“Monster and horror movies and stories of all types …. once were hard to come by. For a time, vampires and werewolves were taboo in comic books.” Author Robert Cotter here explains the long journey of the monster magazine and the story of its fandom over the decades in this noteworthy book. While the so […]
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Category: Comic Book Culture
MOEBIUS Exhibition and Catalog – Max Ernst Museum Brühl, Germany (2019)
French comic book artist extraordinaire Jean Giraud, better known as MOEBIUS, (1938 – 2012) is the topic of a huge exhibition currently at the Max Ernst Museum Brühl, Germany. The show is stocked with roughly 450 works. It covers more or less everything from his notebooks (“carnets”), to comics, “sketched drawings, abstract paintings, up to […]
George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat”. The Complete Color Sundays 1935–1944 by Alexander Braun (ed.) (2019)
Once again, German comic book historian Alexander Braun has written a long text with lots of photographs, sketches and drawings that document a comic book superstar’s life and heritage. George Herriman (1880 – 1944) the inventor of Krazy Kat is the subject of this mega book. His comic strip would become the first of many […]
The Phantom Unmasked: America’s First Superhero by Kevin Patrick (2017)
The crime fighter/superhero The Phantom, aka “The Ghost Who Walks, Man Who Cannot Die,” appeared first in February 1936 in The New York Journal as a comic strip. Thus predating the arrival of Superman by more than two years; two years in “comic books publishing time” is a long, long while (provided that in the […]
The Marvel Age of Comics 1961–1978 by Roy Thomas (2017)
Marvel Comics of New York, originally founded as Timely Publications in 1939, is one of the most important comic book publishers worldwide. Comic book fans all over the world are grateful for superheroes as Captain America or the Sub-Mariner. And particularly for superheroes of “a somewhat other kind,” as the mostly troubled, eccentric and characters […]
Tarzan, Jungle King of Popular Culture by David Lemmo (2017)
Some writers of fiction seemingly are blessed with a fathomless imaginative power, which is the basis for many science fiction and adventure stories. In the case of Tarzan (of the Apes), it is also owed to the very adventurous and at times fast-paced biography of the author of the Tarzan tales, Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875 […]
The Mythology of the Superhero by Andrew R. Bahlmann (2016)
Since by now the superhero has become an intrinsic part of the popular culture in Western civilization, a closer look at the reasons why this has happened makes sense. Although his appearance can be traced down exactly to the early and mid-1930s in the US, his mythological origins go way back. Bahlmann encounters the superhero […]
75 Years of DC Comics. The Art of Modern Mythmaking by Paul Levitz (2017)
Any superhero comic book fan will know about the previous three huge books celebrating the Golden Age, the Silver Age and the Bronze Age of DC Comics. Those three volumes, big as they are, were merely a small part of what the current new edition of 75 Years of DC Comics The Art of Modern […]
The Bronze Age of DC Comics by Paul Levitz (2015)
The third volume of the DC chronicles is out and shows the company’s changing face and politics in the years 1970-1984. As the Golden Age and the Silver Age were focused on the development of DC comics until the year 1970, the current edition is labeled the “Bronze Age“ and demonstrates how the comic artists […]