Once upon a time I frequented the TCJ Message Boards (yes, when people still had message boards) but rarely if ever think to read the website now. But I think I was looking for an interview with someone and came across this excerpt from  "We Told You So: Comics as Art, the long-awaited oral history of Fantagraphics Books put together by Tom Spurgeon with Michael Dean." 
Have to say that this is the sort of shit I still love reading, and while I'm just as interested in the accounts of the bizarre TCJ office politics, that may have a limited audience. While the juicy anecdotes of mainstream icons like Barry Windsor-Smith maintain a broader appeal.

[EXCERPTED]

Barry Windsor-Smith, cartoonist: In the early 1990s, Jim Shooter, Bob Layton and I were traveling to a downtown restaurant. We were crowded in the back of a yellow cab, and the chat was inevitably about the world of comic books. I wasn’t interested, so I was tuned out, thinking of things other than comics.

But then, the mention of The Comics Journal caught my attention and I briefly tuned back into the conversation as Bob snorted, “Fuckers!” with Jim concurring — “Those bastards.” It’s rare for Shooter to curse. I guess he reserves his expletives for The Comics Journal.

Chiming in, I said, “The Journal is the only real magazine we’ve got.” In that context, where Jim and Bob were openly hostile, my use of the term “magazine” implied an arbiter of taste, criticism and intelligence, like The New Yorker, for instance. They both looked at me briefly, and, turning away, Shooter’s ass tightened so fast that it almost overtook the speed of Layton’s gall bladder stricture — what little air was in the back of the taxi was immediately sucked into each of their lower guts with a thunderous stereophonic whistling sound. Following through, I said, “Damned good thing they keep us on our toes, right?”
The rest of the short journey down Broadway passed in silence. Staring out the window while returning to my private musings, I coined the ungainly term Reverse Fart.

Windsor-Smith: One summer evening in 1971, young Gary Groth traveled into New York City, under the supervision of his father, to do an extensive interview with me at my glamorously expensive apartment with a stunning view of Manhattan on 72nd Street next to the Dakota. After completing the tape-recorded interview, during which the older Mr. Groth and I shared some genial chat and several mugs of good English tea, Gary assured me that he’d got a wonderful interview and would quickly transcribe it for his fledgling publication called Fantastic Journal, Comics Fanzine or some such title.

A few months later I received a printed and stapled copy through the mail. Imagine my upset at discovering that Gary had bumped my interview to a secondary slot in favor of a Sal Buscema cover depicting an awkwardly drawn Dr. Strange — that totally stupid version where he had no fucking face. Me, the unwitting golden cum-spot of the early 1970s, reduced to an afterthought by my youthful new pal Gary.

In 1996, I agreed to a second interview with Gary Groth, a quarter-century after the first, this time to be published in The Comics Journal. The interview went OK, I guess, and this time he didn’t toss my cover for some flavor-of-the week pissant penciler. But — and there is always a but with Gary — the letters column of the following issue published only one reader response to the GG/BWS interview. “Bullshit,” said the letter writer. And presumably the editor of The Comics Journal, older but only wiser by the default of time, must have agreed. I always meant to write Gary a nasty note about that, but, y’know, small things fall through the cracks.

Groth: A reader wrote a long letter excoriating Barry and my interview with him. It was so hostile it seemed personal. This prompted me to write a vociferous response defending Barry that was at least as long as the original letter.

[NOTE: I thought these anecdotes would be nothing less than fascinating ton the genuinely good-natured mainstream nostalgics who follow BACK ISSUE magazine's Facebook Forum. And I was gravely mistaken. Sure many found it interesting, but there were vociferously bitter responses directed at BWS (how dare he disparage Sal Buscema?) and the expected amount of vitriol for The Comics Journal ("yellow journalism"..."hateful pricks"). And finally some ardent defenders of none other than Jim Shooter including one who found Bill Willingham's TCJ cover which apparently over-emphasizes Shooter's infamously cratered skin, more offensive than everything Trump has said and done in the past year. Within less than an hour and a string of hyperbolic replies the post was summarily deleted with no explanation. For me, I simply find it fascinating that Barry Windsor-Smith (an artist revered in the mainstream) would ever be offended having not gotten the cover story of an unknown fanzine created by a kid whose father drove him to BWS house for the interview.]

[Oh and NOTE 2: I had numerous genuinely nasty and insulting arguments with Kim Thompson that got as personal as they could get between two people who didn't know one another. Some on the TCJ forums, but most on the old Comicon Forums run by Rick Vietch. So it came as a shock to me when I heard that Kim had died. I think contrary to the general perception, Kim wasn't really the "nice one" out of the pair of Groth/Thompson...but he was a worthy adversary and I still liked him for some reason. And apparently he died of lung cancer...and now I am suffering a similar fate. The moral of the story being: Arguing on internet forums in the early 2000's gives you cancer]

DEBATING THE RE-INFANTILIZATION OF COMICS CRITICISM

NOTE: It seems the only criticism I write these days is in email to a friend. So here is an excerpt in which I wonder if there is any negative impact to sites like TCJ.com embracing superheroes and genre comics now in a way they never would have in their heyday twenty years ago.

I think Kirby and Ditko can rightfully and deservedly be celebrated. Their weaknesses, be it Kirby's ham-fisted anatomy or Ditko's descent into fascist lunacy are so well-documented in TCJ's past, that they are only brought up anecdotally, and almost fondly, at this juncture. Film critics cover all sorts of movies from the most idiotic comedies to FX-laden blockbusters to quiet  indie films. Why shouldn't comics critics be able to do the same? The critics you're referring to who only read and heap praise on superhero or genre-heavy books, I would assume are not critics you wish to read or respect anyway. But there seem to be others out there who can write knowledgeably about Kevin Huizenga or Chris Ware, and also about Grant Morrison and Brian Azzarello or whomever. 

