HOW BIG IS THIS

I remember seeing some awards show in February where Tina Fey got to do an acceptance speech. She said something about how it's really easy for anyone to look up info about themselves on the Internet and discover all the shit talking going on. She actually bothered to take the time to address specific bloggers by name (or "handle"). That blew my mind. Famous people google themselves / pay attention to every little thing random people say about them? It seemed like she was saying something that everyone else in the room (other famous people) understood but were too embarrassed to talk about. It seemed like she was cutting through some invisible wall.



It seemed weird to me to learn that Chris Ware looks at the TCJ mess board, or to hear Dan Nadel bring up things that happened on the mess board in a panel discussion (in an almost emotional way, even). The TCJ mess board is one of those weird things that everyone follows but pretend they don't or feel embarrassed by. It seems to show comics at its least healthiest, most awkward, and least honest with itself.

I wonder how large comics culture really is. I always thought of Chris Ware as this famous person - he's the one I'll bring up to straight world people if they ask what kind of comics I like. "You know the New Yorker, right?" It's strange to me how invisible comics are, how it still seems somewhat immune to criticism. I still have never read anything interesting about Chris Ware except from the horse's mouth. Will he get a google alert from this blog post? I feel like there should be thousands of blog posts about him. There aren't even any ways to frame how to talk about his comics. The terrible thing about the TCJ mess board is every debate around creators like Chris Ware always generate the most obvious polarizing dialogues, like whether or not he is "depressing" or "pretentious" - dialogues that were never useful to begin with.




While googling around for images I found this dream by Zach Soto and it reminded me of similar dreams I've had:

"I had a dream last night that Dave Sim was on the TCJ boards in order to defend himself from his attackers here, but he didn't sign on under his own name. So the only way anyone would have known that the screenname he was using was really dave sim would be for them to have seen the big paper signs he made and wrote on with pencil saying "Hello, this is dave sim and I have come to the comics journal board to clear up a few things" etc etc. But like I said, these paragraphs were not included in his posts, they were written on big sheets of paper and propped up on the side of the street where he lives. So no one at tcj.com knew it was really dave sim they were flaming when he came on the board!

That was part of a real dream. I had it last night, don't ask me why."




It makes me nervous how small the community is. If I write something about someone on this blog, it becomes "meaningful" to that person because no one else is saying anything. I feel like I'm only writing about comics because of this vacuum, that ideally someone else would be doing this. Thank god ComicsComics exists, and High-Low and a couple others. The mainstream press is completely unequipped to talk about comics other than fulfilling "niche" articles and treating comics as a conceptual "vehicle" rather than a world. ComicsComics et all find niches within comics.

Is there some better way to organize people to talk about these things? Is there just not enough comics to write about? Sometimes it seems that way, like there's not a lot of "new kids" to talk about or write about, that it's still the same old creators doing the same old stuff. The comics landscape reminds me of the empty streets of Colorado Springs. Is everyone the same or is everyone too idiosyncratic? Is there any agreement or is there too much agreement? Is comics criticism too gentle, too positive?

Bottom images by John Campbell