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Book Review - Drawing Fire: The Editorial Cartoons of Bill Mauldin.

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reviewed by Lizzy Walker, Wichita State University Libraries

 DePastino, Todd (ed.) (2020). Drawing Fire: The Editorial Cartoons of Bill Mauldin. Chicago: Pritzker Military Museum & Library. 250 pages; $35.00. ISBN 9780998968940.

All images and their captions in this review are courtesy of the Pritzker Military Museum & Library

            William Henry "Bill" Mauldin (1921-2003) had a lengthy career spanning 50 years as a popular and award-winning cartoonist. Drawing Fire: The Editorial Cartoons of Bill Mauldin, collects essays and selections of his wartime and political cartoons from Chicago's Pritzker Military Museum & Library, which boasts over 4,500 cartoons by Mauldin in its collection. The publication of this important volume will include a spring 2021 exhibition at the Pritzker Military Museum & Library in Chicago and will then travel to the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas later in 2021.

            The book opens with a brief preface by Tom Hanks. It is the perfect opening to this poignant book. He states, "If a picture is worth a thousand words, Bill Mauldin drew hundreds of novels" (6). Hanks describes how Mauldin's works depicted the everyday soldier, and discusses two of Mauldin'spieces that resonated with Hanks the most.

            In her foreword, Colonel (RET.) Jennifer N. Pritzker, founder of the Pritzker Military Museum & Library, describes how Mauldin's work affected her interest in following in her family's legacy of joining the military, and how seeing his work helped her in her own journey, down to her attitude and how she treated those above and below her station. She mentions that Mauldin's ability to communicate through different sociopolitical climates showed how his work still presents valuable history lessons in each short cartoon. She sums up nicely, writing "you can take out the print date or the caption and still see contemporary issues and subjects in his drawings. There is a Bill Mauldin cartoon for every situation, for every topic" (10). History marches on, but it also recurs.

            Mauldin's biographer Todd DePastino provides the introduction to Drawing Fire, discussing Mauldin's life and fifty-year career. He joined the Arizona National Guard in 1940 and then transferred into the 45th Infantry. During World War II, Mauldin's cartoons featuring Willie and Joe, two American GI grunts on the front lines in Europe,earned him a position on Stars and Stripes,the Army newspaper. DePastino discusses Mauldin's success at having his characters depicting the less-than-glamourous aspects of wartime while acting as a platform for criticism of the military hierarchy. The characters quickly became favorites of both soldiers in the trenches and civilians on the home front. Mauldin won a Pulitzer at the age of 23, before he even arrived back stateside. DePastino then explains Mauldin's return home, his difficulty re-acclimating to civilian life, the divorce from his first wife Jean, and other topics of his personal life.

            DePastino continues by looking at the subject matter Mauldin started addressing in his cartoons upon his return, such as the rampant discrimination against Japanese-Americans, free speech, civil rights, public housing, and more, which made certain editors request that he censor himself, lest they do it for him by canceling their subscription for his syndicated cartoons. Mauldin's pushing of boundaries throughout his career earned the ire of high-ranking political and military figures, such as J. Edgar Hoover and General George S. Patton. Mauldin retired in 1991 after an injury to his drawing hand.Further tragedy struck as he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and he lived in an assisted living facility in Orange County before his death in 2003.
            In
"Thank you, Mr. Mauldin," Tom Brokaw, one of the most recognized names in news broadcasting, weaves a beautiful essay about growing up as a military child during World War II and how Mauldin's Up Front was an influence in shaping his career as a journalist. Brokaw discusses themes of Up Front, as well as other works that Mauldin published all the way through Desert Storm in 1990.

            "Bill Mauldin, Thunderbird" by Denise Neil provides a brief discussion of Mauldin's time with the 45thInfantry Division (also known as the Thunderbird Division), his regular feature in the 45th Division News called Star Spangled Banter, and Up Front published in Stars and Stripes. Neil asserts Mauldin blended humor with the realism of the "exhaustion and fear endured by the dogfaces" (48), which explains Mauldin's popularity among soldiers, past and present.

            "Back Home" by G. Kurt Piehler addresses the challenge of reintegration of soldiers back into civilian life and Mauldin's hand in assisting with the effort via his post-war cartoons, reprinting some of them in Back Home in 1947. He had to face his own problems head on when he returned as well. Mauldin was witness to many traumatic events, and many of his friends, both members of the infantry and journalists, did not make it home at all. As he was during the war, Mauldin continued to be an advocate of free speech and exercised his right as much as possible in his cartoons. For example, he used his medium to speak out against anti-Semitism and the Ku Klux Klan. Piehler writes of Mauldin's cartoons that "American veterans, if given access to housing and decent jobs, would be able to readjust to civilian life and that the nation as a whole might emerge from the greatest war in history a wiser, more tolerant, more generous power" (69).

            In "Bill Mauldin Goes to Korea" by Cord A. Scott mentions that Mauldin was highly sought after by publishers during the Korean War and reviews his process for creating his new bookBill Mauldin in Korea. Scott states that the"one aspect that distinguishes Mauldin's work on Korea from the illustrations of other cartoonists is that his are consistently realistic even if they do not appear as finished as his other pieces for the book. None of the characters, especially those of enemy combatants, relied on stereotypical cartoon features" (75-76). He also retained his military humor while still making his work accessible to the layman as well as soldiers, presenting the struggles of "sacrifices and conditions in which ordinary people serve. It presents the unique perspective of a famous WWII enlisted veteran on a different, more complicated conflict" (81). Scott writes that Bill Mauldin in Korea is"a reflection of how Mauldin as a person was evolving in his worldview, relaying those views not through his own thoughts so much, but through his character" (81). Scott's follow-up essay, "Korean War Cartoonists," presents a great discussion of Mauldin's contemporaries, including those who were clearly influenced by the artist himself.

            "Bill Mauldin's Legacy in Military Cartooning" by Christina M. Knopf opens with discussion of a Peanutscomic strip conversation between Linus and Snoopy that was a memorial for Mauldin upon his death. Knopf states of military humor that it "helps to strengthen community, buoy morale, teach valuable—even life-saving—lessons, make sense of war, and express universal concerns about daily life" (89). Knopf shows other military cartoonists, including Vernon Grant, John Holmes, W. C. Pope, and others who are what she calls "modern Mauldins," who may use the web to disseminate their work. A particularly amusing section of this chapter, titled "Grumbling in the Ranks," discusses Mauldin and an earlier wartime cartoonist, Captain Bruce Bairnfather from World War I England, and their ability to ruffle the feathers of the military "brass." Knopf then reviews the role and benefits of military cartoons and satire, providing a thoughtful comparison between Mauldin's realistically-styled comics to the more “heroic” war comic books of the time.

            "Sparky and Bill Mauldin" by Jean Schulz is a touching end to the narrative portion of the book. Jean Schulz, the widow of Sparky, better known as Charles M. Schulz of previously mentioned Peanuts fame, briefly but poignantly tells a moving story about the friendship of two major figures in cartoon strips and how they became friends and colleagues.

            "A Selection of Bill Mauldin's Cartoon from the Pritzker Military Museum and Library Collections" takes up a bulk of the book and images cover a wide range of topics, such as post-World War II soldiers returning to civilian life, commentary on his perception of the ridiculousness of bipartisan politics, and civil rights issues, up until commentary on the Gulf War.

            Drawing Fire is a worthy tribute to the soldier, artist, and free speech advocate Bill Mauldin. The first time I came across his work was while I was doing some cataloguing for Wichita State University Special Collections and University Archives. I picked up the well-worn copy of Up Front from the book cart, carefully flipping through the yellowed pages, and was immediately struck by Mauldin’s artwork, and then his captions. It is easy to see why each of the contributors to Drawing Fire included how Mauldin influenced their chosen professions, as well as how he helped shape their ethics, in their essays. The glimpses into Mauldin's life and career, paired with the inclusion of 150 of his military and political cartoons, provides the reader with an historical portrait of the artist, as well as fifty decades of sociopolitical history and wartime coverage.

Versions of this review will appear online and in print in IJOCA 22:2.

 

Bookmarks

Mauldin drew this cartoon on June 6, 1968. In the early hours of that day, forty-two-year-old Senator Robert F. Kennedy died in the Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles after being shot on June 5 at the Ambassador Hotel by assassin Sirhan Sirhan. Following on the heels of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination tow months earlier, RFK’s assassination triggered national soul-searching about the role of violence in American history and society. (Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, 1968.)


A strong proponent of civil rights and social justice campaigns throughout his lifetime, Mauldin illustrated here that those who advance reforms or policies are often the most unqualified to do so. (Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, 1974.)


“We won!”

The U.S. Victory in the First Gulf War left Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in power and raised a number of questions about the United States’ role in the region. Mauldin saw that despite President Bush’s proclamation of victory, the Middle East was far from won. (Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, 1991).


“Yer a Menace to the People. It’s me duty to sink your end of the boat.”

(Originally published by United Features Syndicate, Inc., 1947)


“Good gosh! Willie struck oil!”

In the summer of 1941, the War Department held the Louisiana Maneuvers, a massive exercise designed to test the underfunded Army’s readiness for war. Bill accompanied the 45th Division to Louisiana, where soldiers still clad in World War I -vintage uniforms often wielded two-by-fours instead of actual machine guns. Two men in seersucker suits and a big Oldsmobile approached Bill and convinced him to produced a souvenir book of cartoons to sell to the troops. Bill drew fifteen cartoons and twenty-five drawings in forty-eight hours for a book he called Star Spangled Banter. It cost twenty-five cents and was a hit with the 45th Division, though Bill never saw any royalties or the two men again. (Originally published in Star Spangled Banter, 1941.)


“This damn teepee leaks.” 

This cartoon from 1973 plays on Mauldin’s well-known wartime cartoon and GI comic book titled, This Damn Tree Leaks from almost thirty years earlier. At a time when the Nixon administration was trying to diffuse the situation at Wounded Knee over Native rights, Mauldin not so subtly reminds his readers of the deceit and dishonor that characterized the history of U.S. federal relations with Native American tribes. (Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, 1973.)


“I got a hangover. Does it show?”

This cartoon from January 1945 plays on ordinary civilian concerns about self-presentation in public to highlight both Willie and Joe’s disheveled and grimy appearance and their dependence on alcohol to cope with the trauma of war. It was precisely this kind of cartoon that rankled the spit-and-polish General Patton. (Originally published in Stars and Stripes, 1945.)


“It’s either enemy or off limits.”

American infantrymen in World War II encountered devastation wherever they went. The Germans demolished towns as they retreated, while the Allies did the same as they advanced. It was a war of brute force that left Italy looking, in Bill’s words, “as if a giant rake had gone over it from end to end.” Occasionally, a town escaped ruin. In that case, it would be placed off-limits to dogfaces and reserved for rear-echelon soldiers and high-ranking officers to enjoy. (Originally published in Stars and Stripes, 1944.)


“Come on in – the quicksand’s fine.”

During the Salvadorian Civil War of 1979 to 1992, the Reagan administration increased U.S. support for the military junta government fighting a left-wing insurgency. Observers like Mauldin feared a quagmire akin to the Soviet experience in Afghanistan. Mauldin references (or, perhaps, simply copies) a chilling cartoon by M.A. Kempf that appeared in The Masses in June 1917 during WWII. It shows the great powers of Europe dancing with death in a pool of blood. The caption reads, “Come on in, America, the blood’s fine.” (Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, 1982.)


 “Ain’t you gonna buy a war hero a drink?”

Bill Mauldin returned home before V-J Day. His reluctance to wear his uniform or talk about his wartime experiences led many strangers to assume that, because of his youth and civilian clothes, he had avoided military service, and he was subjected to much bravado from home front GI’s. (Originally published in United Feature Syndicate, Inc., 1945.)


“Investigate them? Heck, that’s mah posse.”

(Originally published by United Feature Syndicate, Inc., 1947.)


 



Comics Research Bibliography 2020 ebook edition available now

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For many years, John Lent and Mike Rhode have been collecting citations for comic art, and putting them out in various ways, most recently through a Facebook page. For 2020, they have decided to try to begin bi-annual electronic updated versions.

Over 1200 pages long with more than 1200 new entries, this is a bibliography of articles and books on all aspects of comic and cartoon art including comic books, comic strips, cartoons, animation, editorial cartoons, newly updated as of the end of 2018. The electronic book, a non DRM PDF, includes tens of thousands of citations with links to information on comic book movies, the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the Danish Islam cartoon controversy and other topical matters (but not COVID-19 which will be in the next edition). Many citations are hot-linked to the web publication for ease of use.

To order, please Paypal $12 to mrhode@gmail.com and be sure to include your email, and a link to download the pdf will be emailed to you. For students or others, email Rhode directly if you need to request a reduced price.

