Lost & Found
by T. Hodler
Friday, July 24, 2009
1. A vanishingly small subset of readers will be interested in this, but for those of you who enjoy discovering the hidden connections between Nabokov and comics, under-appreciated great-novelist John Crowley believes he knows the answer to one of the master’s more obscure comic-strip allusions. (An allusion that apparently baffled Alfred Appel Jr. himself, no less.)
His answer is here.
2. These are all over the internet already, but I would still feel remiss if I didn’t draw your attention to the comics coverage at The Onion AV Club and Vice this week. Some of the content in both is a little hinky (Is “hinky” a word? Does it mean what I want it to mean?), but some of it is pretty good and shouldn’t be missed. In particular, I recommend the interviews with Seth (who I was pleased to learn is a fellow Dick Ayers appreciator), Michael Kupperman, and Al Jaffee, as well as a top ten list from Gary Panter.
Labels: Al Jaffee, Dick Ayers, Gary Panter, John Crowley, Michael Kupperman, Seth, The A.V. Club, The Onion, Vice, Vladimir Nabokov
Fore more on Nabokov & comics see: Clarence Brown's essay "Krazy, Ignatz, and Vladimir: Nabokov and the Comic Strick" pp. 251-263 in NABOKOV At CORNELL, ed. Gavriel Shapiro. Also there is some more by Alfred Appel in his book "Nabokov's Dark Cinema." Worth a look.
Maybe my computer is old, but everytime I go on the Vice webpage my computer crashes.
Jeet
Are the advertisements from the Church of Scientology really necessary?
Y'know, I noticed that myself. Those are automated as part of google adsense. I wonder if we can turn them off? But then again, we are trying to sell Comics Comics: The Movie About Comics to Tom Cruise, so…. whateve it takes?
there's also, i believe, a reference to otto messmer in lolita (humbert humbert includes in his list of other pseudonyms he'd considered both otto otto and mesmer mesmer). granted, nabokov didn't spell mesmer the same was as the cartoonist's name and i'm not sure messmer was widely credited as the creator of felix the cat by the time nabokov wrote lolita, but it seems pretty unlikely to me that this would be a coincidence.
Ben Katchor's a big Nabokov fan. That's all I got in the "Nabokov / Comics" file…