Smith Magazine has another Harvey Pekar comic with drawings by Sean Pryor. It’s called Searchin’. I buy every book Pekar publishes. His collected editions keep me fascinated for weeks because I try to read them slowly to make them last.
Pekar makes comic books out of the ordinary. Of course they are much more interesting than anything Marvel has published in forty years. He’s actually one of America’s finest short story writers. No, wait, he is America’s finest short story writer.
I don’t think there is a more significant American comic book writer than Harvey Pekar. Now he is making comics on the web. Smith Magazine offers the first installment of what promises to be a series. It’s called The Pekar Project.
The first story is Pekar & Crumb: Talkin’ ’bout Art. It’s drawn by Tara Seibel.
This might be the best thing on the web today.
Quimby The Mouse from This American Life on Vimeo.
Here’s a brilliant animation designed by comic artist Chris Ware. The music is by Andrew Bird and the animation is by John Kuramoto. The little tale of a terribly abusive relationship between a mouse and a head is disturbingly hilarious. I love the way everything moves with such clean precision to the the music. Truly creepy and charming at the same time. How’d they do that?
Look at the image to the left. If that image disturbs you to the point of banning the comic book, you are unintelligent. No doubt about it. It disturbs Apple so much that they’ve removed the comic book from their App Store. Clear censorship. The comic book is by author Cory Doctorow who has written many fiction and non-fiction books. Most of his work supports open source creativity and remix culture. I suspect that there’s more to Apple’s censorship of this work than meets the eye. Apple hates open source stuff. They lock down their products like nobody’s business. They even think it’s illegal for you to make your own applications to load onto your own iPhone or iPod Touch.
Recent events at Apple and Amazon paint a disturbing picture of what is going on with these technology-based companies as they try to handle creative content. It seems that the more efficiently a company designs and builds technology, the more interested they become in controlling and censoring content. This is the fundamental core of fascism. It is a very dangerous idea to give control of publishing and content to these companies. It must not be allowed to happen. They do not care one whit about freedom of expression.
What has become very obvious over the past year to any discerning observer is that Apple is a far right-wing conservative organization with truly frightening ideas of what content should be made available on a publishing platform. Censoring the image of the Ork getting his head chopped off in a comic book is just what I would expect from an Islamic fundamentalist group or a right-wing Christian organization. If the Taliban opened their own app store, I doubt they would publish an application that features a bikini-clad female chopping Muhammad’s head off.
So here it is – for all intents and purposes as far as creative expression is concerned: Apple = Taliban.
I think Apple has some very smart engineers and designers working for it, but is burdened with a high-functioning nitwit at its helm: Steve Jobs. We hear a lot about how smart this fellow is, but he appears to be about as clever as your average car salesman. Apple needs to dump this guy quickly and figure out how to run itself as a content distributor because Mr. Jobs is not up to the job.
In the 21st Century you don’t run around censoring creative work in the United States of America. You do that in China, North Korea, Cuba, Syria, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Singapore, Burma, etc.
I would suggest Mr. Jobs apply for a job in one of these places. They would simply love to have him.
Marvel.com is posting all the original Spider Man television episodes for free viewing. They originally aired in 1967 on ABC. They are actually very good. Highly recommended. This is the first episode.
