The Horrors of Being a Human: A Cola Pop Creemees Comic. Desmond Reed. Microcosm Publishing. 2025. 270pp. $19.99.
Desmond Reed is a rising talent in the world of comics. His latest book makes that clear. Years of dedication to the making of comics has resulted in his design being sharper, his insight being keener and, heck, the guy knows how to put on a good show. It is that focus on storytelling, as well as development of character, that leads us to such a smooth and pleasing comics experience. As Reed explains, he has five characters, the Cola Pop Creemees, who, among other things, represent different emotions and different aspects of himself, or yourself. I can see that this comic is very relatable, in the spirit of such groundbreaking work as BoJack Horseman. Let me just say from the get-go, the Cola Pop Creemees are very different and original, and if you see them turned into an animated series someday, well, you heard about it here first.
Cartoonist and Publishers.
The world of cartoons and comics has always dealt with far more than might meet the eye, depending upon where you venture off to. In the world of Desmond Reed, you enter a kaleidoscopic world of the real and surreal. For instance, our heroes live in a house in the shape of a hand. There is plenty to be anxious about in the real world, and this comic manages to tackle many of these issues within its quirky borders.
Cartoonist and Comics Festivals.
Desmond Reed has set the stage and, from there, he can modulate the tone. Stories vary in length with some far-out zany and others more contemplative. Reed’s most serious and ambitious work to date is one of his longer stories, “Memories,” winner of a 2022 MICE Mini-Grant. Here, he focuses on his most madcap character, Wallace T.J. by allowing for a careful look back at his development and the darker side to his life.
“Memories”
Life is quite a journey with plenty of bumps in the road and that’s where a daring artist like Desmond Reed steps in to create art to defy even the most challenging of times. Believe me, there’s always room for another valiant artist to lead the way, especially one as gifted as Reed. It all comes down to the reader getting a chance to know the work–and so I encourage you to seek out this highly inventive work and let it speak for itself. I can tell you that Reed has a magic touch, with his pared-down whimsical style, when it comes to addressing some very serious issues like addiction and depression.
The Cola Pop Creemees live inside a hand.
Desmond Reed is not afraid to go down to depths of despair and come back up with a tear and a smile. It is a combination of a pared-down style and a direct straightforward narrative. Think of it as a friend who sets you down and needs to tell you something. Maybe there will be some humor thrown in that both of you share. But then you get to the story, without pretense, and you just get it. That is what is happening here. Reed has constructed characters that you can tap into in the very best spirit of comics. You can say that the lodestar guiding us cartoonists in such matters is Peanuts, and, I dare say, there’s some of that Peanuts DNA in the Cola Pop Creemees gang.
Some much said within a special world.
What irony there is to be found here is subverted by a persistent vision of perseverance. That is not an easy thing to achieve and it has everything to do with Reed following his own instincts and staying true to his authentic self. That’s where you get original work and not some trendy “next big thing” that is aping some previous “next big thing.” Yes, it is possible for comics to be funny, sincere and have some redeeming quality that will speak directly to you.
It was a lot of fun to get to chat with Desmond about his new book and sharing thoughts about the cartoonist life. I hope you feel the same. So, please do check out the above conversation on the Comics Grinder YouTube channel and please view, LIKE and COMMENT directly on the channel. Every bit of input and engagement helps us continue.
Keep up Desmond Reed here. And be sure to visit Microcosom Publishing here.
I have an event coming up at San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum, 781 Beach Street, on Sunday, August 24th, 2-4pm to talk about my graphic narrative, George’s Run: A Writer’s Journey Through The Twilight Zone, published by Rutgers University Press. It would be so great to have you there if possible.
If you are a science fiction fan, or love various forms of related genres, this is for you. Science fiction acts as a convenient umbrella but, if I was asked to dig deeper in my description, it would be Dark Fantasy. My book is about a group of writers who, individually and in their combined efforts, basically invented a lot of the pop culture we take for granted today. Specifically, I’m talking about the writers behind the original Twilight Zone and Star Trek.
We’ll have a slide show lecture format where I’ll share as much as I can about how I went about creating my book. George Clayton Johnson is our guide, one of the last writers from that 1950s-70s era of golden age television writing. I got to know George pretty well and our friendship led to my book. We’ll have plenty of time for a Q&A as well as overall discussion. I’ll take my cue from the audience. I’m happy to do demonstrations of my art style and chat about making comics too. Feel free to draw or write along the way, and we can share results after we’ve had time to discuss. Hey, this is as open-ended as you like. We might even have some snacks. Seriously, comment here or get a hold of me via email and I’ll consider any ideas.
One step at a time. First, let’s plan on meeting up at the Cartoon Art Museum on August 24th.
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?
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.
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.
Raymond Chandler’s Trouble Is My Business. w. Arvind Ethan David. a. Ilias Kyriazis. Pantheon Books. 2025. 128pp. $29.
You may think you know Raymond Chandler. Thoughts of the quintessential detective Philip Marlowe and The Big Sleep may come to mind. In order to get to the bottom of it all, I highly recommend that you go back to the original 1939 short story by Raymond Chandler, featuring his most famous hard-boiled detective, Philip Marlowe–and the basis for this new graphic novel adaptation. Let me emphasize that this comics version is a gem. It does, without a doubt, bring up an issue in the zeitgeist that I’ve followed with great interest: re-working this or that classic work to contemporary scrutiny. It brings to mind a question I recently saw posted on Quora: Was John F. Kennedy a woke president? One person began their answer with: “It is not an easy fit, to take ‘woke’ values and apply them retroactively to 1960.” Not only is it not easy, the effort to examine history through a “do-over” lens is problematic. And, in creative works, the results can range from mixed to intriguing. That said, the trend to do do-overs is strong and prevalent ever since Hamilton opened on Broadway in 2015, ten years ago. So, the impulse is there and the question is what do you do with that impulse.
