Alas, a Blog

Hey, there, folks!

At my job, I’m the resident Access person – although in fact I know nothing about Access or about databases. So I’m attempting to teach myself as I go along, but the sad truth is I don’t know what I’m doing.

I have an SQL / Microsoft Access problem that I’m hoping someone out there knows the solution to. Please read on if you think you might be able to help….
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So the year’s just about ended, the holidays have come crashing down on us like corporate logos fallen from skyscrapers, and the critics of the world have begun to assail us with their Year’s Best lists. Those of us who read review sites are being bombarded with Top Ten, Top Fifty, Bottom Ten, Honorable Mentions, Dishonorable Mentions, and all those other self-important categorizations.

I’ve always liked these lists, though, even as I hate them, because they seem like incredibly pretentious ways for people to comment on what they liked, what they didn’t, and share their thoughts with other people. I’ve always found that Top Ten lists are easier to read, less pretentious, when one thinks of them not as “Ten Movies That Have Shown Their Quality” but as “Ten Movies That Thrilled Me This Year.”

So that’s what I’m going to write: a list of stuff that thrilled me this year, just as a way of sharing stuff that made me happy. I can’t claim to know what the best movie of the year is (okay, I might with that) but I do know what my favourite movies, books, songs, albums, and so forth were.

My year-end list is different in that I’m not concerned with whether or not the works of art I mention happen to have come out this year or not. I mean, if the best album you heard all year was Highway 61 Revisited, why bother to say it was something else?

This will be my last post until after the Christmas holiday has passed. I’ll be busy avoiding relatives, wrapping presents, and seeing if I can make a thoroughly unpleasant holiday a bit more bearable. I encourage others to make your own lists in the comments thread, if you’d like, but no one’s under any obligation.

Happy Holidays.
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Writing the previous post, I found myself thinking about the difference between “left” and “liberal.” By a happy coincidence, there’s a brilliant post at MaxSpeak about the difference in economic policy between being liberal and being left. Here’s just a sample, but you should go read the whole thing:

Again, I recommend reading the whole thing..

I may be attending the Alternative Press Expo in February 2004. Would anyone out there be interested in lending me a sofa to crash on for a few nights?

APE takes place February 21 and 22; I’d probably be arriving on the 20th and departing on either the night of the 22nd or the morning of the 23rd. I don’t have a driver’s license, so I’m hoping to find a place to stay in walking distance of public transportation. APE itself takes place at “the Concourse at Exhibition Square,” located at 620 7th Street.

I can’t offer much in return, but I’d bring my sketchbook along and offer my best attempt at entertaining conversation. I could even blog from your very own computer, if you’d like (and a more boring sight, you’ll never see)!.

So I posted that last post, got up, walked across the room, and started thinking again. I hate it when that happens.

Most people’s expose to comics is by way of the newspaper “funnies.” Personally, I feel that these pages are crap with some real gems in there (Get Fuzzy being the best that newspapers have to offer right now, although Opus has promise) but the fact remains that they’re what most people think of as being “comics” and that most of what’s on the funny pages isn’t funny… er, I meant to say: “is for kids.”

With a few notable exceptions–Mary Worth, which I don’t think anyone reads, For Better or For Worse, Dilbert, Doonesbury, and The Boondocks being what immediately springs to mind–the funny pages are devoted to comics written for kids or “for the kid in all of us.”

There’s an alternative, though, in the form of alternative papers, but they’re cartoons are always political. I’ve not yet seen an alternative paper that even bothered to try to have comics that were adult without being soley or mostly political in nature. My local alternative paper carries about three articles, twenty pages of ads, and a few cartoons: This Modern World, The Boondocks, and single-panel political-ish (not lampooning current events, just right-wing ideology) which is so terrible that I can’t be bothered to remember the name. This politics thing is pretty much the case with the adult-oriented cartoons in the mainstream papers with the political cartoons themselves, Doonesbury, and The Boondocks making up the “adult” part of the comics section.

Of course, the syndicates have as much to do with this as anything, but I’m disappointed in the alt. weeklies inability to find even a local cartoonist to try to create adult comics that aren’t political.

