John August 29th, 2008
Work continues on the font. At this point I’ve spent about 40 hours on it over the last few weeks, from inking to scanning to cleaning up the letters, to importing the glyphs to removing extraneous points and curves to validating and testing.
I’m done with the regular and italics, halfway through the bold, not yet started on the bold italics, and thoroughly tired of the work.
John August 29th, 2008
Years ago, shortly after Crash came out (the one about racism in L.A., not the one based on the bad pun on auto-eroticism), I wrote a piece about the film. It was a strongly felt criticism of the film as absurd, crass, predictable, and manipulative; and while I was pleased with my writing at the time I realized later that it had some serious failings. The most serious of the failings was that the review was as much about my reaction to the film as it was about the film itself.
Recently I fell into nearly the same trap in reviewing the graphic novel The Walking Dead on my library’s internal forum: I judged it predictable and overwrought, glossing over important ethical concerns while pretending to take them seriously. The criticisms engaged with the text more than in the piece on Crash , but I still judged the work against my expectations rather than against what we can determine about the author’s.
I don’t want to get into the ‘death of the author’ debate, though it’s certainly worth acknowledging that the author’s intentions aren’t always clear, even to him- or herself. What I do want is to give authors a fair shake.
I’m not a fan of the Pauline Kael approach to criticism, where the writer is as forceful a presence (and sometimes more forceful a presence) as the subject. But apparently I’ve been writing with that same approach without realizing it.
It’s retrospectively obvious that everything said says something not just about the subject but also about the person who says it. If you’ve read much of their work you’ve probably noticed Leonard Maltin’s aversion to violence, Roger Ebert’s occasional free pass to derivative storylines in films on uncommon subjects.
In both of those cases I accept the author’s personality as part of the review, but what I want for the things posted here is to determine as much as possible what the work is trying to do and to judge the work against those intentions. I’m puzzling over how those reviews are best written, not at all sure if or when I’ll find out.
John August 20th, 2008
Today while I was at work someone stole the seat off my bike: old, worn, hard, uncomfortable, coming apart.
I’m not sure if it was desperate need, mischief, or harassment, but I hope the thief finds the seat as uncomfortable as I did.
John August 3rd, 2008
King: A Comic Book Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Anderson’s work chronicles the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., from boyhood as a son of a pastor to his increasing prominence as an agitator for civil rights, to his assassination in Memphis. Unlike many works on King, this one does not present him as a saint, instead painting him as a bold and eloquent speaker who is also a womanizer, more than a little vain, and occasionally forced to compromise against his better judgment.
The story is somewhat episodic, presenting relevant events and maintaining them long enough to give a sense of history and import, then leaving them as soon as the purpose is served–in many cases in the middle of a conversation or even the middle of a sentence.
The book is notable not only for its even treatment of King but also for its considerable research and its general historical accuracy, including its mention of COINTELPRO and police brutality and its representation of schisms with strikingly different views on how to proceed towards civil rights and even whether the struggle is worth it.
Still I suspect that at least one of the conversations in the book is fictionalized–the private discussion between JFK and MLK while walking through the gardens at the White House–but the work as a whole remains both educational and entertaining as well as emotionally involving.
Anderson’s art takes a number of different styles, starting off fairly stark and realistic (as shown above) and introducing splashes of color and increasing experimentation as the story continues. The layouts become more fluid and vivid as the artwork ranges from iconic, approaching abstract, to paintings made over photographs. The final section of the book is remarkable for its intensity as the Memphis hotel nears: the art is impressive but also very much in service of the story.
In spite of these strengths the book does have its flaws, including a half-dozen typos, mostly in the middle of the book, and one of them inexcusably during the “I Have a Dream” speech (specifically, the mention of “farmer slaves”).
The book remains worth reading: the writing is compelling and the art shows a talented and creative mind at work taking no artistic choice for granted.