Michael Peterson's latest comics column in The House Next Door, which is a fascinating analysis of comics as cartography, contains this aside:
The Best American Comics was established three years ago as a counterpart to other "Best American" collections of prose writing and has largely maintained the same roster of talent in each annual edition.
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I was digging through some old notes in preparation for this installment on an especially bitter night in 2005, after attending a gallery opening here in Chicago hosted by cartoonist Ivan Brunetti, editor of a Yale anthology of comics very similar to the "Best American" books. The gallery featured the same few folks; I hurled out some invective that evening, some of which I'm inclined to retract and some of which is still true today:
Brunetti is part of that society of cartoonists that holds our most public faces?Spiegelman and Ware, Chester Brown and Seth and Joe Matt, Daniel Clowes and Adrian Tomine and the rest of those who hold Schultz and Crumb as the binary star which we should orbit. They're the ones that sit at the Big Kids Table, and at this point, we're resigned to it. They're married to our roots in the daily and Sunday strips, and for many, that form is what informs their every creation, a view that cannot be disentangled. The comic book as a unit is the stuff of old pulps. To stray too far into genre territory, other than as an ironic metaphor, is to obfuscate your message and resign yourself to obscurity.
This all reminded me quite a lot of my own questioning of genre's acceptance by the mainstream critical world. After all this site was practically founded as a reaction to the predominance of quotidian, autobiographical, realist fiction in the "literary" world, exactly the kind of fiction that dominates both the Best American Comics and (usually) the Best American Short Stories anthologies.
With that in mind, let's take a look at the critical estimation of works in verious media, as judged by some well-known "best of" lists.
I've always thought that when writers say they don't know where their ideas come from, it's a bit of a cop-out. Ideas are everywhere; you write about the things you're obsessed with, or think are cool, or think other writers aren't doing right. It's not actually coming up with the idea that's hard, but executing it successfully.
To wit, here's David Moles' fascinating series of posts on coming up with ideas, in which he somehow fuses together Tom Waits and HP Lovecraft:
- A Change of Clothes: Sexuality, procreation, the human body, invertebrates, marine life in general, fat people, people of other races, race-mixing, slums, percussion instruments?
- Digression: the trick: Myths of the 20th century
- The Names of Towns: ?caves, cellars, old age, great expanses of time, monumental architecture, non-Euclidean geometry, deserts, oceans, rats?
- Digression: the trick (pt. 2): Lateral thinking
- Something to Eat: ?the New England countryside, New York City, fungi and molds, viscous substances, medical experiments, dreams, brittle textures, gelatinous textures?
- Some Weather: ?the color gray, plant life of diverse sorts, memory lapses, old books, heredity, mists, gases, whistling, whispering?
- Digression: the trick (pt. 3): “You have to make them out of things you’ve found”
