Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq Sarah Glidden Drawn + Quarterly October 2016 A review copy was provided by the publisher. What is journalism? This is the primary question cartoonist Sarah Glidden pursued while traveling through Turkey, Iraq and Syria in 2010. Glidden’s friends and co-founders of The Seattle Globalist, Sarah Stuteville and…
Comics Are For Everyone, Or So We Say: Goodbye, Comics and Cola
For the past five years, Comics and Cola has been a reliable source of information, connection and reflection upon… comics. Very little Cola content. But Zainab Akhtar has had enough of the Islamophobia that’s permeated comics so blazing since #jesuisCharlie, and before and after that, and all through everything. She doesn’t want to be a…
Copyediting: What Even IS That? Four Copyeditors Discuss The Matter
Back in May, Claire—WWAC’s Features and Opinions Editor—and Jasmine—the co-editor of The Psychedelic Journal—had a little roundtable discussion on editing and what it’s all about. This got us—the copyediting team here at WWAC—thinking. Perhaps we should have a little roundtable of our own. “Copyediting?” “What even is that?” “Why do you need a copyeditor?” “Don’t…
I’m Loving: Mind of a Chef
I am a foodie—un-ironically, unabashedly. I love to cook; I love to eat. Cookbooks are like porn for me. I nerd out on food writing, food history, and cultural analyses of food at the intersections of race, class, and gender. I get irrationally upset over poorly written or edited recipes. I don’t have cable, because…
I’m Not Charlie, and Neither are You. So Who ARE You? Where’s Your Stand?
Using cartooning to provoke and punish people makes cartooning an instrument of cruelty. It’s easy to say that nothing can devalue or tarnish a form of art or a medium, but it’s harder to sit down your human emotions and sense of connection and tell it that a scene isn’t souring and widely dangerous. Headlines…
The End of The Nib…or is it?
The Nib, which has garnered a reputation as one of the best sites for comics, is no more. Sort of. The past few days have been filled with despair and mourning, and speculation about its future. Yesterday, The Beat published an article that neatly presented what we knew and when we knew it, as well as…
Editing: What Even IS That? Two Editors Discuss The Matter
EDITING. What kind of crap is that?? Some bossy grifter trying to change your words, take your voice, and redirect your thoughts? NO THANK YOU! Actually … no. That’s not so much the way of things. Editing is fun: the opportunity to support a creative writer in their production of their very best work. One…
Mighty Marvel Monday: A Paean to G. Willow Wilson
There is a flurry of speculation coming out about Captain America: Civil War, currently filming, and other upcoming projects, but today I want to take a step away from the MCU for a moment and focus on one of Marvel Comics’ superheroes: G. Willow Wilson. A couple weeks ago this article by Jill Lepore was…
A Chat With Lois Lane: Fallout’s Gwenda Bond
I got to chat with the author of the upcoming young adult novel Lois Lane: Fallout, based on one of DC Comics’ most iconic characters. The book will hit stores on May 1st, but before that, Gwenda Bond discusses a few things with me such as her first encounter with Lois Lane, what this character means…
Kon, Not A Con: Satoshi Kon’s Actual OPUS
What is the relationship between creators and their work? Once released into the world, audiences consume the creation and make of it what they will, and the creator loses control. But what about the work itself? Surely, within the boundaries of the piece, the artist’s will holds sway. Right? Right. Or, not right.
What Jonathan Jones Gets Wrong About Comics
…Pretty much everything. On the Guardian‘s Art and Design blog, art critic Jonathan Jones slammed the art of “the comic-book universe” for being “banal” and “lack[ing]…ambition and verve.” A reasonable criticism, if he’d given evidence to back it up. After all, many comics fans suffered through the epidemic of Greg Land SameFace Syndrome that swept…
Political Cartooning With Joe Dator: Clean Lines and Jokes
At first, I thought I really did not like artist Joe Dator. My initial assumption was that he was sexist and took easy shots like so many other political cartoonists. Honestly, these thoughts were based almost entirely off the the first cartoon of his that I saw, which was this one:
