BONE might represent one success story of this hypothetical “middle.” However, BONE’s song has been sung.

Several manga-series can fairly be deemed a success. But how much of that validation spills over to positively affect the works of “first-run” creators in the American marketplace?

I am tired of bleak, depressing stories about the travails of geeks — no matter which nuance of geek it is you’re pursuing. Emo or gamer or neo-goth, I don’t care.

Newsflash to Indie creators — you don’t have to be dreary, you don’t have to be autobiographical, you don’t have to have to limit the range of your stories to your smug, pseudo-intellectual worlds, where you are so smart, and the world is so dumb.

You’re better than that. If not, then you have no business in the industry.

How about this? Tell me something I don’t know. Tell a story. Smile.

And don’t make me go to the mainstream rack for the only stories that are (at least sometimes) uplifting and entertaining.

Get over yourselves. Appreciate Bone.”

All of this indicates a very surface reading of “indy comics” - reducing them to angsty-autobio, when the collection goes far beyond that. If these comics were the evidence for an argument you are making, I am not sure that your side would win.

People get so worked up over the word “Best” -

When some Authority - the publisher and the editor - do not validate the readers’ preferences they take offense. Just pretend the book is titled Chris Ware’s Best American Comics 2007, and there you go.

Nowhere does it say that it represents all of the work published in that year. Does best American Short Stories 2007 have to have a western, a romance, a slice of life? The main editor picks an issue editor because of that person’s knowledege; this issue represents Ware’s tastes - there is no other mandate.

What I meant was that an anthology — in its strictest sense — is meant to be a representative collection, especially when it is attached to a specific year. Yes, the editor does and should have final choice, but (as I say) not at the risk of completely misrepresenting the year in question. When I heard a few years ago that they were going to do a
Best American Comics” it excited me because here was a text I could use in school (I’m a teacher), much as a I use “Best American Poetry” or “Best American Short Stories.” But these anthologies claim and define comics ONLY as independent and self-referential. This is ok, and is great if that’s the class you wanted it for — but that’s not “Best American Comics.” And it makes them all — for all their independence — strikingly the same. It’s perhaps a small point yes, but an important one, I think.

Brad

I am tired of bleak, depressing stories about the travails of geeks — no matter which nuance of geek it is you’re pursuing. Emo or gamer or neo-goth, I don’t care.

Newsflash to Indie creators — you don’t have to be dreary, you don’t have to be autobiographical, you don’t have to have to limit the range of your stories to your smug, pseudo-intellectual worlds, where you are so smart, and the world is so dumb.

You’re better than that. If not, then you have no business in the industry.

How about this? Tell me something I don’t know. Tell a story. Smile.

And don’t make me go to the mainstream rack for the only stories that are (at least sometimes) uplifting and entertaining.

Get over yourselves. Appreciate Bone.

Bravo Heidi.

Some cartoonists DECIDE to create comics that are not traditional narratives. If a cartoonist is doing something less narrative than you would like, it makes no sense to criticize her ability to tell a story, when she has made it clear by her work that she is doing something different.

So your first comment regarding Nabokov was a “sweeping, provocative, inaccurate generalization”?

Sorry, I just couldn’t resist…good points all.

But I don’t totally agree that Heidi’s essay is quite as innocuous as you claim. The basic problem is that she takes some defensible criticisms of one very particular anthology, and then for some reason goes on and uses them to paint an inaccurate, negative picture of an entire generation of cartoonists and the state of the art form.

But the bigger problem, and one you may not be familiar with as a self-professed outsider, is that these kinds of reductive, generalizing critiques pop up way too often in writing about comics (perhaps especially here at PW), as if comics criticism cannot function without an artificial sense of crisis. The main point of my previous two posts was that this is the kind of provocative writing that reinforces those very stupid, entrenched divisions that you correctly identified.

There are lots of people who are not on a team, people who just love comics, and Heidi certainly seems like one of them. That’s why I think her essay should be taken to task for slipping into the trap of the sweeping, provocative, inaccurate generalization. I don’t think it’s an overreaction to call for more rigorous and thoughtful criticism in a post like this, which pretends to diagnose an entire art form… I admit this may be asking too much of a blog, but this isn’t any old curmudgeon’s blog, and Tom Spurgeon seems to be able to manage it pretty well over at the Comics Reporter, and Tim Hodler (albeit more infrequently) at Comics Comics…

By reacting to the book the way she does, Heidi implies that it’s canonical and gives it some authority that it doesn’t and shouldn’t have. I see comics as an art form refreshingly free of any rigid canon, and would like to see it remain that way.

Anyways I wrote too much again, hope it doesn’t induce an aneurysm.

Regarding the irrelevant Russian literature discussion, I would say that writers such as Bunin, Solzhenitsyn, or Tertz/Sinyavsky are most certainly Russians (in exile), whereas Nabokov is a cultural polyglot as well as a literal one, a true cosmopolitan - though I was certainly hyperbolic in saying he was Russian by birthplace alone.

So this piece is a bit of cheerleading for Heidi’s “middle ground” of comics. No more, no less, and to me, really no different from publishing an anthology chest-thumpingly named “The Best American Comics.” This is something everyone’s guilty of… team spandex, team comix, team manga, whatever. Speaking as a “civilian” (or at the very least, someone who has no particular vested interest in either side of the qualitative argument… mainstream is not my thing, you know), this thread makes the comics community seems like a den of lions where an accidental toe step is dealt with an aneurysm-inducing 10-paragraph admonishment. Frankly, I’m afraid of team comix. Coming from a pornographer, that’s just all kinds of wrong.

Jeff Smith is a great cartoonist.

Of these three, I’d tap Morrison. He’d make some interesting choices, I think (as did Ware).

And I think they should just go with [Editor’s name] Presents for the title and bypass the whole Best Of quagmire altogether.