journal message board, and then on my blog. Then a few years ago, Dirk Deppey, when he was managing editor of The Comics Journal, brought a bunch of people who were primarily bloggers aboard. And that still happens. I never would have dreamed of submitting anything to The Comics Journal. It was just way beyond my ken, I thought. And then all of a sudden I’m writing for it, and that never would have happened if I hadn’t started a blog on my friend’s humor website and started writing about comics.

Chris: I do think there’s some kind of promotional aspect to the Internet and writing on the Internet that allows you — and it’s part of that direct conversation — that you can… I think if I’d just been writing for the newspaper, I don’t think I would have met these people or have access. Unless I’d put it up on a blog, I wouldn’t be doing the work I’m doing at Robot 6. So there is that self-gratifying notion of being able to, I don’t want to say call attention to yourself, but at least the reward of people paying attention, which can lead to other things. It can lead to greater writing rewards down the line.

Rob: The thing about it for me is that there’s potential there… When you’re writing for a publication there’s space constraints, there’s editorial constraints, but there’s a real possibility to write long, thoughtful, critical pieces, and really engage something. And unfortunately, on the Internet, that doesn’t always happen. Too many online critical spaces are just shorter reviews or short excuses for snark as opposed to really trying to engage the work, both for its positive and negative qualities. To me, that’s the greatest possibility there for the Internet, for those who are really willing to engage it, is that a lot can be done that can’t sincerely be done in a publication.

Bill: I talked to some of the panelists ahead of time to see what kind of topics they were interested in or questions they might be interested in, and Sean directly wanted to know, Gary, why you don’t have a blog or haven’t participated in online fora or some kind of writing of that nature, beyond the fact that you’re obviously a very busy publisher.

Gary: Yeah. Well, I don’t know. People bug me about not having a blog all the time. First of all, I’m generationally challenged in terms of having a blog. I mean, I’m just not suited to writing every two days. I’m from the tradition where you sit down and you spend several weeks honing some piece. So I haven’t been able to get into the rhythm of blogging. Plus, in terms of criticism, the criticism I write has been somewhat dilettantish because of my position as the publisher of The Comics Journal, and that’s only gotten more acute over the years. So I don’t feel like I can really whale on a lot of books, because it would look immediately like this is obviously a conflict of interest. So I feel somewhat compromised in terms of writing about specific books. Then I also don’t necessarily want to write only about the books that I love, because there a lot of books that I read that I don’t think much of that I’d love to write about, but I just feel like I’m in a difficult position to do that. I don’t know if that sort of incoherent rambling answered your question.

Rob: You felt your position has changed? I mean, you’ve been the publisher for a long time.

Gary: I think it has, because the Journal has shrunk as a proportion of Fantagraphics over the years. As we publish more and more books, more graphic novels — we publish something like sixty graphic novels a year. So in 1986 or 1988 we publish eight books a year, and The Comics Journal was a much more prominent part of our company, and I was much more involved in it, and now I’m much more involved in publishing the books. So I think it has changed somewhat.

Bill: And that thing you pointed out as well, I think, is sort of the other side of the coin from the networking aspect of blogging and writing online, which is that often, in order to be a presence, as Gary suggested, it’s helpful to be generating content on something resembling a regular schedule, which maybe works against the kind of writing you were talking about — spending two weeks trying to write your definitive statement on X, Y, or Z. Is that something any of you have felt? That there’s some sort of pressure to publish regularly in order to keep an audience? Or are there strategies to maintain your momentum without impinging upon the quality of your writing?

Joe: Well, I think there is an expectation that websites should be updating frequently, like every day. I personally, as I’ve gone along — and I think it’s more difficult now, because the comics Internet has gotten a lot bigger in the last five years since I started writing on the Internet. It’s easier to get lost, I think, now, writing about comics on the Internet — to disappear into the crowd. So I think there might actually be more interest in writing more frequently. I’ve personally found myself slowing down, actually. I do write pretty quick, but I’m always writing something. I just don’t stop, ’cause I don’t want to. But some pieces, they overlap. I can spend two weeks working on something, and y’know, when it’s posted it just appears, and it might as well have been made yesterday, ’cause I don’t talk about how I write it. But yeah, those are factors at work.

Douglas: If you don’t care about hit counts, though, it doesn’t really matter. Once you publish something on the Internet, as long as you’re paying for the website, it’s there for good. You don’t have to worry about distribution, you don’t have to worry about it going out of print. If you have something to say and you publish it when you’re ready, if you don’t care about either hit counts or being supported by ads, it doesn’t matter.

