Columns
Doucetian Claremontism
Austin English is back, bouncing around comics history and investigating the personal and metaphysical qualities of drawing.
Celebrating a Half Century of Doonesbury
Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury is approaching its 52nd birthday this year, and R.C. Harvey is your guide to the origins of this American institution.
André Valente: Day Five
André Valente hits the street of Angoulême during the weeks of the year when it isn’t packed full of comics to see what kind of memories he can track down. (The answer is quite a few!)
André Valente: Day Four
You never get a second chance to make a first impression, and sometimes, your first impression includes a phrase that you may never be able to recover from. André Valente presents: A Cautionary Tale!
André Valente: Day Three
André Valente confronts the question of Chris Ware. No, not the qualitative question! The question of size: does it matter?
André Valente: Day Two
Do you have what it takes to hang dry your clothes? “Sure I do”, you think. “What could go wrong?”, you wonder. André Valente has the answer, in today’s Cartoonist’s Diary!
André Valente: Day One
André Valente begins his week of diaries to attention, by answering the big linguistic questions…and chasing around the visual concept of what it would look like if Andre The Giant and Mandy Patinkin got together and had a couple of babies.
Remembering Playboy & Hef
R.C. Harvey first encountered Playboy in 1955, two years after it started publishing. Today, in 2022, he eulogizes what the magazine used to be, and laments what it eventually became.
Jennifer Hayden: Day Four
On staring into black glass in a room of new silence.
Jennifer Hayden: Day Three
A drive to Princeton, a whale of a surprise, and books, books, books: today’s Cartoonist’s Diary has it all. Deadlines are in the rearview for Jennifer Hayden!
Jennifer Hayden: Day Two
A little bit of progress counts as progress: don’t let anybody put your success on a scale! Jennifer Hayden gets it, in today’s Cartoonist’s Diary!
Jennifer Hayden: Day One
There’s probably no more Cartoonist’s Diary then a Diary that includes good food, deadlines, dreams, frustrating emails and good bookstores: Jennifer Hayden, starting it off correctly!
How Comic Books Have Changed
In this installment of R.C. Harvey’s long running column, he switches his focus from the comics of the past to look at the work of today: new work from Eduardo Risso, Sean Phillips, Jeff Lemire, Matthieu Blanchin, Howard Chaykin, and more. Thinks may have changed–but Bob has changed with them!
The Importance of June 16th to James Joyce, And a New Graphic Biography of the Famously Obtuse Writer
Bob has always liked his James Joyce biographies, when they’ve shown up in prose. He also, as you well know, likes his comics. So is a comic biography of Joyce, like the one by Alfonso Zapico, going to be the peanut butter to his chocolate? Let’s put it this way: the word “best” is about to get a bit of a workout.