"Millions of readers bought the books, which became a popular school assignment and one of the widest-read works to explore the interior lives of modern Iranians."

"The series was adapted into a 2007 film that was nominated for the Academy Award for best animated feature. 'Persepolis,' the author Fernanda Eberstadt wrote in a New York Times review, 'dances with drama and insouciant wit,' its inky black-and-white drawings modeled on both contemporary comics and Persian miniatures.... Not quite two decades later, Ms. Satrapi set to work documenting another tumultuous moment in Iranian history: the unrest in 2022 that followed the death, in police custody, of a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, who had been detained and accused of violating a law requiring women to wear the hijab in public. In protest, women across Iran tore off their veils, in one of the most significant cultural and political moments in the country since the 1979 revolution...."

From "Marjane Satrapi, the Author of ‘Persepolis,’ Dies at 56/Her popular graphic novel series, published in the early 2000s, followed an Iranian girl through the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War" (NYT).

The obituary quotes Satrapi: "Even basic human rights, they deny us. You don’t have the right to dance, you don’t have the right to sing, you don’t have the right to do this, you don’t have the right to do that."

The NYT obituary doesn't say how Satrapi died, but at Deadline, it says: "'Marjane Satrapi died of sadness a little over a year after the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life,' read a statement from close friends and family announcing her death on June 3...."

"In one scene, a military police officer asks Jesus to produce his identification. 'I don’t have one!' Jesus says. 'I don’t have anything!' In another scene, Jesus walks on water by becoming a duck."

From "Frank Stack, Painter Who Secretly Drew 'The Adventures of Jesus,' Dies at 88 For 20 years, he hid his identity behind the nom de plume Foolbert Sturgeon as he chronicled Christ’s encounters with modern-day hypocrites in comic-book form" (NYT)(gift link, so you can read more, including some of the comics).

“I’ve always loved to see my stuff in print, but I was on the horns of a dilemma,” he wrote. “Did I dare to publish the cartoons under my own name when my job was at risk if the university ever noticed that I worked in the most disgraceful of all media — the awful COMIC BOOK?” 

"Since last October in Memuro, Hokkaido, a café specialising in French toast has been open to parents and babies free of charge from 9pm on Sunday to 6am on Monday."

"There are areas for babies to crawl around and sleep, as well as changing tables and nursing booths. Users can relax, knowing their babies’ cries aren’t keeping others up.,,, Across the country in Tokushima Prefecture, a childcare support centre runs monthly 'crying cafés' with specialist staff.... The concept comes from Yonakigoya, a manga by a cartoonist and mother that was published online in 2023. The titular 'night-time crying house' is a space where overwhelmed mothers and babies can de-stress in the small hours...."

From "Overnight 'crying cafés' serve coffee with a side of tears/The night-time refuges in Japan are popular with mothers who can relax knowing their crying child is not disturbing anyone at home" (London Times).

Did Epstein write that "suicide note"?

You can read the text at the NYT article, "Purported Epstein Suicide Note Is Released/A federal judge released the note, which Jeffrey Epstein’s former cellmate said he found in a graphic novel. The New York Times has not authenticated that Mr. Epstein wrote it."

"They investigated me for month — FOUND NOTHING!!!” the note begins, adding that the result was charges going back many years.

“It is a treat to be able to choose one’s time to say goodbye,” the note continued.

“Watcha want me to do — Bust out cryin!!” the note reads.

“NO FUN," it concludes, with those words underlined. “NOT WORTH IT!!”

My initial take, on that text alone, was that doesn't sound like what he would write, but then what do I know about the writing style of Jeffrey Epstein? I haven't been reading his emails, and the NYT points to a 2016 email of his that says "whtchoo want me todo -- bust out cryin" — and what can I say? Do you want to talk about the "Watcha"/"whtchoo" discrepancy? Are you struck by the word-for-word repetition of a 7 or 8 word phrase? But which way are you struck? Are you thinking, yes, that's Jeffrey or somebody swiped a phrase to make it look like Jeffrey? But who?

ADDED: Why can't we be told which graphic novel Jeffrey Epstein had there in his cell to read? I invited Grok to guess — remember, it was the summer of 2019 — and this is what I got:

"The indictment of the judge, Hannah C. Dugan of the Milwaukee County Circuit Court, was a routine but significant step in the Justice Department’s case against her."

