Posts Tagged ‘Comic strip’
“All good things must come to an end”*…
Rusty Foster reports that…
Matt Bors announced that The Nib is shutting down after its retroactively ironically themed final issue, “The Future.” “The Nib has published more than 6,000 comics and paid out more than $2 million to creators.” It will be replaced by: nothing, just another void where independent cultural criticism used to be…
Today in Tabs
The Nib will be online through August; you can still enjoy it’s extraordinary offerings (and buy its issues) until then. Happily Rusty’s Today in Tabs continues– one hopes for a long, long time…
[Image above: from KC Green‘s “This Is Not Fine,” on The Nib]
* Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde
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As we bid a fond adieu, we might recall that it was on this date in 1844 that inventor (and celebrated painter) Samuel F.B. Morse inaugurated the first technological competitor to the post when he sent the first telegraph message: “What hath God wrought?” Morse sent the famous message from the B&O’s Mount Clare Station in Baltimore to the Capitol Building. (The words were chosen by Annie Ellsworth, the daughter of the U.S. Patent Commissioner, from Numbers 23:23.)

“What would your good do if evil didn’t exist”*…
What, Agnes Callard asks, is (literary) art for…
… There are many complex theories about the nature and function of art; I am going to propose a very simple one. My simple theory is also broad: it applies to narrative fiction broadly conceived, from epic poems to Greek tragedies to Shakespearean comedies to short stories to movies. It also applies to most pop songs, many lyric poems and some—though far from most—paintings, photographs and sculptures. My theory is that art is for seeing evil.
I am using the word “evil” to encompass the whole range of negative human experience, from being wronged, to doing wrong, to sheer bad luck. “Evil” in this sense includes: hunger, fear, injury, pain, anxiety, injustice, loss, catastrophe, misunderstanding, failure, betrayal, cruelty, boredom, frustration, loneliness, despair, downfall, annihilation. This list of evils is also a list of the essential ingredients of narrative fiction.
I can name many works of fiction in which barely anything good happens (Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, José Saramago’s Blindness, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Jon Fosse’s Melancholy are recent reads that spring to mind), but I can’t imagine a novel in which barely anything bad happens. Even children’s stories tend to be structured around mishaps and troubles. What we laugh at, in comedy, is usually some form of misfortune. Few movies hold a viewer on the edge of their seat in the way that thrillers and horror movies do: fear and anxiety evidently have their appeal. Greek and Shakespearean tragedy would rank high on any list of great works of literature, which is consonant with the fact that what is meaningful and memorable in a novel tends to be a moment of great loss, suffering or humiliation…
A fascinating case: “Art Is For Seeing Evil,” from @AgnesCallard in @the_point_mag.
And a case in point: Bob Dylan, demonstrating both Callard’s point and why he won the Nobel Prize in Literature:
* Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
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As we go dark, we might we might recall that it was on this date in 2000 that Charles M. Schulz published the last daily Peanuts strip- art that treated the dark with lots of light. (The final Sunday panel ran on on February 13 of that year.)
“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language / And next year’s words await another voice”*…
As we pivot into 2023 (Happy New Year!), a retrospective on the way that 2022– Ukraine, the economy, China, climate change, pivots at Facebook and Twitter, the lingering pandemic– changed our language…
The story of a year is sometimes easy to identify: the financial crisis of 2008, the Brexit-Trump populist wave of 2016 or the pandemic of 2020. The most wrenching event of 2022 has been the war in Ukraine, yet those earlier stories have lingered in the headlines. For language-watchers, all that meant much new vocabulary to consider…
[After considering a number of other candidates…]
After the lockdowns of 2020, followed, in 2021, by a slow return to the office, 2022 was the year that hybrid work settled in. Working at home some of the time has advantages (decongesting cities and fewer painful commutes), and disadvantages (fears of lower productivity combined with a sense of never being off duty). In the spring Twitter announced a policy of unlimited working from home for those who wanted it. When Elon Musk bought the company he promptly decreed the opposite. But most firms have not gone to either extreme, instead trying to find the best of both worlds.
As a coinage, hybrid work is no beauty. But it will reshape cities, careers, family life and free time. That is ample qualification for a word of the year…
From @TheEconomist: “And the word of 2022 is…“
Here are some candidates for this year’s “word of the year”: “23 items of vital vocabulary you’ll need to know in 2023.”
And because it’s New Years Day, and it’s appropriate to look forward, not just back, some advice-like thoughts on 2023″: “Blank Page.”
* T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
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As we name it, we might recall that, on this date in 1995, the last installment of Gary Larsen‘s comic strip The Far Side (which had premiered on New Year’s Eve, 1979) ran. Carried by more than 1,900 daily newspapers, the strip was translated into 17 languages, and collected into calendars, greeting cards, and 23 compilation books; reruns are still carried in many newspapers. Indeed, after a 25 year hiatus, in July 2020 Larson began drawing new Far Side strips offered through the comic’s official website.
“No offense to real jobs, but comics seemed a lot more fun”*…
It’s been just over 12 years since (R)D last visited Dinosaur Comics (though your correspondent checks in regularly). Ryan North— the creator of Adventure Time (comics), Squirrel Girl, numerous books (e.g., How To Take Over The World and How To Invent Everything),and other delights– is still doling out prehistoric profundity…
So much more at Dinosaur Comics (@dinosaurcomics).
* Ryan North
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As we parse percipience, we might recall that it was on this date in 1950 that the daily comic strip Peanuts premiered in eight newspapers: The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Minneapolis Tribune, The Allentown Call-Chronicle, The Bethlehem Globe-Times, The Denver Post, The Seattle Times, and The Boston Globe. Its creator, Charles Schulz had developed the concept as a strip (L’il Folks) in his hometown paper, The St. Paul Pioneer Press, from 1947 to 1950. At its peak, Peanuts ran in over 2,600 newspapers, with a readership of 355 million in 75 countries, and was translated into 21 languages.

