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

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 ...