It's a mystery.

This is how we should write about Hogarth: see Matthias Wivel's Essay on the Marriage a la Mode.
"However, Hogarth’s wealth of visual detail is only bona fide ‘chicken fat’ because it works on its own terms. Elder’s brand of the stuff is incidental and “noisy.” It is not only unrelated to, but often supplants the narrative as the main attraction of his stories (just as does the proliferating gags in Tati’s cinema, incidentally). As mentioned, this is not really the case with Hogarth, whose narratives almost invariably remain undisturbed by his piling on of the good stuff. But it is nevertheless clear that his visual inventions are also meant to be enjoyed in their own right, independently of the narrative."
etc.
It's clear that he has actually looked at the work.
And understood it.
(via Tom Spurgeon)
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hayley campbell is home for a couple of weeks, so we had a bash at the house last night to celebrate her 21st. I didn't mention it in advance lest we suffer the same fate as that poor lass in England last week, 17-year old who invited her friends to a party via her Myspace blog;: Police arrest girl whose MySpace site led to £20,000 party disaster
"Rachel Bell, 17, was questioned by detectives then released on police bail, pending further inquiries, after she emerged from hiding to blame internet hackers for the £20,000 chaos, and to apologise profusely to her parents.
She said she was too scared to face her mother, Elaine, and father, Alan, who have been forced to rent temporary housing and are pressing for criminal charges against partygoers...
But although she spoke to her mother by phone, her remorse was undermined by the appearance of a message ascribed to her on a friend's MySpace site saying: "haaa ... well i hope u liked the party ... was fuckin wild like!!!! hmmm another lol???xx" (lol standing for laugh out loud).
Although her parents, who had gone for a caravan weekend with her sister and two brothers, had forbidden guests while they were away, she admitted asking round 60 friends and a couple of DJs.
Said the mother: "Rachel has got to take blame for organising the party in the first place. I can imagine she is in an awful mental state and fear she could do something to herself. But I don't know the full story and whether it was 200 or 300 people."

See, that's why I don't leave town any more.
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drjon in comments yesterday drew my attention to a flickr group posting then and now picrtures of London, of potential education to anyone following the same kind of thing in my Alan Moore's London series of posts. A commenter who left no name sent us to Reel Streets for a postgraduate course.
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When I saw drjon yesterday he gave me, for curiosity's sake, a copy of the glossy full colour brochure for an exhibition of Australian comics at the State Library Of Victoria (ended 25 Feb 2007). My foreign readers may be puzzled to find that I am the invisible man here. For 21 years I have been living and working in Australia, and for seven of those self-published my work out of Brisbane. I put out a monthly comic book for sixty issues and collected and published the first five printings of From Hell, and though I've now handed it over to Top Shelf, the number of copies out there is in the region of 200,000. One might conjecture that I could have been wedged into this paragraph:
"Few Australian publishers have successfully established a presence in America's 'direct sales' market, where comics are sold exclusively through specialty comics shops. A notable exception is Sydney-based Phosphorescent Comics, which, since 1999, has produced a range of superhero, horror and science-fiction comics for the North American market, and has repackaged some of its titles as 'graphic novels'.
It's a mystery.
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Pam Noles alerts me to this great blog titled Comics en extinción which has a multitude of older European Bande Desinnee album covers. Those Giraud Blueberrys make me want to tear up my attempts at drawing the American west.