With my apologies to, well, just about everybody, but especially you know who.
At first the infant,/Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
The nascent critic encounters something — it could be a mainstream superhero movie, a particular comic strip, a manga that was the source for a popular anime, an alt-comic lent by a girlfriend or boyfriend — that inspires a great enthusiasm for the comics medium. He or she might attend a convention, start visiting a local comic shop, read webcomics regularly, pay off the fines on his or her library card, or drape himself or herself across the aisle at Barnes & Noble, devouring works at greedy pace.
Then, the whining schoolboy with his satchel/And shining morning face
Perhaps this lady's or gentleman's enthusiasm for the medium is so great, he or she wishes to apply some form of theory (gender/queer/literary/media studies, philosophy, etc.) he or she learned in school. If still in college, he or she might write a paper/thesis/dissertation on Kant and Masamune Shirow's
Ghost in the Shell, or The Phantom Zone and Postcolonialism, Althusserian Interpolation and Stan Lee's Soapbox, and so on and so forth. [1]
And then the lover,/Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad/Made to his mistress' eyebrow.
Perhaps he or she wishes to talk about comics outside of an academic framework, or perhaps he or she is an autodidact. Just like someone in the honeymoon phase of a relationship in which he or she just can't stop talking about his or her significant other, the critic may start a blog, write in to a magazine, or social network or Twitter about what he or she is reading. This is the evangelical phase, in which he or she thinks that everyone should be reading comics. He or she might spend a lot of time pondering "magic bullets" — i.e., what comics will get his or her girlfriend/boyfriend/parents/neighbor/third-grade schoolteacher hooked. Or, if emo-inclined, he or she can have a co-dependent, tortured, or just plain abusive relationship with the medium, i.e. — comics ruined my life, but I just can't stop buying
Aquafemforce every Wednesday, or buying volumes of a manga that hasn't had any plot progression or character development or been funny for nine volumes, or keep checking a webcomic that hasn't updated in many months, etc.
Then a soldier,/Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,/Jealous in honour, sudden, and quick in quarrel
Everyone is familiar with this phase in its various forms: passionate defense of one's favorite superheroes, even (and especially) from those currently cartooning them, leading to message-board brawling; the realization that it's easy to snark crappy comics, of which there are legion in all genres and from all countries; long, slightly combative conversations with relatives about how even the
New York Times literary establishment has embraced the medium; railing against the current comics (and comics criticism) establishment. This is also the phase in which the danger of style over substance looms, if a critic becomes more concerned with flashy, rather than solid, writing.
And then the justice/In fair round belly, with good capon lin'd/With eyes severe,
The critic may become more selective at this point. If buzz is a factor, he or she might consider the source. He or she will start evaluating what he or she is willing to spend his or her money on/ time reading with a glance and a flip. He or she might start questioning himself or herself as to whether he or she has anything fresh or insightful to add to the discussion of that comic, or if his or her criticism is sufficiently rigorous. He or she might become more serious about the medium, running a website that aggregates bloggers, or perhaps write a book. Conversely, he or she might even abandon comics-reading for a time, for various outside factors — time, money, family responsibilities — or simply from lack of interest.
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,/Turning again towards childish treble, pipes/And whistles in his sound.
Here there are the obvious perils, in any form of endeavor, really, of hacking it out or burning out. Nostalgia, to the point where it hinders the development of genres and the medium as a whole, is something to guard against (though very few critics are able to avoid it entirely: I'm certainly unable): the same can be said of comics criticism in the form of "back in my day," or, in Internet-diction, "kids, get off my lawn." (That's not to say that comics history or older comics are irrelevant, rather that uncritically sentimentalizing it/them is not fruitful.) Nostalgia is a powerful force, however, and can keep people reading and writing about comics for a long, long time. It can also act as a hook, luring people back (with the caveat that those thus lured have a snowball's chance of understanding what in the hell they've come back to).
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
I find older critics have a sort of freedom. They no longer worry about angering the powers that be, so, instead of being Angry Young Men and Women, their barbs become more pointed, and, freed from the pressures weighing in on the current buzz book, they just write about whatever strikes them, from whatever decade. Strangely, they are often less curmudgeonly than their younger counterparts, and tend to appreciate, rather than gush in the way that younger critics do. Perhaps because the act of reading comics becomes more physically demanding, the critic seems to reach inward instead of outward, engaging less in dialogue with his or her peers. There are pitfalls to this, such as repetition and rambling (a hazard at any stage, but probably more so here), but also the potential for a greater depth of insight to which only someone who has spent his or her lifetime thinking about comics has access.
Notes:
[1] Two of these I made up off the top of my head. One I actually wrote. A couple I made up I couldn't use, because somebody had already written them.
Image credits:
Shakespeare: From Romeo & Juliet [©2007 Esther Pearl Watson]
Zulli: From "The Daughter of Owls" in Creatures of the Night, written by Neil Gaiman and drawn by Michael Zulli [text ©2004 Neil Gaiman, art ©2004 Michael Zulli]
Vocab: From "Mano" by Scott Morse in the anthology Four Letter Worlds [©2004 Scott Morse]
Narbonic: From Narbonic Vol. 1 [©2003 Shaenon K. Garrity]
Kristy Valenti currently works for The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, Inc.
Uncharted Territory is © Kristy Valenti, 2008
