Canada Reads / Essex County: Follow up

Over at The National Post, Christopher Butcher, Darwyn Cooke and Jeet Heer offer some perspective on the Canada Reads panelists' rejection of Essex County. All three of them bring up some excellent points, some similar to my own (though expressed more eloquently).

Here's a quote from Darwyn Cooke:

The most devastating take away left me kind of stupefied and unable to imagine the sort of dusty mind that thinks this way. As several jurors spoke, it was clear that their number one criteria for disqualifying Essex County was… the number of words. They actually said the book didn’t have enough words to qualify as a book. Travis remarked on the word count and I was blind-sided by the fact that these people seemed unaware that every panel of that book is supported by a script filled with words-the words necessary to create and execute entire panels or scenes without any visible writing. The very process by which such a book is created was unknown to them. Particularly disappointing was Ali Velshi. Considering this cat spends his entire life reading American news off a teleprompter in Atlanta, he might have noticed that Time magazine’s book of the year was a graphic novel…FOUR YEARS AGO.

 Read the rest of the discussion here.