Now even literary magazines, the last bastion of reading, are being invaded by comics! But the comics are cool and…well, literary. The Virginia Quarterly Review has been serializing Art Spiegelman’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@?*!” A portion of it is online, and the new Fall issue just came out with a new installment. You can see an excerpt of the cartoon here.

The fall issue of VQR also includes a special fiction supplement with a cover by Chris Ware, which you can see here. The supplement features original fiction with famous writers as characters and includes contributions from Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Lethem, Elizabeth Gaffney, and Edmund White among others. Ware’s cover alone provides hours of reading, but The Beat will need her special magic “reading glasses” to view it!

[Thanks to Kevin Morrissey for the links.]