2 x 2
by T. Hodler
Friday, February 25, 2011
1. You’ve doubtless seen mention of this already, but on the off chance you’ve ignored the links, you should definitely make some time this week to check out HiLobrow.com’s Kirb Your Enthusiasm, a series of posts by various writers deconstructing single panels from all stages of Jack Kirby’s career. I haven’t read a bad one yet, but special notice so far should go to Dan, Gary Panter, and Annie Nocenti.
2. The Onion’s A.V. Club has revamped its regular “Comics Panel” feature.
Labels: Jack Kirby, The A.V. Club, The Onion
Happy to see that the Onion broke up superhero comics and alt-comics into two separate columns, and stopped using their stupid letter grades. Also, they have a single writer doing each column. Noel Murray is doing the alt-comics column, and he’s one of the longest-running AV Club writers.
Credit where credit is due: the AV Club’s new comics review section is vastly superior to what they had before.
I just chimed in over there to commend them for the upgrade. It’s both a step forward (in quality) and backwards to a time of longer, more in-depth reviews, better focus, and no distracting grades (feels like the Stephen Thompson days again!).
I also mentioned how those changes correlate almost exactly with the (main) points Hodler made in that one post that started the storm last year. In the drama of Leonard Pierce being caught and the embarrassing, knee-jerk, tribal reactions of a lot of the AV Club commenters, the more important criticisms were lost: the silly grades, the off-putting mixing of superheroes and “everything else,” the blurb-like nature of the reviews, the lack of an identifiable critic presence. All these have been addressed with the update. It’s cool to see that improvement can come out of otherwise ugly situations.
Thanks for the kind words, commenters. Also, it’s just “The A.V. Club.” No “Onion.” We love “The Onion” and are proud to be associated with it, but editorially we’re our own thing.