Tag Archives: Comics

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – Dec 25, 2023

A colorless New York City street exists above a psychedelic alternate reality.

The New Yorker – December25, 2023 issue: The new issue‘s cover features “The Flip Side” – The annual Cartoons & Puzzles Issue, inhabitants of a colorless New York coexist with their doppelgängers in a topsy-turvy reality.

Can Crosswords Be More Inclusive?

Drawing of a man with a crossword head.

The puzzles spread from the United States across the globe, but the American crossword today doesn’t always reflect the linguistic changes that immigration brings.

By Natan Last

Root around in the alphanumeric soup of the U.S. visa system for long enough and you’ll discover the EB-1A, sometimes known as the Einstein visa. Among the hardest permanent-resident visas to obtain, it is reserved for noncitizens with“extraordinary ability.” John Lennon got a forerunner of it, in 1976, after a deportation scare that could have sent him back to Britain. (His case, which spotlighted prosecutorial discretion in immigration law, forms the legal basis for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or daca.) Modern-day recipients include the tennis star Monica Seles and—in a tasteless bit of irony—the Slovenian model Melania Knauss, in 2001, four years before she became Melania Trump. 

The World’s Fastest Road Cars—and the People Who Drive Them

A Bugatti Chiron Super Sport near the companys factory in Molsheim France.

“Hypercars” can approach or even exceed 300 m.p.h. Often costing millions of dollars, they’re ostentatious trophies—and sublime engines of innovation.

By Ed Caesar

A Bugatti Chiron Super Sport, near the company’s factory, in Molsheim, France. The car, which has lusciously curved side panels, has been produced in a limited run of five hundred. Although its engine is as big as a Shetland pony, the interior is eerily quiet.

Return to New York City

Return to New York City

Revisiting old haunts leads to revelations about “real life.”

By Julia Wertz

1950’s: A ‘Moral Panic’ That Targeted Comic Books

Comic books have been a staple of American pop culture for the better part of 90 years. The origin story of comics as we know them, however, is much more complicated. In the 1950s, a moral panic swept across the country — one in which parents and children burned comic books by the bushel in public gatherings — and led to the near destruction of the comic book industry. Comics were big business even by the 1940s. They reached millions of readers each week. And the superheroes created then have now become billion-dollar franchises, showcased in blockbuster films and massive conventions such as Comic-Con. Events in 1954, however, almost changed that. Laws were passed. Careers were ruined. And comics fell under a strict censorship regime that lasted for decades to come.

Tributes: “Mad Magazine” Cartoonist Mort Drucker Dies At 91 (1929-2020)

Mort Drucker Five Decades of His Finest WorksMAD Magazine and DC Comics mourn the loss of Mort Drucker, whose artwork proved that parody is the sincerest form of flattery. “Mort was one of the best—maybe the best—caricature artists in the world,” said DC Chief Creative Officer and Publisher Jim Lee. “His work will continue to entertain for generations.”

Mort entered the comics field when he was 18, working as a production artist for DC. His first original piece of art was a one-pager titled “Tinker Tom Shows You How to Make Fancy Western Duds,” published in All-American Western #117 in December 1950. In 1956, Mort met with MAD publisher Bill Gaines during a Dodgers vs. Yankees World Series game. “If the Dodgers win, you’re hired,” said Gaines. They did win, and Mort began a career at MAD that would span the next five decades, and most notably brought to life the magazine’s infamous parodies of TV shows and films.

Mort won numerous awards and honors for his work, including the Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year in 1987. He was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 2011, and in 2015 became the inaugural recipient of the National Cartoonists Society’s Medal of Honor. He received an honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from the Art Institute of Boston, and his TIME Magazine covers hang in the National Portrait Gallery.

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History Of Cinema: How Italian Director Federico Fellini’s Love Of Comic Books Shaped His Films

Federico Fellini’s films were bright, surprising and above all, fun. His films are a testament to an extraordinary imagination, but also a deep love of an art form that is often overlooked: comics!

Federico Fellini comic book superfan BFI Video Feb 20 2020

In this video essay, BFI producer Nic Wassell speaks to Fellini experts to draw out the links between the great director’s love of American and Italian comics and the surreal, joyful imagery found in his films.

More information on Fellini at the BFI: https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/Online/def…

Comics Books: “George Herriman’s Krazy Kat – The Complete Color Sundays 1935-1944” (Taschen)

George Herriman's Krazy Kat The Complete Color Sundays 1935-1944 TaschenThe premise is simple: a black cat loves scheming a white mouse who incessantly throws bricks at the cat’s head, which police dog Officer Pupp, secretly harboring a passionate love for the cat, tries to prevent.

George Herriman endlessly plays with the above formula in his legendary newspaper strip Krazy Kat, published from 1913 until his death in 1944. Through his witdetailed characterizationand visual-verbal creativity, Herriman introduced even the least comically-inclined to the young medium; Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, US President Woodrow Wilson, Jackson Pollock, Charlie Chaplin, Frank Capra, P.G. Wodehouse, Willem de Kooning—all KK fans among many others.

It was thanks to media tycoon William Randolph Hearst, a confirmed fan who gave Herriman carte blanche in his newspapers, that the artist was allowed to freely explore countless absurd and melancholy variations on the theme of unrequited love for years on end. Herriman unabashedly took advantage of this, radically exploring the medium’s potential and pushing all of its formal boundaries; readers had to put up with surreal, Dadaist sceneries, a language that whirled slang, neologisms, phonetic spelling, and scholarly references, and diffuse gender roles—making Krazy Kat probably the first gender-fluid star in comic history.

To read more or purchase: https://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/graphic_design/all/01173/facts.george_herrimans_krazy_kat_the_complete_color_sundays_19351944.htm