Take a look at this editorial cartoon by John Tenniel from 1871. Because it's not a very hi-res image, I'll inform you that the two swords read "Radicalism" and "Toryism". Now, what is it about?

Well, it will only make sense if you know several things. First, you need to know what radicalism and toryism are. I suspect most folks could guess at radicalism, and assume toryism would be the opposite of that, but that still might be a stretch. Next, you'd need to know what that the subject of the cartoon is performing a Scottish sword dance and, more significantly, you'd need to have seen such an act performed to really understand what's involved in it. Third, you'd need to know that the illustration is of William Gladstone and that, fourth, he was Prime Minister of England at the time the cartoon was drawn. And even then, it would still help to know what platforms he stood upon and what speechs he had given in the latter half of that year.

The cartoon, by itself, for most people simply doesn't make much sense today. It's a just a Scottish guy stepping over a couple of swords. Even after several setences of explanation (see above), it's still doesn't carry much context, despite the incredible execution of the final product and the probably-super-poignent topicalness that it would've had in 1871. But the base of reference is too far removed at this point, and the cartoon doesn't make much sense, let alone seem funny.

I bring this up in light of the Six Chix comic I posted about last week. I ended that post by saying, "If you don't get it? If you misread it as being against mask-wearing during a pandemic? Odds are that you're deliberately not getting it. And you can fuck off because you're part of the problem!"

I had a related discussion on Twitter where someone was saying that if you assumed the cartoon was by an anti-mask wearing, right-wing cartoonist, he could see how someone might mistake the intent. My argument, though, is that you're still deliberately mis-reading the cartoon if you take that approach. The science behind mask-wearing is over-whelming. For a character to be so flippant about it, the reader can only take this one of three ways:

1. You can read the cartoon as intended
2. Cynically, you can read the cartoon as intended, but actively choose the wrong interpretation for the sake of trashing the cartoonist
3. You can be willfully dimissive of the science; the extension of which is that you will be willfully dismissive of the cartoon

In the Tenniel cartoon above, you don't have much, if any, context because we're well over a century away from when that happened. But Bianca Xunise's cartoon is current; it's about what is going on right now. Today. That is context that you are unable to get away from. The only way to not understand the context is to be willful about it. Whether that's by only getting your news from Fox, or believing anything Trump says, or whatever, you can't not be deliberate and willful in your thinking about it. You can't feign ignorance here.

Context is every bit as imporant in a cartoon as the content itself. If you misread Xunise's cartoon, you're doing it deliberately. Either by willfully misunderstanding the context, or by willfully misunderstanding the content. And, once again, either way, you can fuck off because you're part of the problem!

I don't recall how long it took bewteen reading my first Fantastic Four comic and when I read their origin. I'm pretty sure it was a reprint of FF #1 in either the 1970s' Fantastic Four Pocket Book that I picked up at a local comic shop or the copy of Fantastic Four: The Secret Story of Marvel's Cosmic Quartet that was at our local library. Probably the latter. Those two reprints are significant because they present very different contextual information about the origin, despite both being ostensibly the same story.

In the case of the Pocket Book, it includes reprints of the first six issues of the series in their entirety. It's a Pocket Book, so the art is obviously much smaller than a standard comic book (roughly half the size) but it was still eminently legible. And of course the origin leads right into their battles with the Mole Man, and then the Skrulls, Miracle Man, Sub-Mariner, and Dr. Doom. We see the team's headquarters and costumes and, while not as fully fleshed out as they'd later become, we get a good sense of who the characters all are for their first year. (The title was bi-monthly until issue #7.)

The Secret Story reprint is different. It doesn't include the Mole Man battle from the first issue, but does include reprints of issues #82 and #203 so we get more established, somewhat more contemporary versions of the characters with art by different artists. (Although only the three issues -- two of which are by Jack Kirby -- are reprinted, there are several spot illustrations throughout the book as well.) Additionally, author David Anthony Kraft provides introductions and codas to each story. Although those texts are still fairly superficial, they do point to some key elements that are note-worthy about the stories. So while the Pocket Book does indeed show that the FF don't get uniforms until issue #3, for example, Kraft relays that a superhero not having a costume right off the bat was unheard of prior that first story.

So which is the better way to read about the FF's origin?

Or what about the next time I read the origin in Thing #1? It's not a reprint, but a new retelling. It includes many additional details about Ben Grimm's life prior to his becoming the Thing. What about the truncated version in Fantastic Four #296 that came out a few years later?

I've noted before that, unless you bought the issue off the newsstand in 1961, you can never really experience the "proper" context for reading it. You've got the additional "baggage" of whatever else you've seen/heard/read/experienced that simply was not available in mid-1961. John F. Kennedy was still in the White House. Star Trek wasn't a thing. Man had not yet set foot on the moon. Home computers weren't available to anyone, much less portable ones, much less ones that are small enough to fit in your pocket and also include a phone, a camera, a GPS, hundreds of hours of music, and access to the largest interconnected network of knowledge mankind has ever created. Even if you get your hands on an original copy of Fantastic Four #1, you can't get the same experience or have the same context as someone who read it in 1961.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, just an statement of fact. But what's interesting now, decades later, is that there are several ways to try to address different types of context to reading FF #1, several particularly interesting versions of which came out last year in conjunction with the anniversary.

First is the Fantastic Four Anniversary Tribute which reprints (sort of) both FF #1 and FF Annual #3. The "sort of" comes into play in that every page has been redrawn by contemporary artists, some who've worked on the book before, some who haven't. While it's technically a retelling since it's not what Jack Kirby put down on paper originally, they're using not only Stan Lee's wording and dialogue but, in most cases, the artists lean very heavily on Kirby's layouts if they don't copy them outright. At both the page and even the panel level. When Lee was breaking in new artists at Marvel, he sometimes would have Kirby do rough layouts for their stories first, until the artist got the feel of the type of staging and pacing they were looking for. This feels much like that in a lot of ways.

Normally, I would think this type of approach -- having a different creative team with their own illustrative styles on literally every page -- would be jarring and hard to read. It might well be if you've never read the original story before, but I'm so familiar with it now that it was more of a visual exercise in seeing how different artists work (or don't work) in the same manner that Kirby did. Particularly with the artists that I'm more familiar with, it was interesting to see how much their style actually jars with what Kirby did. To be fair, I expect Kirby himself would lay out the story differently if he did even just a few years later (or if, as we learn about in the next collection, Lee hadn't mandated any layouts of his own) but this helps highlight how much Kirby's own illustrative style was integral to making that first issue work. These layouts, in many cases, simply don't work with many illstration styles, emphasized further by modern coloring techniques. That's the context to find here -- how much of Kirby's approach to drawing makes the story work, in a way that just doesn't for others.

Fantastic Four No. 1 Panel by Panel from Chip Kidd and Geoff Spear is a compartively massive tome in which they've taken a high-resolution photo of each page of an original copy of FF #1, and blown up each and every panel to a full page. Naturally, most panels don't conform to the exact dimensions of the book itself, so sometimes portions are cropped slightly or, more frequently, show some of the surrounding panels as well. While this does inherently mean that you're not seeing the page layout and the story flow is interrupted with having to turn the page much more frequently, it does afford the reader the ability to study the art in much more detail. At this scale, you can more readily notice irregularities that might indicate corrections or shortcuts that would normally be too small to notice.

