Category Archives: Series

TCJ.com/fail/update: A Comment

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(Part of an impromptu mini-roundtable on the failure of TCJ.com)

A few days ago, Noah wrote to me about a critical endeavor that he is planning for the HU site. By the by, I mentioned that TCJ.com deserved another “kick in the butt” now that it had enough time to improve itself to which he responded that he was planning a little something on Sunday (read here).

Noah’s complaints are not the voice of a single cranky individual, they are merely some of the unvoiced grievances of a number of online reviewers and comics enthusiasts. Noah, as well as I, can point to a number of seasoned reviewers and bloggers who find the new TCJ.com a mess.

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TCJ.com/fail/Update

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It’s been more than two months since I wrote this post discussing some of the problems on TCJ.com. I wanted to do another go round — though I think this time there’ll be a good bit less fire and brimstone. In part that’s because there have been improvements to the site. Mostly, though, it’s because my initial disbelief and panic has largely given way to resignation. This is the tcj.com we’re going to have; best to get used to it.

Let’s start with the positive though. The site design has been improved. Clear visual boundaries have been added at the bottom of each post, and the “Read More” links have been made clearer and more attractive. Some (though not all) posts now have brief summaries on the main page rather than just starting in with text, so the posts no longer ends in the middle of a sentence. The Comments links on individual posts are also easier to find. And helpful blue tags (“Review” “News” “Blog” etc.) have been added to each post. All of this may seem like small beer, but the cumulative effect is noticeable. The site still isn’t particularly appealing, and the flashing ads on the side remain distracting and ugly. But it’s no longer a chore just to look at the content.

TCJ has also added a box of links to “Top TCJ” stories in the sidebar. Again, it’s not a huge change, but it’s definitely a good idea — and will hopefully give new users a good introduction to recent content. Individual posts now have social networking links available, which seems like a good move. And the link to the message board is now better marked, which is helpful (though it may be too little too late at this point.) Finally, TCJ is now down with those newfangled social networking sites. (Though one of the first Twitter posts is a Ken Smith link? Why?)

So that’s the good.

The bad is that TCJ’s content has been unsettlingly erratic, to put it mildly. There remains a lot of good writing, from Shaenon Garrity, Matthias Wivel, Tom Crippen, and many others.

But there’s also been David Ritchie posting random tchotchkes, Dave Pifer posting even more random snapshots and
Kent Worcester posting his course syllabus, complete with advice on writing style quoted from Strunk and White. And while these are particularly egregious examples, they aren’t aberrations. You don’t get through a week on tcj.com without at least a post or two that makes you think, “what the fuck?” And not in a good way.

The problem here isn’t that posting random photos or random crap or your syllabus is necessarily wrong. My very strong preference would be not to look at any of those things…but probably someone out there is interested, and what the hell…more power to them. I mean, I keep posting these music downloads even though it’s fairly clear nobody really wants them. But, damn it, it’s my blog, and my readers can l scroll past it once a week if they want to get to the comics criticism.

That’s kind of the thing though; it’s my blog. With tcj, it often feels like there’s nobody at the helm. To pick on poor Dave Pifer again — who is he? Why am I looking at this snapshot he posted, anyway? TCJ.com has managed to get a blog’s randomness without the blog’s personal touch. Thus, for example, R. Fiore’s one-liners come across not as charming eccentricities, but as half-assed fuck-yous by somebody who’s posting because he’s supposed to, rather than because he’s actually committed to being there.

The sense that no one gives a crap is only accentuated by the fact that so many of the supposedly regular bloggers are already AWOL. Where did Anne Ishii go? Eric Millikan, one of the most interesting promised bloggers, barely even got started. There are some constants; Shaenon has been a rock; R.C. Harvey pops up consistently to talk about the comics pages; Rob Clough has been blogging his heart out. But overall…well, on February 10, there were 7 posts, one of which was an HU link, and one of which was Journalista. So you’ve got like 20 writers listed on the side there and effectively five posts. One of which, as it happens, was a review by me.

Meanwhile, on the same day, Tom Spurgeon had 17 posts. Sure, some of them are just individual images…but many of them were substantial. With its layout problems, the one thing tcj.com had going for it was the promise of constant, high-quality content…and yet its team of dozens is getting its ass kicked by one guy. Because that one guy actually cares. And caring, as it turns out, really matters.

