Hurricane Nancy honors us once again by sharing some of her art. This is #453, entitled, “When they put you down keep on dancing.” All sorts of people can try to put us down. They think they can mistreat others just for the fun of it. That’s when it takes those of us with grace and dignity to persevere, and keep on dancing.
Colorized version!
Be sure to visit Hurricane Nancy’s website where you can purchase her art!
This is the first installment of . . . Pop Culture Super Sleuth . . .
“I’ve been a blogger for almost as long as I’ve been a cartoonist. And then I became a pop culture super sleuth . . . “
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I’m building up steam on this new project. And maybe a little shy. You’ll have to tell me what you think. The character isn’t necessarily me, per se, but a sort of alter ego. It’s fun and it’s all possible in the wonderful world of comics. Am I right? You betcha, I’m right!
Thaddeus Stevens is an American historical figure who is brought to life in this remarkable mini-comic. You may not recall or recognize the name, and that is part of the reason this little book has come into existence. Stevens is one of the most significant players in the fight for human rights outside of Abraham Lincoln and, some may argue, there is no Lincoln without Stevens. These are the kind of issues dealt with in this pamphlet-sized comic.
Fans of the work of Noah Van Sciver will appreciate the distinctive style and masterful use of the comics medium. If you haven’t gotten a chance, you’ll want to check out Noah’s landmark book from last year, Joseph Smith and the Mormons. You can read our review here. That same intense level of scrutiny, combined with brevity, is on display for this tribute to Thaddeus Stevens. At a brisk and steady clip, each page here packs a punch. We see how pivotal Stevens was in securing freedom and rights for America’s former slaves. Yes, it’s safe to argue that we needed to have Stevens in order to have Lincoln. In other words, we all know and honor Lincoln but credit must be given to the man at the forefront for the fight for freedom and human dignity.
Paper copies are $5 and if you’d like one, send an email requesting one to info@thaddeusstevenssociety.com and one will be sent to you with a self-addressed envelope to send back payment.
It’s the end of the world. Money is meaningless. But the billionaires have got a plan. Sort of like Noah’s Arc, the elite have a space vessel, the Arca, that will take them to a better world, Eden. All they have to do is make sure to keep their slaves, or “settlers,” in line. Effie is one of the teen servants on this vessel. As far as she knows, she should be grateful to have been spared from the billions of people who perished when Earth died. But things aren’t always as they seem. That is the premise of Van Jensen‘s latest graphic novel, ARCA, published by IDW Productions. It is my pleasure to present to you this interview with one of the great writing talents working today in comics.
As I say in my review, this is a story about a reluctant hero who must rise above her quiet demeanor and confront the powers that be. Persephone, or “Effie,” is in the long tradition of reluctant heroes in fiction and particularly in science fiction: the person who emerges as a leader despite their hesitation. As you will come to see for yourself, Effie is a lot like you and me.
In the course of this brief interview, I asked Van if he’d share a little something about the creative process and he provided a gem that I will long cherish and that I’m sure you’ll enjoy too. It involves a tea kettle. Imagine that you’re moving into your new home and you’ve got a thousand things to figure out. Try boiling it down to a tea kettle. If you can pin down your tea kettle, then everything else will fall into place. It’s a wonderful writing exercise: your “tea kettle” can be a brief description of your main character, or a snatch of dialogue or the first couple of sentences in that first chapter. Whatever helps to kick things off. So, I hope you enjoy this interview, stick around for the writer tips, and seek out this remarkable graphic novel.
ARCA comes out July 11, 2023 and is available for pre-order on many platforms including Penguin Random House right here.
Helvetiq, a publishing house based in Switzerland, announces: Derborence: When the Mountain Fell, based on the classic by C. F. Ramuz of the same name, is being released today in the US and has already been released in Europe in French and German. This graphic novel adaptation highlights the mysteries hidden in the great mountains of Switzerland and is the first in a series of adaptations of C. F. Ramuz’s novels. Derborence is the story of a devastating alpine landslide, of the grief-stricken villagers who are haunted by what they believe is the ghost of a man who should not have survived, and of a woman who refuses to give up hope.
So, that’s the initial brief version of the press release. I love the look and feel of the PDF that I just received so I decided to just jump in and post this. Am I familiar with the work of Fabian Menor? Hmm, I appreciate the loose style. For loyal readers of this site, you know that I’ll sometimes point you in the right direction with a quick note and circle back later with more. Keep this under consideration and, as I suggest, I will come back to it before you know it.