Personally, I find this a little hard to go through. If there's an individual panel I want to study for some reason, that can be interesting, but going through the whole issue at this scale at this pace gets tiresome for me real fast. The design approach... well, I see what he was going for, but I think it only works for studying the details of a single panel. If you try to look at much more than that in a sitting, it becomes overbearing. What strikes me as more interesting is Tom Brevoort's page level analysis at the back, where he goes through and speculates on where Lee may have "influenced" page layouts or where someone like Sol Brodsky may have made corrections after Kirby turned the art in. While it is speculation, it's very much informed speculation. I believe he posted this on his blog at one point, but this version has been tightened up a bit and flows more smoothly with the art. Even though I did read this on his blog previously, I found his analysis here the most useful part of the book.

Brevoort also includes notes on the official Marvel house stat of the cover, compared against what was printed, which is an interesting read. Mark Evanier weighs in on how he thinks Lee and Kirby would have collaborated on the issue, before adding some oft-overlooked kudos to letterer Art Simek, colorist Stan Goldberg, and presumed inker Goerge Klein. Both Brevoort and Evanier reference Lee's original script (also reproduced in this volume) and then the entire issue is reprinted "normally" from the same photos. This provides the most 'academic' approach to context for FF #1 that I've seen outside acutal academic journals.

Another volume Marvel put out last year was Marvel: August 1961 which reprints every issue Marvel published in that same month as Fantastic Four #1. Although, unlike the previous book, this one presents all the stories in a "cleaned up" state. Though they use largely the original color palettes, they've all been recolored and had the linework smoothed out so they print nicely. Here again, Brevoort provides a little context in an introduction, summarizing the predicament the company was in at the time, going so far as to say that most of the titles being published then weren't very good. Not that they were outright bad, just pretty forgettable. Reading through this entire volume, you can see very directly how Fantastic Four stood out from everything else Marvel was publishing at the time.

This is actually an approach I tried independently many years ago, but many of the stories simply weren't available in any format. I think this type of context makes a great deal of sense because it shows readers of today essentially what choices a reader of 1961 had. Would the Fantastic Four stand out to you on a news rack that also showcased Orrgo, Sserpo, Kid Colt, and Millie the Model? Certainly your genre preferences would come into play here, but would Giganto breaking through the pavement on Fantastic Four catch your attenton over the giant spider on Journey Into Mystery or the creature from Krogarr on Tales to Astonish? The context here is certainly very company-specific; this is only what Marvel was doing and doesn't speak to any social or cultural reactions any of it may have been in regards to. Nor does it touch on any competitors' work that would likely have shared space on the newsstand. But it's insightful to see how far Lee and Kirby were taking things in Fantastic Four relative to what they themselves were doing at that exact same time!

Any and all of these provide some measure of additional context for reading Fantastic Four #1. Completely different contexts from any other reprintings or retellings. Personally, I find them all very useful to read through. Because I can't replicate that just-purchased-off-the-newsstand-in-1961 reading, I like bringing in as much as I can in as many different ways that I can. Not all of these are meant for everybody, of course. Some will have a context that speaks more specifically to one person over another for whatever reason. But as I'm more interested in the Fantastic Four than any other comic book characters ever created, I find trying to examine them and their origin story from these different vantage points offers me glimpses of how other people see and read them. And that gives me a better appreciation of what they respond to. Which, in turn, gives me a better appreciation of what I respond to!

Over at The Hooded Utilitarian, Ben Saunders ponders the question: has anyone really read Action Comics #1? He mostly looks at it from the perspective of the fact that, even as early as the mid-20th century, very few people had access to an original copy of the seminal comic book and the vast majority of us are relegated to reading reprints and digital copies. He brings up several salient points around the question, but only briefly touches on one that I think is quite significant.

When I first really started getting into comics as a kid, Fantastic Four was my favorite title. John Byrne was working on it at the time, and he was turning in amazing work month in and month out. In hindsight, it's really easy to see how I was hooked. After reading the book for several months, I realized that there were 200-some issues that came beforehand that I ought to read since I liked the characters so much. And the back issue hunt began.

Not surprisingly, my budget as an early teenager was limited, so I bought back issues in largely reverse order. The more recent issues were cheaper and easier to obtain, so my early finds were right around #200. Then, as I began working at McDonald's and started getting a semi-regular income, books around #150. Then closer to #100. I finally got an original #1 as a college graduation present from my folks. And I made a point to actually read those issues even though they were often in quickly deteriorating condition and I was already familiar with the stories via collections and reprints. (Keep in mind, too, that this was a couple decades ago. Well before the current crop of readily available reprints in multiple formats.)

But you know what I recognized even then? That I wasn't really experiencing the books "properly." By the time I read the famous Galactus Trilogy -- even the original copies -- I knew who Galactus was, how he operated, and much of his backstory. I'd already seen this world-eating giant physically beaten by Earth's heroes, saved by Reed Richards and legally defended by Odin! There was absolutely no way I could remove that context from my head while I was reading the character's debut. There was absolutely no way that I could experience seeing that character for the first time from his 1960s debut because I had already experienced him in the 1980s.

A few years later, Jim Lee was given the reigns of the book for a spell during Marvel's "Heroes Reborn" event. I was reading all the "Heroes Reborn" books at the time, and I distinctly recall getting excited about the impending finale with Galactus. Primarily because I didn't know what was going to happen. The way that series was set up -- essentially putting the old characters in an alternate reality with no ties to existing continuity -- meant that it could potentially even end with the destruction of the world and all its heroes, since it wouldn't impact/affect the "real" Marvel Universe. I believe I even said at one point that it would probably be the closest feeling I would get to reading the original Galactus Trilogy when it first came out.

But!

But that still happened in in 1997, not 1966. Over three decades apart. Galactus debuted before Watergate, before Star Wars, before MTV, before home computers... before everything that made 1997 what it was. There was no way I could experience the Galactus Trilogy in the "proper" context because I hadn't even been born in 1966!

Art is a reflection of the society in which it's created. Everything that was swirling around the collective social consciousness in 1966 informed how the Galactus Trilogy was created and how it was received. The further removed you are from that, the further you remove yourself from the original context. Even someone reading it in 1967 would have a slightly different context than anyone who read it the year before. Star Trek, for example, debuted a few months after the Galactus Trilogy concluded. So did The Monkees' first album. The Black Panther Party was created. Walt Disney died late in the year. Even within the span of a few months after the books were published, people were reading them in a different context because they had other things to contextualize the story against.

I specifically choose the Galactus Trilogy for my example here because it's a story that was quite powerful when it first came out. "Have the FF fight God" was the anecdotal inspiration for the story (and one that I dig up evidence for being reasonably accurate in an upcoming-but-not-sure-which issue of Jack Kirby Collector) and that made for a huge sea change in comic storytelling. At Marvel certainly, and eventually over at DC as well. The people who would've read it in 1966 and still working/playing in the industry are relatively few and far between, putting the book substantially into comics' past. But it's still recent enough that obtaining original copies is not all that difficult. So you can see/hear/feel the original and compare that against a reprint, but it's not something you're likely able to fully put into context. Because it's no longer 1966.

So, in that sense, does it even matter whether you read the original or a reprint or a digital copy? I don't know, but I think it's a relevant point that, as I said, Saunders touches on but doesn't explore very deeply.

Here's Doonesbury from yesterday in case you missed it...

Not surprisingly, a number of webcomics people took a bit of umbrage at the idea that the loss of newspapers means the loss of comics. As if comics were ONLY available through newspapers. Very quickly, several people took Gary Trudeau's comic and filled that blank space with tons and tons of webcomics.

The question is, though: what is Trudeau's actual tone here? Is he saying that comics would literally cease to exist if newspapers weren't around? Or is he being more satirical, pointing out the absurdity of that same idea?

