Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware contribute stories to this Zadie Smith anthology of new fiction, The Book of Other People. Charles Burns illustrates the covers. It also has prose from the likes of Dave Eggers, Jonathan Lethem, and George Saunders. All of this makes for yet another beautiful Penguin Books artifact. [Note: I originally found out about this book via the great Blog Flume which has some scans of the cartoonists' work.]

I liked the punk rock earnestness of this GOOD magazine essay about the coming-of-age of contemporary graphic novelists like Clowes, Bagge & Ware. You gotta love anyone who can work Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, Charles Peterson, Estrus Records, Hate, Love & Rockets, Oui, Jasper Johns, Ted Nugent, Tron and at least three liberal arts colleges into 750 words.

... one copyright infringement at a time. A friend just sent me this cellphone pic, and writes, "We had a meeting today going over 401K stuff, and the slideshow from Principal Financial Group included the attached slide. I asked the guy if he knew who put this together but he didn't know." Talk about random. What does this picture signify? Is the guy in the photo supposed to be Chris Ware? (He isn't.) If so, are we to think that Chris Ware likes to bring giant xeroxes of his work to his financial advisor's office and participate in photo shoots? It this like that Diff'rent Strokes episode where Gordon Jump takes pictures in his back office of Arnold and Dudley their tidy whities and safari hats? Do cartoonists even have 401Ks? I kind of didn't think so.