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2020.12.02

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I've long considere you 4 as the gold standards of comics criticism. Besides the TCJ related crew, is there anyone else you consider doing good critical work out there?

Marc Singer's book was really good! I guess that's been out for a while. Ryan Holmberg's work. Bubbles. There's probably work hiding in Patreon accounts I'm not familiar with. So many great critical projects are tied up in publishing and archival work now--we don't talk about it in this episode, but things like Picturebox, Shortbox, the NYRC publications--there's an aspect of that being an act of criticism/advocacy. People leaving behind the practicing of reviewing and reading into comics deeply and turning to publishing as a way to exercise the same concerns. I don't have that idea fully thought out. But it feels like if you had a more robust industry (meaning more of an infrastructure to support adult leaning books, curiosity) than people whose interest lean more towards reading and thinking wouldn't shoulder the responsibility of publishing this stuff.

I did return to using twitter in part because there is an aspect of critical exploration that occurs there--not threaded essays, those are all terrible--but things where people present certain ideas or aspects that inform reading. But nothing has been more deleterious to comics criticism than that site--some of the most interesting writers about comics have been lost to it in the last few years, many of the younger and aspiring writers have embraced popularity there and gotten stuck, and its near useless as a method to finding interesting work--it's just a shopping list generator. There's a handful of people who live completely on twitter who I think could probably be insightful, smart critics--you can see flashes of it every once in a while--but they seem to be completely lost in their pursuit of being serf royalty.

In addition to Holmberg's work in Bubbles, his book introductions are always excellent and totally live up to Matt's ideal of criticism as (in part) contextualization.

Yeah, i didn't mean just his work in Bubbles. His whole body of work. The historian, the critic, the reporter, the translator, the advocate, the publisher, the hard-worker-in-general guy. Comics shouldn't need so much to be on one guy's shoulders, but until more people take on some of the burden, i'm glad he's willing to do so much.

“Serf royalty” is the best comics crit of 2020 Tucker

"not threaded essays, those are all terrible" -- thanks, Tucker, thanks a lot.

Correct me if I'm wrong Jeet, but aren't your threaded essays on politics? I'm responding to a question about comics criticism.

Not all politics: https://twitter.com/HeerJeet/status/540326438277091328

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