“I would say lenguage is that we may mis-unda-stend each udda”*…
Long-time readers will know that your correspondent adores George Herriman’s Krazy Kat (c.f., e.g., this post: the remarkable Chris Ware on the modern relevance of the seminal strip). Today, Amber Medland on Krazy Kat‘s huge resonance with Modernists throughout its run…
The Kat had a cult following among the modernists. For Joyce, Fitzgerald, Stein, and Picasso, all of whose work fed on playful energies similar to those unleashed in the strip, he had a double appeal, in being commercially nonviable and carrying the reek of authenticity in seeming to belong to mass culture. By the thirties, strips like Blondie were appearing daily in roughly a thousand newspapers; Krazy appeared in only thirty-five. The Kat was one of those niche-but-not-really phenomena, a darling of critics and artists alike, even after it stopped appearing in newspapers. Since then: Umberto Eco called Herriman’s work “raw poetry”; Kerouac claimed the Kat as “the immediate progenitor” of the beats; Stan Lee (Spider-Man) went with “genius”; Herriman was revered by Charles Schulz and Theodor Geisel alike. But Krazy Kat was never popular. The strip began as a sideline for Herriman, who had been making a name for himself as a cartoonist since 1902. It ran in “the waste space,” literally underfoot the characters of his more conventional 1910 comic strip The Dingbat Family, published in William Randolph Hearst’s New York Evening Journal. Hearst gave Herriman a rare lifetime contract and, with his backing, by 1913 the liminal kreatures had their own strip. Most people disliked not being able to understand it. Soon advertisers worried that formerly loyal readers would skip the strips and miss the ads. Editors were infuriated by devices like Herriman’s “intermission” panel, which disrupted the narrative by stalling the action…
For [E.E.] Cummings, who, with his flagrant anti-intellectual stance, privileged what he called “Aliveness” above all else, Charlie Chaplin was the only artist to rival Herriman. But technology disrupted both Chaplin’s and Herriman’s idiosyncratic work. At the introduction of sound in film in 1927, Chaplin said that the “spontaneity of the gags had been lost,” but what he really lost was his control of time. Sound erases distance; there was no longer a delay in which the incongruity between seeing and comprehending could bloom. In his essay “What People Laugh At” (1918), Chaplin noted “the liking of the average person for contrast and surprise in his entertainment.” Both Herriman and Chaplin orchestrated meticulously timed, silent dialogues between images and words. Slapstick—a word that originally referred to two pieces of wood joined together, used by pantomime clowns to make loud noises—is, in their work, a deliberately clumsy cleaving of the relationship between words and images. If people could explain themselves, there would be no time to revel in ludicrous situations, as when in The Kid, Chaplin, caressing the hand of a policeman’s wife, is accidentally caressed by her husband…
The unsung Modernist: “E. E. Cummings and Krazy Kat,” from @ambermedland in @parisreview.
Enjoy Krazy Kat strips here.
* Krazy, to Ignatz (Herriman one-upping Wittgenstein…)
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As we praise percipience, we might recall that it was on this date in 1948, in the Bugs Bunny cartoon “Haredevil Hare,” that Marvin the Martian made his debut.

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