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In comics as literature, part 1 GeekDad's Jonathan Liu is assembling a list of graphic-novel classics:

In the world of comics, just as with novels or kids' books, there are some stories that transcend the realm of "hey, it's just entertainment" and become Serious Literature. I'm not saying that they can't include a few laughs (though some are solemn), but that you can tell there's something under the surface, whether through the subject matter or the language or the artwork.

And here's the best part: there's a lot of them. I'll share some of my old favorites and recent discoveries with you over the course of a few posts, but I guarantee you that there are so many more that I haven't read (or even heard of) yet, and I'm counting on you readers to fill in the gaps on my own shelves.

He ventures a few of the classic graphic novels: Maus, Sandman, Watchmen, and Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics trilogy. It's tough to disagree with any of those choices, but I'm curious to see what books he adds in future installments.

WSJ looks at comic books and the success surrounding the Avengers, Batman, Spiderman, and X-Men franchises:

You might thus assume that superhero comics, the original properties on which these franchises are built, are in flush times. They aren't. The upper limit on sales of a superhero comic book these days is about 230,000; just two or three series routinely break into six digits. Twenty years ago, during the comic industry's brief Dutch-tulip phase, hot issues of "Spider-Man" and "X-Men" sold millions.

That two-decade slide "is a bit of a puzzle, especially because comics, broadly speaking, are respectable as never before:"

If no cultural barrier prevents a public that clearly loves its superheroes from picking up a new "Avengers" comic, why don't more people do so? The main reasons are obvious: It is for sale not in a real bookstore but in a specialty shop, and it is clumsily drawn, poorly written and incomprehensible to anyone not steeped in years of arcane mythology. [...]

The people who produce superhero comics have given up on the mass audience, and it in turn has given up on them. Meanwhile, the ablest creators have abandoned mainline superhero comics to mediocrity.

I'm not that concerned about superhero comics tending ward mediocrity--in the same way that summer blockbusters (like the Transformer movies) are for the motion-picture art form, or soap operas for TV. "The superhero comic has for decades been the fixed point around which this vital American art has revolved," the piece continues, and "it deserves better than to be reduced to a parody of a parody of itself."

Agreed. The medium needs better works of art, but also requires better criticism.

WSJ calls artist Jack Kirby the lost Avenger and announces that "sky-rocketing auction prices and a new museum in his honor are signaling that Jack Kirby may finally have arrived" with a $155,350 purchase:

That was the winning bid for a single page of "Fantastic Four" comic-book art drawn in 1966 by original "Avengers" artist Jack Kirby (and scripted by "Fantastic Four" and "Avengers" co-creator Stan Lee) on the website of Heritage Auctions.

The record-setting art, from Fantastic Four #55, can be seen here--with the artistic contribution of inker Joe Sinnott, who completed Kirby's vision with unparalleled skill:

Charles Murray asks in the pages of New Criterion:

Given what we know about the conditions that led to great accomplishment in the past, what are the prospects for great accomplishment in the arts as we move through the twenty-first century?

Although I take issue with his dark hints about "problems associated with increased secularism" [such as lower crime, higher education, and longer lives?] and his "strongest conclusion that ... Religiosity is indispensable to a major stream of artistic accomplishment," this article functions as an intriguing appetizer for his 2004 book Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950.

Slate's James Sturm writes, "I have decided to boycott The Avengers" due to Marvel's mistreatment of the characters' primary creator, Jack Kirby:

His style was completely original. His characters flew across the page with fierce purpose and yet total abandon, fighting their hearts out against a backdrop of crazy machinery and abstract depictions of elemental energy. Though lacking in finesse, the drawings possessed a brute force that made the reader feel a pulse-pounding urgency that other cartoonists could not elicit. Every panel propelled the story forward at warp speed. Other cartoonists' work hit you with a water pistol; Kirby's slammed you with a fire hose.

