Pollux writes:

“Some reviewers in Tucson and Kansas City, if they talk about American Splendor at [all,] are gonna say stuff like, ‘This is a comic book? Then why ain’t I laughin’?’ I know that, I’m ready for it.”

These are words spoken by Harvey Pekar in The New American Splendor Anthology (1991), or rather “Harvey Pekar,” the persona who inhabited volumes of comics. As figures and scenes from the Bible were rendered again and again by countless medieval and Renaissance artists, so Pekar was depicted by various comic illustrators, Robert Crumb not the least among them.

Pollux writes:

“Why should I be afraid of the camera?” Gary Coleman asked, in an April 1979 interview in Ebony Jr. magazine (Vol. 6, No. 10). “If it wore a black cape and had fangs, I’d be scared of it. But since it doesn’t, then why be afraid? There’s really nothing to this.” Coleman was eleven at the time. Diff’rent Strokes, of which Coleman was the life and soul, had already been on the air for four months.

By the time Coleman celebrated his 21st birthday, the actor had attempted to take control of his life, and his finances, by suing his parents and former manager for mismanaging his $3.8 million trust fund. His life had become a mixture of misfortune and success. Celebrities attended the actor’s 21st birthday. The mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, declared February 8 to be “Gary Coleman Day.” Coleman cut into an enormous birthday cake shaped like a train (the actor was a model train aficionado).

Emily Gordon writes:

I was very sorry to hear from illustrator and cartoonist Derek Van Gieson that John Kane passed away a few days ago. John, a New Yorker cartoonist, was also a dedicated musician and devotee of that small instrument with a big heart, the ukulele. He sent me many ukulele links and had a YouTube channel dedicated to them; I’ll find it to link to, but right now, the thought makes me too sad.

John may have been getting up there in age by the time I caught up with him, but he was more animated and on the ball than any twelve youngsters combined. He was always going out to exhibitions, learning about some new technology, or improving himself via activities like judo. One of his most recent passions was taking up the uke. He had five models last time I remember. He’d watch Youtube clips and learn from the masters. I know he drove Sam and Sid nuts with all of his uke talk as there was usually something happening in that realm that he was very enthusiastic about. After lunch we’d walk down to the subway and talk music shop or just shop about guitars. He always had a unique theory he was thinking about or a new way of experiencing something that he’d often share. More often than not, I’d come home from The New Yorker luncheons, thinking I was one of the luckiest bastards in the world to be in the court of these fascinating gentlemen. Eventually our friendship became quite solid and if I didn’t make it one tuesday for lunch, either John or Sid would get ahold of me to ask me what the hell happened. I can’t really express how much that meant to me.

Pollux writes:

“If Mr. Salinger is around town, perhaps he’d like to come in and talk to me about New Yorker stories.” So William Keepers Maxwell, Jr., The New Yorker’s fiction editor, wrote in 1947. Salinger would contribute several short stories to The New Yorker that year, beginning a career that was at once fascinating and strange, and in many ways, tragic.

There seems to be only one photo of J.D. Salinger: the black-and-white author photo that graced millions of copies of Catcher in the Rye. There are, of course, other photos of Salinger, but he will remain for us the young author with the 1950’s style haircut and intelligent face whose stories have become required reading in the library of American literature.

Martin Schneider writes:

Some people, you figure they will just always be there. David Levine was drawing caricatures for The New York Review of Books well before my birth, and it was only reasonable to suppose he'd be at it years after my death, too. It's difficult to imagine a world without a steady succession of new Levine drawings in it; it's not merely perverse fancy to wonder whether Levine's death makes it impossible for The New York Review of Books to keep publishing articles. That is how strong that association was.

You may have guessed that I grew up in a household with The New York Review of Books in it. Has there ever been a connection between an illustrator and a periodical as