Comments on Huizenga!

The jump seems to be broken.

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

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.

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.

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.

@5 Well put, Matthew.

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.

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..

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

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.

Kerfluffle?!?!?!?

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

...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.