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Fw: favourite authors include Vladimir Nabokov ... Boyd on VN and
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian Boyd (FOA ENG)" <b.boyd@auckland.ac.nz>
To: "'D. Barton Johnson '" <chtodel@cox.net>
Sent: Sunday, January 25, 2004 2:59 PM
Subject: RE: favourite authors include Vladimir Nabokov ...
> Nabokov and comics
>
> I comment on the origin of comics in explicating "all his trim stripes and
> colors were a little displaced, though, in the process of comic strip
> printing, because it was a Sunday" (124.28-30) in the "Annotations to ADA
> I.20" (Nabokovian 49: 40-41).
>
> The greatest figure so far in the history of comics, the first genius on
the
> scale of the great novelists and poets, is Art Spiegelman. When he was
still
> in charge of the comics section of the New Yorker, he drew the cover for
> their Winter Fiction issue (the issue containing Nabokov's discarded and
> semi-fictional Chapter 16 of "Conclusive Evidence"), December 28,
> 1998-January 4 1999, a picture of a Sue Lyons-like Lolita in a bikini on a
> beachtowel reading a book called "Fiction," in the midst of a snowy
> landscape, with a watching snowman's hat leaping up off his head as his
> eyebrows jump up in surprise at the bikini in the snow.
>
> Interestingly, Nabokov never seems to have commented on the work of George
> Herriman, the maker of Krazy Kat, arguably the greatest talent in comics
> before Spiegelman, whose work appealed to many artists and writers. The
> color pages of Krazy Kat ran in the color supplements of American
newspapers
> from 1935 to 1944 (and sometimes do comment self-reflexively on the
> displacement of ink-as Spiegelman does brilliantly in his Two-Fisted
Tales).
>
> Brian Boyd
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: D. Barton Johnson
> To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
> Sent: 1/25/2004 7:06 AM
> Subject: Fw: favourite authors include Vladimir Nabokov ...
>
> EDNOTE. Boy and man, Nabokov followed the comics and frequently alluded
> to them in his writings. Only a few critics have delved into the the
> subject: Alfred Appel; Clarence Brown (himself a comic strip artist--as
> well as distnguished scholar); and I (see my illustrated essay on ZEMBLA
> that deals with VN's early interest in comics. Still rarer are the
> comics artists themselves who have expressed an interest in VN. See
> below.
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Sandy P. <mailto:spklein52@hotmail.com> Klein
> Sent: Friday, January 23, 2004 9:30 PM
> Subject: favourite authors include Vladimir Nabokov ...
>
>
>
> <http://www.thestar.com/>
>
>
> <http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/
> Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1074858202527&call_pageid=968867495754>
> http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/A
> rticle_Type1&c=Article&cid=1074858202527&call_pageid=968867495754
>
> Jan. 23, 2004. 10:42 AM
> <http://www.thestar.com/images/star/nav/spacer_487.gif>
>
>
> <http://ads.thestar.com/click.ng/site=thestar&Section=entertainment&page
> =index&spacedesc=windowad>
>
> <http://www.thestar.com/images/thestar/img/040123_thompson_c_250.jpg>
>
> AP PHOTO/RICK BOWMER
> Graphic novelist Craig Thompson, author of "Blankets," holds pages from
> his book Dec. 30, 2003, in his Portland, Ore., studio.
> Comicsville, U.S.A.
>
>
> BY SARAH LINN
> ASSOCIATED PRESS
>
> PORTLAND, Ore. ? Craig Thompson wanted to write comics but it was rough
> going when he moved to Portland six years ago.
>
> His budget was so small, he said, he'd wait outside fast-foot
> restaurants until people finished, then eat food off their trays.
>
> "The first six months were harsh," says Thompson, author of the
> critically acclaimed, mostly autobiographical graphic novel blankets.
>
> To survive, he painted houses for a scam artist who left him with $6,000
> worth of bad cheques. His bike was stolen. Four men in a grocery store
> parking lot assaulted him and another man.
>
> But he stayed, and found a job as a designer with Dark Horse Comics, the
> fourth largest U.S. publisher in the growing comic book industry. Now
> Thompson is part of a thriving Portland comics scene that includes
> journalist Joe Sacco and superhero comics writer Greg Rucka.
