Four-Color Critiques #0: My Brain Unhinges

Four-Color Critiques #0: My Brain Unhinges

Apr 21

Part of me wants to be more disciplined about writing comics reviews–or just reviews period, for that matter.

I had a whole imaginary post composed in my brain; I was gonna launch a review column or something that would take place weekly and would just compile all the scattered thoughts I have about comics I read, old shit and new. I would do this both to discipline myself into thinking more critically again about the entertainment I consume, and out of a deep insecure need to feel the approval and attention of the scattered collection of burnouts, wannabes, and poets known as the “comics blogosphere.”

Read that last phrase again–that’s what’s giving me pause. Among other things.

I can never trust my own instincts when it comes to creating. Even something as inconsequential as reviews of comic books becomes second- and third-guessed to the point where I quickly stop wanting to do it at all, out of fear that I will do it wrong, or do it right for the wrong reasons, or do it right for the right reasons and still find it unfulfilling, or just even wake up one day and stop wanting to do it, thus leaving a wrecked ruin of incomplete concepts in my wake. I probably waste more brain power destroying ideas than I do pursuing them.

I mean, why the fuck shouldn’t I just write reviews of comic books? I think I’d enjoy it, I think I’d do a decent job, and I think it would be good for me. I used to review the shit out of everything–movies, TV shows, comics, what have you. My history on the web has been one of totally unsolicited opinions on everything from 24’s last season to that random issue of Starman where James Robinson pissed me off greatly by killing Justice League Europe. (Fucker.)

But I should be doing other things, I tell myself. I should be doing something more original; I should be proactively working toward my own stuff, not reacting to the creations of others. I should be chasing down short story and novel ideas, or editing some of my past material into some kind of readable shape for collection, or even finishing my book-length treatise on why The Phantom Menace is the worst movie ever made.

And then the insecurities kick in–I feel the burning eyes of the big and medium and small fish in this little fucking geek blog pond, all those people out there who refer to each other by first name and everyone reads them and thinks they’re wonderful, and most of them are wonderful, so that’s good. I feel this weird desire to be part of that club, to get attention, to be noticed and linked, and to somehow be recognized by people I don’t know for doing something not all that dissimilar from what they’re doing.

That’s another part of it too; is there anything honestly new to be said about most of this shit? We’re talking about comic books, not Ibsen. I can tell you I read New Avengers #39 the other night; I can tell you I liked it, and I can tell you a little bit about why. But others have done it, and you’ve read it, if you’re even reading this, that is–for all my commenting and our attempts to bring our corner of the web under new eyes, our comments and the imperfect hit data I’ve seen suggests that no one still pays much attention to us at all.

Sometimes that pisses me off. I think we all feel a little bit resentful of io9, if I may speak for my compatriots here–we wish them the best and we hope they do well, but part of me feels like they’re just doing what we do, except better because it’s ALL they do, and they do way more of it than we do, and focus on shit like “news” that has always seemed the ultimate waste of time to me, because unless I quit my job and starve to death whilst surfing the internet all day to post the latest set pics from X-Files 2, will we ever hold a candle, in that sense?

I guess we could have quit our jobs, given this a go, and taken the chance that maybe we’d have been the io9 instead of io9, in spite of the fact that io9 has the full weight of Gawker Media behind it, which I seem to perceive as some kind of real corporate entity now, a true business grown up around a bunch of cranks spouting shit online. That’s the dream, right there.

Whose dream? My dream? Sometimes, sure, I wish I could write professionally about the things I love–truly pursue my passions, instead of squeezing them into moments when I should be writing bullshit press releases about software, or compiling lists of the various populations of our various clients for corporate approval, or whatever the hell else is part of my “day job.”

Most of the time, I am just happy to do what I do creatively, here and at anyplace that will have me–I try to write in an entertaining yet personal way about the culture I consume. It’s what I’ve done since my first column in the Marist High School Sentinel back in 1994. It’s what I do here.

I just feel like I don’t do it for realz anymore. I blog, and sometimes those entries evolve into larger pieces, but there’s nothing…aggressive about it, you know? Maybe you don’t, but I bet some of you do, if you blog, at least. The temptation’s there to just spit things out that are refined and polished, perhaps, but only have a bite of substance. “Burst culture,” Warren Ellis calls it, and I know it has its place, and it’s easy and fun.

I don’t know if it’s making my brain any more active and participatory to do that, however. I think it’s actually sending my head in the opposite direction–I work, I throw up posts, I feel mild satisfaction whenever I get something together. And there’s a place for the short stuff; don’t get me wrong.

I feel like I want to do something more, though. I read SO MUCH CRITICISM in the course of my day to day–I can kill a few hours at work just skimming a myriad of sites, reading five or ten different people offering their individual takes on the latest and greatest (and sometimes worst too) in comics, or maybe movies or TV. But mostly comics. I want to contribute to that conversation, even if no one hears what I’m saying; I am pretty sure I want to do it for me, or at least, I want to do it in such a way and tailor my feelings to make it for me, instead of for some desperate clingy need to be “noticed” by other bloggers and writers.

