Right now, Marvel is running a promotion where if you join Marvel Unlimited, using the promo code SDCC14, you can pay 99 cents for your first month, during which time you can access “over 15,000 Digital Comics, featuring Earth’s Mightiest Heroes and the galaxy’s vilest villains – all spanning Marvel’s 75 year history!” Yes, that includes the Incredible Hulk, Captain America, The Mighty Thor & many other favorites.
According to Wired, the “comics can be viewed on PC and Mac, as well as iOS and Android devices through a Marvel Unlimited app. Readers can download up to 12 comics at a time for offline reading.”
A Marvel Unlimited subscription usually costs 69 dollars a year or $9.99 a month, but the terms and conditions say that “Subscribers can cancel their subscription at any time by accessing My account or e‑mailing Marvel customer service.” In other words, you can subscribe for one month, pay 99 cents, read a heck of a lot of comics, then decide if you want to continue the subscription — or not — before the end of 30 days. (Just as an fyi, Audible.com offers a similar arrangement with audio books. You can join their 30-day free trial, download a free audio book, then decide whether you want to stick with the program before the month’s end. No matter what you decide, you can keep the free audio book. Find more details here.)
If you prefer to just pay zero cents for comics, please see our two prior posts.
Sci-fi author B.C. Kowalski recently posted a short essay on why the advice to write every day is, for lack of a suitable euphemism, “bullshit.” Not that there’s anything wrong with it, Kowalski maintains. Only that it’s not the only way. It’s said Thackeray wrote every morning at dawn. Jack Kerouac wrote (and drank) in binges. Every writer finds some method in-between. The point is to “do what works for you” and to “experiment.” Kowalski might have added a third term: diversify. It’s worked for so many famous writers after all. James Joyce had his music, Sylvia Plath her art, Hemingway his machismo. Faulkner drew cartoons, as did his fellow Southern writer Flannery O’Connor, his equal, I’d say, in the art of the American grotesque. Through both writers ran a deep vein of pessimistic humor, oblique, but detectable, even in scenes of highest pathos.
O’Connor’s visual work, writes Kelly Gerald in The Paris Review, was a “way of seeing she described as part of the ‘habit of art’”—a way to train her fiction writer’s eye. Her cartoons hew closely to her authorial voice: a lone sardonic observer, supremely confident in her assessments of human weakness. Perhaps a better comparison than Faulkner is with British poet and doodler Stevie Smith, whose bleak vision and razor-sharp wit similarly cut through mountains of… shall we say, bullshit. In both pen & ink and linoleum cuts, O’Connor set deadpan one-liners against images of pretension, conformity, and the banality of college life. In the cartoon at the top, she seems to mock the pursuit of credentials as a refuge for the socially disaffected. Above, a campaigner for a low-level office deploys bombastic pseudo-Leninist rhetoric, and in the cartoon below, a cranky character escapes a horde of identical WAVES.
O’Connor was an intensely visual writer with, Gerald writes, a “natural proclivity for capturing the humorous character of real people and concrete situations,” fully credible even at their most extreme (as in the increasingly horrific self-lacerations of Wise Blood’s Hazel Motes). She began drawing at five and produced small books and sketches as a child, eventually publishing cartoons in almost every issue of her high-school and college’s newspapers and yearbooks. Her alma mater Georgia College, then known as Georgia State College for Women, has published a book featuring her cartoons from her undergraduate years, 1942–45.
More recently, Gerald edited a collection called Flannery O’Connor: The Cartoons for Fantagraphics. In his introduction, artist Barry Moser describes in detail the technique of her linoleum cuts, calling them “coarse in technical terms.” And yet, “her rudimentary handling of the medium notwithstanding, O’Connor’s prints offer glimpses into the work of the writer she would become” with their “little O’Connor petards aimed at the walls of pretentiousness, academics, student politics, and student committees.” Had O’Connor continued making cartoons into her publishing years, she might have, like B.C. Kowalski, aimed one of those petards at those who dispense dogmatic, cookie-cutter writing advice as well.
Cartoonist and Patron Saint of Honoring the Creative Impulse, Lynda Barry, believes that the secret to understanding poetry is to commit it to memory. Effortless recall is key. Get that poem lodged inside your brain as if it were a Top 40 hit of your youth.
That’s all well and good, but is there a secret to memorizing poetry?
According to Barry (or Professor Chewbacca, as she is known to students in her Making Comics course at the University of Wisconsin), the secret to memorizing poetry is to set it to music.
It does the soul good to see poetry offering this lady the sort of joyful release her dog experiences, rolling around in a dead squirrel.
Perhaps you, too, are in need of such an outlet. Odds are, we all are. Barry, who traces her passion for poetry to the 1974 anthology Mad Sad & Glad: Poems from Scholastic Creative Writing Awards, claims that the best poems deal with our darkest feelings. Dickinson, she posits, wrote what she did to stay alive, a theory she supports with a hilarious impersonation of Dickinson’s perceived handwriting versus Dickinson’s actual handwriting.
Dickinson wrote volumes, but as Barry points out, she also wrote short. Look at how many there are to choose from, were you to challenge yourself to learn one by heart today. (Don’t think about it. Just do it. Whatever happens, it’s sure to be a more gratifying experience than listening to the female robot charged with reciting “A Day! Help! Help! Another Day!” here.)
