Skip to content

Category: Miscellany

Published November 2, 2012

Something for the Weekend

A rather brilliant cover for The Yellow World by Albert Espinosa, reminiscent of a Matisse cut-out or a Paul Rand illustration, designed by Jon Gray.

The Sickly Glow — John Banville, author most recently of Ancient Light, reviews The Big Screen by David Thomson, for The Guardian:

Thomson worries that something happened to the cinema around the time of Jaws, something cynical, sinister and perhaps even fatal. Part of the fun of Jaws and the other mindless thrills-and-spills imitations that it spawned, he says, “is that the commotion meant nothing. The sensation eclipsed sensibility”. This is the contentious heart of The Big Screen. The deadening process that, according to Thomson, set in the 1970s has now spread across the billions of tiny screens that infest the world, the combined sickly glow of which must be visible from outer space. Watching has become mere gaping, open-mouthed and slow-breathing. “Facebook already takes our earnest admissions about ourselves and trades them for advertising.”

You can read a short interview with Thomson about the book at The Arts Desk:

I went through a stage, particularly when I was teaching, of saying, “Well, these are the great filmmakers, let us explore them as if they were Charles Dickens or Van Gogh or someone like that.” The auteur theory. And now I’ve got to a stage where I sort of feel that every film is more like other films than anything else. Films are all alike, because the technology is more important. The director is fading away – you don’t think to ask who directs television, and yet television today in America is at a very good stage. So I’ve become increasingly interested in the technology, and what that has done to shape the format.

And on a somewhat glummer note… David Denby, movie critic at The New Yorker and author of Do the Movies Have a Future?, on the economics of Hollywood, at The New Republic:

Most of the great directors of the past—Griffith, Chaplin, Murnau, Renoir, Lang, Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock, Welles, Rossellini, De Sica, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, Bergman, the young Coppola, Scorsese, and Altman, and many others—did not imagine that they were making films for a tiny audience, and they did not imagine they were making “art” movies, even though they worked with a high degree of conscious artistry. (The truculent John Ford would have glared at you with his unpatched eye if you used the word “art” in his presence.) They thought that they were making films for everyone, or at least everyone with spirit, which is a lot of people. But over the past twenty-five years, if you step back and look at the American movie scene, you see the mass-culture juggernauts, increasingly triumphs of heavy-duty digital craft, tempered by self-mockery and filling up every available corner of public space; and the tiny, morally inquiring “relationship” movies, making their modest way to a limited audience. The ironic cinema, and the earnest cinema; the mall cinema, and the art house cinema.

Viva Hate — Keith Gessen, founding editor of n+1, on Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, at The New Statesman:

They had been brought together by their mutual hatred of the universe, which for a while did a fine job of confirming their feelings about it by rejecting and ignoring them. As they began to find their way in the world it became a little harder to hate it, at least with the same intensity. And so their letters to each other dwindled: What was there to say?

They were rescued by the 1960s. Amis and Larkin managed to greet the transformations, disturbances and new thinking with shared hostility. It brought them a whole gamut of things to hate.

And finally…

Lunch with painter Frank Auerbach, at the Financial Times:

It’s funny, this business of a vocation. One starts from a motive one hardly comprehends. In the school holidays I was an office boy – I found the idea of going into an office horrifying. As a painter, I thought there would be bohemianism, freedom, and there was, but gradually the practice of art took over. As Auden says, in any crisis, the break-up of a relationship, the response is to flee to the arms of the muse. At art school you know at least as many talented students as those who became painters, but they get off the train at some point. I met Stephen Spender once, I expected a poet with a vocation but I found a civilised man, gregarious, leading a varied, entertaining, virtuous life – for whom poetry was only one of the facets. He said one of his dreams was to be a poet, the other to have a lovely life, go to France, know lots of people.

Comments closed
Published October 31, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

A fantastic new cover for the Vintage (UK) edition of Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, designed by Matt Broughton (via the Vintage Books design Tumblr CMYK)

CTRL+C; CTRL+P — Music critic Simon Reynolds, author of Retromania, on remix culture and ‘recreativity’ at Slate:

Recreativity has many proponents and represents a wide spectrum of opinion. Still, it’s striking how easily some of these critics and theorists glide from relatively sensible talk about the role of appropriation and allusion in art to sweeping claims of an ontological or biological nature. They seem so confident. How they can be certain that nobody has ever just come up with some totally new idea, ex nihilo? The remixed nature of everything (not new) under the sun has become an article of faith. Impossible to prove, these assertions tell us way more about our current horizons of thought and our cultural predicament than they do about the nature of creativity or the history of art.

