Merchandising: The Search for More Money! - Apr 16, 2008 - 02:17pm
The new site format is reallly terrible. Did Mania even attempt any kind of outside or usability testing? Not only are the margins out of control (at least in the newest version of Firefox), but there is no way to tell from the front page whether each article is part of a column or not, what date it was posted on, etc. And while I realize that the site requires commercial advertisers to survive, it needs readers more, and as is, the site is too difficult, annoying, and ad-saturated for me to really deal with. No offense Kurt and Ben, excellent column as always.

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Words and Pictures: Comics vs. Literature - Mar 26, 2008 - 01:26pm
Thanks, Merin. Btw, Terry Moore's great, can't wait for his run on Runaways..!

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Words and Pictures: Comics vs. Literature - Mar 26, 2008 - 11:40am
The definition of all books and no comics as literature is, to use a technical term, screwy. Many examples of conventional 'literature' include art and pictures, and Kurt's example eliminates, for example, 90% of children's literature. Comics *are* literature: they contain character, narrative, and plot; and are (generally) told in a kind of sequence and bound and printed on a type of paper. Yes, comics has formal elements of its own like the panel and the gutter, but that doesn't mean they aren't literature. (Novels after all, sometimes contain drawings, photographs, and increasingly, short comic sections to help tell their own stories). If a distinction regarding 'literature' is to be made, its a critical distinction. See Georg Lukas' "The Historical Novel," for example. He draws the line between the 'novel' proper (ie, literature), and the 'entertainment novel' which is escapist fun, but really about nothing other than its own story, characters, etc. "Watchmen" is 'literature' because its concerns are larger than the story contained within its pages. Now this distinction might be elitist and slippery, but its a much better one than 'all books are literature' and 'all comics are not', because the difference between books and comics is arbitrary, indeed shrinking.

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