Well, you can't even draw!

I don't "review" comics, outside of this place (& it'd be an act of unparalleled generosity to call what I do here "reviewing"), but in terms of writing about comics or CDs or whatever, I'm not sure it's really a matter of knowing about The Art of writing / drawing / musical theory as much as knowing what you know & what you don't know, & being honest. & as far as being interested in formalist readings that emphasize the art over the plot - depends totally on the book. Something like Frank is totally different from something like Watchmen, &c.

Of course, I'm an odd duck, because I enjoy reading criticism more for the writer's panache than what they're thinking - the only time I tend to notice bullshit arguments is when the writing's shitty (&, sometimes, I can't see the strength of the arguments for the shitty writing).

Daver OTM. If you extend your art/music crit analogy to textual narrative, you don't often see reviewers mentioning formal analepsis or something, though knowing what the fancy words mean can help reduce what you do or don't like about a comic to reader-friendly terms.

Also, I imagine the reason that the questions that are raised about music crit being left unraised about comic crit is because (like you said) comic crit's still unestablished. It seems corny to say something like, "The comic world doesn't yet have its Creem or Rolling Stone or Meltzer or Bangs," but at some level I think it's true - there hasn't been any sort of critical comic zeitgeist (that I know of) where the interest in the medium dovetailed with the work being produced and the people writing about it. Or, if this actually DID happen, it came & went. Of course, one BIG difference - music's communal; comics ain't.

Of course, the movement that those mags & dudes were part of lead to the stodgy self-referential anti-communal shut-in crit-culture that (depending on where you look) runs rampant today. &, from what I've seen of the comic blogosphere in-crowd, those tentpoles have already been set up.

Actually I think it does help - my far-too-occasional jaw-jaws on The State Of Comics with Al in the pub have definitely been improved by Al's actual hands-on experience of comics scripting: he's able to spot and criticise little details that I would usually miss, like particularly elegant examples of necessary exposition. It's not quite at the "yeah the song sucks but man the guy's picking is great" level yet tho!

(Wow the text in these new answer boxes is TINY)

See also that amazing link from a few months back to Toth laying into Steve Rude. There was a certain amount of wood/trees stuff going on but the specific details of the criticism of storytelling were simply not the stuff you'd generally think through if you didn't actually produce comics.

When I used to read comics mags though I often got the idea that "storytelling" was this enormous bluffword usually meaning "I can't quite put my finger on what I do or don't like, but I know I like it".

I believe what you're refering to comes more from the fact that those are made for people who don't make comics. Most readers of comics magazines don't care about a "particularly elegant examples of necessary exposition" just like readers of most music magazines don't really care if 'the guy's picking is great" : they want to know if the song sucks.
And most of the time, if you get say one issue of the comics journal, it'll be filled with reviews of dozens of comics you'll never read anyway, so the review should focus on the mystique & what the comic is about, some things you can enjoy even if you'll never read the comic in question, rather than the use of a certain type of brush.
All that being said, there are ways to talk about the art, the layout or the panel sequencing without being to techincal, and some critics try to use those ways (at least I do). And every would-be comics critic should at least have read McCloud's books, Eisner's & some others.

My entirely selfish problem w/McCloud's first book on comics was that section where he starts defining what is and isn't a comic, and at the time I was helping Al make comics that were excluded from the definition, so I thought, "Well, this definition basically doesn't work."

But loads of his thinking in those books is terrific.

One of the great things about comics, like pop music, is that it's usually quite easy to get a bead on the effect and impact and overall 'idea' of the thing (what you're calling "mystique" I guess) and then you can work back from there and try and understand what decisions and accidents have gone towards achieving those effects.

(The specific dictat of McCloud's Al and I were breaking, btw, was the "you have to have transitions between panels for it to be a comic" - from our POV, you could depict a single panel of complex action and have the entire course of a story implicit and encoded within it, without needing to sequentialise it into a panel format, and what you were creating still felt like 'comics'.)

(This makes these comics sound a lot more highbrow than they actually were - they were basically one-panel gag strips which would riff on the splash pages of corny silver age stuff. But they were still comics DAMN YOU MCCLOUD)

Off topic, sorta: [linkOH NOES]http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=102399[/link]

I GIVE UP

McCloud's making a dogma out of comics language anyway, and in a very stifling, anti-creative way. I find some of his observations to be very convoluted expressions of the stunningly obvious, and others just not worth making (and certainly to be resisted in a formal sense). He actually writes like someone who genuinely struggles to understand the medium, thus given to explaining things in pointless detail that a great talent (i.e. Toth, Kirby) would never give a second thought to.

I don't see 'storytelling' as a bluffword. I mean, if I use it, I think I'll use it with some pertinence. I might point to a particular page or panel and say the storytelling (composition or whatever) failed, because confusion ensued. If I have to sit and ponder a page or sequence before moving on, to figure out what it happening (as opposed to pondering its implications or deeper meanings, which is a different matter), I'd probably call that a failure unless the story was intentionally seeking to confuse or be oblique.

I try to draw comics, though. I'm not very good, but I try. ;-) I have enough knowledge, I guess, albeit basic, to spot some amount of bluffery in reviews -- people wanting to look smart and spot symbolism and meaning or narrative devices that the author plainly didn't intend. I've had that done with my own work, several times, and I always make a cruel point of getting this across to the person who's done it: 'No, sorry, you're talking arse, that's not what I intended AT ALL!' :-) (There was one occasion where someone read a really neat thing into something I did, though. And on reflection, I have to wonder if I should've just said, 'Well spotted!')

I have mixed feelings about reviews, including the ones I occasionally write myself. I wish I could resolve this. Someone help me.

I find Eddie Campbell's takes on the notion of comics and what they are for (whether in How To Be An Artist, The Fate Of The Artist, or the short-lived History Of Humour) to be far more illuminating than anything McCloud has ever written on the topic. I don't dislike McCloud, or necessarily find him unreadable, but his desire for precise codification is very wearing.