Do literary critics have what it takes to review comics?

We’ve given a fair bit of space in Q&Q to conversations about literary criticism, but we’ve heard relatively little about what it means to be a critic of comics. Considering how significant graphic novels have become in Canadian literature and publishing, perhaps it’s time to address the question.

Where better to start the conversation than the comics scene itself. Michael May, writer of Kill All Monsters! Webcomic, sparked an interesting conversation about comics criticism over on the Robot 6 blog at Comic Book Resources. In his first post in a series dedicated to sketching out some basic guidelines for engaging in comics criticism, May suggests all comics are not created equally and encourages critics to take their cues from “authorial intent”:

By “author” I don’t mean just the writer, but everyone involved in the creative process. In comics that might only be one person or it could be a huge team. The point is that the people who make the comics have something that they’re trying to accomplish and good criticism of the book should take that into account. It’s not fair for me to open Dan Clowes’ Death Ray expecting it to be like Fantastic Four…. [T]o judge [a work] correctly, critics need to focus on what it is they think that [the authors] are trying to accomplish and whether or not it succeeds on that level.

In his second post, May tackles the issue of amateur criticism versus professional criticism, and suggests a critics’ credentials matter only insofar as they help a reader get what she needs out of the review, whether it be reading recommendations, a deeper understanding of the craft, or both.

The latest post by May offers tips to readers for evaluating a review based again on authorial intent: was the point of the review to entertain? To provide a product review? To contribute to the development of the craft? To curate a canon?

These aren’t new concepts or questions by any means, but May (unintentionally) raises another issue. Is comics criticism the same as literary criticism, and do literary critics who aren’t well-versed in the world of comics have the chops to write an informed review of a graphic novel?

Edmonton literary magazine launches in Toronto

Eighteen Bridges, the cultural magazine of “narrative journalism and first-person essays” that sprang onto Edmonton’s literary scene in October 2010, will make its Toronto debut tonight. A labour of love co-founded by Curtis Gillespie and Lynn Coady and featuring the likes of Lisa Moore, Marni Jackson, Timothy Taylor, and Marina Endicott, the general interest publication also includes literary criticism, fiction, and poetry that is “primarily, but not exclusively, about Canada or written by Canadians.”

On the magazine’s website, the co-founders suggest they’ve taken cues from some of the industry’s heavy hitters:

We value the timeless narrative flair of The New Yorker, the journalistic rigour of Harpers, the literary excellence of Granta, and we hope to weave these elements together with a distinctive Canadian sensibility. Eighteen Bridges will be a modern in-touch magazine concerned with people, politics, culture, and ideas, its articles substantial, in-depth, and grounded in the narrative tradition.

The public launch takes place at the Spoke Club, 600 King St. W., starting at 7 p.m. (RSVPs are welcome at nina@eighteenbridges.com.)


The Washington Post expands book coverage

Starting Jan. 23, The Washington Post is expanding its Sunday book coverage to include two new specialized reviews.

The additional coverage is part of The Post’s decision to split the Arts and Sunday Style sections, the latter of which will now come as a pull-out tabloid. The Arts section will feature a review of an arts-based book, while the Sunday Style section will get its own pop culture-themed book review. Book news and criticism featured in the newspaper’s Outlook section won’t be affected by the changes.

In a press release, Post publisher Katharine Weymouth said the expansion reflects the publication’s “commitment to providing [the metro Washington] community with news and information that is compelling, informative and engaging in our Sunday package.”

Reviews sabotaged on Amazon U.K.

The U.K.’s Daily Mail (via MobyLives) reports authors and publishers who are accusing each other of skewing Amazon star ratings by creating fake reader reviews:

[PR firms] provide favourable reviews of new books, at a price. Nathan Barker, of Reputation 24/7, offers a service starting at £5,000. He said: “First we set up accounts. For a romance novel we’d pick seven female profiles and three males. We’d say we like this book but add a tiny bit of criticism and compare it to another book.” Mr Barker claims this is common practice among publishers.

The article goes on to describe hostile reviews received by authors Polly Samson and Rosie Alison.

Vonnegut, Jr. memorial library opens in Indianapolis

When Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. died in 2007, American literature lost one of its most idiosyncratic and beloved voices. That voice is now being honoured with a new library in the author’s hometown of Indianapolis. The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library opened last week in an historic downtown building. Several of the rooms were paid for by donations from a local law firm, which is somewhat ironic given Vonnegut’s often cutting barbs about the legal profession. Among the items on display are Vonnegut’s typewriter and an unopened package of Pall Mall cigarettes.

As to why the library is located in Indianapolis and not the east coast, where Vonnegut lived for most of his life, The New York Times has this to say:

As the library welcomed the public for the first time last week, the author’s friends and family said that it belonged in Indianapolis, with which he had a complicated and not always complimentary relationship. Despite his criticism of the traditionally conservative city, this is where he developed his voice as a writer and learned the values expressed in his books.

“All my jokes are Indianapolis,” Mr. Vonnegut said at a speech here in 1986. “All my attitudes are Indianapolis. My adenoids are Indianapolis. If I ever severed myself from Indianapolis, I would be out of business. What people like about me is Indianapolis.”

Why “likeable” characters aren’t important

Lazy reviewers – often online reader-reviewers – tend to be deeply concerned about whether or not a character is “likeable” and use this as the foundation of their overall critique of a book. Laura Miller skewers this propensity in an article for Salon‘s reading club:

I confess, I’ve grown to hate such remarks. It makes me feel like we’re all back in grammar school, talking about which kids are “nice” and which kids are “mean.” It’s a willfully naive and blinkered way to approach a work of literature.