>
> Portland and its suburbs are home to such publishers as Dark Horse, Oni
> Press and Top Shelf Publications. The area is quieter than other comics
> hotspots like Seattle and New York.
>
> "It's a place where you can daydream," Sacco, who travels the world for
> his work, says. In peaceful Portland, "You can step out of your house
> and think while you're out on the streets."
>
> Comics have come a long way from the newspaper-print funnies once sold
> at drug stores and newsstands, says publisher Michael Richardson, who
> founded Dark Horse Comics in 1986. Underground icons Robert Crumb and
> Harvey Pekar broke new ground for comic book subjects in the 1960s, and
> Art Spiegelman's Holocaust tale, Maus, brought a level of gravity to the
> form in 1986.
>
> These days, readers are just as likely to find graphic novels crowding
> bookshelves as pulpy superhero pamphlets, Richardson says.
>
> And the genre is growing. Graphic novels earned $100 million in 2002, a
> 33 per cent increase from the year before, when they accounted for one
> per cent of American book sales, according to Publishers Weekly.
>
> The soft-spoken Thompson, 28, published his first graphic novel five
> years ago. Goodbye, Chunky Rice is about the seagoing adventures of a
> lovelorn young turtle. Blankets, a 2003 Top Shelf release, explores
> adolescent insecurities, faith, family and first loves with delicate
> images of snow and sleep. The 582-page coming-of-age tale deals with
> such thorny subjects as molestation and growing up in a fundamentalist
> Christian household.
>
> "Stories I pursue I always want to be, at the risk of sounding
> pretentious, literary," says Thompson, who grew up in Wisconsin and
> whose favourite authors include Vladimir Nabokov and Gabriel Garcia
> Marquez.
>
> Thompson often meshes the fantastic with the factual. His current
> project is the story of a love between a eunuch and a courtesan in an
> Arabian Nights setting.
>
> He has filled notebooks with sketches, dreams and plot details, an
> approach that he says helps build ties with readers. "Comics you can
> linger over and look at each page," he says. "You see the author's lines
> as if you're looking at a handwritten letter from them."
>
> Sacco takes the approach of a war correspondent, filing gritty
> dispatches from the front lines of human suffering. His books, which
> include Palestine and the Bosnian civil war journal Safe Area Gorazde,
> chronicle armed conflicts in a cartoonish, crosshatch-heavy style.
>
> The stories have a dark, absurdist humour, according to the 43-year-old
> Sacco, who studied journalism at the University of Oregon.
>
> Sacco, from the Mediterranean island of Malta, travels frequently from
> Portland to Europe and the Middle East, and most recently went to the
> Rafah refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. He documents his experiences with
> notes, photographs and tape recordings.
>
> In the 2003 memoir The Fixer, Sacco recalls Neven, the guide he met
> while covering wartime Sarajevo. The book follows Sacco in 2001 as he
> searches for traces of his former fixer.
>
> Macho and morally ambiguous, Neven has no qualms about milking Sacco for
> money as he tells outrageous war stories and chaperones the younger man
> through a strife-torn country.
>
> The former newspaperman scoffs at the journalistic ideal of objectivity,
> arguing that everyone has a background, prejudices and a point of view.
> "Why can't we go to a journalist and say, `Tell us what you think?'"
>
> Rucka has taken a more traditional approach to comics, simultaneously
> writing titles for DC Comics' Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman series ?
> the first writer to tackle such a hat trick since 1974.
>
> The task puts Rucka, 33, in a vulnerable position, given the decreasing
> appetite for serial, pamphlet-style comic books. Superhero comics have
> long attracted scorn from critics who see the genre as silly, even
> infantile.
>
> Rucka, a published novelist, says tales of muscle-bound, masked men and
> women let readers examine human struggles on a superhuman scale. "Nobody
> would have asked the Greeks, `Why Hercules?'" he says.
>
> Comics' growing narrative consciousness can be attributed to a changing
> customer base, says Richardson, the publisher. While fewer children are
> buying comics, teens and adults alike are turning to the medium.
>
> Comic books and graphic novels are also gaining respectability as
> serious art forms, thanks to such literary endeavours as Thompson's
> Blankets, said Top Shelf publisher Brett Warnock.
>
> "It's the golden age right now."
>
> <http://www.thestar.com/>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _____
>
> Learn how to choose, serve, and <http://g.msn.com/8HMBENUS/2749??PS=>
> enjoy wine at Wine @ MSN.
