Now the New York Times gets into the running, with this embarassingly bad look at the industry by Dana Jennings. Once again, we’re presented with ridiculously classist notion that the best comics can do is stoopid popsploitation; once again, we’re treated to the glaring inaccuracies that only lazy NYT reporting can produce (this sounds like a minor point, but the Hulk really doesn’t say “Hulk smash!” anymore); unlike his condescending compartriot Dan Rajdu over at the New York Review of Books, however, Jennings rejects the notion that there’s only been three or four good comic books in the history of mankind–in favor of one-upping him by completely ignoring any comic with any kind of ambition whatsoever.
The layman can’t be blamed for thinking that most comics are stupid–walk into the average comic shop, and most comics you see are stupid. But for the love of Pete, this is the newspaper of record, at least when they’re not just waging vendettas and making stuff up. Shouldn’t we expect their reporting to be at least as accurate as, say, Jim Lee’s sense of anatomy?