The A.V. Club list their 50 best films of the ’90s. (Their list of their most-hated movies is here).

Picture This — Cartoonist Adrian Tomine discusses his work and his new book New York Drawings with the The Paris Review:

If you were to go back in time and talk to the people who invented cartooning, and were doing it for newspapers, and told them that there were going to be guys who were going to do twenty-four-page long stories, they would think that was a strange use of the medium. And if you then said, they’re going to try and inject that with a singular vision and personal experience and do six-hundred-page long stories—I mean, their heads would have exploded.

See also: Adrian on his first cover for The New Yorker at the The Thought Fox, the blog of his UK publisher Faber & Faber.

And Finally…

Speaking of The Paris Review, an interview with editor Lorin Stein at the LA Review of Books:

The tradition of discovering new writers makes it easy to go out and find stuff that excites me, and at the same time feels of a piece with the history… To me it’s like that line in the great Italian novel, Lampedusa’s The Leopard. If you want things to stay the same, everything’s going to have to change. Nowadays we have to exist in the digital world if we don’t want to be strictly of the digital world.

2 Comments
Published September 19, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

A design collaboration between Paul Buckley and Jessica Hische, Penguin Drop Caps is  a 26-book series of hardcover classics. The first six books go on sale November 27th. See the covers at Imprint.

Plumbing — An interview with book designer John Gall at The Believer:

A cover is a structural part of the book. It protects the pages. It provide the first impression of the content. It’s an eye-catching device – maybe the book’s only means of advertising. It can even add to the editorial content of the book; you can kill bugs with it.  Then, after you buy the book, the cover takes on another function. It’s your visual connection to the book as you develop a relationship with the material. It can also communicate to others who you are. I’m one of those people, who when I visit someone, I snoop around and see what’s on their bookshelves. I’m not doing this to judge them, but to find some common interest, a connection to that person.

There is also this great anecdote about Tom McCarthy and the cover for Remainder:

We did a photo shoot for his cover so it appeared that the book was being slowly immersed into blue liquid. We had to create a somewhat elaborate setup to get it just right. We sent the author a photo of the studio setup as a souvenir, showing the tripods and lights and water tanks. A year later he wrote back saying he had an argument with some artist friends of his over dinner. They were looking at the studio-set photo and were insisting that it was all a fake setup and that the cover was executed in Photoshop; that the photo shoot was all staged to provide “proof,” like a fake moon landing!

My Q & A with John is here.

Graveyard Stillness — Andrew Beckett reviews Unknown Pleasures by Joy Division bassist Peter Hook for The Guardian:

Joy Division, for all the graveyard stillness of their record sleeves, were participants in a frenetic golden age for British pop, which had begun with punk in 1976 and would peak, commercially at least, with the British dominance of the American charts in 1983. Groups grew up fast and seized their moment, or disappeared. Yet Joy Division did not earn enough from their feverish touring and recording to give up their day jobs. Hook worked in the offices of the Manchester Ship Canal Company, Curtis at an employment exchange, and Sumner for a film company where his “job was to colour in Danger Mouse”.

And finally…

The Fight Against Loss — A lovely essay by Simon Schama on why he writes:

Orwell’s four motives for writing still seem to me the most honest account of why long-form non-fiction writers do what they do, with “sheer egoism” at the top; next, “aesthetic enthusiasm” – the pleasure principle or sheer relish of sonority (“pleasure in the impact of one sound on another”); third, the “historical impulse” (the “desire to see things as they are”), and, finally, “political purpose”: the urge to persuade, a communiqué from our convictions.

To that list I would add that writing has always seemed to me a fight against loss, an instinct for replay; a resistance to the attrition of memory.

 

Comments closed
Published September 14, 2012

Something for the Weekend

Saw this in person for the first time at a bookstore  last night… Gray318’s cover really is outstanding.

Natives on the Boat — Teju Cole, author of Open City, on his stay in the Roi des Belges in London, and an encounter with V.S. Naipaul:

This boat of which I am temporary captain is named the Roi des Belges. In 1890, Joseph Conrad piloted a steamship down the Congo on a boat with the same name. That journey became his inspiration for “Heart of Darkness,” a puzzling novella with nested narrators who unfolded a shadowed, strangled, brutal tale. He wrote it in the last year of the nineteenth century and published it at the beginning of the twentieth. So, this perch on which I sit above the Thames—the sky is blue now, the hundred-and-eighty-degree view of it full of long stratus clouds—this perch in which the city is exposed to me but I am not to it, is an homage to Conrad’s bitter vision. What might it mean when the native pilots the ship? What happens when the ones on the shore, numerous, unindividuated, are white?