Trouble Is My Business by Raymond Chandler
Trouble Is My Business is a fast-moving Philip Marlowe short story authored by Raymond Chandler (1888-1959), that much we can’t deny. It is a classic noir detective story written by one of the masters. In all the rapid-fire storytelling, surely it would be asking a lot for Chandler to also recast himself as an activist or futurist–but, it turns out, he was far more aware than some may credit him to have been. The do-over strategy is playing with time travel or something beyond the reality of space and time. And perhaps that’s where a writer like Arvind Ethan David steps in to write this comics adaptation. He is no stranger to science fiction. He worked with Douglas Adams as executive producer to the TV adaptation of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. Now, maybe I’m being a bit tongue-in-cheek but I say all this just because I know other purists out there might be having some difficulty with a rethinking of a classic. But let’s take a pause. The way I see it, “a comics adaptation,” or any other adaptation, can utilize whatever options needed to fulfill a certain vision. Arvind Ethan David is no stranger to writing comics adaptations. He has written seven. And that’s only part of quite a remarkable career.
Arvind Ethan David’s approach, as he states in an interview with me, is to open up the story to other voices. He made a point of giving each major character a spotlight, complete with each having their own color palette and lettering font. That’s a tricky strategy, which David readily admits. You’re playing with the delicate balance to a tightly-woven mystery. When you add to a story, the trick is to not upturn the original’s purpose and charm: one gumshoe’s pursuit of solving a mystery. Not only that, we as readers owe it to ourselves to not overlook the original in other ways. For example, if you don’t bother to read the original, you might simply dismiss it as somehow inferior and unenlightened to today’s standards. Chandler’s version has George, a Black chauffeur, with an education from Dartmouth, who holds his own with the main character of Philip Marlowe. That’s certainly forward-thinking without it being forced upon the narrative.
“You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.”
Without resorting to spoilers, let’s just say that the impulse to balance the order of things is very strong today and so there’s some tilting of the power dynamics in favor of George in this graphic novel. Again, a tricky matter to pull off but an interesting one. George is elevated a bit in status in this comics version–complete with Philip Marlowe thanking him for his heroics. Marlowe says to George: “You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.” But, hey, after Raymond Chandler was given time to recover from a time travel adventure to 2025, he probably would applaud this tinkering with his work! Give the guy some credit. My guess is that Chandler would politely quibble with his relatively plot-driven story being transformed into an even more nuanced character-driven story. Given ample time to soak up the zeitgeist, maybe he would just smile and say that it’s awesome. The guy knew how to read a room.
Harriet Huntress
Chandler’s short story also features a strong woman character, Harriet Huntress. She is a femme fatale and that may distress some readers but this is, after all, noir crime fiction so the character is true to form. It would be ridiculous to apologize for her being a villain. Anyway, she puts Philip Marlowe in his place in both the original story and in the comics adaptation with, as I say, the added benefit of getting her extended point of view in the graphic novel.
George Hasterman
It’s fascinating to read Chandler’s own introduction to his short story. He fears that there’s no way out of following a proven formula to writing a successful mystery. Well, you could argue that some writers today may fear there’s no way out of following a proven formula to writing a successful work that follows the latest trend. As I say during our conversation, I found David’s graphic novel to smoothly thread that needle. Part of what David is after is finding a way to tilt the focus, with a nod to the contemporary, and I believe he has achieved that. In David’s version, you see each major player take the stage in a fuller way, from their own point of view, and you can argue that Raymond Chandler himself would have had no problem with it. And he would have championed the artwork in this book by Ilias Kyriazis too.
So, I welcome re-imagining a classic. That’s not the issue. Just think of Orson Welles’s triumphant 1936 production of Macbeth, which featured an all-Black cast, 80 years before Hamilton. The problem is when people conflate history: mixing different events, time periods or contexts leads to inaccurate understanding of the past. Raymond Chandler’s original storytelling, his language, his artistry, doesn’t automatically require a retelling. Here’s a fine example from the original Raymond Chandler story: a quick snapshot of another strong woman character, Anna Halsey. A line, among so many other quintessential Chandler lines, that Arvind Ethan David uses in his graphic novel version too:
“I need a man good-looking enough to pick up a dame who has a sense of class, but he’s got to be tough enough to swap punches with a power shovel.”
Nice knowin’ ya.
Ultimately, the do-over strategy, or we can call it the Hamilton Effect, still has a lot of gas in the tank and can lead to some interesting results. But, at the end of the day, we will do ourselves a great injustice if we dismiss this or that classic, solely based upon some notion, ill-conceived or otherwise. I’m not saying that is happening in this graphic novel. More discerning readers will appreciate what is going on in this comics adaptation. Chandler’s work does not demand to have new life breathed into it, per se, and withstands being “reworked” in the same creative spirit as other great fiction has been re-imagined, from Shakespeare to Jane Austen. I think, in that sense, we can say that Arvind Ethan David has created a most notable reworking.
I hope you enjoy the above conversation with Arvind Ethan David, the author of this graphic adaptation. Raymond Chandler’s Trouble Is My Business is published by Pantheon Books. Do seek it out. It is brainy, quirky and something Raymond Chandler would give a gracious salute.
We’ve had quite a number of comics chats here at Comics Grinder and we will press forward with more! In that spirit, I present to you Todd Webb, a perfect ambassador to the world of comics and a great person to chat with. This time around, we focus on Todd’s new collection, The Poet, Volume 2. You can find it via Todd’s website and various platforms, including Barnes & Noble. Todd is on a roll with one of the most consistently funny and engaging comic strips. Keep in mind, as we discussed in our previous chat, Todd is an old-fashioned cartoonist creating a daily comic strip. You must hop aboard and see what he’s up to. Join him on his Substack right here. Consider the following example:
In the above example, the bird gets the better of the poet yet again. But, I’m sure, the bird is only trying to help the poet reach his “A” game.
The Charlie in the Rye, the Schulz-Salinger mashup mini comic.
Todd is always coming up with new ideas. Recently, he wondered about how much Charles Schulz (1922-2000) and J.D. Salinger (1919-2010) might have in common considering they were contemporaries: both going off to war; both sharing in the same culture; both creatives working at the top of their profession. Well, you get the drift. The upshot to this is . . . very funny. What if you took lines from The Catcher in the Rye and inserted them into Peanuts comic strips? Todd was pleasantly surprised with the results and you will be too. Here is one example:
Well, pretty uncanny, don’t you think? This Schulz-Salinger mashup is priceless.
