This and below: From Krazy Kat by George Herriman.

My response to Noah Berlatsky? I refer readers to my reply to his original BACC blog post. He only offers more personal attacks on me (adding “craven” and “toadying”), more of his painfully limited definition of all things literary, and adds a piece-by-piece and insulting dismissal of the individual authors collected therein. Actually, in some ways, this response offers a little less than his first post. Several of Noah’s complaints from his first post have disappeared. He’s silent now on the claims that BACC ignored online writers and superheroes as a topic, maybe because he actually got around to reading it? Or at least the table of contents? He also doesn’t credit two other critics for ideas he uses: Sean Howe’s misguided quoting of Dan Nadel on the context-free feeling he got at the Masters show, and Erin Polgreen’s disappointment at seeing only one woman writer in the book — two observations Noah failed to make on his own, but now does. Only one woman writer, yes, but I do include pieces on Satrapi, Lynda Barry, Phoebe Gloeckner and Alison Bechdel. For whatever reasons, I found more interesting women cartoonists than female critics in the 2000-2008 period. But there’s so much Noah to discuss, let’s get to it.

Since Noah heaped all those insults onto the BACC‘s authors, I can only say I stand by every one of those writers, for the reasons laid out in my introduction. Nothing about Noah’s invective has changed my mind. His dismissal of John Hodgman’s piece is utterly misleading. Berlatsky writes: “John Hodgman’s essays, for example, tells us that Jack Kirby thought of his 4th World series as a long completed work… and now folks like Brian K. Vaughn also think of their series as long completed work, and ain’t that something?” Actually, Hodgman specifically discusses the genre of epic literature in comics, something Kirby introduced to comics, that has taken increasing importance in comics storytelling. Hodgman means epic in the literary sense (Homer, Milton, etc). I have come to realize anything literary is a stumbling block for Berlatsky, because he finds it “boring.” The literary-epic-as-comics is specifically why I included Hodgman’s piece, and Berlatsky completely missed the point.

Noah rattles off sentences he dislikes in many pieces. He finally writes, “This is knee-jerk boosterism, platitudinous bunk intended to sell me crap, not to make me think.” As I found in his first post, Noah and a close reading of anything is a slim possibility. I wrote in my introduction to BACC: “Indeed, while the reviews reprinted here were originally intended as consumer guides, I chose them for the insight their authors bring to the medium via specific books.” Duh. I mean, super-fucking-duh. At some point, Noah’s litany of complaints all turn to his personal taste v mine or arise from his inability to pay attention over the span of several paragraphs. I can’t win the former argument and am done with the second. For Noah, criticism is a pose and an attitude and nothing more. I often learn things from counter-intuitive writers, but the key half of the word is “intuitive.” He’s all counter and no insight.

However, since he had to back off on the superhero and online arguments, he’s left with one whip word for me (aside from his personal attacks) “manga.” For Noah, the test of a book called Best American Comics Criticism is its inclusion of writing about manga. And not just manga, but shōjo, a popular sub-genre marketed to an audience of young girls. Again, I refer readers to the last column of Noah’s I tried to read seriously, back in 2007, where he writes:

Which isn’t to say that comics are (like contemporary poetry) unredeemable or absolutely doomed. Fort Thunder, which looks to visual art rather than to literary fiction, is great. And there’s a whole generation of potential cartoonists growing up who see manga, not super-heroes, as the standard. In moments of hope, I think that in twenty years Chris Ware and Dan Clowes and the Comics Journal will all be seen as a quaint detour in the history of the medium, and comics will be a hugely popular, aesthetically vital medium mostly created by women in a manga style.

Three years later, Noah returns to shōjo as his, at this point, somewhat obsessive litmus test of not only great comics but a good book on comics criticism. Seriously, how is one supposed to argue with a fetish? Whatever Noah’s interest in shōjo, it’s clearly an example of his mistaking personal taste for a critical standard. One of my favorite comics ever is Drew Friedman’s “Attack of the 50-ft Stinky.” I have never based my appreciation of another comic on the inclusion or lack thereof, of a 50-ft tall Stinky. BACC has a decided editorial slant towards literary comics as the major aesthetic issue in comics of the last decade (which it has been), but hardly the only aesthetic issue of that time. I explained in the first round that to me, “lit” is a qualitative term, not a genre. I doubt this point will penetrate Noah’s anti-literary thinking, but I hope readers here will make the distinction. The choices I made were not about subject matter, but what the critics brought to the subject they chose. When I looked at different writing about manga or anything else, I mainly sought literary theory and conceptualizing, no matter the subject.

