After taking an extended hiatus from writing, I am back at the blog. I’ve actually been thinking about this for the past couple of months or so, but truthfully, I was unsure of the direction to take, but kind of like being in a fog that has begun to clear, and a revisiting of the tag line, I will continue to write about life, learning and comics, or more specifically, graphic literature, a great term that I saw on a sign at Sky Light Books in Los Feliz. It seems to me that the term “graphic novels” is more suited to the many great fiction titles such as Watchmen. But many of the great titles are personal memoirs and histories, as well as world histories, such as Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, or Joe Sacco’s The Great War. Graphic novels also do not address other sub-genre of graphic literature, such as Graphic Journalism such as the brilliant work of Joe Sacco (Palestine, and Journalism), and a new favorite, Sarah Glidden (How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less and Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq). Other interesting sub-genre are Graphic Medicine, and books about graphic literature, that are as much philosophical as aesthetic, such as Nick Sousanis’ brilliant Unflattening, a commentary on the relationship between text and line, or Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, as well as his other works.
There is so much more too, but that shall have to wait, because I only have a couple of minutes to post this before midnight. Why you may ask? Because View from a blog will continue as a weekly blog, posted every Sunday by 10:00 pm, although from time to time, I may take the liberty to do an update during the week – artistic license.