I read through some of the discussions, and there were a variety of points raised and positions taken. Doonesbury is serialized online at slate.com and is a webcomic itself in that respect. Trudeau has shown himself to be a very smart and savvy cartoonist over the past four decades; don't forget the man was the first cartoonist to win a Pulitzer. He also makes a great deal of money selling books, which are distinctly not newspapers; would those books still sell -- at least enough to be profitable -- if the newspapers weren't around to subsidize the original comics? There's really no one in webcomics doing anything remotely like Doonesbury -- does Trudeau's style of humor really work online?

But here's another interesting point that was brought up. A lot of people don't read Doonesbury. Some cited his political leanings, others cited that he's past his prime, but many of the people who were complaining read the strip in isolation. That they saw it at all seems to stem from Spike Trotman running across it in an actual newspaper and posting a scan of it.

There's an editor's note on the aforementioned Slate site...

I checked with the home office, and the strip is nothing more than a simple gag about the state of newspapers. It was intended for the readers of the 1,100 daily and Sunday print editions that publish the strip. While understandably sentimental about his roots in print media, GBT was an enthusiastic, early adapter to digital platforms, creating three different CD-ROMS (1995), a web-based motion-capture video project (Duke2000), a milblog (2006), e-book editions of his anthologies, and of course, this website, launched in 1995, long before most webcomics were created. He first wrote about the social impact of computers, a favorite topic, in 1972.

I read Doonesbury daily. (Online, of course!) I've been reading it off and on for about 20 years, and pretty consistently for the past 7 or 8, I think. In the context of that, I didn't think Trudeau had any malicious intent, which is backed up by that editor's note. I think he was being deliberately satirical.

But readers need some context to get that. And the problem, I think, arose because so many webcomics people don't read newspaper strips, having dismissed them years ago as banal garbage ever since Calvin & Hobbes and The Far Side left the funny pages. (Curious aside: newspapers comics have ALWAYS been seen as funnier from when people were kids. People in the 1950s thought the current comics were crap and the stuff from the 1930s was the best. People in the 1970s thought the current comics were crap and the stuff from the 1950s was the best. Small wonder that people today are looking to comics from 20-30 years ago as the best material.) Humor is inherently contextual at least at some level; if you start making fun of a friend, they might take it in fun, light-hearted manner, but a stranger trying to make the same joke comes across like a jerk. That's because you and your friend have a historical context for the comment, where the stranger does not. Can you imagine sitting through a Don Rickles show if you came to it not knowing his shtick? Humor is an acquired taste.

Trudeau's joke is, I think, successful. But only in the context of those 1,100 regular newspapers that carry it. Trudeau was speaking to a decidedly known and finite audience and, for them, the satire is recognizeable. But the comic is not successful outside of that context, as evidenced by the number of people who took it more at face value. You know, though, that's been Trudeau's M.O. for years though -- looking at his caricatures of George W. Bush or Dan Quayle outside of reading the strip regularly wouldn't even make sense!

While one could suggest Trudeau is not being inclusive enough in his comics, writing them in such a way that only a relatively small number of people appreciate the humor, isn't that what webcomics do?

Eric Kim posted the following on Mastodon earlier this week...

He's got several excellent points here.

One thing I've been very keen on since college is being able to put the pop culture I currently like in context against where/when/how/why it was produced and by whom. I recall originally coming to this as a codified realization in respect to comedy; you can only understand (and laugh at) a joke if you understand what's being implicitly or explicitly referenced. Whether that's what expectation is being subverted or how you're deliberately conflating two homonyms or whatever, the joke is only funny in light of the audience understanding that. I later applied the idea to cartoons. I was a fan of the old Merrie Melodies and when I began to realize just how much Carl Stalling and others were borrowing from other composers, I began listening to classical music.

And this is a large part of the approach I've long taken to comics. I've said before how I first really got hooked on comics through John Byrne's Fantastic Four. This led me to digging through the rest of their history. Which led me to Jack Kirby and Stan Lee. Which led me to Marvel Comics as a whole. Which led me to superhero comics as a whole. Which led me to comics as a whole. I'm always trying to put my current reading into the context of everything that came before.

And because of all that, I can put in some measure of perspective when presented with someone's narrative of the craft and/or medium, whether that's How to Make Comics the Marvel Way or Understanding Comics or The Smithsonian Book of Comic Book Comics. Because I've expressly gone out of my way to read up on not only the official company line about Batman, but also what Bill Finger and Jerry Robinson and Jim Steranko and Jack Kirby had to say about Bob Kane, I can put the Wikipedia article about him in some measure of context. And that's not to say every first-hand account or Wikipedia article is wrong, of course, just that they're being presented with a specific agenda and knowing a broader context can help me discern what that agenda might be.

Bill Finger being sidelined in the creation of Batman for so many decades is an easy go-to for comics fans, but it's hardly unique. Frankly, it barely counts compared to many "people from maginalized backgrounds" as Kim puts it. None of Jay Jackson's decades of work was ever collected and/or reprinted until this past December, despite it being immediately worthy of an Eisner nomination. There's no Wikipedia entry at all for Chu F. Hing, creator of the Green Turtle. How many biographies have you seen of Filipino comic book artists? I know of only one. Much of Trina Robbins career over the past two decades has been bringing to light all the previously overlooked women in the history of comics. There are tons of people there who developed incredible work, but have long been glossed over because of their gender, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, or whatever. They're no less imporant than all those cis-het white men, but they were pushed aside when the history books were first written so others could take all the credit (and accompanying rewards).

So as Kim says, be aware of not only who is saying what, but also what they aren't saying. Who is being left out of the conversation and why? If you understand that, that's when you finally start to understand the medium.

Most of my personal comics library consists of books. Several thousand pamphlet comics, a few thousand trade paperbacks and hardcovers, and a few hundred prose books about comics. When I first started getting in to comics, reprints were sporadic and inconsistent at best, so a lot of what I picked up were the original printings of the comics stories. Because that's what I was primarily interested in. I wanted to learn about how the Avengers formed and what those original adventures were like, I didn't necessarily care that I had an actual copy of The Avengers #1. But for many stories, getting those original issues was literally the only way I could read them.

In the vast majority of cases, I'm interested in the story so I don't care what format it comes in. At one point, I wanted to see how Batman evolved as a character and bought the first several volumes of The Batman Chronicles. They're not great reprints and they're on cheaper paper, but it gets the basic stories across. I can see, "Oh, here's how they introduced Catwoman" or "Oh, I've got context for the Red Hood now" or whatever.

On occasion, I do find the context of the original book helpful. If I know a reprint has been modified somehow (often getting recolored) or if I want to look at the original fan letters or ads or something, I'll try to go back to the original if I'm able. That's still not always possible from a practical standpoint, but there are sometimes facsimile editions that come very close. I've actually picked up several of the IDW Artist's Edition books so I can even look at close reproductions of the actual art used for production. It's not quite as good as looking at the actual art pages themselves, but those are even harder to get your hands on than the old comics!

This brings me to a bit of my current dilemma.

I also have in my possession any number of ephemera that is tied to comics, but not actually comics themselves. Marketing pieces, mostly, promoting an upcoming series or event. They're almost entirely tangential to the comics I normally read. But they can provide a great deal of context that would otherwise be absent from the actual comics. Often there's some additional art unique to the marketing that is absent from the comics. Letters or promotional copy that help explain what the creators were trying to do, which might not be evident in the final product depending on how talented they are! I find this type of stuff incredibly useful when I'm researching something, but the problem is that it's frequently so rare that it's barely even known about by anyone, much less accessible in any form!

