This is a great book if you are interested in Douglas Wolk. If you want to spend hours and hours reading what he thinks, being told what – in HIS opinion – is right and what is wrong, this is a great book.

If however you are genuinely interested in an enjoyable book about something that should be enjoyable, then avoid this book.

The first 30 or 40 pages are a struggle, filled with sentences containing “… comics I like …”, “I’d also …”, “… I’m talking about …”, ” I find …”, “I mean ….” and “I think …” making it one of the most egotistical pieces of writing I have ever come across.

Doug may think he knows a lot about comics, but he knows little about writing. I lost count of the number of times he started writing about something or someone, and then stops and tells the reader there is more in a later chapter.

There appeared to be redemption at around page 40, but it was short-lived and the book fell back into the “soapbox” style of the beginning.

I didn’t finish the book. Maybe I should have stuck with it, but I tried flicking forward a few pages at a time to see if the writing style improves, but was consistently disappointed.
Rating: 1 / 5

I don’t know where to begin. This book is a mess. The writing is awash with redundancy, questionable grammar, and an annoying love of parenthesis. Too often he touches upon ideas in earlier chapters only to say that he will clear up any questions in later chapters, rather than clearly expressing his thoughts. An earlier review states that an editor should have cleaned the book up a little. I agree 100%. There are better books out there. Search them out.
Rating: 1 / 5

The problem with reviewing a book of criticism is the endless path it can lead you on. After all, my review itself can be critiqued in the comments area below, and those comments can be analyzed, and so on. Eventually, the main topic may be lost in all the reviews of reviews of reviews. Such is the peril that I am undertaking with Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics.

Plenty of people view comics rather negatively as shallow entertainment for children. Certainly, if you look at the standard comics page in a newspaper, the few quality strips are islands in a sea of mediocrity. As Wolk points out, however (and what many comics fans already know), comics are just a medium like television or books, and there’s a lot more to it than kid stuff.

The first portion of Reading Comics looks at the medium as a whole: its history, its fan culture, what it does well and not so well and what makes the comic form unique. Actually, the term “comics” is not really that great as many comics are actually quite serious; on the other hand, other terms – including the often-used “graphic novels” – have their own problems, typically either also being descriptively inadequate or overly pretentious. When one thinks of comic books (or, as Wolk annoyingly calls them, “pamphlets”), the one genre that stands out is the superhero comic. Wolk gives superheroes some acknowledgement, but wants to look beyond that limited area.

The second part of the book looks at various comic artists and writers; often times, one person serves both functions. Among the more well-known writers/artists discussed are Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Marv Wolfman, Art Spiegelman and Steve Ditko. Other less commonly known names are also reviewed such as Hope Larson and Kevin Huezinga. Wolk’s choices are of generally significant works, but he is up front about his own biases in selecting material.

Wolk sometimes come off a bit snobby in his discussions, but he usually keeps any elitism toned down. If you’re reading this book, chances are you are familiar with much of the work that’s reviewed and will not always agree with Wolk’s opinions. Overall, however, even when I disagreed with him, he provided good arguments for his views. If you’re a comics fan, and you want to start looking critically at the medium, your best introduction would probably be Scott McCloud, particularly with Understanding Comics and Drawing Comics. McCloud, however, focuses more on the “mechanics” of comics rather than particular artists. If you want to delve into comics more in depth – especially as a form of literature – Reading Comics does the job well.

Rating: 4 / 5