Sean: In my case, my blog is hosted on a site that was designed by a friend and some of his college buddies from Cornell to practice coding. So the hit count, y’know, the thing that monitors traffic is so rudimentary that it’s useless. So I literally couldn’t find out what my traffic was even if I wanted to. And that, over the years — I really have never thought about having an audience. I’ve been blogging regularly, particularly over the last two years or so. I’ve been reviewing three comics a week, pretty much non-stop, and that’s more for my own fun and benefit. I feel much worse about how rarely I contribute to Savage Critic(s), which I think…

Tucker: Yeah.

Sean: …Tucker is part of and Joe and Douglas, because that’s somebody else’s site, and I know that they would like to get some traffic, and I just, I don’t have it in me, for some reason. That I feel bad about, but on my own site, it doesn’t really register.

Tucker: I don’t know how anybody else comes at it, but I — I mean, I haven’t been at this but for maybe a couple years, and I always kinda treated what I do at my blog, at the Factual, as just like, it’s my own school. I don’t really know anything, I didn’t take any classes in writing or anything — it started as a hobby. And then other people… basically, Dirk Deppey linked to it, and then Tom Spurgeon linked to it, and then all of a sudden there was an audience, and it wasn’t something that I really expected. I do try to follow a deadline, but that’s basically because in my head I think, “Well, that’s what writers do. They have deadlines to turn in pieces,” or “They have deadlines to turn in columns.” Then when ComiXology actually gave me money to write something, then I did have a real deadline. In my head, I’m like, “Well, if you have a deadline, then that’s gonna… ” It makes me write, it makes me do it. Like Joe, I just write about stuff all the time anyway, now that I do it and it’s a hobby and it’s fun. But it’s kind of also a way to go, like, “Well, if you’re gonna be a writer, you have to get stuff done by… ” When I do my weekly comic thing, I do that every Sunday. That’s what I do every Sunday night — it has to go up. And there’s an expectation there. But also, I just had an education this week: The most popular thing on my website, by far, is a review that my wife wrote, which is not really much of a review, it’s just a personal reaction to Achewood, and that’s because Chris Onstad linked to it. And if Chris Onstad links to something, then obviously that immediately becomes more popular than any review you write about any superhero comic or anything else, because a lot more people read Chris Onstad than read Tucker’s jokey reviews of comic books. That’s just the way it goes. So hit counts — I don’t even have ads, so I don’t really care. It’s like, “Whatever, that’s not important.”

Rob: For me, I only have a very vague idea of what audience I may have. But I read something, I think about it, and then I just feel a compulsion. I must write about it. And until I have written about it, the feeling doesn’t go away. It’s a very intense thing. And when people start sending you a lot of comics, just out of the blue [laughter from the panel], it’s like, “Oh my God.” All I think about is the backlog, thinking “Now it’s time to read this.” And then once I’ve done it, it starts the process, it starts the chain reaction until I’ve finished the review. And some books are harder to approach than others. I’ve been working on a review of the second Ivan Brunetti anthology thing for the last three months, and it’s just not quite ready yet.

Gary: Can I ask you guys a related question to what Bill asked? I know most of you write for both print and the Internet. Maybe all of you do, but I know most of you do. Do you write differently when you write for print than when you write for the Internet?

Chris: Absolutely, yeah. Doug and I were just talking about this. I think you have to consider your audience and who you’re writing to. When I was doing my column for the newspaper, it didn’t matter if I was writing about Kazuo Umezu or Robert Crumb, I had to assume that most of the people who were gonna pick up that column were gonna have no idea who those people were, and I was gonna have to introduce them to this person. So half the column was easily going to be “Robert Crumb was this person who started in the ’60s and did Zap Comix and now he has a new book out and it’s good, the end.” Whereas if I’m writing on Robot 6 or on my own blog or what have you, I don’t really have to worry about that. I can assume that most people are all speaking the same language. I might, depending on the obscurity of the artist or the writer, I might do a little hand-holding sometimes for something like the “Collect This Now!” column that I do, where I kind of forge… I don’t probably go into as much detail as I really should, usually ’cause I’m doing this late and night and I’m tired. But I do definitely consider who I’m writing to. The way I write for the Journal, for example, I bring probably a different attitude and way of writing than I do for some of the other reviews I do.

Joe: Yeah, and on an even more basic level, the Internet tends to be kind of a free-for-all, actually. So when I’m reacting to a book on the Internet, some of these things run upwards of four thousand, eight thousand words. In print, you just don’t have that much space, and to make the thing read correctly, to get your ideas across properly, I’ve found that because I started on the Internet, I have to temper myself in order to get things within a certain hit count. Plus, I’m interacting with an editor who’s looking at what I’m doing and sometimes will tell me, “Yeah, no one’s gonna understand this.” So I react to that, I interact with my editor, and that inevitably changes things, ’cause [when] I’m writing for my own site, I’m my only editor.

