Critiquing the critics.
I believe it is absolutely right that the critic freely expresses his or her opinion about a work, but what is it with Ng Suat Tong?

"For my part, I found Habibi utterly repugnant and well deserving of a place on a list of worst comics of 2011."

A few months back:

"Glidden’s comic is a work of self-condemnation; a “warts and all” cautionary to all those who would seek to traffic in their trifling insights, for therein lies undistinguished banality. It is the rotting carcass of the autobiographical genre in comics."

Way back in the day, Top Shelf once stopped sending review copies to the Comics Journal because the magazine kept giving them to this guy to review. "We can see no purpose in it" they said, quite logically. "But he keeps asking for them," replied the Journal.

Now, Suat is a nice enough bloke whom I have met on occasion, and I'm concerned for him. Something must have happened in his past. Did his mother make him wear his hair in ringlets until he was fourteen? Did his father spank his bare bottom in front of all the relatives?

Please attach your personal observations in comments, though if they cross the line of good taste like mine just did, I will probably have to remove them.

Pádraig Ó Méalóid asked the question What's your opinion of the term 'Graphic Novel'? to several notables of the comic book arts. All the usual bases are touched; Neil Gaiman has fun at Campbell's expense (I'll get ya! Watch yer back!), Todd Klein evokes the serial nature of the original publication of the novels of Dickens; Bryan Talbot allows that 'graphic' has connotations of explicit sex and violence. This last should be dismissed quickly; the primary meaning of the word has always been art of and for printing, and it is derived from the ancient Greek word for drawing, 'graphikos'. The other meaning probably came along after the word was used as the title for an early illustrated newspaper, the Graphic, which sought to be more vivid and striking than its 'staid rival,' the London Illustrated News.


It never matters if anything sensible is said in these things, because nobody is paying attention. Case in point: respondent Gary Spencer Millidge adds: "The comics' industry's usage of the description 'trade paperback' I also find particularly unhelpful. Do the comic reading public have any idea what that means?." And sure enough, the first commenter writes: "For me, 'Graphic Novel' is separate from collections of ongoing monthly comics for which I use the distinction 'Trade Paper Backs.'" Nobody is listening (a little Knowledge is a good thnig).

Most of the other respondents have given up on treating it as anything more than a euphonymous marketing tool, more or less useful, more or less tolerable, while Rick Veitch and Dave McKean refer to a time when it represented something more, a reaching for a form that could carry work of higher ambition.

The question should have been, not 'What do you think of the term...?" but "What do you think of the idea of the graphic novel?'

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(I wrote a two thousand five hundred word extension to the above, then amputated it and threw it away.) (you will be glad to know)

there's been a recurring theme here since I reviewed the Watchmen movie on 30 July. The jist of my argument is that a good book is not just 'about' the contents of its plot. Andrew Rilstone has written the finest analysis of Watchmen that i have so far read.

In our world, kids read comics about superheroes and wish that they were real. In the world of the watchmen, supeheroes are real, so kids read about pirates instead. Hollis Mason described the emergence of superheroes as being like characters escaping from comics and coming to life. The idea of superman was so powerful that it caused real superheroes to come into being. In order to create his squid monster, Ozymandias kidnaps the man who wrote the most frightening comic of all time, gets him to imagine the most frightening monster possible, and persuades everyone on earth to believe it is real. Like Hooded Justice, the squid has escaped from comics- from the realm of ideas- into the black and white factual world of newspaper headlines
Watchmen is about the power of stories, of ideas, of comic books. Bernard, the comic book reader is its hero. He has in his hands the grand key to the whole story, and he couldn't care less. in the middle of this great insane complicated game the comic book fan is the voice which debunks the whole exercise.
"Lotta people called Bernard, man. Don't signify nothing."

(thanks to Greg Gerrand for sending the link)

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In other news:

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – An American widow is selling her husband's burial spot directly above film legend Marilyn Monroe so that she can pay off her mortgage.
Elsie Poncher has put an advert on eBay to auction off the tomb in Westwood Village Memorial Park, Los Angeles.
"Here is a once in a lifetime and into eternity opportunity to spend your eternal days directly above Marilyn Monroe," says the advertisement.
"In fact the person occupying the address right now is looking face down on her."

something my fellow artist Seth said in the recent Interview at the daily Crosshatch:

Do you envision your books cinematically, when you’re working on them? Do you think like that?
Not generally. Some of my stuff is cinematic in the way the “camera”—if you want to call it that—follows the characters around. I call that naturalistic storytelling. Of course I don’t really think of it as a camera. I actually envision it as the reader following the character around, as if you’re a disembodied head. In Clyde Fans, you’re following the character walking through the house. I think of that as how you experience the world through your eyes. Above shots, close-ups etc. They are film terms but I think of them as simply techniques to mirror how we experience vision. Film, being the more popular, has created the vocabulary to label these things but they are not purely actions of a camera. It’s more about vision in general.

