A New Yorker Cartoonist Explains How to Draw Literary Cartoons

in Comedy, Comics/Cartoons, Literature, Magazines | February 8th, 2021

“I enjoy pok­ing fun at any­thing edu­cat­ed peo­ple do and civ­i­lized soci­ety per­pet­u­ates that is odd, frus­trat­ing, wacky, or hyp­o­crit­i­cal,” car­toon­ist Amy Kurzweil, above, recent­ly told the New York Pub­lic Library’s Mar­go Moore.

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, she’s been get­ting pub­lished in The New York­er a lot of late.

The process for get­ting car­toons accept­ed there is the stuff of leg­end, though report­ed­ly less gru­el­ing since Emma Allen, the magazine’s youngest and first-ever female car­toon edi­tor, took over. Allen has made a point of seek­ing out fresh voic­es, and work­ing with them to help mold their sub­mis­sions into some­thing in The New York­er vein, rather than “this end­less game of pre­sent­ing work and then hear­ing ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”

Kurzweil has a fond­ness for lit­er­ary themes (and the same brand of pen­cils that John Stein­beck, Tru­man Capote, and Vladimir Nabokov pre­ferred—Black­wings—whether in her hand or, con­vers­ing with Allen on Zoom, above, in her ears.)

Get­ting the joke of a New York­er car­toon often depends on get­ting the ref­er­ence, and while both women seem tick­led at the first exam­ple, Kurzweil’s mash-up of Proust’s Remem­brance of Things Past and the pic­ture book If You Give a Mouse a Cook­ie, it may go over many read­ers’ heads.

The thing that holds it all togeth­er?

Madeleines, of course, though out­side France, not every Proust lover is able to iden­ti­fy an inked rep­re­sen­ta­tion of this evoca­tive cook­ie by shape.

Kurzweil states that she has nev­er actu­al­ly read the children’s book that sup­plies half the con­text.

(It’s okay. Like the idea that mem­o­ries can be trig­gered by cer­tain nos­tal­gic scents, its con­cept is pret­ty easy to grasp.)

Nor has she read philoso­pher Derek Parfit’s whop­ping 1,928-page On What Mat­ters. Her inspi­ra­tion for using it in a car­toon is her per­son­al con­nec­tion to the mas­sive, unread three-vol­ume set in her family’s library. Because both the size and the title are part of the joke, she directs the viewer’s eye to the unwieldy tome with a light water­col­or wash.

She also has a good tip for any­one draw­ing a library scene—go fig­u­ra­tive, rather than lit­er­al, vary­ing sizes and shapes until the eye is tricked into see­ing what is mere­ly sug­gest­ed.

A all-too-true lit­er­ary expe­ri­ence informs her sec­ond exam­ple at the 4:30 mark—that of a lit­tle known author giv­ing a read­ing in a book­store. Despite a pref­er­ence for draw­ing “fleshy things like peo­ple and ani­mals” she for­goes depict­ing the author or those in atten­dance, giv­ing the punch­line instead to the event posters in the store’s win­dow.

As she told the NYPL’s Moore:

A car­toon is always an oppor­tu­ni­ty to show­case a con­tem­po­rary phe­nom­e­non by exag­ger­at­ing it or plac­ing it in a dif­fer­ent con­text.

Over the last year, a huge num­ber of New York­er car­toons have con­cerned them­selves with the domes­tic dull­ness of the pan­dem­ic, but when Allen asked if she has a favorite New York­er car­toon cliché, Kurzweil went with “the Moby Dick trope, because whales are easy to draw, and I like a good metaphor for the unat­tain­able.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New York­er Car­toon Edi­tor Bob Mankoff Reveals the Secret of a Suc­cess­ful New York­er Car­toon

The Not York­er: A Col­lec­tion of Reject­ed & Late Cov­er Sub­mis­sions to The New York­er

Down­load a Com­plete, Cov­er-to-Cov­er Par­o­dy of The New York­er: 80 Pages of Fine Satire

