I know I’ve been uncharacteristically harsh on fanboys lately, seeing as how I’m pretty much a fanboy myself, at least insofar as I still read and enjoy a good many superhero comics. But I think that just as I’ll argue passionately that superhero comics are not automatically junk–or automatically junk provided no one named Kirby, Ditko, Cole, or Moore was involved with them–I think it’s equally important to lambaste, mock, excoriate, ridicule, and otherwise make life unpleasant for people who read only superhero comics, or comics from superhero publishers, and have the audacity to claim they “like comics.” Besides the fact that you’re doing yourself a tremendous disservice if you’re not reading more of the brilliant material that’s out there, you’re also doing actual comics fans a disservice by making us look stupid by association–by, I don’t know, saying that Outsiders #2 was the best comic to come out in a given week (thanks to ADD for pointing that out), or by trying to get your wife into comics by giving her a copy of Trouble as an example of comics with multi-dimensional characters. These are examples of either appalling ignorance or abyssmal taste, and I don’t think we (all comics readers, and this goes double for comics readers with blogs) should brook either of them. No, I’m not expecting everyone with JLA/Avengers on their pull list to run out and buy copies of Teratoid Heights, but going a little further afield than an Eye of the Storm book (or, for those truly radical types, Strangers in Paradise) is the least we should expect out of comics “journalists.”
What’s funny about my increasingly opinionated takes on comics is that a) I make my living, at least in part, dealing with comics companies and creators for A&F; b) I’m working pretty hard at becoming a comics creator myself. A while back I decided that I wasn’t going to ever put any of my comics opinions up for public consumption, because hey, if I were an accountant, I couldn’t go around talking about how much the partners at my firm suck in the pages of the CPA Journal. But at a certain point I realized I care too damn much about comics, and about my own artistic/creative/critical integrity, to soft-pedal this stuff. I’d like to think that most comics pros would appreciate a little tough love, since it shows you respect them enough to tell them the truth about their books; if Marvel’s drive to recruit comics journalists as writers for their Epic line is any indication, they might even believe you really do know what you’re talking about when it comes to what makes a good comic. Let’s hope this really is the case, for comics’ sake.