James Wood, in his book How Fiction Works, wrote that this complaint implies that “artists should not ask us to try to understand characters we cannot approve of — or not until after they have firmly and unequivocally condemned them.” That we might recognize a character’s unappealing qualities while simultaneously seeing life through her eyes, “and that this moving out of ourselves into realms beyond our daily experience might be a moral and sympathetic education of its own kind,” doesn’t seem to occur to far too many readers. Wood calls this sort of criticism, so common in Amazon reader reviews, a “contagion of moralizing niceness.”

The Salon reading club is currently discussing (what else?) Freedom. Miller describes her feelings about one of the main characters:

Patty is not nice. She does some bad things, and she can be grouchy and bitter. I wouldn’t necessarily want her as a friend, but then that’s not really an option because she’s not a real person. She’s a literary character — which means it’s not imperative that we take a moral stance on every single thing she does. Literature is an experiment of the imagination, and if we don’t try to leave behind our contemporary compulsion to pass judgment on everything and everyone when we enter into that experiment, then we are the ones who lose out.

New copyright legislation likely this Thursday

According to a Canadian Press report, Industry Minister Tony Clement is likely to table long-awaited legislation amending Canada’s Copyright Act this Thursday. The legislation apparently includes a revised definition of “fair dealing” that would make it easier for academics to employ primary-source material in their work without running afoul of the Act, and will make it a crime to circumvent copy protection on DVDs and CDs.

Sources have said the legislation will make it a crime to pick a “digital lock” attached to a piece of music, film, electronic game, or other product. For example, overriding the copyright code on a song to burn it to a CD would violate the Act. Format shifting, moving digital material around from say, a CD to an iPod, or burning from a PVR to a DVD, will be considered legal for personal use as long as no digital lock is picked.

That doesn’t sit well with many vocal proponents of user rights, who say big entertainment multinationals will be given too much sway over what Canadians do in their own homes, with their personal property. When the Conservatives last tried to introduce changes two years ago, a massive online campaign erupted to oppose it and they were forced back to the drawing board, striking cross-country consultations and going back and forth within cabinet.

Perhaps in a pre-emptive move to counter exactly this kind of criticism, Clement is reaching out to opposition MPs to support the bill, and suggesting that he is open to amendments:

“I’m not coming down from the mountain with this chiselled in stone,” Clement said.

“This bill may have elements in it where we could seek some consensus and there could be some positive amendments to this bill. That’s certainly in the realm of possibility too, and let the process begin.”

Clement stated that the legislation will attempt to balance the interests of content creators and users, but acknowledged the many competing concerns, would make it virtually impossible to please everyone.

“That’s why this bill is going to be thoroughly discussed and debated…. I would just urge people to wait for the bill and read the bill, and they can make up their own minds.”

Eye Weekly launches new book club

When Oprah announced last November that she is calling it quits in 2011, publishers blessed by the mojo of the daytime television doyenne’s eponymous book club started biting their collective nails, wondering where they would get such valuable free publicity in the future.

While it likely won’t boast Oprahesque numbers, the Toronto-based alternative newspaper eye Weekly announced today that it is inaugurating a monthly book club, called Pop Fiction.

Each month, on Mondays, the club will debate a single title, with the book’s author taking part in the final week to respond to our praises, or our criticisms. Over the first few months of the year, expect visits from Canadian greats like Yann Martel and Andrew Kaufman as well as new voices on the international scene, like Eleanor Catton and Kathleen Winter.

(Quillblog is puzzled about the “international” nature of Newfoundland-based writer Winter, but never mind.)

The book club is hosted by author and eye Weekly book columnist Brian Joseph Davis, and features poet and Toronto bookstore staffer Kyle Buckley, blogger and Penguin Canada publicity assistant Bronwyn Kienapple, eye Weekly staff writer Chandler Levack, and editor of the National Post‘s Afterword blog Mark Medley.

The first book on the club’s agenda is Gil Adamson’s Help Me, Jacques Cousteau. Discussion of this title kicks off one week from today.

Best of lists take a beating – but what about critical honesty?

On Salon.com, Laura Miller talks about the controversy over PW’s best ten books of 2009 being 100% male:

What’s at issue isn’t sales or even access to readers; this is an argument about prestige and critical recognition, an argument best articulated by the novelist and critic Francine Prose in a 1998 article for Harper’s magazine. Prose detected a greater reverence for books by men among the nation’s literary and critical establishment, which includes reviewers, prize committees and the institutions that bestow grants. She blamed this on a widespread if seldom-stated assumption that “women writers will not write about anything important – anything truly serious or necessary, revelatory or wise.”

Miller goes on to admit that anyone who’s had to compile a list – will feel an “awkward sympathy for the PW team”:

But every year we do face a ticklish question: Is it the right thing to gerrymander your list in order to counteract real, long-standing cultural biases, even if that means lying to your readers? What is a 10-best list, after all, if not a record of the books we enjoyed most over the past 12 months? If you insist on a list that’s ideally representative of gender, race, class, nationality (i.e., including at least one translation), publisher size (small as well as large), fame, length (short story collections as well as novels), region, genre and so on, you can easily wind up with, say, a list of nine books you kinda like and maybe one you truly love. That’s a tepid dish to serve up to readers, and not likely to inspire much enthusiasm, either.

John Updike dies

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and man of letters John Updike has died of lung cancer, at the age of 76. From the Associated Press:

A literary writer who frequently appeared on best seller lists, the tall, hawk-nosed Updike wrote novels, short stories, poems, criticism, the memoir Self-Consciousness and even a famous essay about baseball great Ted Williams.

An old-fashioned believer in hard work, he published more than 50 books in a career that started in the 1950s. Updike won virtually every literary prize, including two Pulitzers, for Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, and two National Book Awards.

Update: the New York Times obit.