Sealion II

A couple of my friends were saying that they were looking forward to this movie, and I said that I didn't much like the look of it; it seemed disrespectful to make the Battle of Thermopylae into a comic book.

This got some blank looks, and then one of my friends told me that it was a comic book, by the guy who did Sin City.

Which set me down right sharp, but it made me think. There are some things I really don't care to see rendered as comic books because I think they're too..."serious" isn't quite the word I'm looking for, but it will have to do. And yet I would say that comic books (or, as I might say, "graphic novels") are not, per se, necessarily less serious as art than novels of the ordinary sort. (Viz. Maus, Sandman, et al.)

I seem to be using a lot of Latin today.

I suppose that I maintain a subliminal association of "books with pictures" as low art, rather than high. (What on earth would William Blake think?) Which leads us in the direction of the vexed question (which roscivs mentioned in his blog the other day): what is art, anyway?

No answers here (today) but it's a good one to chew on for a while.

I've now gone from an integer to "What is Art?" in one blog post. That's the way we do it here; the only subject of discussion is "everything at once".