I’m being somewhat inconsistent here; in my earlier post I said there was too much content; now I’m saying there’s too little. But, alas, I think the site has managed to have both problems at once. Because there’s no sense of why what’s being posted is being posted, the site feels both overwhelming and insubstantial. The whole thing has an air of despairing malaise — the toilet paper spools and spools, and you can hear the creaking and the distant flush. Who are we talking to? Do they want to hear tit jokes? Do they care what happens at the Hooded Utilitarian, and if so do they really want those damned desperately “controversial” updates every day? The comments sections positively echo; the message board has been rendered almost mute; it’s like everyone’s sitting around with their mouths slowly sagging, waiting for the drool to plop out and ruin their laptop so they can get up and burn their longboxes in despair .

I’ve made suggestions before about what the site should do, and I guess I still have ideas about what I’d change if I were king of the world. But at this point it mostly feels like rearranging the deck chairs, etc. — or, to pick a more poignant metaphor, like adjusting the format of your magazine for the fifth time while the industry goes belly-up. I think tcj.com’s main problem is simple, and perhaps unfixable — there’s no sense of editorial guidance. I have the highest regard for Gary, Michael Dean, Kristy Valenti, and Dirk. Individually and together, they know a ton about the industry, a ton about the internet, and a ton about putting a magazine together. For whatever reason, though, all that talent, knowledge, and dedication has so far added up to a site which seems to be running on autopilot. I mean…why not have themed weeks? Why not have roundtables? Why not have new interviews, for god’s sake — that’s what the Journal is known for, right? (And when you do have an interview why not include a paragraph or two of introduction so that people who don’t already know the interview subjects have some incentive to wade into the four part video?) Why not have Gary dive into that rolodex and get some creators to write pieces? Why not do something to make it seem like the energy that went into so many issues of the journal is being put into tcj.com? Everybody involved knows that a successful magazine needs enthusiasm, heart, and genius if anyone is going to want to read it, but nobody seems to have noticed that a successful website needs the same thing. The cosmetic changes are helpful and appreciated, but until and unless someone decides to treat this site as a personal labor of love, it’s not going to be worth the bytes it’s printed on. And bytes aren’t worth a hell of a lot.

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Update: Suat has an even more brutal take here

Update 2: And Johanna Draper Carlson weighs in.

Just in case anyone thinks that this particular snarkfest brings me joy, I thought I’d mention that reading Suat and Johanna on tcj.com, as well as many of the comments here, makes me feel vaguely sick. I would like tcj.com to succeed anyway, but having tied my fortune to their wagon…well, let’s just say I keep hoping that things aren’t as bad as I think they are. Being continually disabused of that hope by a long line of folks whose opinion I value is not especially pleasant.

Update: And Heidi weighs in.

Utilitarian Review 2/13/10

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On HU

We started out this week with me explaining why R. Fiore is wrong about the Watchmen. A lot of comments, some of them even about Watchmen.

I posted my report on a panel on Gender and Cartooning in Chicago.

Richard reviewed the first volume of Parasyte.

Suat discussed a classic comics adaptation of the Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber.

I reviewed Manhwa 100, a catalog of Korean comics.

And this week’s download featured Beethoven, prog, and other things.

Utilitarians Everywhere

In my monthly Comixology column I review Craig Yoe’s recent collection of Joe Shuster’s fetish comics.

So Shuster was into kink, then? Yoe does manage to uncover some evidence that the artist had an eye for chorus girls and the female form. But while that’s interesting, it’s not really the main issue. The point here isn’t that this or that creator had a personal thing for spanking or sadism or masochism. Rather, the point is that as a genre superhero comics simply aren’t that far removed from the kind of pulp fetish porn that Shuster retailed in Nights of Horror. Read through Yoe’s plot synopses of the sixteen plus issues that Shuster illustrated and you’ll get a definite feeling of déjà vu. Damsels in distress, evil hooligans, manly private dicks, and fiendish torture devices — didn’t Shuster illustrate all of this somewhere before? You’ve even got a fair number of men getting shown up just like that milquetoast Clark Kent…though, admittedly, Kent’s humiliation didn’t usually involve a French maid.

On tcj.com I sneered mean-spiritedly at kid’s manga Dinosaur King.

