What’s Entering the Public Domain in 2026: Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, All Quiet on the Western Front, Betty Boop & More

in Books, Comics/Cartoons, Film, Law, Music | January 1st, 2026

Though it isn’t the kind of thing one hears dis­cussed every day, seri­ous Dis­ney fans do tend to know that Goofy’s orig­i­nal name was Dip­py Dawg. But how many of the non-obses­sive know that Mick­ey’s faith­ful pet Plu­to was first called Rover? (We pass over in dig­ni­fied silence the qua­si-philo­soph­i­cal ques­tion of why the for­mer dog is humanoid and the lat­ter isn’t.) It is Rover, as dis­tinct from Plu­to, who pass­es into the pub­lic domain this new year, one of a cast of now-lib­er­at­ed char­ac­ters includ­ing Blondie and Dag­wood as well as Bet­ty Boop — who, upon mak­ing her debut in Fleis­ch­er Stu­dios’ Dizzy Dish­es of 1930, has a some­what canoid appear­ance her­self. You can see them all in the video above from Duke Uni­ver­si­ty’s Cen­ter for the Study of the Pub­lic Domain, with much more infor­ma­tion avail­able in their blog post mark­ing this year’s “Pub­lic Domain Day.”

The year 1930, write the Cen­ter’s Jen­nifer Jenk­ins and James Boyle, was one “of detec­tives, jazz, speakeasies, and icon­ic char­ac­ters step­ping onto the cul­tur­al stage — many of whom have been locked behind copy­right for near­ly a cen­tu­ry.”

Nov­els that come avail­able this year include William Faulkn­er’s As I Lay Dying, Dashiell Ham­met­t’s The Mal­tese Fal­con, and Agatha Christie’s The Mur­der at the Vic­arage; among the films are Lewis Mile­stone’s Best Pic­ture-win­ning All Qui­et on the West­ern Front, Vic­tor Heer­man’s Marx Broth­ers pic­ture Ani­mal Crack­ers, and Luis Buñuel and Sal­vador Dalí’s L’Âge d’Or. In music, com­po­si­tions like “I Got Rhythm” and “Embrace­able You” by the Gersh­win Broth­ers as well as record­ings like “Nobody Knows the Trou­ble I’ve Seen” by Mar­i­an Ander­son and “Sweet Geor­gia Brown” by Ben Bernie and His Hotel Roo­sevelt Orches­tra have also, at long last, gone pub­lic.

Reflec­tion on some of these works them­selves sug­gests some­thing about the impor­tance of the pub­lic domain. With the title of Cakes and Ale, anoth­er book in this year’s crop, Som­er­set Maugh­am makes ref­er­ence to “a clas­sic pub­lic domain work, in this case Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night”; so, for that mat­ter, does Faulkn­er, giv­en that the line “as I lay dying” comes from the Odyssey. “To tell new sto­ries, we draw from old­er ones,” write Jenk­ins and Boyle. “One work of art inspires anoth­er — that is how the pub­lic domain feeds cre­ativ­i­ty.” Today, we’re free to take explic­it inspi­ra­tion for our own work from Nan­cy Drew, “Just a Gigo­lo,” Blondie, Mon­dri­an’s Com­po­si­tion with Red, Blue, and Yel­low, Hitch­cock­’s Mur­der!, and much else besides. And by all means use Rover, but if you also want to bring in Dip­py Dawg, you’re going to have to wait until 2028.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What’s Enter­ing the Pub­lic Domain in 2025: Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Ear­ly Hitch­cock Films, Tintin and Pop­eye Car­toons & More

The Harlem Jazz Singer Who Inspired Bet­ty Boop: Meet the Orig­i­nal Boop-Oop-a-Doop, “Baby Esther”

Car­toon­ists Draw Their Famous Car­toon Char­ac­ters While Blind­fold­ed (1947)

Watch Restored Ver­sions of Clas­sic Fleis­ch­er Car­toons on Youtube, Fea­tur­ing Bet­ty Boop, Koko the Clown & Oth­ers

