the Scott Stein

Understanding Comics was recommended on two separate occasions by my friend and colleague, author Paula Marantz Cohen. Last week, I put my Barnes & Noble holiday gift cards to good use and picked up a copy. My trust in Paula's judgment was, as I expected, well-placed: Understanding Comics is that rare book that lives up to its enthusiastic back cover praise. I was a big comic book fan through my mid-teenage years, regularly reading nearly a dozen Marvel titles. I finally outgrew their limitations, but as McCloud argues, those limitations might not have had anything to do with the form itself. I don't know if I'm fully convinced, but maybe mostly. Understanding Comics is a wonderfully absorbing comic book about comics, an explanation of the craft of storytelling and the tools available to the artist that should interest all writers. McCloud not only explains, but also demonstrates comic book technique with great wit and insight throughout. I don't agree with everything McCloud argues--his definition of "art," for example, is so broad as to make it include practically everything, which I think makes "art" and "artist" mean nothing at all. Still, even on this count, McCloud's explanation is engaging and fun to grapple with. This is a book worth reading and re-reading, for fans of comic books and storytelling of any kind, and for fiction writers.

I wanted to like American Gods. It sounded like a fun concept--ripe for commentary and satire, perhaps--and was a bestseller, with some enthusiastic praise on the back cover. Neil Gaiman's name had popped up here and there, for me, notably as the writer of a blurb on Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, one of my favorite novels that I read in 2006. Gaiman's praise for Clarke's book, and his success, had me looking forward to reading his novel.

I'm not going to bother you with a plot summary, something about old gods (Odin and the like) battling new gods (media and the like) in America. The main character, Shadow, is lifeless. The prose is mostly dull, sometimes clunky. The drama doesn't exist. I didn't care who lived or who died, and thought most of the content simply went nowhere. I didn't laugh or smile. I could have stopped reading at any time and wouldn't have wondered what I'd missed by not finishing. It wasn't painful reading--I would have abandoned it--just long and boring. The too-effusive back cover blurbs and the brief author interview at the book's end suggest that there is a meditation in the novel, somewhere, on what America is. I found nothing profound or insightful--hardly anything at all--on that count. The concept of people believing in technology and modern appliances rather than gods left room for meditation, but nothing was remotely developed. This book is just empty, not only devoid of meaning--which I didn't demand but the book implied was there--but of entertainment value as well. I don't read sci-fi or fantasy like I did when I was younger, but I do make an effort to not let any residual MFA snobbery prevent me from enjoying a good read, whatever the "literary" merits might be. I will embrace any story that is sufficiently entertaining or witty or suspenseful and skillfully rendered. American Gods never came alive. There's no there, there.