In his post on issue 258 of the Comics Journal, NeilAlien says a whole lot of stuff, most of which I can’t really comment on because I still haven’t seen the issue. (I have seen my letter and the responses to it; more on that later, except to say now that in a couple of cases, Neil’s not far from the mark about them.) But one thing caught my eye:
There’s a conversation of artcomics people comparing themselves to other artcomics people. Yeah, because that’s not as much of an Outsiders Beware circle jerk as needing to know Hal Jordan’s origin story to appreciate New Frontier.
Uh, no. No, it really isn’t.
I think Neil’s responding to this post of mine, in which I take writer A. David Lewis to task for conflating the overwhelming amount of information needed to understand most superhero stories themselves with the overwhelming number of alternative/indie comics titles. But Neil’s doing a very similar thing here–he’s comparing material present in a story to material compiled as backround on the story-tellers. Quite simply, that’s apples an oranges. A proper comparison to the feature he’s talking about, which I’m assuming is Craig Thompson’s conversation with Gilbert Hernandez, is Frank Miller’s upcoming book of conversations with Will Eisner. Will that book make The Dark Knight Returns and The Spirit any easier or harder to follow? Of course not. Nor will Thompson & Beto’s dialogue make it tougher to understand Goodbye, Chunky Rice or Poison River.
(A fairer comparison would be to say that you need to know a lot about Luba’s backstory to understand Poison River, just as you need to know a lot about Hal’s to understand New Frontier. But Beto’s Palomar opus, which by the way is nearly singular in the whole of altcomix, has the advantage of being written by one man and therefore subject to one man’s vision and rules, rather than constantly being rewritten and contradicted by a rotating cast of characters. I’m sorry, but in terms of comprehensibility, the advantage lies with your average alt-comic over your average superhero tale. Which of course isn’t to say that superhero stories don’t have their own advantages…)