In addition to staying up til 1AM getting these 20×200 prints going, I’m guest-blogging this week for one of my favorite blogs: Joe Sullivan’s The Book Design Review (@theBDR). I‘ve made two posts so far I made three posts:

• David Mazzuchelli’s Asterios Polyp and the need for 3-D views of book cover design
• How publishers and authors can use Flickr to set up a Blogger Kit for their books
• King-Cat Comics by John Porcellino

All of the posts got me thinking about how to best present books online and make it easy to spread them around the internet. It was really fun: Joe has some really smart readers, so be sure to check the comments.

I’ll update this post with links as I go along. Next up is the design of John Porcellino’s King-Cat mini-comics and its successful transition to the book collections.

PS. This is how my second post on the Blogger’s Kit began (with doodles, of course):

see it bigger

Yesterday Meg and I went to the Texas Book Festival. We were hoping to catch Shalom Auslander at the book signing tent, but he didn’t show up, so we walked downtown and got some Jimmy Johns and ate it on the lawn of the capital. Beautiful day. We finished up lunch and went to the House Chamber (which is pimped out beyond belief with the most comfortable leather chairs I’ve ever sat in) to listen to Tom Perrotta read:

After that, we went to see the always-fantastic-certified-genius George Saunders:

That last panel is a response to a (kinda lengthy) question I asked in the Q & A: “You’ve written about Charles Schulz and Peanuts before. David Michaelis’s new biography questions whether Schulz was as good of a family man as we’ve been led to believe. You strike me as a genuine family man, and I detect the great theme of work vs. family in your writing. So what do you think is the relation between being a good artist and being a great family man, and which do you think is more important?”

That night, we walked downtown to see a screening of Little Children at the newly-reopened Alamo Ritz. I love Tom Perrotta, but he really seemed uncomfortable in the setting:

All in all, it was a great day.

I used to be a snob about the Harry Potter books. Meg devours them. She talked me into reading the first two, but I got sick of #3 after 90 pages of [in bumbling British accent] “Harry remembered his first year at Hogwarts when the blah blah blah blah blah…” and gave up on the series. “I’ll go see the movies,” I said.

Loved the Azkaban movie, thought Goblet was good, and Phoenix even better. (I still think a perfect Harry Potter movie would be directed by John Hughes, and it’d just be two hours of Harry, Hermione, Ron and the gang stuck in detention and talking about sex.

Ron: She’s a tease.

Hermione: I’m sure. Why don’t you just forget it.

Ron: Oh, you’re a tease and you know it. All girls are teases.

Harry: She’s only a tease if what she does gets you hot.

Hermione: I don’t do anything.

Luna: That’s why you’re a tease.

Ha! Anyways, I finally pulled the corncob out of my ass and read book #6 this week. And I loved it. I let go of my snobbery and loved it. Can’t wait to read #7 this weekend.

For other great posts on Harry and the gang, check out Maureen’s thoughts about it being a post 9-11 fairy tale, and Eddie Campbell’s thoughts and links.

Oh, and if you care what Michiko thinks…

Charles Burns’ BLACK HOLE is a graphic novel set in a Seattle suburb during the 70s. It follows a group of horny teenagers who contract an STD that basically turns them into mutants: they grow tails, they shed skins, some even grow second mouths. I decided to pick it up after listening to a pretty good hour long interview with Burns and Chris Ware. Since 1995, BLACK HOLE has been serialized in 12 installments, but having read none of them, I came to Burns’ work with fresh eyes: I’d only seen a small clip of BLACK HOLE in McSweeney’s 13, and his cover art for THE BELIEVER.

Reading it, I was reminded of John Neborak’s senior project presentation, in which he talked about the unique verbal/visual blend of comics as a narrative. Burns’ artwork is admirable, no doubt about it: his masterly brushwork is intricate and meticulous, and his command of black and white is great. However, when it comes to storyline, BLACK HOLE really falls flat for me. Mostly what you get from reading it is a sustained, creepy mood. Because the sexual metaphors that evoke this mood are purely visual (the vaginal gashes, the hot dogs roasting over an open fire), I’m wondering what BLACK HOLE would read like without any words.

I’d go on, but Meg sent me an e-mail that really summed it all up:

Graphic novels aren’t art and they aren’t a novel – they’re both, and too few graphic novelists (even the so-called “pros”) seem to get that. If either the art or the story aren’t really up to par it ends up detracting from the whole thing. I feel like so many graphic novels are written by men who are emotionally still teenagers in high school who get a big charge out of drawing scantily-clad women. Sometimes I just want to tell the authors to grow up a little. That’s what made a novel like FROM HELL so good, it rose above all that to tell an interesting story.

Couldn’t have said it any better myself. (And didn’t.)