Douglas Wolk

Douglas Wolk writes about comics and pop music for Salon, Blender, The Believer, The Washington Post and elsewhere, and blogs about the DC Comics series 52 at 52 Pickup and other subjects at lacunae.com. His book Reading Comics will be published by Da Capo in 2007. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Is there an audience for comic book criticism outside of those already a part of this culture?

This is a really huge question, and it's a question I'm tussling with as I'm writing the book I'm working on. Part of the problem, actually, is built into the question: What's "this culture"? If you asked, say, if there was an audience for film criticism outside of those already a part of this culture, the answer would be "what, outside of Western culture?"

But a lot of the people who read comics think of comics as a culture—or as a subculture; something with its own private codes that mark its members as belonging, and everybody else as not belonging. (This is why people who don't read a lot of comics and walk into a comic book store are terrified, and rightly so: Everything about most comics stores says "you mean you don't know?") This is a stupid and destructive mindset for any number of reasons, the biggest one being that if you agree with it, you have to buy into a whole subculture, or at least come up with a reason that you're not really buying into the subculture, to enjoy a comic book. (There was a pretty amazing review of, I think, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis in The Nation a while back, in which the reviewer painstakingly explained that she had no interest in comic books, but had liked Persepolis, which wasn't really a comic book, it just looked like one…)

I'm a fiend for good writing of any kind, and I read lots of criticism of things I don't have very much interest in, just because I find the criticism itself interesting; sometimes it makes me interested in the things the critic is writing about. The critics I admire most are probably Pauline Kael and Susan Sontag, and to some extent Alex Ross, Robert Christgau and Greil Marcus. I'll read them on anything. (Kael's especially interesting to me because she's always trying to pick a fight—not a nasty fight, but a "come on, really think about this" fight.)

The trick to writing comics criticism meant for an audience beyond the cult, I think—and, really, if the criticism is good enough and is in any kind of a general-interest venue, the audience will come—is subtle exposition: I try to write for a general audience, and give them everything they need to know, without making it look like I'm explaining something esoteric. In a lot of ways, the long comics reviews I write are just book reviews; I figure out a hook or some kind of engaging way of addressing the subject, I assess the thing in question, and I don't make a big deal out of the fact that it's a comic, any more than Kael would hem and haw over the fact that what she was reviewing was a motion picture.

At the same time, it's very hard for me to write decent general-audience criticism about a lot of Marvel/DC comics, because the "comics-as-culture" mentality is thoroughly baked into them. Infinite Crisis and House of M and Marvel Zombies and "One Year Later" and a whole lot of other mainstream comics I could name have meaning only within the comics subculture—their entire dramatic impact is based on their deviation from the familiar scenarios involving their characters, and if those scenarios (or even characters: Sue Dibny!) aren't familiar to my readers, there's no way to get them to care one way or the other about that deviation.

(The litmus test for this is the question: what is this comic about? The Bendis/Maleev run on Daredevil was mostly about a well-intentioned lie that gradually turns toxic, and to a lesser extent about surveillance and information-flow and the distance between the law and reality. Easy enough to write a general-audience piece on it. Infinite Crisis is about the relationship between Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, and the darkening tone of the last 20 years' worth of mainstream comics; that's not, y'know, a universal theme.)

Then why hasn’t a self-supporting culture of criticism ever developed from within this culture (however you define it)? We’ve got a Comics Journal, but why haven’t there been more magazines, or even just individual writers, devoted to establishing and extending a cohesive point of view? Where are our Kaels or Christgaus?

One word: money. American comics are just barely a mass medium, by any other mass medium's standards; it's not financially feasible to publish more critical magazines than there already are, I suspect, and writing for The Comics Journal (or Comic Art) isn't going to be a living for anyone. The last time a new medium developed a serious criticism, it was movies via Cahiers du Cinema—and people who go to movies greatly outnumber people who read comics.

