Only Connect

Posted on November 24, 2014 by Kim O'Connor

Before I read The Hospital Suite, I was only vaguely aware of John Porcellino as a sort of folk hero. He packed up and left Chicago near the turn of the century (around the time I moved here myself), and some 15 years on still seems to be the patron saint of comics in this city, or maybe the Midwest in general. Cartoonist laureate of a Carl Sandburg poem. Any place where folks work hard and make the best of it.

Paul Bunyan had an ox. John Porcellino, a cat. Her name was Maisie. She’s been memorialized in no less than three Sufjan Stevens songs—more if you count the b-sides. I recently learned that a cabal of suburban mail carriers named her a minor deity. They want to get her on a stamp. They say that on clear winter days, at first light, you can feel the spirit of the cat making copies of out-of-print comics at the Wicker Park Kinko’s. I met some guy at Quimby’s who claims he communed with her there. Three beers in he admitted she had to correct his pronunciation of Kukoc.

I don’t know, I guess you read comics. You probably know the lore. But all I really knew up until I read The Hospital Suite was that Porcellino has a pure punk heart and a 90s-era webstore, and I confess that my more cynical side wondered if that wasn’t, on some level, super fucking ridiculous. I’d like to be the kind of person who buys mail-order zines, but the truth of my life is that I read celebrity gossip magazines and persist in ordering almost everything from Amazon even though I know it’s evil. I truly wish I cared.

In any case, I’m grateful to the good people at Drawn & Quarterly for publishing this work in a format that feels accessible to jerks like me. While I could see Porcellino’s appeal from page one, there were moments early on when I worried The Hospital Suite was another “good patient” story. I also found the current of what I’d reluctantly call spiritual comics to be a bit much—not a deal breaker, but always off-putting. (I love Ron Regé Jr, but there is no plane to which I could ascend where I would be inured to the hilarity of his wizard robe.) Slowly, though, it dawned on me that I was reading something rare and real and special, and not at all ridiculous, and by the end of The Hospital Suite I felt for Porcellino a sort of affection that is a rare sensation in reading comics, or really all of literature, or maybe life. I’d compare it to how I feel about David Foster Wallace or Lynda Barry. I mean to say he shines a light.

Autobio is a crowded category, not just in its number of practitioners but also in its sensibility. It’s often a jaundiced genre—frenetic, claustrophobic, uncomfortable. Neurotic. Obsessive. Tortured. Overwrought. Within The Hospital Suite, there are traces of all the classic themes: ambivalence toward the responsibilities of adulthood, depression, masturbation, being broke. The chief difference is, despite a grueling fight for his life and nigh on a decade’s worth of catastrophic diarrhea, John Porcellino somehow seems to be the least miserable bastard in comics. Of course—and this is critical—he’s not quite happy, either. He’s something else. And whatever you want to call it, it’s a breath of fresh air.

There is a palpable sense of calm conveyed by Porcellino’s simple aesthetic. I gather that’s just how he draws, but it suits the subject matter here very well, offsetting the intense distress he depicts throughout The Hospital Suite. I’ve heard him say that his drawing is sometimes referred to as bad. I find that astonishing, but it certainly sounds like something my dad would say. Of course anyone who has aspired to minimalism in any area of life, artistic or otherwise, will recognize the sophistication required to draw stripped-down pictures like these. It’s advanced iconography—a very high level of graphic design—and that Porcellino manages to pack so much charm into drawings this spare is remarkable, if not unheard of (cf. Allie Brosh). Occasionally he flashes his chops in a cool composition, like this scene from his sickbed that captures the whole Starship Enterprise vibe of being in the hospital.

But I think Porcellino is at his best when he keeps things simple. He has developed an idiosyncratic shorthand to convey outsized feelings—the good, the bad, and even the ineffable. Probably my favorite thing about the book is the little hearts he draws to convey all the love he feels in the universe. He seems to tap into it almost everywhere, including the post office.

Reader, I don’t know about you, but this does not even remotely resemble any interaction I’ve ever had with USPS.