Kirby's most creatively fertile decade (the 1960s) saw an output of about 800 pages of artwork per year, from The Avengers, Fantastic Four, and the X-Men to The Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, and Nick Fury. Later decades saw Kirby singled out for onerous contractual restrictions, and his heirs denied any share of Marvel's $4 billion sale to Disney in 2009:

What makes this situation especially hard to stomach is that Marvel's media empire was built on the backs of characters whose defining trait as superheroes is the willingness to fight for what is right. It takes a lot of corporate moxie to put Thor and Captain America on the big screen and have them battle for honor and justice when behind the scenes the parent company acts like a cold-blooded supervillain.

Hero Complex introduces some memories of Jack Kirby's son Neal this way:

"The Avengers," which unites the title characters from four film franchises -- Thor, Captain America, Iron Man and the Hulk - to save Earth from a cosmic threat. The only person who had a hand in creating all of those characters was the late Jack Kirby, a titan figure in comics, but his heirs weren't invited to the premiere; their presence would be awkward considering their legal quest to reclaim the rights to hundreds of his Marvel creations.

Neal writes, "I think about Dad a lot lately, especially when I see Thor, Captain America, Magneto, or the Hulk on a movie poster:"

My father drew comics in six different decades and filled the skies of our collective imagination with heroes, gods, monsters, robots and aliens; most of the truly iconic ones are out of the first half of the 1960s, when he delivered masterpieces on a monthly basis. I treasure the fact that I had a front-row seat for that cosmic event.

[Avengers #4 cover by Jack Kirby (1964), featuring the return of Captain America, a character he co-created in 1941]

Back to the movie, Comics Alliance speculates "it's not unlikely that The Avengers will earn a hundred million dollars on its opening day alone" and notes that "This represents a pretty big payday to a lot of people:"

...shamefully, the people who aren't making a big profit from these movies are the people (and the families of the people) who did the essential work of creating them in the first place. It's not just Jack Kirby, either, or (Black Widow and Hawkeye co-creator) Don Heck, but also Steve Engelhart, Peter David, Herb Trimpe, Jim Steranko, Roy Thomas and dozens more - the artists and writers who refined and defined the characters appearing in this movie, who fleshed out the original creations and molded them into the figures we cheer for when we see them on the screen.

Some very sensible people are calling for a boycott of this film on those grounds, but I think it's fairly obvious that a boycott of idealistic comic fans isn't going to accomplish much.

CA suggests instead that "as a thank you to the creators who brought you these characters in the first place, who gave you something to enjoy so much -- you match your ticket price as a donation to The Hero Initiative?"

THI is a charity which provides essential financial assistance to comic book professionals who have fallen on hard times. For decades, the comic industry provided no financial safety net to its employees, most of whom it regarded only as freelancers and journeymen, meaning they were offered no health insurance, no unemployment insurance, no retirement plans -- none of the financial support most of us enjoy from our jobs and careers. A small donation will help this agency provide a valuable safety net in times of need to these beloved entertainers.

The NYT breaks the sad news that DC plans to defile the memory of Watchmen, one of the few generally recognized classic graphic novels. A group of seven mini-series under the collective title Before Watchmen "will expand on the back stories of the costumed vigilantes like Rorschach and Nite Owl." (h/t to Comics Alliance for linking to the official DC announcement.)

Alan Moore, author of the original graphic novel, calls the plans "completely shameless" and adds that he's not objecting for pecuniary reasons: "I don't want money. What I want is for this not to happen." Similarly, Wired's Scott Thill laments that such artistic necrophilia "has become indispensable in an culture industry that long ago stopped calling derivative a dirty word."

