I promise this will be the last post for a while where I troll my proprietors. Unless they keep pissing me off, I guess.
In case you missed it, Gary Groth, the editor of the Comics Journal, has a Welcome to TCj.com post on the main page.
The essay is basically an unctuous exercise in self-hagiography. Gary reminisces about the good old days, slaps his knees, and bellows, “Eh! I just don’t get this new-fangled blogging! Why, I’m going to show those young whippersnappers how to criticize if I can only get my darned ear-trumpet out of my…eh, what part of me is that, anyway?”
I joke, but really, it’s a depressing spectacle in a number of ways. Most obviously — well, Gary really is somebody I admire, as I noted in my last post. He wasn’t a formative influence or anything, but he’s a good writer and a smart guy. His magazine took a chance on me when I didn’t have much of a name for myself, and while that was mostly Dirk, it was Gary who gave him the rope to do it, and I’m grateful to both of them. They took another chance bringing this blog here, for that matter, and I appreciate that as well.
Moreover, between the bouts of self-congratulation and maudlin reminiscing, Gary actually has a point. He and TCJ really do have a good deal to offer to folks who write and/or read about comics. There’s a roster of critics, like R. Fiore and Gary himself who haven’t had much of an online presence, and they’ll certainly be welcome. Having the Journal content free and online will be a boon to both casual readers and researchers. The long-term perspective on criticism and the comics industry which Gary has is not unique certainly (Tom Spurgeon and Johanna Draper Carlson have both been critics for a while, to name just two examples) but that doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile.
So yeah, Gary and the Journal bring a lot to the table. But they will both offer less — and possibly a lot less — if Gary spends all his time online preening over his past accomplishments and sneering at everyone who doesn’t have the good luck to be him.
I doubt Gary noticed the irony, but at one point in his article he quotes this aspirational paen to comics, penned back in those days when Nobody But Gary And A Few Other Like Minded Visionaries Took Them Seriously. The quote’s by Richard Kyle.
The commonplace world is built of iron fantasies, a place where yesterday was always better.
In the commonplace world, all new arts are trash. In Elizabethan times, it was commonplace to say that Shakespeare’s theatre was trash. And then it was the novel’s turn: the novel, they said, was trash. And then the film came along. First it was the silent film, and the commonplace was that it was trash — until the sound film emerged. Then the silent film suddenly became an art, as the theatre and the novel had, and it was the sound movie that was trash. Today, all film is becoming art. What’s trash today, then? Comics, of course. But now that the newspaper strip is ailing, the commonplace is that it may be art. Those comic book stories, though, they’re surely trash…
As Gary says, it’s a nice quote. Though, you know, if Gary had actually read it, he might have been reluctant to write this a few paragraphs later.
Very little writing on the Web is of any real critical worth — or even pretends to be— and there is no journalism to speak of. I have never assiduously followed comics blogging, but so much of what I’ve read feels dashed off — amateurish, shallow, frivolous.
That web writing — that’s surely trash.
Not to go out on a limb to defend writing on the web or anything. There’s a lot that’s not very good. On the other hand…you know, virtually everyone who’s written for the sainted Journal in the past ten years is on the goddamn web. Not just Robert Stanley Martin and Bill Randall, but Jog, and Shaenon and Alan David Doane, and Sean Collins and Chris Mautner and Steven Grant and on and on. If you don’t know how to use google, that’s not the blogosphere’s fault.
On the other hand, if you’re talking amateurish, how about posting sixteen lines of tag-spam, completely filling the top of your new website’s screen with a list of boring crap, presumably because you simply don’t know what the fuck you’re doing? If you’re talking shallow, how about admitting that you don’t really read blogs, and then broadly condemning them on the basis of that? If you’re talking frivolous, how about an entire two-page post devoted to discussing how awesome you and your friends were back in the day?
