{"id":2316,"date":"2010-04-23T14:31:09","date_gmt":"2010-04-23T18:31:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/?p=2316"},"modified":"2010-04-23T14:31:09","modified_gmt":"2010-04-23T18:31:09","slug":"worst-comics-criticism-of-the-21st-century","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/?p=2316","title":{"rendered":"Worst Comics Criticism of the 21st Century"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lately there has been an attempt to\u00a0flesh out\u00a0what constitutes good comics criticism. There was a Hooded Utilitarian roundtable<\/a> on the topic and Ben Schwartz has edited a soon-to-be-released book titled Best American Comics Criticism<\/a>. But it is worth remembering that there is a lot of bad criticism out there, which is also worth describing and demarcating. For me, one of the worst pieces of comics criticism I’ve ever read was Harold Bloom’s review of Crumb’s Genesis<\/em> in the December 3, 2009 issue of The New York Review of Books<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Perhaps wisely, the New York Review<\/em> hasn’t made more than a snippet of this idiotic review available.<\/a> But some early sentences are telling:\u00a0 “Staring at the women and men of Crumb\u2019s Genesis, I dimly recall someone showing me an issue of Mad<\/em> magazine. To my untutored view the work of Crumb recalls that publication yet somehow also is touched with what I remember as the doughty proletarian style of Ben Shahn.” As this makes clear, Bloom doesn’t have the background or equipment to say anything useful about Crumb as a visual artist. For most of the rest of the review he talks not about Crumb but about other things that spring to his mind like Thomas Mann’s Joseph<\/em> books. For a more thorough examination of Bloom’s review, with some choice quotes, see here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lately there has been an attempt to\u00a0flesh out\u00a0what constitutes good comics criticism. There was a Hooded Utilitarian roundtable on the topic and Ben Schwartz has edited a soon-to-be-released book titled Best American Comics Criticism. But it is worth remembering that there is a lot of bad criticism out there, which is also worth describing and demarcating. For me, one of the worst pieces of comics criticism I’ve ever read was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"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":[3],"tags":[251,543,1068],"class_list":["post-2316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-clueless-critics","tag-harold-bloom","tag-r-crumb"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2316","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\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2316"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2316\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}