Category: Links

Kyle Baker, the writer/artist of Nat Turner, discusses why he chose to self publish Nat Turner in an this interview.

In the interview he brings up the idea of the black Holocaust and how important it was to him to educate people about it.  He also said that he didn’t make it political.  He states the images are “visual and human, not political”.  I’m not sure that a reader can completely ignore the political aspects of the novel, though.  Is it human? of course, but I think there is a political edge too.  Maybe Baker didn’t make the novel political on purpose but I believe it is political just the same.  After all, having an opinion on any controversy is political in some way.

I hate this man. I just do. I have a big Thing against censorship. Its just Evil. Especially for Americans, considering Freedom of Speech etc.
I happened to found myself fascinated by William Gaines. He Is Way too Ahead of Time–He should have worked for Hammer Horror films. I feel As though EC really Set The groundwork for further Comic Book exploration. Especially cOnsidering how many writers And artists were influenced by him.

After reading the Dark Knight returns I thought that there was no way that this joker could have been approved by the “Comic Code” of the 50’s.  As it turns out he wasn’t.  This NPR article talks about the history of the infamous trickster.  He started out as homicidal maniac like his current incarnation, but when the comic code was instituted he was turned into a whacky tacky, goofball thief.  As the years progressed and the comic code became more lenient the artists and writers made him become a dark, twisted murderer again.

Dark Night Returns being a major reinvention of Batman made me wonder what the comics looked like before Frank Miller’s version. After some searching I found this site that put together a large image that takes a few issue covers from each decade Batman has been around and displays them along with a short description of the content and changes of each decade. Being around since the 1940s, there is a huge amount of Batman comics written and drawn by a number of different people. The covers provide a nice, quick way to see the differences in art style.

A great article I found on Batman gives you a new and intriguing look upon Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. A great beginning quote from the article is from Alan Moore himself, “Miller ‘has taken a character whose every trivial and incidental detail is graven in stone on the hearts and minds of the comic fans that make up his audience and managed to dramatically redefine that character without contradicting one jot of the character’s mythology. … Everything is exactly the same, except for the fact that it’s all totally different.”‘ As they go through the article the last quote is proven through comparisons to other versions of The Batman stories. Like how in the other stories when Batman is retiring they show him proud to have his young robin take his place and his son be the new side kick. But as seen in The Dark Knight Returns, that is not the case and he is actually having trouble with his retirement. Going through the article you get a better grasp on the Dark Knight story and a better look on Millers take on it.

            In this article, the author compares novels such as Gods’ Man to silent movies. He discusses other artists besides Lynd Ward and their impact. An insightful idea I learned about in this article, something I didn’t really think of until now, is that silent novels like Gods’ Man are not affected by a language barrier. No matter what language they speak, any person can pick up Ward’s visual narrative and generate some kind of meaning or theme. Lanier also points out that Gods’ Man was initially being released during the stock market crash of 1929, yet sales were doing well. Perhaps, this universal understanding of the novel helped create a larger audience. It seems silent novels have that advantage over books that are originally released in only one language.

A short biography on Lynd Ward (found here) reveals a bit about the artist’s life**.  I found it’s most fascinating aspect to be the degree than Lynd Ward was influenced by his instructors.  I searched for images of his teacher’s artwork, as well as the work of the other two men mentioned.  I assumed that most of these wood carvings would be similar due to the nature of the medium (hard; unforgiving), and the fact that it doesn’t seem to be a very popular form of art, but was rather shocked to see the differences in their work.  The style “Gods’ Man” is etched in seems to be most influenced by his primary instructor, Hans Alexander Mueller, almost mimicking his hard, thin lines.

** Assuming it isn’t entirely fictional. (Its on the internet, it must be true.)

Here is a story I found on Lynd Ward’s full works being printed into a a two volume set by The Library of America. I found it interesting that The Library of America is publishing it because on their website it says that they’re about the need to preserve the nation’s cultural heritage by publishing America’s best and most significant writing in authoritative editions is as strong as ever. I guess they deem Lynd Ward as influential and important as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, and mark Twain. The relevance of this article is that since we’re reading Ward’s book God’s Man I thought it was interesting that they were printing his life work into a two volume set.