Frank Santoro is disillusioned with New York.
When does a place flip from being alive to being mummified? Everyone’s pretending that New York is still New York. It’s strictly Greenwich, Connecticut—not Greenwich Village anymore.
But whatever. Fuck that town. I worry about my friends, though. They seem to pretend that they’re doing okay. So does everyone, right? No. New York squalor is a particular type of squalor. It’s like living at the airport. I know a guy who hasn’t been above 14th Street since the 1970s. He’ll probably live in his little cell until he dies. Maybe he’s happy? Maybe my friends who are already there can hang in there while the city gets turned into a Las Vegas walking mall. The worst part of it is is that all the knuckleheads who can’t break in to NYC now are gonna go to Rust Belt depression towns and make it like everywhere else AND beat my friends stuck in NYC to the punch and buy up all the good stuff in places like Pittsburgh before my friends can extract themselves from their NYC prison cells.
And Rob Kirby likes Noah Van Sciver's Youth is Wasted:
His ability to realistically yet sympathetically limn his characters, presenting them in their full warts-and-all human dimensions, is one of his greatest strengths as an artist and writer. It’s a Crumb-like ability, actually, especially in “Who Are You, Jesus?” where the sad-sack title character has a lapse in moral judgment and pays dearly for it. Van Sciver is one of those artists – like Seattle's Max Clotfelter – whose comics strike me as the missing link between today's alt-comics scene and great old '80s and '90s-era anthologies like Weirdo and Street Music.
And I am disillusioned with this time of year on the comics internet, always more full of dubiously interesting publishing announcements and enough movie/toy/collectible news to make you choke.
But I found a few links worth checking out:
—Janelle Asselin writes about comics-convention harassment issues for Bitch, using some of the data gathered from the sexual-harassment survey she ran earlier this year.
—For their new tour, the band Everclear has commissioned a poster clearly based on iconic Jaime Hernandez art (without permission or compensation).
—Tove Jansson makes it onto Finland's currency.
—CBR's Kiel Phegley talked to Mimi Pond.
—Brian Cremins borrows filmmaker/critic Paul Schrader's "transcendental style" concept to discuss minicomics by Julia Gfrörer and Jessi Zabarsky.