I thought it could be interesting to run a test on this idea that 'cinematic' is a term that describes an effect that illustrators may have arrived at by other means without the help of film. I've delved back to 1892 and a series of front covers from the weekly Illustrated Police News of London. The paper was a single sheet, I believe, folded, with the typeset stories inside, all luridly wrapped in wood-engraved drawings representing the news items. It looked every bit as horrible as the worst sorts of comic books. It predates both comics and moving film, and also photojournalism.

The story of Frederick Deeming sated the British public's appetite for gruesomeness on at least a dozen consecutive covers of this paper (called 'the worst newspaper in England only six years earlier, see notes below). Deeming was even suggested as a candidate for the still unidentified Jack the Ripper for a while, which is why I have this stuff in my files. He had already been arrested for the murder of his wife in Australia when the earlier murders of his previous wife and family in Rainhill near Liverpool in England were uncovered. The Police News reconstructs it. As per the narrative technique that Seth describes, the artist recreates the scene by following the villain around his house as he dispatches the members of his family. (apologies to Seth for mentioning him in the same paragraph as this awful stuff)
April 23 1892

In the cover from a fortnight later the story gets a spot in the tier along the bottom. Of technical interest on this page is the fact that the artist combines landscape images in an arrangement with portraits, creating the effect of photos or drawings spread on the table in front of us. In the upper tier he has some dramatic juxtapositions. My point is that the jarring variations in scale caused by 'cutting' from close to long is not an effect that owes everything to film.
May 7 1892

Advancing a couple of weeks again (there are a dozen relevant covers in this narrative series, from which I'm selecting four), to the depiction of Deeming's execution. To put the effect over, the artist has been given a full page, another effect that we associate with the comic books (as in 'splash page'.) Notice also how the perspective positions the viewer among the immediate witnesses of the event.
May 28 1892

The following week they were pressing the last drop out of the story and we see Deeming's final troubled sleep, with the narrative of his crimes played out in an imaginary smoke in the pictorial space above him, which comes pretty close to being a big damn thought balloon.
June 4 1892

To say that the earliest adventure comics, such as the example below, lack dynamism because they were waiting for somebody to come along and introduce techniques analogous to those of the cinema is problematic.


The techniques were already in circulation. They were, in Seth's words, 'More about vision in general', or simply basic typographical procedures, ways of arranging printed matter on the page for sensational effect, to put the viewer close to the action, or in among it, rather than watching it acted out on a stage. They were the techniques of the lowest kind of illustrated journalism. Scholarly blogger John Adcock recently posted the excavated text of an old article concerning the Police News:

“THE WORST NEWSPAPER IN ENGLAND” an Interview with the Proprietor of the “POLICE NEWS.” Pall Mall Gazette 23 Nov 1886.

On perceiving that the readers of the Pall Mall Gazette who express their opinions on current topics through the medium of our Prize Puzzle Column had voted the Police News to be the “worst English newspaper,” one of our representatives betook himself to the office of the journal which has required so unique a distinction, in order to learn something as to its character, career, and circulation, and to discover what points its conductors could plead in defence of the publication. He was without delay introduced to the proprietor, Mr. George Purkess, who received the “verdict of the jury” with great good temper, not to say complacency, readily answered when put to the question, and urbanely volunteered much interesting information as to the history and position of his illustrated weekly calendar of crimes, casualties, and curious incidents...
--"If a tragedy were to occur in London to-day, we would send an artist straightway to the scene; should a terrible murder or extraordinary incident be reported from the country, we would at once dispatch a telegram to one of the artists whose names are in the book I have shown to you, or, if we are not acquainted with an artist in the locality, we would advise a newsagent to instruct one on our behalf. Often artists will send up sketches without previous communication of any kind; sometimes they will warn us by telegram to expect a sketch. The artist of course always endeavours to get a view of the scene of the tragedy, outrage, suicide, or accident, and we always give a picture of the house in which the inquest is held; but naturally, in sketches of this kind, from the very character of the incident, the imagination must be given some freedom. Our artists always try to obtain portraits of the actors in the scenes which they depict, but when these cannot be had they are driven to work upon verbal or written descriptions of the persons portrayed. If people would only think of it, they would instantly perceive that the accuracy of our illustrations is one of the secrets of our success. " (a great deal more at the link)

footnote: there are many lazy and confusing pictorial ideas that comic book artists have certainly inherited from cinema, but that is a separate article.