There’s a few other complaints that just furrow Noah’s already over-furrowed brow — “gimmicks,” he and Caroline and Ng call them (see below) — that is, anything that flies outside a narrow view of what critical thinking is. That complaint I’ll deal with below, but you can also read Jeet Heer’s opening essay on it for this roundtable. Still, for Noah to accuse me of elitist snobbery toward genre in his first blog posting on BACC and to do now do a complete turnaround that I’m pandering to a low brow perception of readers just reveals how bereft Noah’s thinking on this subject is.

As to BACC, in my opinion, Noah Berlatsky’s responses come off so far as a low-grade contrarianism with an impressive gift for invective. I’m not sure what kind of idiot savant that makes him, but as a critic, that’s what he is. Since he has called me craven, toadying and contemptible, I offer the following. For all Noah’s braying about online critics, he comes off as the perfect Internet cliché: ill-informed, personally vicious, and intolerant of any idea he can’t understand or that doesn’t flatter his world view (which is a boatload, apparently). The only thing he’s missing is a glib Nazi analogy of some sort to hit for the Internet Hack’s cycle. At Comic-Con, I looked through Andrei Molotiu’s Abstract Comics. Noah has a few pages in there, as good as anything in the book. It’s clear his interests in sequential comics lie outside the literary. What isn’t clear is why he writes about work that doesn’t reflect his specifc tastes as if the work failed.

Finally, at one point, Noah actually accuses me of using this book and comics criticism to advance my career as a writer. Well, that’s the difference between us, Noah. For me, that’s an option.

The ad hominem attack is always a sign of the attacker’s weak position.

As to Ng’s piece, he takes a bold leap into territory of which I now believe Noah incapable. Ng actually has a point of view on criticism other than his personal tastes. To that I can only say, sorry our views on this are so different. A lot of attention has been paid to four words on the cover — “Best American Comics Criticism.” Not enough has been paid to, “Edited By Ben Schwartz.” Meaning, it’s subjective. The odd thing is that Ng and Noah both look at the word “best” and take it as an objective possibility at all. Seriously, I never thought that I’d need to explain that it’s subjective, especially with my credit on the cover. You know, think of all the times you see the word “best” used — Best Picture Oscars, Best in Show dog awards, Best American Short Fiction, Best Buy. The idea that the title is called a “lie” because the concept is subjective and not objective is, uh… well, like I said, who thought I’d spend time talking about that?

Ng brings up a good point of what kind of reader I sought. The book is aimed at a general reader with an avid interest in comics, a primer on this ongoing era of writing about comics. It’s perhaps one reason that Ng didn’t care for it. Joe McCulloch pointed out to his readers that they would have come across more than a few of the pieces in it. Yes, for the well-read comics aficionado, I can see the “been there, done that” effect would pose a problem . I worked hard to beat that, but not in Ng’s case, I guess.

Ng also understands that what you see in the book is what I was able to get. I was turned down by a few people who are planning books of their own and in some cases because of money needed for rights.

Ng brought up a single-page devoted to Judge Larsen, which also baffled Sean Howe at Bookforum and of course, the permanently baffled Noah. You really don’t get it? It’s in the section marked “History.” It directly follows Gerard Jones’ chapter on the creation of Superman. It’s the Judge’s decision in the landmark Siegel copyright case, a seven-decades-later postscript to one of the great historical moments in comics, one that helped determined the work-for-hire model for generations. You went all the way down the road with me that critical thinking can be found in history and biography, but you can’t see how the judge’s decision might have something to do with Jones’ narrative? I found that single-page entry a dynamic twist to one of the givens of 20th-Century comics history: The Publisher Always Wins.

Since Ng and Noah cling so hard to a Comics Reporter quote from me as the damning obiter dicta of BACC , I’ll go to the interview too, for my view on the forms criticism can take. Otherwise known as the “gimmicks” and “bunnies”:

I e-mailed friends for thoughts on non-traditional sources for writing — ‘zines, panel discussions, on-line list threads, anything where the ideas were of value. That brought me to Pete Bagge‘s Ditko essay, Darell Epp’s on-line interview with Chester Brown, the videotaped panel with Daniel Clowes and Jonathan Lethem, and the Pacho Clokey mini-comic I bought at Meltdown years ago. The Moore interview was up on Youtube for months and then they took it down. It’s the only case of Internet copyright infringement waste-of-time bullying of which I heartily approve — because now the BACC has it! I went to some obvious places — the New York Times, Bookforum — and the Updike piece was a barely on the radar intro he did for a Thurber reprint.

