One of the intriguing things that came out of last month's tidal wave of best-of comics list for 2012 was actually a negative: the apparent almost complete lack of interest by the body of people that read comics with something close to a professional interest in Gary Panter's Dal Tokyo. I would imagine as others have speculated that this was a sign of just how many comics are out there right now, but I don't accept that this has to remain a shrugged-shoulders, "Welp, that's comics!" moment. One positive that might come from a realization that this all-time work dropped into comics' midst without an accompanying reaction is to engage the work now. I'm in the middle of reading it, and Nicole Rudick offers up a nice place for readers and critics to start in the LA Review Of Books. If you somehow haven't been paying attention to Rudick's writing on comics, you should correct that, too.
One of the intriguing things that came out of last month's tidal wave of best-of comics list for 2012 was actually a negative: the apparent almost complete lack of interest by the body of people that read comics with something close to a professional interest in Gary Panter's Dal Tokyo. I would imagine as others have speculated that this was a sign of just how many comics are out there right now, but I don't accept that this has to remain a shrugged-shoulders, "Welp, that's comics!" moment. One positive that might come from a realization that this all-time work dropped into comics' midst without an accompanying reaction is to engage the work now. I'm in the middle of reading it, and Nicole Rudick offers up a nice place for readers and critics to start in the LA Review Of Books. If you somehow haven't been paying attention to Rudick's writing on comics, you should correct that, too.