See also: Teju Cole’s diary in the Financial Times and an interview with Cole at 3:AM Magazine. (Thanks Peter)

SciFi Now picks 10 of the best Judge Dredd story arcs.

Wood For Our Coffins — Adam Kirsch on the modern rival of fairy tales for Prospect magazine:

fairy tales have a double relationship to poverty. They are poor themselves—in motivation, imagery, description, ambiguity, complexity, everything that makes for literary interest—and they are the products of poverty. This is clear enough from their social and economic premises: they are frequently  tales of hunger and neglect and child abuse. What we remember about Hansel and Gretel is the gingerbread house and the witch in the oven, but it starts out as a portrait of starvation and infanticide: “If we don’t get rid of them, all four of us will starve,” the children’s mother says to their father. “You may as well start planing the wood for our coffins.”

And finally…

Imprint reviews The Lustigs: A Cover Story, 1933-1961, an exhibition of covers designed and illustrated by Alvin and Elaine Lustig opening at the CVA in Saint Paul, Minnesota, next week.

You can see more of the Lustig’s astonishing body of work at the Alvin and Elaine Lustig Flickr Pool

Comments closed
Published September 12, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

Purple Haze — A typically tangential literary collage about Conrad’s Heart of Darkness by Geoff Dyer:

The actual book is far stranger than accounts of it sometimes suggest. It’s a shame in a way that the book has become so famous as to dull our sense of this pervasive strangeness. Re-reading it now I find it scarcely less bizarre than when I plodded through it as a mystified seventeen-year-old (we were doing The Secret Agent for A-Level). What H. G. Wells wrote of Conrad’s earlier book, An Outcast of the Islands, also holds good for Heart of Darkness: “his story is not so much told as seen intermittently through a haze of sentences.”

Read the whole thing. Trapped on a boat, Dyer apparently wrote the piece in one night. You can almost hear him losing his mind.

Etiquette — Caleb Crain on criticism and the role of critics, at The Paris Review:

A non-question has recently preoccupied the literary corners of the Internet: How rude should a book critic be? I call it a non-question because its non-answer is the same as for people in social situations generally: it depends. It’s impossible to find a universal rule that licenses rudeness. There’s always going to be at least one observer who feels that a conflict could and should be handled politely. (And who knows? Insofar as politeness is a skill, maybe there’s always room for improvement.) Also, there’s always going to be at least one observer who describes as honest what others call rude… Only the particular questions are worth debating, and no matter how many questions like them you answer, you never reach a rule that has the purity of math. The most you can hope for is etiquette.

Hackery — Simon Kuper on the fantasy of being an artist, for the Financial Times:

Even if you are sure that it’s your vocation to make art, you are most likely wrong. For a start, if it was your vocation, you would probably have embarked on it aged 18 instead of making a living first. And even people who do devote their lives to their supposed vocation often discover that they aren’t good at it after all. As Nick Hornby writes in his memoir Fever Pitch, in a riff on the failed Arsenal footballer Gus Caesar: Gus must have known he was good, just as any pop band who has ever played the Marquee know they are destined for Madison Square Garden … and just as any writer who has sent off a completed manuscript to Faber and Faber knows that he is two years away from the Booker. You trust that feeling with your life … and it doesn’t mean anything at all.

The Sadness at the Heart of Dredd — A headline as brilliant as it is unlikely… Antonia Quirke reviews Dredd, also for the Financial Times:

Dredd has something absent from all recent action and science fiction films: sadness. How desperately The Dark Knight craved sadness!… The slow-mo moments in Dredd – imagined by the screenwriter Alex Garland and realised by cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle – aspire to the bluesy melancholy of the sequence when Joanna Cassidy as the doomed replicant Zhora goes crashing through the glass in Blade Runner: a moment that set the tone for all our hopes for science fiction on screen.

See also: Writer John Wagner talks to the Daily Record about his creation Judge Dredd.

Comments closed
Published September 7, 2012

Something for the Weekend

For the launch of his new book Building Stories, Chris Ware has two exhibitions opening this weekend. The first opens tonight at the Carl Hammer Gallery in Chicago. The second opens on Saturday at the Adam Baumgold Gallery in New York. Both shows will display original art from the new book.