Sean: For me, it can be a print-web dichotomy, but it’s also just the audience. The writing I do for the Journal, when I was reviewing for the Journal, obviously was a lot closer to my personal blog than if I’m writing online for Marvel.com or whatever.

Gary: I should hope so. [Laughter]

Sean: I’m not really doing criticism for them, but yeah, it’s different. I also think that —

Gary: But the media themselves don’t necessarily change how you…

Sean: Not really. Well, I mean, it really depends on the venue and their target audience. Douglas may be the only one of us who has the clout, in print, to write a bad review. In my experience, when I’m writing for a general-interest publication, they ask you, “What are some good comics coming out that we can cover?” So I’ll pitch them stuff that I actually like, or think I’ll like if I don’t have a copy yet. So 99 times out of a 100 that I’ve written for Maxim, it’s been about something that I’m excited about. I’ve barely ever given a bad review in print, except in the Journal, for that reason. Because they’re not really… you know, usually the editors at general-interest publications who are running comics reviews are comics fans who are sort of boosters of the medium, to a certain extent, and they don’t really want to waste real estate telling the audience why they shouldn’t buy something.

Gary: So you’re actually saying you need clout to get a negative review published?

Sean: I guess? I mean, I don’t… [Laughs] [Douglas] is writing for magazines and publications that are a different kettle of fish than the ones I’m writing for.

Joe: It kind of depends on the forum. The general interest newspapers and magazines, they tend to take more of an advocacy position. I have written negatively for Bookforum — they’re a literary newspaper, though, so I think they’re more inclined to treat comics like the rest of the books they’d review.

Douglas: Right. If you’re writing for a large general-interest non-literary sort of magazine, if you’re not writing about something that you’re giving a positive review to, they’re going to ask, and very reasonably, “Then why should our readers care?” I think, addressing your point about print versus online, one thing that is useful to keep in mind when I’m writing online is that print is maybe more suited to rendering some sort of judgment; writing online is maybe more suited toward opening a conversation, giving people something to respond to where I actually care about their responses, and they may actually care about each other’s responses. I don’t always manage that, though.

Gary: Does that change the way you approach the review itself?

Douglas: Um, it can certainly change the way I approach writing it. There’s also the matter of the audience. If I’m writing for The Savage Critic, I’m writing for the people I saw in the comic store on Wednesday, and now it’s Friday, and we’re talking about what we saw on Wednesday.

Bill: That’s interesting too. It does point out the value of venues like either The Comics Journal or Bookforum, in that if print is more suited towards rendering definitive judgments, and nine times out of ten print is also a positive advocacy slot, you’re not going to frequently find in print the kinds of really thoughtful criticism that can actually maybe change the way that you think about things, necessarily. Right? I mean, [Douglas has] a lot of latitude at the Times, for example, and I think Joe and Dan [Nadel] and everyone else who’s written for Bookforum has a certain amount of latitude there, and the Journal is all about critical latitude, I think. It’s interesting, because someone wrote — and I wish I could remember the writer’s name… Well, Ng Suat Tong wrote a separate post on a similar subject, so I’ll mention this one just because I remember the name, about Bottomless Belly Button, saying that he had read this book — and he’s someone who’s written criticism for the Journal and other places. But he was responding more as a reader, saying that he had read this book and he wasn’t entirely sure what he thought about it having read it. He went out looking for criticism that would help him refine his thoughts about it, expose him to other points of view, and found very little, even though there were many many reviews and things to link to. If that is a problem to some extent — well, does anyone agree that that’s a problem, that there isn’t enough of this kind of thoughtful criticism out there for a reader who might be looking for this kind of material as a way to navigate the terrain? Or was it just a book that was underreviewed, or he wasn’t finding it?

Chris: No, that was definitely not a book that was underrreviewed. [Laughter] I think that what you’re getting is…

Bill: Well, maybe under-criticized, in a non-pejorative sense.

Chris: Yeah, well no, I don’t even know if it was that so much as I think you’re getting a lot of people who are coming at it with just that initial review. They’re getting the book for the first time, and there’s not a lot of going back to the book and reexamining it, or considering it on a deeper level. There’s a lot of just that initial “Is this book good or not?” More review-ish.

Gary: But by the time he did that survey, the book had been out for about nine months. It wasn’t like he did it three weeks after the book came out. It was pretty scary survey, I thought.

Bill: You saw this thing that I’m talking about?

Gary: Yeah.