Or possums? ~~oO{:> ……..(/*o*/)

Structurally, The Hospital Suite isn’t quite sound. On one hand, Porcellino does an excellent job of distilling a narrative from an incredibly complex system of mental and physical illnesses that span a long period of time. On the other, we have the book’s clumsy division into three distinct, but overlapping, sections, plus several wholly unnecessary appendices. The central paradox of Porcellino is that his stories are very processed—aggressively reduced and refined—but feel entirely organic. Untouched. In sharp contrast, the section breaks feel artificial and distracting, and it messes with the magic just a little. One of the advantages of comics as a medium is the ease with which they can accommodate more than one timeline. These stories should have been stitched together with more care.

Overarching the structural concerns is the book’s lack of dramatic tension; the terror of the Mystery Illness is offset by the reader’s sure knowledge that Porcellino did in fact survive this experience. Even when emotions run high, the stakes feel low. Some stories are so engrossing that you feel “worried” even when you know the outcome, but The Hospital Suite never quite manages to transcend its own inevitability. I don’t know, it might be unfair to expect a Zen Buddhist to ratchet up the drama.

Admittedly, this is where we brush up against my limitations as a critic: the places in the text where I wondered if its “deficiencies” were areas in which there was real room for improvement, or just a different way of looking at the world. Often I admire Porcellino’s clear perspective. (Even when he’s talking about the shame spirals of obsessive-compulsive disorder, his gaze is cool and level.) But sometimes I get the sense that he simply hasn’t done the hard work of what Justin Green has described as presenting the self as a “specimen.” The world of The Hospital Suite is a place in which things happen to John Porcellino. There is no real sense that he assumes any agency in life.

Whether that lack of agency is a personal problem, a spiritual belief, or a syndrome borne of years coping with a debilitating, unpredictable illness is difficult to discern. (Maybe it’s all of those things.) I’ve read that the events in The Hospital Suite span two divorces and three relationships—something that wasn’t quite clear to me from reading the book. It’s understandable that Porcellino didn’t want to delve into the particulars; these are real women in the world, after all, and in some ways the dissolution of those relationships seems tangential to the story he’s trying to tell. But I found myself giving him the side eye, hard, in some of the sequences about his first wife.

I wonder if, as an autobiographer, the decision to do what was best for his cat instead of his relationship was something that Porcellino could have delved into more deeply.

But no one’s perfect, you know? And as much as I love autobiographical comics, they tend to celebrate imperfection in a way that’s slyly self-congratulatory. They relish rolling around in the shit. Whatever flaws are in The Hospital Suite, the author seems to come by them without ego or agenda. Which all sounds rather humorless, doesn’t it? He’s very funny, though.

I’m not a spiritual person, or the kind of girl who has easy access to all the love in the universe. Frankly, I’m more disdainful and suspicious of those things than I’d like. As much as I wish I were a special disgruntled snowflake, this perspective is, increasingly, a cultural norm. From the milieu of autobiographical comics to television’s recent obsession with antiheroes, drama isn’t really about Good People right now. It’s hard to make them seem compelling, or even believable. As a creator, it’s all too easy to explore the nuance of being a garbage person. It’s also easy, from a reader’s point of view, to sigh in relief that someone else in the world is just as bad (or, better, worse) than you are.

It’s more difficult and brave, I think, to make art that takes people outside themselves and shows them something larger. More than craft or even sheer likeability, it is that reach that makes John Porcellino’s comics remarkable. It’s a quality I can’t quite hope to convey in these 1,500 words. This is where I’d draw the heart.

Let’s Play Make Believe

Posted on October 15, 2014 by Kim O'Connor

Last summer, I wrote about a time I encountered sexism in comics. The piece received nearly 200 comments, most of which were some version of that didn’t happen. Funny enough, the one that stands out in my memory was left by another woman—one of maybe five or six who participated in a thread that was almost exclusively men talking to other men.

Even in the context of a blatantly sexist comment thread, her words really bothered me. That critic is unimpeachable, she wrote. I know because he’s been supportive of me. You’re inexperienced and you should toughen up. P.S. Comics is perfect!

Which: good for her. (Genuinely, I mean it.) But I still have no idea what her experience had to do with mine. What you’re saying about you isn’t correct because it’s not what happened to ME is a weird way to filter the world.

Yet people do it all the time. Her comment is a really mild example of an ugly problem I have seen elsewhere in comics: the inability to imagine that life even exists in someone else’s shoes. As a semi-casual observer who has witnessed this, this, and this—a small sampling against which my own experience literally pales in comparison—it’s clear to me that this industry is dominated by straight white men who are constantly finding new ways to discount the perspectives of people of color, women, and queer people just because they are different.

