Things we learn in the surprisingly good NYT Magazine article on graphic novels

1) This is your company. This is your company after you hire Peggy Burns to be your publicist.

Any questions?

2) Art Spiegelman’s drawing process involves the use of a computer on a fairly extensive basis. I’m impressed–I figured him for something of a luddite, but he’s taking advantage of all the tools at his disposal.

3) Seth is as glam as fuck. He’s the Thin White Duke of comics. I just wish he’d kept his actual name–Gregory Gallant. Most people have to invent glitter pseudonyms, but this guy was born with one!

4) Chris Ware’s borderline-pathological self-deprecation and melancholy seems to be pretty much a non-stop deal. Can you imagine what he’d be like if he wasn’t the best cartoonist in the world?

5) Seeing Charles Burns’s Black Hole compared to James Joyce’s Ulysses (primarily in terms of its serialization, but not just in those terms) makes me smile, quietly, to myself.

7) Ware’s explanation of his thought process while working is maybe the most fascinating such explanation I’ve ever read from a cartoonist. It’s a new way about thinking about the creation of comics, at least for me.

8) Kudos to the author for mentioning The Dark Knight Returns and the work of Neil Gaiman, as well as interviewing Alan Moore, without acting like the presence of genre fiction amidst various and sundry McSweeney’s alums is something to be apologized for.

You’ll be pleasantly surprised as to how non-snobby, non-“bang! pow!”, almost entirely factually accurate this article is. It’s the best I’ve read from one of the mainstream guardians of literary and artistic taste in a long time.