A Potentially Serious Discussion

In addition to my interest in comics starring people with odd abilities who hit each other, I'm also a bit of a sports fan. Well, "sports", in the sense of "professional baseball, football, and basketball, and maybe billiards, if it's on ESPN2". I normally keep those sporadic thoughts on the Macq Experience because, honestly, that blog needs some content, and everything else I've got goes into trying to keep this place at near-daily* update level. But this was something that started with sports, and intersected into comics, so I think it fits. I suppose I should warn you I'm going to work out some of my issues with various sportswriters as I go along. Sorry, but I need to vent about something, I've been repressing a lot of hostility towards my father's dogs these last few weeks.

* Near-daily does not apply if blogger is not at home computer. Offer may be void on holidays, or whenever else the blogger feels like it.

One of the sites I frequent for sports news is Deadspin. It's not the most highbrow, but it usually provides some sort of amusement, and links to other interesting sports blogs. The primary contributor is one Will Leitch, and last week he appeared on HBO's Costas Now, along with sports writer/author Buzz Bissinger, and Cleveland Browns wide receiver Braylon Edwards, to discuss blogs and their place in sports media (here's a link to the segment). Bissinger was the traditionalist, Leitch represented the bloggers, and Edwards was to represent the athletes who are the topics of discussion and ridicule when you catch one of them beer bonging (Damnit, Leinart, Warner won't hold together forever, get your shit together). It might have been better to invite one of the athletes with a blog, like Gilbert Arenas, the Redskins' Chris Cooley, or professional pitcher/gasbag, Curt Schilling! Hopes of an actual discussion fell to pieces, right along with Bissinger, as his second sentence was to call Leitch a 'piece of shit', as he railed profanely against blogs for being profane (raising the question of whether Mr. Bissinger kisses Tony LaRussa's hind end with that mouth, and whether he purposely missed the hypocrisy of his actions), and claimed that blogs were dumbing down the art of discourse.

He might have a point, as people can sometimes opt not to bother to defend their points with any actual evidence (for example, I've got this post, where all I could think of that supported the idea was some Bullpen Bulletins of the time, and an issue of Slapstick's series, which means I probably should have looked into it some more first). Grammar can be lacking (though there are a lot of people out here who aren't naturally English speakers, doing the best they can). Profanity can be an easy crutch (and fun too! Damn shit!). And there's name-calling that probably wouldn't happen if those involved were face-to-face. But it has the advantage of letting people who might never meet otherwise discuss common interests from their different perspectives, and that can't be a bad thing.

Also, I fail to see how sportswriters, by themselves, elevate the art of discourse. If you read a piece by Mike Lupica and it evokes a response, you still have to find someone to have a discourse with, whether at a bar, your friend's house, the comic store (where I do most of my sports talking), or - gasp! - online. By itself, the piece does nothing for discourse except provide a starting point, which is no different from any blog post. I suppose he could be referring to the tone of the post setting the tone for the conversation, and that's where his issues with profanity come in, but he's still tarring all blogs on the basis of a few. By that standard, I could say sportswriters are overstuffed, self-important windbags prone to rambling on about the good old days, while trying to tell us what we should be outraged about (steroids), when they were blithely turning a blind eye to it when they could make money writing books about the magic of the McGwire/Sosa home run chase of '98 (ahem, Mike Lupica). And that furthermore, sportswriters no longer care for sports as anything other than a means to a free pressbox buffet, and as an opportunity to get into the locker room and steal from the players' postgame spread. I'm sure some of that could be applied to a few, but it's certainly unfair of me to label them all as such, wouldn't you say?

Ultimately, whatever points Bissinger might have had got lost in his decision to treat what was supposed to be a discussion - you know, talking back and forth - as a street fight - where you simply assault your opponent until he stops moving. At least, as far as reaching the people that bother him so is concerned. Little chance many bloggers will pay attention to what he was concerned about, since they're busy being angry about his generalizations, and mocking him for acting the fool. I'm not all that inclined to listen to him, that's for sure.

But it's an interesting divide in the sports media world. While there are sportswriters who embrace blogs (at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Bernie Miklasz and Derrick Goold both have blogs, and so does the Kansas City Star's Joe Posnaski, to name three), there are several others who, the nicest way I can put it is that they aren't convinced that blogs serve much of any purpose (Bissinger, Bill Plaschke, Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser, maybe Bob Costas). I understand they see a lot of lousy blogs out there, but I've read a lot of lousy sportswriting (thanks FireJoeMorgan!), overly reliant on the same old cliches about grit, scrap, hustle, and dismissive of those who like stats as nerds/bloggers/geeks who need to get out of their mom's basement and watch the game, regardless of how true that is for the majority of the people they're disagreeing with. What I was curious about was whether there's a similar divide in the comic world.

As far as I can tell, the world of comic analysis and discourse in print is much smaller than that of sports analysis/opinion. Newspapers have sports sections, where writers are able to do entire columns about their opinions of a player's recent play, or their latest public mistake. A comic might get a column in the Arts sections, but it's not the same constant presence. Comics do have magazines devoted to them (Comics Journal, Comic Foundry, Wizard, what else? Help me out here people!), but those don't seem to have the circulation numbers of a Sports Illustrated, or ESPN the Magazine. Which makes sense. Comics don't seem to have as large an audience, at least not as large an audience that wants to read features about the people making them, as sports do. It's different worlds. Perhaps the smaller size of the community means there's a not an entrenched upper-echelon seeking to guard their jobs, which revolve around people caring enough about their opinions to seek out a newspaper (whether in print or online), or watching them on the Sports Reporters.

I know some of the comic creators have their own web sites or forums, and this dates back at least a decade or so (Christopher Priest had a web site as far back as the '90s, correct?) which enable them to communicate with their fans outside of the restrictions of comic conventions. Perhaps that connection legitimatizes the Internet as a discussion tool in comics, in a way that hasn't happened yet in sports, because there's less contact between fans and players. You might be able to chat with players before or after a game, or at a winter convention (if it's baseball), or maybe if you see them out and about, and they're amendable to it, but until recently, it didn't seem as though athletes were going out of their way to interact with the fans, especially online, and so a lot of what we got was through print and televised journalists. And so the internet is still the little brother in that regard.

I could be hallucinating the amicable relationship between the comic print lit and online realm, but I don't think I am, so what do you think?