Sample entries -

                        Benton, Gregory

  Arrant, Chris. 2014. Gregory Benton talks art, universal narratives and 'B+F'. Comic Book Resources (January 2): http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2014/01/gregory-benton-talks-art-universal-narratives-and-bf/

  Benton, Gregory. 2013. B+F. Richmond, VA: Adhouse Books

  Rhode, Mike. 2015. Hang Dai Studios at Baltimore Comic-Con: Gregory Benton speaks. ComicsDC blog (September 23): http://comicsdc.blogspot.com/2015/09/hang-dai-studios-gregory-benton.html

                        Berg, Dave

  Fischer, Craig. 2013. My Friend Dave. TCJ.com (October 25): https://www.tcj.com/my-friend-dave/


Table of Contents -

Introduction                                                                                                                   v

  Deaths in the comic arts field 2019-2020                                                                       

United States

1.    Comic Books and Strips                                                                                

2.    Comic Books                                                                                                 

·         BUSINESS ASPECTS - Publishers, Companies                               

·         BUSINESS ASPECTS -  Distribution, Sales                                      

·         COMIC BOOK MAKERS AND THEIR WORKS                                     

·         CHARACTERS AND TITLES                                                                

3.    Comic Strips                                                                                                  

·         CHARACTERS AND TITLES                                                                

·         Cartoonists                                                                                        

3a. Web Comics, webcomics                                                                        

4.     Animation, Caricature, and Gag and Political Cartoons                          

4a. Comic Art                                                                                            

4b. Gag, Illustrative, Magazine Cartoons                                                   

·         New Yorker magazine                                                                

4c. Animation                                                                                                

·         Animators and Their Works                                                       

·         Characters and Titles                                                                 

·         Companies, Networks, and Studios                                          

4d. Caricature            

4e. Political Cartoons            

·         Feiffer, Jules                                                                         

Canada                                                                                                                       

Global & Europe                                                                                                        

·         Danish Islamic Cartoons - Religion & Censorship Controversy          

·         Charlie Hebdo massacre                                                                         

·         Belgium                                                                                                   

·         France                                                                                                      

·         Great Britain                                                                                           

Africa                                                                                                                         

Middle East                                                                                                                

Asia                                                                                                                            

·         India                                                                                                        

·         Japan                                                                                                       

Australia and Oceania                                                                                             

Central and South America                                                                                

Caribbean                                                                                                                  

 Deaths in the comic arts field 2010-2018                                                            

 

An explanatory note about the project from the book's introduction -

The Comics Research Bibliography began as an online resource in 1996. John Bullough, struck by the success of the Grand Comics Database crowd-sourcing project, proposed a companion project of a compilation of works about comics. Michael Rhode was the only member to join him in compiling an online Comics Research Bibliography. Bullough selected a citation format and created a web interface hosted on his school's server. We both contributed citations, from our local newspapers and collections, especially from Rhode's books and magazines. In the early days of the Internet, we were unaware of John Lent's similar project which he had started for an academic publisher. Both online library catalogues and booksellers have made it less necessary to have an author's books listed, but it seemed silly to have reviews of the books and not the citation for the book itself, so collections of comics were added fairly early in the project. Since updates to the online version have stopped, Rhode has decided to produce a semi-annual print and electronic version to fill the gap. He and Lent began working together on the International Journal of Comic Art over a decade ago, and at the conclusion of Lent's publishing contract, began sharing bibliographic data. Three previous print editions appeared as Volume 11, Number 3 of International Journal of Comic Art (626 pages), Comics Research Bibliography, 2012 (two volumes, 832 pp.) and CRB, 2018 (two volumes, 1253 pp.). This bibliography is a continual work in progress – the authors literally have thousands of additional citations waiting to be formatted and included. Many new articles have appeared due to the growing acceptance of comic art as a subject of interest at the same time the Internet has become a mass publishing media. As the years passed, and the Internet expanded, online citations grew far more rapidly than print ones. We are trying to be a quality filter by only grabbing substantive articles, or interviews off the web. If one types 'Fantagraphics' into Google's search engine, one million results are returned, but if you look at the Fantagraphics entry here, hopefully we will have some substantive pieces on the company that will be useful for research.A word of caution – this bibliography is best used in conjunction with Lent's 10-volume set of Comic Art Bibliography, Rhode & Bullough's online Comics Research Bibliography at  http://www.rpi.edu/~bulloj/comxbib.html (for not all citations there have been added here yet), Joachim Trinkwitz's Bonn Online Bibliography of Comics Research at https://www.bobc.uni-bonn.de/ , and Randy Scott's Index to and List of the Comic Art Collection at http://comics.lib.msu.edu/ . It is neither feasible nor possible to duplicate efforts, and it would not be desirable either, as we all work together and have helped each other.       

 

Book Review - Strong Bonds: Child-animal Relationships in Comics

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reviewed by Chris York

Maaheen Ahmed, ed. Strong Bonds: Child-animal Relationships in Comics. Presses Universitaires de Liege, 2020. 295 pp. ISBN 978-2-87562-259-4. http://www.presses.uliege.be/jcms/c_22440/acme-6

http://www.presses.uliege.be/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-02/acme_6_free.pdf (open access link to entire book)

  Maaheen Ahmed notes in her introduction to Strong Bonds that there is a disproportionately small amount of scholarship on the child-animal relationship in comics, despite its prevalence throughout comics history, across publication formats, and across cultures. Strong Bonds addresses this need with a collection of essays that are engaging and insightful, and show the range and complexity of the child-animal relationship in comics.

The book is structured around five sections: The Alternative Family, Queered Relationships, Childhood Under Threat, Politics, and Poetics. Each section consists of two or three chapters, which, at times, felt inadequate. The section Queered Relationships, for instance, consists of essays that focus on two runs of superhero comics, Supergirl in Action Comics, and Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur. While the chapters themselves are well-conceived, having only two essays focusing on comics from major American publishers, DC and Marvel, seemed inadequate for expressing the range of the theme across the spectrum of comics.

The essays throughout the volume find common ground in their assessment of the child-animal relationship’s ability to disrupt conventional dichotomies such as queer/straight, self/other, adult/child, and civilized/savage. Laura Pearson, a contributor of one of the more compelling chapters in the book, notes that dualisms “devalue” the side that is implied to be inferior. The child-animal relationship, as each of these essays attest, is an effective vehicle for exploring these dual conceptions because it is not really dichotomous at all; the adult/parent is always, either implicitly or explicitly, a third contributor to the relationship’s dynamic. Thus, the child-adult relationship is disrupted by the addition of the animal, and the human-animal relationship is disrupted by the child. It is in these fissures that the concepts of the family, gender, identity, and society, among others, are scrutinized and reformulated. The strength of this anthology is that it demonstrates the versatility of the child-animal-(adult) relationship in addressing social conventions.

It is almost inherent in the nature of the anthology that the quality of the chapters will be uneven. Strong Bonds is no exception. However, the majority of chapters in this volume are well-written, show a strong understanding of the field, and add to the conversation in interesting ways. While many of the chapters focus on narrative, I found that the most compelling contributions addressed how the formal elements of comics are able to uniquely represent the child-animal relationship. Pearson’s essay on Matt Forsythe’s Jinchalo, for instance, notes how the sparse use of language, in the form of onomatopoeia, inspires a sense of readerly curiosity and destabilizes a variety of boundaries (linguistic, cultural, generational, species). The instability of the text, Pearson concludes, encourages the reader to explore “[t]he idea of attempting to imagine another.” Elsewhere, the visual structure of comics informs Shiamin Kwa’s exploration of Brecht Evens’ Panther. The unsettling shifts in the illustration of the panther from panel to panel, Kwa notes, is integral to exposing the ambiguity and compounding the tension within the narrative. Both of these essays, and many more within this volume, are aided by attractive, high-quality color reproductions of their subjects.

As I suggest above, the primary critique of this collection is that it does not completely deliver on its intent to show the range of the child-animal relationship in comics. In her introduction, Ahmed states that the anthology covers “a historically and culturally diverse corpus”(10). The comics that are the focus of this collection do touch upon nearly every decade of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Little Orphan Annie to Jommeke to Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur.  However, the collection does not venture beyond the western tradition. All of the chapters deal with comics by British, European or North American creators. The closest the book comes to engaging non-western traditions is the chapter on Matthew Forsythes Jinchalo. Forsythe is Canadian, but draws upon Korean culture and language in the narrative. His essay’s play with cultural borders is fascinating, but it left me all the more aware of the absence of other comics traditions in the volume. The child-animal relationship spans all traditions, and it would have been interesting to see non-Western comics in dialogue with the other essays in this collection. With that caveat in mind, Ahmed has assembled a valuable collection of essays for anyone interested in exploring child-animal relationships in comics.

A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 23-2 (Fall/Winter 2021).

 

Table of Contents


Introduction
Maaheen Ahmed
Child-animal Relationships in Comics: A First Mapping ................................... 9


Alternative Families
Peter W.Y. Lee
The Maternal Arf!: Raising Canines in the Roaring Twenties in Harold Gray’s
Little Orphan Annie .............................................................................................. 29
Gert Meesters and Pascal Lefèvre
Towards an Unexpected Equivalence: Animals, Children and Adults
in the Popular Flemish Strip Jommeke ............................................................... 51
Jennifer Marchant
Hergé’s Animal Sidekicks: The Adventures of Snowy and Jocko ....................... 71


Queered Relationships
Olivia Hicks
(Super) Horsing Around: The Significance of Comet in Supergirl ................... 91
Nicole Eschen Solis
A Girl and Her Dinosaur: The Queerness of Childhood in Moon Girl
and Devil Dinosaur ............................................................................................. 109


Childhood under Threat
José Alaniz
“Winner Take All!”: Children, Animals and Mourning in Kirby’s
Kamandi ............................................................................................................... 129
Mel Gibson
“Once upon a time, there was a very bad rat…”:
Constructions of Childhood, Young People, Vermin and Comics .................. 149
Shiamin Kwa
The Panther, the Girl, and the Wardrobe: Borderlessness and Domestic Terror
in Panther ............................................................................................................. 165


Politics
Michael Chaney and Sara Biggs Chaney
Animal-child Dyad and Neurodivergence in Peanuts ..................................... 183
Fabiana Loparco
The Most Loyal of Friends, the Most Lethal of Enemies: Child-animal
Relationships in Corriere dei Piccoli during the First World War ................ 195


Poetics
Emmanuelle Rougé
A Poetics of Anti-authorianism: Child-animal Relationships in Peanuts
and Calvin and Hobbes ...................................................................................... 225
Benoît Glaude
Child-animal Interactions in Yakari’s Early Adventures:
A Zoonarratological Reading ............................................................................. 239
Laura A. Pearson
Graphic Cross-pollinations and Shapeshifting Fables in Matthew Forsythe’s
Jinchalo ................................................................................................................. 257


Postscript
Philippe Capart
Boule & Bill: Unwrapped .................................................................................... 279


List of contributors ........................................................................................... 287
Index ............................................................................................................................ 291

An Obituary & Remembrance of Manga Historian Shimizu Isao

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Shimizu Isao,  2015 Japan Cultural Affairs Agency Award winner

by Ronald Stewart 

Shimizu Isao, a giant in manga studies scholarship (and founding International Editorial Board member for IJOCA) left us on March 2, 2021 at age 81, after a battle with prostate cancer. Shimizu was astonishingly prolific. Over a period of roughly fifty-years from when he began to publish on manga history, he penned and/or edited in excess of 100 books, but this was just part of his legacy.

Born in Tokyo in 1939, Shimizu had toyed with the idea of becoming a cartoonist or animator after graduating university, but found himself instead doing editing work between 1963 and 1984 for publishers in the heart of Tokyo’s Jimbochō secondhand book district. His growing interest in satirical prints and cartoons, particularly those of the Edo (1600-1868) and Meiji (1868-1912) periods, as well as comics history in general, led to him haunt those used bookstores. He managed to amass a huge collection of historical comic art cheaply, at a time when there was very little interest in this material. His home overflowing with a collection that swelled to over two million items (magazines, clippings, books and prints) and became the Japanese Manga Archives (Nihon Manga Shiryō-kan). This collection not only enabled Shimizu to research, exhibit and publish using this material, but he also allowed other historians, museums and students access for their research.

The caricature used on his name cards and website     

Public institutions had long ignored this kind of material as ephemera of little value. However, as Shimizu’s writing, talks and exhibitions began to draw attention to pre-war manga history, his collection and his expertise became sought after by more and more museums, galleries, libraries, universities, and the media, and became integral to a number of major exhibitions in Japan. These include, his early “Meiji Manga” exhibition at Machida City Museum in 1978, “300 Years of Japanese Manga” at Kawasaki City Museum in 1996, “Images of Meiji – The World of French Artist George Bigot in Japan” at Itami City Art Museum in 2002, and the “Grand Manga History: Tracing back to Edo” at Kyoto International Manga Museum in 2015. At the time of his death, the large “Giga – Manga” exhibition that he supervised – consisting of comic art from Edo satirical prints, called giga, to early popular comics of the 1930s - is touring a number of public and private museums throughout the country. He had also been involved in exhibitions and manga related events in France, Germany, Spain and Italy.

Giga Manga exhibition catalogue 2020-2021

After Shimizu quit his editing work around 1984 to concentrate full time on researching and writing on satirical cartoons and manga history, he was employed as a research associate at Kawasaki City Museum for nearly two decades. In 2006, he became an advisor to the Kyoto International Manga which acquired a large portion of his collection. The “Shimizu Collection” there forms the core of the museum’s pre-war historical holdings. At both of these institutions, Shimizu helped foster a number of young curators and researchers active at various institutions today. At Teikyo Heisei University, where Shimizu worked as a professor for over a decade, more than a few students had an interest in satirical cartoons and manga history kindled by his lectures.

1995 Poster for a public lecture

Shimizu was also involved with the creation in 2001 of the Japan Society for the Study of Cartoons and Comics (Nihon Manga Gakkai) and was a member of its inaugural board of directors. This remains the only national society for this field of study in Japan. However, Shimizu no doubt felt slightly marginalized, for the vast majority of the society’s more than 350 members are interested first and foremost in post-war and modern narrative comics expression (rather than Shimizu’s first love of satirical cartoons and pre-war comics history). Moreover, for the limited number of younger scholars who now actively research early manga history, Shimizu’s long view perspective on this history - a perspective built upon earlier manga histories which connects comics to a centuries-old humorous art tradition - had become the subject of criticism. Nevertheless, while Shimizu’s books are primarily aimed at a general audience, many of them are, and will remain for many years to come, essential reading for any scholar of manga. In Yoshimura Kazuma and Jaqueline Berndt’s 2020 book Manga Studies, which introduces thirty foundational books in the field to Japanese readers, Shimizu’s 1991 classic Manga History (Manga no Rekishi), is at the top of the list as a “first step into Japanese manga history research.”

Bigot Sketch Collection 1 - Manners and Customs of Meiji 

Shimizu’s earliest books were two self-published cartoon collections in the early 1970s. The first grew out of his fascination with French artist Georges Ferdinand Bigot who produced satirical cartoon magazines while living in Japan at the end of the nineteenth-century. The other book was a rare collection of wartime political cartoons. These two interests, Georges Bigot and wartime cartoons, along with Edo period humorous prints, Meiji period satirical magazine cartoons and cartoonists, manga pioneer Okamoto Ippei, early postwar comics, and newspaper comic strips, were themes he would revisit throughout his career, revealing surprising new discoveries each time. Shimizu wrote or edited eighteen

Manga Shonen and Akahon Manga
publications on Bigot, many of which have been reprinted multiple times; his 1992 book Bigot’s Japanese Sketch Collection (Bigōt Nihon sobyō-shū) has gone through an incredible thirty-one printings. Among his other publications that are highly regarded are his 1989 book on the early postwar magazine ‘Manga Shōnen’ and akahon manga books, his 1997 book on Hasegawa Machiko’s Sasae-san comic strip, and his 2008 book on the pioneering story manga artist Yokoi Fukujirō. For scholars of manga history, his chronologies of manga publications, manga dictionary, and his reprints early satirical magazines, in particular his 1986 series Manga Magazine Museum (Manga zasshi hakubutsukan), are indispensable references. His self-published journal Satirical Cartoon Research (Fūshi-ga kenkyū), 48 issues between 1992 to 2005, is an important resource for scholars of political cartoons.

Shimizu’s efforts to preserve, record and bring manga’s early history to a broad audience earned him the 1986 “Special Jury Award” from the Japanese Cartoonists Association and in 2015 a “Special Achievement Award” from the Japan Agency for Cultural Affairs. It is no exaggeration to say Shimizu’s achievement in making material available through his collection, exhibitions and publications has made it possible for a new generation to conduct pre-war manga history research today.