It is hugely important, now more than ever, to listen to those perspectives. One of the most respected publishers in comics is about to launch his new imprint with what he calls transgressive art, a comic that contains some of the most racist and misogynistic imagery I have seen anywhere, ever. That he is doing so in the name of “a publisher’s obligation to take risks” is not just a travesty; it is a crisis.

We talk about racism and misogyny in comics as though these are problems that belong to a bygone era. Meanwhile, in the last six months, The Comics Journal ran a column defending imagery that could have come straight out of a Wikipedia entry about black stereotypes, and Fantagraphics promoted its glorified white supremacist comic with folksy words like “innovative, quirky, idiosyncratic, oddball, experimental, [and] downright crazy.” It is no doubt a mark of my paltry knowledge about comics that I am so astonished by these incidents. My guess is that people much more involved in the industry aren’t even remotely surprised.

I was thinking about all of this as I watched a different crisis unfold in the literary world with regard to serial harasser Edward Champion. Some would call him a book blogger or a literary critic, and who knows, maybe he was those things once. In any case now he’s a person who says really despicable (and sometimes criminal) things under the banner of criticism. He has finally been denounced by the publishing world—a process that began in June, when he published a misogynistic nightmare screed against Emily Gould, and ended recently when he harassed another female novelist on Twitter.

One weird thing I observed as that scandal unfolded was how some corners of the Internet tried to dictate the terms of how people talked about what he did. In many ways, Champion served as his own chief of propaganda; his public suicide threats caused many people to privilege his mental health over the well being of his victims, which included women who have been afraid to attend their own book events or even leave their houses at all. Watch what you say about him, these people implored. He’s clearly not well.

From a diametrically opposed point of view, I confess I felt a similar urge to dictate the terms of the Champion conversation as I watched some critics place what I believed to be undue emphasis on the question of his mental health. We should focus on the known quantity, which is the abusive behavior, for both his sake and for the sake of his victims. That’s what I want to talk about. That is the story I see.

But the weirdest (and maybe the saddest) thing about the whole sick sorry spectacle was watching women that Champion harassed chastise each other for deviating from the narrative as they see it. The most jaw-dropping display of this was, of course, Sarah Weinman, Champion’s ex-partner, who publicly scolded (and maybe privately threatened) everyone from Porochista Khakpour to the entire population of Twitter for not responding to Champion’s behavior in a way she deemed appropriate. Laura Miller at Salon, who was once the subject of Champion’s ridicule, weighed in with a “don’t feed the trolls” take that downplayed the violent imagery and threats in his rants and implicitly blamed Gould and Khakpour for his harassment. And most recently, I saw Khakpour call people out for being tough on Weinman, minimize threats that were of a different nature than the ones she received, and even (tentatively, ambivalently) defend Weinman as on-the-record reports of her abuse of power began to trickle in.

I don’t mean to suggest that these three women’s situations are analogous (and am especially anxious to seem critical of Khakpour, who I admire, and who was the victim of a crime). Weinman, Miller, and Khakpour are all quite different from one another—and that is exactly my point. Not one of their stories can stand in for another’s, just as the woman’s story I mentioned at the top of this essay can’t stand in for mine.

It has been a few weeks since I wrote the bulk of this post—time enough for the Champion thing to have become old hat. Time enough, in fact, for an entirely unrelated literary scandal to have unfolded. Time enough for another woman writer to publish a truly despicable essay that is a much more flagrant example of the me-first phenomenon I’m describing. Time enough for all of that to have become old hat, too.

While those events already feel far behind us, you will see the same pattern elsewhere, if you look. It seems like an understatement to call it a lack of empathy. It’s more like a Tyra Banks-level solipsism. David Foster Wallace has described it as a default setting that has to be actively overcome:

Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realist, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being “well-adjusted,” which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

A bold choice, I know, to quote extensively from someone’s commencement speech in a screed against “edgy” comics, but I find myself returning to these words all time. The central task of adulthood, DFW suggests, is to push past the boundaries of self. A lot of people will dismiss or diminish this enterprise with accusations of political correctness or pretentiousness or whatever, but the truth is a more stripped down and simple and fundamental to being human. And I’m pretty sure that a lot of us are failing at it.

