January 5, 2016
Go, Read: The Beat Survey Of Professionals, The Big Stories
I'm always a bit fascinated by
the end-of-year survey answers that
The Beat runs, mostly because of how it catches the industry in a collective moment of self-regard.
I'm grateful for Jeffrey Brown's answer that indicates the Charlie Hebdo murders might be the biggest story for comics last year. It's very difficult for stories like that one -- or the attempted crippling of Ali Farzat, or the routine institutional abuse faced by Zunar -- to penetrate into our thinking. They all feel very "over there" in a way that DC settling down onto Burbank like the spaceship on the cover of a 1970s rock album does not. In addition, some people just want to keep it positive, some people gravitate to stories about trends or issues that they themselves face, and others only see news as business in an art form they approach first and foremost as a business. Others share my viewpoint but simply disagree. There are no rules. All approaches are valid.
For me, though, I can't help but think that the Hebdo killings, and the swirling political clouds around them, and the decisions made by some of the murdered to keep at their jobs and sustain an approach to art about which they feel strongly after being warned in as severe a way as a bombed workplace, is the story we'll remember and the story that gets at a lot of the heart of why we make art and why it matters for us to do so at some personal cost, usually not the kind that makes headlines. I've thought about it every day for a year now, and I'm no closer to any moment of certainty beyond thinking that what happened is so very important.
I think it relates, too. I want everyone to be rewarded as possible for the art they create, and I've devoted a not-insignificant portion of time to fighting some of those battles when they flare up. It's a great thing to be able to do so. Yet I was reminded by a cartoonist at SPX a couple of years ago that our sprightly, obsessive careerism can sometimes occlude the meaning of doing art that makes being treated fairly for it in the marketplace so important in the first place. These are the answers I wish I had. These are the questions I'm struggling to formulate.
posted 9:25 pm PST |
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