Tag Archives: Dan Nadel

Not Best, Mostly American, Comics Non-Criticism

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Hate fest is over, but hate is ever new. So I thought I’d reprint this review of Ben Schwartz’s Best American Comics Criticism which I posted at tcj.com a while back. The piece was part of a roundtable: you can see all the other pieces at the following links:

Opening contributions from Ng Suat Tong, Noah Berlatsky, Caroline Small, Jeet Heer, Brian Doherty and BACC editor Ben Schwartz; responses from Caroline Small, Ng Suat Tong, Jeet Heer, Noah Berlatsky and Ben Schwartz.

My review is below.
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Ben Schwartz begins his introduction to Best American Comics Criticism with an anecdote: one day at a mall he heard two young girls arguing about what to call graphic novels. For Schwartz, this was a “definitive moment.” Comics used to be for nebbishy, perpetually pubescent, socially stunted man-boys — but that’s all over. Superheroes are dead, replaced by the teeming offspring of anthropomorphic Holocaust victims. Nowadays everybody from New York Times editors to real live tweens are enamored of the sequential lit. From a niche product for mouth-breathing microcephalics, comics have become our nation’s primary containment vessel for deep meaningfulness. Open them and feel your world expand.

But while comics may have generously embraced tween mall rats, the same cannot exactly be said for The Best American Comics Criticism. Schwartz’s keyboard lauds the heterogeneous appeal of comics, but his heart is still in some back alley, cheeto-smelling direct market basement, lost in a rapturous fugue of insular clusterfuckery. You’d think that if you were editing a tome focusing on comics criticism over the last 10 years, and if you further began your tome by genuflecting towards tween girls as icons of authenticity, you might possibly feel it incumbent upon you to include some passing mention of the 1,200 pound frilly panda in the room. Not Schwartz though; if he’s ever heard the word “shojo,” he’s damned if he’s going to let on. The only manga-ka who defiles these pristine pages is alt-lit analog Yoshihiro Tatsumi — and he only makes the cut because he was interviewed by that validator of all things lit-comic, Gary Groth.

The almost complete omission of manga (and the complete omission of online comics) isn’t an accident. Schwartz deliberately set out to produce a work which would appeal only to his own tediously over-represented demographic which would focus on the triumph of lit comics over the years 2000-2008.

Now, you might think that it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to title your book Best American Comics Criticism and then, deliberately collect a sampling of essays related to one particular strand of comics that happens to interest you and your in-group. You might think that in these circumstances your title seems, not like a description of the contents, but rather like a transparent marketing ploy. You might think that craven, and I would agree with you.

It’s only once you get over the fact that the book’s cover is a lie, though, that you can really start to appreciate the purity of the work’s cloistered lameness. Yes, only one female critic (Sarah Boxer) is included. Yes, Schwartz compulsively returns to the same writers again and again — three essays by Donald Phelps, two pieces by Dan Nadel, two by Jonathan Lethem, two by Dan Clowes. And yes there are not one, not two, but three interviews by Gary Groth, the book’s erstwhile publisher. But the most audacious moment of collegial nepotism is a pedestrian essay about Harold Gray by — Ben Schwartz himself! Even better, if you read the acknowledgements you learn that Schwartz wanted to include another of his own essays, but was prevented by rights conflicts. Really, it’s kind of a wonder he didn’t just put together a book of his own writings and slap that Best American title on it. After all, he’s the editor. If he thinks Ben Schwartz writes the best criticism in explored space, who’s to gainsay him? (It’s possible that Schwartz wanted to include the other essay instead of the piece he used… which means that he printed his second best as one of the top essays of the decade. If that hadn’t worked, would he have gone to his third best? His tenth? His grocery lists?)

To be fair, I’ve actually quite liked some of Schwartz’s writing over the years. A piece by him about Paris Hilton which ran in the Chicago Reader is one of my favorite things to ever run in that publication — I still remember its concluding paragraph clearly seven years later. And while using multiple essays by a handful of writers seems like a gratuitously ingrown way to structure a best-of book, if the results were provocative and enjoyable, I wouldn’t kick.

