This article in the L.A. Times is all about the "slabbing" of comic books...sealing old issues in plastic so that their condition will not go down and their value will go up. Within the hobby, it's a controversial endeavor, though the "con" side seems to not go much past the notion that if something is designed to be read, it's a shame to render it unreadable. Maybe so. But if I owned a pristine Action Comics #1 and I had a sudden yearning to read it, I don't think I'd go pawing through that copy. I think I'd make do with a reprint.
What I think bothers some about slabbing is that it really institutionalizes the idea that rising back issue prices are mostly smoke 'n' mirrors. If you pay a thousand dollars for an old comic — let alone tens or hundreds of thousands — it's already not a reading experience. It's an investment experience predicated on the hope/knowledge that someone else will pay more some day for your copy. Ever since a mint condition Superman #1 topped a hundred bucks and we all marvelled at anyone paying even that much for one, that's what that part of collecting has been all about. Slabbing merely means we have to admit it.
This coming Saturday would have been the 94th birthday of Walt Kelly, one of the true greats of cartooning and the creator of Pogo Possum and his merry band of swampland goombahs. Would you like to know more about this extraordinary man? Well, this Friday, his extraordinary daughter Carolyn Kelly — also, a fine cartoonist — will be interviewed on Time Travel, a pop culture radio show hosted by Dan Hollis and Jeff O'Boyle and heard on WNRJ, 1510 AM on your dial in Hackettstown, New Jersey. Carolyn will be on the air live with them from 4 PM to 5 PM Eastern Time talking about her father and his work and her work and maybe even the forthcoming reprinting of The Complete Pogo from Fantagraphics Books.
Just on the slight chance that you are not within listening range of Hackettstown, you can hear the show over on the WNRJ website. And if you miss it there, all episodes of Time Travel are archived soon after on this page. There are many fine conversations there to be heard, including one with Yours Truly. But you can hear me all the time, especially on Stu Shostak's station. It will be a rare treat to hear Carolyn interviewed.
There isn't a lot of film footage of the great Tom Lehrer performing his wonderfully satiric songs. But Robert Spina, a loyal reader of this site, informed me of a couple of examples I'll be embedding this week. Here's the first one...
I don't know why this kind of thing amazes me these days but it does. A Journalism professor named Michael Skube wrote this column for the L.A. Times. The content of the column is pretty well summarized by its subtitle: "The hard-line opinions on weblogs are no substitute for the patient fact-finding of reporters."
Fair enough...and more than a little obvious. I don't know anyone who thinks weblogs are a substitute for the patient fact-finding of reporters. Some of us think that they're an important adjunct, and also that not enough reporters are doing that patient fact-finding these days. But a substitute? That sounds like Straw Man territory to me. Anyway, in his piece, Skube mentions several bloggers who don't do any real reporting and one of those names is that of Josh Marshall, whose Talking Points Memo website certainly does a fair amount of reporting and has even broken a number of stories that newspaper and TV reporters later picked up on. (Two examples of many: It was Marshall's site that first flagged Trent Lott's infamous remarks at Strom Thurmond's birthday party...remarks that soon cost Lott his post as Senate Minority Leader. And Marshall's site was reporting on the "outing" of Valerie Plame long before any of the mainstream press.)
So why did Skube cite Marshall as a blogger who didn't do reporting? Answer: He didn't. Skube says he hadn't visited Marshall's site when he wrote the article. Skube's editor, he says, stuck the name in there because he thought the piece needed more examples.
Isn't that kind of shoddy Journalism? The characterization of Marshall is offered as Skube's opinion...but he really didn't have that opinion. He was unfamiliar with Marshall's work and so accepts no responsibility for that opinion the way a blogger must accept reponsibility for what's on his blog. His editor decided the article didn't have sufficient examples (i.e., Skube had not done sufficient research for a piece complaining about others not doing sufficient research) so he added Marshall in as an example of Skube's thesis. And then Mr. Skube did not do the rather simple bit of reporting that it would have taken to log into Josh Marshall's website and see if it really was an example.
You can read Josh Marshall's summary of the whole story here.
August 21, 2007
