HOW THE NEW YORK TIMES SCREWED UP

It isn’t often that we get to correct that glorious font of journalistic accuracy, the New York Times, so we take an understandable if perverse pleasure in the occasion. The nation’s newspaper of record announced on Sunday, February 15, that “for the first time in its history, the Louvre is having a comic strip exhibition. The showing, ‘Small Design: The Louvre Invites Comics,’ features the words of five authors,” which are then named — Nicholas de Crecy, Marc-Antoine Mathieu, Eric Liberge, Hirohiko Araki, and Bernar Yslaire, all of whom “have used or are using the Louvre as part of their stories.”

But this wasn’t the first time comic strips have hung on the walls of the world’s mustiest art museum. The first time may have been in 1967 when the National Cartoonists Society was invited to assemble materials for a display tracing the history of the art of the comic strip, and the French mounted the show in six rooms of the Decorative Arts Gallery of the museum and issued a 256-page illustrated catalogue. The show’s main emphasis was on the American comic strip, but examples of Egyptian and Chinese narrative art were included as well as American pop artists. Milton Caniff was delighted. “It’s great to be hanging up there with Da Vinci,” he told a reporter in London where he stopped en route to the Paris exhibition. Later, he described the exhibit: “they blew up individual panels. Giant size — three by four feet. Really something.”

The exhibit ran from April 7 to June 12 and featured panel discussions and seminars, screenings of animated films, and even a fashion show. After closing at the Louvre, the show moved on to Brussels, Amsterdam, Lausanne, and Rome. All of this impressive information has been ripped from the pages of an equally impressive tome, Meanwhile: A Biography of Milton Caniff, Creator of Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon (my magnum opus, you might say, which is still offered for sale at the usual destination, www.RCHarvey.com; merely $35, including p&h).

Comments

[Ben Carlsen]

Interesting that not only is this not the first time there's been a comic strip exhibition, the one in '67 sounds like it was much larger than the current one, which includes only five "authors."