For example, I have in my possession a "business card" from Marvel's Taskmaster character that was used to promote the "Acts of Vengeance" storyline. (The front is pictured at the right, the back featured a checklist of all the issues the crossover was featured in.) Now, this was from Marvel and was widely promoted so I expect a number of folks who were Marvel fans from that era might recall it, but how often does this come up? If you were working on a piece about "Acts of Vengeance" how likely would you be to even come across a reference to it if you didn't know it already existed? And if you did, how likely would you be able to find one? It would have to be an original artifact because it's never been reprinted. Why would it be?

And that's one of the interesting challenges. Finding these esoteric metatextual items to put the actual comics in a broader context. This is the stuff that wasn't saved at all because people were interested in the comics, not the promotions of them. There historically was that proverbial mother who threw out every kid's comics, thus making many of them rare, but the kids themselves often didn't even bother to save the ancillary stuff, so those pieces can be even more rare! But those pieces can prove very enlightening if you can find them.

Of course, the downside to recognizing that is that you loathe to throw out anything you might get contemporaneously because you never know when it might prove to hold some significance later on. Which means I've also got in my personal library several drawers and boxes full of what likely looks like (and may well end up being) garbage. But you never know when it might come in handy...

Most of my personal comics library consists of books. Several thousand pamphlet comics, a few thousand trade paperbacks and hardcovers, and a few hundred prose books about comics. When I first started getting in to comics, reprints were sporadic and inconsistent at best, so a lot of what I picked up were the original printings of the comics stories. Because that's what I was primarily interested in. I wanted to learn about how the Avengers formed and what those original adventures were like, I didn't necessarily care that I had an actual copy of The Avengers #1. But for many stories, getting those original issues was literally the only way I could read them.

In the vast majority of cases, I'm interested in the story so I don't care what format it comes in. At one point, I wanted to see how Batman evolved as a character and bought the first several volumes of The Batman Chronicles. They're not great reprints and they're on cheaper paper, but it gets the basic stories across. I can see, "Oh, here's how they introduced Catwoman" or "Oh, I've got context for the Red Hood now" or whatever.

On occasion, I do find the context of the original book helpful. If I know a reprint has been modified somehow (often getting recolored) or if I want to look at the original fan letters or ads or something, I'll try to go back to the original if I'm able. That's still not always possible from a practical standpoint, but there are sometimes facsimile editions that come very close. I've actually picked up several of the IDW Artist's Edition books so I can even look at close reproductions of the actual art used for production. It's not quite as good as looking at the actual art pages themselves, but those are even harder to get your hands on than the old comics!

This brings me to a bit of my current dilemma.

I also have in my possession any number of ephemera that is tied to comics, but not actually comics themselves. Marketing pieces, mostly, promoting an upcoming series or event. They're almost entirely tangential to the comics I normally read. But they can provide a great deal of context that would otherwise be absent from the actual comics. Often there's some additional art unique to the marketing that is absent from the comics. Letters or promotional copy that help explain what the creators were trying to do, which might not be evident in the final product depending on how talented they are! I find this type of stuff incredibly useful when I'm researching something, but the problem is that it's frequently so rare that it's barely even known about by anyone, much less accessible in any form!

For example, I have in my possession a "business card" from Marvel's Taskmaster character that was used to promote the "Acts of Vengeance" storyline. (The front is pictured at the right, the back featured a checklist of all the issues the crossover was featured in.) Now, this was from Marvel and was widely promoted so I expect a number of folks who were Marvel fans from that era might recall it, but how often does this come up? If you were working on a piece about "Acts of Vengeance" how likely would you be to even come across a reference to it if you didn't know it already existed? And if you did, how likely would you be able to find one? It would have to be an original artifact because it's never been reprinted. Why would it be?

And that's one of the interesting challenges. Finding these esoteric metatextual items to put the actual comics in a broader context. This is the stuff that wasn't saved at all because people were interested in the comics, not the promotions of them. There historically was that proverbial mother who threw out every kid's comics, thus making many of them rare, but the kids themselves often didn't even bother to save the ancillary stuff, so those pieces can be even more rare! But those pieces can prove very enlightening if you can find them.

Of course, the downside to recognizing that is that you loathe to throw out anything you might get contemporaneously because you never know when it might prove to hold some significance later on. Which means I've also got in my personal library several drawers and boxes full of what likely looks like (and may well end up being) garbage. But you never know when it might come in handy...

I stumbled across this old post of mine from 2007 in which I talk about how context is important in the reading of editorial cartoons. The example I used was an 1871 political cartoon that makes no sense at all to contemporary audiences who likely have never even heard of the subject (William Gladstone) much less recognize what he looked like or what his politics were. And that was the crux of my point -- to understand the cartoon, you need the context of 1870s England.

More interesting, though, in seeing that post now, was my counter-example, a comparatively recent cartoon... That cartoon is fifteen years old now. When posted it on June 11, 2007, I argued at the time that most Americans would immediately recognize what the cartoon was about and could probably even pinpoint the day it ran (June 8) because the particular confluence of stories it refers to overlapped essentially for only a single day.

How many people today understand that cartoon? While I think Paris Hilton's star has faded somewhat since 2007, I expect she's still well-known enough folks would recognize her name on the newspaper, but would they recall more that? "Released? Released from what? Jail? She was in jail?" She served, like, two days of a 45 days sentence -- I wouldn't be surprised is she didn't even remember that at this point. And the person being shown in jail in this cartoon? Even with the name tag, how many people would know who that was? To be fair, it's not exactly a great caricature of him, but Scooter Libby has (smartly) kept a pretty low profile for at least the past decade; I suspect anyone under 25 or 30 has literally never heard of him and almost certainly doesn't know why he was sentenced. (Or why he served almost none of his sentence either -- but that occurred after this cartoon first ran, so it doesn't exactly apply to the context here.)

It's not a bad cartoon by any means. Perhaps not the absolute best one Mike Keefe ever did, but it's solid, both in the joke and the execution. But honestly, if I hadn't myself posted and discussed this cartoon back in 2007, I sincerely doubt that I'd recall enough of the details to make sense of it today. And I think that further reinforces the point I was first trying to make fifteen years ago: without context, even the best editorial cartoons can seem random and meaningless.

Imagine the life of your average person from, say, 500 years ago. They got up at the crack of dawn, did the morning chores, went off into the field and worked for the whole day before eventually coming back to the house for a late supper. This was well before home electricity was common, so there wasn’t much a person could do after the sun set. They spent much of their waking hours doing whatever their job was and often would define themselves in those terms. “I am a farmer.”

Now let’s jump to 100 years ago. Still a lot of work, but not quite to the sunup-to-sundown levels from before. There’s a little more room for entertainment, and a broader selection of jobs available. But they weren’t fully consumed and/or defined by their work. Maybe they sang barbershop on weekends, or took the family out for a ride in their new automobile. Whatever the case, the point is that they more ways to identify themselves, and might even adopt different identities depending on the context.

Today, things are a bit different. Here's how futurist Stowe Boyd put it several years ago...

There is a diffusion and shift of affiliation, belonging and identity in the emergent business context, relative to what has come before.

The transition to a context where people in general have more connections, but a smaller proportion of weak ties, means that affiliation is diffused. While a person might cowork with a larger constellation of people, fewer of those coworkers are likely to be connected to each other. This is the nature of loosening the network, even while increasing the degree of connectedness for each individual.

That's a little dense, but what he's basically saying is that we're more connected now than we used to be. We have more contacts with more people in a wider variety of ways. The people I know going to my local comic shop, for example, don't perfectly overlap with the people I know from writing about comics, despite being very similar types of groups. Extending that idea, those are both different groups from co-workers from other jobs, my family, my signifcant other's family, my friends from school, etc. I have a wider circle of people that I come into regular contact with.

