Anyone who does a graphic novel about his father’s secrets and history has a long shadow to contend with. (It’s art spiegelman’s Maus, in case you’ve forgotten.) The closer that father was to WWII, the clearer the parallels. If the father was Jewish…even more so. Now, a creator doesn’t have to engage with that at all:…
In this space two weeks ago, I wrote about the death of cartoonist and comix legend Jay Lynch. I noted his half-century friendship with Skip Williamson; despite their physical distance, I don’t think two people could have been closer. As fate would have it, Skip died eleven days after Jay. Each was 72 years old….
Every town must have a place / Where phony hippies meet / Psychedelic dungeons / Popping up on every street • Frank Zappa, “Who Needs The Peace Corps?” The late Sixties really did live up to its reputation. In my home town of Chicago hippie central was the Lincoln Park neighborhood around the iconic Biograph…
Doctor Who, the long-running BBC TV series about a humanoid alien transversing through time and space with his companions, has wound up its current season, its tenth since it’s return following a long hiatus. The current actor playing the part, Peter Capaldi, is the fourth actor (or the fifth depending how you number it) since…
Yesterday I had the privilege of joining fellow ComicMixers Martha Thomases and Adriane Nash and a standing-room-only crowd at Columbia University to hear Congressman John R. Lewis talk about graphic novels. Make no mistake about it: Congressman Lewis is a genuine hero. I realize that’s a word we toss around rather lightly these days, but believe…
Last week I went with my friend to a screening of Germany’s entry for the foreign-language film Oscar, Labyrinth of Lies, hosted by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and featuring a Q & A with director and co-writer Giulio Ricciarelli. The film and Q & A were excellent. The film focuses on the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials,…
We made it to Week 8! Yay! For our final Challenged Challenge book, we discuss Maus by Art Spiegelman. This Pulitzer Prize winning graphic novel is written about the author’s father’s experiences in a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust. Obviously, the subject matter is brutal and is aimed at those who are mature enough…
There was a time when it was assumed that people who read comics were not very smart. They couldn’t understand a book without pictures, despite the opinion of Lewis Carroll, as expressed by Alice. This opinion began to lose ground in the 1970s, and by the 1980s, when Art Spiegelman published Maus, some people began…
I know what I’m re-reading today. And if you haven’t read Maus: A Survivor’s Tale yet yourself, you should. Comics really don’t get much better. Consider it a rebuttal to all the people who insist that the Holocaust never happened, and that it’s a shame that it didn’t.
If you watched the first full trailer for Frank Miller’s upcoming adaptation of The Spirit, you could be forgiven for thinking it had little more than the title in common with Will Eisner’s comic series. Miller insists that’s not the case, though, in a story in the New York Times. “The only ways they resemble…
Comics have long battled against proponents of "serious literature," who have often decried comics as a less intellectual medium than prose. In the past few years, comics have become increasingly accepted into popular culture, and now it seems they’re well established in the literary world too. The Virginia Quarterly Review, one of the elite literary…
With comics being created throughout the world, it’s all too easy to overlook some of the medium’s best talents. The lack of recognition for Séra, the French-based cartoonist who’s created a collection of graphic novels sketching out tales of the Khmer Rouge. Like Art Spiegelman and Marjane Satrapi, to name two, Séra looks back on…
