deet deet deet
by T. Hodler
Thursday, July 15, 2010
A new low for Comics Comics? Here’s a quick, egocentric look at the rest of the recent comics blogosphere webonet.
beep boop beep
The most important comics internet writing of the week can be found here, of course.
dreep dop dope
A few weeks back, the great Brynocki C posted his latest must-read epic, which included the following bit I wanted to republish just for Frank:
Didja hear? Artists can’t write unbiased criticism. They only see their subjects through the filter of self interest as a creator. As opposed to critics. Real critics. Real critics are as pure as new snow, with eyes of a child yet minds learned like the eldest philosopher. They castrate their creativity to write from the place of total mental stillness. Able to see through all walls of personal agenda. They use their pen of young lamb to judge what’s best not for themselves, but for all humanity. Such is the powerful power, the terrible responsibility of the true critic.
Co-sign (cosine?) that. Get it yet, Frank?
Coincidentally, by the time I read BC’s post, I had already bought and read (and decidedly did not enjoy) two of the comics under review, in the most recent of many misguided attempts to acquaint myself with the larger superhero comics world since we started Comics Comics. Every once in a while, I get the idea that it’s important to “know what I am talking about.” But that’s all over now. Honestly, I almost never write about Brian Michael Bendis or Blackest Night anyway, so I think it is safe to finally let that ambition slide. It’s healthier to rely on back issues or Bully when I need a fix of four-color fisticuffs.
bloop blop blap
Which leads me to another recent post on superhero comics, written by everyone’s favorite new internet hyperbolizer, Matt Seneca, who seems to have genuinely taken the intellectualizing-about-capes beat to new heights in a very short time. He believes in treating “the entire mainstream like a quarter bin.” This philosophy has much to recommend it, except for a not entirely inconsequential math problem: four dollars can get you sixteen comics from a real quarter bin, but only pays for one copy of Neal Adams’ Batman: Odyssey.
brope bop bleem
bop a dop a doo
No comment either on Ng Suat Tong’s mostly negative take on Crumb’s Genesis, though it is the first solid online pan of the book I’ve read, and though he takes issue with things Dan, Jeet, and I have written. I’m sure all three of us would differ with some of his interpretations to varying degrees, but I am just grateful that he seems to have actually read the book in question, and didn’t manufacture our views wholesale, something you can’t always count on from certain quarters of the internet. I disagree with the ever thoughtful (if occasionally somewhat humorless) Ng on many, many things, but his essays and posts are always worth taking seriously. That comment thread is so forbiddingly unreadable, though, that it more or less banishes any thought (for me, at least) of attempting to continue the argument.
breep bap bop
Speaking of TCJ.com threads, could this be the most hilarious comment ever written? (Oh, to be a fly on the wall when it is read to Ken Smith over the telephone!) Of course, to really find it funny, you have to have wasted an awful lot of your life reading various blinkered self-proclaimed pundits going on and on about unimportant things in incredibly pedantic detail. … Then again, if you’ve made it to the end of this post, you’ve probably done just that.
deep depp doop
Did I miss anything? Is there any good writing about comics on the internet, or is the situation as dire as it sometimes seems?
yop yop yop
Okay, back to our regularly scheduled “comic book” coverage. Stay tuned as Dan and Frank argue over who should play Jarvis in the Avengers movie! (My money’s on Richard Jenkins.)
Labels: bloggers, clueless critics, comics vs. movies, Matt Seneca, Ng Suat Tong, superheroes, The Comics Journal, waste
My policy in this type of internet food fight is not to intervene expect on factual matters.
So I’ve stayed out of this but there is one remark by Caro that caught my eye:
“I come here and I think ‘these people have never read Jameson or Zizek or Barthes or Krauss, and are completely uninterested in what’s interesting to me. All they want is for me to say “comics are sooo cool”‘ (or historically significant or aesthetically significant or whatever.)”‘
Jameson: http://www.jeetheer.com/culture/dick.htm and http://sanseverything.wordpress.com/2009/06/28/the-uses-of-nostalgia/
Zizek: http://sanseverything.wordpress.com/2008/10/09/zizek-on-the-financial-crisis/
I would also invite Caro to take a look at two books I’ve co-edited with Kent Worcester: Arguing Comics and A Comics Studies Reader (both published by University Press of Mississippi; both easily available in any good academic library). Among the contributers to these books: Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Manny Farber, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, C.L.R. James, Umberto Eco, David Kunzle, Annalisa Di Liddo and Hillary Chute: i.e., all people who can be fairly described as intellectually challenging critics. The works of Barthes and Jameson are named and engaged with in the Comics Studies Reader.
