In a 1980 essay titled Another Relentlessly Elitist Editorial, Kim Thompson made the argument, on behalf of the old Comics Journal in general, and curmudgeon Gary Groth in particular, that negative comics criticism is worthwhile and necessary.
And to those who, fists tightly clutched around the latest issue of Micronauts or Warlord, indignantly shriek, “Comics—love ’em or leave ’em!” we can only respond: We do love them. But we refuse to become apologists for the mediocre and the worthless in the process. To wallow in that which is artless and dishonest is an act not of love but of betrayal. The Comics Journal’s sights are pointed obstinately at the stars. Perhaps reading it is depressing at times; but I think the disappearance of the magazine, or of the basic philosophy that makes it what it is, would be more depressing by far. We haven’t given up hope for comics yet. We’re still waiting for the medium to flower.
Thompson’s response to the purveyors of anti-negativity negativity is, then, that only through (selected) negativity can you express true love. Folks who refuse to admit that Micronauts is a piece of crap denigrate the medium they claim to reverence. If you value comics, then you must have standards. If you promote any old piece of dreck, then you’re treating comics as any old piece of dreck. You are, as he puts it, a gluttinous gourmand, lacking respect for your pallet and yourself, rather than a discriminating gourmet.
The issue, therefore, is framed specifically, and competitively, in terms of love. Thompson is responding, he says, to a question that many people at the time asked of the Journal: “Why, if you have such contempt for the medium, do you publish a magazine about comics?” Kim’s response is a turnabout: it is not we who point out flaws who have contempt. It’s you, who refuse to hold comics to the highest standards, who are spitting on the medium. If Gary calls most mainstream comics “bland, useless garbage,” it’s because that bland, useless garbage is smearing filth upon the face that he reveres.
Kim’s points seem reasonable enough. I might question whether Roy Thomas or Steve Gerber have actually “achieved superior works in the medium,” or whether the O’Neil/Adams Green Lantern/Green Arrow proves the worth of comics rather than the opposite — but those are quibbles. Different folks have different canons, and in terms of worthwhile comics, there were even slimmer pickings in 1980 than there are today. The general point that respect for the good in art sometimes involves contempt for the bad stands, even if one doesn’t quite agree on the merits of a given work.
If I agree with Kim up to a point, though, I’m also a little leery of the way he frames the issue…and perhaps of the conversation in which it occurs. Reading Kim’s editorial, it’s hard not to be struck by the extent to which TCJ, and its editors, were embedded not just in the medium, but in the industry they were critiquing. Kim isn’t jousting with internet trolls; the folks who are telling him he’s too negative are editors and writers at DC and Marvel. One guy basically sounds like he’s threatening the Journal that he won’t help with news or cover reproductions if the reviews aren’t more positive.
Given those kinds of incentives (and/or that kind of frank thuggery) it’s a credit to Gary and Kim’s integrity that the Journal didn’t back down, and did continue to call out crap when confronted with steaming piles of it. At the same time, though, it seems like being embedded in that world would have to affect your worldview — or, to look at it another way, to have wanted to be in that world, and to have worked to be in that world, means that your worldview would have to sync up to some degree with that of the folks you’re criticizing. Kim may not agree about what it means to love comics — but he does agree that loving comics is a reasonable criterion by which to judge comics critics. And that love should, in this view, extend to comics as a whole — very definitely including super-hero comics. he takes care to show that he has the right and the standing to sneer at the most recent X-book, by declaring that he has no prejudice against the genre as a whole. Recognizing Steve Englehart as a glorious treasure is part and parcel of recognizing the lousiness of the Micronauts.
This is not really where I’m coming from. I would never say that I loved comics, nor would I necessarily say with Kim that it’s “a great and wonderful medium.” Certainly, there are some great comics — and then there are lots and lots and lots of terrible comics (some of which Kim signals out for praise.) Certainly, comics isn’t any greater a medium than music, or art, or literature, or film…or possibly video games, which I know almost nothing about. Comics perhaps can do some unique things — but doing unique things isn’t unique. Every medium has its own history and its own formal potential. Why praise one in particular? Why love one in particular? And why should loving one in particular be a condition for criticizing that one? Or to put it another way, why do I need to be a fan to point out that Green Lantern/Green Arrow is clumsy, overblown agitprop, in which the vivid, dramatic visuals mostly serve to emphasize the self-parody?
