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Five Star consists of four sections printed on heavy, expensive stock. They’re called the A Section, Culture, Focus, and Words, and the first three—all but the tabloid literary section—are broadsheets, roughly 13 by 23 inches. That was a pretty standard size in the day when newspapers were newspapers, but it’s zaftig by current standards, two inches wider than the present Tribune, which was narrowed by half an inch in 2007 and another inch in February. The dummy’s 56 pages in all, with a coffee-table heft that sends a message: read me or don’t, but your home will feel tonier for having me in it.

Maybe I’m groping for analogies, but Five Star suggests to me the day Hollywood’s knees stopped knocking and it hit back at television with CinemaScope. Five Star is the antithesis of RedEye. It’s not portable and it’s not disposable. For one thing, the pages are simply too big and heavy to negotiate on a bus or train; for another, you’d be barely done with one article when you pulled into your stop.

Read the whole story:

Your New Sunday Tribune? | Media | Chicago Reader by Mike Miner.

the psychiatrist whose 222 boxes of papers the Library of Congress has opened to the public. In comics lore, Dr. Wertham has become something of a cryptic figure himself. But long before Tipper Gore, Edwin Meese, Andrea Dworkin, and our current crop of anti-video game crusaders took their turns at policing the national palette, Wertham was on the job, insisting that comics turned America’s kids into crooks and worse.

He laid it all out in his 1954 best seller, The Seduction of the Innocent.

via Papers of anti-comic book crusader now open to scholars.

In the 50′s comics were often sold along with racy detective and true confessions kind of pulp fiction. The comics were often very good stories, and some of them were sort of political in a sci-fi kind of way. The one where an helmeted astronauts need to save the world, and when one of them does, he takes off his helmet — and DRUM ROLL — he is a black guy, got Mad Magazine’s William Gaines an invitation to appear in front of Joe McCarthy’s HUAC committee.

While calmer educators who were in touch with reality believed that reading was reading, and thus, reading comics would build reading skills, there were many who feared that comics might make kids …. think?

I just remember hours of intense reading pleasure, reading my comic books over and over. Oh, and then Grandpa cleaned out his attic and without asking, threw my collection away.

Thanks to my pal Len Strazewski, for re-introducing me to comics via his own and stuff like Watchman, Vendetta, and Sandman. Oh, and I don’t go with the Wonder Woman, “Lesbian counterpart of Batman” either.

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• This Week in Comics (chicagoist.com)

in 2014 Americans will be spending $1.5 billion on online newspaper subscriptions and $5 billion on imaginary objects. Maybe I find this ridiculous because I’m a reporter and my sympathies lie with the newspaper industry.

via MediaPost Publications Virtual Goods Worth More than Real News: Curmudgeon 08/27/2010.

So this does sound like “amusing ourselves to death,” “fiddling while Rome burns,” doesn’t it? Folks will spend money in virtual worlds, to buy everything from a hot avatar to a pig for their Farmville, but they can’t or won’t pay for news. Hmm. Time for some kind of new model. Perhaps that ought to be a model of civic engagement or citizenship education, not necessarily another business plan.

Vince Hunter considers himself tech-savvy, but never realized the newest “app” on his iPhone would thwart a burglary while he was out of town.

via iPhone ‘app’ thwarts burglary for out-of-town couple | wfaa.com | Home Page.

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