Another reason is that, until relatively recently, there hasn't been a lot of comics work published in America that could stand up to any kind of critical examination. That's partly because there really weren't a lot of comics—in 1983, when I started working in a comic book store, the weekly releases were usually seven or eight titles apiece from DC and Marvel, and maybe one or two indies. Books meant to stay in print? Two or three a year, maybe. Art-comics? Oh, you mean like undergrounds? Sure, we carry the Freak Brothers stuff, under the counter, and a few times a year there's a new issue of Raw… even five years ago, I don't think I'd have been able to do a monthly column for Salon about comics, because there simply wouldn't have been a book a month I could write about for a general audience. Now, it's no problem. I just got asked by an editor if I thought there were any interesting graphic novels in the next few months, and rattled off a list of books by Hope Larson, Renee French, Gary Panter, Joann Sfar, Eddie Campbell, Alison Bechdel, Rick Veitch, Anders Nilsen, Moore & Gebbie, Colleen Coover, Bendis & Maleev, Bendis & Gaydos, Englehart & Rogers, Megan Kelso, Ron Rege Jr., Seven Soldiers, blah blah blah.

Which means that now it's possible, in a way it hasn't been before, for Kaels and Christgaus of comics to appear. I hope so, anyway.

If we’re now spoiled for choice in terms of what we’re talking about when we talk about comics, is it worth thinking about how we’re talking about it? Does comics criticism do itself a disservice by co-opting the vocabulary of, say, film (how the “camera” moves, the composition of shots, illustrators’ “acting”), or is that the nature of the beast?

It's a problem, absolutely—using the language of film suggests that comics are somehow subordinate to film as a discipline: a movie that doesn't move. (Ditto for using lit-crit terms.) I think "composition" is a perfectly fair term to use—it's used for all of the visual arts. "Shots," though—maybe not. For "camera" you can say "perspective" or something similar... It's something worth paying attention to, anyway. On the other hand, borrowed language is, as Hedwig said to Tommy Gnosis, what we've got to work with: It's sometimes a fair trade-off for clarity. It's probably more important to pay attention to, say, the arrangement of panels on a page than to be too nitpicky about not using language from other kinds of criticism. The occasional "mise-en-scène" is a good thing.

Is there a difference between criticism and review?

To my mind, yeah, but they overlap a lot. As far as I'm concerned, reviews are useful to people who want to know whether or not they should spend their limited resources (of money or time or whatever) to experience something; criticism is (ideally) useful to people who've already experienced the thing at hand, or who are generally interested in its medium or meaning or cultural context. Note that r. and c. are not mutually exclusive. Things that are more review-like are often shorter than things that are more criticism-like, though.

What are the criteria for what gets covered in the Salon column? Who decides, and how?

Around the middle of the month, I write to my editor and say, "Hey, we should think about the next column, shouldn't we? How about thus-and-such a topic? What's my deadline?" So far, that's been the procedure. The idea of the column is that it's generally about the art-comics side of things, but I try to vary what I cover: so far it's been (in order) Steve Ditko, Promethea, Finder, Acme Novelty Library, The Quitter, Black Hole, Little Nemo, Daredevil, Ghost of Hoppers, the Belle & Sebastian anthology, Grey Horses, and the state of the superhero. A pretty broad range, I think.

In terms of what’s going on creatively, what do these books have in common, if anything? What is it that you’re responding to, both/either as a critic and/or, simply, as a reader?

They don't really have much of anything in common, aside from their medium and the fact that I had something to say about them, although the ones I like to write about most all have a very strong aesthetic, a specific look-and-feel, to the point where a sliver of a panel or a couple of randomly selected lines of dialogue would be enough to tell who they were by. (A lot of comics I don't like still have a strong aesthetic, but I can't think of many comics without one that I do like...) I guess one thing I tend to respond to is comics that have something entertaining going on at the surface level, but also lots of stuff happening in a deeper, more resonant way. On the other hand, something like Little Nemo is almost all surface, but what a surface!