One reason to be a fan, perhaps, is that fandom — to some extent in 1980, and even more now — is the way that our cultural interests are organized. Kim’s love of comics (and TCJ’s love of comics) was an essential part of what the magazine was and how it became so important; that love was the reason it could be so connected, however ambivalently, to the institutions and communities that Kim is, in this essay, both defending himself from and insisting on his own place within. It was the love that powered his long, long list of achievements as publisher, translator, critic, advocate, and editor.
Criticism without a basis in a fan culture of love, on the other hand, isn’t likely to produce such achievements. The common community, the common audience, and the common institutions, which spring out of commitment to a particular medium are vital to organizing and perpetuating communities, audiences and institutions. Placing yourself outside of community puts you outside of community; you end up, by definition, not talking to a whole lot of people.
Still, I like to think that there’s some worth in comics criticism, or any criticism, even by folks like me who don’t necessarily have a special fondness for comics in particular. Different perspectives can, perhaps, pick out different gems, as well as different warts. And different loves, or different kinds of loves, can maybe create different communities, or different connections between existing ones. Kim and TCJ and Fantagraphics are a longstanding and impressive demonstration of what those committed to comics can do for comics, and for art. But I think too that one measure of comics’ worth is, or will be, that they can speak not just to fans, but even to those who don’t have a stake in loving them.
________
As most folks reading this probably know, Kim Thompson passed away last month. The last time I communicated with him was when he, graciously as always, declined an invitation to participate in our anniversary of hate.
…and I just went back through my too-few emails from Kim and found one where he was talking about how much he loved translating that just about made me cry.
TCJ and Thompson definitely had a history of fan community participation in those early days. When you have been immersed in that culture, have even been considered a leader within that culture, its value system becomes difficult to disengage from. I read Thompson’s 1980 essay as a first step in that disengagement. I was 15 years old in 1980 and thought that Michael Golden was the greatest comic book artist of all time, I should probably mention.
I don’t think they ever actually, or exactly disengaged, is I guess part of what I’m saying. I don’t think TCJ/Fantagraphics ever stopped being about, or coming from a place of, loving comics as a bedrock.
Which isn’t bad. It’s great in a lot of ways. It’s just not where I’m coming from, exactly.
“Criticism without a basis in a fan culture of love, on the other hand, isn’t likely to produce such achievements.”
Obviously Kim Thompson’s experience as a critic informed his work in other fields where he made a much greater contribution. But he’s undoubtedly an anomaly as is Gary Groth. Most comic publishers, translators, and editors aren’t critics as well. In fact, such was the weight of Thompson’s other duties, that he largely gave up on formal articles on comics (he still had lots of informal opinions). The really important thing (as you sort of point out) in the equation isn’t the criticism but being an ardent lover (a fan if you will) of the form. That’s the wellspring.
If there is a “problem” with criticism not connected to “love”, it would be the lack of commitment. If a critic doesn’t like comics (as an art form) *almost* as much as books/movies/music etc., he’s likely to stay in the field temporarily before moving on to better things. And there’s something to be said for a critic who has >40 years of comics reading and thinking under his belt (like Gary and Kim). The less dedicated critic won’t have any commitment to tracking trends, “discovering” new (or forgotten) artists, or looking more deeply at major artists of the past etc. (at the risk of stating the obvious). That’s why fans are important.
There are problems with too much “love” of course but those have been discussed extensively on this site.
They have been…which is why I was trying to point out some of the advantages of love as well (which you’ve elucidated more fully….)
Noah, I for one am very glad you continue to write comics criticism. At the risk of sound too effusive, I would have completely given up on comics a while ago if I hadn’t discovered your writings here, and the writings of several of HU’s contributors.
Awww. Thanks!
I think lots and lots and lots of folks over the years felt that way about Kim and Gary and tcj and fantagraphics.
I sure loved Micronauts at one time. I suspect it probably holds up better than GL/GA. Comic book elitists are a funny kind of elitism.
Fantagraphics asks DC rep for more reproduction rights for the Comics Journal.
