Comics Critics Cry: "Context!"

The panel I looked forward to most at this year's TCAF was the Critics' Roundtable near the end of the final day, and it didn't disappoint, except in the sense that I left wishing it had been at least twice as long. They'd assembled a great lineup: Jeet Heer, Douglas Wolk, Dan Nadel and Bart Beaty, plus moderator Bill Kartalopoulos. The latter began by goading everyone with this quote from a review of Rutu Modan's Jamilti in The Guardian: "It's no longer necessary to convince people that comics can be more than Batman or the Beano. On the other hand, anything with any merit tends to get overpraised and is routinely spared the sort of critical scrutiny brought to bear on everything else, from a new Zadie Smith novel to the latest Star Wars flick. The mainstream press almost never measures a graphic novel's actual achievement against its unfulfilled potential. New converts, reluctant to show their cluelessness about the ninth art, merely parrot the publishers' hype."

Beaty broadly agreed with the sentiment, noting that when he writes non-scholarly articles (like his "Conversational Euro-Comics" series for The Comics Reporter) his role is typically the enthusiast or tour guide. Douglas added a point he's made before, which could be stressed more often: most mainstream or non-specialist publications still don't cover comics routinely enough to make critical broadsides feasible there, let alone pieces about older works. I write a fair number of negative music reviews for EYE Weekly, because their coverage of the medium in Toronto aims to be comprehensive. Anything about funnybooks is more sporadic, so I tend to pitch articles about comics I expect to be good, or at least interesting - and EYE already gives me more space for my ramblings than most alt-weeklies would. There is no perceptive critic writing regularly about comics at the New Yorker or whatever, but then there aren't many of those left in dance or classical music either.

Anyway! After describing his past life as a film reviewer, Jeet Heer came up with a fantastic analogy for the comics critic's dilemma (it's a heavy burden to bear). This is paraphrased at best, because I couldn't scribble it down verbatim, but here you go: "We're almost like religious missionaries...If you're speaking to an outsider you'll say 'wow, isn't this cathedral great?' but if you're inside the church we'll talk about how such-and-such priest is a pedophile." When everyone had stopped laughing at that Kartalopoulos changed the panel's structure a little, introducing various new/recent/upcoming books to see how the roundtable responded to them. The first one was Drawn & Quarterly's opening volume of The Collected Doug Wright, and Kartalopoulos quoted a promotional blurb from Chris Oliveros (which I can't actually find to quote here) making the case for Wright as an undiscovered Kurtzmann/Crumb/Schulz-level figure.

Heer replied: "I would have to say Chris' comment is hyperbole...he's not a new Kurtzmann or Crumb or Schulz. But I would say he's a new John Stanley." (That is, a cartoonist who did remarkable and brilliant things within a circumscribed commercial substrata.) And if he's only coming to light through the idiosyncratic lens of Seth, well: "Artists invent their ancestors...We now read Donne differently because of Eliot." Heer ended up placing Wright below masters like Schulz but above extremely talented craft guys such as Hank Ketcham. Beaty argued that Wright and Ketcham are "almost peers," but Heer distinguished the former as an observational cartoonist, portraying the actual lived experience of suburbia. All of Ketcham's housewives wear high heels; Wright's wear pants.

Around this point Kartalopoulos changed the topic to Fantagraphics' Supermen! The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-1941. It was the first time Dan Nadel really leapt into the discussion, so much so that all my notes from this segment are about him. Both crotchety and self-deprecating, he said that Supermen! was "very blatantly influenced by a book I wrote called Art Out of Time, which is fine." But he criticized the newer anthology for having no "curatorial verve," reprising a theme he's sounded in his own book and elsewhere: that critics should locate strange old pulpy types like Fletcher Hanks within their historical and aesthetic contexts instead of simply gawking at how "weird" it all is (later on, Heer characterized the latter as the "Look at all this wacky stuff!" approach to comics writing). Even some giants are susceptible to those fannish lines of criticism; when talk turned to Jack Kirby and the many, many words devoted to him, Nadel groused: "There's so much written about Kirby and it sucks so bad."

He was just as cheery when Kartalopoulos introduced Craig Yoe's Boody: "Here's an example of the absolute worst tendencies in contemporary comics publishing." Nadel's jihad against the book mostly followed his earlier attacks at Comics Comics' blog, but being harsh doesn't make you wrong, and I still agree with most of what he said. I'll co-sign this: "If you want to be taken seriously, be serious." He also suggested that Boody "makes a great argument for the role of archives and universities in comics." The general sentiment at this point seemed to be "fuck camp, yo."

The last book under consideration ended up being Jules Feiffer's The Explainers, which made this focus on history oddly appropriate - as Beaty noted, Feiffer has sort of been written out of it. He was apart from the Mad crew and an older generation than the undergrounds. According to Douglas, Fantagraphics got about three volumes into a complete Feiffer by the early '90s and then just stopped. Sometimes the context defies its surveyors. I'll give the last word to Jeet: "The history of comics is a history of clubs...and Feiffer was an unclubbable man."

(OK, the panel did take up Asterios Polyp briefly, agreeing that it's the kind of book which will take months to fully digest and frustrate immediate reviewers, but this post is already long-winded to the point of self-indulgence. I can hear birdsong outside my window.)