Word: thors
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...magazines: hundreds and hundreds of comic books thrown together in one enormous heap that is truly awesome. Batman and Superman are there, and so are a legion of other familiar super heroes: Spiderman, the Incredible Hulk Wonder Woman, The Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Captain America, and the Mighty Thor...
...this, wrote the-I radical critic Théophile Thoré, "should be one of the primary democratic goals of young artists: Man does not exist in the arts of the past, in the arts of yesterday; and he still has to be invented." By this, Thoré (like the artists he spoke for) meant man as political creature, man seen in his manifest social relations-not the decorative peasants of Boucher or the squalid, undifferentiated social lump the French bourgeois imagined the proletariat to be. The task of realism was therefore to record, in Weisberg's phrase, "human...
Some pens are mightier than other pens. Last year the Supreme Court handed down an opinion that spelled harder times for thousands of publishers and their authors. In Thor Power Tool Co. vs. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, the court ruled that the company could not claim a reduced value on warehoused stock in order to lower its taxes. The accounting procedure, known as a writedown, was a standard legal loophole. Its plugging has allowed the IRS to move with its customary even heavyhandedness. "All the IRS is doing is carrying out regulations, that have been in force for many years...
...regulation will be even harder on first novelists, and is certain to curtail lesser-known writers' advances against royalties. The Hollywoodizing of publishing and the boom-or-bust psychology that pervades the industry have made it more difficult to place first novels and nonfiction without mass appeal. The Thor decision can only quicken this trend. Few publishers are likely to take risks on little-known authors without at least a guarantee of a tax break on his unsold books. First printings will be smaller, and second printings may become a rarity for trade books that are not bestsellers...
Fortunately, there is one author in a position to do something about this situation. Senator Daniel P. Moynihan (Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding) plans to introduce special legislation that would exempt publishers from the Thor ruling. The bill would join one sponsored by Senator Gaylord Nelson, who favors a moratorium on implementing Thor. In the meantime, publishers searching for loopholes might consider the tax credits available for energy conservation. Books stacked against the walls of warehouses might be considered insulation. For the more literary, who prefer a Swiftian modest proposal, there is always the book-burning stove...