Frank Santoro is here with a new column. This week, after reading a somewhat depressing book on general popular culture, he's excited about comics:
I just read Retromania by Simon Reynolds. It’s mostly about pop music but some of the ideas made me think about comics. There’s an idea out there that everything that happened to the music industry is going to happen everywhere else. And all that may be true--we all may have to give our work away for free and digital technology is changing the equation, and maybe all the best ideas have already been thought of--but I must admit I felt more hopeful about comics when I finished this book. Music is, according to Reynolds, caught in a retromania that can’t sustain itself. Music deals in "pasts" the way the stock market deals in futures and they both crashed. There is no new language in music right now.
However, in comics there is a new language: the scroll.
We also have Paul Buhle's review of Noah Van Sciver's Saint Cole:
Saint Cole himself, a young guy with a live-in girlfriend and unplanned baby, is ... already in trouble before the mother-in-law moves in. He takes all the hours he can get as a waiter at a pizza joint. He means well, but self-medicates, i.e., drinks too much. He is, most of all, the only one in the household bringing in money. His alienation is financial pressure, the same pressure on college drop-outs (or never-starteds) in an economy where the unionized factory jobs, even the non-unionized factory jobs, have just about disappeared. The service economy needs millions of workers like him but has many millions who would be just as happy taking his job. The downward spiral is multifaceted. It has him deeper in debt, it has him fantasizing about sex out loud, in a repulsive, self-destructive, uncontrollable fashion. In short: acting like one more loser in a sports bar that could be anywhere, from noon to midnight and beyond. This is pained realism, not even “ripped from the headlines” because it is sub-headline, everyday news.
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—Reviews & Commentary. Shea Hennum at Paste has the first negative review of Scott McCloud's The Sculptor I've seen. Rachel Cooke at The Guardian, on the other hand, compares it favorably to David Mitchell.
Carmen Maria Machado writes about MariNaomi's Dragon's Breath. Ariell Cacciola writes about Mana Neyestani's An Iranian Metamorphosis.
—Interviews & Profiles. Robert Sullivan at The New Yorker has a nice piece on Tomi Ungerer (who has an exhibit up in NYC).
Patrick Reed speaks to the ubiquitous Scott McCloud.
Vice interviews Charlie Hebdo's Luz:
—Misc. The New Yorker's famous (in some circles) James Thurber wall has made the move to 1 World Trade Center.
—News. Less than two months after it was burglarized once, Marc Arsenault's Wow Cool/Alternative comics shop in Cupertino was broken into again. Online orders could help him out a lot.
This much-shared Boing Boing post on Molly Crabapple's voluminous FBI files is pretty scary.
Zunar, the Malaysian cartoonist officially investigated for sedition, has been invited to speak at the UN.
