- Via Eschaton, I really enjoyed this debate between Ralph Nader and Howard Dean. On the whole, Dean makes a better case, but Ralph gets some good points in – particularly on how little Kerry is really offering voters interested in lesbian and gay issues. John Anderson also makes some great comments from the audience.
- The strange conceptions some mainstream comic book artists have of female body parts always amazes me. It’s actually gotten much worse since I started reading comics – back then no one would have drawn the crotch in such bizarre detail. (Consider yourself warned).
- Maggie Gallagher recently published the story of an adult child who (gasp) doesn’t think her lesbian parents did a good job raising her. (Good thing children of straight parents never feel that way!) Then, defending herself from charges of drawing conclusions from an anecdote, Ms. Gallagher argued that she just published it because “is a viewpoint I have NEVER seen represented in print. Not once.” Daddy, Papa and Me makes an interesting point:
…out of the decade or more [she’s been writing] about gay adoption, parenting, and marriage, Ms. Gallagher has NEVER seen a story like this represented in print? Out of the (I assume) thousands of words she has written and read on the topic, she has NEVER seen such a story?…
Isn’t that telling?
There’s lots more, so read the whole thing.
- A very interesting New York Times Magazine article about the current alternative comics movement (although nearly all of the cartoonists it describes in fact came out of the 80s alternative comics movement). Sure to annoy fans of the internet-comics movement, which is totally ignored; but still worth reading for the quotes from cartoonists like Chris Ware, Art Spiegelman, Chester Brown, Julie Doucet, Alan Moore, and many other brilliant people. (Also, for once, the author seems to know about and like comics.)
- David Cole describes what it’s like behind the scenes with Bill O’Reilly.
I apologize for my last comment. Trump's election is the fault of Trump voters and no one else (well, Putin,…
What? Are you saying that you don’t remember me, on Saturday evening, telling you about watching part of this very same debate on CNN? Why do I even bother? First you cheat me on credit for referring you to the essay on masturbating to Brad Pitt (which, admittedly, I also found via One Good Thing). But this! This I found all on my lonesome & told you about. Sure, I didn’t provide you a link… to either of them. But still. Harrumph.
Actually, Barry, I thought McGrath was still attempting to ghetto the stuff: not as openly, and more gracious in his condescension, and yes, it’s better Big Name press than comics has gotten, but it’s still a piss-poor article that’s almost 10 years out of date, and it’s not worth the kowtowing comics bloggers have been giving it. Don’t be blinded by the semblance of respect, y’all! We’re better than this tripe. —And prettier, too.
Okay, maybe “tripe” is harsh. But it was still a piss-poor piece.
Kip: I thought reading the quotes from various comics people was interesting, and this article had more quotes from cartoonists I consider interesting than any other mainstream article I’ve ever read. I also thought that some of what the author said about the differences between prose and comics was worthwhile (particularly about how comics handle time), while other bits were stupid (the discussion on the last page of the article).
As for “10 years out of date,” how so?
This I found all on my lonesome & told you about. Sure, I didn’t provide you a link… to either of them. But still. Harrumph.
Jake, you’re just going to have to post your discoveries on your own blog first and scoop, the competition!
As to the picture of that cartoon woman… I think she is almost as curvaceous as I am. I definitely have shapelier calves… but not quite as much.. uhmmm “definition” in the nether regions…. Yes. I’m more curvaceous… more..
Comic book artists are not doing themselves or their fans any favors by continuing to draw women like that. It only reinforces the stereotype that they only have vague notions of what women look like bolstered by a whole lotta fantasizing.
That or they have a really good grasp of what women will look like in a hundred years when massive plastic surgery is mandatory.
Yeah, the quotes were nice, but you had to wade through a lot of guff to get there. And there’s no doubting these guys deserve their propers, and to get them in the New York Times Magazine is grounds for raising a glass or a smoke or what-have-you. But we were trying to write middlebrow comics-appreciation stuff in 19-fuckin’-97 at Anodyne and these were the people we were writing about. Stuff’s happened since then. Mightabeen nice to have written about it. Mightabeen nice to integrate the women who’ve been doing graphic novels, rather than treating them as the usual one-paragraph anomaly. (There’s your lipservice. Happy?) I’m not expecting even a mention of web comics, or more than a glancing punt at manga, but still: this is a lousy piece. I could forgive the factual errors if he showed some genuine enthusiasm; I could forgive the smarmy condescension if he demonstrated something beyond a crash-course grasp of comics criticism.