Wonder Drug: LSD in the Land of Living Skies, by Hugh D.A. Goldring, Nicole Marie Burton and Dr. Erika Dyck. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2021, 96 pp, $19.99.
A Train in the Night:The Tragedy of Lac-Megantic. By Anne-Marie Saint-Cerny, Christian Quesnel, translated by W. Donald Wilson. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2022. 192 pp, $24.99.
Time was, and not long ago, that color printing for radical comics seemed too much to demand, either for the publisher or for the hard-pressed artist. That time may be passing, at least for the innovative, less-than-giant Between the Lines publishers in Toronto.
The story of LSD offered in Wonder Drug is a story almost never heard south of the Canadian-US border, and for good reasons. Aldous Huxley’s major collaboration in the early decades of research happened to be a less-than-famous Candian researcher, Dr. Humphry Osmond. A veteran of WWII, employed at a psychiatric clinic in a London hospital, Osmond met scientist John Smythies, who would become his long-term collaborator. Osmond coined the term “psychedelic,” but the two seem to have “discovered” the value of LSD and Mescaline.
In distant Saskatchewan, in a research center, the two worked on synthesizing peyote, known and used by Indigenous peoples across the Americas for millennia. Mescaline could be laboratory-produced, as they discovered. But they also hit up on Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, from an ergot fungus. Research became global back in 1943, separately from the Canadian experiments, when a Swiss scientist accidentally ingested LSD and went on a what we could call “A Trip.” Happily, somehow, he did not fall off his bike when returning home.
Here comes the fascinating political part of the book. Saskatchewan, with its social democratic government, The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (or CCF) set out to attract world scientists for its own version of socialized medicine. Treatments for alcholism among other problems embraced the use of drugs more and more as the decades passed. Dr. Osmund happened to see an ad for a job at the British publication, The Lancet, and snapped it up: the Wayburn Institute was a natural. Osmund also snapped up some LSD.
Enough of the intriguing plot, which carries us foward through better-known territories of the 1960s, official “moral panic” and, everntually, a return to the origins: psychedelics legitimated for the supervised use of psychiatric patients. Onward—says the reviewer—to the way the comic looks and feels. There has never been an all-color comic quite like this one, and we realize it best in the many trippy moments, captured (in my own personal experience) beautifully and successfully, “bad trips” included. The art is therefore a job and a lesson. Better things can be done with comics.
By contrast, A Train in the Night, the saga of a needless train disaster in 2013, offers the colors of horror. Not so different in its agonies from East Palestine, the small town in Ohio, USA—if not Trump territory in the Canadian case—the village of Lac-Magnetic is the victim of this story. The former logging town of Lac-Magnetic, if never itself beautiful, stood close enough to the emerging tourist trade in Canada’s majestic northeast to thrive and provide a living for many of its residents.
What is the danger and where did it come from? In an explanatory sidestep, the author/artists take us to fracking and oil in North Dakota, for a few pages. The 2008 economic crisis fell upon all, but hardest upon workers in the fracking operation. A boomtown in an extractive district has grey skies, a lot of heavy drinking by the working people there for temporary well-paying but also dangerous jobs. They risk their lives to extract the oil that goes on trains for destinations far away, with layoffs and health consequences for themselves ahead.
The train that started off in North Dakota, picking up its fracked load, was to deliver the dirty goods to New Brunswick. Lac-Magnetic just happened to be along the way. The train, armored against potential disaster from air breaks, also needed the engine to be engaged for the brakes to work. Because the company took the short-cut of a one-man crew, the driver himself had not been on hand to apply the hand-brakes. Poor safety regulations and poor maintenance brought 72 tank cars full of crude oil to catastrophe.
As the fire on the train appeared and grew, local firefighters learned to their horror that an earlier problem had been “corrected” with the use of flammable epoxy glue. In the worst possible place, five million litres of toxic explosives went up in a fireball. It was the “the train from hell,” as a nine-year-old described it. “The fault of one guy who didn’t follow the rules,” as a leading corporate figure responded. This claim was echoed by a raft of similar claims by Canadian authorities.