This is all that I have to say:

update (2/6):
Dork Tower had the same idea:

Ted Rall posted a top ten comics of all time list, and asked for his readers' favorites. Over the course of several tweets, I mentioned a few that I have here categorized and alphabetized:

comic strips
Calvin & Hobbes (Watterson)
Dykes to Watch Out For (Bechdel)
Gasoline Alley (King)
Krazy Kat (Herriman)
Little Nemo (McCay)
Pogo (Kelly)
Prince Valiant (Foster)
The Spirit (Eisner)
Tarzan (Hogarth)

mainstream
Dark Knight (Miller)
Fantastic Four (Lee/Kirby)
Green Lantern/Green Arrow (O'Neill/Adams)
Nick Fury (Steranko)
Swamp Thing (Moore/Veitch/Totleben)
Walt Disney Comics & Stories (Barks)
Watchmen (Moore/Gibbons)

alt/indie/underground
American Splendor
Cerebus (Sim)
Cheech Wizard (Bode)
EC war comics (Kurtzman)
"Master Race" (Krigstein)
Maus (Spiegelman)
Moebius
Persepolis (Satrapi)
Raw
Ring of the Nibelung (Russell)
Zap

As with my favorite books, I'm lousy at making a list of n anything--my mind seems to gravitate toward a list of 2n items. I have a strong temptation to pull several anthologies down from the shelves, and spend the afternoon perusing them...

Newt's spokesweasel Rick Tyler fired a floridly full-bore fusillade against critics of his boss:

The literati sent out their minions to do their bidding. Washington cannot tolerate threats from outsiders who might disrupt their comfortable world. The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment's cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods. Now they are left exposed by their bylines and handles. But surely they had killed him off. This is the way it always worked. A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the onslaught. But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won't be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.

It's ridiculous to suggest that Newt is anything but a Washington insider who makes his own living from distortions and falsehoods, but Rachel Maddow ridiculed the statement as "The Epic of Gingrich" for its overblown heroic rhetoric:

The text has also been adapted into a delightful cartoon (h/t: Alex Pareene at Slate):

(Click here to see the whole thing.)

Christopher Hitchens' "When the King Saved God" (Vanity Fair) is a paean to the poetry and prose of the Tyndale/King James translation:

For generations, it provided a common stock of references and allusions, rivaled only by Shakespeare in this respect. It resounded in the minds and memories of literate people, as well as of those who acquired it only by listening. [...] A culture that does not possess this common store of image and allegory will be a perilously thin one. To seek restlessly to update it or make it "relevant" is to miss the point, like yearning for a hip-hop Shakespeare.

"Its abandonment by the Church of England establishment," writes Hitchens, "is yet another demonstration that religion is man-made, with inky human fingerprints all over its supposedly inspired and unalterable texts."

update (4/12):
Here is a great illustration--a revision of Michelangelo's "The Creation of Adam" (h/t: John Loftus) that should perhaps be retitled "The Creation of God:"

Even better than Garfield without Garfield, 3eanuts takes classic Peanuts strips and simply drops the last panel:

Charles Schulz's Peanuts comics often conceal the existential despair of their world with a closing joke at the characters' expense. With the last panel omitted, despair pervades all.

(h/t: Brian Childs at Comics Alliance)

update:
See this WaPo feature for more information.

This series of what Dr Seuss books were really about is wonderful:

Erika Moen has previewed the new webcomic Bucko, with collaborator Jeff Parker. Check out my review of her two DAR! books for a look at her mad cartoon skillz...I'm so happy to see her back to work on a regular webcomic!

This day-long photo collage of the sky is a work of art (h/t: Jason Kottke):

As the photographer writes, "It took me about 12 hours to pull together and process a single image that included over 500 star trails, 35 shots of the Sun and 25 landscape pictures."

This United States of Shame map

has been countered with this United States of Awesome map:

[slightly reformatted for ease of comparison]

The characteristics chosen yield some interesting combinations, such as infertile Vermonters who are otherwise healthy. One might be tempted to mock Utah's happy porn users or Mississippi's fat church-goers, but avoid picking on Pennsylvania's hunters--doing so might get your house burned down.

Ohio's nerdy library users, however, make that state sound positively enticing.

Tomorrow, Tom. Too Much Crazy (Berkeley: Soft Skull Press, 2011)

Under the pseudonym Tom Tomorrow, cartoonist Dan Perkins has spent the last twenty years skewering various political foibles and fallacies in his strip This Modern World (website, Wikipedia). His previous collections (including 2008's The Future's So Bright, I Can't Bear to Look) have just been joined by his ninth book: Too Much Crazy. It covers the period from mid-2008 through mid-2010, with Obama's election serving as prelude to the, well, craziness that the Right has foisted upon us since. (The Left's craziness has largely been limited to wishful thinking that Obama is anything but a centrist, a belief that the author ridicules several times.)