Obviously, a big part of being a writer is being a reader, so I wanted to ask about what you’re reading, first with regards to criticism. You mentioned above some of those critics you’ve enjoyed. Why them? What is it in their writing (or in others’) that you enjoy as a reader of critical analysis?

The criticism I like best tends to have two particular virtues. It's really good writing on its own (clear, elegant, witty, enjoyable on its own merits even if I don't care about the thing it's ostensibly about), and it's got insight into its subject—I come away from it understanding its subject more than I would have otherwise, even if I've already seen/read/heard its subject. Also, very often, it has some kind of specific idea or argument about its subject. Of the people I've mentioned above, Sontag and (at his best) Christgau are magnificently precise with their language—Christgau's Consumer Guide to albums of the '70s has some of the tightest critical writing I've ever seen, and it's really funny, too. (It had a big effect on me when I first encountered it at the age of 19 or so.) Marcus's specialty is the unexpected perspective, the way of looking at something that nobody's figured out before. Kael, like I said, is a great arguer, and Ross is just a great explainer—when he writes about classical music, which is almost as insular a world as comics, he somehow makes the reader feel casually familiar with it, and when he writes about pop, he's very precise and very unjaded about it.

What’s on your pull list now?

I don't really have a "pull list," since I get promotional copies of some stuff and buy other things at a bunch of different stores, but if I did have one—a list of floppies I'd buy without flipping through them first—it'd probably be something like… DC: Seven Soldiers (all), All Star Superman, Infinite Crisis, (Supergirl and the) Legion of Super-Heroes, Birds of Prey, 52, The Spirit (jumping the gun a little here), Superman/Action Comics (for the Busiek storyline, anyhow), Catwoman, Villains United/Secret Six, Y: The Last Man, Lucifer, Ex Machina. Marvel: Daredevil, New Avengers, Civil War (I'm curious to see the beginning, anyway), Ultimates 2, The Pulse (R.I.P.). Others: Love & Rockets (and anything else the Hernandez brothers do), Following Cerebus (sigh), Big Questions, The Acme Novelty Library (okay, not "floppies" any more), Queen & Country, Or Else, Ganges, Babel, Ed the Happy Clown, Tales Designed To Thrizzle, Uncle Scrooge when it's got Don Rosa stories in it, Finder (well, if it's going to be coming out once a year now…), Age of Bronze.

Now, there's also the graphic novel list…

Feel free.

Recently read: Showcase Presents House of Mystery, Brian Fies's Mom's Cancer, Renee French's The Ticking, Mome 3, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home (I am raving to everyone about how good this is, so I might as well rave here too), Anders Nilsen's Monologues for the Coming Plague, Eddie Campbell's Fate of the Artist, Joann Sfar's A.L.I.E.E.E.N. Alan Moore & Melinda Gebbie's Lost Girls.

Looking forward to: Gilbert Hernandez's Luba: The Book of Ofelia, Gary Panter's Jimbo's Inferno, Neil Kleid & Jake Allen's Brownsville, Joann Sfar's Vampire Loves, Rick Veitch's Can't Get No, Ex Machina: Fact v. Fiction, Batman: Dark Detective, The Spirit Archives vol. 18, Andi Watson's Little Star, Ron Rege, Jr.'s The Awake Field, Megan Kelso's Squirrel Mother, Gabrielle Bell's Collected Lucky, Gotham Central: Unresolved Targets.

…and of course the Frank King and Charles Schulz and George Herriman reprint books.

Going back to your “pull list”, a bunch of stuff comes to mind (that I’ll now ill-advisedly try to compress into one question). You spoke earlier about tending to respond to well-defined individual aesthetic. I’d say that that’s something most of the books you’ve named—the ones I’m familiar with, anyway—certainly have. But you’ve named quite a few books from the Big Two heavily enmeshed in their respective crossovers. Shouldn’t a creatively individual point of view be mutually exclusive with the type of editorial-driven world-building that’s currently going on? How is it possible that something like, say, Infinite Crisis is both a summary of the last twenty years’ worth of DC publications and very much Geoff Johns’s baby?

