12/27/2025

Most treat Töpffer as a mere question to be answered: is he is the origin of sequential storytelling or merely an origin? An answer to this will never satisfy, and obscures what Töpffer’s century old narratives have in kind with the most progressive comics of 2025. The great critic Theirry Smolderen knew to quote Töpffer’s words directly, to explain how radical his rejection of Europe’s existing art history was, a history already too much to bear for so many in the nineteenth century: ‘I saw, in vignettes made during the Middle Ages by some unskilled monk, a face drawn in such a way that it would make a teacher shrug his shoulders, and yet all the knowledge of the professor would not be able to reproduce its energetic appeal, its singular grace…those who…study art at its infancy, [know] the merits of which are erased, utterly lost in sophisticated art.’ Töpffer’s art was not hopelessly nostalgic for a lost time, it instead proposed a new kind of ‘unsophisticated’ art full of ‘singular grace.’

12/25/2025

Krazy Kat, if read seriously, will never offer the ‘utility’ that the narrow minded, as a dominant majority, impose on art. It does not court the concerns of the powerful, it is not melodrama, it offers no instruction. The avant-garde playwright Richard Foreman encountered a similar impediment when addressing his audience, remarking that theater goers attended his plays hoping for their sexual, moral or familial concerns to be explored and assuaged, only to be meant with what appeared to be mere scatological sound and motion.  Reactions to Krazy Kat wear the same colors and will continue to for the foreseeable future. For those willing to accept this work into their lives in full, we offer a paraphrase of Flaubert’s demand for how we approach art: do not read Herriman, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read Herriman in order to live.

11/14/2025

One thing I hope Domino can be: a constant display of as much creative work in comics as possible, without any rule/aesthetic to unify it, constant proof that people keep making comics outside of definable narratives. Another week of books added, another uncategorizable paragraph in comic history.

So many small press publishers I observe seem to have some sort of idea that they are right about what comics should be---and I'm guilty of that too, of course, except in my work around Domino, where I shove that idea aside.

11/14//2025

More Krazy Kat thoughts in progress:

Those changing landscapes, a cloud one moment and a moon the next (both so beautiful) is what we all remember most of Coconino County, or rather: what we feel secure in remarking upon—we try to explain their meaning but falter, maybe we connect them to ‘expressionism’, maybe one thinks ‘this is why the strip was respected, this chance it took, it wasn’t bound to reality’. This is all, we know, inadequate. Coconino County’s life (as we come to know it) begins in those famous changing skies, but it continues on the ground and in the trees (which, for decades, grew). Its life continues to this very day, as Coconino County is as alive as the Redwoods of physical reality, the only thing created in art that meets the challenge of orthodox surrealism, at times becoming more real than those Redwoods, though equally unknowable and to be reckoned with forever. If we squint and rearrange our focus from Krazy and Ignatz’ daily interactions and instead focus on the terrain they walk, we begin to accept this place into our lives. What do we do then? As readers, what can we give this place, what possible purpose can we serve? It is a place beyond us, we cry out that we cannot understand it intellectually—but we do want to stay, emotionally we know we belong here—though we wouldn’t call it a kind place, or a particularly warm place, it is what we hoped for all along, the great contradiction bridged, a utopia free of the mundane (for all its unknowableness, it is not a violent place (the brick throwing doesn't approach that), nor is it a dry listless place either). The texture of it is as indefinable as Lovecraft’s shapes, but with the reverse implications, we are drawn in rather than repelled. Sci-fi, at its loftiest, promises this, a new world that exists on paper, let us explain all to you as you settle in. This is not how Coconino County operates, it is not explained, it offers no origin or purpose. Anything resembling attempts at familiarity is contradictory to this place, any program of mediating us as readers is laughable. So, again, what do we do in this place that is—we must admit—as hostile as it is non hostile, and that is beyond our capacities to reconcile?

11/14/2025

One thing you likely grow out of the more art you look at: imagery that is nothing more than skillful design with a dash of incongruity thrown in so that it's 'art.' I used to be very susceptible to this, I loved images where all the choices were 'just right', maybe there's a little restraint, one detail 'off', but basically pleasing, hard fought simplification. My revulsion to this imagery now becomes a subject of critique as well, my need for art to be something one can 'do something' with, take something from, correspond with. I can't correspond with the design of my iPhone. If pressed, I'd admit I actually love its design, as hateful an object as it is, there's something about it, every time I look at it it's like having a piece of candy. But there's nothing I can do with that---if you try to do something with the implications of the iPhone design, if you actually let that low level pleasure it gives you into your actual interior, the only viable path is resentment of the natural world, which you cannot allow yourself---so you have to hold this pleasure at bay, at all costs. The iPhone's design is evil if you actually take it seriously, it denies pretty much everything about being human. And though I hate to admit it, a lot of modernist art I enjoy contains the same problem. 

