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Have you been missing actual esthetic debate about the state of comics? US TOO. you should be happy, then, to know that here’s a new blog in town called Next Issue! and it’s by Xeric winner Geoff Grogan (Look out! Monsters!) and Kevin Mutch (the Blurred Vision anthology and more.) It starts out with a shot over the bow right at the literary comics crowd:

For all of the promise of daring and innovation implied by the sobriquet “art”comics (as its been applied to a handful of comics creators and publishers in recent years), anyone familiar with developments in contemporary art of the last 60 years and undertaking a sampling of recent “art comics” must surely feel as though they’ve unearthed a time capsule from an era pre-1960, if not pre-WWII. For with few exceptions, the dominant visual modes seem to be stuck in some version of the modernist-past, and a relatively distant past at that. Jumping into the art comics scene today is rather like finding oneself transported to a moment where expressionism and surrealism were still radical and new.


That’s gonna go over about as well as The Comics Journal did in 1977, methinks. Anyway there’s lots to chew on and become irritable about — or merely debate — in the posts and comments.