Artist Mike Choi noticed my post on criticism and art the other day, found it interesting, and wondered this:

A lot of people are taking offense to the ideas that Scott Kurtz and David Kellet bring up, that there is no room for critics in the creative process, and that all criticism is to be deflected, not used to correct. A lot of those people are critics though, so there might be some motivation to assume that position, but it doesn’t make it wrong.

However, I will pose this: Why do critics do what they do? What is their impetus to sit down and write a critique on something? I’ve heard many answers to what critics do and what purpose criticism serves, but what is the reason that they take it upon themselves to fulfill that function, without solicitation or compensation?

Before I get into it, I do want to say that I wish the argument hadn’t been framed and linkblogged in various places as Critics vs Creators, because that instantly causes people to choose sides and throw down (or is it put on?) dueling gloves. I’m not speaking from a position of enmity here. I love comics. I spend a considerable amount of my free time reading and talking about comics. You can’t really do that and hate creators.

And there, I guess I kind of answered Choi’s question. I don’t even really think of myself as a critic, to be honest. But, I talk about comics and things in them, be it positive or negative, because I enjoy them.

I feel like all great art involves audience participation. I don’t mean that as in being involved in the creative process, but more in the sense of actively participating in discussions about, interpreting, and generally poring over the work itself.

I’m an English major at heart. The most fun I had in high school was doing those essays where you take a poem or passage from a book and take it apart piece by piece, figuring out what each part of it means and where it fits into the greater whole. I like Grant Morrison. Most of the reason why I like him is that his stories encourage this behavior. I liked Seaguy the first time I read it. I read it a second time to see what I missed the first time. And a third time. And a fourth time.

I like being able to converse about these books. David’s annotations for Batman RIP are a ton of fun, because they’re the outcome of these conversations.

It isn’t so much taking it upon myself to fulfill that function as growing into it due to being a fan. It’s no different than spitballing comics at the comic shop, though the internet allows you to put some deeper thought to it, and hopefully not say stupid things. It’s fun and hopefully interesting.

I kind of balk at the assertion that all criticism is to be ignored, not because of job security (I don’t do it for a living, it’s almost strictly on hobby status right now), but because that shows a frightening lack of foresight. Positive comments from fans and negative comments from critics, or vice versa, are all the same thing. It’s feedback. It’s letting the artist know what has been working and what hasn’t, and it’s letting the audience of fellow readers know what to expect.

I don’t think that you should have to listen to all critics ever, but I think that checking out positive and negative feedback and deciding what’s valid or not (a different scale for everyone, to be sure) is important in growing.

I’m not even coming at this from the position of “Ugh, why do those guys get to make comics and I don’t?” I’m not a comics creator. I’m part of a group that has creators and soon-to-be creators alike. I like being able to go to them and get advice/criticism on my writing. But, right now, I have so many hustles (1, 2, 3, 4, amongst others) that creating comics has been pushed to the wayside.

I’m coming at it from the position of “I love comics and need to talk about them with somebody.” My friend Larry Young has a catchphrase. It’s “Making comics better.” I think that talking and discussing all this stuff, be it race, sex, violence, or even simple stuff like the quality of work, helps to make comics better. It isn’t a calling or a job. It’s just something I fell into, or grew into, and realized that I enjoyed.

I don’t even need to comment on this joint. Found via Nah Right.

I saw an interesting conversation on the blogohedron last week. It was about criticism and its place in art. It started here, with Johanna’s review of How to Make Webcomics, which was written by Brad Guigar (Evil Inc.), Dave Kellett (Sheldon), Scott Kurtz (PvP) , and Kris Straub (Starslip Crisis). It’s an overall positive review, though she dings it for proofreading errors (which is totally fair and most likely warranted), but the controversy (or whatever you want to call it) arose from this paragraph:

Oddly, the promotion chapter doesn’t mention either press releases or getting reviews, both sources of free coverage; instead, dealing with critics is covered in the audience chapter. The author of this section, Dave Kellett, breaks them into four categories and says, “each one can be diffused or made impotent by kindness and politeness.” So the goal here is not to listen, but to deflect. And that’s reflected in his categories; not one covers someone pointing out a legitimate flaw or place for improvement in the work. In other words, he doesn’t think critics are ever right. (The categories are the person who’s mean without meaning to be and really loves the comic; nitpickers correcting “useless details”; the hater; and the troll. This section, by the way, was the first piece of the book I read — it’s where the copy I was browsing fell open when I first picked it up. Fate!)