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. She most recent­ly appeared as a French Cana­di­an bear who trav­els to New York City in search of food and mean­ing in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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In 1896, a French Cartoonist Predicted Our Socially-Distanced Zoom Holiday Gatherings

in Comics/Cartoons, History, Magazines, Technology | December 28th, 2020

Imag­ine that, this time last year, you’d heard that your fam­i­ly’s hol­i­day gath­er­ings in 2020 would hap­pen on the inter­net. Even if you believed such a future would one day come, would you have cred­it­ed for a moment that kind of immi­nence? Yet our video­con­fer­ence toasts this sea­son were pre­dict­ed — even ren­dered in clear and rea­son­ably accu­rate detail — more than 120 years ago. “My wife is vis­it­ing her aunt in Budapest, my old­er daugh­ter is study­ing den­tistry in Mel­bourne, my younger daugh­ter is a min­ing engi­neer in the Urals, my son rais­es ostrich­es in Batavia, my nephew is on his plan­ta­tions in Batavia,” says the cap­tion of the 1896 car­toon above. “But this does not pre­vent us from cel­e­brat­ing Christ­mas on the tele­phono­scope.”

This pan­el ran in Belle Époque humor mag­a­zine Le rire (avail­able to read at the Inter­net Archive), drawn by the hand and pro­duced by the imag­i­na­tion of Albert Robi­da. A nov­el­ist as well as an artist, Robi­da drew acclaim in his day for the series Le Vingtième Siè­cle, whose sto­ries offered visions of the tech­nol­o­gy to come in that cen­tu­ry.

“Next to Zoom Christ­mas,” tweets phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor Helen de Cruz, Robi­da also imag­ined a future in which this “tele­phono­scope” would “give us edu­ca­tion, movies, tele­con­fer­enc­ing.” As ear­ly as the 1860s, says the Pub­lic Domain Review, Robi­da had “pub­lished an illus­tra­tion depict­ing a man watch­ing a ‘tele­vised’ per­for­mance of Faust from the com­fort of his own home.” See image above.

Though Robi­da seems to have coined the word “tele­phono­scope,” he was­n’t the first to pub­lish the kind of idea to which it referred. “The con­cept of the device first appeared not long after the tele­phone was patent­ed in 1876,” writes Ver­i­ty Hunt in a Lit­er­a­ture and Sci­ence arti­cle quot­ed by the Pub­lic Domain Review. “The term ‘telec­tro­scope’ was used by the French sci­en­tist and pub­lish­er Louis Figu­ier in L’An­née Sci­en­tifique et Indus­trielle in 1878 to pop­u­lar­ize the inven­tion, which he incor­rect­ly inter­pret­ed as real and ascribed to Alexan­der Gra­ham Bell.” The goal was to “do for the eye what the tele­phone had done for the ear,” though it would­n’t be ful­ly real­ized for well over a cen­tu­ry. When you raise a glass to a web­cam this week, con­sid­er toast­ing Albert Robi­da, to whom the year 2021 would have sound­ed impos­si­bly dis­tant — but who has proven more pre­scient about it than many of us alive today.

via Helen De Cruz

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A 1947 French Film Accu­rate­ly Pre­dict­ed Our 21st-Cen­tu­ry Addic­tion to Smart­phones

Jules Verne Accu­rate­ly Pre­dicts What the 20th Cen­tu­ry Will Look Like in His Lost Nov­el, Paris in the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry (1863)

How French Artists in 1899 Envi­sioned Life in the Year 2000: Draw­ing the Future

Mark Twain Pre­dicts the Inter­net in 1898: Read His Sci-Fi Crime Sto­ry, “From The ‘Lon­don Times’ in 1904”

In 1911, Thomas Edi­son Pre­dicts What the World Will Look Like in 2011: Smart Phones, No Pover­ty, Libraries That Fit in One Book

Paris Had a Mov­ing Side­walk in 1900, and a Thomas Edi­son Film Cap­tured It in Action