From: "Brian Boyd (FOA ENG)" <b.boyd@auckland.ac.nz>
To: "'D. Barton Johnson '" <chtodel@cox.net>
Sent: Sunday, January 25, 2004 2:59 PM
Subject: RE: favourite authors include Vladimir Nabokov ...
> Nabokov and comics
>
> I comment on the origin of comics in explicating "all his trim stripes and
> colors were a little displaced, though, in the process of comic strip
> printing, because it was a Sunday" (124.28-30) in the "Annotations to ADA
> I.20" (Nabokovian 49: 40-41).
>
> The greatest figure so far in the history of comics, the first genius on
the
> scale of the great novelists and poets, is Art Spiegelman. When he was
still
> in charge of the comics section of the New Yorker, he drew the cover for
> their Winter Fiction issue (the issue containing Nabokov's discarded and
> semi-fictional Chapter 16 of "Conclusive Evidence"), December 28,
> 1998-January 4 1999, a picture of a Sue Lyons-like Lolita in a bikini on a
> beachtowel reading a book called "Fiction," in the midst of a snowy
> landscape, with a watching snowman's hat leaping up off his head as his
> eyebrows jump up in surprise at the bikini in the snow.
>
> Interestingly, Nabokov never seems to have commented on the work of George
> Herriman, the maker of Krazy Kat, arguably the greatest talent in comics
> before Spiegelman, whose work appealed to many artists and writers. The
> color pages of Krazy Kat ran in the color supplements of American
newspapers
> from 1935 to 1944 (and sometimes do comment self-reflexively on the
> displacement of ink-as Spiegelman does brilliantly in his Two-Fisted
Tales).
>
> Brian Boyd
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: D. Barton Johnson
> To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
> Sent: 1/25/2004 7:06 AM
> Subject: Fw: favourite authors include Vladimir Nabokov ...
>
> EDNOTE. Boy and man, Nabokov followed the comics and frequently alluded
> to them in his writings. Only a few critics have delved into the the
> subject: Alfred Appel; Clarence Brown (himself a comic strip artist--as
> well as distnguished scholar); and I (see my illustrated essay on ZEMBLA
> that deals with VN's early interest in comics. Still rarer are the
> comics artists themselves who have expressed an interest in VN. See
> below.
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Sandy P. <mailto:spklein52@hotmail.com> Klein
> Sent: Friday, January 23, 2004 9:30 PM
> Subject: favourite authors include Vladimir Nabokov ...
>
>
>
> <http://www.thestar.com/>
>
>
> <http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/
> Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1074858202527&call_pageid=968867495754>
> http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/A
> rticle_Type1&c=Article&cid=1074858202527&call_pageid=968867495754
>
> Jan. 23, 2004. 10:42 AM
> <http://www.thestar.com/images/star/nav/spacer_487.gif>
>
>
> <http://ads.thestar.com/click.ng/site=thestar&Section=entertainment&page
> =index&spacedesc=windowad>
>
> <http://www.thestar.com/images/thestar/img/040123_thompson_c_250.jpg>
>
> AP PHOTO/RICK BOWMER
> Graphic novelist Craig Thompson, author of "Blankets," holds pages from
> his book Dec. 30, 2003, in his Portland, Ore., studio.
> Comicsville, U.S.A.
>
>
> BY SARAH LINN
> ASSOCIATED PRESS
>
> PORTLAND, Ore. ? Craig Thompson wanted to write comics but it was rough
> going when he moved to Portland six years ago.
>
> His budget was so small, he said, he'd wait outside fast-foot
> restaurants until people finished, then eat food off their trays.
>
> "The first six months were harsh," says Thompson, author of the
> critically acclaimed, mostly autobiographical graphic novel blankets.
>
> To survive, he painted houses for a scam artist who left him with $6,000
> worth of bad cheques. His bike was stolen. Four men in a grocery store
> parking lot assaulted him and another man.
>
> But he stayed, and found a job as a designer with Dark Horse Comics, the
> fourth largest U.S. publisher in the growing comic book industry. Now
> Thompson is part of a thriving Portland comics scene that includes
> journalist Joe Sacco and superhero comics writer Greg Rucka.
>
> Portland and its suburbs are home to such publishers as Dark Horse, Oni
> Press and Top Shelf Publications. The area is quieter than other comics
> hotspots like Seattle and New York.
