It’s well within Gary Groth’s power to solve his own problems with online critical discourse–that good criticism is hard and time-consuming to find, that it’s decentralized into different individual blogs, that it’s drowned out by millions of idiots, etc.–by rejiggering The Comics Journal‘s website into the kind of centralized, “destination” critical entity that would serve as the new-media analog to the print publications of yore that he lionizes. Or to The Comics Journal itself, for that matter. He’s certainly in a unique position to capitalize on TCJ’s brand recognition–as a name, if not always as an actual magazine, it remains revered among the kind of people who’d want to read the kind of criticism Gary supports, and hated among the kind of people Gary would want to be hated by. It’d certainly make it easier for him to find good criticism online if he published a lot of it on his own website. It doesn’t solve his problem with the Internet’s supposed inferiority to print generally, but there isn’t a print publication in the world that’s been able to thread that needle.