The Snail — The ‘accidental’ history of the @ symbol at the Smithsonian Magazine:

Called the “snail” by Italians and the “monkey tail” by the Dutch, @ is the sine qua non of electronic communication, thanks to e-mail addresses and Twitter handles. @ has even been inducted into the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, which cited its modern use as an example of “elegance, economy, intellectual transparency, and a sense of the possible future directions that are embedded in the arts of our time.”

A short profile of artist and designer Ray Eames at Dwell:

According to Beatriz Colomina, in her essay “With, or Without You: The Ghosts of Modern Architecture,” even though Charles and Ray Eames were revolutionary by including her name in the brand as an equal partner, Ray didn’t always receive her fair share of credit. An editor from the New York Times once erased Ray’s name from an article on the Eameses, despite protests from the writer, Esther McCoy. McCoy was outraged, and wrote Ray an apology letter outlining her frustrations over the omission (and the editor’s insistence on calling the Eames lounge a casting couch), “This is sheer nonsense; the broad audience isn’t titillated by the phrase casting couch nor does it object to a woman being credited for work,” she wrote.

And finally…

ShortList on Mary Harron’s movie adaptation of American Pyscho:

If there’s one moment in American Psycho that sums up the film’s utter greatness, it’s the business card scene. On the one hand, parodying the narcissism of Eighties yuppies, on the other, lending an insight into the warped psyche of the film’s protagonist… And 10 years after the film was first released, it’s certainly one of the reasons why this darkly hilarious Wall Street satire, based on the Bret Easton Ellis novel, is considered a cult classic and one of the greatest films of the past decade.

Comments closed
Published September 5, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

Steven Heller shares a few pages from Effective Type-use for Advertising, self-published by Benjamin Sherbow in 1922, at Imprint.

Lost in the Shuffle — Brian Appleyard profiles the writer and critic Clive James:

James’s television work, brilliant as it was, has tended to blur his identity as one of the most influential writers of his time. At one level every newspaper is still packed with James wannabes, his prose tricks and tropes are imitated everywhere; at another level, the whole 1980s wave of new British fiction, especially Martin Amis, showed signs of having learnt from James. Most important was his invention of a way of writing seriously about popular culture.

Listed — Phil Patton on the age of the list, for the New York Times:

We’re living in the era of the list, maybe even its golden age. The Web click has led to the wholesale repackaging of information into lists, which can be complex and wonderful pieces of information architecture. Our technology has imperceptibly infected us with “list thinking.”

Lists are the simplest way to organize information. They are also a symptom of our short attention spans.

And finally…

Swallowing Up the Past — John Gray on J. G. Ballard and memory, for BBC Magazine:

Through a kind of inner alchemy, the Shanghai of his childhood became the London of his first major novel The Drowned World, also published in 1962.

Irreversibly altered by climate change so that it has become a region of tropical lagoons and advancing jungle, the city is almost unrecognisable, though the weed-choked streets remain intact in the depths of the lagoons and the upper floors of a few crumbling hotels continue to be habitable.

Like many of Ballard’s characters, the novel’s central protagonist – a biologist who shares many of Ballard’s own preoccupations with time and memory – doesn’t regret the passing of the old world. At the end of the novel he finds fulfilment in the sun-filled wilderness that is swallowing up the past.

Comments closed
Published September 1, 2012

Something for the Weekend

Less Shit Please — A great article on British political cartoonists by Helen Lewis for The New Statesman:

[Martin] Rowson tells me that his fellow Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell always files as late as possible to make the staff grateful that the picture has arrived at all. “There’s a wonderful story about Georgina Henry, when she was deputy editor, going past the comment desk at about eight o’clock one evening and Steve’s cartoon had just come in,” he says. “It was a wonderful one of [George W] Bush as a monkey, squatting on the side of a broken toilet, wiping his arse with the UN Charter. And there’s all this shit splattered on the wall behind it, and she looks and says, ‘Oh God, no.’ [Alan] Rusbridger had put down this edict saying less shit in the cartoons, please – you know, the editor’s prerogative – and she and Steve had this eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation.” What happened? “He finally caved in. In one of the greatest betrayals of freedom of speech since Galileo, he tippexed out three of the turds.”

