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Rating: 
Summary: Another beautiful collection from TCJ. So why am I bored?
Review: Another gorgeous special edition from the Comics Journal. As usual, it is a visual marvel: 10" by 10", with excellent design on the cover and throughout. You wanna hang these things on your wall. Unfortunately, this long delayed collection of essays and comics is the worst yet and may spell the end of the special editions. The book features essays and interviews with several generations of cartoonists, but Chris Ware--the most exciting cartoonist of his and maybe any generation--gets interviewed only along with Jules Feiffer and we learn little about Ware or the important work he does. An inept essay about Ware--in which the essayist substitutes breathless exuberance for critical analysis--does little to fill the gap. The other "cartoonists"--Hirschfeld, Spiegelman, Feiffer--are fine but the interviews are a little dull. Besides, these guys have done the bulk of their work in magazine illustration (including most of Spiegelman's later stuff) so one wonders if the magazine is about comics or merely cartoony art. In the same vein, a chaotic and seemingly purposeless essay about the Simpsons doesn't even make a nominal connection to comics. The writer doesn't let us know much, except pointless bits of trivia he mistakes for erudition and that he doesn't think the new shows are as good as the old ones. But not all the essays fall flat; Tom Spurgeon, with typical insight and thoughtfulness, lets us know what makes Phoebe Gloeckner (sp?) tick and gave me newfound appreciation for that soulful, subversive cartoonist. Gloeckner, the Hernandez brothers, Bill Griffith and Ho Che Anderson all contribute wonderful pieces, putting the oversized square format to good use (though considering the eminence of the artists none of it is especially salient). But those are about the most prominent names here; neither Ware nor Bagge nor Crumb nor Seth contribute anthing and their absence is palpable. Fewer artists contributed this time, so the editors compensated by giving the cartoonists who did show up more space. Many of the remainder of comics are unremarkable if not clunky, though a strip about two pretentious English boys writing their own comics was ironic in a lighthearted way refreshingly foreign to comics. In any case, it's a gorgeous book; it's just not a whole lot of fun to read. Design brilliance and airy substance aren't odd pairs to anyone who's ever "read" Adbusters, but frankly I expected more from a magazine that tries to wear its brain so prominently on its sleeve.
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