Comics Relief

In late August, Coyote vs. Acme, a feature-length treatment of the eponymous coyote’s eternally thwarted efforts to eat the Road Runner, finally opened in theaters, years after the artless CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery determined never to release it. “Coyote vs. Acme takes a lesson from the darkness of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?,” Lucas Adams writes in the NYR Online, “but asks: What if the bad guys had already won?” The result is “a barrage of clever, hilarious visuals”—“a courtroom stenographer dutifully transcribing the Tasmanian Devil’s incoherent ravings”—alongside a surprisingly wistful treatment of longing and desire deferred.Adams is the editor of New York Review Comics, which publishes lost classics and new translations of comics, manga, and graphic novels—including work by Saul Steinberg, Joe Brainard, and Glen Baxter—for our sister book imprint. His writing, cartoons, and illustrations have appeared in The New Yorker and The Paris Review, and for The New York Review he has written about, among other subjects, speculative fiction, William Wegman, and Edward Gorey.This week I wrote to Adams to ask him about the Looney Tunes, the comics industry, and growing up humorless.D...