I used to think that Rachel Cooke’s columns were authored by some sheltered journalist who never left her house and who simply wasn’t paying much attention to rudimentary trends developing in the publishing industry. Here, after all, was an idiot, who was actually collecting a regular paycheck for her foolish generalizations, castigating the litblogosphere based on one day of indolent Web surfing. Maybe she simply didn’t have the smarts to engage with the world around her. Maybe she preferred to furtively pick her nose and watch bad movies instead of doing a bit of thinking or even hard investigation of a genre.

But now, Ms. Cooke declares she’s seen the light! She’s one of us now! These things called graphic novels actually have literary merit! Never mind that Art Spiegelman won a Pulitzer in 1992 — a good fifteen years ago — and Maus‘s two volumes were nominated for the National Book Critics Circle. Ms. Cooke dutifully read Art Spiegelman and she could clearly see “how brilliant it was, of course.” But being cast of an utterly lazy and incurious mental disposition, Ms. Cooke, perhaps incapable of tracking down Will Eisner or Alan Moore or any of the countless graphic novelists working around the time, privately declared in 1986 that the landscape to be devoid of any additional talent. The “strips” that Ms. Cooke identified — as opposed to comic books or graphic novels, which every other neophyte was jumping up and down over; presumably, Ms. Cooke was confused and didn’t have a clue as to where to look — were giving her a headache.

But now no more! For comics are now mainstream! And this means that Ms. Cooke can rethink her prejudices against this retrograde medium because, well, these books are now too omnipresent to discount.

I’m very glad that Ms. Cooke has written this column. It is now entirely clear that she lives underneath a rock.

(Thanks to Andrew for the link.)

David Ulin raises a provocative point about Harvey Pekar’s recent prolificity, contemplating whether Pekar is authoring too many books for his own good, while likewise pondering whether Pekar’s concentration upon other personalities comes at the expense of Pekar skillfully depicting his own personal experiences.

While there exists plenty of evidence to confirm Ulin’s point about Pekar writing “work for hire” (Pekar intimated this during a 2006 appearance on The Bat Segundo Show), I don’t think these circumstances translate into an automatic critical condemnation of Pekar’s material. Ulin not only ignored 2005’s The Quitter, an inarguably raw and mature portrait of a younger Pekar developing some of his anger while being tormented on the Cleveland streets, but he failed to cite specifics about why he feels Ego & Hubris and Macedonia are lesser works. Ulin may very well prefer Pekar to his peripheral subjects. But if this is the case, why not simply state this?

I haven’t read Macedonia yet. But in Ego & Hubris, Michael Malice’s story (as conveyed through Pekar) struck me as a narrative uncannily similar to a Pekar-centric American Splendor issue: the case of a misunderstood and sometimes unpleasant misfit struggling against idiotic thinking and the everyday shackles of conformist instincts. Malice may not be as charismatic a figure as Pekar, but Ego & Hubris‘s deliberately boxy framings (as convincingly inked by Gary Dumm) and Malice’s obdurate Ayn Rand-influenced dialogue collectively serve up a new spin on the Pekar maxim: “Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.” Malice — indeed “a piece of work” — may be a less ordinary figure than Pekar, but his struggles are just as complex as Pekar’s, if only because Malice’s “ordinary life” collides against the demands of paranoid security protocol, working at VH1, and his own self-serving instincts. It’s all pretty complex stuff, if you closely examine the many points at which contrarian philosophies run against each other.

Thought I’d take a moment just to introduce myself after yesterday’s dive into the world of blogging. I have a novel coming out in September titled When One Man Dies. I’ve written several short stories over the years, which are available at my website.

Right now, reading wise I’m into comic books. I don’t know where that came from, but it’s probably a combination of things. Seeing Spider-man 3–which I actually liked–and reading a really, really fast paced novel by Duane Swierczynski called SEVERANCE PAKCAGE. It’s one of my favorite books and it comes out in the fall too.

Anyway, the book was so high paced that everything I read after wasn’t fast enough for me. So I figured I’d try some highly recommended comic books. And boom, now I’m back into trade paperbacks and graphic novels, and especially digging Ed Brubaker.

Heidi McDonald reports on this extremely important contest: America’s Top Toon-a-MILF.