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

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The Dune Graphic Novel: Experience Frank Herbert’s Epic Sci-Fi Saga as You’ve Never Seen It Before

in Books, Comics/Cartoons, Literature, Sci Fi | December 16th, 2020

Like so many major motion pic­tures slat­ed for a 2020 release, Denis Vil­leneu­ve’s Dune has been bumped into 2021. But fans of Frank Her­bert’s epic sci­ence-fic­tion saga haven’t had to go entire­ly with­out adap­ta­tions this year, since last month saw the release of the first Dune graph­ic nov­el. Writ­ten by Kevin J. Ander­son and Frank Her­bert’s son Bri­an Her­bert, co-authors of twelve Dune pre­quel and sequel nov­els, this 160-page vol­ume con­sti­tutes just the first part of a tril­o­gy intend­ed to visu­al­ly retell the sto­ry of the first Dune book. This tri­par­tite break­down seems to have been a wise move: the many adap­tors (and would-be) adap­tors of the lin­guis­ti­cal­ly, mytho­log­i­cal­ly, and tech­no­log­i­cal­ly com­plex nov­el have found out over the decades, it’s easy to bite off more Dune than you can chew.

Audi­ences, too, can only digest so much Dune at a sit­ting them­selves. “The par­tic­u­lar chal­lenge to adapt­ing Dune, espe­cial­ly the ear­ly part, is that there is so much infor­ma­tion to be con­veyed — and in the nov­el it is done in prose and dia­log, rather than action — we found it chal­leng­ing to por­tray visu­al­ly,” says Ander­son in an inter­view with the Hol­ly­wood Reporter.

“For­tu­nate­ly, the land­scape is so sweep­ing, we could show breath­tak­ing images as a way to con­vey that back­ground.” This is the land­scape of the desert plan­et Arrakis, source of a sub­stance known as “spice.” Used as a fuel for space trav­el, spice has become the most pre­cious sub­stance in the galaxy, and its con­trol is bit­ter­ly strug­gled over by numer­ous roy­al hous­es. (Any resem­blance to Earth­’s petro­le­um is, of course, entire­ly coin­ci­den­tal.)

The main nar­ra­tive thread of the many run­ning through Dune fol­lows Paul Atrei­des, scion of the House Atrei­des. With his fam­i­ly sent to run Arrakis, Paul finds him­self at the cen­ter of polit­i­cal intrigue, plan­e­tary rev­o­lu­tion, and even a clan­des­tine scheme to cre­ate a super­hu­man sav­ior. Though Her­bert and Ander­son have pro­duced a faith­ful adap­ta­tion, the graph­ic nov­el “trims the sto­ry down to its most icon­ic touch­stone scenes,” as Thom Dunn puts it in his Boing Boing review (adding that it hap­pens to focus in “a lot of the same scenes as David Lynch did with his glo­ri­ous­ly messy film adap­ta­tion”). This stream­lin­ing also employs tech­niques unique to graph­ic nov­els: to retain the book’s shift­ing omni­scient nar­ra­tion, for exam­ple, “differ­ent­ly col­ored cap­tion box­es present inner mono­logues from dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters like voiceovers so as not to inter­rupt the scene.”

As if telling the sto­ry of Dune at a graph­ic nov­el­’s pace was­n’t task enough, Ander­son, Her­bert and their col­lab­o­ra­tors also have to con­vey its unusu­al and rich­ly imag­ined world — in not just words, of course, but images. “Dune has had a lot of visu­al inter­pre­ta­tions over the years, from Lynch’s bizarre pseu­do-peri­od piece treat­ment to the mod­ern tele­vised mini-series’ more grit­ty inter­pre­ta­tion,” writes Poly­gon’s Char­lie Hall. While “Villeneuve’s vibe appears to take its inspi­ra­tion from more futur­is­tic sci­ence fic­tion — all angles and chunky armor,” the graph­ic nov­el­’s artists Raúl Allén and Patri­cia Martín “opt for some­thing a bit more steam­punk.” These choic­es all fur­ther what Bri­an Her­bert describes as a mis­sion to “bring a young demo­graph­ic to Frank Herbert’s incred­i­ble series.” Such read­ers have shown great enthu­si­asm for sto­ries of teenage pro­tag­o­nists who grow to assume a cen­tral role in the strug­gle between good and evil — not that, in the world of Dune, any con­flict is quite so sim­ple.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the First Trail­er for Dune, Denis Villeneuve’s Adap­ta­tion of Frank Herbert’s Clas­sic Sci-Fi Nov­el