And then:

I didn’t want the reader to get bored, basically. Most “Best” anthologies offer a uniform set of essays/stories with various points of view. I wanted a lot of formats and points of view on the general topic of lit comics. A model I emulate is Strong Opinions, a collection of hilarious introductions, interviews, essays, letters to editors, and arch rebuttals to other writers by Nabakov. I love that book. My favorite collections of criticism mostly come from the music and film world, like The Nick Tosches Reader, Greil Marcus’ Ranters, Ravers, and Crowd Pleasers, Lester Bangs’ sketchy collections, or Manny Farber’s collections. They’re more accessible, less plodding. They have that same mix of reviews, interviews, essays, etc. I just read (for research on a story) The Bruce Springsteen Reader. That book is a pretty dazzling example of what I hope the BACC will be — and I’m not even that into Springsteen.

As to the last part of your question, it says two things. One, that a lot of smart people are thinking about comics in a lot of different ways and places.

So Ng, the point is, I wanted to challenge the reader on both what they think comics and criticism is. There’s a lot of creative critical thinking out there, not just in the plodding style you prefer and practice. Again, I very much appreciated Jeet Heer’s reaction to that particular formally expansive aspect of the book.

As to manga: Please check out what I said above. I was looking for pieces done 2000-2008 that offered literary discussion. That’s why Tatsumi is in the book, because that’s what he and Groth discuss. If I missed someone, I missed someone. Please post some authors for me to read, if you have people in mind.

There is also the question of my use of TCJ authors, or authors used more than once. Journalism 101 says the very inclusion of my publisher and other TCJ/Fanta writers looks like bias. But, it’s also done up front, fully disclosed. It’s an easy enough complaint to make, but harder to back up intellectually. So, now do some actual thinking: explain why those pieces don’t belong in the book. Why should Fiore and Groth and Phelps be excised? The Comics Journal has shown shown up day in and day out for over 30 years. It tends to publish great stuff as well as filler (present company most definitely included). Fanta never gave me a space limitation. Not one of those pieces sits there in place of something else. So tell me, why don’t they belong?

As to Caroline Small’s response, well, she goes to some length to separate the words “critic” from “journalist.” While I understand the difference in the purpose of the two forms, I see insight and critical readings in everything from history to academia to comics themselves (i.e, fiction). Please see my answer to Noah on why journalism is included past its relevant life as a consumer guide.

In her essay, Caroline relies quite a lot, actually totally, on Rosalind Krauss’ definition of criticism as a “paraliterature.” I see absolutely no reason to model this anthology on Rosalind Krauss’ criteria. No one should, unless they are Rosalind Krauss.

Caroline also has some complaints with my choices, which she notes, “But because of this choice, the book suggests that very little of the decade’s best criticism was written about the decade’s best comics.” Yes. History and biography and assessments of a body of work often require time to see work in perspective. The critic Robert Boyd blogged about the BACC recently, and summed up the my attitude pretty well. Writes Boyd:

What I think is most interesting about the book is that in his choices of pieces, Schwartz is laying out a theory of lit comics. It’s a theory that rings very true to me. Part of this theory goes that as literary comics grew, they made necessary a reevaluation and relearning of certain classic comics. For example, Little Orphan Annie and Gasoline Alley. Several of the pieces here are about classic rediscovered strips which seem to prefigure current tendencies in comics. (As Borges wrote, “Each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.”)

What I think is this: Much of the most interesting criticism has come in the reevaluations of past work that was once taken for granted or dismissed. Getting perspective on artists, reevaluating them, sometimes takes decades. Yes, what’s gone on with King, Herriman and Schulz fascinates me, if not Small. That Small demonstrates no interest in the historical context of this, or at least awareness of it, means she doesn’t understand how exciting, imaginative and historic in its own right this era of criticism is.

Caroline then conflates my choices into another section of the introduction. She writes:

The precedent for this transformative correlation between “serious reading” and serious history, according to the Introduction, is film’s New Wave: “Since 2000, comics recall the cinema of the 1960s and ’70s. New and vital works appear with surprising regularity, accompanied by a rediscovery of the medium’s history and classic works…

The problem is that Schwartz’s take on the New Wave elides how much this “rediscovery” was driven not by accessible mainstream journalism, but by crossover journals like Cahiers du Cinema, which documented a highly intellectual critical conversation among directors and critics steeped in the traditions of literature, art and philosophy in addition to film — and in fact, marked a break from film traditions. Cahiers was founded by the theoretician André Bazin…”

Caroline, seriously? A theoretician founded the magazine, yes, but it was always a journal that covered pop culture in a pop culture mode. As far as the New Wave goes, Small is perhaps best to stay away from Cahiers du Cinema, a magazine that specialized in reviews, interviews, and monographs — i.e, journalism — much like BACC. Truffaut and Godard’s writing alone undermines most of your definition of criticism. Its discussion might very well veer to the intellectual — as the Chester Brown and Tatsumi interviews I reprint do — but you seem to have read about Cahiers more than read it. Here, for example, are Jean Luc-Godard’s “Top 10″ lists from 1956-1964. Top 10 lists? Wouldn’t those fall under the heading of “gimmicks” and “bunnies”?

