Good morning, folks. A couple new things are up for you this morning.
Rob Clough reviews the second issue of Dunja Jankovic's Habitat.
Also, Mike Dawson's podcast, TCJ Talkies (did I already tell you that Dan came up with that name? I think I'm gonna be reminding you often), is now available on iTunes. You can find it here.
And because Dan decided to talk about Viking movies yesterday instead of providing links, I should announce that Shaenon Garrity turned in her inaugural webcomics column yesterday. Check it out.
Elsewhere on the internet:
The New Yorker's Richard Brody recently weighed in on a minor kefuffle in film-crit world (more here), and while I don't really have any interest in discussing the topic at hand, Brody did bring up something relevant to comics criticism:
At newspapers and magazines, as here at The New Yorker, classical-music critics and pop-music critics are usually different people. With movies, things are different: David Denby and Anthony Lane write about “The Dilemma,” “Source Code,” and “Toy Story 3”; about “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” and “Meek’s Cutoff”; and about the life work of Robert Bresson and Abbas Kiarostami. Though analogies between the arts are inexact, the boundaries between classical and pop cinema are as fluid as are the interests and curiosities of critics who do the cinema justice. D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Carl Theodor Dreyer, and Sergei Eisenstein are artistic peers, regardless of the differences in their cultural heritage and context, and one of the great discoveries made by critics—the young French writers at Cahiers du Cinéma in the nineteen-fifties, the inventors and advocates of the politique des auteurs (or “auteur theory”) who are now better known as the filmmakers of the French New Wave—is the recognition that some of cinema’s most popular latter-day artists, such as Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, are not merely skillful showmen but classical artists, akin to the writers and painters of the grand tradition, despite working in popular styles and genres in the employ of a mass-media industry.
Comics, too (or at least modern comics), has something of the same "problem"—it began as (and remains?) a popular art form, and as a result of that, many of the most historically and aesthetically important comics are not sufficiently "serious" for more respectability-minded contemporary critics and artists. This is partly where the vitality—and for some, the embarrassment—of comics come from. It's an issue that permeates nearly everything written about the form, and won't be going away during our lifetimes. I have mixed feelings about how film critics have handled their version of the same issue, but it's worth keeping in mind.
No-Prize to the first reader who can guess why this story makes me sad.
Pete Hamill briefly discusses the comics in this pretty great interview about Osama bin Laden, 9/11, and his life in newspapers.
Nice Daniel Clowes interview at the Wall Street Journal.
The Chilean critic Ariel (How to Read Donald Duck) Dorfman offers his own somewhat idiosyncratic take on the idiotic-on-all-sides Superman-renounces-his-citizenship story. (Thanks, RB.)
Pretty astonishing figure for this Dark Knight Returns splash page at auction yesterday: $448 thousand! Is that the most money ever paid for original comic art?
Not comics: John Coltrane doodles.
And don't forget: depending on where you live, tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day.
