Maps are ubiquitous now, embedded in nearly every mobile device, but in the early days of America, maps were far more precious. In Mapping the Nation, Susan Schulten argues that the formation of the ...
Tag: Graphic
Building Stories: The Missing Manual
If there is a comics geek in your life (or if you happened recently to mention to family or friends a passing interest in “graphic novels”), this holiday season you are likely to find yourself the ...
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 ...
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 ...
Can’t Stop Screaming
Every line of Antigonick is printed in boldface handwriting, emphatic, as if something urgent and excessive has to be loudly said. The title and the format suggest that this is a translation of ...
Comics Journalism, Comics Activism
It has been a good fifteen years now since our cultural gatekeepers collectively patted themselves on the back for having discovered that comics were “not just for kids anymore,” and in that time ...
Powerful Images Recollected in Tranquility
Lila Quintero Weaver’s Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White takes advantage of the generic pluralism comics have enjoyed, or suffered, since becoming “respectable” in the mid-1980s. Expertly drawn ...
Dollars and Sex
House of Holes, Nicholson Baker’s celebrated return to dirty fiction, conjures an alternate sexual universe, where a broad range of heterosexual men and women (and one detached male body part) find ...