A purist would be somebody who is very concerned about The Comics Medium and whether or not something advances it.

The kind of people I imagine wearing black mock turtlenecks, drinking Americanos with no sugar and discussing American Splendour like it's right up there with The Iliad in terms of being a Great Work.

... the kind of people who need to lighten up a bit about the fact that they're over thirty and still reading picture books patterned after something originally intended mainly for children.

When I think of The Medium, my first thoughts aren't "Uncle Vanya would totally work with Barks-style anthropomorphic animals" so much as Wonder Woman getting chained up by lesbians from Venus.

The roots of The Medium lie a lot closer to superheroes than to Alec. Being able to read Little Nemo in the original French doesn't do much to change that.

Where to begin? Forgive them Lord for they know not what they etc. etc.

As for the rest of your post,

..this sums things up quite nicely.

Dumas,

You might be interested in this site on the history of comics:

http://bugpowder.com/andy/

Gene,

Thanks for asking; I don't have the time now to go back and read this stuff to say something halfway intelligent - I'll post soon if I can, but who knows . . .

Could you or someone else explain this? I thought Nemo was an American comic published in an American newspaper.

It's simple. I made a mistake.

Since CR decides to put the following link on the table:

http://www.textetc.com/theory/emotive-expression.html

I may as well respond to some of it. As a general overview it may be broadly informative, and he does a fair job of covering some of the complexities of how emotions function in literature. However, I did think he oversimplified a few things for effect:

"Do we know exactly what an audience experiences during a play? Hardly, to judge from the comments of the audience making its way home from the theatre, or even from theatre critics, whose judgements are notoriously at odds with each other."

But the question then occurs, how are the audience-members and theater-critics differing? Is it just in terms of their emotional experience, or is also in terms of their rational discourse about 'judging' what a given play means? It seems to me that there's no need to analyze minutely whether or not everyone reacts equally to the same play: clearly they won't. But statistically, if the majority of the audience laughs at a given comedy, then it's a successful comedy on the emotional level. If Critic A and Critic B both basically enjoyed the play, the fine points of their individual experiences certainly matter to them, but do they count for anything beyond themselves?

I also think the author oversimplifies the views of Suzanne Langer and Ernst Cassirer re: the alleged primacy of emotion in art. I don't have Langer to hand, and the one Cassirer work I do have isn't primarily about art, but it does discourse about the same feature of "detachment" that this Holcombe guy mentions in the section previous: From THE PHILOSOPHY OF SYMBOLIC FORMS, p.276:

"All knowledge of the world, and all strictly spiritual action upon the world require that the 'I' thrust the wofld back from itself, that in contemplation as in action it [should] gain a certain distance from it...This acquisition of the world as idea is, rather, the aim and product of the symbolic forms-- the result of language, myth, religion, art, and theoretical knowledge."

However one feels about Cassirer's theory of symbolic forms, from the above it's clearly wrongheaded to lump him in with those who view art as purely emotional experience. For this reason, perhaps, Cassirer uses the term "expressive" to speak of the emotional center of mankind, but this is very different in character from what Croce and Collingwood are talking about.

(Edited for snarkyness and good kharma.)

Humor strips and adaptations of well-known fairy tales are still a lot closer to mainstream comics than they are to, say, Dave McKean's semiautobiographical stories about the people who hung out at his favorite bar.

Most indie comics have more in common with all those low budget indie films about people having relationship problems one might see on The Sundance Channel than they do with those early comic strips at that site.

The conflict would exist if you wished to state that:

(a) motif x was "representative" of genre y based on the sheer preponderance of motif x's appearances,

And yet were also saying that:

(b) a preponderance of good stories in medium x does not make it superior in any way to medium y, which cannot boast the same number of good stories.

This position, which you're now claiming is not yours, would be an inconsistent application of statistical tools. The position you've expressed here is at least consistent on its own terms, though not with the earlier statement that MOKF has to be better than all the other akfm in order to be superior, since that statement didn't allow for making cross-comparisons in terms of numerical statistics. Even so, you've found a way to hedge your statistical bets with the claim that one superior work in genre x raises it above a host of not-quite-as-superior works in genre y. But if you can invoke quality over quantity, I can do the same, which takes me back to an earlier point: that the critic who over-generalizes based on pure statistics is in danger of disregarding the particulars of the genre-works from which he has abstracted his case. Thus a critic who states (as you did) that in *EVERY* way Henry James is superior to Stan Lee has practiced bad criticism.