Vin­tage Audio: William Faulkn­er Reads From As I Lay Dying

16 Free Hitch­cock Movies Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Did Tintin Creator Hergé Collaborate with the Nazis? A Historical Investigation

in Art, Comics/Cartoons, History | December 4th, 2025

The Adven­tures of Tintin may be a chil­dren’s com­ic series from mid-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Europe, but its appeal has long since tran­scend­ed the bound­aries of form, cul­ture, and gen­er­a­tion. In fact, many if not most seri­ous­ly ded­i­cat­ed fans of Tintin are in mid­dle age and beyond, and few of them can have avoid­ed ever con­sid­er­ing the ques­tion of his cre­ator’s activ­i­ties dur­ing the Sec­ond World War. Georges Remi, known by the nom de plume Hergé, was born to a low­er-mid­dle-class fam­i­ly in a Brus­sels sub­urb in 1907: utter­ly mun­dane begin­nings, per­haps, but ones that would lead to what the apoc­ryphal ancient Chi­nese curse calls inter­est­ing times, even for a young man whose inter­ests did­n’t run far past scout­ing and draw­ing.

After serv­ing in the Bel­gian army, explains his­to­ry YouTu­ber Mark Fel­ton in his new video above, Remi was hired by the con­ser­v­a­tive Catholic paper Le Vingtième Siè­cle to draw comics for its chil­dren’s sup­ple­ment Le Petit Vingtième. It was there that he became Hergé and cre­at­ed the boy reporter Tintin, whom the paper’s edi­tor asked to be sent to a fic­tion­al­ized Sovi­et Union in order to expose the evils of the Bol­she­viks. Pop­u­lar­i­ty came imme­di­ate­ly, and built up to the degree that an actor was hired to put his hair into a quiff and “return” by train to an appre­cia­tive crowd in Brus­sels upon the sto­ry’s con­clu­sion. There fol­lowed the fur­ther adven­tures of Tintin in the Con­go (at the time, a Bel­gian colony) and Tintin in Amer­i­ca, both of which have since come in for a great deal of crit­i­cism for their reliance on stereo­types.

Though very much his own artist, Hergé at this stage let the pol­i­tics of Tintin sto­ries be dic­tat­ed by high­er-ups. Con­ceived in response to Japan’s inva­sion of Manchuria, The Blue Lotus, from 1934, did offer him an oppor­tu­ni­ty to increase the real­ism of his art, ren­der­ing the look and feel of Chi­na as accu­rate­ly as his research could make pos­si­ble; he con­tin­ued to incor­po­rate large amounts of detail from all over the world into The Bro­ken Ear, The Black Island, and King Ottokar’s Scep­tre. Though that last deals with fic­tion­al Euro­pean coun­tries, it also clear­ly sat­i­rizes the inva­sive ten­den­cies of Hitler’s Ger­many — which would come for Hergé’s home­land in 1940, shut­ting down Le Petit Vingtième, putting him out of a job, and even req­ui­si­tion­ing his home.

Even­tu­al­ly, Hergé land­ed on his feet and joined Le Soir, Bel­gium’s largest French-lan­guage news­pa­per. Though he could pub­lish Tintin there, the Nazis had turned it into their ide­o­log­i­cal mouth­piece, a fact that did­n’t reflect well on Hergé after the Allied vic­to­ry. He found him­self black­list­ed and cat­e­go­rized with the thou­sands of Bel­gian col­lab­o­ra­tors who could receive the death penal­ty or life in prison, but an inves­ti­ga­tion into his case found him to be “a blun­der­er rather than a trai­tor” — shades of P. G. Wode­house mak­ing broad­casts about the lighter side of intern­ment for the Gestapo. His good stand­ing as a cit­i­zen and artist was even­tu­al­ly restored, though even today, his wartime activ­i­ties are occa­sion­al­ly called into ques­tion. Still, he was able to con­tin­ue Tintin’s adven­tures until he died in 1983, engag­ing in only the kind of col­lab­o­ra­tion he could do with his staff at Stu­dios Hergé.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hergé Draws Tintin in Vin­tage Footage (and What Explains the Character’s Endur­ing Appeal)

How Andy Warhol and Tintin Cre­ator Hergé Mutu­al­ly Admired and Influ­enced One Anoth­er