Unfortunately, the results here are… well, they’re really boring, mainly. Part of the problem is, again, the insular air of self-satisfaction. The worst in this regard is probably the Will Eisner/Frank Miller interview excerpt, in which the participants both pat themselves on the back so vigorously that they seem to be in some sort of contest to see whose arm will fracture first. In terms of abject sycophancy, though, the David Hajdu interview with Marjane Satrapi is close behind. “Like her work, Satrapi’s apartment is a mosaic of Middle Eastern and Western, high and low — a willful testament to cultural and aesthetic heterogeneity.” What is this, Marie Claire? Compared to such celebrity puff-piece drivel, the merely grating mutual admiration on display in the Jonathan Lethem/Dan Clowes interview seems positively tolerable. Sure, Lethem actually claims that what he and Clowes are doing is somehow “dangerous” while they’re both sitting on a podium in front of a herd of maddened, man-eating elephants — or are those rapturously respectful undergrads? Either way at least he doesn’t opine that Clowes’ bow tie is a sartorial sign of nostalgic doubling. You take what you can get.

When the book isn’t oozing complacency, though, it’s giving off an even worse miasma — anxiety. As any alt comics confession will tell you, the clubby smirks of the knowledgeable hobbyist hide a desperate desire to be accepted. The book is one long grovel, as if Schwartz hopes to win fame, fortune, and mainstream acceptance through sheer power of toadying. This is most visible in the egregious reliance on “name” authors. Ephemeral book introductions by John Updike, Dan Clowes and Jonathan Lethem all read like exactly what they are — celebrity endorsements. Alan Moore’s disjointed interview transcription about Steve Ditko is interesting but slight, while Seth’s essay on John Stanley seems padded out with an overdetermined breezy musing that is, I guess, supposed to be redolent of whimsical genius. “I’m sure when [Stanley] wrote these disposable comic books he could never have dreamed that, half a century later, grown adults would still be looking at them. It’s an odd world.” Or maybe it’s a clichéd world. So hard to tell the difference.

Schwartz pulls out a host of other gimmicks too — a fascimile of the court decision giving Siegel and Schuster back their rights in Superman; an Amazon comments thread about Joe Matt; a meta-cartoon by Nate Gruenwald, comprised of annotations upon a fictitious old school cartoonists “classic” strips. The first seems needless, the second is blandly predictable; the last actually has a lovely expressionist/modernist feel, though I think it probably lost a good deal in being excerpted. All of them, though, seem to come from the same place of nervous desperation. “I know no one here really wants to read criticism,” Schwartz seems to be saying. “So, um… here! Look! Bunnies!”

Schwartz does seem to prefer bunnies to criticism — perhaps because he has only the vaguest idea of what criticism is, or of why anyone would be interested in it. Specifically, for a critic and a supposed connoisseur of criticism, he seems to have a marked aversion to anything that might be considered an idea. Most of the pieces in the book say little or less than little. John Hodgman’s essays, for example, tells us that Jack Kirby thought of his Fourth World series as a long completed work… and now folks like Brian K. Vaughn also think of their series as long completed work, and ain’t that something? Rick Moody says Epileptic shows “this relatively new form can be as graceful as its august literary forbearers.” R. C. Harvey assures us that Fun Home is “Serious literature for mature readers for whom sex is only part of adulthood;” Jeet Heer insists that “Whatever he might have drawn from his personal memories, the emotions that Frank King explored are universal;” Donald Phelps emits his usual fog of avuncular gush; Paul Gravett bounces up and down in the backseat while chattering on about how “lots of people, writers, artists, editors and readers, are in this for the long haul, for however long it takes for the graphic novel to achieve its possibilities.” This is knee-jerk boosterism, platitudinous bunk intended to sell me crap, not to make me think. For Schwartz, it seems, the best criticism is marketing copy. Maybe he should edit an anthology of beer commercials.

