Category: Rants

I’ve installed the Share This! plugin created by WordPress guru Alex King. If you like one of my posts, you can email it to someone, add it to your Google bookmarks, Digg it, and a whole bunch of other options.

For me, this blog isn’t supposed to be a monologue. It’s a conversation. I’m hoping that this encourages you to become a participant in this discussion about what’s good about comics. Enjoy! Leave feedback!

Tom Spurgeon caught this story today. I’ve been reading Fox Trot since I was an undergrad at the U of Delaware, and have always loved the geek-friendly strip. I’ll miss the daily strips, but every artist should know when it’s time to close up, and I wish Bill Amend well with his new projects.

We’re losing Fox Trot and Narbonic this month! Bleh. Of course, Narbonic’s ending for the best possible reason: the story’s over, rather than creator burnout or economic hardship. I’m convinced that Shaenon Garrity is one of the brightest bulbs in the Lite Brite world of webcomics, and I look forward to her next project.

It turns out that my back condition is degenerative disc disease. I go for an MRI soon to determine the extent of the injury. Bleh.

(Thanks to Glyph Jockey for the Nancy cartoon. Click through for the whole joke. Thanks to Boing Boing for pointing it out.)

I’ve been battling back pain for a while now, and my doctor over the weekend now suspects I have a herniated disc. It’s hitting the nerves on the right side on my right leg, so walking any distance more than a few feet is mighty painful. I should be getting an MRI to confirm the diagnosis in the next two weeks. Bleh.

At least comics aren’t heavy!

The list is here.

I’m not arguing the inclusion of the graphic novel Fun Home to the list. I’ve always been a fan of Alison Bechdel’s work, and while I haven’t gotten to this book yet, I’ve heard nothing but wonderful things about it. It’s in my to-read pile, which at this point is almost as tall as the house.

But…one graphic novel out of a hundred? This has been the year of the literary graphic novel. Having only one graphic novel named a "notable" book smacks of tokenism. Where’s Jessica Abel’s La Perdida? Eddie Campbell’s Fate of the Artist? Mom’s Cancer (quite possibly my favorite graphic novel of the year)? Gilbert Hernandez’s Sloth? Heck, Alan Moore’s Lost Girls may not have well-reviewed, but it certainly was notable for the taboos it broke.

Note that I’m only mentioning new material, not reprinted material. But there are books on the NYT list that would be considered representations of older material. Ginsberg’s poems, Joyce Carroll Oates’s short stories, and others made the list. If those books are worthy of inclusion, why not, say, Absolute Sandman or Kings in Disguise or Castle Waiting or a Complete Peanuts or Dennis the Menace collection?

Some will say that the inclusion of Fun House indicates that comics are finally being accepted as an artistic medium. I say one out of a hundred shows how large the gap really is.