It’s natural that we use our own life experience to relate to other people. (You may have observed this essay is itself an act along those lines.) But we should never wield those experiences as some sort of testimony that diminishes, discredits, or replaces some other person’s. The “my story is somehow more real and correct and relevant than your story” response is not just an act of ego and faulty logic; it is a form of sabotage, however well intentioned. This sabotage may be innocuous, like my example of that woman’s self-involved comment on my essay. Or it can be something much, much more serious and damaging, like discrediting a rape victim.

It could be, say, publishing gore so dim that Danzig himself wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot demon dick. It could be dismissing the concerns of readers who clearly and calmly point out the blatant racism and misogyny in the work. (This narrative is not about them, after all. It’s about you and your bravery and your “obligation to take risks.”) It could be capitalizing on that controversy even as you’re dismissing it (as any savvy businessman would), hoping that your customers will buy the thin excuse that it heralds a return to your punk rock ethos, or something?

No need to think about that last part too hard! These wild and zany comics will practically sell themselves to other white men who will not recognize that this “return to your roots” masks a profound lack of imagination.

I think a similar lack of imagination fuels all those contentious comments threads that come up whenever the issue of diversity in comics is broached. Increasingly, I suspect that many, if not most, of those comments can be boiled down to solipsism more than hate. They represent a total failure to see past the self that is then reinforced by people who largely—and by no coincidence—look exactly the same. And to borrow a term from their Pale King, I can scarcely think of anything more square than a bunch of white guys quacking at each other about their own perceived edginess, a self-image that has relied on the same old shit for nearly half a century.

Are you a white man in comics who has received a critique regarding your treatment of a different demographic? Instead of merely reacting, try to step outside yourself.

Imagine for a moment that there are other people in the world whose experiences exist independently from your own. Imagine that those experiences are valid, and that the people reporting them aren’t just confused, or overly sensitive, or stupid, or lying. Imagine yourself as a person who’s capable of listening to what they have to say. This is our real obligation—not just as publishers, or cartoonists, or critics, or readers, but also as humans.

Or, hey, we can play a different game of pretend. Let’s make believe that Gary Groth is doing something noble by building his brand on some bigot’s stupid garbage art.

Up to you!

Existential Angst: Men vs. Women in Autobio

Posted on September 22, 2014 by Kim O'Connor

In 1972, the genre of autobiographical comics was born unto us by a mysterious penis with magical powers. Technically, of course, there was a man attached to the penis, though mostly he was just in its thrall. The legacy of that immaculate conception lives on today in the long line of tortured male cartoonists who express intense dissatisfaction with their lives and art via detailed accounts of everything they have ever done or imagined doing with their genitals.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. As with any subgenre, some works of dick-centric autobio are good, some are bad, and some are in between. Justin Green is not just first, but also probably the finest, of its lauded practitioners, including Robert Crumb, Ivan Brunetti, Joe Matt, and Chester Brown (to name just a few). Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary is not exactly a meditation on Green’s struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder, but is a visceral account of what it’s like to live with that condition—and the way in which Green rendered his interiority still strikes me as singular in what has since become a very crowded category.

In Binky Brown we see two interwoven themes that appear with great frequency in autobio: sexual obsession and the torturous act of cartooning.

Cartooning is hard, god knows, especially when you’d rather be doing PEEN STUFF. The tough compromise that some men have made is to simply draw their dicks constantly, very often sacrificing any semblance of story or self-respect in the name of their art, such as it is.

Recently, I was reminded of the inalienable right of tortured male cartoonists to create work — entire catalogs of work — about their dicks when I read this “positive” review of The Truth Is Fragmentary at The Comics Journal, where reviewer John Seven explores Gabrielle Bell’s conflicted relationship with making art. Within it is a note of condescension that is perhaps most palpable as the review begins.

Poor Gabrielle Bell. You’d think a cartoonist’s life would be perfect for her loner tendencies, but she’s constantly having to deal with being flown to comics events around the world and facing expectations to interact with the community that comes with cartooning. She doesn’t always do so well.

Which sure, Bell writes a lot about loneliness and social awkwardness, but the subtext here is that she whines about it. There is an implicit question — Why on earth would she complain about her “perfect” cartoonist’s life? — followed by an implicit answer. The poor gal simply can’t handle the basic functions of her job.

