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Thursday, December 08, 2005
I BLAME IAN BRILL
Now that the dust seems to have settled from Larry Young's latest column I suppose I can now unleash the awful truth into this world.
It was all my fault.
Please, let me explain. Last week Larry and I got on the subject of reviewers and he asked me why do so many of those who review comics go for the style of "It was kinda good, except for this one part I didn't like," to use Larry's example. He felt that the commitment to being so even-handed in reviews left many of them lacking a good direct premise and became a chore to read. Larry brought up his Nixon analogy then, too, although I think that’s because he loves to remind me of how young I am.
Being the mess of nerves I am I started to think of all the bad reviews I’ve written that committed this sin, and boy are there plenty. With the exception of my essay on Sleeper and the interviews I’ve done for the site, everything I wrote for Comic Book Galaxy was an example of this type of limpness. Alan, Chris Hunter and Chris Allen deserved a lot better because I think they run a great site and I wish could give them my best all the time. Instead, and I won’t give you any excuses why, I just went on auto-pilot and gave the very standard and very boring “this was good/this was not-so-good” review for a lot of books. The talents behind those comics deserved better as well, no matter how I felt about their books.
Larry was trying to get me to, as he put it, “grow some stones” as a critic. He wanted to see me, as well as others who examine comics, to be bold and take a clear stance on a comic when we review it. I agreed with him that my writing needed more focus and to be clearer. I feel that’s apparent in my best reviews and is what I should be striving to hit every time. Larry was “trying to light a fire under my ass” and I appreciate that he cared as much to do so.
Out talk inspired his column on Friday about comics criticism and that led to many weighing in on the subject. After reading the column I told Larry that it would have been better if he gave examples of the type of criticism he didn’t like and named some names as to make a stronger case. I told him it would have been totally cool if he linked to me as an example, I’ve certainly written enough bad criticism as good (probably more). Larry said he didn’t want to do that because he’d get a ton of e-mails accusing him of being this “King of Independent Comics” coming down on some poor, defenseless blogger. I figure he got enough e-mails already from the column so might have well as held me up as an example but I respect his decision.
So if you don’t like shitstorms going on down the WebComicBlogoNet than you can point the finger at me for this one and send me all the nasty e-mails you like. I liked some of the discussion that came out of this, especially the ones found on The Engine. I also appreciated seeing people like Mark Fossen and Alex Cox say nice things about me, not even knowing that I was the catalyst for all this clustfuckery. In my interview with Graeme McMillan Graeme defined an internet “celebrity” in terms of the Comic Blogopshere (and the word “celebrity” certainly needs quotes marks around it in this case) as someone who is brought up when they aren’t even in the debate yet. Does this make me one of those ““““celebrities””””?
To quote Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate: “Oh God, I hope not.”
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