A comic about the hearing-impaired

ABS-CBN announced a Filipino comic about deaf people is being adapted to theater:

A comic book by Deaf Filipino artist CJ Reynaldo that uses humor to introduce Filipino Sign Language and explore the experiences of Deaf people will be adapted for the stage by Apothecary Productions in November.

“Whatcha Saying?” follows CJ, a Deaf freshman student navigating life in a hearing world. When he meets his schoolmates Liam and Sarah, the three find ways to communicate as they explore friendship, love, identity and college life.

Published by Komiket, the graphic novel was a finalist at the 39th National Book Awards. Its stage adaptation will be performed in Filipino Sign Language, Tagalog and English, with a running time of about 45 to 60 minutes.

As somebody who believes theater's an important medium that shouldn't be overlooke in an era where cinema long became entrenched, they have a great idea to turn this into a stage play. And the subject of hearing-impairment is important too.

Upcoming anthology spotlights musicians

DJ Mag announced the publishers of Heavy Metal magazine are putting out an anthology based on a music duo next year:

A new comic anthology exploring the world of Daft Punk is set for release in 2027.

Published by French science fiction magazine, Métal Hurlant, the 272-page edition features 26 comics and six articles inspired by the legendary electronic duo, with contributions from more than 30 comics creators. The collection brings together original stories, archival material and essays exploring science fiction, technology, and electronic music.

Available to pre-order via publishers Humanoids, the anthology features work the likes of Laura Pérez, Malachi Ward, Jonathan Djob Nkondo and Zep, as well as contributions from French artists Mœbius and Philippe Druillet.

Music does make a good wellspring for exploration in comicdom, so good luck to them in marketing this.

A modern take on a Bengali classic

Stir World interviewed artist Charbak Dipta, who's currently working on comics like Heshoram Hoshiyaar, based on a classic Bengali story, and developing a modern take on it in panel format:

Srishti Ojha: Can you tell me about your decision to adapt Sukumar Ray’s Heshoram Hoshiyaar into a comic book medium?

Charbak Dipta: Bengali kids like me have grown up reading this story. The story is 100 years old now, so I wanted to bring it back and present it in a new and colourful way for today’s kids. It’s only four or five pages long, but in that short text there are so many visual elements, including some illustrations and sketches from Ray. It was really fun to turn these few pages into a complete graphic novel.

Srishti: So much of your work—from Heshoram Hoshiyaar to Lublur Prithibi references visual art and literary works. What draws you to these references?

Charbak: I like to reference famous paintings and works in my comics, such as Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942) in The World of Lublu or the movie Nayak (1966) by Satyajit Ray. This comic has a lot of Easter egg references scattered throughout as well.

I like this practice because kids can enjoy seeing the colourful illustrations and stories, but underneath there is a lot of philosophical thought and social and political references. When they grow up, they can understand the undercurrents and the subtext. I try to do this so that adults can also be attracted to the work, and I can cater to both generations with a single book. The World of Lublu and Heshoram Hoshiyaar are cross-generational books.

I think it's very clever and admirable to draw from literature and paintings for inspiration, and building on philosophy can also be a great idea. On the subject of political allusions, that can work provided it's in good taste.

Srishti: Often, adaptations for TV or film in animation or live action are considered the ‘next step’ for comic books and graphic novels. Now that you are experimenting with motion comics and 360° comics, would you be open to such adaptations?

Charbak: I don’t consider it a next step because comics themselves are a powerful medium. They don’t need support from other industries like animation or film. There have been offers which came to me for filming Lublu, etc., but they did not progress much. If someone approaches me, I’ll discuss it, but I’m not very keen on trying to get into film or animation.

Many people have asked me why I don’t try animation, VFX, gaming or these historic, constructed industries. There is no comic industry as such in India—it’s very fragmented and like a cottage industry.

I have stuck to this medium for over 10 years out of pure love for it. It’s not a stepping stone for me; it’s not the higher level; it is all the same.

While animation can be a far better venture than live action, Charbak is doing the right thing to stick with comicdom and not stray far from it. After all, we do need all the talented creators we can get to keep the medium going, even in foreign countries.

