I just wanted to let readers know that Suat, Caro and I are all contributing to a roundtable over at TCJ.com on the book Best American Comics Criticism edited by Ben Schwartz. Ben himself is also participating, as are Jeet Heer and Brian Doherty. I think the roundtable will be running for several days, so check back throughout the week.
The Hooded Utilitarian
a pundit in every panopticon
I don’t know if anybody’s going over to read this but Rob Clough posted a really nice, thought-provoking response to mine that’s worth reading if you haven’t caught it.
Contributors: Like the book.
Non-Contributors: Don’t.
I found that… well, interesting. Kind of sad in a way.
isn’t the book’s mission far too broad, though?
i’d be more interested if instead of one book, it were a series of “best” criticism on various, more specific topics–even topics i don’t necessarily care about.
otherwise, the whole value of the book weighs on the editor’s head: oh yeah, is it really the “best” criticism? and obviously if you’re not included then it surely can’t be “best”, lest you think lowly of yourself (which is not very healthy, i think). this is a book that in its title claims to have a specific mission, but from the onset this mission is impossible to fulfill. i thought “abstract comics” had the same problem.
Yeah, Derik, I agree. Although it may have something to do with the fact that everybody knows each other and the general “be nice” culture, which HU is apparently notorious for eschewing. Rob kind of talks about that in his comment, although obliquely.
Here’s encouraging people to make comments, especially people who like the book! I’m hoping Shaenon will come back and respond to Noah (also Ken Parille but that doesn’t address the contributor business.)
to precise my thought re: topical vs too broad:
when selecting “best” criticism from any topic related to comics, what you might end up with is a bunch of texts which all share the same basic methods or conceits. whereas by restricting the field, you might end up with a larger variety of viewpoints, & thus, a more representative view of criticism as a whole. just a thought (not that it matters too much).
David T: I’d agree with you that the mission is impossible to fulfill. But I also think that the editor chose that mission, so it’s probably fair game to ding him on it. There were other missions available to him that he didn’t take!
In retrospect I don’t think I called sufficient attention to the fact that I think these essays fare better on their own than they do collected together. Many of them have great information; some of them even have decent prose. It’s just that when they’re all clustered together they give this sense of a very limited range of conversations that you don’t get when any single one of them is treated as a single data point. I think that’s the worst part of the “Best of” strategy, and it jives with your point, David: comics criticism might not be ready for such a broad stroke. I can accept that it’s ready for an anthology, but just not this anthology.
Abstract Comics seems to me — and I owe it a more careful read than I’ve given it — to be sketching out an idea more than trying to be a “best of” in this sense. I think Ben maybe was trying to sketch out an idea about “lit comics criticism,” but it’s just not an idea that I can dig or advocate for, because it’s so narrowly “comics-culture” defined and so interested in recouperating comics history.
I do think he defends the approach in his essay and is successful at being very clear about where he’s coming from and what his priorities are; it’s just not a satisfying defense to me because my priorities are so different…
Noah, you really have to examine your ‘ad hominem’ addiction.
Besides the general ethical problem of gratuitous cruelty, you should reflect on how such excess undermines your own arguments.
“Abstract Comics seems to me — and I owe it a more careful read than I’ve given it — to be sketching out an idea more than trying to be a “best of” in this sense.”
Agreed. Andrei did a lot of work soliciting work for the anthology. It wasn’t a simple case of gathering existing published comics (and culling said selection based on some criteria).
David: I like the idea of more focused collections. A best manga criticism/writing collection would be fascinating, particularly if there were someone who could gather actual content from Japanese critics.
Oh come on Alex. Ben went way more ad hominem on me than I did on him. I went out of my way to say nice things about one of his essays, for crying out loud.
I’d agree with Caro that the pieces together work less well than many of them would in their original contexts. Many of the pieces that were originally introductions are entirely fine as introductions, for example. It’s only when you claim that they’re either best or criticism (and put a bunch of them together) that you start to get problems.
i’m following this discussion from afar, having not read the book in question, but having read enough about the book that a few things spring to mind, which should evidently not be construed to be a final assessment of the book itself. but–
one thing i can’t help noticing is that the most persistent criticism of the book (at least coming from the usual HU cheerleaders) aims very much at the “gushing praise” aspect of the essays contained therein. what i also see criticised (but to me it’s very much linked) is the critics’ essentially “nostalgic” impulse.
