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Friday, February 16, 2007

Huizenga!

posted by on February 16 at 0:53 AM

Oh, dear. I seem to have started a kerfluffle—it must’ve been a slow Seattle blogosphere news day. I will—for the last time, I promise—address all issues that I inadvertently raised after the jump, but first I want to stress the only important piece of information that everyone should have gleaned from all this:

This Saturday, February 17th, you should go to the Fantagraphics Store in Georgetown and see this show. It’s important because Anders Nilsen’s last book, Monologues For the Coming Plague, was a wonderful mix of contemporary art and apocalyptic slapstick, and you’ll be seeing much more of Nilsen’s ugly/beautiful artwork (and the inevitable rip-offs that will follow) in the very near future. It’s important because Gabrielle Bell has been the standout in Fantagraphics’ standout-heavy anthology Mome, and it’s entirely possible that Bell will one day soon create a medium-changing graphic novel. But I think that it’s most important because of Kevin Huizenga, whose last book, Curses, blew away a ton of other excellent books (Lost Girls, Fun Home) to be the best graphic novel of 2006. Huizenga is happening even as we speak, and he’s got the same energy and power that Chris Ware did when he burst on the scene in the mid-1990’s. What’s more, his comics—about magical realism, about the stupid/genius things that we think about when we walk down the sidewalk, about theological discussions, about love, about birds—are not cynical or sarcastic or obsessively literary at all, and I really believe that he’s on the verge of changing the way that comics are going to be created and read for the next ten years, and entirely for the better.
It’s at six o’clock, it’s free, and you’ll still have plenty of time afterward to hit up that party or that rock and roll show. You should totally go.

After the jump, for the sake of the five people who care about this, I will get totally wonky on a blog issue that is at least twenty-four hours old. I don’t recommend clicking through, unless you really care about this sort of thing.

All right:
Some folks think that, because The Stranger was going to run the Hernandez cover that the Weekly wound up running, they totally trapped me in a gotcha.
That's simply not true; The artwork on Strangercovers, at least 80% of the time, doesn't relate to the interior matter, except for the little blurb on the inside that says whose art it is and where you can go see it. It's a nice way to showcase the local art scene, and the Hernandez cover--promoting the Hernandez artwork at the Fantagraphics Store--would have been no different.

The Weekly, however, runs their cover story as cover art 99% of the time--in fact, this is the first exception I can think of, in my seven years in town. And combined with the blurb that uglifies the gorgeous Love and Rockets artwork--""Alt-comic innovators THE HERNANDEZ BROTHERS flaunt 25 years at Fantagraphics" --I actually was excited this week when I picked up the Weekly, for the first time in years, thinking that they were going to have a big, juicy feature story about Love and Rockets. My disappointment--and I know I'm not the only one who's disappointed by this, as some coworkers at the bookstore I work at experienced a similar excitus interruptus moment on picking up the Weekly--spurred the initial Slog post.

That is all I'm going to say on the matter anymore. Except for I'm working on a long, juicy feature on The Hernandez Brothers. But that is all I'm going to say on this particular matter anymore.

Oh, and, I don't care what dictionary.com says, it's spelled barista, dammit, not barrista, which is just wrong.

And Tome Raider is still, quite simply, the worst title for a book column that I can possibly think of, except for maybe The Spine Cracker.

The end.

RSS icon Comments

1

The jump seems to be broken.

Posted by Gabriel | February 16, 2007 6:28 AM
2

So... why [i]did[/i] y'all run the cartoon on the cover instead of the Love and Rockets art?

Posted by Joshua H | February 16, 2007 6:46 AM
3

Paul, in your initial post you said you thought it was strange timing for the Weekly to use such cover art - that it came a week too late and would have been more relevant the week before. Using your same logic, why are you writing a feature on the artists now?

I don't actually care why, I'm just noting the pettiness and hypocrisy there. It seems clear that there was some irritation at the Stranger for having their cover art stolen from underneath them and that the Weekly made the ANS jab on their cover to make things worse. The end result is that the Stranger ends up late to the game, the opposite of what you initially argued.

Posted by Gabriel | February 16, 2007 7:25 AM
4

I'm with you on the original argument - SW almost always has a cover story to go with their cover art, and it's disappointing that this isn't the case with the Hernandez Bros.

But reading further, I'm more disappointed to see that the Stranger would consider running a Hernandez cover - and dump it for a drawing of ANS! Also, did the Stranger have a big story on the Hernandez Bros last week (I was out of town)?

With you 100% on barista.

Posted by genevieve | February 16, 2007 9:15 AM
5

I enjoy Slog quite a bit, because many posts by some key writers make great points, many of which are misunderstood at first.

But, ouch. When some of you guys mess up a little, you guys are the WORST at being able to even calm down, step back for a second, and surmise the mess. Your attempt to backpedal has the same effect as a meteor crashing into the ground, given how large a well you dig for yourselves.

Why not just a) let it go, or b) rationally explain the confusion and not be such a 7-year old about getting your last digs in to the competition, so to speak?

It's disappointing, because I think The Stranger has a potential to be a GREAT paper, and I think it's getting there in baby steps. But sometimes baby drops the vase on the floor, and this is one of those times.

Posted by matthew fisher wilder | February 16, 2007 9:17 AM
6

@5 Well put, Matthew.

Posted by Gabriel | February 16, 2007 9:34 AM
7

Actually, there is a simple, rational explanation for all this, and here it is: We didn't run an L&R cover this week because, A) the 25th anniversary show was already a week old, and we couldn't run the cover the week before because of Valentine's Day, and B) we wanted to run one of Jim Blanchard's illustrations of recently deceased celebrities, which is a bit of a Stranger tradition.
The thing is, we don't even know from week to week what the Weekly is going to run on there cover, so there's no way it could even be a factor in our decision. Also, there are usually a handful of cover ideas each week, and wht we think will be the cover on Thursday has often been replaced with something else by the following Tuesday when we go to press.
The fact the Weekly did run an L&R cover is what we in the newspaper game call a "coincidence." Personally, when I saw that they had done it I was glad we hadn't because that would have looked pretty silly, wouldn't it? Imagine what kind of controversy people would have created out of thin air if that had happened.
This is a simple case of two local papers having the same idea for a cover (And why not? It's a great local company celebrating 25 years of a groundbreaking comic?). One ran it, one didn't. The end.

Posted by A-Train | February 16, 2007 9:38 AM
8

I agree it's barista, I'm just saying a spell checker/editor could have been confused. Although I suppose it would have been almost faster to look our their window at the Starbucks across the street to figure it out..

Posted by Tiz | February 16, 2007 9:39 AM
9

@7 I think the point is that Paul exhibited some childishness about the whole thing, that's all.

Posted by Gabriel | February 16, 2007 9:48 AM
10

Paul's feature is in fact for The Progressive (based out of Madison Wisconsin), and not for the Stranger, and my understanding is, while it's on the exhibit and the 1 billion pages of Love and Rockets, it's not so readers in Wisconsin can come to the Fantagraphics shop. So while he MIGHT be petty and hyporcritical (fyi, he's not), the fact that he's writing an article on the Hernandez Bros and their large body of work is certainly no indication of it.

Posted by Davida | February 16, 2007 10:09 AM
11

Kerfluffle?!?!?!?

Someone's been watching 'Little Britain'.....

Posted by michael strangeways | February 16, 2007 12:34 PM
12

...we couldn't run the cover the week before because of Valentine's Day...

You couldn't run a Love and Rockets cover for the Valentine's Day issue? Seriously???

Y'all missed a good thing.

Posted by Joshua H | February 16, 2007 6:42 PM

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