The lineup in “Bullies”
The first panel of my little memoir comic “Bullies” presents an array of comics characters that I was into when I first started reading comics. I still have almost all of these comics (except from ...
History
The 80s Never Loved You Back
When you love the 80s, you are loving the executives who manipulated you into caring about things that they themselves had no respect for. You are celebrating your abuse.
contaminated water and alcohol
This is a bit of a spoiler for my story Lounger, so fair warning. A few weeks ago, I was reading Edward Tufte’s excellent book Envisioning Explanations (shout out to libraries!), and in the first ...
The Prehistory of the Graphic Novel – Revised
Based on some suggestions via Twitter and email, here is an updated list of books that could be classified as graphic novels, but that were published before the term was coined. Special thanks to Steve ...
The Prehistory of the Graphic Novel
Whatever the term “graphic novel” actually means, it is one that rose to mainstream use in the 1980s. But most people seem to agree that the term was first applied in 1978 to Will Eisner’s ...
Ishii, Arriola, and stereotypes
The MoMA just posted a comics biography of Ruth Asawa done by Jillian Tamaki. On the second page, Tamaki mentions Chris Ishii and a comic strip created about life at the Japanese-American concentration camps. I ...
my comics history
For people of my generation, the common comics history they tell is that they started with superheroes and then sometime in late high school or college grew tired of the tights and serendipitously discovered Love ...
An alternative history of graphic novels
The common history of graphic novels, and the one I learned, follows comics aimed mainly at children and the publishers who made them. We hear about the rise and fall of EC, the birth of ...