Here’s a funny little teacup tempest:
Last year, shortly after Ariel Schrag released the fourth volume of her comics memoir, Likewise, I wrote a review covering the entire series. The piece was intended for The Comics Journal, but it got put off repeatedly and eventually the editors decided it had just been too long since the book had come out.
Lucky for me, the folks at Verbicide were less concerned with up-to-the-minute newness. They ran the review, titled “The High School Comic Chronicles of Ariel Schrag” on January 29.
Ironically, not quite a month later, one of The Comics Journal‘s affiliated blogs, The Hooded Utilitarian, is hosting a roundtable discussion on the last volume of the set, Likewise.
To start things off right, Noah Berlatsky wrote a survey essay covering the reviews of Likewise. And in it he pretty much accuses me of being a condescending sexist jerk.
Ng Suat Tong comes to my defense, and Berlatsky calls him a condescending sexist jerk, too — but now at least I have company.
I’m not in the habit of responding to reviews (especially not reviews of reviews). But I do want to state my position clearly in case it has been misunderstood.
Noah wrote: “In short, Williams recognizes that Schrag is working in a modernist idiom, where form follows function. He finds this alienating. He recognizes that the alienation is a deliberate artistic decision. And he responds by…sneering at Schrag for successfully alienating him when she should be writing entertaining, unambitious anecdotes, since that is what high-school girls do best.”
Now, it’s not that I object to highbrow modernism when it succeeds. But I do object to it when it fails. (Pointing out that Schrag intended her book to feel sloppy and dull — or, as Berlatsky puts it, “alienating” — is hardly a defense.) Given how badly I think Likewise failed, I wished aloud that Schrag had stuck with the approach that worked well in her previous books. That’s not because it’s “what high-school girls do best” — but because it’s what Ariel Schrag does best.
I don’t think I suggested that teenaged girls are incapable of producing substantive work. And if someone can convince me that I did, I promise to go back and re-read both Frankenstein and The Outsiders to remind myself that they can.
MEANWHILE:
I wrote a two-part essay, “Border Horror,” in which I parse the economic and political subtext of a zombie comic, Infestacion: The Mythology, and a vampire comic, 30 Days of Night: Juarez. Both happen to be set at the US/Mexican border.
And I’ve offered my gloss of Alan Moore’s anarcho-porno manifesto, 25,000 Years of Erotic Freedom.
You can read these, and the rest of my work for the new online Comics Journal at:
http://classic.tcj.com/author/kristian-williams