In other words, the “upper echelons” are just another niche market, and not a very popular or vital one, especially now.

Back when a deal with a particular publisher, a positive note from a particular critic, or the engagement of a particular agent, could get you on The Tonight Show to debate ethics or economics or foreign policy with Norman Mailer and Charo, there may have been some value to getting yourself known in the old-fashioned back-patting boy’s club. Those kinds of appearances doubtless sold books. These days, you’re better off sucking up to reddit editors than New York Times editors — the former have more actual clout with more actual readers.

Spawn is an alternative to everything that is not Spawn.

“Art-comics” or “artcomics” took hold for a while, but calling a comic an “art comic” always seemed a). snooty, and b). repetitious, like calling a particular glass of water “wet water,” or a particular movie “filmic,” which people do, but people do all kind of silly things. Comics are an art form, so every comic is an “art comic.”

“Literary” was my personal favorite for a little bit, and while it’s a term that definitely describes a large and important subset of the kinds of comics we want to talk about (Fun Home is decidedly literary, for example), it does not begin to be usable for most of them (the stories in Johnny Ryan’s Angry Youth Comix, for example, are as literary as the Ramones were, which is to say not at all, but kinda, but definitely not).

Great literary insight from Johnny Ryan

Most of the “graphic novels” that people talk about a lot aren’t “novels” — book-length works of fiction — at all. Maus and Persepolis and Fun Home are nonfictional, for example. Sandman books and Love & Rockets collections are episodes in an ongoing serial, more akin to DVD collections of great television shows like The Sopranos or I Love Lucy than to novels. And so on and so on and so on. Which is fine. Many of the comics we want to talk about are not in any way novelistic, easy enough to understand — so why force that expectation upon them?

“Comix” with an “x” has been promoted as a term by no less a figure than Art Spiegelman, but that word, when spoken aloud, is indistinguishable from “comics” with a “cs,” so we are only able to talk about the comics we want to talk about when we are writing. That eliminates this solution. In spoken conversation, it would be annoying to have to keep saying, “with an x” every time, you know? Though I do like to annoy, so maybe I’ll try that.

Elsewhere on the web:

I think Darryl Ayo might be trolling the fanboys a little bit with his thoughts on the nomenclature of non-mainstream comics:

I look at a lot of the so-called “alternative comics,” and–I don’t expect that I’m blowing anyone’s mind here–find that they are perfectly normal. They should be called “normal comics” and marketed as such. They should be called “normal comics,” and people can say “oh, are you into Spider-Man?” and you’d respond “nah, I only read normal comics.” Read more …

In the course of his obituary for the great Spain Rodriguez, Robert Boyd tries to make a case for the term “art comics” by using it to define works that are not created with commercial intention, which seems like a slippery slope to me (he immediately has to account for works that clearly were created for commercial gain but which are considered masterpieces of the form, like Krazy Kat and Little Nemo in Slumberland). Still, his distinction is close to what I am trying to get at when I talk about “comics that are not mainstream,” so if he’s guilty of oversimplifying his case, I’m as guilty as he is.

Spoken language is (should be) extemporaneous and loose, or else the speaker sounds like a liar or a robot or both. That’s why things that are not acceptable in written language — like using “like” or “so” as stalling tactics while your brain catches up to what you want to say — are perfectly reasonable, even effective communication devices, in the context of spoken language. (The unspoken but meaningful subtext is often: “I said ‘like’ or ‘so’ because the next part of what I want to say is a little difficult to formulate, and communicating that to you is part of what I am communicating overall.”)

I have a lot of friends and acquaintances, especially editors and writers, who expect spoken language to be as well-tuned and elegantly tricked out as a New Yorker piece. In particular they decry stalling words like “like” and “so.” Or at least they claim to. I don’t know if the use of these words in these ways really bothers them, or if, like most “pet peeves,” their complaint is just a convenient gambit to have handy in case conversation lags — a sort of intellectual tchotchke designed to make its owner look more interesting. I suspect the latter. I sometimes run with a fairly pretentious, persnickety crowd — and I love them for it! I’m a bitch, too, just in other ways.

The English language is not settled science, subject to the rules of logic and consistency that pedants wish to impose upon it. It is a performance, subject only to the context in which it is presented and the needs and expectations of the speaker and the audience. The pedant’s “proper English” is appropriate in formal contexts, even when speaking. Let’s say you’re addressing the United Nations. You’d want to avoid “like” and “so” as stalling words. But I’m not going to use subjunctive verb phrases when talking to my mom, though, nor will “whom” (nor “nor”) ever cross my lips when I’m hanging outside with a bunch of silly queens at a gay bar, unless I am making fun of pretension itself. I’ll use other words and speak in other ways at other times.

