The New York Times: Readers and Editors

A letter to this past Sunday's NYTimes' Sports Section concludes that

Let us cheer Halladay for his accomplishment, but we should not compare his to another, greater accomplishment.

He means Larson's perfect game.  How did he arrive at this conclusion?  As is clear from his use of a compartive term, he compared the two events and found one greater than another.  He means, no doubt, equate.  Is this nitpicking.  No it really isn't; if you spend the time necessary to write a letter and make a comparative argument, it makes little sense to dismiss as comparison illegitimate.

There were yet even more comparatively  worser problems in the book review. Let's assume that a books review's purpose is to present in an honest way information about the book under review that will either encourage or discourage a reader from reading the book.  Let's further assume that there are only some many words allowed in an NYTRoB.  Neither proposition seems unlikely.  Yet today in a review by

Steven Heller, the former art director of the Book Review, writes the Visuals column[.]

We read that

In his enlightening introduction to this hefty two-volume collection, the editor, Art Spiegelman, notes it was only a few decades ago that extended comics, published in book format with actual spines instead of staples, started being referred to as graphic novels.“The ungainly neologism seems to have stuck since Will Eisner, creator of the voraciously inventive ‘Spirit’ comic book of the 1940s, first used it on the cover of his 1978 collection of comics stories for adults, ‘A Contract With God,’ ” Spiegelman writes. “It was a way to distance himself from the popular prejudices against the medium.”

Is there anything wrong here. Well yes, there is. Is Spiegelman the editor or an editor or its editor?  Does the knowledge that Heller thinks the book hefty illuminate the book's content in any way?  Is that sentence ungainly?  It's its, no, and yes.

In the his introduction to this interesting and important collection, its editor, Art Spiegelman, argues that what we now call graphic novels are a recent invention. “The ungainly neologism seems to have stuck since Will Eisner, creator of the voraciously inventive ‘Spirit’ comic book of the 1940s, first used it on the cover of his 1978 collection of comics stories for adults, ‘A Contract With God,’ ” Spiegelman writes. “It was a way to distance himself from the popular prejudices against the medium.”

Are there other more substantive problems with the review?  Well, yes.  Heller writes that

[i]n large part owing to the continued success of Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Maus,” about his parents’ experiences at Auschwitz, graphic novels are now widely accepted.

 Does Maus I and II most salient theme concern Spiegelman's parents and Auschwitz? No.  It's much more about the surviving parent and the son.  Are graphic novels "widely accepted"? As what? By whom? Here's a site listing the best selling graphic novels by month and year.  Last years best seller?  The Watchmen. The rest of the list seems to be a bunch of comic books tarted up. Are these widely accepted by people who don't read them as legitimate because of Maus I and II?  Not really.  Are there occasional really good graphic novels?  Sure. Am I being a nitpicker, no not really.  This kind of confused writing and sloppy thinking allows folks to make unsubstantiated if not false claims, it's bad practice whatever the issue under consideration might be.