Also on tcj.com, also sneering, my review of the shojo title Book of Friends.

On Metropulse I review Sade’s new album.

And on Splice Today I talked about why John Le Carre’s famous novel, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, is an idiotic, melodramatic piece of horse dung.

Other Links

I enjoyed this mean-spirited manga review by Erica Friedman.

Shaenon defeats Captain America.

And Matt Yglesias
makes with the Watchmen reference.

Utilitarian Review 2/6/10

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On HU
We started out the week with Adam Stephanides returning to xxxholic. He read the whole thing and eh. Could have been worse.

In memory of Howard Zinn’s passing, I sneered at the graphic adaptation of his book.

I mocked the prevaricating title of The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga.

And doing her part to convince Suat that people really do write mean things about manga, Kinukitty dumped on the yaoi Madness.

Vom Marlowe does her part as well by not much liking Book of Friends.

And finally this week’s download features women in extreme metal.

Utilitarians Elsewhere
On Splice Today I join the long line of those who have sneered at Pauline Kael.

In other words, Kael uses “we” because there is no “we”; the point for her is always self-referential; her thesis is always, “I am right.” And that solipsism is, in turn, a function, not of rampant egotism, but of the categories she uses. As “Trash, Art, and the Movies” suggests, Kael is obsessed with what is art and what isn’t art and with the evil “businessmen” who muck up everything and make it “almost impossibly difficult for the artists to try anything new.” To read Pauline Kael, therefore, is to be confronted with a capitalism whose worst sin is making mediocre movies; with a bourgeois society the worst sin of which is enjoying those same mediocre films. Smack dab at the end of the 60s, Kael has nothing to say about Vietnam, or Lyndon Johnson, or civil rights, or any of the cataclysmic upheavals of her day. She manages to write a review of Godard’s La Chinoise in which she explicates Godard’s feelings about revolutionary youth but doesn’t tell us anything about her own position except, “Yep, I think Godard is really clever!”

On Madeloud I look back at the Rolling Stone Record Guide from 1993.

Still, if the Album Guide isn’t exactly useful as reference anymore, it retains sentimental and historical interest. Consider, in 1993:

– Nirvana was a decent band peddling a more pop-laden version of the “metal-edged punk” that typified Soundgarden and Soul Asylum. “At their best,” J.D. Considine says, Nirvana’s songs “typify the low-key passion of post-MTV youth.” Bleach (three-and-a-half stars) is faulted for relying on “metal riffage” as much as on “melodic invention,” while the poppier Nevermind gets four stars. Since Nirvana has not yet been named rock royalty, no one needs to trace its bloodline, and bands such as the Melvins and the Vaselines don’t exist.

On Splice Today I have a review of the latest in dubstep meets doom metal by Necro Deathmort.

On Madeloud I review the quite-good-but-unfortunately-named Scandinavian thrash band Rimfrost.

Also on Madeloud I review the latest slab of endless doom from Holland’s Bunkur.

Other Links

Tom Crippen has been writing some great super-hero pieces on TCJ.com this week, including this sad song for MODOK. Also, a great discussion of Ebony White.

Jessica Hopper’s takedown of Vampire Weekend is nicely done.

Utilitarian Review 1/31/10

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On HU

I started out the week by reviewing the Mike Sekowsky run on Wonder Woman.

The discussion of whether or not manga critics are too nice continued with some snark by m. of coffeeandink and a long, long comments thread.

Kinukitty reviews the yaoi Sense and Sexuality.

Suat talked about problems with Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms. There’s a long comment thread as well, with Kate Dacey, Jog, Derik Badman, Bill Randall and others commenting.

Vom Marlowe reviews a good white ink.

Utilitarians Elsewhere

At the Chicago Reader I reviewed Garry Wills’ new book Bomb Power.

There’s no doubt that the bomb and nuclear fears are regularly marshaled in defense of unlimited executive power. And Wills makes a good case that the Manhattan Project provided institutional impetus for, and training in, federal secrecy. But his claim that the bomb “caused a violent break in our whole government” is less persuasive.

