Opinionated Fridays: People Holding Forth On Various Issues

* here's another lengthy response to creator Scott Kurtz's long essay about the cynicism of criticizing Marvel Comics on a Jack Kirby-related release while Avengers is the movie theaters. I'm actually encouraged by the passion of the push back on these issues, even though it's small and it's not exactly having a measurable effect beyond the essays themselves. A potential, achievable benefit of talking about creator's rights issues is people -- maybe only a few -- taking stock in how they orient themselves to companies that don't respect those things. Comics has a long history of being made better as a result.

* I'm glad that people are paying attention to Chip Kidd's forthcoming Batman-related graphic novel, as I think Kidd is an interesting creator generally with an obvious fascination for that character and using him to look at architecture seems as fun as anything anyone has that character doing. However, it's sort of funny to see a statement that Batman is the most architectural comic book character the week that a comic comes out featuring Mr. X -- an architect (at least early on) whose raison d'etre at one point was fighting twisted architecture. It's not like I expect a writer to know that, but it does underline the problem of having the entire comics world be defined by a certain kind of action-adventure book (and related works slightly off-genre). It's sort of like seeing the entirety of theatre through musicals. Heck, this new Batman book isn't even the most architectural comic book with which Chip Kidd has been involved.

* here's what I think is a student editorial over the decision several weeks ago made by several newspaper editors not to run Doonesbury comic strips about Texas law related to abortion. It point out how stupid this was, but also makes the point -- explicitly and generally -- that it's even counter-intuitive: the only reason the strip's handling of the issue got any national play isn't by its content but because newspaper tried to drop it. Maybe someone should create a strip that's always being dropped but doesn't actually exist.
 
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