2014 was a pretty bad year for comics criticism. On the basis of my simple survey there was hardly anything of note from the first third of 2014 as far as comics criticism was concerned (though things did pick up in the latter half of 2014). So if you find me clutching at straws in some of the entries below, well, you know the reason why.
Apart from the perennial issues of racism and sexism in superhero comics (or maybe in general?) there weren’t many critical controversies in 2014. I can’t say that this failure to engage with fellow critics and their ideas is a positive sign of health; especially if this reticence is symptomatic of intellectual torpor or a lack of breath in comics thinking.
[Your annual Comics Criticism Metaphor]
Needless to say, the selection below is incomplete and careful readers of comics criticism (?) should list any notable articles they’ve read in 2014 in the comments section.
(1) Listed by author in alphabetical order.
Merve Emre and Christian Nakarado on architecture in the comics of David Mazzucchelli and Chris Ware.
Brian Cremins on transcendental style in the comics of Julia Gfrörer and Jessi Zabarsky. Or consider the first part of his lecture on “Comics Books and Visual Literacy”; both of which are related to his long term work on nostalgia and comics. Or consider his “How to Read The Curse of the Werewolf.”
Julia Gfrörer – “Shadow Puppets”
R. C. Harvey – “Understanding Barnaby”. This may be the most comprehensive analysis of Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby available online.
An alternative selection might be Harvey’s piece titled, “The Perversion of the Graphic Novel and Its Refinement” This one is about comics biographies and a reiteration of Harvey’s version of “comics fascism” (i.e. the essential nature of visual-verbal blending). His most notable target in the past has been Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant but he hasn’t rehearsed this pet peeve in quite a while. Here he is on a stumbling block in comic biographies:
“Generally speaking, a biography’s impulse is to include all the chief details of the subject’s life. As we see in SuperZelda, the effort to include all such matters in graphic novel form effectively destroys the form. Unless the biographer expands the number of pages in his/her work to gigantic dimension, the natural impulse—the best way to achieve a manageable length—is to resort to words for telling the story, and in obeying that impulse, the biographer inevitably uses pictures only to make the pages look pretty. As a result, the pictures don’t add any narrative content. The comics form works best as a form when it can portray at some length an incident or event, an impossibility if the over-all objective is to cover all the chief events in a person’s life in as few pages as possible.”
Jeet Heer on Herblock’s legacy and deification in a new HBO documentary. Or consider part of his ongoing work on Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie.
Adrian Hill – “Falling into Place.” On Malcom Mc Neill and William S. Burrough’s Ah Pook is Here.
Ryan Holmberg – “Matsumoto Katsuji and the American Root of Kawaii.” Or his article on Enka Gekiga: Hiyashi Seiichi’s Pop Music Manga.
Illogical Volume on Pax Americana – “An Experiment in Assisted Re-Viewing.” Or consider David Uzumeri‘s annotations for the same comic.
Domingos Isabelinho – Chester Brown as a Gothic Artist.
Etelka Lehoczky on S. Clay Wilson’s Pirates in the Heartland.
Joe McCulloch on Recidivist Vol. IV.
Tahneer Oksman on Julie Delporte’s Everywhere Antennas.
Ken Parille – “Don’t Move: The Still Life of Peter Morisi”
Megan Purdy – “Love Is Far, You Can Wait for It”
Abraham Riesman – “The Secret History and Uncertain Future of Comics Character John Constantine.” I don’t know if this article offers a tremendous amount of new insights into the character but it’s probably as good an overview of the character in toto as you’ll find online. I’m going to guess that it was the editor who decided to put the words “comics character” in the title of the piece (maybe even the words “uncertain future”).
Jonathan Rosenbaum – “Peanuts, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” (this was published in 2013 but only appeared online in 2014).
Nicole Rudick on Julia Gfrörer’s Black Is the Color.
Joanna Scutts – “War in Panorama” (on Joe Sacco’s The Great War).
Matt Seneca on Richard Maguire’s Here.
Bob Temuka – “Superdeath”
Nicholas Theisen on Hannah Miodrag’s Comics and Language.