Antisocial behavior is, of course, celebrated in men’s autobio, which rarely traffics in stories about friendship (as Bell’s often do) or even feature any round character that is not the protagonist — or, more specifically, the protagonist’s penis, which is all at once the hero, the villain, and the love interest of his story. Anyway, it’s not until much later in the review that Seven (who seems to hold Bell’s work in high regard) begins to ask much more explicit questions about his subject.

Why does [Bell] challenge herself to these diaries when she also often mentions how dissatisfied she is by the prospect of doing them? What is she trying to attain by sharing these works that could easily function as private, daily exercises in cartooning of no interest to anyone else but the cartoonist?

Why, indeed, is Bell a cartoonist at all? Can you imagine a reviewer asking this existential question of one of the tortured men of autobio?

Mr. Spiegelman, gee, you don’t look so hot. Are you sure about this comics thing? Maybe you should take a break. Adjust your meds. Lie down or something.

Heyyyyyy Ivan. You okay, buddy? Couldn’t help but notice that you constantly draw yourself committing suicide. Have you ever considered keeping those thoughts to yourself?

Justin Green. Dude. I know your penis is about to invent a whole new art form, but are you sure it’s worth THIS?!

These questions seem preposterous because when men share their inner worlds, whether they’re glorified bathroom wall graffiti or something more sophisticated, we automatically see those thoughts and feelings as worthy of being shared. No justification is required. And if those men have to endure some sort of trial or struggle to get that art out into the world, all the better. The comics world loves nothing more than some good old-fashioned MANGST.

Of course, Seven writing about Bell is just one example of how comics culture questions the very existence of a women’s autobio. Lest you think this phenomenon is limited to male critics — or to critiques of Bell — I’m very sorry to report a conversation I once had with a well respected lady cartoonist who spoke to me at length about her distaste for women’s autobio, which she considers frivolous. She singled out, among others, Vanessa Davis, whose charming work she referred to as “teenage twaddle” that “should have not been printed.”

I can’t tell you how irritated I am that they use perfectly good paper and product and marketing and everything else,” she said. “They put money into such egocentric crap.

Women in autobio can’t win, really. If they portray themselves as happy, their stories are too light to be taken seriously. If they explore any sort of negative emotion, they’re perceived as complaining. And women who mix the two approaches run the risk of being deemed uneven, as in this review of Hyperbole and a Half, where Stacie Williams criticizes Allie Brosh for drawing “relatively frivolous narratives” about “unremarkable activity” alongside her devastating accounts of clinical depression.

The inherent worth of women’s autobio is hardly a given. Its authenticity is constantly called into question — and all too often, the work is found to come up short. Meanwhile, many people labor under the delusion that female cartoonists are accorded the same critical treatment as their male counterparts. I’m reminded of those men on the street who are always telling me to smile. Why are Gabrielle Bell’s comics so glum? And what am I so worked up about, anyway? Let’s raise a glass to the latest perk in Bell’s perfect life as a cartoonist: John Seven gave her a good review. :)

The Anxiety of Coming Correct

Posted on September 8, 2014 by Kim O'Connor

In the beginning, R. Crumb created comics. I didn’t know this was the Word until I went to the Comics: Philosophy & Practice conference in 2012. I just sort of assumed that Art Spiegelman had created comics. Now I know that’s just in academia.

That conference was enormously interesting, but two things particularly stood out to me. The first was that Spiegelman, who was billed as the keynote speaker, transformed his speech into a dialogue with a prominent professor of media. “This was going to be a talk by me but I was too daunted by the audience of fifteen or sixteen peers who were billed as being here with me,” he said. “I couldn’t make myself deliver something that’s called a keynote address.” This was clearly a last-minute change; it wasn’t noted in the program.

Perhaps Spiegelman was just being modest, but on another level, he was absolutely correct: he was not the leader in that room. Over the course of that weekend, it wasn’t Spiegelman’s name that I heard praised again and again and again; it was Crumb’s. It was almost as though people took turns speaking to his influence. As thoughtful artists like Joe Sacco and Alison Bechdel paid him eloquent tribute, Crumb shouted stray observations from the audience like someone’s drunken uncle. I idly wondered if he was dying.