Like Entertainment Weekly‘s Sean Howe, whom Caroline most resembles in her list of complaints, Caroline dissects my analogy of comics in the 2000-2008 period as paralleling that of other subculture movements that reached a “tipping point” toward mainstream audiences and critical acceptance. She writes: “The critical and cultural moment in the 1960s, during which the paraliterary met high art, high art met low commodity, and everybody’s boundaries became osmotic, was dramatically different from the present situation.” Sean Howe provided a similar misreading/conflation re: Bonnie and Clyde‘s eventual acceptance by mainstream audiences and mainstream critics (which I disagree with all on its own). I actually compared the mainstreaming of lit comics to a long list of such pop-culture moments, not simply the New Wave and the ’67 release of Bonnie and Clyde. I wrote:

September 12, 2000 reminds one of several pop-culture pivots. In 1967, Bonnie and Clyde validated a decade of subculture and New Wave filmmaking from the U.S. and Europe to a mass audience. In 1953, Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March arrived, mainstreaming a generation of heated postwar New York intellectualism and Partisan Review café debate into one of the great novels of the 20th Century (according to James Atlas’ Bellow: A Biography). Jackson Pollock’s 1940s abstracts, the 1914 Armory Show, 1986 hip-hop crossover hits like the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill and Run-DMC’s Raising Hell — aesthetically, they have little, no, nothing in common. Commercially, critically, they rewrote the public perception of what was, until that time, subculture. In the case of Ware and Clowes, 25 years of lit comics — from American Splendor and Love and Rockets — went mainstream “overnight,”as well as the work of 1920s American lit-comics pioneers Frank King and Harold Gray.

Of course the circumstances leading up to these moments are quite different. It’s the subculture to mainstream transition alone where I drew the parallel.

For everyone who muddled through all this, I thank you.

From Asterios Polyp, ©2009 David Mazzucchelli.

I certainly have mixed feelings about being a part of this. I had my say in the introduction to The Best American Comics Criticism. Then again, critics of BACC didn’t much pay attention to my introduction. So much for the high road. Friends told me, “Don’t do it! You’ll look thin-skinned and over-sensitive.”

But, I am thin-skinned and over-sensitive. I also realized that, whereas BACC is an anthology making clear what I like, this gives me a chance to talk about critical writing I don’t like.

First let me say, editing BACC wasn’t easy. I meant it when I said we’re in a golden age of critical writing about comics, from history and biography to blogs and reviews — all of which I tried to represent. I tried for a sampling of the most interesting points of view on comics, where I learned something. Some stories, like Fiore’s on 9/11, reflect events of the times. Others, like Jeet Heer’s groundbreaking piece on Frank King, show a journalist making news.

There is also a lot being said about my use of the term “lit comics,” which has offended some of the critics I discuss below. “Lit comics” means two things to me. As to form, it’s a much better term than “graphic novel,” because it applies to both fiction and nonfiction. It also isn’t married to the length of the book, the long form “novel” any more than the term literature means only novels. It applies to War and Peace as much as it does a “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.”

That’s why I need to correct what I wrote on p. 12, where I conflate the term “lit comics” with the phrase “original graphic novel,” as used by Marvel’s Joe Quesada. Earlier, I offer a much more nuanced idea of “lit comics,” and it’s more expansive to me than just long-form fiction.

There’s more to be said about the term lit comics, but I’ll get to that in a minute. As to the critics who have written about the book, I concede a big point to Erin Polgreen at Attackerman, who brought up the book’s No. 1 failing. She writes:

But of all the essays in the book, only one is written by a woman. That’s a big let down. While Sarah Boxer’s piece about George Herriman’s Creole heritage — and how it played into his comics — is brilliant, it’s incredibly disappointing that it’s the only work of critical thinking by a lady in the entire book.

To that I can only say, I tried. I looked. I really did. I missed Nicole Rudick’s Believer interview with Adrian Tomine. Rudick got an insightful discussion going with Tomine, as she did recently there with Dan Clowes. Rudick caught Tomine’s unique perspective and professional position in this era of the “graphic novel,” and I wish I’d seen it. The other writer, Laurel Maury, has written a number of excellent reviews about comics for NPR, which you can check out here.