I can certainly understand the desire of a critic to expose the flaws of shoddy material that is inexplicably popular or praised by idiots with no taste, but at the same time I’ve often wondered whether bad reviews ever really change anyone’s opinion. Of course bad reviews can be illuminating and fun: Carter Scholz eviscerating Bill Mantlo’s Swords of the Swashbucklers on the one hand while praising DeMatteis and Muth’s Moonshadow on the other (issue 99, 1985) stands out in my mind as one of the best things I ever read in the Journal. But at the same time, some of Gary Groth’s sputtering, rage-filled screeds against various targets (e.g. the post-Turtles b&w explosion of the mid-eighties or the effect on the industry of the 1989 Batman movie) make me imagine him as a slightly more articulate Donald Duck, stamping his webbed feet in impotent fury.
It was perhaps to comics’ benefit and the Journal’s detriment that Kim Thompson spent his time editing/translating/publishing rather than raging and complaining; though when he did offer his opinions, they always seemed very much on the money to me. His thoughts about how the European comics industry seemed to be more capable of providing good “middle-brow” material than most US publishers struck me as both perceptive about the medium and highly revealing of his own sensibilities, which I suspect were a lot closer to mine than Groth’s ever were. Whenever I read one of Groth’s pieces, I often come away wondering whether he actually likes comics at all outside of his own tiny “idiocanon” of Crumb, Schulz and the Hernandez brothers.
I think for the most part criticism, like any art, is its own reward, or lack thereof. Sometimes it can seem pointless…but, again, so can any art, pretty much.
I think there’s a fine-line middle ground between “love,” in the critical sense, and a problematic absence of that love. (I can already tell from that sentence I’m going to have a hell of a time coherently making my point, but here it goes…)
I’m reminded of Harlan Ellison’s introduction to his book of film criticism, Watching, in which he too posits that a love of the form is a necessary pre-requisite for a top-notch critic. He offers up a counter-example of John Simon, whose writing and powers of observation Ellison praises. Ellison laments, however, that Simon clearly considers film to be a second-class art form, and that this disdain poisons his otherwise highly valuable reviews.
(And now I’m feeling awkward for bringing up Harlan Ellison in a post about Kim Thompson, since now there’s an elephant in the room that I didn’t intend to invite…I’m just going to ignore it and hope everyone else does too, as it’s beside the point and merely upsetting.)
I think the middle ground (that I would say, Noah, you occupy) is in not necessarily loving a particular medium over all others, but likewise not consideing that medium as beneath those others. Your critical “love” would seem to be for art and cultural expression in toto, as well as for acts of analysis and criticism in and of themselves. This position would not be, to my mind, the antithesis or opposite of the love that Thompson writes about, but would merely be another permutation of that love, with different focused interests but serving as the same crucial building block for “good” criticism.
I don’t know for sure that I agree with everything I just wrote here, but it seems to make sense right now.
Kim actually mentions Ellison in that essay; I think it was written before they had their break. (I don’t have much sense of the timeline of that….)
Ellison’s point re: Simon is a good one. Effectively, any positive film review written from the perspective of someone who views film as a second-class medium will always come down to: “That was pretty good…for a movie.” (Of course one might say the same about Ellison’s own television reviews as collected in The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat, though it’s been a while since I read those so I might be off base.)
Regarding a love of one medium over another, it occurred to me recently that I genuinely love comics (and perhaps literature) in a way that I don’t love movies or television. Especially comics. I am far more likely to read a comic book (or strip) because it’s comics, regardless of subject matter, than I am to watch a film or a TV show because of a love of those forms. I spent many years reading and genuinely enjoying Alex Kotzky’s soapy Apartment 3G because it was in the Boston Globe every day and because I loved reading comics (In fact, I read every strip in the Globe and the Boston Herald every day for many years). Apartment 3G was there. I read it. But I doubt very much I would have watched a television show with the same premise and characters simply out of a desire to have something to watch. Similarly, I think that many of my friends go to movies and watch television far more than I do because they like to go to the movies and enjoy watching television, regardless of what they end up seeing. I never do that. I love and cherish certain movies and TV shows and will certainly obsess over those that I do love, but I don’t love movies and TV in a general way. Not that my moviegoing friends are indiscriminate in their tastes. Far from it. But I’m far more likely to walk out of a film that’s boring or offending me or turn off a TV show for the same reason than I am to put down a comic book/strip or a novel that’s not doing it for me. I plow through at least 85% of each week’s New Yorker magazine because I genuinely love reading but I rarely go out to the movies for the sake of watching movies or settle in for a night of television watching simply because I enjoy watching television. (And for the record, I certainly don’t view movies or TV as second-class in any way.)
p.s. The one exception to my above claim about having no particular love for movies or TV is animation. I’ve watched a great deal of animation of all different types (Disney, Japanese, experimental/avant garde) purely out of love for the medium.
