Speaking of the New Yorker and cartoon issues (we were), I heard a great interview with Art Spiegelman on the radio the other day. He mentioned that our culture experiences everything in quotation marks. We are defined by nihilistic irony. (I'm paraphrasing "big-time".) He said that as he's getting older, he's tired of experiencing everthing like this. So he's starting a movement called neo-sincerity where the quotations marks are gone, yet there is an acknowledgement that the quotation marks (irony) could exist. (eg. His friends used to wear safety pins in their ears...and now they're using them on their kids' diapers.) So there's that. It was also interesting to hear that Scott McCloud was a student of his. I need to read Maus.