Scott Kurtz talked about the review here, and says this:

I’m not sure how I ended up in so many tug-of-war competitions with bloggers, where the outcome of our match determines the superior position: creator or critic. But it seems to be cropping up again. There is a strange sense of entitlement, an eerie assumption of an unspoken working relationship that I am happy to inform does not exist. Why we insulate ourselves from the notion that the external critic can EVER be right, is because their critique is moot in regards to the progression of our work.

Click through for the rest of the post. I’ll have some excerpts here, but not the full text.

I’ve got kind of a huge problem with this statement. The biggest problem I guess is that no one has ever said this in the history of ever. If anyone has actually said it, they were probably a pretty terrible critic.

I don’t think that any critic believes that he or she is a part of the direct creative process. Indirect? Yes. Direct? No. Critics do not exist to tell you how your work should go as you’re making it. They exist to tell you how you work has gone after you’ve finished. My mental image of a critic is still that first bit from History of the World Part I. The caveman paints on the cave wall, his friends and family praise it, they cheer, and then the critic walks in. And the critic pees on the drawing.

It’s probably a bad example, because the critic pees on the work and I can’t think of anything that’s really worth all that trouble, but it fits my view of a critic. Critics come along after the work is done and judge it. Whether they’re judging the literary worth of the work or just whether or not it made them laugh, they’re there to judge the finished work in whatever form it may take. Whether they pee on it or praise it is up to them.

Kurtz goes on to say–

Think about Star Trek and the Prime Directive. Sometimes, civilizations take a left turn in their natural progression and things go tits up. Sometimes there is a dictatorship or a famine or a plague that is going to steer this civilization into trouble, but the crew of the Enterprise CAN NOT ACT. They can NOT interfere. To interfere with those hardships would be to damage the natural progression of that civilization.

I feel like this is a labored metaphor, but maybe that’s just because I’ve never been a trek fan and had to actually ask someone about the Prime Directive. Anyway, his point here, boiled down and hopefully not misrepresented, is that you can’t interfere at all in the creation of art because that will kill the creativity inherent in it.

Again, I can’t agree. I think he has half a point, here, but feedback is important in the creation of anything. The best teacher I ever had was my senior year IB English teacher who wouldn’t hesitate to hand you a paper back with “rewrite this entire terrible thing” scrawled across the top. Critics exist to point out what you have done that didn’t work. It can give you pointers on what’s succeeding and what’s failing with your audience.

No critic is going to, or deserves to, stand over your shoulder while you’re at the drawing board or your typewriter and go, “Hey hey, hold up! You should change this word here and that line is way too heavy. Lighten that up and try this specific brush. Also make his cape blue.” That’s not why critics exist.

It might just be the critics I read, but I don’t get a sense of entitlement from any of them. It’s more about reading a book and giving your opinion on it. These opinions come in a lot of different forms, be it free association, measured responses, retailer-oriented, rambly new journalism, fairly highbrow, irreverent, worthless fanboy/fangirl screaming at the heavens (too many examples to count), or whatever. It’s up to the artist to read these and decide which ones are valid and which are not. Some of them may valid, all of them may be valid, or none of them may be valid.

The trick is being discerning. Not everyone’s opinion is going to make sense. Discounting the idea that any critic can ever be right seems kind of silly. No one is perfect yet, which Kurtz seems to agree with, but how exactly do you figure out what you did right and wrong? I’ve had things that I think work that turn out to be opaque and terrible. I’ve read interviews with creators who have had things pointed out to them that they never would’ve realized otherwise. Alternate points of view are important.

It’s not that we don’t realize we’re making mistakes. It’s not that we’re oblivious to the fact that our work is imperfect. But if we play it safe and never risk those imperfections, then we’ll never grow as artists. Ultimately, we can’t chart our course based on what our readership or critics thinks is working. We have to go with our gut.