Pages from Fushiga Kenkyu journal showing research on Shonen Puck

My own research on early manga history was sparked by Shimizu’s publications on Meiji satirical cartoons, written in highly readable jargon-free prose. I had the good fortune to meet him a number of times over the years beginning in 1995 when I attended one of his public lectures. He acted as chair in 2002 for my first academic paper in Japanese on Frank A Nankivell and his student, Japan’s first career mangaka Kitazawa Rakuten (for more details, see Fusami Ogi’s interview with Shimizu in IJOCA5(2) 2003). The last time we met was at another talk public talk in 2018 on Rakuten. As always, I was amazed by his encyclopedic knowledge of not just Japanese, but also foreign cartoon history (He could be described in Japanese as an ikijibiki or a ‘living dictionary’). His curiosity was also insatiable, and his eyes would sparkle whenever he a conversation turned to manga and cartoon history research. While my own take on the history of manga development has come to diverge from his over the years, his work continues to be important for me. On the bookshelves of my study, I keep over fifty of his books close at hand as a constant source of information and inspiration. I, like many others, felt his ever-inquisitive mind would continue to provide us with more research, discoveries and exhibitions. Rest in peace Shimizu-sensei, and thank you. 

Some of Shimizu Isao's many books on my bookshelves


A version of this will appear in print in IJOCA 23-1.

New Issue of IJOCA is out - 22-2 Fall/Winter 2020 table of contents

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COMIC ART
Vol. 22, No. 2 Fall/Winter 2020
 
Editor's Notes
1
Survilo and Historical Trauma in Contemporary Russian Comics
Jose Alaniz
5
Tintin: From Violent Communist-Hating Conservative to Radical Peacenik, Part 2
Marty Branagan
33
An Interview with Patricia Breccia
Hector Fernandez L'Hoeste
64
"The Fez, The Harem Pants, and the Embroidered Tie: Fashion and the Politics of Orientalism
in Three Francophone Graphic Novels"
Annabelle Cone
92
Far Out of the Box: The Comics of Chile's Marcela Trujillo (Maliki)
John A. Lent with Geisa Fernandes
134
The Characteristics of Japanese Manga
Natsume Fusanosuke
Translated by Jon Holt and Teppei Fukuda
164
Ordinary Enemies: Robert Kanigher, Garth Ennis, and the Myth of the Unblemished Wehrmacht
Stephen Connor
180
Re-invention of Indian Myths in the Superhero Comic Books of Nagraj
Pritesh Chakraborty
213
Watchmen: An Exploration of Transcendence in Comics
Christine Atchison
229
The 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War and American Comics
Francisco Saez de Adana and Michel Matly
261
Comix from the Cosmos: Interview with Barbara "Willy" Mendes
Kim Munson
284
Trying Times Require Re-inventiveness: Ways of Coping of Taiwan's Ling Qun
John A. Lent
336
"Reoccurring Dreams": Music and the Elegiac Voice in John Porcellino's Perfect Example
Brian Cremins
341
The Maternal-Feminine and Matrixial Borderspace in Megan Kelso's Watergate Sue
Alisia Grace Chase
351
How Sugiura's Ninja-Boy Comics Developed after the Asia-Pacific War
Kosei Ono
365
The Pedagogy and Potential of Educational Comics
Aaron Humphrey
375
To Play or Not to Play? That Is the Question:Perspectives on Organized Youth Sports in Comic Strips
Jeffrey O. Segrave
405
An Interview with India's Ghost Animation Studio about Their Short Film "Wade"
Alexandra Bowman
424
An Expert on Arrow: Critical Fan Activism and Gail Simone's Twitter
Peter Cullen Bryan
434
Is It a Bird? Is It a Plane? It's Jack the Ripper!
Andrew Edwards
451
Habibi Worth a Thousand Words, and a Few Words Worth a Thousand Tales
Safa Al-shammary
462
In Memory of Theresa Lee Wai-chun (1943-2020)
Wendy Siuyi Wong
476
Print Is Dead; Long Live Print!: Are Digital Comics Killing the Print Comics Industry?
Kyle Eveleth
482
Comics as a Window into Disposability: Some Thoughts
Angelo J. Letizia
496
Cartoons in the Time of Corona in India
Mrinal Chatterjee
509
The Wild Career Path of Taiwan's Tsai Chih-chung: Animator, Comic Strips and Books Creator, Physicist, now Monk
John A. Lent with Xu Ying
525

Book Reviews
John A. Lent
Janis Be Breckenridge
Bryan Bove
Christopher Roman
Tony Wei Ling
John A. Lent
Lizzy Walker
Elke Defever
John A. Lent
Cord A. Scott
John A. Lent
Matthew Teutsch
A. David Lewis
John A. Lent
Aaron Ricker
John A. Lent
531

Exhibition Reviews
Chris Yogerst
Lim Cheng Tju
Chaney Jewell and Cassandra Christ
582

Portfolio
590

Chronicles of a Circuit Breaker Exhibition book talk (online) and exhibit in Singapore

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Comics and Covid

Sat May 1, 2021
11:30 AM - 12:30 PMSGT

Description
A year after Singapore's circuit breaker, author of Chronicles of a Circuit Breaker, Joseph Chiang joins book editor, CT Lim in reminiscing the quirky, and sometimes, downright perplexing days of the lockdown. In this special book launch event with Mulan Gallery, learn how comics play a role in recording the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

Date: Saturday, 1st May 2021
Time: 11.30AM-12.30PM SGT
Location: Zoom and FB Live

*For those who want to participate in the Zoom session, please fill up the attached form. Invitation to the Zoom session will be sent via email.


*******


ABOUT THE BOOK
Funny and stark, this comic strip memoir relives the surreal days of Singapore's circuit breaker days from April to June 2020. Cartoonist Joseph Chiang records the strangeness and the mundanity of daily life during the circuit breaker such as the toilet paper shortage, mask-wearing woes and forced family time. Chiang's slice-of-life stories provide humour during unprecedented times and document local events and idiosyncrasies that stemmed from this new-normal era.

Get the book here.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joseph Chiang is a visual artist and printmaker. He is the founder of Monster Gallery, a creative print studio; and the Young Printmakers League, a mentorship programme supported by Noise Singapore. He was commissioned by the National Arts Council to organise the Contemporary Printmaking Festival as part of Singapore Art Week 2017. He has exhibited in Singapore and internationally, and was invited to show his work at the 10th World Triennale of Original Prints and Engravings in Chamalieres, France in 2017.

------------

Chronicles of a Circuit Breaker Exhibition
Exhibition Day: 1 - 15 May 2021
Event Address: 36 Armenian Street, #01-07 s(179932)
Contact us at (65) 6738 0810 or enquiry@mulangallery.com.sg

Flugennock's Latest'n'Greatest: "Blue Lives Matter no.2"

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DC's anarchist cartoonist, Mike Flugennock, sent this out on April 23rd but it slid down my screen. Sadly, it will remain relevant.


"Blue Lives Matter no. 2"
http://sinkers.org/stage/?p=3196

Mere hours after the Derek Chauvin verdict was handed down, Columbus 
police shot 15 year-old Ma'Khia Bryant to death after she called the 
police for help as she was being threatened. That's right; she called 
the goddamn cops for help, and they shot her — after which police 
taunted bystanders with declarations of "Blue Lives Matter!".

And while that atrocity was going on, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was 
sharting out the following hot, sloppy bucket of White Liberal Bougie 
Politician horseshit:

Speaker Pelosi: "Thank you George Floyd for sacrificing your life for 
justice ... Because of you and because of thousands, millions of 
people around the world who came out for justice, your name will 
always be synonymous with justice."

The Recount @therecount on Twitter, 04.20.2021

...and here I thought Pelosi had totally hit bottom with that taking a 
knee in a kente cloth stunt. Christ, that goddamn woman needs to just 
shut the hell up, resign from office, and retire back to San Francisco 
with her huge-ass fridge full of overpriced ice cream.

--------------

"Nancy Pelosi: 'Thank You, George Floyd, For Sacrificing Your Life'", 
by Akbar Shahid Ahmed in the Huffington Post, 03.20.2021
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nancy-pelosi-george-floyd-thank-you_n_607f4d32e4b017537f0c1370

"Columbus Cops Accused of Saying 'Blue Lives Matter' After Ma'Khia 
Bryant Shooting", Anders Anglesey in Newsweek, 04.21.2021
https://www.newsweek.com/columbus-cops-accused-blue-lives-matter-makhia-bryant-shooting-1585314

"Speaker Pelosi: 'Thank you George Floyd for sacrificing your life for 
justice ... Because of you and because of thousands, millions of 
people around the world who came out for justice, your name will 
always be synonymous with justice'." The Recount @therecount on 
Twitter, 04.20.2021
https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1384624882600796167


Mike Flugennock, Political Cartoons: http://www.sinkers.org/stage
and follow me on Mastodon at https://mastodon.social/@flugennock

When Le Chat Was Put Among the Pigeons

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 Musings by Wim Lockefeer

In a time of pandemic, it was no more than a fait divers on the global news cycle, but it was a fait nevertheless: the plan of the Brussels regional government to invest 9 million euros in a museum for Belgian cartoonist Philippe Geluck and his character Le Chat met with less than favorable, or at least mixed, reactions. Protest predominantly focused on the perceived lack of artistic merit in Geluck’s work and on whether the government should spend that amount on a new museum in times of Covid (while the Museum of Modern Art has been closed for more than a decade).

What is Le Chat? Why would the Brussels government want a museum for a cartoon cat? And why is everybody in the art world seemingly so set against it? Here are some thoughts from a local part-time comics journalist.

For the casual observer, Belgium’s government structure may seem like an impossible Gordian knot. We have three communities, each with their own language (Dutch, German, French) and their own governmental functions. In addition, there are two state-like regions that don’t really cover the same grounds, but also have their own governments. Then there’s the region of the capital or Brussels (with its own government) and there’s the federal government. Even I had to look it up, and I’ve lived here for more than fifty years.

Belgium likes to present itself as the cradle of European comics. Almost every sizable town has its speciality store, and comics fairs and festivals are all over. In Brussels especially you’ll bump into comics around every corner, be it in one of its several museums (including the comprehensive Comic Art Museumand the specialized Marc Sleen Museum), along the comics mural route, in galleries and art houses and in quite a lot of comics shops, both in French and Dutch (and a little English).

Even though Philippe Geluck is a cartoonist, his most important work, Le Chat, largely is not a comic strip. During its run in the Belgian newspaper Le Soir (from 1983 until 2013) his daily offering was quite often a single panel gag cartoon, with a penchant for bon mots, absurdism and self-referential jokes. Le Soir is one of the oldest newspapers in the country, and its readership is a perfect fit for Geluck’s kind of humor: respectable, highly educated, with a well-paying office job and quite progressive values, but not so much so as to ever be calling for a revolution.

Belgium may well be the birthplace of the Franco-Belgian comics tradition, but for the longest time comics were considered to be low-grade children’s fodder, whereas the single-panel cartoon was a quality cultural product for the discerning connoisseur, with international festivals in places like Knokke-Heist since the early 1960s. Think of the status of the New Yorker cartoon in the USA.

Single-panel jokes have the additional benefit that they can be easily reproduced on all kinds of merchandising products. Over the years Le chat has graced numerous post cards, napkins, badges, magnets, posters, and lately, of course, face masks. Le Chat chocolates (Les Langues du Chat) in their collectable tins are a favourite to take along when visiting friends. Les Chat and its licensing is omnipresent.

Or rather, that’s what you’d think if you visit Belgium and land in Brussels National Airport (or, conversely, if you leave the country and want a final farewell to all the riches it has to offer). If you don’t consider the ever-present Tintinfor a moment (or at least try not to), you’d think that Belgium is basically Chat country.

Which it isn’t. I’d wager that if you ask any one hundred Dutch-speaking Belgians, roughly 80% would not know about Le Chat or Geluck (although they would now, after all the hullaballoo in the papers). In Brussels, the urban centers in the south of the country, and in France, they are a bona fide hit though, with more than 14 million books sold.

Because, indeed, Geluck also managed to get his cartoons collected in a long-running series of albums, published by Casterman (historically, the publisher of the more respectable clear line of bandes dessinėes, such as Tintin or Alix). From 1985 onwards, Le Chat was a recurring feature in color in the avant-garde comics monthly A Suivre (also published by Casterman) and, as with most of the more popular titles in that periodical, later collected in up-market hard cover books.

All in all, Philippe Geluck is without a doubt a very successful creator, with numerous books in various languages, radio shows and television series, awards and honorifics a-plenty, and even an asteroid named after him. He could be considered, for better or for worse, one of the most recognized Belgian authors of the past few decades.

But even while he kept quite busy with his cartoon series, stand-alone books, spin-off books and animation series, Geluck also started try his hand at a different, even more profitable business - that of fine art. Helped by specialized galleries such as Huberty-Breyne, he started doing large scale paintings with the same zany, absurdist humor and, indeed, with Le Chat.

At high-profile art events like the Brafa art fair, Geluck is present with his paintings, offered at quite hefty prices, and limited-run multiples. And he is selling – this is the kind of art that fits the office wall of an accountant who wants to be more than just a dreary functionary. It’s funny (it has an actual joke that may break the ice), it’s easy (Geluck’s art style has been called a lot of things, but never sketchy or chaotic) and it’s largely innocuous.

Halfway through the 2000s, Geluck started mentioning how Paris and other French cities had approached him with proposals for a museum of some kind for him and his creation, and culturos in the Brussels government got a tad anxious. After all, haven’t they just lost Tintin and the Hergé Museum, to Louvain-La-Neuve-Ottignies, a provincial town in French-speaking Walloon Brabant (one that, admittedly, also had a university)? Could they afford to lose Geluck as well, and to France at that?

            And so, a plan was made, a site was chosen (a building that for the longest time had been empty, but that is situated on the Rue Royale, in the middle of the cultural heart of the city) and initial designs were presented to the assembled press.

After which a (small) wave of protests washed in, especially from the Brussels art world, with a petition asking why a museum dedicated to one man, a cartoonist with a simplistic style at that, was in the works, while the whole collection of the National Museum of Modern Art had been in storage for more than a decade, and while other (more serious, I gather) art was being neglected.

While all this was covered in the press and on TV, the Brussels, and Belgian, comics scene, kept strangely quiet, even though the Belgian Comics Museum had announced only two weeks earlier that it was forced to let go a third of its employees because it had attracted 70% fewer visitors due to the COVID crisis. In addition to the rent from the book store and coffee shop, tickets are the only source of income of this unique Museum.

