I complained to Tom Spurgeon yesterday on occasion of his Comics Industry Coverage Group Think about how the cartoonists I like aren’t being interviewed and written about, or at least not enough. That’s part of the reason I’ve been doing some short comics reviews lately. Be the change you want to see and all that. Here’s what I said:
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I have a few comments that fall under the general rubric of your point that cartoonists and the comics they make deserve a greater share of coverage. First, I wanted to point out the particular lack of coverage of the younger set of prominent alternative cartoonists. People like, to pick a few of many possible names out of the hat, Ryan Cecil Smith or Maré Odomo or Lala Albert or Angie Wang, are doing really exciting and unique and I would say well-received work but aren’t being written about or interviewed to any great extent. I believe Sean T. Collins has raised this issue a couple of times.
Another subset of cartoonists who aren’t receiving as much critical engagement as they deserve is webcartoonists. Maybe this coverage exists and I’m not aware of it, but it’s certainly not prominent in the places where I look for quality critical analysis of comics – like your site or the Comics Journal. This is particularly surprising when it comes to people like Evan Dahm or John Campbell whose work is much more within the alternative comics vein than, say, Homestuck ,and who I very much suspect would be more widely covered in alt-comics circles if they were published by a Secret Acres or a Koyama Press.
It’s of course a challenge when there are perhaps a dozen people who write about these kinds of comics with any regularly, which I’d imagine is the only real explanation for this. However, I still think it’s worth making note of it.
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Then of course Frank Santoro goes and write his Comics Journal column about two of the cartoonists who I cited as undercovered. Thanks a lot, buddy. But I think the larger point stands. Hope the above is somewhat coherent.