Tag
Comics
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It’s on the Illabus: Jean-Christophe Cloutier and John Jennings
“Everything in the comic has to be thought about from front cover to end … How are you going to use all the secret resources of comics?”
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The End?
The apocalypse—for all the questions of when and where and why and how surrounding it—will actually be a rather straightforward affair. At some point in time, after a particularly grueling winter, Odin, the all-father, will find himself plummeting into the stomach of Fenrir—son of Loki—the wolf whose upper jaw can scrape the sky while his…
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Keep Out, Or Else: Girls’ Diaries in Comics
Comics and the diaries of teenage girls don’t at first glance have that much to do with one another. After all, the latter tend to invoke the pastel ink of pens used to …
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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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The Book That Made Me: Belong
As a literature student, I’d wanted words to fix me. But it was images that pieced me back together …
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Keyword of the Week: Mothers
It’s Mother’s Day on Sunday! If you know a mom who loves to read, send her this week’s Public Bookshelf. It features four of our favorite PB articles about motherhood, including a review of Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?, and an essay on Sally Mann’s extraordinary family photography. The Bingewatch: Mother Winona 9.15.2016 Sarah Kessler Since its release in mid-July, Stranger Things,…
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Keyword of the Week: Animals
It’s nonhuman appreciation week at Public Books. This week’s Public Bookshelf features four PB articles about animals, on topics ranging from animal sentience to the anthropomorphic world of Zootopia. What Is It Like to Be an Elephant? 12.15.2016 Matt Margini The Harambe incident demonstrated one coherent principle: when nonhuman animals lose political representation, as they inevitably do, it often becomes the…
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Keyword of the Week: Healthcare
House Republicans are attempting to replace the Affordable Care Act with legislation that that would disadvantage sick and low-income Americans. This week’s Public Bookshelf features four articles about health and health care, on topics ranging from immigrants and illness to comics about medicine. Show Me Where it Hurts: Part 1 11.15.2015 Jared Gardner Illness, mental and physical, is arguably comics’ invisible master theme, deeply woven into…
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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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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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What to Do If Yer Bit By a Snake
This is the latest installment of El Mirador, an ongoing series curated by Francisco Cantú. Spanish for “the lookout point,” El Mirador collects original nonfiction, translation, and visual art on the American West, the US/Mexico borderlands, and Indian Country. In the middle of mind-numbingly boring days at work as an online content manager, Ronald Stanage challenges…
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Who Puts the Fun in Fun Home?
There’s something delightfully intimate about reading a graphic novel and seeing a story unfold across the panels, visualizing the world the way its creator does. Theater, however, doesn’t often afford its audience that luxury. What the audience sees is clouded by their own interpretations, the baggage that they carry with them through the doors. So…
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Public Picks 2015
Welcome to the third annual edition of Public Picks, a selection of the books and art that most interested and excited our editorial staff over the past year. As with previous years’ Picks (2013, 2014), we aimed for a list that combines the best of the best with more idiosyncratic works that you may have missed. With admiring…
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Do We Need Wonder Woman?
My two-year-old daughter plays on the beach in a tiny red, white, and blue swimsuit, her chest emblazoned with winged yellow Ws that need no explanation. At a glance, the suit appears of a piece with the branded Dora the Explorer and Mermaid Ariel gear sported by fellow toddlers frolicking on the shoreline. Unlike her…
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The Teflon Kid: How Annie Enables Apathy About Inequality
What’s not to like about seeing an adorable black child nestled up with a baby animal on the cover of the New York Times Style Magazine? The composition of this shot links child actor Quvenzhané …
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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 …
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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…
