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Saturday, November 03, 2007

Warming up to The Comics Journal

Well, I finally showered; I did that much - little else.

My house is in that state where I don’t even know where to begin cleaning, so just looking around makes me tired to think about it, so I keep putting off doing anything.

I think I’m starting to warm-up to The Comics Journal finally. I was reading the latest one while I was out today and found the article extremely interesting. It was about an old-hand named Roger Armstrong who recently died.

I am not familiar with the man or his work, as it was almost all before my time - and yours too, I’m sure - but he was one of those guys like Harvey Kurtzman (the one old-hand I have met that worked the strips - aside from Joe Kubert and one or two others) who worked the newspaper strips back in the days before there even were comic books. The article relayed a bunch of the stories he used to tell about The Olden Days (and I mean THE OLDen Days: 1920s-40s) and working the strips and they were endlessly fascinating.

I really like eulogies like these - because that’s what they are, really - that are so well-written, they make you feel close to a person you never knew, never met, and may not have even heard of previously. And it made me want to clarify again my stance on TCJ:

I have a great respect for every cartoonist, period. I may or may not like some of the work some of them do, I may not like some of their attitudes or outlooks or opinions - and I feel nothing bad about saying so when I do - but that should never be misread as my disrespecting what they do; I may not necessarily respect a particular artist’s work and/or I may not respect a particular creator’s outlook or attitude on life, cartooning, music, or what-have-you, but I absolutely respect cartooning.

I’m just not a big fan of just anything obscure. I don’t care how obscure something is, obscurity does not specifically connote grandiosity; just because no one has heard of it or because it hasn’t “broken into the mainstream” does not mean it’s good. TCJ seems to think it does and that’s my problem with it.

I love learning about cartoonists and works of which I am unaware, but I also want to read about the artists I grew up with, the artists working today that I may not have heard of, American artists who are working independently on titles with subject matter and themes other than homosexuality or 20-somethings' post-modern punk rock love lives or whatever else is the same “quirky” old Love & Rockets schlock that keeps getting churned-out in ashcans throughout the Northeast and somehow finds its way into TCJ under the insinuated banner of The Next Big Thing You’re Not Reading!

And superheroes.

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