Augie de Blieck Jr. in his Pipeline column on Comic Book Resources:
The issue reads like a storyboard to a feature film, and not just a comic book.
“Just” a comic book?
To clarify a bit, I’m questioning an implicit assumption I see here that New Frontier is better than “just” a comic book because of its apparent aesthetic association with movies, or at least with movie storyboards. I doubt Augie intended to suggest that movies are better than comics, but nevertheless I see in the subtext some ambivalence about the worth of comics compared with movies.
alex says:
there’s a lot of talk in the comics community about which criteria comics should be judged by (the same criteria as literature or art or movies or what?). because comics are such a marginal medium at this point in time, the rationale for making comics (and not literature/art/movies) often boils down to an oft-asked question: “why can’t this comic be a [literature/art/movie]?” the “just” in the referenced sentence seems to be used in this fashion, with the (questionable) assumption that good comics cannot be translated to any other medium; in this case “just” should be read as “unique to.”
— 25 February 2004 at 2:46 am (Permalink)