muse-comixin' (Sunday a.m. funnies ed.): Art, post-Maus, post-9/11

Art Spiegelman won a special Pulitzer Prize 12 years ago for _Maus: A
Survivor's Tale_ & _Maus II_, novel-length comic-strip/comic-book narratives
depicting Jews as mice, Nazis as cats, etc. based on his parents' experiences
during World War II and the Holocaust.

It is mainly because of Art that novel-length comic-strip/comic-book
narratives are now not only called "illustrated novels"... as Art says: "It's a
done deal that comix are now part of bookstores and libraries."

An immigrant from Sweden, Art has been a paid illustrator since age 15,
"weaned on _Mad_ magazine and ever-distrustful of Disney, Spiegelman dodged the
aesthetic imposed by Senate hearings on comics and juvenile delinquency in
the 1950's. He was responsible for countless artworks in underground
periodicals, and, later, such novelties as Wacky Packages trading cards and Garbage Pail
Kids stickers. To see how far he has come is to recognize that he has managed
a peculiar and subversive version of the American Dream, not to mention a comi
x renaissance (Jonathan Keifer, review, _East Bay Express_, Feb.18, 2004)

Talking of the whole illustrated novel art-form, Art said: "It's a
gateway drug into reading which will help you sort through all the bullshit that
keeps hitting you in the face. For grown-ups, it's similarly useful. ... Comix
function basically the way the brain works. We think in small snippets of
language, not full paragraphs. Visually, we think in iconic images."

Art has currently been talking of what maybe even more powerful,
ambitious and "All-American" work than _Maus_, _In the Shadow of No Towers_:
"After September 11, everything started seeming ephemeral to me. Like
buildings. Like buildings ten blocks from your home. Let alone art and culture."

Baby, maaan! have comicbooks come a long way...

<A HREF="http://www.comics.com/">Comics.com Home Page</A>

<A HREF="http://www.webcomics.com/">Web Comics and Comic Strips Free Online
Comics</A>

<A HREF="http://www.Artbomb.net/"> * Harvest Gypsy/Artbomb</A>

somewhat related, multi-faceted websites (bookmark 'em all, worth explorin'
repeatedly):

<A HREF="http://www.io.com/~hmiller/">Teamouse's Home</A>

<A HREF="http://www.zompist.com/">Zompist</A>

<A HREF="http://www.eatnet.org/">E.A.T. Net</A>

<A HREF="http://www.newmusicbox.org/index.nmbx">NewMusicBox- the web mag from
the American Musi…</A>

<A HREF="http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue195/sound.html">Sound Space: Science
Fiction Audio Reviews</A>

<A HREF="http://www.furious.com/perfect/">Perfect Sound Forever: online music
magazine</A>

<A HREF="http://www.bibalex.org/website/">Bibliotheca Alexandrina</A>

<A HREF="http://www.langmaker.com/">Model Languages & The Art of Language
Making (C…</A>

<A HREF="http://www.boheme-magazine.net">=> boheme-magazine.net</A> (of which
I am Music Editor and frequent contributer)

--- *DiDJiBuNgA!!* Hang Binary,baby...---

Hanuman "Stitch" Zhang, ManglaLanger (mangle + manga + lang)

Language[s] change[s]: vowels shift, phonologies crash-&-burn, grammars
leak, morpho-syntactics implode, lexico-semantics mutate, lexicons explode,
orthographies reform, typographies blip-&-beep, slang flashes, stylistics
warp... linguistic (R)evolutions mark each-&-every quantum leap...

...languages are "naturally evolved wild systems... So language does not
impose order on a chaotic universe, but reflects its own wildness back." - Gary
Snyder

"Some Languages Are Crushed to Powder but Rise Again as New Ones" -
a chapter on pidgins & creoles, John McWhorter,
_The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language_

= ¡ gw'araa legooset caacaa !
¡ reez'arvaa. saalvaa. reecue. scoopaa-goomee en reezijcloo ! =
[Fight Linguistic Waste!
Save, Salvage, Recover, Scavenge and Recycle!]