Can you explain to me how the co-editor of these books can be described as someone who pretends “that criticism has no history of its own and that comics are best served by protecting them from that history”?
Jeet:
Thank you so much for the response, the correction, and the links. I didn’t find those when I searched at Comics Comics, obviously.
I’ll try to explain what I meant; I doubt I’ll be able to defend the exact phrasing in most instances or that it would even be productive for me to try when I can. I was offended when I wrote it and irritated and that of course comes across more strongly than anything else. If you’re willing for me to retract it as written and try again to make only the relevant points as they apply to your comment specifically, then read on.
Here’s a rewrite of something I said originally that I’d like to keep:
And here’s the summation of the piece you sent me on nostalgia, to illustrate what I mean. You say:
You present Jameson as an authority for the idea that nostalgia “allows us to see what is wrong with the world,” and that is indeed the idea stated in the paragraph you quote. But Jameson wrote this in 1971, at the very start of a multi-decade engagement with this idea, and the notion of nostalgia he ends up with is almost the exact opposite of what’s stated here (I’m not positive that he ended up with this idea intact even within Marxism and Form, but I’m on a train and can’t check). This is the first rung of a ladder — he’s beginning to trace the history of the idea of nostalgia as it emerges out of the Marxist notion of dialectical history, a project that will lead him eventually to a thesis where nostalgia entails the end of art.
That thesis is most concisely summarized in his essay “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” Jameson describes nostalgia, using examples from film, as “an alarming and pathological indictment of a society that has become incapable of dealing with time and history,” which leads to “the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment of the past.”
The Jamesonian “critical conversation” is quite thoroughly anti-nostalgia.
So that is what I mean when I say that critical conversations don’t find their way in – you are quoting Jameson to lend authority to an argument completely opposed to the position he advocates overall. What you say is his “sound basic insight” is the very thing he has spent his career proving unsound. That’s just using a source; it’s not engaging with the conversation. It doesn’t show understanding of the history of criticism as it pertains to this idea.
Does it make any more sense why, to someone who is used to conversations about Jameson and nostalgia that start from this supposition, that even your post which cites Jameson doesn’t really look like it grew out of an engaged reading?
Of course, this is not to say that there’s no way you could ever use that quote independently of this larger history and conversation: of course, you could make the argument that nostalgia works this way in Crumb without using Jameson at all. You could just state the insight and then use examples from Crumb (or whatever) to demonstrate how nostalgia performs this function in his work. But to be consistent with regards to a critical conversation about Jameson, you’d either have to completely ignore him, because you disagree with his conclusions, or you’d have to use Crumb as a corrective to him and actually argue why Crumb helps us see that nostalgia really doesn’t work the way Jameson says it does. But quoting Jameson as an authority, as if he believes that passage and the only thing you’re disagreeing with him on is the politics, just doesn’t work.
The history of criticism is not a narrative of punctuated “important works” or even important writers – it’s dialectical, emerging out of an ongoing conversation among thinking people about what ideas mean in aggreate. Anthologies and edited works certainly demonstrate an awareness of specific works, which is one reason among many why the way I phrased my original comment was wrong. But as the example illustrates, just having read something by a critic or an author or a theorist doesn’t mean you really understand the conversation that author was part of when he was writing or the conversation that started because of that author’s work. You demonstrate that through the types of arguments you make and the questions you ask overall, and in general even comics academia is less than fully engaged with these questions, because comics academia is also very focused on the analysis of specific comics texts and comics history. It’s this sense of really trying to understand what the big ideas were over the last 50-60 years with regards to the critiques of form, of history, of narrative, of identity, of consciousness, of expression, of representation, that’s missing – even if you only understand them to then disagree.
