Marvel Comics’ The ‘Nam, DC’s G.I. Combat and Weird War Tales, and Charlton’s Battlefield Action eschewed “feel good” war stories in order to focus on the far-reaching consequences of physical violence, the shifty political motives of the Cold War, and the universal philosophies that define military service…
By Eve Tushnet
The standard story of the postwar media landscape centers on the rise of television: news anchors and variety shows, cowlicked children of white couples who sleep in separate beds, the same flickering glow from every home—Donna Reed across the face of the world forever…
In 1977, with von Däniken mania still thriving, Alfred Górny of Polish publishing house Sport i Turystyka—Sport and Tourism—made an agreement with Econ Verlag, the publishers of the German edition of Chariots of the Gods?, to create a series of comics based around von Däniken’s crackpot concepts…
In 1989, at the very end of the Cold War, a group of four prominent mainstream and alternative comic book writers and artists created a double volume graphic novel exposing the rampant injustices, assassinations, and terrorism facilitated by the CIA and its creatures worldwide, ostensibly to fight global communism in the years following World War II…
Most editions of Vidas Ilustres dealt purely with the biographical details of the person in question, but in the Obras Inmortales (“Immortal Works”) series the comic would dramatize not only their life but also a piece of their oeuvre. This was the case with “El Hombre Que Se Convirtirio En Un Insecto”—“The Man Who Became an Insect.”
In 1985, the first issue of an unusual new title hit the shelves of North American comic book stores. Part of Marvel Comics’ short-lived creator-owned imprint Epic, Rick Veitch’s The One stood out because its cover was an obvious visual reference to the yellow and orange concentric circles of Tide laundry detergent’s branding…
How a Baby Is Made was the English language translation of Danish psychotherapist and “sexologist” Per Holm Knudsen’s children’s picture book Sådan får man et barn, published in Denmark in 1971. After winning the Danish Ministry of Culture’s children book prize in 1972, the rights were acquired in Britain where Piccolo Books, the children’s division of paperback publisher Pan, published it the following year…
Over the course of my many explorations of British hauntology of the 1970s over the past five years, I found myself enjoying a pair of television adaptations, produced a decade apart, full of deep mystical themes reaching back into the marrow of ancient Britain…
By Ben Schwartz
The hectic, global nightmare of early 2020 seems like a good time to reappraise our perception of Disney, an increasingly powerful demigod in the media-saturated hellscape we live in. Outlets and organs of multiple disciplines have put out breathless articles about the conglomerate’s “unprecedented” success last year…
By K.E. Roberts
You’ve seen the images before: interiors of massive cylindrical and spherical space habitats, where posh-looking off-world colonists attend catered cocktail parties and sip coffee on their (seemingly) tilted verandas; where space-suited construction workers navigate through zero-g miles above an immaculate suburbia, complete with backyard swimming pools…
