Hey Kids! Comics!
Via Arts & Letters Daily comes this great Toronto Star Ideas section piece by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester about egghead reaction to comic strips and comic books over the past 100 years or so. The familiar yadda-yadda abour Fredric Wertham is present and accounted for (along with asinine denunciations that appeared in the serioso pages of '40s-era New Republic and elswhere).
But the real fun is with respectable folks who really dug comics. Here's acid-tongued Dorothy Parker copping to a comic jones:
"For a bulky segment of a century, I have been an avid follower of comic strips--all comic strips," Parker wrote. "This is a statement made with approximately the same amount of pride with which one would say, 'I've been shooting cocaine into my arm for the past 25 years.'"
Other highbrow fans included Gilbert Seldes (who gave high-brow props to Krazy Kat in the influential 1924 tome The Seven Lively Arts), Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and Leslie Fiedler.
Whole thing here.
