Category Archives: Book Reviews

January 1, 2026 · 11:35 am

The Atlas Comics Library No. 8: Snafu (The Fantagraphics Atlas Comics Library) review

Atlas Comics Library No.8: Snafu. (Snafu 1-3, 1955-1956). Seattle: Fantagraphics. 256pp. $39.99.

Review by Paul Buhle

A close look at Snafu suggests what is behind the behindess of popular culture in its pulp-industry glory days, just before professors discovered the paperback market for their prospective (or imagined)  best-sellers. A dozen versions of Seventeen or other magazines for adolescent girl-readers; more dozens for the home-bound household drudge, mostly short fiction; Hollywood glamour mags by the dozens; Men’s Magazines with adventures and salacious fiction of semi-nude women, alongside lion-hunting and such-like manly fantasies. Not to mention Hot Rod specials, Wrestling specials, big-selling Sci-Fi magazines with wonderfully crazy covers. All this miles below the respectable (and then still numerous) slicks like the Saturday Evening Post.

MAD #6, 1953.

Mad Comics (1952-55), notoriously the brain child of Harvey Kurtzman, drawn by a handful of the greatest satirical artists of the age and best known for skewering the morals and manners of modern culture was also….a huge hit. So huge that it evoked, as its more hugely popular successor Mad Magazine would evoke, a not-so-small army of imitators. The best of them by a long stretch was Panic (1953-55), using many of the same artists but without the avant-garde “feel” expressed, for instance, in the April, 1955 Mad Comics satire of art history including abstract expressionism, seen through the imagined artistic life of Willie Elder, Kurtzman’s most intimate collaborator. Nobody else would even think to go that  deep, although when I asked Kurtzman about this most striking and unusual feature, he responded “it is amazing what you can do if you have pages to fill.” He was joking, I think. Maybe.

PANIC #1, 1954.

Kurtzman, resigning from Mad when his insistence that he own 51% ownership was turned down, famously tried to duplicate his success in Trump, Humbug and the final shot, Help!  Simply to name all the other Mad knockoffs during the 1950s-70s would be impossible, but they definitely include Eh!, Snafu, Frenzy, Cracked, Thimk, Loco, Frantic, Grump, Drool and Crazy. Cracked outlasted the rest by winning reader loyalty as a serviceable if second-rate Mad. Sick!, more literary pulp than comic, stands out as a kind of avant-garde response, an imitation Lenny Bruce on the page, easily adopted from the lesser stand-up comics of the day.

Kurtzman, when I pressed him for precursors of Mad Comics, suggested that the college humor magazines, especially in their post-war phase where censorship and political restraint wavered, had offered a model of sorts for what he wanted to do with something new. He and his artists would take on the world. The GI Bill generation that launched campus cinema clubs to see European art films and sometimes protested racial discrimination wanted something more than a handshake from the society that sent them to war. Through the 1950s and a bit further, college magazines continued to appear with issues banned for their sarcastic political commentary as well as overly sexualized prose and cartoons.

SNAFU #3, 1956.

Snafu, like  nearly all of the other Mad imitators, had no such ambition, although  repeated, not-very-humorous references to violence may indirectly reflect wartime memories and unintentionally express PTSD. “The Funniest Magazine in the World” (an overly ambitious claim, to say the least) lasted two years in the middle 1950s, the  normal run for a Mad Comics imitator. And it had several veterans of Kurtzman’s project, mainly artist John Severin and his sister Marie, a letterer who could obviously go beyond her domain to produce parody photo manipulations.

HELP! #12, 1960.

The expansive introduction by Michael J. Vassallo may itself be worth the price of the book to scholars. Both meticulous and incisive, at least when the fannish generosity of appreciation does not get in the way, it tells us what we need to know.  We learn that businessman-publisher Martin Goodman, known earlier for the formative Timely Comics, is in charge here, if doubtless preoccupied by the wider scope of his empire. For a while, Stan Lee clocked in as an executive employee and continued in the boom years to reign over dozens of titles with a small army of underpaid contributors. Jim Warren would publish Kurtzman’s Help!. And kill it for the crime of low revenue.

Goodman, familiar with many of the comic artists and writers who had seen military service—most of them in non-combat roles as educator/editors, identified with the sentiments of the Warner Brothers famed 1946 animated feature, “Private Snafu.”  Famously, the phrase “situation normal, all fucked up” was a familiar expression of ordinary soldiers none too fond of the Brass that lorded over them, especially because the overlording so often got in the way of whatever really needed to be done. This movie cartoon had been created by some of the animation greats, including Chuck Jones, Fritz Freeling, Bob Clampett and Frank Tashlin, “voiced” by Mel Blanc, and for millions of GIs, offered a much-needed laugh and some mental solace.

SNAFU #2, 1956.

Then, seven years later, came Mad.  As popular among young adults as kids, its readership included plenty of GIs, many of them already familiar with Kurtzman’s bravely realistic, arguably antiwar war comics. It was apparently Stan Lee, still hardly a name outside of the comics industry, who came up with a knockoff of Mad for the growing Goodman empire.

RIOT #1, 1954.

Snafu closely followed teen and funny-animal humor of the same company, published under titles like Millie the Model, Patsy and Her Pals,  The Monkey and the Bear, Girls Life, Homer and the Happy Ghost and My Girl Pearl. Among them, Wild, Crazy Comics and Riot all imitated Mad, but none with the energy or success of Snafu. A comics art veteran, Joe Maneely, was chosen along with John Severin to carry the serious artistic weight, issue after issue, with Mad veteran Russ Heath among others on the side.

SNAFU #1, 1955.

Vassallo comments that the humor writing in the comic aspires to be at Mad level, but “unfortuntely, Lee is no Kurtzman,”  and “sometimes very funny, but frequently juvenile” (p.xx). This is an understatement of considerable weight. The cover of the volume—a young woman in panty girdle and bra, seen from the back but clearly holding onto a subway loop, with an all male cast in the foreground reading Snafu rather than looking at her— already suggests juvenile humor of boys turning toward sexual interests a little nervously, as funny or strange. Very very Snafu.

THIMK #3, 1958.

The art, numerous steps downward from  the EC standard, looks rushed, the gags pretty obvious. Albeit sometimes contemporary: “Good News for Men Over 40…Who are Frequently Tired and Worn Out.  You’re Draft Exempt!” A Korean War joke or a memory of WWII? Sometimes the jokes are a bit worse, as in “TV Programs This Week”: “Evelyn runs away from reform school because [her] boy friend is always smacking her with the palm of his hand. She finally finds true love with Jack Gonng, prize-fighter, who hits her only with a closed fist.” (p.15, November 1954.)

WILD #1, 1954.

On the last page of the introduction, Vassallo asks why these highly ephemeral efforts failed and were, so to speak, never heard from again. He reiterates that Mad really was the original, attracting the best artists with the best editors and production, while Snafu and others in the Goodman barn could never, by their nature, be more than imitations.

SNAFU Issues 1-3.