11/6/2025

So much about meaningful art is a negotiation of repression, of one kind of another. Crumb’s entire project thinks it’s about this, but Crumb is not repressed at all, he’s just a consensus person. He seeks repression but that’s not the same as living with it day to day. 

There's a line Bertolucci's The Conformist that I think about a lot. Marcello describes turning his head to look at a pretty woman in a bikini on the beach, and noticing other men doing the same thing. He says that there is a pleasure in this, in this agreement of turning your neck to look, and that this makes one 'a perfect fascist', the acknowledged agreement. We are all like this in one way or another, we all have organic (I guess) consensus impulses, but Crumb's fatal error is branding those drives as something other than what they are, that being a standard sexual being is somehow a political act for him specifically. Crumb's comics don't speak to any kind of emancipation of sexuality for us all, it's only about him, but his type of sexuality faces no barriers at all. It's this contradiction at the center of his art, one he seems totally unaware of. And if we are being honest, he doesn't have the mind to someday become aware.

There is something so embarrassing about his new comic sporting a 'Warning: This Comics Is Not Popular Entertainment' label on the cover. Reading this 'warning' in a moment where cultural figures are fully soaked in the deepest and most fantastical conspiracy theories and their messages are attracting millions of viewers just feels depressing. Yes, they want to stop you from droning on about the pandemic Crumb, it's not as if people with the most power in this moment---including the leader of the free world---aren't saying more or less the same things, only in a tone that's more crass and more vulgar. And of course it's that way, because Crumb is the same as them, he's deeply non introspective, with a veneer of transgression as misdirection. At some point, as you age, you have to challenge yourself to become an actual humanist, because you'll never keep up in the 'pushing the boundaries' upping the ante game. You will fall behind and when you do, it will start to look like a schtick. Spiegelman is the same way: 'can you believe I have a perspective on 9/11??' Although he doesn't, really. 9/11 x Krazy Kat is not even a thought. These guys do not have cultural perspectives, but they like to indicate that they do, and comics is such a backwater that the indication is enough to become 'fact', the same way a gigantic page count in a graphic novel indicates 'depth.' Charles Burns included one of these 'warnings' in his recent book...who is stopping these guys from doing anything? I do not share the online critique of Crumb that he should not be read because he's sexist or racist. I think his art is valuable and I've read every single page of it ever published and I've enjoyed every one of those pages...but I also find it stupid. And the idea that Charles Burns work would offend anyone, in 2025, is beyond silly. It's on the same level as the Deadpool movies marketing themselves as 'oh, can I actually say this, tee hee?' All media is essentially Deadpool these days, our current presidential admin's social media is more overtly crude and crass than any of this nonsense. I remember in high school, in one of the bathrooms someone had graffitied a nude woman and underneath the drawing they'd written 'take that, hush hush society.' I remember wondering 'is this supposed to be sincere, or are they this stupid?' But that was a high schooler, at least, not an artist known around the world for his 'transgression.' When your themes are the same as every spoiled and reactionary aging upper middle class property owner, you are not a cultural critic, you are just confused and searching for the answer, but searching with a kind of unrighteous anger, so you'll never get close to finding anything. 

10/24/2025

Looking at this new C Comics collection brought up some thoughts. Since the early 00s, poetry comics DID happen, but they did NOT happen in publications like Ink Brick. There is the famous Jean Cocteau quote about a child prodigy poet, Minou Drouet. When asked what he thought of her, Cocteau said 'all children are poets, except Minou Drouet.' That's how I feel about Ink Brick. All comics [have the potential to be] poetic, except those published in Ink Brick, comics that just graft cartooning onto outdated and conservative poetic forms. What's happening now, at the heart of comics fringes, is something different than simply breaking up a sentence over many panels and calling it 'comics poetry.' Instead, many young artists focus on publishing work that is a short exploration of a thought or a feeling, and this exploration unifies text and imagery in the pursuit of eliciting feeling from the reader. Instead of naturalistic fiction (which dominated alternative comic spaces in the 80s and 90s) we begin to see less and less focus on characters. Even auto bio seems to be disintegrating. Self publishing art cartoonists now often begin with an unnamed persons speaking directly to the reader, with great focus on how such a person poses on the page, how they carry their weight. We see, in these kinds of comics, an avoidance of epiphany and an avoidance of resolution, though (crucially) without an avoidance of feeling. 

