How to use this Page

Fellow blogger of note checking out what you've got going on here.

I love it!
My vintage blog was listed on BlogsOfNote, but I have another blog dedicated to Black Superheroines and female comic book and cartoon characters of color.

I absolutely love your sketches and illustrations. They're marvelous.

You're blog is very amazing and illustrations are all wonderful and sorry for my rusty english ;)

Thanks Rebecca! I miss the huge numbers I got in the first few days after I was tagged in Blogs of Note. I felt like a celebrity. Your superheroine blog is amazing! What a brilliant idea. I'm going to mention it on my blog soon.

Thanks Amylee! Your English is just fine!

A critic is like a friend who knows a lot about something and you refer to him once in a while when you need advice about that. He's not supposed to be the guy who ruins Broadway plays, like in the movies. A critic must be a "third voice", someone who is not an artist but who is not the regular audience either. Art criticism should be like those TV shows about traveling, where someone goes to a strange place you've never been before and shows and tells you what's interesting about it and why you should go there.

We're all playing critics when we try to convince someone to read a comic or a book, or watch a movie that we like. What we need is people who can do that on mass media. If regular people were exposed to comics more often, they would surely be interested sooner or later.

I mean, shit, they even became interested in eating raw fish! If normal people can be convinced to eat sushi, why not to read comics?

I can't believe you just made such a convincing argument with a sushi anqalogy. Stragley brilliant.

Don't you think a critic has an obligation to say what's wrong or missing in a work as well?

There are a couple of really useful essays on this topic, largely because the role of the critic in relation to art of any kind is probably the oldest hot debate in Art, and the main dialog between artists and critics. Check out Oscar Wilde's essay, "The Critic as Artist" (I need to re-read it myself). Samuel R. Delany (who wrote a run of Wonder Woman in the early 70s and wrote "Empire", which was painted by Howie Chaykin) often writes comic book and genre criticism from the inside, as it were: his knowledge of production, style, and craft as it applies to industry practices seems unparalleled to me.

Anyway, those are just some suggestions. As a person who was trained up as an academic critic (American Literature PhD), I find these discussions fascinating.

Oh! And here's a link to Wilde's essay on criticism:

http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/480/

Really great to have your inpout Justy! I can recall the Wilde essay and found it online but I've not read any of Delany's criticsm and can'yt easily find any examples online. I'll do a more extensice search later on.From what you say the Delany writing sounds really essential.I wonder if anyone's collected a book of critical essays on this subject?

To respond to what you said about the debate over criticism, I find it astounding that there is no real critical machinery in place in the western world for comics.Or that any criticism that does exist in the mass mediais usually misinformed.

I hope i do some of what you and Daniel are looking for with the Inkstuds.

McConnell, I think you do a _terrific_ job in Inkstuds. The interviews are always great. I just wish I could re-read them sometimes. I hope consider the possibility of publishing some of them in transcripted format somewhere in the near future, for the sake of comic-book-ologists in general.

I don't think there is a lack of good comics critic, but I do think that it's often directed for people who already read comics. My concern is: how can we use critics to make people read new comics they didn't know about?

Let's suppose that someone releases a Twilight or a Harry Potter comic book series. How can we help people transcend this and read other kinds of comics too? Imagine a girl buying a Twilight comic book... it's the first comic she buys in years... She used to read Little Lulu when she was 5, then she gave up on that because it's kids stuff, and now she's given the opportunity to read a new comic that speaks to her.

Will this girl ever read other comic besides Twilight? Will she read Sandman, or Blankets? How could she do this transition? Is she going to buy Wizard magazine, or even the Comics Journal? Is she going to enter comics blogs to see wat's going on?

When a Twilight fan goes to SDCC, does he wanders aimlessly around the booths, giving himself the chance to run into comics he never heard of, or does he does hangs out with his friends and makes fun of people in anime cosplay?

The bottomline of all this: how can we show people that, if they read comics and books, their life will be better, and they will not be wasting their money??

Oh my shit, with a gigantic comment. Sorry about that. Maybe I should shut up and write a book or something.

Inkstuds the book, will be out in fall 2010. just getting permission from certain guests right now. and then the long process of putting it together, the interviews are already transcribed.

I'm a HUGE Inkstuds fan and think it's the best thing out there to learn about great new comics, the kind of stuff I want to read. I can't even tell you how many books you've sold me and how many people I've sought out because of your brilliant show.I don't mean to suggest there is no critical voice in comics today, because that's not the case. If I have a gripe at all it's that most mainstream voices talking about comics are either focused on mainstream superhero stuff or are misinformed or treats comics as novelty. There are a few exceptions, Publisher's Weekly does a great job. I don't really have a solution and I'm not sure a mainstream discussion can be controlled in any place. The best I can think of is for people like you to keep talking and spreading the word.