There is much to be said for this interpretation. Yet, as Vassallo insists, the seriously talented Severin obviously labored under rushed conditions and tight deadlines, turning out visual gags. We wince at the Burlesque Show jokes, the “Squaw” gags with pretend-Indians and the assorted gender jokes that would not survive “Me Too” complaints of a later day. Snafu does a lot better, arguably hits a high point, with one repeat feature, well-drawn imitations of famous cartoon artists’ work, from the Saturday Evening Post to the New Yorker, not to mention 1000 Jokes and other low-class pulps that would disappear from the news stands before 1970 or so. The various artists who created these pages obviously did their homework.

Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang, #188, 1934.

Seen from another standpoint, the repetitive sex-joke format of Snafu issues may seem further from Little Annie Fanny (Kurtzman and Elder, later on in Playboy) and closer to the tradition of Captain Billy’s Whizbang of the 1920s-30s. Updated to suburban life and its consumer pleasures with built-in frustrations, it loses the old sex-crazed undergraduates—often male and female alike—of the campus and the sailors, not to mention the naughty talking parrot of the college landlady. Snafu offers, one might say, a last look backward on another time and another world of comic art.

BUNK #1, 1956.

With two issues of Snafu under his belt, Goodman launched Bunk!, made up almost entirely of retouched photos and gag commentaries, as if the butt of the joke is actually Confidential, just then a new hit in the exploitation trade. Then comes Riot, soon dumped and  then revisited in short order, itself spun off to monster-satire features like Melvin the Monster. Still other, seemingly endless  spinoffs follow until Atlas itself implodes. The lead artists of these efforts evidently go on, but not, I think, to greener pastures. Some made it to advertising, a long-wished goal of comic book artists, at first barred or limited by their Jewishness, and then less so. By then,  the golden age of printed satire is over. At least, according to this critic.

Paul Buhle

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December 8, 2025 · 1:44 pm

Complete Works of Fletcher Hanks by Paul Karasik book review

The  Troubled World of Fletcher Hanks.

Turn Loose Our Death Rays and Kill Them All!: The Complete Works of Fletcher Hanks. Paul Karasik. Fantagraphics. 2025. 353pp. $44.99.

Review by Paul Buhle

By nature, comic art has been unpredictable, its deeper meanings as often elusive as banal, but above all vernacular. It gets no respect—a stand-up comic’s phrase now itself grown old—and needs none. At least until recent decades when the graphic novel began to replace the art book in the libraries of those (mostly younger) readers, the minority of them who still have growing libraries.

Glen David Gold, in his preface to the troubled mind of Fletcher Hanks, gives us a wonderful glimpse into his own discovery of the forgotten comic artist. He refers in passing to Henry Darger, whose work is the epitome of “outsider art” discovered in recent years and lifted up into museum displays.The reference is a good one even if Hanks was closer in, almost an accepted comic artist. The weirdness factor, however, points elsewhere.

Paul Karasik, a noted comic artist and commentator, fills in the picture with a short introduction. Hanks, born in 1887, son of a Methodist minister in Oxford, Maryland, joined a cartoonist school-by-mail in his teen years, the same school that enrolled E.C. Segar, Hank Ketcham and Chester Gould at different times. Hanks pretty soon married, had four children, and meanwhile indulged himself in heavy drinking and carousing, including violence against his own family. He disappeared with the family’s cash in 1930, pretty much to everyone’s satisfaction, resurfacing almost a decade later, several states away.

The new comic book industry was booming by 1939, with more room for unknowns, dubiously talented nonprofessionals, than likely at other times. It was also booming with superheroes and exotic adventures, outer space to jungle, airplane adventures to more bizarre and almost inexplicable genre. Hanks, drawing under several names (publishers imaginatively expanded their supposed list of artists in this way), could be identified as suited to violence, revenge, and such-like behavior that would have brought any consulting psychological to a ready conclusion. Hanks disappeared from the trade and from sight two years later. The introduction suggests that the overly-indulgent aunt of his early life was replaced by another indulgent lady in 1941, and he could go on being as dissolute as he chose…until his luck ran out.

There must be more to it. Perhaps because I was asked to write an introduction to the reprint edition of The Boy Commandos (first appearance, 1943), a comic with plenty of anti-fascist violence, I took pleasure in nearly all of it—as directed, by the ragtag ethnic bunch, toward the genuinely evil ones. Hanks, an adult in 1939, could already see in the newspapers and more graphically, in newsreels, the looming horror of war violence. Hanks’s heroes, in contrast to the courageous teens of Boy Commandos, looks pretty much the same, strip after strip, whether the theme is cosmic or human. Big muscles. Not a big talker. Not a lover, either, although the occasional beset female, human or otherwise, sometimes appeals to his good nature.

Karasik points to a certain parallel of Hanks’s work with Surrealism in 1939, very much part of the art world and even a popular culture world, thanks largely to Salvatore Dali. The role of the unconscious, introduced or dramatized in art, finds a ready home in these comics, barely below the surface. The surrealists seemed to know what they were doing, more or less, and how it fitted into the world of art. If in doubt, they had leader-savant Andre Breton to explain it to them.

Hanks, hacking out a living over the drawing board in the cramped quarters of a comic publishers’ office, had no theorist or savant to explain or to offer him inspiration. We can guess why he began drawing comics, as an extension of a youthful hobby, but no one knows why he stopped, let alone what was going through his mind as he plotted and drew his oeuvre. Found dead on a park bench in Manhattan, he reminds me of the uncle I never met, reportedly on or near skid row, Chicago, possibly passing in the same year, 1976.

What did he leave behind? We move quickly past a few pages of trial efforts made for the school, and onto a Joe Palooka knockoff, “Moe M. Down, ‘King of the Canvass Kissers,’”  a “brainless bone-buster” with a woman manager. Hanks quickly hit his stride with SciFi superheroes and stays there for most of his two year run.

Every story, almost every panel, looks like he could have used another round of training as an artist. The faces are wrong, if not terribly wrong. The backgrounds appear done in a hurry, without any artistic intention whatsoever. Violence is the key. Stardust, known as “The Super Wizard,” has almost unimaginable powers. He is, after all, “master of space and planetary forces,” whose “scientific use of rays” protect him from all kinds of assaults.

As the “most remarkable man that ever lived,” he can break up the conspiracies of mobsters and not only by them. A “Fifth Column” of traitors seek to destroy New York with their terrible techno-weapons. Strardust comes to the rescue, finally turning the leader into a harmless human rodent. The last panel nevertheless warns in the last panel,  “America…Beware of the Fifth Column.” Was Hanks sneaking into the German-American Bund meetings still drawing crowds in 1940?

But this is by no means Hanks’s finest superhero. Fantomah, “Mystery Woman of the Jungle” and “the most remarkable woman that ever lived,” spends her time defending the jungle population of tribespeople, and likewise the animals, against militarized white invaders. She has the power to evoke nature’s revenge, and she reminds me more than a little of Aquaman, perhaps my own favorite hero.

Thus not only the usual lions, tigers, etc, but “beasts unknown to white men” and looking amazingly like dinosaurs, also “respond to her wizardry.”  Sometimes, moments of rage against the wrongdoers. she changes the form of her face that most remarkably becomes a skull seeking revenge for martyred Africans. And then…she becomes a beautiful blonde again!

