an exhibition at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh:
Local Heroes: The Art of the Graphic Novel

Visual art: Unfit for heroes- The Scotsman- 25 April 2008-

"With its vast resources, the National Library had a golden opportunity to take us through the evolution of comics, but this flawed exhibition is an opportunity squandered... The idea of a sequence of images forming a narrative is as old as art, but it was Hogarth who first made it funny...

I can't even be bothered to critique this crap, and I would cheerfully say that none of it has anything to do with me, except that I turn up later in the piece. Has anybody seen the exhibition? What have they been and gone and done? Or am I better off not knowing?

"Raymond Briggs's wonderful Where the Wind Blows is apparently highly rated in this story and there are a few other familiar faces, Asterix and Posy Simmons looking very lost among the aliens and comic book monsters, for example. If you spend a lot of time peering at the covers you can work out that separate cases are dedicated to different Scottish artists, including Eddie Campbell, Cam Kennedy and Frank Quitely. The way it is displayed you can scarcely judge the quality of their work."

As I responded to a recent request to reproduce images of mine in a book to be ludicrously titled "Five Hundred Essential Graphic novels," please, please do not include me in any of this shite.
*****
From Onion AVclub last year:
15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will

14. He wrote Player Piano while working for General Electric, "completely surrounded by machines and ideas for machines," which led him to put some ideas about machines on paper. Then it was published, "and I learned from the reviewers that I was a science-fiction writer. I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled 'science fiction' ever since, and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal."

(via Bob Morales)
*************