A Side-by-Side, Shot-by-Shot Com­par­i­son of Denis Villeneuve’s 2020 Dune and David Lynch’s 1984 Dune

Why You Should Read Dune: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Frank Herbert’s Eco­log­i­cal, Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci-Fi Epic

The 14-Hour Epic Film, Dune, That Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky, Pink Floyd, Sal­vador Dalí, Moe­bius, Orson Welles & Mick Jag­ger Nev­er Made

Moe­bius’ Sto­ry­boards & Con­cept Art for Jodorowsky’s Dune

The Dune Col­or­ing & Activ­i­ty Books: When David Lynch’s 1984 Film Cre­at­ed Count­less Hours of Pecu­liar Fun for Kids

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

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Comic Book Writer Fred Van Lente Touts “Comic Supremacy” on Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #72

in Comics/Cartoons, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | December 10th, 2020

Fred Van Lente has writ­ten for more than 15 years for his own Evil Twin Comics, Mar­vel and oth­er out­lets. In this episode of Pret­ty Much Pop, he joins your hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt to dis­cuss comics as an idio­syn­crat­ic form of lit­er­a­ture.

In the realm of non-fic­tion, Ryan start­ed with the beloved Action Philoso­phers! series in 2004 with illus­tra­tor Ryan Dunlavey, and this team has gone on to cre­ate the very suc­cess­ful Com­ic Book His­to­ry of Comics, plus more recent­ly Action Pres­i­dents, Action Activists (avail­able free in asso­ci­a­tion with the NYC Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion’s Civics for All pro­gram), and have just begun releas­ing The Com­ic Book His­to­ry of Ani­ma­tion. While the non-fic­tion comics for­mat is com­mon in places like Japan, and has a sto­ried his­to­ry in Amer­i­ca, hav­ing been used to train sol­diers in World War II, this is still some­thing of a nov­el­ty in Amer­i­ca as comics still strug­gle to over­come their rep­u­ta­tion in (as Ryan puts it) “trash for morons.” Giv­en that visu­al con­tent is well known to help peo­ple learn as com­pared to text alone, the use of tools like Action Pres­i­dents in class­rooms should­n’t be sur­pris­ing.

The inter­view also gets into Ryan’s fic­tion work, from Cow­boys & Aliens, which was turned into a 2011 Jon Favreau/Steven Spiel­berg film entire­ly with­out Ryan’s involve­ment, to titles like Mar­vel Zom­bies and X‑Men Noir which use alter­nate dimen­sion ver­sions of pop­u­lar char­ac­ters to tell sto­ries too dark and/or whim­si­cal to have much pos­si­bil­i­ty of ever being trans­ferred to the screen. Despite comics’ rep­u­ta­tion as being basi­cal­ly like elab­o­rate film sto­ry-boards, their low over­head is exact­ly what dis­tin­guish­es them so strong­ly from film: Their cre­ativ­i­ty is unlim­it­ed by bud­get, and cre­ators can take tremen­dous risks. What­ev­er the main­stream palata­bil­i­ty of (alter­nate dimen­sion) Peter Park­er eat­ing Aunt May’s brain, this has been one of the most pop­u­lar things that Ryan’s been involved with among com­ic book read­ers.

Learn more about Fred’s work at fredvanlente.com. You can read there about how Fred con­structs scripts; the one Mark refers to with the mys­te­ri­ous­ly changed coat is right there high­light­ed at the top of this page, and there are also sev­er­al sam­ple scripts includ­ing the one for Action Philoso­phers: Immanuel Kant that demon­strates Fred’s meth­ods for vivid­ly explain­ing a com­plex idea.

Hear more of this pod­cast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion you can access by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

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An Animated Stan Lee Explains Why the F‑Word Is “the Most Useful Word in the English Language” (NSFW)

in Comics/Cartoons, Film | November 30th, 2020

FYI. The lan­guage in this video is not safe for work. And, now, on with the show.