"The Trump administration has defended the prosecution as a warning that no one is above the law, while many Democrats, lawyers and former judges have denounced it as an assault on the judiciary...."

From "Wisconsin Judge Indicted on Charges That She Helped Immigrant Evade Agents/Judge Hannah C. Dugan was accused of helping an undocumented immigrant elude federal agents who were waiting to arrest him outside her courtroom" (NYT).

[E]arlier this month, more than 150 former state and federal judges signed a letter to Ms. Bondi calling the arrest of Judge Dugan an attempt to intimidate the judiciary. “This cynical effort undermines the rule of law,” that letter said, “and destroys the trust the American people have in the nation’s judges to administer justice in the courtrooms and in the halls of justice across the land.”

What is a "hall of justice" if not a courtroom?

"In a 1987 episode of the HBO satire series 'Not Necessarily the News,' he played an enraged, violent version of himself obsessed with revenge..."

"... on Hollywood executives who had ignored him, all while wearing Dennis the Menace’s signature overalls and striped shirt."

From "Jay North, Child Star of ‘Dennis the Menace,’ Dies at 73/He was best known for playing the towheaded Dennis Mitchell on a sitcom that ran on CBS from 1959 to 1963" (NYT).

"But from the start of her career as a cartoonist, she said she felt shut out by her male peers, who excluded her from parties as well as comic anthologies..."

"... that helped draw wider attention to their work. 'There are very few fields as heavily male,' she once told the Los Angeles Times. 'Maybe the only equivalent is the fire department.' Ms. Robbins became a fierce critic of peers such as Crumb, calling out pieces like a three-page 1970 story in which Crumb imagined himself strangling a female television interviewer. 'I think that a lot of these guys simply were misogynist,' she told the pop culture website Vulture in 2018. 'It turned out what a lot of these guys, what they had in their head was very vicious stuff, very violent stuff.'"

From "Trina Robbins, cartoonist who elevated women’s stories, dies at 85/She put out the first American comic book created entirely by women. Years later, she chronicled the history of female comics artists, writing books that excavated the stories of overlooked writers and illustrators" (WaPo).

Trina Robbins was also a clothes designer of the very coolest kind: "For much of her 20s, she designed clothes in Los Angeles and New York, where she befriended Jim Morrison, dressed folk and rock musicians including Donovan, Cass Elliot and David Crosby, and inspired a verse in Joni Mitchell’s song 'Ladies of the Canyon.'" It's the first verse. Listen here.

And here's some video of Robbins, talking about women comic artists:

"... stay present in your emotions while scrolling...."

From "Fear of missing out? Find the joy in saying 'no'" — a 9-panel comic by Richard Sima and Pepita Sándwich. That's a free access link to WaPo.

But my neighbor sucks.

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"A long time ago, I got an email from a troll saying he could draw better than me with his penis."

"The unfortunate effect of these consolidations is that whether or not you can draw well with it, you must be in possession of one."

Said Hilary Price, creator of the comic strip “Rhymes With Orange,” quoted in "Female artists are disappearing from print comics at chain newspapers/Creators are thriving in other mediums. Are print comic strips nearing the end?" (WaPo).

Something I learned from the top-rated comment over there: The Washington Post website offers lots of comic strips, but they're so hard to see: "With an online subscription to WaPo, you have to scroll allllll the way down to see the link for the comics. Then you click each comic title, and there are dozens, to see each individual daily strip." Here's that link.

It's been so long since I've followed any comic strips, I don't know what to click on. I'm sort of (but not really) surprised to see many names that I read when I was a child: Andy Capp, Blondie, Beetle Bailey, Hi and Lois, Prince Valiant, Mark Trail, Mary Worth. With a webpage, I have the sense not to click on any of them, but if I had a real newspaper with "funny pages," I might read them because they were there.

"I did everything by the book the whole time. They changed the rules, and I should be grandfathered in. I shouldn’t have to abide by them."

Said Tony Cavallaro, quoted in "Authorities Seize Alligator Being Held Illegally in Home Near Buffalo/The alligator, Albert Edward, had been with his owner for 34 years" (NYT).

He was 11 feet long, 750 pounds heavy and 34 years old, and until this week, he lived in a pool house attached to his owner’s home in Hamburg, N.Y., about 13 miles south of Buffalo.