The second interesting thing was a disagreement that Crumb had with Françoise Mouly about his blown cover for The New Yorker. Mouly explained why the magazine rejected the art: it felt out of touch. But this is not the critique that Crumb heard; he preferred to cast himself as a provocateur. “I just realized that you have this loyal readership there that is pretty fucking square,” he said. “When you work for The New Yorker…you have to kind of bend whatever lurid qualities your work might have to fit that sort of lite, L-I-T-E [mentality].”

Characteristically, he was a real jerk about it. But what was most fascinating to me in looking at the cover (which Mouly had projected onto a huge screen) was that it was totally dumb. It had the unique distinction of being heavy-handed without actually making much sense—exactly the kind of “political” work you might expect from an artist who built an empire on drawing his dick.

It’s one thing to feel agnostic towards other people’s god; it’s quite another to find him ridiculous. Crumb’s affectations, his attitude towards women, his dim take on race—I don’t intend to spend a single second of this wild and precious life trying to figure out what other people see in that. Does that mean I’ll never understand comics? The answer is, simply, I don’t care, but I worry that’s arrogant. And on another level still, I feel resentful of that worry.

I find that writing, like life, is a delicate balance of feeling worried and giving zero fucks.

I like paradox. It’s the engine that powers everything interesting. When I started reading comics in a critical capacity, I was startled by the early work of Ivan Brunetti, whose illustrations I had seen in The New Yorker and Real Simple for many years. I hated Misery Loves Comedy. It was nothing like his work I knew and loved. But knowing the same man drew all of those things made me feel very hopeful about the world, where all too often people are afraid to embrace multiplicity. Now I scan every issue of Real Simple hopefully for allusions to murder-suicide. This brings me great joy.

There is a certain type of discourse—or is it a pedigree?—that is highly valued in comics crit. Names of the founding fathers (and let’s face it: it’s always the fathers) are whispered with reverence as a sort of password into that clubhouse. There is also a tendency to value historical perspective over any discussion of the present. Creating a false opposition between then and now (or high and low or this and that) is often done in the name of historical preservation, but it’s always a matter of propagating an opinion. There is no such thing as objective criticism; it is always an extension of the self and what you care about. There is an important distinction between saying these are the things that matter and saying these are the things that matter to me.

Still, some take a cold approach. They equate getting good with growing calloused. They forget that sensitivity is a tool, not a flaw. Men who learn to use that tool are generally praised. Sensitive women are crazy or inexperienced. We’re confused. We OVERREACT. Or so we’re told.

When I wrote the Piece that Shall Remain Nameless, I knew I’d be told all of those things. I felt a lot of doubt. I knew it would take fire that was far more intentional than the smoke the piece itself described. I thought that speaking up was the right thing to do. Now I’m not sure. I never am.

(I give zero fucks. I give zero fucks.)

I closely read a very small amount of material, not because it was in itself momentous, or to catch anyone in a word trap, but to explain how I felt about it, and also how I felt about something larger. The feelings were instantaneous when I read the material; the close reading came later. In response, people closely read my writing back to me. They called it fair, but I would argue it was not in the same spirit as the one in which I approached the project. So it goes.

There’s no one path to understanding. We go about it in different ways, if we go about it at all. In examining an issue from different points of view, it’s necessary to be critical of another vantage. But it’s equally necessary to interrogate your own.

R. Crumb created comics, and it seems to me that comics crit was then made in his image. I see his bad attitude and rude behavior all over this town. I see his petulance and his defensive posturing. I see his unwillingness to absorb a critique. And I also see his growing irrelevance—perhaps most keenly every time another fanboy tries to foist his opinion on the world under the noble guise of History.

Real criticism thrives in doubt, not in certainty. In conversations about comics, there is no right and wrong. There is only coming correct. Under the rock of my lousy long essay, it seems to me that a few people tried. Many others came to conquer. The anxiety of it, as ever, is women’s work.

Short Take

Posted on September 6, 2014 by Kim O'Connor

Grief is bigger than a feeling. It is a place. Bianca Bagnarelli’s “Fish” unfolds in a grief inhabited by Milo, a quiet boy who’s coming to grips with the death of his parents. He has been there a while.

A scant 24 pages, “Fish” is the latest offering in Nobrow’s 17 x 23 project, a series of self-contained comics that showcase young talent. Bagnerelli finds a remarkable fullness in the format with her confident use of big quiet panels. You aren’t drawn in so much as consumed; the palette is biological, all shades of soft tissues and warm skin tones that create a palpable sense of place. This world is imbued with a languid sort of violence. As you move through the story, it becomes difficult to discern lush landscapes from human guts.