Holding On — An interview with Francis Ford Coppola at The Rumpus:

when I wanted to do Apocalypse Now, no one would do it. I couldn’t believe it. I was so disgruntled that I had played by their rules and won, yet they still didn’t want to make it. So I just went on myself, and took all the money and property I had, went to the bank, and made Apocalypse Nowmyself. When it came out it was very dicey. People didn’t know what to make of it; it got bad reviews. My films have always gotten a lot of bad reviews. I was very scared that I was going to be wiped out because the Chase Manhattan Bank had all my stuff. I decided I would make a movie that would be very commercial. Every time I’ve tried to do something commercial it’s always failed. So I made One From The Heart.

And what happened was that Apocalypse Now, little by little, started to be a big success and thought of as a classic, a great movie. But by then I was already making One From The Heart and that was a big flop and I lost everything. So from age forty to age fifty I just had to pay the Chase Manhattan Bank all that money, and I just barely ended up holding onto everything. So ironically, the thing I did to solve the problem ended up causing a problem.

Coming or Going? — Tim Parks on the unevenness of globalization for the NYRB Blog:

To what community does a writer belong today? The whole world, might seem to be the obvious answer in an era of globalization. Alas, it’s not that simple… I am known in England mainly for light, though hopefully thoughtful non-fiction; in Italy for polemical newspaper articles and a controversial book about soccer; in Germany, Holland, and France, for what I consider my “serious” novels Europa, Destiny, Cleaver; in the USA for literary criticism; and in a smattering of other countries, but also in various academic communities, for my translations and writing on translation. Occasionally I receive emails that ask, “But are you also the Tim Parks who…?,” Frequently readers get my nationality wrong. They don’t seem to know where I’m coming from or headed to.

And finally…

A new excerpt from Linotype: The Film, which will finally be released in mid-October apparently…

Comments closed
Published August 30, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

Drowning Not Waving — A short profile of Toronto-based cartoonist Jeff Lemire, creator of Essex County and The Underwater Welder, for The Globe and Mail:

Lemire, who profited from art classes in high school but is otherwise self-taught as a graphic artist, first heard about the profession of underwater welder from a colleague at one of the restaurants where he worked before comics started paying the bills three years ago. The father of a three-year-old boy, also named Gus, Lemire felt that underwater welding seemed like a good metaphor for parenthood.

Burdened with Cinema — Clive James reviews The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael, for The Atlantic:

She could talk well about popular art because she had not only seen all the movies that there were, she would have gone to all the opera performances that there were if she had not been so burdened with tickets to the cinema. When she talked about Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly, her remarks were up there with the professional dance critic Arlene Croce’s because she, Kael, had been a connoisseur of dance all her life. She knew her way around a jazz band. Apart from mental equipment like that, her reading was prodigious in its volume, and fully serious in its content. Her house had all the Oz books in first editions—I saw them, and marveled; they looked as beautiful as her Tiffany lamps—but she was by no means restricted just to film-linked popular literature. When she reviewed a Russian movie based on a Dostoyevsky story, she could refer with daunting ease to anything by Dostoyevsky, including all the major novels chapter by chapter.

And finally…

An interview with film director David Fincher at Art of the Title:

I was eight years old and I saw a documentary on the making of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It had never occurred to me that movies didn’t take place in real time. I knew that they were fake, I knew that the people were acting, but it had never occurred to me that it could take, good God, four months to make a movie! It showed the entire company with all these rental horses and moving trailers to shoot a scene on top of a train. They would hire somebody who looked like Robert Redford to jump onto the train. It never occurred to me that there were hours between each of these shots. The actual circus of it was invisible, as it should be, but in seeing that I became obsessed with the idea of “How?” It was the ultimate magic trick.

Comments closed
Published August 23, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

The Creative Review previews an exhibition of the graphic design of the Eames opening at the PM Gallery in London next month.

Gravity — A profile of playwright Tom Stoppard, at Intelligent Life:

He gets the old books he needs from the London Library, the open-stack treasure-house in St James’s Square. It was founded by Thomas Carlyle and others in 1841, and Stoppard has been its energetic president since 2005. “I get a big kick out of the very existence of the London Library. I’d say it was an ornament to society, only it is more than an ornament. The centre of gravity of our morality is our literary culture.”

Special — China Miéville’s keynote speech at the 2012 Edinburgh World Writers’ conference on the future of the novel:

The blurring of boundaries between writers, books, and readers, self-publishing, the fanfication of fiction, doesn’t mean some people won’t be better than others at the whole writing thing, or unable to pay their rent that way – it should, though, undermine that patina of specialness. Most of us aren’t that special, and the underlining of that is a good thing, the start of a great future. In which we can maybe focus more on the books. Which might even rarely be special.

