One of the things about rededicating myself to writing one of these columns every week is that weeks go by really fast, and then I have to, like, write one of these things. So, once again, I have absorbed precious little culture over the last week. Not such an awful thing, this, however, given that, as we've learned over the last year and a half here at Culturology, most (almost all) culture isn't worth bothering with anyway.
Given that, as I was suspecting last week, Brubaker/Philip's Criminal is definitely worth bothering with. A full notch better than Sleeper, mostly because they both seem more at home writing a straighter noir piece, rather than having to bother with sci-fi elements. The first arc, Coward, just hits on all cylinders (and the second issue's cover is one of my favorite covers ever (and I don't normally even notice covers all that much; so maybe my immediate enjoyment of this cover demonstrates some aspect of my taste in general (I think it probably does), and thereby further clarifies why I think Criminal is better than Sleeper.
Criminal also further brings up the issue of back-matter in comics, an area of content which, to me, reached it s height with Casanova, where I can't really imagine reading the book without the back-matter; it'd still be good, but not nearly as good as I feel like it was. Criminal has some of the usual letter-responses and shout-out type material, but then also features (and I guess, again, that most of you know this, since the book isn't, like, new at all) short essays by guest writers about aspects of noir that they like, or specific movies or books that seem worth talking about. So not as personal/interwoven as the Casanova material, but definitely substantial and an aspect of reading the book in general (since the quasi-scholarly material certainly heightens the sense of genre exercise from the book).
It's a conversation that Nick and I have begun to have, as we approach the printing date of our 10-years-in-the-making masterpiece, Time Log. The story itself is enough pages that we can just print it and use the inside covers for any publishing info & thank-yous that we may need, but there's also this sense that maybe we should add another 4 pages of content, in order to have some supplementary materials. But how necessary is this? If we did so, would we just be copping an aspect of smarty-pants comics that I like and some of which appeal to Nick? Or is this what readers want in the first place? To know about all the trials and tribulations that we've been through in the last ten years in order to finally get this book in print?
I don't think that either Nick or I are particularly confessional about our craft (if you can call it craft), and I'm not sure if Shawn is or not. Plus, it would cost just that much more to print an additional four pages. But is that what we need to do to get this comic read? Or should we just run some advertisements instead...
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