(Does anyone else ever suffer from that “lookit me, see what I wrote” attitude about their blog? Not just the lust for readers, but the lust to be…attended by the “pillars” of the “community”? Like if Kevin Church would comment on my post, it would make me feel better than if some random schmoe commented?

(Is that pandering, using his name? Will it come up in his Google Alert and will he show up and say something and will that suddenly make me feel better? Why am I even wasting time on these feelings?

(I may bring this up to my therapist. I’M NOT EVEN KIDDING.)

Urgh. A few cleansing asterisks, perhaps.

***

There’s also, frankly, a towering brick wall of unwarranted negativity amongst comics bloggers that I feel some primal need to beat against. I get that there’s a lot of shit in the world of corporate superhero comics, but really, is it worth the vitriol? Are these people just trying to make themselves seem “cool” or “feel better” about being a “nerd” who “reads comics”? Do they think they’re the hippest persons in the room because they came up with some smart-ass clever way to shit on Nightwing #5,326?

I mean, really–it’s just not THAT bad. And it’s not ALL bad. It just isn’t. But when I read those reviews, I feel bad, for myself because I just read them and I read comics in general, and for the people who write them, because I can understand writing bad reviews, and I can understand hating books, and I can even understand taking potshots at books you hate.

I just can’t understand wasting so much time and energy and effort chronicling that hate all for the hollow back-pats of a select few who share your feelings of entitlement, self-satisfaction, and elitism.

Roger Ebert has always been my idol, when it comes to reviewing shit, and it’s because of his basic philosophy (or at least, that philosophy as I understand it): Does a work succeed at achieving the goals it appears to set out to achieve? In other words, is the campy horror flick good at being campy and scary? Does the sci-fi action blockbuster have decent sci-fi, and fist-pumping action, and make you want to eat lots of popcorn?

Or to bring it on home–does the Mainstream Superhero Comic Book achieve the goals of that genre? What about the Artsy Indie Autobio Comic Book? The Classic Sword-And-Sandal Fantasy Epic Comic? The Zombie Comic?

If you hate Mainstream Superhero Comic Books, you do not need to tell me why they suck so very bad; write about things you DO like, or things you wanted to like but didn’t. Doing otherwise fundamentally undermines the process of good reviewing, as I regard it.

I also make a pretty big distinction between “reviewing” and “criticism.” Ebert achieves the former effortlessly, and sometimes aspires to the latter; in comics writing, people often seem to confuse the two. I like folks who aspire to the former, and sometimes achieve the latter; that, OR the really talented bastards who can write criticism and make it readable and insightful, and not like some reject from a college department journal.

Anyway, that’s what I wanna do, if I decide to do it. I just wanna REVIEW STUFF AGAIN. Is that so wrooooong?

***

In college, I wrote regular reviews on Usenet, for a brief period of time, maybe four months? I may have mentioned that before. They were called “Four-Color Critiques,” and if you search Google Groups for that phrase, a whole bunch of them will come up. This was back in the day when folks like Randy Lander, Don MacPherson, and Elayne Wechsler-Chaput were reviewing on Usenet, since the web hadn’t evolved to the point where anyone was really using it for that purpose.

I wrote pretty good reviews, but I was also a gigantic prick. I would just get into the most AWFUL arguments with people about what were basically generically passable late nineties mainstream superhero comics. My aforementioned review of Starman #38 inspired a 176-comment thread, in which myself and some dude named “PrestorJon” go back and forth for pages and pages, then I kinda take a break, and come back SEVERAL WEEKS LATER to continue the fight.

Lord, I hated that issue.

I was way too involved in the tangled arguments that seemed only to be possible on Usenet, until the birth of the message board brought such messes to the internet writ large. But on the whole, I have fond memories of those days–I’d get my books on Wednesdays, read them in bed, and then sit down at the computer with a stack of comics next to me and write about them.

The big trick is that I don’t get my books on Wednesday anymore; I get them mailed to me, so I’m already behind by the time I sit down to review issues. I also have a pile that at any given time includes newer floppies, older floppies, newer trades, older trades, and stuff best classified as “extremely random.”

I want to create an experiment of sorts; I want to have a weekly WordPress post always in draft mode, where I peck out reviews and write-ups of the comics I read, whether they be old or new or whatever. Every Monday (or so), I want to post the collection, and I want to call it Four-Color Critiques.

I want to ignore the insecure bullshit in my brain about “getting noticed” (although it’s very hard), and I want to stuff down the protests that there are better creative ways to spend my time than in writing comic book reviews. I want to join this conversation because I think there’s too much negativity in it, and I want to work against it not just by complaining about it in comment threads, but by contributing my own voice to the mix.

I want to do this because I think it could be fun, and I think it’s a valuable exercise; I am ready to stop passively shoveling this shit into my brain, and to start thinking in a rigorous way about the culture again, comics and movies and TV and music and everything else besides. This seems like a good first step on that road.

***

So remember at the start of this, if you’ve read this far, about the “imaginary post” launching the comics review column?

I think I just wrote it, and I think it just launched. Oh holy fuck.