>
> "It's a place where you can daydream," Sacco, who travels the world for
> his work, says. In peaceful Portland, "You can step out of your house
> and think while you're out on the streets."
>
> Comics have come a long way from the newspaper-print funnies once sold
> at drug stores and newsstands, says publisher Michael Richardson, who
> founded Dark Horse Comics in 1986. Underground icons Robert Crumb and
> Harvey Pekar broke new ground for comic book subjects in the 1960s, and
> Art Spiegelman's Holocaust tale, Maus, brought a level of gravity to the
> form in 1986.
>
> These days, readers are just as likely to find graphic novels crowding
> bookshelves as pulpy superhero pamphlets, Richardson says.
>
> And the genre is growing. Graphic novels earned $100 million in 2002, a
> 33 per cent increase from the year before, when they accounted for one
> per cent of American book sales, according to Publishers Weekly.
>
> The soft-spoken Thompson, 28, published his first graphic novel five
> years ago. Goodbye, Chunky Rice is about the seagoing adventures of a
> lovelorn young turtle. Blankets, a 2003 Top Shelf release, explores
> adolescent insecurities, faith, family and first loves with delicate
> images of snow and sleep. The 582-page coming-of-age tale deals with
> such thorny subjects as molestation and growing up in a fundamentalist
> Christian household.
>
> "Stories I pursue I always want to be, at the risk of sounding
> pretentious, literary," says Thompson, who grew up in Wisconsin and
> whose favourite authors include Vladimir Nabokov and Gabriel Garcia
> Marquez.
>
> Thompson often meshes the fantastic with the factual. His current
> project is the story of a love between a eunuch and a courtesan in an
> Arabian Nights setting.
>
> He has filled notebooks with sketches, dreams and plot details, an
> approach that he says helps build ties with readers. "Comics you can
> linger over and look at each page," he says. "You see the author's lines
> as if you're looking at a handwritten letter from them."
>
> Sacco takes the approach of a war correspondent, filing gritty
> dispatches from the front lines of human suffering. His books, which
> include Palestine and the Bosnian civil war journal Safe Area Gorazde,
> chronicle armed conflicts in a cartoonish, crosshatch-heavy style.
>
> The stories have a dark, absurdist humour, according to the 43-year-old
> Sacco, who studied journalism at the University of Oregon.
>
> Sacco, from the Mediterranean island of Malta, travels frequently from
> Portland to Europe and the Middle East, and most recently went to the
> Rafah refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. He documents his experiences with
> notes, photographs and tape recordings.
>
> In the 2003 memoir The Fixer, Sacco recalls Neven, the guide he met
> while covering wartime Sarajevo. The book follows Sacco in 2001 as he
> searches for traces of his former fixer.
>
> Macho and morally ambiguous, Neven has no qualms about milking Sacco for
> money as he tells outrageous war stories and chaperones the younger man
> through a strife-torn country.
>
> The former newspaperman scoffs at the journalistic ideal of objectivity,
> arguing that everyone has a background, prejudices and a point of view.
> "Why can't we go to a journalist and say, `Tell us what you think?'"
>
> Rucka has taken a more traditional approach to comics, simultaneously
> writing titles for DC Comics' Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman series ?
> the first writer to tackle such a hat trick since 1974.
>
> The task puts Rucka, 33, in a vulnerable position, given the decreasing
> appetite for serial, pamphlet-style comic books. Superhero comics have
> long attracted scorn from critics who see the genre as silly, even
> infantile.
>
> Rucka, a published novelist, says tales of muscle-bound, masked men and
> women let readers examine human struggles on a superhuman scale. "Nobody
> would have asked the Greeks, `Why Hercules?'" he says.
>
> Comics' growing narrative consciousness can be attributed to a changing
> customer base, says Richardson, the publisher. While fewer children are
> buying comics, teens and adults alike are turning to the medium.
>
> Comic books and graphic novels are also gaining respectability as
> serious art forms, thanks to such literary endeavours as Thompson's
> Blankets, said Top Shelf publisher Brett Warnock.
>
> "It's the golden age right now."
>
> <http://www.thestar.com/>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _____
>
> Learn how to choose, serve, and <http://g.msn.com/8HMBENUS/2749??PS=>
> enjoy wine at Wine @ MSN.