@Caro. It seems to me that you are shifting the grounds of the debate. In your original comment you wrote that the people at CC “have never read Jameson or Zizek or Barthes or Krauss” and believe “that criticism has no history of its own and that comics are best served by protecting them from that history”. I documented that I, at least, have read Jameson and Zizek (I would add that, although I don’t have documentation on this point I’ve also read Barthes and Krauss); I also showed that I’m interested enough in the history of criticism to co-edit two books that, taken together, record the evolution of comics criticism over the course of a century. I’d add that these are fairly well-regarded books (one of them won an academic award) and are often used in university courses on comics.
To my factual response, you shift to the terrain of interpretation and say that I don’t understand Jameson. Well, that may or may not be true. We can debate it at length if you want, but I’m not sure if that debate will be edifying. But whether I understand Jameson fully or not, that’s a seperate question from whether I’ve read Jameson or not. You made the statement that I (and the other CC writers) have not read a certain type of critic, and our lack of engagement with these critics makes our writing not very “interesting.” As I’ve tried to demonstrate, purely as a factual statement what you wrote was wrong. Rather than concede your error, you’ve decided to shift the debate into an entirely new life of argument (that I don’t understand the critics I quote). This sort of shifty shifting is one reason why it’s so difficult to have a productive conversation in the comment section of a blog.
Jeet – I told you I was shifting it in the first two paragraphs: I thanked you for the factual correction and then went on to say that I couldn’t defend what I wrote because I was so offended and irritated when I wrote it. I’m sorry that didn’t effectively come through. I hereby elaborately concede that the statement was an error.
But I also said that I would try to explain what I meant, which is what I did. If you aren’t interested in what I meant, fine. Ignore it. If you want to continue the quibble about my (admittedly poor) phrasing and tone in a blog comment I already said I wrote while pissed off, no. That’s not a good use of our time. If you’re interested in talking about substance, let’s do it!
I do stand by the statement that insularity — specifically your lack of engagement with larger critical conversations, but it’s true for insularity in general — makes your writing less interesting than I think it could be. What I wrote does address that. Your factual evidence doesn’t seem to me relevant for that. Using a source is not engaging with a conversation.
Also, being interested in the history of comics criticism is not the same thing as being interested in the history of criticism in general. Refer back to the point on insularity.
It’s absolutely not hard to have discussions in comments threads. It’s just hard for people on the defensive to have discussions period.
ummm….Frank’s Silver Surfer is fucking awesome.
What’s up with Jeet’s post?
I like to do the Cryptoquip and Kenken puzzles in the paper, but I didn’t know Comics Comics had a puzzle page.
What do you mean, Patrick? It looks okay from my computer… Or am I just slow on the uptake?
“Can you explain to me how the co-editor of these books can be described as someone who pretends “that criticism has no history of its own and that comics are best served by protecting them from that history”?”
Here’s the explanation; she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, and you have proved that factually. Her interest is in making attacks against a blog that was mean to her and has hurt her feelings and ’caused’ her to call people names.
“comics are best served by protecting them from that history”?” another made-up idea. No one believes that. It’s kind of like saying “no one on comics comics has come out against North Korea therefore they support the regime.”
In HU-style (which a few HUers don’t practice) the pose is more important the facts. This is why the blog is usually not worth reading. It’s too bad for Suat. Maybe he should join CC.
Tim, On my screen it looks like a long stream of horizontal half-words. It’s the only post which looks that way. I was going to cut and paste to show the message as it looks on my screen, but when I did (below) the whole post was revealed even the missing letters.
As an example of what I’m seeing I’ll type a bit as it shows up, since cutting and pasting showed the complete message I can now read Jeet’s post.
Example first 7 lines:
M
po
in
th
ty
of
in
Cut and Paste:
Jeet Heer says:
July 17, 2010 at 9:58 am
My policy in this type of internet food fight is not to intervene expect on factual matters.
So I’ve stayed out of this but there is one remark by Caro that caught my eye:
“I come here and I think ‘these people have never read Jameson or Zizek or Barthes or Krauss, and are completely uninterested in what’s interesting to me. All they want is for me to say “comics are sooo cool”‘ (or historically significant or aesthetically significant or whatever.)”‘
Jameson: http://www.jeetheer.com/culture/dick.htm and http://sanseverything.wordpress.com/2009/06/28/the-uses-of-nostalgia/
Zizek: http://sanseverything.wordpress.com/2008/10/09/zizek-on-the-financial-crisis/
I would also invite Caro to take a look at two books I’ve co-edited with Kent Worcester: Arguing Comics and A Comics Studies Reader (both published by University Press of Mississippi; both easily available in any good academic library). Among the contributers to these books: Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Manny Farber, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, C.L.R. James, Umberto Eco, David Kunzle, Annalisa Di Liddo and Hillary Chute: i.e., all people who can be fairly described as intellectually challenging critics. The works of Barthes and Jameson are named and engaged with in the Comics Studies Reader.
Can you explain to me how the co-editor of these books can be described as someone who pretends “that criticism has no history of its own and that comics are best served by protecting them from that history”?
Reply
#
“If ever there was a bunch of childish clubhousers, it’s the comics ghetto.”
And I proudly present the newest member of HU!
Patrick: This is a problem unique to your monitor.
Thanks, Dan it’s never cropped up before, and none of the other posts are corrupted, so I guess it’s just a strange bit of computer funny business.
Frank: ” I’m not as smart as you?”
Just remember Frank:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pWSwfVDiq8
Jeet, in the future make sure you use the Jameson quote that Caro wants you to use.
“But as the example illustrates, just having read something by a critic or an author or a theorist doesn’t mean you really understand the conversation that author was part of when he was writing or the conversation that started because of that author’s work.”
She can’t help herself — the insults keep come on coming. Why?
She’s not insulting him, Mark. She’s saying he’s wrong. He said she was wrong in his comment, and that wasn’t an insult either.
If you want to get just Suat’s posts in an RSS feed and skip the rest of HU, I believe this will do it:
http://www.tcj.com/hoodedutilitarian/tag/suat/feed/
Remember the line in Citizen Kane when Kane is cautioned:
“But people will think…”
and Kane jumps in and finishes the sentence:
“What I tell them too think.”
What I see here is a step up from that.
“People think what I say they think.”
Caro: “I do stand by the statement that insularity — specifically your lack of engagement with larger critical conversations, but it’s true for insularity in general — makes your writing less interesting than I think it could be. What I wrote does address that. Your factual evidence doesn’t seem to me relevant for that. Using a source is not engaging with a conversation. ”
Is it really insular to not want to engage someone who says things with no basis in fact, and then wants to “debate.”
To engage this sort of thing gives it a kind of credibility.
Hey, guys! Did I miss anything?…
Nope.
Jared, Are you seeing comments as normal followed in a few instances (Jeet’s posts and Caro’s replies) by huge gaps of white space with a horizontal stream of two letter word fragments down the right hand margin abutting the aqua margin border?
If so let me know because I have a method of releasing those quips from their crypt.
i think austin pretty much nailed this one and i was hoping he would have the last word, but i guess that wasn’t really very likely
I don’t know…it’s been kind of fun watching Patrick work out the implications.
“To engage this sort of thing gives it a kind of credibility.”
Negotiation is weakness. I should change our tagline to “HU: the Hamas of comics blogs.”
As Austin says — with all apology to people in the real world….
Ah, how romantic! But you don’t get it: I don’t think of you as terrorists, I think of you as trolls. Terrorists, I imagine, would have some sort of a point.
How long does it take to starve a troll, anyway? You need less sustenance than I expected, I have to admit. Three days later and still at it!
“I’m crossing the street to get away from a mangy dog.”
Hey Tim. Well, the Frazetta thread on HU ran for weeks.
Suggesting we don’t have a point doesn’t get you out of the anti-terrorism discourse at all, unfortunately. Pointlessness is one of the standard reasons given for not negotiating with terrorists, actually — neo-cons argue that terrorists have no demands and just commit violence out of a love of chaos. So…the terrorism/troll link is actually really smart. I hadn’t thought of it before. And yes, if you’re going to continue to be persistently insightful, I’ll probably stay around for a while longer, at least.