I try something a little different for our deep dive into Volume 2. It occurs to me that the back-of-the-book Notes are all too often overlooked or taken for granted. But people appreciate them when they read what’s there. With that mind, I begin with the notes and work by way back to the contents. Makes for some interesting discoveries.
Patrick McDonnell’s favorite comic strip from The Poet.
I encourage you to pick up a copy of The Poet, Volume 2. This 410-page book makes a perfect gift for a friend, a loved one, or yourself! I leave you with one more sample. This is the one that cartoonist Patrick McDonnell (Mutts) cited as one of his favorite The Poet comics strips in the foreword to this collection. If you’re a Mutts fan, then you appreciate the interest. Both McDonnell and Webb have a way with paring down to the essentials.
Be sure to check out our conversation and, if you have the time, please LIKE and COMMENT over at the YouTube Comics Grinder channel. Your support keeps us going.
And be sure to check out Todd’s Etsy store where he’s a Star Seller!
Under Review: Mike Borkent, Comics and Cognition, Toward a Multimodal Cognitive Poetics (Oxford University Press, 2024); Benôt Crucifix, Drawing fromthe Archives, Comics Memory in the Contemporary Graphic Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2024); Alexander Durst, The Rise of the Graphic Novel, Computational Criticism and the Evolution of Literary Value (Cambridge University Press, 2024); Fabrice Leroy, Back to Black, Jules Feiffer’s Noir Trilogy (Rutgers University Press, 2025); Jonathan Najarian, ed., Comics and Modernism, Memory, Form and Culture (University Press of Mississippi, 2024); Diana Whitted, ed, Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics (Rutgers University Press, 2023); Frances Gateward & John Jennings, The Blacker the ink: Constructions of Black identity in Comics & Sequential Art (Rutgers University Press, 2015); Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, ed., Arguing Comics: literary Masters of a Popular Medium (Mississippi, 2004); Paul Buhle and Abigail Susik, ed., Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues: Selected Writings on Popular Culture (PM, 2025).
We comics readers and fans, engaged in the nearly-vanished Funny Pages since we learned how to read old-fashioned ten cent comic books, are likely to be overwhelmed by the reality, let alone the volume, of comics scholarship. One of the scholars under review here quips that comics scholarship is among the most “productive” cultural efforts by sheer volume, in the continuing rise of deconstructive university life. Jobs and salaries depend on something here, and if most undergraduates these days are said to shy away from actual books, the graduate student world offers new horizons. And not only in the US, and not only in English, of course.
It all makes sense, at least some sense, first of all because the number of undergraduates taking courses on comics, or with comics as part of the curriculum, seems to continue to rise. For prospective comics artists or writers, the world of digital comics, at least, can only grow larger and more global.
Krazy Kat mashup. R. Sikoryak, after George Herriman.
Comics history can only be an uncertain part of this large narrative. Ben Katchor, magnum figure in his own artwork but also with his use of comics classes at Parsons, quipped that the word “new” in comics signifies only what is happening today. Very respectfully, your reviewer considers the emergence of Underground Comix as the end of censorship in the creative regions of comic art, and the proper beginning of something new that remains something new. But Katchor certainly has a point.
Desegregating Comics, Diana Whitted, ed.
Historians of comics will likely feel that “new” does not reach what they find most interesting. Several of the essays in Desegregating Comics point to the story line and art work of artists in the local (sometimes not so local) Black press, at its comics peak from the 1910s to the 1970s.
Patty-Jo ’n Ginger comic strip (1945 to 1959), by Jackie Ormes: “It would be interestin’ to discover WHICH committee decided it was un-American to be COLORED!”
To take a case in point, Jackie Ormes, creator of the Patty-Jo ’n Ginger strip that ran for a decade in the Pittsburgh Courier (the largest-circulation Black paper for many years), combined fashion, cheesecake and politics in ways impossible for white artists. She was watched closely by the FBI in the 1940s-50s, and she wrote popular novels that pushed at the edges of racial controversies.
There are plenty of other cases in point in this remarkable volume, including the rise and fall of Negro Romance during the 1950s, and the post-censorship Black comics full of bemuscled men and full-figured women in states of undress and violent behavior. Plenty more in these pages offer the reader/scholar a lot to take in and mull.
The Blacker the Ink, Frances Gateward and John Jennings, ed.
An earlier anthology along the same lines by the same publisher, The Blacker the Ink, explores Black comics productive from somewhat different angles. Here we find some analyses of African novels unknown to me, and some superheroes, male and female, like none seen before. Consider pregnant teen Raquel/Rocket who strains to click on her utility belt over a very pregnant belly, in a comic referencing Batman and Robin but with a Black superhero Batman and a very un-Robin. Most of all, however, consider artist Aaron McGruder’s Boondocks, hugely syndicated around the turn of the twenty-first century. The Black Power era was long gone by this time but the strip’s star, Huey, won’t let it go forgotten. In referencing a past radical challenge, Huey seriously criticizes the invasion of Iraq and its Black apologist, Condoleezza Rice. Huey, named for Huey Newton, uses the hip hop culture icons to attack the unending white domination of society and the eagerness of some Black elites to become partners of it.
Comics and Modernism by Jonathan Najarian
Historical study can be extended in other ways, as we learn in the essays of Comics and Modernism. Consider this, for example: the promoters of the famed Armory Show of modern art in Manhattan, 1913, challenging and in some ways transforming the US art scene, happened to be….comic artists in local newspapers. Katherine Roeder’s “Modernism for the Masses” has a lot more to say about how the graphic ridicule of cubism in particular inevitably made the ideas about modern art available to a wide audience. And how the Greats, at least some of them (like Winsor McCay) toyed with modernist themes in their drawings, and George Herriman’s Krazy Kat based a certain amount of its strangeness in the internalization of modernist gestures. “While plot and dialogue loop in upon themselves, Herriman’s customarily changing landscape ramifies with kaleidoscopic consequence for the reader’s eye and comprehension.” (p.77). ( Yes, reader, “ramifies” is a word.)
Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues, Paul Buhle and Abigail Susik, ed.
This notion sounds right, and is in line with the general line of commentary on Krazy Kat, one of the most discussed of all comic strips, ever. I ask the reader’s indulgence to add that Franklin Rosemont, Chicago surrealist, was far ahead of this crowd of critic-scholars in his essays on Krazy Kat (also the forgotten Smokey Stover), and that a collection of Rosemont’s writings on popular culture, co-edited by myself and Abigail Susik, has shortly been published: Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues: Selected Writings on Popular Culture (PM, 2025). But I digress.
Arguing Comics, Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, ed.
Meanwhile, the scholarly investigation of women-oriented comics is here to stay, and then some. This is new, so new that the classic collective of the field, Arguing Comics: literary Masters of a Popular Medium (Mississippi, 2004), edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, has only a couple of women commentators (one of them is Dorothy Parker, on the Red artist Crocket Johnson) and no female artists studied. Since this book’s publication, the exploration has begun in earnest.
Taking a case in point. A rather famous essay, Scott Bukatman’s “Telling Details: Feminine Flourish in Midcentury Illustration and Comics,” argues that by “reading the face” of women in comic strips and comic books, looking hard at the fashions of women in the stories, reveals something beyond the nominal plot narrative. Buried deep in the history of the magazine advertisement and the illustrations of short stories, emerging vividly in “romance comics,” these images offer the real intent. If (as the essayist recalls of his earlier writings), superheroes actually fight crime to wear costumes, romantic comic characters have plots in order to display their stylishness. Makes sense to me.
Drawing From the Archives by Benoit Crucifix
Benoit Crucifix, burdened or graced with probably the most unusual name of any comics scholar ever, argues vividly that comics have always been “about memory,” and the main change is that today’s artists more and more wish to explore the collective memory of comic art itself. Art Spiegelman, who taught comics at the School for Visual Arts (taking over the slot from his mentor, none other than Harvey Kurtzman), is naturally the key case in point. From the 1970s onward, Spiegelman reconstructed comic art tropes of the famous, like McCay, and continued to do so in a famous cardboard-framed special created as a response to living in Manhattan in 9/11.
Not that Spiegelman was alone, in his (and my) generation. Robert Crumb’s uniqueness, stunning in 1970 and hardly less so today, lay in his semi-conscious recovery of tropes from past generations, not only comics but street signage of past big cities, sheet music illustrations, and so on (including the famous Big Feet). Artist Chris Ware and book designer Chip Kidd have lifted this borrowing up to new levels, thanks to the use/manipulation of software and comics archives.
Thanks likewise to ruminations from the likes of Jeet Heer, the totemic artist Frank King and his genre-inventing Gasoline Alley with its continuity day-by-day treatment of ordinary (white, urban, middle class) life comes back into focus. That King was the master of the Sunday comic page recuperating museum Modernism could not be an accident. He was a walking encyclopedia.
Back to Black by Fabrice Leroy
Many are the specific studies in this new genre of comics studies. Fabrice Leroy’s study of Jules Feiffer disappoints this reader by treating only his last cycle of works—leaving aside the works that reached us way back in the early 1960s and remain in memory as “underground” before the “underground” had a name in the Counter Culture. Never mind. The very, very, very close reading of what the critic rightly called the “noir trilogy” would be more satisfying if it had explored further Feiffer’s own family connections with the Old Left (aka Communist Party/Popular Front) and FBI pursuits. That it takes the visual text at literal face value, with plenty of excerpts, is enough. It’s a good book.
We would be a the end of this roaming except for the most difficult of texts. The notion that comics would be suscepitable to “computational criticism” is presumably as new to the readers of Comics Grinder as it is to me. But, still, the idea that a computational study of “brightness” in comics, from Donald Duck (very bright colors) to Frank Miller (very dark indeed) is intriguing. Can the “digital humanities” gathering together comics sales figures, scholarly and popular reception, escape the overwhelming accumulation of data? I am hoping not to be kept awake at night worrying this point.
But author Alexander Dunst has something else to say, of more identifiable value to this commentator. He describes “the rise of the graphic novel as an instance of aesthetic gentrification.” (179)
This is very real, if not startlingly original. The reader of the graphic novel, at least those intended for adult audiences, is more and more likely to be buying an “art book.” The leading art book publisher in the US and Europe for a half-century, Abrams, dubs its series “ComicArts” (all one word) for good reason. The most “arty” book ever to be edited by the reviewer (along with Harvey Pekar) is Yiddishkeit (2011), published by Abrams. This is proof positive for me, but the most prestigious graphic novels these days are likely in the same category. Chris Ware produces art books that cannot be anything but art books, even with meaningful social content.
Comics and Cognition by Mike Borkent
I would like to offer something lucid on the book Comics and Cognition, but I find the language-framework too hard for me to follow. Comics, with their spatio-topical apparatus, are said to be “tabular” rather than narrative, producing a “sense of sequentiality and rhythm, but refuse a sense of narrative without. Direct connection to referentiality,” amounts to a “panelogic.” (p.201)
Admittedly, this analysis refers to “abstract’ comics so far out of my world that I have no need as well as no capacity to see what is going on. Do we need to Go Gestalt or did those little lines coming out of the feet in comic characters back to the 1910s to indicate motion, seem to come from some place in popular culture that may not be susceptible to Gestalt?
Octavio E. Butler’s Parable of the Talents: a Graphic Novel Adaptation. By Damian Duffy, John Jennings & David Brame. New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2025. 300pp, $25.99.
Perhaps it is the ominous ecological signs that we have been living through, with a painful added irony, looking back on the declaration of Earth Day in 1970. No doubt it is the worsening of government in every sense with the first Trump administration and now the second. Whatever the reason, the work of the late and great Science Fiction author Octavia E. Butler is now amidst graphic novel adaptations, adaptations like none others. After a first streamed series adaptation of her novel Kindred, more are already in development. In other words, we are going to hear a lot more from and about Octavia Butler, the first SciFi writer to win a MacArthur (“genius”) Award and more famous in her death than she could possibly be in her own lifetime.
