Mid-stream.
By Dylan on May 18th, 2012Posted In: News
(Permalink to this week’s page)
Family dynamics! There is nothing more fascinating for me to draw. Although refracted moonlight on water is a bit of a mind-bender, too.
On an unrelated note, I’m looking for examples of really atrocious comics criticism. Book reviews  that are completely unhelpful, ignorant, condescending, or just plain confused about what on earth a comic book is. If you’ve got a gem stashed away somewhere, or something that (as an intelligent reader of comic books) makes your blood boil, I would like to hear about it! The more prestigious the publication that whelped the horror, the better.
Send me your link (or a brief description of your general pet peeves) in the comments section on this post!
Excuse my older eyes, but did she step into a steel trap? Ouchie.
Nope – just slipped!
Thank heavens. Those old bear and wolf traps were mutilators.
no link. brief description of general pet peeve? (i may actually be able to dig up a link related to this, i’ll look for it later, but for now) when people are reviewing a graphic novel or comic and go “for a graphic novel, this is surprisingly insightful….”
okay no. it’s really not. those of us who have been reading them for years know that JUST BECAUSE IT INCLUDES PICTURES doesn’t mean it’s not ~literature.~ stop that.
OOhh, pet pieve reviews! A few moments browsing on Amazon yields a treasury of unfounded, purely personal, un-insightful gems Here is one:
To ‘Dawn: Lucifers Halo’ (which somehow reminds me of The Crow because of it’s cult philosophy, if not because of its drawing style): ‘The book itself seemed to be a bit flimsy and the drawings were quite poor-I didn’t even think that Dawn was that much of a babe. I won’t be collecting any more of these ‘ (for the record, whether it’s your style or not, Linser is NOT a ‘poor’ artist.)
I don’t know if it’ll help any, but this guy clearly has had some run-ins with bad critics (see the blog post just below the comic itself):
http://www.goblinscomic.com/
…Although the details of his complaints indicate he was dealing with amateur critics at best.
The ones that get to me are the whiners about which way a story is going. I assume the artist has it in his or her head, all plotted out, and so I let them tell me the story willy-nilly, as they wish. Yet many readers seem to feel as if they own the story, not the creator, and should have a say in how it is woven. Karl Kerschl who created The Abominable Charles Christopher sometimes digresses from his storyline for a month or more at a time. Sometimes he does it for whimsy and sometimes he weaves it back in later. Let the artist be the artist. I cannot draw a comic, especially one as well-drawn as this one, nor have I been able to create an entire 18th century world in which to weave my story as Dylan does so well. I am content to passively follow the story and enjoy it as it is presented, only reporting problems with links, etc, in the comments page, or asking questions when I am puzzled.
Just look up the Sandman Collection on Amazon. The one-star reviews are hilariously bad, but as for bad comic book reviews from prestigious groups, I honestly didn’t even know that there were pro critic groups for comic.
Yes! Comics (of a sufficiently literary bent) are semi-regularly reviewed in publications like the New York Times Book Review, Time Magazine, the New Yorker, etc.
As Robert A. Heinlein stated:
“A “critic” is a man who creates nothing and thereby feels qualified to judge the work of creative men. There is logic in this; he is unbiased — he hates all creative people equally.”
Pretty shrewd observation.
And as Orson Welles said, in “History Of The World, Part I”:
“And of course, with the birth of the artist came the inevitable afterbirth… the critic. “
Ha!
I think criticism is generally useful and good. The problem is that bad art is answered by criticism; bad criticism gets, at most, a couple of resentful lines in the “Letters to the Editor” section in the next issue…