14 YEARS IN THE MAKING
Ron Mann's "Comic Book Confidential" will see DVD release on July 23, if a review on filmcritic.com is anything to go by. Christopher Null writes: "The new DVD features a few extras, including an introduction from... wait for it... Kevin Smith."
INFO: Filmcritic.com
posted by Egon on Wednesday, July 17, 2002

STEADY, MAN
Ralph Steadman is furious, according to The Western Mail (in a story passed along by icWales and later Newsarama). Because this is UK news, we can safely say that the Pembrokeshire County Council has scuppered a proposed plan for a Steadman gallery and arts center in Haverfordwest. According to Steadman, the arts center, to be housed in a supposed former mental asylum, was designed as "a place of regeneration. It's not for me. I was only the pretext because of my association with Haverfordwest many years ago when I did my military service as a Radar Operator." Steadman and the Asylum Foundation negotiated with the County Council for 18 months before the plans were finally rejected. "I did not reckon," delcared Steadman, "with the enemy within."
INFO: icWales
posted by Egon on Wednesday, July 17, 2002

MASTER WORK?
Art Spiegelman damns with faint praise "B. Krigstein Volume One" in The New Yorker. Spiegelman is disappointed by the book's failure to adequately address Krigstein's artistic achievements; he mentions the book's publisher, Fantagraphics, but entirely fails to mention author Greg Sadowski's name. Spiegelman dispenses with the book itself early on: "As it stands, the current book is best read as a poignant bildungsroman about a disappeared type: the mid-century lower-middle-class New York Jewish intellectual, drunk on art and culture, struggling to survive morally and aesthetically in the commercial wilderness." The rest of the piece is given over to Spiegelman's own praise and analysis of Krigstein's body of work, topped off with a twist ending of sorts.
INFO: New Yorker.com
posted by Egon on Monday, July 15, 2002