- Ayun Halliday believes that Lynda Barry has enough milk of human kindness & funk power supreme to be the Patron Saint of Everything. Follow her @AyunHalliday
A friend once told me of his older cousin who, for the freakish act of installing a computer in his college dorm room, found himself immediately and irrevocably dubbed “computer Jon.” This happened in the early 1980s, and boy, have times changed. They’d even changed by the late 1980s, by which time Apple’s college marketing efforts had become sufficiently advanced to require the talents of Matt Groening, best known as the man who created The Simpsons. But that prime-time animated sitcom wouldn’t begin its record-breaking run (still without an end in sight) until Christmas 1989, while the Groening-illustrated Who Needs a Computer Anyway? (which you can flip through above) appeared earlier that year. Back then, readers might well have known him first and foremost as the creator of the satirical alternative-weekly comic strip Life inHell, which had debuted in 1977. One of its stars, the hapless but good-hearted young one-eared rabbit Bongo, even made his way to Apple brochure’s cover. Though computers themselves had long since come to dominate America’s campuses by the time I entered college, he and Groening’s other now-lesser-known characters did do their part to prepare me for academia.
I refer, of course, to School is Hell, his 1987 Life in Hell book offering sardonic primers on each and every phase of modern education from kindergarten to grad school (“when you haven’t had enough punishment”). Groening’s pages in Who Needs a Computer Anyway? read like a less sharp-edged version of those cartoons, following Life in Hell’s signature “The 9 Types of…” format to present the reader with their nine types of future college classmates, from “the stressed” to “the technoid” to “the unemployed.” Between these, you can read Apple’s pitch for why you’ll find a piece of equipment still somewhat outlandish and expensive so essential to every aspect of your college career. Though dated technically — the text mentions nothing of the internet, for instance, which this generation of college students would sooner drop out than do without — it nevertheless underscores the design virtues of Apple computers — an intuitive interface, application interoperability, “everything you need in one small, transportable case” — that remain design virtues today. It also displays an impressive prescience of the personal computer’s coming indispensability, a confident prediction that, if not for the slacker’s levity lent by Groening’s hand, might, at the time, actually have sounded implausible.
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Other than Romeo and Julietand possibly Hamlet, Shakespeare doesn’t exactly lend himself to the elevator pitch. The same creaky plot devices and unfathomable jokes that confound modern audiences make for long winded summaries.
Those of us who are semi-versed in the Bard should delight in the way major characters and complex side plots are glibly stricken from the record.
(Methinks Lady MacBeth would not be pleased…)
And what high schooler won’t experience a perverse thrill, when the obscure and boring text his class has been parsing for weeks is dispatched with the swiftness of your average Garfield? (The wise teacher will be in no rush to share these revelations…)
Gosling, whose dad introduced her to Shakespeare at an early age, knows the material well enough to subvert it. Who cares if her artistic talent maxes out with stick figures? Familiarity allows her to nail the ending of Troilus and Cressida (“Homer’s Iliad happens”). The middle panel ofWinter’s Tale is devoted to “some poor guy” getting eaten by a bear, and why shouldn’t it be, when the author’s famous stage direction is the only thing most people can dredge up with regard to that particular play?
As for the title of her web comic, it’s an insult from one of her faves, Henry IV, part 1. My kind of geekery, forsooth.
Along with its whimsical, hand-drawn covers and its surprisingly readable articles on unlikely subjects, like nickel-mining, The New Yorker magazine is known for its cartoons – single panel doodles that can be either wry commentaries on our culture or, as a famous Seinfeld episode pointed out, utterly inscrutable.
Translating the cartoons to television seems a task doomed to failure but Seth Meyers, the newly-installed host of Late Night, managed successfully to do just that. The show’s “theater group-in-residence, the late night players” reenacted some of the magazine’s more famous recent cartoons. Many of the magazine’s most enduring cartoon set ups are represented – a bar, a wedding reception and, of course, a deserted island.
Providing deadpan commentary on the performances is The New Yorker’s editor-in-chief David Remnick. When selecting cartoons for the magazine, he notes, the primary criteria is that they “should be funny.” Check it out above.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
The decade beginning with the late 1930s is known as the Golden Age of comic books. Many of the superheroes from today’s blockbuster franchises, including Batman, Superman, and Captain America, emerged during this period, and the industry grew into a commercial powerhouse. Following a sales dip during the early 1950s that marked the end of the Golden Age, the Silver Age began (circa 1956) and lasted for some fifteen years.
During this era, superhero comic books initially lost steam — letting stories of horror, romance, and crime grow in popularity — before emerging triumphantly once more with characters like Spider-Man and The Flash. While copyright remains very much in effect for such titles, a slew of comic books from the same period, many of which have narrowly missed attaining such iconic status, are available online at Comic Book Plus.
Similar to the Digital Comic Museum, which we wrote about last week, Comic Book Plus contains a near inexhaustible quantity of Golden and Silver Age comic books. The collection’s timespan ranges from the late 1930s through to the early 1960s, and includes many thousands of comic books in the Superhero, Sci-Fi, and Horror genres.
Those hankering for something a little more unusual will also be in luck. Desperate to read about a hospital romance? Why not give Linda Lark Student Nursea read in the Medical Love category? Sick of landlubbers hogging all the attention in comic books? Head to the Water/Boats section, where you can read all about Davy Jones, the navy lieutenant who lives in Atlantis and does battle with the evil Dr. Fang, in Undersea Agent.
For further reading, head on over to Comic Book Plus. You can preview all materials without registration. But you will need to register (for free) if you want to download the various comic books.
H/T to Yocitrus for making us aware of this archive.
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