Even while I was at SPX and offline for pretty much 48 hours, I still heard quite a bit about Heidi MacDonald’s essay decrying a perceived lack of respect for traditional character and storytelling values among today’s young cartoonists. Most objections to it have focused whether her arguments are supported by any valid examples of young cartoonists who actively dislike such comics, or whether she ignored many genre-based works that are respected and admired these days, but my problem with it is more fundamental. Simply put, why should storytelling and character be paramount concerns? That’s like calling pop music a failure unless it’s Tommy or one of Ghostface Killah’s cocaine-deal narratives. It’s imposing a narrative fiction or film model onto an artform that can just as easily incorporate the influences of poetry, fine art, music, freakin’ dancing.

Many of the new comics that have meant the most to me over the past three years–a time during which I’ve also read and loved any number of books by authors primarily concerned with story, from Gipi and Jason to Bryan Lee O’Malley and Becky Cloonan to Ed Brubaker and Grant Morrison to Minetaro Mochizuki and Ai Yazawa to Nick Bertozzi and Jordan Crane–have been primarily concerned with mood, emotion, and rhythm rather than telling gripping yarns. That seems perfectly fine to me. A conception of comics that invalidates Kevin Huizenga’s “The Sunset” or Anders Nilsen’s The End or John Hankiewicz’s Asthma is not a useful one to me, or probably to comics.

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