Paul Williams on Martin Vaughn-James’ The Projector. This one comes from a new-ish blog about 70s comics. There really isn’t much writing on this particular comic out there.
Matthias Wivel – “The Cage Stands As Before: The Comics of Yvan Alagbé”
(2) Notable Guest Articles on The Hooded Utilitarian
Brian Cremins – “Walt Kelly and Me”
Shaenon Garrity on Bloom County – “The Truth, Steve.” This is a nice summary of Bloom County‘s place in the comic strip firmament. I liked it better than Calvin and Hobbes back in the 80s anyway.
Michael A. Johnson on the ethics of war photography in War Photographer.
Kate Polak on empathy in J. P. Stassen’s Deogratias. In relation to this, also read Michelle Bumatay‘s review of La Fantaisie des Dieux: Rwanda 1994 which is published at her personal blog.
(3) Notable Controversies
R Fiore on Walt Kelly’s Pogo: The Complete Dell Comics: “Sometimes a Watermelon is just a Watermelon.” Also see Noah’s reply here and Brian Cremins article noted above.
One of those pieces which I expected to elicit more discussion but didn’t. Part of the problem is that almost no one has read or has any interest in the earliest incarnation of Pogo. The comments section remains interesting however.
As comics criticism has gained sophistication over the years, it’s become easier to identify the politics of various “heritage” comics critics. Fiore, for example, falls somewhere along the spectrum of Neo-Liberal to Neo-Con. Which generally marks him out for ideological disagreements with the editor of this blog and many of its contributors. Noah would no doubt find it disgusting that some people find Fiore’s piece worthy of consideration for a place on this list.
The discussion surrounding this piece also demonstrates the sharp divide that has occurred in the last decade or so. Fiore is venerated among many old time readers and writers of comics criticism but he’s quite the unknown among the younger set. His views frequently come across as old fashioned and conservative within the “art” comics community and they are often given short shrift and scant respect. In one corner we find the TCJ stalwarts who consider Fiore “one of the ten best writers to ever cover the medium“, and in the other a progressively engaged community which finds his thoughts increasingly out of touch. This could be taken as a sign of (comics) critical health.
Having corresponded with Ryan (Holmberg), I can say he is top notch. He has a keen sense for what is crucial and overlooked in manga scholarship, and any intro to manga studies for the uninitiated should begin by reading everything he has written.
Thanks for putting together such a good list, I’m definitely going to work my way through this as soon as I have some time. I think that the lack of respect Fiore gets is broadly a good thing, even without his shitty conservative opinions I think at this point in comics criticism there are people who have been around long enough where they could become a too authoritative if you don’t have people challenging them.
I’m very interested by Isabelinho’s article about Chester Brown as a Gothic artist, I’ve been thinking about that sort of thing for a while and I was wondering if anyone could think of an essay or book drawing a diachronic line through that kind of gothic art to the modern comic form, it seems like you should be able to work it through the political cartoon and the grotesque drawing or something along those lines.
Fiore rules; Suat drools.
Heh, that trigger-happy jerk in the first illo is Mark Gruenewald and Paul Neary’s “Scouge”, a prctical psycho who went around killing off stoopid supervillains like Commander Kraken, the Basilisk, Turner D. Century or Black Mamba; always with the motto: “Justice is served!”
Truth be told, if Justice were served the Scourge would’ve killed off the entire Marvel Cast of Superstars — one of Jim Shooter’s few authentically brilliant ideas — now apparently resurrected.
It seems to me one way to avoid accusations of racism is to only draw from ones own “race” and only comment about depictions of ones own “race”. Cross “race” drawings and cross “race” criticism comes with it potential issues of one “race” calling the other “race” racist in its depictions or in its assumptions when commenting on cross-race issues.
Personally I think a more interesting issue is ethics in the comic genre. I mean when a lead character is saying “eat lead and die” I do wonder.
My triumphant string of 2 straight years ends ignominiously! I didn’t write anything online this year. Unless you count ill-advised contributions to comments threads. Like this one.
