52 Pickup's Douglas Wolk Looks in the Mirror

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on August 15, 2006 Sign up now!

by Douglas Wolk, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 8/15/2006

Freelance writer Douglas Wolk is known around the PWCW office as the guy who will write whatever we ask him to. He's also the author of Reading Comics, a book of comics theory and criticism that Da Capo will publish in spring 2007. Around the blogosphere, though, he's becoming infamous for 52 Pickup, his own weekly analysis of DC Comics' also-weekly superhero series 52. We tracked him down at his local comics store, furtively rifling through back issues of Atari Force. He agreed to interview himself on the condition that he gets to clarify that it wasn't his idea.

Douglas Wolk: With an imminent book deadline, a bunch of work for various magazines and newspapers, and a one-year-old to take care of, I was getting dangerously overbooked this spring, so I figured I should add something hugely time-consuming that I wouldn't get paid for. The 52 writers' rampant enthusiasm at WonderCon had gotten me excited about the project as a reader, and I decided it could be a fun challenge to write some kind of commentary on every issue as it came out. I didn't want to provide plot summaries or consumer recommendations--I'm a lot more interested in its unfolding themes and significant details and storytelling techniques, so I'm basically writing the blog for people who are already reading the comic. Also, I'd written a bit for Suck.com back in the days of dialup, and I ripped off their style of smartass links, with extensive help from the Grand Comic Book Database.

PW Comics Week: No, seriously: Why a blog about 52, a superhero series? I thought you were an art-comics guy!

DW: Why is that a contradiction? If you're going to think honestly about American comics, you are eventually going to run into the Spandex wall, and some of it's pretty great. I don't love the fact that the medium and the business are dominated by a genre that's almost as formally limited as stories about pirates, and I bet if pirate comics had the same kind of hegemony, art-cartoonists would be sick of X-Ships, too. I do love superhero comics, though--when they're good, which isn't nearly often enough--and I have the same vague mistrust of comics critics who dismiss anything with capes that I have of film critics who aren't willing to engage with anything that isn't arthouse-type cinema.

PWCW: Maybe you don't understand me. Why a blog about 52 in particular?

DW: For one thing, it's weekly--the momentum keeps the project interesting for me. (Supposedly, there are two basic groups of comics buyers: the people who come into the store every couple of months and buy a small stack of graphic novels, and the people who need their fix every Wednesday morning. I'm the Wednesday-morning kind. I love finding out what happens next.) For another, one thing I like about 52 is that it's drawing on a core strength of superhero comics: their sense of a world full of fantastic things, and an enormous shared history that's been documented in slightly unreliable ways. It's not my favorite mainstream series (that would probably be All-Star Superman or Daredevil right now)--I think it's missed some opportunities, particularly by adopting a generic "2006 superhero comic" look instead of a more distinctive visual style. But I enjoy it a lot.

PWCW: Let's put it a different way. Why write a blog every week about 52? Don't you have a book to finish?

DW: Yeah, I do, and I like to delude myself into thinking that the blog is sort of an advertisement for the book, even though they don't overlap at all. But mostly I just like writing 52 Pickup. Actually, I'm going to have to skip Week 17, since I'll be running around the Nevada desert with 40,000 hippies at the Burning Man Festival. I'm hoping that there will be a very special guest blogger that week.