In the last cou­ple years of his life, Stan Lee was ill, his health fail­ing, but he stayed engaged and remained his old wise­crack­ing self. His hand­picked suc­ces­sor for edi­tor-in-chief at Mar­vel, Roy Thomas, tells the sto­ry of the last time he saw Lee and showed him his then-new biog­ra­phy of the comics leg­end, The Stan Lee Sto­ry. They talked about the Spi­der-Man com­ic strip they’d writ­ten togeth­er for two decades until a cou­ple years back. Oth­er famil­iar sub­jects came and went. Lee “was ready to go” and seemed at peace, Thomas says.

“But he was still talk­ing about doing more cameos. As long as he had the ener­gy for it and didn’t have to trav­el, Stan was always up to do some more cameos.” Lee’s cameos con­tin­ue after his death in 2018, as is the way now with deceased icons. He has made three live-action appear­ances posthu­mous­ly, in footage shot before his death, one posthu­mous appear­ance in an ani­mat­ed super­hero film, and anoth­er in a Spi­der-Man video game. Soon, these vignettes may be all pop­u­lar audi­ences know of him.

Who knows how much footage–or will­ing­ness to cre­ate CGI Stan Lees—Disney has in store for future Mar­vel films. But a memo­r­i­al in script­ed one-lin­ers seems to miss out on a whole lot of Stan Lee. The man could be count­ed on to make the set on time. (Accord­ing to Jason Mewes, Lee had din­ner with his wife every sin­gle night with­out fail at 6:00 pm sharp.) But he could also be unpre­dictable in some very delight­ful ways.

Thomas tells a sto­ry, for exam­ple, of vis­it­ing Lee in the 80s in a Cal­i­for­nia house with mar­ble floors. “At one point he excused him­self, and he came back on roller skates…. I’d nev­er seen any­one roller-skat­ing on a mar­ble floor.” The short film above ani­mates anoth­er of these unscript­ed moments, when Lee lit­er­al­ly went off-script to deliv­er an extem­po­ra­ne­ous mono­logue on the f‑word. Of course, “I don’t say it, ‘cause I don’t say dirty words,” he begins, before let­ting it rip in an argu­ment for the f‑word as “the most use­ful word in the Eng­lish lan­guage.”

Lee’s off-the-cuff George Car­lin rou­tine rolls right into his rea­son for being in the record­ing booth: get­ting a take of his sig­na­ture excla­ma­tion, “Excelsior!”—the word the cre­ator or co-cre­ator of Spi­der-Man, Thor, Iron Man, Ant Man, Black Wid­ow, Black Pan­ther (and most the rest of the Mar­vel Uni­verse) reserved for empha­sis in his heart­felt, whole­some let­ters to fans over the decades. After he says his catch­phrase, James Whit­brook writes at io9, he goes “right back into hav­ing a laugh with every­one around him. It’s a love­ly, if pro­fane, remem­brance of an icon,” and, unfor­tu­nate­ly, not the kind of thing like­ly to make it in future cameo appear­ances.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Stan Lee (RIP) Gets an Exu­ber­ant Fan Let­ter from 15-Year-Old George R.R. Mar­tin, 1963

R.I.P. Stan Lee: Take His Free Online Course “The Rise of Super­heroes and Their Impact On Pop Cul­ture”

The Great Stan Lee Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”

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

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Before Creating the Moomins, Tove Jansson Drew Satirical Art Mocking Hitler & Stalin

in Art, Comics/Cartoons, History, Magazines | November 2nd, 2020

Much of the world has only recent­ly dis­cov­ered the Moomins, those lov­able hip­popota­mus-like fig­ures — giv­en, it must be said, to moments of star­tling brusque­ness and com­plex­i­ty — cre­at­ed in the 1940s by Finnish artist Tove Jans­son. In forms rang­ing from dolls and school sup­plies to neck pil­lows and cell­phone cas­es, they’ve late­ly become a full-blown craze in South Korea, where I live. Like any mas­sive­ly suc­cess­ful (and high­ly mer­chan­dis­able) char­ac­ters, the Moomins over­shad­ow the rest of Jansson’s oeu­vre. Hence exhi­bi­tions like Tove Jans­son (1914–2001) at Lon­don’s Dul­wich Pic­ture Gallery, which “aims to rec­ti­fy the fact that less atten­tion has gen­er­al­ly been paid to her range as a visu­al artist.”

