
Awaiting the Collapse: Selected Works 1974-2014
In “Highwire”, the opening entry in Paul Kirchner’s new collection Awaiting the Collapse, a tightrope walker navigates the skyway of a busy metropolis. The walker’s magical high wire takes him over skyscrapers and into offices, dinner parties, supermarkets, and the … Continue reading
Is This Guy For Real?
Andy Kaufman was around for just long enough to ensure that people are going to be writing about him for a long time to come. There’s something sticky about his story in the mind, despite (or because of?) its brevity. Box … Continue reading
Crazy Quilt: Scraps & Panels on the Way to Gasoline Alley
Frank King became America’s master of quiet domestic drama on the daily comics page. His long-running Gasoline Alley told a sometimes melodramatic but generally gentle narrative in which his characters aged reasonably and passed through the phases of their lives. … Continue reading
Geis II: A Game Without Rules
My mental image of the American West has the texture of 1970s film grain seen in spaghetti westerns. I justify this instinctive deferral to technological contrivance by believing that the dirt and sand of the desert find a home in … Continue reading
The Lie and How We Told It
Here is a great truth about our age of gender fluidity, queer visibility, and increasingly ductile sexual identities: regardless of our sexual self-identification, we are all the same. An observation so banal as to be ridiculous, perhaps, but considered not … Continue reading
Mister Morgen
Igor Hofbauer’s stories niggle at the dark recesses of the psyche. They are visits implying there’s much more to face, panels awaiting uncovering, but we don’t want these scenes of extended hideous horror to be so easily explained or, for … Continue reading
The Big Book of Bisexual Trials and Errors
A collection of comics detailing cartoonist Elizabeth Beier’s coming of age, with a focus on her introduction to the complicated world of bisexual dating & romance. Continue reading
Monograph
It’s page 5 of Monograph, and Chris Ware is fretting! “To make a book of things that one likely already has would be a useless waste of paper, and a bummer. So I had to try to figure out a … Continue reading