History

Jill Lepore, author of The Secret History of Wonder Woman, talks about how the Amazons origins are tied up with the history of suffrage and birth control and nicely sums up the history of women in comics in a couple of paragraphs:

I totally stole this from artist/producer Denys Cowan's FB page, but it's an interesting little sidenote, Back in the 90s people still read magazines, and liquor companies would purchase full page advertisements in these magazines. Man, history is SO WEIRD, right? Anyway, Dewars scotch ran a series of profiles of debonair achievers attempting to convince you that if you drank their scotch you would also be a debonair achiever. Cowan, then well known for his Batman and Question comics and about to co-found Milestone Media, was a fitting choice but it did seem like a win for comics at the time. This predated the Rob Liefeld Levis commercial, but both are a reminder that cartoonists as media figures is far from a recent phenomenon.

Here’s the sixth part of my interview with the late Steve Moore, with more to follow. The 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th parts are already online, along with some explanation of how the...

This extraordinary book—surely one of the most beautiful picture books of the year— has a complicated history. It began with Mattotti's phenomenal illustrations, originally commissioned for the Metropolitan Opera's 2007 production of Engelbert Humperdink's...

Here's one of those matters where there are really no winners. The Wallace Wood Estate, which is administered by J. David Spurlock, the publisher of Vanguard Publishing, is suing Wood's ex-wife Tatjana Wood, for the possession some of 150-200 pages of Wood art. According to the complaint, the pages are worth between $2000-25,000 each.

Who is Marie Duval? While not a household name in comics circles she's actually one of the most important Victorian cartoonists, artist on Ally Sloper, one of the early cartoon sensations. The tale of a no good lazeabout that ran from 1857 on, it was created by Duval's husband, Charles Ross, but gained its greatest fame after Duval took over in 1859. The Guardian has a tribute to her.

Manga isn't all awkward schoolgirls and giant robots. There has long been a very strong alternative and literary thread of manga, and two recent articles give you some perspective on it. I would call Ryan Holmberg's Proto-Gekiga: Matsumoto Masahiko’s Komaga a must read, but I have to confess, it is very long and involved, and I have set it aside for weekend reading. BUT the important thing is that he compares and contrasts Yoshihiro Tatsumi, who is kind of credited as the father of "gekiga" or realistic manga, with Matsumoto Masahiko, a figure who appears in Tatsumi's autobiographical A Drifting Life under another name. Masahiko's work went down a slightly different path than Tatsumi's but Holmberg shows that it was equally important:

by Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson Frederic Wertham’s name is akin to the devil incarnate in the comics world. Wertham was one of the ringleaders of the anti comics movement in the early 1950’s with his book Seduction...

Dark Horse Comics have published the US edition of Mary & Bryan Talbot and Kate Charlesworth's Sally Heathcote, Suffragette, as of a few weeks ago. When this was originally published in May in the...

We all know that William Moulton Marston, the creator of wonder Woman, was a bit odd. He had two "wives" and he was heavy into bondage. But did you know that one of the...

Australian cartoonist/journalist Eleri Mai Harris isn't just an editor at The Nib, Medium's marvelous comics section, run by Matt Bors. She's a trained journalist who turned to comics to tell stories and in today's Nib she has a good one: the story of the abortive designs for Canberra, the capital of Australia. Like a few other planned capital cities—Celebration and Brasilia comes to mind—the structural, utopian approach to city design rarely works out. The story also includes a dandy forgotten woman—Frank Lloyd Wright's associate Marion Mahony Griffin. So sit back and learn some Australian and architectural history.

Lisa Hix of Collectors Weekly sat down with Trina Robbins and runs through a few chapters of Robbins' Pretty in Ink, her third history of women cartoonists. The result is an immense article that could function on a primer on the history of women cartoonists going back more than 100 years, starting with Rose O'Neil: