Word: comicalities
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...Jordan" (Pantheon; 288 pages; $21) collects Mark Beyer's comic strip that ran in a select few alternative weekly newspapers during the early 90s. A tour de force of the form, it combines wild, fever-dream visions with dark, existentialist gag humor. Beyer takes all the clich?s of the traditional "laugh-a-day" strip and turns them inside out. The typically cute, bourgeois family of the dailies has been replaced by Amy and Jordan, a fear-filled, childless couple who live in a nameless city full of bugs, aliens, dirt and neighbors like Dame Head, who is just a head...
Searcy points to a large screen at his right that shows other comic-book heroes with multiple identities. In his sermon, he alludes only vaguely to the Catwoman myth and gives the impression that he (like most other Americans) hasn't seen the Halle Berry version. But Searcy knows that a person tormented by questions of image and identity can find encouragement in the message of Genesis 1: 27: "So God created people in his own image." That biblical quotation is projected on the screen, which also features an icon of a smiling cartoon Catwoman sporting purple tights, a feather...
Superheroes. You can't live with them and you can't live without them. They are inexorably tied to the history of American comic books. After the 1950s restrictions on comic's content, the popularity of superheroes kept the medium alive while simultaneously stigmatizing it as a children's entertainment. Beginning with the first generation of "underground" comix artists, most cartoonists interested in exploring the artistic possibilities of the medium have treated superheroes like a form of radiation - an invisible energy best left ignored lest you get seriously burned. Recently that prejudice has been eroding as more and more alty...
Today, though, it’s pure American comic existentialism, stealing a glance away from its navel to plunder decades of pop culture. References to weapons of mass destruction, The Matrix and Popeye abound among more serious moments of reflection...
Graphic novels used to be viewed as comic books--only bigger and more pretentious. Now that sales are booming, the medium is being embraced by artists as a hip way to tell challenging stories. The just released Birth of a Nation (Crown; 140 pages) by Aaron McGruder, creator of the controversial comic strip The Boondocks, and Reginald Hudlin, director of the 1990 movie House Party, began as a movie script that used race as the centerpiece of a political satire. "By the time we realized how difficult that would be to sell in Hollywood, we had already fallen in love...