Huh. Still not hearing any point! (Or seeing any glorious acts of political violence, for that matter.) Also, if we were really neocons, I imagine we wouldn’t allow you such easy access to our comments threads. But let’s not let little things like that spoil your self-aggrandizing fantasies. Dream away!
Okay, I should really stop. I apologize to each and every one of this blog’s readers, if any remain.
I QUIT!
*flips table, storms off*
Ha!
Nope; you’re not neocons and we’re not terrorists. That is in fact my point (or one of them.)
Quote:
“She says, “I know you’re an artist, draw a picture of me!”
I say, “I would if I could, but
I don’t do sketches from memory”
“Well,” she says, “I’m right here in front of you, or haven’t you looked?”
I say, “All right, I know, but I don’t have my drawing book!”
She gives me a napkin, she says, “You can do it on that”
I say, “Yes I could, but
I don’t know where my pencil is at!”
She pulls one out from behind her ear
She says, “All right now, go ahead, draw me, I’m standing right here”
I make a few lines and I show it for her to see
Well she takes the napkin and throws it back
And says, “That don’t look a thing like me!”
I said, “Oh, kind Miss, it most certainly does”
She says, “You must be jokin’.” I say, “I wish I was!”
Then she says, “You don’t read women authors, do you?”
Least that’s what I think I hear her say
“Well,” I say, “how would you know and what would it matter anyway?”
“Well,” she says, “you just don’t seem like you do!”
I said, “You’re way wrong”
She says, “Which ones have you read then?” I say, “I read Erica Jong!”
She goes away for a minute
And I slide up out of my chair”
Some time ago on a message board I posted a link to an essay by Jeet. A couple of people responded with comments like the one below.
“I’m not that impressed by his opinions or insights about comics.”
I responded by explaining why I enjoy Jeet’s essays.
“I tend to be a lot more interested in research than opinion, so while I’m interested in peoples opinions, I couldn’t say I’m impressed by analytical commentary on art.
It’s the artists, and their work which interests me, I have my own opinions, and I’ve never seen a review or analysis which I’d say “impressed” me because of it’s insight. This isn’t to say I won’t on occasion look at analytical criticism, but it’s only in an effort to find information mixed into the opinion.”
Since Jeet has written about Crumb’s Genesis I wanted to toss in something that ties into the various topics.
It’s facts/context that I’m looking for from a commentator or historian.
In reading a review of the Crumb Genesis book the reviewer’s opinion of the book would be of practically no interest to me no matter if I agreed with it or not. The value of a review from my perspective would be if the reviews author had some expertise (knowledge of Crumb or Genesis) which would add to my understanding of the book and it’s historical context.
A review of the Crumb book by a biblical scholar is of interest to me not because of how they see the book in terms of it’s “success” or “failure,” but because they might point out something based on their knowledge. For example they could compare Crumb’s Genesis to any number of past Genesis biblical commentaries, they might have specific background information on the texts Crumb based his work on.
Crumb described his “illustration job” as a conscious attempt at neutrality.
Certainly it’s impossible to remain completely neutral as an artist, but Crumb was specific that he wanted to reinforce the text, that describing the text with pictures invites the uninitiated to confront the text and it’s “ancient weirdness”
Crumb is aware even the majority of Bible believers have never read the full text.
The reader with less than a full knowledge of the text might well page through the book, and be curious about the lurid images, with the reinforcing text directly linked to the image any “attempt” to ascertain the veracity of the images is easily done, and again the illustration (as Crumb intended it) trys hard to adhere to the text as written, and uses a graphic vocabulary which is more or less familiar to the average reader. Crumb’s God looks very much as most people would expect, not unlike the Michelangelo template.
Crumb’s “illustration job” is in my view a brilliant piece of work, one which is subversive, yet difficult to attack from a “word of God” perspective, because of the pains he takes to be “faithful.”
The book is also something which may have no antecedent in art or illustration as far as I am aware. Has any full text which comes even close to the length of Genesis ever been illustrated in this way before? The comparisons to Blake and Wolverton don’t work, because their intent was not Crumb’s intent.
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