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COMMENT: Modern Days Yeah, I know I said I wasn’t writing any more columns on the train. Tough. I’m on my way back from Edinburgh, I’ve finished writing the couple of reviews I needed to get done in order to meet deadline, and there’s still battery life left in the laptop. So, another column written on the train. Reviewing is harder work than you might think. I’m finding this as I’ve started writing book reviews for Reactor, which of course, you are all reading. Rather more accurately, good reviewing is harder than you might think. It’s annoyingly easy to churn out a review that is basically a plot summary, and a statement about whether or not you thought the book was any good. But to be honest, that sort of thing isn’t what we need. It’s only any good if the person reading your reviews knows that they have similar taste to the reviewer. It’s by and large useless to the general public. As an example, I tend to pay attention to anything that Warren Ellis recommends as worth reading or listening to, simply because on any occasion that he’s recommended something that I bothered to look at (or already owned) he’s been dead on, for my taste. I don’t go out and slavishly buy everything he mentions, any more than I go out and buy everything that my friends recommend that I listen to or read, but they do get filed as “worth considering”. But then, most of the time, when he or my friends are recommending something, they take no more that a couple of minutes over it. Even a bad review takes quite some time to write, and is generally less useful, since it neatly spoils the story for the reader. So why are comics plagued with so many bad reviews? So many reviews that read “In this issue, Spiderman beats the snot out of Fred the Wonder Potato. The art’s quite pretty, and the story is quite nicely nostalgic. I liked it, and so will any fan of the Silver Age appearances of Fred” but at a length of 500 words and more? What we really need is commentary, rather than reviews. We need a critical vocabulary concerning comics. We need reviews that pay attention to the comics in detail. We need the ability to discuss whether or not a panel-to-panel transition on page 6 worked, and whether the placements on the splash page on page 12 worked, given the rythmn of the dialogue. People make their living considering these things, artists, writers and editors. Yet it seems that very few of the fans pick up on it. Or at least, very few of the fans who bother to comment. It’s not like there aren’t works out there that lay the groundwork for this sort of thing – Scott McCloud’s UNDERSTANDING COMICS, which I reviewed a while back. Will Eisner’s COMICS AND THE SEQUENTIAL ART FORM, or hell, the irregular series here at PI, “Behind the Curtain”, which is basically a nice digestible version of the contents of those works, in monthly installments. So you can see, it’s not hard to learn about this sort of thing, if you’re prepared to go looking. But no-one is really bothering. Oh, people do recognise the talent when they see it – the reaction to a well paced and laid out comic is almost always better (among those comics readers who aren’t spotty, 13 years old and obsessed with Psylocke’s tits) than the reaction to your average work. At the end of the day, it’s Alan Moore’s mastery of the form as much as his stories that have earned him the heaps of accolades rained down upon his hairy head. I make this comment having been unduly startled to find myself unexpectedly staring at a photo of Alan while reading Marc Atkin’s excellent Liquid City. Imagine my surprise as I turn the page and find Alan Moore staring up at me, all mad eyes and hair. Not what I needed while digesting my dinner, I can tell you. Anyway, back to comics. It’s writers like Moore, Ellis and Morrison that receive the accolades for being excellent writers. Creators like Todd MacFarlane, who is on record as saying that he “draws cool scenes” then thinks of a way to link them may shift books and buy needlessly expensive baseballs, but they don’t get featured in Entertainment Weekly. I’m willing to bet that with a more useful commentary on comics, we’d get more Moores and Morrisons out of the coming up through the ranks, mostly because it would make it so much easier to learn the craft of comics. Rather than having to go looking for the source material by which one learns to build a comic, rather than having to trawl around for the work that explain how it’s done like I did, in one of those annoying periods when UNDERSTANDING COMICS was between printings, aspiring new writers would be “raised” in a culture that taught them how to do it, almost by accident. I’m not asking that every review suddenly become a detailed deconstruction of its subject. After all, there is a place for simple, easy thought bomb reviews, for quick recommendations. At the same time, a paragraph given over to it isn’t so hard. A quick nod of the head to the sequences that worked and those that didn’t. As an added bonus, I can’t see that it could help but raise the level of general acceptance of comics. If some of the arty intellectual crowd realised just how much thought, skill and careful planning goes into a good comic, perhaps they’d be less quick to dimiss them. Either way it couldn’t hurt. And it might get rid of some of the terrible drivel that passes for comics reviews at the moment. Alasdair Watson, somewhere near York, April ’00.
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Thoughts on comics inspired by events in daily life. By Alasdair Watson.