There’s room for growth in Bagnerelli’s storytelling, which feels spotty. On one hand, the story hits all the right beats, with a natural pace that belies the artist’s tight control. (She uses a new composition on nearly every page.) But there is some clunky exposition along the way, and the language itself could use more finesse. The heavy-handed imagery would have more room to breathe and resonate in a longer work.

There’s a stillness at the center of melancholy, so on some level “Fish” feels quite substantial. It leaves a large psychic footprint. Still, it’s fundamentally brief, less than 10 minutes from start to finish, even if you linger. Given the 17 x 23 project’s tight parameters, Bagnerelli’s true subject, transience, is cannily chosen. The work itself is true to life — beautiful, imperfect, and almost impossibly short.

Tom Spurgeon Subtweeted Me and All I Got Was This Lousy Long Essay

Posted on July 28, 2014 by Kim O'Connor

I’m a freelance writer who occasionally writes about comics. I’m sort of an outsider to comics criticism and reporting; I came to it two years ago when I wrote a long piece on truth in autobiographical comics for The Awl.

Recently , Pacific Standard ran an interview I did with Hillary Chute, a comics scholar. On Twitter, I couldn’t help but notice when Tom Spurgeon mentioned it:

i admire the work and writing of Hillary Chute, but Lucy Shelton Caswell was writing a/b comics in an academic milieu before Chute was born

writers, please, there’s no reason to shape the past to serve a distillation that reads well in a modern article; i can do better, too

I’d like to explain how I interpreted his words about my work, pausing first to acknowledge the obvious fact that there’s something distasteful about parsing someone’s subtweets (at least in public). It feels undignified. I’m doing it anyway because it’s a near-perfect case study in how comics criticism is systemically closed to women.

Here’s a gloss of what Spurgeon’s subtweets said to me:

Why did I write about THIS woman in an academic milieu? I should have written about THAT one…even though she retired like five years ago.
Tom Spurgeon knows who the real foremost comics scholar is. His ruling on the matter is final and implicitly correct. It is impossible for another writer to have a valid, but different, opinion.
Further, he feels the onus upon him to dispense writing advice to his brethren. “Writers, please…” Everyone gather round so Tom can tell you how to be.
But he disguises his presumption with faux humility: he “can do better, too.” Better, in this case, meaning two pompous subtweets.
He questions my journalistic integrity, saying I “shape the past” to serve an agenda. A nasty little thing to say about a professional writer, even in a subtweet.
That agenda, according to Spurgeon, was “to serve a distillation that reads well in a modern article.” Note the negative value judgment here on distillation, reads well, and modern. Are those things bad?

In summary, he suggested there is only one female comics scholar(-ish person) worth writing about, questioned my integrity, and used my work as an example of what comics critics must never do. And he got to do ALL OF THAT without ever saying my name or directly referencing the piece. I mean, why would he? To him, it wasn’t even real for the simple reason that he disagreed with it.

All critics should try to seek out opinions that are different than their own, but with vaunted experts like Spurgeon, the stakes are even higher. As one of the foremost figures in comics writing, he has a professional responsibility to think twice before trashing new perspectives and alternative approaches to his field. He seems like a vocal advocate for diversity, but how does he expect his insular world to open up if he isn’t willing to entertain the possibility that someone who doesn’t share his view isn’t just a hack?

I’m lucky to be old enough and confident enough in my talent that Tom Spurgeon’s opinion doesn’t impact my sense of self-worth. But I suspect his lack of regard might have been deeply discouraging to a younger woman, especially one who hoped to seriously pursue writing about comics. When I think about that, and about how he broadcast his ridiculous proclamations on what a critic should be to his 14k followers—who, again, give his opinion on these matters special weight—I feel mad as hell and perversely amused. I have read the same tone in other women’s comments when they write about sexism in comics.