Comics Inspired by Wait­ing for Godot, Fea­tur­ing Tintin, Roz Chast, and Beav­is & Butthead

How Dis­ney Fought Fas­cism with Pro­pa­gan­da Car­toons Dur­ing World War II & Avert­ed Finan­cial Col­lapse

How the Nazis Waged War on Mod­ern Art: Inside the “Degen­er­ate Art” Exhi­bi­tion of 1937

The Nazis’ 10 Con­trol-Freak Rules for Jazz Per­form­ers: A Strange List from World War II

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

An Introduction to Moebius, the Comic Artist Who Influenced Blade Runner and Miyazaki

in Art, Comics/Cartoons | September 30th, 2025

The work of the com­ic artist Jean Giraud, bet­ter known as Moe­bius (or, more styl­ish­ly, Mœbius), has often appeared on Open Cul­ture over the years, but even if you’ve nev­er seen it here, you know it. Grant­ed, you may nev­er have read a page of it, to say noth­ing of an entire graph­ic nov­el­’s worth, but even so, you’ve absorbed it indi­rect­ly through gen­er­a­tions of inter­na­tion­al pop­u­lar cul­ture. If you enjoy Blade Run­ner, Aki­ra, the man­ga and ani­me of Hayao Miyaza­ki, and even the Star Wars movies, you must, on some lev­el, enjoy Moe­bius, so deeply did his com­ic art shape the look and feel of those major works, to say noth­ing of all it has inspired at fur­ther remove.

The new video above by Youtu­ber matttt goes in depth on the bio­graph­i­cal, cul­tur­al, and psy­cho­log­i­cal force that shaped the artist’s vision on the page, whose sheer imag­i­na­tive force and per­sis­tent­ly strange sub­lim­i­ty looked like noth­ing else in comics when he hit his stride in the nine­teen-sev­en­ties. It helped that he was French, and thus an inher­i­tor of the grand Fran­coph­o­ne tra­di­tion of the bande dess­inée, an art form tak­en much more seri­ous­ly than com­ic strips and books in Amer­i­ca. Bel­gian comics like Spirou and Tintin caught his atten­tion ear­ly on, and time spent as a teenag­er amid the vast desert land­scapes of Mex­i­co instilled him with a taste for spir­i­tu­al grandeur.

An appren­tice­ship under the Bel­gian com­ic artist Joseph “Jijé” Gillain, whom he idol­ized, helped Giraud — who had not yet become Moe­bius — to refine his style. His cre­ation of the Jean Paul Bel­mon­do-look­ing cow­boy Blue­ber­ry in the ear­ly nine­teen-six­ties pro­duced what turned out to be his most lucra­tive fran­chise.  But it was­n’t until his encounter with taboo-break­ing Amer­i­can “under­ground” comics that flour­ished lat­er in that decade, and espe­cial­ly the work of Robert Crumb, that he found it with­in him­self to let loose, explor­ing tech­no­log­i­cal, mytho­log­i­cal, and psy­cho­sex­u­al realms hith­er­to unknown in his medi­um.

It was with the launch of the comics-anthol­o­gy mag­a­zine Métal Hurlant in 1974, lat­er repack­aged in the Unit­ed States as Heavy Met­al, that Moe­bius’ work found its way to a much wider pub­lic. Notable read­ers includ­ed William Gib­son, Rid­ley Scott, Luc Besson, George Lucas, Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky, and the Wachowskis: some imi­tat­ed Moe­bius, and oth­ers hired him. Through the Japan­ese edi­tion of Star­log mag­a­zine in the late sev­en­ties, his art re-shaped the aes­thet­ics of man­ga­ka like Aki­ra cre­ator Kat­suhi­ro Oto­mo and Stu­dio Ghi­b­li co-founder Hayao Miyaza­ki. Moe­bius him­self lat­er took on Oto­mo as one of his own influ­ences, and in trib­ute to Miyaza­ki, named his daugh­ter Nau­si­caa. For Jean Giraud, inspi­ra­tion was­n’t a one-way street; it was more like a Möbius strip.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch Ground­break­ing Com­ic Artist Mœbius Draw His Char­ac­ters in Real Time

