![]() The books were selling well and generating revenue for more arcane projects, so who cared? When Martin and I complained bitterly to Felix Lowe, then the director of the Smithsonian Institution Press, that we had been misled, he shrugged off our complaint. The color proofs that my co-editor Martin Williams and I saw were beautiful, but they were from a sheet-fed press, and the actual books were printed, inadequately, on a rotary press. The prices of old comic books were on the way up, and any payment was going to fall short of what the comics would be worth in just a few years' time. I raised hell, and the contractor ultimately wrote a check that was as much as I could reasonably ask for but was, of course, not large enough. When I picked up the comics after the separations were completed, I found many of them damaged, obviously through careless handling, so that, for example, the covers of my copy of Pogo Possum No. But it seemed ridiculous to demand more rigorous supervision of the comic books than the National Gallery required for its masterpieces. In retrospect, I should have accompanied the comic books through the separation process, never letting them out of my sight. ![]() The contractor's offices were within walking distance of my home in Alexandria, so there was none of the angst that might accompany shipping the comics around the country. I was deeply concerned that the company making the separations would handle the comics carefully, and I was assured repeatedly that it was a premier operation that did a lot of work forWashington's greatest art museum, the National Gallery of Art, and other gold-standard clients. Most of the color separations were made directly from the comic books, for the sake of the best possible quality. The comic books that were the sources of the reprints in that book belonged to me and a small number of trusting and helpful collectors. Reading Don's comment, and thinking about the shortcomings of the Porky set, put me in mind of my own experience many years ago in assembling the Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics. And if you want to see a Disney movie that is truly memorable, that looks seriously at life and death, that was born of genuine feeling rather than sophisticated scavenging, let me recommend an 80-year-old relic called Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.ĭecember 11, 2017: S-s-s-son of a B-b-b-b.ĭon Benson, in a comment I've posted at this link, offers some information about the DVD reissues of items that are, if anything, even more obscure than the cartoons in the new Porky Pig set. To ask such questions, even with tongue in cheek, is to take Coco much too seriously. And is there an anglophone Purgatory on the other side of the Rio Grande? Come to think of it, if, as the ghost Hector says, you can survive in the afterlife only so long as you're remembered by people who knew you when you were alive, doesn't that mean that almost everyone in the afterlife (the villain most definitely included, since he was killed in a 1942 accident) is going to evaporate within a few decades at most? The partying would seem to get in the way of being shriven of one's sins. But it's one of those enjoyable movies that may become less enjoyable in retrospect if you can't resist the urge to pick at some of its loose threads.įor one thing, the afterlife it depicts is very culturally specific if what we see is Purgatory (a reasonable guess, since Mexico is a Catholic country), it's Purgatory with mariachi bands. (In how many animated features does a seemingly benign character, like de la Cruz in Coco, turn out to be a truly bad guy? I would count them but I'd run out of fingers pretty quickly.)Ĭoco is, I hasten to say, a very good-looking and enjoyable movie, with only a few inconsequential slow spots (although I wonder what very young children make of it). And beyond that, Coco has been cunningly assembled from so many sources, familiar and otherwise, that it seems foolish to single out one of them. That's not to say that Coco owes its existence to Kevin Brockmeier something like the idea of "the city" is present in other sources, too, like Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld novels. If you've seen Pixar's new feature, Coco, that premise may sound familiar. In the book-which I've read only in part-our planet's dead populate "the city," which is located in an alternative reality, but their afterlives depend on the memories of the living. There's a novel by Kevin Brockmeier, published more than ten years ago, titled The Brief History of the Dead.
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