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.

Kramers Ergot #4, edited by the cartoonist Sammy Harkham, is an artistic and stylistic statement of a kind rarely seen in comics. Expansive of format, impressive in its editorial consistency and lavish in production, it presents a selection which forces one to consider — and perhaps revise — one’s formal and aesthetic conception of comics.

In recent years, North America has seen the emergence of a benevolent laissez-faire attitude to creating comics, originating primarily in the continent’s extraordinarily lively minicomics scene. Decades after other visual arts, comics are finally mounting a concerted challenge to the reigning, self-imposed dogma of craft as an end in itself, with many young cartoonists prioritising instead a kind of ‘pure’, personal expression.

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.