Which brings me to another tweet of Spurgeon’s I saw earlier in the week.

dear professional friends that happen to be women — please stop writing me and start posting

He wasn’t talking to me, of course, and I know he meant well, but boy, did that stick in my craw. This sort of “encouragement” has seemed to me a common refrain from male critics as the conversation about The Comic Journal’s woman problem has revived itself over the last few weeks. Stop complaining and start writing. Be the change you want to see! This sentiment is, in itself, deeply shitty because it suggests that women themselves are the root of the problem (for not writing enough) and they themselves should fix it (by just writing more). Quit whining and get to work! It’s a line of thinking that conveniently ignores the environment that prevents so many women from writing comics criticism for outlets like TCJ in the first place.

I strongly believe that Spurgeon and Dan Nadel and Tim Hodler at TCJ (and many other guys) really would love to see more criticism from women writers. But the time has come to shift the focus from listening to what people SAY to analyzing what they DO.

It is perhaps worth noting that my Chute piece criticized The Comics Journal for having a homepage where every single piece was authored by a man. This is nothing that people in the comics community don’t already know. I received a (friendly, complimentary) message from TCJ explaining that one of the interviews on their homepage was actually written by a woman. When I pointed out that it hadn’t been there at the time I was writing, they said “No worries.” I had not apologized.

What kind of mindset does it take to read “yeah, but your site was all male critics literally four days ago” (to paraphrase) and interpret it as an apology? Were they proud of that one piece written by a woman, I wonder? Why mention it at all if they had, as they hastened to add, taken my larger point seriously? (They also said they were working on it. How? Rethinking their commenting policy seem like a step in the right direction, but what else is in the works?) Dan and Tim strike me as likeable, smart, thoughtful people, but sexism is so endemic to the culture of comics criticism that good men often miss the point, even when you plainly lay it out for them, as Heidi MacDonald and Nicole Rudick (at Tom Spurgeon’s site) and many others have before me.

Why do women favor platforms that aren’t dedicated organs of comics criticism? Because those are the places they feel welcome. If TCJ wants more women to start writing for them, they need to apologize for their shameful lack of diversity on their Twitter and their blog and anywhere else where there’s the (admittedly off) chance that someone outside their circle of middle-aged male insiders might hear them. They should create a page on their website that outlines what they’re looking for in a pitch instead of burying the submissions email in a single line in their FAQs. The new submissions page, too, should include a prominent pledge to diversity. They should recruit graduate students or women that have been writing for free at other sites and offer those people choice reviews instead of letting them get claimed by the same five guys who always do them. (I don’t know the exact demographics of TCJ’s regular contributors, but I suspect they’d do well to keep an eye out for gay people and people of color, too.) Offer some of these new voices regular columns. Be proactive! I don’t even think it’d be that hard!

But to return to Spurgeon: subtweeting makes having a critical dialogue near impossible. I would have just replied or sent an email if I hadn’t felt uninvited to do so, but alas here we are. (Even now, some dude who’s reading this thinks I’m a self-obsessed bitch.) Given the closed-off milieu in which he works, if Spurgeon wishes to denigrate a woman’s piece in a public forum, I encourage him to do so in a more direct fashion. But I suggest he come correct instead of offering up his conflicting opinion as though its truth is self-evident like some Grand Poobah of Comics. Deep expertise has its advantages, but so do fresh eyes.

This is a story about my personal experience, but it isn’t really about me. I doubt anyone connected Spurgeon’s subtweets to me, and even if they did, no one cares—me least of all. But being aware of the conversation about women and comics criticism that’s ongoing, it was sort of fascinating to receive a critique in which I myself had been so thoroughly erased. My anger comes not from a place of sour grapes, but of imagining how that might feel to a woman who aspires to someday sit at the lunch table with Spurgeon and Gary Groth or smaller dragons like Sean T. Collins and Rob Clough. And by the way, as the community wonders how to encourage women writers, they’d do well to look to Clough, who has been, in my limited experience, a really kind and generous mentor. Please make him your king.

While I do not aspire to expertise, it is my fervent hope that some other woman will. (The dying relevance of TCJ is often overstated; I think it will persist in history in a way that the disparate pieces that people like me write for other markets simply cannot.) I’m sorry to say that I find the prospect very unlikely. Why would someone put herself through it? People in that world behave badly and they don’t even know it, and those are the good guys.

The world—in comics and around it—is changing, but then it always has been. I think life must be hard for men who appoint themselves the docents of something that never existed. I wish Spurgeon the best.
_____

Editor’s Note: Tom Spurgeon replies in comments below.

Tim Hodler of TCJ also replies in comments.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Author Archives: Kim O'Connor