Hey R.C. So, does that mean that there’s no legitimate place for negative criticism? (You occasionally write negative criticism yourself, so I don’t think this can be what you mean, so I must be misunderstanding.)

I also wonder…what in your view is the legitimate purpose of art? And if art can do things other than enhance appreciation of other art, why shouldn’t criticism be able to do those other things as well? Or do you also feel that art is primarily self-indulgence, and therefore should not be taken all that seriously (though that doesn’t seem right if you think that we should be enhancing appreciation of art….)

Even what you describe as the critic’s self-indulgence is a variation on enhancing appreciation. The act of writing criticism enhances any critic’s appreciation, sometimes of the work at hand, and sometimes just of art or the artform in general. I agree that’s enjoyment, but it’s not mere diversion. It’s pleasure, a particularly human pleasure, and I think the pleasure of art is a high-enough purpose. It’s not the fight against human trafficking, but it’s also not entirely indulgent.

It seems to me that there are simple pleasures and luxurious pleasures, and art (and criticism) are luxurious, complicated pleasures, with many facets and permutations and possibilities. So are our options here really limited to Things that are Matters of Life and Death and pure self-indulgent diversion?

Not that you meant that. It’s just that there’s a real danger in using the term “enjoyment” to describe the work of the thoughtful critic, regardless of approach, who takes the time to engage in that conversation you describe. It can too easily be equated with the passive, simple “enjoyment” of someone who pays their $10 to sit in the theater and watch a slapstick comedy. Thinking of criticism like that really seems like the wrong way to go.

Let’s maybe leave Trilling out of the equation: Kael also doesn’t generally craft the type of essay that Sale wrote and called for either; she rarely “quotes” from the movies she’s writing about and her reviews are full of observations and history. But she does not get to the point — I’m sure intentionally, given that she is writing primarily reviews — where she’s presenting both a reading of the movie and some big thesis about the context, the way Sale did in his essay on Trilling. Sale is more like Trilling than Kael: I called this “more intellectual” earlier and that still seems right to me, not more intelligent, but more intellectual. More concerned with big ideas, transferrable ideas, less concerned with readings and reviews. Not unconcerned but less concerned.

In light of your post I feel like I should say I don’t think Sale is more academic than Kael. Trilling is more academic than Kael. But Sale really isn’t (at least in that essay): that’s an immensely readable essay from a periodical, not a “journal.” And yet it has a conceptual bite to it that Kael lacks: she bites, of course, but she bites in a very reactive, passionate way, not the “calm and measured” way that intellectuals tend to use. (Sale uses those words, I believe, to describe Trilling at his best.)

This is the stratification I’m talking about: Charles Hatfield’s essays are not impenetrable piles of academic jargon. The Craig Fischer essay that Noah linked to is also not “academic” in any perjorative or exclusionary sense. But those types of essays were not included in BACC, because there is a strong preference for a type of primarily “journalistic” writing, whether the models are Kael or the volumes Ben mentioned in his Comics Reporter interview, that rarely attempts, for example, to deploy a metaphor the way Sale used “centrality”, or to work out the trajectory of a concept like Trilling did for authenticity.

That doesn’t make the works of cultural journalism that are included “bad criticism.” (They might or might not be, but not for that reason.) It makes the diversity of writing in BACC limited. I think that limitation has to do with the limited embrace of (non-academic) intellectualism among critics. Some critics embrace academia. Other critics embrace whatever we want to end up calling Kael: “intelligent journalism” maybe? But very few people work in a synthetic mode. Picking Kael over Trilling in all instances and for all purposes is narrow; there are more ways to recognize Trilling’s limitations and avoid them than to create a class of “academics” that sweeps up everybody who won’t say that spirit matters more than ideas. We can debate the semantics, but the suspicion of academic writing tends to sweep up “academics” who do in fact write like “critics” and who are not guilty of the excesses of Trilling, but who are more conceptually ambitious in their thinking and writing than people whose priorities are more journalistic. It seems wrong that they should be excluded, but at the very least, it seems like we should expect to understand the reasons for their exclusion as something more than subjective caprice.

Gary’s writing less on comics is a tremendous loss. (His piece on Strangers on a Train for tcj.com is worth a read, though, if you haven’t.) Maybe he’ll get less busy and write on film more for us. So sure, he and the critical writing he cultivated at the journal set up an amazing critical foundation. (I’m a bigger Harvey fan than Fiore; his piece on Monument Valley is my favorite thing I’ve read since I started paying attention.) But I’m uncomfortable with saying that the existing work shows “what comics criticism is capable of.” Kill your idols a little bit here; can’t we really not pick up where those guys have left off and do even better? Isn’t that sort of what Sale is doing that makes that piece so great?

I’d still like to see a “Best Criticism from The Comics Journal” book.

As for who is writing comics criticism at the level of Roger Sale? Perhaps no one, but there are some who come close. I’m thinking of Charles Hatfield (in his book on Alternative Comics and perhaps his much-anticipated Kirby book) as well as some of the essays in The Comics of Chris Ware book (I’m thinking of David M. Ball’s essay). I also think some of Gary Groth’s best essays, like the one on Eisner, or R. Fiore’s best essays, like his overview of Crumb’s career, show what comics criticism is capable of.