That’s interesting. What about comics makes it more enjoyable to you than other forms? Is it something you can pin down?
You don’t need to be a fan to point out that Green Lantern/Green Arrow is…whatever you said it was. You need to be a fan to *care*.
Noah, I honestly have no idea, but it might be connected to the endless joy of reading Peanuts books as a kid. I certainly watched my share of TV and movies in those days, but I never got into it quite as much.
I recall Kim saying he would not like a lot of the things he did back then, that he was scared of going back to read Howard The Duck because it probably wouldn’t hold up.
I love music because there is an almost universal agreement that it has to sound good, it has to satisfy your ears.
If comics, film and visual art in general agreed on looking good all the time, I would like it more. Not that I don’t respect peoples reasons for not wanting something to look good.
I also think musicians and book writers and maybe even film directors are more committed and serious about the sum total effect of what they create has on a person, than comic creators generally are. I don’t think most comic creators worry about what speech bubbles, fonts and gutters might do to the overall reading experience.
Doesn’t everyone prefer certain media over others as a matter of personal preference? Most people rarely read poetry these days, television has largely replaced radio performances and live theater…
I imagine its an unusual person who equally consumes every form of communication. A critic will likely be happiest if writing about the medium they prefer, although there’s no reason the critic can’t engage with a medium they don’t like at least for a limited period of time before they get burnt out.
Sure…but preferences don’t have to have much to do with love. They could just be a matter of convenience or price point. I don’t play video games just out of habit, and because getting into it would require time and effort I’m not really willing to put into it. I don’t go to live theater because it’s expensive and inconvenient. But I don’t think comics is more lovable or better just because I happen to read more of them for what are basically fairly random personal and professional reasons.
“(Of course one might say the same about Ellison’s own television reviews as collected in The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat, though it’s been a while since I read those so I might be off base.)”
I don’t think you’re that off base…The Glass Teat was essentially written from the point of view that television COULD be as good a medium as others (combined with the implication that television’s ubiquity made it important to try and raise its standards), but when Ellison did eventually give up on television as a medium and consequently stopped writing about it.
I think the social element is very important. People watch tv and films together, a lot of people do games and listen to music together, you can eat and drink as you do these things (Does anyone eat pizza when they read books?).
Get a load of all these photos of kids reading comics in large groups, it looks really odd now…
http://beautiful-grotesque.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/cool-kids-read-comics-various.html
If tv and film were experiences only for the isolated individual and everyone had to pay for each film/programme individually without the convenience of television, things would be totally different.
I tend to watch tv mostly as a lazy way of avoiding my real priorities, I enjoy extremely little of what I watch. It is like a procrastination aid.
The thing that makes it hard to stop is watching with family, because it is an easy way to spend time with people.
Noah says “I don’t play video games just out of habit, and because getting into it would require time and effort I’m not really willing to put into it”
Even for fans, videogames are becoming offputtingly complicated. I’ve barely played games for the last 4 years because I find the current consoles so irritating. The actual games are more complex than I would like too. I’ve always preferred arcadey simplicity.
My wife’s friend just revealed this evening that my wife was a Dave Matthews Band fan in high school, which I was appropriately, politely horrified by. The friend responded in her defense, although my wife was not interested in defending it. I asserted that it’s okay to hate shitty things. Which makes me a dilettante and unable to commit to a medium of choice.
No, no; Kim hates shitty things, and he’s able to commit.
I think you’re able to commit too, actually. Would you say you don’t love visual art? You’re totally enmeshed in it institutionally and professionally, it seems like…?
Robert Adam Gilmour, those pictures of kids reading comics are great. By contrast, a friend happened to post this great photo of an adult reading comics by herself to FB yesterday:
http://life.time.com/culture/in-praise-of-classic-comics-and-comic-strips/attachment/00653117-jpg/
Bert…but Dave Matthews band is better than Billy Joel, right?
I wish *we* could have a divorce from mainstream comics. I think about this everyday. As someone who *loves* comics, I’m just tired of jousting with mainstream fans over, say, the technical ability of mini-comics artists and stuff like that. I’m also tired of jousting with art/alt comics fans about the merits of Kirby or Ditko. Haven’t *we* had these arguments already? It’s like listening to my punk rock friends razz on jazz music or my jazz friends make fun of “people who can’t play their instruments”. Sigh. Time to make the donuts.