It is fair to say that Butler never deserted, through all her efforts, the ominous and only occasionally hopeful narrative that she adopted almost from the beginning of her work. If it sounds like Afro-Futurism, that would be accurate because she actually did much to invent the genre, so to speak, without giving it a title. Inasmuch as we live, all of us, in a time of ecological disorder and disaster, with the fragmentation of communities all around, and desperation never far away, she pushed the boundaries even further.
Within this daunting framework of her narrative, the situation of non-whites is precarious, to say the least. Whites are almost certain to get the last lifeboats off the sinking ship, and some of the whites will certainly be eager to kill anyone else seeking escape—another anticipation of Trumpism. Not to mention whites, really anyone in power, seizing every opportunity to exploit and degrade minorities along the way. Here is the Butler Dilemma: her nonwhites do not actually live in some distant continent like Africa, surrounded by other non-whites. Everyone shares a location—it happens to be Future California—also sharing a need for relationships, love, family and a means for collective survival. Non-whites or at least her non-whites, most of all women, have accumulated the historical, collective understanding that they need, if only they can express their full creative energies. Amazingly enough, this narrative also portends the possibilty of interracial relationships and even interracial marriage, something rare for literary science fiction to describe right up to the current century—interspecies sex and romance has, somehow, always been easier.
Butler manages this, not by the geographical escape but by blending a black culture-based spiritualism within a perpetually uneasy hybridity compulsory in the face of the struggle for survival. Only the gay, black SciFi master Samuel Delaney, who swiftly sought to help the young Butler, had dared to go so far in terms of race and sexuality. Butler takes what may be called the next step.
The Parable of the Talents is, in fact, the second outing for its two creators, Adaptor Damian Duffy and artist/professor John Jennings. Kindred (2017) won an Eisner among other awards and it was their effort that reached streamed film adaptation. They create with a sense of confidence that is observable on the printed page. A reviewer wrote of that work that the graphic expression, “brutally jagged, disorientating, gothic, and impactful art” had added a dimension to Butler’s work, a new angle of vision, something achieved in a small handful of past graphic adaptations going back to prize-winning woodcut adaptations of novels (Including Moby Dick) by Lynd Ward. But more jarring.
If Kindred travels back in time as a black woman in 1976—married to a white man—and finds herself on a plantation before the Civil War, then Parable of the Talents moves forward to 2032, seventeenth year of the Pox. A father-figure physician saves the life of an eighteen year old and they struggle to live, even to build a community, up in the mountains of Humboldt County.
Along with its precursor, Parable is certainly among the most ambitious graphic novels ever published, at least in English. Perhaps the narrators/artists might have chosen to reduce the level of detail, including dialogue? Or allotted more space for the physical settings? I think these questions will be distant, not even secondary, to devotees of Butler who are readers of graphic novels. To have devoted herculean efforts to this production is a sufficient accomplishment.
But consider this, in a book actually written and drawn a bit before the 2024 election. We are about halfway through when we realize that that corralling of homeless children, redirected into Christian indoctrination under the regime of a fascistic and power-mad president, is more of a prediction of Trump II than anyone could have predicted. “It is hard to imagine that it happened here, in the United States, in the 21st Century, but it did. [President] Andrew Steele Jarret scared, divided and bullied people into letting him ‘fix’ the country….his fanatical followers—filled with righteous superiority and popular among the many frightened ordinary citizens who only wanted order and stability—ran amok.” (p. 180).
Of course there were wars, which are viewed here as “useless, ridiculous, obscene” (p.181) and properly so. War feeds the Maw, and that Maw grows later on, even after a supposed peace is negotiated. Christianity is here at its worst, or among the worst in two thousand years of intermittent and self-righteous attacks upon non-believers.
Our protagonist, suffering horribly for herself and others, helps lead an uprising that shakes the scene around them even if a national government cannot be overthrown. A destiny of freedom may be reached across generations and across the cosmos if not on Earth. This offers, for Butler but also for current socialistic SciFi writers like Kim Stanley Robinson and China Mieville, a prospect of hope.
Craig Thompson is a cartoonist and the author of the award-winning books Blankets; Good-bye, Chunky Rice; and Habibi. He was born in Michigan in 1975, and grew up in a rural farming community in central Wisconsin. His graphic novel Blankets won numerous industry awards and has been published in nearly twenty languages. Thompson lives in Portland, Oregon. In this interview, Craig Thomspon discusses his new book, Ginseng Roots, published by Pantheon. Publication release date is April 29, 2025 and it is available for pre-order.
You could count on buying it cheap from China.
Ginseng Roots explores class divide, agriculture, holistic healing, the 300-year-long trade relationship between China and North America, childhood labor, and the bond between two brothers.
From ages 10 to 20, Craig Thompson (the author of Blankets) and his little brother Phil, toiled in Wisconsin farms. Weeding and harvesting ginseng—an exotic medicinal herb that fetched huge profits in China—and funded Craig’s youthful obsession with comic books. Comics in turn, allowed him to escape his rural, working class trappings.
Working in the fields and loyal to the family.
This new book is the result of Thompson having worked in serial form, creating a bimonthly comic book series, the first time he’s done this in his career. Ginseng Roots is part memoir, part travelogue, part essay and all comic book. In this conversation, we chat about the book, and life as a cartoonist, from as many angles as possible.
Panax Ginseng dating back 3,000 years.
Henry Chamberlain:Craig, would you kick things off with an elevator pitch for folks who are new to Ginseng Roots?
Craig Thompson: Sure. This is my new book. It is half memoir and it is half documentary. When I was a little kid, starting when I was 10 years-old, during my summer vacations, I would get up at the crack of dawn, and load up in the car with my little brother and mother. We’re driving on gravel roads and muddy fields, in the middle of nowhere, in rural Wisconsin, to giant ginseng gardens. Ginseng is a medicinal herb prized in Chinese medicine. We worked eight hour days and forty hour weeks, throughout the summer, weeding this delicate medicinal plant.
It was the first job of my life. It spanned from age 10 to 20. When I started, I was being paid one dollar an hour, which translated to one comic book an hour. So, it was ginseng that first fueled my obsession with comic books and kind of led me to where I am today.
