“A Mad Look At Toes: A Tribute To Al Feldstein.” (Part Of A Celebration Of Mad Editor Feldstein)

I’m bugged by much of the mainstream media attention given to Al Feldstein’s passing, because it feels less about the editor himself than about websites providing Boomers with yet another opportunity to wax nostalgic: “Mad’s editor died? Too bad. Hey, do you remember ‘2001: A Space Idiocy’?” For me, Feldstein’s 28-year editorial run shouldn’t be simplified to clichés about Mad’s irreverence. Feldstein’ achievement is more ambivalent than that, as much about Fordist efficiency and lost opportunities as about the supposed cultural subversions of the “usual gang of idiots.

Column -- "My Friend Dave"

Column published in The Comics Journa

Book Review -- "It Is The Bad Time," Edited By Kazimir Lee Iskander

Bad Time focuses on horror, specifically the aim to cultivate a sense of dread in the cartoonists themselves. Again, Iskander from the book’s foreword: “My mission statement was simple—every artist involved should write a comic that would contain at least one panel that was frightening or traumatic to draw. The comic itself didn’t need to be traditionally horrific, although many would be.” And they are, although not every story is equally successful at transmitting fear and trauma from artist to reader

Providence: Lovecraft, Sexual Violence, And The Body Of The Other

The subject of this essay is the first six issues of Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’ Providence, but let me begin with an apology. In Comics Journal #278 (October 2006), I wrote a negative review of Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls, arguing that Moore’s rigidly schematic plot made the book a chore to read, despite the beauty of Gebbie’s art. I still think Lost Girls is minor Moore, but I went too far in the final paragraph of my review. In response to Moore’s claims that he was retiring from comics (most fully expressed in an interview in Comic Book Artist #25 [April 2003]), I wrote that he was “leaving comics none too soon and many years too late” (138). I was disappointed with much of the America’s Best Comics line (though for me Promethea was major Moore), but I regret those words. They show ingratitude to a writer who entertained me for decades while inspiring other creators to produce better comics

Column -- "The Ballad Of Axe-Faced Anne: Comics, Criticism, Contexts" (Part One)

Reading a comic book once made me sick. Like other Baby Boomer kids, I fell in love with Silver Age Marvel Comics, especially the Kirby/Lee/Sinnott Fantastic Four. I was imprinted by Lee’s narrative voice (simultaneously melodramatic and folksy) and Kirby’s visual imagination: the Marvel aesthetic became my be-all-and-end-all, my standard for quality comics. One day, though, a friend left some comics at my house, and the next morning I casually picked a non-Marvel from his stack to read at breakfast. I started eating and reading: the comic was a weird pre-Code horror anthology, and the first story featured inky, crosshatched illustrations (a lesser artist channeling Creepy-era Reed Crandall, maybe) for a disturbing story about a woman who turns herself into a leopard. I hated it because it wasn’t a Marvel comic. I glanced at panels where the woman, with a human head and leopard’s body, prowled over her unconscious lover. I felt nauseous. I threw the comic and my cereal away. Why did I get sick? Why was I so invested in Marvel, and why and how did this leopard-woman horror comic upset my tastes so traumatically? What does it mean to read a new comic

Column -- "Pluto And Doubling"

Welcome to the first installment of “Monsters Eat Critics,” a monthly column I’ll be writing for TCJ.com. I hope that “Monsters Eat Critics” sounds like the title of a Z-grade science-fiction movie, because I plan to write about genre comics, including science-fiction comics, rather than the alt-, art- and mini-comics so ably covered by other TCJ critics. Let me make clear, though, that I’ll be saying little about contemporary superhero comics, because I’m bored by the ones I’ve read and have nothing to express about them beyond a shrug and an annoyance that hype like “The New 52” gets so much attention, even negative attention, on comics blogs. Even though future columns will discuss creators who simultaneously labored in and transcended the superhero genre—we’ll trot Kirby out for obligatory analysis, if only to rile Pat Ford—I don’t care about superheroes or the superhero-driven business of American mainstream comics. I’m looking for art in other genres, and I’ll begin with one of the most artistically accomplished genre comics of the last ten years, Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto (2003-2009). Specifically, my argument is that Urasawa builds Pluto on overlapping, complex systems of doubling, and in reading closely to uncover these systems, I’ll be giving away all of Pluto’s major plot points, so beware. We spoil to dissect here

Book Review -- "Treasure Island: Part I"

Book review of Connor Willumsen's Treasure Island: Part I

Column -- "The Ballad Of Axe-Faced Anne: Comics, Criticism, Contexts" (Part Two)

Reading a comic book once made me sick. Like other Baby Boomer kids, I fell in love with Silver Age Marvel Comics, especially the Kirby/Lee/Sinnott Fantastic Four. I was imprinted by Lee’s narrative voice (simultaneously melodramatic and folksy) and Kirby’s visual imagination: the Marvel aesthetic became my be-all-and-end-all, my standard for quality comics. One day, though, a friend left some comics at my house, and the next morning I casually picked a non-Marvel from his stack to read at breakfast. I started eating and reading: the comic was a weird pre-Code horror anthology, and the first story featured inky, crosshatched illustrations (a lesser artist channeling Creepy-era Reed Crandall, maybe) for a disturbing story about a woman who turns herself into a leopard. I hated it because it wasn’t a Marvel comic. I glanced at panels where the woman, with a human head and leopard’s body, prowled over her unconscious lover. I felt nauseous. I threw the comic and my cereal away. Why did I get sick? Why was I so invested in Marvel, and why and how did this leopard-woman horror comic upset my tastes so traumatically? What does it mean to read a new comic

Column -- “My Back Pages"

Column/Essa

Column -- "Kirby: Attention Paid"

Last month, I wrote that my “Monsters Eat Critics” column would focus on genres other than superhero comics, and this month my topic is (cue trumpets) Jack Kirby’s Silver Age Marvel art. But I can’t help myself. I love the detail in Jack Kirby’s art. I love how he fills his panels with an almost promiscuous number of real and imagined objects, and I’m perpetually amazed by his ability to visualize and draw people and things from any angle in 360-degree space. My fascination with Kirby’s detailed, stylized, three-dimensional spaces has led me to write a few tentative ideas about how Kirby’s images—particularly in the 1966-67 heyday of the Fantastic Four, for me the visual apogee of Kirby’s art—structure a reader’s attention, and how backgrounds generally function in comic art