Thinking about this after you called it the "re-infantilization of comics," I thought perhaps it's actually a further maturation. In other words, when there really were little more than superhero comics everywhere and nothing remotely resembling an independent or literary strain of graphic fiction (in the US anyway), TCJ essentially existed to rail against these superhero comics and their oft-delusional creators. That went on for decades until at some point Groth/Thompson basically announced that the war had been won, and in effect they ceased to be relevant in the critical realm (still remaining relevant as publishers). So the new generation no longer sees that need (nor obviously feels brow-beaten into silence as the TCJ fans once did) to endlessly rail against superheroes. The need for hyper-defensiveness as related to perceptions the mainstream has about the comics medium may have come to an end. Obviously the 'critics" who only and ever write about and slavishly praise superhero books are easily ignored. Those same types of pseudo-crits work in film, music, literature as well.

I get the impression that you're annoyed and/or disillusioned with whoever has bastardized TCJ (and you may be right, I don't know. I was feeling that way going way back to Eric Evans editorship, though A.E. Moore's "highminded feminist" tenure was far far worse). 

On one hand I understand where you're coming from and maybe if I had been engaged in criticism all along and witnessed some sea-change and/or hated some of these critics, I would feel the same way. But my instincts nag me as to why we can watch all these genre films and enjoy them for what they are (or criticize them for the same), and yet we can't do so for genre comics? There are a lot of non-superhero GN's in the bookstores these days, so this misguided perception that that is all the medium can do is gone as regards most book publishers. Of course the irony is that most of these GN's I see look terrible and incomprehensibly dull. Making the superhero and manga books right beside them look infinitely more exciting and better executed.

I Can Finally Start Tossing Out My Back Issues of TCJ

I have easily avoided reading TCJ.Com for many years now but I was intrigued as to why Peggy Burns of D&Q posted a photo of Kevin Eastman on Facebook. Now I know it was in celebration of the digitalization of one of TCJ's juiciest and craziest interviews. From The Comics Journal #202 (March 1998)


The former co-creator of Ninja Turtles turned rich and extravagant publisher of failed vanity projects and current publisher of Heavy Metal (which somehow carries on with Ero-sex comics despite the endless availability of prurient things online).  READ HERE

And for all the buffoonery of days past, Eastman is still a very generous soul. 

Paul Theroux: "Comics spell the end...perhaps of writing itself."

Paul Theroux is an excellent writer and I very much enjoyed his collection of short pieces in the recent Atlantic Monthly Fiction Issue, but...the man really truly genuinely doesn't understand or respect the comics medium in the same egregiously stupid way that so many authors, intellectuals and numbskull "critics" have trashed the medium in the past. The following is an excerpt from Theroux's latest non-fiction book, that is as seething an indictment of comics and its readers (and Japanese culture) as you're likely to find.



GHOST TRAIN TO THE EASTERN STAR

Chapter 28
Night Train To Hokkaido


I had seen Japanese comics books on my Railway Bazaar trip and was mildly shocked by them, especially in their images of crepitation and vomiting and preposterous sex acts. The singular depictions of farting and puking set them apart in my reading experience. I was reflecting on this in an internet café when I saw a man across the aisle wearily turning the pages of a thick magazine that was mainly comics, not one strip but a whole cartoon novel.

These comics were a greater elaboration of Japanese life than I had seen before, not going deeper but sprawling, producing a glut of superficiality. By contrast, the bookstores were not well stocked. Manga and the graphic novel seemed to represent a dumb, defiant anti-intellectualism, though there were plenty of people who argued that they were art on a par with ukiyo-e. But however well drawn, modern manga were banal or silly or sheer fantasy, hastily and crudely drawn compared with the work of the great printmakers. I found Hokusai’s erotic prints much more powerful, indeed sexier, than these ludicrous comics.

[At the internet café] many of the users were merely sitting in a plump cushioned armchair reading one of the fat comics books. But “comics books” did not do them justice. They appeared in multi-issue sequences, like Victorian magazines Household Worlds or All The Year Round, which printed David Copperfield in installments over many months. Nana was one of these--not the Zola novel but thirty-five issues of a Japanese cartoon character and her picaresque and often sexual adventures. Other narratives concerned tough guys, schoolkids, gang-bangers, mobsters, adventurers, sports, fashion, motor racing, and of course hard-core porno--rape, strangulation, abduction. Even with declining sales, from a peak of $5 billion a year, graphic novels in some form are probably the future of popular literature. --increasingly they are being downloaded to cell phones. Purely pictorial pleasure, undemanding, without an idea or a challenge, yet obviously stimulating, a sugar high like junk food, another softener of the brain; they spell the end of the traditional novel, perhaps the end of writing itself.

In a fascinating sidenote Theroux's older brother Alexander Theroux published his 2007 novel Laura Warholic through American comic book publisher Fantagraphics.
At the time Fantagraphics Publisher Gary Groth (forever desperate to get some respect outside of his microscopic corner of an oft-disrespected medium) said getting a novelist of Theroux's stature was his dream come true. "Literary fiction inspired the kind of comics we publish here and I've wanted to publish literary fiction myself for the last 15 years or so. It's been a kind of quixotic goal to find the prose equivalent of our comics." Also worth pointing out that much of what Paul Theroux disdains in manga--farting, puking, crepitation--are the very lifeblood of Fantagraphics stalwarts like Johnny Ryan.