            Philippe Geluck seemed quite shocked by all the hubbub the plans for his museum had caused. During a television debate on commercial station RTL he announced that, if a better goal for the building could be found, he’d gladly step aside.

            So, what to do? Perhaps turn the Rue Royal building into a modern art museum and support the already existing Comics Museum? Give Le Chat its own wing there? For the government bodies involved in the affair, nothing seems to have changed in spite of any controversy. Maybe we should simply wait a couple more years. After all, Geluck is still alive and very much kicking, while other bigwigs of the Belgian art world only got their museums long after their demises. 

 A version of this will be published in print in IJOCA 23-1.


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Book Review: Spanish Comics: Historical and Cultural Perspectives

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 Spanish Comics: Historical and Cultural Perspectives. Ann Magnussen, ed. New York: Berghahn Books, 2021. 268 pp. $27.95. ISBN: 978-1-78920-997-6. https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/MagnussenSpanish

 reviewed by Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste

On the practical side, if anyone is planning a course on contemporary Spanish comics, please look no further. This title is the ideal companion for any class on this topic. On the other hand, one of the virtues of graphic narratives is the amount of information they can transmit about the culture, history, and politics of any location, making them a suitable vehicle for the examination of any context. Anne Magnussen’s edited volume is a flawless example of this aspect. Within the pages of this title, in a single tome, academics, enthusiasts, and fellow readers will find pieces that cover the role of comics from the time immediately after the Civil War, passing through Madrid’s Movidaduring the transition to democracy in the late 1970s and early 1980s—following Franco’s death in 1975—to the early decades of this century, when Spain seeks to establish itself as a modern, European parliamentary democracy while facing multiple challenges and growing pains. From a more theoretical perspective, it’s appealing to find an anthology that, while discussing the plethora of comics and graphic novels produced in Spain during the latter part of the twentieth century and the early part of the current one, manages to connect this production with its cultural, political, and social context in a more organic, plausible manner, clarifying how the country’s evolution from dictatorship to one of the main partners of the European Union dictated and determined the rise and development of Spanish comics.

The book contains 12 chapters, first published as articles in the peer-reviewed journal European Comic Art, which Magnussen co-edits. The amount of vetting and evaluation these texts have endured is visible in the clarity of its arguments and expositions, adding to the quality of the volume. Unlike the editor, an associate professor of History at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense—though she has enjoyed stints at US institutions of higher education—most of the authors, whether Spanish or of some other nationality, are associated with the US, British, or Spanish academe (Agatha Mohring, based in France, is the only other exception).

The first chapter of the collection, by Rhiannon McGlade, a lecturer and fellow at Cambridge, focuses on the golden age of Spanish comics for children, which took place in the 1950s. The article analyzes the production in terms of the interaction between publishers, the censorship authorities, and the audience. Throughout the chapter, it becomes evident how the Franco regime tried to influence comics production via its support of a particular construct of Spain, to be disseminated and popularized among children.  What remains particular about the Spanish situation is the extent to which the government tried to control and discipline the population through measures that, in the case of children, were discernible from a very early age, given the number of orphans and fatalities resulting from the conflict.

Chapter 4. Castelao by Siro, Mazaira, and Cubeiro

One of McGlade’s main contentions is the extent to which some children’s comics tried to push censorship boundaries. Since the press was under strict control by the state, effectively complying with orders and directives associated with the public, all material to be published had to first receive approval from the corresponding authorities. In turn, publications partial to the government were afforded subsidized rates for printing materials. Clearly, this was not the case with any dissenting periodical. Nonetheless, after Franco’s rise to power, staples like TBO or Pulgarcito were eventually allowed to return, in time resulting in the arrival of DDT, by Bruguera, in 1951. Through the 1950s, the government implemented a series of decrees and directives attacking secularism and any sort of content deemed to ridicule the roles of parents and the sanctity of the family and home, enshrining respect for authority, the love of the Fatherland, and obedience of the law, a veritable dream recipe for any autocrat. At the same time, a very tight control was kept on imported material, which, given its promotion of the supernatural—superheroes and their disrupting superpowers were greatly in mind—was judged potentially harmful to the adolescent psyche. Thus, the path toward self-censorship began to surface openly. Near the end, McGlade discusses in detail the cases of main characters of the period, Carpanta, Doña Urraca, and Zipi y Zape, which displayed carefully contained critiques of authority under government watch.

Chapter 4. Titoan by Inacio and Ivan Suarez

The second chapter, by Gerardo Vilches, who teaches social sciences at the European University of Madrid, discusses the development of the comics industry during the political transition (1975–1982). Vilches focuses on explicitly political production of the period and the efforts by the regime to limit their impact and influence through censorship. He starts by addressing the last two years of the so-called Ley Fraga, the guidelines promulgated by Franco’s Minister of Information and Tourism, which allowed publishers the risk to circulate what they wanted, only to be punished later. In effect, the law wanted to give an appearance of modernity, but the mechanisms for repression remained intact. The article chronicles the experiences of magazines like Por Favor, El Papus, El Jueves, and Butifarra! in the context of the rise in nudity in a variety of expressions of Spanish popular culture—Destape(Unveiling), it was called by locals—and the judicial system. During the political transition, a hostile environment prevailed in which creators were prosecuted and, on some occasions, strips were cancelled as the result of pressure from the government. Mockery of the Catholic faith was a habitual pretext for the punishment of the satirical press. For instance, both Por Favor and El Papus experienced four-month closures in 1974; El Papus even endured three court martials. Things got so personal that El Papus was chastised as the result of a formal complaint by Carmen Polo, Franco’s wife. By 1978, having faced weekly visits to the court system, Por Favor was closed and only El Papus and El Jueves remained. In the end, with the arrival of democracy, there were more options in terms of procuring information; readers looked elsewhere for political and social criticism. However, the struggle for freedom of press during the transition speaks volumes about the travails of a young democracy.


Chapter 4. Atila by Inacio and Ivan Suarez

The third chapter also addresses the political transition, though from a different perspective. Louie Dean Valencia-García, an assistant professor of Digital History at Texas State, focuses on underground fanzines during Madrid’s Movida, theorizing about the ways in which they offered outlets for the youth’s inconformity and desire to communicate. Valencia-García mentions fanzines like La liviandad del imperdible (The Lightness of the Safety Pin), Kaka de Luxe, and ¡Bang! Fanzine de los tebeos españoles (Bang! Spanish Comics Fanzine), to illustrate the impact these publications had on the culture of the time. According to the author, 1977 figures as the peak year for the production of new, independent fanzines amid a scene marked by personalities like Alaska (Olvido Gara Jova, of the bands Kaka de Luxe, Los Pegamoides, and Dinarama fame) and Pedro Almodóvar. The text includes close readings of work found in zines from the early 1980s, such as Ediciones Moulinsart and 96 Lágrimas (96 Tears). Ediciones repurposed images from Tintinor The Phantom to speak of the Movida. On the other hand, 76 Lágrimas combines strains of feminism and racialized language within Madrid’s zine scene, depicting women as sexually assertive and physically aggressive in a milieu that for decades had rebuked behavior of this nature.


Chapter 4. Castelao by Diaz Pardo

Next, the volume begins to map a broader, more intricate version of the nation, less in sync with the homogenizing, stultifying spirit of the Generalissimo. The fourth chapter, by David Miranda Barreiro, a senior lecturer in Hispanic Studies at Bangor University (Wales), is about Alfonso Daniel Manuel Rodríguez Castelao (1886–1950), a Galician comics artist and one of the founder of Galician nationalism from the early 20th century, and the many ways in which he is represented in contemporary Galician comics. The mention of Galicia, one of today’s officially recognized autonomous communities, with its own language and culture and a potentially separate project of nation, stands in sharp contrast with the dictates of Franco’s regime, which for decades persecuted any Iberian culture separate from Castile’s to the point of demonizing alternate languages and traditions. Though Castelao

Chapter 4. Castelao by Martin, Sarry, and Balboa

worked as caricaturist during the first three decades of the past century, the article follows a transdisciplinary approach—comics theory, literary biography, and adaptation—to center on his representation in comics biographies published in the 1970s, 1980s, and 2000s. Among the works discussed are a comic by Paco Martín, Ulises Sarry, and Xoán Balboa titled Castelao: O home (Castelao: The Man), a tribute on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death; Isaac Díaz Pardo’s Castelao, from 1985; Castelao  (1987), by Siro, Mazaira, and Cubeiro, the first full-length graphic biography of the artist; and Titoán (2012), by Inacio and Iván Suárez, winner of the Premio Castelao de Banda Deseñada, awarded by the A Coruña Council (and part of an eight-volume series, of which only four have already been published, including O pobre tolo [2012], Máis alá [2013], and Atila [2015]).

 Chapter 5. Paracuellos by Gimenez
Chapter 5. Eloy by Hernandez Palacio

Chapter five discusses trauma, memory, and comics. Juan Carlos Pérez García, an associate professor of Public Law at the University of Málaga, traces the representation of the Civil War and its subsequent dictatorship from the 1970s to the 2010s. Memory and trauma, it turns out, play big roles in the Spanish comics of the current century; in fact, this interest in memory and trauma in comics evinces how closely the Spanish comics scene reflects trends from the comics industry around the world. The mention of master cartoonist Carlos Giménez’s Paracuellos (1976—), his unparalleled testimony of childhood in the Francoist Hogares de Auxilio Social (Social Assistance Homes), is unavoidable. Though the Civil War is nowhere, its presence can be felt extensively all over the narrative,

Chapter 5. Un largo silencio by Gallardo

documenting how Franco’s regime sewed social division and embraced systematic violence to repress the population. Eloy(1979), by Antonio Hernández Palacios, does approach the conflict directly. Following commercial conventions, Palacios uses the figure of a young militiaman to chronicle the war and portray a parade of celebrities, including Major Enrique Líster, one of the great Republican military leaders; Dolores Ibárruri, “La Pasionaria” (The Passionflower), the legendary communist politician, famous for her slogan “¡No pasarán!” (They shall not pass) during the Battle for Madrid; and Buenaventura Durruti, the renowned anarchist hero buried at Montjuic in Barcelona, among his characters. Un largo silencio(A Long Silence, 1997), by Francisco and Miguel Ángel Gallardo, father and son, is a first-person account of the war from a critical point of view. It also represents the quintessential mnemonic narrative associated with trauma; it includes the imperative to tell, the notion of generational memory that aspires to be shared, and repetition and fragmentation, thus being exemplary of Marianne Hirsch’s “post-memory.” 

Chapter 5. El arte de volar by Altarriba and Kim
El arte de volar (The Art of Flying, 2009), by Antonio Altarriba and Kim, is also based on the parent’s memories, chronicling the failed ideals of the Spanish republic, and shared trauma, that of the main character who commits suicide and the one of the son, unable to prevent his father’s suicide.

Chapter 5. Los surcos del azar by Roca

Next, there is Los surcos del azar (Twists of Fate, 2013), by Paco Roca, in which the story of

Chapter 5. Paseo de los canadienses by Guijarro
La Nueve (Number Nine), the division composed of exiled Spanish soldiers that participated in the liberation of Paris in 1944, serves as a device to explore the trauma of Republican defeat in the Civil War. Finally, there is Paseo de los canadienses (Promenade of the Canadians, 2015), by Carlos Guijarro, which tells the story of the old Malaga-Almería Road, where between three to five thousand people perished under the attack of Nationalist ships and Italian planes while fleeing Málaga’s siege by the Francoist forces, a story that was virtually erased by the triumphalist revisionism of the dictator’s adherents.

Chapter 6. El Cid by Hernandez Palacios

Interest in the past is not limited to trauma, as explained in chapter six, by Iain MacInnes, a senior lecturer in Scottish history at the University of the Highlands and Islands, who discusses representation in historical comics of the 1970s and 2010s. Like the two previous authors, MacInnes combines textual analysis with a great deal of societal context, offering readers a well-rounded outline of the objects of his research. His main interest, proper of a specialist in the 14th and 15th centuries, is the Reconquista (Reconquest), the process culminating in 1492 by which Castilians managed to recover the territories invaded by the Moors. This was especially relevant in the 1970s because, after the Civil War, Franco aligned his actions with Castilian success, hoping to legitimate his own Reconquista

Chapter 6. 1212 - Las Navas de Tolosa by Cano de la Iglesia
from the hands of the Second Spanish Republic. The two graphic novels at hand are El Cid (1971–1983), by Antonio Hernández Palacios, and 1212: Las Navas de Tolosa (2016), by Jesús Cano de la Iglesia. In both accounts, Spanish forces are portrayed as heroic. In the first, other Christian forces, like the French, are otherized, condoning a nuanced understanding of the greater role of the neighboring nation within Spanish history. In addition, both narratives frame their actions within the more ample context of the crusades. As would be expected, the main other in both accounts is the Muslim population, though Cano de la Iglesia takes things a tad further by emphasizing the non-homogeneous nature of the Muslim troops, some of which appear zealously religious. He distinguishes cautiously between Arab forces and a group of black African slave troops, playing on stereotypes. To some extent, Cano de la Iglesia echoes the modern context of a refugee crisis in Europe after the Arab springs and the Syrian crisis, providing a more comprehensive depiction of the impact of war on the Muslim population. Representation of the French troops isn’t as empathetic, though; in both stories, they’re frequently problematic and fail to follow orders, giving in to violence and acts of atrocity, like at the massacre at Barbastro. Also, their brand of Christianity borders on fanaticism, though in a manner reminiscent of pre-secular tensions. Lastly, the prevailing impression is that, while Cano de la Iglesia seems more kindhearted, Palacios embraces a portrayal of a Spain still in development, less prone to nationalist inclinations, in which Christians and Muslims battle according to convenience and personal interests, well along the lines of El Cid, who, as a soldier of fortune, occasionally served as ally of the Moors. In the end, both narratives figure out ways to avoid explicit nationalism, given political implications during their times.