There’s more here,in Hanks’ own bestiary, including a few continuing odd characters like two-fisted Big Red Maclane of the northern woods. Without space adventures, the wild imagination of Hanks becomes pretty mundane. Mere comic book filler.

But let’s look at these comics in a somewhat different light: they seem to offer a subconscious art, art of a certain kind, with garish colors, violence, and patterns of a troubled artist at a most troubling moment in modern US history. Amidst a very mixed scene of different painting styles taking the stage or gallery in 1940— and against the background of the rising comic book—older artistic fashions began to fade. The severely representative, historical-minded public art of the New Deal is losing its lure. Perhaps it was too positive or just too literal to appeal any longer in the same way.

Famously, for those who followed contemporary major art trends, Jose Clemente Orozco, a representative of Mexican super-realism, offered up ”Dive Bomber and Tank,” in glaring colors. An emerging pattern of “Symbolic Realism” took on  scary psychological themes. The moment saw what would become Abstract Expressionism on the rise, alongside the gloomy realism of Edward Hopper and George Ault, among others. Would Hanks, working on his comics in New York, the center of art interest and publicity in the US, have been unmoved by these widely-publicized examples?

Perhaps, with Hanks, comic art is already pointing toward the slightly more sophisticated brutality of Crime Does Not Pay, the leading popular series during the decade just before censorship. Or perhaps toward its chief rival in those years, and perceived enemy of children’s minds: horror comics. Born under the shadow of Fascism’s menace, drawn by men whose families often enough faced the worst of the horrors ahead, comic art could not very well avoid a kind of psychic crisis invading popular art. Here we find Fletcher Hanks.

Paul Buhle

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October 12, 2025 · 1:35 pm

Maria La Divina by Jerome Charyn book review

Maria La Divina. Jerome Charyn. Bellevue Literary Press. 2025. 

Maria Callas (1923-1977), the celebrated opera singer, has gotten on more people’s radars with Angelina Jolie’s portrayal in Maria, on Netflix. Add to your appreciation of Maria Callas with the new novel by Jerome Charyn. Callas had the look, the poise, and, most assuredly, the voice. While keeping to her opera sphere of influence, she was certainly heard beyond it. Novelist Jerome Charyn, known for his in-depth explorations of notable figures, including Emily Dickinson and Abraham Lincoln, delivers a rags-to-riches tale of Callas at the level befitting such a towering diva.

Maria Callas is this novel’s clay, which Charyn molds into this beautiful melancholic character: perpetually hungry for cheese and chocolate; perpetually starving for love; blessed with extraordinary raw talent; burdened with poor eyesight and awkwardness. Callas came from humble origins. So humble that a Dickensian treatment, at least in part, is apropos to tell her story. Once she found her voice, she began to soar, even while still a teenager, at the height of World War II, living in occupied Greece, and fearing for her life. But Callas, at her core, isn’t especially fearful in this novel. She is gifted with an out-sized operatic singing voice that preoccupies her every waking moment. Displaced as she is growing up, her neurotic stage mother moving her and her sister from New York to Greece, she gains much solace from the companionship of three canaries, particularly her prized Stephanakos. Her lovers fated to doom. Callas, truly a tragic figure.

Maria Callas, portrait by Cecil Beaton, 1956.

Charyn, a masterful writer by any measure, is a delight to read. He sets in motion a narrative that you do not want to put down. His prose has a distinctive poetic magic to it, a relentless drive that charms and intrigues the reader. He will highlight certain aspects, features, quirks, of a character and return to them: Maria’s devouring, like a wolf, cheese and chocolate; Maria’s aspirations to master the art of “bel canto,” an impossible goal for any singer; Maria’s myopia, leaving her to memorize every inch of the stage since she won’t easily see it when she performs. Charyn, the writer and artist, diligently researches his subject to the point where he has a palette to dive into, like a painter, that sets him free to express the essence, meaning and purpose of a character, a story.

Maria Callas was to know world-wide fame but happiness was to allude her. In many ways, she was trapped: another VIP among other VIPs. It is in this bittersweet world of privilege and deprivation that Maria navigated. In such a world, she could be both miserable and mesmerized. In such a world she could find herself on the yacht of one of the richest men in the world, Aristole Onasis, circa 1959, the start of an extended love affair with Onasis. Here is just a brief excerpt as Charyn, amid all the glamour and pomp, has Callas, in an unhappy marriage with her manager, return to the simple pleasures of her canaries while speaking with Winston Chruchill:

“Madame Meneghini,” Sir Winston said, “you keep staring at poor Toby. Does my bird delight you?”

A shiver ran through Maria. Somehow this pompous bird reminded her of Stephanakos, her lost canary, and how much she missed singing duets with that bright yellow wonder of a male soprano.

“Forgive me, Sir Winston. I did not mean to stare. But I must kiss your hand.” And she did. His hand felt rough against her lips.

“That’s cheeky,” said Sir Winston’s bodyguard from Scotland Yard.

“Shut up,” Sir Winston said, his eyes half closed, “and let the opera singer explain herself. I’m sure she had an excellent reason, Sergeant Marley.”

“You see,” Maria said, “I was in Athens during the civil war, when you arrived in your armored car. It ignited the population.”

The old man with the babyish bald head was suddenly alert. “I remember that afternoon, indeed. I couldn’t afford to have Greece fall to the Reds. All of Europe would have fallen.”

Sir Winston’s head began to droop. His bodyguards transferred him to the outsize wheelchair, trundled him as far as they could, then cradled him in their arms and carried him to Aristotle’s lavish suite on the bridge deck.

Maria La Divina by Jerome Charyn is available now. I highly recommend that you seek out this engaging tale of bittersweet existence, the story of Maria Callas, La Divina, considered the greatest diva that ever lived.

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July 22, 2025 · 2:00 pm

The Spawn of Venus and Other Stories Illustrated by Wallace Wood book review

The Spawn of Venus and Other Stories Illustrated by Wallace Wood. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2025, 216pp. $39.99.

Review by Paul Buhle

The Great Bohemian of comic books’ grandest moments, Wallace (aka “Wally”) Wood drew like a genius for a number of publishers before falling to overwork, too many cigarettes and too much liquor. EC loved him the best, and it was a mutual feeling, notwithstanding the inevitable tensions of artist, collective/collaborative work process, and the reality of a boss.

Wally Wood in his prime, excerpt from “My World,” Weird Science #22, 1953.

This splendid volume collects some of his finest Sci-Fi—he was also among the greatest satirical artists for Mad Comics—from forgotten series titles like Weird Science, Weird Fantasy and Incredible Science Fiction of the early 1950s. It also offers much woderful contextual material, commentary by serious scholars—university professors but mostly otherwise—to individual stories and collaborations, from editors to scriptwriters to presumably lowly inkers.

