Moving through this year’s shelf of notable titles for comics aficionados, I wanted to call out several projects that revived forgotten or previously uncollected work. From a pharmacist heroine to an illustrated prayer, the ultimate 20s flapper to a pioneer of cartoon journalism, 2024 surfaced some real gems.
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Shelf Scan 2024: Taschen’s Ultimate Duck
Kicking off this year’s roundup reviews of notable books for comics history buffs, let’s start with the annual Taschen doorstop.
Continue readingRockwell Kent: Accidental Cartoonist
Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) was not a cartoonist in any typical sense of the genre. He was insanely prolific across all media and seemed oblivious to formal silos that bother art critics and scholars. He worked in book and magazine illustration, painting, greeting cards and postage stamps, bookplates, murals, and, yes, comics (under the playful pseudonym, “William Hogarth, Jr.” for Vanity Fair). He was a working artist who liked to turn a buck, as entrepreneurial as he was genre agnostic. Which is to say that he was an artist in the American grain.
Continue readingBuster Brown: ‘Race Suicide’ v. Family Planning, Circa 1903
Talk of declining fertility and birth rates, even white nationalist mumblings about “race suicide” have become a weird sidebar this election cycle. At the turn of the 20th Century, all of these themes had already been well rehearsed. In 1903, R.F. Outcault’s blockbuster hit Buster Brown alludes to contemporary arguments around changing gender roles, women’s increased autonomy, family planning and, yes, “race suicide.”
Continue readingI Hear America Talking: Stan Mack’s Real Life
Earlier this summer, I got to chat with visual journalist Stan Mack as he launched the indispensable compilation of his most famous work, Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies: The Collected Conceits, Delusions, and Hijinks of New Yorkers from 1974 to 1995. The interview is embedded below with a cursory review after that.
Advertising Decency: The Cartoon War on Hate
Hate is an easy sell. In the marketplace of hearts and minds, intolerance, grievance, anger are some of the most compelling product features of any cause or candidate that is new to the political shelves. Likewise, simple, high aspirations tend to market more easily. See “Hope and Change.” Appealing to base instincts or ambition and aspiration is Marketing 101 in America’s cultural economy.
Continue readingA Usable Past for Advertising: Mucha and Art Nouveau’s Great Moment
This is a perfect time for a Mucha revival, I think. Advertising creative is exploring new depths of cultural irrelevance. Marketing seems to have become an unimaginative haven for data scientists and bureaucratic functionaries. And company efforts to align themselves with social progress and “meaningful branding” are now in full, cowardly retreat. And so, reviving both the art and thought of perhaps the greatest advertising illustrator of all time, Alphonse Mucha is not only welcome but necessary.
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Panels & Prose 