Sean: But even online, you don’t get a lot of… after the first couple weeks that the book comes out, nine months could go by and you don’t get anything after that first wave. I mean, I’m skeptical about [Ng's] thing, but I’ll…

Joe: That speaks to, I think, a potential downside of the Internet. Personally, I think there’s an inclination, since there is no word count, there is no editor, to write short, to just get your impressions out, to just summarize, give what you think immediately about a book, you know, in five hundred, eight hundred words. Furthermore, there’s no industry surrounding the Internet.

Douglas: The other thing there isn’t is money. [Laughter]

Joe: Yeah.

Gary: But since there isn’t any money, why wouldn’t more thoughtfully considered reviews be just as good as a glib summary?

Chris: I think time.

Sean: Spending a lot of time for no material [gain], y’know, other than just the satisfaction of a job well done. And if you have to make a living as a writer, a lot of the time — I mean, there’s been times where I’ve been just like, “Well, I can do a freelance assignment that’ll give me $100, or I can review a book.” I’ve tried to keep reviewing books for free, but there’s times when it’s tempting just to take the $100 and run.

Joe: I agree with you, yeah.

Gary: This may sound like a preposterous question, but do you guys get paid for blogging about comics?

Chris: Yes.

Rob: No.

Tucker: No.

Joe: Sometimes. [Laughter]

Douglas: I think the Savage Critics have split ad revenues that have come in, and over the past two and a half years, it’s amounted to maybe $18? [Laughter]

Bill: What did you get with it?

Douglas: I got a Diet Coke. [Laughter]

Rob: One of the downfalls of the Internet is a problem I had: I wrote something like 200 colums for Sequart, and then it died.

Bill: Yeah, and they’re not there.

Sean: [gasps]

Rob: And they’re not there, and you can’t get to them.

Tucker: Gotta back it up! Back it up on the hard drive.

Rob: Yeah, I should have.

Sean: I don’t even wanna think about that. Oh my God! [Laughter] It just occurred to me that that could happen! Oh my God! [Laughter]

Rob: The guy who runs the site says he’s going to get all my old stuff and give it back to me. But I wrote a 3,000 word review of Bottomless Belly Button that I would have loved to have given to [Ng] and said “Yeah, I really thought about this book for a long time.” But things can just disappear like that.

Bill: Tucker, you were about to say something?

Tucker: Part of it — and I don’t want to steal anybody’s words, but this did come up when we were driving down here, because I rode with two of the people on this panel. [Laughter] It’s part of the thing with Bottomless Belly Button, and I’ll out myself for it: If you really really hate something, yeah, you might write some thoughtful piece about why you hated it and what’s wrong with it. And if you really really liked something — and I agree that maybe Bottomless Belly Button didn’t get that treatment — you might write something thoughtful. But if you’re middle of the road, like, “I read it! I don’t really give a shit! [Laughter] I don’t hate it, but this is not gonna knock any of my ‘Oh my God, this is what comics is to me’ kinda stuff off the shelf.”

Gary: But you shouldn’t even be writing about something you’re ambivalent about.

Tucker: Well, that’s it — then you don’t. I don’t write about Bottomless Belly Button.

Rob: Do you feel an obligation to write about…

Tucker: I think if anyone says they feel an obligation to write about something, that’s totally self-imposed. Unless there really is an editor who’s telling you what to put on your blog, there’s no way, other than self-imposition, to write about something. Like, “Oh, I’ve gotta write about Asterios… ” No you don’t.

Sean: Yeah, Asterios Polyp.

Tucker: You don’t have to write about Bottomless Belly Button, you don’t have to write about David Mazzucchelli, you don’t have to write about the latest development in Superman, you don’t have to write about anything other than what the fuck you want to write about. It’s not print…

Rob: I agree with you, but does anybody else feel like they need to be part of the critical discourse on…

Tucker: But what’s that even mean? What’s that even mean, though? [Laughter] Like, “the critical discourse.” I mean, you go wide enough on the Internet, you’re gonna find plenty of people… I mean, the classic thing for me is, you wanna see what’s happens with the Internet, you go to the most popular YouTube video, and look at the comments on there, and everybody’s just like, “THAT BITCH IS A CUNT!” [Laughter] That’s the discourse of the Internet when you go wide enough. [Laughter] I really have to go to the bathroom.

Bill: You want to?

Tucker: Yeah. [gets up and leaves -- laughter]

Sean: Tucker Stone, ladies and gentlemen! [applause]

Bill: Tucker Stone will be returning momentarily. He’s actually writing a blog post right now. [Laughter] A couple points I want to get to. Rob, I think you’re coming from a very opposite position, because I think you actually make a good-faith effort to review everything that comes your way, right?

Rob: Yeah.

