Everyone’s talking about Before Watchmen, the seven Watchmen prequel miniseries announced by DC this week. As with pretty much everything in the world of comics, opinions are divided and being fiercely argued where anyone will listen—and even places where they won’t. (The Beat and ComicsAlliance round up the serious and snide reactions.) I guess...
I just finished Charles Hatfield’s new book, Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby, which is the latest addition to the University Press of Mississippi’s “Great Comics Artists” series. I’m not a Kirby expert or acolyte, though I’ve always appreciated the manic, insane energy of Kirby’s work–most especially of his Fourth World...
A few years ago, I started trying to dress like a grown-up. I’d always had an interest in the accoutrements of traditional masculinity–in things I saw men wearing in old movies, in felt hats and sleeve garters and suspenders–but I’d always felt constrained by budget and lack of knowledge and the relentless casualness of...
In my research on nerd culture, I have been trying to distinguish between, on the one hand, an understanding of subculture as a kind of identity position or “imagined community” (Anderson 1983) and, on the other hand, a “subcultural scene.” The distinction here is between an abstract and trans-local field (the subculture) and a...
For those of you who know me, it’s no secret that I’m a great admirer of the work of cartoonist Joe Sacco. For years now, Sacco has been producing what he calls “comics journalism,” a mix of auto-biography and reportage in the style of the “new journalists.” These are, to me, some of the...