Wonder Woman’s Secrets in Context
Jill Lepore’s The Secret History of Wonder Woman is a major event in comics scholarship. But no scholarly work stands alone; all are always part of a wider conversation.
Jill Lepore’s The Secret History of Wonder Woman is a major event in comics scholarship. But no scholarly work stands alone; all are always part of a wider conversation.
Visually, there are very few gifted cartoonists who are as remorselessly ungiving as Nick Maandag. There is no succulent texture in his universe, no oasis of exfoliating leafy beauty to offer relief from the aridity of the art.
Race, Harold Gray and Little Orphan Annie.
There were many Kim Thompsons: translator, anthologist, editor, publisher. The first Kim Thompson I encountered was Kim the critic, who tended to get lost in the busy shuffle.
Everybody misunderstands Seth. Popular mythology has pegged the cartoonist as a nostalgist hankering over the lost past. In fact, Seth is a fantastist obsessed not with the world-that-was but rather the world-as-it-might-have-been.
In 1987, the proposal to bring all of Crumb back into print in a uniform set of books was a radical publishing act which re-contextualized and re-vitalized an already momentous body of work.
A visit to Iowa with a crowd of cartoonists, publishers and academics.
From Ice Haven to Mr. Wonderful.
Some notes that try to tease out a fuller account of Chester’s remarkable “comic-strip memoir.”
The man who gave comics its memory.
If we acknowledge that he was the artist who gave permission for Crumb to become Crumb, then it’s clear that Wilson was the central artist of the underground generation.
Some more notes on race and comics. Although the notes deal with this issue from a variety of angles, one topic that I keep returning to here is the question of black readers of the comic strips.
Some notes on race and comics which attempt to bring some nuance and complexity to a frustrating debate by bringing some historical facts to the table.