Welcome to the new week. Over the weekend, Frank Santoro posted an interview with Ed Piskor, author of Wizzywig. And we're leading off with the great Bob Levin. Join him as he revisits Ed the Happy Clown:
Drowse-inducing scholarship aside, footnotes can be fun. They can provide hilarious counterpoint to the text (Will Cuppy), an entire alternative narrative (Vladimir Nabokov), the ruminations and reflections of an over-flowing intelligence (David Foster Wallace), or the opportunity to shoehorn in anecdotes one can’t find space for otherwise (Not infrequently, me). In Louis Riel, Brown’s footnotes amplified his text, explained his choices between competing “facts,” afforded voice to others’ differing views, and revealed what he had made-up, overlooked, exaggerated, got wrong, guessed at, can’t explain, and flat-out falsified, wonderfully illustrating the unreliability of historical “truth.” I hoped Ed’s footnotes would provide insight into Brown’s magic. I wanted his thoughts on from where those pygmies and perversions, plot loops and dimension jumps had come. I hoped to have his genius, wars-and-all, self-investigated.
Elsewhere:
Frank Santoro is giving a talk tonight at 7 pm in NYC as part of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium.
Tom Spurgeon has an interview with Rob Salkowitz, who wrote a book about Comic-Con and the pop culture biz.
Here's an interview with cartoonist Jason Karns, who we featured early this year.
Fred Guardineer did some awfully nice work back in the 1940s.
