CSotD: Giant RNC wrap up and some book reports
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Meecy-micey, atsa some big cartoon, dere, Tom Tomorrow. All those panels and not a clunker in the group. (This might be a good time to remind you that you can click on the image for a larger version.)
I've got nothing to add. He covered it all. And any one of these panels could have been the kickoff for a whole cartoon of its own.
Which could make you wish he'd done all those cartoons during the month and a half or however long the hurricane-shortened convention went on. But, while things certainly dragged on in perceptual time, cartoons have to be produced in real time, and he discusses the process of producing this piece on his blog.
There's a lot of cartoon-journalism going on these days, but the best long-form Joe-Sacco-level stuff is not being released quickly, and, from a journalist's perspective, some of the stuff that is coming out fast is very clearly one-sided.
The good thing about convention coverage is that it is by nature one-sided. That is, the reporter is essentially talking about a product, because conventions have been pre-fab for the past 20 years or more.
You couldn't have told Chicago '68 from one perspective because it was chaos inside and outside the hall, but they've fixed that. Now it's like doing TV criticism, or the people who blog about American Idol or whatever. And, as Tom Tomorrow notes, being there doesn't always give you the best seat in the house.
So the Dems are up next, and you may want to see what Jen Sorenson has going on — she is on site blogging the convention for a couple of papers and you can pick up her coverage here (Austin, Texas) or here, (Charlottesville, VA), and judge for yourself how good a seat she has.
So far, it's words and photos. Good art is not fast; fast art is not good. Or something like that. She's still quite an articulate and interesting person, howsoever, even without a drawing pen in hand, and some good not-so-fast art will no doubt emerge at some point.
And as long as we're talking about words, here are a couple of books to know about:
Nowt So Daft is a collection of single panel cartoons by Kieran Meehan, who, of course, is totally daft and frequently featured here for just that reason. I was alerted to this by a post over at Mike Lynch's blog, where he has an interview with Meehan that is very much worth a look, as Mike's blog often is.
Also, Dave Astor has a memoir out, Comic (and Column) Confessional, which is an informal ramble through his career, much of which was spent as the go-to guy for information about comics and other syndicated features at Editor & Publisher. That Amazon link lets you read the first chapter or so, and there's a lot you can pick up about the business, explained clearly for those who don't know how that end of things works, with some insider goodies for those who do.
E&P was the bible of the newspaper industry for decades and Dave's column in it was mandatory reading. When I was first in the trade, every department head had a subscription and, each week, it was a work-stopper — when the mail came, there was a quick perusal, a read of the columns relating to your corner of the trade, and then back to work, but with a longer look later, after which it went out where your subordinates could find it.
And you dared not show up at a department head meeting without knowing what was in it, even if it had only arrived an hour earlier.
Not being a department head, I had to ask for a subscription, but it was automatically granted, back in those bygone days when newspapers were run by people who gave a rat's ass about newspapers and who could tell at a glance a waxer from a plateburner.
If nothing else, Dave had a great view from which to watch the demise of it all, given that his was one of the first name-brand heads to be lopped off by people who decided there is no logical reason for a publication's budget to include frivolous expenditures on "things that people want" or "reasons they buy us."
The whole thing gives me heartburn, which is simply a cheap segue so that I can let the youngsters in on the "meecy-micey" reference with which I began things today.
There's never a bad excuse to watch this.
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