First, late last month, Christian Sciene Monitor, whose staff really should know better, brought us Pow! Zowie! Scholars discover the comic book. Then this week, The Washington Post, whose staff should also know better, brings us Drawing Power, where Bob Thompson wonders in amazement about how people — and not just kids — are reading comics and graphic novels!
And while Thompson eventually gets around to talking about this, I am waiting for the day where people realize that comics are a medium. They are no different than film or prose or poetry. They are a way to tell stories. Nothing more. They are not for any particular person or demographic. You can happily like one more than another — you can be a film buff and not read a lot of fiction or you can spend all your time reading poetry and not really care for movies — but that doesn’t mean the others are inferior to your chosen medium.
Is there a lot of crap out there? Yeah, but that goes for any medium. For every best picture nominee, there’s five Meet the Spartans. For every Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, there’s 10 cranked-out mysteries. For every poet laureate, there’s a teenager posting her trite poems on MySpace. Are there bad comics out there? Yeah. I think we all know that. But there’s also some really great ones.
I read a lot comics, sure. But I just read a lot, period. My bookshelves are filled with everything from the classics to fantasy paperbacks, Norton anthologies to second-hand sci-fi novels. I am happy to share my shelf space with the comics I own. One medium is no better than the other. They both offer me something very lovely and I like that.
(And if these sorts of feature writers need a new topic, why don’t they look into bars that are hosting Guitar Hero nights? That hasn’t been done to death yet.)
I thought that the article was pretty decent, and I also felt that it represented a sort of change from the ‘same old articles’ to which you refer, and which most of us dread. It made a pretty solid point that Graphic novels are comics, and that they are a medium and not a genre as so many seem to still think.
I thought it read more like a ‘late adopter’s’ look at something that clearly a large part of the population has started to embrace, but that he himself did not quite get yet.
The article was huge and fairly prominent in the paper, it talked some about the market, and of course how underutilized the medium has been here, etc. It also used comic strips to highlight how the medium can work, rather than as a gee whiz sort of thing… I thought at least.
The paper also devoted space in the book world to comics reviews. Should we have to have this sort of thing these days, no. Would it be better if there were articles about comics that weren’t written as though a bizarre new alien culture had been discovered? of course!.
Excellent blog!… and yes, B.L.O. and Hope Larson are the cutest ever. I really enjoyed Bear Creek Apartments. I look forward to your write up of Chiggers (I just read it in the last month or two.)
Bob
I did like the strips that accompanied the article — and yeah, I was being a little hard on it. But for the Post, who does have at least one noted comic book fan on staff (Michael Dirda), it just felt a little too condescending. I don’t want articles with a tone of “you’re stupid if you don’t like comics” either, but I want some somewhere between the two.
Yeah, I agree. I think the model of what I want is sort of like what Kleefeld is talking about In this post. Different topic, similar treatment.