Ah, The Scholarly Life

Just got the proofs for a book review I did for a Comparative Lit journal called INTERTEXTS. They were sent Tom Sito's excellent history of animation unions and weren't sure who they knew who would review it. An old friend of mine is an Associate Editor there and he dropped me a line asking if I wanted to do it.

It's been a while since I was in academia; those two Masters Degrees seem like a million years ago now. But once you've laid down your opinions with footnotes, you never really lose the urge. You'll have to troop to your local university library to read it if you're interested. I wrote it during the Writer's Guild strike (if you think movies have a long lead time, try journals) and it's already a snapshot because of that.

As soon as you stop writing, your work sits still while you float on ahead; I've known a lot of writers who feel uncomfortable with this fact. Some folks will keep tinkering and tinkering and never quite finish. I suppose I've been like that myself, but that's the great part of writing graphic novels--it's done when it's drawn. Well, you can change bits in lettering, sure, but there's no going back on the big choices. It's for the best.

I'll employ fair use and give you the last paragraph:

"History repeats itself with painful regularity in the case of animation unions; the lessons are forgotten as a new generation of animators, grateful to be working in the dream factories, make costly sacrifices that work against them later. Drawing The Line is a cautionary tale for the artists and writers who want to join in telling the established epics of our time. The warning isn’t that you should prepare for a beating; it’s that you should prepare for a fight."