Comments Off | Posted: May 19th, 2005 | Filed under: Uncategorized
Linking is fun, linking is serious. (Hi, Ed!)
Ren pointed me to a reason to get an iPod. Sounds like how I’d roll, even if the writer is stupidly embarrassed to like the Pet Shop Boys. (Major respect for The Rezzillos getting some love, though.)
I’ve been enjoying the hell out of Sterling’s button retrospective. I actually had this one and some JLI buttons.
This open letter to the Kansas School Board is screamingly funny, and not in the way that Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing seems to think a picture of Mickey Mouse winking at Donald Duck is.
Make sure you check out Ian’s J. Jonah Jameson lovefest, which has been cracking my shit up.
You know, normally, Don Simpson can go right to hell in my opinion for comments like this:
There are two groups of readers served by American comic books: the ages of 10-15 and the ages of 17-22. The genres that serve these two age groups are known as superheroes and so-called alternative or art comics, respectively. Both genres, needless to say, are predominantly male-oriented.In other words, there are comics for boys who live in their parents� basements, and comics for guys who live in basement apartments.
You can read on from that link, he gets downright insulting and dismissive of indie publishers who are doing things that aren’t at extreme ends of a spectrum – he states that there’s basically Superman or Eightball and that’s it, ignoring publishers I like and respect for the sake of making a nebulous point. Anyway, Ed (Hi, again!) pointed me to this essay where he makes some perfectly good points and saves him from being tossed against the wall when the revolution comes.
The question, ultimately, is not whether one learns to tell comic book stories from other comic books (or Swiss proto-comics) or from movies, but rather, why is it so difficult for comics to acknowledge a debt to another artform, any other art form�in this case, one so obviously dominant and ubiquitous in our culture? Who cares where one has learned his craft, as long as it has been learned?
I think of good writing or art in comics1 or film as being akin to jazz – if you’ve got the skills and can play well, how you got where you got isn’t nearly as important. I do think that one can get a better understanding of how things work when they educate themselves a bit, but if the raw talent is is there, go for it and play catch up with us pseudo-intellectuals later, for Grodd’s sake!
1That said, I urge all artists to take at least some basic anatomy courses or read a few books on the human form so we don’t get stuff like this.
