Comics culture, redux: On his blog, Jamie S. Rich has an interesting response to Sunday's The New York Times Magazine article on the evolution and current state of comics:

"[Writer Charles McGrath] works from the viewpoint that comics could possibly replace prose in a world where video games and TV are killing our attention spans and ability to absorb complex narratives, and then disimissing all comics books except for the ones he wants to focus on. This includes gettering rid of manga in one sentence, writing the whole of Japanese comics off as 'books that feature slender, wide-eyed teenage girls who seem to have a special fondness for sailor suits.' There is so much ignorance in those 17 words, I would have to go through each word one by one just to debunk it. He pushes Clowes, Ware, Sacco, Seth, Tomine, and Spiegelman to the forefront, not once acknowledging that this is a little like saying that no one knows how to read very well but Borges, Barthes, and Robbe-Grillet are going to change the course of illiteracy by making books accessible again.

"And that's even if you agree with his theory that comics are somehow for a new generation of mouth-breathers who find the intricacies of John Grisham too much to digest. It's ludicrous. So, shove that assertion aside, and then let's ask, are these really the guys who are going to fuel the new generation of comics and keep the medium alive? To a degree, but I've been saying for a while now that this old guard of alternative comics, as good as most of them are, represent a world that is just as closed off from the bulk of the population as superhero comic books--and like the raging fanboys that this side of comics often decries (a bit like the closeted jock picking on the effeminate kid), they like it that way. They want to horde the crumbs of success and recognition because, like capes and tights, the chronic masturbator cartoonist is just as outmoded as the kid who wants to be Superman and beat up the bullies that pick on him."