This book is about myself and my childhood but also about that herb and all those labyrinthian tangles that it weaves around the world.
Considering your other long-form work, what can you tell us about how you built up your new book?
So, this is the first project that I serialized in comic book form. A 32-page, twelve issue series through Uncivilized Books, based out of Minneapolis, the amazing cartoonist Tom Kacyniski’s publishing house. At this point in my career, this was the first time that I’d worked in the comic book format unless you count mini-comics and zines. That was my introduction to everything: going to Kinko’s and photocopying and hand-stapling my own zines. So, I sort of had missed out on the whole ’90s indie comics thing. I serialized the book first as twelve issues. But the book and the series are different beasts because, once I finished the series, it was missing some key components, some glue to hold it together, to help me transform it into a book. It went through an overhaul: I added some 70 new pages. I moved the order of things around a bit.
The final Pantheon edition, this new book, is twelve chapters. As you say, there are things you have refined or expanded on.
Yes, for example, the series has twelve issues and the book has twelve chapters but the ninth chapter in the new book does not exist in the series. That one focuses a lot of my personal health crisis–it was part of the glue that was needed to hold the whole book together: to be vulnerable about my own health and how ginseng related to that too.
How did it feel returning to the subject of childhood and growing up, which you covered so beautifully in Blankets–what did it feel like to go back to that in Ginseng Roots?
Quite different. Because of my age. When I started Blankets, I was 23 years-old. I worked on that book from ages 23 to 27. I was only about five years away from the events that took place in the book. So, it was pretty raw and I was still a kid. I was still living those experiences and trauma.
Now, I’m turning 50 and I’m the age my parents were when Blankets was published. So, it’s definitely a mid-life sort of perspective that I have now. The dynamic with my parents has shifted. They are in a much more vulnerable position than they were back then. It’s now a more nuanced and empathetic view that I have of my parents. It’s a whole different view of my childhood. I grew up in rural Wisconsin and I hated growing up there and always wanted to get as far away from there as possible from this suffocating small town, this rural farming community. That led me to the West Coast and Portland, one of the most liberal cities in America, with its artistic circles.
Ginseng Roots was an opportunity to go back to where I grew up and to reconcile a lot of things. And to feel differently about that place that I grew up in discomfort as a child.
Ginseng Baptism.
I picked up on that. You are more tolerant about certain things. There are layers of wisdom as we get older. As we go through the book, I’m on a page where you daydream about what it might be like to live the life of a cartoonist. Maybe, someday, you too can be Bob Hope or Jack Lemmon, in silk pajamas at the cartoonist drafting table.
Yeah, growing up working class, you know. My dad was a plumber. And everyone around me were either farmers, truck drivers, carpenters or electricians. I didn’t know adults who had university educations. It wasn’t my class. My first job was outdoors, working an agriculture job, dealing with all the elements of the outdoors and all the discomforts. Besides the fact that I loved comics, working as a cartoonist sure did seem like a very cushy lifestyle, hiding from all the physical elements of weather and get to make-believe and draw.
Younger people can totally relate to wishing for their lives to just get on with it. Older people can relate to looking back at the good things. Maybe someone learned how to fish or paddle a canoe because of a parent.
Yeah, now I miss being outside. Maybe it seemed like a bad thing as a kid but, after twenty-five years creating graphic novels, it sounds nice to get out of the house a bit more often. And this book brought me out of the house. It wasn’t something just created from my imagination. It was documentary work so I had to get out in the field. And interview people. I interviewed nearly 80 people for the project. Generally, any dialogue in a word balloon is from some recorded conversation I had with someone I interviewed.
You do this so smoothly. You just do it. In the spirit of the best comics journalism, like Joe Sacco.
My biggest inspiration of all is Joe Sacco. Certainly for this project since I wanted to deliberately work in comics journalism. Also, thinking more broadly. Joe is a friend of mine, full disclosure. You know, he’s a mentor, a great role model or artists. I always wanted to do comics journalism like he does but I don’t have his background, or his intellect. I don’t know if I quite have that sense of adventure that Joe has, going to war zones and whatnot and being embedded in places of conflict.
But then with my book, I had this very organic subject matter that was kind of unique to me and so I had my entry point. I had wanted to write a book about plants. That’s sort of my tagline. I was really influenced by Michael Pollan, the food and plant writer. He’s known for The Omnivore’s Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind. The book that really influenced me is The Botany of Desire, and it’s about four plants that shaped human civilization as much as we manipulated them as a species. After that, I really wanted to do a book about plants. Again, I’m not a botanist, I don’t have that background like Michael Pollan. And so I just meditated on what I knew and ginseng surfaced right away. I started researching and I knew there was a lot to work with.
One thing I wanted to emphasize to readers of my review of your book is what prose novels and graphic novels have in common. Each begins as something small and then mushrooms into something much bigger as you add to it. I’ve done my fair share of graphic narratives and I know that once you have a compelling subject, you find yourself having to read this or that book. It just keeps growing.
Sometimes I’d read an entire book just to inform one panel. There are certain chapters that are a little more dense; and some areas that I didn’t know at all. I’d have to get through a pile of books just to write that one 32-page chapter.
This is a monumental book, on the same scale with Blankets and Habibi. Can you share with something about the freedom that you have when you have such a big canvas to work on?
I guess I’ve always tended towards this longer format. Blankets was 580 pages, at a time when that was pretty novel, so to speak. I like books that are fully immersive, you just kind of get lost in them, get disoriented, have this opportunity to sort of wander labrynthian routes and work you way back to the main narrative. In the case of this book, I serialized it first. The twelve issues was arbitrary, it just seemed like the right amount for the series. I liked the numerology. I work from an outline and then I focused on one issue at a time. I’d write, pencil, ink it and color it–and publish it–before really digging into the next section. Each issue was self-contained when I was putting it out as a series. The goal was to have each issue stand alone along with having the momentum to have the reader want to seek out the next issue but not like cliffhangers.
