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It looks all very overdrawn and hideous; the wine is made from the same substance as the shrimps and there’s a nauseous quality to it all which I suspect is not so much intentional as the artist’s normal view of the world. Note that the Joker’s coat folds right over left in the universal manner of women’s coats instead of that of menswear, left over right. I apologise for picking on this artist, but I see the same problem all over the place. It can happen because the artist is looking in a mirror, but the overwhelming reason in the last twenty years is that comic book artists generally speaking, though there are a few fashion plates to give exception to the rule, are the worst dressed people in the world who mostly get around in t-shirts and draw people in leotards. Editors too, otherwise somebody would have picked up the mistake. The only other explanation is that it’s intentional, in which case I’m full of baloney*. But if I arrived at the pub with a coat like that, somebody would have ridiculed me, probably Evans. Everybody else in the room has their coat open, and if I had done it intentionally I’d have made sure the reader knew it by showing all the others folding the opposite way.

Since I worked in illustration for years I can blame a lot of illustrator-cartoonists for the way my work looks now, like Quentin Blake and Ronald Searle, and on an on. And some movies, like Local Hero or Gregory’s Girl, and a lot of writers, like Twain and Thurber and Perelman and Milhauser.

I’ve never read much Dickens and I remember a quote from Maurice Sendak to the effect that in Dickens everything is alive; the chair and the table are alive and so is the fire in the grate, and they all have character. So I’m starting with Great Expectations, and I’ll work my way through some, likely not all, Dickens. Watch for the Otterloops to be sent to the poorhouse.

There is a street vendor in my neighborhood named Chino, who sells comics. I see him whenever I get off the subway at 86th street surrounded by his friends all talking about who would win in a fight, but none of that normal arcane bullshit “Who would win a fight: Superman vs Batman,” more like “Gorilla Grodd vs the Hulk,” kind of stuff. Other times, the discussion would turn to what happened (or didn’t) happen in the latest issue of Secret Invasion or trying to wrap their eight heads together to figure out “What the fuck is up with that Final Crisis bizness, Son?”