 Chapter 7. Arrugas  Roca

Chapter seven marks a break in the narrative of the volume, since, from this point on,  the focus is on contemporary comics and, most specifically, the work of cartoonist Paco Roca, of Wrinkles (Arrugas, in the Spanish original, 2016) fame. Cleverly, Magnussen has chosen an interview of Roca by UCLA grad student Esther Claudio, who centers her work on post-Francoist Spanish historical memory in graphic novels. The interview figures as a sensible opener to the second half of the book. In it, Roca is candid about his relationship with the graphic novel, acknowledging how the format has forced him to implement and embrace new narrative tools, and the fact that some of his most recent production—like Los surcos del azar—though reminiscent of Art Spiegelman’s Maus in its methodology, is actually a far cry from the US cartoonist’s oeuvre. In fact, Roca underscores how in Los surcos the facts and evidence are framed in fiction, emulating historical testimony.  He goes on to point out the irony that the members of the Nueve, the main characters of Los surcos, fought with one object in mind—to free Spain from fascism—and this was precisely what they were not able to accomplish. Roca even elucidates that, though seemingly inspired by Valencian painter Joaquín Sorolla—Claudio is dead right pointing out the likeness—his palette is more influenced by nineteenth-century Romantic painters like Scottish artist David Roberts, who traveled to Spain and Tangiers. Alluding to Wrinkles, he also explains how, in retrospective, he wishes he had focused more on people providing care, since they tend to grow in the face of adversity. The interview is remarkably adept at setting a new tone and rhythm in the volume in comparison with previous articles, more concerned with assessing the politics of the cultural production of the post-Civil War and transition period. Thus, it serves as a smooth transition toward the remaining portion of the volume. Claudio does a competent job interviewing Roca and extracting some key tidbits on his work and plans for the future, as well as explicating the theoretical relation between Roca’s production and issues related to memory.

In the following chapter, Sarah D. Harris, a Bennington professor, discusses the use of metaphors and memory in La casa (2015), Roca’s more recent work. The graphic novel explores the importance of the self-built vacation home, as common fixture of many Spanish families in the 1970s and 1980s, as a space of memory. As Roca points out, the experience also hints at the prevalence of the Diogenes syndrome among his father’s generation; thus, many second homes became the preferred spots for old school projects, family memorabilia, and discarded gifts, eventually embodying a museum of mementoes. As Harris explains, after the passing of the father, the house—and the land it rests upon—becomes a semi-autobiographical bridge between the memories of two generations, past and present co-existing. The trees, for example, become metaphors for family. The space for the barbecue ratifies the presence of the deceased parent. The dumpster is packed with heirlooms and objects of the past. And, as usual, food under the father’s beloved but rickety pergola triggers remembrance. Harris is utterly proficient at showing how Roca dwells on the mnemonic implications of a second home and, along the way, processes mourning for a father who passed away shortly before La casa was concluded.

In the next chapter, Benjamin Fraser, from the University of Arizona, looks at La casafrom another perspective: that of architecture. Fraser suggests the notion of an architectural elegy as a mechanism to process grief in Roca’s novel. Initially, he focuses on structural elements of visual narrative, discussing how the layout invites readers to take in the images as a whole, rather than sequentially. In this way, page layout reinforces architectural specificity, drawing parallels between visual and material structures. In the second half of the chapter, Frasier centers on grief, depicting recollection as something that is spatially bound, with the past superimposing itself over the present. A new pérgola toscana, built to honor the father’s wishes and memory, becomes the embodiment of how the siblings come together to repair their strained relationships, all impacted by the manner in which they related to their progenitor. By the end, the chapter reveals that, in Roca’s case, unlike in the graphic novel, the second home wasn’t sold, and the cartoonist even used it to spend two summers working on the graphic novel in question.

Agatha Mohring, from the University of Angers (France), analyzes several Spanish comics and uses them to describe their representation of illness as pathography, thus pertaining to the nascent field of graphic medicine. At the same time, she argues, these strips illustrate the strong connection between Spanish comics and the international comics scene. The comics are María y yo (Maria and I, 2007), in which Miguel Gallardo describes his daughter’s autism, just like Mexico’s BEF in Habla María: Una novela gráfica sobre el autismo (Maria Speaks: A Graphic Novel on Autism, 2018); Arrugas (Wrinkles), the famed graphic novel by Roca, which deals with the various ailments afflicting the residents of a retirement home; and Una posibilidad entre mil (One Shot in a Thousand, 2009), by

Chapter 10. Una posibilidad entre mil by Duran and Giner Bou
Cristina Durán and Miguel Ángel Giner Bou, which shares the experience of cerebral palsy and Vojta methods, highlighting the resulting despondency and isolation. Mohring identifies all three accounts as didactic pathographies, since according to Anne Hunsaker Hawkins they combine medical information with personal involvement and knowledge, helping readers to get acquainted with the signs and symptoms of ailments or conditions. In all of them, the language of the travel narrative is employed as a metaphor for illness, evincing the graphic novel’s potential to delve into the intimacy of the afflicted and offer insights into autism, cerebral palsy, and Alzheimer’s.


The eleventh chapter marks an idiosyncratic turn, given it focuses on the work of Aleix Saló, the wildly successful Catalonian cartoonist who lit a fire with his Hijos de los 80: La generación burbuja (Fills dels80: La generació bombolla, in his native Catalan, 2009; Children of the 80s: The Bubble Generation, in English), a volume that discusses how a generation that expected to benefit from Spain’s economic buoyancy following the arrival of democracy ended at the mercy of the modern European welfare state. Saló’s work is in sharp contrast with Roca’s; he may review recent events, but his accounts are more on the pedagogic side, translating into common language the mechanisms and

Chapter 11. Espanistan by Salo

policies that conjured Spain’s predicaments in the late 20th and early 21st century. The authors, Javier Muñoz-Basols and Marina Massaguer Comes, from Oxford and the Open University of Catalonia, respectively, do a very able job analyzing Saló’s deceptively simple graphic (his characters tend to be amorphous, occasionally resembling minions) and written style (he combines economic terminology with pop culture slang). In addition, they look into Saló’s adept use of book trailers on YouTube, pointing at an evolution in the marketing of comics. In a way, Saló’s work is a comics performance, since he found a career and a way out of unemployment as an architect by examining graphically the conditions that led to his professional evolution. His style of work combines humor with education and information, given his account of the economic and political events leading to Spain’s crisis.  Saló has followed Hijos with Españistán: Este país se va a la mierda (Spainistan: This Country Goes to Crap, 2011), which chronicles the economic downturn after the real-estate bubble. Most recently, he has published illustrated essays like Simiocracia: Crónica de la gran resaca económica (Apecracy: Chronicle of the Great Economic Hangover, 2012) and Europesadilla: Alguien se ha comido a la clase media(Euronightmare: Somebody Devoured the Middle Class, 2013), which are also studied in the chapter.

Finally, there’s Antonio Lázaro-Reboll’s account of the emergence of a Spanish comics art scholarship between 1965 and 1975, i.e., the decade immediately preceding Franco’s death. Though the period is marked by the Ley Fraga, it provides significant clues as to why the academic field of Spanish comics studies developed in particular ways. Lázaro-Reboll, a reader in Hispanic Studies at the University of Kent, employs French scholar Luc Boltanski’s Bourdieu-inspired analysis to historicize the emergence of Spanish comics studies, embracing quintessential sociological concepts like the intellectual field, class habitus, and the logics of distinction. Initially, he discusses the appearance of articles in cultural magazines, titles within the publishing industry (Umberto Eco’s Apocalittici e integrati [Apocalypse Postponed], 1964; Terenci Moix’s Los ‘comics’: Arte para el consumo y formas ‘pop’ [Comics: Art for Consumerism and Pop Forms] 1968; Román Gubern’s El lenguaje de los cómics [The Language of Comics], 1972), periodicals, etc., all of which endorsed the artistic and serious status of comics, legitimizing them as cultural products. Next, he discusses the emergence of cultural intermediaries, i.e., the group of figures who contributed to the consolidation of a taste, people like Luis Gasca (Tebeo y cultura de masas [Comics and Mass Culture], 1966); Antonio Martín Martínez (“Apuntes para una historia de los tebeos” [Notes for a History of Comics], in Revista de Educación, 1967–1968); and Antonio Lara (El apasionante mundo del tebeo [The Fascinating World of Comics], 1968). There’s also the consideration of fanzines like Cuto: Boletín Español del Comic (Cuto: Spanish Comics Bulletin)[1]or Cuadernos Bang! (Bang! Notebooks), which played a key role in the dissemination of a comics culture in Spain.

Chapter 11. Fills dels 80 (by Salo)
Overall, Magnussen’s volume does a superb job bringing together a select group of scholars to discuss and examine the contemporary Spanish comics scene. As a whole, the volume is an extension of the argument by Lázaro-Reboll, in the sense that it serves as an additional tool for the legitimation of the study of Spanish comics studies as a professional activity. After all, we are talking of an industry that, on a yearly basis, aside from bountiful joy and tons of amusement, produces millions of Euros. In the span of seven years, from 2013 to 2019, the numbers of comics released by the Spanish publishing industry increased a third, a phenomenal growth by any standard.[2]Anyone reading this book will understand well why Spanish comics are thriving. Their effervescence and vibrancy denote an area of the national cultural industry that shows no signs of faltering or hesitancy. Not even with the pandemic, as I suspect the intimate nature of the prolonged predicament forced upon everyone during this last year will work well as authorial ground for new, imaginative yarns not only from Spain, but throughout the entire world. As both Pérez García and Mohring emphasize, Spanish comics nourish themselves from the international scene, and the world in turn reciprocates, learning precious lessons from the experience of the Iberian peninsula.

References

Altarriba, Antonio and Kim. El arte de volar. Alicante: DePonent, 2009.

BEF. Habla María: Una novela gráfica sobre el autismo. México: Editorial Océano de México, 2018.

Cano de la Iglesia, Jesús. 1212: Las Navas de Tolosa. Rasquera: Ponent Mon, 2016.

Díaz Pardo, Isaac. Castelao. A Coruña: Ediciós do Castro, 1985.

Durán, Cristina and Miguel Ángel Giner Bou. Una posibilidad: Edición Integral. Bilbao: Astiberri, 2017.

Eco, Umberto. Apocalittici e integrati. Milan: Bompiani, 1964.

Gallardo, Francisco and Miguel Ángel Gallardo. Un largo silencio. Alicante: DePonent, 1997.

Gallardo, María and Miguel. María y yo. Bilbao: Astiberri, 2007.

Gasca, Luis. Tebeo y cultura de masas. Madrid: Prensa Española, 1966.

Giménez, Carlos. Todo Paracuellos. Barcelona: DeBolsillo, 2007.

Gubern, Román. El lenguaje de los cómics. Barcelona; Ediciones Península, 1972.

Guijarro, Carlos. Paseo de los canadienses. Alicante: DePonent, 2015.

Hernández Palacios, Antonio. Eloy. Vitoria: Ikusager, 1979.

—————. El Cid Integral. Rasquera: Ponent Mon, 2015.

Inacio and Iván Suárez. Atila. Santiago de Compostela: Demo Editorial, 2015.

—————. Máis Alá. Santiago de Compostela: Demo Editorial, 2013.

—————. Titoán. Santiago de Compostela: Demo Editorial, 2012.

—————. O pobre tolo. Santiago de Compostela: Demo Editorial, 2012.

Lara, Antonio. El apasionante mundo del tebeo. Madrid: Cuadernos para el Diálogo, 1968.

Magnussen, Anne, ed. Spanish Comics: Historical and Cultural Perspectives. New York: Berghahn Books, 2021.

Martín, Paco, Ulises S. Sarry, and Xoán Balboa, “Castelao: O Home,” Axóuxere supplement of La Región (11 January 1975).

Martín Martínez, Antonio. “Apuntes para una historia de los tebeos IV: El tebeo, cultura de masas (1946–1963),” Revista de la Educación, 197 (1968): 125–141.

—————. “Apuntes para una historia de los tebeos III: Tiempos heroicos del tebeo español (1936–1946), Revista de la Educación, 196 (1968): 61–74.

—————. “Apuntes para una historia de los tebeos II: La civilización de la imagen (1917–1936),” Revista de la Educación, 195 (1968): 7–21.

—————. “Apuntes para una historia de los tebeos I: Los periódicos para la infancia (1833–1917).” Revista de la Educación, 194 (1967): 98–106.

Moix, Terenci. Los ‘comics’: Arte para el consumo y formas ‘pop.’ Barcelona: Llibres de Sinera, 1968.

Roca, Paco. La casa. Bilbao: Astiberri, 2015.

—————.  Los surcos del azar. Bilbao: Astiberri, 2013.

—————.  Arrugas. Bilbao: Astiberri, 2007.

Saló, Aleix. Hijos de los 80: La generación burbuja. Barcelona: Penguin Random House, 2014.

—————. Europesadilla: Alguien se ha comido a la clase media. Barcelona: Random House Mondadori, 2013.

—————. Simiocracia: Crónica de la gran resaca económica. Barcelona: Random House Mondadori. 2012.

—————. Españistán: Este país se va a la mierda. Barcelona: Editorial de Tebeos, 2011.

Siro, Mazaira, and Cubeiro. Castelao. A Coruña: Nova Galicia, 1987.

Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste is professor in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Georgia State University in Atlanta, GA. A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 23:1.


[1] Cuto is the nickname of a popular character from the forties authored by Jesús Blasco and published in the Magazine Boliche (Bowling). For more information, see https://www.tebeosfera.com/sagas/cuto_1940_blasco.html. Accessed 9 May 2021.

[2]Staff at Tebeosfera(2020): “La industria de la historieta en España en 2019,” in Tebeosfera. TERCERA ÉPOCA, 13, Seville. Available at: https://www.tebeosfera.com/documentos/la_industria_de_la_historieta_en_espana_en_2019.html. Accessed 6 May 2021.

Book Review: Dirty Biology: The X-Rated Story of the Science of Sex

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Dirty Biology: The X-Rated Story of the Science of Sex. Léo Grasset (scripter) and Colas Grasset (artist), translated from French by Kendra Boileau. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021. 192 pp. $24.95. https://www.graphicmundi.org/books/978-0-271-08705-4.html

reviewed by Laura Sayre

Of zizis and zézettes: Teaching evolutionary biology through sex

Dirty Biology: The X-Rated Story of the Science of Sex, by Léo and Colas Grasset (originally published as DirtyBiology: La grande aventure du sexe, Éditions Delcourt, 2017), is a full-length graphic novel that offers a detailed account, not just of the evolutionary history of animal copulation -- as might appear at first glance -- but rather of the various means by which genetic exchange and reproduction are accomplished by biological organisms, from bacteria to fish to elephants. The authors’ gamble is that the topic’s potential for crude humor, particularly in the graphic format, will contribute to, rather than detract from, its objective of delivering serious ideas about the workings of evolutionary biology. The extent to which that gamble pays off will depend on your sense of humor. Nevertheless, this is a smart book that successfully conveys its creators’ wide-ranging, iconoclastic appreciation for the unimaginable variety of life on earth. 

