The model that dominates comics discourse is self-inventory.
Though in the same paragraph Spurgeon passes remarks on the oddness of the comics medium, he never defines qualities he found in other media had that struck him as more normative. Maybe he made some mention of "l'difference" in other essays, but I find it interesting that he didn't think he had to prove his case. To the extent that many of his essays were directed at the sort of comics-readers who clustered about THE COMICS JOURNAL-- which admittedly used to include me-- it's a shame that he didn't think he even had to prove his case.
For me the peculiarity of the phrase is that it doesn't seem to take into account how much "self inventory" factors into all of human culture. I'm reminded of this quotation from Friedrich Nietzche on the matter of memory:
The so called unconscious inferences can be traced back to the all-preserving memory, which presents us with parallel experiences and hence already knows the consequences of an action. It is not anticipation of the effects; rather, it is the feeling: identical causes, identical effects . . .
As far as I can see, what Spurgeon calls "self inventory" is indistinguishable from Nietzche's concept of "the all preserving memory," with its idea that "identical causes" must align with "identical effects." It occurs to me that Spurgeon may've had some idea that comics fans were given to self-inventory because of the fandom's emphasis on checklists and completing issue-runs, though he does not make this express correlation in the essay. But how is that type of inventory different from any of the many "self inventories" that literary authors undergo to produce the fiction that's important to them. Hemingway was obsessed with the nature of masculine action, so much of what he wrote has him making inventories of how actions of courage or forbearance impacted the people in his stories. A poet like W.B. Yeats made inventories of the myths of many cultures, trying to tie them into one another in a grand pattern, while Faulkner was concerned with defining the American South. In all of these examples the authors drew upon their memories of whatever was important to them-- more or less in line with what Nietzsche calls "identical causes"-- and from that their creative priorities explored "identical effects," in which each artist saw his own face reflected in his fictional mirrors.
In a less artistic vein, "self inventory" seems to me the main way in which we take stock of our own natures. If an individual deems himself a good person, doesn't he take inventory of all the good things he's done? Or if that individual is down on himself, doesn't he do the opposite, inventorying all of his failures or embarassments?
I frankly can't see any way that any person, whether interested in comics, Russian literature, or jai alai, doesn't resort to making inventories from one's memory in order to validate (or invalidate) himself. Maybe there are individuals who "live in the now," not resorting to delving into memory on a regular basis. But they would be rare individuals in the history of humankind. Perhaps this is why Nietzsche also wrote on the subject of memory:
it is possible to live almost without remembering and live happy, as evidenced by the animal, but it is still impossible to live without forgetting. Or more simply, there is a degree of sleeplessness, rumination, the historic sensibility that is harmful and ultimately fatal to living things, be it a man, a people or a civilization “
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