Like so.

Out of the corner of my right eye I saw a young woman running toward the street. She was a fat girl. I say this not to make fun of her or shame her but to impress you even more with what happened next. She maybe stood 5 feet tall, and probably weighed about 300 pounds. She was heading directly toward the gap between me and the car in front of me at a full tilt.

Out of the corner of my left eye I saw a car coming toward us in the other lane doing about 60 miles an hour, which is crazy for that area, a combination of low-income residential and retail.

All of this happened way too fast for me to do or say anything.

The girl didn’t stop. The car didn’t stop.

She did manage to make it almost across the street, though. The hood of the car (it was a low-slung Mazda sportscar type dealie) caught her in the right thigh as she was almost out of its range. She did a complete head-over-heels flip in the air and landed on her hands and knees, right outside my open window. I looked at her. Then, like a Hong Kong movie protagonist, she said, “Son. Of. A. Bitch.” Stood up. And walked into the liquor store which had been her original destination, without even so much as a limp.

She was gone before I could think to say anything. It was the weirdest thing to see her flip over in the air like that.

The car, of course, didn’t stop.

Everybody else in traffic started getting out of their cars at this point and yelling, “Hey, is she all right?” to each other. Turned out there was a Sheriff’s deputy in one of the cars, so he turned his lights on and did a U-turn and pulled into the liquor store parking lot, presumably to check on her.

Life in Louisville.

I love it, with one important caveat: I had to trim my subscriptions down to 12 in order to fit within a free account. I used to be subscribed to hundreds of feeds. This turned out to be a good thing for me, since many of my feeds were ancient. Some had burned out years ago; others no longer interested me; some I didn’t even remember subscribing to, and couldn’t imagine why I had done so. Having to look at each feed and wonder if I really wanted it, and only keep the ones I really did, has improved the quality of my overall daily trawl, weirdly. Less is more.

You can pay to have more than 12 feeds, but I’m not yet ready to do that yet. I’ve heard rumors of other potential Reader replacements, from big, reputable companies, that are launching soon. It seems wasteful to spend money on something that has always been free for me until I’ve at least tried those, especially the one Digg is promising to launch. That one’s going to be fee-based as well, but I’m sure I’ll be able to try it out for free, and my mama always told me that you better shop around. You know?

Note that until Google Reader goes away you can still use a free Feedly account to access your Reader feeds, if you take advantage of the integration feature. That might be a good way for you Reader fanatics to test the UI and see if it does what you need for it to do.

[UPDATE: Feedly contacted me on Twitter to let me know that they do not have a 12-feed limit on free accounts. I guess I hallucinated that part. I'm still happier with my pared-down feed subscriptions, though!]

Howard Chaykin’s memories of the recently-passed comic artist and publisher Carmine Infantino are interesting because they are Chaykin’s, written in his inimitable, irascible voice, as much as they are interesting because they are about Carmine Infantino.

“Back then, when I was in my early 20s, the fact that the publisher of DC Comics disliked me simply because I was associated with his lifelong nemesis [Gil Kane] seemed like the end of the world. In the long run, it didn’t make a damned bit of difference, but I made a commitment to myself that I would never fall into the kind of distaste for my contemporaries to which Kane and Infantino’s generation was clearly prone. Needless to say, things didn’t quite work out that way: there are a number of my contemporaries that I hold in the same high disregard that those men shared amongst themselves, and I’m certainly loathed by quite a few of my colleagues in return.”

No shit! Ha!

I know people who are scared of Chaykin because they’re afraid of his sharp tongue. You should hear him on the subject of the much-beloved-by-everyone-else Will Eisner. To hear that he imagined he, Howard Chaykin, would try to spread love and togetherness throughout the industry is especially delightful, knowing his reputation as a trouble-maker. None of us end up becoming who we thought we wanted to be.

I should mention that Chaykin’s refusal to suck up to the Common Gods of Comics is one of the reasons he is a hero of mine. That, and the amazing, seminal, artform-redefining work he has done throughout his career (I ignore the crappy work he has done throughout his career, as best I can). Please don’t hurt me Mr. Chaykin!