He argues, for instance, that our foreign policy following World War II was in large part predicated on our need for missile bases—a claim I don’t see any reason to dispute. But in the course of that argument he also states that the need for bases “began a long history of friendly relations with dictators.” This neatly elides America’s extended, inglorious prebomb encouragement of tyrannies abroad, starting with our support for the slave-holding regime in 18th-century Haiti and finding perhaps its most spectacular expression in our brutal and extended battle against a popular insurgency in the Philippines in the early 1900s.

At metropulse I review a number of recent Thai luk thung release.

Luk thung is often characterized as Thai country music, which is both accurate and misleading. It’s accurate in that, yes, luk thung is mostly created and consumed by folks from rural backgrounds, and its lyrics reflect their concerns—the love left at home, the joys of rural cooking, the shock of moving to the city and discovering that your new urban flame is a he rather than a she, etc.

It’s misleading, though, in that luk thung doesn’t sound anything like country music. It sounds like film music exotica. Also garage rock. And like J-pop and Bollywood and AM radio balladry. And like hip-hop. In other words, and very much unlike American country, luk thung is almost pathologically omnivorous.

Bert Stabler and I discuss Inglorious Bastards and Zizek and other things.

At tcj.com I review two crappy manga: Biomega and Ikigami.

At Madeloud I review Drudkh’s fantastic first album, Forgotten Legends.

Wonder Woman Must Change!

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Denny O’Neil, Mike Sekowsky, others
Diana Prince: Wonder Woman vol. 1-4
DC Comics
$19.99 each

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Wonder Woman is virtually impossible to write well. The problem isn’t that the concept is dumb — on the contrary, the difficulty is that it’s not dumb enough. Most superheroes are artistic nonentities. Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Wolverine — they’re defined by their powers and their backstory and maybe by one or two dabs of easily reproduced personality (Batman’s grim; Spider-Man’s down on his luck, Wolverine’s mean.) You can put them in different narratives because they aren’t integrated into any narrative. They aren’t the product of a coherent individual aesthetic in the first place, so imposing a different vision on them isn’t especially hard.

Wonder Woman’s different. Her creator, William Moulton Marston (with the help of his wife, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, and their lover, Olive Byrne) created the character to fulfill very specific political and sexual fantasies. Marston wanted to create a strong icon of femininity, so girls would be inspired to embrace feminine virtues, like love and… submissiveness. The result was Wonder Woman, a powerful heroine of justice who would preach about female empowerment in one panel, bash a bad guy in the second, and find herself trussed up like a turkey in the third. Harry G. Peter rendered Marston’s inspirational, fetishistic fantasies in one of the most distinctive styles of the golden age; his stiff figures, active lines, frilly imagery, and distinctive stylization gave Wonder Woman an outsider-art look somewhere between Fletcher Hanks and Henry Darger.

Together Moulton and Peter created a comic that had self-conscious ideological and aesthetic content. They set out, quite deliberately, to reconcile and explore binaries involving fetish and feminism, submission and strength, peace and violence, masculinity and femininity. Those contradictions, and the passion with which they were handled, give the early Wonder Woman stories an energetic, absurd sublimity like very little else in super-hero comics. But those same factors have made it extremely difficult for anyone else to use the character. Just as the most obvious example: how do you present Wonder Woman as an icon of strong womanhood when her costume is a ridiculous swim suit tricked out with fairly explicit bondage iconography (the rope, the metal bracelets)? Or, as another for instance, if Wonder Woman’s mission is supposed to be to bring peace and love to man’s world, how do you make that work with the fact that she spends most of her time hitting people? Moulton had specific answers to these questions because he was a crank and, I would contend, because he was a great artist. But if you’re not both a crank and a great artist, and you try to write Wonder Woman, you’re pretty much screwed. Which is why, while lots of people have written great Batman stories or Superman stories, I have yet to see a great Wonder Woman story written by anyone other than William Moulton Marston.

The one possible exception to that is “Wonder Woman’s Rival,” by Denny O’Neil and Mike Sekowsky. Initially published in Wonder Woman #178 way back in 1968, it’s the first story O’Neil and Sekowsky worked on, and thus the first entry in DC’s four volume “Diana Prince: Wonder Woman” reprint series.

