ADVANCE REVIEW! Monomyth #1

Thanks for responding, John McCubbin. Your writing is very thoughtful in these replies, and I believe that the volume of your reviews might be the culprit affecting their quality. You’ve taken what I have to say seriously, which I appreciate, and I hope that my words can still be constructive.

My writing may have come off as harsh, but it was direct and honest. A scale of 1-to-10 is tricky. A “5” would suggest a 50% success, but who wants to read books that are only “half good”? A “7” will hardly kill a Batman book, but a small Indie comic needs to earn at least a “9” to compete with such a congested market. Based on your statement, “Do you find it hard giving an up and coming series a chance[?]”, I realize I may have been overly-serious about what amounts to a good deed being done in an environment that tolerates a bending scale.

Nevertheless, the driving force of my own critique is that Comic Book Criticism itself is a crucial means by which the medium can be taken seriously. The gold standard is The Comics Journal, which has been hugely influential in getting me to read books I would never have heard of, much less picked up. I fully understand, though, that a lot of fans out there aren’t necessarily excited about Maus or Gary Panter’s rendering of Purgatory. This is why writers such as yourself need to be so vigilant: you are the ones who are taking on the populist material and weighing its artistic merit. The Comics Journal, itself too hefty to publish regularly, often dismisses the costumed hero stuff while obsessinging on the tiniest details of “slice-of-life” introspective books (which, themselves, run the risking of blurring into one big mass), or European adult sci-fi comics that are driven by socio-political issues – which are easier to take seriously in an academic community. The Journal does concede, however, that there is merit in books done for fun’s sake. They highly respect Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, Carl Barks, and Harvey Kurtzman – even though their reviewers eventually elevate the fun guys by pointing to the deep seriousness that underlies their fantasies and whimsy.

Do comics need to tackle politics and grit as a critical act of artistic merit? I don’t think so, and I believe you, John, feel the same way. The tools that populist reviewers have at their disposal are those metrics of quality that most fans boast about regardless of genre or intent, and those are: story, plot, dialogue, artwork, memorability, and innovation. Kirby’s often selfless enthusiasm for telling a thrilling adventure has made him practically a genre unto himself, and I believe his talent came before “comics criticism” but, instead, helped shape it. Kirby set a standard for the adventure book, and a few subsequent artists, like a young Neal Adams and Frank Miller, have taken on the challenge and produced truly memorable work. Neal Adams today, though, has bought into the idea that he is a writer, and so the once-mighty titan is exposed for his often juvenile understanding of the world. However, when Adams illustrated for Roy Thomas and other talented writers, his focus was clearly open to deal with the intricacies of “how” to tell the story visually, and to give it weight and depth.

I bring up Neal Adams because his is such a clear case of where an artist can be brilliant in his visualizations, but unremarkable-at-best in other areas in which one could easily have assume he would have skill. Apropos to our current disagreement: Monomyth is crafted from a very clever idea, but executed with unintended reductiveness and other weaknesses that come from inexperience and, maybe, just a lack of talent. Your score of a “9” for Monomyth was based, to my understanding, on what you perceived as a near-perfect comic that was slightly underserved by the illustrator(!). Your writing leads on that Siike Donnelly didn’t fail one iota, but that the talented Ninaltowski did not do enough to realize what would have been a flawless book.

I respect that you enjoyed the book, and that you like the creatives involved. Your personal opinion definitely matters in your reviews, but do you really believe that Monomyth #1 is that close in quality to The Dark Night Returns? If you were to review a reissue of Miller’s vanguard work, would you give it a “10”, or would you elect to use a different scale to account for the sheer enormity of that work in comparison to most everything else? Sam Keith is an experienced artist whose been in the business for 3+ decades, and, while I agree that not everything he does is perfect – in fact, nothing he has done needs to be described as “perfect” – I think he knows a lot more about what he is doing than the creators of Monomyth, and that giving Monomyth such an unusually high score exposes it to greater scrutiny, criticism, and disappointment. Hence, my posts earlier.

There are slickly produced disasters of the last decade, like Marville and Identity Crisis, that truly deserve their respective places in the Hall of Dishonor. Those books featured major characters from major companies, yet managed to be so comprehensively awful that whatever existed of quality within them was drowned out by their raging detestability. Bad as Identity Crisis is, there might be some who fully believe that its artwork is considerably more polished than Ninaltowski’s in Monomyth. Certainly, the faces are more distinct in Crisis. Monomyth’s earnest attempt to be a “good”, or “quality”, book should not be so redemptive as to skyrocket it to just one wrung below Watchmen, Maus, Sin City, Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol, The Dark Phoenix Saga, Darwyn Cooke’s New Frontier, or the original EC comics.

John, you have the desire to write about comic books and you challenge your own critics with great civility. You have it within you to be doing considerably better work, and I mean that sincerely. I was completely surprised by what you wrote, and it compelled me to write back as honestly as I can. I know I am not perfect by any stretch, but I hope that what I’ve had to say can be taken – at least now – as friendly debate, and as something more constructive than my admittedly harsh tone earlier.

My best to you,
Günter