Despite the fact that he is very, very old indeed, James Salter, for example, belongs in a generation that is even older than he is. Let’s call him the last distant peer-wannabe of Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, that crowd. He comes from the age of the Big, Brawling Man-Writer Who Took on the World and Won. The last of Hemingway’s literary children.

I do not mean this as a compliment, necessarily. I also don’t like the Black Crowes very much.

Anyway, I’ve decided to finish the thing before I start posting it. I’m getting there. Don’t rush me! Ha! I’m getting there.

Meanwhile, I’ve been looking at these fiction “communities” and wondering if it would be better to serialize the book there, where there’s already a large audience.

On the plus side: sites like figment.com and wattpad.com have a reasonably large base of readers already, who are specifically looking to read fiction. Not all of them will end up reading mine, of course, but some of them will, and in the world of online content, “some” is an excellent start.

On the negative side: I lose the opportunity to own my brand (not my work — none of the sites I’m thinking of posting on claim to own your work). Having your own website has always been the best way to ensure that you are in control of the way your work is presented. Posting your work on a big aggregation site has sometimes been perceived as less-than-professional.

That said, I’m tending toward the fiction hosts. The “owning your own brand” thing made a lot more sense in the days when the goal was to make a living solely by running a content-oriented website. If your website is going to make money all by itself, then you want all that money to land in your own pocket. Right? That’s not the business model anymore. My business model is to serialize SBLSP in order to build up an audience, then maybe sell books in the future. If a labor of love like this one can be said to have a “business model” at all.

I’m still not convinced, though.

So I’m asking you: are these sites worthwhile? Have any of you used them? Have any of you used other sites like these, that I haven’t heard of? If I do decide to go this route, which of the sites would you recommend? Or should I just continue to post work on a site I control?

So far I’m loving the Chromebook. Superfast, super-lightweight (all solid state electronics, no hard drive), supercheap, and there are more web apps out there, to do more things, than I ever realized. Sumo Paint for Photoshoppy stuff (not nearly as good as Photoshop, of course, but not nearly as crappy as GIMP), Outliner of Giants for outlining — plus, of course, the old, more-famous standbys like Evernote and Kindle Cloud Reader. There are even several IDEs for developing PHP apps (and other kinds of apps) out there. One thing that concerned me about switching to a “dumb” device was losing the ability to be anything other than a consumer of computing services, and not a creator of them — coding is power. I’m glad to know that I don’t have to give that up.

I’m not superthrilled with Google Drive (formerly known as Google Docs) for writing my novel in, mainly because of the poor organizational system. Every document you’ve ever written shows up on the left. I hate having to be reminded of the existence of stuff I wrote five years ago every time I work on my book. I’m betting I find an alternative. I’m waiting for them to turn my old Zoho Writer account back on right now, for example, (apparently they changed their codebase and didn’t migrate accounts unless you were using the service, or unless you come in years after using it and politely ask, which I have done). Or I could just use Evernote, couldn’t I?

I hope I continue to love this thing. I’ll keep you posted!

I’m saying this because I just looked at my Goodreads inbox for the first time in months. I was just going to repost my Meg Wolitzer review over there (might as well find readers where they are), but I got distracted by the fact that I had 74 “emails” in my Goodreads inbox! Oh boy! Reader responses! Old friends who have found me! Something cool, surely!

But no.

The majority were very literally nothing but a link to a self-published book — and when I say literally, I mean literally. Open the email, and find link, period. No salutation, no explanation of why the author thinks that this would be of interest to me in particular, hardly even any indication (other than the fact that the url goes to a bookseller’s website) that this is a book, or that the book in question was authored by the person sending the email. No, that would be too difficult. Too time-consuming! All these people are sending is just a raw, naked http:// link. That’s the majority. I shit you not.

The rest are form letters, from people who at least took the time to copy/paste. “Hello JOEY MANLEY nice to meet you here on GOODREADS, please allow me to introduce myself,” with, yes, a link to a self-published book following that salutation. No indication that they have any idea who they’re talking to. No reference to anything about me. No attempt to make a real human connection, just a transparently pathetic attempt to fake same.

Here’s a tip: if you are a writer, do not use the same “online outreach” strategies to promote your book that penis enlargement companies use to promote their sugar pills! Your potential readers are out there, and approaching them one at a time is surely one way to find them, but you have to seem like an actual human being trying to make an actual human connection. No, strike that. You have to be an actual human being trying to make an actual human connection. This is work. But it works.