Srishti: In India especially, comics don’t enjoy the same support, funding or popularity as art forms like film and animation. What are your hopes for the Indian comic industry as it establishes itself domestically and nationally over the next few years?

Charbak: I think Indian comics should be more original rather than imitating existing Western graphic novels and comics. For example, Shakti Man and the Bengali comic Batul the Great, two of the most prominent Indian comics, are imitations of Superman and Desperate Dan (a British comic book), respectively. I hope Indian creators can explore more original themes and characters that suit Indian themes and Indian settings in the way Japan and Korea do with manga and anime, allowing them to export their culture to the world. We need more original comics to show the world what we have.

I think the support of the government, through funding and investment or a new national award for comics, can revolutionise the Indian comics landscape by encouraging Indian creators. Support from the media is also very important to grow the industry.

Publishers also need to take more risks. I went to English publishers working in India with The World of Lublu, and all of them rejected it. Then it got nominated for the Eisner, and now the conversations with English publishers are finalised. They should publish different, out-of-the-box subjects instead of the same old stories like biographies and adaptations of old classics. That’s how the industry can grow.

He's right, if anything, that sticking with local inspirations is far better than trying to imitate the western world in its current incarnations, certainly in the USA, where political correctness resulted in disasters, both artistic and financially. So I hope Charbak and other artists like him will find success in building up the comics industry in India more than it already is now, and one day elevate it to the status of Japan's. That could help tremendously.

Some history of Animerica magazine

Aftermath tells some history of an early magazine that gave coverage of Japanese anime, Animerica, which was in publication from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s:

Animerica Magazine was the closest thing the West had to a Reader’s Digest for otaku, by otaku. The monthly magazine, published by Viz Media, by and large did everything I strive to do in covering anime and manga: write explainers for universe readers, elucidate why a show or its creators matter through easy-to-read columns, exclusive interviews with voice actors and animators, and put folks on to when the new hotness will drop and where they can check it out. The issues I copped had one major difference—and one that hit me as a bit saddening to read in retrospect. Animerica Magazine is the last vestige of an industry for that kind of neuron-firing bliss you can get from scrolling through a webpage. You can only get this visual splendor by flipping through its pages.

Each issue of Animerica Magazine followed a format that’s equal parts pleasantly archaic and entirely backward compared with how online publications prioritize anime and manga. Instead of anime and manga (if they’re lucky) existing as a tucked-away vertical covered by one person in a staff filled with writers and content geared elsewhere, anime and manga are the magazine's centerpiece. Duh, it’s in the name. It's both humbling and heartening to flip through a magazine and see how much work and interest was put into a medium compared to how today feels like we’re still catching up to covering the medium in earnest. Much of my wistful nostalgia is encapsulated by Animanga’s layout. [...]

Even with the hindsight I have as an anime journalist, I found myself learning new information from a magazine two years older than myself. Chief among them was learning why Dragon Ball Z came to the U.S. before Dragon Ball (tldr: more action), the initial episode order (26), and how the Saban version of the show was marketed to 8- to 10-year-olds, hence the censorship. Hearing all this insider information from Gen and Cindy Fukunaga, the husband-and-wife duo who led its U.S. production in the halcyon days of Funimation, felt like an archaeologist brushing dust off a T. Rex tooth. The magazine had the wherewithal to dedicate four pages to illuminate readers on the many puns in its characters’ names and a mini-history of its video games back, a testament to the forward-thinking Animerica had in its coverage of a series that’d become synonymous with the genre.

On the subject of Haim Saban's onetime production studio and localizations, I don't find them appealing in retrospect, and today, I make an effort to avoid his editions, if and when I watch anime. One of the most annoying things about some early examples of localization dubbing is that the USA producers would attach all these ridiculous bells and whistles like third person narrators and other sound effects that might not appear in the original edition, and of course, there's the little matter of removing all that's Japanese about certain dubbed productions, which strongly suggested at the time the USA marketers didn't consider Japanese culture even remotely compatible with US culture. Japan does have its flaws, and there's examples where I came away feeling angry, but there are still plenty of positives you can find by distinguishing. I've got a feeling that, if a country like Bulgaria had even half the industry Japan does, the USA's distribution specialists would still do everything they could to drastically alter even cartoons from Bulgaria so they'd be all but unrecognizable in US localization, with no cultural aspects emphasized, if at all. Though I do wonder why a leftist like Hayao Miyazaki's the one who got to determine and champion his visions, while most other animators didn't.