Let me put it to you simply, Gary. If you’re in the room, you’re not cooler than the room. The Internet isn’t going to fall on its knees and worship your tag-spam just because you’ve been doing the comics criticism thing for a while and now you’ve blessed it with your presence. Which isn’t to say that you don’t have a lot of goodwill; you absolutely do. I don’t know tons of people in the blogosphere, but everyone I do know, even folks who are more or less your competitors, wants you to succeed. And, yeah, being a curmudgeon is part of your charm — don’t stop with that. But, for a moment or two, you might think about whether you, in fact, know it all, or whether it’s possible that, in this new venture you’re undertaking, you could, just maybe, have something to learn. With love, with respect, with hope even, I ask you, stop being a horse’s ass. We need you to do better.
Deet… deet… deet…
Pop… pop… pop popopopopopopopopoppop pop pop…
Munch munch munch munch
I was really taken aback by that essay. I read it because I don’t know much about TCJ, and I’ve been invited to be here, so I thought to myself ‘Here’s a welcome essay, what a lovely chance to learn some more about the whole enterprise!’ My sunny optimism strikes again.
Er, nice to know the head honcho thinks folks like me are mostly amateurish and frivolous, I guess. Jeez, I feel all warm and snuggly now. Not to mention welcomed.
Yeah. In the last issue of TCJ there’s an interview with him where he talks about how much of a pain in the ass TCJ was to edit. A nice farewell to all the writers, basically.
On the plus side, the all caps comments do seem to be gone…though the hideous typeface that’s there now is only a marginal improvement, unfortunately….
“On the other hand…you know, virtually everyone who’s written for the sainted Journal in the past ten years is on the goddamn web. Not just Robert Stanley Martin and Bill Randall, but Jog, and Shaenon and Alan David Doane, and Sean Collins and Chris Mautner and Steven Grant and on and on.”
I understand what you’re getting at but many seasoned comic critics tend to reserve their best writing for “print”. Some have openly said as much regarding the current online version of the Journal (i.e. saving the best for the twice yearly print version).
I would say that many critics can be quite accurately accused of treating “online writing” as a throwaway medium (and not completely without reason). There are big exceptions to this of course including one of the names above who really puts his time where his mouth is.
VM: Actually, I think this is Gary being nice.
I made a comment!
I am brilliant!
Anyway, I dunno, the part you quote was playing-to-Gary-Groth type a little bit, or the kind of thing you have to say if you’re Gary Groth.
I, being me, would probably phrase my argument “I have never assiduously followed comics blogging… “So I don’t TECHNICALLY know what the fuck I’m talking about”*” Because that’s my online persona and it’s different.
Anyway the rest of the piece was really, really interesting. I’d love to read the Gil Kane interview.
* Actual quote.
Hey Suat. You’re talking about Jog of course.
I think it varies, obviously. Getting paid can be an important factor. I think comixology, which is relatively generous (and where I write, obviously) has gotten a lot of great essays from people like Shaenon and Kristy (who I forgot to mention above), and Jason Thompson as well.
And I forgot Charles Hatfield, who’s certainly written some very nice pieces online.
It’s worth noting too that criticism in the Journal isn’t always all that.
Hey Mark. Glad you made it!
The Gil Kane interview does sound fun, I agree.
Suat: I understand what you’re getting at but many seasoned comic critics tend to reserve their best writing for “print”.
I’ve interacted with almost every one of the dual web/print-Journal critics Noah just rattled off, and this isn’t true of a single one of them. In this day and age I don’t think it’s true of pretty much anyone.
Has Groth even written any criticism lately? I feel like I haven’t seen his byline in TCJ in… years?
I’m curious, Noah, is there much of an editorial hand in the print TCJ when you write for them? At Comixology?
Noah – Nice to see that you aren’t changing your shtick any.
Hey Derik. Gary did a long piece on Hunter Thompson and Ralph Steadman not that long ago…so yeah, he showed up in the print Journal with some regularity doing interviews or longer pieces.
Neither TCJ nor comixology has had much editorial interference while I’ve been writing for them. The closest I ever came to having TCJ alter something was for that Art Spiegelman review I did, where Gary wanted a couple things toned down, apparently — but in the event, more or less accidentally, it ran as I’d originally intended.
Places I’ve written for that do have a lot of editorial input are the Reader and, to a much lesser extent, Reason.
Jon, as I think I’ve said before, I have various schticks. I haven’t really done the trolling thing in a little bit, but moving over here seemed an appropriate occasion. Don’t want them to feel they’re not getting their money’s worth.
