Comic Books
Story Stream
How Comic Books Became Classics September 22, 2023
In September, 2023, Penguin Classics, the venerable publisher of elegant Anglophile editions and portable canonical texts—Robert Fagles’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, Thomas Hardy’s “The Mayor of Casterbridge”—released three books that push the te...
The Secret to Appreciating 'Garfield' September 15, 2023
It’s late August, and I am cracking up as I read a brand-new Garfield comic. Panel one: Garfield, lying belly-down in his cat bed and wrapped up in a blanket, wears a bored expression as he thinks, Time to get up and start another day. Panel two: Gar...
How Marvel Swallowed Hollywood June 06, 2023
Growing up in Missouri, Christopher Yost had boxes of Marvel comic books, which his mother bought at the grocery store. None of his friends read Marvel; it was his own private world, a “sprawling story where all these characters lived in this univers...
Alan Moore, Illuminations October 18, 2022
Well, this is a strange book. Billed as a collection of “stories,” Illuminations is, rather, as Neil Gaiman concedes on his back cover blurb, “a sort of camouflage, or frame” for What We Can Know About Thunderman—which, at 240 pages of a 450-page boo...
The Genre-Shattering Fictions of Alan Moore October 12, 2022
There are many comics cognoscenti who consider the British writer Alan Moore the Greatest of All Time. Moore has written everything from “E.T.” knockoffs to weird “Star Wars” shorts, but his legendary status rests on comics that he created in his 198...
R. Crumb Means Some Offense September 20, 2022
THERE’S A COMIC by Robert Crumb from 1979 called “A Short History of America.” It’s 12 panels, all portraying a single spot of land. In the first, we see a bucolic field abutting a forest, birds flying overhead. In the second, there are fewer trees a...
Streaming Neil Gaiman's Dreamworld September 09, 2022
The Sandman is a heady mix of symbols, occultology, Greek mythology, and dream psychology, invoking Dante’s Inferno, Milton’s Paradise Lost, history, horror, dark fantasy, and even theology. It is one of the most audacious cultural creations of moder...
How Tintin Exposed the Soviet Union January 15, 2019
Tintin, the young reporter famed for his exotic adventures exposing skullduggery across the world, turns 90 this week.The character was created by Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi, better known as Herge, and first appeared in strip form in the pages o...
Why Calvin and Hobbes is Great Literature July 23, 2016
Behind the Mask March 29, 2016