Most “classics” comic art volumes these days contain a hat-tipping of industry insiders. Same here. Howard Chaykin, vaunted comic artist (and a short time assistant to  Wood)  does not have a lot to say beyond describing Wood’s talent, nor does the appropriately admiring Larry Hama, of today’s GI Joe, itself a remnant of another and in this case, less pleasant, aka Cold War, comics era. S.S. Ringenberg, a comic scriptwriter, and fan-interviewer works harder with a biographical introductory sketch that goes little beyond ground familiar to Woods devotees, but reminds us sharply of the nature of the self-destructive genius. Wood put a gun to his head in 1981, leaving no note. The career disappointments were real, especially for an artist who worked hard at improving his style. But by that time, two divorces and a separation, he became too exhausted to keep himself in check. Besides, the glory years of the older comic art had been long past, and he was not suited to the new comix generation. His barely controlled artistic id did not find a home in the ill-paying Undergrounds.

Meanwhile, in the substantial Introduction,Tommy Burns and Jon Gothold go through the stories one by one, in such detail that no biographer of a novelist may ever have done better. Do we need such detail? Perhaps not every reader will think so, but among the plot summaries, these scholarly-minded critics offer so many small insights that the net result is remarkable, and demands several readings for details.

Wood reached his apex, arguably, in adapting the stories of Ray Bradbury, and this tells us much of what need to know about the vital and lasting importance of Wood’s work. This reviewer came upon Bradbury’s writings around age 10 or 11, in the Republican political/cultural climate of Central Illinois where the perceptions of sophisticated New Yorkers, for instance, would have been unusual and likely mistrusted. Mad Comics explained McCarthyism in the most penetrating and hilarious fashion. Bradbury, who was personally close to the Hollywood Blacklisted, found ways in his stories and novels to explore the takeover of public space, the waning of the New Deal stress for reform in favor of forced patriotism, but also unapologetic commercialization of daily life. He saw the future and it looked bad.

Thus, famously,  Fahrenfeit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, made into feature films but only after the worst of McCarthyism had faded. Bradbury had been trying for years to send out warnings, even while he was making a living and a reputation (including a personal move to Hollywood)  in a Sci-Fi field with leftist underpinnings going back to the 1930s. He also badly wanted to escape being pegged as a “genre writer,” but never made it and did not need to: we loved him anyway.

Photo funnies tribute in The Spawn of Venus and Other Stories.

Wally Wood so internalized the logic of Bradbury that stories composed by others at EC somehow have the “Bradbury Touch” in addition to the EC Touch, which consists—leaving aside the art— in terse scripting and a surprise ending. Like the alien civilization in “He Walked Among Us,” where the Savior was actually an Earthman who preaches love and forgiveness is executed. Two thousand years (!) later, another Earth visitor learns that the aliens’ holy symbol is the rack, aka cross, where the presumed savior was tortured to death.*

You get the idea. Human folly in the Atomic Age has become toxic. Wood could have predicted what a willful destroyer like Musk would write about opening up the need for “planetary” civilizations when Earth has been plundered beyond repair.

Not that all the stories are like this. And Bradbury could not have featured the scantily-clad beauties, alongside the virile young males, that seemed to be a specialty for Wood. Earthmen fall in love with alien females who assume a delicious human form only… to revert back, inspiring horror. Humans landing on a distant planet learn that the babies born to them, urgently wanting love and care, may have a dozen arms and look like octopi or something else weird (in this case, mommy does not care, which sounds right).

How were Wood’s females all so young and buxom, you might ask? The mostly male and young readers of these comics didn’t likely ask at all. The happy dreamers of another story are space explorers kidnapped to service the all-female population of a planet whose males have died out after a war. The “scientifically selected” dames look awfully familiar.

Wood could also favor social criticism–with a dark turn. In one story here, tens of thousands of Earth people who disappear in bunches, every few hundred years, turn out to be farm edibles, as a scientist explains over…a turkey dinner. Actually, this was an EC Sci-Fi trope several times over, like the aliens in another EC comic who capture interplanetary humans to use their skins for…fashionable minkish coats, and so on. Why do we egotistical Homo sapiens think we can abuse the animal kingdom?

From “Spawn of Venus”

Wood also loved the occasional in-joke, with a drawing of himself in the final panel. Here, EC Comics miraculously predict unexpected events, like the appearance of flying saucers, or the rise of surgical sex change (think “Christine” Jorgenson in tabloid headlines of the time). A jowly comics publisher (could it be plump William Gaines, who inherited EC when his father died in a boating accident?) wants them to take “a loyalty oath” (cue to Joe McCarthy). After some alien hi-jinks, the real Wally confesses that he and his fellow artists are actually disguised Venusians saving the world from horrible-looking Martians!!! What those helpful Venusians might look like beneath their disguise…we will never know.

In the real world, EC’s marvelous Sci-Fi, “Real War” and humor series (MAD and PANIC) never reached the sales level of its various, blood-dripping but also deeply satirical horror comics, also full of plot reversals and revenge-justice. Gaines was called upon, in the famous Congressional hearings (held in the same Manhattan courtroom as “Red” hearings a few years earlier), to explain the horror as something less than dangerous to young minds. The inquisitors weren’t listening to his answers, and the guillotine blade fell on a glorious moment in popular art.

Wally Wood outlived his time, this is the tragedy of his life and not only his. Harvey Kurtzman and his trusted artists hit their peak as satirists, also arguably as editors and artists, in their twenties and early thirties. Some became highly successful illustrators. None could recapture the magic.

Paul Buhle

*Let it be known that the Ray Bradbury Museum rests in the blue collar city of Waukegan, Ilinois, which only happens to be my wife’s hometown.

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July 7, 2025 · 10:00 am

TERMINAL EXPOSURE book review

Michael McMillan, Terminal Exposure: Comics, Sculpture, and Risky Behavior. New York: New York Review Comics, 2025. 231pp, $39.95.

Review by Paul Buhle

ONTEMPORARY CRITICS’ RECOGNITON of “Outsider Art” can be said to have come early to its precursor, Underground Comix of the late 1960s and 1970s.  “Recognition,” that is, in the best way:  publication—albeit with a real if fleeting audience—far from any recognized, official art scene. Thus artist/nonartist Michael McMillan. A leftover from those days and now past 90, he fairly inhabits this book of his past drawings and sculptures, with a standout introduction by Crumb biographer Dan Nadel and supportive blurbs from the likes of Gary Panter and Bill Griffith.

Nadel takes less than four pages to give us the heart of the McMillan saga, among the more unusual in the always-unusual “comix” world. Son of a railroad office worker and an art teacher, the young artist grew up mostly in Fresno, home of an agricultural empire with the Sierra Nevada nearby. An insular kid drawn to fantasy popular culture, building model airplanes and railroads, also a high school newspaper cartoonist interested in abstract art, he attended the USC School of Architecture just before he found himself drafted into the peacetime Army.

Trying to avoid “predictable boredom.”

Moving to San Francisco after his two-year hitch, McMillan landed, in the late 1950s, in US version of Bohemia. Over the next decade, he worked at various jobs, took art and sculpture classes at San Francisco State and felt himself inspired or confirmed in his inclinations by a 1969 exhibit of the Hairy Who. Would-be successors to Surrealism but conspicuously without the label, the group of Chicago artists lasted only 1966-69, with a couple of group showings in Chicago and one (the one that McMillan saw) in San Francisco. Drawing heavily upon vernacular street visuals, sharing the psychedelic colors, anti-racism and anti-war politics of the contemporary scene, they offered ambiguous but transgressive symbols of a radically shifting public culture. Most of all, arguably, they challenged the contemporary New York art scene. Thereby, they moved close to the sensibilities of the emerging Underground Comics, but from another direction.

McMillan actively sought out comix publisher Don Donahue, living nearby in the city’s Mission District, and arranged publication of a one-shot comic of his own, the instantly obscure Terminal Comix. Recognized and greatly admired among these artists a half generation younger than himself, he remained nevertheless an outsider.

Oddly, the public history of the artist almost ends here, in the 1970s. A handful of comix (after 1980, restyled  “alternative comics”) anthologies, including Robert Crumb’s Weirdo magazine, took him up, usually for one-shot contributions. He earned a  quiet reputation among the artist-editors as someone drawing upon multiple vernacular visual sources, breaking down the barriers between experimental art and comic styles. He made no effort at further outreach, giving himself over to the quiet life of his own sculptures, paintings and prints on his home press. He did it all because he enjoyed the work for its own sake, living cheap and taking little commercial jobs along the way. According to the more notable artists, this self-chosen insularity demonstrated his artistic purity: he had nothing to gain and no interest in gaining it.

The easiest part of Terminal Exposure to describe is naturally the autobiographical five comic pages. Boyhood fascinations with machines, boyish fantasies of heros and adventures followed by fantasies about girls at his school, and above all, riffs on hiking seem to flow forward, however weirdly drawn and narrated. One might say that all of this constituted, already, a way of being alone, learning to be alone, and satisfying himself with that choice.

More pure fantasy dominates the book otherwise. The strips that appeared in the comics anthologies and others very much like them would be the most narrative, a few pages at a time. His characters change, sometimes satirical superheroes or random oddballs. The setting is forever abstract, more than unreal and often humorous but never in the predictable fashion of funnypaper gag strips.

Reflecting his own life or rather his view of his life, these dream-like sagas often take place amid wide horizons, even amid some mild eroticism and occasional nudity. Returning to the fantasy films and pulp literature of his young years, his characters appear in jungles or the high seas. More than occasionally—this is often theorized as the real source of Wonder Woman’s popularity—a miraculous female overwhelms the ostensibly innocent but definitely gratified male, ignorant in the mysteries of biological appeal and incapable of seduction.

Most remarkably, McMillan is also capable of straight-forward memory art, like his experience in climbing mountains of the West, in the half century from 1951 onward. Of his four drawn and otherwise unpublished volumes of illustrated stories, we get two pages of exertion and also escape—from an entangling relationship. This is an artist who, we learn repeatedly and in different circumstances, made the choice to escape relationships in order to be on his own.

The assorted sculptures in the book mean less to this reviewer. They certainly resemble the products of surrealist experimentation with mixed materials and playful human/non-human depictions. McMillan, even more than the collective Hairy Who, makes no editorial, political or any other statement about his his art. It Is.

Trying to reach those “primeval forces.”

The best or easiest to see McMillan’s work is as an extension of comic art forms appropriate to the age of comic/art experimentation, an age that began in the 1960s and has, in multiple ways, continued as fixed forms break down at all levels. By contrast to, say, Pop Art’s stylizing familiar and notably banal comic strip  protagonists and remaking them into studio art, McMillan goes the other direction. They escape Pop Art by posing the issues differently.

Or is this somehow familiar, after all? The last several years have seen a burst of renewed Surrealist activity in its own name,  exhibits in dozens of locations celebrating the centenary of Surrealism’s 1924 birth but also a global art-show interest and an accompanying scholarly surge. Who would have guessed that the younger generation of radicalized graduate students and an evidently wider milieu would re-establish actual surrealist groups in familiar (Prague) and unfamiliar (Helsinki or Sao Paulo) locations, create the Journal of Surrealist Studies or its sponsoring International Society of Surrealist Studies? Why, in a world damaged almost beyond repair, would the long-gone dreams of the 1920s Parisians now find watchers, listeners and zealous disciples?

Your reviewer, publisher of two journals (1967-91) with several special issues organized by the Chicago Surrealists (and mainly Franklin Rosemont) has a special stake in these questions, without any firm conclusions. McMillan, unpublished and unknown, might easily have been a “discovery” of surrealist researchers rather than the underground comix circles. Instead, he may offer a kind of bridge between several worlds, not by dint of any political commitment or any commitment, except to his own imagination and skills.

Whatever the analysis, Terminal Exposure’s content, that is to say also the artist’s work as a whole, can now be said to have been exposed to public examination. Also the artist himself? Probably not,  because without intending to do,  Michael McMillan remains a mystery within his work. Or he has done so by intent, the very reason he stopped drawing for publication just as soon as editors stopped asking?

Paul Buhle

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June 25, 2025 · 9:00 am

The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism book review

The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism, by Sue Coe and Stephen F.  Eisenman. New York: OR Books, 2025. 190pp, $22.95

When I eyeball the work of Sue Coe, the highly awarded radical illustrator, painter and lithographer, what comes to my mind is a forgotten 1935 book, Karl Marx in Lithographs, by Hugo Gellert.

Review by Paul Buhle.

From Comrade Gulliver by Hugo Gellert

There’s a good reason, if also personal. I went to interview Gellert in New Jersey, in 1984, and found the 91-year-old artist voluble in memories of The Masses magazine—he had long since been the only surviving staffer of any kind. The radical modernist experiment in words and pictures reached wide audiences before it was suppressed, for opposing the US entry into the First World War.

To extend this story a little before turning to the book at hand, the Hungarian-American Gellert traveled back through a Hungary amidst revolution and counter-revolution. He subsequently became a leading artistic antifascist, a collaborator with Communists in art and politics.  Karl Marx in Lithographs is easily his most didactic work.* Here, Capital rules ruthlessly, murderously, in iconography that reminds us, in turn, of some of Sue Coe’s favorites, notably Francisco Goya, not to mention a favorite contemporary of Gellert, Kathe Kollwitz.

The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism

Cue, Sue Coe. Growing up in the English countryside, so close to a hog butchery that she could hear the screams of the animals being slaughtered and smell the process, Coe took an art degree and emigrated to New York City at the dawn of the 1970s. It would be a mistake, as more than one friendly critic has noted, to see any of Coe’s work as far from the experience of animals at large, animals mostly endangered by ruthless, mechanized human activity. Sometimes—rarely—animals of all kinds are seen in a utopian future, reconciled with a better humanity and highlighted by children. This is clearly her idea of the classless socialistic society.

The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism

Hugely successful and widely admired in a variety of art forms, she has very often published in World War 3 Illustrated, the annual lefty anthology best known for bringing forth young radical artists. Coe even provided the vivid image of an African-American worker as the frontispiece of Wobblies! A Centennial History of the Industrial Workers of the World, the 2005 anthology that started my own later-life project of radical comics

Coe calls herself a activist artist, and for good reason. Meat-packing has been high on her list, but factory farming, the hyper-exploitation of immigrants and victims of the prison-industrial complex, the curse of AIDS and, very often, war in its various grisly forms can be seen. She does not want us to turn away from the horrible.

The Birth of Fascism (2017) by Sue Coe.

The Birth of Fascism (2017) might be viewed as the precursor to The Young Person’s Guide, and a handful of her art on Trump specifically from that period, is on view again here. The interpretive essays by Stephen F. Eisenman, retired professor and art historian, also columnist for  Counterpunch, offers a fresh element of collaboration. Eisenman is nothing if not didactic: he explains that US democracy has never been all that democratic, despite endless narcissistic claims, but that fascism is much, much worse. The undercurrent of “racial fascism” never really disappeared from the mainstream, and the pseudo-scientific American theories of race superiority found a welcome home in Hitler’s Germany.

The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism

A reviewer earlier this year, in the London Morning Star (formerly the Daily Worker), praised The Young Person’s Guide but posed the problem of the “melodrama” in the artist’s work, what he called “the exaggerated emotional effect …..[of] focusing on grief pain and suffering.” In the critic’s view, this tendency somewhat diminished Coe’s impact, as has the common place alternative in Left art, an exaggerated sentimentality. Each extreme, according to the critic, tends to emphasize “feeling” over understanding and serve the reader poorly.

The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism

This is criticism-among-comrades that continues a discussion going back well over a century. Socialistic best-sellers on the page, in theater and in film achieve an emotional pitch that is not likely to be cerebral, nuanced or even necessarily in line with modernism. Popular audiences are unapologetically sentimental, even if they enjoy pratfalls, especially in ridicule of the wealthy classes.

The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism

Without saying so, Coe meets this criticism head on, in the traditions of angry audiences turning their rage upon the villains in the pay of the ruling class. Weapons makers dance over the pyramids of corpses, a chorus line of skull-headed dancers carries on beneath boots squashing a hapless victim. Trump appears again and again, a monster, trophy hunter of infants, assaulting the embodiment of the Statue of Liberty, and so on. The images of death and destruction, lined up one after another in the book, are demanding: LOOK!

And that, surely, is Coe’s point. Eisenman insists properly that she mixes mythic and contemporary images, adopting the role of a reporter of current events, while also the fine artist widely seen in museum and other public exhibits.

Paul Buhle

*My interview with Gellert is in the Oral History of the American Left archive at New York University’s Tamiment Library collection.

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May 9, 2025 · 7:57 am

Peter Kuper interview: On Comics and INSECTOPOLIS

Peter Kuper is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Nation and MAD magazine where he has written and illustrated SPY vs. SPY every issue since 1997. Kuper is also the co-founder and editor of World War 3 Illustrated, a political graphics magazine that has given a forum to political artists for over 40 years. Well, that gives you some sense of his impressive career, one that finds his latest graphic narrative a most notable addition. Insectopolis, published by W.W. Norton, is about the insect world and how it interacts with us humans and is truly one of those great all-ages works that will equally appeal to kids and adults. Insectopolis makes you all the more aware of your existence and how it is shared with a multitude of other beings, some with wings, antennae or multiple eyes and legs.

Insectopolis is published by W.W. Norton. The publication date is May 13, 2025 and is available for pre-order. Visit W.W. Norton here.

All great works of graphic narrative always involve a process with numerous factors in play: the research, the timing, the pacing, the work environment, and so on. It was an amazing and fascinating conversation I had with Peter Kuper. In terms of getting a window into the creative process, Kuper shares a multitude of observations on how his new book was created, and under some very unusual circumstances. As he explained, it all began when he was awarded a fellowship with The New York Public Library. Oh, it did just so happen to coincide with the Covid pandemic. This perfect storm or, let’s say, most unusual set of circumstances provided Kuper with quite a unique vantage point. Suddenly, here he was working on his new book with a world-class library practically all to himself.

“Roses?”

The Rose Room!

Suddenly, the famous Rose Room, a favorite of library visitors and usually filled with hushed activity, was empty and there for Kuper, and Kuper alone, to draw inspiration from. Well, he must have been in heaven, a heaven filled with butterflies, beetles, and even cockroaches! All insects are welcome here!

Under the library!

So, Kuper set about making the most of this situation he was in, where time had seemed to stand still. He was able to linger longer than ever before and explore places that normally would have gone unnoticed, like the library’s vast underground corridor. And, bit by bit, a book being created during a pandemic led to a book set in a post-apocalyptic future, post-human, where insects must assess the relationship between humans and insects. Fortunately for us, we can read the results. Without a doubt, this is a book that is a must-read for any human seeking a better connection with the vast array of potential insect friends.

A paperback talisman.

A little over ten years ago, Kuper published a wonderful graphic novel, Ruins, which follows two parallel stories: one of a troubled relationship between a husband and wife; and the other, the struggles of migration for a Monarch butterfly. Well, there are plenty of Monarch butterflies in Kuper’s latest book. Is there a connection? Oh, sure, but the deepest one goes back to a four-year-old Peter Kuper. As he states, it was picking up a paperback on insects at such an early stage that sparked a lifelong interest in insects. Peter even held up a copy of that very same beloved paperback. He keeps it handy, as a friendly reminder.

And then a gnat flew by.

I must say, there was something in the air on the day of our interview. This has never ever happened before to me but, just as I was reciting my introductory remarks, a gnat emerged out of nowhere and darted across the screen. You can see it for yourself. Was that a sign? Yes, of it was! That little gnat needed to be known!

Ants as Horror Movie Monsters.

As you will see in the video, our conversation is easygoing as well as at a steady pace. There are a lot of dots to connect. I did my best to imagine, beforehand, what it must have been like for Peter to find himself gathering one compelling set of facts after another and seeing how this element might fit in with another. For example, there is a good bit of unpacking on how insects have been demonized by humans. Dragonflies were once deemed spawned from hell itself. And ants get grilled over the coals and become monsters for Hollywood’s answer to the atomic bomb and the threat of nuclear war. But it’s humans who ultimately cause the most destruction to insects, the planet and to themselves.

One favorite moment for me is when Peter and I discuss what a cicada and a tree might chat about over the course of many years. That happened after we had discussed the various shifts in tone and style found in the book. The cicada sequence proves to be a refreshing shift from the previous sequence of pages–and a great example of how Kuper deftly balances the pace of things.

I greatly encourage you to view the video and, while you’re at it, give it a Comment and Like. I’m often good at getting people to stop by for a brief view and now I’m doing what I can to have more and more folks take it a step further and engage with my YouTube channel. Your engagement helps to secure more videos in the future and we all want to see me continue to do that, don’t we? Ah, well, that’s my pitch.

That said, by all means, seek this book out and, if you’re in New York City, be sure to catch a show of original art from the book at the Society of Illustrators. Details on the show follow:

Society of Illustrators Presents Insectopolis: A Natural History

Insectopolis: A Natural History will be on view at the Society of Illustrators from May 14 – September 20, 2025 in the second floor gallery. It will feature original artworks by Peter Kuper.

Exhibit Details:

On display in the 2nd Floor Gallery.

Join us on Thursday, May 22, from 5–9pm for a Museum Mixer celebrating the opening of Insectopolis: A Natural History.

The evening will kick off with a special pre-tour at 4pm & 4:30pm, led by artist Peter Kuper, with guest entomologist Louis Sorkin — who will be bringing live insects for visitors to observe and interact with up close! Space for the pre-tour is limited, so be sure to RSVP.