If we attempt to trace the origins of this, I'd say Doucet looms large, though I'd narrow her influence to before her concessions to alt comic conventions got the better of her (New York Diary and everything that came after, until her return to form with Time Zone J). In an early Doucet strip, called 'Month of December', Doucet stands on a bridge and says 'Christmas is coming.' She sniffs her nose, 'it's cold....'. In the final panel, she hurls herself off the bridge: '...and I'm gonna die?' That is the entire strip. Is it about suicide? Depression? Maybe, but no simple prosaic judgement can contain the strips power. So many emerging cartoonists work in this way today. This makes sense, as pure comics get at the core of poetry better than poetry itself could. Poetry strives to make expression new while working with an inherited set of symbols, the letters of the alphabet you write your poetry in. A comic like Doucet's goes farther, she does not write 'I stood on the bridge and began to speak to you.' She draws the bridge, her description of this specific bridge is already charged with a poetry that the letters themselves could never contain, no matter how you place them or rearrange them (all the tortured word placement of modernist poetry could have been solved, it seems, with drawing). Traditional cartoonists worked hard to make the bridge disappear. If Milton Caniff's story required him to draw a bridge, he'd do it perfectly, but so perfectly that you would not notice it or linger on it, the bridge merely a prosaic detail to connect point A to point B, no matter how proudly he drew it. Doucet allows the charge of her expression to be seen in every line, you ignore nothing, it's all part of the whole, just as nothing can be discarded or ignored in poetry. 

Doucet, and the generation that embraces her approach, is not like the group of avant garde poets who made C Comics. Joe Brainard and his ilk lived and breathed what poetry was and is, they devoted their life to it. When they sought to make comics, the tools of poetic expression were already on call within them, and the tools were finely honed. The work in C Comics feels mature and exact, work made by people conscious of what they were doing. Poetry comics circa 2025 are most often made by those with no (or little) interest in orthodox poetry, but instead in how comics can be used for self expression. This search for how to use comics in a mature way has been subverted and derailed for a century. When someone taps into the poetic potential of comics, you see it happen on the page, you feel the charge, 'finally, this is how it can be done!'. Lately, I see this moment of conception everywhere, all the parts coming into place organically and the thrill of artistic gestalt happening in a way that it has really never happened before, the absolute triumph of raw artistic discovery. You'd think C Comics would connect to this, but it feels oddly distant, not so much a relative to todays explosion as it is an acquaintance who,  if you come to think of it, you never actually met, .

And yet, despite this disconnect: as contemporary underground and fringe comics lean deeper into their poetic destiny, it is very important that this book is out now. C Comics is a tome that can now be corresponded with, there is enough strength in contemporary and organic poetic comics that the community making them won't be bulldozed by what is within this book ('it's already been done'). Instead it can act as a prophecy that you missed, and reading it now is exhilarating in its affirmation but not so influential as to change the flow of where we are already headed. 

10/5/2025

It should be called Coconino County. The creation of this place is the most potent expression of Herriman’s great genius. The antics of Krazy and Ignatz could be repeated through speech or explained in text (though shabbily and without the passion we see when they are made with ink). Coconino County, however, can never be given form elsewhere than on paper, and placed on paper through the high art of cartooning. It is the greatest creation this form has to offer, and one that rivals all other art form’s masterpieces of imaginative art . If we compare it to the creative highs of, say, Carrol’s Alice In Wonderland (Wonderland itself quite a formidable notion), a key difference emerges: Coconino county lives, it may be the most alive work of art I have ever encountered. Carrol gives us Wonderland through a series of words made by letters, all inherited, the alphabet a tool he uses. Herriman’s creation is shown through his own invented language, his shapes and his images, and a logic born out lifelong study of how to speak this language fluently. We find him, year after year, obsessed with Coconino County and how things grow in it, foliage building itself with motive unique only to this place panel to panel. We find him immersed in how people move, how their bodies weigh their steps on this mythic terrain. Natural phenomenon in Coconino County is spiritually real, maybe even more real than it is in our own. For all of Herriman’s unapproachable alienness (or perhaps because of it) he gives us something more human than ourselves, as Coconino County is an organism birthed by Herriman and realized in our own eyes—when we focus on it, it lives more markedly than reality because of how precisely we create it with another, which is what we all seek in daily life itself but so rarely realize. This is no accident of a naive master who stumbles into poetry through his artlessness. It is, instead, a hard fought (and fought daily) victory of creation that Herriman modified and honed for decades, tended to with more care (an aggressive and wild creative care rather than a treacly ‘loving’ care) than the cities or towns we all have lived in while reading it, struggling with it and ultimately accepting it.