Kurtz seems to be thinking that critics exist to encourage (or force) artists to work inside little boxes and never grow. “Nine panel grids or death! That person better be five heads tall! Why isn’t this three act structure?” There are critics who do that, yeah, but they aren’t the end-all, be-all. Honestly, I don’t even think those critics are any good.

This is kind of how I approach reviewing. I’m not there to try and diminish it, so much as to try and spot what went right and what went wrong. Sometimes comics outstay their welcome. Sometimes clunky dialogue kills an otherwise fun story. Sometimes someone writes a story where two adults with superpowers don’t realize that they’re upside down until eighteen pages in. Sometimes you get a sublime mix of words and art like JLA: Classified 1-3.

If anything, the critic should be a help to the creator. It is something the creator can go to, check out, and judge himself. Maybe they have a valid point. Maybe something wasn’t as clear as he thought it was. Maybe he’ll find something to take away from it, maybe he won’t. That’s the luck of the draw, I guess.

Recently, I called Mike Krahulik to compliment him on a new coloring technique he had used on a recent Penny-Arcade strip. I opened my phone conversation with the following statement: “Mike, Ignore all emails about the new coloring. It’s awesome. Pursue it.” But it was too late. He had already read all the mail and had been sufficiently discouraged enough to just drop the matter. “That’s what I get for trying to innovate.” he said to me.

He was joking, but there was some truth to his statement.

And that’s why there is no chapter in our book on when to accept that, sometimes, the critic is right.

This is kind of a terrible anecdote, though. Kurtz liked something that Krahulik did, other people didn’t, and Krahulik already decided to quit it, deciding that it wasn’t worth the hassle. I’m not sure exactly why that is why there is no chapter on when to accept that, sometimes, the critic is right, but okay?

It did illuminate one thing for me, though. It made me realize that Kurtz holds fans and critics to different standards. Critics exist to give negative feedback and fans exist to give positive feedback. It’s a thoroughly false dichotomy, and kind of an intellectually dishonest one, as well. What Kurtz told Krahulik is just as much criticism as what JDC displayed in her review of the book. It’s offering a critical opinion of a work. The idea that positive feedback is valid while negative feedback shouldn’t be paid any attention is a terrible one. Feedback is feedback, whether positive or negative, and both can help to grow a work.

I’ve got a friend who just screened his movie, Yeah Sure Okay. It’s something new and innovative, both for him and possibly for movies in general. I know that he co-created it with that idea in mind. After the screening, he went around soliciting feedback. What worked, what didn’t, what was hokey, what was awesome, and so on. He did it because he needs to know if he succeeded at his goal, and if he didn’t succeed, what parts weren’t hitting with the audience. He didn’t decide that he should never listen to critics because critics will alter the natural course of his creativity. He decided that it’s important to get feedback so that you can be sure that you’re on point.

That’s what the critic is for.

6:00-7:00 The Comics Blogosphere— The blog explosion has opened up a new frontier for comics criticism. This lively (and inevitably bloggable) discussion features David Brothers (4thletter!), Jeff Lester ( The Savage Critic(s)), Laura Hudson (Myriad Issues), Tim Robins (Mindless Ones) and moderator Douglas Wolk (Reading Comics).

Wow. That’s my name up there. Let me go ahead and say thanks to my fellow FBB4l! gangster David Uzumeri of Funnybook Babylon, who recommended me to Douglas Wolk after being unable to make it to the panel, and to Douglas Wolk, who didn’t look at 4l and go “Ha ha ha… no.”

I’ve been comics blogging in specific for a little over three years now. I went to my first convention in 2007. It was New York City Comic-con. A few months later, I moved to San Francisco. My second convention was Wondercon here in SF in 08, then NYCC again, and then I went to my very first San Diego Comic-con and had the honor of being on a panel at the biggest comics show in the country.

Wow, right?

The panel was a lot of fun. We didn’t exactly pack the room, but there was a respectable crowd. I was slightly nervous before the panel, as Andrew Bayer can attest, but that disappeared once I got close to the stage. I introduced myself to Douglas and the rest of the panel and took my seat. I already knew, or knew of, most of the people on the panel. I’d seen and spoken to at least one guy from Mindless Ones, though I didn’t know Tim personally. Laura I met at NYCC08 courtesy of Jon from PopCultureShock, though I was reading her blog before then. Jeff Lester I knew from Savage Critic(s) and had been reading for a while. We lived in the same town for a full year before meeting, since I kind of danced around the outside of his social circle. Do I even have to explain why Douglas Wolk is important? I kind of felt like the odd man out a little– I respected everyone on the panel. What was I doing there?

