Whoa, a couple of pieces I wrote on comics last year have been selected among the best pieces of online comics criticism of 2012 by a panel of judges at The Hooded Utilitarian. I’m flattered, not the least to be in the august company of a selection of really excellent pieces from a variety of writers, several of whom I admire a lot. Although I’m proud of the two pieces in question — my review of the first volume in Fantagraphics’ complete edition of Carl Barks’ Disney comics and my critical piece on New Yorker cartoons — it’s hard for me to agree with the selection in a year when a lot of great comics criticism was published. Give me half an hour and I’ll match any of my pieces with something better… wait, Suat mentions a bunch in his ‘notable omissions’ section at the end, so I won’t have to!
The Best Online Comics Criticism is an annual feature at The Hooded Utilitarian, run by Ng Suat Tong. It’s been interesting to follow it, and I must say this year’s edition has been the most convincing yet, in execution if not in the final selection. Suat has been really thorough, running quarterly reviews in order to reduce the risk of missing significant pieces in the final round. Those are great overviews in themselves and also rather hilarious for Suat’s pithy comments on the nominations.
One thing that’s unfair about the feature is that Suat himself will never be in the running, for obvious reasons. To my mind, he wrote several pieces in 2012 worthy of consideration. His meticulously sourced approach proves illuminating on Mattotti and Zentner’s The Crackle of the Frost, for example, while his skill at ideological criticism comes to the fore in his review of Joe Sacco’s Journalism. His command of visual reference is on display in his piece on Lovecraft in comics, and his critique of Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? is commendable for its dissection of the book’s complex if also smothering structure.
Anyway, the Best Online Comics Criticism is your one-stop linkage to a lot of great comics criticism. It kind of makes one optimistic on behalf of this still fledgling discipline. Go and explore.
The image at top is from Craig Fischer’s fantastic essay on serial photography, photocomics, and memory, which is also (kinda) among the year’s selections.
Another problem is the identification of the sitter. He looks quite different from known portraits of Fracastoro, such as the woodcut on right. The sitter in the painting is clearly slimmer of face and with a thinner, more elegant nose, but he is also clearly older in the woodcut, which might account in part for his fuller, more plump appearance. Plus, we still know very little about the extent to which, and how, painters at this time idealised, rejuvenated, and otherwise altered the appearance of their sitters . It’s an issue, which always makes identification of sitters in Renaissance (and later!) portraits difficult. The nineteenth-century label helps in this case, of course, but is far from proof, even if it repeats an older tradition.
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More on comics criticism at the Hooded Utilitarian
Michael Kupperman on the issue at hand
In the latest instalment of my irregular column at the Hooded Utilitarian I present a late entry in the debate kicked off last month by Eddie Campbell, with his essay for The Comics Journal, “The Literaries”. In his essay, Campbell took issue with the insistence by some critics not just of comparing the achievements of comics with those of other art forms, but also what he saw as an unfortunate, concomitant tendency to understand comics by the logic of other media, especially literature.
It should come as no surprise that I’m sympathetic at least to the second part, having long thought that the visual aspects of comics tend to get short shrift in serious comics criticism. So… well, do pop over and take a look at my column. And do comment — it’s a difficult issue and one that needs more thought, so I would love to hear what you think.