It’s certainly an honour to be mentioned in the same sentence as Jog, Steven Grant and Sean T. Collins, all of whom have written far more and far better about comics, both for the Journal and online, than I ever will.
That said, I think both Milo George and Dirk Deppey in their time as editors of the print edition made a concerted effort to bring new blood into the magazine, finding talent they liked online and bringing them into the fold. I’ve said before that getting my first piece in the Journal was a dream come true for me, and it remains that, probably my proudest and happiest moment other than the birth of my children.
I’m sorry to see the roll-out of the new, online TCJ be marred by technical glitches and — discontent? in-fighting? Hopefully once all the bugs are worked out, the Journal online can be as vital and exciting a thing as the print magazine was for most of its existence. If nothing else, at least we see that a lot of people still care about TCJ and its quality, and that’s gotta count for something.
I vote, by the way, for eliminating the “read more” feature and making the ads less blinding. These are my only real quibbles so far.
Hey Alan! I don’t know that there’s any infighting really, other than me bitching. Which is kind of in the Journal tradition after all, as I think Sean pointed out at Robot6….
I guess with Gary you take the good with the douchey. Good history of fandom/criticism, but woefully out of touch as far as how much better online criticism is now as opposed to just five years ago. Comics criticism is not in its infancy anymore–maybe toddler or precocious kid stage? And as with all things, some of those writing today were influenced by Groth and TCJ and some are blissfully ignorant and carving their own way, and that’s all to the good. It’s just unfortunate human nature that old trailblazers tend to want to detour young ones onto those same, well-trodden trails. It’s not in someone like Groth to embrace something new with humility and curiosity. He’s going to deride it and grouse and sneer until his natural talent will figure out a way to make it work for him and remain relevant. And then in another five or ten years he can post how online criticism didn’t start happening until TCJ went online.
Yeah, I was kind of thinking it’s like Blood and Thunder circa 1981.
Sean,
I certainly save my best stuff for print and don’t plan to republish it online. Doing so would do the work no favors.
For me, there’s certainly some differences between what I publish in different venues, but I don’t know that that difference is really captured by saying “print better/online worse.” My longest most academic pieces (about film, not comics as it happens) have been online, because you can bet nobody’s going to print on paper a 14,000 word screed on women in prison films. But then, other online stuff is shorter and more off the cuff. It just depends.
I don’t think one’s better than the other, just that the medium changes how they’re read. And the web’s so crowded, we all run the risk of becoming Joe Sugarman just to get people past the headline. Though I did love Shaenon Garrity’s opening paragraph in that Wally Wood piece.
Eventually I’m going to republish all my TCJ reviews on stone tablets in a cave atop Furnace Mountain.
Bill–Nice to e-meet you!
You really do save your best stuff for print, huh? Wow. It would never occur to me to make a distinction. Other than one based on the specific venue, that is, but that still isn’t a distinction based on the medium of publication.
And Chris–that last bit of your comment made me laugh out loud here at my table at Panera bread.
To me, one of the biggest distinctions between print and online is the voices. Print has long been the venue for male, privileged, cisgendered, straight, white, American writers. (Nothing against them, I promise.)
One the best things about reading blogs is reading criticism written by women or POC or non-USian or gay or trans or whatever. They’re voices that bring a different lens to the medium.
Another thing I love about blogs is that many people who write them let it all hang out. If they hate something, they say, ‘This fucking sucks!’ Which I find a refreshing change from ‘This work, while perhaps well-intentioned, did not work for this reader.’ The lack of formality can be a huge plus.
I don’t wanna get into a “best” argument here, but I think it’s easier for the audience to process longer, more in-depth – again, not better per se – writing when it’s in print – Which is one of the reasons I particularly value the print JOURNAL.
The web is a fairly ADD medium.
Speaking as an academic librarian, I’d say that most (90% +) of the scholarly journals are read via the web, even though the print is available. It may feel ADD to you, and I often print articles myself (including blog posts) to read if I want to really dig into them, but the web is the media of choice for a whole lot of folks.
Fair enough – I ACCESS that kinda stuff using the web, but either print or skim.