So, three women — that doesn’t make the situation much better. I found that most women who write about comics have the same bad taste as most guys who write about comics. As writing about comics continues to interest talented people, I’m sure this is already changing.

That said, I’ve had two reviews of the book that were pretty negative, one by Noah Berlatsky here on TCJ and one by Sean Howe in Bookforum. To those critics who liked it, like Vice‘s Nick Gazin and several blogs, I’m grateful. Especially for Nick’s opener, “You might guess that this book is a snoozer but if that’s the case you’re a presumptious loser.”

Today, however, it’s all about the power of negative thinking. Mine, anyway.

First, Berlatsky got quite bent out of shape about the title and why the specific dates 2000-2008, which the book covers, weren’t laid out in the title itself. Why not? I changed it several times. When it came time to finally title it, I liked it as simple as possible, and figured that the jacket copy and the free downloadable introduction from Fantagraphics would explain its context to everyone. And they do — at length.

But then, here’s where Berlatsky took it:

Of course, I understand how these things happen. Schwartz and/or Fanta wanted to create a book focusing on the lit comics revolution they care about, without having to think about manga or on-line comics or random comics criticism written 50 years ago by god knows who and lord knows who holds the rights. But they figured that a book called “Literary Comics, Literary Criticism, 2000-2008″ would sound like it was created by a bunch of boring, insular stuffed shirts who rarely peer over the towering castle walls of the luxurious Fanta compound. So they figured, “you know, if we call this Best American Comics,” it’ll sound like all those other “Best American” books, and people will buy it because they like Best American things — and, what the hell, literary comics are the best anyway, and only the best people write about them, so it isn’t like we’re lying really.”

I mean, I don’t begrudge Schwartz and Fantagraphics trying to sell books. Capitalism is capitalism…

I take full responsibility for the title. Fanta went with all the various titles I “decided” on, even announcing a few. Or as Joe McCulloch put it on his ComicsComics blog, “third time’s the charm?” Maybe it’s all that Canadian socialist healthcare I’ve read so much about, but McCullogh wasn’t fooled one second by my Yankee trickery.

Still, this is why Noah Berlatsky is so difficult to take seriously. He pushes things in a viscerally personal way, then dresses it up as an ethics lesson — all for a book he denounces while blithely admitting he hasn’t even read it. The publisher’s jacket copy, downloadable PDF of the introduction, and the table of contents, are available to anyone, anytime, for free. Free — so much for the cynical capitalists at Fantagraphics.

Yet Berlatsky still accuses me of deception. That’s a pretty desperate reach to get to his point, his longstanding dislike of literary comics (well, his definition of them) and a book he presumes is only about those he dislikes. He takes the title of BACC with such literal constipation that I’m not surprised he couldn’t be bothered to even read the table of contents.

As Berlatsky writes, “The best piece of criticism ever may have been about manga, or on-line comics, or mainstream comics, or may have been written, for that matter, in 1968 — but none of those pieces are eligible to go in this book, because this book focuses on criticism about literary comics between 2000-2008.”

BACC isn’t all reviews, nor is it all about Berlatsky’s narrow definition of lit comics — mostly defined, if I recall past Berlatsky — by his two bêtes noires, Mr. Clowes and Mr. Ware. A perusal of the table of contents makes clear my definition of comics’ literary cartooning figures is nowhere near as limited.

While lit comics are the single biggest story in comics in the last 10 years (with the exception of movies co-opting comics as the home of the superhero) it’s not the only story, many of which are covered (Fiore on 9/11, Herriman’s race, the History section). Finally, I’d argue that Brian Doherty’s and John Hodgman’s and Gerard Jones’ are possibly the best pieces on superheroes done in 2000-2008, and I didn’t miss them.

However, this is a classic Berlatsky deflection — arguing work down by proposing something better that doesn’t even exist. In 2007, I wrote him off for this opinion from his blog:

And there’s a whole generation of potential cartoonists growing up who see manga, not super-heroes, as the standard. In moments of hope, I think that in twenty years Chris Ware and Dan Clowes and The Comics Journal will all be seen as a quaint detour in the history of the medium, and comics will be a hugely popular, aesthetically vital medium mostly created by women in a manga style.

True, you never can tell where people will stand critically and commercially over the years (please, see BACC‘s Appraisals section for several such discussions). It’s even harder when one is as ignorant about Clowes and Ware’s backgrounds as artists. However, unlike Berlatsky, I have to deal with comics and writing that exists. I can’t offer imaginary comics or critics of the future to prove a point.

