I downloaded Halo Jones but don’t want to read it on screen. Comic Book Viewer doesn’t have a print command, but is there some way of tricking it into giving me what I want?
Category Archives: Blog
Yeah, well, I know why
John Edwards’s poor wife has got a book out about her shitty husband. Time is running an excerpt, and Time‘s political blog, Swampland, teases the excerpt with a smaller excerpt, from which I present the following:
More than a year later, I learned that he had allowed [the woman] into our lives and had not, even when he knew better, made her leave us alone. I tried to get him to explain, but he did not know himself why he had allowed it to happen.
Her husband did not know himself that he wanted to get laid. Is he aware that he has toes?
Interview with Ariel Schrag
I have an interview with the creator of Awkward, Potential, and most recently Likewise up on the Bitch Magazine website.
As I’ve mentioned a time or two, Schrag is one of my favorite creators. Likewise is pretty amazing. I’d recommend it to all and sundry.
Grampaw
I missed the good news that Drawn & Quarterly’s bringing over Susumu Katsumata’s short story collection Red Snow. It’s surprising, as nobody remembered his work until Seirinkogeisha put out the collection in 2005. Unlike also-forgotten stablemate Tatsumi, Katsumata can’t claim to be historically important.
His stories are better than Tatsumi’s shorts, though: timeless, bawdy, mysterious, like an earthy Kwaidan. Cartoon figures sneaking bits of pleasure in the grass, water sprites breaking things. They reveal a handmade craft that fits next to the Moomins and Monsiuer Jean.
If timeless, these stories feel old, too. They appeared mostly in the anthology Manga Goraku between 1978-80; the feeling of reminisce echoes Tatsumi’s rue. Both are old men’s manga in their way, best read over milky homebrew and several packs of borrowed cigarettes. In August, under a fluorescent light, while grumbling over back pains.
Not too much to my taste, unlike the also-announced collection of Imiri Sakabashira. I’ve liked Sakabashira’s manga and artwork a good long time. It feels a lot less fusty than either Tatsumi or Katsumata. Actually, it’s more kin to Yo Gabba Gabba. With cigarettes. I’ll give some to the nephew when he’s considerably older.
Another Question: Who’s This Thierry Guy?
I could swear there was a book that analyzed comics as a medium and was written by a European with “Thierry” somewhere in his name. I thought Fantagraphics published it, but the company’s site doesn’t list anything like the book in its section on pure-print titles. Anyone?
Who Has Catalogued the Watchmen?
I’m doing a column on Alan Moore and Watchmen, and as part of my preparation I just went thru the comic and made notes about the various recurring images and symbols that pop up thru the length of the work. Has anyone else done this? It seems like an obvious step for some geek (aside from myself) to take, and I’d like to backstop my attempt with somebody else’s.
Don’t Italicize the Bolded
I’m reading the Atlantic’s piece about Alan Moore. It seems okay to me, nice writing and whatnot. But when he quotes dialogue, the author italicizes the words that were bolded in the original. I’ve seen a few people do this and the effect is always bad. A comics page is not the same as a text page. Words get bolded on the comics page only to break up the visuals; the emphasized words don’t jump out, they just give the eye enough traction to make it through bits of print that otherwise would be lost amid all the pictures. In straight text the words aren’t going to be lost; put words here and there into italics and they become a bit overbearing. So we get Dr. Manhattan, that limp, far-away personality with one eye on the tachyons, biting his words off like an undergraduate intellectual in mid-debate:
“Time is simultaneous,” he explains in the comic to his girlfriend, Laurie, “an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.“
What do we call that? Misguided fidelity that produces a mistake.