A recent TCJ.com messboard thread cleared up a lot of pre- and mis-conceptions I had about the inner workings of the Comics Journal, a magazine with which I think most comics lovers have had a love-hate relationship. Editor Milo George gave me permission to reprint, and thus preserve for posterity, his extremely informative post on the question of the Journal’s review policies in particular and “mission” in general. I think you’ll find it quite educational.
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There are eight bazillion reasons why the reviews we publish aren’t up-to-the-moment; nearly all of the publishers don’t send me review books in a timely manner — I generally get a big box of a pub’s latest releases two or three times a year, so most of them have been out for a few months before I even see them. Publishers often send review books to someone here who isn’t me, which means that I often get books late or not at all. A lot of the small-fry non-comics publishers who put out comics are amazingly tight with review copies — if I had a quarter for every time I’ve heard “But I already sent Fanta a review copy [not addressed to you],” I could afford to buy most of the books I need — which slows things up. Some critics are agonizingly slow — I have a think piece that I commissioned for the 2001 Year In Review that’s still inching toward completion [when it’s done, it’ll be fucking great, though] — some critics are good but require scads of rewrites before I have something I’m proud to publish. But most importantly, despite finally have a big enough wrecking crew to cover everything that deserves timely coverage, I don’t have enough pages to publish the crit I have in the increasingly claustrophobic two-interview 128-page format. At the moment, Gary’s considering a change in format that would get all the stuff I like — twice as much [thus much more timely] criticism, all of the columns, some comics, Blood & Thunder, Newswatch, On the Boards, Viva and my recast of the multi-interview format in each issue — as well as solve a number of sales issues involving cover features, which would in turn allow the magazine to cover worthy subjects that would be sales death in the current format.
That said, I don’t view the JOURNAL’s criticism section as an ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY-like source for comics readers to use to help them decide if they want to buy FUNNYBOOK X or not, nor do I think that people will “digest” a work and have no need for another examination of the work, ever. I think the JOURNAL should be dedicated to giving readers more tools to engage the material they read and new ways to view the art form, not tell them what to buy or give people something to pass around at a comics book of-the-month club and never look at again. For example: I’ve never read 1994, I’ll probably never read 1994, but I don’t think a season’s gone by in the last 12 years that I haven’t read “Seduction of the Ignorant,” Carter Scholz’s magisterial essay about 1994. When I was a TCJ reader, it was no hair of my ass that UNDERSTANDING COMICS wasn’t examined in depth for a few years; I was happy to read a few genuinely interesting essays about UC in TCJ #211. Most of them were good reads, they enriched my reading of UC and helped me to better articulate my thoughts on the book. [The same can be said for Dylan Horrocks’ essay on the form chapter of UC that was scheduled for the UC issue but appeared two years later.] I do my very best to shoehorn as much crit as I can into every issue, but I’m more interested in making the section [and my chunk of magazine] a satisfying, cohesive read, not picking and slotting the articles chronologically. There’s no expiration date for good criticism.
I really don’t have an overarching take on the magazine’s mission because I’m kept out of the Newswatch war room, and news is half of the magazine’s mission. It probably results in a subtly schizophrenic magazine, but not distractingly so. In the 4/5 of the magazine’s pages I’m responsible for, I’ve worked to broaden and deepen the field of magazine’s coverage — launching columns on manga, web comics, cartoonist craft, world comics and, fingers crossed, one devoted to editorial cartoons starting late this year; going outside of the direct-market funnybook field for interview subjects, like Sickles, Flessel, Bolling, Rooum, Herge, Panter, John Cullen Murphy, Fort Thunder, Keiji Nakazawa, McGruder, Griffin and Steve Bell; and doing what I can to run the best, most interesting crit I can get in the Firing Line and Bullets — to give readers a better sense of the medium’s big picture as well as show them the little details of the subjects examined. That’s as close to a mission statement as you’ll get from me at the moment; the rest is all run by instinct.
As for no review of DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL: I have a pretty good idea of what comics I want to short list as the books of the year. Until I discovered [this week] that the book came out late late last year, I had plans to name it as one of them, with a review on one of my best writer’s back-burner. With pages at a premium, I’d rather run a review of a work I know isn’t a book of the year now than run a review of something that will be a BotY now and then figure out how to cover it in the Year-In-Review section in February. Anyway, I have one of the magazine’s best writers working on a DIARY review, due toot sweet, as we speak.
We’ll have to agree to disagree about the noteworthiness of Grant Morrison’s X-Men, though.
— Milo, big honkin’ narrow-minded elitist