I’ll happily admit that I usually read Newsarama when I need a good laugh, even if arrives through gritted teeth. Today, though, Newsarama offers something really interesting… entirely on its own terms! No ironic context whatsoever!
Joanna Estep, illustrator of Tokyopop’s Roadsong (written by Allan Gross) offers the first installment in a very engaging three-part look at “the design and manipulation of the mechanism of time in sequential art, and how it can apply to other media.” Think of it as a nice on-line companion piece for Matt Madden’s wonderful 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style, which arrives in comic shops today.
Estep also manages to take me back in time by mentioning her education at Ohio University. I went to a college in Ohio, probably many, many years before Estep did, and my classmates always had kind of an attitude about OU. They took the school’s “Public Ivy” designation way too seriously, clinking their wine coolers together, retying the sweaters around their necks, and thanking a higher power (probably the Republican National Committee) that they didn’t have to study in Athens, of all places.
Weirdest of all was that this attitude almost invariably came from students in journalism, theatre, and fine arts, in spite of the fact that everyone with a lick of sense knew that OU had better programs in all of those disciplines. (OU also seemed to be the educational destination of many of my more unfortunate late-adolescent crushes. That’s neither here nor there, though it does add to the mystique of the place for me.)