Animerica may be long gone, but I'm sure it had advantages in print that online sites don't always have, with the main one being that you can sit down on a couch and relax, reading various news articles and interviews that gave insight into how the anime industry was doing at the time. But, modern web technology clearly won out, and now, not many specialty magazines exist in print for the subjects. Though arguably, if we bring up Wizard, they probably did more harm than good to comics in their 2 decade print journey based on the favoratist approach they had, laced with crude humor at times, yet if they were still around today, they'd doubtless go "woke". Perhaps even Animerica would do the same? They wouldn't do anime/manga any favors if they did.

What the Harvard Independent says about comics history

A writer at the Harvard Independent tells some history of how comics began as far back as a few centuries ago, and cites one of the most questionable European comics as something her parents got her into reading:

They also gave me a love for comics. Alongside traditional novels, I read the pre-teen series “Percy Jackson,” “The Adventures of Tintin,” and Japanese manga. I remember my dad buying “The New Yorker Encyclopedia of Cartoons,” two heavy tomes I spent hours paging through, wondering when I would finally understand the jokes I didn’t get yet.

My enthusiasm for comics is far from unique; many aficionados are far more dedicated to collecting and discussing comic books. “Tintin” has had relatively low popularity in the United States, so I never had much reason—or company—to expand beyond rereading my favorite issues.

That's interesting if Tintin wasn't big in the USA in her time, and considering how severely questionable its ideological viewpoints were, that's why it didn't really matter. It just wasn't all it could've been is probably one way of putting it. Another subject brought up is pretty surprising, however:

The first large-scale combination of pictures and words was—unsurprisingly for the Western world—the Bible. In the 1830s, London mass-printed “The Pictorial Bible.” Though illustrated Bibles had existed since the 15th century, none were as thorough as this version, which featured a picture accompanying almost every major scene; the number of illustrations leaped from around 30 to hundreds. Woodblock carvings, which required a huge initial investment in artists, accompanied biblical verses, but advances in printing technology let printers reproduce them quickly.

The goal of such a labor-intensive yet inexpensive Bible was to reach the largely illiterate masses of the time. Though literacy increased significantly in the next hundred years, only about half of England could read at the end of the 19th century. Even for literate Christians, a widely distributed pictorial Bible would have solidified iconography, characters, and settings in the common imagination.

Though the concept of a “comic” had not been invented yet, this biblical form foreshadows the reasons comics and graphic novels became so popular and pervasive as storytelling methods. They not only help readers understand a work’s core scenes and themes but also create cohesive interpretations. In turn, this makes discussion smoother (though not necessarily broader), allowing tight-knit communities to form around the same story.

I'm surprised a university paper that's bound to be as left-wing as you could expect would be willing to bring up religious themes in the topic, considering how badly minimized the Bible's been for surely even long before the turn of the century. That's certainly one credible achievement this article's making.

It would be a disservice to the genre to fail to discuss comics in the Eastern Hemisphere. Manga, a Japanese form of comics, has gained widespread popularity worldwide in recent years. The history of illustrative mediums in Japan is also tied to religion, as the first widespread pictures were created by a Buddhist monk in the 12th and 13th centuries. As Europeans came into contact with Japan, so did their artistic techniques, including the political cartoon. From then on until World War II, Japanese manga heavily featured political themes, especially nationalist ones, as well as inspirations from traditional folklore.

Japan’s defeat in the war led to a decrease in militaristic imagery, especially with the influence of manga artist Osamu Tezuka, who was inspired by American Disney movies and superhero comics. This movement helped the genre become the world’s best-selling comic format in the 21st century, surpassing the American-born Marvel Comics.

