By Shaenon K. Garrity
Our columnists are independent writers who choose subjects and write without editorial input from comiXology. The opinions expressed are the columnist's, and do not represent the opinion of comiXology.
The 300th issue of
The Comics Journal is soon to hit the stands, and the magazine everyone in comics loves to hate rattles on, chugging and sputtering and picking up disreputable beardy guys like a Toonerville Trolley of spite.
The Comics Journal is older than I am. It's outlived
Comic Book Artist,
Comics Scene, its own lowbrow sister publication
Amazing Heroes, and the brief, lamented
The Imp. In some
Inglourious Basterds-like alternate history, the 1990s ended with the twisted faces of Kim Thompson and Gary Groth hovering, laughing maniacally, over the charred and bullet-riddled corpse of
Wizard magazine. In our universe, it could still happen.
My relationship with
TCJ has been, I suspect, typical. I've seen my comics ignored. I've seen my comics ripped to shreds. I've even seen my comics praised. I've written reviews, I've conducted interviews, I've transcribed other people's interviews, and every once in a while I've gotten paid for it. I've collected back issues, fretted over format changes, been unable to find the half of the big Dave Sim interview I
really needed. One year I ran around Comic-Con searching madly for the latest issue because I was certain it was going to change comics forever (it was the shoujo manga issue edited by Dirk Deppey, and it didn't, but it should have). Another year I tried to track down all of
TCJ's 100 Best Comics of the Century, in between griping about everything the list left off.
Since I've come here to praise
TCJ and not to bury it, I might as well reveal my favorite thing about the magazine. My favorite thing about
TCJ is that it has some of the cheapest ad rates in publishing (currently starting at $70 for the smallest size), thus ensuring that the magazine that devotes itself, in its famously snotty way, to the best and brightest in sequential art is always filled with pages advertising the nuttiest and least explicable. Many of the comics advertised in
TCJ are terrible. Many are destined for greatness. Most are peculiar. There are big price breaks for renting ad space in multiple issues, so it's common to be treated to ads for the same grab bag of weird small-press comics (and, in
TCJ's earlier years, T-shirts and related consumer oddities) for month after month.
Recently, for example, every issue of
TCJ has featured at least one full-page ad from Crossover Comics, which uses the space to run one-page comics unaccompanied by any explanation. The comics are sometimes about how Diamond has an unhealthy stranglehold on the market, which is true, and sometimes about how women who have premarital sex or wear shirts that show "under boob" are sluts doomed to die of disease and/or abortion-related guilt, which is more debatable. The URL at the bottom of each comic leads to the homepage of a cartoonist named Robert Gavila, who, with his wife Maria, self-publishes a comic that does not appear to be about either the Diamond monopoly or the sluttiness of women, but instead follows the startlingly original premise of a hot superpowered woman killing stuff. There are also links to some reviews I'm pretty sure are by Gavila himself. These ads are classics. Another 300 issues from now, this period of
TCJ will be remembered for two things: the Crossover Comics spots, and costing friggin' $11.99 per squarebound prestige-format issue.
TCJ's next most notable feature is, of course, the Ken Smith column, which has graced the back pages for over twenty years without ever having anything to do with comic books, or, for that matter, reality. Smith is, to put it simply, Ignatius J. Reilly, except that he saved Gary Groth's life in ‘Nam or something and has been rewarded with a somewhat public platform for his ten-dollar-word-padded Miniver Cheevy rants about the decline of modern culture, said decline having begun, in Smith's estimation, roughly around the time the Greeks let their women go outdoors. In his inaugural column, did Smith quote both Kierkegaard and Keynes? Did he type, non-ironically, the sentence, "Ah Yeats, where are you when we need you?" He did indeed. But let it never be forgotten that he once wrote a column entitled "Modernism in My Pants," and for this we should, as Smith would put it, proffer a modicum of the gratitude all-too-seldom exhibited in this hollow age of value-neutral ideologues and chattering dullards, an age foolishly hostile to the wisdom, the crowning virtuosity of the philosopher-saint.
The Internet has, alas, killed off one of the other reliable sources of entertainment in
TCJ, the "Blood and Thunder" letters column. Seen today, the old "Blood and Thunder"s form a near-complete record of everyone remotely interesting in comics for the last thirty years. Some great arguments raged in the dawn times. My personal favorite remains the long-running battle, waged over months of columns, between Harvey Pekar and everyone else. Pekar ultimately won, in my opinion, by arguing that modern indie comics would be better if cartoonists had taken their inspiration from Spain rather than Robert Crumb. He was right. Imagine how much less annoyingly emo everything would be, and how much more fun Seth would be at conventions.
The longetivity of
TCJ has less to do with its content, which has varied wildly over the years—it was a straight-up fanzine called
The Nostalgia Journal before Gary Groth and Mike Catron got their hands on it—and more with its personality. When
TCJ interviews Todd McFarlane, you know it's not going to be a
Wizard puff piece; it's going to be a hallucinatory psychic battle between Ming the Merciless and a He-Man action figure. When
TCJ interviews Robert Crumb, you know he's going to say something mind-blowing, like that he really enjoys
Cathy. When Harlan Ellison comes up in any context whatsoever, it's time to pop some popcorn. It would be inaccurate to say that the sequential art world's magazine of record is never boring (tell me with a straight face you finish the interviews), but it's never bland.
Also, check out that photo of John Kricfalusi from 1991. That's some Marvel Hunk of the Month-level beefcake right there. It'd never work out between us, John K. I love UPA animation and "The Flintstones" bores me to tears. But never stop popping that collar.
The Comics Journal is pugnacious, stubborn, fraught with weird prejudices, widely despised. More like Spain than Robert Crumb, come to think of it. But it survives. It survives because it has a soul.
Shaenon K. Garrity is a manga editor at Viz Media and is best known for her webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse.
All the Comics in the World is © Shaenon K. Garrity, 2010