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April 22, 2025 · 8:30 am

Ivan Brunetti’s Graphic Fiction essay

The first volume.

The sequel!

The Ultimate Comics Anthology: A Deep Dive into Ivan Brunetti’s Graphic Fiction

Guest Blog by Jonathan Sandler, Editor of graphicmemoir.co.uk and Author of The English GI: WWII Graphic Memoir

A few weeks ago, I was speaking with Comics Grinder’s Henry Chamberlain about comic anthologies. I told him about Ivan Brunetti’s An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories (Volumes 1 & 2), published in 2006 and 2008 by Yale University Press. When I described the books to him, he remarked that they sounded like an encyclopedia—an apt description, though they are perhaps a hybrid of anthology and reference guide. Given the intrigue, he asked me to write a review piece for his blog.

Over the weekend, I picked up both volumes and began rereading them. These books now have a permanent place in my lounge, perfect for dipping in and out whenever time allows, especially between other books. I’m grateful to Chamberlain for prompting me to revisit them.

One of the highlights of both volumes is the collection of essays. Volume 1 includes a written reflection by Charles Schulz on the art of the comic strip, along with graphic essays and tributes scattered throughout. Volume 2 features an essay on Harvey Kurtzman by Adam Gopnik, as well as tribute comic essays by Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman. My only criticism is that I would have loved more essays—Daniel Raeburn’s piece on Daniel Clowes’s short story Gynecology is another standout, but more analytical content would have been welcome.

Prior to the first volume, Brunetti curated The Cartoonist’s Eye, an exhibit of 75 artists’ work, for the A+D Gallery of Columbia College Chicago. Given his expertise in comics, the task must have been immense. His prologue, though brief, offers valuable insights. He describes comics as a “peculiar art form” and cites Chris Ware’s description of cartooning as “the convergence of seeing and reading” and Spiegelman’s characterization of comics as “writing with pictures.” Brunetti firmly believes that doodling is the fundamental essence of cartooning.

Notably, the anthology is deliberately unstructured—Brunetti eschewed chronology and explanations, preferring the cartoons to speak for themselves. He even apologizes for the title Graphic Fiction, acknowledging that it serves as an umbrella term for memoir, essay, fiction, nonfiction, autobiography, and journalism.

The selections span a wide range, from excerpts of 10–12 pages to single-page works. Many are drawn from serialized pieces, and I realized I already owned several of the featured classics: Maus, Black Hole, Clyde Fans, Berlin, and Building Stories. Seeing Richard McGuire’s Here in its original form was particularly exciting.

Some notable works include:

  • Riot of the Insane by George Grosz (1915)
  • Nancy by Ernie Bushmiller

Personal favorites from the collection:

  • Jack London by Jessica Abel
  • An untitled work by Ivan Brunetti (page 87 of Volume 1)
  • Cheap Novelties by Ben Katchor
  • Griffith’s Observatory by Bill Griffith
  • Hawaiian Getaway by Adrian Tomine
  • Patton and A History of America by Crumb
  • How I Quit Collecting Records by Robert Crumb & Harvey Pekar
  • Is There Life After Levittown? (from Lemme Outta Here!, 1978)
  • The Ethel Catherwood Story by David Collier

While writing this article, I watched Married to Comics, the documentary about Justin Green and Carol Tyler. It featured Green’s groundbreaking work Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary—a piece I had never read but immediately wanted to. I thought to myself, I’m sure this is in Brunetti’s anthology—and of course, it was, which only underscores the lasting value of these volumes. Phoebe Gloeckner was also interviewed in the documentary, which piqued my interest in her work. I was then able to dip into an excerpt from Diary of a Teenage Girl included in the anthology. There’s always something more to discover, even years later. That’s the magic of a truly great collection.

Other contributors include David Mazzucchelli, Lynda Barry, Gary Panter, Gilbert & Jaime Hernandez, and more. In fact, there are too many to mention. Of course, not every piece resonated with me, but that’s the point. Some styles didn’t connect, and certain artworks—like King-Cat by John Porcellino and Joe Matt’s work—can be challenging to read due to how much they try to fit onto each page. This reminded me of something Scott McCloud once said: how comics were once constrained by limited space—artists would cram as much as possible onto a page—but now, they have the freedom to stretch out. The key takeaway is that there are so many different ways to draw comics, and this anthology showcases the eclecticism and variety of this wonderful art form.

It’s also worth noting that these volumes are nearly 20 years old. In a 2013 interview with Gil Roth, Brunetti mentioned the proliferation of graphic novelists, noting that he couldn’t keep up. Now 20 years on—as readers, we are spoiled for choice. That said, the works and the artists in these two volumes still stand the test of time.

Other details worth noting: The books were co-edited by Chris Ware and Laura Mizicko. Volume 1’s dust jacket was designed by Seth, while Daniel Clowes provided the cover for Volume 2. The anthologies draw from essential art-house comics publishers, including Fantagraphics, Drawn & Quarterly, Pantheon, Top Shelf, and Smithsonian Collections. Both volumes also feature illustrations by Saul Steinberg.

A few years ago, if someone had asked me about comics, I might have (ignorantly) thought only of superheroes, horror comics, or children’s books. But over time, I’ve immersed myself in the world of art-house comics, particularly those by North American cartoonists. Brunetti’s two volumes of Graphic Fiction are magisterial. Every art-house comics fan should have them on their bookshelf. These aren’t books you read from start to finish—they are books to explore, revisit, and savor over time.

About Ivan Brunetti:
 Ivan Brunetti was born in Italy and moved to the South Side of Chicago when he was eight. He is an Associate Professor of Illustration in the Design Department at Columbia College Chicago, where he teaches courses on illustration, cartooning, graphic novels, and visual narrative. He has also taught at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice and Aesthetics: A Memoir, as well as the editor of both volumes of An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories.

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April 17, 2025 · 10:00 pm

Anarchy in the Big Easy book review

Anarchy in the Big Easy: a History of Revolt, Rebellion and Resurgence.

Written by Max Cafard, illustrated by Vulpes. Ithaca: PM Press, 2025. 225pp, $15.95.

Guest review by Paul Buhle

When is a comic better described as an illustrated text? This  question goes back to the distant pre-origins of comics in the hand-drawn, pre-printed “illuminated texts” that kept workers in primitive factories on certain streets of fourteenth century Paris. Perhaps the distinction is not even important, except as evidence that “comics” today are undergoing constant evolution not excluding the very subject. Call Anarchy in the Big Easy an art book of a certain kind, and call it an experiment in anarchist reinterpretation of history.

There is a grand story to tell, and writers of every kind, especially novelists but doubtless also generations of talented journalists, have poked away at the anarchistic spirit of the city. How could it be otherwise? More Caribbean than any other US city of size, more interracial or transracial, with the distinctions of color (and the privilege conveyed) astonishing, almost as astonishing as the birth of jazz, with comics the most important contribution of the US to global culture (films would be third, but mainly for the scale of Hollywood).

