![]() ![]() Panter, also a virtuoso, but rooted in punk, riffs on Goya and Picasso and Ukiyo-e prints and medieval illuminated manuscripts along with Dick Tracy and the Fantastic Four. Ware's title characters and alter egos the work is surpassingly sad and beautiful. Ware's craftsmanship and supernatural ability to draw serve a singular, melancholy vision that mixes allusions to mechanical drawings, bygone comic artists, Charlie Brown and Superman (the caped crusader "as signifier of lost illusions," as the show's co-curator John Carlin, puts it). It spotlights artists like Chris Ware and Gary Panter, amazing state-of-the-art talents and endearing in the tradition of all those shy, gifted kids who drew endlessly in their rooms when other kids wouldn't play with them, dreaming about someday telling the world, "I told you so." This was a pity, for the obvious reasons, and also because the Jewish Museum scrambled to fill the gap he left by appending a half-baked display of superhero comic artists, some great although in general reinforcing the exact cliché about comics just being schlock for kids that the exhibition was conceived to undo. Art Spiegelman, one of the masters, who helped instigate the exhibition, felt so aggrieved by the circumstances that at nearly the 11th hour he pulled his work. Organized by the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where it made a splash, it has come east cut in size and split between the far-flung Newark and Jewish museums, in which it looks cramped. ![]() For many people, I suspect, it will be a revelation too. "Masters of American Comics" is a landmark and a pleasure. ![]()
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