The Mumpsimus

Boomtron just published my latest Sandman Meditation, this one on Chapter Two of The Wake . "Sandman Meditation?" you say. "That sounds ... vaguely familiar..." In July 2010, I started writing a series of short pieces called Sandman Meditations in which I proceeded through each issue of Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic and offered whatever thoughts happened to come to mind. The idea was Jay Tomio's, and at first the Meditations were published on his Gestalt Mash site, then later Boomtron . The basic concept was that we'd see what happened when somebody without much background in comics, who'd never read Sandman before, spent time reading through it all. I wrote 71 Meditations between July 2010 and June 2012, getting all the way up through the first installment of the last story in the regular series, The Wake . 75,000 words. And then stopped. I read Chapter 2 of The Wake and had nothing to say. I tried writing through the lack of words, but...

It is with tremendous sadness that I share news I received this morning from my friend David Beronä's family: David passed away peacefully at home last night. He'd been fighting a brain tumor for about a year and a half, and so while the news is not quite a surprise, it is a blow. [ Update:   Here's David's official obituary .] I interviewed David for Colleen Lindsay's blog The Swivet in 2009, where we talked about his Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels , which had recently been published by Abrams. I knew very little about graphic narratives before meeting David, and he gave me an extraordinary education over the years, as his knowledge was vast and his passion was thrilling. Eric Schaller and I had the honor of publishing what David told us was the last piece of writing that he completed before getting sick, the essay "Franz Masereel's Picture Books Against War" , which appeared in last year's issue of our magazine The Revelat...

  I recently read Jill Lepore's The Secret History of Wonder Woman alongside Noah Berlatsky's Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism , which had the bad luck to be published at nearly the same time. The two books complement each other well: Lepore is a historian and her interest is primarily in the biography of William Moulton Marston, the man who more or less invented Wonder Woman, while Berlatsky's primary interest is in analyzing the content of the various Wonder Woman comics from 1941-1948. Lepore's book is a fun read, and it does an especially good job of showing the connections between late 19th-/early 20th-century feminism and the creation of Wonder Woman, particularly the influence of the birth control crusader and founder of what became Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger . The connection to Sanger, as well as much else that Lepore reports, only became publicly known within the last few decades, as more details of Marston's living arrangements emerged: ...

Before 1995, Howard Cruse was best known as an underground comix artist, first coming to prominence with Barefootz in the 1970s, with his editorship of Gay Comix in the early 1980s, and then hitting a real stride with the Wendel comics in The Advocate throughout the '80s. Wendel ended in 1989, though, and Cruse began a major new project, his first graphic novel, Stuck Rubber Baby , released by the DC Comics imprint Paradox Press . It gained notice and won awards, but never had the breakout success of something like Maus , Persepolis , or Fun Home , though I would argue that it is at least close to equal in merit. Stuck Rubber Baby is a true graphic novel — unlike many other books that get that label, it was not conceived in pieces or published serially; it was always intended to be a long, unified narrative. It tells the story of a man named Toland Polk, mostly through his memories of growing up in Alabama during the early 1960s as a white guy who doesn't really kno...

In my latest Sandman Meditations piece , I discussed the unconscious shame of reading comics in certain settings, and at the end I promised I would read some old  G.I. Joe comics while my students worked on their final exam activities. I have kept my promise -- and gone beyond it. Since today's class was called Media as Popular Culture, I thought we should all enjoy some popular culture for a moment, so I loaned everyone in the class a G.I. Joe  comic....

Eric Schaller and I have been working on creating an online version of a magazine some of our ancestors  were involved with in 1876, and after a long period of work, with the brilliant and invaluable help of Luís Rodrigues, THE REVELATOR can now be revealed. In it you will find two new short stories, "Gaslight" by Jeffrey Ford and "Nick Kaufmann, Last of the Red-Hot Superwhores" by Nick Mamatas; an essay about the relationship between Salem, Massachusetts and witches by Robin DeRosa, poetry by Lillian Aujo and Beverly Nambozo, an interview with and comix by Edward Bolman, an account of The Spleen Brothers by Brian Francis Slattery, paintings by Michaela D'Angelo, and an eyewitness account of the James/Younger gang's raid on the bank in Northfield, Minnesota -- an account unlike any others, and till now lost in the archives of The Revelator ! A theme of twins, doubles, and doppelgangers runs lightly through this issue of the magazine. It's presen...

My latest Strange Horizons column was posted at the beginning of the week; the subject this time is Joanna Russ . One thing I thought about including, but couldn't figure out how to fit in, was that Russ's marvelous story "The Clichés from Outer Space" predicted one of the elements of Bryan Vaughn's comic Y: The Last Man (a series that I must admit I only read the first 3 collections of, its virtues utterly lost on me). In the comic, the Daughters of the Amazon are a bunch of evil, man-hating lesbians who cut off one of their breasts to be able to shoot arrows better or something, which is what some folks have  said the actual Amazons did back in the day ( the myths are contradictory ). It's possible that this noxious stereotype is ironized and deconstructed later in the series; I didn't stick with it long enough to find out. The relevant passage from Russ's story is one I quoted only a sentence of in the column. It's from the section called...

Things are likely to remain quiet around here for a little bit, because I need to force myself to kill the demons of procrastination and write a bunch of things for which I have deadlines. But as one little hiatus begins, another ends -- Gestalt Mash is back (in beta ) with new and better hosting, having suffered what any new site likes to suffer: faster-than-expected growth. Kudos to Jay Tomio for a huge amount of work migrating the site over the past few weeks. Anyway, my latest column is about Season of Mists , Episode 3 . (Previous installments are still here .) It contains this brilliant nugget of subtle insight, sure to recontextualize the entire Sandman  series for you: Entrails. Yum.

The Center for Cartoon Studies' Schulz Library has a great blog , which, if you're at all interested in comics or graphic novels, provides wonderful reading. Today, for instance, they posted a marvelous piece by S.R. Bissette about a new anthology of 1950s horror comics .  This is part one of what looks to be a three-part series. I also just discovered Bissette's own site , itself a marvel.  Don't miss his series of posts on LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka's Dutchman .