In comments on Matt Brady’s post on Geoff Johns, several folks criticized him for attacking the readers of Johns’ comics as well as the comics themselves. This prompted Jones, One of the Jones Boys to write:
Here’s an interesting (to me!) question that’s raised by some of the push-back in these comments: is it appropriate for a critic to talk smack about people who enjoy a particular work that they personally dislike? My initial feeling is that it isn’t — it always shits me when a critic disses me for liking something, especially when they speculate as to the bad/silly/morally-incriminating character traits that would lead me to enjoy something so patently terrible. You don’t know me, man; you can’t know why I do or don’t enjoy something.
…but on the other hand, I’m not sure that there is any good reason to censure critics for doing this. After all, critics routinely speculate as to the personality traits and motivations of artists, so why can’t they do the same for the audience?
…but back on the first hand, it seems like a kind of ad hominem. If an artwork is bad, it ought to be shown so on its own (de)merits, not via the failings of its audience. Plus it’s generally counterproductive: if you want to dissuade the audience from enjoyment/consumption, you probably won’t do it by insulting them (even if the insults are accurate!).
What do other people think?
I replied:
I don’t really know that it’s that easy to draw a line. Just as a work figures an author, I think a work figures an audience. Geoff Johns assumes a reader who cares about continuity porn; who finds violence exciting and interesting; who can’t follow or doesn’t care about following plot; who wants to see Star Sapphire’s tits falling out of a pink wisp of nothing. Criticizing the work is in part figuring out what it is you’re supposed to like about it, and that involves thinking about an ideal reader. And if that ideal reader seems like a sexist, drooling idiot…well, I don’t see what’s wrong in pointing that out.
What’s tricky, of course, is that an ideal reader isn’t *only* an ideal reader — or, to put it another way, you aren’t always the person you are when you read a Geoff Johns comic. People are complicated, and it is possible to want to see Star Sapphire’s fan service while still believing that in the real world women are human beings.
But…just because you aren’t always that ideal reader doesn’t mean that that ideal reader doesn’t have something to do with you. If art matters, that means it matters to somebody, and that means that somebody is being affected by it. One of the things critics do (or can try to do) is talk about the content of that affect (or effect.) And that involves talking about how the art interacts with people…which means thinking about the kind of people who are called by the art — and who answer it.
It’s essentially another version of the question of whether art is a formal exercise or whether it’s a social and historical practice. If it’s the first, then the audience and its reaction should be bracketed. If it’s the second, that bracketing becomes a lot more difficult.
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I’ll bump part of my response over here, and then add a bit: Maybe my problem is just that often these “readings” of the audience are reductionist and not alive enough to the range of possibility in the work — in other words, some of the audience might be reacting to very different facets of the work from what the critic has seen, or they’re even just reacting differently to the same facets.
Or, in other other words, when a critic speculates on the character of the audience, and that speculation seems inaccurate to me (because e.g. it doesn’t ring true to how I personally respond to the work), it may not be the principle that’s wrong so much as the practice. It suggests that the critic has an impoverished interpretation of the text and that, had they a richer view, they’d have a more accurate notion of the range of the audience.
I think that’s entirely fair. In that case it’s just like any disagreement of interpretation.
I think the problem with reducing the enjoyment of superhero comics to “male power fantasies for stunted man-children” is that it’s pretty dissonant with what reading a superhero comic FEELS like.
I mean, I can ultimately only speak for myself. But as a kid buying Amazing Spider-Man (and Thor, Quasar, Silver Surfer, and the Fantastic Four) well, there’s no question that I identified with the heroes and wanted to be like them. But I wanted to be like them because they were heroes. Sure, they had cool powers and stuff, but it was the heroism that sold me on them — the million little morality plays built into the Spider-Man mythos made him by far my favorite character, the honor and family stuff built into those other characters had an appeal as well.
And soon enough, especially as a kid, you’re hooked on the soap opera aspects — you actually start worrying about who’s going to have custody of Eric Masterson’s kid and whether Vaughn Securities will make ends meet — and pretty soon you’re embroiled in what’s rightly called “continuity porn” because you’re a human being with narrative desire and you like recognizing the bigger pattern the writers are putting together. I was definitely conscious, even then, of the psychic reward of seeing two disparate things connect.
But what I was pretty much not conscious of doing, at any point, was thinking “Man, I want to be like this guy because he beats people up” or “Man, the women in this comic are super-hot! All women should dress like that if they want my attention!” Part of that is because I was eight or whatever…part of it is that the “hot” women in comics have always looked like, you know, drawings to me…but part of it, I think, is that once you’re on the inside of the super-world looking out, a certain amount of the overt sexism and absurdity just fades into the background.
Now, if you were to point out that the titles I named were among the most innocuous of the Marvel oeuvre in the late 1980s and early 1990s, well, yeah, they were. I had a vague sense that that Liefeld stuff and the Punisher and Spawn and whatnot would not be tolerated in my home, and I was basically right. But they were my gateway drug into the World of Super-Heroes.
