Here's something that pisses me off.

Last week, I'm in the comics store, shooting the shit with my pals Brett and Sean and killing time on a Saturday before I have to go home and make a lonely lunch for myself, what with the wife being out of town and all. I've got books under my arm, paid and ready to go, but I hang around, leafing through the magazines in the rack at the front of the store. And I realize that the latest copy of the COMICS JOURNAL is hidden in the back of that rack.

My attention caught, I grab the thing and start idly flipping through, checking out what the Real Comics Literati are talking about this month while my pals and I gab about what we did last Saturday night. And flip, flip, flip, BANG. There, on the page in front of me, in black and white, my name.

Huh? you're probably saying, right about now.

A pull quote from a review I wrote a few months back. The guy whose book I read and wrote about used a quotation of mine in his ad in the COMICS JOURNAL. Full disclosure: it wasn't exactly the best review in the world, and the guy was obviously holding me up as the Moron Who Doesn't Appreciate Fine Art, but whatever. He made the comic; I read it and wrote down what I thought; he used my thoughts to sell his next book.

Nothing out of the ordinary there, mind you. Such is the nature of contemporary entertainment and its criticism - good or bad, the responses to a creative endeavor invariably end up being linked to (and sometimes referenced by) the work in question. Even so-called "bad" reviews, which have a special place in the hearts of the modern masses - movie critic Roger Ebert sold an entire book of his reviews in which he flat out destroys cinematic clunkers, one after the other, like shooting gallery ducks. It’s just how it all works, from creator through publisher and distributor and down through the consumer.

This isn’t what pisses me off.

What pisses me off is that I can’t tell my parents.

Which sounds very, very odd, I know, but give me a minute and I’ll try and explain.

I showed the ad to my pals at the store; they were all very excited, thought it was kind of cool, laughed about the fact that it wasn’t a very flattering review. When Valerie got home, I told her about it, and she thought it was a great sign that someone was actually reading the things I wrote for SAVANT. (Which is true, I suppose, in a very silver-lining kind of outlook. Val’s good for that.) She is so proud, she tells her family, and they agree with her that it’s a really neat thing, that something I’m doing and enjoying appears to be having some sort of effect, some kind of a reaction.

And this is where we get to my parents. I love them dearly, and we have a wonderful, wonderful relationship… but somehow, when I’m on the phone with them the next night, I just can’t bring myself to tell them that I wrote a review of a comic book, and the author of said comic book quoted me in an advertisement for his next issue.

I can’t figure out why that is - why I can’t share with them some good and interesting news, some little thing that kind of made me happy. I can tell them all about my job, about the funny things that happen to me during the week, about my new wife and my friends and their new wives and the amusing little minutiae that fill our lives. I can go into all of that with them, but I can’t talk to them about comic books.

Why?

I want to say that a large part of it is because my parents think of comic books in the way that more than half of America looks at comics: as juvenile, pulp literature fit only for prepubescent children. And understand: my parents are educated, literate people with a rich appreciation for mass entertainment. But they’ve got a blindspot for comics, and they always have. They tolerated it when I was a kid, growing up, but I know for damn sure now that they think it’s childish waste and foolishness. Because they’ve told me so.

So yes, I hesitate to tell them about an ad in the COMICS JOURNAL, or about going to a convention, or about a book I read last week that absolutely blew the back of my mind off. I hesitate to tell them about these things because I know what they will say. I know the kinds of comments I will likely face, the tone and tenor of conversation that will inevitably follow. I just don’t bother.

Pisses me off. Because when good things happen, you’re supposed to be able to share them with the ones who are most important to you, you know?

Except.

Except.

Except I have a very deep, very nagging suspicion that that’s not the real reason why I can’t bring it up.

The real reason, I fear, is that talking about some guy’s use of my criticism in an ad for his book as if it were good and wonderful news is roughly equivalent to bragging about beating up the sick kid at school. And I know it.

Here’s the thing (and it’s been said before, in these pages and others, so it’s nothing new): criticism, and particularly comics criticism, is largely bullshit. I don’t mean this to belittle reviewers, or aspiring reviewers, or any similar meaning that might be construed therefrom. After all, I’m one of them. I know and respect a lot of people, including those here at SAVANT, who read and review comics, who make recommendations based on their selections, who excel at the fine art of deconstructing and disassembling a creative work and are able to try and figure out what works and what doesn’t. All well and good. But to pick up something that someone put hours and hours of sweat and hard work into and, in three or four paragraphs, try and sum it up and then dismiss it?

You tell me that wouldn’t piss you off, if it were your hard work. Look me in the eye and tell me that.

Like I said, this isn’t a new refrain. Critics in every entertainment medium get this argument from someone at one point or another. Musicians deride critics as hacks who don’t get what they were trying to do with a particular composition. Filmmakers point out that Roger Ebert, film critic to the masses, has BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS on his resume, and God knows Harry Knowles doesn’t even have that. Comics creators remind us that most reviewers don’t produce comics on their own.

But we have to wary of falling into the trap of thinking that in order to criticize art, you need to be an artist. Becausecriticism has its place - at least, the kind of criticism that actually wrestles with the work, rather than glosses over its surface. It becomes more than just someone’s opinion; it becomes a detailed examination of the work and its underpinnings. It asks why creative choices were made. It looks for meaning beyond the plot. It may tear a work apart, but generally doesn’t do the kind of damage that a quick read and casual summation of a book does. It respects the hard work and effort that went into the work by exercising the same level of work and effort in the critique. It tries to learn from it, to understand. And at its most basic level, it should try to inform people as to why they would or would not be interested in sampling the artistic work in question.

None of which changes the fact that I’m embarrassed to talk about reviewing comics with my parents.

Maybe, I tell myself, I’d feel better about it if I had actually produced something myself. I suppose that’s true, on some level. If I had put my own sweat and tears into a comics project, I could consider myself at least a peer, someone whose opinion was worthy of respect if not appreciation. And I’ve actually even done just that , once, though I’d hardly say that was for public consumption the way this guy’s book was. But that’s a trap, too. The truth is, that wouldn’t matter, either, because then I’d just be someone who had done one kind of comic but couldn’t understand the complexities, the subtleties, the ART which was on the pages of this book I didn’t care for RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF ME, GODDAMMIT, and we’d be right back where we started.

So here I am. Someone read what I wrote, and in using my words somehow gave them credibility and validity. And I’m pissed off because I can’t talk to my parents about how good that made me feel, because deep down inside, I think I’m embarrassed about it.

I think I know what the solution is.

If I can’t tell my parents about something that I’m embarrassed about, I’ll do something I can be proud of. Something of my own, that I slaved over. Something that builds up a creation of my own, instead of tearing down someone else’s. Something that - hopefully - puts into practice the lessons yielded from deconstructing other’s works. I’ve pulled their works apart before; I’ll probably continue to do so, for a while, because I think there’s something to be gained from doing so if you’re careful. And so I’ll take what I’ve learned and put myself in their shoes, put something into the world that could only have come from me.

Maybe something else that starts with PAGE ONE - PANEL ONE...

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