<![CDATA[Reading Comics]]>

false <![CDATA[Reading Comics]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1176044583m/586106.jpg 586106 2 It's a sign of how grown up comics have become that a book like Douglas Wolk's Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean can ignore the bashful throat-clearing that has plagued most mainstream writing about comics and just wade into the fray without having to apologize or justify such serious attention to what was until recently considered a throwaway kids' medium. Now that grownups everywhere are talking about comics without shame, what's newly refreshing about Reading Comics is the way that Wolk balances his love (sometimes tough love) for the two often warring (or at least mutually ignorant) sides of comics--the superhero tradition and the art comics that have gained highbrow attention lately--without ignoring the differences between them. Reading Comics is an appealingly idiosyncratic tour of many of his favorite artists that doesn't hesitate to criticize some of the most revered names in the business (like Chris Ware and Will Eisner) or investigate some of its most forgotten genre byways (like the '70s series Tomb of Dracula) with serious enthusiasm. --Tom Nissley Questions for Douglas Wolk Amazon.com:What do comics--the writing and the pictures and the narrative combined--give us that other art forms don't? <img src=" http://g-ec2.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/books/blog/Wolk_Douglas_300.jpg" border="0" align="right">Wolk: The most important thing comics give us, I think, is drawing that makes a story. What you're seeing when you look at a page of comics, you're not just looking at a bunch of images that represent a plot, you're looking at something that came from somebody's hand--a deliberately distorted world, changing over time, built by a particular artist, line by line. Amazon.com: There is a great perceived divide in comics, between the superhero tradition and what you call art comics. One of the pleasures of your book is the way you happily work both sides of that divide without fuss. Do you think the divide is valid, or does it melt away the more attention you pay to individual artists? Wolk: There's definitely a useful distinction to make--art comics are primarily about particular cartoonists' self-expression, and superhero comics are primarily about the characters and their shared fictional history. One's an ethos, the other's a genre. But I don't think individual artists have to stay in one camp or the other, and in any case an ethos and a genre can overlap. You can say that Mark Bagley and Hope Larson belong to totally different schools, but then somebody like Bill Sienkiewicz turns up and makes the idea of a binary opposition look ridiculous. In fact, the best genre comics almost always have a really strong sense of expressive style about them. Amazon.com: One way you, by necessity, limit the range of your discussion is to leave out the newspaper-strip side of comics history. As someone who came to comics from that side of things, it was a little disconcerting to read a book on American comics that only made a single passing reference to Charles Schulz. What influence do you think newspaper strips have had on the development of art comics especially? Wolk: One of the biggest breakthroughs I had in writing Reading Comics was realizing that not only did I not have to make it comprehensive, it'd be more interesting and useful if it didn't even pretend to be comprehensive! I didn't mention newspaper strips much because they mostly seem to me to be playing a slightly different game from narrative comics--at least, there hasn't been a lot of extended narrative in newspaper strips in a long time. (By their nature, they have to get in and get out in a few lines, and now that they're all postage-stamp-sized, there's really no way they can move a story forward.) What newspaper strips did contribute to art comics was the development of distinctive visual style--the idea that an artist's handiwork was at least as important as a strip's characters--but these days they're so tightly limited by their size and populism and every-third-panel punchlines that they sometimes seem like an arcane kind of microminiature. Everybody loves "Peanuts," but I don't know that there's even room for a new stylist as fresh as Schulz (or George Herriman or Milton Caniff or Winsor McCay) on the newspaper page now. On the other hand, "Calvin & Hobbes" wasn't so long ago. Amazon.com: And for a reader like me who has pretty much bypassed the superhero tradition and become a Dan Clowes/Charles Burns/Chris Ware fan via Peanuts and literary fiction, where would you recommend I start reading on the superhero side of the divide, which, as you say, has become so self-referential that it can be hard to crack the code? Wolk: I was talking with some friends recently about the common mistake of recommending Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen, as great as it is, as a starting point for superhero comics--as one of them put it, that's like recommending The Seventh Seal as someone's first movie! For pure, unencumbered superhero joycore, I love Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's All-Star Superman--if you've heard of Clark Kent and Lois Lane, you know everything you need to know to enjoy it, and it deepens with repeated reading. Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos's cruelly witty Alias, about a self-loathing ex-superheroine-turned-P.I., has lots of Easter eggs for the continuity-obsessed, but it probably works even better as a stand-alone story. And if you're at all into Victorian literature and/or want to sample Moore's work, the two volumes of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (drawn by Kevin O'Neill) are hugely fun on their own, and also illustrate by analogy the way a lot of the best superhero comics and other pulp art work: providing metaphors to illuminate the central concerns of their moment. Amazon.com: You're as prolific a writer about music as you are about comics. How do you compare writing about the two? Wolk: They're hard to compare--it feels like different parts of my brain deal with music and comics. I suppose both of them present the risk of paying too much attention to the words and missing the really important stuff. There's also much more of a tradition of music criticism with a strong, personal voice, and a richer shared vocabulary for talking about what's happening in music. ("Musical," for instance, is a perfectly normal word; there's no word that means "comics-ish"...) Right now, people writing about comics (in English, anyway) are still making it up as we go along, which is risky but exciting. Amazon.com: I'm a big fan of your little book on James Brown's Live at the Apollo, my favorite so far in that wonderful 33 1/3 series, and one thing that struck me, having read your two books now, is that one, the James Brown book, is super-tight (fitting its subject I guess), aphoristic and efficient, while the other, Reading Comics, seems purposefully loose, willing to take a stroll and maybe not come back. Is that a difference you thought about while writing the two books? Wolk: It was! I thought of Live at the Apollo as one long essay, a way of diagramming how the 35 minutes of that album exploded outwards in time, and I stole a lot of its tone and technique from George W.S. Trow's tiny fireball of a book Within the Context of No Context. I wanted Reading Comics to be more conversational--the idea was to open up as many arguments as I could, to try to broaden the way people talk about comics instead of codifying it. 572948 2 7 2007 Reading Comics total:168|5:22|4:80|3:46|2:18|1:2| 168 606 296 49 4 1 false false Thu Nov 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Wed Nov 07 18:03:13 -0800 2007 Wed Nov 28 09:53:30 -0800 2007 more...]]> 2 0 false false Fri Mar 06 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Fri Jan 30 08:45:50 -0800 2009 Fri Mar 06 10:48:55 -0800 2009 Reading Comics would help me get more out of our book club selection, Fun Home, and maybe pique my interest for other graphic novels. I only ended up reading a few chapters out of the whole book...more...]]> 4 1 false false Sun Jan 25 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Sun Jan 18 08:30:46 -0800 2009 Sun Jan 25 15:41:41 -0800 2009 more...]]> 4 0 false false Mon Apr 27 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Thu Dec 18 08:18:28 -0800 2008 Fri May 01 10:50:05 -0700 2009 http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/434... This says all I have to say in just 3 paragraphs. Be forewarned.)

