Pointless Man

Chris Ware's comics are playful, well honed, much honoured, and have been highly influential over the last decade.  However, their appeal eludes me.  His drawings, design, and layouts are cold.  So, too, his bone dry humour.  Frankly, I find his work boring, in form and function.   Intellectually and as entertainment, it offers me nothing. I feel (somewhat) similarly disconnected to the music of Charles Mingus. Still, when people tell me Charlie is a genius, a fantastic band leader, and quite possibly the greatest jazz bassist ever, said persons almost always know more about jazz than I do.  I believe, in this case case I may be missing something others key into.  I believe it because it is an oft held view among people who understand the medium and its history better than I do. I don't think that's what's going on when someone tells me Chris Ware is a genius .  More often, it's like people who hardly know anything about art praising 'the Mona...

By using superheroes in titles like Wanted and Kick Ass , Millar has brought the navel gazing and Gen-X-style angst of self indulgent, pity-party indie comics to what may loosely be termed a mainstream audience. This would be pathetic enough by itself, but it gets worse. Part of his popularity is based on dismantling the superhero (or supervillain, as the case may be) as fantasy fulfilment. Nevermind that this work was done with far more aplomb (and even subtlety) well over twenty years ago by the likes of Alan Moore, Frank Miller, John Ostrander, Mike Grell, Steve Ditko, and Howard Chaykin. Millar's protagonists exist in a hyperrealistic world where they remain scrawny cry-babies at heart, no matter how good they have it. This isn't deconstruction, it's embracing all that is wrong with nerd culture. Aggrandizing petty suffering and self doubt to such heroic heights as to make martyrs of geeks everywhere reinforces the need for fantasy fulfilment. Playing into and then ...

I am tired of seeing their work in alternative comics anthologies like Mome and Best American Comics . If those guys are turning out some of the better indie and small press cartooning, then the industry is in a sorry state, but that's still no excuse for printing such tripe. A page from Hensley's Wally Gropius story, where he exhibits a complete inability to draw, and a dry, unearned sense of overburdened irony: Heatley's illustrations suck, even when he's not writing:

Call it a compulsion. There was a time when I would have read any and every comic I could get my hands on. I've gotten better, and far pickier. Nevertheless, after coming across a cache of the much hyped Walking Dead books, I thought I'd give them a chance, despite the art, writing, and layouts all seeming boring. About four issues in, I began to wonder why I was doing this to myself. Eventually, it felt like punishment for some unnamed misdeed. Thirty-seven(!) issues in, I believe I can say The Walking Dead showcases the reasons there has been so little interest in comicbooks (as opposed to comic strips) in the American public. The series offers up everything that is wrong with so-called mainstream comics--the real mainstream being either the aforementioned strips, or else manga, both of which are more popular and widely read than adventure books published by Marvel, DC, Image, or so forth. I suppose this also explains its appeal to many comics readers, many of whom seem t...

This Penny Arcade strip has a much repeated stylistic error in comics layout. Notice the two panels at the left of the bottom row. They actually comprise a single picture of one point in time, without motion or change of perspective between panels. These should be a single panel. There is little reason for the split. The artist may realize this, but wish to keep the integrity of his unimaginative 2x3 panel layout--and that is the mistake. Bad artist. Bad. If it was just this once that they made this amateurish layout mistake, or if it weren't a widespread problem, I wouldn't make an issue out of it. But the ideas that panels must be consistent and must be so in this very patterned manner is something I see far too often. Sequential art is a visual medium, and an important part of that is composition of art and words within panels, of panels as they relate to one another, and of each page (be it on the web or in print) as a whole. These factors are what make comics unique, a...

I have always been of the opinion that Fred Gallagher, alias Piro, is a cartoonist working beyond his own abilities. He's better at drawing clothing than making his characters' faces look unique , laying out his pages, or writing. Unless the girls he draws have bangs, they all have the same exact widow's peak as every one of his male characters. He is incapable of keeping to his own self-imposed 3 page a week schedule. His hard copy collections have gone through 3 volumes and 2 publishers without him fixing the DPI settings so his line work doesn't look jagged and roughly digitized. His most recent material, complete with a page that went up late, then was taken down, promised to be up by three days later, and then replaced by something completely different which was also late, and is now promised to be fixed and back up some five days after it was supposed to be done. Then look at the confused layouts he's been using during this time. There's action going...