Bill: So you’re definitely someone who’s taken on an almost martyr-like constraint. [Laughter]

Rob’s wife [from the audience]: As his wife, I agree! [Laughter]

Rob: When someone sends me something in the mail, I feel obligated to take a look at it and review it. What I have to say about it will vary. There were some things that were sent to me three years ago that I haven’t written anything about yet.

Joe: Yeah.

Sean: Yeah.

Rob: But eventually I feel like I’ll do something on it. And occasionally I’ll do what I call a short-reviews column, where I’ll realize, “I don’t have anything more to say about this than a paragraph, or even a couple of sentences.” As a critic, I feel that if someone sends me something, I should engage it as best I can, almost phenomenologically, just putting aside certain suppositions and ideas about a work. Which is why I review a fairly wide range of genres, with the exception of superheroes, which I don’t write about. But I’ll review minicomics, big publisher comics, children’s comics, and each one of them sort of gets not a different critical response, but they’re meant to be engaged at different levels, and I engage them in different ways. Yeah, I just feel a need to respond to that, to response to someone’s work. And I rarely give — what I actually rarely talk about is “Should you buy this?” I don’t really care. I don’t care. That’s not something I ever say. Some critics even discuss, like, “This is a pretty good comic, but it wasn’t worth the $20 pricetag,” and that’s a valid thing to say, but again, I don’t care. It’s not something I’m interested in. I just talk about the work, I engage it, and sometimes there’s not much to engage, or sometimes there’s an interesting idea but it fails in some spectacular way, and I talk about it on that level, and I go into detail, and it’s a compulsion I have.

Bill: One issue that came up, too, is this notion of, “Do you need to participate in a critical discourse? Does everyone who writes need to weigh in on these big tentpole books that come out?” Obviously Tucker doesn’t think so. [Laughter] And here he is. Welcome back, Tucker.

Tucker [returning]: That was off the charts, man. [Laughter]

Bill: Did you wash your hands? Okay. I think one of the things that’s interesting to me about critical discourse is that criticism generates discourse, in that I don’t know that it’s necessarily required for every critic to write about the Crumb book, for example, but I also think it’s possible for a very good piece of criticism about that to generate another piece of criticism. If a critic is identifying some quality of the book and either holding it up as praiseworthy or holding it up as a flaw, or identifying it as a virtue or the primary virtue or the point of the book or et cetera, I think that’s the kind of thing that can probably generate a healthy critical discourse more than everyone feeling like they have to take a whack at the new piñata or whatever. Have any of you found yourself in that situation, where you’ve come across a book that you weren’t necessarily motivated to write about, but some other writer’s take on it motivated you to respond or reconsider something? It’s probably hard to remember, so I’m asking a horrible question. [whistles]

Gary: I think that does sort of answer Tucker’s question, though, which is “What the fuck is that?”: Critical discourse is a public dialogue about what’s going on out there, what significant works are out there, what do they mean.

Tucker: Yeah, but that’s — yeah, I agree with that. What I disagree with is — the notion that there’s a real public dialogue that comes about because a bunch of critics wanna do what he’s talking about, they wanna respond to real criticism and they wanna create some criticism of they own.

Gary: You don’t think that that exists?

Tucker: No, I do agree that that exists. Like, earlier this year, when, um — like, these three right here [gestures to Sean, Joe, and Douglas], you know? When Final Crisis dropped.

Sean: Oh yeah.

Tucker: Which is like, it’s a superhero masturbation-fest, but still. [Laughter] That was really fascinating, to see all these different takes, and to see people genuinely come out of the game and really put out there stuff there. But they didn’t feel — I don’t think that you’d turn to Sean and be like, “Did you feel imposed upon?”, like he had to respond to Final Crisis. He wanted to. Joe wanted to. When stuff comes out, it’s up to the art to create that desire in people to actually go and respond to it. If it’s created from some feeling of, “Well, I’m obligated to write about this, so that there will be a public discourse… ” The art creates the public discourse, not —

Gary: Of course.

Tucker: It shouldn’t come from some feeling of, “I’m obligated to help create this so that comics can have its own little critical discourse.” It’s up to the comics. It’s up to them.

Joe: I think it happens with superhero comics. There tends to be a lot more, I think, discussion about those on the comics Internet because there’s a certain volume of superhero comics that comes out every week, every single week. And superhero comics today are attuned to giving this impression of a shared universe that you peek into every week and see how things do or do not interact. So I think that has a way of encouraging more people to talk about these things often, and there’s inevitably more dialogue about a superhero thing that a lot of people happen to want to talk about, like Final Crisis. There’s more support.

Douglas: I don’t think of it as an obligation, though. I think of it as a pleasure.