Interesting she puts it that way, because in a way, yes, manga's long surpassed even DC in sales, due to how both company managements destroyed the coherency and impact of their products, with distortions of continuity just the beginning of their downfall. So is it any wonder manga became more popular? Of course, even that may not last, and depending on the subject matter, certainly not if they start taking up the kind of Orwellian tactics that brought down much of USA comicdom.

Though many still dismiss comics as a juvenile genre, the combination of text and visual art can often tell a story more powerfully than either medium alone. “Maus” by Art Spiegelman is an autobiographical graphic novel about his experiences as the son of a Holocaust survivor. The medium allowed him to use animal heads as a visual allegory for different groups of people without ascribing human facial features. “Maus” was introduced as a comic in 1972 and published in book format in 1986, eventually winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1992. The recognition “Maus” received helped legitimize the graphic novel in the eyes of the public and academics, allowing future comic artists to tell their stories using this hybrid medium.

I think it was in 1980 when the beginnings of Maus first saw print, but what's regrettable here is Spiegelman's far-left politics, which dampen the impact it could've had, and it's disturbing how Spiegelman minimized 9-11 more recently. If he doesn't consider what occurred a quarter century ago a serious concern, it's hard to believe he's really serious about his concerns over what happened during WW2, or even WW1. Also, why does she say Maus validated the GN, but not the late Will Eisner's A Contract With God, which came much earlier? Seriously, it sounds too much like she doesn't have what it takes to research what could be a more challenging example. Spiegelman's an easy choice.

Anyway, the citation of the Bible is certainly interesting, and quite surprising for what again is surely a left-wing college paper, but apart from that, this is an article that's decidedly too reliant on easy examples, and not enough on harder, more challenging ones, and ultimately doesn't explore how artistic quality was brought down in the mainstream for starters. As a result, it's hard to believe people like these are really fans of the medium if they won't voice concerns about what went wrong over past years.

Luton's Comicon pays tribute to Steve Dillon

Luton Today says their local convention is going to pay tribute to artist Steve Dillon, who passed away a decade ago:

Luton Comic Con 2026 will pay tribute to one of the town’s most celebrated creative talents with a special exhibition dedicated to the life and work of legendary comic book artist Steve Dillon.

The exhibition, which Luton Comic Con CIC describes as a special final tribute to Dillon’s legacy, will showcase his remarkable career and lasting contribution to the world of comics.

[...] Dillon’s professional career began when he was just 16 years old, when he was hired to work for Marvel UK’s Hulk Weekly. His early Marvel UK work included drawing Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., as well as work connected to The Hulk, before he went on to establish himself across some of the most influential British and American comics.

That's pretty interesting he had Nick Fury to his credits. But what else was he know for?

He would later become renowned for his work on titles including Judge Dredd, Hellblazer and The Punisher, as well as co-creating the acclaimed Preacher with writer Garth Ennis. His distinctive storytelling and character work made him one of the most respected British comic artists of his generation.

Would that be Ennis' take on the Punisher they're referring to? Because Ennis set in motion the destruction of Frank Castle, turning it into a political mess 2 decades ago, and his take is something to admire? Though it does make me wonder what the late Gerry Conway might've thought of it.

Whatever the quality of Dillon's art, the sad part's that he was apparently one of a whole ocean of scribes who veered to the darkness, as his resume suggests. So what's so "remarkable" about that? I don't see it. There's bound to be only so many artists and writers who dealt more with the bright side - and Superman's building on that angle - who don't get as much attention as artists like Dillon may be getting (Al Plastino, for example). Seriously, it's time to give them more spotlight too.

A lawsuit was filed against Ed Brubaker, but because of the politics involved, judgement should be withheld for now

Brubaker, a comics writer who's been in the business for 35 years, may be one of the most left-wing around, and overrated. But the following news on Deadline about a sexual/racial harassment lawsuit that's been filed against him contains clues why it may not be a good idea to take it at immediate face value:

What may or may not have gone down on Prime Video‘s upcoming Criminal now looks set to end up in a California courtroom.

