This is part of a Metabunker series celebrating a great decade in comics with Rackham by reprinting select reviews of the decades’ best comics from the Rackham archive, along with a number of new pieces.

By Thomas Thorhauge

“Striking terror. Best part of the job”, says Batman somewhere in the first chapter of Frank Miller’s long-awaited sequel to The Dark Knight Returns (1986). The line makes sense coming from Miller, because “striking terror” is kind of what DK2/The Dark Knight Strikes Again has done with comic readers (if we keep the scare quotes, naturally).

The New Zealand cartoonist Dylan Horrocks has described Frank Miller as an “internal writer”, i.e. a writer who composes from his gut, or perhaps more accurately his subconscious. By describing him thus, Horrocks wishes to emphasise that one never quite knows what to make of Miller’s stories. His “internal” approach results in ambiguous stories, in which the point is never really, well, the point. Actually, Miller does not seem really to have one most of the time. This, of course, is a characteristic shared by many artists, but it’s rare to see in comics the kind of creative rage Miller summons.

This is part of a Metabunker series celebrating a great decade in comics with Rackham by reprinting select reviews of the decades’ best comics from the Rackham archive, along with a number of new pieces.

Between April and May 1993 the UN Security Council decided to establish a number of so-called “Safe Areas” in war-torn Bosnia. These were placed around the Bosnian enclaves of Bihać, Tuzla, Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Žepa, and Goražde. In return for disarmament, they were put under the protection of the UN. Threatened by reprisal by the UN, the Bosnian Serbs halted their bombardment of Sarajevo in February of 1994 and turned their attention instead to the East Bosnian enclave of Goražde. Apart from a few airborne missions in April, the UN did not intervene against this Serbian aggression, which only gained in force as time passed. It soon became obvious to everyone that a humanitarian crisis was imminent, if not already occurring.

Tomorrow, I’m off to Finland for the Helsinki Book Fair, where there will be a substantial comics presence. Making up for missing the recent Helsinki Comics Festival, I’m looking forward to meeting the Finnish cartoonists present, as well as to see the apparently substantial contingent of international authors, primarily Scandinavian, who will be converging there, smack in the midst of one of the most interesting comics scenes right now.

I wrote the following piece for the book fair comics paper, published by the Finnish Comics Society. More when I get back.

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Comics right now are in a heightened state of evolutionary flux, headily promising great things as they go off in a multitude of previously unexplored directions. A century-and-a-half as a popular, patently lowbrow mass medium saw them define and refine a pictorial language by now built in to our visual culture, but it also restricted their expressive field to a handful of genres and circumscribed rather narrowly their visual vocabulary. Although this pattern has been challenged consistently since at least the sixties, it is only in the last decade-and-a-half or so that a kind of critical mass has been reached. An expanded field is opening for the art form.