Fanboy Rampage chronicles critical response to Avengers 501 and inadvertently triggers a crushing tension headache at the same time by quoting an example of the leader of the pack in my least favorite critical gambits. It’s from Silver Bullet Comics, and it goes something like this:
“There are some people who just aren’t getting this… Well, I suppose that those people have to complain somewhere now that X-Statix has finished, but this is Avengers, not an experimental Grant Morrison project. It’s really not hard to understand, and as such Bendis shouldn’t have to explain the plot to those too feeble-minded to comprehend…”
Because, heaven knows, anyone who doesn’t like what Bendis is doing simply doesn’t understand it. It’s a failure of comprehension, you see, not a reasoned response to relative artistic merit.
Pardon me while I grind my teeth down to nubs. I’ll be back in a moment.
Is it just me, or is there a worryingly high degree of ad hominem attacks in critical discourse at the moment? (I know, I know, it’s the Internet, but it still seems to have reached epidemic levels lately.) It’s not sufficient, apparently, to disagree about a book’s quality. To really drive your point home, you have to question the intelligence of those who hold different views, to assume that some flawed worldview colors their ability to evaluate content, or to dismiss them as enemies of creative change.
Maybe they understand the book perfectly and just happen to think it’s crap. Is that possible? No? Okay, sorry.