I Miss People Not Writing About Comics

Valerie D'Orazio makes a fine point: this Newsweek article about Wonder Woman has more than its share of cretinous elements, from its goofy title to the writer's decision to depict the widening gap in female readership between superhero comics and other expressions of pop culture including other comics at this point as little more than a quirky outcome of a wacky sub-culture. My guess is that this is another outcome of a tendency by arts writers to treat peccadilloes of what people see as non-mainstream art as authentically representative of American culture while people more immersed in that culture see the same things as crappy, uncalled-for and unfair. My first reaction, however, is that it's just another not-good mainstream-publication article in a recent avalanche of them.

I'm not the best person to make such a criticism. As a writer that works within comics rather than on the outside looking in, I may simply be jealous that I'm not getting these gigs myself, or that my way of looking at comics becomes less dominant with every widely disseminated piece on Spider-Man's dating habits, or that my own writing career where it touches on comics isn't more financially rewarding. Still, I bet I'm not the only one disappointed by a lot of these pieces. I can't imagine anyone letting someone write about theater, say, in the dismissive and vaguely hostile voice that Robert Julian brings to this piece on Blue Pills. My prose is clumsy and my ideas lack clarity when compared to the skills of the many quality culture writers that string for the New York Times, but let's be serious: 80 percent of their many articles on comics in the last two years read like trend-massaging blowjobs, not insightful arts coverage. Actually, eighty percent is probably too nice. I don't think I'm overstating the case to suggest that more and more of the art form's public perception and even its self-image is being shaped by articles driven by assumptions and takes on industry history both recent and far-reaching that many of us find questionable at best, potentially harmful at worst.

Why is this the case? I can only hazard a guess or three. Part of it is likely people being asked to write about an art form for which they're not prepared to say anything meaningful. There were very few writers like Jeet Heer and Douglas Wolk waiting in the wings when comics-related articles became more prevalent. I bet very few arts editors would assign an uninformed writer to other, more established forms, but it doesn't surprise me. Besides, there's no reason such an article can't be a good one if some degree of rigor is brought to the writing and some editorial standard is maintained. Another reason is likely that as an not-respected form comics tends to breed local experts as much as it does those for the local stage. There are "comics people" on staff at many publications, and although that has probably contributed to the degree of coverage, it also means you get top comics of the year lists that look like they came from a spinner rack circa 1992, not the fruits of 30 years of artistic flowering in multiple genres. There are also wider issues, such as that a lot of people see arts writing as useful only in how it assists them in publicizing new work, and a lot of arts writing is happy to comply, including that about comics.

All that said, it remains amazing to me that comics receives the attention it does. It really does. At some point, however, comics needs to stop being flattered and start being covered, pulled apart, questioned, challenged and dissected. That may be impossible to expect of any arts coverage, let alone that surrounding a newer one like comics. But one thing more of us can do is to read and disseminate articles for their content and not simply for their pay rate, brand name and reach.
 
posted 7:30 am PST | Permalink
 

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