Joe McCulloch is here as usual with his indispensable guide to the Week in Comics! Highlights this week include new titles by John Porcellino and Andrea Panzienza (which Joe calls "quite possibly the vital global comics release of the season").
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—Reviews & Commentary. Kate Beaton celebrates Meredith Gran's Octopus Pie.
That might sound grandiose, but in my mind, nothing tops the ten year run of Octopus Pie. And in the lifespan of what we call Webcomics, 2007-2017 is a granddaddy of a run, worthy of names like “pioneering,” “influential” and “groundbreaking” because in the space of those years, in this new medium, there was room to be those things without any hyperbole. The comics landscape of the past decade needed filling out and Meredith carved her space out with precision, showing a polish and drive and a talent from the beginning that set a high standard.
At the Los Angeles Review of Books, William Bradley reviews a new book about the political dimensions of young Frank Miller's work.
Many of us grew up certain that Miller was not only an artistic genius who changed the way people thought about Batman in the 1980s, but also a champion of artistic freedom and creators’ rights in an industry that had a history of not only censoring itself needlessly but also screwing over creators like Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Jack Kirby, and Steve Gerber. Later we were forced to ask ourselves: Had he changed in some way? Had we been wrong about him? Did the problem with his later work and attitudes cast a shadow on the earlier work that we had enjoyed so much?
—Interviews & Profiles. For Wired, Emma Gray Ellis writes about the ultra-rightwing cartoonist Ben Garrison and his encounters with 4chan.
Former Breitbart editor and troll king Milo Yiannopoulos once called Garrison “the most trolled man in internet history.” (And considering Yiannopoulos has taken part in some of the largest, most vicious trolling campaigns in internet history, he ought to know.) But in 2009, when his career as an internet cartoonist began, Garrison was just a 52-year-old graphic artist with an obscure blog. "I was furious when the banks were bailed out, so I decided to draw a few protest cartoons," Garrison says. "But the Nazis didn't think I went far enough."
The most recent guest on RiYL is Frank Santoro, and the most recent guest on Process Party is Josh Bayer.
