Jared Gardner is Professor of English at the Ohio State University and editor of Inks: the Journal of the Comics Studies Society. He is the author and editor of 10 books, including Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling.
Jared Gardner
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Writing on Public Books
Charlotte Salomon’s Triumphant “No”
Charlotte Salomon’s short life was haunted—by the rise of the Nazis, who ultimately took her life, but also by her family’s history of severe mental illness …
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 …
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 […]
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 […]
Invasion of the Funny Animals
“Funny Animals” is a genre of comics that is, like most things in comics, inappropriately named. Just as “comics” are quite often not comic and “graphic novels” are rarely novels, comics featuring anthropomorphic animals are only occasionally funny …
Otherworlds
In the history of modern comics—as in the history of comic’s cousin, film—there have long been two competing impulses. Film history contrasts the styles of two pioneers: the documentary realism of the Lumière brothers and the magical stagecraft of Georges Méliès. In comics, we can find a parallel fork in the road in the pioneering […]
Edible Comics
Comics and food have a longstanding relationship, most spectacularly in a unique genre known in Japan, its country of origin, as ryôri manga, or cooking comics. These are comics entirely devoted to food—its preparation, its appreciation. Today we can find food comics in France and the US, but this is a genre that traces its […]
Origin Stories
There are many mornings when I cannot help but express my gratitude that I did not come of age in this current generation. As a father of two Millennials and a teacher of hundreds more, I know that any one of the unprecedented hurdles they face—from the grim face of global extinction to the savageries […]
Polish Dreams
I often joke that everything I know about Israel I learned from comic books. As a secular Jew with deep ambivalence about Israel, this quip has served as a shield against being engaged on the topic by friends and colleagues on either side of the Zionist divide. So imagine my surprise when I recently gave […]
Cassandra, Retiring
I spent a good portion of 2010 playing the Cassandra, mongering doom and gloom about the heat death of the alternative comics universe.1 Despite some important works—chief among them James Sturm’s Market Day, Chris Ware’s Lint (an entry in his ongoing Rusty Brown), and Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon’s remarkable miniseries, Daytripper—ominous signs seemed unmistakable: […]
Found in Translation: Franco-Belgian Comics in America (Part 1)
I first encountered French-language comics at age twelve while visiting my best friend’s grandparents at their farm in the south of France. There, on an attic shelf, we found a stack of Astérix, Tintin, and Lucky Luke. The books appeared almost talismanic effect to me, not least because, well, they were books. It was 1978, […]
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 recipient of a beautiful but mystifying object: Building Stories. But don’t worry, we here at Public Books can help: […]
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 […]
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 several remarkable achievements in the form have found their way into the critical spotlight. But for every Persepolis and Fun Home that […]
