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Racism as a Stylistic Choice and other Notes
If you watch the cable news shows, you’re used to endlessly circular debates where Republican shills and Democratic shills keep spitting out the standard talking points of their side for the day, a...
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Black Readers & White Comics
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. The...
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Notes on S. Clay Wilson
Ryan Standfest has just edited a very interesting anthology called BLACK EYE 1: Graphic Transmissions to Cause Ocular Hypertension (Rotland Press), devoted to comics done in the tradition of black...
View ArticleBill Blackbeard, R.I.P.
One of the key differences between popular entertainment and more ambitious art is that art has a longer memory. Popular entertainment tends to be ephemeral and faddish, moving from one style to...
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A Chester Brown Notebook
I’ve already written about Chester Brown’s Paying for It in a column for the Globe and Mail, which meant missing out on last week’s Brown deluge at TCJ.com. But the Globe and Mail column dealt with the...
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Lines and Frames: An Interview with R.O. Blechman
Dapper and compact, soft-spoken and full of erudite conversation, R.O. Blechman is the single most cosmopolitan cartoonist I’ve ever met. He could easily be a character in a Henry James novel....
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A Dan Clowes Notebook
Ice Haven: a densely populated book. Obligatory Warning. These notes are about some of the recent books of Daniel Clowes, which tend to have twisting plots rich in surprises. I’m working from the...
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Iowa Comics Conference Notebook
Iowa City, strange to say, beckoned. The lure, as you might guess, was comics. My partner and I have a nettlesome newborn, so I’ve been scaling back my travels. But when literary and film scholar Corey...
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Nuts
You can’t accuse Gahan Wilson of being a coward. Over the last half century any cartoonist who does a comic strip about kids, especially one that spotlights the neuroses and traumas of childhood, runs...
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Crumb in the Beginning
Comics can be like your family. Both have the power to start shaping you long before you even have any consciousness of yourself as a separate being. If you don’t break free of them, they are a...
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Jack Kirby: Hand of Fire Roundtable (Part 1)
Editor’s note: Jeet Heer conducted this roundtable on the occasion of Charles Hatfield’s book, Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby. The participants include Jonathan Lethem (novelist and comic...
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Jack Kirby: Hand of Fire Roundtable (Part 2)
To read the first installment of this roundtable, click here. FOUR: THE TECHNOLOGICAL SUBLIME AND EARTHINESS DAN NADEL: Well, I finished the Hatfield book so I wanted to circle back to one of Jeet’s...
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Jack Kirby: Hand of Fire Roundtable (Part 3)
For the first installment of this roundtable, go here, and for the second installment, go here. EIGHT: KIRBY AS VISUAL ARTIST DOUG HARVEY: OK, I’m going to just spew out a few things as they come to...
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A TCAF Tip
As Tom Spurgeon notes, TCAF is an ideal occasion to enjoy not just a superb comics festival but also a great city. So here’s a tip for Toronto visitors who want to see a little bit more of the city’s...
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Cartoon Monarch: Otto Soglow and the Little King
In 1933 a newspaper columnist described Otto Soglow as “a great cutup” who “clowns all over the place” at parties, livening up the scene with magic tricks and jokes. This convivial portrait of Soglow...
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Cruisin’ with the Hound: The Life and Times of Fred Toote’
For some reason Spain Rodriguez – popularly known just as Spain — is rarely described as one of the great autobiographical cartoonists, yet his stories about his teenage days and young manhood in...
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Fact and Fancy in Seth’s G.N.B. Double C
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...
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An Interview with Walter Biggins
Comics scholarship has its roots in fandom and in the efforts of freelance intellectuals such as Bill Blackbeard and Donald Phelps but in recent years has been making significant headway in the wider...
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Kim Thompson as Critic
There were many Kim Thompsons: among others, there was Kim the translator, Kim the anthologist, Kim the hands-on editor, Kim the publisher working with Gary Groth (and later Eric Reynolds) to shape...
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Harold Gray and the Limits of Conservative Anti-Racism
To twenty-first century eyes, Harold Gray was an unlikely racial progressive. He was famously reactionary, for most of his life on the far right of the Republican party. In private correspondence, he...
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The Plugged-Up Parodist: Nick Maandag’s Constipated Comedy
“I’m fine. I’m just … constipated.” — Rod Vanderbranch in Nick Maandag’s The Libertarian (2012). Some cartoonists are wet, others are dry. The wet cartoonists gush out images, their pages overflowing...
View ArticleWonder Woman’s Secrets in Context
I reviewed Jill Lepore’s The Secret History of Wonder Woman for Hazlitt. The magazine was generous with their space, allowing me to give a detailed survey of a juicy book full of eye-popping...
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