That descrip­tion comes from Simon Willis’ review of the show in the New York Review of Books. “In Octo­ber 1944, Tove Jans­son drew a cov­er for Garm, a Finnish satir­i­cal mag­a­zine, show­ing a brigade of Adolf Hitlers as pudgy lit­tle thieves,” Willis writes. These draw­er-rifling, house-burn­ing car­i­ca­tures “were not unusu­al for Jans­son, who had been belit­tling Stal­in and Hitler in the mag­a­zine since the ear­ly days of World War II.” But “peek­ing out at the chaos from behind the magazine’s title,” there was also a “tiny pale fig­ure with a long nose”: a pro­to-Moomin mak­ing an appear­ance the year before the pub­li­ca­tion of the first Moomin book. (And even he was forged in mock­ery, hav­ing first been drawn by Jans­son, so the sto­ry goes, as a car­i­ca­ture of Immanuel Kant.)

Hav­ing start­ed con­tribut­ing to Garm, accord­ing to the offi­cial Moomin web site, “in 1929 at the young age of 15 (her moth­er Signe Ham­marsten-Jans­son had worked for the pub­li­ca­tion since it start­ed),” she kept on doing so until the mag­a­zine fold­ed in 1953.

“Dur­ing that peri­od she drew more than 500 car­i­ca­tures, a hun­dred cov­er images and count­less oth­er illus­tra­tions for the mag­a­zine.” In them, writes Glas­stire’s Caleb Math­ern, “angels appear on bat­tle­fields. Rein­deer pre­pare to rain TNT. An effete, under­sized Hitler cries instead of eat­ing slices of cake. Jans­son even impugns Stalin’s man­hood with an over­sized scabbard/undersized sword joke.” To the young Jans­son, the best part was the chance, as she lat­er put it, “to be beast­ly to Stal­in and Hitler.”

Even after the suc­cess of the Moomins, Jans­son con­tin­ued to draw on the imagery and emo­tions of war: “The first time we meet young Moom­introll and his Moom­in­mam­ma in The Moomins and the Great Flood (1945), they are refugees, cross­ing a strange and threat­en­ing land­scape in search of shel­ter. Moom­in­pap­pa, mean­while, is absent, as fathers often were dur­ing the war,” writes Aeon’s Richard W. Orange. In the next book “the world is threat­ened by a comet that sucks the water out of the sea, leav­ing an apoc­a­lyp­tic land­scape in its wake.” With the Cold War heat­ing up, the alle­go­ry would hard­ly have gone unno­ticed. Like all mas­ter satirists, Jans­son went on to tran­scend the sole­ly top­i­cal — and indeed, so the increas­ing­ly Moomin-crazed world has demon­strat­ed, the bound­aries of time and cul­ture.

via Aeon/Moomin

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Edu­ca­tion for Death: The Mak­ing of Nazi–Walt Disney’s 1943 Pro­pa­gan­da Film Shows How Fas­cists Are Made

Don­ald Duck & Friends Star in World War II Pro­pa­gan­da Car­toons

“The Duck­ta­tors”: Loony Tunes Turns Ani­ma­tion into Wartime Pro­pa­gan­da (1942)

Dr. Seuss Draws Anti-Japan­ese Car­toons Dur­ing WWII, Then Atones with Hor­ton Hears a Who!

The Sub­lime Alice in Won­der­land Illus­tra­tions of Tove Jans­son, Cre­ator of the Glob­al­ly-Beloved Moomins (1966)

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

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What Can Superhero Media Teach Us About Ethics: A Pretty Much Pop Culture Podcast (#63) Discussion with Philosophy Professor Travis Smith

in Comics/Cartoons, Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Television | October 7th, 2020

Is there no end to the seem­ing­ly end­less fas­ci­na­tion with super­hero media? Your hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt are joined by Travis Smith, who teach­es polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy at Con­cor­dia Uni­ver­si­ty, to dis­cuss. Travis sees their res­o­nance as a mat­ter of metaphor: How can we do more with the abil­i­ties we have? His book Super­hero Ethics: 10 Com­ic Book Heroes, 10 Ways to Save the World, Which One Do We Need Now? match­es up heroes like Bat­man vs. Spi­der-Man for eth­i­cal com­par­i­son: Both “act local­ly,” but Bat­man would like to actu­al­ly rule over Gotham, while Spi­der-Man engages in a more “friend­ly neigh­bor­hood” patrol.  What phi­los­o­phy should gov­ern the way we try to do good in the world?