Berlatsky then pulls the same thing with me, imagining a perfect manga review that I must have missed due to his pet hate of lit comics which proves my book a disaster. How am I supposed to argue with that kind of hypothetical?

Manga needs a Manny Farber, a Pauline Kael, a Lester Bangs more than it does another great artist — some one to extol it with passion, wit, and knowledge. I don’t see that advocate out there. If Berlatsky did, maybe he would have pointed one out to me. I was refused one great piece by an author who felt that, on reflection, it didn’t hold up. I hoped to pair it up with Gary Groth’s Tatsumi interview — where Tatsumi explains manga versus gekiga in detail. Disagree with him? Debate that, but don’t tell me it’s not there. I personally learned more about Japanese comics from Tatsumi’s comparisons than most reviews I read extolling one over the other. Simply put, Berlatsky would be hard-pressed to make the argument that the pieces involving Elder (2), Ditko (3), Frank Miller (4), or the David Hajdu and Gerard Jones excerpts, only cover the lit comics he personally despises.

Berlatsky has other issues I’ll go into as they dovetail with Sean Howe’s piece on BACC in Bookforum. Howe writes most frequently on comics for Entertainment Weekly, whose editorial slant he apparently brings with him wherever he goes.

As I write this, EW‘s Green Lantern cover is burning up the Internet because die-hard Lantern fans don’t like the costume. (Nor do I. What’s with the big mask?) Harvey Pekar’s death is given a single paragraph on p. 31. Of course, Howe isn’t responsible for the covers or editing EW (the most comics-friendly general-interest magazine there is) but after reading his review of BACC, I can’t imagine him quitting in protest. He writes:

The road to respectability has been a long one for comic books; in fact, it’s felt like the home stretch for ages now. Despite all the progress, there’s been nothing like a canon of comics criticism. A few criteria for inclusion would then be expected from a book titled The Best American Comics Criticism, but editor Ben Schwartz tosses these aside ([...] but there’s no explanation for including court-case documents, Q&As, and comic-book excerpts under the banner of criticism).

I tossed aside any criteria for inclusion in the book? The introduction, on p.13-14 argues that we are in a golden age of writing about comics and each section — Context, History, Appraisals, Reviews, Interviews — and most every individual piece, is introduced. Of course no single criterion exists for so many formats. It’s not a book of only reviews or monographs. Why would Howe assume a reader wants that?

Well, because he’s used to writing for Entertainment Weekly. What Howe seems to want is the kind of handy capsule-writing at which EW excels. He reviewed Asterios Polyp and gave Mazzucelli an “A.” He reviewed Clowes’ Wilson, which he found “exhausting,” and gave it a “B.” I assume his dislike of BACC earns me the same damning “B.” And judging by the comments section of the Mazzucelli review, EW readers appear just as irritated with Howe’s casual reading style as I am.

He obviously skimmed my introduction, or he would not write:

And if this is indeed meant as a “primer” to the golden years so painstakingly defined, why then do nearly half the entries concern comics that first appeared more than forty years ago.

I specifically point out that BACC is not a Top 10 Comics Graphic Novels You Need to Read list. It’s about the writers. Comics history and redefining the canon is a large part of current critical writing, some of its best, which make them topical despite their subject’s age. Dispute that if you like, but the explanation is there. Howe:

An exaltation of Steve Ditko’s difficult and divisive Mr. A (1967–1978) follows a takedown of Ditko’s beloved work on Spider-Man (1962–1966), which has all the logic of presenting a celebration of Godard’s loathed Tout va bien (1972) alongside a dismissal of his adored Contempt (1963) as an introduction to the past decade’s cinema.

Again, Howe cherry-picks in his reading. Alan Moore’s lengthy discussion of Ditko revels in Ditko’s 1960s Spider-Man work. Still, this is where Howe’s thumbs up/thumbs down sensibility hits overload. The Ditko pieces appear in the Appraisals section to reflect changing and diverse views of Ditko: his politics, strengths, limitations — and then Bagge and Moore take opposite ends of the argument regarding Stan Lee’s contribution to Ditko’s work. This is followed by Donald Phelps’ brilliant dissection of Mr. A.

Spider-Man Writer: Stan Lee, Penciler/Inker: Steve Ditko; ©1962-1965 and 2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Ditko is complex. Dumbing him down is a disservice. Howe took the title of his own anthology, Give Our Regards to the Atom Smashers!, from a cherished bit of Ditko-era Spider-Man dialogue. Small wonder a view not within his fannish tastes frustrates him so. And Howe is a passionate fan, as his enraptured review of Roy Thomas and Peter Sanderson’s coffee-table book of Marvel memorabilia, The Marvel Vault, makes clear.