Are Fiore’s views “often given short shrift and scant respect’ because the younger crowd finds them “old-fashioned and conservative”, or simply because the *subjects* Fiore writes about tend toward the old-fashioned and conservative? I looked at the articles Fiore published at TCJ in 2014 and there were a grand total of 3: a piece on Joe Sacco and Ted Rall (both more pertinent to the art-comics center in the 90s/early 00s); a review of the Drew Friedman and Monte Beauchamp books (both figures of the 80s/90s); and the Pogo controversy. The articles published by Fiore in years prior also skew “old”: Skippy, Eisner, UPA, with Chris Ware and Chester Brown being the “newest” figures. Regardless of its merit as criticism, I just can’t see a younger audience getting all hot and bothered about Eisner’s Army comics one way or the other. I also don’t see a lot of younger art-comics fans discussing R.C. Harvey’s writings either. In addition, while Fiore is a regular in the TCJ comments section, he otherwise has zero social media presence (that I know of) and isn’t a very prolific writer. It seems to me that Fiore was closer to the center of critical discussion in the 80s, when he was in most issues of TCJ and the magazine itself was the only game in town for serious discussion of comics – and even then his critical stances were often at odds with many of the magazine’s other contributors and the art-comics party line.
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I just started reading some Pogo strips (newspaper strips, not the comicbook version) aloud to my daughter, and sheesh. I’m not even American, and actually saying that dialogue is embarrassing; it feels like I’m going to break out into Jar-Jar Binks mode any minute.
How old is Fiore? Is he Gary’s age? 60ish?
I find Fiore consistently interesting. I can’t say the same for that Slate article that searched at length for the point at which John Constantine turned into a vacuous, corporate “cool” character and didn’t choose the first issue.
I think Fiore’s politics are liberal/left. My favorite line of his involved politics–he described the message of one of those awful 9/11 anthology comics as, “America is the greatest country in the world, except it was kind of shitty what we did to the Indians.” That sums up a certain type of liberalism pretty beautifully.
“How old is Fiore? Is he Gary’s age? 60ish?”
In one of his old Funnybook Roulette columns, he mentioned being about 10 years old circa 1966.
Jack: “My favorite line of his involved politics–he described the message of one of those awful 9/11 anthology comics as, “America is the greatest country in the world, except it was kind of shitty what we did to the Indians.””
Are you sure he doesn’t come from somewhere close to that end of the spectrum as well (at least nowadays)? His views on American foreign policy and race in recent times seem to indicate as much – very New Republic. Neoliberalism seems to be the dominant trend in American politics. Of course, all this tends to be rather vague terminology since the foreign policy initiatives of the Neoliberals and Neocons are nearly the same.
And Pogo strips should not be read aloud!
Well, I don’t know. I do remember him writing something about Joe Sacco’s Palestine that seemed New Republic-ish. My memory could be slightly off, but I think he compared Palestinians’ presence in the occupied territories to the hypothetical case of right-wing Cubans refusing to leave refugee camps on the island after being ousted by Castro’s revolution. His point seemed to be that once you lose a war, you have to stop clinging to your homeland and immigrate to Jordan, Egypt, Syria, or, worst of all, Florida. It actually seemed like one of the better pro-Israel arguments I’ve heard.
Suat, I hope you’re not still pissed at him because of that old argument about E.C. Comics! Grown men should not get mad at each other because they have differing views on “The Vault of Horror” and “Shock SuspenStories.”
Good grief! Of course not. I haven’t thought about the thing since the thing was republished here a while back. On the other hand, people have stayed angry with each other for things far more minor than even EC comics.
Thanks a lot for the inclusion, Suat, but I wouldn’t call my small blog post “comics criticism.” It’s just that, a blog post, not much longer than a tweet. My comics criticism for 2014 is this one: http://tinyurl.com/nb58rqz It isn’t online, though…
Neoliberalism isn’t particularly concerned with foreign policy or the military. Its overwhelming focus is economic policy and government’s relationship thereto. It is a resolutely anti-socialist ideology, and regards the marketplace as the ultimate arbiter of good and bad in society. The only significant international goal is promoting the spread of free-market capitalism. The most important neoliberal thinker is probably Milton Friedman. It is a major ideological force in the world today, and plays a dominant role in virtually every capitalist society on the planet.
