Reading Comics

Douglas Wolk has a great book out called Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. I picked this up out of curiosity and to see if he wrote anything about Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, creators of Love & Rockets (previous post). After skimming the L&R chapters I looked at the table of contents and saw chapters on Alan Moore and Dave Sim, as well as a bunch of creators whose names were new to me.

The first section of the book "Theory and History" is a pretty good overview. I expected to cruise straight through this section to get to the chapters on individual authors. However, Wolk had plenty of interesting things to say. This didn't change the way I thought about comics in the way that Scott McCloud's book did, and he spends a lot of time on mainstream comics, but it was definitely worth reading.

In the second section of the book "Reviews and Commentary" he discusses lots of creators. Some I knew already, some were new to me.

Ones he discussed whose work I knew well included Steve Ditko, Will Eisner, Frank Miller, Los Bros Hernandez, Dave Sim, Craig Thompson, Grant Morrison, Charles Burns, Chris Ware, and of course Alan Moore and Art Spiegelman. (Quick note to my dad - thanks for introducing me to so many great comics when I was a kid; as I look over the list above, Will Eisner in particular.)

Wolk had something new to say about each of them and is at times iconoclastic. I didn't think there would be much new to say about some of these creators but I was very wrong. In particular I was impressed with Wolk's very even-handed commentary on the work of Dave Sim.

New comics I bought specifically after reading this book:

• Alison Bechdel, Fun Home - very, very good
• Jaime Hernandez, Ghost of Hoppers
• Chester Brown, Louis Riel

Highly recommended.