(jeff’s a luke cage fan, so he’s automatically cool.)

Pardon any errors in here– I’m going from memory and I may have a few things out of order. I’m sure I got all the facts right, though. This is also all very me-centric, because a) the world revolves around you know who, b) I feel like I learned a lot, and c) I didn’t take any notes, so there’s no way to do a proper report.

We went over a lot of the usual stuff you’d expect on this kind of panel. Where we got started, why we do it, and so on. I got to tell the secret origin of 4thletter! and everything. It was a lot like #34 on this list, only with more fanfiction. I mentioned how Fanboy Rampage, The Beat, and the old Journalista were kind of the trinity of blogging back then, and it turns out that Heidi Mac was in the audience. That was a nice surprise!

(At some point during all of this, I called Gavin a genius and possibly my rival.)

We talked about being part of a group blog is kind of an involved game of one-upmanship, as well. Having a partner, or partners, forces you to try and keep up. You can get complacent when you’re the only one on a blog, but a group blog is a community unto itself.

All of us got on really well. There were a lot of laughs and jokes and everything was very friendly. Laura described herself as a “stats stalker,” meaning that she keeps a close eye on her referrals and stats for her blog. I won’t lie– I do the same thing. I particularly like finding creators who’re googling for themselves. It’s fun and interesting.

That ended up spinning off into a sidebar about how stats and feedback affect your blogging. Almost everyone agreed that you should respect the feedback, but not follow it slavishly or allow it to completely alter your style. Use the feedback to grow as a writer, but you have to be careful not to let it give you a swelled head or wreck your self esteem. Trying to pay attention to the criticism, constructive or otherwise, is important, but learn what’s useful and what’s useless.

Jeff Lester made a good point that I can’t quote from memory, but it was in reference to growing as a writer and looking back on things you’d written years ago and having something like an “ache in your soul.” Growing as a writer is vital, and sometimes that feeling is bad, but necessary, one. It shows that you’re getting better. Or have low self-esteem, I’m not sure which.

I mentioned that, in my experience, the only way to become a better writer is to write regularly. I’ve been press of some sort or another (games or comics) since 2003, and that’s led to me writing almost every day ever since, be it for work or play, fact or fiction. In high school, a steady stream of (fan)fiction and school essays kept me busy, too. It helped a lot, since I tend to immediately hate whatever I write thirty seconds after I finish it and am always pushing myself to do and be better. Pushing through those thousand terrible pages you write before you get to your first good one is a necessary evil.

There was also a brief tangent about trolls and negative commentary online. Learning to recognize a troll when you see it, and learning not to engage them no matter how tempting it gets, is basically a life skill.

On the flip side, both Laura and I mentioned that we have been guilty of causing trouble, due in part to our blogs being vanity blogs, for lack of a better term. Jeff and Tim are part of group blogs with specific aims, while 4l is me and Gavin and Myriad Issues is just Laura. We blog because we can, so a lot of personality and real life issues start coming in. If you’re in a bad mood when you write, that’s going to come through in the post and then you might have some ‘splaining to do, Lucy. We both tend to shoot emails to trusted friends before the post to check and see if we were going over the line, and sometimes that gets posted anyway.

On the flip-flip side, sometimes you just have to eat a blogger alive. Don’t pretend like some don’t have it coming.

Laura made a really interesting point mid-way through that piggybacked off something Tim said. Tim mentioned that he’d gotten his start in fanzines, which just aren’t a viable from an economic or attention standpoint these days. Laura, and myself, grew up on the internet. It’s helped mold her style of writing, introduced her to people, and opened up new doors. It’s a brand new age for criticism, and there’s kind of a generation gap (I’m not calling anyone old!) between the people who grew up online and who got on the net after they grew up.

