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Thank you, Alison Scott, for letting me know that the Guardian has put up an archive of Posy Simmonds’ Literary Life cartoons. I’m sure that different readers would come up with different lists of cartoons that speak to them. This is mine:
Your New Baby. My baby has disappeared.
Children’s picture books.
The mathematics.
Stay as beautiful as you are.
Self-published authors.
We make it up on volume.
Spot the Turkey.
Where are the bookstores of yesteryear?
Readings and signings.
Second book syndrome.
Creating a buzz.
A tale of character assassination.
Name that author.
Dry runs.
Love scenes at the keyboard.
On being a writer.
On being a writer.
Infectious cliches.
On reading slush: One. Two. Three.
The author of an acclaimed book.
Why are we publishing this disgusting book?
These are wonderful! Thank you for the link.
I saw this just after reading "In Iraq, Flag Design, Too, Comes Under Fire", by Ernest Beck and Julie Lasky in The New York Times, Thursday April 29, 2004, p.D9.
What hooked me was the line: "'They had apparently wanted to create a symbol first and then build a consensus and a democratic society around it,' Mr.Bierut said. 'But it's a symbol for something that doesn't exist yet.'"
So, is the new Iraqi flag science fiction?
Can we see a cartoon about that? Is it part of the Literary Life? I laughed, wincing, at the Mathematics cartoon.
"Disgusting Book" was especially funny after the online discussions of the new Neal Stephenson book. Its binding is alleged to be garbage, with copies falling apart in mid-read more than once.
Scorpio
Eccentricity
Jonathan. Sit down and breathe into a paper bag for a while. You've been free-associating for days.
... which reminds me of a story *pant* *pant* ...
On second breath this syllogism came to me:
Data want to be free.
Associations want to be free.
Therefore Data want to be Associations.
I especially liked the lovingly drawn slushpile in the upper-right corner of "On reading slush Three."
The strips are rendered just a bit too small for these old eyes. Also, since they're line art, perhaps the Guardian should convey them as GIFs instead of JPEGs.
"Overdue? the danger signs" -- man, I need to read that!
Oh, Teresa, how did I miss this before. Thank you so much! Your New Baby and the three slush comics are particularly wonderful, but they're all splendid.
BH--BJ: These eyes too. I cut and pasted them into a Word doc set to 150%. Helps.
Delightful stuff.
The British use of "literals" for "typos" was new to me -- separated by a common language and all that.
Oh dear, there goes my saturday.
Pet peeve: rendering line drawings as .jpg -- can't people *see* those little glitches that appear?
Pasting into Word? Bah! I love reading comics holding my glasses four inches in front of my face. Makes me feel happy to be 50.
Thanks, Teresa, for the Posy Simmonds link -- funny, good use of panels, and acutely observed.
(Though there were only _nine_ people at my last reading on a rainy evening . . .)
Re: Disgusting Book--
Because some idiot non-book person at the upper management level has shipped all design and production overseas, that's why!
(Very funny stuff, the rest of it...)
Can anyone suggest the browser that works best? In Safari, the drawings are rendered so small on my laptop that I can't read the f-ing word bubbles.
Help. The drawings suggest humor, but I think most of the humor is in the words.
Paula: The images will be rendered exactly the same size on all browsers, since they get specified in terms of pixel widths. The main exception to this is browsers which have some sort of "zoom" option to override the specified image size; an example of one is Opera, which I use.
(The other exception is Internet Explorer, which resizes at least some images to smaller sizes when they don't fit on screen; this is not only Not Helpful for this particular problem, it seems to me to be distinctly Not Helpful in general.)
Paula - shift, command, 4 on a mac will turn your pointer into a crosshairs. Position the cartoon so you can see it in its entirety on the screen, select the image with the crosshairs, let go and "click-whirr" you will have a .pdf file of what you selected on your desktop (or wherever you default-save to) called "Picture 1." Adobe Acrobat has a very easy-to-use zoom feature at the top of the screen. The image will be a bit pixel-lumpy, but hopefully easier to read. Have fun!
Scorpio:
The binding on my copy of Quicksilver has held up fairly well, in spite of the supposed binding issues... but my copy of the second book in the trilogy?
Binding failed upon arrival. Pages were coming out while it was still in the original packaging...
( note: I would have had to wait a full two weeks past release date to see the book in my local bookstore, as they were in the middle of a move. )
