The great, woefully under-appreciated American culture critic of the early 20th Century Gilbert Seldes remains my own North Star of pop culture criticism. I could go on forever about this guy, and almost did. I started researching a biography of him and his critical legacy, but Michael Kammen beat me to it with his fine 1996 evaluation of Seldes’ life and work. Still, my own appreciation of Seldes’ open, democratic spirit of criticism is a bit different from Kammen’s, even if I didn’t feel at the time that the world needed a second book-length study of the man. I explored some of those ideas in an essay Tom Heintjes kindly published in Hogan’s Alley No. 6 in 1999. It is reprinted below. I will also post soon Seldes’ original take on Krazy Kat and the comics generally from 1923’s The Seven Lively Arts. Almost a century later, I still think Seldes’ early observations about the unique aesthetic and cultural qualities of the comic strip remain indispensable to anyone trying to appreciate the form. – Ed.

The Critic That Walks By Himself

The longtime and often lonely historians of the American comic strip have enjoyed an embarrassment of riches in recent years. What with centennial exhibits, commemorative postage stamps, some truly luscious reprints of seminal work and even—God help us—occasional academic scrutiny, the comic strip form seems poised to assume a place among the “respectable” mass media. But assembling the history of any medium, including the comic strip, requires more than rediscovering its primary documents, however fun that may be. A rich chronicle of an art form must also recount how the medium integrated itself into people’s lives, how it was understood and debated. In America, such a history must begin with the first thoughtful and genuinely critical celebrant of the modern popular arts in general and of the comic strip in particular. He was more responsible than any single American for getting common readers and other intellectuals to think about the comics that they enjoyed. Gilbert Seldes (1893-1970) was the father of comic-strip criticism, and his insights about the form represent an alternative, albeit now largely overlooked, path in the serious appraisal of our national pleasure.