It’s useful to know at the outset that the “Dirty Biology” moniker is intended to convey something broader than “the science of sex.” Léo Grasset, the book’s scripter, is a type of French Stephen Jay Gould for the YouTube era: with degrees in evolutionary biology and journalism, he is what the French call a vulgarisateur scientifique, a popularizer of scientific information, and he has been posting videos (in French) on YouTube under the “DirtyBiology” rubric since 2014. With 77 episodes (from 15 to 30 minutes in length) and 1.17 million subscribers to date, Grasset’s topics range from the psychology of fear to the role of fermentation in primate evolution to (inevitably) the characteristics of epidemic disease outbreaks. “Dirty,” in other words, means not just relating to sex, but any and all scientific phenomena that are in some way disturbing, weird, surprising, or inexplicable. Grasset has the evolutionary biologist’s trick of turning familiar concepts on their head by effecting a leap in scale (millions of years, millions of species) and recurring to the hard law of natural selection. How did these strange things come to be? Why is there sex?

One question that presents itself to the reviewer, then, is what Grasset gains and loses in moving from YouTube to the graphic novel as a medium of expression. (This is Léo Grasset’s first graphic novel but his second book; his first, translated into English by Barbara Mellor as How the Zebra Got Its Stripes: Darwinian Stories Told Through Evolutionary Biology [Pegasus, 2017], tells some of the same stories but without the comics.) Young, conventionally good-looking, and articulate, Grasset has clear strengths as a YouTuber that count for less in the comics format. But he also knows his material and is a skilled writer, structuring the story in a way that offers good pacing, variety, even suspense, and that makes use of graphic novel conventions to engage in an imagined dialogue with the reader. The book’s illustrations, by his brother Colas Grasset, appear to be pen-and-ink drawings, tinted in pastel hues and populated for the most part by gentle-looking, stylized creatures. The narrative is delivered by an androgynous humanoid with a large round head and simplified features, who addresses the reader directly, punctuating its scientific instruction with humorous or ironic asides (such as the recurring line, “I love animals!” delivered after the description of a particularly “dirty” biological tidbit, like the fact that one-fourth of baby lion deaths are caused by infanticide by rival male lions [p. 148].)

As a creative team, the Grasset brothers convey biological concepts in a way that is both engaging and original, if not always pleasant (there is a scene, for example, where the humanoid narrator suffers from pollen allergies, its features melting and pustulating). The lessons move from, what is sex? (the exchange of genetic material by two individuals to create a third, different individual, p. 7); to, why have sex? (when bacterial reproduction, by replication and division, is so much more efficient, p. 20); to, why these particular forms for animal genital organs? (the movement of life onto dry land required a new method for fertilization: the female womb as a kind of internal sea, p. 28). Two sexes vs. multiple sexes; isogamy vs. anisogamy; sequential hermaphroditism; the “gangbang” engaged in by the slipper shell mollusk Crepidula fornicata; it’s all here. One advantage of the graphic novel over YouTube is that its special effects, while in many ways analogous (the montage, the self-conscious digression, the “explosion” to emphasize a key point, the visual gags), move more slowly, allowing the reader to absorb at their leisure what can otherwise become a blur of successive ideas.

Kendra Boileau does an impressive job of walking this fine line between science and slapstick in her translation. Translating profanity poses special challenges of tone, for obvious reasons, including the fact that such words are used more often in speech than in written language, with connotations that may vary considerably over time and space. Boileau navigates these treacherous waters with panache. Imagine the number of possible translations for the French term bites (Boileau chooses peckers, doinkers, and dicks). For les zizis et les zézettes, in case you were wondering, Boileau goes with weenies and muffs. Other terms appear in the original as imports from English and thus come back unchanged: glory hole, badass. Meanwhile, Boileau renders the more strictly scientific content in a manner that is clear, concise, and in keeping with the tone of the original.

At the same time, this mixture of science and profanity raised questions for me as to the book’s intended audience. Much of the humor comes across as juvenile, and yet the content is sophisticated -- not to mention the fact that I wouldn’t want to let this book get into the hands of anyone under the age of 14. Presumably, the intended audience for the book includes current and future prospective viewers of Léo Grasset’s YouTube channel, and yet his videos are targeted exclusively at a French-speaking audience (automatically generated English subtitles are available for some of them, but don’t work very well). Given this double paradox, the best achievement of this book may be in pointing readers toward the richness and diversity of the contemporary non-fiction graphic novel, in France and elsewhere, as well as toward the multitudinous, creative, wacky, yet serious content available on YouTube that (at least in this case) is co-evolving with it.

We should note, finally, that Graphic Mundi is an imprint of Pennsylvania State University Press, where Boileau is also an editor. Comics scholars may know that PSU Press is likewise home to an important series on graphic medicine, a term coined by Ian Williams in 2007 to describe “the intersection between the medium of comics and the discourse of healthcare.” The Graphic Mundi list as a whole treads into adjacent territory, including an exploration of the history of prostheses told from the perspective of a young man who has lost an arm in a road accident, an autobiographical account of a young woman’s struggle with anorexia and bulimia, and an anthology of comics about life under COVID-19. Taken together, this work pushes the boundaries of the comic in new and provocative directions, and is proudly international in scope.

Laura Sayre is an independent translator from French to English. A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 23:1.

 

“DirtyBiology” on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtqICqGbPSbTN09K1_7VZ3Q

 

Graphic medicine, a term coined by Ian Williams

https://www.graphicmedicine.org/why-graphic-medicine/

Tribute to Tom Inge for next issue of IJOCA

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We have space in the current issue, so John Lent would like anyone's tributes and photographs.

Let him know if you want to write one at "John A. Lent" <jlent@temple.edu> ASAP. The deadline is June 1st for print. If you send them to both John and I, we'll also put them on the blog as they're received.

Also, we'd like for a volunteer to write Tom's obituary.

Thanks,

Mike Rhode

Memories of Tom Inge, part 1

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When I began as the new editor at University Press of Mississippi, I did not really know a lot about comics. Fortunately for me, I could confer with Tom Inge. What a pioneer in the field of comics studies! 

Consulting with Tom, sometimes I felt like I was at the moment of creation. 

In working on so many books together, Tom graciously made me feel like I was benefiting him. When of course, it was actually the other way around. 

This gift was one of his several qualities.

Vijay Shah
editor at University Press of Mississippi.  
-------

I met Tom when I was in my first job out of graduate school, serving as a visiting assistant professor in a one-year capacity with no accomplishments to my name and no future secured beyond the end of the academic term. He was a guest of honor at an academic conference, the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, and I was part of a group of new scholars following Tom around with puppy-dog eyes. He treated us with patience and kindness, not a surprise to anyone who knew him, and asked us about our research. He helped us understand how the work we dreamed of doing might fit into the critical conversation as well as the economy of academic publishers. He never once urged us to read his own work to try to build our arguments: he was delighted to see the new directions of the field, even when they were not the directions he himself wanted to take. I stayed in touch with him over the years, and his demeanor was always the same. He treated me with kindness, a genuine curiosity, and a pragmatic mentorship that helped me understand the realities of being a professional academic. To me, he was a model mentor and set a standard I will always be pursuing.

Joe Sutliff Sanders
University Lecturer
University of Cambridge
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Word is moving through the comics academic community that M. Thomas 'Tom' Inge passed away last week. I didn't know Tom deeply, but for a long time I sent him comics ephemera for his collection at VCU, and articles about Edgar Allen Poe in comics. He was a big fan of my friend, Richard Thompson too.

Tom and I probably met at an ICAF meeting, but we became better acquainted when I was called up from the minors to fill in for two Harvey Pekar interviews at SPX. I did them, and then transcribed them for John Lent's International Journal of Comic Art. Not wanting to miss a wider audience, I offered them to Tom for whomever might do a book in Tom's Conversations with Comics Artists intervew series at the University Press of Mississippi.

Tom instead wrote back, changing one direction of my life - "How about your doing the Pekar volume in the Conversations series?  I don't have anyone signed up for him, strange to say, and you already have two interviews I assume.  Have you resources to locate the previously published ones? " ( Jul 19, 2006)

Never having edited or compiled a book before, I wrote back that I'd think about it, and then a day later, "Tom,  I'm still mulling it over although I'm leaning towards doing it." (Jul 20, 2006)

So I did it, and Harvey Pekar: Conversations came out in 2008. Not learning from experience, I wrote to Tom about doing a collection of Herblock interviews. He responded favorably to me and the Press' editor -

"[Mike] raises the question of doing another volume for the series on the political cartoonist Herblock. I think that is an excellent idea.  It is a shame that we have had not titles yet on political cartoonists, and Herblock is a very good place to begin (we need them on Bill Mauldin, Jeff MacNelly, Pat Oliphant, and Doug Marlette, among lots of others as well)." (May 1, 2008)

Unfortunately the Herblock Foundation never really got behind the idea, and they controlled his rights, so the idea faded away. Tom didn't though and he continued to be a major force in comics studies. I saw him for the last time at the PCA meeting in DC in 2019, I think? I snuck into the meeting and just said hello in passing after watching his panel. One always assumes there's more time...

Tom was one of the best and most productive members of the first group of academics to study comics. He was an immense help to my second career, and to many others, and the field is much richer for his time spent cultivating it. He'll be missed by many.

Mike Rhode
IJOCA editor

Memories of Tom Inge, part 2 - Remembering Tom Inge by Joseph Witek

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Remembering Tom Inge

Joseph Witek

Dept. of Creative Arts

Stetson University

 

Many of the deserved tributes to my friend, mentor, and role model Tom Inge[1] will call him a “pioneer,” most of them meaning simply that Tom was among the earliest academics to study popular culture generally and comics specifically. And that he surely was. But Tom was much more literally a pioneer—one who goes ahead, who explores and maps the previously unknown ground, and, most especially for me personally, one who blazes the trail to show the way to those who come afterward.

As Tom had been two decades before me, in the 1980s I was a graduate student in English at Vanderbilt University, where the English department, like many such in academia, was a changing place.  A rising cohort of faculty were variously engaging with the myriad strains of literary and cultural theory while a deeply traditionalist senior faculty, many of them the heirs of Vanderbilt’s conservative and indeed politically reactionary heritage of the literary Fugitives and Agrarians, looked on skeptically.

Under the tutelage of one of those younger professors, Don Ault, a literary theorist and scholar of William Blake and of Carl Barks, I had become increasingly enthralled with the study of comics, and eventually began to research a dissertation on the contemporary comics (not quite yet canonized as “graphic novels”) of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar. In those days it was just possible to find and read close to the entire published canon of substantive critical literature on comics in English.  Much, and in fact most, of that criticism had been generated outside of academia by literary and cultural critics, by public intellectuals, and by comics historians and fans.  Within the academy, discussion of comics in publishing venues recognizable to English department dissertation committees was extremely limited, and among the small handful of brave voices willing to broach the topic of comics in the pages of academic journals and edited collections, by far the most vigorous and ubiquitous was that of Tom Inge. Every bibliography, every OCLC database search, every set of footnotes to one of the rare academic articles on comics featured the name of Tom Inge. And Tom not only carried the message of comics to academia, he brought scholarship to the comics-fan community as well—a researcher like me looking for a timeline of the development of U.S. comics books would find one in that bible of the comics collector, the annual Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide, a timeline compiled and regularly updated by M. Thomas Inge.

Having formed the backbone of my dissertation proposal’s bibliography, Tom Inge likewise had, unbeknownst to me, already smoothed my path within the Vanderbilt graduate program at large.  When senior faculty would ask about my pending dissertation topic, even the most hidebound traditionalists responded with a gleam of recognition: “Ah, comics—like Tom Inge!” (In fact, the hoariest of those elders, a deep-dyed Southern Literature specialist, told me the story of the very first doctoral dissertation he had ever directed—one on American humor, written by Tom Inge.)

So when, with a preliminary draft of my dissertation in hand, I spotted an ad in the back of an issue of PMLAannouncing a new book series on popular culture by the University Press of Mississippi, the tipping point that enabled me to screw up my meagre grad-student courage to send off a query letter to the press was the name of the series editor, the single person in academia who I knew for a fact would look on a book about comics knowledgably and sympathetically: M. Thomas Inge.  A return letter from Tom was one of those countless acts of encouragement that he gave so freely to me and to other junior colleagues; it turned out that he did want to see my manuscript, and before very long he made the dream of every aspiring scholar come true by publishing Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar. And in a characteristically generous move, he made a book by a brand-new Ph.D. the initial entry in the UP Miss Studies in Popular Culture series, which became one of the cornerstones of the field of comics studies, reserving his own already completed work, the seminal Comics as Culture, for the second volume of the series.

I soon met Tom in person at a meeting of the American Studies Association in 1990, and his genial figure, always impeccably dressed and coiffed, was a fixture at comics conferences and popular culture professional meetings all over North America.  For decades previously Tom had carried the flag of academic comics studies nearly alone, and he welcomed newcomers to comics studies with open arms; his delight at watching the growth of the field over the decades was palpable.  Tom Inge was tireless in encouraging and supporting his expanding cohort of junior colleagues, and many of us in the field have received out of the blue a letter enclosing a comics-related news clipping or article or bibliographical citation with a handwritten note saying something like, “Saw this and thought you might find it useful—Tom.”

I last saw Tom at the inaugural conference of the Comics Studies Society at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana in 2018.  After the papers had been presented, the CSS held a reception at a local restaurant, and as the energetic young organizers were presenting various awards, Tom and I found ourselves in the back of the room, perhaps inevitably reflecting back on the long and winding path to the establishment of a learned society for academic comics studies. In his typically generous and inclusive way, Tom said with some satisfaction, “Well, it looks like we did it.” I answered with the truth: “No, Tom—you did it.”  Tom Inge will be deeply missed, but the good he has done as an exemplary scholar and mentor lives on.

So it’s one last time to say what I have had so many occasions to say before:

“Thanks, Tom.”


[1]His professional name was “M. Thomas Inge,” but I never knew what the “M.” stood for, nor do I want to know now—he was always and forever “Tom” to those who knew him.

Memories of Tom Inge, part 3 - A Tribute by José Alaniz

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 A Tribute

José Alaniz

University of Washington, Seattle

 

Though I would describe our relationship as mostly collegial, Tom Inge never failed to greet me with a warm smile and handshake at the various conferences where we crossed paths. Everything people are saying about him in their various tributes – his tireless devotion to the fields he helped inaugurate, his unflagging support of younger scholars – holds 100% true for my own interactions with him.

We first met, I want to say, at one of the late 1990s or early 2000s ICAFs. I recall more than once seeing him and John Lent sitting together at the back of the room, like Odin and Zeus, looking on as we grad student whippersnappers presented at the podium, drawing – whether we knew it or not – on their generation’s insights and breakthroughs. Tom had done so much to prepare and enrich the soil we later worked.

