Defining a group
May. 7th, 2008 02:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hmpfMore and more, I'm beginning to think that the one, elusive thing that all the comics in my 'central' group have in common - that strange quality that I sense about them all without being able to say what it actually is - is simply... 'literariness' (for lack of a better word).
Of course, that is probably the single most unhelpful discovery I've made so far, because 'literariness' is not a clearly definable category like "sf/fantasy comics" or "self-published comics". So how can I use it to help define a group of works?
*
What I'm dealing with here just might be its own sub-genre, too, although a singularly difficult one to define. It's neither clearly sf nor fantasy, though it frequently contains elements of both. More than anything it's characterised by a certain messiness, an organic quality, a sense of having not so much been written as grown.
Carla Speed McNeil calls the world of Finder a 'magpie world' in an interview. That works, too.
*
(Why, oh why are Cerebus and THB so difficult - read: impossible - to acquire? I *need* to read them... THB especially.)
Of course, that is probably the single most unhelpful discovery I've made so far, because 'literariness' is not a clearly definable category like "sf/fantasy comics" or "self-published comics". So how can I use it to help define a group of works?
*
What I'm dealing with here just might be its own sub-genre, too, although a singularly difficult one to define. It's neither clearly sf nor fantasy, though it frequently contains elements of both. More than anything it's characterised by a certain messiness, an organic quality, a sense of having not so much been written as grown.
Carla Speed McNeil calls the world of Finder a 'magpie world' in an interview. That works, too.
*
(Why, oh why are Cerebus and THB so difficult - read: impossible - to acquire? I *need* to read them... THB especially.)