But hey: lazy editors at papers all over the country are going to say, you know, the New York Times did a piece on comics. Maybe we should do a piece on comics. Good will come from this, I have no doubt. But let’s not go overboard patting this guy and this article on the back. We deserve better.
Kip, rereading my original comment, I said it was an interesting article (pretty much the word I use for all quick links that I don’t want to praise more highly), and worth reading for the quotes from great cartoonists; yet you’re reacting as if I’ve praised it effusively.
As for what’s happened since 1997, he did mention Blankets and Jimmy Corrigan. If your focus is on comics as novels or novel-like narratives, I don’t think he really missed much that’s important to talk about. Frankly, nearly every important cartoonist doing novel-length work today was already pretty well established by 1997.
The piece could be criticized for skipping some important work – particularly Stuck Rubber Baby – but it’s not claiming to be a catalog of all important (non-genre, novel-length) comics.
Finally, any reasonable assessment of top-quality, novel-length, non-genre, American comics of the last couple of decades is going to be overwhelmingly dominated by male cartoonists. We could discuss the reasons why, but the fact is that comics are dominated by men in a way that (for example) novel-writing is not. That’s problematic, but I’m not yet convinced that an article discussing comics which reflects that reality is blameworthy. (I’m willing to be convinced on this point, however).
(When I wrote a post recommending some comics, only one of the comics I listed was by a woman. It’s possible that I was just being sexist, but it’s also possible that my list reflected the truth that the large majority of comic creates are male).
Yeah, I’m more reacting to the general reaction throughout comics than your specific reaction. And I’m open and up-front about the fact that I’m a grouch on this one. (Unreasonable? Moi?) I just think somebody has to be.
And his shallowly reductionist lineage of graphic novelists qua graphic novelists (as obsessive protegees of R. Crumb with a penchant for masturbation jokes, Joe Sacco excepting) would have been vastly different had he bothered to integrate the work of Lynda Barry, Phoebe Gloeckner, Debbie Dreschler (Howard Crumb, Jason Lutes, James Sturm), etc. etc. I don’t mind that so many more men than women were mentioned; that’s unavoidable. I want women to be more than inconvenient anomalies, grace notes that are ignored when it comes time to sweepingly assess.
Comic book artists are not doing themselves or their fans any favors by continuing to draw women like that. It only reinforces the stereotype that they only have vague notions of what women look like bolstered by a whole lotta fantasizing.
The cartoonists who draw women that way do so because they are emotionally and intellectually arrested in development. No great insight there, but I feel it should be pointed out. They don’t represent the mainstream of comic book artists any more than Barry or Bill Muldron or Steve Lieber, however; they represent a well-propagated and self-reinforcing pathology within a particular genre of the industry. I agree that they do the rest of us a disservice, but only because folks like McGrath can’t be bothered to look beyond stereotypes. It’s an easy dismissal: “They’re all a buncha lonely, wanking social misfit overgrown adolescents, so why read ’em?” Then the grotesque misogyny Bill Muldron indicated pops up as to reinforce the notion. Does it matter that we know plenty of male cartoonists who know how to draw a proper female nude? That most of us draw women as individuals, with the same variety in body type as found in men? Yes and no: McGrath won’t notice, even with Jaime Hernandez staring him in the face; but it matters to artists and readers who actually care. Over the long run, we may never completely discourage the production of such regressive imagery; but we might overwhelm it.
“McGrath wouldn’t notice, even with Jaime Hernandez staring him in the face…”
Well, from the article, McGrath seems to think LOVE AND ROCKETS was purely an ’80s phenomenon. He also thinks Daniel Clowes was “discovered” by Art Spiegelman. I think errors like these, plus the stuff Kip mentioned, are just signs that the guy didn’t really know crap about the field, took a crash course and tried to go from zero to sixty in a few months. Is it still a better article than the average ZPCAJFKAM (Zap! Pow! Comics Aren’t Just for Kids Any More) story? Sure, but I don’t share Amp’s gratitude that “the author seems to know about and like comics”; he obviously likes them, but I think he clearly did most of his research at the last minute, and that’s almost more insulting than the condescension in the last paragraph. When publications like the Times cover other fields, you’d generally expect them to assign a writer who knows the territory way better than this. But aside from Calvin Reid at Publishers Weekly, and whatshisname who does the comics column at Time.com, that doesn’t happen with comics. This article is still a ZPCAJFKAM, but a lot longer and with better quotes.