The other part of what Boyd is saying, though, that those contacts generally aren't as deep. Whereas we used to live down the street from our co-workers and hung out with them after hours at a local bar, we might now live hundreds of miles apart and never see each other socially. What happens as a result of that is that we're not as integrated into each others' lives and only deal with each other in the context of a specific identity. I deal with this person strictly as a colleague and that person as a gym partner and this other person as a relative. The relationships aren't as deep and, therefore, tend to be more role-specific.

NPR has a podcast called Code Switch that speaks to that idea. Originally, the notion of code switching was linguistic in nature; how someone might switch from one language to another. They're using the phrase more broadly: "We're looking at code-switching a little more broadly. Many of us subtly, reflexively change the way we express ourselves all the time. We're hop-scotching between different cultural and linguistic spaces and different parts of our own identities — sometimes within a single interaction."

All this relates to fandom in how any given fan might act in a different situation. You've seen that "What people think I do..." meme? That speaks to this notion of code switching. As a fan, you act (and are perceived) differently around different groups. Relatives might not see the positive emotional benefits of your hobby and view it as a waste of money, and those you only meet at conventions only see your final works without a real appreciation for the amount of time and resources you may have put into things. As an individual, you're going to inherently react differently to those people in those situations and, before long, you're going to come to expect those types of people when you encoutner similar situations later. You begin to mentally code switch to another role.

These different identities can make things challenging for a fan. Back in the early part of the 20th century, finding another person who liked comic books the way you liked them was so hard that anyone who read them at all was a welcome addition. With the increasing number of identities we're able to (and often) adopt, and in no small part thanks to worldwide communications we have at our fingertips, we're able to distinguish between fans who like the Marvel Cinematic Universe because of the superhero asthetic and fans who like the MCU because it showcases a certain type of heroism and fans who like the MCU because of Kevin Feige's direction of the Studio and fans who like the MCU because Chris Evans is attractive.

There's nothing wrong with switching between identities, of course; it's quite normal and everyone does it to some degree, emphasizing certain character traits more than others in various situations. The key, it seems to me, though, is to be self-reflective enough to recognize how, when and where you code switch while you're in fandom, and thus be able to mentally and emotionally align yourself better to whatever group you happen to be with.

Sofia Warren's debut graphic novel, Radical: My Year with a Socialist Senator, is a rare breed of graphic novels. Not only is it non-fiction, but it's journalism. Warren spent a year more-or-less embedded with Julia Salazar, the New York State Senator for District 18. Warren contacted Salazar shortly after she won her primary and followed her first year in office, from having essentially no team at all to an office full of experienced staffers. There are elements of memoir here and elements of biography, but it's journalism in pretty much exactly the same way Joe Sacco's work is.

While Salazar and many of her initial staff were socialists, she ran on a Democratic ticket. While that wasn't unheard of even for New York state senate races, it had been some time since it had happened. Her primary campaign focus was on rent control, and that became much of the focus of her first year. One of the big challenges, though, was trying to both learn the ropes as a senator, figure out how those could be used in a socialist context, and still push through as much of her agenda as possible within that framework. My first thought at her approach was, "She's either going to be completely blocked from doing anything by those with more experience, or she'll get absorbed by the system and realize that you can't change the system at all." I could not picture any scenario that didn't end with a depressing narrative.

As Warren states early on, she opted to write this book more as an exercise in showing how the state legislature works and not so much a biography of Salazar herself. Her being a subject is essentially just a narrative hook to show the process in action; the reader learns about how everything works right along with Salazar. It's a practical, functional look at how things operate, not the idealized Schoolhouse Rock version you may have learned as a kid. What Warren does, though, with what so many people think of as a very dry subject is still put her emphasis on Salazar and several of her key staff, so readers aren't left with a cold version of events. We see the individual challenges and struggles these people have in learning how things work, how to work together cooperatively, how different approaches to the same problem can yield different results. It's in fact a very engaging narrative and that you happen to learn how legislation happens almost feels incidental, which is the best way to get someone to understand and remember something! As I said, Salazar's main platform centered on rent control. The basic ideas surrounding it are covered well -- both from the standpoints of tenants and of landlords, although as Salazar is the book's subject, sympathies are very much towards tenants. (It says she's a "socialist senator" literally in the title, so that should come as no surprise.) If you have any base knowledge of, well... anything political, I don't think it would be a spoiler to say that not every piece of legislation that Salazar wants to pass does so. Much of it does, however, and Salazar and her team are able to do some well-deserved celebrating towards the end.

Maybe it's me. Maybe it's four years of Trump, followed by an attempted insurrection, followed by the absolute barest minimum of repercussions and, even then, only for the people on the lowest rungs of the ladder. Maybe it's three years of a pandemic that the government has done far too little to combat, favoring the economy over the health and safety of the citizens it's supposed to represent. Maybe it's because I'm going to a memorial service later today for a friend who tried making a difference in local politics for years, saw it from the inside, discovered how mind-boggingly corrupt and insurmountable it is, and committed suicide because of it. Maybe I'm just too tired as I'm writing this. Maybe it's some combination of all of that. But despite Warren's attempt to end the story positively with a sense of both accomplishment and hope, I couldn't help but come away thinking, "We're fucked." Here we have someone who really wants positive change to benefit the people, who has the scruples to reject donations from large corporate interests, who had a massive groundswell of support both for her personally as well as her agenda... She had nearly everything in her favor and, in the end, she wasn't able to defeat the system. She got some important legislation passed and I don't doubt that it has helped many, many people. But she couldn't behead the minotaur; at best, she stabbed it.

And while, within the context of the story, that's certainly a win for Salazar personally and her team more broadly, I keep thinking about it in context of a larger scope. That the system is too large and ingrained to do anything more than slow down a little. It's still coming; it's still going to run you over; the most anyone can do is delay things a bit. And I don't mean for that to sound defeatist and that certainly isn't Warren's intent, but I can't walk away from this story feeling uplifted or empowered. No fault of Warren, no fault of Salazar... but I see it as much an indictment of US politican disfunction as the story of a good-hearted senator who wants to change the system from the inside.

Warren's craft is really solid. Particularly for as many characters as the book has. In fact, she has a "Who's Who Character Guide" before the story begins showcasing many of the main characters, but it's not needed. She's talented enough to make everyone distinct and defined within the context of the narrative. It's an excellent book if you want to learn about how state legislature -- particular New York's state legislature -- works, and it acts pretty darn well as a biogrpahy of Salazar as well. Warren even notes that she didn't intend this to be a biography of Salazar, but she wouldn't change much if she did want to refocus it. Any complaints or negativity I have written here today is with the system itself, not how Warren presented it.

Radical: My Year with a Socialist Senator came out last month from Top Shelf, and should be available at all major bookstores now. It retails for $24.99 US.

Onrie Kompan, in the final years of his grandfather Marx's life vowed to capture his story. Kompan knew his grandfather had lived a difficult life in general, made harder by being a Russian soldier during World War II. Kompan was able to wrangle a number of stories from his grandfather before he passed, and a few more from his grandmother -- despite neither seemed especially willing to discuss that period in much detail. But the results of those discussions, as well as some additional research, have resulted in Marx: A Tale of Survival. Kopman Kickstatered the book back in April and has been sending out copies from that recently.

The potential danger from a story like this is that the author can be too close to the subject. This not leads to an inherent bias in the storytelling, but it also runs the risk of only being interesting as a point of family lore. Just because your family thinks that wacky story about Uncle Albert is entertaining, that doesn't necessarily mean anyone else will think the same thing. And if you go so far as to include yourself in the story -- the challenges you had in crafting the account of it and such -- then you also layer on the risk of making the whole piece pretentious and self-absorbed.

