January 2012
“This stealthy undertaking was not an act of robbery or espionage but rather a crucial operation in what would become an association called UX, for “Urban eXperiment.” UX is sort of like an artist’s collective, but far from being avant-garde—confronting audiences by pushing the boundaries of the new—its only audience is itself. More surprising still, its work is often radically conservative, intemperate in its devotion to the old. Through meticulous infiltration, UX members have carried out shocking acts of cultural preservation and repair, with an ethos of “restoring those invisible parts of our patrimony that the government has abandoned or doesn’t have the means to maintain.” The group claims to have conducted 15 such covert restorations, often in centuries-old spaces, all over Paris.”
—The New French Hacker-Artist Underground (via curiositycounts)
“A lot of things have hurt comics. Needlessly conservative storytelling, crap coloring (maybe that’s just me and my art snob friends though), bad comics, rising prices, a lack of speculators, the Hollywood money being exponentially better, companies going for the short gain instead of the long-term gain (I’m looking at you, Humanoids, and your reprinting of comics classics in strictly deluxe formats that are too expensive for the casual reader who needs that stuff and you, Marvel, who can’t even keep a trade of a book that’s buzzing super hard in print, and you, comic shops, for banging your doofus drum every time somebody does something in digital comics you don’t like), and yes, piracy, have all hurt comics.”
—David Brothers, from an excellent post about online piracy and comics. Don’t know if I agree with ALLLL of it, but this needed to be bolded and flashing all caps style. (via ghostattack)
“Such a miserable experience, reading this comic. It’s the narrative equivalent of watching the first episode of that Justice League cartoon in three minute bursts over the course of five months—there’s just no way to enjoy that, it’s fucking absurd. When you’re a kid and you want to hold a boner longer, they tell you to do that exercise where you drape a wet washrag on your shaft and flex it up and down, but they never go so far as to say that you’re going to enjoy doing that, or that it’s as fun as jerking off, or that you better watch out because you might prefer washrag flexing to putting the thing inside a lady. DC doesn’t seem to have ever understood the difference. It’s not a surprise that they don’t—take a look at the Beat or the Journal’s current comment sections, you’ll get a plaster cast of what’s wrong with comics on both sides—but that doesn’t change how tepid and unsatisfying this whole exercise of the Johns/Lee combine has become. Anyway. The Internet says you shouldn’t hope people get fired, but honestly, if you just went down the list and got rid of every single person who believes that this comic is worth the four dollars they’re asking for it, there’s no possible way you wouldn’t see an increase in the intelligence average the next time everybody at the staff table pools their “resources” and pours them, like warm oatmeal, into Eddie Berganza’s beckoning gullet.”
—Tucker Stone on Justice League #5. (via ——comix)
