Michael Redhill: award-winning author, man about town, secret nerd

probably the only Booker nominee who ever wrote a letter to The Comics Journal

I still need to catch up on the well-named Wednesday Comics (good luck finding a copy on any other day of the week), and I definitely don't want to write about Asterios Polyp yet, so here's a distraction in the meantime. I recently flicked through the first issue of The Beguilling's short-lived in-house magazine, Crash, subtitled "The Quarterly Comic Book Review" and featuring an inauspicious cover story on Chester Brown's Underwater. It was published in 1994 and very much of its time (one that preceded both the current management regime and my entry into first grade), but what caught my eye was a number of credits for Michael Redhill.

Redhill is a local novelist, poet and playwright who currently edits the Canadian literary journal Brick; his 2006 novel Consolation won the City of Toronto Book Award and was longlisted for the following year's Booker Prize. I knew that he writes criticism on the side, and vaguely remembered/imagined an affinity for comics, but I was unaware that the two ever dovetailed. Here's a chunk from one of his articles in Crash #1, a comparison of Jeff Smith's nascent Bone to Walt Kelly's Pogo:

We may begin by asserting that there are no funnier animals than people, and here is where Kelly and company began their explorations. Pogo, Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge were antropomorphications of recognizable types of their day, namely Americans, living in America. The creators of these books were connected to their time and their place, and these comics proceeded out of a secreted, but powerful, concern for the issues of the day. Barks is an out and out capitalist (cf. any number of theses and tracts critical of the Disney Ducks for inculcating ruthless capitalism in young children), and Kelly more of a crypto-socialist, but he's more concerned with political systems than he is with parties. The Pogo strips, comics and books are some of the best populist criticism we have of American politics in the fifties...Here is the main point of conflict with Bone. Addressing little more than itself, it gives the illusion of having the kinds of concerns those Golden Age stories did, but it does so without taking those kinds of risks. It's gorgeously shallow.

The next issue included a rambling, amusing letter from Robert Crumb: "...Who's this Michael Redhill? I found him rather sophomoric (but then, so am I, huh?)" Has Redhill written comics criticism more recently, post-Crash? I'm curious about any and all writers-on-comics who found renown with different subjects (writers-of-comics too: hi, Mr Delany), so feel free to post other examples of the genre in comments.