Not so useful
Imagine Mr. A's b/w calling card right here. Just haven't uploaded the image.
I have to say that I’m more than a little dumbstruck by the polarization I’m seeing going on in the vast majority of online comics culture today. Pick a topic and watch folks line up eagerly on either side of it. And boy, does the net make it easy.
For instance. Kids and comics. I don’t recall anyone saying that superhero comics (much less comics themselves) should be solely for kids. Even the most fervent booster of increasing the number of kid-friendly titles out there hasn’t ever suggested that we do away with mature comics of any stripe. But you’d never guess that from the hue and cry raised by a number of prominent creators and fans (to be fair, there’s just as many creators who want more kid-friendly comics.)
Let’s take another. Superheroes. Either superheroes are the end-all be-all of comics or they are to be reviled and hated, relegated to the level of thinly-veiled perversion and lurid power fantasies that inevitably end in fascism. There’s precious little middle ground. The same could be said of just about any genre that appears in comics from porn to autobiographical confession to westerns to romance. Granted, there’s brave souls who embrace any and everything that comes their way, but they’re a precious few.
Even further, look at a lot of the “critical” dialogue (okay, harangue) that goes on. Either you’re a smart reader, reading what the critic likes, or you’re a rube, a nerd, a loser with an IQ not unlike that of a houseplant (with the attendant belittling that said station requires). I won’t even go into the fat jokes. This sort of thing does nothing more than demean and obscure the point that speaker is trying to make (if indeed they have a point beyond simply lashing out at those who are not themselves.)
It’s incredibly easy to set up adversarial and confrontational relationships on the net. Too easy. Better people than I have written on internet invulnerability, so I won’t go into it here, other than to remind folks that it’s all too easy to let vitriol (or smugness) get in the way of actual discourse.
Mr. A’s black/white universe might make for interesting (or troubling, depending on your point of view) fiction, but as a critical mode, and more importantly an interpersonal mode, it’s dangerously limited. But it is horribly attractive. There isn’t any black and white on anything other than an individual level. It’s not a useful critical tool, other than to perhaps examine your own motivation and responses to various aesthetic input. One reader’s life-changing text is another’s toilet paper. That’s something that’s been lost sight of.
If you're passionate about the medium, then you’re motivated to enrich and expand the medium as a whole, not simply your vision of the medium. Nobody’s big enough to own all of comics. Nobody.