Category: literary life

Sunday Funnies

Alex Chun talks to a few comic artists about Sunday strips, and finds them pretty anxious about the future:

While strips such as “Boondocks” and “Over the Hedge” are making forays onto the small and large screen, respectively, the comics page is struggling to find its place in a post-“Calvin & Hobbes” world as its readership grows older and as its piece of newspaper real estate shrinks.

“I don’t think you’ll ever see another ‘Calvin & Hobbes,’ ‘Bloom County’ or ‘Doonesbury’ again,” says Breathed, 48, who received the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1987. “The popularity of those strips was built on a young audience — great comic strips are not built on the backs of aging readers.”

Part of the problem, Breathed and other cartoonists say, is that newspapers, when choosing their comic strip lineup, put too much emphasis on the opinions of aging readers. As a result, stalwart strips such as “Peanuts,” which continues to run as a reprint since the death of Charles M. Schulz in 2000, and “Blondie,” which was created in 1930 by Chic Young, tend to remain entrenched on comics pages.

You can read the rest here.



Link Soup

I’m trying to get a few things finished (including Chapter 5) before I head out of town again, so there’s not much up here today. A few links to tide you over till later in the day:

  • John Barlow at Slate: “My failed fling with a book packager,” or how he didn’t end up accused of plagiarism.
  • I read excerpts of Mark Bowden’s Guests of the Ayatollah when they appeared in the Atlantic a few months ago, and they really irked me, for all the reasons that Evan Wright details in his Los Angeles Times review.
  • I was very curious about Chris Abani’s take on the new Wole Soyinka memoir. Here it is, in last Sunday’s SF Chronicle. (Yes, it is another rave.)
  • Film to character: How Capote explains Capote.



Failbetter

The new issue of Failbetter is up, with contributions by Benjamin Krier, Colleen Mondor, and Portland author Kevin Sampsell, among others. There is also an interview with Anne Tyler. Check it out.



PEN World Voices Festival

The 2006 PEN World Voices Festival opened yesterday in New York, with dozens of readings and discussions on the bill. I’m looking forward to reading some of my friends‘ dispatches from the front lines. I did, however, want to highlight one event that might get lost in the shuffle:

Voices From Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich
Housing Works Bookstore Cafe
126 Crosby St.
Tickets: Free;
Call (212) 334-3324
Presented by The National Book Critics Circle

Writers read from Alexievich’s Voices From Chernobyl (winner of the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction) to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the explosion of Chernobyl’s nuclear power plant. The readers include Philip Gourevitch, fiction writers Ken Kalfus, Julie Otsuka, Lynne Tillman, Martha Cooley, and Jim Shepard, along with poet Lawrence Joseph and translator Keith Gessen.

Related: Slate has a photo essay by Paul Fusco on the 20-year anniversary of the explosion.



RAWI Website

RAWI, the Arab American Writers’ association, has launched its website. Find out more about members, read the newsletter, and check out opportunities and annoucements.



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