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As a lot of you probably already know, great writer-about-comics Jeet Heer recently got into a small disagreement with another great writer-about-comics, Michael Chabon, in response to a piece Heer wrote about David Hajdu‘s new cultural history of the crusade against violent comics, The Ten-Cent Plague. I don’t have too much to say about it, other than that in his Slate article, and in several other recent pieces, Heer has been making a worthy attempt to depict the complexity of the 1950s comic-book scare. (That second link, a discussion between Heer and Fredric Wertham biographer Bart Beaty, is particularly interesting.)

I wish the same could be said of the ongoing debate about the book between Hajdu and Douglas Wolk at The New Republic (to which both are frequent contributors). Wolk’s a smart guy, and as evidenced by the Jeet Heer links above, there’s a lot of potentially meaty topics to discuss in Hajdu’s book, so why waste this opportunity with a lot of talk about how comic books are too taken seriously!? Hajdu’s answers aren’t particularly enlightening, but I can’t really blame him after Wolk starts with that bizarre hobbyhorse tangent inspired by a stray Newsarama (!) interview question that has little or nothing to do with the subject of Hajdu’s book. Can we ever lay off this tired “are comics sufficiently recognized?” stuff? Anyway, the exchange isn’t over yet, so there’s time for things to get more cogent. It would be great if Wolk followed up on some of the questions obviously posed by Heer and Beaty’s writings.

UPDATE: The second round of questions is up, and it’s really not much better. I’m curious to see if Hajdu can make more sense out of them than I can. (And Bernie Krigstein‘s artistic accomplishments should be judged only by how many of his stories are famous? Really?) Oh well.

UPDATE II: Since Tom Spurgeon linked to this post this morning calling these comments “unkind”, I wanted to point out that I have found Wolk to be a very likeable person in all of my encounters with him — he very generously gave me advice before a panel I moderated at SPX (something I’d never done before), for example. This is simply meant to be friendly argument. That may not need saying, but I’m weak and can’t help myself. (I like Tom, too. I like everybody!) All the same, I really think that Wolk could (and should) have done a better job with this.

UPDATE III: In the final round, Hajdu gives it the old college try, and quite rightly defends Krigstein, but understandably gives up on answering Wolk’s weirdest question: “If there hadn’t been a conflict over morality in entertainment going on, how do you think the comic books of the ’50s might have been received at the time?” That one stumps me, too. Actually, upon further reflection, it doesn’t: I’d say about the same, but with fewer bonfires.

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I went to the Omega the Unknown event at Rocketship last week to see co-creators Jonathan Lethem, Farel Dalrymple, Paul Hornschemeier, Karl Rusnak, and Gary Panter talk about the series. I was feeling a little under the weather, and the store was packed, so I didn’t stay long, but I did get a chance to briefly ask Lethem about the whole Rusnak/Kansur thing I pointed out a million internet years ago, and then expanded on a few thousand years later. Suffice it to say I didn’t get a very mind-blowing answer — if I recall correctly, Lethem called it “pretty obvious, huh?” and then went on to say that “Kansur” was Rusnak’s old graffiti tag, and that, sort of like how Charlie Brown always wanted to be called “Flash”, Rusnak used to wish his first name was “Rex”. Anyway, as this doesn’t exactly provide evidence for my “grand theories” (though it doesn’t necessarily contradict them!), I probably shouldn’t mention it, but due to my irreproachable personal honor code, I felt compelled to publicize it here. (That link is like my favorite political commercial of all time, by the way.)

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Everyone and his sister has already linked to this profile of Paul Pope in the Wall Street Journal.

And I still agree with John Updike’s rule for critics: “Review the book, not the reputation.”

But man, I have to say this makes me wish I’d been a little harder on Heavy Liquid last month.

This does not reflect well on me, I know.

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This isn’t much really, especially split three ways, but it’s a lot better than the $0.00 I’ve actually made on this so far. I want a raise, Dan.

[Via Paul DiFi.]

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1. This old interview with Matt Groening popped up in my RSS reader about a week back, devoid of any context or explanation. I’ve decided to take it as a sign that now is the time for me to declare that — strange as it sounds to say about one of the wealthiest and most-celebrated cartoonists alive — I think Groening’s comics work is highly underrated.

Most episodes still have a few funny moments in them, but The Simpsons lost me as a big fan at least a decade ago. And while I was initially excited by the concept of Futurama, it never hit that sweet spot for me that the first two or three seasons of The Simpsons and many of Groening’s early Life in Hell strips reached on a regular basis. The strips collected in books like Work is Hell, Love is Hell, and School is Hell are not just incredibly funny and insightful, they also display a barely concealed sense of real dread over the human condition. That underlying pain raises the humor above the amusing into something that I find genuinely moving, and even strangely comforting — yeah, sure, life is pointless, but at least I’m not the only one who feels that way. To me, early Groening at his best belongs to the same great tradition as Kafka and Ecclesiastes. (Or at least it’s a small, awkwardly beautiful fish swimming in the same big river.)

