animation, comics, exhibits, events, etc!

In Strip Search, Jennifer M. Babcock reviews and recommends comic strips available in print and on the web.

I’m such a jet setter this summer! Within a week of coming back from Egypt I was back on the plane to Paris, France- ooh la la.

Now, most of what I was doing in Paris was pure vacation fun time but I did some Egyptological research there as well, and of course… comic hunting. Many Americans don’t realize this but the French are quite fond of comics, or “BDs” (short for bande dessinee) as they call them. Go to the Virgin Megastore on the Champs Elysees and you’ll see an entire floor dedicated to them. Fnac, the French equivalent of a Barnes and Nobles, also carries a tremendous supply of comic book albums, and if you take a stroll through the Latin Quarter, you’ll find numerous shops dedicated to comics and cartoon paraphernalia. While I was in Paris, there was an arts magazine that dedicated its cover to R. Crumb and his latest comic Genesis and another one that came out with its annual “BD issue,” which was all about French comic artists.

The French are often seen as cultural snobs so it may surprise many readers to hear that even adults embrace comics as a genuine and legitimate form of art/literature making, but I think if we look at what Francophone countries have in their comics history, it becomes more understandable. Most famously, Belgium, churned out comic greats like Herge (Tintin) and Peyo (Les Schtroumpfs AKA The Smurfs). More recently Americans have come to know the work of the Iranian-French author Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis).

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On alternating Fridays, Michael Carlisle examines the world “outside” sequential art to find… more sequential art. Expect mathematics, a bit of madness, and a dash of pessimistic optimism.

“I think that adaptation is largely a waste of time in almost any circumstances.” – Alan Moore⁶⁶⁶

Non-exhaustive list of forms of the mythos known as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

• radio series (1978, 2003)
• book series (1979-1992)
• BBC TV miniseries (1981)
• text-based video game (1984)
• comics (1993-1996)
• movie (2005)

Remember the first time you said something to the effect of, “No, they can’t remake [adapt] THAT! I love that!”

If you’re reading this, you probably don’t, since it’s happened so many times you’ve either been worn down, grown accustomed to it, or, possibly, screamed in righteous Fan rage every time.

Part of the notion of “sequential art”, art in sequence, is the idea of a sequence of art. If we consider a piece of art (not necessarily “sequential”) as an individual entity, then a remake or adaptation of that particular work creates (or adds to) a particular sequence of works sharing characters and/or certain other plot elements. This sequence, if it becomes large and/or popular enough, gains its own name: canon^19.95.

These two notions²,

• REMAKE: an art work which heavily shares recognizable plot sequence and elements of a previous work in its medium.
• ADAPTATION: an art work which heavily shares recognizable plot elements of a previous work in its or another medium, usually with significant stylistic or other changes.

have covered a large share of popular culture over the last 100 years. My
esteemed smurfologist colleague waxed frustrated on this topic recently, in regards to a specific plague of adaptations called the “comic book movie”.

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