DEATH TO THE UNIVERSE: February 2011

Monday, February 28, 2011

Your Monday Panel

Well, after fifty installments and exactly a year (I took two weeks off), I've decided to stop writing my "Your Monday Panel" column. I started it off last year with an idea swiped from (or "inspired by") the Powerful Panels feature at Are You A Serious Comic Book Reader, and a goal of moving my own comics-critical dialogue away from the words and toward the pictures as much as possible. For me, the level comics function most powerfully and affectingly on isn't story but that of pure visual experience. Comics have shown my eyes more beauty than anything else has, and I wanted to write a kind of serialized ode to that. But also, I felt and still feel that comics criticism places too much emphasis on the work of "comics writers" and not nearly enough on the art. There are so many wonderful artists who don't get talked about enough because they draw for big-name scripters or make work that doesn't capture people with what it's about, and I wanted to write on some of them, if only in a brief, narrow-focus manner. I also wanted to work up my knowledge of the craft of comics art, to give myself a place to think about how comics panels do what they do once a week. The early installments of the column are pretty embarrassing on that level (and others), but writing all fifty of them increased my ability to understand comics significantly.

We're always the worst judges of our own work, but I'm rather proud of a few of the articles I wrote, and I'm much prouder that single-panel comics criticism seems to be an idea whose time has come since I started this project. I think there are a lot of factors pushing comics criticism into a greater engagement with the visual side of the medium, and I'd hope my little column has helped it in that direction on some level.

I'm far from done with Monday analyses of comics art, by the way -- just taking this opportunity to move on to something new, which to me is the most important thing you can do as a critic. Or as an anything, really. For this week, though, I'll be lazy and just give you a list of the fifty pictures I picked apart:

1. Howard Chaykin