Well, I do like big crossovers, especially if they involve a lot of creators taking on the same idea—if they're good. (I thought House of M was really promising, and didn't live up to a lot of that promise.) I mean, generally I do gravitate more toward stuff by auteurs, but that's not how Arrested Development or Six Feet Under or The Simpsons are made, and I love those too. Infinite Crisis I have a real love-hate relationship with, and probably more hate than love, but I do like the way it's pulling out ALL the stops. 52 just sounds like a hell of a lot of fun, and what convinced me about it was seeing (at WonderCon) how excited everyone involved with it seems to be.

I've seen some creators talk about feeling frustrated by having to work within arbitrary editorial mandates that come down every few months and derail whatever big storylines they're working on, and I totally understand that. On the other hand, a lot of the best mainstream creators seem to be the ones who can take an editorial mandate and spin it into something that's very much their own thing. I thought the Gotham Central crossover with Infinite Crisis was one of the best issues of the series, for instance, and I really like how New Avengers plays off whatever else is going on in Marvel continuity. And Seven Soldiers: Zatanna riffs off the whole Crisis/mindwiping business in a way that enriches the story if you know about it and is basically invisible if you don't know about it.

And speaking of Seven Soldiers: I know you’re planning on taking a look at the series for the mainstream media. How do you plan to approach the piece? Without yet being able to look at the series as a whole, what stands out about this series as being worthwhile discussion points for that audience?

What I think is interesting about 7S for a lit-mag audience is that it's formally incredibly complicated, in a way that you usually only see in densely packed prose fiction or some kinds of poetry—it's a very rich source of subtext, it keeps a whole lot of narrative balls in the air at once, its language is precise, there's plenty to say about it in terms of interpretation (I'm reading its main idea as something like "how can something that's been stuck in childhood for a very long time grow up without succumbing to despair?"), it's loaded with resonant details, it thematically critiques a lot of the problems of its genre—but it's also unbelievably fun and entertaining, page-for-page, as a piece of escapist fiction. (And it's no coincidence that one of its big themes is escape: Mister Miracle's raison d'etre and the "life trap," Zatanna's attempted escape from her 2-D context, Klarion's from Croatoan, the "breakouts" on the covers of the fourth issues, etc.) In some ways, it reminds me a little of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, one of my favorite books—Wallace figured out that if you're going to be writing a huge, complicated novel about addiction and entertainment, it had damn well better be a page-turner. 7S also does a cool thing vis-a-vis the auteurism problem you mention above (which Morrison also did in The Invisibles): it's set up so that it's supposed to have a lot of different visual perspectives & no visual consistency overall—even the 3-artists-in-4-issues thing with Mister Miracle worked just fine in the context of the story.

One more, this one re: The Pulse. How 'bout that Jessica Jones?

She really is awesome. Somebody was asking recently if there'd been any first-rate super-type characters created since the Endless, who are pushing it anyway, and I think Jessica qualifies. She's a character type I can't believe didn't show up at Marvel in the '60s: the hero who's self-loathing to the point where she can't even grasp her own heroism a lot of the time. (She's actually kind of the inverse of Arsenal the way Devin Grayson wrote him, as someone who genuinely means well and will work overtime to make things right, but makes one horrible missing-the-forest-for-the-trees error in judgment after another.) I also love the fact that after all this time, we still don't know what Jessica's powers are, and it doesn't matter.

Finally, what’s going on with the book?

It's going. Pretty much the same problem I faced with my previous book, Live at the Apollo: lots of research, lots of inchoate notes, not as much neat and clean prose as I'd like at this stage. But I never write anything start-to-finish anyway. Parts have turned out to be incredibly easy, things that have just been waiting for ages in my head to be spilled out, but some days I feel like the words are coming at Swamp Thing speed. Or Black Bolt speed.

This interview was conducted by Chris Tamarri.