I mean, looking at my life from day job to fun gigs– in the past five days, I’ve written something like ten blog posts for a certain game website, kicked off a new strategy guide project, edited five manuals for two different game franchises, troubleshot a few hilarious hardware/software failures (they weren’t hilarious at all, that was sarcasm), played a bunch of currently unreleased games, shot about half an hour of video and edited it into something interesting (and sad), tricked Gavin into doing a great PCS piece on Batman, and wrote an emergency (short) script for a game company.

This is my life. I love my life. It’s always interesting, always fascinating, and sometimes frustrating, but it’s mine. It’s different, it’s weird, and I don’t know that I would have been able to do this in anything but the Internet Age. I’d like to do more freelance writing, since 90% of what I do these days is a weird mishmash of technical writing and educational, but that’s my fault for not pursuing it actively.

At some point during the panel, probably before all of this stuff I’ve already talked about, someone asked about the role of comics blogging in regards to affecting companies and letters pages. All of us agreed that the blogs are a replacement for letters page, but without the filter that a keen-eyed editor employs in comics.

Any idiot, including myself, can have a blog and talk about comics all day long. There are an enormous amount of bloggers out there, and not all of them are worthwhile. Again, discernment is the key skill to have when speaking online. I don’t think that any of us said that they’d affected someone’s publishing operations in their day-to-day, but there had definitely been a fan reaction.

I came away from the panel kind of re-energized, honestly, and not for the first time that weekend. The blogging panel and the Black panel reminded me what I love about the quagmire that is comics and why I even bother with it. The answer is the community– there are a lot of smart people out there that I don’t know, but will one day meet via the internet, and then eventually in real life.

Case in point: Cheryl Lynn (who needs to check her email >:|), Pedro, Chris, Joe, Jamaal, Jon, and David from the FBB4l! gang, Carla Hoffman from Snap Judgments, and Graeme McMillan, who writes for every website ever, but is currently on io9. Add the entire cast of the blogging panel to this, as well. That’s why I do it.

This wasn’t on the panel, but on Friday night, after the Eisners, a lot of people came to the Hyatt to get their drink on. I was going to sneak in and go straight to bed after seeing Tropic Thunder (hilarious, and there is a post coming on that soon, as well), but I got there and at least three people I knew spotted me on the way in, so I kind of had to come back downstairs. I caught up with Darwyn Cooke after seeing him at the con earlier, talked to my San Francisco buddies, and spotted Laura in the lobby. The bar had just closed, and while Laura and I were talking, she said “What would you say if I could get you a drink?” I said she’d be my brand new favorite person. So, we go back into the bar, to a table, and she gives me a drink.

Laura Hudson is my BFF and my favorite blogger. Sorry, Graeme!

Black Panel & BET post(s) coming soon. I’ve got a lot to talk about and a lot to turn into coherent sentences instead of my chopped and screwed notes.

TSS Presents 15 Minutes With Method Man | The Smoking Section

TSS: So what’s the word with this comic book you got coming out?

Method Man: Huh?

TSS: What’s the word with this comic book you got coming out?

Method Man: (Laughs) It’s funny getting asked that, that’s why I wanted to hear you say that again. It’s called Method Man of course, named after me. Except for Method Man is in a gang of murderers who are descendants of the first murderer, Cain. My character doesn’t want anything to do with that lifestyle anymore nut that’s the only life he knows. So, in the outside world, he becomes a private investigator. He just takes the cases nobody else will because basically they don’t think the cases are real because they deal with paranormal and occult things.

TSS: So what was your role in the book? Did you just do the concept? The writing?

Method Man: The concept. David Atchinson took the writing over and Sanford Greene did the artwork.

TSS: What made you want to do this comic book?

Method Man: I never really thought about it. But when the opportunity presented itself, I jumped at it because I’m a big comic book fan.

TSS: Yeah, I remember the Wu-Tang had a comic book a few years ago. I collect too and—

Method Man: Wack. That shit was wack. I ain’t understand that bullshit.

TSS: Who’s idea was it?

Method Man: I don’t know. I ain’t have nothing to do with that shit. There were a lot of things going on I ain’t have nothing to do with. Like that wack-ass video game. That video game was garbage.

TSS: Wait, which game was that?

Method Man: Shaolin Style or some shit like that.

