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When I was growing up in the 1980s comics were seen as puerile and kinda retro. All the cool kids were playing with Atari or later Nintendo. Reading Teen Titans and or The West Coast Avengers was not an enviable past time. I never brought my comics into school for fear of being ridiculed by teachers…and when I once brought a comic on a school field trip to read on the bus, I was made fun of. Now comics are the bottom feeder for TV and cinema and comic book art can be found in museums. A quick Google search of “comic book studies” reveals a plethora of journals and conferences dedicated to the academic use of comic books. University departments in English, Communications, Cognitive Studies and Linguistics have found their new darling … and I am happy to report that comics have finally grown up!

Here’s a  quick list of some links to check out:

http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archive.shtml

http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-issue,id=1804/

http://library.buffalo.edu/asl/guides/comics.html

The untitled graphic novel that I am working on with Harvey Pekar is moving along nicely. Working with Harvey is a pleasure. He calls me about once or twice a week to check in and/or read me new versions of the script. He’s always gracious on the phone and I am always smiling when I hang-up with him. People seem to be surprised when I tell them how nice Harvey is. I mean, he calls me boychik! I wonder if he’s mellowing with age or his public persona is just “warped” from decades of media depiction. He’s nowhere near the curmudgeon that he seems like in film and in print. He’s like the storytelling, encyclopedic uncle I never had. Add to the mix an amazing editor in NYC, and a no-nonsense letterer in Nova Scotia and we’ve got quite the merry band working on this project. Stay tuned for more updates in the months ahead. I am happy to report that it’s full steam ahead!

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook or have had the chance to sit with me in a diner recently, you know that I am not happy with the conclusion of the TV series Lost. I found the pink ribbon, ecumenical, cheesefest that was the series finale to be VERY UNSATISFYING. Not only did it rip off the Six Feet Under finale with the whole, “we all die at some point” BS, but it completely sidestepped the plot that had driven the show for its entire run. All of season 6 was a waste and I wish that it had all ended with Juliet hitting the nuke.  To ignore the elegant scaffold that they had built so meticulously, is a narrative crime.