Lurk­ing in the back­ground is the cur­rent release of sea­son two of the Ama­zon series The Boys, based on Garth Ennis’ graph­ic nov­els, which assumes that pow­er cor­rupts and asks what reg­u­lar folks might do in the face of cor­po­rate-backed invul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. This cyn­i­cal take is part of a long tra­di­tion of ask­ing “what if super-heroes were lit­er­al­ly real?” that goes through Watch­men all the way back to Spi­der-Man him­self, who faces finan­cial and oth­er mun­dane prob­lems that Super­man was immune to.

Giv­en Travis’ book, we did­n’t real­ly need sup­ple­men­tary arti­cles for this episode, but you can take a look at this inter­view with him to learn more about his com­ic book loves and the Cana­di­an her­itage that led him to start fight­ing crime (you know, indi­rect­ly, through eth­i­cal teach­ing).

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts

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A Short Introduction to Manga by Pretty Much Pop #60 with Professor Deborah Shamoon from the National University of Singapore

in Comics/Cartoons, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | September 17th, 2020

One of our goals on Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast has been to look into not just our favorite cre­ators and gen­res but into things that get a lot of buzz but which we real­ly don’t know any­thing about. Man­ga is a great exam­ple of a “look what these crazy kids are into today” kind of area for many (old­er) Amer­i­cans.

Deb­o­rah Shamoon, an Amer­i­can who teach­es Japan­ese stud­ies at the Nation­al Uni­ver­si­ty of Sin­ga­pore and  has loved man­ga since ado­les­cence, here schools man­ga noobs Mark Lin­sen­may­er and Bri­an Hirt–along with Eri­ca Spyres, who also does­n’t read man­ga but at least has a com­pli­cat­ed his­to­ry with ani­me. What are the bar­ri­ers for Amer­i­cans (whether comics read­ers or not) to appre­ci­ate man­ga? For some of us, man­ga is actu­al­ly eas­i­er to appre­ci­ate than ani­me giv­en the lat­ter’s sound and pac­ing.

We talk about man­ga’s pub­li­ca­tion his­to­ry, how fast to read man­ga, and its use of iconog­ra­phy to depict sound and move­ment. Deb­o­rah gives us the truth about the famed Osamu Tezuka’s place as “god of comics”; we dis­cuss his Metrop­o­lis, Astro Boy and Princess Knight, which is not as you may have been told the first “sho­jo” man­ga, mean­ing aimed at girls. Sho­jo man­ga is Deb­o­rah’s spe­cial­ty: She wrote a book called Pas­sion­ate Friend­ship: The Aes­thet­ics of Girls’ Cul­ture in Japan. We dis­cuss The Heart of Thomas, Sailor Moon, and how Tezu­ka actu­al­ly copied that big-eye style from Hideko Mizuno’s Sil­ver Petals. Do you need to get a han­dle on these old clas­sics to appre­ci­ate the new­er stuff that’s made such a dent in Amer­i­ca like Death Note? Prob­a­bly not, though some Aki­ra would­n’t hurt you.

A few of the arti­cles we looked at includ­ed:

We also looked at some “best of” lists to know what titles to try to look at:

Deb­o­rah rec­om­mends the Japan­ese Media and Pop­u­lar Cul­ture Site from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Tokyo for aca­d­e­m­ic writ­ing on man­ga. She wrote an arti­cle on sho­jo man­ga for that site that sums up the his­to­ry con­veyed in her book. She’s also been inter­viewed for the Japan Sta­tion and Mei­ji at 150 pod­casts.

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts

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