Neoconservatism, on the other hand, is a rather pretentious designation for the views of a faction in the right wing of U. S. politics. It is all but entirely concerned with foreign policy and the use of the military. It essentially favors turning the U. S. into an effective police state in the name of protecting it against perceived foreign threats, and actively promotes military adventurism to deal with perceived threats abroad. Most neoconservatives are stridently pro-Zionist. At times, one may wonder whether their first loyalty is to the Likud rather than the U. S. All neoconservatives are ostensibly neoliberal in outlook, but in practice they favor the worst forms of crony capitalism. For them, the commons essentially exists to be looted by allied business interests. Neoliberal arguments are just a means to that end.
As for Fiore, he’s essentially a Social Democrat with a libertine outlook on culture. His blind spots on race and so forth are not unusual among white male hetero liberals of his generation. (He’s in his mid-to-late 50s.) His biggest fault is that he’s become ridiculously solipsistic in the last dozen years or so. When he gets into disputes with people, he doesn’t engage with his interlocutor so much as long-windedly respond to a straw man that exists only in his head. That’s generally been a big part of the arguments Suat, Kenneth Smith, and God knows how many others have had with him.
Well, good lord, isn’t the possibility of a meeting of the minds pretty narrow in a debate with Ken Smith?
Suat, did you make a decision to stop writing for the Journal at some point, or did you just gravitate toward group blogging?
Domingos: There’s definitely space for short pithy posts about hitherto unremarked upon elements. Not everything has to be long and convoluted – that would be too predictable.
Robert: Isn’t the spread of “free-market capitalism” (a bit of a euphemism nowadays) inextricably linked with foreign policy? The most prominent recent example being the Ukrainian uprising/coup?
Zan: It wasn’t anything deliberate. Posting on HU is just the path of least resistance – you write about whatever you want, in whatever length or style, and arrange the text/images as you want. It’s great if you don’t need the money. A hobby should be as unaggravating as possible.
Well, if you’re going to argue with Kenneth, it’s a good idea to make an effort to read what he wrote before sounding off about it. Fiore projected a lot of views onto Kenneth that had no basis in anything Kenneth wrote. Fiore ultimately admitted he hadn’t read the piece at issue.
Suat–
Yes, there are foreign-policy ramifications to neoliberal ideology, but it doesn’t promote military adventurism to achieve its goals. Military adventurism doesn’t really figure into neoliberal theory. Neoconservatives, on the other hand, are obsessed with foreign policy, and the advocacy of military adventurism is a major emphasis. That contrast is what I was trying to get at.
“The only significant international goal is promoting the spread of free-market capitalism.”
I think that, in practice, this is actually a huge spur to military adventurism. Neoliberal and neoconservative do blur into each other there, I think.
Your characterization of Fiore’s political position seems right to me. I don’t know that I think he’s especially unfair to his interlocutors as these things go….though I don’t think I read that Kenneth Smith debate.
“Posting on HU is just the path of least resistance – you write about whatever you want, in whatever length or style, and arrange the text/images as you want. It’s great if you don’t need the money. A hobby should be as unaggravating as possible.”
Our mission statement…
In practice, neoliberalism enables racism and sexism, but I wouldn’t call it a racist or sexist ideology. Neoliberalism is just Friedmanite (“Chicago School”) economic theory applied to public policy. Neoconservatism doesn’t have any intellectual underpinning beyond jingoism, xenophobiq, and a belief that might makes right. Oh, and whatever the most paranoid and ruthless factions of Israel’s Likud party think is best.
In general, I will say that all neoconservatives are ostensibly neoliberals. However, most neoliberals are not neoconservative.
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@joyce – Which character are you referring to?
Suat,
Thanks for including my Morisi piece in this list.