As the 1960s sitcom Get Smart makes its way back into popular culture with the release of the film adaptation starring Steve Carrell, it is amusing to note that the series has also had an unlikely impact on legal discourse. In both Canadian and American legal briefs and court rulings, the idea of the ‘cone of silence’ - which never worked on [...]
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A page from John Stanley’s Melvin Monster series.
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There are not many cartoonists who have claims to greatness; perhaps a dozen or a score. Of this elite group, the least known to the general public and most underrated even by the cartooning cognoscenti is John Stanley (1914-1993). To the extent that he’s remembered at all, [...]
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Krazy Kat — please click on art for a better view of this Sunday page.
The facts about George Herriman have been known for a long time: he was born in Lousiana in 1880. The birth certificate listed him as colored. Other documents described every other member of his family as colored. They were in fact [...]
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If you talk to Russians and East Europeans of a certain generation, their faces will light up if you mention Cheburashka. The star of a children’s book and series of short films, Cheburashka is as beloved in the east as Winnie the Pooh and the Muppets are in the west. He looks a bit like [...]
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In an article for Slate, I took a deeper look at the controversy surrounding Fredric Wertham and the postwar anti-comics crackdown. During the course of my article I made reference to Michael Chabon’s much-loved novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (where Wertham figures as a very minor character). Somewhat to my surprise, Chabon took umbrage [...]
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Charles Burns’ cover for Raw #4.
Is there anyone in the cartooning world who is more underrated than Francoise Mouly? She has strong claims to be the most important comics editor of the last 30 years, but I suspect that if you asked your average comics fan or even cartoonists to name influential editors, Mouly wouldn’t [...]
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Action #1 — the birth of Superman and many lawsuits.
Superman never made any money
Saving the world from Solomon Grundy
– Crash Test Dummies, Superman’s Song
The story of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, has been in the news lately due to a big court decision. I look back on the history here.
An excerpt:
The [...]
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I like to read and I like public transit. So I spend a lot of time reading on buses, trains and subways. In general reading in public doesn’t cause problems, although when I was on a subway in New York, a group of teenage boys started pointing at me and smirking while I was making my [...]
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A comic-book burning in Binghamton, NY, 1948.
My review of David Hajdu’s new book The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America appears in today’s Globe and Mail and can be found here. I’ll have more to say about this book on this blog later this week but in the meantime, here [...]
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Betty and Veronica as drawn by Dan DeCarlo and Alison Flood.
Betty Cooper and Veronica Lodge are not just rivals for the love of Archie Andrews, they are archetypes of two sharply contrasting ways of being feminine. The differences between the two is not as sharp as the traditional misogynist dichotomy between the virgin and the [...]
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