New Yorker on Comics

pretty lame article, yeah. i laughed at his dismissal of manga, but it still reeks of new yorker-style snobbery (he wouldn't be caught dead looking at "kinky romance manga for GIRLS"). why do all these "comics = art" articles inevitably focus on the same 4 or 5 people?

This IS The New Yorker we're talking about. If it doesn't focus un upper class protestant caucasian angst, they barely know it exists.

hey um this IS the new yorker, half the guys mentioned pay their rent thru nyer freelance work. hell half those guys are probably IN this nyer. pretty sure the ware focus came from ware being the one contemporary (ie. not crumb i guess is what i mean) comix guy getting alot of museum/gallery play (he was like the toast of that one whitney show right? or maybe my eyes just jumped to his name cuz 'hey lookey - chris ware!'). despite the results (and i do like schjeldahl alot on his own turf, he's very profun) i do like reading an art critic take on comix if only as a change of pace from the usual litcrit alternative; it's pretty funny to see how ridiculous he finds the idea of someone just writing, not even drawing their own comic is. i'd prefer an actual comix critic (however few and far between they are)(big ups to wolk here whose sim piece in the believer is a step in the right direction)(and another sigh that if spiegelman was still there maybe this reads better though who knows; maybe we'd've gotten a comic out of it). this did seem sorta redundant though - the nyer's ran reviews of persepolis and ware, big feature on clowes, etc. already - does schjeldahl read his own magazine?

Another New Yorker article that exaults Peanuts to the highest? NO WAY.
Why doesn't this article focus on new work that came out this year?

what new work that came out this year has been shown in a gallery already?

countdown to infinite crisis?

i hear mary boone went buckwild for the omac project, it resonated or something

this year we present the ULTIMATE VENICE BIENNALE

i love peanuts as all know but it does sorta irk me how since the "complete" reprints were announced everyone's suddenly embraced it as a prototype for the modern depressive indie comic - which was really only one aspect of the strip. i mean, to read articles like these you'd never imagine that half the time it was about a dog and his pretend adventures with a little bird.

And that isn't indie? I'll let Kochalka know.

x-post!

that's because everyone knows the strip turned shit when it was about a dog and his pretend adventures with a little bird (also because those strips ran years after they had a chance to be a formative influence on the generation of cartoonists that produced the modern indie comic - even those reading in the '70s have always talked of being far more influenced by the concentrated intake of work in paperback reprints of '60s strips, rather than the occasional viewing of weak '70s work at the breakfast table before Dad came down and claimed the newspaper)

well, i didn't mean that as a putdown of the snoopy and woodstock strips (which are quite a bit better than ppl remember them being), i just wanted to point out that ppl who paint peanuts as being all gloom n'doom and "l'il neurotic" jokes are ignoring about three-fifths of it!

i also think the only thing really wrong with '70s peanuts is that it isn't '60s peanuts - i.e. still better than all but a handful of all other strips ever. the sunday page where charlie brown is sitting on a bench reminiscing about the times he used to sit and watch the little red-haired girl (who has apparently moved away; one of the very few times peanuts acknowledged the passing of time) is possibly the most moving thing schulz ever drew.