I was thinking about how to get a handle on the book and I thought we could focus on one of the chapters, “Make America Ginseng Great Again.” It’s a very timely chapter. I enjoyed viewing a talk given by Will Hsu, of Hsu’s Ginseng Enterprises, one of the leading growers of ginseng in Wisconsin who you profile in your book. This gives us an opportunity to cover ginseng from many angles.
Yeah, this is Chapter 5 in the book and Issue 9 in the series and it focused on the Hsu family. Paul is the father and Will is the son who took over the family business. Paul Hsu emigrated from Taiwan with a degree in Social Work but ended up becoming a ginseng farmer, and growing the business into a mega-growing operation, partly because they diversified, developing all these other products. They also have strong family connections in Taiwan that provided advantages in trade routes and all kinds of leverage and knowledge that the typical white ginseng business would not have.
Make America Ginseng Great Again!
“Make America Ginseng Great Again” was a tagline that Will Hsu used in 2018. The Hsu family has a lot of political ties. They’ve had ties to the Bush administration, and tangential ties to the Trump administration and local government. They’re a big business and big business ends up tangled with politics. When I traveled in Asia, I was in China, South Korea and Taiwan. In Taiwan, I met with my publisher’s foreign rights agent, Joann Yang, and she talked about what she’d heard about Wisconsin ginseng, and that was connected to the Taiwanese version of Trump, Terry Gou, who has ties with President Trump and they’re both getting involved with Wisconsin ginseng.
Trump and the Rust Belt strategy.
It’s a bit of a convoluted story. So, people are now hearing more about Pres. Trump trying to get more industry and factories in the U.S. Well, he made a deal with Terry Gou, who is the CEO of Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturer. They employ more people than anyone in China. That’s where iPhones come from, and Xboxes and most of the electronics and they wanted to start a company in Wisconsin and they were able to score the biggest state subsidies in U.S. history, something like 4 billion dollars. They were going to bring all these jobs to the area and none of that quite materialized. They have only about a tenth of the staff they have promised. Back to the ginseng, Gou teamed up with the Hsu family to develop a high-end version of ginseng products. So, a lot of the business and science behind all of this is covered in this chapter. A lot of the future of ginseng focuses on breaking down the compounds of ginseng, and synthesizing it for pharmaceuticals.
What can you tell us about misconceptions that the general public has about ginseng?
There’s a lot. Either people have never heard of it or don’t know what it is. Often, people will call it, “ginger roots,” since they’re familiar with ginger, which is also a medicinal root. People will also associate it with these power energy drinks that you might get at a gas station. Those are derived from Asian ginseng which is a stimulant, like caffeine. American ginseng has the opposite properties. It is more of a cooling adaptogenic herb which is better for long-term use for overall health. It’s the American ginseng that is more prized in Asia.
Working on your comics and loyal to your dreams.
You begin your book talking about your love for comics. Could you share with us a bit more about what it is that attracts you to the comics medium?
I’m like a lot of people, more of a visual learner, visually oriented. Unlike other content, like film, video games, other digital content, it just washes over you, bombards you, is moving over you. Comics is much more intimate, something a reader can take in at their own pace. I love prose but it has a sort of arms-length technology of being typeset. So, you’re looking at a font that has been typed. Whereas with comics, you’re actually seeing the handwriting of the author. There’s a great intimacy in that. You’re seeing the handwriting in the lettering and in the drawing itself. I’ve always been into the calligraphy of cartooning. And the sort of strange time travel of comics: you can exist in different times on the same page. I don’t know of any other medium that can do that so effortlessly. It takes skills for us as readers of comics. It’s also something we’re sort of indoctrinated with and so we know how to read them. Once you do, there’s a lot of potential.
It becomes intoxicating!
Yes! I love that!
It’s happening instantaneously and simultaneously. You look in every direction and something is happening.
I just got back from several months of touring in Europe. The A.I. question always comes up. If I feel threatened by A.I., my general response to that is: while I think all jobs are threatened and even human life could be threatened, I don’t think that comics is specifically threatened. I think because A.I. can do a lot of things “better” than humans, the things that people will value more in the arts is the humanity, the fragility, the flaws, the vulnerability. That’s why I like paper and ink. Because it can transmit those things. I don’t want to draw digitally because of the perfection and the cleanness of the line. I want to see the humanity in the line. I think that’s going to become more common. As A.I. takes over all of illustration and the images we see, we’re going to be seeking out images feel more human in their flaws.
I don’t see A.I. replacing you or Kate Beaton or any other cartoonist. For one thing, comics is too idiosyncratic. Where I see A.I. having clearly taken over is hyper-realistic illustration. Basically, A.I. is regurgitating human content–spewing out generic results.
A.I. will just make it easier to get generic but the more personal content will require humans.
Let’s talk about hand-lettering. You still do all your own hand-drawn lettering, right?
Yes. It’s all hand-drawn.
I hesitated to ask since I felt I knew that. It’s something that always comes up, the pros and cons of hand-drawn and using a font. If you’re an auteur cartoonist, you do everything, including the lettering–and it’s hand-drawn. There’s no getting around the fact that hand-drawn lettering is part of the art.
Yeah, I like it being embedded in the art. It might make it more difficult to work on the foreign editions. But, for those, we have a font. There’s a digital font created from my hand-lettering for the foreign editions. I want the lettering to be on the page. I start with the word balloons first to see how many words I can fit. I want the balloons to be kind of minimal, not too dense and wordy. I use a sort of felt tip pen that’s archival, a Micron, which is loose enough to keep the character of my handwriting. It’s not as stiff as using a more traditional tool to slowly letter. I want to retain the looseness of my hand-lettering.
As I get older, I keep looking at other options. I prefer using a Speedball. It does have that resistance but, if you like it, then you can’t help but want to use it. And, if you prefer a Micron, then you use that. One person once told me that it’s no use overthinking it. And I’ve concluded that you’re best served by using what keeps you wanting to draw, what keeps you productive.
That’s great advice. I agree with that for sure. Although, I do admire you for using the more traditional Speedball style. I was never patient enough. And, I guess if it takes a bit longer, it’s giving you more time to think about how the words fit in the balloon and other decisions on the page so there’s a benefit to slowing things down.