Of the various objects in my shambles of a campus office, the one I’m most proud of is a plaque that says I won the 2005 Inge Award for Comics Scholarship, given annually to a paper presented in the Comic Art and Comics Area of the Popular Culture Association, for material which would eventually make it into my second book, Death, Disability and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond. Running into Tom at the PCA conferences over the years became just a given, like the sun in the sky. To his credit, he never made you feel cowed in his presence; he always had an encouraging word and good suggestions. That also proved the case in Tom’s reader report for my first book, Komiks: Comic Art in Russia. He played an important role in shaping that work.

In recent years I mostly corresponded with Tom for work reasons. But even these short e-mails always bore his congenial stamp. For example, knowing that I write on Eastern European comics, he took the time in one missive from 2012 to tell me about how much he liked going to Palacký University in Olomouc as a visiting professor and his delight at finding a two-volume anthology of Czech comics in Prague. “You probably have them already,” he wrote.

Indeed I did, but in a very real sense I wouldn’t have my professional interests, my career or even the field of Comics Studies to play around in if not for Tom. I am eternally grateful.

 Requiescat in pace. 

 

 


Memories of Tom Inge, part 4 by Marc Singer

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Marc Singer

Howard University

It’s rare that a single scholar can be said to shape an entire field, but I can think of no other way to describe the profound impact that Tom Inge had on comics studies. Indeed, “impact” seems grossly inadequate to describe the scope of his contributions, in that it implies there was a field to be impacted before he came along.

More than just a writer or researcher, Tom was an institution builder, to the extent that it’s impossible to imagine the discipline or my own career without him. I presented my first paper on comics at the Popular Culture Association conference, which he helped found, and my first book was published as part of a series he edited for the University Press of Mississippi, which he made into a home for comics studies.

But he was so much more than the list of his accomplishments, impressive as they are. Tom was incredibly generous with his time and patient with younger scholars. Even his moments of reproach—there were a few—were delivered with a gentle encouragement that motivated you to do better. He was a model scholar and his influence will be felt in ways great and small for decades to come.

I last saw Tom at the first Comics Studies Society conference in 2018. That meeting felt like a singular moment in the history of comics studies, an inflection point in the development of the field, and it was entirely appropriate that Tom was there to usher it in. I’m glad I got to see him there. I wish I’d seen him since. Rest in peace, Tom.

 


Memories of Tom Inge, part 5 - A note about Tom Inge by Charles Hatfield

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A note about Tom Inge

Charles Hatfield

 

My initial thoughts on hearing about Tom's passing....

On Saturday, December 30, 1978, at the New York Hilton, M. Thomas (Tom) Inge presided over the first-ever Modern Language Association panel about comics, featuring cartoonists Will Eisner and Art Spiegelman. It was sponsored by the American Humor Studies Association.

In 2000, Gene Kannenberg, Scott Stoddart, and I presented in the first-ever MLA panel about Charles Schulz's Peanuts, organized and chaired by Tom. It too was sponsored by the American Humor Studies Association. It was at that MLA that I interviewed for the job I have now.

Of course, I met Tom in between those two events—specifically, at the Popular Culture Association conference in Philadelphia in April 1995. That was the conference that ushered me into the PCA comics studies community, I mean the Comic Art and Comics Area, within which Tom was understandably and rightly revered. That was the conference that propelled me into my dissertation and changed my life.

In fact, Tom Inge not only opened the doorway to my career as a research writer but changed the lives of many, many other scholars. My first two books are due to him. I cannot imagine what my last twenty-five years would have been like without him. He quite literally made the field of comics studies, as I understand it, possible.

Tom Inge: a tireless scholar, a happy, productive, infinitely generous man, a true gentleman. Where would I, we, have been without him? There are debts we can never repay.

My deepest condolences to Tom's loved ones, colleagues, students, and mentees, everywhere. My further thoughts about Tom’s career can be found at http://www.tcj.com/tom-inge-and-what-he-did/

Book Review: A History of Women Cartoonists by Mira Falardeau

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 A History of Women Cartoonists. Mira Falardeau. Oakville: Mosaic Press, 2020. 298 pp. ISBN 9781771613514. $24.99. http://www.mosaic-press.com/product/history-women-cartoonists/

 reviewed by Jean Sébastien, Professeur, Collège de Maisonneuve

Working in comics, cartooning, or animation was for a long time perceived as man’s work and this is slow in changing. In A History of Women Cartoonists, Mira Falardeau envisions how we can turn the tide. The title of the book shows that one of the ways in which change can be brought is by including more works by women in the canon and to do this by valuing work published by women from the early 20th century up to the most current day. Even if the book is largely a history of women artists, the last chapters have a different tone.; they act as a call to action in order to get things to change!

In this book, Falardeau gives an overview of the work of creators from the United States, from English Canada and Quebec, from France, Belgium and Switzerland and from the Middle East and the Maghreb. The main portion of her book is structured according to these four regional cut-outs. In her general introduction, she acknowledges that her book, thus, limits itself to only a part of the world’s production by women artists. Such a project, by its very nature, can be celebratory, but deciding who should be included can always become an issue. Falardeau has chosen to reference a larger number of artists in the introductions she writes for each of the four sections that constitute the main content of the book. For example, in her section on the United States she refers briefly to some 60 authors; out of this number, Falardeau selected 15 for whom she has written a more detailed biography, while describing that author’s most important works.

Falardeau’s book is designed to bring forth the similarities in the obstacles that women are faced with, whether in cartooning, comics or animation. In her introduction, she makes a point of noting that these three mediums share elements of a common language. In animation as in comics, women have been less recognized than men and Falardeau’s book works to tilt the balance. This is especially important, for instance, if one is to have a proper historical view of the animation that came out in 1930-1960 period: among the women animators portrayed are two pioneers: American Mary Ellen Bute and Canadian Evelyn Lambart.

A most interesting aspect of the book is its comparative nature. If the section about the United States will not bring any new names to the attention of those who have read Trina Robbins and Catherine Yronwode’s Women and the Comics, or Trina Robbins’ follow-up works, including her more recent Pretty in Ink. Falardeau does a great job in comparing the general economic context and the prevalence of misogyny at different times in the four contexts that she has chosen to look at. For instance, Falardeau links the relative openness to women in newspaper illustration in the United States to the fact that America developed early on a very dynamic illustrated press and that the sheer number of positions opened some of them up to women. She notes that this was not the case in Canada, either English or French, where she finds that women only began to have a presence as major newspapers added women’s pages and children’s pages to their pages from the 1940’s on. In France, there were numerous girls’ magazines in the early 20thcentury. However, very few illustrations in such publications were attributed, and even if it is likely that there were women illustrators, most worked in anonymity. Falardeau’s section on the Middle East and the Maghreb is the shortest of the four and she touches very lightly on the political situations in different countries only to point out that, if some women have found it easier to create as expatriates, others became professional illustrators  to work in their home country. Through this comparison of the history of the press, Falardeau compares feminisms within different national contexts finding more advances for women in the United States.

“Should we link this abundant production to freedom of expression generated, on the one side, by a fundamental tradition and on the other, by successive waves of immigration providing the most innovative ideas of feminist thought? Ultimately, the United States were at the forefront of comic’s innovations while the other countries remained a little more conservative.” (p. 154)

Falardeau also points to the differences as to how second-wave feminism entered comics. Whereas in the U. S., this was mostly in comic book form through counterculture publishers, in France, it was the publishers of the science-fiction magazine Métal hurlant who thought that there was a market for a feminist publication in the world of bande dessinée and developed Ah! Nana a quarterly that came out from 1976 to 1978. The title roughly translates to Hey! Gal, but is homonymous with the French word for “pineapple.” In the section about Quebec, Falardeau briefly situates herself in this. As women’s magazines were taking on feminism, one of them asked her to create a strip which she did for from 1976 to 1978. A few years later (1981-1987), Falardeau joined a specifically feminist monthly, La Vie en rose, covered political and social issues; it gave humor and cartooning an important place.

The small press movement of the early nineties embraced autobiography as an important genre in which quite a few women creators of the period found their niche. Falardeau points to the fact that there already was an important autobiographical strand in the work of many women artists before that and refers to Mary Fleener’s comics in the underground movement, Lynda Barry’s early work in alternative weeklies and Lynn Johnston’s syndicated strip For Better or Worse. Even if there have been some opportunities for women in the past decades, feminist criticism has highlighted the slowness in openings within the mainstream. For those who remember Robbins’ criticism of the closed doors for women at Marvel and DC in her 2001 book The Great Women Cartoonists (to which Falardeau refers), there is a sad resonance to be found in more recent criticisms in France against the Angouleme International Festival which has granted its Grand Prize to only three women since it was founded in 1974. One of the festival’s attempt to correct the situation was miserably sexist; in 2007, the festival had come under heavy fire for having named an event “the brothel”, “La maison close.” In 2016, a collective of women authors called for a boycott because that year there were no women at all in the list of thirty author candidates for the Grand Prize.

In accounting for current production by women, Falardeau takes into account the rise of webcomics. She duly notes issues that come with self-publication on the web, especially that of needing to monetize one’s work, and the fact that, especially for younger artists, webcomics have served as a springboard to get attention from traditional publishers. Here she brings to attention a few artists in each of the four geographical groupings she highlighted. Her book is a who’s who in this new medium, from Meredith Gran and her comedic Octopus Pie to the tidal wave of blogs in France (many of them by women in the early years of this century), to the more recent political use of Facebook posts by Nadia Khiari in which she drew, Willis from Tunis, a cat who commented about the Arab Spring.

Even if Falardeau’s book is mainly designed as a canon-making work, she has found it important to show how empowerment of women cartoonists has been possible over time. In a chapter titled “Three Examples of Positive Action,” she opens with a short history of the New Yorker magazine. Its liberal founders, Harold Ross and Jane Grant published a great number of women illustrators. Her brief overview of the less-than-great record of the magazine in the ‘50s and ‘60s in its openness to women is meant to show that there needs to be an awareness about patriarchy’s hold on the workplace, and on certain types of work at the decision-making level, if change is to be attained. She makes this even more clear with her next example. The National Film Board of Canada developed structures in the early 1980s that encouraged the development of a women’s cinema. However, it was only in 2016 that the organization gave itself the goal of getting to 50% of its productions directed by women. Political cartooning still is, by and large, a line of work in which the number of men is disproportionate.  The organization Cartooning for Peace, founded in 2006, has chosen to value the membership of women cartoonists in many of its activities.

A History of Women Cartoonists translates and updates Falardeau’s 2014 Femmes et humour published by the Presses de l’université Laval. In each of the contextual pieces that precede the portrayals, Falardeau added a new paragraph or two. Among the additions in the section discussing the United States are Lisa Hanawalt and Eleanor Davis. In the section about Canada, she features Emily Carroll’s innovative work with webcomics. The call to boycott the Angouleme festival in 2016 is one of the new additions in the contextual text about France. In the case of artists from the Arab world, she added references to a few political cartoonists, among them Samira Saeed and Menekse Cam. However, the editorial work on the book by Mosaic Press is subpar. There are words in which a letter is missing. Some names have not been checked. For instance, when referring to French academic Judith Stora-Sandor, her name is properly spelled on page 22, but misspelled twice on page 246 as Stora-Standor and Stora-Stantor.

Falardeau concludes her book by taking on a certain number of issues. For instance, in cartooning, how can a character be designed to represent humans in general? She notes that the use of characters identifiable as women will lead to an interpretation of the drawing as referring to women specifically. Can the universality of a situation only be represented by the inclusion of male characters? Then there is the issue of caricature --in exaggerating characteristics, one runs the risk of encouraging stereotypes. The situation is not much better in the work of academics who analyze the work of women, where the cliché is noting the ‘sensitivity’ of the work of a woman author. Falardeau closes this short chapter by noting “the obvious link […] between humor and power, and consequently, the difficulty for women […] to achieve recognition for themselves in the world of humour” (p. 247). Destroying stereotypes takes time. “This is the task that feminist women cartoonists have given to themselves. But which stereotypes? Those held by men? The way that they see women? Or the opposite? The way women see themselves?” (p. 258) The last words in her conclusion come as an answer: “Women cartoonists need to create their own mythology.” (p. 269)

A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 23:2.

Book Review: EC Comics: Race, Shock and Social Protest by Qiana Whitted

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EC Comics: Race, Shock and Social Protest. Qiana Whitted. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2019. https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/ec-comics/9780813566313

Book Review by Maite Urcaregui

 

Qiana Whitted’s EC Comics: Race, Shock and Social Protest explores how William M. Gaines’ Entertaining Comics (EC) experimented with generic constraints in their “preachy” stories to critique the status quo of the Atomic Age, “the post-World War II era known as both the ‘Fabulous Fifties’ and the ‘Age of Anxiety’” (p. 5). Whitted brings critical attention to the “preachies,” also referred to as social-protest comics or message stories, “a distinct group of EC stories designed to challenge readers’ assumptions about racial, ethnic, and religious prejudice, Cold War paranoia, and other anxieties over social difference and American heterogeneity” (p. 5). These stories appeared in EC’s genre-fiction anthologies, such as Shock SuspenStories or Incredible Science Fiction, beginning in 1952 and ending in 1956, when EC ceased publishing comic books due to the Comics Code Authority’s increasing restrictions. While EC’s Mad or individual EC creators have received critical attention,1 the preachies have been overlooked, often dismissed as too formulaic and didactic.2 Whitted’s “study takes a different approach by analyzing the creative choices and critical significance of the message stories within the EC brand and against the larger ideological contexts of the Late 1940s and 1950s” (p. 6). EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest introduces readers not only to the breadth of EC’s social-protest stories, but also to their depth. Whitted’s analysis of the preachies emphasizes the network of narrative, aesthetic, and marketing strategies that the company developed as part of their “EC way” (p. x). These formal innovations opened opportunities for the company to initiate conversations around racial justice during a time of simultaneous social progress and increasingly insular national impulses.

In her “Preface,” Whitted beautifully elucidates her personal investments in and the political stakes of her work by reflecting on Mad’s back cover “fold-ins.” Describing the process of folding the page to reveal “a new picture and a clever quip,” she concludes: “I marveled over the story that our hands made together. Even now I remain fascinated by the way the words and image that seemed so familiar could be reoriented to expose something wholly unexpected from within” (pp. ix-x). Just as the fold-in’s “sleight of hand” invites readers to become a part of the clever joke that their hands have helped co-create (p. x), EC’s preachies played with generic conventions (extradiegetic narration, twist- or snap-endings, optical illusions) to shock readers out of complacency. Through this generic call and affective response, EC challenged its readers to question normative notions of race, nation, authority, and safety. I linger over the preface because it was such an elegant, efficient example of how a meditation on medium and materiality can look outward and can gesture toward community. In her short preface, Whitted stakes out her hope for the book, “that readers will come away with a deeper insight into how American comic books advance the public understanding of complex social problems through popular media” (p. xi). Certainly, Whitted does her part to fulfill that hope throughout the book. In an effort to draw out the complex social problems that EC Comics: Race, Shock and Social Protest explores, this review thinks with and through the provocations of the book’s subtitle--race, shock, and social protest--to showcase these distinct yet interconnected contributions.

