NYT art review: "Masters of American Comics"

Masters of American Comics - Newark Museum - The Jewish Museum - Review - Art - New York Times: "“Masters of American Comics” is a landmark and a pleasure. For many people, I suspect, it will be a revelation too.

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. 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.

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 clich�about comics just being schlock for kids that the exhibition was conceived to undo.

Good grief.

Still, the show shouldn’t be missed. 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.”"