Do people do this with actual multi-hundred-page book length works, too? That kinda blows my mind.
The first full books that I read on a monitor were Edward Carpenter’s THE THIRD SEX and Thomas Paine’s THE AGE OF REASON, sometime in the late 1990s — the only copies I could find were electronic. I’ve since become quite comfortable reading extended texts and comics online since, but I had always assumed that I was simply a mutant in this regard.
My wife recently discovered she LOVES reading books on her laptop.
I’ve read quite a few super-long things in electronic form because I couldn’t get them another way.
I know someone who got a Kindle and really loves it. I’m not sure I’d enjoy that as much, myself. I like print best.
I didn’t you were also a libarian, vom.
…didnt “know”, that is.
Isn’t reading scholarly journals online a consequence of academic publishing economics? He asks with a full run of “Proceeds of the American Catholic Philological Society” on his shelf.
I’ve read a bunch of moronic business & marketing books on my laptop, only because I’m embarrassed to be caught reading them in the library.
& Sean, nice to e-meet you too. Maybe I should say that I save my most complex writing for print? I do enjoy trying to boil stuff down int 400 words for a blog post… but something like my essay on Red-Colored Elegy, which required a lot of research, I have a hard time putting it online just to drown.
It’s funny that you see online publishing as drowning. I pretty consistently get exponentially more feedback when something’s online. II mean yes, in some sense it’s more permanent if it’s in print… I guess it all depends on what kind of narcissist you are. You want a feeling of posterity; I want some evidence (however transitory) that somebody’s reading the damn thing.
I love my hit counter.
Perhaps not all that surprisingly, this web-only venue got a whole lot of pro-web responses to Noah’s dickish post. I guess I wasn’t bothered by Groth’s lack of enthusiasm for online comics crits if only because, uh, GG tends to be on the critical side of most things and because I pretty much share his view (chiefly based on my experiences following Journalista links, I should add). The other day, one writer, discussing the obviously photo-referenced artwork in Russ Heath’s only Blazing Combat story, praised it by saying it almost looked like it was done from photographs. That, to me, pretty much summed up the level of insight in most online comics writing.
& I don’t have a hit counter or comments enabled! I’m that other kind of narcissist, as writing’s always been solitary for me. No one in my circle really reads comics, certainly not my criticism. It’s like digging a ditch– I’m happy I dug it, and if someone else likes it that’s just gravy.
Hey Scott. Well, to be fair, Suat didn’t agree, and Bill was slightly skeptical at least.
Gary is obviously critical of most things, sure. But…jeez. Even the tag spam didn’t bother you, huh?
Two days later, that massive block of tag spam is still the most prominent thing on TCJ.com. Even though there’s been several interesting updates since. That’s kind of sad.
Nope – looks like Scott is almost completely correct since I’m pretty pro-web myself. At least I think it’s the future of comics criticism for what that’s worth. My response to Noah above was mainly due to my memory of various comments made by long time comic critics about web articles. This isn’t the first time Bill has made the remarks he makes above.
“Isn’t reading scholarly journals online a consequence of academic publishing economics?”
That and library economics. It costs a lot of money to keep paper journals around. And with electronic journals you can get to a larger number of readers much more easily.
Noah: I think it remains to be seen if print is more permanent. As anyone whose been a victim of some kind of online identity slander could tell you, those bytes live on pretty tenaciously. I know I’m amused to be able to go into the Internet Archive and see my website from my pre-blog days.
Scott…just to elaborate slightly. I’d be totally fine — quite happy even — if Gary had opened by tearing the Internet a new one. Something along the lines of Suat’s take on Internet reviewers (though presumably meaner if Gary did it) would be great.
The problem isn’t that Gary’s sneering at the Internet. It’s that he’s presenting himself as God’s gift to the Internet while seeming to have only the vaguest of ideas where to even find the darn thing. It’s embarrassing for him, for the site, and for everyone who would like tcj.com to succeed — which, I’m pretty sure, includes everyone on this comments thread.
“I pretty consistently get exponentially more feedback when something’s online. ”
Yeahbut –
It’s easier to GIVE feedback to online sources, and I think people are more – trained, I guess – to give feedback to a blog than write an e-mail.
