Today on the site:
Bob Levin goes into Pop Wasteland #1.
“Having no talent is not enough,” said Gore Vidal about the underground theatrical troupe The Cockettes, following its New York City debut. Neither, it seemed, were bestiality, cannibalism, child abuse, necrophilia, perverted nuns, and several gross of severed penises. Or so Robin Levy concluded after finishing Pop Wasteland (Jon F. Allen and Tim S. Allen, eds. 2015), an anthology of cartoons and poetry, which encompassed all of the above, while leaving him unshaken and unstirred.
He distrusted collections of the previously unpublished anyway, which this was. Unless you paid cash money, or featured celebrated names around whom the less known wished to huddle, which this didn’t, they seemed likely shelters for the cast-off, stunted, misformed. And when you featured forty-four comix, of which forty were a page in length, you were unlikely to have netted artists who’d probed with depth of thought their subjects or themselves. The result came across as spasms of thought, quickly fleshed and spasmodically delivered.
Elsewhere:
New Yorkers: Go an see this remarkable, beautiful exhibition by Keith Mayerson. Masterful paintings hung as a narrative suite that defies conventional reading. I was blown away.
I'm not surprised by this article about a conflict of interest in the reporting of a very sensitive topic but it's sad nonetheless.
Michael J. Vasallo has been updating his Timely-Atlas comic strip blog post for months. Go and dive in.
