JEET CANNA DOIT, PART 2

I stated in part 1 that I considered most interviews given by creators of entertainment to be "hype," at least in their primary function, with the main exception being those artists who are no longer producing work to be consumed by patrons. Yet now I think I should eliminate even the retiree faction, insofar as some of them can still profit from good press. Those who own their own works can still sell more works in their remaining years, and some of those who don't own the works with whom they're associated (think Dick Sprang/BATMAN) can still pick up some dough doing new artistic renderings of old favorites. It's not even impossible for writers to so profit: during the late Arnold Drake's last attendance at Comic-con Drake was selling facsimiles of his old DOOM PATROL scripts.

Therefore I define interviews in terms of the old Marxist "cash nexus," and not only for the artist, but for the interviewer as well. I think I enjoyed the Golden Era of JOURNAL interviews (mostly the 80s if you care) every bit as much as Jeet Heer did, but those interviews were never just a matter of Gary Groth conducting some comics-version of the Algonquin Round Table. An interview with Gil Kane was conducted to show readers that Gil Kane was a great artist and that more readers should buy his books, and, simultaneously, that COMICS JOURNAL was a great place to read interviews and that more people (who might be indifferent to everything else in it-- paging Joe Matt) should buy the JOURNAL on a regular basis.

Formal criticism, whether of comics or another medium, is not quite the same. True, the critic wants some reward for his services (be it a paycheck or university tenure) and a critique favorable to the subject can expand the popularity of the subject, even when the author is long dead (think Herman Melville, resurrected from literary obscurity by academia). But an interview doesn't need to appeal to intellectual history, and a critique must. Even in situations where one doubts the intellectual attainments of certain critics-- as I have done with both Roland Barthes and Theodor Adorno on this blog-- the doubter cannot dispute that even bad critics are part of an intellectual history.

I also have a hard time with Jeet's strange divorce between "conversations and the response of artists themselves to earlier art" and what he calls "boosterism" in a separate blogpost:

“The simple fact is that because of the intellectual poverty of most writing on comics, infected as it is with fannish boosterism and journalistic glibness, the interview form has been the crucial venue for comics criticism and comics history.”

This makes little sense in that the "boosterism" of early comics fandom is exactly what caused its emphasis on the interview whose primary point is always: "this is how the artist works his magic." Interviews are theoretical "boosters" to any artist's popularity, so if Jeet meant to create an opposition between the "infection" of fannish adulation and the "crucial" role of the interview in terms of advancing criticism, he has failed in spectacular fashion.

Though, for all I know, my coming out against Jeet's comments will probably "boost" him in the comics-community...