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Rethinking Reconstruction: Kate Masur on “Freedom Was in Sight”
“Freedom Was in Sight” conveys that even as Reconstruction ended and the Jim Crow order took shape in the South, not everything was lost.
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H. P. Lovecraft For Our Time
Fear of the other cuts both ways. A young woman in Brooklyn today is afraid to go outside. Even in daylight, and especially in the company of the pale white child …
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Presidential Comics: Part 1
The vitriol of modern elections is nothing new. Indeed, it is relatively tame compared to earlier generations. Ever since the emergence of the party system in …
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Join the Mutant Resistance!
The real world just got a lot more like a superhero comic, and not in a good way. I write on November 13, 2016; one of the many things that came up in my panicked, angry, sometimes despairing social …
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In Praise of Pulp
Like so many other once-disreputable cultural forms before them, comics over the past several decades have gradually shed many of their debased associations to become a respected aesthetic practice. It’s a familiar dynamic, as that which is first scorned as a low-minded entertainment for degenerates is then rehabilitated as worthy art. Think of the novel;…
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Comics versus Franquismo
In the late 1960s, dictator Francisco Franco slowly opened Spain to tourism while continuing to obliterate public memory of the retributions meted out after the Civil War (1936–9). I spent those years studying in Madrid, living for two semesters with a Spanish family. My professors were among the most distinguished of those who hadn’t sought…
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Graphic Novels for MBAs
Over the course of the two-year program at Harvard Business School, an MBA student will read over five hundred case studies. They range in length from a single page to over 50, but their format is typically the same: a description of an ambiguous scenario that forces students to read actively and decide for themselves…
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Show Me Where It Hurts: Part 2
In this second part of my survey of the growing field of graphic medicine, I review four recent nonfiction books about health, illness, recovery and loss. These books vary in many respects—in their visual styles and narrative approaches, but especially in the ways in which the educational and the personal are engaged. However, what they…
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Show Me Where It Hurts: Part 1
Illness, mental and physical, is arguably comics’ invisible master theme, deeply woven into their genome and shaping the stories they tell, from the earliest newspaper strips (chronic allergies in Winsor McCay’s Little Sammy Sneeze) through the rise of superhero comics (from Batman’s PTSD in 1939 through the Fantastic Four’s radiation poisoning in 1961). It is…
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Nuclear Graphics
One of the most challenging aspects of nuclear politics today is the simultaneous invisibility of nuclear things and their ever-presentness. Radiation, of course, is invisible to human senses, but nevertheless presents a constant challenge to health and safety at all nuclear sites. Similarly, while the atomic bomb is hidden behind elaborate systems of state secrecy,…
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Graphic Fables of Old New York
Two recent books serve as potent reminders of the ongoing historiographic obsessions of graphic narrative. Leela Corman’s Unterzakhn and Mark Siegel’s Sailor Twain are both ambitious historical graphic novels that return to early periods of New York history. Using strikingly different visual styles and narrative techniques, both create deeply haunting fables that, like much of…
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The Mom Problem
For hard-core fans of Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home—and we are legion—the publication of its follow-up, Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama, was a major event …
