Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean | 
 enlarge | Author: Douglas Wolk
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Category: Book
List Price: $16.95
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Rating:  12 reviews
Sales Rank: 430011
Media: Paperback
Pages: 416
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.6 x 5.6 x 1.2
ISBN: 0306816164
Dewey Decimal Number: 306
EAN: 9780306816161
ASIN: 0306816164
Publication Date: June 9, 2008
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Amazon.com Review
Amazon Significant Seven, August 2007: With none of the bashful, "comics aren't just for kids any more!" throat-clearing that accompanies most mainstream writing on comics, Douglas Wolk's iReading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean/i leaps straight into smart, conversational talk about perhaps the liveliest medium going. His enthusiasms and criticisms are infectious and often surprising, and, most refreshingly, he treats the two often warring (or at least mutually ignorant) sides of comics--the superhero tradition and the art comics that have gained highbrow attention lately--without ignoring the differences between them. iReading Comics/i is an appealingly idiosyncratic tour of many of his favorite artists that doesn't hesitate to criticize some of the most revered names in the business (like Chris Ware and Will Eisner) or investigate some of its most forgotten genre byways (like the '70s series iTomb of Dracula/i) with serious enthusiasm. i--Tom Nissley/i p align=left span class="h1"strongQuestions for Douglas Wolk/strong/span p strongAmazon.com:/strongWhat do comics--the writing and the pictures and the narrative combined--give us that other art forms don't? p img src=" http://g-ec2.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/books/blog/Wolk_Douglas_300.jpg" border="0" align="right"strongWolk:/strong The most important thing comics give us, I think, is drawing that makes a story. What you're seeing when you look at a page of comics, you're not just looking at a bunch of images that represent a plot, you're looking at something that came from somebody's hand--a deliberately distorted world, changing over time, built by a particular artist, line by line. p strongAmazon.com:/strong There is a great perceived divide in comics, between the superhero tradition and what you call art comics. One of the pleasures of your book is the way you happily work both sides of that divide without fuss. Do you think the divide is valid, or does it melt away the more attention you pay to individual artists? p strongWolk:/strong There's definitely a useful distinction to make--art comics are primarily about particular cartoonists' self-expression, and superhero comics are primarily about the characters and their shared fictional history. One's an ethos, the other's a genre. But I don't think individual artists have to stay in one camp or the other, and in any case an ethos and a genre can overlap. You can say that Mark Bagley and Hope Larson belong to totally different schools, but then somebody like Bill Sienkiewicz turns up and makes the idea of a binary opposition look ridiculous. In fact, the best genre comics almost always have a really strong sense of expressive style about them. pstrongAmazon.com:/strong One way you, by necessity, limit the range of your discussion is to leave out the newspaper-strip side of comics history. As someone who came to comics from that side of things, it was a little disconcerting to read a book on American comics that only made a single passing reference to Charles Schulz. What influence do you think newspaper strips have had on the development of art comics especially? pstrongWolk:/strong One of the biggest breakthroughs I had in writing iReading Comics/i was realizing that not only did I not have to make it comprehensive, it'd be more interesting and useful if it didn't even pretend to be comprehensive! I didn't mention newspaper strips much because they mostly seem to me to be playing a slightly different game from narrative comics--at least, there hasn't been a lot of extended narrative in newspaper strips in a long time. (By their nature, they have to get in and get out in a few lines, and now that they're all postage-stamp-sized, there's really no way they can move a story forward.) What newspaper strips did contribute to art comics was the development of distinctive visual style--the idea that an artist's handiwork was at least as important as a strip's characters--but these days they're so tightly limited by their size and populism and every-third-panel punchlines that they sometimes seem like an arcane kind of microminiature. Everybody loves "Peanuts," but I don't know that there's even room for a new stylist as fresh as Schulz (or George Herriman or Milton Caniff or Winsor McCay) on the newspaper page now. On the other hand, "Calvin Hobbes" wasn't so long ago. p strongAmazon.com:/strong And for a reader like me who has pretty much bypassed the superhero tradition and become a Dan Clowes/Charles Burns/Chris Ware fan via Peanuts and literary fiction, where would you recommend I start reading on the superhero side of the divide, which, as you say, has become so self-referential that it can be hard to crack the code? p strongWolk:/strong I was talking with some friends recently about the common mistake of recommending Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' iWatchmen/i, as great as it is, as a starting point for superhero comics--as one of them put it, that's like recommending iThe Seventh Seal/i as someone's first movie! For pure, unencumbered superhero joycore, I love Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's iAll-Star Superman/i--if you've heard of Clark Kent and Lois Lane, you know everything you need to know to enjoy it, and it deepens with repeated reading. Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos's cruelly witty iAlias/i, about a self-loathing ex-superheroine-turned-P.I., has lots of Easter eggs for the continuity-obsessed, but it probably works even better as a stand-alone story. And if you're at all into Victorian literature and/or want to sample Moore's work, the two volumes of iThe League of Extraordinary Gentlemen/i (drawn by Kevin O'Neill) are hugely fun on their own, and also illustrate by analogy the way a lot of the best superhero comics and other pulp art work: providing metaphors to illuminate the central concerns of their moment. p strongAmazon.com:/strong You're as prolific a writer about music as you are about comics. How do you compare writing about the two? p strongWolk:/strong They're hard to compare--it feels like different parts of my brain deal with music and comics. I suppose both of them present the risk of paying too much attention to the words and missing the really important stuff. There's also much more of a tradition of music criticism with a strong, personal voice, and a richer shared vocabulary for talking about what's happening in music. ("Musical," for instance, is a perfectly normal word; there's no word that means "comics-ish"...) Right now, people writing about comics (in English, anyway) are still making it up as we go along, which is risky but exciting.p strongAmazon.com:/strong I'm a big fan of your little book on James Brown's iLive at the Apollo/i, my favorite so far in that wonderful 33 1/3 series, and one thing that struck me, having read your two books now, is that one, the James Brown book, is super-tight (fitting its subject I guess), aphoristic and efficient, while the other, iReading Comics/i, seems purposefully loose, willing to take a stroll and maybe not come back. Is that a difference you thought about while writing the two books? p strongWolk:/strong It was! I thought of iLive at the Apollo/i as one long essay, a way of diagramming how the 35 minutes of that album exploded outwards in time, and I stole a lot of its tone and technique from George W.S. Trow's tiny fireball of a book iIn the Context of No Context/i. I wanted iReading Comics/i to be more conversational--the idea was to open up as many arguments as I could, to try to broaden the way people talk about comics instead of codifying it. /p
Product Description
DIVSuddenly, comics are everywhere: a newly matured art form, filling bookshelves with brilliant, innovative work and shaping the ideas and images of the rest of contemporary culture. In IReading Comics/I, critic Douglas Wolk shows us why and how. Wolk illuminates the most dazzling creators of modern comics-from Alan Moore to Alison Bechdel to Chris Ware-and explains their roots, influences, and where they fit into the pantheon of art. As accessible to the hardcore fan as to the curious newcomer, IReading Comics/I is the first book for people who want to know not just which comics are worth reading, but ways to think and talk and argue about them./Div
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| Customer Reviews: Read 7 more reviews...
 Reading (what?) comics October 5, 2008
Jon Holt (Seattle, WA USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Having read other books on comics, like "How to Read Superhero Comics and Why," I wanted to like Wolk's book more than those I've read before it. What I found most compelling about Wolk's book was his introduction where he talks about what makes comics different from other works of art is its unique deployment of metaphor. Yes, it's in that Straw Man argument (god, that is annoying, as other reviewers here suggest). What I found disappointing is that Wolk doesn't really deliver on giving us a coherent argument about that. Instead of giving us Comics, he gives us comics. br / br /That being said, Wolk chooses some good, some bad, some interesting comics to talk about. I found his later chapters on individual authors interesting. Particularly on Starlin's Warlock, Ditko's Spider-Man and Mr. A, Sim's Cerebus, and finally Morrison's Invisibles. br / br /You should look at the table of contents and see if Wolk writes about any comics (or creators) you have read and then pick up this book if there are enough of them. Note that Wolk will often spoil the endings of books so be careful. br / br /Why I see Wolk failing to deliver on his promise to talk about metaphors in comics is that he spends way too much time telling us what the text in those comics mean (can't we figure a lot of this out for ourselves? -- exception: I welcomesd his take on Morrison's Invisibles is passionate and pretty coherent). I was hoping he'd be able to present a consistent view on the language of the comics medium (the art), and instead I got a lot of more of regurgitation of storylines (I already knew).