2. Incidentally, it occurs to me that with all the endlessly recurring talk about “literary” comics versus “art” comics, if you go by the only definition of literary comics that makes much sense to me (the relative importance and prominence of the words), then Groening and Lynda Barry are two of the most literary cartoonists around. It’s strange that their names never come up in those discussions.

3. Since I’ve written some harsh things about the critic Noah Berlatsky in the past, it seems only right to point out his recent post on Alan Moore, which I think is quite good. I don’t necessarily agree with him in all the particulars, but it’s a really strong, fair, smart piece. For some reason, writing about Moore tends to bring out the best in him.

4. Finally, I don’t think I’ve linked to Charles Hatfield & Craig Fischer’s relatively new comics site yet, but it’s been worth regular stops for a while now. (I probably never would have bought the fascinating Fantastic Four: The Lost Adventure comic if I hadn’t read their write-up, so I owe them for that alone.)

Anyway, while I regularly disagree with many of their individual judgments, their writing is unfailingly thoughtful and fair. This week, they took on Frank’s Storeyville. Again, I don’t concur with everything they say about it, but it’s nice to see the book finally getting some real (and overdue) critical attention. (If I didn’t feel constrained by ethics, I’d write more about it myself.) I hope this helps get a good conversation going.

[UPDATE:] 5. & 6.: A Gary Panter interview and Gary Groth on Jules Feiffer.

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I never read Batman, never read Superman, never read Flash. I didn’t read comic books. There was one time my mother was going to have to be gone, so she made me heat up a Swanson’s fried chicken TV dinner. I wanted to read something while I was eating, it was some cartoon, I can’t even tell you what the comic book was. Oh, I also watched Clutch Cargo, but I have no idea who this Curious George guy was. Now I do. I’ve seen the pictures of Curious George, everybody is telling me about Curious George. So I wish to apologize to both Senator Obama and Senator McCain. It was not my intent to bring dishonor and guttural utterances into this campaign. … In fact, I can tell you, I have never seen a cartoon starring a monkey, unless there was one on the Flintstones, but I think those were dinosaurs and alligators.

Via Radosh.net.

[Limbaugh caricature by Steve Brodner.]

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Shake It Records in Cincinnati is hosting a month-long art show for the great undersung genius Justin Green, with an opening this Saturday night. Apparently, Green will be selling prints of his “Perpetual Calendar”, which you may remember from the back of Comics Comics 2.

More info here and here.

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I’m sure this will be everywhere on the internet in half an hour or less (if I didn’t already miss the deluge), but this looks like something too good to miss.

[Via the great Dan Z.]

UPDATE: Oh, and this is worth checking out, too. [Via everyone.]

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We present a special President’s Day Cage Match.

You have been warned.

[If you want to familiarize yourself with the rules, you can see how it went last time here.]

[Oh, and thanks to Frank and Alex Holden for providing me with replacements for the issues of Heavy Liquid I own but can not find.]

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Two of my favorite online writers about comics, Matthias Wivel and Joe “Jog” McCulloch, have recently weighed in on Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, and they were both able to articulate some of the issues I had with the book in a much more detailed, supported, and impressive way than I was capable of when I spoke to Tom Spurgeon about the book last December. (The Arrival section is about two-thirds of the way down that link, by the way. Look for the big ship.)

They’re both really smart, incisive reviews, but I guess overall I’m a bit more with the critical but relatively gentle Jog than the more scathing Wivel, if only because I do think Tan showed a pretty remarkable affinity for comics storytelling, completely apart from whether or not the book suffers from thematic and aesthetic shortcomings. (It does.) These two reviews made me think a bit harder about my own earlier judgment, though.

In the aforementioned interview, I eventually said that despite my problems with the book, “there’s a very plausible argument to be made that [the artistic style and simplicity of story] were appropriate choices considering the audience Tan was writing for…”

That audience, of course, being children, a fact that is conspicuously left unmentioned by either Wivel or Jog. Which doesn’t mean they’re wrong! If anything, I’m starting to wonder if my letting that fluke of marketing influence my criticism was a mistake. Is it condescending to give a children’s book a bye if it doesn’t fully address a complicated social (and political) situation? Shouldn’t we at least expect the attempt? I mean, of course, there are limitations to the form, but it’s not like The Arrival couldn’t have included a few more layers of subtlety without turning into a full-blown tract about xenophobia. A few changed panels here and there could have made all the difference.

Obviously there are shades of gray here, so I don’t know. This bears more thinking. For now, I’d just like to substitute the “very” in my quote with “somewhat”. I’m the Decider!

UPDATE: Wivel points to a relevant Shaun Tan interview in the comments.