The book opens with "My grandfather was no ordinary man. He led an extraordinary life." It's a relatively bold claim to start with, and it does suggest we've got a seriously biased author here. However, we do soon see things start getting very challenging for Marx when he loses his mother when he's only ten years old. His father was labeled an enemy of the state and killed a few years later. The story weaves in and out of Marx relaying his stories to Onrie, and the events themselves transpiring. Much like an oral telling, too, it's not entirely linear, though Onrie has no doubt straightened things out considerably. Readers do get the sense the story is being told to them in a conversation, and not so much a formally crafted narrative. But we learned about Marx surviving (barely) the front lines against the Nazis as well as some years in prison, being classified as an enemy of the state mostly on the grounds that his father was considered one.

What the story does well, I think, is that it's not just a relaying of what happened. But the basic narrative serves as an exploration of what made Marx who he was as a child and a young man, and how that gets reflected in his a life as an old/dying man. I think that's where a lot of generational conflict comes from; without the context of someone's life and all they've experienced, their actions and characteristics of today might not make sense. And frankly, even with that context, trying to peer through those foundations can be difficult even for a person who has that context. But it's only when you're able to piece together those elements, and (somewhat) objectively frame their actions with that does their rationale begin to make sense.

By the time you get to the end of the story, the "extraordinary life" claim from the front checks out. Marx did have to go above beyond "ordinary" for much of his life. Which makes the post-WWII summary that's presented as a prose coda all the more incredible! There's enough on that one page for an entire other book! I don't know if that will be coming or not, but I'll definitely back it if it shows up on Kickstarter at any point!

Though I haven't mentioned the artists, I thought Nick Bell, Vassilis Gogtzilas, and Dan Dougherty all did fantastic work. I did manage to secure one of Dougherty's original pages, and it really is superb even on close inspection. The changing artists does occasionally make identifying characters from one chapter to the next a little challeneging just by virtue of their diffrerent artistic styles, but Kopman seems pretty quick to make sure the textual content helps to parse that out in short order. And since it's only between chapters anyway, it's not a frequent or ongoing issue.

You can buy the book from Kopman's online shop for $14.95 if you missed the Kickstarter, and I expect he'll have copies at any conventions he tables at.

The last Calvin & Hobbes strip ran on December 31, 1995. We're over twenty-five years past that now. Which means that, for anyone under the age of, say, thirty, they have never read Calvin & Hobbes as a newspaper strip. For them, it has only been available in collected editions.

(Yes, I understand there were/are a handful of newspapers who continue to print re-runs of the strip, but those are becoming increasingly rare.)

Beetle Bailey, Garfield, even Barney Google can still be found in newspapers. But Calvin & Hobbes (or, for that matter, any strip that ended before 1995) is only known through collections now. I've never read Pogo as Walt Kelly intended; I'm only familiar with the strip through books.

Why is this significant? Don't the books do a better job of reproducing the strips, generally speaking?

They do, but the difference in presentation can drastically change a reader's perception. Most notably, the strips in a book format show up one after another and can be read in a fairly short time-frame. With the newspaper, though, you usually had to wait a full 24 hours before you could read the next installment. Which means that creators frequently provided a recap of the previous day, and would sometimes reuse gags. This is unobtrusive in a daily venue, but it stands out like a sore thumb in a collection.

Furthermore, book readers are inherently missing any context. Since the books come out significantly later, anything that may be a commentary on or reaction to some contemporary aspect of culture will be more removed. In the newspaper, you were not only reading the most current iteration of the strip, but you could flip a page or two of the paper to find all sorts of contextual clues in the paper itself if you were somehow removed from any other context! It's a newspaper; it has the day's news.

I talked about this with regards to comic books a few years ago, but I think it can be even more important in comic strips. And while you might think that a "timeless" gag strip like Calvin & Hobbes can exist perfectly fine without cultural context, how about some of these examples...

Kmart hasn't regularly used "blue light specials" since 1991 (before the strip ended). They've been revived a handful of times, but never for very long. And for that matter, there are literally only about a dozen Kmart stores left in the entire world at this point!

When was the last time you used an encyclopedia, much less a Britannica? They haven't published a print edition since 2010!

VCRs? They're old enough that there's a Kids React video about them.

Not to mention the old tube televisions, corded phones, etc. As good as Calvin & Hobbes still is, it will always be a product of its time, and it's being read and experienced now in a manner very different than how you may have first read it.

Let me leave you with one final strip...

Question: how much are your views about comics colored by the creators themselves? Not by their talent, but by their personality?

Quick example: John Byrne. Byrne's taken flak for a lot of years for his thoughts on this, that or the other. He's gotten into arguements with other creators and editors and fans, and that's dragged out into the public from time to time. It's frequently presented in a light that makes him look bad. So does your opinion of John Byrne, the person, affect your reading of Spider-Man: Chapter One?

Byrne's an easy example because he was one of the first "casualties" of what you might call the Silver Age of Comics Fandom. He became professional (and a popular one, at that) right around the same time that comic fans were really getting together and publishing professional-grade fanzines and organizing conventions and such. Prior to that period, fans' knowledge about comic creators was extremely limited, and they were judged almost solely on the quality of their work. But now fans had the opportunity to share information and rumors, and news of a comic professional's gaffs/quirks/opinions could be shared with nearly the entirety of the fan community. (Can you imagine if someone like Steve Ditko tried starting a career even as late as the 1970s?!)

Of course, reporting of information didn't have a 100% guarantee of accuracy. The old game of telephone was often in full operation, and a stray comment could be mis-construed and mis-interpreted and reach the ears of fans in the form of a full-blown, knock-down-drag-out between a writer and an editor.

Here we are, a few decades later, and the Internet has broadened the scope of the issue considerably. Not only do more people have access to the information, but it's also transmitted much more quickly. So a creator who might casually say at a convention that they don't like rice can find that they've got a flood of e-mails by the time the get back to their hotel room demanding to know why s/he is leading a boycott against the rice industry.

And, for good or ill, that seems to color how a creator's work is perceived by a large number of people.

Now, there's certainly something to be said for context. Without context, you won't understand jokes, social commentary, or subtexts. But if a creator writes a string of stories, none of which involve guns or shooting, his/her thoughts on gun control are pretty much irrelevant. His/her approach to dealing with editors is almost never relevant unless s/he is specifically writing about that. There's only so much context you really need and, for most comic books, you shouldn't need any to follow the basic story.

Personally, I try to separate the two as much as possible. In some cases, it's easy -- I've never actually met John Byrne, for example, so I can't really speak to his personality. In other cases, I have to admit, it's more difficult. On that end, I had a series of very nice, extended conversations with Salvador Larroca and it's harder for me to look at his work objectively. But even so, I have criticized his work on occassion, when I felt there was room for criticism.

So here's a suggestion to try. Select a creator who you don't like on a personal level. Doesn't matter why you don't like them. Then have someone loan you some of their work you haven't previously seen, and make an active effort to judge it on its own merits. I might also suggest mixing that loaner in with other material you haven't seen before, and try to skip over the credits in all the books, so you don't know which book is by the creator you don't like. (Although, artistic styles are sometimes distinctive enough that that might not prevent you from spotting whose work is whose anyway.)

Give it a shot -- you might find some work you might actually like.