There are some enjoyable pieces. In his review of comics commemorating 9/11, R. Fiore sounds like the ignorant blowhard at the end of the bar (Terrorism doesn’t work, Robert? Really? The KKK will be surprised to hear that Jim Crow never happened then.) But at least he has some personality and something to say, no matter how asinine. Sarah Boxer’s essay about race in Krazy Kat has moments of interpretive élan. Ken Parille’s dissection of Dan Clowes’ David Boring is so passionate about its obsession that it’s fascinating reading even for someone who, like me, really hates David Boring. And Dan Nadel’s evisceration of the Masters of Comics art exhibit is perhaps the strongest piece in the volume, not least because it hits so painfully close to home. “So, if the curators really want comics to be examined as a serious medium, the first step is not to establish a bullshit canon, but rather to be serious — avoid silly stunt-casting, attempt to provide rudimentary information, and for heavens sake, try not to commission an exhibited artist’s wife to write about another exhibited artist. Y’know, act like real, grown-up curators! Good luck.” Schwartz, man — that had to have left a mark.

But a few pleasant oases don’t make it worthwhile to cross the wasteland. The irony is that, in the end, this book proves exactly the opposite of what Schwartz intended. Best American Comics Criticism doesn’t give us comics as an engaged, vibrant medium, connected to ideas and to the broader world. Instead, Schwartz’s comicdom is a cramped little shanty, from which, every so often, a tiny face sticks out to lick the nearest boot or shout in a quavering voice, “I am somebody!” before diving back into the hovel. If you believe this volume, comics between 2000 and 2008 went precisely nowhere. They’re still as boring, still as self-involved, and still as desperate for approval as they ever were. I don’t actually believe that Best American Comics Criticism is an accurate reflection of the best in comics or in writing about comics. But if it is, we all need to give the fuck up.
 

The Treehouse

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The comics internet’s been afire and atwitter and presumably afacebook in response to Dan Nadel’s editorial in which he went off on some kickstarter project because they didn’t know Garo like Dan knows Garo, and also Amazon.

I think the most telling point Dan makes is this:

p.s.: Frank Santoro is having another big back issue sale this weekend in NYC!

In short, if you get an idea and try to crowdfund it, you’re a whiny little beggar man undeserving of kissing R. Crumb’s $700 napkin doodles…but if you’re the editor of the Comics Journal and you use your position at the top of the comics critical heap to shill for your friend’s basement sale — hey, that’s professionalism.

I don’t know anything about Garo. I don’t know anything about Kickstarter. I don’t know Box Brown or his comics. But nonetheless, I’m wearisomely familiar with Dan’s argument, because it’s not an argument. It’s an assertion of professional status and in-group clout, which boils down to little more than, “Hey! I’m a publisher and the editor of the Comics Journal, and you’re not. Go around the back, boy, and if you’re lucky I’ll let you drop some pennies in my awesome tin can, which is miles more authentic than your tin can, because it was pissed in by Gary Groth himself.”

I respect Dan’s accomplishments as a publisher; I have enjoyed his writing in the past; I think that he and Tim have done many great things with TCJ. But the signature weakness of Comics Comics remains. That weakness, in case anyone hasn’t noticed, is a supposedly jocular but in fact witheringly earnest cliquishness, which manifests in fulsome sycophancy towards those who are further up the pecking order, and bullying contempt towards those who are further down. To the extent that art comics is an irrelevant insular subculture, it is not because people use the word “Garo” wrong, or because they hand money over to Jeff Bezos so he can do horrible things like support marriage equality. Rather, it’s because, in the art comics world, people like Dan, with institutional power and authority, continue to treat their artform like a grimy little treehouse, from which they emerge only briefly to blink and snicker contemptuously at all those poor schmucks (Dan’s word) who don’t know the password.
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Sean Collins has a thoughtful discussion of Dan’s post and related matters.

A commenter named Shannon on the tcj.com thread also had some good things to say.

