Week Nine: New Comics

This week we will be reading a number of recent issues of several new comics series. All these series have been receiving attention from reviewers and represent a number of ways in which comics have been expanding audiences and exploring new subject matter. I have also included a few recent classic longer form comics on the resource page and here are some links to a few recent online web comics that have garnered critical interest.

Bad Machinery by John Allison starts from 2009. Several adventures available here.

Hip Hop Family Tree by Ed Piskor is a blog comic being collected now by Fantagraphics for print. It has become an excellent popular culture history of hip hop .

Meg, Mogg and Owl by Simon Hanselman is a weekly comic with a unnatural supernatural millennial slant. Site can be tricky to navigate try starting as close to the beginning, last May, 

Oyster War or Hell on the Half-Shell is a recently completed webcomic of 128 pages by  Ben Towle. You can read the whole thing here.

Kate Beaton issued a new sketch comic online this year called Ducks which is autobiographical and more long form; read it here.

Here is a link to Drax Tran-Caffee's web comic Failing Sky. Panel to panel format with very well-drawn panels that you have to explore to understand the narrative which is multi-threaded.

A good blog for young artists who want insight into the life of making comics is the blog of Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon. It shows the importance of the blog in helping support a career position. 


One of the important factors that has shifted the situation of comics in the last few years has been the acknowledgement of the changing demographics of readership that now includes female readers in more or less equal proportion to males. Current comics readership may even be more female than male if we include popular shojo manga series, for example, in our measurements. This changing demographic, or at least the changing perception of it, has meant increasing opportunities for women in all areas of comics production and and increasing importance given to storytelling designed to capture female interest. 

Here, for example, is a link to a recent article on several important women doing comics in a main stream media outlet.

Reading Assignment: Please read as many series as you can among those posted on the course resource page. Alternatively, you can also read a series you have been wanting to read and post your appreciation of that series. 

Writing Assignment: Please post to your blog before coming to class an appreciation of one of the series you have read for this week. Make your appreciation as in-depth as you can.