Review of Reading Comics by Douglas Wolk
Reading Comics by Douglas Wolk
Pitched as a primer on comics but one that doesn’t follow through, Reading Comics suffers from the same insularity-of-subject that the author himself identifies as a problem in the comics world. While it offers a decent jumping-off point for a newbie who wants to know more about what’s good to read, only about a third of the book is dedicated to the meaning and history of comics. The rest is a compilation of Wolk’s essays on specific authors, series, and books, which means someone who expected a thorough background on how one might read different comics is left adrift, most of all because the majority of Reading Comics–despite the aims stated in the introduction–can be appreciated only by those familiar with the publications being referenced. Wolk and his publisher go to great lengths to secure reprint rights for many, many individual cells or pages of comics, but ultimately, out of context, these reproductions are only meaningful to those who have read the references works in full themselves.
So basically: use Reading Comics to select a handful of comics you would read yourself but only dive into the full book after having an idea of what Wolk is writing about.
