Hi. Julia Gfrörer joins us for a new column.
Certainly we first understand the astronaut to be an adventurer, a heroic figure, and yet the stark facts present a human being, essentially a wad of raw throbbing pulp, packed in its unwieldy casing, dwarfed by immense darkness: an object lesson in total helplessness. That early space exploration should have been accomplished using grindingly primitive midcentury technology, with room-sized punched card computers, is astonishing, but falsely so, when in spite of some improved tools, the possibility of exploring space in anything approaching genuine safety and comfort remains devastatingly remote. We humans may enter oblivion, in a limited way, but can never belong there. The image of the astronaut seems to balance on razor-point heroism over a chasm of madness.
Elsewhere:
Gil Roth interviews Mimi Gross, who has interesting connections to comics and cartoon culture.
Bart Beaty on the two-time best book winner at Angouleme, Riad Sattouf.
Dept. of self-promotion: I'm going to be on a panel with Chris Ware and Karl Wirsum on Saturday in Chicago at the Cultural Center following a screening of Hairy Who and the Chicago Imagists. And hey, I am co-curating an exhibition of Victor Moscoso's drawings from 1967-1982, opening March 6th in NYC.
This fascinating NY Times piece veers into comics in a great way. Also, my own son might use this headline to describe me one day!