In his introduction, Tom Tomorrow laments a prominent crazy component of today's media, "The constant unending refrain, the low keening wail that just seems to grow louder every day:"

Obama's a Marxist, a fascist, a Muslim; progressives have a century-long plan devised by Woodrow Wilson to overthrow capitalism itself, blah blah blah blah--if you're paying the least little bit of attention, you've heard it all out there. [...] There was a time when we might have been able to at least politely pretend that most of the people around us had some tenuous connection to sanity, but thanks to chat boards and comments sections and Tea Party tallies and those aging standbys, talk radio and Fox News, we have all been thoroughly disabused of that notion. Now we know all too well just how much crazy there is around us at every moment. (p. xxiii, Introduction: When the Levee Breaks)

Here are links to a few of my favorites from the book, beginning with a memento from the early 2009 "post-partisan" moment in "Wrong about Everything" (1/7/2009, p. 35):

Glenn Beck's conspiracy theories take a hit in "Democrats Are Fascists" (4/15/2009, p. 48),

along with double standards on political rhetoric in "Then and Now with Goofus & Gallant" (9/9/2009, p. 63),

Tom Tomorrow examines anti-abortion self-righteousness in the "Rightwingoverse" (6/10/2009, p. 78)


and his "All the Rage" is, sadly, as relevant as ever (4/6/2010, p. 93)

Sparky the Penguin asks "WWSAD?" (4/26/2010, p. 96)

and Obama is exposed as a "Far-Left Radical" (6/8/2010, p. 104)

If this sampling intrigues you, please visit the cartoon's archives at This Modern World and Salon--then go out and buy some of his books. Independent newspapers don't support political cartoons like they used to, so it's up to readers to pick up the slack!

...and I'm not the only one:

(h/t: Comics Worth Reading)

This update to A Charlie Brown Christmas (h/t: PZ Myers at Pharyngula) made my day:

After the decades-long relentless Christianization of practically every square inch of our culture, it's nice to see a little bit of truth breaking through here and there...bravo!

Cartoonist Tom Toles identifies the economic problems caused by extreme concentration of wealth (h/t: Ezra Klein):

After that tease a few months ago, the trailer for Thor has finally been released:

The film opens on 6 May 2011.

This lamp from Studiomeiboom (h/t: Bookshelf Porn, photo by Amy) is a fabulous idea:

It's gorgeous, but the price of €105 (including postage from the Netherlands) makes it a bit too spendy for an impulse purchase. Maybe I'll get one for my dream library...someday...

Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury (website, Wikipedia) turns forty today--not a longevity record, but a significant accomplishment nonetheless. This nearly-700-page retrospective hits bookstore shelves today,

and another by scholar Brian Walker is due next week.

Is it possible to OD on satire?

This Fitzsimmons cartoon
(h/t: Creature at The Reaction) is wonderful:

(David Fitzsimmons/Arizona Daily Star)

I love books, I love bookshelves, and I love clever wood-working designs. This piece combines all three:

Looking at data from publishers and booksellers, the NYT's Julie Bosman proclaimed "Picture Books No Longer a Staple for Children." The picture book, "a mainstay of children's literature with its lavish illustrations, cheerful colors and large print wrapped in a glossy jacket," has apparently been suffering from disappointing sales. Bosman suggests that due to "increasingly rigorous standardized testing in schools" parents have "accelerated the graduation rate out of picture books:"

Many parents overlook the fact that chapter books, even though they have more text, full paragraphs and fewer pictures, are not necessarily more complex.

Jonathan Liu at Wired's Geek Dad worries that kids of these parents "will miss out on some of the world's best artwork, some of which you can't truly appreciate until you're older:"

I bet they won't go for comic books, either. It's like making the mistaken assumption that because Pixar movies are cartoons, they're only for little kids.