Those four volumes are, by the by, utterly lacking in any contextual material; there’s no introduction, no commentary, no nothing. But, from what I’ve been able to determine from other sources, it seems that in the late ‘60s Wonder Woman was not selling especially well. DC was therefore open to letting Mike Sekowsky, the new editor and artist on the title, take some chances with the character. As a result, O’Neil and Sekowsky clearly feel liberated from any need to treat Wonder Woman with reverence or even respect, and the result is exhilarating. O’Neil turns in a script which is positively mean-spirited in its desecration of the Wonder Woman mythology. Steve Trevor, upright military man, is portrayed as a slimy, brutish, insecure Neanderthal. One particularly ludicrous scene shows him adopting hippie lingo to pick up some anonymous and much younger girl. Later, when he’s arrested on false murder charges, he behaves like a whiny baby-man, sneering at Wonder Woman when she, obviously heart-broken, is forced to testify against him. Meanwhile, Wonder Woman herself is depicted as deeply, weirdly insecure; “I’m not a woman, but a freak,” she cries after Steve has rejected her.

This is the last thing Moulton would have had the character say, obviously; for him, Wonder Woman was a paragon, not an aberration. But I think the outburst pretty clearly captures O’Neil and Sekowsky’s position; they want nothing to do with this nightmarishly outré heroine, nor with her ridiculous costume, nor with her unworkable mythos. Instead, they want to groove, baby. In an antithesis to Wonder Woman’s usual World War II honor-and-military associations, O’Neil sends the plot cavorting through hippie hang-outs, and sprinkles it with wannabe up-to-the-minute patois like “the fuzz frowns on chicks cruising in this pad solo” and “Yeah, man! We need some hens for a party!” Sekowsky, too, seems to be having the time of his life; the art is relentlessly modern retro-chic, with over-saturated psychedelic colors and bold, off-center constructivist layouts. The high-point is a full-page makeover sequence, where Diana Prince, preparing to infiltrate the burn-out underworld, goes on a shopping spree to get that happening look. Sekowsky uncorks everything he’s got: full-bore kaleidoscope effects, fabulous fonts, and dramatic patterned clothes. “Wow!” Diana declares when she’s done. “I…I’m gorgeous! I should have done this ages ago!” I guess, in O’Neil/Sekowsky’s world, Diana always secretly thought that the stars made her ass look big.

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The comic is a mess, continuity-wise; Wonder Woman seems to completely forget that she even has a magic lasso when she’s interrogating people, for example. But that’s part of the charm; O’Neil and Sekowsky seem, not only not to care about the character, but to actually be contemptuous of her and her milieu. “Wonder Woman must change…!” Wonder Woman herself mutters at the end, and you get the sense that O’Neil and Sekowsky really believe it. They. Want. To. Do. Something. Else! They’re going to be modern, they’re going to be hip, they’re going to be different, and no stupid canon left to them by some decade-dead crank is going to stand in their way.

Alas, while a barbaric yawp is certainly good fun, it’s hard to build on it for the long term. O’Neil and Sekowsky are great when they’re gleefully leaping about on Marston’s corpse. As soon as they try to create something of their own, though, things quickly go to hell.

In issue #179, O’Neil, in the space of about three pages, strips Diana of her powers and sends Paradise Island into another dimension. Shortly thereafter, he shoots Steve Trevor, putting him safely out of the way in a hospital bed, where he is quickly and summarily forgotten (you never even learn if he recovers or not.) So far, so good. Wonder Woman is now Diana, a non-super civilian, struggling to adjust to her new humanity.

But then O’Neil introduces I Ching (groan) a blind (groan) martial arts master (groan) who trains Diana in his techniques while spouting (you guessed it) wise parables that appear to have been lifted directly from fortune cookies. Diana and her attendant master/racial stereotype then head off to battle Dr. Cyber, a typical evil genius whose sole distinguishing characteristic appears to be that she is a woman. Along the way, Diana encounters and semi-falls for a disreputable private detective named Tim who is just about as familiar as I Ching, though less viscerally offensive.

Sekowsky took over the writing chores himself with #182, zapping Wonder Woman back to Paradise Island for a sword-and-sandal battle royale. As the title staggers on, there are a few other one-shot exercises — a fantasy adventure, a ghost story, a couple of street-level helping-the-colorful-neighbors-with-their inner-city problems stories — interspersed with further campaigns against the inevitable Dr. Cyber. The different genres allow for some playful stories: one comic has an entertaining battle with a witch summoned by some neighborhood kids; another, by the irrepressible Bob Haney and Jim Aparo, features the bizarre appearance of a pint-sized “Amazon guardian angel” with whom Diana communes in a Gotham alley.

