Comics In The News

Okay, returning to more familiar territory, another pair of articles on the Dispatch site that caught my eye are:

Exhibit treats comics as serious art form --I'm not sure the headline writer, at least, thinks that that's such a good thing.

Anyway, somebody, whether it's the writer of this article or those in charge of the exhibit (more likely the former, I'd think), doesn't know much about comics, or at least comic books, as shown by lumping Jack Kirby in with R. Crumb and other "underground artists." Listing the co-creator of the majority of Marvel Comics super-heroes along side the man responsible for Mr. Natural shows a serious lack of knowledge of what the heck you're talking about.

Then there's: Filtering The Funnies: Newspapers More Wary of Content as Cartoonists Push Envelope

It bothers me a bit that the editors quoted seem to put "political content" on the same level as toilet humor and sexual innuendo. Sexual "innuendo" doesn't bother me too much, and I could do without alot of the toilet humor, but I'd actually like to see more political content (especially in the so-called "political cartoons" on the editorial pages, but that's really an entirely different rant) Poop and dick jokes don't require much thought, either on the part of the reader or the cartoonist, but the best political humor engages the reader's intellect and requires at least a passing knowledge of what's actually going on in the world aside from who got booted off American Idol last week. (By the way, as I reported on Thursday I was in a drunken stupor on Wednesday night, so who did get booted last week?) Of course what I really want to see in the comics is sophisticated humor derived from characters and situations that readers can care about--if like Gary Trudeau, an artist can manage to do that while also satirizing politics and current events, well that's just a bonus really.