The picks of the week from around the web.
Li Se on the proposed South African media bill. As good a critical overview as any I’ve read on the ANC’s latest media clampdown in disguise.
Sam Lipsyte on Wilson. A fine review of Dan Clowes’ latest comic. One of the few I’ve read that seems […]

As explained here the other day, there’s currently a public debate raging in Denmark about drawn and animated child pornography, triggered in part by the opening of an exhibition on the topic in the city of Odense, in part by the conviction in Sweden of a manga translator alleged to have possessed drawn images of […]

The highly publicized child pornography conviction last month of a Swedish translator, for possessing manga which allegedly depicted sexualised minors or minors engaging in sexual acts, is but the latest manifestation of a debate concerning what constitutes child pornography that has been going for a number of years. The chairman of the Swedish Comics Society, […]

“Think, for example, of Northrop Frye. Frye’s is now a name that you never hear mentioned but which was then everywhere. CS Lewis, who is now famous for fairy stories, was then famous for being a scholar. Tolkien too was famous for being a scholar, not for elves and so on. There is no prestige […]

I was just reminded today of how depressingly treacherous it has become to navigate the Mohammed cartoon affair and its religious-cultural discontents. The day before yesterday it was reported worldwide that the upcoming memoirs of ‘Bomb in Turban’ cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, Manden bag stregen (’The Man Behind the Line’), would be published with the cartoon […]

“I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for […]

The picks of the week from around the web.
RSA Animate: David Harvey breaks down in simple terms the financial crisis from his perspective, accompanied by some great instructional white-board cartooning (above).
Amoeblog: Billyjam interviews hip hop legend Krs-One in depth, on the occasion of the release of his new book The Gospel of Hip Hop. As […]

The inimitable ‘Li Se’, in whose “extended network” I find myself, has finally opened the floodgates and is committing to writing the kind of intellectual effluvium that people in said network have come to appreciate in conversation over the years. Written on the principle, appropriated from Charles Bukowski, of ‘not trying’, it is blogging as […]

The picks of the week from around the web.
The Guardian: “The Unwanted”. Joe Sacco on African refugees in Malta in the first installment of a 48-page reportage that originally ran in the Virginia Quarterly Review.

Harvey Pekar. The death of the pioneering comics writer this week elicited some fine journalism around the web: Tom Spurgeon’s obituary, […]

The picks of the week from around the web.
Rolling Stone: “The Runaway General”. Without question this week’s most exposed piece of journalism, Michael Hasting’s article on the now deposed Gen. Stanley McCrystal, is well-worth spending time with if you only read the summaries. It does much more than convey the disparaging one-liners that lost him […]

“Like the attacks by Al Qaeda, the disaster in the Gulf was preceded by ample warnings – yet the administration had ignored them. Instead of cracking down on MMS, as he had vowed to do even before taking office, Obama left in place many of the top officials who oversaw the agency’s culture of corruption. […]

“It’s pretty well understood amongst the crew who’s in charge,” …[Kuchta] said.
“How do they know that?” a Coast Guard investigator asked.
“I guess, I don’t know […] But it’s pretty well — everyone knows.”
– Captain Curt R. Kuchta of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig
The weekly linkage is back! Which I guess means the blog is […]

For better or worse. I’m not sure what, at the end of the day, this will do for the cause of reason and compassion in this matter, but a situation where drawing certain things will net you death threats and attempts on your life is simply unacceptable. Whatever the history of systemic injustices or problems […]

The following is the official press release from the Danish Comics Council on yesterday’s news of Danish newspaper Politiken’s settlement with eight Muslim organisations on its publication of the most infamous Mohammed cartoon:
The Danish Comics Council has learned that the Copenhagen daily Politiken has reached a settlement with eight international Muslim organisations representing the descendants […]

Dansk Tegneserieråds formand, Thomas Thorhauge, udtaler sig officielt i debatten om selvcensur ovre på Rådets hjemmeside.
Tegning af Claus Seidel, fra Caricature.dk.