Howe also disputes my argument that lit comics went, or became, the mainstream of comics, in the past decade. He writes:

What about pre-Y2K successes like Clowes’s Ghost World and Chester Brown’s I Never Liked You? Were Harvey Pekar’s Late Night appearances and the 1982 movie adaptation of Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie not “mainstream”?

Now, this is where Howe actually has a disagreement with something in BACC, a definite improvement. But Annie? Pekar? Why stop there? Comics were born mainstream, as entertainments in the biggest New York newspapers 100 years ago. They weren’t treated as literature, though.

I argue that the acceptance of comics as literature, as a medium, is what made the decade unique. Howe refutes this with Annie and Pekar trotted out onto Late Night as comics’ Oscar the Grouch. Pekar — the same writer EW‘s Ken Tucker cites this week as a “cult-favorite’ in his obit? That Pekar took comics mainstream? This is Howe the EW writer at work, confusing celebrity with the validation of a medium. Perhaps it’s why in the photo run of Pekar, he’s seen with Paul Giamatti, the actor who played him in the movie — to make his importance by association, in EW‘s point of view.

There have always been artistic exceptions — Herriman, Arno, Feiffer, Capp, Trudeau, Spiegelman — they all caught the eye of the intelligentsia of their day. Today, publications from EW to Paris Review and daily newspapers cover the release of comics as they do books and theater, from cartoonists far less celebrated than Pekar. It’s because comics themselves broke through, not just an individual commercial success.

Finally, I want to address points Berlatsky and Howe both dwell on quite a bit. First, there’s my apparent dismissal of online critics for print critics. BACC includes print, comics, blog, documentary transcript, Amazon customer reviews, comic convention panel discussions, and a single-page legal opinion from the Federal decision on the Siegel copyright case. In light of what’s actually in BACC, print v. online is a moot point.

Berlatsky and Howe also perceive a lack of respect for genre comics in BACC. It’s their mistake to see “genre” and “lit” as separate, competing subsets of comics. Great artists transcend genre to create art or literature. The Western is a genre, yet it gives us art like Blood Meridian, The Searchers and Unforgiven.

For me, literature is a qualitative description, not a genre. It’s why I spend so much time explaining that term’s flexibility in the book and how it applies to so many kinds of comics. Berlatsky and Howe will have to ask themselves why they don’t consider Ditko, Kirby, Elder, Miller or Chaykin (all in BACC) as literary figures in comics, because I include them in my lit-centric book, don’t I?

At this point, I can’t help but noticing that the two writers who liked the book least knew the least about it. They didn’t pay attention to what I wrote, and spent lots of time huffing about… the title, the one “section” they did read.

Here’s something else they both have in common. For both Berlatsky and Howe, BACC hit a nerve. Howe writes of “…BACC‘s reverence for the label ‘lit comics’ as opposed to (one supposes) ‘genre fiction.’ The elitism goes beyond the subject matter…” Berlatsky has this to say in his creepy imaginings of the dialogue inside my head, writing: ” … and, what the hell, literary comics are the best anyway, and only the best people write about them, so it isn’t like we’re lying really.”

Elitism? Snide references to the “best people”? Perceived snobberies, rage at imagined conspiracies to defraud the good, simple folk — if Glenn Beck talked comics, he’d talk like this.

I edited a book called Best American Comics Criticism. Of course it’s elitist. Something about that very act just riles these two, that an elitist stance alone is the real problem with the book. With that, I could not disagree more. There’s good writing and there’s bad writing. I made clear what I think is good. And now, what I don’t.

[Why is Dr. Who so worried we might hurt some fascists?]

When They Kick Out Your Front Door
How You Gonna Come
With your hands on your head
Or on the trigger of your gun?

– The Clash, “Guns of Brixton”

Last Saturday night, BBC America debuted its new Doctor Who series, and Dr. Who certainly got his door kicked out. Sad to say, he came out with his hands on his head.

I was a Doctor Who fan of the 1970s Jon Pertwee/Tom Baker era, and I like the new doctor (Matt Smith). On a no-babysitter Saturday night, I was curious to see what a post-Matrix, post-Iron Man, post-I-don’t-know … post-microwave oven Doctor Who might be like?

Having a kid has certainly put me back in touch with my nerd roots. It’s not easy getting a pre-K into Kevin Huizenga when Superman is around. One entertaining move of Doctor Who show runner Steven Moffat is to make the series premiere as much Clive Barkerish lizard horror as it is 1950s BBC sci-fi. They did a great job creeping me out with Prisoner Zero, a piranha-faced thing hiding out in (I think) multiple dimensions, one of which is in a little girl’s house.

