“It makes me glad to see, and to remember, that comics can also just be for kids”: The Christian Science Monitor has a very sweet story written by Rebekah Denn, a life-long comics reader taking great pleasure in her six-year-old son’s embrace of “the glorious fable of a man who had been exposed to cosmic rays until he could stretch his limbs like rubber, and how that man, ‘Mr. Fantastic,’ battled evil aided by his fiancé, who could turn herself invisible, and her kid brother, a human torch, and their friend Ben Grimm, an orange, rocky ‘Thing.’” Obviously comics can be so much more, but it’s worth remembering that even when all they are a couple of middle-aged-men hastily cranking out disposable trash entertainment for the children of the 1960s, they’re still something pretty special.
My Google News alert-bot must have somehow pulled this article from 1999: The Eagle Tribune reports that its local library in Hampstead, New Hampshire is going to start a collection of these newfangled things that “if judged strictly by their covers…look like comic books. But they’re not comics.” No? Then what are they? “The books belong to a genre called graphic novels,” the article says. Ugh. I know it’s easy to point and laugh when some poor local reporter has to write some poor article about some dumb thing or another they probably neither know nor care very much about just to fill in all that blank space between ads, but…well, but nothing. I’m just pointing and laughing, I guess. Meanwhile, here’s a nice, thorough article about Pittsburgh-based cartoonist Ed Piskor and his two volumes of Wizzywig (which I highly recommend, by the way). The article itself is great, but the headline refers to graphic novels as a “genre” (“Ed Piskor’s graphic novel creates sensation among genre’s fans”) and the caption manages to spell the name of Piskor’s book wrong in the very same sentence that it’s also spelled right. So, to sum up: This is why newspapers are currently dying their richly deserved death—they offer the very same quality of writing you find on the Internet, only slower, and not for free.
Oh God, I hope he reads the book himself for the audiobook version!: Based on the interviews he tends to give about the superhero comics he’s writing, Grant Morrison’s upcoming history of the superhero genre, Supergods: Our World in the Age of the Superhero, will probably be a pretty good read.
The Passion of St. Jameson…?: I’ve linked to some of the images of J. Jonah Jameson that comics blogger and writer Kevin Church has commissioned in the past, but I’m going to link to this new one from John Keogh as well because a) it is awesome and b) Church has a link to his whole collection of JJJ art at the bottom of the post. Go check it out, and try to pick a favorite. It ain’t easy.
June 24th, 2009 at 9:12 am
There are a bunch of us librarians who conduct workshops for libraries about graphic novels, and our mantra is “it’s a format, not a genre!” And people still don’t get it. Sheesh.