I'm pretty sure that when Partition was covered in school, we didn't get much more than: India and Pakistan used to be one country and now they're not. There may have been a detail about making one country for Muslims and one country for Hindus, but there was certainly zero context provided. I did hear a bit more about it from an Indian-American professor I had in grad school, but that was in an economics course so it was almost more of a conetxtual aside than part of the formal curriculum. I do recall vividly, though, how he noted how abusrd it was and how, since he was from Jalandhar, he had more in common with someone from nearby Pakistan than he did with someone from Chennai, which is still in India but some 1600 miles to the south. The first time I saw Partition presented in popular culture was the 2018 episode of Doctor Who, "Demons of the Punjab," which was also the first time I had really gotten any real emotional context for how truly devastating it was to families at the time. This was reinforced with Ms. Marvel a couple weeks ago when Yusuf relayed the story of Kamala's great-grandmother, and Aamir added that every Pakistani family has a Partition story and all of them are tragic.

Which brings us to my reading from this weekend: What Is Home, Mum? by Sabba Khan which came out, I think, in April. Khan herself was born and raised in England, but her parents were both from Pakistan. And despite being born after Partition and having been on the "right" side of the new border anyway -- so her family didn't have to move off their ancestral lands in 1947 -- they still found themselves dealing with the repercussions of Partitions decades later and seeing their town deliberately flooded because of it. Over the course of years, Khan's family moved to England and she was born and raised amid a fairly large (at least by Western standards) extended family. The book then is a study of and reflection on self, identity, religion, and family.

While there are certainly elements of memoir here, I don't know that's really the point. Pretty much all of the personal incidents and anecdotes Khan relays are to provide a framework and context for the larger issues she's discussing. While the root of those issues, I suppose, is basically, "Who am I?" she is also trying to identify what is family (and who is her mother in particular), what does religion mean to me, and of course what is home. One thing I find particularly interesting here is that she doesn't hang these questions off a linear narrative. It's not an accounting of Khan's life in chronological order and she comes to realizations or understandings with time. As readers, we get more of her thought processes as she's trying to sort out these questions for herself. The questions are all intertwined to begin with and Khan's train of thought follows more along the lines of the issues in order of significance. We get, for example, an explanation -- both historical and familial -- of Partition pretty early on, as well as addressing some broad notes about her personal background. (Where she lives, went to school, etc.) She addresses the easy, borderline superficial answers first and adds nuance and complexity as the book goes on.

One of the ongoing topics in particular that I find interesting in the book is how Khan wrestles with religion. As with most people, she was initially raised in the traditions of her parents. However, as she grew older -- and, notably, in a decidedly more secular environment than her parents had grown up in -- she began questioning what she saw her family doing for faith that seemed to counter not only what she saw outside her home, but even within it. Particularly regarding the treatment of women. I don't often see personal accounts of losing one's religion, but Khan's story in particular is interesting in that she claims to have come closer to the divine in becoming more secular and embracing the love of an atheist.

Also interesting is her ongoing relationship with her mother. (Her father is not absent, but he doesn't figure nearly as prominently. Khan somewhat suggests that was a very deliberate choice on her mother's part, and that the her parents' relationship to one another was, at best, cold. That further suggests there's some additional generational trauma Khan hasn't even addressed here!) She has some insightful revelations when it comes to understanding where her mother is coming from, and that keeping an ongoing relationship requires both of them to meet the other halfway. Khan's upbringing was wildly different -- a different time, a different country, with parents dealing with very different issues. Of course, we're only seeing this from Khan's own perspective but I do get the sense that she's meeting her mother WAAAAY more than halfway (Khan's mother seems only barely tolerant of any non-Muslim ideas and openly passes judgement on Khan about them) even though Khan seems accepting of that.

I have said many times before that, as an able-bodied cis hetero white man, I have virtually all the privilege boxes checked. Popular entertainment caters VERY heavily to my demographic and it sadly requires too much effort to even find stories that are different. I don't doubt there were Partition stories that came out before that Doctor Who episode, but I didn't even really know that I was missing them beforehand! What Is Home, Mum? is not a Partition-specific story, but it is very much a story about a set of life experiences that are very different to my own. I don't know much cartharsis Khan experienced in sorting through everything to relay this story, but she does an excellent job of sharing what it's been like trying to wrestle with who she is and how she fits into both her own and her family's worlds.

What Is Home, Mum? was published by Street Noise Books and retails for $19.99 US. It should be available from all decent booksellers.

Mafalda has finally arrived in the United States!

I suspect like many of you, I'd heard of Mafalda years ago as THE best comic to come out of Argentina, often being favorably compared to Peanuts. Joaquín Salvador Lavado Tejón -- better known by his pen name Quino -- began the strip in 1964 (having created the character the year before) and continued on it until 1973. The strip's humor was allegedly incredibly witty and satricial, but despite the strips being collected in book form and translated/published around the world, it's only been in the last two weeks that we finally get an English-language version here in the States.

Mafalda collects the firsst 240 strips and the comparisons to Peanuts are almost immediately obvious. The characters bear little resemblance to one another and Quino's drawing style is nothing like Charles Schulz's, but the biting commentary on adults and adulthood coming from children hits in much the same way that the very best Peanuts strips do. The strips tend to focus on a single theme for 4-5 days in a row, frequently with Mafalda trying to learn more about a subject by discussing it with her friends, asking her parents, or by simply observing things around her. She comes to the topics with a child-like naivete but manages to pose extremely pointed questions like, "Papa? Can you explain why humanity is a disaster?"

While I think Quino was often writing the strips in reaction to current events, most of the strips don't require much historical context. There were a few references to the Vietnam War and a couple of news-worthy folks that have since fallen into relative obscurity, but even those references don't need much context to understand. I think the cultural touchstones might be a little harder for Americans to connect with -- while strikes are not unheard of here, certainly, we haven't seen the spate of them that would've been taking place (and are therefore referenced) in Argentina back in the '60s. Also, Mafalda has an absolute aversion to soup, going so far as to use "soup" as a curse word; I think I must be missing something with that bit.

But by and large, the humor holds up exceptionally well and it really is as good as I'd been led to believe. More amazingly, too, it starts right out of the gate with some good gags and the really biting stuff starts coming within a few pages. I've rarely seen comics start that well-crafted and well-defined that early on. Quino really knew what he was doing.

As far as I can tell, this version is -- aside from being an English translation -- basically just a reprint of the original Argentinian edition from 1966. It's a high-quality reprint, certainly, on a very nice paper stock with better-than-I-expected reproduction quality. (I half-wonder if they were able to use the original printing materials; all the linework is incredibly clean!) So it's a very nice presentation. But that also means there's no context for American audiences -- no introduction, no foreword, not even a note about when these originally were published. Granted, we are in 2025 so that's all easily found online and the majority of people likely to buy this book are already familiar with Mafalda's reputation, so it's probably not really critical to include, but it does come as something of a departure from what I think we're used to seeing in comic strip collections these days.

Like I said, this is the first time Mafalda has made it to the US. That's why you're interested. My review, nor anyone else's, is really going to sway you one way or another. You heard Mafalda was getting published and that was all you needed to hear. It's out now, and the hardcover retails for $18 US. It really does live up to its reputation, so go get it if you've got any interest at all.

Last night, Keith Knight gave an online presentation on behalf of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum and Library, which I sadly missed. But he's been giving talks about race and police brutality for years. This a review of his book They Shoot Black People, Don't They? that I ran back in 2015 and is, sadly, still very relevant.

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Last year, amid the summer of Ferguson, Missouri's protests, cartoonist Keith Knight realized he'd been drawing cartoons about police brutalizing and killing people of color for two decades. He went through his archives, pulling out many of the old strips, and built a presentation around the work that he started touring with it in November 2014 under the title "They Shoot Black People, Don't They?" It's been fairly well-received by my understanding, so when Knight put it together in book form earlier this month, I was curious to see what he had to say.