a little knowlidg is a good thnig

i've been reading Spiegelman's excellent new edition of Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!, which was released last October. The 28 huge new pages in this alone are worth the entry price. Artie dedicates it in part to the memory of Woody Gelman, who at one point, in 1977, was to be the original publisher of Breakdowns, which reminds me of a theory I entertained for a while. That is, the significance of Gelman's contribution to the modern 'idea' of comics. Before making my point however, I would have you know that this is no longer an idea that I have faith in. It's an idea that had its day in the world and has given way to a smaller, shrunken situation in which it is difficult to locate any idea. Alan Moore was addressing this state of affairs when he wrote: "I did once feel I was part of a movement that wanted to change comics into something valuable to culture, but I don't really feel that kinship in the way I used to." I do admit that Spiegelman's book almost revives the old enthusiasm, but occasions the thought that this may be a generational thing.
My perception was that it was Gelman who first envisioned comics for the bookshelf and, whether he invented the notion himself, he certainly inspired us with the thought of it. With his Nostalgia Press editions of Flash Gordon in two pleasing clothbound volumes, and particularly the lavish large format Little Nemo (all between 1967 and 1975 approximately), he put in our heads the idea that one of us might one day do something worthy of such a serious presentation. I'd bet that Alan Moore had such a thought when he held them. And I know he could not have failed to have bought them, probably in the same place as I did, Bookends in Camden Town, the only shop I know that imported all this obscure stuff in the early 1970s. This was just one aspect of the multi-faceted concept of what later they were calling the 'graphic novel,' long before we had stalwarts like the following chap to explain it to the world on our behalf:

'Comics 101: What is a Graphic Novel?' by one Adam Relayson- Examiner.com - July 20,

One of the most common mistakes made in our medium is the confusion of Comic Books with Graphic Novels. This is sort of like referring to a Magazine as a Newspaper; while they may contain similar information, they are entirely different formats.
The main source of misinformation in this case is the film industry and celebrities. Part of it is simple ignorance, while much of it is the desire to disassociate multi-million dollar film projects with the stigma of comics on which they are based. For instance, Zach Snyder's recent film adaptation of Watchmen contained a tag line in the trailers referring to it as "the most celebrated graphic novel of all time." Yet Watchmen is not a graphic novel. It was 12-issue mini series published from 1986 to 1987. Later Watchmen was collected into a format known as a Trade Paperback.
Trade paperbacks or 'trades' can easily be confused as graphic novels because they both present a seemingly self-contained story in a similar format. The difference being that a trade is the collected version of a story previously published in an ongoing, maxi- or mini-series comic. Whereas graphic novels present an original story.
At the end of the day, they are all comics in some format. Still, a little knowledge is always a good thing.

All of the labels that he explains so cleerly and knowledgously, all this misinformation that he sends out into the world, are the end-results of several years of misinterpretation and misunderstanding, every bit of it originating within the comic book collecting community and not outside. A person of any education, while accepting that these labels exist as such within this tiny enclave, would be embarrassed to be asked to promote them to a larger public, where a 'novel' is not a format and 'trade paperback' just means a larger-than-conventional paperback whose name resulted from old-time practices within the book 'trade.' That's what it meant when I was ordering printing only seven years ago and the printer didn't care what you called the stuff inside it, because content and format are completely separate things. It could be recipes or song lyrics or a novel, or a 'graphic novel' even. And in the larger world, since a novel is not a format but a literary form, which I realize may be too abstract for some comic book minds (think: it can be taken out of one format and lodged in another without altering its internal formal connections), serializing a novel in a newspaper or magazine, prior to its book publication, never disqualified it from being a novel. Will Eisner likewise serialized some of his earlier unquestioned 'graphic novels' (Message from Space, A Life Force), so labelling them as he did so. Marvel comics devised a format into which to put their their 'graphic novels,' that became standard for a while, being 48 or 64 pages- in large size-perfect bound-card covers, and called it their 'graphic novel format.' Comic book fans interpreted that to mean that 'graphic novel' IS a format.

Examiner.com is hardly a site of any authority (in fact I had to go to wikipedia to find out what the hell it is), but the bunch of opinions expressed by this particular citizen journalist are held by a large number of his fellow fans. There was a time when such blather would only be found in xeroxed fanzines and nobody would pay it any attention, but his page turned up for me via a Google news search, not a blog search, while I was investigating Watchmen's DVD reception two days ago. A sensible person arriving at it as I did must wonder how such a load of baloney could ever have come to be. It dents longstanding general knowledge in at least four places, and offends the preposition in two, all of this just within the 'pull-quote.' And it does it while declaring others to be 'ignorant.' Said sensible person might find himself momentarily questioning his or her previously held suppositions about the lately trumpeted value of the so-called 'graphic novel,' or worse, reverting to the earlier held supposition that comics are read by people who are not very bright.

I suppose all pop-culture communities are bound to have their own jargon, but it's very cringeworthy to find fans arguing that the larger society has got it wrong when they themselves have mangled it out of shape in just three or four cultural generations. My inclination is to feel as Alan felt when I quoted him above, and to say: they're not with me; I came in alone.