Quick Monday Link Blogging

India Celebrates Comic Creator's Birthday - The 75th birthday of a popular comic creator in India, has an article focusing on his career. I wonder how many of America's comic creators would warrant such attention?

The article says that every kid in India has read his comics, which is a remarkable feat. I found his reason for doing comics, to be really interesting.

From the article:

1967 Delhi The idea
At a quiz contest on TV when the children were asked who was the mother of Lord Ram none of the contestants could reply, but when asked a question about Greek Gods everyone had a reply. I realized then how the children of today were getting alienated from our own culture.


The idea of doing a comic in order to introduce or keep your culture alive is a very wonderful concept.

Can Comics Be Literature?- Interesting review of Art Spiegelman's "In The Shadow of No Towers" book from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper.

I thought this opening paragraph was very interesting:

Lately there has been a good deal of anguished discussion among book critics over -- shades of the 1950s! -- the growing impact of comic books (that's graphic novels to you, bud), specifically regarding the question of whether a comic book or graphic novel can be a real work of literature.

It is sort of interesting with the strides comics have made over the past couple of years, that it is still a question of their worth. I suppose I can understand it given the large amount of crap there is out there in comics, and when stuff like Identity Crisis gets so much publicity.

Yet I guess I was hoping that with works like Jimmy Corrigan, From Hell, Blankets and the like. That perhaps their worth had long since been answered, yet I guess as with anything there is still a lot of proving to do.