TSS: Now, back to this comic, I hear you got 25,000 comics or something like that…

Method Man: Yeah, I got a gang of books.

TSS: What were your favorites and what really influenced this comic book?

Method Man: All of them, really. I basically stuck with Marvel. I like some of the independent titles. I read comics like Evil Ernie. Vampirella. Lady Death. All those outside independents and stuff like that. Dark Horse Comics and Image when it broke off and all those artists formed their own company. But mostly Marvel was my mainstay. And any X-Men.

TSS: So X-Men were the favorite?

Method Man: Yeah.

TSS: So what was your favorite character?

Method Man: All of’em really. I wasn’t that much of a geek where it’s like ’such and such is my favorite character because he does this, that and the third.’ But I just love the books. I like the teamwork.

Shaolin Style was awesome because it was a real deal four player fighting game with fatalities. It wasn’t really all that fun, though.

Method Man, from the Black Panel (full report coming soon), on his comic Method Man: “It’s pretty decent.”

I love his marketing. I should be getting a copy of the book in the mail soon, so I’ll definitely have to report back with that.

RZA: Interview

I always thought the story of Bobby Digital would make a wicked comic book. Are you seriously considering it?

That’s what we’re doing now. We got a comic book coming. When you get the new album, you get a little taste of the artwork and the villains that I’ve created around the character. The Birds of Prey are after him, the main villain being the Raven. You also got the Hawk, the Vulture, the Eagle and the Crane. We have them incorporated inside the artwork of the album, as well. They’re also mentioned in the music, but you gotta listen closely.

In true RZA fashion, he peppers the interview with plenty of smart dumb quotes.

“You Can’t Stop Us Now” is pretty hot, though.

I am officially back from San Diego Comic-con. I’m going to hit you guys with a ton of posts over the next week, maybe two, due to the con, but for tonight, I sleep. And linkblog. You know. The easy stuff. I’ll have hotness for y’all later on, like why I’m a bad nerd, Who Is The Black Panther, Faces of Batman, and so on.

I’m hoping the Black Panel write-up I’ve got cooking is the bomb. I’ve got 3500 words of notes and quotes. No commentary at all. Now to turn that into something readable!

CBR has a writeup on the Women in Marvel Comics panel up. It really, really needs an editing pass, because I’m pretty sure that Robin Firth, Sonya Ovak, and Colleen Cooper don’t exist. Anyway, click through. Maybe by the time you read this, it’ll have been fixed.

The panelists were Jim McCann, Robin Furth (Dark Tower), Marjorie Liu, Sherrilyn Kenyon (Lords of Avalon), Jen Grunwald (awesome editor at Marvel), Christina Strain (awesome colors all over Marvel’s best books), Sonia Oback (Mike Choi’s colorist, among other artists, and i think his wife as well), Colleen Coover (she rules), Emily Warren (who I found in artist’s alley on Friday and talked with for a moment, she also rules), Irene Flores (who I do not know, but is also probably cool and is drawing Cloak & Dagger), and Valerie D’Orazio (Cloak & Dagger).

Speaking of Colleen Coover:

A couple quick things, first–
–Augie De Blieck’s Pipeline this week is really good. He makes a good point about the Manchester Hyatt thing– most things are owned by complete and total jerkoffs. The trick is to find your limits, embrace them, and don’t be afraid to speak up when things go past them. He also has a fun review of Mini-Marvels.

–Tor.com is the new sci-fi blog from, er, Tor. This post on piracy is dead on. Comics should take note. In a nice bit of synergy, Augie has tips on that in the link up top, too.

And the main event– the extremely rough copy of my first video podcast. I left off the URL like a genius (holla), and the editing is kind of an accidental bite of IllDoctrine, but I’m getting my legs under me. Enjoy the rough, and look for more polished joints later this week.

And if you see me at SDCC, holler at me.

I’m out, I’ve got exactly five minutes before my shuttle gets here. Peace!

Who should I be reading on the internet? I need to update my blog roll and RSS feeds.

Comics preferably, but I’ll take not-comics, too.

Jay Smooth has some dope advice for you if you don’t know how to talk about things like actual people, instead of like mobile talking points attack vehicles.