{"id":167,"date":"2007-09-14T10:14:00","date_gmt":"2007-09-14T15:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/2007\/09\/some-not-so-fancy-footwork\/"},"modified":"2007-09-14T10:14:00","modified_gmt":"2007-09-14T15:14:00","slug":"some-not-so-fancy-footwork","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/?p=167","title":{"rendered":"Some Not-So-Fancy Footwork"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So Noah Berlatsky has <a href=\"http:\/\/hoodedutilitarian.blogspot.com\/2007\/09\/manifesto-against-manifestoes-against.html\">responded<\/a> to my <a href=\"http:\/\/comicscomicsmag.blogspot.com\/2007\/09\/manifesto-against.html\">last post<\/a>, and while he does clear up a few misunderstandings, his response basically provides a clear demonstration of my point: he makes a series of over-the-top judgments and claims, based on apparently arbitrary or contradictory premises, and with little or no evidence to back up his theories.<\/p>\n<p>Here is what we learn:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The creators of &#8220;art comics&#8221; are overwhelmingly obsessed by memoir and literary fiction.\n<p>[Berlatsky does not say what he means by &#8220;literary fiction&#8221;, or provide examples. There exist many, many examples of comics \u2014 Jim Woodring, Julie Doucet&#8217;s dream comics, Gary Panter&#8217;s <span style=\"font-style:italic;\">Jimbo<\/span>, <span style=\"font-style:italic;\">Teratoid Heights<\/span>, Marc Bell, much of <span style=\"font-style:italic;\">Love &#038; Rockets<\/span>, Paper Rad, Charles Burns, Kim Deitch, etc., etc. \u2014 that I don&#8217;t think would fit, whatever his definition might turn out to be.]<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>Memoir and literary fiction are very close to the same thing, and hardly &#8220;separable&#8221;.\n<p>[I don&#8217;t know how to respond to this, other than that I don&#8217;t understand it. Again, a definition of &#8220;literary fiction&#8221; would be helpful.]<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>The cartoonists&#8217; &#8220;obsession&#8221; with realistic subject matter stems from &#8220;a desire for literariness and respectability,&#8221; a desire Berlatsky sees &#8220;as being linked to the pulp past.&#8221;\n<p>[This is his key assertion in both posts, and he really should back it up. I don&#8217;t want to simply repeat the substance of my last post, but as I mentioned before, other than a few cartoonists who have dabbled in, parodied, or expressed their affection for the genre, it is difficult to identify any younger cartoonists who seem very exercised about superheroes one way or the other. Surely there must be some evidence somewhere for his main thesis&#8230;]<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>All memoir and all &#8220;contemporary literary fiction&#8221; can be described as tedious, pretentious, and self-absorbed.\n<p>[Again, Berlatsky gives no examples, and no definitions of his terms, but is still quite comfortable providing a very broad-brushed condemnation of two enormous genres.]<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Elegy\">Elegy<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Nostalgia\">nostalgia<\/a> are <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">also<\/span> more or less the same thing, and therefore elegy is &#8220;just about the worst of all possible modes for art&#8221;.\n<p>[Wordsworth, Whitman, Yeats, and Rilke: your stock is dropping!]<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>Michael Chabon&#8217;s novel, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.powells.com\/partner\/30974\/biblio\/9780312282998\">The Adventures of Kavalier &#038; Clay<\/a>, is the &#8220;best example&#8221; of a comic book striving for literary respectability.\n<p>[One would think that the absence of pictures would disqualify this.]<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>Berlatsky is happy to use Daniel Clowes as a scapegoat for all the &#8220;problems&#8221; of alternative comics, but doesn&#8217;t feel the need to read the bulk of his work before doing so.\n<p>[Check out his description of Clowes&#8217;s comics in the comments of his post: &#8220;His stories seem magical-realist in a really perfunctory way that seems completely New Yorker ready.&#8221; Are we supposed to take this judgment seriously, applied to the creator of &#8220;Needledick the Bug-Fucker&#8221;, &#8220;Why I Hate Christians&#8221;, and &#8220;Dan Pussey&#8217;s Masturbation Fantasy&#8221;?]<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>&#8220;Manga is an incredibly vital and diverse art form, with standards of craft and storytelling that leave most American comics whimpering in pitiful little puddles of incompetence.&#8221;\n<p>[So what are we to do with all those manga that deal with real-life situations and people, not a superpower or magic spell in sight? Are those manga also &#8220;obsessed&#8221; with literary respectability? Or is Noah only defending giant-robot and ninja stories?]<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There are several other hidden assumptions and unproven assertions and conflations in Berlatsky&#8217;s post, but this has gotten boring enough already. In the end, here&#8217;s what I take away from his posts: Berlatsky doesn&#8217;t like the fiction published in <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">The New Yorker<\/span>, and somehow, superheroes are to blame.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So Noah Berlatsky has responded to my last post, and while he does clear up a few misunderstandings, his response basically provides a clear demonstration of my point: he makes a series of over-the-top judgments and claims, based on apparently arbitrary or contradictory premises, and with little or no evidence to back up his theories. Here is what we learn: The creators of &#8220;art comics&#8221; are overwhelmingly obsessed by memoir [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[251,273,299,971],"class_list":["post-167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-clueless-critics","tag-comics-vs-literature","tag-clowes","tag-berlatsky"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}