Before Comics: the Great Stupa at Amaravati
The Great Stupa at Amaravati is a Buddhist temple in India built between the third century BCE and 250 CE. The construction time period is so long because the stupa was added onto and revised ...
History
Before Comics: The Egyptian Book of the Dead
A look at the Egyptian Book of the Dead as a piece of sequential art.
Before Comics: The Standard of Ur
Originating around 2,500 BCE, the Standard of Ur is one of the earliest examples of sequential art that we have. While there is earlier art that is definitely narrative, it is not clearly sequential. The ...
Before Comics: We’ve Been Telling Stories with Pictures for a Long Time
Narrative art stretches back 44,000 years. We humans like to tell stories with images. And we like animals.
Jugend
A quick look at the magazine Jugend, especially its sequential art.
Kango Takamura – an uncollected graphic novel
For the past few years, I have been volunteering at Manzanar National Historic Site with my family. We usually stay in the town of Independence, which has an incredible little museum, The Eastern California Museum. ...
Life? Or Theatre? By Charlotte Salomon – Pages M004237, M004245, and M004300
As I mentioned before, Life? or Theatre? tells the story of Charlotte Salomon’s family, keeping the given names but changing the surnames. So far, I took us through the first hundred pages which cover the ...
Life? Or Theatre? By Charlotte Salomon – Introduction and pages M004179 and M004211
The rise of the graphic novel is intimately, and of course tragically, tied to the Second World War. If we consider the book that broke through and captured a wider audience and showed the reading ...
Prehistoric Word Balloons – “Speech-Breath”
I was reading a little article in Archaeology Magazine and learned that archaeologists now believe that prehistoric cave painters attempted to incorporate graphic depictions of sound into some of their works. The earliest example comes ...
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 ...