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Shelf Scan 2024: Can’t-Miss Comic Book Reprints
We go a little off the reservation this time to embrace a few pre-code comic book reprints and underground favorites that have come back into print this…
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Steven Smith
Peak Segar: Plunder Island (1934)
The Plunder Island sequence of Thimble Theatre Sundays that ran from December 1933 to July 1934 was E.C.
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Steven Smith
The Democratic Genius of Clare Briggs
The great Clare Briggs (1875-1930) continues to impress me as perhaps the most under-appreciated figure in American comics history.
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Steven Smith
Rockwell Kent: Accidental Cartoonist
Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) was not a cartoonist in any typical sense of the genre.
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Steven Smith
Shelf Scan 2024: Reviving Calvin, Nancy, Flash, Mandrake and Popeye…Again.
There are now generations of young adults who have no memory of daily newspapers, let alone that back page and Sunday section of comics.
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Steven Smith
The Timid Soul Toys With Fascism
The authoritarian strain in modern democracies has only heightened since I first posted this bit of cartoon wisdom several years ago.
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Steven Smith
I 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…
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Steven Smith
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.
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Steven Smith
Shelf Scan 2024: Necessary Reprints – From Anita Loos to Betty Brown
Moving through this year’s shelf of notable titles for comics aficionados, I wanted to call out several projects that revived forgotten or previously…
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Steven Smith
Buster 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.
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Steven Smith
The Fabulous Furry Revolution
The United States has never made a bold move forward without anchoring it in a reading of the past.
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Steven Smith
Tijuana Bibles: The Alternative America of Lust
The underground sex comics of the Great Depression were not just an interesting sidebar to comics strip history.
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Steven Smith
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