Joe: Well, yeah. But there’s just more things to react to.

Douglas: Sure.

Sean: I see what [Joe]‘s saying, though, ’cause I think Final Crisis gives you a good apples-to-apples comparison. I loved Final Crisis to pieces, and I loved talking about it, and I loved reading people talk about it even when they hated it. But Acme Novelty Library #19 came out in roughly that same time frame. It is not just the best comic of the year, in my opinion — it’s a terrific science-fiction story, it’s a terrific horror story, you could talk about it in genre terms if you wanted to, which is the kind of thing I like doing. But there was none of that back-and-forth that we had going about Final Crisis. And I will defend Grant Morrison and Final Crisis until the day I die, but I would have loved to have — and I said so, I think — I would have loved to have that much writing, just that volume of people writing these huge impassioned posts, about Acme Novelty Library #19.

Gary: Well, why didn’t that happen?

Sean: Well, I think there’s a bunch of reasons. He’s been so good for so long that that people run out of things to say about how good he is…

Gary: And that’s not true of Grant Morrison? [Laughter]

Sean: Well, I guess — ’cause Morrison is like “the literature of ideas,” and he’s beboppin’ and scattin’ all over the place, so there’s always specific things to talk about.

Douglas: He’s a lot less consistent than Chris Ware, too.

Sean: That’s also true. There’s stuff you can compare that you didn’t like by Grant Morrison. And it’s also very bleak, and Acme Novelty Library might be the bleakest thing he ever did. I feel like that turns a lot of people off, and they just don’t feel like they have an “in” to it.

Joe: But I think it is a different situation, though, because Acme #19 is a serial, and unless you’ve been following Chris Ware’s thing for however long ago he serialized this in the papers, it doesn’t compare to something like Final Crisis, where it’s the lynchpin of the DC Universe. I don’t think it works like that, but —

Sean: But I’m not even talking about the people who just —

Joe: I’m saying there’s inevitably going to be more conversation, because people are going to want to talk about it even if — because it effects other things in the superhero world.

Sean: But I’m not really paying attention to those guys. I’m talking about people who… [sighs] They’re not just being like, “What did Wolverine say this week? He would never say that!” [Laughter] I’m not talking about those people. I’m talking about people who treat comics as art, and yet don’t… I’m sorry.

Douglas: If we’re going to be apples-to-apples about serials, though, you might have seen more of that if, you know, Acme were monthly. [Laughter] Dream on, but…

Rob: Honestly, it’s easier to talk about Final Crisis than it is to really sit down and think for a long time and think about Chris Ware’s Acme #19. The other thing I’ve noticed about superhero comics is that it’s almost akin to people talking about their favorite football team, and what has happened to their football team that week.

[murmured assent from the panel]

Sean: Yeah, Tim O’Neil had a thing about that recently.

Rob: There’s this kind of weird emotional investment in it that’s difficult to put apart from a critical analysis. And to me that’s kind of the culture of way more mainstream superhero criticism. I know there’s a lot of folks who do both, but there’s also many, many, many more folks who only will review superhero books.

Sean: Yeah.

Joe: Yes, yes.

Rob: And it kind of creates a certain kind of clubby thing with their writing. Which is why it’s interesting — a question I’ve asked a lot of you guys is, do you approach reviewing superhero comics and art-comics any differently? How does that work for you?

Sean: I’m sure that I do, but…

Chris: I really try not to, whenever possible.

Rob: Not to do it differently?

Chris: Just approach the work on its own terms and on its merits. I mean —

Bill: Well, if you say on its own terms, though, that suggests something different.

Chris: Well, yeah, I was about to say, yeah.

Bill: ‘Cause you’re not judging the Whatever Crisis the way you would judge the Chris Ware, necessarily.

Douglas: If you’re judging something as part of the giant interlocking master narrative, like, yeah, that’s obviously going to come into it. And that’s part of the fun of reading it and that’s part of the fun of thinking of it. It’s also really fun to deal with superhero comics on the same terms that you would deal with art comics. But it can sometimes be hard to get away from the fun of thinking of, like, this window on the master narrative.

Bill: But there’s a different focus, certainly, right? Because when you’re talking about Chris Ware, you’re talking about someone as an author or an artist making a work, whereas when you’re looking at this other stuff, you’re kind of looking at this sort of collaborative project.

Douglas: Well, you’re thinking of it as an author and artist, partly, making the work also. But there’s also this other part to it.

Sean: Yeah. I don’t treat that any differently.

Gary [to Bill]: You’re saying Grant Morrison isn’t an auteur?