Mœbius & Jodorowsky’s Sci-Fi Mas­ter­piece The Incal Brought to Life in a Tan­ta­liz­ing Ani­ma­tion

The Long Tomor­row: Dis­cov­er Mœbius’ Hard-Boiled Detec­tive Com­ic That Inspired Blade Run­ner (1975)

Watch Moe­bius and Miyaza­ki, Two of the Most Imag­i­na­tive Artists, in Con­ver­sa­tion (2004)

Moe­bius Gives 18 Wis­dom-Filled Tips to Aspir­ing Artists

The Dis­ney Artist Who Devel­oped Don­ald Duck & Remained Anony­mous for Years, Despite Being “the Most Pop­u­lar and Wide­ly Read Artist-Writer in the World”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Superman vs. the KKK: Hear the 1946 Superman Radio Show That Weakened the Klan

in Comics/Cartoons, History | March 28th, 2025

Years ago, back in 2016, we fea­tured a 1950 Super­man poster that urged stu­dents to defend the Amer­i­can way and fight dis­crim­i­na­tion every­where. Today, we present anoth­er chap­ter from Super­man’s lit­tle-known his­to­ry as a Civ­il Rights defend­er.

The year is 1946. World War II has come to an end. And now mem­ber­ship in the Ku Klux Klan starts to rise again. Enter Stet­son Kennedy, a human rights activist, who man­ages to infil­trate the KKK and then fig­ures out an inge­nious way to take them down. He con­tacts the pro­duc­ers of the pop­u­lar Adven­tures of Super­man radio show, and pitch­es them on a new sto­ry­line: Super­man meets and defeats the KKK. Need­ing a new ene­my to van­quish, the pro­duc­ers green­light the idea.

The 16-episode series, “The Clan of the Fiery Cross,” aired in June 1946 and effec­tive­ly chipped away at the Klan’s mys­tique, grad­u­al­ly reveal­ing their secret code­words and rit­u­als. Lis­ten to the episodes above. And take heart in know­ing this: Accord­ing to Stephen J. Dub­n­er and Steven Levitt, the authors of Freako­nom­ics, The Clan of the Fiery Cross was “the great­est sin­gle con­trib­u­tor to the weak­en­ing of the Ku Klux Klan.” Mocked and triv­i­al­ized, the Klan’s num­bers went back into decline.

For more infor­ma­tion on this chap­ter in super­hero his­to­ry, read the well-reviewed YA book, Super­man Ver­sus the Ku Klux Klan: The True Sto­ry of How the Icon­ic Super­hero Bat­tled the Men of Hate. Also find more infor­ma­tion on these episodes at the Super­man Home­page.

To hear more orig­i­nal Super­man radio shows, head over to Archive.org.

Note: There is a lit­tle bit of a con­tro­ver­sy about the exact role Stet­son Kennedy played in infil­trat­ing the Klan. You can read up on that here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Orig­i­nal 1940s Super­man Car­toon: Watch 17 Clas­sic Episodes Free Online

1950 Super­man Poster Urged Kids to Defend All Amer­i­cans, Regard­less of Their Race, Reli­gion or Nation­al Ori­gin

Read Mar­tin Luther King and The Mont­gomery Sto­ry: The Influ­en­tial 1957 Civ­il Rights Com­ic Book

75 Years of Super­man in 2 Min­utes

Nine Clas­sic Super­man Car­toons Restored and Now on YouTube

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

What’s Entering the Public Domain in 2025: Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Early Hitchcock Films, Tintin and Popeye Cartoons & More

in Books, Comics/Cartoons, Film, Law, Music | January 1st, 2025

Each Pub­lic Domain Day seems to bring us a rich­er crop of copy­right-lib­er­at­ed books, plays, films, musi­cal com­po­si­tions, sound record­ings, works of art, and oth­er pieces of intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty. This year hap­pens to be an espe­cial­ly notable one for con­nois­seurs of Bel­gian cul­ture. Among the char­ac­ters enter­ing the Amer­i­can pub­lic domain, we find a cer­tain boy reporter named Tintin, who first appeared — along with his faith­ful pup Milou, or in Eng­lish, Snowy — in the Jan­u­ary 10th, 1929 issue of Le Petit Vingtième, the chil­dren’s sup­ple­ment of the news­pa­per Le Vingtième Siè­cle.

