* Here's an excellent autopsy of Scott Lobdell's loathsome non-apology for being a sexist asshole. I have to credit Yan Basque's Twitter feed for the link; Yan has really been a great resource for finding valuable commentary in the ongoing, gobsmacking revelations of just how many assholes and scumbags have been covered up by the culture of comics in recent years.
* The latest Tom Spurgeon holiday interview is with comics academician Brian Cremins. I have to admit that much -- most, really -- academic pieces on comics leave me befuddled, baffled and/or bored. I'm glad such work and the people who create it exist, but I'm not usually able to metabolize it in a way that becomes part of my thinking about comics in the same way that, say, reading Roger Ebert's The Great Movies books did. More succinctly, such writing is probably just over my head.
* Despite all that, I enjoyed the hell out of Spurge's chat with Cremins, possibly because my experiences with comics over the past 40+ years seem to be pretty simpatico with Cremins's own. Further, I find some of the ideas he expresses in the piece -- like that the quality of a given comic is not a factor for him, that he's more interested in its context and impact -- absolutely fascinating. It's not a point of view I think I would ever embrace as my primary lens through which I would view comics as a whole, but it's something I'd never thought about, and definitely merits a lot of consideration.
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