If one thinks about it, though, the most successful comic strips have been the ones that intruded on “adult” themes beyond politics. Calvin and Hobbes had some pretty adult humour in it; Dilbert is probably as boring to kids as Garfield is to me, but is a real hit with their parents; The Far Side played well with adults; Peanuts is morose and depressing in a way that hits at some adults (although I’m not sure of how many anymore; Peanuts is now, in reprint, a nostalgia act taking space away from new cartoonists).

So, perhaps, a good way to begin to convert the adult population of the United States to the idea that “comics aren’t just for kids” is to get some non-kid stuff on the Sunday funnies. Of course, trying to sell something like that to the syndicates is ridiculous on its face….

Well, not the absolute most annoying, but certain high up there on my list of really annoying things…

I was reading through Time Magazine’s review of the second volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen when I came across this disclaimer at the bottom:

Every time I see something like this is annoys me. You see stuff like this attached to reviews for comics like Sandman or American Splendor and to reviews for animated features like Akira or damn near anything else that comes out of Japan. The first article about Neon Genesis Evangelion I ever read devoted a few whole paragraphs, paragraphs that could have been used in service of actually reviewing the material, to warn parents that Evangelion wasn’t for small children because it was violent and people said “shit.” (And of course, that it’s blasphemous, but that wasn’t really stated explicitly. Instead the writer summed the issue up by saying the series had “mature religious themes.”)

The old cliché (all too true) is that every year a major magazine or newspaper will run an article with the headline: “Bang! Pow! Zap! Comics Aren’t Just For Kids Anymore!” The articles go on to carefully explain that a small group of rogue artists are daring to create a new type of comic book that explores more, and here’s that phrase again, “adult themes.” Nevermind that “adult” comics have been around for decades, it’s always “new” this new phenomenon and it’s always “a small group” of artists and it’s always a big shock that artists who create sequential art aren’t exclusively drawing inarticulate morons in tights.

What bothers me more, though, is when I see graphic novels with stuff like this on the back:

This is, obviously, from the inner flap of volume one of Spiegelman’s Maus but I’ve seen others like it before. The Sandman series that I read had quotes on the covers assuring/warning readers that this was “legitimate literature,” and similar quotes can be seen on American Splendor collections, the collected version of Watchmen, and Ghost in the Shell.

I’ve wondered for a while now if perhaps part of the reason why sequential art has had a hard time finding legitimacy as something other than a “kids’ thing” is because comic fans, artists, and publishers seem to constantly go out of their way to assure people that their adult comics are the exception and not the rule. It may seem strange, but I think that assuring readers that this comic is an “adult” comic does more harm than it does good. By extolling this single comic (say, Maus) as special, one reinforces the notion that comics are for kids.

Consider a shamelessly over-the-top analogy: What idea of African-Americans is reinforced by saying that “this black guy… you know, he’s actually pretty smart.”

I’m not saying that the general public’s refusal to view comics as an all-ages art form is on par with the oppression of minorities but that on a smaller scale the rationale used in my–again, over-the-top–analogy is doing more to trap comics into a box than set it free. The problem of public perception is, I realise, more complex than just this single annoyance, but comic publishers, artists, and reviewers need to stop reminding people that they should view comics in any other way than as a means to an end, a medium..

John Isbell, who regular Alas readers will recognize from the comments, has a blog entry on Open Source Politics which is well worth reading – John’s tour of world religions. Check it out..

Over the course of the past year or so I’ve become very interested in comics (or graphic novels or sequential art or whatever you want to call them) but have had a hard time finding stories that are along the lines of what I like to read. Or, perhaps to be more honest, I’ve had trouble finding comics that aren’t written for eight-year-old boys; I don’t know what it is, but something about the line “I’ll use psyonic blasts from my fists to stop him!!!” just doesn’t do it for me. (It did when I was eight though–and I have a stack of X-Men to prove it–so I guess they work for some people some of the time.)

So I was thought I would ask the lovely and literate Alas crowd if they had any comic recommendations for me. I’m not especially interested in comic strips (unless they’re genius) or superhero comics, but I’ll give most anything a few pages. I don’t care what country they’re from, what direction they read, or if they’re on the internet, but I want some comics.

Below is a list of what I’ve read recently. It isn’t much, but it might give you an idea of what I’ve read so far.

[Update: This post has generated a plethora of recommendations. I haven’t had a chance to read any of them yet (read any of the comics, that is; I’ve read the comments) because of stuff like work and The Return of the King but have printed up the comment threads and will start hunting. Thanks to everyone who responded!]
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