Less than 200 days later, train service returned with similar toxic loads. Survivors who had abandoned town returned, anxious for their property, enraged that a settlement was so small, for citizens that is. The pharmacies and the supermarket chain got a million Canadian dollars. Investigations were blocked, by leading figures in Canada’s ministry of transport. The railroad corporations across North America basically continue to write their own rules.
The last, beautifully horrible pages of this book are the hellscape/aftermath, with testimony of the victims prominent, and the courage of the survivors our consolation. At least the corporate and government plan to victimize the engineer himself, part of the project of letting the corporation and government off the hook, is foiled. Some of the strongest drawings of the book capture perfectly the public and corporate officials lying through their teeth, protecting the rich against the public.
It is doubtful that the recent crimes of capitalism have yet been depicted so brilliantly. That the work appeared first in a French edition may help us to understand the levels of Canadian creativity as multi-lingual, multi-cultural. This, at last, may be our consolation.
Harriet Tubman Demon Slayer. w. David Crownson. a. Courtland L. Ellis and others. Kingwood Comics. 252 pp. $59.99
The subject of slavery has been depicted and processed in many ways, from critical analysis to cathartic expression. This new comics series takes the reader on a mystical journey led by none other than Harriet Tubman (1823-1913), the famed leader of the Underground Railroad (1850-1860) which led enslaved people to freedom in America. Creator and writer David Crownson gives his story just the right bite, which makes sense for this mashup of genres.
Meet Harriet Tubman, Demon Slayer. Crownson goes all out casting Tubman in the role of a superhero ninja freedom fighter who must do battle with whatever monsters slave owners can throw at her: vampires, werewolves, demons, you name it. This trade paperback is a graphic novel collecting the previous six issues to this series. In this story, we follow Tubman as she is helping a family to freedom. Crownson has done a great job with character development. I was quickly engaged in the plight of the Edgefield family: the young girl Vanessa; her parents Caesar and Catherine; and her brother, Nathan. Tubman, like a mysterious angel, suddenly appears in their lives as they are attempting to flee from slavery. The right amount of action, humor, horror and fantasy ensues.
I was immediately intrigued by this book. The cover art got my attention and the artwork throughout, led by Courtland L. Ellis, kept me turning pages. The book begins with a photograph of Tubman and a quote from her: “Never wound a snake; kill it.” That sets the tone very nicely. From what I know, Tubman appears to have been a very driven, reserved and no-nonsense person. That’s the way that Crownson depicts her. She has a job to do and she does it with speed and precision. She knows exactly how to drop a vampire or werewolf in seconds flat. Out comes the magic sword or the wooden stake and that’s that. It’s cathartic to see how swiftly Tubman takes care of all the villains. In comics, we often find some righteous justice and this comic delivers on that promise.
Harriet Tubman and her son, Chip, battle monsters.
To take a historical figure and then put that person into a fictionalized universe is one of the most satisfying things you can do as a writer. No doubt, Crownson is having a great time with his superhero version of Harriet Tubman. On the creative side, it’s great fun. And you can also call it a sacred privilege. Crownson celebrates and honors Tubman with respect and joyful energy, fully aware of the painful and sensitive subject; fully aware of hope and healing. There’s no record of this anywhere but Crownson includes a character, Chip, a young white man, as Tubman’s adopted son. It’s just part of the story, an uplifting use of creative license, and something that Tubman would probably give a wink to and approve of. I’m confident that she’d approve of this whole audacious comic book series and enjoy it.
This is the book for any fan of comics, pop culture, and great stories!
It is my pleasure to present to you my conversation with Ray Carcases on his YouTube channel. Just click the link to the video right below this paragraph. This time around it’s me who is being interviewed. We discuss my new book, George’s Run: A Writer’s Journey Through The Twilight Zone, published by Rutgers University Press. Ray is a kindred spirit and I am so lucky to have gotten this opportunity to chat with him. I look forward to pursuing more of these sorts of conversations with him in the future since he’s a thinker and an excellent conversationalist.
I’ll tell you right now and I’ll bring it up more as we continue to spread the word about George’s Run. I said it in so many words but maybe I didn’t come right out and say it in this interview. I really feel that I’m the ideal spokesperson to guide the reader along as we pursue several pop culture backstories. It’s folks like Ray and myself, from Generation X, that have a certain perspective and so much to share with each other and younger generations. And that doesn’t make me feel “old” at all. It just makes me feel like, as Ray expressed so eloquently, I’m in that group that “know enough to know.” You just don’t get it until you finally reach that point!