What is it about New Orleans? An eco-history is, here, vastly helpful. The natural sustenance offered in edible (also buildable) plant life, along with the vast range of seafood, made for one of the most productive Native life in what would become the USA. Also, and this is a large point, the need for others thousands of years ago to cultivate varieties of what would become corn, demanding enormous care, could be here evaded, allowing looser organizations of communities, and arguably less class structure.

All this is thrown into chaos by the Old World invasion, reducing the estimated population by at least two-thirds, as of 1750. From here on, escape into the backwoods and attempts to built insular communities became mandatory, and with a difference: escaped black slaves escaping with, merging with, others who survived.

Liberated socieities of Maroons, escapees, certainly opened the way for these groups and others, even the enslaved Filipinos who escaped Spanish ships. Not surprisingly, theorists of what would be called anarchism found inspiration here. The text references Elisee Reclus,  a true giant of nineteenth century anarchism, who spent some years here, learning and writing. Then we turn to Joseph Dejacque, rediscovered in recent decades as a visionary with his vision of utopia that he called “Harmonic Anarchy.” From the Left, Dejacque assaulted Prudhon himself as the enemy of women’s freedom.

The 1853 novel Mysteries of New Orleans, by a German immigrant intellectual, gives Anarchy in the Big Easy an opening for a more sweeping literary-anarchist overview, but by this time,  the book is already moving from literature to social and labor history. Many are the stories of solidarity from the era of Populism to the high days of the IWW to the streetcar strike of 1929, with massive popular support, to the emergence of Black Nationalism and the larger meanings of the annual, Mardi Gras Carnival of the People.

That Carnival, its triumphs and struggles amidst the vast and mostly white tourist outpouring, makes up the rest of the book’s final section.  The latest culture or cultures of resistance, over perhaps forty years, seem more obviously anarchic in mobilization, involving more volunteerism of the humanitarian kind, than what we have understood as Left organization or mobilization.

Is it New Orleans or is this the shape of radical activity in our era, when even the most modest political reform seems to fall to defeat or become corrupted by the nearness of power? The virtue of Anarchy in the Big Easy is that the present seems very much in tune with the radical, humanitarian past before the Spanish arrived.

With one big caveat: we are still on the run.

The art of Anarchy could be described as “thin,” or perhaps minimalist, really sketches that seem to want the reader to fill in the gaps. It suits the purpose of the volume.

Paul Buhle

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March 1, 2025 · 11:00 am

Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues by Franklin Rosemont book review

Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues: Selected Writings on Popular Culture. Franklin Rosemont. Editors Abigail Susik. Paul Buhle. PM Press. 368pp. 2025. $26.95
The art of the essay provides a platform for writers to share their subject and perhaps a bit about their worldview. We read essays all the time, usually as reviews, mainly on books, movies and music. And there are notable collections such as Pauline Kael’s oeuvre. A writer who likes to write such essays tends to like a lot of things and Franklin Rosemont (1943-2009) was no exception. Rosemont was passionate about the masses, mass media and how it all interconnected. In this collection, the reader is swept up by Rosemont’s thoughts and vivid writing on the inclusive power of entertainment, particularly, cinema, comics, Surrealism, and popular music.
Beginning in the 1960s, and for the next thirty some years, Rosemont wrote and edited for progressive magazines, the two main ones being Cultural Correspondence (1975-1983) and Radical America (1967-1999). It seems only natural that Rosemont made connections with the Left, especially the Labor movement, and the democratic nature of mass entertainment. Anyone is free to enjoy it, to contribute to it, to be transformed by it. As I read one essay after another, I was moved by the cumulative effect of Rosemont’s arguments, his deep belief that everyone has a place at the cultural table.

“The Dream That Came True,” by Dust Wallin, One Big Union Monthly, May 1920.

 

Mad Magazine, May 1, 1954. Basil Wolverton. As subversive as he needed to be.

The more I read, the more I gave myself over to the people power theme in these essays. It certainly fits in well with Rosemont’s writing on cartoonists for Wobbly newspapers, like Industrial Worker (1909-1931). But can one be certain that Basil Wolverton (Mad Magazine, 1950s) was so closely aligned with the proletariat, as Rosemont seems to imply in another essay? Well, maybe so but you just never know for sure. The greatest satirists will leave you wondering which side they’re on, if any. Of course, one can argue that anything unusual in the 1950s potentially carried subtext. It is a different case with the Surrealist movement which, beginning with its founder, Andre Breton, made clear it was indeed an anti-fascist movement. It’s interesting to consider Surrealism’s history, starting in 1924 and into the 1950s. What began as an art and political movement, in response to the aftermath of World War I, was constantly pushing against authority. In this context, it is not surprising to bring in the subject of anarchists. One of Rosemont’s most insightful essays discusses how the anarchist political and philosophical movement, focused on the viability of stateless societies, came to be maligned in the United States and caricatured as bomb-toting terrorists.
It’s the 1920s, the era of silent movies, where I will conclude my review. If we are looking for connective tissue to Rosemont’s writings, we need look no further than dreams. It is in the land of dreams, after all, that we can all indulge our most subversive desires. We can all return to our youthful ambitions of leading the charge in the subculture! It is the world of silent movies, with its play of light and shadow and uncanny expression that we enter a netherworld closely aligned with our own private slumberland. In this world, such figures as Buster Keaton, the Great Stone Face, reign supreme. No wonder such a world would utterly fascinate Rosemont and lead to some of his most compelling writing. Here is an excerpt:
These two films (Sherlock Jr., 1924; Cameraman, 1928) best exemplify Keaton’s revolutionary/poetic worldview. When he passes through the looking-glass, he is not content merely to see what is on the other side: he braves his way through a whole succession of looking-glasses, each behind the other, and each reflecting only the meagerest hint of what we call “the real.” And what motive could possibly underlie such feverish wanderings back and forth through the interpenetrating spheres of the pluriverse? The answer is crystal clear: Keaton’s audacity is in the service of sublime love. His agility is always radiant with a lover’s grim determination. There is no risk that he will not take for the woman he loves. Only Buster Keaton, moreover, can sustain a single kiss for two years (The Paleface, 1921).
We can always return back to Keaton, with that iconic poker face, champion of subversion but always leaving you to wonder as to what side he’s on, if any. When I simply consider Keaton’s artistic considerations, I feel confident he was seeking a more universal tone with whatever he did. Let his movies speak for him, he would say. Ah, there’s that one scene with Keaton (Cops, 1922) when he takes a bomb, by then popularly accepted as the symbol for the anarchist or, more plainly, widespread mayhem, uses it to light his cigarette, and then throws it back to the police. A great political statement? Hmm, how about just a funny visual prank? The Great Stone Face would never tell.
Like any great collection of essays, there is something for everyone in this book. Give yourself over to the vast array of subjects discussed here, and you’ll be the richer for it. I can imagine Rosemont going from one cultural signpost after another and reaching his own conclusions such as embracing Bugs Bunny as a folk hero for the masses. Well, more than fair enough. And he takes it one step further and implicates Elmer Fudd. Again, more than fair enough, as well as relevant for today. Yes, be wary of the Elmer Fudds of the world, those who only think in terms of transactions. The Fudds of the world are the conformists and the sell-outs. But, with will and determination, the Bugs Bunnies of the world will prevail!

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