RSS Feed
Facebook
Twitter
THE BLOG AT THE CROSSROADS
The Dreaded ‘C-Word’ Looms Again!
Posted: February 6, 2011
My second complaint to Time Out has surfaced again in their Inbox letters page last week, I’m glad to say, naming and shaming in print their reviewer’s lazy slurring of comics. But no sooner have I taken this journo to task, than novelist Tim Lott betrays his prejudices and ignorance on new BBC2 series Faulks on Fiction, shown last night on BBC2 and re-watchable now on BBC iPlayer. At 52.52 minutes in, Lott spouts on as a supposed expert about the shallow, self-indulgent “hero” of Martin Amis’s novel Money, John Self:
“But he’s a cypher, in that sense. That’s why he IS comic book - and that’s why his journey is so entertaining, in a comic-book sort of way.”
Pray tell me, what does the razor-sharp insight “in a comic-book sort of way” actually mean? In the case of self, it seems to me that, once again, the ‘C-Word’, this time ‘comic book’ (a nod perhaps to the American setting of the book) is being used here as slovenly shorthand to describe a character who is undeveloped, unnuanced, one-dimensional, merely “a cypher”, and the comics medium is reduced to standing for nothing better than the slightest of pulpy entertainment. I’m not going to let this sort of left-handed compliment, really more of a glib dismissal, of comics in all their variety and wonder go unnoticed. Every time this slur gets trotted out, it relies on the public knowing what is meant, relying on a preconceived notion of comics and reinforces the general misconception of them, whether comic book or graphic novel.
Elsewhere in this first episode, by the way, Sebastian Faulks equates Batman’s Gotham City to Sherlock Holmes’ London, hailing Doyle’s creation as ‘the first superhero’. Appealing to populism, but far from accurate. Hercules anyone, for starters?
Read The Blog At The Crossroads here.