now this rings a bell because it is precisely the debate that has raged in the past 10-15 years in francophone comics criticism, where in the 1960-70s what you might call (hindsight helping) a hobbyist culture essentially took over the whole field of criticism for themselves. (to their credit, nobody else wanted to step in those shoes.) talk about “golden ages” & “essential reading” & “10 most important books” abounded, a canon was developing, historical points were clarified, & the whole field of comics continued to be seen from this somewhat narrow lens for quite some time.
at the same time, some scholars began to discuss comics, though coming from completely outside of the field. no assessment of aesthetic value was implied, no interpretation of the works was done: comics was seen as a cultural phenomenon like any other. the main problem is that often, this study ignored certain methods & historical fact that comics criticism, notwithstanding their fault, had begun to develop. academic studies that did take these aesthetic/historical factors into account, for the most part focused of tintin only, at the expanse of everything else.
hence, aside from overcrowded tintinology, for the rest of comics you had two adverse fields not talking to each other, making their own mistakes on their own side (criticism of both schools of though, the latter dubbed “semio-structuralist”, can be found in harry morgan’s principes des littératures dessinées, as well as groensteen’s un objet culturel non identifié, both interesting reads, unfortunately untranslated as far as i know).
it’s only recently, it seems to me, that criticism has raised its stakes somewhat. morgan’s book did a lot to address that problem, but so did groensteen’s work (to which you could add peeters’ & baetens’). this is one point i have argued in an article for comix club no 9.
nowadays, what i see as the most interesting criticism is one that, while it may contain some praise, doesn’t accept praise alone as an ultimate writing motive. just because a book is good doesn’t mean you have to write about it: criticism isn’t interested in “good” but in “interesting”: what it needs is problems (in the mathematical sense of the word). not necessarily problems to solve, but more importantly to expose. what criticism does best is giving the reader some new vantage point from which to read a given work or body of work.
saying that a given work, for example, “is a pleasure to read” or “transcends the form” or “should be wiped from the surface of the earth” is ultimately an empty statement to make: it only works if you already know how your own tastes stand in regards to that one critic’s tastes; in which case, as a reader, you can make a mirror assessment, in the form: “if s/he likes it, i’ll probably like it” (or inversely) “if s/he hates it, i’ll probably like it”.
there’s one last point that this whole discussion makes me think of (but maybe i’ve gone way off topic?), & that’s northrop frye’s distinction between the “public critic” & the “systematic critic”. the former is actually an arbiter of taste; the latter is not. here i’m thinking of genette who built an entire book out of an analysis of proust’s recherche, but who is admittedly more of a short story fan (you’ll be hard-pressed to find a single short story critic from his pen). whereas the “public critic” (essentially, the journalist) is concerned, to put it bluntly, with moving units.
& a footnote on the subject of nostalgia. it is christian rosset (in his great avis d’orage en fin de journée) who has suggested that the opposite impulse to nostalgia is melancholy. in this sense, perhaps (& this reference will be more obvious to an english speaker than to a francophone) maybe what this debate boils down to is that as critics, we have to act less like newspapermen, more like a robert burton.
just a few, admittedly long-winded thoughts–i don’t know how useful they can claim to be, but these are the thoughts which i can afford the time to type while my son is taking his afternoon nap. & maybe that’ll have the side effect to help me practice my english–so if some of my sentences seem formless or meaningless, please do bear with me, i’m learning.
Not rambling at all. It’s fascinating to hear how these debates look in another (obviously related, but still) culture.
Alex, does this fit with your sense of things?
Very interesting, David.
I have to say, I do find the comics criticism/writing of Groensteen, Morgan, Peeters, etc. a lot more interesting than most English language comics criticism/writing.
My favorite French critics are the guys from _Critix_: Évariste Blanchet, Renaud Chavanne, Jean-Paul Jennequin, Christian Marmonnier, Jean-Philippe Martin.
I miss _Critix_…
_Comix Club_ has nine issues already!… I bought issue number one and I liked it (it was a good idea: authors as critics). I need to seek all the other issues.
domingos–
comix club just stopped at 11 issues, actually. the editorial team (co-ran by jean-paul jennequin) got a bit exhausted, from what i gather. it’s too bad, it was a great magazine, with fresh, non-academic insights on comics. their blog comix pouf is still around though, but it is mostly satirical (& usually quite funny).
as for critix, after 10 issues (1996-2000), the same team (led by évariste blanchet) has gone on to release 2 issues of a new magazine called bananas… then they went on another hiatus but i’m hearing from the grapevine that they will release a third issue for 2011.
while we’re at french criticism, the three issues of l’éprouvette (published by l’association, who else) were also quite interesting & generally thought-provoking, though not completely immune to polemic for the sake of it. but anyway, they made quite an impact when they were released in 2006-2007.