Now, here in le vingt-et-unième-siè­cle, that first ver­sion of Tintin can be rein­vent­ed in any man­ner one can imag­ine — at least in the Unit­ed States. In the Euro­pean Union, as the Duke Cen­ter for the Study of the Pub­lic Domain direc­tors Jen­nifer Jenk­ins and James Boyle note in their Pub­lic Domain Day blog post for this year, that Tintin remains under copy­right until 2054, a date based on his cre­ator Hergé hav­ing died in 1983. The thor­ough­ly Amer­i­can com­ic-strip hero Pop­eye also made his debut in 1929, but as Jenk­ins and Boyle has­ten to add, while that “Pop­eye 1.0 had super­hu­man capa­bil­i­ties, he did not derive them from eat­ing spinach until 1931.” Even so, “it appears that the copy­right in this 1931 com­ic strip was not renewed — if this is true, Popeye’s spinach-fueled strength is already in the pub­lic domain.”

This year also brings a devel­op­ment in a sim­i­lar mat­ter of detail relat­ed to no less a car­toon icon than Mick­ey Mouse: last year freed the first ver­sion of Mick­ey Mouse, his riv­er-nav­i­gat­ing, farm-ani­mal-bash­ing Steam­boat Willie incar­na­tion. “In 2025 we wel­come a dozen new Mick­ey Mouse films from 1929,” write Jenk­ins and Boyle, “Mick­ey speaks his first words – ‘Hot dogs! Hot dogs!’ – and debuts his famil­iar white gloves. That ver­sion of Mick­ey is now offi­cial­ly in the pub­lic domain.”

This Pub­lic Domain Day also brings us lit­er­ary works like Faulkn­er’s The Sound and the Fury, Hem­ing­way’s A Farewell to Arms, Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (as well as detec­tive nov­els from Agatha Christie and the pseu­do­ny­mous Ellery Queen, once the biggest mys­tery writer in Amer­i­ca); the first sound films by Alfred Hitch­cock, John Ford, and the Marx Broth­ers; musi­cal com­po­si­tions like “Sin­gin’ in the Rain,” Gersh­win’s An Amer­i­can in Paris, and Rav­el’s Boléro; actu­al record­ings of Rhap­sody in Blue and “It Had To Be You”; and Sur­re­al­ist works of art by Sal­vador Dalí and — pend­ing fur­ther inves­ti­ga­tion into their copy­right sta­tus — per­haps even René Magritte, whose L’empire des lumières just sold for a record $121 mil­lion. Who knows? 2025 could be the year we all look to Bel­gium for inspi­ra­tion.

For more on what’s enter­ing the pub­lic domain today, vis­it this Duke Uni­ver­si­ty web­site.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hergé Draws Tintin in Vin­tage Footage (and What Explains the Character’s Endur­ing Appeal)

An Intro­duc­tion to René Magritte, and How the Bel­gian Artist Used an Ordi­nary Style to Cre­ate Extra­or­di­nar­i­ly Sur­re­al Paint­ings

William Faulkn­er Reads His Nobel Prize Speech

Alfred Hitch­cock Presents Some of the First Words Ever Spo­ken on Film .… and They’re Saucy Ones (1929)

An Ear­ly Ver­sion of Mick­ey Mouse Enters the Pub­lic Domain on Jan­u­ary 1, 2024

What’s Enter­ing the Pub­lic Domain in 2024: Enjoy Clas­sic Works by Vir­ginia Woolf, Char­lie Chap­lin, Buster Keaton, D. H. Lawrence, Bertolt Brecht & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

A Short Visual History of America, According to the Irreverent Comic Artist R. Crumb

in Comics/Cartoons | October 25th, 2024

As a founder of the “under­ground comix” move­ment in the 1960s, R. Crumb is either revered as a pio­neer­ing satirist of Amer­i­can cul­ture and its excess­es or reviled as a juve­nile pur­vey­or of painful­ly out­mod­ed sex­ist and racist stereo­types. Crumb doesn’t apol­o­gize. He keeps work­ing, and his fans are grate­ful. He has par­layed his sex­u­al obses­sions and out­sider rela­tion­ship to black cul­ture into an intrigu­ing vision of the coun­try that reflects its own fix­a­tions as much as those of the artist/author of comics like Zap and Weirdo.

