Tuesday, July 19, 2005

Sean Maher's Quality Control

There’s a term that’s been lost to comics as far as I can tell, a hell of a thing called constructive criticism. Look, anybody with the balls to put together their own comic and send it out into the world has a couple of points in my book. That doesn’t mean I have to dig what they’re trying to say, or how they’re saying it. But what I do see there is potential and passion. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: people create comics because they love the hell out of them. These are people who are genuinely looking to make a real contribution to their chosen art form. And frankly, I think that means I owe them some consideration in return. Will every review you see here be a positive one? No, definitely not. But when I find something I don’t think is working, instead of panning it and tossing it in the bin, I’m gonna try and figure out what’s wrong with it and how it could be made better.


MillarWorld regular, blogger, and weekend retailer Sean Maher has had a reboot. It looks like his weekend in retail (and his cool work with kids) has rejuvenated him, and he's relaunching his blog with a new mission statement: Sean Maher's Quality Control.

3 comments:

Sean Maher said...

Hey, thanks for the shout-out, Mark! I'm glad you've enjoyed what I've been up to lately.

The kids thing was really special. I can't even describe how good it felt. :)

Mark Fossen said...

I think it's a great blog (and I also generally like your MW posts), and I'm looking forward to the relaunch.

When you talked about leaning reading from comics to an extent ... and how that would be great for kids, I understood completely. I always read far above my grade level, and I really think a lot of it was due to the visual reinforcement from comics. Claremont, especially, wrote at a high enough vocabulary level that it really pushed me as a reader. And if Byrne's art couldn't help me figure it out, I usually was so invested I'd get a dictionary.

Sean Maher said...

You and me both, brother.

It's funny, because a lot of people think of comics as being something that makes you dumb.

But same as you - I learned a lot of vocabulary from those damn things. And I was always way ahead of the other kids in reading.

Part of that's natural inclination - both my parents are academic folks with way too much college under their belts, so I'm sure between nature and nurture I was bound to be a reader.

But the comics sure helped.