Lileks reviews (his assessment) the greatest comic-book cover ever.

If he’s really a dummy killer, we need to send him to Washington.

Also, a screed on the NEA:

The Federal-funding argument was lost a long time ago. As with so many things, opposition to Federal funding is equated to opposition to the thing itself. The existence and healthy survival of these things before Federal intervention is meaningless; what seems to count above all is the satisfaction some get from knowing there is a National Something or other, complete with assistant special directors for coordinating things, because God knows we couldn’t produce art if someone in Washington wasn’t coordinating it all.

But before we go on, consider the National Endowment. I’m just guessing, but I’ll bet the National Endowment for the Arts was conceived as some sort of middlebrow self-improvement program – sending Pablo Casals LPs to schools, helping small towns put on “Our Town,” subsidizing museums so they could put on challenging works like gigantic Calder mobiles, and paying off the survivors when the damned thing snapped a cable and carved a tour group in stir-fry slices. I’m sure it still funds good things. But let us risk a headache and try to think of a few art forms we managed to create without its assistance:

Jazz

Blues

Rock and Roll

Every movie made in America

Skyscrapers

Painting that looks like something

Sculpture that looks like someone

As it happens I like modern art, so this isn’t some philistine sneer at funny pitchers what don’t look like Whistler’s Mama. I’m not even opposed in principle to state funding of the art, for two reasons: 1) the monarchs and the church did a fine job of it for millennia, and 2) if some small town wants to help defray the cost of a play in the school gym, fine. But I have to draw a line, because if I say it’s good to support orchestras in large cities with Federal money, then anyone gets to support their favorite kind of art, even if it happens to be guillotining paper-mache replicas of the Founding Fathers on Presidents Day. You get your art, I get mine.

Read all. The banks are discovering what artists should have long understand — when you start to take handouts from the government, your integrity is hopelessly compromised.

I should note that it gets better:

What does he propose?

. . . and move into a broad, far-reaching series of projects that question the role of religion and commerce in the life of the nation

Ah. Of course. It’s the perfect distillation: take the money from people who have used commerce to succeed in the arts, so we can question the role of commerce in the life of the nation. Ideally, common people will become Aware and have Consciousness Raised from its gutter-state to the Olympian heights where one can see a magnificent future, a time when the role of commerce has been questioned with the force and incisive detail you only get from people who can’t get anyone to pay them for what they do.

To quote the Iron Lady, the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other peoples’ money.