“This action arises from the sustained sexual, racial, national origin, and religious harassment that Plaintiff ljaaz Noobu, a Sri Lankan American filmmaker with fourteen years of experience in the film industry, endured while working on the production of the forthcoming television series Criminal,” states a 12-claim complaint filed earlier this week in L.A. Superior Court. [...]

“Hired in February 2023 as a production assistant to showrunner and Executive Producer Ed Brubaker, Plaintiff came to the production eager to contribute his talent and technical knowledge to a marquee project, the pretty plainspoken jury trial-seeking document from Burbank attorney Fahim Rahman says. “Instead, he was subjected to a workplace made toxic and abusive by the very individuals entrusted with authority over it.”

With claims that Noobu was subjected to cracks about rape and “demeaning stereotypes” for being the only Muslim on set and asked by Brubaker if the PA was a supporter of Hamas, the suit seeks a variety of unspecified damages. Also named in the complaint as defendants alongside Brubaker are Amazon Services, MGM, Criminal EP Phillip Barnett and others as defendants.

Now, Brubaker is but one of many pretentious scribes in today's landscape, and in hindsight, I don't like his Batman work from the early 2000s. But when I noticed the plaintiff's an Islamic adherent, I had to give pause to taking the claims at face value, realizing it's possible this could be trumped up accusations. That doesn't mean it's impossible for a non-Muslim leftist to abuse a Muslim though, recalling there was an incident in NYC over 15 years ago where a leftist attacked a Muslim cab driver, and a few years ago, a Pakistani Muslim in Seattle, Washington, nearly had his son taken from him for the sake of "transing". But it's clear in the long run that negativity from leftists towards Islamists is rare, especially based on where they're going now with choosing political candidates.

I do wonder however, what Brubaker thinks of Hamas? Or the plaintiff himself? That's what isn't clear from this article. Somehow, it's scarier to think what Brubaker could think, based on any leftist credentials he retains. But if it turns out the plaintiff comes within even miles of supporting such a repulsive bunch, then I'm not sympathetic to him.

For now, we'll have to withhold judgement and let any ensuing trial determine whether the accusations are factual or false. However this turns out though, I'm not interested in Brubaker's resume.

Film director defends comic adaptations

Variety reports film director Chloe Zhao, who worked on the unsuccessful Eternals movie, and is insisting on defending them as a form of entertainment:

When Chloé Zhao was growing up, she dreamed not of directing movies but becoming a manga artist.

“But I wasn’t very good at drawing. I wasn’t up to standard,” she said with a laugh during a wide-ranging masterclass presented by Cartier on Friday afternoon at the Venice Film Festival. “I wanted to tell stories. I didn’t think cinema was an option for me.”

Of course, Zhao found her way into film and directed acclaimed movies such as 2020’s Oscar-winning “Nomadland” and 2025’s Shakespearean drama “Hamnet.” She was eventually able to meld her passions with 2021’s Marvel adaptation “Eternals,” which starred Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Kumail Nanjiani, Brian Tyree Henry, Barry Keoghan, Salma Hayek and Angelina Jolie and revolved around an immortal alien race sent to protect Earth from evil beings.

“I loved doing it,” she said of directing the movie. “For any of you who love anime, I know you know this was a girl’s dream come true. Comic books are the western equivalent of [manga]. They are very different, but I live in the west, and that’s what I had access to.”

Although superhero movies have waned in popularity since the pandemic — even “Eternals” fell short of box office expectations with $400 million globally against a $200 million-plus budget — Zhao sees the value in all forms of entertainment. That’s unlike, say, Martin Scorsese, who has infamously likened Marvel movies to “theme parks.”

“I do feel it’s important to not write off stories because we don’t consider them high art,” she said. “The purpose of storytelling for me, humbly, is to create containers for people … to try to process what they need to process. Archetypes are such a great way to do it — and we see them in myths — is because it’s something we all share.”

The problem is that political correctness has long taken over - even the Eternals movie had its own share of that - and it's drained the adaptations of whatever potential they had. If Zhao's creative license was restricted, that also says something about the film she directed, which was one of the first serious failures for modern comic adaptations to screen.

