I’m an old fan of Douglas Rushkoff, who is one of our most generous public intellectuals. I appreciate how he keeps the Gen X flame lit. In this nifty little Webcomic from Seth Kushner Rushkoff covers some key points from his current book, Life Inc., and themes from his Frontline documentaries, The Merchants of Cool and The Persuaders. In the above panels he riffs on a few motifs that I’ve been playing with: slowing down, mediating less, doing more with people outside the Internet, and engaging in organic and slow media.

From the comic book scare to video games. Author David Hajdu talks The Ten-Cent Plague and being a father in the digital age.

Comic controversy a cautionary tale – On the Level- msnbc.com:

Parents, politicians, religious leaders have gone after virtually every art form associated with youth culture – comic books, rock music, and now, video games. And with comic books, these efforts eventually had a chilling effect (on the industry). How is it that current “objectionable” entertainment products avoided that same fate?

The question is, why did comic books lose that battle? The main reason that comic books lost is that their advocates didn’t have much voice. The advocates were kids and no one was listening. Nobody cared what they thought.

Another reason is simply economic. The big corporations weren’t publishing comics.

You write that the comic book industry was comprised of outsiders: ethnic minorities, women, people who were disadvantaged financially and perhaps couldn’t gain entry to prestigious schools or professions. How important was that diversity to the success of the medium?

It was immeasurably important because comics of all kinds — even superhero comics — were explicit, overt, opulent in their portrayal of the pride of (their) outsider status. Superman was the ultimate immigrant. He was an immigrant from another planet.

It’s essential. I think it’s the main thing that comics were here to say, was that outsiders of every sort were not lesser for their outsider status. That had, in one way or another, something over the orthodoxy.

I’m a big fan of graphic novels, and this one promises to be a terrific exegesis on Iraq and the media. What follows in an excerpt from an interview with Shooting War author Anthony Lappe…

AlterNet: War on Iraq: Shooting War: The Horror of Iraq Goes Graphic [Video]:

Shooting War was in part inspired by my own reporting in Iraq for a documentary I produced for the Guerrilla News Network (with my partner Stephen Marshall) called BattleGround: 21 Days on the Empire’s Edge. We traveled across the country just as the insurgency was beginning to gain strength, trying to understand the various forces that were fueling resistance to the coalition occupation. Near the end of our trip, we found ourselves smack in the middle of the Sunni Triangle interviewing Lt. Col. Nate Sassaman; the cocky former West Point quarterback had become a legend among his men for his aggressive attitude and tactics. After vehemently denying allegations locals made to us that his unit beat up old ladies, shot pets and hauled off innocent young men in midnight raids, a frustrated Sassaman blurted out, “My life is a surreal movie. Everyday I wake up, and it’s a surreal movie.” (Sassaman later resigned in disgrace after trying to cover up the killing of an Iraqi teenager by two of his men.)

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A Wooster Collective comic based on street art characters. Frakken brilliant.

I came across the very cool Newspaper Rock blog that covers the intersection between pop and Native culture. It’s produced at Blue Corn Comics, whose comic book, Peace Party, is featured in the above video.

PS Be sure to check out their cool “stereotype of the month” contest page.

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The ACLU has a comic explaining government abuse of power.

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TheStar.com – Books – Wordless graphic novels show rich art:

Communications theorist Marshall McLuhan once noted that yesterday’s technology becomes today’s art form. He also observed that when a thing becomes obsolete, there’s more of it around than ever. Walker agrees on both counts. “It’s funny when something becomes obsolete, all the artists drag it out of the garbage.”

He notes the success of numerous companies that sell old-fashioned printing presses, which satisfy an aesthetic emotion digital art cannot duplicate.

“They give a different type of image on the paper,” Walker says of these obsolete technologies. “You can use hand-made paper, or paper with different textures that you can’t run through a laser printer. You can sink an image into the paper so that you actually feel that impression, that embossment in the paper. It’s a beautiful thing.”

Anyhow, I came across the following article that argues for graphic novels in the classroom. I wholeheartedly agree!

Reading Online – New Literacies::

Educators need not worry that graphic novels discourage text reading. Lavin (1998) even suggested that reading graphic novels may require more complex cognitive skills than the reading of text alone. Some English teachers use graphic novels to teach literary terms and techniques such as dialogue, and they use works like the Victorian murder novel The Mystery of Mary Rogers (Geary, 2001) as a bridge to other classics of that period. Graphic novels can also inspire writing assignments. For example, the human interest story Jack Cole and the Plastic Man (Spiegelman & Kidd, 2001) intersperses an essay on the short, tragic life of comic artist Jack Cole with examples of his artwork, photographs, and even reproductions of a Christmas card Cole sent. The collage that results captures biography in a new way. For a challenging classroom project, students could create graphic novels based on literary works or their own autobiographies.

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