Trying To Make Sense of Things: Why Four Comics Critics Are Just About Done With Comics Criticism

Much to my chagrin, a number of important voices in comics criticism have started to move away from writing about comics. The reasons for this move are many. In the case of some, they've taken on other positions within the medium (working for publishers, creating their own comics, etc...), in other cases they've been harassed by the internet for having unpopular views (most recently Zainab Akhtar from the great site Comics and Cola who is scaling back her posts), and in still other cases, they've just hit burnout. I recently contacted three of my favorite critics and writing partners who have all publicly stated they are moving away from criticism or have begun to question its worth, and I asked them to write a short piece on why they have come to this point in their “careers”. My hope is that this discussion may lead to something. What that something is, though, I have no idea.

My concern is that as more erudite and thoughtful critics leave comics, what will become of comics themselves?

It started when I put out the following e-mail to Taylor Lilly, Justin Giampaoli, and Keith Silva:

“Gentlemen –

I'm thinking about putting together a little writing piece called “When Good Reviewers Burn Out” or “Writin' About Comics Blues” or “When Love Ain't Enough” or “Fuck You, There's No Money In This Shit” or something like that.

I figure it this way – we're all kinda wondering what the hell we are doing when we are doing this writing about comics thing. As you know, I've been thinking about this a lot lately – not necessarily what is the role of the critic (although I'm still working that shit out, see my interview with Colin Smith), but why write about comics at all.”

What follows is their responses (followed by my own sense of things):

Taylor Lilley (No Cape No Mask): Why write about comics at all? Why write at all? Why do anything of soft value in a world where actions of hard value are so desperately needed?

Don’t worry, I’m not going to actually try to answer all those questions. I too have looked at the header of an article, seen the double digit read-time, and thought “Not today”.

Elkin, you wrote the above italics in an email to a small group of people who routinely invest their time, gratis, in considering the work-for-money of people who make art for a living. Then, a couple weeks later, you wrote this. I’m not going to label it a review, or an article. It just is.

For me, my answer to the italics is this: If I can’t be as emotionally involved and as philosophically provoked by what I’m writing as Elkin clearly was, and articulate it so effectively, well… why shout mediocrities into an already echoing well?

Defeatist? Extremist? Unrealistic?

At the core of generating any kind of readership is consistency. Every copy-and-pasted “How To” article you’ve ever superciliously browsed will confirm that. So will Seth Godin, so Hyperions and Satyrs both agree. And if we’re considering writing, we’re hoping to be read. Unfortunately, I’m rarely engaged to the extent that I feel my content deserves to be found. Rarely do I watch a film, read a comic, binge on a show, and find at the end of it that I have something to say about it so worthwhile, so insightful and otherwise unavailable, that I MUST deliver it to the people.

But if I don’t deliver something consistently, if I have no track record of entries to prove my dedication and credibility, how will anyone find these infrequent gems of mine? They won’t.

So to have a shot at discovery, I have to create and publish content that I don’t really believe deserves sharing, earning trust for when I drop the good stuff. That sounds too much like my day job, grinding through the shitty parts to get to the golden parts. Doing that pays my bills, buys me this computer so I can afford to indulge these navel-gazing quandaries of self-expression. But before the screen, fixed in its glow…

I just don’t care enough about being read to start grinding again.

Without that effort, though, I don’t get to exchange with brilliant folks like the other contributors to this piece. I don’t read as much of what they produce, either, because I’m less interested in receiving than in exchanging. So do we actually publish for the minds we’ll meet, rather than the effects our content will have?

I don’t know. I’m not publishing right now.

But once I’m engaged, there are two questions: “Will anyone find this?”, and “If nobody did, would their lives be worse for missing out?”. Double-positives do not abound.

Maybe I’m asking the wrong questions.

There's Nothing Wrong with Hating Something: An interview with COLIN SMITH about the role of comics criticism and critics themselves

It began with a tweet:

Still trying to write about a truly awful comic.There has to be a way of discussing work that’s terrible without seeming to be point-scoring.

– Colin Smith

To which I responded by writing, “Why write about it at all? Why not just spend your time championing things you love?”

And thus began my initial conversation with Colin Smith, writer for Q Magazine, NewStatesman.com, Sequart, CBR (Comic Book Resources), FPI (Foreign Policy Initiative), and his recently shuttered blog, Too Busy Thinking About My Comics, about the role of modern comics criticism.

Daniel Elkin for Comics Bulletin: First off, thanks again for agreeing to talk more about the role of the critic, criticism in general, and Modern Comics Criticism (MCC) in particular. We covered a broad range of ideas in our tweeting back and forth, but there is only so much you can say limited by 140 characters.

Let’s begin here: Your initial response to my tweet pointing to the use of criticism to champion things you love was something along the lines of that this is “not the critical tradition (you) come from.” Before we go any further in this discussion, I think it would be helpful to clarify and define exactly what that critical tradition is.

Colin Smith: I immediately felt uncomfortable about my use of ‘tradition’ in that tweet. It had seemed appropriate in the by-necessity pithy context of Twitter, but it seems to suggest an authority that I hadn’t meant to lay claim to. A far better way of making the same point would’ve been to say that the critics I most enjoy and admire would never have considered an approach that was exclusively about ‘championing things (they) love’.

If you’ll forgive me, the only way to explain my point is to fall back onto autobiography, and I can well imagine that that would make this too self-involved and long-winded a response to be of interest or use to you. So please do feel comfortable in just calling a halt to these proceedings. I would entirely understand, I promise you!

I never had any ambition to be a critic of any sort. (I certainly don’t think of myself as one.) It wasn’t on my list of things to do. Yet no matter how incredibly minor a critic I am, and I think we can agree I’m an incredibly minor critic, I have ended up writing a considerable amount of criticism. It was all an accident. I had been unexpectedly and protractedly ill. I had to retire from work, I became unavoidably isolated from the world and my mind become more and more distractible and rusty. So simply to get my brain turning again, I started a blog, and while it could have been about anything from theatre to the singles chart to football, I settled almost by chance on comics. It’s a medium I love, of course, but it was also a subject that seemed to promise anonymity. Who was going to read my thoughts on comics? As a discipline, it helped focus my thinking and served to mark off one day from another, but I never imagined that even one or two people would stumble across the blog, or return again after they did.TooBusyThinking was never a major player – it never had more than a quarter million hits in any year – but it was never meant to be. Accidentally emerging into the peripheries of pop cultural debate, it took a while for me to realise that I’d given no prior thought at all to any critical tradition. But to have done so would have been absurd.