Whitted’s study of race in EC’s message stories attends both to the quality of representation and to its effect on readers and public consciousness. Her analysis of the formal strategies EC used “to disassociate white normative subjectivity from virtuous qualities such as innocence, courage, and moral authority” is always situated within the cultural, historical, and political backdrop of Atomic Age anxieties over both comics and race (p. 53). Chapter One, “‘Spelled Out Carefully in the Captions’: How to Read an EC Magazine,” traces these public anxieties by explicating EC’s role in the 1954 US Senate subcommittee hearings over comics’ influence on young readers and their so-called “delinquency.” EC creatively responded to these public pressures by carefully and consciously framing their social-protest stories through extradiegetic narration and pointed captions. Toeing the “boundaries between ‘entertaining’ and ‘educational’ reading practices,”3 EC paired educational captions--verbal text that directed readers regarding how to read the comic--against more sensational and sometimes violent images of racial and mob violence (p. 26). The company’s reliance on a “containment system equipped with discursive barriers to shield readers from harm” ultimately relied on and reinscribed the cultural narratives about the hazards of comics that would lead to the Comics Magazine Association of America’s (CMAA) Comics Code Authority (CCA)--the very thing that would force EC to change its publishing model (p. 34). Whitted’s explication of the well-worn history of the CCA feels refreshing. Despite the impact the CCA had on EC, rather than overdetermining the CCA’s role in comics history, Whitted advocates that “EC’s legacy as a maverick in the mainstream comic-book industry grows out of these Atomic Age controversies” (p. 23). The book illustrates how the growing concern over comics was not disarticulated from post-World War II concerns over racial integration. In fact, as Whitted explores in her second chapter, “the landmark decision to end public-school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education” occurred in the same year as the Senate subcommittee hearings on comics, and both would fundamentally change EC’s approach to portraying the complexities of Black life (p. 53).

EC’s preachies often elicited a sense of shock or shame in their readers, creating an affective call to action. Chapter Two, “‘We Pictured Him So Different, Joey!’: Optical Illusions of Blackness and Embodiment in EC,” explores the comics efforts to picture anti-Black violence and the racial disparities of the criminal-(in)justice system on the comics page. Whitted explores stories that relied on optical illusions, or actively withheld the racial identity of a character, to create a snap ending that reveals the character’s identity alongside the reader’s own expectations and, perhaps, biases. These types of narratives frequently relied on characters of color (often Black male characters) “to embody and to complicate the race problem of the early 1950s” (p. 53).  Yet, at times, these portrayals privileged the affective responses of White readers over complex, expressive portrayals of Black identity. Whitted contends that the most effective stories were those that “call[ed] attention to the way blackness acts as an unstable image/text, a fraught sociohistorical signifier that is misread and misrecognized in American society with devastating consequences” (p. 69). One such example is Wallace Wood (artist and writer) and Marie Severin’s (colorist) “Perimeter!” which appeared in the last issue of Frontline Combat in January 1954. In “Perimeter!” Private Matthews, a Black soldier fighting in a mixed-race US platoon in Korea, is more than an image/text that carries the weight of signifying the US’s racial disparities; he is a heroic Black character who speaks and acts for himself as he struggles alongside his peers to survive. His appearance on the cover of the issue attests to how Wood and Severin created a visual portrayal of a Black man in comics that resisted the iconic weight of that image/text and spoke to readers through Private Matthews’ quotidian specificity. Chapter Three, “‘Oh God . . . Sob! . . . What Have I Done . . . ?’: Shame, Mob Rule, and the Affective Realities of EC Justice,” explores how narrative devices, such as the dramatic identity-reversal-plot or the snap ending, work to elicit shame in both the White characters they portrayed and the White readers they implicated. According to Whitted, “In EC’s social-protest comics, shame chastens society from the inside out; the writers and artists used the emotional burdens of affect to accomplish what the law could not” (p. 103).

The final chapter of EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest firmly situates the preachies within a tradition of social protest literature. Chapter Four, “‘Battling, in the Sea of Comics’: EC’s Invisible Man and the Jim Crow Future of ‘Judgment Day!’”examines one of EC’s most famous stories: Joe Orlando (artist) and Feldstein’s (writer) “Judgment Day!” first published in Weird Fantasy #18 in 1953 and republished in a 1956 issue of Incredible Science Fiction #33.4 Whitted explores the suggestiveness of this science-fiction story, which “uses the speculative to denounce Jim Crow” (p. 106). “Judgment Day!” is a futuristic tale that follows Tarlton, a helmeted astronaut from Earth, who has been charged with inspecting life on Cybrinia, the “Planet of Mechanical Life” (p. 107). Tarlton is disappointed to see a hierarchical system imposed by the orange androids that relegates the blue androids to segregated portions of the city and positions in the workforce, “a system that bears striking resemblance to the racial segregation of midcentury America” (p. 107). Notably, in the final panel of the comic, Tarlton, now inside his ship and headed to Earth, takes off his helmet to reveal that he is a Black man. Through Orlando’s realistic physical rendering of Tarlton’s face with “beads of perspiration on his dark skin twinkl[ing] like the distant stars” (cited on p. 127), his visage in the final panel becomes emblematic of the expressive possibilities of space itself, an aesthetic precursor to Sun Ra’s Afrofuturist proclamation that “space is the place’ of Black liberation.5In her analysis, Whitted recognizes “Judgment Day!” as more than a social allegory and, through a conceptual (rather than a comparative) reading of the comic alongside Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), uncovers the narrative’s call that “recognition [is] a requisite part of meaningful social change” (p. 126).

This fourth and final chapter, my favorite of the book, illustrates the critical import and creative ingenuity of Whitted’s work. She pairs a deep sense of historical responsibility and cultural specificity with a responsiveness to the preachies’ formal innovations and affective demands. EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest models how comics scholars can open up a space for social protest and justice without flattening texts into sociological mirrors. The book offers extensive, in-depth analysis of many of the social-protest stories that were published throughout EC’s tenure, and Whitted’s close readings are as exciting to read as the shocking plots they plumb. Qiana Whitted’s EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest emphasizes how “even the most disposable ephemera of American popular culture can have a lasting impact,” and it is a work that likewise will have a lasting impact on not only the study of EC comics but also the study of race and form in comics studies more broadly (p. 136).  

Endnotes

1. Mad was EC’s longest running comic. Founded by Gaines (EC’s publisher) and Harvey Kurtzman (Mad’s creator and first editor) in 1952, the humor magazine would continue until the present, although largely via reprints since 2019, long after the company closed down its publication of comic books in 1956, and Gaines sold the company in the 1960s. For more on Mad, see Judith Yaross Lee and John Bird’s collection Seeing MAD: Essays on MAD Magazine’s Humor and Legacy (2021); Grant Geissman’s Feldstein: The MAD Life and Fantastic Art of Al Feldstein! (2013); andFrank Jacob’s The MAD World of William M. Gaines (1972).

2.   Whitted discusses the critical tradition around EC Comics on page six of EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest (p. 6).

3.      When the company began in 1944 under the direction of Maxwell Charles Gaines (né Ginsberg), EC stood for “Educational Comics.” When William Gaines inherited the company from his father in 1947, he rebranded it as “Entertaining Comics” (p. 9).

4.      Whitted notes how the 1956 reprinting only narrowly gained the CCA seal of approval because Charles F. Murphy, the CCA administrator, wanted the company to make Tarlton White. Gaines argued that Tarlton’s racial identity was “the point of the whole story,” and through his outrage, pushed the story through the Code review unchanged from the 1953 original (p. 105-106).

5.      See Space Is the Place, directed by John Coney, written by Joshua Smith and Sun Ra, performed by Sun Ra (1974; Berkeley: North American Star System, 1974), YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iAQCPmpSUI.


A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 23-2.

 

Maite Urcaregui (she/her/hers) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her current research investigates contemporary mixed-media literature that experiments with visual poetics to examine the relationship between and among race, citizenship, and political belonging. Her most recent publication, “(Un)Documenting Single-Panel Methodologies and Epistemologies in the Non-Fictional Cartoons of Eric J. García and Alberto Ledesma,” appeared in a special issue on “Latinx Studies” in Prose Studies in 2020.

Book Review: Critical Directions in Comics Studies edited by Thomas Giddens

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Critical Directions in Comics Studies. Thomas Giddens, editor. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020. <https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Critical-Directions-in-Comics-Studies>

 Book Review by Stephanie Burt, Professor of English, Harvard University

In our experience, matter ordinarily comes in three varieties: solid, liquid, gas. Critical approaches to an art form come in three varieties too: first, fan takes and essays aimed for those who already care about the primary texts. Think film-fan magazines, or letter columns, and then The Comics Journal; think Samuel Johnson’s essays, too. These can be a gas: they circulate rapidly, though-- confined to periodicals-- they may not stick around.

Second come more ambitious and more formal explanations, either showing new audiences how to take the art form seriously, or else laying out tool sets other critics can use. In our field that’s Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics; in another it might include E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel. These takes often demonstrate canon formation too, along with counter-canons, anti-canons, and anti-formalist populism (think Pauline Kael). They are the liquids of critical thinking: some move slowly and smoothly, some try to cover everything, and they rarely vanish into thin air.

Third come the books and articles after a canon, a working history, and a formal vocabulary have solidified. Extended works of criticism respond to earlier works; models from other disciplines sometimes alien to practitioners—Continental philosophy, say, or data analysis—build out a robust academic field, taking part in continuing debates that exceed one art form’s discursive world.

Critical Directions in Comics Studies is by these standards a very solid book. “Critical” in the title connotes not only literary and comics criticism (though that too), but self-conscious multidisciplinary approaches to an academic field, with overtones of critical legal studies, Continental Marxist thought, and other radical critique. Its best parts will lead almost any comics critic to ideas they might not otherwise have find.

If there’s a through-line, it comes from legal studies (five of thirteen contributors, including editor Giddens, come from the law): comics, according to much of this volume, reveal the assumptions that underpin modern society by breaking its stated or unstated rules. Christopher Pizzino’s opening chapter adds a persuasive reading of Kyle Baker’s magnificent Nat Turner (1986), with its frame-breaking, texture-heavy pages, to a perhaps unhistorical broader claim. There’s something especially mediated, material, embodied about a comic book, Pizzino suggests, so that “its great theme is violation,” whereas—with its disembodied prose—“the novel is on the side of the law.” (p. 27) Pizzino supports this contrast via the anticomics discourse of the 1950s. But almost every moral panic around a new art form has ventured similar claims: the new art (whatever it is) excites readers’ bodies, rather than guiding their minds. Consider video games in the 1980s, or Gothic novels via Northanger Abbey (1803). Pizzino’s emphasis on physical pages also raises questions: is the stunningly successful webcomic Check, Please! not embodied? Or not a comic?

Yasemin Erden gets more reliable results in her serious reading of (wait for it…) Marvel’s Deadpool, “a being without an essential nature” (p. 61) whose utter, disorienting, ridiculous freedom makes him an existentialist antihero, his “identity tied up with the breaking of things generally: of rules, of people, of walls.” (p. 69) (OK, but what makes him funny?)  Maggie Gray offers a careful history of comics-making at the countercultural 1970s Birmingham Arts Lab, with its anti-elitist, anti-commercial mission, “distributing expertise… and democratizing culture and media.” (p. 123) And Matthew J. A. Green examines Utopian visions in Mary and Bryan Talbot’s The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia (2016), a graphic novel about Louise Michel, who took part in the Paris Commune of 1870 and ended up in New Caledonia. Non-UK readers may, and should, discover the intricacies of the Talbots’ joint works here.

Books like this one often focus on indie comics, but the most complex of its persuasive arguments takes on a classic Marvel hero. Timothy Peters looks at secular law and Christianity in two runs of Daredevil, whose alter ego Matt Murdock is both a blind lawyer and (since Frank Miller’s run in the 1980s), a devout, troubled Catholic. Kevin Smith’s 2003 story “Guardian Devil” shows Matt deceived by material entities, as if Creation were full of snares (a deeply Protestant position). Miller and David Mazzuchelli’s “Born Again” (1986) instead finds a “participatory legal aesthetics,” showing in Daredevil’s actions and in our experience of comics form how our bodies exist as “part of the law.” (p. 99) Like Matt, we must connect justice to equity, rules to cases, spirit to all of the senses, removing the law’s metaphorical blindfold.

What if the best thing to do with the law is to break it, to smash an entire society in hopes the future will build something else? That revolutionary, or anarchist, hope animates several writers here. Two focus on Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta, whose anti-hero or hero in his Guy Fawkes mask brings about (according to Peter Goodrich) “the destruction of Parliament, the end of representational politics… so as to take back the theatre of the political and embody it in the community.” (p. 257) Giddens himself recommends the graphic novel 100 Months (2010), which the British artist John Hicklenton completed as he was dying: its demonic heroine Mara “is the unstoppable wave of beyond that destroys, that undoes and razes” a humanity ruined by capital. (p. 229)

These essays enlist Walter Benjamin (despite his protest against the aestheticization of politics!) and Giorgio Agamben (“bare life cannot separate itself from sovereign power”) (p. 210) in a somewhat predictable anti-political politics. People who have lived through revolutions rarely end up so excited about them. Fortunately the collection does not end there. Instead it concludes with another legal scholar, Adam Gearey, examining the 2010 graphic memoir To Teach, in which the onetime Weather Underground revolutionary and present-day expert on pedagogy Bill Ayers, together with artist Ryan Alexander-Tanner, model the open-mindedness teachers require: “unless you confront your own self-certainty, you become lost in your own impeccable radicalism.” (p. 293)

Matter actually has four states, not three. Under high enough heat and pressure, it turns into plasma, a gooey high-energy state that eliminates boundaries between atoms. Comics criticism, too, has a fourth state, in which it becomes its own hand-drawn subject. In a trio of “comics interludes,” Giddens, the education researcher Lydia Wysocki and the literary scholar Paul Fisher Davies cartoonify their preferred, and self-conscious, approach. Wysocki parodies Olivia Newton-John’s music video for “Physical,” whose stills give Wysocki a model for her light-hearted, multi-modal, heteroglossic, frame-by-frame affair. “Let’s get critical,” her headband-wearing athletes demand. “Let’s get into critical.” (p. 106) There’s a lot to get into here.

A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 23-2.

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