Anyone in the mood for a grotesquely condescending, often wildly inaccurate portrayal of the comics medium as written by a guy who wants us all to know that he’s just as surprised as we are to find him reviewing the things? Then check out this monstrosity by David Hajdu for The New York Review of Books. His rundown of Joe Sacco’s Palestine & Safe Area Gorazde and Dan Clowes’s Ghost World will make you want to chew your own foot off, especially when he mentions how Sacco’s work is particularly jarring since its disempowered protagonists are so at odds with the rest of comics, in which everyone is powerful all the time, or something. (You’ve really got to read this howler to find out just how smug that bit comes across, how patronizing it manages to be not just to comics, or even superhero comics (the best of which deserve much better treatment), but even to the people in Palestine and Gorazde!) Insulting not just to comics in general (and rock and roll while he’s at it) but to the brilliant creators whose work he’s denigrating by likening it to making a beautiful sculpture out of poo, Hajdu’s screed gets my vote for the year’s worst mainstream article about comics thus far.
Note: I see from his author page that Hajdu is working on a book about comics’ early days. That he is apparently, in some sense at least, a comics “fan” makes this dopey bit of snobbery even more inexcusable. Comics readers who claim that the best the artform can do is produce exuberant trash deserve a life filled with no more than the kind of comics that would prove them right. They’re like music critics (cough Rob Sheffield cough cough) who claim that the apotheosis of rock and roll is brainless pop stupidity like Britney Spears’s version of “Satisfaction.”