CSotD: Biting back at the critics
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These are a pair of illustrations by Dylan Meconis, created for my educational series, "Stories in the Stars," which was recently purchased by a major newspaper (a little over 300,000 daily). The paper has not yet announced the series, so I won't name them, but they have paid for it, so I need to get her percentage off to her today.
The series was the second we had worked on, back a few years ago when newspapers were healthier and Dylan was, I hope, hungrier than she ought to be now. That is, she's been earning a lot of praise and getting a lot of attention and I hope that translates into more than praise and attention.
A moment more of bragging about this: The first series we did was called "Tales of Ancient Rome" and was done in a right hurry when the artist I had lined up had to drop out. Dylan was about to graduate from college, but her interest in mythology was great enough — as was her need for a little walking-around money — that she did the job between preparing for finals and moving back to the Northwest.
In this illustration — the first in a three-part treatment of the legend — Proserpina is being lured towards a crack in the Earth, whereupon she will be kidnapped by Hades and taken to the Underworld to serve as his queen.
Incidentally, I changed the name from "Tales of Ancient Rome" to "Tales of the Ancient World" after furious Greeks protested, including one who threatened to picket the New York Daily News for running a series that suggested in any way that the stories might have originated in Rome, and another who raised similar hell at a small New England paper.
I fear the Greeks when they bear grudges.
Anyway, I put my own commissions of her art at the top of this posting because Dylan's personal work outstrips them, and that is not an attempt at a pun but a fair assessment of her talent.
She created "Bite Me!" — a self-described "vampire farce" set in the French Revolution — while still an undergraduate, and is a couple of hundred episodes into "Family Man," an online semi-historical fiction, semi-fantasy story set in 18th century Germany.
She was also recently nominated for an Eisner Award for "Outfoxed!" which is not a graphic novel but, um, more of a graphic short story.
She's also very good at explaining the things she wants to explain, which is to say, her growing list of notes and FAQs for "Family Man" begins with this disclaimer:
I’m a fool for extraneous period and character detail, but don’t care to
bog the actual story down with painstaking accounts of 18th century
laundry procedure or Character 27b’s professional background. So I
provide notes to accompany many of the story pages in Family Man. They are updated approximately every ten pages, and can be read or ignored at will.
So, while her work is intelligent and highly entertaining, so is her commentary, which (finally!) brings us to the point of today's post about her.
She recently published a set of theses and nailed them to the doors of literary critics everywhere, about the annoying, tone-deaf cliches that mainstream critics bring to the job whenever they are asked to review a graphic novel.
Or, to use her favored term, a comic book.
The piece, which is light, funny and trenchant, has rocketed around within the comic books sphere, but that's a bit of preaching to the choir, and I thought I'd at least bring it to readers of comic strips, who may be less submerged in the subculture but will, first of all, recognize these gripes immediately and who, if they find anything I ever say amusing or thought-provoking, will be in raptures over Dylan's combination of barbs and insights.
And one of the best things about it is that every part of her argument where I thought of a comment or quibble is addressed in the comments section. I get thoughtful comments here, but she gets them by the boatload and they are more like a seminar on the piece than a simple Q&A period following it.
In any case, if you haven't already experienced the sense of "here we go again" that comics people feel when they read mainstream reviews of the art form, this will plant enough little landmines in your head that you will never again accidentally enjoy a badly written, poorly edited piece.
You will also enjoy Dylan's regular work, and all three of the pieces I've mentioned here are available for free at her website, though you shouldn't let that stop you from buying some of her stuff.
And, Dylan, the money will be PayPal-ed your direction today. Really.
Unless, y'know, I forget.
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