Every day, after checking my email and taking care of anything that needs to be done immediately, I read my "Comics" feed in Google Reader. Or, rather, I skim it. The feed has only a dozen subscriptions to news and reviews sites, which amount to about 50 messages a day, but sometimes I find myself devoting far more time to skimming the articles than I mean to. More and more, I'm asking myself "Why?" The reasoning usually goes, "As a comics professional, I need to keep informed about current events and issues within the industry, blah blah blah." But do I really?
What good does it do for me to know that the Savage Dragon has endorsed Barack Obama? Or to skim through reviews of more comics and graphic novels than I will ever have time to read? (Gotta stay on top of what's in the marketplace, I tell myself.) To scroll past comics bloggers' promotions of their webcomics and numerous Comic-Con pictures? To catch up on the latest arguments? (As I write this, it seems to be about whether comics creators should favor their own work or working for the Big Two, but by the time this column appears, no doubt it will be something else.) I stop to read the obituaries, bookmark the reviews of books published by SLG, star the analysis for future perusing, and pause at reviews of a graphic novels I am interested in, but mostly it's just a lot of pressing "j, j, j, j" (how you skip to the next story in Google Reader) and then going back to minding my business of getting comics published and writing blog posts of my own for someone else to skim past.
Some might say that this is indicative of a poor signal-to-noise ratio in the comics coverage online, but I don't think that analogy is apt. What I'm scrolling through is the fact that comics coverage is so wide that nearly everything gets at least a mention. My "Comics" feed is an ever-changing entity as I add and delete feeds trying to find the right balance of to reduce what I personally find to be noise, but I know that my noise is someone else's signal, and vice versa.
But I do have my concerns. One of the most-talked-about issues on the Internet outside of the comics sites is the one raised by Nicholas Carr's essay in the Atlantic, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" In it, Carr explores the anxiety that by becoming accustomed to the Internet's fast, easy, succinct (and often shallow) information, we will lose our ability to deeply read long works. As a result of Internet immersion, Carr writes, his "mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles."
I see a certain amount of truth in Carr's concerns as it relates to comics coverage. The ratio that may be off here, as it is in all the Internet, is not signal to noise but depth to breadth ratio. In a given day, I will see hundreds of links to Web comics, reviews, press releases, gallery show announcements, artists' sites, antique comic strips, amusing Silver Age comics covers, interviews with artists, interviews with writers, interviews with editors, bloggers' links to each other, and bloggers' snark at each other. What it amounts to is a score of people saying, "Hey, I thought you might find this interesting!" to me simultaneously, but without the kind of interaction that a conversation with a friend would have or the depth of analysis that a single person, writing about comics craft using single pages in two comics as examples, might have. The comments on comics blogs—again, like comments on blogs on all the Internet—often display a breathtaking lack of critical reading and thinking skills. There is much breadth but little depth.
But do I, like Carr, fear that exposure to this world of links and quick-and-easy blog posts will turn my brain to mush, leaving me unable to digest anything longer than five paragraphs? On the contrary—I've found that I appreciate reading pieces that are longer and offer more in-depth analysis more and more. I save Thought Balloonists essays on books I want to read, carefully read and think about opinion pieces by bloggers like Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter, and try to do my own small part in occasionally adding to a meaningful dialogue about comics as an industry and art form. However, I find that there is a reversed ratio at work here; comics blogs tend to focus narrowly when delving deeply—on a single artist or character, on a specific work rather than range of works unified in theme. Or attempts to delve deeply, to ask, "How can the comic book industry be healthier?" leads to reiterations of the same positions and cross-accusations that do nothing to answer the question but perhaps reveal everything about why it gets asked in the first place.
On the other hand, it seems that commentators and critics outside the industry can achieve both depth and breadth, allowing for far-ranging contemplation, without the entrenched points of view that impede progress. Recently, the literary blog The Valve ran a series of essays about Reading Comics by Douglas Wolk, a reflection of a situation that seems to have gone unnoticed, or at least uncommented on, in the insular comics world—that because of his book Wolk has become nearly the sole ambassador of the medium to the mainstream media. "Secret Skin," Michael Chabon's essay on superhero costumes in The New Yorker, got a lot of linking on the comics blogosphere, but in terms of works of the same depth and breadth, there is little comparable in comics writing that I have come across.
But I know there could be. There are some excellent minds at work for the cause of comics, and I want to let them know that I appreciated it when they ask questions, dig deep, and shed light—all the work that ensures that the comics world becomes the place for the most meaningful comics coverage. The "star" list on my Google Reader thanks them, too.
Jennifer de Guzman is editor-in-chief at the independent comics publisher SLG Publishing. She also writes fiction—mostly in prose, occasionally in comics—and holds an M.F.A. in literature and creative writing from San Jose State University.