& as far as print goes, there’s also neuvième art which is arguably the most “established” of these publications (though i find it has similarities in tone with comic art in the US), & which unfortunately stopped its print run & turned into a not-so-hot web site (hmm, that reminds me of something), with some interesting articles though (plus, it hosts thierry groensteen’s blog, which is surprisingly awesome in its own way).
& on a weekly basis, there’s du9 which i think is doing a great job. (full disclosure: i’m writing for them. but then so is derik. hah. (actually i’ve also written for many of these other rags i named in this comment.))
on the other hand, france has no daily blogs with roundtables & heated discussions the likes of which you’ll find in the US (this one, for instance). i’m not sure why that is, actually.
some links–
comix pouf: http://comixpouf.blogspot.com/
neuvième art: http://neuviemeart.citebd.org/
du9: http://www.du9.org/
woops, i just wrote a pretty long comment in response to domingos, but it got moderated i think (probably because it contained links). so uhm, yeah. if it doesn’t show up i’ll try to repost it.
Don’t repost; I’ll fish it out of the filter.
ah i go away for awhile and this I come back to!
Derik~ “A best manga criticism/writing collection would be fascinating, particularly if there were someone who could gather actual content from Japanese critics.”
You know, other than histories I have a few books by Japanese critics that haven’t really grabbed me. “Why is Manga Interesting” by Natsume what’s-his-name, and “Intro to Manga” by the heta-uma cartoonist Shiriagari Kotobuki (chap 1: “I can make manga & thereby eat food! so amazing”). Funny but not filling.
Probably the best essays on manga-as-manga appear in “Eureka,” a literary journal. Nothing like Continental criticism, still better than fawning.
But my erstwhile opinion holds that the best stuff, and these are bilingual English/Japanese books, are two books of art criticism. I’ve mentioned both in essays before: first is artist/critic/Vuitton hawker Takashi Murakami’s Little Boy, mainly about J-nerd roots & shoots, and the post-otaku artists in his coterie. The other’s Micropop, an exhibition catalogue/essay collection by curator Midori Matsui. She riffs on D&G’s “Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature” in explaining her ersatz pride of artists who draw on that subculture & mix it up. Both are quite arguable in assumptions & conclusions, and very rich in opening ways of thinking about manga that go beyond most other approaches.
& I love hearing about little critical journals that flame out, like shining from shook foil. More please!
Hey Bill! Welcome back!
Superflat and micropop, huh? You have to love that.
David:
Thanks a lot for all that complete info. I was especially pleased to know that _Bananas_ # 3 will see the light of day.
It was also great to go into that _9e art_ link and find… Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware!…
Hey Bill:
What you say is troubling. Do you mean that there are no Jan Baetens, no Martin Barker in Japan?
David T:
“’m following this discussion from afar, having not read the book in question, but having read enough about the book that a few things spring to mind, which should evidently not be construed to be a final assessment of the book itself. but–
one thing i can’t help noticing is that the most persistent criticism of the book (at least coming from the usual HU cheerleaders) aims very much at the “gushing praise” aspect of the essays contained therein. what i also see criticised (but to me it’s very much linked) is the critics’ essentially “nostalgic” impulse.
now this rings a bell because it is precisely the debate that has raged in the past 10-15 years in francophone comics criticism, where in the 1960-70s what you might call (hindsight helping) a hobbyist culture essentially took over the whole field of criticism for themselves. (to their credit, nobody else wanted to step in those shoes.) talk about “golden ages” & “essential reading” & “10 most important books” abounded, a canon was developing, historical points were clarified, & the whole field of comics continued to be seen from this somewhat narrow lens for quite some time.”
You’ve pretty much nailed it. One reason for the sway of this tendency was that it was abetted by celebs like Umberto Eco, Fellini, and Alain Resnais; This was the impulsion behind influential magazines like ‘Linus’ in Italy and ‘Phénix’ in France.
Probably other reasons peculiar to the ‘6Os are Pop art, the camp craze, and the rise of media studies (McLuhan).
It’s not all bad, archival and taxonomic work is useful, but indeed it has very little to do with true criticism. And we get to absurdities such as the apotheosis of Burne Hogarth.