I notice that your analogy puts jazz & superheroes together. Again, a funny kind of elitism in comics.
Yah, maybe a “classic rock / punk rock” analogy would have been better? haha
Nah, that won’t work because that just triggers further pointless false binaries, e.g. “Dude, hardcore is NOT punk!” Feh.
Frank: my feeling is that the solo works of both Kirby and Ditko are actually quite close to the goals of art/alt comics and that those two (along with W. Wood (Witzend) and Steranko (auteurism and self-publishing)) helped jumpstart the movement towards making more personal artistic statements in the comics medium that dominate the alternative movement, at least as much as underground comics did. So fine, divorce the mainstream but the alt should retain some of our forebears.
ok, I’ll just slink over to my side of the playground again :)
sorry – that last one by me was for Daniel –
yah, I know what you mean James – Tom Scioli’s doing a good job these days of making case for the artists you mention…
I certainly have my unqualified sweeping preferences and axes to grind in visual art and popular music, but that doesn’t make me less of a dilettante.
Billy Joel is horrible. I think he has some value as a nerdy Jew hero-figure, which is perhaps more upstanding that Dave Matthews’ role as a clueless WASP dude hero-figure.
I have opinions about everything. Like these Captchas are now harder to read and sort of more aesthetically pleasing. I read an article in Art Papers about balck metal logos and Captchas once.
Well, I’m all for dilettantes. And I am glad that someone somewhere is less execrable in some way than Billy Joel….
Noah – maybe the key to a mature approach to the criticism as well as the creation of comics is to answer the question: Am I still able to love comics as an artform/medium, even after having abandoned the infantile illusion that it is the greatest artform/medium of all?
I don’t recall anyone saying comics are the greatest medium of all—on the other hand, who says it can’t be?…comics are but one of various mediums of artistic expression; all have their merits and those who prefer one or the other. And who the fuck are you to dismiss the form and those who admire it as infantile? It may be debatable whether or not greatness has been accomplished to date, but the potential remains, Mr. oh so mature and dismissive.
I don’t think Joel was saying the artform or its admirers are infantile. He was just saying that he doesn’t think it’s superior to other artforms…
It doesn’t really sound like you and he disagree all that much, James.
James – I wasn’t aware that my comment could be understood as dismissive of anybody. If you heard a dismissive tone, please accept my excuses.
I did not say that comics as a form are infantile, and I haven’t said either that its admirers are infantile. I think I did not even want to say anything particularly inflammatory. That you perceived it as puzzles me.
Sorry – last line should read: That you perceived it as such puzzles me.
Oh, well, I guess I misinterpreted what you wrote. There have been those purists who stand by poetry or opera, for a pair of instances, as the be-all-and-end-alls of mortal accomplishment, when we all know that such would preclude the delights of Proust, Slim Whitman and Jeff Koons. So. You mean by “infantile illusion”ists, people who think the 80 page Batman featuring Batmite and Batdog is the greatest work of western civilization—-or those deluded types who believe that the latest issue of Spiderman and his new stickiest blue costume will change the way we all think forever? I’m just sayin’ that the Mozart of Kommmiccxz may not have come down the pike yet, despite the claims of those of us who may revere Spiegelman, Clowes or Kirby—-but perhaps she’s clawing her way out of the womb as we speak.
James: I actually do think that comics can be great. What I referred to as an infantile illusion (and please consider that there can be a way of employing a word such as ‘infantile’ without necessarily meaning all that heavy moralistic burden that it usually carries with it – for example, when Freud speaks of ‘infantile sexuality’, there’s no moral condemnation included) was the belief that comics may be the greatest artform of all, which I am fully aware nobody on this forum claimed, and it wasn’t so much directed to anyone on this forum in particular, it was more a reflection of what I have perceived in the discussion about the cultural status of comics in general, as well as what I have gleaned from personal conversations with other cartoonists over the years, including myself. I think I have this belief, that comics may be the greatest artform of all, myself in some corner of my mind – and at the same time I often have thus feeling that that isn’t really true.