And since manga came up, it's vital to recall there've been at least a few Hollywood adaptations that were failures too, like the Saint Seiya film. That one, IIRC, wasn't even released with much fanfare. Some mangakas are also against following certain "western" principles. For all we know, the least successful adaptations of manga could've precipitated the failure of USA comics movies. Another problem is that the adaptations only seem to build on action and comedy themes, not unlike how animation is marketed in the west. If Hollywood's not willing to try out projects based on comics and manga emphasizing drama and romance, it just illustrates the failure of the western film industry to expand beyond certain themes and be more creative, not to mention give the audience something that could be more challenging.

So what's the use of defending comics-based live action films if they're going to remain so PC, and not expand to more challenging themes? There's whole shiploads of independent comics out there too that could serve as a wellspring, and they eschew all that for the sake of adapting mainstream comics that've been throughly ruined over the past quarter century. Indeed, what good does it do to watch live action adaptations when the original comics are being destroyed? If the original comics are turned stale, it just makes a mockery out of the idea to adapt them in the first place.

A former director of Marvel films tarnished her entries by celebrating murder

Warner Todd Huston at Breitbart reports a filmmaker named Lexi Alexander, who has some comics-related filmings to her credits, wrote obscene social media posts celebrating the murder of a deputy bank manager in NYC's Times Square:

Lexi Alexander, director of the 2008 Marvel film Punisher: War Zone, is taking heat for celebrating the stabbing murder of a Bank of America employee with an X post featuring Luigi Mangione’s face superimposed on a drawing of Batman’s bat signal.

Bank officer Erin Piacenti was fatally stabbed in Times Square, New York, shortly after celebrating her second wedding anniversary — and the day of her murder was her first day back to work from maternity leave. Piacenti, 32, was walking near West 42 Street and Seventh Avenue when 49-year-old Pamela Cisneros of Queens stabbed the young mother and another person in unprovoked attacks. Cisneros was later shot and killed by police after she threatened them with her two butcher knives.

After the murder, Alexander, who calls herself a “Palestinian filmmaker” (born in Germany to a Palestinian mother and father), jumped to her X account and posted a drawing of Batman looking up at the bat signal, but in the lighted image in the sky, there is instead an image of Luigi Mangione’s face. Mangione is now on trial for the 2024 assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. [...]

Palestinian American film maker celebrates the murder of a random white lady who worked in middle management at Bank of America.

32,000 likes pic.twitter.com/f7e4wxd54b

— Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 (@DrewPavlou) September 1, 2026

Her X post is still on her timeline, but it has been restricted from being embedded.

In a followup post, she accused everyone who criticized her post of being a “Hasbara bot,” meaning someone working for Israeli propaganda operations. [...]

After Punisher: War Zone bombed at the box office (a $10 million gross to its $35 million budget), Alexander has mostly directed episodes of TV shows such as Supergirl, S.W.A.T., and How to Get Away with Murder.

Well just look at that. More comics creations have been tarnished and desecrated through poor employment choices. As if it weren't bad enough the Supergirl TV show from the past decade was clogged with far-leftism. This is whom the studios that own Marvel and DC are hiring? What this makes clear is that Tinseltown is in serious need of reform, which they're tragically unlikely to work on. It's also got to be telling this repulsive "filmmaker" also worked on a TV show with a title that itself makes light of a serious issue. Alexander's career as a film and TV director will hopefully be over after this horrific case, which strongly hints she's as anti-American as she's anti-Israel. And no doubt, she also hates the Jewish creators and publishers of the comics the films and TV shows she worked on adapted.

NPR wants to blame tariffs for hindering specialty store in Ohio

NPR wrote about Alter Ego Comics in Lima, Ohio that's reportedly had problems with tariffs the Trump administration set in place for Canada, as a result of all the trouble the latter's government caused:

But these days, the reality of tariffs has encroached into that escape that Bowker seeks to offer.

"It's become a challenge to try and remain stoic and focus on the four walls of my shop when it seems like the world is on fire," he says.

For nearly a year and a half, small business owners like Bowker have dealt with both the financial cost and uncertainty caused by tariffs.

