[Noah Berlatsky:] I basically agree that saying, “Well, Clowes’ character shouldn’t talk about Dark Knight because Clowes was involved in a lousy movie,” seems ridiculous. I do have some sympathy with the irritation Abhay expresses. Which is, there’s a default stance in certain regions of lit comics land which is basically: “life sucks and people are awful.” Which I think is glib and overdone and tedious, a, and which, b, can be made even more irritating by the fact that the people promulgating it are, you know, fairly successful, and (what with various autobiographical elements thrown in) the result often looks like a lot of self-pity over not very much.
So…I’m wondering how strongly you would push back against that characterization of lit comics in general…and also whether you feel it is or is not ever appropriate to think about a creator’s biography in relation to his or her work in that way.
[Tom Spurgeon:] At this point I wouldn’t push back at all against the stance that says the default mode in lit comics land is basically “life sucks and people are awful” because it’s no longer an argument I take seriously. I don’t think it’s true by any reasonable measure and I’m done with entertaining the notion until someone presents the argument in a much more effective or compelling fashion than what always sounds to me like some angry, lonely, re-written Usenet post from 1997.
—Tom Spurgeon, in an interview with Noah Berlatsky
Oh man… if we have to get rid of everything that sounds like an angry lonely rewritten Usenet post from 1997, that’ll wipe out huge swaths of print media, music, the Internet, my own brain, and most of Noah Berlatsky’s reviews (well written though they are).