The book collects all the strips Knight uses in his presentation, plus a few more. I've found Knight does his best work when he's really passionate about a topic, and this certainly fits the bill. Which means that the comics here are of a very high calibre. Very insightful and poignant, with some brilliantly ascerbic takes on many ripped-from-the-headlines events. Many of the strips refer to specific incidents, which are not always immediately evident; the strips were written in the context of current news, so some incidents, particularly the older ones, may not resonate now as much as they once did. Which is true of any political cartoon, but the 20 year time-frame on the book's contents make some more accessible than others.

Interestingly, and to help counter some of that, Knight also includes some notes about the strips. Presumably, it's much of the same type of thing he talks about in live presentations. He makes note of some of the specific people and events that sparked some of the cartoons, and provides some additional background and context.

He also includes a fifteen point list by Chuck Creekmur on what you can do help stop police brutality. Some of the points are only relevant in particular circumstances, but others are more general. I strongly suspect Knight relays this same material in his presentation. And as Shaun King said in a quote Knight includes in the book: "If you ever wondered what you would do if you were alive in the Civil Rights Movement, NOW IS THE TIME to find out." It's clear that Knight is not just looking for another vehicle to peddle his work, but he's (understandably) troubled and concerned about this issue and is trying to use whatever platform he has to affect change. He's using his cartoons to alert people to what's happening, and then providing resources for how to change that.

The book's intentions are noble, certainly, and the cartoons have a fierce edge to that most cartoonists don't use. The only complaint I can lodge here is that Knight's additional notes are not printed in the book itself, but included as a set of additional pages. There are a few notes printed in the book alongside some of the comics, so Knight certainly had some idea to include additional context, but I'm not sure why most were printed up separately.

But the book itself is brilliant at making you laugh with rage. If you're like me, and can't see Knight present this material in person, this is the next best thing. Available directly from the artist for either $16 (regular) or $45 (artist's edition).

One of the many things my cishetero white male privilege affords me is a lack of kickback. I've been working on these "On -isms" pieces for over three years and I have not once been called out by someone who tried to mansplain what I said back to me, or "well, actually"ed anything, or dismissed my thoughts out of hand. Now, some of that probably has to do with my generally being unable to solicit responses of ANY sort on pretty much anything I write. That's been an issue I've had going WAAAAY back to my BBS days in the mid-'80s; I would regularly post active questions to active boards and threads, and receive zero responses -- not "I don't know" or "what a dumb question", nothing at all. So I learned long ago that there's something in my writing that people look at and just kind of shrug. I'm not sure how much of the lack of responses to my "On -isms" pieces stems from that, and how much is because I'm sitting in a chair of immense privilege, but either way, I've found I can talk about race, gender, sexuality, religion -- pretty much any topic where discrimination might be involved -- with zero fear of being harassed or bullied or worse. It's a power I wish I could give to so many people with so much more influence and reach than I have.

That said, I was reminded of the two instances in the decade-plus I've been blogging where I was harassed for what I wrote. And in both cases, it came from Christians who took offense to something I said. In the first instance, in reviewing a comic, I said that the heavily Christian theme that I wasn't expecting to see in the book came across as proselytizing. Considering the book was ostensibly about fighting zombies, I said that message bothered me because it seemed subversive. If you want to try to convert people to your religion, at least have the courage to do it openly. Well, I caught all manner of crap (on my own blog, and the author's site) from Christians (or at least people who claimed to be Christians) who tried raking me through the metaphoric coals. No death threats or anything serious, but a lot of name calling and mud-slinging and generally being rude assholes.

The second instance was after I had reviewed another book. It wasn't religious, although one character was a practicing Catholic. As such, he made a Biblical reference, the understanding of which was absolutely essential to the story. However, it wasn't a Bible passage he quoted or anything like that but a kind of oblique detail without any real context. No mention of which Biblical characters or even what story he was referencing. In fact, there was so little context, I didn't even realize it was a reference to a Biblical story until I Googled it afterwards. And I said that that was bad writing, not because the author used a Biblical reference, but because he provided zero context for anyone who might be unfamiliar with that particular detail of that particular story. Without that, the very climax of the book (where the reference took place) made no sense. I was again raked over the coals by Christians (again, or people claiming to be Christians) for saying that, and how EVERYBODY knew that reference and I was clearly an idiot who never bothered to read any significant literary works. Also, atheists are pretentious, arrogant assholes and if they'd only read the Bible, it would make them good people.

(I wish I were exaggerating with some of these responses.)

(Oh, and for the record, most atheists I know have read the Bible. That's part of why we're atheists.)

I also saw one other guy who didn't harass me, but did say at his own site that I was a deluded Muslim-sympathizer because I wrote a positive review of The 99.

Needless to say, these experiences did nothing to help my opinion of people who wear Christianity on their sleeve like that. But, like I said, these are just a few very isolated incidents. If I had received more bullying like this, my opinion of these people would not only sink lower, but considering that almost all my interactions with Christianity are along these lines already, I'd eventually come to conclusion that all Christians are assholes like this. (As it is, I find it really hard to mentally separate these "Christians" from all Christians.)

And that's me, sitting in my chair of nigh-universal privilege, with only a handful of really bad personal interactions to work with.

Now imagine if you got that all the time. Because of your skin color. Or because of your sexual orientation. Or because of a disability. That's why people often throw a blanket description of "White people should stop doing this..." or "Straight people need to stop saying this..." or whatever. Sure, there are exceptions -- you don't need to tell anyone that -- but they've had enough instances to color their perception against the majority. Maybe you should instead just listen and try NOT to be the type of person they describe.

The last Calvin & Hobbes strip ran on December 31, 1995. We're over twenty years past that now. Which means that, for anyone under the age of, say, twenty-five, they have never read Calvin & Hobbes as a newspaper strip. For them, it has only been available in collected editions.

(Yes, I understand there were/are a handful of newspapers who continue to print re-runs of the strip, but those are becoming increasingly rare.)

Beetle Bailey, Garfield, even Barney Google can still be found in newspapers. But Calvin & Hobbes (or, for that matter, any strip that ended before 1995) is only known through collections now. I've never read Pogo as Walt Kelly intended; I'm only familiar with the strip through books.

Why is this significant? Don't the books do a better job of reproducing the strips, generally speaking?

They do, but the difference in presentation can drastically change a reader's perception. Most notably, the strips in a book format show up one after another and can be read in a fairly short time-frame. With the newspaper, though, you usually had to wait a full 24 hours before you could read the next installment. Which means that creators frequently provided a recap of the previous day, and would sometimes reuse gags. This is unobtrusive in a daily venue, but it stands out like a sore thumb in a collection.

Furthermore, book readers are inherently missing any context. Since the books come out significantly later, anything that may be a commentary on or reaction to some contemporary aspect of culture will be more removed. In the newspaper, you were not only reading the most current iteration of the strip, but you could flip a page or two of the paper to find all sorts of contextual clues in the paper itself if you were somehow removed from any other context! It's a newspaper; it has the day's news.

I talked about this with regards to comic books a couple years ago, but I think it can be more important in comic strips. And while you might think that a "timeless" gag strip like Calvin & Hobbes can exist perfectly fine without cultural context, how about some of these examples...

Kmart hasn't regularly used "blue light specials" since 1991 (before the strip ended). They've been revived a handful of times, but never for very long.

When was the last time you used an encyclopedia, much less a Britannica?

VCRs? They're old enough that there's a Kids React video about them.

Not to mention the old tube televisions, corded phones, etc. As good as Calvin & Hobbes still is, it will always be a product of its time, and it's being read and experienced now in a manner very different than how you may have first read it.

Let me leave you with one final strip...