A man must serve his time to every trade — Criticism

"There were a lot of working professionals who were just sort of appalled at our attitude and probably at our punkish disrespect for mainstream, predominantly superhero, comics in general. They didnt think it was legitimate to criticize comics in that sort of high-toned way. Mainstream creators took a certain degree of pride in their work, but it was pride in them from the perspective of hard-core fans, and they werent really imposing standards on them, other than craft standards, which had devolved from the history of comics—and the history of comics is mostly just a history of crap. So when we came in and applied these "exalted" standards to comics, creators were, frankly, pissed off."

"We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donné: our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it."

"In such a time as this it is not meet That every nice offence should bear his comment."

"The modern proliferation of theoretical means and critical methods barely conceals the fact that we still allow ourselves to write about these works only within the narrowest disciplinary boundaries. We move from rigorous scholarship (the phrase is already too obvious) to ideological commitments that often seem, even when they are put forward in the name of History, to have forgotten the perils of devotion to an idea; to some straitened notion of pleasure; to the fantasy that some new science of rhetorical displacements will finally release us from the cold regime of the final signified. We have plenty of psychoanalytic criticism, formalist criticism, ideological criticism, etc., but where is our fear criticism? our despair criticism? our disgust criticism? our criticism of resentment? of petty ambition? of treachery, deceit, jealousy, hysterical rage? Nowhere in sight; and yet it would hardly require much effort to discover them all just beneath the thin civility of the strictest critical decorum. Then what if we were able to pursue critical fear, to identify critics with their fear, to prove that service to the text is driven by jealous desires, horrified resentment, abject loathing."

"If constructive criticism causes uncomfortable reactions from politicians and business people, they need to look at themselves."

"“Ah, ‘The Suffering Critic.’ A work to gladden the heart of any artist.”"