8/28/2025

There is a kind of comic, a style of comic that people who know a little bit about my writing/art/publishing might assume is my favorite kind of thing. The kind of comic that appears to break new graphic ground, to invent 'new forms of graphic language', suggesting artistic 'innovations' that are somehow scientific and possibly worthy of anthropological attention.  I have a deficiency in engaging with work like this, work that presents itself as graphically defiant but that is rather, in fact, quite restrained, is in fact so restrained in order to remain polite in the large, with flirtation towards the reverse, which (crucially) is enough to flatter many a reader. And this flattery will lead nowhere, to nothing but a kind of graphic engagement that can only be grown out of. My failing as someone who values expression in art more than (possibly) human expression in daily non artistic life: in the end, all I care about is work that engages with poetry & emotion, my tastes hover around this alone. So many of the enthusiasts of the medium, the obsessives, are deeply engaged with work in which I find no utility in, work that cannot admit to the scent of revealing itself, work that is aggressive in its self removal. 

8/19/2025

One wonders why comics, as a culture, passes over work like Fellini's Book of Dreams. So much of comics scholarship hovers around finding possible depth within formulaic scripts from competent practitioners working on lent out IP. Often, comic devotees seem so starved for psychological portrayals, that a glimpse of the Fantastic Four eating lunch at a diner will, for them, resemble some sort of truth. People are thirsty, surrounded by salt water, and mirages are emerging. This is unnecessary when books like Fellini’s Book of Dreams exists. Page after page of psychological notions are made tangible in these pages, and made tangible through the art of cartooning.

8/18/2025

Re-read Devil's Grin v. 1 by Alex Graham (had read the single issues as they came out, this was the first time reading it all in book form). I truly think this is one of the best comics of the past decade, maybe one of my favorite comics ever. With the idea of graphic novels as the dominant way comics get out there now, most of them are just a single issue comic idea stretched out to an under cooked 200 pages (or way more). This one is a real novel, it's worth the pages it's printed on. Also, while being novel like in depth, it IS a comic, I love how it's drawn, even in certain panels that are rushed, there's no way anyone else besides Alex Graham could draw what's written here, she gets the expressions exactly right in a way that a more virtuosos drawer could never do, all of Adrian Tomine's printed work combined can't equal the actual writing that goes into Graham's cartooning/drawing. Maybe the wrong way to describe it, but it's deeply emotionally intelligent work, which I think is what so many cartoonists struggle with actually doing, there's intense/'transgressive' stuff happening here, but also real feeling and real care for how people treat each other. Each panel in this is worth 1,000 Milton Caniff panels. Justifies my interest in the art form, which needed a jolt like this currently...

6/1/2025

Kirby is  this example of someone whose cultural impact hasn’t been (and never will be) examined/appreciated in the way that a somewhat middling American author (Phillip Roth for example) is examined/appreciated. And even if Kirby DOES get that recognition, it will still never get close to deciphering what he was all about, because the language to talk about what he's doing does not exist. Matisse is more important on his own than all the words written about him. But, those words, over the last century, help us to approach his work in its totality...even if we've never read them, they've merged into the air enough that we can accept Matisse's radicalism as part of our lives. Kirby will never have this, and that is a loss. In fact, Kirby's work, in the way most get to access it, is a putrid ugly version of his vision, an almost satanic crime. ‘Comics working class' this, 'comics can be made by anyone' that, but those words miss the complexity of a generation of young &  poor men whose destiny was to be blue collar and, in a way, remained blue collar, essentially working in sweat shops....but made visionary art. Every effort has been made to degrade what they did, to make it ugly, and those efforts have been successful. The delivery system, a system for people from poor backgrounds to create imaginative works and communicate to a mass audience, has also been erased.

4/26/2025

The influence of The Hairy Who on comics culture is more detrimental than the entirety of Wizard Magazine. 

4/25/2025

Comics inability to assert itself as a serious art form (a condition which persists and I believe most likely always will): people have all the wrong explanations. It's not the comics code, it's not Fawcett getting sued, etc. To say something in comics that has texture, something that genuinely needs to be expressed, something that an artist has earned the right to state through years of defining whatever that thing is, defining and reflecting to the point where improvisation can begin so as  to get at the poetry of it all...comics requires an unbelievable amount of patience to do all this, and only those who make comics can truly understand this. If your intentions are pure, it means spending months and months on, possibly, a single panel...and not due to a paralysis of neuroticism, but out of obligation to the project itself. 

This is why so many of comics actual masterpieces, the works that matter, are a marriage of limitless time offered to the artist and a delivery system that subsidized the time: newspaper comic strips from the turn of the century into the 60s and, arguably, serialized alternative comics of the late 80s and early 90s (subsidized by newspapers circulation and the direct market system, both at the height of their powers, respectively). Manga, at its highest level (think: Matsumoto), has such a powerful commercial center that it creates a reliable enough market to protect those on the margins, those making art. You might think underground comics has a place in all of this, but for the most part, they remain the movement offered all the right conditions that ultimately failed to seize the moment. That may seem heretical, but go back and read those books. We are talking about timeless art, not an assertion or approximation of such a thing lost in a haze of confused ego, but the thing itself. 

4/24/2025

Teaching Feuchtenberger and De Vries' W The Whore to students at Parsons and observing a trend that carries over from semester to semester: multiple people in each class see the work as being about asexuality. I respond with 'I do not think Feuchtenberger and De Vries anticipated that reading or intended it, but I also believe that they'd an interpretation of the work viewed through that lens.' But I say that only to encourage further discussion, I'm not confident that it's true. W The Whore is about male/female daily life. What does it say about how men and women interact? I'd push back against a reading of the work as a feminist text where women are in a subservient role that demands change. There is a lot of talk about being 'free' and that freedom being frustrated. Everything hovers around the idea of freedom as relational, in that freedom only exists when you are as free as everyone else. The men in W The Whore are anything but, and this becomes a factor in the book. An isolated reality dominates both sexes, though every chapter shows interaction. 

4/19/2025

'Disaster is My Muse' is about as embarrassing as it gets when routinely used as a phrase to describe your life project. 

4/15/2025

I want to write a review of Nadel's Crumb book, but I need to reread Céline and Kafka to prepare to get at what I want to say. Crumb is an artist I care about, but all this 'hey man, he's struggling with his own racism and putting that struggle on the page!' is dead end thinking. In my mind, he is a gleeful participant in the racist and misogynistic attitudes that govern our world, and acknowledgment of this obvious fact doesn't preclude the works high and clear value. Crumb is a noteable artist because he offers no resolution to his attitudes, and that makes his art electric in a world of equally racist/sexist though more delusional lesser talents. It does not make him a great mind though. In fact, it makes him a common place one. We can respect him for being honest and expressing that honesty with truly incredible artistic distinction. This honesty, though, is not the same as the 'honesty' everyone ascribes to Crumb. It's 'honesty' born without struggle.  He is one of comics greatest artists, which points to a kind of poverty within comics. Crumb's thinking is so, so thin, but comics culture regards his work as something of a masterful intellectual project. Crumb can either be viewed as a reflection of our received attitudes or a reveling in them, but his thinking is not lively enough for (even a negative) departure from what has already been (poorly) thought out. Kafka is an artist worthy of actual mental engagement from readers in this moment, because he saw the same sickness in the world and could not participate. He had a mind that allowed him to navigate the basic necessities of life (more than we can say for many today, it must be said), but engagement beyond that was an impossibility. If people followed his art to its logical conclusion, if we truly digested his view of participation in the world as it is being beyond the capabilities of those who grasp it (which is all of us, if we take ourselves seriously),  life as we know it would vanish and a new way of being would emerge. The often told story of Crumb not appearing on Saturday Night Live is not the same as this, though it may be to the most mush brained TV fed fans of underground comics. Crumb, though confused with Kafka, does not admit to a basic incompatibility with the world----though he does flirt with this notion enough to make his readership feel that he is, in fact, a critical thinker. There are mentions of 'the trouble with this here Modern America' but he notoriously (to me at least, no one else seems to mention this) loses interest after the first few pages of his social critiques and reverts to very lazy surrealism (Mode O 'Day may be the one he had the energy for, and is possibly his best work, but...it's not just about yuppieism, it's also about some uppity woman being a bitch, which is probably what sustains his interest). His sustained and vigorous anger is reserved for...he didn't get laid much when he was younger? But, it ended up working out later? In fact, in the end, everything worked out pretty good? But, it's like, man, even having it all is harsh, right? To be clear, this ability to thrive within and with the putrid aspects of our age and still end up being a spoiled, annoying self involved guy is no mark against Crumb (and a scathing critique of society that rests on your anger at being denied the level of sex you feel owed is more compelling when it comes from (almost) Dürer level drawing than it does from some crappy sub Ziggy drawing ability groyper dork). I am grateful to engage with his view on the world, and as a graphic artist he has few peers. I am, though, extremely ungrateful for lazy readings on him. The received ideas of 'Crumb outsider this', 'Crumb struggles that', etc etc. He, like many of his generation, thrived within an age that offered them very little pushback, and any denial of their confused patchwork Eastern-philosophy-as-hedonism (the collectivism of it left in the dust almost instantly) was, to them, the fight worth having. They easily won, because there was no real struggle against their attitudes, except in their own minds, minds so empty that no amount of indulgence can ever hope to fill them. 