It is easier, sure. I wasn’t claiming that there were actually more people reading; just that I got more feedback. (Though, in the case of TCJ, I think I may well get more readers on the blog than in print.)
The beauty of blog comments isn’t the convenience of immediate feedback from the reader to author; it’s much richer that. Properly moderated, the many-to-one, or many-to-many conversation that springs from the post can be as interesting the post itself. Sometimes more so. Private e-mails between individuals or print magazine like The Comics Journal just aren’t as effective at generating that conservation.
Over time the virtual community that springs up around the conversation becomes the most important feature of the blog or website. The community ends up contributing a lot of added value. From a business perspective, it’s also that community that ends up generating revenue for the website. Of course, it takes work to keep the conversation going and not degrade to the level of a typical YouTube comment thread.
To bring it back to TCJ.com, there’s not much there that is inviting or easy to use. Throw in Gary Groth’s post and I get the sense that he favors preaching instead of conversing. There’s nothing wrong with that model, but I find the alternative far more interesting to read, even when I don’t participate myself.
Yeah; they need to figure out a way to deal with comments better overall. That’s part of the trouble with having it all in one streaming pipe; it’s just really hard to keep track of.
Even YouTube comments can be useful, honestly. I’ve learned a lot from them in terms of this Thai Pop kick I’m on.
“Perhaps not all that surprisingly, this web-only venue got a whole lot of pro-web responses to Noah’s dickish post. I guess I wasn’t bothered by Groth’s lack of enthusiasm for online comics crits if only because, uh, GG tends to be on the critical side of most things and because I pretty much share his view (chiefly based on my experiences following Journalista links, I should add).”
I think it deserves to be said that our dear Mr Groth (and I say that with zero sarcasm; I think he’s fantastic) bemoans the overall state of criticism pretty much regardless of where it shows up, not just on the Web, although he does reserve his most vituperative criticism for blogging-as-journalism.
He made this point at the SPX critics roundtable (transcribed over at Robot6):
“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.”
I read this as saying that the immediacy of the online medium discourages the sustained thought that results in the sort of criticism someone still wants to read a dozen years later. I think that’s very insightful. I do think it’s as much the constancy as the immediacy — even when your intentions are good and it’s going really well, it’s tiring; it can feel like being in a discussion class that’s in session 24 hours a day.
But I take his point that we do need to discipline ourselves to write the final paper and not just get graded on participation. It’s one thing to appreciate and pay attention to feedback and to engage in a meaningful conversation with other thoughtful people about your work. That conversation can make your work better and more meaningful, and it’s a benefit the Internet provides that traditional criticism didn’t have. But it’s quite another thing entirely to never get to the point that you synthesize the conversation and put something on paper that feels done.
I think that’s a more or less fair point. On the other hand, the web is an amazing venue to do certain kinds of writing that could never see print. My Wonder Woman series on Marston and Peter for example; that’s just not publishable, period. But it’s certainly something I’ve enjoyed doing, and that at least some other people seem to have found worthwhile. Would such a thing be better if I were forced to cut it down and only focus on a couple of issues after I’d read the whole thing rather than writing sequentially on each one as I finished? I mean, it would be different, definitely, but I don’t know that it would be improved, at least not from my perspective as a writer.
Agreed, especially in today’s pathetic journalism environment. When I last worked in print journalism, I wasn’t lucky enough to have an editor like GG; I had an editor who first insisted we use bigger font on the media spread, and then cut it to one page so she could have a society section (the first feature was a story on the guy who crashed the White House State Dinner.)
I should say this to be clear: this was in 2006. It wasn’t a mocking feature.
Caro – “That conversation can make your work better and more meaningful, and it’s a benefit the Internet provides that traditional criticism didn’t have. But it’s quite another thing entirely to never get to the point that you synthesize the conversation and put something on paper that feels done.”
I think this is quite a good point. I do believe that there are some online comics critics/bloggers out there who *are* more interested in producing that “finished”/definitive piece than initiating conversation. I like to write those guys short notes of appreciation so that they know they’re not launching things into a sea of apathy.