Talk:Matt Baker (artist)

Untitled

How about some info about his death? As he appears to have only been 37 years old when he died, I would think that something other than "natural causes" might be a possibility? -Grammaticus Repairo 21:20, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

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Unexplained rewrite

The article underwent an unexplained complete rewrite recently, if someone has more knowledge of the artist, he/she could go through the verion of http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Matt_Baker_(artist)&oldid=292275356 to see if it has useful information. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 14:38, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

SPA

A single-purpose account anon-IP, pushing an agenda to burnish Matt Baker's reputation, wants to insist that "many scholars" ( as opposed to a few historians — no one he's cited is in academia) call It Rhymes with Lust one of the first graphic novels ... without mentioning the many more who note it was a newsstand publication, with all the postal and other legal technicalities that entails, and was a proto-graphic novel. Sources for that include Ken Quattro at http://www.comicartville.com/archerstjohn.htm ("...in many ways It Rhymes with Lust was the prototype of the modern graphic novel") and the book reviewer for Portland, Oregon's newspaper The Oregonian at http://blog.oregonlive.com/steveduin/2007/03/it_rhymes_with_lust.html ("...showcases Baker's art even as it celebrates one of the more entertaining chapters in the early history of the graphic novel.").

He has been edit-warring, and I've asked him to bring it here for discussion instead. --Tenebrae (talk) 20:21, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

And historically speaking, calling it one of the first graphic novels, as opposed to an early form of graphic novel, ignores fellow predecessors The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck (1828); Frans Masereel's Passionate Journey (1926), Lynd Ward's Gods' Man ( 1929) and other woodcut books; Milt Gross' He Done Her Wrong (1930); Max Ernst's Une Semaine de Bonté (1934); and Charlotte Salomon's Life? or Theater? (1941-43). --Tenebrae (talk) 20:34, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

Matt Baker edits

I have not attempted to burnish Matt Baker's reputation so much as attempted to have the Wikipedia entry more genuinely reflect the critical consensus on his contributions to the medium.

A simple Google search will show that hundreds of sites assert and debate the idea that "It Rhymes With Lust" may be the first graphic novel. I included a verifiable citation from David Hajdu (a professor at Columbia University) and other published work at citations. I didn't state any of those works necessarily make the claim that it is the first graphic novel, but they assert it is possible and they reaffirm that this particular work is at the center of an ongoing debate on the subject.

You accuse my alterations of not being backed by acdemic writing (when I have just shown they are), while the two citations you cite in your Talk comments are far from academic. I personally don't think the only scholarship worth considering has to come from an academic (where would Wikipedia be with that criteria), but you can't hold my contributions to a different standard than your own.

Finally, the term "graphic novel" doesn't enjoy the kind of concrete consensus definition that you are trying to impose here. Even the Wikipedia definition is very broad. To argue that it was a "periodical" (which it wasn't; it was not serialized or numbered in any way, and it was formatted like a book not a magazine) or "sold on a newstand" as criteria for what qualifies as a graphic novel is highly questionable. And to cite a single (non-academic) source that described it as a "proto-graphic novel" hardly gives you the codgel you've been using to bang away at my highly qualified phrasing of "some SUGGEST...it MAY be" the first graphic novel.

You've behaved like an over-zealous gatekeeper, and despite creating hoop after hoop for me to jump through (which I've done each step of the way), you've allowed some kind of weird pride to get in the way of making an entry as good as it might otherwise be. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.66.78.46 (talk) 20:42, 1 December 2013 (UTC)