4/6/2025

Happy to have the Kunzle Cham book, it's valuable because I don't think Cham is very good. His well crafted but passionless mediocrity proves how much of an artist Töpffer is in comparison. Cham is the kind of cartoonist people still fall for now, though. Töpffer: 'I saw, in vignettes made in the Middle Ages by some unskilled monk, a face drawn in such a way that it would make a teacher shrug his shoulders, and yet all the knowledge of the professor would not be able to reproduce its energetic appeal, its singular grace. They know all about it, those who browse through these vignettes, and sit for long hours in public libraries with fifteenth century books to study art at its infancy, the merits of which are erased, utterly lost in sophisticated art.' Yes...these are the words of the only father of cartooning I want to acknowledge. Sadly, even if he's a footnote compared to Töpffer, it's Cham whose spell we exist under. The first cartoonists understood what comic art was, but received ideas about what this new art should be were too dominant for its founders radicalism to survive.

4/3/2025

Going to start writing about things here from time to time. I have a long term goal of writing a book about comics, maybe putting different thought threads here can help with that.

I'm so overworked lately that it's hard to engage with serious comics, comics that attempt actual art. With students at Parsons, I'm teaching Joe Sacco's Paying the Land. That's a sophisticated, strong book, a book engaged in real questions about what people alive in this world today, no matter who they are, face. If I have some free time from work, I've been allowing myself to read junk like Roger Stern's Spectacular Spider Man run, just for pleasure. It is odd, the way you start to think about comics...the cheapness of these Stern Spider Man comics holds so much appeal, how worthless they are, the paper fading away, the small kindness of the story, easy heroism, some kind of weird humanity, people being 'nice'. You see how this medium attracts the most screwed up people. It's assumed superhero comics are fascistic, and they are a bit, but they're not really that forceful, they're not committed to much of anything, and a fascistic project needs conviction. Comics are for people who crave super low level, no effort needed friendship, a drawing of a nice person doing things that are vaguely exciting, that's what 80s comics are like, a time when the medium was actually popular. What Sacco is doing is disconnected from all this, there's no comfort to be had with this book, it presents a hopelessly cynical world but not in the romantic way that most alt comics do, where the cynicism is 'why doesn't a depressive old fart like me get to have as much fun as I think I deserve?' That's not real cynicism. Sacco's Paying The Land, if you read it closely, is: there was a way of life that functioned, industry destroyed it, you can try to reform that destruction, but it won't take. That's a comic engaged in truth, a comic that isn't pretending. I don't particularly like a lot of the drawing choices Sacco makes...he's brilliant but it's his least 'cartoony' work, basically words and pictures not congealing together for hundreds of pages. A Stern/Marie Severin Spider Man is more cartoony than this, very lively drawings of a strange figure in tights swinging around doing things that don't matter. Feels intentionally artistic even though it was drawn by someone punching the clock, and this view of it as art enforces a reading of comics as folk art made by serfs. More romanticism, getting further away from reality. And it's an alt comic brain problem, seeing comics as 'beautiful' when words and pictures congeal, but it's Sacco who has it right: drawing pictures involves people in his text dump, there doesn't need to be more justification for words + pictures than that. Plus he draws so well, and good drawing is persuasive. Who cares if it moves nicely? There's more important things in life.