And finally…

Girls — Writing at CNN’s Geek Out! blog, Danica Davidson looks at manga’s popularity with women:

“I honestly believe women are just as interested in the comic format as men no matter the country of origin,” said Robin Brenner… author of Understanding Manga and Anime.

“Women are just are more likely to pick up titles that acknowledge or seek them as an audience,” she said.  Japan has been pursuing women and girls as an audience in earnest since the 1970s, whereas we here in the States left that audience behind in the 1970s”

Comments closed
Published August 18, 2012

Something for the Weekend

The brilliant Jon Gray and Jamie Keenan reveal the 20 irrefutable theories of book cover design. All of them are great.

Also at The Guardian: Ahdaf Soueif, author most recently of Cairo: My City, Our Revolution, on fiction and the revolution in Egypt:

Attempts at fiction right now would be too simple. The immediate truth is too glaring to allow a more subtle truth to take form. For reality has to take time to be processed, to transform into fiction. So it’s no use a story presenting itself, tempting, asking to be written, because another story will – in the next minute – come roaring over it, making the same demand. And you, the novelist, can’t grab one of them and run away and lock yourself up with it and surrender to it and wait and work for the transformation to happen – because you, the citizen, need to be present, there, on the ground, marching, supporting, talking, instigating, articulating.

The Last Book Sale — A charming piece for the NYRB by Larry McMurty, book dealer and author of The Last Picture Show, on an auction of his books in Archer City:

Everything sold but the fiction. Everyone who deals in fiction has plenty, and more is spilling onto the market from the sale of the Serendipity Bookshop stock now being dispersed on the West Coast. Many people asked me if I was sad to see so many books go. I wasn’t—mainly I was irritated to discover that I still had 30,000 novels to sell.

And finally…

 Put A Bird On It — The New York Times on the city’s boutique art bookstores:

perhaps because the physical book is coming to seem more like an object than ever before, the current landscape of shops blurs the line between bookstore and gallery in rollicking, unpredictable fashion. And because the shops are not nearly as tethered to high-end economics as art galleries, the mélange of stuff that results, some for sale and some not, can be strange and wonderful, like highly personalized cross sections cut from the culture at large.

1 Comment
Published August 15, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

Drawing for a Living — A 1994 interview with the late, great Joe Kubert, who died earlier this week aged 85, at The Comics Journal:

Doing comics was usually not a matter of choice, for most artists. I guess they felt the real brunt of the Depression a lot more than I did. The Depression hit in ’32 and we were slowly climbing out of it through the ’30s and into the early ’40s. It was actually World War II in ’41 that generated work and jobs. Especially when everyone else was starting to be drafted. Most working cartoonists came from extensive art backgrounds… It was a way to make some money, that’s all: pure and simple. Nobody considered it an art form. Nobody was proud of being a comic-book artist. Matter of fact, it was a couple of steps below digging ditches. Syndication was recognized success. If you could get to do a syndicated strip, my God, that was the answer. But comic books were considered for many, many years to be a shameful occupation. Most of the guys in the business, if you asked them what they did, would never admit that they were comic-book artists. “I do commercial artwork,” or “I just draw for a living.”

See also: Obituaries at TCJ, New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.

Penis Rays and Self-Loathing — Kim O’Connor on the truth or otherwise of autobiographical cartoonists, at The Awl:

[The] one place where fact and fiction fraternize… freely is in the graphic novels section, which is located, in most bookstores, between sci-fi and fantasy in what champion of popular fiction Michael Chabon has called the genre slums. In libraries, too, most graphic novels are grouped together regardless of content, so that autobiographical and semi-autobiographical comics share the shelf with fiction that ranges from one-dimensional superhero stuff to literary stories like Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. The line between fantasy and reality—and high and low culture—is blurred in a way that makes everything that exists within this milieu more rich and resonant.

And finally…

Tim Parks asks “Does Copyright Matter?” at the NYRB blog:

Officially the idea is that the writer, artist, or musician should be allowed to reap the just rewards for his effort. This is quaint. There is very little justice in the returns artists receive. Works of equal value and quality produce quite different incomes or no income at all. Somebody becomes a millionaire overnight and someone else cannot even publish. It is perfectly possible that the quality of work of these two writers is very similar. The same book may have a quite different fate in different countries. Any notion of justice in the incomes of artists is naive.

What we are talking about, more brutally, is preventing other people from making money from my work without paying me a tribute, because my work belongs to me. It’s mine. What we are talking about is ownership and control.

Comments closed