I dunno…my eight year old pretty much likes superheroes because he likes imagining that he has powers, near as I can tell. He invented a superhero with every power ever, I think.
He also thinks Spider-man is too whiny, FWIW.
Marvel is slightly more complicated and (not incidentally) aimed at slightly older kids…but those Siegel and Shuster Superman comics are pretty nakedly about what they’re about. That’s their genius, such as it is, and I don’t think it’s disappeared from superhero comics yet.
I don’t need to quote Cultural Studies 101 to state the obvious: if you want to know how an audience reacts to a work of art you need to ask. Guessing is poor criticism…
Not being an academic I tend to avoid the sociology of the whole thing (unless I’m on militant mode writing a comment on the nets, but, as I said before, that’s not criticism; also: in spite of what my cohort of detractors always thought, I never mixed private taste with public discussion), I’ll add just this, though: how an 8 year old reacts to a comic has become irrelevant by now because 8 year olds, generally, don’t read comics.
Well, the problem is that asking doesn’t always tell you all that much either. Nobody’s going to say, “I read this because it’s an adolescent power fantasy.” (Or not many people are going to say that.) Does that mean that it isn’t? I don’t think necessarily not…
Freudian crit can seem like a ouija board…but sociology and surveys aren’t necessarily much better. People’s interactions with their art are complicated and sometimes not especially accessible or clear.
Here’s a hateful thought: North American eight-year olds may not be reading comics but they are making movies, recording music, drawing comics, writing fiction, producing TV shows … the puerile list of their achievements is a breathtaking omnium of the entire rotting corpus that is contemporary pop culture.
Hate week continues, Winston …
“the puerile list of their achievements is a breathtaking omnium of the entire rotting corpus that is contemporary pop culture.”
I just wanted to copy that.
@Domingos: “I’ll add just this, though: how an 8 year old reacts to a comic has become irrelevant by now because 8 year olds, generally, don’t read comics”
Except for those published by Scholastic, or reprint collections of Calvin & Hobbes and Garfield. Those, I understand, do pretty well.
Yeah…there certainly is an audience for kids comics, including C&H, mainstream all ages titles (my son loves Franklin Richards) and of course lots of children’s books that are comics in all but name (like Mo Willems’ books.)
It’s not even close to the number of kids who are into video games and videos, though….
Just wanted to come over here and mention that my Chris Ware criticism elsewhere on this network of hate may not directly treat the Ware fan base, but I do intend for the Ware fan to feel insulted by what Ware thinks will appeal to them and make him famous and respectable.
I think that came through, actually.
That’s a relief. Does anything really have a reader, anyway, after all? We’ve gotten rid of the redundant fictional author (producer)– can we just annihilate the consumer while we’re at it?
What are you, some kind of commie?
Noah, Jones, et. al… Narrative theorists are interested in all of these issues of “figuring the reader”—and basically use a bunch of separate concepts to cover them. 1)–The “implied” reader is the reader that the book seems meant for –the reader the book (or comic) “implies.” So..in Johns’ case…GL certainly “implies” a reader that enjoys mega-violence, eviscerations, balloon-breasted women, and arcane references to years of continuity. Related is the notion of (2)- the “ideal” reader…which would probably be a reader who not only has all of the above characteristics, but also has read all of the Hal Jordan comics that Johns’ references, can keep all the continuity straight, and who orgasms copiously when recognizing continuity references. Separate from these is the concept of the 3) real reader (sometimes referred to as the flesh-and-blood reader)…who may not fit any of these characteristics, but reads the comics for different reasons, or who finds different pleasures in them, …or who finds no pleasure in them, etc. Real readers, as Jones points are, are strikingly variable—may miss things that seem incredibly basic to other readers…or see things nobody else sees, etc.
As Domingos points out, you don’t really know why real readers read things unless you ask them (even then, they may not give very credible or articulate answers)…but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the text doesn’t “imply” a certain kind of readership…which may have significant overlap with the majority of its real readers.
All of which is to say…it seems totally valid to me to say that the text implies a certain kind of infantilized brain-dead readership…and even caters to such an imagined audience. At the same time, the actual readers of the text may be very like, or unlike, the readership the text “implies.”
Author’s (and texts) often consciously manipulate reader expectation and response. They can only do this by “imagining” a reader and how they will respond to certain beats, moments, or trajectories of a text. What kind of reader is being imagined??? Speculations on this can range from basic things (like saving the big explosion or evisceration for a “page turn” when the “ideal reader” will be most “surprised”–[if the real reader has already flipped through the entirety of the comic, though…the surprise planned for the implied reader will not be fulfilled])—to more ideologically freighted things (like designing the skimpiest costumes possible for Star Sapphire as fan service). Assuming a straight male reader (as in the second example) may alienate other constituencies…or it may not. The vagaries of the “real” reading public cannot always be divined…
Eric–that’s an awesome answer. Really helpful, thanks.