 A pleasant discovery September 18, 2008
T. Triplett
I picked this book up on a whim from the new book section of our local library. Expecting it to be a dry and boring treatise on the "comics medium", I was pleasantly surprised to find a rather interesting book that brought new perspective to a medium I've been enjoying for over 4 decades. The first section of the book discussing the history and theory of comics was enjoyable, though somewhat familiar (to anyone who has read other comics 'meta-literature'). The second section of the book (a series of reviews of creators of interest) was notable for the fresh perspective it brought to familiar material. It was also a good introduction to creators that I did not know or had ignored in the past. This was in no small measure due to the skill of the author in homing in on the essential aspects of the creators that made them unique and noteworthy. This was a much better and informative approach for me than the biographical resumes with pictures and plot synopses I've encountered in other works of the same sort. I found myself going back and rereading comics on my bookshelf based on comments made by Wolk to catch things I missed the first time through. I can recommend this book both for readers familiar with comics as well as those who are not but want to learn more. I would also note that this book is clearly written by an adult for adults, so might not be appropriate for younger readers.
 Aren't comics supposed to be enjoyable? May 5, 2008
A. Moralis (Australia)
2 out of 6 found this review helpful
This is a great book if you are interested in Douglas Wolk. If you want to spend hours and hours reading what he thinks, being told what - in HIS opinion - is right and what is wrong, this is a great book. br / br /If however you are genuinely interested in an enjoyable book about something that should be enjoyable, then avoid this book. br / br /The first 30 or 40 pages are a struggle, filled with sentences containing "... comics I like ...", "I'd also ...", "... I'm talking about ...", " I find ...", "I mean ...." and "I think ..." making it one of the most egotistical pieces of writing I have ever come across. br / br /Doug may think he knows a lot about comics, but he knows little about writing. I lost count of the number of times he started writing about something or someone, and then stops and tells the reader there is more in a later chapter. br / br /There appeared to be redemption at around page 40, but it was short-lived and the book fell back into the "soapbox" style of the beginning. br / br /I didn't finish the book. Maybe I should have stuck with it, but I tried flicking forward a few pages at a time to see if the writing style improves, but was consistently disappointed.
poorly written April 10, 2008
Willis Due (Philly)
3 out of 7 found this review helpful
I don't know where to begin. This book is a mess. The writing is awash with redundancy, questionable grammar, and an annoying love of parenthesis. Too often he touches upon ideas in earlier chapters only to say that he will clear up any questions in later chapters, rather than clearly expressing his thoughts. An earlier review states that an editor should have cleaned the book up a little. I agree 100%. There are better books out there. Search them out.
Needed an editor to really polish it February 28, 2008
Andrew Otwell (Seattle, WA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
There's a lot to recommend this book. No matter how versed you are in comics (I'm not), you're sure to find something new here about an amazingly complex medium. br / br /But it's got some annoying flaws. Particularly in the first third of the book, it can be seriously geeky when it should be introductory and welcoming. You may find yourself stumbling on what seems like fan jargon or expert knowledge. I didn't(and still don't) understand the stylistic differences between Jack Kirby's early and late work. But that's the kind of thing Wolk more or less assumes at times. br / br /At best, the book has some wonderful visual analyses of comic panels and styles. That's good, because most of the arguments require you to trust the visual descriptions. For a book about comics there aren't nearly enough illustrations, and none in color. How about a companion website where readers could look at more than a few low-quality black and white reproductions? br / br /But Wolk's writing style gets annoying at this length. The book's trying to be academic and authoritative, but do it with a casual writing style. It doesn't work. Wolk often writes like a smart blogger; in other words, like someone who *really* needs an editor with a sharp red pencil. For example, he'll use annoying terms like "wave at" or "poke at" to mean "show" and "examine." He has a short "interview" between himself and Mr. Straw Man which feels like a clumsy way of avoiding constructing actual prose. Or he'll discover a new ten-dollar word (like "somatic") and use it two or three times in as many pages. He uses cliched writing (calling someone "a god-awful hack") constantly. br / br /Worst, nearly every page has at least two or three parenthetical phrases, which makes following arguments clunky. An editor would have deleted these as either truly side comments, or else rewritten them to be part of the argument. br / br /You might not be bothered by these things, though I was. They get in the way of reading and following what's actually a pretty subtle and worked-out argument. br /
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