Features
Hagai Palevsky | June 23, 2026
As I write these words, the social media discourse du jour has reverted to an old reliable subject: should authors read? Or, rather — is it a position of privilege to argue that a writer, in order to qualify as such, should read, both for professional enrichment and for pleasure? Admittedly I have fairly little interest in the discussion itself, but the notion that the two functions, reading and writing, are separate from one another brings me back to a question I think about from time to time, being the seeming dichotomy between creator and critic, especially in comics. I don’t adhere to the idea that a critic must create in order to attain credence or validity, but more and more I find myself wanting to see cartoonists engaging with the works of their peers in a critical fashion, in earnest and on record.
In this context we may look, just for a handy example, to Chris Ware, who shows up occasionally in the vaunted pages of The New Yorker or The New York Review of Books to offer an "appreciation" of this book or that. By and large, these appreciations are fawning; by and large, they’re not very good. Ware is a favorite cartoonist of mine — Jordan Wellington Lint in particular is one of the three best comics of all time, in my opinion — and part of what I find interesting about him is that the qualities that make him a good, interesting cartoonist and storytelling (the fretful, neurotic need for love and constant connection) are precisely the same qualities make him a poor, uninteresting critic, for one specific reason: in his comics, he projects these insecurities entirely onto himself, or, rather, onto the level of the human individual. When he writes about the comics of others, he feels compelled to take on the role of "ambassador" or "advocate," projecting the same insecurities outwards onto "comics" as a whole, to prove to his assumed audience of skeptics that, yes, comics can be art, comics can be serious. I need to be loved and respected is, regardless of time, a compelling sentiment; comics, as an art form, need to be loved and respected, twenty-something into the 21st century, is a tedious insistence that betrays its own insecurity.