And now, Bowker is also dealing with how to seek tariff refunds after some of the import taxes he paid were struck down by the Supreme Court earlier this year – and facing the prospect that an escalating trade war with Canada could soon drag him into another tariff storm.

"It unfortunately could be a major issue to an industry that has really been firing on almost all cylinders for the last couple of years," Bowker said.

It's an illustration of how tariff walls around countries continue to put pressure on main street American businesses more than a year after President Trump first unveiled them in a White House ceremony.

Has the comics medium really been on "all cylinders" in the past few years? Not via the majors, that's for sure. And if regular bookstores know how to handle these things, I don't understand how managers of specialty stores don't. Also, look what the store in focus is relying upon:

For Bowker, those initial "Liberation Day" tariffs meant paying more for the action figures that drive about 70% of his revenue. Think highly detailed foot-tall statues of Wolverine or Spider-Man made in China. At one point, Chinese goods were tariffed at 145%, though they've since fluctuated lower.

Since "Liberation Day," Bowker has paid his supplier more than $16,000 in tariffs. For a while he passed some of that along to his customers as a 3% tariff fee. Recently though, Bowker decided to get rid of the fee and just eat that extra cost himself because it was costing him business.

"The reality is our action figure business was down 50% last year," Bowker said. "And I have a feeling a lot of that had to do with tariffs."

Tariffs or none, I find it annoying how statues are emphasized here, when the story merit of the original comics are what should matter. Yet it's excruciatingly obvious NPR has no interest in such challenging issues. Wow, this is what the specialty store's business depends upon by and large? That's got to be telling, right down to how the action figures and statues are made in a communist-run country.

Today there are still other tariffs raising the cost of his action figures. And there's another possible tariff threat down the line – the growing trade war between the U.S. and Canada. Comics – including the ones Bowker sells – are primarily imported from Canada.

They are not included in this round of tariffs, but that could change if the trade war keeps escalating.

But nobody argues that perhaps comics should see more printing in the USA proper, huh? Canada isn't doing a favor by refusing to cooperate with Trump on business and trade issues, and he's encouraging Canadian businesses to move their operations to the USA. Maybe that's just what they should do, if Trump's willing to offer special benefits and bonuses. But that's not a concern to NPR, in all their biases.

At least Bowker is seeing a break from the tariff storm. Despite all these headwinds, Bowker says business this year is up. There's a comic book renaissance right now boosting his sales, driven by popular titles like Absolute Batman.

But while many customers are still buying, others are tightening their budget because of rising prices, caused in part by tariffs.

And no discussion of the $5-plus cover prices for the now outmoded pamphlets, right? I wonder how that doesn't matter or concern? It looks like NPR exploited this whole topic just for the sake of a pathetic attack on Trump's tax policies, and naturally, they have no interest in how DC's Absolute line builds on some bad political metaphors as well. So of course, one can only wonder if NPR gave a citation to Absolute Batman based on its political components. Here, they had a chance to shed some light on various independent titles, and what makes them click or not, and instead, we have to hear cliche upon cliche about Absolute Batman, and action figures that're no replacement for the actual comics themselves. This whole report is therefore a joke, and asks no questions helpful to USA business at all. It definitely doesn't offer any valid alternatives for comics.

Swiss comic for teaching students about AI

Geneva Solutions announced a special comic that's for teaching about AI, but also about wider cooperation:

A 48-page comic book, titled Critical Code, aims to educate students about the importance of multilateral cooperation. It has been distributed in Geneva’s secondary schools and across 15 other Swiss cantons.

Since 2023, international Geneva has faced challenging years, marked by thousands of job cuts across UN agencies, the Palais des Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and scores of NGOs, as well as relocations of key operations. The impact has been profound, forcing Geneva to rethink its future.

In response, the Foundation for Geneva – celebrating its 50th anniversary this year – has championed the creation of a comic book exploring Geneva’s international ecosystem. The work, published in French, German, Italian and English, is called Critical Code.

[...] The 48-page comic has already been distributed by the Department of Public Education to secondary school classes in Geneva and a dozen other cantons. