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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Comics were once a gutter art form, barely more respectable than pornography. Now comics are perhaps all too cherished by the establishment, showered with attention by academic studies and museum shows. More than anyone else Art Speigelman is responsible for this shift, thanks not only to his celebrated graphic novel Maus but also his many [...]
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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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My friend Brett Grainger grew up in a hardcore fundamentalist Christian household. So thoroughly did he imbibe his family’s creed that one day, when he came home to an empty house, he feared everyone had been taken up by the rapture and he was left behind to endure the turbulent reign of the anti-Christ. Fundamentalist [...]
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Posted in Popular culture, tagged Superman on April 22, 2008 | No Comments »
Joe Shuster’s cover, Superman #1.
This year marks the 70th anniversary of Superman. As an offshoot of the celebrations I was interviewed at length about the meaning of the superhero genre by the CBC’s Jian Ghomeshi for the radio program Q. You can listen to an Mp3 file of the interview here.
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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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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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Dr. Fredric Wertham: not too pleased to be reading a horror comic.
Last week in the Globe and Mail, I wrote about David Hajdu’s entertaining new history of the post World War II anti-comics crusade, The Ten-Cent Plague, in which Dr. Fredric Wertham, an intellectual leader of the anti-comics crowd, is portrayed as a prissy, humourless scold. Bart Beaty, a leading comics scholar and also a [...]
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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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