The Comic-Book Critic

Douglas Wolk looks completely exhausted. He's standing in line at the Southeast Portland coffee shop Crema, where he agreed to meet me on a four-day layover between New York and the San Diego Comic-Con. He's a little off-kilter now, his wire-rimmed glasses slightly askew, but the worst is yet to come. "The two days after San Diego are the last I'll be home for two months," he tells me. "It's book-tour hell."

The book in question is Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean (Da Capo Press, 405 pages, $22.95), billed by the publisher as "the first serious, readable, provocative, canon-smashing book of comics theory and criticism by the leading critic in the field." That's a little over the top—Wolk doesn't pretend that major theoretical works by the likes of Will Eisner and Scott McCloud never happened—but the "leading critic in the field" bit is hard to dispute. Over the past few years, Wolk has become the go-to writer for mainstream publications (Rolling Stone, Publishers Weekly, The New York Times, etc.) looking to tap into a new generation of comics readers who are coming to the form in other ways than the traditional superhero channels.

Wolk didn't set out to be a comics critic. The 37-year-old writer—and occasional WW contributor, after his 2003 move to Portland—started his career as a copy editor and music writer in New York, where he started his record label, Small Beloved Cloud, played in a few bands, and once cranked out an entire issue of CMJ after the rest of the staff suddenly quit. Writing the magazine himself gave him free rein over content, so he started a column on comics.

After "retiring" to freelance full-time in 1997, he started reviewing comics for Salon.com, and new gigs just kept popping up. These days, as he divides his time between comics and music criticism, his record label, and his 2-year-old son, Wolk is as good an example as any of author Katherine Dunn's "everyone in Portland is living a minimum of three lives" maxim.

Wolk says he isn't sure writing about comics is something he can make a living at just yet, but it's getting there: "My conceptual coup was a few months ago—the same morning I opene d my email, and I had requests to write about comics for The Huffington Post, Shojo Beat and Penthouse. At the time, I had never seen an issue of Penthouse. I still feel like I should donate all the money I got from that gig to In Other Words."

In Reading Comics, Wolk collects and expands upon some of the in-depth pieces he's published elsewhere and packages them with a whirlwind history of the medium and an explication of why the experience of reading a comic book is fundamentally different from watching a film, reading a novel, or looking at a painting. It's a friendly, passionate and accessible introduction to a world that can be offensively intimidating to the uninitiated—he describes contemporary American comics culture as "an insular, self-feeding, self-loathing, self-defeating flytrap"—and might be the first entirely subjective guide to the medium.

"The primary audience that I had in mind was people who read some comics, a little bit, and are really interested in what else is out there," Wolk tells me, as he works his way through a fruit tart. "I don't want people necessarily to agree with me, but I want to be their barometer."

It's likely that a lot of readers won't agree. Wolk is unafraid of meting out harsh criticism of the medium's most revered creators—saying of Will Eisner, the late, beloved "father of the graphic novel," for example, "his ironies are cheap, and his attempts at profundity aren't very deep at all"—and stridently condemns the unfortunate majority of bad comics, even though parts of his book read like an apologia. "There are a lot of comics that need apologizing for," he says. "There's still a lot of stuff that it's hard to like without severe reservations."

That said, Wolk is not a member of the art-comics crowd who wants to kill superheroes for good. "Everything needs to grow up," he tells me, "but you can't only grow up. A society where everyone is 35 years old is a sick society. There are 70-year-old comics now. Soon there will be comics for 70-year-olds." And Wolk will be there to review them.