The Origins Of Comics Criticism

After the break, you'll find the latest episode of Comic Books Are Burning In Hell...the only podcast ever made that focuses exclusively on comic books, hosted by Joe McCulloch, Matt Seneca, Chris Mautner & Tucker Stone!

On this special background and feelings episode, we get Joe to open up even more than he already did in a 10,000 word interview, specifically about the conclusion of one of his major works of comics criticism, "This Week In Comics", then we discuss the merits and debits of comics advocacy as a general program, talk about our favorite types of writing, and say nice and mean things to one another in equal measure. If you stick around at the end, there's a nice little conversation about Batman and jeans.

You can take a look at a lot of the books we talk about on this show on our Bookshop page. If you purchase any of the books, the podcast will receive an affiliate fee, which will go towards paying the monthly hosting fee for the podcast, and, because it is Bookshop, will also go to support indie booksellers. On Twitter, you can keep up with the boys at @factualopinion, @snubpollard, @mattseneca and @cmautner.

Comments

[Ryan]

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?

[Tucker Stone]

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.

[Nate A.]

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.

[Tucker Stone]

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.

[Matt Seneca]

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

[Jeet Heer]

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

[Tucker Stone]

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

[Jeet Heer]

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