The [New York State Department of Environmental Conservation] said that Albert’s owner, Tony Cavallaro, had a license for the alligator, but it expired in 2021. In an interview, Mr. Cavallaro, 64, said that while visitors to his home did sometimes take pictures with Albert, they never swam with him or rode him. Instead, they would briefly get in the water for a quick photo with the animal, often when he was sleeping, Mr. Cavallaro said.

Cavallaro bought Albert as a newborn and believes "the poor thing loves me."

I'm interested in the law here, the always enticing notion that the law doesn't apply to you. Cavallaro also seems to believe that the law of nature — the dangerousness of alligators — does not apply to Albert.

But what's missing from this article is any mention of the comic strip that was once central to our culture: Pogo. There's an alligator named Albert, and you don't cite Pogo?

ADDED: The Wikipedia article linked above describes Albert Alligator as "An exuberant, dimwitted, irascible, and egotistical alligator."

"In his influential book 'Imagined Communities,' Benedict Anderson argues that shared reading—newspapers, pamphlets, novels—made modern European nations possible."

"Frenchmen were people who shared news and stories in French; English people came together through the Illustrated London News, the books of Dickens, the cult of Shakespeare. By the time Jack Kirby left Marvel, in 1970, and Lee stepped down as editor-in-chief, in 1972, they and their colleagues had founded a kind of miniature nation: followers versed in a language of secret identities, geographies, and histories, eager for news that only they understood, and ready to forge a next generation.... Amateurs and professionals, over decades, come to something like consensus about which books matter and why...."

I'm reading "How Comic Books Became Classics/By publishing Marvel comics like Black Panther, X-Men, and The Avengers, Penguin Classics is pushing the literary canon into new, contested territory" (The New Yorker).

"Up until that point in my life, in conformance with King Frederick II’s proscription against inebriation among falconers, I had resolved..."

"... never to use drugs or alcohol. In fact, I hadn’t even tasted coffee. However, I had recently gathered from my favorite comic book, Turok, Son of Stone, that hallucinogens might allow me to see dinosaurs, which I greatly desired. [The person offering it] assured me that this was a near certainty, so I swallowed the LSD, which more than delivered on his promise. Buildings melted like wax candles; trees bowed and swayed on a windless night; bright lights with long comet tails lent Hyannisport the cheery aura of Christmas in July.... Still tripping, I rode into Hyannis with two older kids and struggled in a Main Street diner with a plate of lively white noodles that squirmed and squeaked as I stabbed at them with my fork. I became suddenly appreciative of the impossibly complex choreography of minute movements required by my mouth and its various parts in order to chew and swallow food. Abandoning that endeavor, I looked up to see a picture hanging behind the counter of my father, Uncle Jack, and Jesus. All of them had their hands folded in prayer.... Two days later I flew to South America.... I worked during July and August as a ranch hand in the Colombian llanos, returning that fall to Millbrook.... My generation was developing its own counterculture. That summer’s Woodstock concert—just across the Hudson from Millbrook—was our constitutional convention.... I... read underground newspapers and Mr. Natural comics.... I thought of drugs as the fuel of the insurrection...."

Writes Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in  "American Values/Lessons I Learned From My Family." 

It was the summer of '69. Perhaps you remember it. RFK Jr. was 15. 

Millbrook was the private boarding school RFK Jr. attended, chosen by him because "it operated a certified zoo and several of the boys practiced falconry." The place was the alma mater of William F. and James Buckley. James would go on, in 1970, to win the Senate seat that had belonged to RFK Sr.

"Seems like you're avoiding me."

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"I think the biggest misconception is that we are making fun of gender, or somehow romanticizing gendered clichés."

"In my experience, drag is mostly about emotion, story, and beauty. The gendered aspect is simply a stage, a gesture that helps free the performer and the viewer from the supposedly realistic limitations on the world 'as it is,' helping us step into the realm of fantasy. Sometimes, the character we create in drag is more authentic, more personal, more real that what we are allowed to be in our day-to-day.... I first created Sasha Velour as a comic character, and slowly became that illustration in real life, too. Comics and drag share the same idea: you take a good story, clear character design, and put in lots of hard work.... Both comics and drag come from strong independent traditions that enable artists and performers to develop a more unique and recognizable style, and to address a wider range of political and personal topics. All you need to make art is your own self."

Says Sasha Velour, interviewed in "Sasha Velour’s 'The Look of Pride'/The artist discusses gender, self-expression, and how drag can be an antidote to shame" (The New Yorker).