Please don’t understand everything I am saying here es cut in stone – it isn’t all that clear in my mind – I am just trying to make sense of the debate that has been going on in this forum for a long time now, about the literaries versus the picturaries and all that, which is kind of linked to the discussion about how you evaluate the potential of comics in relation to other arts. The debate has been running for a long time, and it has forerunners in a lot that has gone on before about kinda the same topic – I remember interesting essays by Gregory Cwiklik in TCJ in the nineties, comparing the potential of comics to the potential of written literature.
I think that those who claim that comics have a potential that cannot be realized in any other form do have a point. They are right: Comics do have a specificity, specific capabilities. There are some things that you can only do in a comic, not in literature, not in the fine arts, and nowhere else. There are some important things that only comics can do.
But on the other hand – the other side of this truth is that there are some things that comics can’t do. Things that only literature can do, or things that only a fine artist can do. That is the thing that is more difficult to accept for a comics enthusiast, and I am myself a comics enthusiast. So I am saying this first and foremost to myself, and posting it here to see if anybody shares anything of that.
It simply means that comics can be on a par with all the other artforms if they want it, but they will not tower above all the others. The wish to say that comics are, or maybe the greatest of all is I think, an understandable reaction against all the contempt that has been heaped upon comics. But it must be left behind I think, if comics shall evolve and progress.
So: I didn’t want to dismiss comics at all. I am just trying to make sense of the longoing debate about what comics can do, what they are “worth” (putting this in quotation amrks very much on purpose), which I am very interested in, and I am trying to figure out why this debate continues to be so heated very often.
My lecture of this debate while reading discussions on this forum has often been, that I had the feeling of recognizing myself in both positions: I have had monets where I was very enthusiastic and convinced about the greatness of comics, and other moments when I thought that the comics culture is very limited and insular compared to, let’s say the circuit and public of written literature. I think both moments are kind of linked dialectically, so to speak.
End of tentative sermon.
Sorry for all these typos!
Joel, you raise some interesting points.
I think that no medium can be said to be the “best.” That would be a matter of entirely subjective preference.
It could be said that poetry and literature lack images and a soundtrack, that painting lacks sound and movement, that music lacks imagery and movement, or that films have the benefit of sound, imagery and movement but tend to be overly explicit and limit the audience’s imagination, for instance that a film version of a great book will nail the depiction down to such a degree that the imagination employed in reading is lost entirely —but these things that may be considered by some to be intrinsic limitations can be rendered moot by an artist of skill and subtlety.
It is true that comics can do things that no other medium can, by virtue of being a form that blends words and images in sequential passages that most often appear as interrelated multiple-image page designs, in black and white or in color, that can be quite explicit yet still retain a quality of audience involvement that can transcend spectator immersion.
Those potentials have been explored by such innovative artists as Roy Crane, George Herriman, Will Eisner, Bernard Krigstein, Jack Kirby, Alex Toth, Jim Steranko, Art Spiegelman, Melinda Gebbie, Gary Panter, Richard McGuire, Dan Clowes, Chris Ware and others—-and they continue to fascinate forward-thinking artists. I even broke my Marvel boycott recently to buy a Fraction/Aja Hawkeye comic because they are doing something unusual (if apparently something of a combination of appropriated devices) that is specific to the medium. It is a very young medium, still only around a hundred years in the current form and so it’s possibilities are barely scratched. It is a very exciting time to be working in comics—if not always very lucrative, outside of select compromised areas of the mainstream..
I admit I have some reservations about the elevation of the graphic novel, mainly because the label is used indiscriminately as an umbrella for a range of material that isn’t worthy of serious consideration. Corporate shlock publishers use their standard tricks of flooding the market with bound volumes of trashy and juvenile periodicals, collected as “novels” and shelved in bookstores and libraries alongside and undifferentiated from the limited number of more serious works, and often crowding out those more literate and sophisticated efforts by dint of their publishers’ greater promotional capabilities.
And I had a disturbing vision as my friend Karen Green’s fostering of a graphic novel section at Columbia University’s Butler Library had borne fruit and its single aisle of comics has grown to encompass a second aisle; I imagined a horrific scenario where eventually all the great and revered classics of yore would all be gone to dust, only preserved in the cold and airless digital domain, while the stacks became row upon row of exponentially replicant Marvel Masterworks and DC Omnibi. Even we who hoped for the comic book to reach a mature stage as an artform worthy of consideration with the other great mediums certainly never intended for them to entirely supplant printed prose.