An old woman has fought with death a thousand times and has always won. But now she finds herself afraid to let a wounded policeman in her door for fear he is Mr. Death. Is he?
Ray and I got into a groove and built upon one observation after another. We marveled together over the cinematic elements to The Twilight Zone and how you need to appreciate them, “know enough to know,” in order to understand this most celebrated yet misunderstood pop culture phenomenon. I like one moment when Ray observed the quality of Rod Serling’s epilogue to the George Clayton Johnson masterpiece, “Nothing in the Dark.” Just as the scene comes to a close, that one final thought summing up the tension between fear and reason: “There was nothing in the dark that wasn’t there when the lights were on.”
Gladys Cooper stars as an old and dying woman named Wanda Dunn.
I’ve been following the work of Ray Hecht for years now and it has been fascinating to see him develop as a writer, artist, and now as the leading force behind this collection of short works in comics. Hecht is a devoted and creative explorer trying to make sense of the world. The goal for this book is to make some sense of Taiwan, a country many of us know very little about other than it being forever threatened by China. The main service this book provides is to offer up some slice-of-life vignettes from a variety of artists at various stages in their careers.
Panel excerpt from “Walks & Talks,” by Patty Hogan and Todd Allen Williams
Every comics anthology is a delicate ecosystem that is cared for and nurtured into existence by its editor. I’m happy to say that Ray Hecht has delivered a charming and enlightening book. This is a mellow and easygoing journey, seven stories in all, written and drawn by eight contributors. Instead of dramatic epiphanies, you’ll find more of a contemplative vibe: observations on the struggles to fit in and to simply survive. There is plenty of common ground to be found here among life and work issues. In many ways, it’s the very act of dislocation that seems most compelling and the overriding theme. And sometimes that’s really all we need: some signs of life and shared humanity.
Panel excerpt from Ray Hecht’s “How Not to Get Your Scooter License in Taiwan.”
In the case of Ray Hecht’s contribution, the theme is dealing with the tensions of isolation during lockdown. Hecht’s solution was to finally get his scooter license so that he could drive around within the allowed perimeters where he lives in Taiwan. It’s a very honest and funny story and another fine example of Hecht’s sharing of his expat experiences.
Art by Fabienne Good
Among other contributions, Fabienne Good offers up some lively illustrations for her piece, “An Island of Inspiration,” which is just the sort of clean and idiosyncratic style that buoys the whole discussion. Well done work by all involved! Seek this book out. It can be your new travel companion and guide whether or not you might be thinking about your own visit to Taiwan.
TidalWave Comics has an amazing track record of delivering concise and compelling comic book profiles and you have probably come across some of them. This latest 22-page comic book on the legendary punk band, The Misfits, is part of its popular “Orbit” comic book series focusing on personalities who impact the world. And, if you know anything about this series, then you know that it can masterfully get down to granular details while always mindful of the big picture. As I read through, I was blown away by the fly-on-the-wall perspective and steady pace.
Straight outta Jersey!
The story opens on a living room scene, circa 1977, in Lodi, New Jersey, as told by the second bass player, Jerry Caifa. The LP pressings have just arrived and Jerry is none too pleased to see that the order has printed his last name when he expressly stated to only use his first name. And the narrative just keeps moving. The guys painfully realize, as they catch a Ramones show, how much they need a dedicated frontman on guitar. They find one. More players follow. More adjustments follow. They discover how well they’re doing leaning into horror.
Intrigue in the studio.
And then, one day while browsing a thrift store, they stumble upon the idea for the band’s mascot, that world-famous skull. Bigger shows right around the corner, just before a few more detours and going down rabbit holes. But this kind of rise to the top is always one step away from burning down in flames. Writer Joe Paradise smoothly covers all the drama, particularly how songwriter Danzig managed to pretty much hijack the whole Misfits brand along with the credit and profits, at least for a while. A court case finally decides in favor of the rest of the band to continue as The Misfits. But it hardly ends there as our story proceeds. Artist Martin Gimenez perfectly evokes all the ups and downs with an urgent vibe running through his artwork. This is a great comics tribute for hardcore fans and newbies alike.