comics history – the metabunker https://metabunker.dk by matthias wivel & friends Mon, 17 Aug 2026 12:53:34 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0.4 How Comics Were Made reviewed https://metabunker.dk/2026/07/07/how-comics-are-made-reviewed/ Tue, 07 Jul 2026 14:45:35 +0000 http://metabunker.dk/?p=10301 How Comics Were Made: A Visual History from the Drawing Board to the Printed Page

In the latest issue of Print Quarterly, I review Glenn Fleishman’s instructive, detail-oriented How Comics Were Made — A Visual History from the Drawing Board to the Printed Page. The book is a very helpful examination of the complicated, sometimes arcane, production and printing processes behind newspaper strips in particular, from the late nineteenth century till today. Here’s an excerpt:

 

Chromolithography, Electrotype, chalk plates, flongs, Zip-a-Tone, X-Acto knives, Ben Day dots, stat cameras, Rubylith, rubber cement, Wacom. The terms emanating from mass media printing in the modern era, notably in the realm of comic strips, are recondite yet evocative. They might baffle even print connoisseurs, and while comics afficionados are generally vaguely familiar with them, the arcane, highly specialized processes of which they are part, and which have brought comics to life on the page for upward of two centuries, remain exotic abstracts to most.

 

In steps Fleishman with this comprehensive study of the printing techniques of North American newspaper comics from the dawn of mass media to the digital present. Not an academic study, the book brings the enthusiastic zeal and keen attention to detail which, in the still institutionally unconsolidated domain of comics and cartoon studies, largely remains the preserve of fans.

 

In other words, this book is a balm for anyone curious about this and as such highly recommended.

 

Catch the review in Print Quaterly, available in better research libraries the world over!

]]> On Comics History and the Canon https://metabunker.dk/2013/10/15/on-comics-history-and-the-canon/ Tue, 15 Oct 2013 21:38:00 +0000 http://metabunker.dk/?p=5852
Just thought I’d collect links to a number of writings on comics I’ve done over the years on comics history and aesthetics, as well as some of the great or otherwise significant works that have shaped it, here and elsewhere. Hopefully it will be interesting or useful to anybody interested in the subject, not the least students that I’ve bored with it in the seminar room. Anyway, here’s an overview:

History

  • Tempus Fugit (Degas, Comics)
    Essay on Edgar Degas, comics and representations of movement in nineteenth-century visual culture.
  • One Flew Out of the Cuckoo’s Nest: Comics Between Old and New
    On the history of comics as popular culture.
  • The Graphic Novel Tradition?
    Toward a canon of the graphic novel. More here.


    • Aesthetics

  • Flipping the Script: Comics and Classical Art
    The ideal and the grotesque: two sides of a coin.
  • Critiquing a Lively Art
    On how a low culture art form might be seen as important in the high-culture canon.
  • Hergé and the Order of Things
    Hergé, Tintin, and the importance of deep form in comics.
  • What’s the Story?
    Essay on how comics operate on levels beyond the strictly narrative and the significance of word and image for comics as art.


    • The Canon

  • Comic Tranformations: Töpffer and the Reinvention of Comics in the Nineteenth Century
    In-depth examination of the comics of Rodolphe Töpffer and the comics tradition they energized.
  • Word Made Inky Flesh
    Robert Crumb’s Genesis and incarnation in comics.
  • The Dreams of Children
    Introducing Quino’s comic strip classic Mafalda.
  • The Constant Garage
    On Moebius’ stream-of-consciousness masterpiece, Major Fatal.
  • Ishoku
    Introduction to the great Japanese auteur Yoshiharu Tsuge.
  • New Yorker Cartoons: A Legacy of Mediocrity
    A critique of the Mothership of American (gag) cartooning and its discontents.

  • Jimmy Corrigan’s Spectacular Reality
    On Chris Ware’s groundbreaking graphic novel and its visual language.
  • Kramers Ergot 4
    A critical dissection of the most significant anthology of the naughts.
  • Gary Panter’s Jimbo in Purgatory
    An examination of Panter’s delirious revisioning of Dante and Boccaccio, et. al.
  • Chester Brown’s Louis Riel
    On the representation of modernity and visual exegesis in Brown’s historical masterpiece.
  • Images Have Power
    A critique of the infamous Danish Muhammad Cartoons.
  • Sacred and Profane Love
    On Chester Brown’s autobiographical book on prostitution Paying for It and his sacred imagery.
  • True Lies
    Dominique Goblet’s Faire semblant c’est mentir and the representation of lived reality in comics
  • Respect the Architect
    The hole at the center of David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp.


    • Images from Gustave Doré, Hergé and studio, Cliff Sterret, Chris Ware, and Moebius.

    ]]>