It’s going to be a tough nut to crack. I tell folks that it’s going to be time-consuming not matter what you do. It’s going to take time whether it’s all analog or digital so pick whatever method works best for you.
Yeah. Agreed. That’s solid advice.
I have a high concept question for you. Looking at the issues that you cover in your new book, what do you think it will take for better economic outcomes for folks in rural areas?
Wow, that’s a great and broad question. In my hometown, population 1,200 people, this town that I’d found suffocating as a child, now I have a nostalgia for it because it was all these home-grown businesses. The grocery store, the diners, the general store and the pharmacy that had the spinner rack where we bought our comics–all of those were local businesses owned by families in town. And now all of those have been gutted. There’s no real businesses there except for just on the outskirts of town and that’s only corporate things like MacDonald’s. It makes me very sad to see the loss of all those local businesses.
And the ginseng industry has dried up, even in the course of working on this project. Part of that is due to climate change. The growing region has started nudging north–and I saw that happen in the span of the six years I was working on this project. The gardens migrated north because it was too warm to grow south of my parent’s house.
As a kid, I felt my hometown was sheltered from everything else going on culturally. I have some fondness for that reality now. Because, now, everybody is online–so culture has become pretty homogeneous and global. Instagram has made interior design generic for wherever you go in the world.
I was just in a cafe the other day in Portland and we were commenting on how all cafes look exactly the same now. We’ve been spoon-fed this specific aesthetic via Instagram algorithms. Whether you’re in Portland, Iowa City, Barcelona or Beijing, all the cafes look exactly the same. I miss the strange cultural isolation of where I grew up now.
One of my favorite things in life, for many years, has been spending time in coffee shops in Seattle. I’ll just mildly correct you in saying that Seattle still has its fare share of independent coffee shops, in all its neighborhoods, and they can all be a bit different, have some well-worn homey/comfy vibe to them.
Maybe Seattle has managed to keep the integrity of that. Portland use to be like that too but I wouldn’t say that about Portland now. They all look the same: that minimalist inoffensive hipster style.
The minimalist style you see world-wide, for sure. All tones of gray and beige.
Yes! Beige! The neutral, muted and inoffensive tones of gray and beige. Of course, as we scroll through the book, we’re seeing gray and beige tones too! Everything in the book is made up of just two inks, a black and a red ink–and then gradations of those colors to get a whole palette of sepia tones. I really nerded out of the process, you know, trying to add just the right amount of red to this gray to get this earth tone.
Did you end up tweaking things in Photoshop to any great extent?
Yes. So, everything is drawn on paper with ink, the line art. A lot of the second color I would use bond paper that I would lay over the line art. So, tracing paper for that second color. Then it’s all scanned and composited in Photoshop. To get separate tones, that’s all Photoshop manipulation of many layers of reds and grays.
Speaking of digital vs. analog, Photoshop has been around forever so it has a cred all its own.
I last real job, before becoming a cartoonist, was being a graphic designer back in the ’90s. My first graphic design job was at a newspaper, around 1995. And in 1996, I was at a small town advertising agency. In 1998, I joined Dark Horse Comics as a graphic designer. So, I came from that background of production. Before I was doing comics or illustration, I was helping out Top Shelf with book design, production work. My ’90s training in Photoshop has been what’s carried me through my whole career.
A lot of people would envy your skill set. I mean, with such an intimate knowledge of Photoshop. The new generation seems to be relying more on Procreate and perhaps not being quite as familiar with Photoshop.
What I’m grateful for is having been around, in the ’90s, when there was still so much paste-up and analog work being done. I still think of making a color page as more like making a screenprint: thinking about trapping, how the colors print out on the plates. There was a printing press in the building so you need see each plate. You would see the cyan, magenta, yellow and black plates printed. How things would come alive.
When I try to tinker with something like Procreate on the iPad, I think it defaults to RGB since most people are using it for online stuff. Right away, that’s jarring to me. I’m so trained in CMYK, the way things are printed. Old school print technology is an obsession of mine. Maybe not on the level of someone like Jordan Crane. He’s the excerpt of those things but we’re of that generation.
Ginseng Baptism.
What we’re looking at now, a page about the ginseng baptism, speaks to the attention to detail, the beauty on the page, you’re talking about. Any final thoughts on what people can expect from this Pantheon edition of your book?
The book comes out at the end of the month, on April 29th. There’s around 70 additional pages since the series. I changed things around. I changed the beginning. I changed the end. And I added a lot in the middle. The series has its own unique features, art created by my brother and an old-fashioned letters page in each issue. The book is a hardcover edition, 448 pages. When I sat down and read all twelve of the original comic book issues, I felt it wasn’t cohesive enough. So, it went through quite an overhaul.
Let me ask you one last question as we close out. How do you tackle a visual metaphor? Maybe how you used the ginseng root?
Every new project starts with a visual metaphor, or symbol or scene. It’s hard to know how I break it down. That’s one of the unique strengths of comics, that you can illustrate ideas visually with metaphors. It just sort of happens organically. I think my religious instruction also informs that. Because Jesus’ teachings were all in parables and they’re all a little bit abstract and so you have to decipher the meaning from them. Some cartoonist are far better than I at working the magic of having the words say one thing and the images they another and from that dissonance a whole other meaning emerges.
As for the ginseng root, I was drawn to the physicality of a plant root. But it was also the perfect metaphor for this process that I needed to engage in of going back to where I came from: tilling through that soil, the aeration of that soil. One thing that is confounding and disturbing about ginseng is that it can never be grown on the same plot of land more than once. You can imagine how frustrating that is for farmers. And we are running out of land for growing in places like Wisconsin. A hundred years can go by and you still wouldn’t be able to grow ginseng in the same soil and that has to do with ginseng depositing a form of toxin in the soil particular to the plant. So, on a personal level, as an author, best known for a memoir, Blankets, I was very wary of that fact. If you have a plant that won’t grow again in the same soil, is it dangerous for me to go back to Wisconsin, revisiting memoir, and try to plant there again which is what I did with this project.
Wow. Well, that’s a perfect place to end it. Thank you so much, Craig.
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.
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.
