At The Nation, Jeet Heer writes about the impact of MAD magazine and references its origins, which came at a tumultuous time for the comic book industry and for EC Comics publisher William Gaines.
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Gordon Parks’s photography of a “Harlem Gang Leader”
In 1948, Gordon Parks’s photography of a Harlem gang involved getting its dangerous members to trust him, so that he could spend time shooting them and talking to them about what life was like as a “Midtowner.”
A significant force in modern Canadian graphic design
Via Present & Correct, I was glad to find these gorgeous early 1960s-era science textbooks designed by Rolf Harder.
In a short piece at Graphis magazine not long after these designs were produced, Hans Neuburg wrote that Harder, who won scores of international design awards and has had his work exhibited all over the world, was “among the most significant forces in modern Canadian graphic design.” Born in Germany in 1929, Harder moved to Montreal, Canada in the late 1950s. Online archive Canada Modern has these textbooks as having been designed by Rolf Harder’s firm, beginning in 1964.
These book covers are very strongly reminiscent of the work of painter and illustrator Charley Harper, who looked to field guides to draw beautiful fish and other wildlife for the covers of Ford Times magazine and elsewhere in the early 1950s. I wrote about Harper’s magazine work here at my site in 2017.
See more of Rolf Harder’s work at MoMA and Canada Modern.
The new adult comics revolution
At The Comics Journal, Derik Badman writes about Italian comics artist Guido Crepax and his popular character Valentina Rosselli, whose strip was first serialized in a monthly adult-aimed comics magazine called Linus in the mid-1960s.
Should you tire of aimless and infuriating political theater, the Miles Davis doc airs tonight on PBS. (Richard Brody thinks it's "rote" and "formulaic," however, so maybe keep that remote handy) https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/review-miles-davis-birth-of-the-cool-and-the-problem-of-the-archive
Congratulations, Keum Suk Gendry-Kim and @JanetHong333 (and other finalists). My 2019 piece on Grass, an important, harrowing work of graphic nonfiction that examines Japan's "Comfort Women" system https://hyperallergic.com/513389/grass-keum-suk-gendry-kim-drawn-quarterly/
I talked to @ronanfarrow about the incredible last few years of his life and also about how making the Catch and Kill podcast together took a couple years off mine https://longform.org/posts/longform-podcast-380-ronan-farrow