Welp, to be honest, Peter, I've lost track of Gene's argument. As best I can tell, he likes certain types of writing within genres, and thinks others aren't really appreciating those genres when they (I, for example) like other types of writing within the same genres. But, according to him, the others are the elitists for preferring what they prefer.

Lem, to me, is as good as scifi gets. If you liked SOLARIS, then give HIS MASTER'S VOICE a go. It's many things, a critique of bureaucracy, professionalist thinking, the influence of money and politics on scientific thinking, but the most amazing aspect of it for me is his demonstration of the beauty of atheistic reasoning. An incredible book.

CYBERIAD is one of the funniest books I've read.

I agree with that. Lem writes in both styles: CYBERIAD isn't concerned with what you might call representational plaubility, but HMV is (it's a phony memoir). He says a good deal of relevant things about our world in either case.

This is true. I still believe it. I don't think it explains why you like what you like, though.

Being accused so often of overcomplicating everything I see or read, I find it refreshing, in a perverse way, to be accused of oversimplification. Not sure what Gene means in particular, but it's still sort of refreshing. It's certainly not a term I'd sling towards Gene. Wrong he cetainly is most of the time, but wrong in a really tortuous fucked up way. Anyway, it must imply something when an obvious elitist such as myself or Lem is accused by such a common member of the fat part of the Bell curve to be simplifying things. It must be that esteemed vantage point at a high altitude allowing for a more complete and complex vision than we have at the narrow ends. It couldn't be elitism.

I wouldn't deny that the material used isn't going to have any necessary effects in the way a story is received. My argument is that there's a hell of lot more that would be lost in translating something like Ware's work to film or a novel than FUN HOME or PERSEPOLIS or Joe Matt's work or Harvey Pekar's or etc., etc..

While I have encountered that mindset before, I wasn't assuming that was true about you and/or Ken.

So, kudos for picking up on something I was implying. But I didn't have anyone specific in mind.

I agree that there's a difference of degree between insulting a person and a viewpoint held by that person, but it's not a difference of kind. I don't think it's always illogical for a person to be offended by aspersions cast on one's beliefs. A lot depends on the context of the remarks. For instance, if a conservative calls a liberal opponent of the Iraq war a "cut-and-runner," he's describing both the individual and his philosophy. That would be a low blow and the conservative would deserve the liberal's ire.

Oddly, there's an anecdote in one Al Franken book that's very like the Dave Sim/Jeff Smith challenge. A conservative made some blanket statement about the courage of liberals (as I recall it) and Al Franken phoned the guy up and asked if he wanted to fight. The guy declined.

Clowes here;

http://www.nytimes.com/ref/magazine/funnypages.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

That last part's a pretty good description of Thompson's BLANKETS, but ironically BLANKETS is the sort of thing Charles is saying he considers the stuff that isn't trying so hard, compared to the more adventurous types (Clowes and Antonioni, I think). Personally I liked BLANKETS well enough for what it was, and don't fault Craig Thompson if-- and this is a big if-- some critics choose to laud the humble accomplishment over the ambitious failure (or even the ambitious success).

It does seem to me unquestionable that there are artists who merely "talk the talk" of being hugely ambitious, though. Harvey Pekar makes the argument (right on his own website) that "Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff," but most of the time he doesn't manage to translate that complexity into his collaborative works, and so I usually do find that he fits the "boring autobio" category, as well as being a guy who merely "talks the talk" of artistic ambitiousness.

CR: "And although I can see some relation of this problem to what's deemed acceptable or normative disourse in academia, there's not near the resistance to having something questioned, even harshly criticized, from people with a thorough academic background as there is from those without."

Possibly. Still, one also sees a comparable openness in the non-academic public as a whole, which depends a lot of the time on the ability of a popular artist to get across his chosen themes in a clever way without breaking the illusion of consistency. I'm sometimes surprised that 1992's CRYING GAME was as successful with a general public as it was, and the face that 1992 audiences could go see both that and UNFORGIVEN the same year-- assuming as I do a considerable overlap in the moviegoing audiences of each-- the common factor would seem to be good straightforward storytelling, that allows viewers to enter the "what if" mentality more easily than would be possible with a more hyperintellecual approach to similar subject matter.