PS David, if you’re in touch with JP Jennequin, tell him ‘Wolvie’ says hi. We worked together for a brief time on the magazine ‘Scarce’, some 25 years ago…
Stop everything! I agree with Alex! Will civilization as we know it end today? I’m afraid so!
I suppose that you are referring to SOCERLID and CELEG. It’s true that those huge celebrities, Umberto Eco,Federico Fellini, Alan Resnais, lent their names to endorse that nostalgic movement. (Curiously enough, these French fans – I refuse to call them critics – were nostalgic not of the old French “illustrés,” but of good ol’ North American comic strips like “Mandrake,” “Fritz the Cat,” “Tarzan.”) But it is also true that Umberto Eco wrote great essays in the early sixties and Alan Resnais liked comics just from an artist’s point of view (i. e.: as a strong visual influence). I never read anything by Fellini about comics. I just know that he was a cartoonist before being a filmmaker.
Fellini actually interviewed Stan Lee!
Thanks Domingos and David for the French critic mentions. Not sure how much of that I can track down, but I’ll add it to my list of things to look for.
Derik:
_Critix_ is almost impossible to find. Their print run was 150.
Oh, and, you’re welcome!
_Bananas_, by the same guys, appears regularly on eBay.fr (4 issues released back in the 90s):
http://tinyurl.com/354uobp
http://tinyurl.com/33bkh6a
More recently they published two more issues of _Bananas_. They have a site:
http://www.bananas-comix.com/
I think that _Bananas_ is not as good as _Critix_ though. _Bananas_ is more like _TCJ_. It aims to please everyone. _Critix_ really was a critic’s dream: they could write anything about any subject. With a print run of 150 why do you care, right?
Domingos: Do you know if the Critix guys have any interest in translating some of their best pieces into English for publication online?
I’m not sure if Suat is asking for HU…but I’ll ask for HU. I would love to do that.
Alex, do you think you’d be interested in helping with translations with something like that?
i’ve got to leave for work but here’s the URL for bananas:
http://www.bananas-comix.com/
the last 3 issues (#8-9-10) of critix are actually still available for sale on that web site (see under “boutique”). they include all of pierre huard’s 3-part “question de méthode” which is pretty much on the topic of what we’ve been discussing these past days. as for previous issues, i’m told they should be put online in the near future. i’ve never read them myself so i’m looking forward to that.
as for comix club, you’ll find more info (including ordering) on the publisher’s website:
http://groinge.fr/revues.htm
you might also be able to find comix club (as well as l’éprouvette) on amazon.fr & maybe even amazon.ca. hope that helps!
i’m actually surprised there’s so much interest here in french criticism but hey, there you have it.
noah–i’ll get back to you shortly.
Someone needs to archive (online) all this stuff.
I’d be interested in translating too (I translated one of David T’s du9 pieces last year for du9’s English version).
Great Derik. Thanks for offering!
Suat and Noah:
I don’t know the answer to your question, but I can ask someone at the _Bananas_ site.
I would go for Fabrice Neaud writing about Aristophane! First Second published _Les soeurs Zabîme_ recently (one of my favorite books ever published): http://tinyurl.com/3xekf5d
It seems that “recently” means next fall!…
Noah:
“Alex, do you think you’d be interested in helping with translations with something like that?”
Sure,long as it’s not some 50-page dissertation, and the deadline is flexible…
First Second is publishing Aristophane? I thought they only did YA. I hope “Conte démoniaque” is next! In the YA racks of course.
Domingos, there could be fine manga critics/academics who also write poetry on basketball, I just have little incentive of late to track them down. ITO Go’s “Tezuka Is Dead” looks promising, but mostly I see histories on the shelves.
Bill:
Sorry for being a bore, but, since I can’t understand the lingo Japanese comics criticism is such a mystery to me (I’ve read a bit about it in IJOCA, but what I read was mainly about the very first Japanese comics critics. (I refuse to say “manga.”)
Do you know if there are University presses publishing books about Japanese comics? Or Japanese mass culture?
Why do you refuse to call it manga?
It took me about 2 years to stop thinking of A.A. Milne’s kangaroos when I saw “Manga” so maybe Domingos has a similar problem?
“I would go for Fabrice Neaud writing about Aristophane!” Yes yes please please.
Also, not French, but anything (everything) related to Feuchtenberger? PLEASE?
