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Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Books / Nerd Saving Print Journalism Makes for Strange Bedfellows

Posted by Paul Constant on Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 2:32 PM

I've written about this before, but it's getting very close now: The 33rd issue of McSweeney's is going to take the form of a Sunday newspaper titled The San Francisco Panorama:

It'll have news (actual news, tied to the day it comes out) and sports and arts coverage, and comics (sixteen pages of glorious, full-color comics, from Chris Ware and Dan Clowes and Art Spiegelman and many others besides) and a magazine and a weekend guide, and will basically be an attempt to demonstrate all the great things print journalism can (still) do, with as much first-rate writing and reportage and design (and posters and games and on-location Antarctic travelogues) as we can get in there. Expect journalism from Andrew Sean Greer, fiction from George Saunders and Roddy Doyle, dispatches from Afghanistan, and much, much more. We're going to try to sell this thing on the street in San Francisco, but it'll also go out to our subscribers and be in bookstores all over.

The page with images from the Panorama is here. Weirdly, you will note that one of the comic strips features Erik Larsen's superhero comic book character The Savage Dragon. I am not snobbish when it comes to Savage Dragon: I kind of enjoy the book, the way I enjoy trashy mysteries. It's like a superhero comic book drawn by a cross between Jack Kirby and a pervy Robert Crumb with an enormous-boob fetish. It's proudly dumb fun, but it can often be proudly experimental, too. But I'm really surprised to see Larsen working with McSweeney's. He's not as cerebral as their usual cartoonist choices (see: Spiegelman, Ware, Clowes listed above). I think this pairing can only be good news for the both of them.

You can pre-order the Panorama here. Unlike a normal Sunday newspaper, it costs $16 (unless you live in the Bay Area). But I'm really excited about this, and I think you should be too.

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Oldest First Unregistered On Registered On Add a comment

more comics.

no, I'm serious.

Posted by Will in Seattle

on November 4, 2009 at 3:31 PM

i still thank my lucky stars the day i bought a lifetime subscription to mcsweeney's after issue one. the greatest $120 i ever spent. :)

Posted by beef on November 4, 2009 at 3:38 PM

Larsen is a genuinely good guy, overlooked by the McSweeney's crowd because of his early work with then-fledgling Image Comics. But as you say, he's often quite experimental, and has used his clout to launch and/or support some really interesting work. Once he got the first year or so of Dragon (the least interesting/most formulaic & craptacular stuff) out of his system, it's only gotten better. "This Savage World" was the most fun I've had with superhero comics as an adult.

Posted by eric (the other one) on November 4, 2009 at 3:57 PM