But Crumb’s work—permeated by drug use, pop-cul­ture ref­er­ences, skirt-chas­ing over­sexed men, very specif­i­cal­ly shaped (and always sex­u­al­ly avail­able) women, and all sorts of creepy under­ground characters—has anoth­er side: an almost sen­ti­men­tal attach­ment to purist Amer­i­cana from the late-nine­teen­th/ear­ly-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. Most notably Crumb is an anti­quar­i­an col­lec­tor of old-time music—country, jazz, rag­time, the blues—as well as a musi­cal inter­preter of the same. One of my favorites of his books col­lects a series of trad­ing cards he made into R. Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Coun­try, a rev­er­en­tial set of illus­tra­tions of folk musi­cians, accom­pa­nied by a CD of Crumb-curat­ed music.

Crumb’s love for sim­pler times is more than the pas­sion of an afi­ciona­do. It is the flip side of his satire, a genre that can­not flour­ish as a cri­tique of the present with­out a cor­re­spond­ing vision of a gold­en age. For Crumb, that age is pre-WWII, pre-indus­tri­al, rural—a time, as he has put it in an inter­view, when “peo­ple could still express them­selves.” His expe­ri­ence with the slop of Amer­i­can pop­u­lar cul­ture was decid­ed­ly less idyl­lic. Ian Buru­ma writes in The New York Review of Books:

Crumb, like his broth­ers, soaked up the TV and comics cul­ture of the 1950s: Howdy Doo­dy, Don­ald Duck, Roy Rogers, Lit­tle Lulu, and the like. While on LSD, in the 1960s, Crumb thought of his mind as “a garbage recep­ta­cle of mass media images and input. I spent my whole child­hood absorb­ing so much crap that my per­son­al­i­ty and mind are sat­u­rat­ed with it. God only knows if that affects you phys­i­cal­ly!”

Crumb’s com­ic art—which he has described in almost ther­a­peu­tic terms as an emp­ty­ing of his “garbage recep­ta­cle” unconscious—is bal­anced by his more sober and nos­tal­gic illus­tra­tions, the coun­ter­weight to the “crap” of his child­hood media expo­sure. One might even think of Crumb’s con­sump­tion of old-time music and imagery as a kind of cul­tur­al health food diet. One of the most pop­u­lar of his nos­tal­gic works is “A Short His­to­ry of Amer­i­ca” (1979), a series of pan­els show­ing the shift from open coun­try­side, to the town set­tle­ments brought by the rail­roads, to the gross overde­vel­op­ment of the late-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. The only text besides the title (and the bur­geon­ing bill­boards and street signs) is a coda at the bot­tom-right-hand of the last pan­el ask­ing, “What next?!!!” You can see the com­ic ani­mat­ed above (top), set to an old-time piano piece. Anoth­er fit­ting ver­sion of his vision of the country’s growth (or ruina­tion) is above, in col­or, scored by Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yel­low Taxi.” See the full series of images here and here, and be sure to check out Crum­b’s three epi­logue spec­u­la­tions on what’s next.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site in 2013.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

R. Crumb Describes How He Dropped LSD in the 60s & Instant­ly Dis­cov­ered His Artis­tic Style

Robert Crumb Illus­trates Philip K. Dick’s Infa­mous, Hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry Meet­ing with God (1974)

R. Crumb Shows Us How He Illus­trat­ed Gen­e­sis: A Faith­ful, Idio­syn­crat­ic Illus­tra­tion of All 50 Chap­ters

R. Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Coun­try Fea­tures 114 Illus­tra­tions of the Artist’s Favorite Musi­cians

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Peanuts Creator Charles Schulz Shares with a 10-Year-Old Kid the True Meaning of Good Citizenship

in Comics/Cartoons, Life | October 16th, 2024

In 1970, when 10-year-old Joel Lin­ton asked Charles Schulz, the cre­ator of Peanuts, “What do you think makes a good cit­i­zen?” Schulz sent the young­ster a short but pithy reply:

Dear Joel:

I think it is more dif­fi­cult these days to define what makes a good cit­i­zen than it has ever been before. Cer­tain­ly all any of us can do is fol­low our own con­science and retain faith in our democ­ra­cy. Some­times it is the very peo­ple who cry out the loud­est in favor of get­ting back to what they call “Amer­i­can Virtues” who lack this faith in our coun­try. I believe that our great­est strength lies always in the pro­tec­tion of our small­est minori­ties.

