(A call for nominations and submissions.)
This is the final list of nominations for 2012. The judges are now deliberating on the nominations and we should have the list of articles with the highest number of votes by the end of January.
Reiteration: Readers should feel free to submit their nominations in the comments section of this article. Alternatively I can be reached at suattong at gmail dot com. Web editors should feel free to submit work from their own sites. I will screen these recommendations and select those which I feel are the best fit for the list. There will be no automatic inclusions based on these public submissions. Only articles published online for the first time between January 2012 and December 2012 will be considered.
Jenna Brager on Madeleine L’Engle and Hope Larson’s A Wrinkle in Time.
Jacob Canfield – “Subversion, Satire, and Shut the Fuck Up: Deflection and Lazy Thinking in Comics Critcism”.
Brian Cremins – Captain Marvel, The Master, and the Feminine Embrace.
Michael Dirda – “A Duckburg Holiday”. I don’t think Michael Dirda does that many comics reviews so I’m including it here more as a formality. It’s probably more competent than great.
Elisabeth El Refaie – “Visual authentication strategies in autobiographical comics”.
Emma (of Get Me Some Action Comics) on Sex in The Walking Dead.
Glen David Gold – “The Lure of the Oeuthre: On Charles Portis and Flannery O’Connor”.
Nicholas Labarre on Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli’s City of Glass.
David Large – Palimpsests and Intertexts: The Unwritten.
Peter Tieryas Liu On Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco’s Days of Destuction, Days of Revolt.
Adrielle Mitchell – “Is Comics Scholarship Ekphrasis?”
Andrei Molotiu – “Abstract Comics and Systems Theory”
Rick Moody – “Fugue for Centrifuges: On Chris Ware’s Building Stories” (Nominated by a jury member)
Jason Thompson on The Heart of Thomas.
Gabriel Winslow-Yost on the works of Chris Ware.
The Comics Journal
Craig Fischer – “The Lives of Insects: On Photography and Comics”
Katie Haegele on Ron Regé, Jr.’s The Cartoon Utopia.
Nicole Rudick on Frank Santoro’s Pompeii
A selection of Building Stories Essays by Martha Kuhlman, Katherine Roeder, Daniel Worden, David Ball, Matt Godbey, Margaret Fink, Georgiana Banta, Joanna Davis-Mcelligatt, Shawn Gilmore, Peter Sattler, Paul Karasik, and Craig Fischer.
The individual essays are linked to here for the judges to peruse. Since this process is only selecting individual pieces of comics criticism, the roundtable as a whole is not eligible for consideration.
Also see:
that canfield piece shook me up a bit. if the comments section is anything to go by, i wasn’t alone.
“Shook you up,” and felt “not alone” in which way?
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sorry, i didn’t mean the idiom “shake up” to have its negative connotations. what i meant was that i had been getting into an aesthetic/ethical rut, and jacob’s piece got me out of it.
i’m a bit of an outsider here (rarely read comics, rarely post online) so maybe i am “alone”. nevertheless, i get the impression that some of the points jacob raised could be healthy for a comics community the way they were for me.
and yes, the following critical moves strike me as lazy and deflective.
-shutting down criticism with the fan/square dichotomy.
-irresponsibly setting up the “satire of satire” buffer.
-treating the creative process as something sacred, uncensorable. (nate atkinson’s piece is salutary)
-assuming that provocation is thought-provoking or that it generates meaningful attention from outside the field.
hope i’ve not misrepresented any of your arguments, jacob– as i abstracted them i found that they held true in other discourses (literary, political etc.) as well.
let me clarify what i meant by “healthy for a a comics community”. jacob’s piece is not an apollonian, ethical curb on marra’s or ryan’s dionysian aesthetics. rather, it reconfigures some of the same elements– there is a dionysian glee in the “shut the fuck up” that he borrows from his opponents.
in practical terms, it actually complements the work of marra and ryan. tucker stone made a case for marra’s inclusion in 19 best comics of 2012 stating that the negative reviews “cemented Marra as being more than just a flavor-of-the-blogs cartoonist, existing so that his fans (and friends) can praise him.”
“I was on a panel with Johnny Ryan. . .”
“Comics should embrace the idea of being exploitation. Low level, gutter-trash entertainment. ”
these lines are from marra’s tcj journal. allow me a (lazy, deflective?) homonymic turn:
is it the job of the critical “panel” to frame “gutter-trash” entertainment within the gutter space of the real, where race and rape matter? does “frame” mean “contextualize” or ”buffer”?
typo
“tcj journal”
should read
“tcj interview”
Hi Nadiya,
I think you’ve very succinctly summarized my article, thank you for such encouraging words. I’m glad to know that it had a good effect on you.
I don’t know a ton about comics panels, but my general impression is that they tend to support the status quo. People don’t go to see a panel to hear controversial, shocking things, they go to see their favorite writers/artists talk about familiar, comforting, affirming topics. So, I’m not really surprised when a panel doesn’t address a glaring problem in comics, because that’s not what anybody’s there to see.
Thank you for commenting!
Rereading Jacob’s essay ( https://hoodedutilitarian.com/2012/10/subversion-satire-and-shut-the-fuck-up-deflection-and-lazy-thinking-in-comics-criticism-2/ ), with which — as my following comments showed — I heartily agreed, ran across a felicitous typo:
———————
Jacob Canfield says:
This brings me to the problems I have with the criticism surrounding contemporary alt comics artists like Johnny Ryan and Benjamin Marra. It is my opinion that there is dishonesty present in the criticism and promotion of “controversial” alt-comix, a dishonesty which not only damages the credulity of comics criticism as a whole, but leads to a hyper-defensive maintenance of the status-quo.
———————
From the context, clearly Jacob meant to write “the credibility of comics criticism as a whole.”
But, surely isn’t “credulity” a major part of what we see in criticism in all but the most erudite arenas?
As with trends in fashion, even economics ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble ), not only the public, but supposedly knowledgeable writers are willing to be swept along in being cheerleaders for unexamined assumptions, dubious assertions; supporting (as Jacob just noted about comics panels) the status quo.
And if you disagree, you’re a stick-in-the-mud; considered out of touch as a critic, as when writers who warned of the dangers of the dot-com bubble were mostly shut out of appearing in business/investor-advice magazines.
Hi Mike, you’re totally right about that typo – I was surprised to read it! Strange word choice on my part, there.
I agree with you about credulity; it’s easy to be effusive about things. Tucker Stone had a pretty funny diagram in one of his columns, taken from Abhay’s tumblr (http://twiststreet.tumblr.com/post/36613928742) that compared the number of times various criticism sites said the word “masterful.” I don’t know if it’s an entirely fair comparison, since the cbr search would also include its forums, but it’s still a good illustration of that phenomenon. (HU, for the record, clocks in at 71 results. Probably 72 now.)