I've been reading a lot of comics 2
Picked up Douglas Wolk's Reading Comics the other day and I just finished it.
It's pretty much the best book on comics I've read since, probably, Jules Feiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroes. Both books are very personal takes on comic books and their importance to our cultural history. Wolk spends a good degree of the beginning of the book making a stand that calling comics anything other than comics (i.e. graphic novels, illustrated novella, what-have-you) is a classist evasion. In other words, if you like a comic book, and you're an intelligent, cultured, classy type, it can't possibly BE a comic book -- it's a graphic novel.
Good point.
He also does some deep dives on creators who have done interesting work, although the bulk of the authors he tackles are very well established and have been around for a while (a point he notes several times, with the caveat that comics take a long time to create, so it takes a while for a body of work to develop). I would love to see his take on Ed Brubaker, Brian Michael Bendis, Garth Ennis and the rest of the "new" guys.
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