Bill: Well, maybe, I don’t know. He has a chapter in Douglas’s book, so the answer is yes. [Laughter] Tucker, this is something you had talked about, too. Putting aside the superhero/auteur-driven work, whatever, you were also talking a little bit about, do you — [Tucker fidgets with the tablecloth on the panel's table] Don’t play with the Velcro.

Tucker: You’re the one who knocked it off, man! [Laughter] C’mon, playa!

Bill: Sorry. But bringing different expectations to different work — like if there’s something by a young, twentysomething first-time cartoonist, handling that a little different.

Tucker: Yeah, I have to admit that that does… Like, I’ll read some minicomic or something where I’ve met the person, you know? Some 19-year-old kid who’s shy and is like [quietly] “This is my minicomic” and that sort of thing — I really don’t look at that and go, “Well, okay, you’re some 30-year-old in the business and you’re published by Fantagraphics which means you’re probably not some first-timer.” Yeah, that stuff, it gets a little — I mean, I try not to do that, and most of the time what I do is I just don’t review it, because it’s hard to read something by some kid. Like a kid, a fucking kid! [Laughter] Who’s just getting started! And to be like “Yeah, this is trash!” You want to sit there and go, “Well, I really see some promise.” I don’t see any promise! I want you to stop! [Laughter] I mean, you should go to college! Learn a trade! Because you’re not gonna be Chris Ware. You’re not even gonna be Tony Bedard, you know? [Laughter]

Rob: I’ve been reviewing comics lately for the Poopsheet Foundation website, and —

Tucker: Poopsheet?

Bill: Poopsheet.

Chris [in a dramatic voice]: Poopsheet? [Laughter]

Rob: Let’s all get it out. [Laughter] And these are things sent to the guy who owns the site who then sends it to me, as opposed to some of the other comics I get. ‘Cause people who send me stuff have a general idea of what I’m going to say about comics, or comics in general. These people don’t know that I’m going to be reviewing it. And the quality of the comics I’ve been getting from this guy have been measurably worse, and I’ve said some of my harshest stuff. And again — but it’s the same approach. I hear what Tucker’s saying, like “there’s a young kid,” and I see a lot of comics like that, where it’s like, “Well, you know, it’s overwritten, it’s overdrawn, but maybe there’s something here and maybe there’s not.” But there are some where it’s just like, “This just wasn’t a good thing to read.”

Gary: You can ignore them, if they’re not somehow significant.

Rob: Yeah. And hopefully the feedback is useful to them in some way, in saying, “This is the best I could do, or maybe it wasn’t, and it just wasn’t good enough.” And maybe it’ll spark some kind of response. But I don’t feel any obligation to think about what their response will be.

Gary: Right.

Rob: You can’t.

Gary: You can’t, right.

Sean: I got a lot of my scorched-earth criticism out of my system in the early days of the comics blogosphere and a couple things I did for The Comics Journal. I don’t really have that in me anymore, and I find myself not enjoying reading it too much, either. But one thing that I’ve brought up before on my site or in interviews is that all the reviews I do for my own blog, I do from my own spare time, and they’re generally books I’m interested in reading, so it’s sort of a self-selecting group. Like, if I flip through something, and it doesn’t look appealing, or it looks downright aggravating, you know, there’s only so many hours in a day, and I’m generally not gonna force myself through something that I don’t think I’ll get to the end of it and say, “Well, that was a valuable way to spend my train ride” or whatever. So to a certain extent, that’s not a problem for me, because if I get something and I’m like, “What am I gonna do, tear this apart?”, I just won’t.

Tucker: Well, I’m not gonna try and back off or anything like that. [Laughter] But I will say that I don’t ask for free shit and I don’t get free shit, so when some kid sends me something, I usually read it. And I’m talking, what, two fuckin’ minicomics a month, you know? I’m not sitting there, I don’t have some kind of hookup or anything like that. I basically read what I read and then review that. But when I do get something in the mail from some kid — which it’s always fucking kids! I don’t know why — it’s like they don’t read the blog or something like that. It’s not like I have some big post on there where I’m like, “Aren’t minicomics awesome? Can I read more about your parents?” [Laughter] That’s the shit that I get sent! I get sent 8 X 11s stapled at the top corner. That’s what I get sent. I don’t know why they send it to me, I don’t know who told them to do that, but that’s they send.

Bill: There’s some grade school teacher somewhere who found your address.

Tucker: Somebody! Somebody.

Bill: Gary, Sean was just talking about how he’s not as interested in negative critiques —

Gary: A little sad! [Laughter]

Bill: But the Journal has actually run some of the outstanding negative critiques in the history of this field. How would you articulate the value of that kind of criticism for someone who maybe finds it difficult to approach?

