![]() Besides, you think, tumblers falling in the back of your mind like a key falling into an ancient lock, the clues were there all along. (And you’re really not ready for the conversation about the enduring outsize influence of Sean Landers’ “Genius Lessons” on American cartooning.) The era of the semi-ironic guilty pleasure came to an abrupt end at the waters’ edge of the Aughts, and in hindsight it should come as little surprise that those waters were the Dead. It’s like you weren’t even paying attention to SPIN lo those years ago. This was the Grateful Fuckin Dead! Game over, man! This wasn’t just any critical reassessment. Only this wasn’t some previously discarded slab of AM Gold whose virtues stood undiminished by parody. Think about how it became cool to like the Carpenters in the early 90s, after Todd Haynes’ Superstar in ‘87 and Sonic Youth’s quaalude-tastic “Superstar” in ‘93 blew the doors open. ![]() It stuck out to me at the time because it was a late example of precisely the kind of semi-ironic revivalism that had typified hipster curatorial discourse throughout the 90s, a time when the so-called guilty pleasures from past decades could only be smuggled back into the mainstream with proverbial oven mitts. Stephen Malkmus has always been a fan, and for some reason he was talking about the Dead a lot around the promotional tour for Real Emotional Trash (he may have discussed the band earlier, but that was where the influence became pronounced enough to be discussed). Seemed like it became cool to like the Dead again right when I started to ease out of the field. Now, I haven’t really been a music writer of any note for a decade, so my union card is out of date. You still see Deadhead stickers on Cadillacs, sometimes even taped over Black Flag decals. The band’s estate still does brisk business, having successfully and rather improbably managed to sell the Dead to subsequent generations. Came up with the likes of Big Brother & the Holding Company and Jefferson Airplane, performed at Woodstock (though they’re not in the film so you wouldn’t know). The Grateful Dead were a rock & roll band who got their start in the mid-1960s, playing shows in and around the Bay Area during a famously fecund period in the history of popular music. ![]() It is because of my deep respect for the man behind Fante Bukowski - or as it’s called in my house, Why Did You Make A Comic Book About My Mid-Twenties? - that I have recently read a comic book about the Grateful Dead. Not every good cartoonist gets the luxury of prolificacy in these waning days of the American experiment, so it’s worth noting when you find it. I’ve championed his work in a number of venues over the years, and he’s been consistent both in terms of prolificacy and of marking milestones of gradual but implacable improvement with every subsequent release. Noah Van Sciver has long been one of my favorite cartoonists.
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