For the most part though, there’s little effort to experiment, either for thrills or laughs. Instead the four collected volumes read suspiciously like hack-work, created by folks who aren’t paying too much attention for an audience that they distantly hope isn’t paying too much attention either. Nobody, for example, ever bothers to give Diana a personality. Sekowsky supposedly based her wardrobe on that of Diana Riggs in The Avengers…but it wasn’t the clothes that made Mrs. Peel, but the wit and sophistication. Diana has neither of these, nor, indeed, any consistent character at all. There is one interesting issue where she’s presented as advocating torture; a vicious Diana Prince might have been kind of fun. But the trope is dropped, and Diana drifts back to the blandly heroic default.

Not that it’s all bad. A Rober Kanigher-penned Superman/Wonder Woman team-up, where Wonder Woman and Lois Lane vie for Superman’s love, has the requisite Superman-is-such-a-dick Silver Age appeal — plus you get to watch Supes and WW dance together at a space-age hippie shindig (Supes sets the floor on fire — darn super powers.) Sekowsky’s Wonder Woman/Batman team-up seems to reignite his creative juices somewhat, with Bruce Wayne alternately leering over Diana and worrying about his male ego (“I can’t let a woman and a blind man rescue me!”) Throughout the run, too, Sekowsky’s art remains enjoyable; he has a gift for pretty female faces, and the fact that Diana stays in civies gives him a chance to design a plethora of outfits for her. But even he never really regains the dynamism of that first issue, with its hippie coloring and in-your-face modernism.

Sekowsky eventually got moved off the title; Denny O’Neil came back for a bit, and finally sci-fi master Samuel R. Delaney showed up for two issues. In the first of these, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser make a cameo because, apparently, Delaney wanted to prove that he could be boring with a whole range of other’s copyrighted properties. In the second story, Diana has her consciousness raised by a women’s lib group. I guess this last was somewhat controversial, and seeing Wonder Woman utter the words “for the most part, I don’t even like women!” is definitely jarring. But the whole thing’s so stupid anyway it’s hard to get too exercised about it. To say Delaney was phoning it in here is a disservice to telecommunications technology. The scripts read more like he leaned out the window and casually hawked them out between brushing his teeth and shaving.

The final story in volume 4 is the predictable reboot. Robert Kanigher, who’d written Wonder Woman stories through much of the fifties and sixties, came back to write another, while Don Heck supplied some strikingly awkward and ugly art. I Ching gets shot by a sniper, which is a lot less satisfying than you’d think it would be. Diana gets amnesia, Paradise Island is inexplicably back from its dimension- hopping, Wonder Woman regains her “special outfit.” It’s all so rote it’s hard to see why they even bothered; obviously continuity doesn’t really matter, so why even pretend to have a transition issue? Couldn’t you just put her back in the swimsuit without any explanation at all? Who would care?

I guess maybe somebody would have. Gloria Steinem cared that Wonder Woman had lost her powers, apparently; she’s supposed to have been the one responsible for getting DC to go back to the original, powered-up, scantily-clad version of the heroine. Soon thereafter WW was once more regularly appearing in tied-up bondage poses on her covers, something Sekowsky had kept to a minimum. A return to submissive cheesecake probably wasn’t exactly the outcome Steinem had hoped for, but you fool with Marston’s character at your own risk. O’Neil and Sekowsky had the right idea in trying to get as far from the original version as possible…even if, unfortunately, that was the only idea they had.
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This essay first appeared in the Comics Journal.

Update: This is the latest in a series on post-Marston takes on Wonder Woman. The rest of the series can be read at our old blogspot address here.

Utilitarian Review 1/23/10

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On HU

This week was devoted to a roundtable on Clamp’s xxxHolic. Guest posts, lots of comments, and pretty scans abound if you missed it.

Also, this week’s music download is here.

Last week’s doom metal playlist is here.

Utilitarians Everywhere

On Madeloud I review Hamsoken’s Foul Harvest.

On tcj.com I review a collection of James Bond comic strips.

On Metropulse I review a collection of 60s Cambodian pop.

Other Links

Marc Singer has a balanced essay about using Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics in a classroom setting.