Noah:
For the same reason that I don’t say “maalaus” when I mean Finnish painting, or “lalkarstwo” when I mean Polish puppetry.
Caro:
That may be a bit difficult. You see?, the French have the same problem as the North Americans: they have a huge navel to gaze at. I don’t say this as a criticism. Both countries really have a huge navel…
When I say “North Americans” maybe I should exclude Canada.
Domingos, in Japanese?
TAKEUCHI Osamu (b. 1951) may fit– he’s a professor of sociology & media studies at Doshisha University who co-edited the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Manga, 1945-2005. It’s okay for just having 400 pages. His other books are pretty general– “Main Currents in Manga Studies,” “The Handbook of Manga Research,” a critical biography of Tezuka. He also does a bit of newspaper writing.
Other than him, Micropop would count. Shidosha (publisher) put out the Japanese translation of Groensteen’s System in 11/’09– they also do the journal Eureka. I’m not up on Japanese university publishing at all, but a skim of Tokyo U’s catalogue looks like geopolitics, hard sciences, that kind of nonsense. I expect manga writers can get books published through larger houses– “Tezuka Is Dead: Postmodernist and Modernist Approaches to Manga” came out from NTT, a subsidiary of the telecom corporation.
And I forgot about Comic Box! They’re kind of the TCJ of Japan, only polite. (Maybe, I have like two issues.)
In English my name means “Sundays” that’s why I’m such a shiny person. On the other hand my favorite Greek song is titled “synefiasmeni kiriaki” (cloudy Sunday): rats!…
Thanks a lot for your report, Bill!…
I just assumed that things wouldn’t be much different in Japan than they are in the west: academic books about comics aren’t exactly putative best-sellers.
Tell that to Maurice Horn. He might wake up from his delusions.
Maurice Horn is an academic? Who knew?…
Since this is really where the conversation on French criticism is happening, I’m cross-posting the comment I just left for Domingos over on the main site.
===========================
My God, Domingos, why haven’t you mentioned this before!? ;) I’m kidding…I’m especially interested in the bit quoted below (and perhaps we should move this over to the HU thread on the roundtable), although I’m interested in your opinion on whether I’m overstating the intellectualism of cinema’s Cahiers: it’s namesake certainly seems sufficiently intellectual.
_Les cahiers de la bande dessinée_ was a good magazine about comics during Gröensteen’s period (as I said: 84 – 88). But it had the same problem that I find in TCJ. Both mags were inconsistent alternating good reads with mediocre hagiographies. Their editorial policies (if they had any) were incoherent practicing what Lecigne correctly called: the amalgamation.
I’m not exactly a Cahiers specialist, but I don’t thing that you’re overstating anything…
i have to admit i’m relatively new to criticism per se (my first essay for du9 is dated 2006), & i’ll have to confess i have never had any occasion to read the cahiers. also, all i know from bruno lecigne comes from l’éprouvette (i might have to go back & read his essays again, actually). that said, domingos’ comments do provide quite a bit of historical context to my previous overview of the evolution of french criticism.
one great thing about literary criticism (to take an easy counter example) is that it has litterally centuries of material to work with. so even if you’re a critic with your books released by a big-name publisher (say, gallimard or seuil), nobody at the sales department is going to be bothered by your analysis of proust or joyce, no matter how devastating it might be. whereas in comics, nearly everything is contemporary, & even when it’s not, interferences are commonplace (see for example: the hergé estate’s meddling with critical works on tintin, etc.). which makes it harder to keep a perfectly independent stance towards the material. whether consciously or not, it’s easy to act like a salesperson…
also: domingos, this is purely nitpicking, but i’m just wondering where you picked that little umlaut you keep putting on top of groensteen’s o. it’s just that i’ve never seen his name spelled with it, ever. but maybe it’s the special portuguese spelling of his name? (& who wouldn’t want their name to have different spellings in foreign tongues?) uh, just wondering!
In English my name means “Sundays” that’s why I’m such a shiny person
I’m sure you meant to say “Spanish.”
Surely you kid, but I’m not Spanish. I like Spain a lot though…
Also: read until the end. That’s usually how we grasp a phrase’s meaning… but what do I know…
David:
Nope, the umlaut exists in Brazil, but not in Portugal. I’m sure that I saw Groensteen’s name spelled like that, but a quick search around here found nothing. Frankly, I’m intrigued…
In German, “oe” and “ö” are equivalent, but I’m not sure this applies to Flemish.