It was a fun episode … on the Doctor’s return, a galactic police force surrounds Earth and will incinerate us in 20 minutes unless Prisoner Zero surrenders. This, as they say on MacGyver, is a tough spot. The Doctor jumps through incredible hoops to capture Prisoner Zero. But … the Doctor never once asks what Prisoner Zero did. Nope, the cops flash their big badges and he skips ropes for them. Literally, he doesn’t ask why, just how high.

What surprised me is what an Upper Class Tory twit the new Doctor is. The Doctor, of course, is a Time LORD. Not a Time Lad, a la Noel Gallagher or the average football YOB. He also talks up his doctorate quite a bit (“I’m the Doctor!” he likes to shout) — I mean, he’s not a medical doctor, but a sort of physicist who insists on using his title at all times – so he’s got some status issues. And he works out of a police call box. An aristocrat, a preening edu-snob, a fetishist for the law and order trappings of government power — so of course he never thinks twice when the cops bark orders.  He’s got a lot invested in the status quo. Over here he’d be an alien Wm F. Buckley or George Will. The new Doctor even wears an iconic 1980s conservative bow-tie, as Will still wears every Sunday morning talking politics.

As for that little girl in the house, the biggest problem in her life isn’t the alien down the hall — it’s that the Doctor blew his time coordinates when she was 8 or so and left her waiting 12 years after he promised to come back in five minutes (with an alien down the hall from her, no less), putting her in years of therapy over the “imaginary” time traveler who abandoned her. By the time he gets back, she’s a sex-worker (OK, a “kiss-a-gram girl” who dresses up as cop or nun for “parties”), a classic self-esteem case with abandonment issues.  Sad.  I mean, compare the emotional damage done to this poor girl (actress Karen Gillan, as the Doctor’s new assistant, Amy Pond) by the Doctor with her boarder alien, who has the courtesy to block her mind from sensing him for 12 years – the perfect roommate!  There’s a total insensitivity on the Doctor’s part to Time Commoners like ourselves.

Could be the alien got here via an Underground Railroad escaping a concentration camp for piranha-faced lizards – but does the Doctor ask? He’s certainly been to enough horrible totalitarian planets. Instead of getting rid of the aliens planning to incinerate Earth in 20 minutes, he manipulates the Internet to track Prisoner Zero and turn him in – a creature who hasn’t really done any harm here except live here among us – just like the Doctor!

Maybe I’m too liberal for Dr. Who. Which is odd, since Moffat and many of the show’s creators past and present are currently supporting Labour Party PM Gordon Brown.

[Gordon Brown campaign ad featuring Sean Pertwee, son of Jon, and David Tennant’s voice-over]

Maybe they feel guilty in a Leni Riefenstahl way for foisting this Tory time traveler on us. Check out the trailer for Victory of the Daleks (above), when the Doctor travels to 1940s Britain and finds Sir Winston Churchill using Daleks as a secret weapon against the Nazis. This Doctor, of course, finds these heroes of the Left too vicious to use on the Third Reich (the first hero in history to pity the Nazis). I’ve only seen the trailer, but I’m worried the “victory” in the title may refer to Churchill listening to the Doctor and turning the Daleks on Ghandi to keep India in the Empire.

And yet, the Doctor’s suck-uppery to intergalactic jack boots got me thinking.  If he’s so right wing, perhaps the Daleks are not the horrid exterminators of All Life, but Socialist liberators the Doctor hates for trying to force him into an equitable healthcare system. Perhaps the dormant Silurian dinosaur men are natives simply tired of human imperialists.

And you know why the Doctor FINALLY gets mad at the alien cops? Because they finally push him around, like village constables stepping on his Lordship’s prized rose garden to catch a burglar. Once he turns Zero over, he wants them to kiss his butt for being a lord — and there’s even a montage of all the past doctors (a nicely done nostalgia moment for older fans) to emphasize his aristocratic lineage. Like he’s saying, look here officer, I’m the 11th Earl of Who, SO GET OFF MY LAWN.

I hope Doctor Tory has a great run, but the next one needs to be played by or Russell Brand or Lennox Lewis.

[Special thanks to Facebook Friend Jake Rosenschein for making the Gordon Brown – Doctor Who connection for me.]

All three parts of this promotional film can be downloaded at archive.org. The music is 1930′s “Medley of Paramount Music” and Ray De Costa’s “Whoopee.” All video and audio used here are in the public domain.