With all the literary criticism flying around and my own avid reading of the metacomics and comics commentaries of Will Eisner,...more...]]> 3 0 false false Tue Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Tue Sep 02 12:41:36 -0700 2008 Tue Sep 02 12:44:40 -0700 2008 more...]]> 2 0 false false Sun Aug 17 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Sat Jul 12 12:01:25 -0700 2008 Sun Aug 17 17:07:52 -0700 2008
Reading Comics suffers from the same insularity-of-subject that the author himself identifies as a problem in the comics world. While it offers a decent jumping-off point for a newbie who wants to know more about what's good to re...more...]]> 4 0 false false Sun May 11 07:24:58 -0700 2008 Sun Oct 12 03:52:10 -0700 2008 Reviewing Comics

Although the cover jacket proclaims Wolk's 2007 volume as "the first serious, readable, provocative, canon-smashing book of comics theory and criticism", the very existence of this blog proves that Reading Comics is no such thing. But, apart from t...more...]]> 5 0 false false Fri Feb 22 08:07:43 -0800 2008 Thu Mar 06 16:22:37 -0800 2008 more...]]> 4 0 false false Tue Feb 26 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Thu Feb 14 06:58:45 -0800 2008 Thu Mar 06 14:49:59 -0800 2008 Understanding Comics when I picked this up. Before you spend more time reading my review of this book, I should admit that I have been trying to like comics for awhile now. The only three authors who make comics that I can say that I like are Harvey Pekar, Daniel Clowes, and Chris Ware...more...]]> 3 0 false false Sun Jan 27 08:00:59 -0800 2008 Sat Feb 23 15:42:27 -0800 2008
I think in some ways it's a really good book for people who don't know much of anything about comics but are looking for a quick and easy way to get up to speed on som...more...]]> 4 0 false false Tue May 06 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Sun May 04 18:38:04 -0700 2008 Tue May 06 11:43:51 -0700 2008 more...]]> 4 0 false false Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Mon Mar 02 18:43:26 -0800 2009 Mon Mar 02 18:47:00 -0800 2009
Also he isn't a comics snob, where eve...more...]]> 4 0 false false Sun Mar 23 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Thu Mar 06 20:03:07 -0800 2008 Thu Mar 27 19:00:34 -0700 2008 Reading Comics was purposely named so it would fall in line with Scott McCloud's books, all of which are titled "[Gerund-form verb] Comics" Douglas Wolk starts out with a few chapters on why comics matter (even superhero comics) then breaks down individual comic creators' bodies ...more...]]> 3 0 false false Wed Aug 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Wed Aug 22 08:38:24 -0700 2007 Wed Aug 22 08:46:57 -0700 2007 more...]]> 4 0 false false Wed Aug 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Fri Jul 06 14:06:20 -0700 2007 Sat Aug 11 09:17:29 -0700 2007 more...]]> 4 0 false false Mon Apr 20 08:19:55 -0700 2009 Mon Apr 20 08:22:50 -0700 2009 5 0 false false Sun Jul 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Thu May 03 13:40:21 -0700 2007 Sat Jul 28 07:55:31 -0700 2007 this will be "The" book of comics criticism for some time, i'd imagine. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and not simply because my sensibilities line up with Wolk's on several points (i gotta say i loved his commentary on how many of the best of the so-called art-comics are as crippled by ...more...]]> 4 0 false false Fri Feb 01 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Mon Nov 26 06:34:27 -0800 2007 Sat Mar 01 11:48:45 -0800 2008 more...]]> 5 0 false false Wed Aug 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Wed Nov 21 04:44:49 -0800 2007 Wed Nov 21 04:44:49 -0800 2007 more...]]> 5 0 false false Thu Jan 08 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Fri Aug 08 12:50:10 -0700 2008 Thu Jan 08 21:57:23 -0800 2009 Understanding Comics and the better parts of Warren Ellis' Come In Alone. One of the things about comics criticism that's occasionally made it dry is that people who want comics to be taken seriously ...more...]]> http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=586106