GRAPHIC VIOLENCE: This NYTMagazine piece on graphic novels is fine–nothing desperately new, silly ending, but certainly not a bad piece–but mostly worth reading for the bits where Alan Moore says stuff.

I also noticed a parenthetical, in re Adrian Tomine: “(He became an English major at the University of California, Berkeley, because the art department had no use for representation, let alone comics.)” That anti-representational shtik is something the awesome Carla Speed McNeil talked about at last year’s Small Press Expo, as well (including a really funny story about a professor who claimed to produce “narrative art,” but the narrative consisted of the professor standing in front of his blurry weird pictures telling people what happened in them!).

And surely there are more non-anomie-related graphic novels (again Moore has the better term: “big expensive comic books”) than this article suggests? I hope so, anyway, because apathy’s a drag. If slacker anomie is the alternative I am all the more willing to wave the pom-poms for genre fiction. Not that I was ever unwilling!