And here’s the Kickstarter drive that started the ruckus.
 

The above is from an ad that seems to run perpetually on the Comics Journal site. It’s for celebrity photographer Eric Curtis’ Fallen Superheroes. “Using superheroes (think Batman, Captain America, Iron Man, Spider-Man, Superman) as the allegory, Curtis explores the not-so-glamorous and sometimes dark realities of those who strive to live their dreams against all odds,” says the copy if you click through. Plastering that all over your site is a lot more dignified than funding through Kickstarter, I think you’ll agree.

Dyspeptic Oroborous: The Divine Hobby

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A couple of days ago, my twitter feed displayed the following message from TCJ.com.

Today we worship the latest by @xaimeh with pieces by Dan Nadel http://bit.ly/oZjPF2, Frank Santoro and Adrian Tomine http://bit.ly/mV9U8W

I’ve liked things that both Dan and Frank have written in the past — Dan’s piece on the Masterpieces of American Comics exhibit was probably my favorite selection in the Best American Comics Criticism volume that Fanta published a year or so back. And tcj.com has been doing a lot of good things since they sent us packing (this lovely piece by Craig Fischer, for instance. So I was assuming that that “worship” was just a bit of jocular hyperbole. Obviously the pieces would be laudatory, but I had hopes they wouldn’t be sycophantic.

Alas, if you click the link you get what the tweet says; Jaime’s comics transubstantiated into communion wafers, less to be read and discussed than to be consumed as a path towards union with the divine. Thus, Frank expresses awe, reverence, and wonder, talks about breaking down into tears, lauds the purity and uniqueness of Jaime’s talent, and finishes up with what reads like literal hagiography.

No art moves me the way the work of Jaime Hernandez moves me. I am in awe of his eternal mystery.

Tomine’s piece is more of the same, albeit shorter. In comments, Jeet Heer suggests that it might be worthwhile to compare Jaime’s work to Dave Sim’s. This does seem like an interesting juxtaposition, but Frank nixes it insisting, “Lets be careful to not make this thread about Sim. This is a Jaime celebration.” No criticism at TCJ, please. Only celebration, worship, and gush.

To be fair, neither Frank nor Tomine are making any pretense of trying to explicate, or really even engage, with Jaime’s work. Instead, both of their pieces are testimonials — personal accounts of having seen the light. From Frank’s piece

Something extraordinary happened when I read his stories in the new issue of Love and Rockets: New Stories no. 4. What happened was that I recalled the memory of reading “Death of Speedy” – when it was first published in 1988 – when I read the new issue now in 2011. Jaime directly references the story (with only two panels) in a beautiful two page spread in the new issue. So what happened was twenty three years of my own life folded together into one moment. Twenty three years in the life of Maggie and Ray folded together. The memory loop short circuited me. I put the book down and wept.

We don’t need to see the two panels in question reproduced (or, indeed, any artwork from the story reproduced), because it’s not about the panels. It’s about the effect of those panels, and of Jaime, in Frank’s life. Jaime is transformative because Frank says he’s been transformed. It’s a witness to true belief by a true believer for other true believers. The imagery of short circuits and closed loops is unintentionally apropos.

Dan’s essay is nominally a more balanced critical assessment. In practice, though, it’s got the same religion minus the passion, resulting in an odd combination of towering praise coupled with bland encomium. Frank’s piece has the energy of an exhortation; Dan’s, on the other hand, reads like a painfully distended back-cover blurb. “The Love Bunglers”, Dan declares, is the story of Maggie “finally holding onto something.” Jaime’s art is great because it is personal, so that “this alleyway is not just any alleyway — it’s an alleyway constructed entirely from Jaime’s lines, gestures, and pictorial vocabulary.” And the big finish:

In the end we flash forward some unspecified amount of years: Ray survives and he and Maggie are in love and Jaime signs the last panel with a heart. “TLB” is also a love letter from its creator to his readers and to his characters. It’s a letter from an old friend, wise to the fuckery of life, to the random acts that occur and that we have no control over. Jaime, I think, used to be a bit of a romantic. He’s not anymore, but in this story he gives us something to hang onto: A piece of art that says that you should allow fear and sadness into your life, but not let those things cripple you. That sometimes life works out and sometimes not, but the things we can control, things like comics and storytelling, carry redemption.”

