comics commencement

May 20th, 2007

Today I drove down to White River Junction to see the Center for Cartoon Studies’ first ever graduation ceremony. Here’s everyone hanging out on the street in front of the school. There was a very impressive thesis exhibition by the eighteen graduating students. This school is really amazing. Here’s an excellent article about it that ran recently in the Christian Science Monitor. At least I thought it was excellent until I got to the sentence, “And the professionals who pass through as guest lecturers – as many as 15 a semester – are luminaries of the comics world. Mr. Spiegelman. Chris Ware. Alison Bechdel.”

You would think a person would find that flattering, but it’s actually rather mortifying. It’s like saying, Tolstoy. Nabokov. Borat. Or maybe Garbo. Dietrich. Aniston. Don’t worry, I’m not fishing for reassurance. Just a little perspective.