These turning-the-tables arguments don't always work out the way the table-turner thinks.

Ha! The men I know would be thrilled. pic.twitter.com/xWZxeabPKt

— Gail Heriot (@GailHeriot) January 27, 2023

Via Gail Heriot on Instapundit. 

Now, that's a screen shot, not a working embedded tweet, and there are lots of Twitter accounts named "Women in Power." There's no "@" line. Did someone make a screen shot, then erase the "@" part?

I suspect that "Women in Power" is copying someone else's nicely drawn, well-conceived comic. Where is the artist's name? Also erased?

Anyway, isn't Heriot right that a lot of men would get a charge out of hearing these stray, lame compliments? But what happens next?! I'm predicting a shit show. 

ADDED: I searched Google images until I found one that identified the artist. It is Kasia Babis.

"Descriptions of 'Spare' as 'pure chaos,' TMI or the lament of a privileged White man oversimplify the book...."

"Harry’s memoir sweeps in: one man’s singular journey from schoolboy to soldier to married father; a love letter to a lost mother, cast in the grief of a 12-year-old boy; an indictment of a family with resources to care for two wounded children — but no apparent will or concern to do so; a love-struck man’s celebration of his wife. 'Spare' is no literary masterpiece (for your own sake, skip the multi-chapter talk of his frostbitten todger). In time, Harry might regret sharing so much.... Harry accuses his stepmother, Camilla, soon to be crowned queen, of spreading negative reports about him amid efforts to improve her public image. He recounts speaking to his brother about their father’s efforts to promote himself at their expense. Think about that. A lot of Americans who were tiring of Harry and Meghan will likely find elements of Harry’s story to respect or even lament....."

Writes Autumn Brewington, in "Post Elizabeth: To understand Prince Harry’s book, you need to know 5 things" (WaPo). 

About that todger (don't tell me what to skip!):

"[S]he arrived [in San Francisco] in the early 1970s and joined a feminist art collective. The group produced Wimmen’s Comix..."

"... one of the first feminist comics produced entirely by women, with topics that ranged from queer life to abortion to rape. The artist left the collective over disagreements about works that some found to be too unsparing (her alter ego character Bunch, for example, would sometimes pop pimples or masturbate or pick her butt). So in 1975, she founded a new women’s comic: Twisted Sisters. Together with her husband and collaborator Robert Crumb and their daughter Sophie, she moved to the south of France in 1990...."

From "Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Rebellious Cartoonist, Dead at 74" (NY Magazine).

This is from 2 years ago:

The bankruptcy barrel.

I was amused by these "Exclusive Emojis from Elon Musk" drawings from Barry Blitt (in The New Yorker). Please check them all out. I'm just going to focus on one (and not because it's the best in the set of 12):

  

I just want to talk about the image — which I've seen all my life — of a guy wearing a barrel. I understand it means you're so poor you don't have even a shred of normal clothing and your only hope of modesty is wearing this very bulky, unwieldy object, the barrel.

Hating/loving graphic novels.

2 things I clicked on in today's NYT have famous people — people I greatly admire — taking opposite positions on comics. 

Obviously, I could see it coming in the first headline: "Temple Grandin Is a Visual Thinker Who Hates Graphic Novels/'It is too difficult for me to constantly switch back and forth between the pictures and the text bubbles,' says the animal behaviorist and advocate for autistic people, whose new book (with Betsy Lerner) is 'Visual Thinking.' 'I like technical and scientific books with lots of illustrations.'"

Actually, I hate graphic novels. It is too difficult for me to constantly switch back and forth between the pictures and the text bubbles. I like technical and scientific books with lots of illustrations. When I read business books and scientific papers, I often look at the illustrations and graphs first. The next step is to read the text. When I am reading a novel or a memoir, I prefer to create my own pictures in my imagination. As I read the text, my brain creates a movie.

The other one is buried in that article about Keiichi Tanaami that I blogged about in the previous post. Asked what he is reading, he said:

I don’t really read novels. I read a lot of essays and other things, though. I read an enormous amount of manga. Fujiko Fujio often write stories about a character succeeding in life. I loved this kind of manga when I was a small child. The character would move to Tokyo, rent out a tiny apartment, study super hard and succeed. He writes those kinds of success stories. I love them. I still read anything by Osamu Tezuka. He writes many different manga, so I read them all.... I also read Fujio Akatsuka. He is a super famous manga artist....