Steven Weisenburger's A Gravity's Rainbow Companion is tragically wrong.
On a reference to Porky Pig, it says:
"Porky Pig was a regular feature (with Donald Duck and nephews, Bugs Bunny, and Woody Woodpecker) of Walt Disney's Comics and stories, a comic book in continuous publication after 1940." (235)
Why does Slylock Fox suspect that Weisenburger has never read Walt Disney's Comics and Stories?
This is the old version of the book; there's a new one out that presumably fixes this, but jeez louise, that's a pretty breathtaking mistake. It doesn't exactly take an encyclopedic knowledge of popular culture to know that Loony Tunes and Warner Brothers characters--to say nothing of Woody Woodpecker, who is neither--are NOT THE SAME THING. And, having read many issues of WDC&S, I can verify that, no, the two did NOT have some crazy cross-marketing scheme going on. Disney, WB, and Woody comic books were all published by Dell back in the day, but that would not lead anyone who thought about it for three seconds to confuse them.
Anyway, laughable though it is, this isn't a huge deal, but if Weisenburger's capable of making such an obvious mistake that ANYONE can see, you sort of have to wonder how accurate the more esoteric background information he relays is.
"Porky Pig was a regular feature (with Donald Duck and nephews, Bugs Bunny, and Woody Woodpecker) of Walt Disney's Comics and stories, a comic book in continuous publication after 1940." (235)
Why does Slylock Fox suspect that Weisenburger has never read Walt Disney's Comics and Stories?
This is the old version of the book; there's a new one out that presumably fixes this, but jeez louise, that's a pretty breathtaking mistake. It doesn't exactly take an encyclopedic knowledge of popular culture to know that Loony Tunes and Warner Brothers characters--to say nothing of Woody Woodpecker, who is neither--are NOT THE SAME THING. And, having read many issues of WDC&S, I can verify that, no, the two did NOT have some crazy cross-marketing scheme going on. Disney, WB, and Woody comic books were all published by Dell back in the day, but that would not lead anyone who thought about it for three seconds to confuse them.
Anyway, laughable though it is, this isn't a huge deal, but if Weisenburger's capable of making such an obvious mistake that ANYONE can see, you sort of have to wonder how accurate the more esoteric background information he relays is.
posted by GeoX, one of the GeoX boys. at 12:32 AM