Gary: Someone for whom it’s difficult to read?

Bill: Yeah, maybe, or who would balk at writing something like that.

Gary: Well, I don’t feel like you should write it just for the sake of writing it. But I think as a critic, you have to run the gamut. You just have to give an honest response. And sometimes that honest response is going to be negative. And, I mean, that serves the function of critically dismantling something that might be a sacred cow or that might be widely reviewed and widely praised and offering readers an alternative point of view about that, and allowing them to think about it in terms they haven’t even seen before. I mean, I just think that has an intrinsic value.

Rob: To me, the danger is that you can never make a negative review personal, to me. At least that’s my philosophy. Which is why I hate really snark-heavy negative reviews. [Various panelists turn to look at Tucker -- Laughter] Because to me it’s just kind of a dishonest reaction. That’s just my personal thing. You can talk about the weaknesses of a work as the work without necessarily attacking an author or a person. And you can get really really negative about it and talk about “This is why this doesn’t work.” And the responses to some of that that I’ve had have been, some people have been… I’ve written some harsh things and people have said, “Thank you for the review, that was very helpful,” and I’ve written some minorly harsh things and gotten really negative feedback. I’m like, “Well, that’s just the way it goes,” but in neither case did I say, “This is awful, this person should never write again” or anything like that.

Douglas: My allegiance as a critic is always to the people that are reading what I’m writing, not to the person making the art. But there’s a lot of art that I’m exposed to that leaves me so cold or bores me so much that I don’t get all the way through it, and I can’t see the value in writing scorched-earth something about that unless there’s a way that it can be a gift for my reading audience.

Bill: A gift in terms of food for thought as opposed to just dismissing a work that you thought didn’t have any merits?

Douglas: Yeah, something that can be useful or meaningful or something to the people reading it.

Bill: Alright, well, with that we’re basically out of time. But I guess I could probably take one or two questions, if anyone has… yes?

Audience Member #1: I have a question. If you — like, I listened to the discussion — Is there a proper venue to go through to get a good critique? [Laughter]

Bill: What’s the best place to get a good review?

AM1: Yeah — no, not, like, “a good review”…

Bill: Do you have any friends with blogs? [Laughter] No, no.

AM1: I mean, I heard you [Tucker] say you get like two little minicomics a week or something — is there a submission…

Sean: No, just find a blog that you like — I mean, it just comes from reading different sites or different publications and getting a sense for their tone, and if you feel like you’ll get something valuable out of being reviewed by this person, drop them an email and say “Hey, I’d like to send something.”

Rob: Go to The Comics Reporter website and Journalista! — they do a zillion links to reviews. Find someone whose work is interesting to you and that you think would be appropriate and contact them.

Bill: Yeah, almost every blog or whatever, review website, has some kind of email link, and if the mailing address isn’t on there, people will usually send it to you if you ask them to.

Sean: Unless it’s NeilAlien, people will take review copies and thank you for it.

Audience Member #2: Have you ever changed your mind about something, either positive, liked it and then didn’t like it, or didn’t like it and then liked it, and felt you needed to really let people know that?

Sean: I wrote a very negative review of Locas, the Jaime Hernandez hardcover, in The Comics Journal, and I have completely changed my mind since then. [Laughter] And I’m waiting until I have a chance to sit and read everything in a row and write a new review, and I’ll run the old review one day and I’ll run the new review the next day and be like “I was totally wrong.”

Chris: You have to. If you’re gonna review, and you’re gonna be a critic, you have to face the fact that you may change your mind and you may change your taste as you go along.

Tucker: I actually reviewed Essential Fantastic Four, one of those black and white reprint books, the day before my wedding. [Laughter] I don’t know why I reviewed it then, but I was just like, “Man, fuck this book,” you know? [Laughter] “I like Kirby, but fuck black and white reprints. Five-hundred page — this is retarded!” [Laughter] Then Frank Santoro was like, “Man, you’re just freaking out because you gotta get married tomorrow.” I was like, “That’s right!” [Laughter] I got back from the honeymoon and I left it up there, but I was like, “I should probably fix that. That was a stupid thing to do.”

AM2: Not necessarily “fix it,” but just kind of…

Tucker: No, fix it.

AM2: Oh. [Laughter]

Bill: One more —

Audience Member #3: Where do you guys see a role in arts criticism in general, and how would you compare some of the ways you engage with the work with music writers or fine-arts critics?

Bill: Anyone immediately wanna jump on that? I know Douglas, you write about music.

Douglas: I can talk to you about this afterwards, but yeah, I… I can’t answer it easily. [Laughter]

Bill: Well, with that, please join me in thanking all of our distinguished panelists for being with us. [Applause]