It's been a low-key, recovery kind of week, which is why I don't really have any art to show off today.  Oh, I printed a handful of etching yesterday, and I'll be hand-coloring those on Monday, and I'm going to be printing those woodcuts I've been putting off printing for about a month now then, too.  But that's then, and this is now.   And what I have been doing this week is trying to refill the ol' bean, so I can have some good ideas when I sit down to work hard again.

I also polished off a few comic books/books on comics.  None of them were Earth-shattering (Ex Machina volume 7, Gipsy Star volume 1, and Underground Classics: the Transformation of Comics Into Comix), but the underground comix book seemed like a desperate, belated plea for artistic credibility.  One of the dichotomies of sequential art is that the actual artwork used to produce a book doesn't necessarily closely resemble what is printed.  In fact, what shows up in print is considered the final version, and is what the work is produced with in mind.  In this book, the authors chose to shoot the artwork as if they were pieces of fine art (complete with errant marks, corrected sections, white-out, and paper tone present), and most artists were represented with only one page or two, at best.  Considering also that comics are meted out not in individual pages but in complete stories (or at least chapters of larger stories), the book seemed to be compiled not with the intention of accurately representing the work and the artists of that era, but instead by which original pages the authors had access to.  As an overview of the genre, it was a functional introduction, but I would have much rather the authors visually present the work as it was intended, as well as finding short stories from the people they wanted to cover instead of giving random excerpts from their work.  But I guess it's inevitable that work that was intended to be anti-establishment would eventually be knocking at the door of the system, asking for a way in.