Sin­cere­ly yours,

Charles M. Schulz

When this let­ter sur­faced in 2019, Schulz’s wid­ow com­ment­ed, “I con­tin­u­al­ly find com­ic strips that could have been writ­ten for today’s audi­ence.” “This says what needs to be said now.” Need­less to say, the same mes­sage bears repeat­ing in 2024.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent 

23 Min­utes of Charles Schulz Draw­ing Peanuts

Umber­to Eco Explains the Poet­ic Pow­er of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts

How Franklin Became Peanuts’ First Black Char­ac­ter, Thanks to a Car­ing School­teacher (1968)

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

T. S. Eliot’s Classic Modernist Poem The Waste Land Gets Adapted into Comic-Book Form

in Art, Comics/Cartoons, Poetry | October 8th, 2024

The phrase “April is the cru­elest month” was first print­ed more than 100 years ago, and it’s been in com­mon cir­cu­la­tion almost as long. One can eas­i­ly know it with­out hav­ing the faintest idea of its source, let alone its mean­ing. This is not, of course, to call T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land an obscure work. Despite hav­ing met with a deri­sive, even hos­tile ini­tial recep­tion, it went on to draw acclaim as one of the cen­tral Eng­lish-lan­guage poems of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, to say noth­ing of its sta­tus as an achieve­ment with­in the mod­ernist move­ment. But how, here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, to read it afresh?

One new avenue to approach The Waste Land is this com­ic-book adap­ta­tion by Julian Peters, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for his graph­ic ren­di­tions of oth­er such poems as Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee, W. B. Yeats’ “When You Are Old,” and Eliot’s own “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

It’s an adap­ta­tion, to be pre­cise, of the first of The Waste Land’s five sec­tions, “The Bur­ial of the Dead,” which opens on a First World War bat­tle­field — at least in Peters’ adap­ta­tion, which puts the first line “April is the cru­elest month” into the con­text of night­mar­ish imagery of blood­shed and death — and ends in a worka­day Lon­don likened to Dan­te’s hell.

The Waste Land presents a tempt­ing but daunt­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty to an illus­tra­tor, filled as it is with vivid evo­ca­tions of place and appear­ances by intrigu­ing char­ac­ters (includ­ing, in this sec­tion, “Madame Sosostris, famous clair­voy­ante”), and char­ac­ter­ized as it is by exten­sive lit­er­ary quo­ta­tion and sud­den shifts of con­text. But Peters has made a bold start of it, and any­one who reads his adap­ta­tion of “The Bur­ial of the Dead” will be wait­ing for his adap­ta­tions of “A Game of Chess” through “What the Thun­der Said.” Though much-scru­ti­nized over the past cen­tu­ry, Eliot’s mod­ernist mas­ter­piece (hear Eliot read it here) still tends to con­found first-time read­ers. To them, I always advise con­sid­er­ing poet­ry a visu­al medi­um, an idea whose pos­si­bil­i­ties Peters con­tin­ues to explore on a much more lit­er­al lev­el. Explore it here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Read the Entire Com­ic Book Adap­ta­tion of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

A Com­ic Book Adap­ta­tion of Edgar Allan Poe’s Poignant Poem Annabel Lee

W. B. Yeats’ Poem “When You Are Old” Adapt­ed into a Japan­ese Man­ga Com­ic

T. S. Eliot Illus­trates His Let­ters and Draws a Cov­er for Old Possum’s Book of Prac­ti­cal Cats

T. S. Eliot Reads His Mod­ernist Mas­ter­pieces “The Waste Land” and “TheLovee Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

More in this category... »
Quantcast