Let fear and sadness into your life but don’t let them cripple you. Sometimes life works out and sometimes not. It’s criticism by fortune cookie. And…signing the last panel with a heart to show us the power of love? Gag me.

The point isn’t that “Love Bunglers” isn’t great. I haven’t read it; I don’t have any opinion on whether it’s great or not. But I wish instead of telling us that this is one of the greatest comics in the world no really it is, Dan would have taken the time to develop an actual thesis of some sort — a reading of the comic that elucidated, unraveled, and interracted with its greatness, rather than just declaiming it.

I’m talking here specifically as someone who is interested in and conflicted about Jaime’s work. I would like Dan, or someone, to write something that would allow me to see why this particular sentimental melodrama dispensing life wisdom is better than all the other sentimental melodramas in the world that are also dispensing life wisdom. But instead all Dan provides is assertion (“It just works. They’re real.”), predictable appeals to vague essentialism (“There are no outs in his work — what he lays down is what it is.”) and paeans to nostalgic retrospection (“As I took it in, I realized that I remembered not just the moments Jaime was referring to, but also the narratives around those moments. And furthermore, I remembered where and how and what I was when I read those moments. I remembered like the characters remembered.”) If I am unconvinced by standard-issue authenticity claims and do not have years and years of reading Jaime comics to feel nostalgic about, what exactly does “The Love Bunglers” have to offer me?

Part of the trouble here may be that it’s difficult to write about something you like as much as Dan likes Jaime’s work. Love can sometimes reduce you to gibbering — which is understandable, though not a whole lot of fun to read for someone who isn’t under the influence of similar giddiness. I think it can also be especially tricky to write about soap-operas, where a large part of the point is personal emotional attachment to individual characters. If the narrative deliberately figures the reader as fan or lover; it can be hard to say anything other than, “I adore this character! I adore this author! I’m in love I’m in love I’m in love! It’s so awesome!”

I don’t have a problem with people writing to say that something they love is awesome. I’ve been known to do it myself even. But this is TCJ,…and it’s Jaime Hernandez — the most prestigious publication devoted to comics criticism focusing on one of the most lauded contemporary cartoonists. If they wanted to run one love letter, I guess I could see it…but two or three? Surely, nobody in TCJ’s audience needs to be told that Jaime is awesome. Everyone knows Jaime is awesome. Except, possibly, for a few weirdos like me who are waiting to be convinced. But if this is the case, why forego actual nuanced and possibly convincing discussion of his work in favor of vacuous cheering?

Partially no doubt it’s because comics remains permanently tucked in a defensive crouch. No matter how unanimous the praise of Jaime is, no matter how firmly he is canonized it will never be sufficient to undo the brutal unfairness of the fact that he’s not as popular as…Frank Miller? Harry Potter? Andy Warhol? Lady Gaga? Somebody, in any case, can always be trotted out to show that the really famous and canonical person you love is not famous and canonical enough.

But there’s also a sense in which TCJ’s tweeted fealty is less about Jaime (who surely doesn’t need the flattery) and more about the celebration of fealty itself. You worship at the altar of Jaime because worshiping at the altar of Jaime is what the initiated do. The sacramental praise both constitutes an identity and confirms it for others. You are in the club and enjoying the hobby in the proscribed fashion. Fellow travelers shall take you to their bosoms, and even the chief muckety-muck shall weigh in with a heartfelt and avuncular hosannah.

Comics was long a subculture first and a subculture second and an art a distant third. TCJ set itself to change that. Certainly, it has altered the list of holy objects. But the rituals remain depressingly familiar.

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Update by Noah: This is part of an impromptu roundtable on Jaime and his critics.