The experiences at Borders and Barnes & Noble typify the no-picture-book attitude:

Other retailers have cut shelf space devoted to picture books while expanding their booming young-adult sections, full of dystopic fiction, graphic novels and "Twilight"-inspired paranormal romances.

Lea Carpenter at Big Think, however, takes a broader attitude--writing that:

...a love of reading, whether genetic or learned, is less about the number of words on a page than the quality of the experience of the story. Adults can wrestle with Chris Ware alongside Salman Rushdie, and appreciate the diversity of experience.

update (10/12):
GeekMom weighs in as well. She understands the argument against illustrated books, but doesn't buy it:

Picture books are seen as something for little kids, a minor step on to bigger and better things. I understand the pressure parents are under to keep their children moving forward academically. But letting go of picture books too early is not the answer. [...] By reading picture books to my son I'm exposing him to all types of art and artists. He gets the value of an illustration on a much higher level than a preschooler ever could.

In the NYT, Stanley Fish writes about the film Howl. Based on the life and most famous work of poet Allen Ginsburg, (which I discussed here) Howl has a multi-layered narrative structure that affords viewers "a chance to hear the same lines and passages twice and even three times:"

...as a result, we experience the effect of deepening understanding that is produced by the classroom teacher who circles and surrounds a poem with information, references and multiple points of view.

Interpretation in still another register is provided by the amazing animation -- part-biographical, part-metaphorical, part-imagistic and largely hallucinogenic -- that seems to flow upward from Ginsberg's mouth as he reads. The phrase "teaching moment" is now overused, but this film earns it and leaves us wanting more, not more of Franco (who is terrific), not more of the plot (which is less than minimal), not more of the trial (you get just enough), but more literary criticism. Mirabile dictu!

AO Scott's review echoes this point, writing that Howl "does something that sounds simple until you consider how rarely it occurs in films of any kind. It takes a familiar, celebrated piece of writing and makes it come alive." However, Scott flags the animation sequences as "sincere, visually adept and nearly disastrous, the one serious misstep in a film that otherwise does nearly everything right." (Eric Drooker's animations from the film are published in Howl: The Graphic Novel, and Drooker's previous book of Ginsberg's Illuminated Poems.) The trailer looks pretty good:

update (10/12):
Greta Christina reviews Howl at Carnal Nation and writes that "I do have to respect Allen Ginsberg:"

I have to respect him for writing candidly about sex, at a time when writing candidly about sex could get you arrested. I have to respect him for being an out gay man in the freaking 1950s. I have to respect him for breaking the ground that I'm casually strolling on today.

Allen Ginsberg lived in a world that was much, much shittier about sex than the world I live in today. And the world I live in today is better, in part, because of him: because of the things he wrote, and the fights he fought, and the life he lived out loud.

A lot of things drifted into my mind when I was watching this film. But the idea that kept drifting into my head, again and again, gently and relentlessly, was this:

Thanks.

I have an ongoing love affair with Library of America, a publisher dedicated to--what else?--keeping our nation's foremost historical, literary, and cultural works in print. The past few years have seen a broadening of the LoA canon, which now includes Kerouac, Lovecraft, and Philip K Dick (with Vonnegut on the schedule for 2011) in addition to the old standbys. The wordless woodcut novels of Lynd Ward are the newest additions to the literary stable in a two-volume slipcased edition:

Given the LOA's usual attention to detail, as well as the stature of Ward's work, I expect this set to be a remarkable literary experience as well as an unusual one. To whet your appetite, the opening sequence of Gods' Man is here, and a long essay from fellow graphic novelist Art Spiegelman is here.

In case your newspaper is staffed by cowards, you might have missed Wiley's "Where's Muhammad?" Non Sequitur strip yesterday. Here it is:

In the pages of the Boston Globe, cartoonist Ward Sutton has reimagined newspaper comics pages, Teabagger-style (h/t: Towleroad). Favorites include Sutton's mimicry of the stuck-in-the-past Blondie,

Dilbert's right-to-workplace,

and a Teabagger-style Family Circus: