It’s easy to forget, given the sensitivities that have been awakened in this country since 9/11, thrusting lifelong citizens under suspicion for having foreign-sounding names and subjecting visitors to the indignity of being fingerprinted, that America was conceived in a spirit of openness, as a land where people could build new identities, grounded in the present and the future, not the past. This dream, despite current fears, has in great part been made real.
The term ‘graphic novel’ is dismissed by most of its practitioners as either an empty euphemism or a marketing ploy. As Marjane Satrapi puts it, graphic novels simply enable ‘the bourgeois to read comics without feeling bad’; according to Alan Moore, they allow publishers to ‘stick six issues of whatever worthless piece of crap they happened to be publishing lately under a glossy cover and call it The She-Hulk Graphic Novel’. Moore and Satrapi, in common with many others, want their work to be known as ‘comics’. But ‘graphic novel’ can usefully designate a certain type of comic: a single-author, book-length work, meant for a grown-up reader, with a memoiristic or novelistic narrative, usually devoid of superheroes. By contrast, the older and more capacious term ‘comic book’ recalls the thinner, serialised, multi-authored or ghost-written publications rife with Supermen and She-Hulks. Some comics, of course, straddle (or elude) both categories; but in broad terms ‘comic book’ and ‘graphic novel’ serve to distinguish two trends in the history and form of comics.
From the recent archive:
Television was the Cold War intellectuals’ nightmare, a machine for bringing kitsch and commercialism directly into the home. But by exposing people to an endless stream of advertising, television taught them to take nothing at face value, to read everything ironically. We read the horror comics today and smile complacently at the sheer over-the-top campiness of the effects. In fact, that is the only way we can read them. We have lost our innocence.
Once Jean Nouvel examines his given conditions and decides that the best architectural solution is, say, a skyscraper without visible base and summit, or a mechanized geometric facade that casts filigreed shadows, he can get going. But to this cerebral process he appends a counterweight: the sensuous love of the material components of a building. “What I like is the poétique of the situation,” he said, in Gallically accented English. “I am a hedonist, and I want to give pleasure to other people.”
We are gathered here, way far in the future, for the funeral of Jack Handey, the world’s oldest man. He died suddenly in bed, according to his wife, Miss France.
No one is really sure how old Jack was, but some think he may have been born as long ago as the twentieth century. He passed away after a long, courageous battle with honky-tonkin’ and alley-cattin’.
Even though Jack was incredibly old, he was amazingly healthy right up to the end. He attributed this to performing his funny cowboy dance for friends, relatives, and people waiting for buses. All agreed it was the most hilarious thing they had ever seen, and not at all stupid or annoying.
As everyone knows, the Japanese have a highly idiosyncratic brand of trouble with the English language, resulting in enormous quantities of inadvertently hilarious yet weirdly poetic Hello Kitty phrases. No doubt these arise mostly from dictionary-based translations led astray by the unfathomable differences between the two languages, which have little in common beyond using vocalizations and marks on paper to communicate meaning.
Downstream is an arresting vision of the Colorado River by renowned landscape photographer Karen Halverson. The Colorado, crucial to development in the West, is at once wilderness, natural resource, recreation area, and wasteland. In seventy large-format color photographs, Halverson captures the river's natural majesty as well as the strange and unexpected beauty of its altered state. The images take us on an intimate exploration of the Colorado's entire length--from its rugged upstream canyons, to its dams and reservoirs, to where it disappears into the desert, entirely consumed. In an insightful, personal introduction to the photographs, Halverson tells how she explored the Colorado--accessing it by car, on foot, and by raft--while learning about its transformation into a complex water delivery system. In a lyrical foreword, historian William Deverell sets the photographs in the illuminating context of Colorado River history and discovery. In both images and prose, the book gives an extraordinary view of the Colorado's great and enduring splendor and a clear-eyed look at the many ironies contained in its waters.
While every computer these days comes pre-loaded with an adequate number of fonts, sometimes you want to create your own. Maybe there's a special project like a family cookbook or class assignment that requires a personal touch. Or maybe your kid wants some AC/DC-esque Trapper Keeper lettering to show his classmates how much he rocks. Whatever the reason, here's how to make your own font.
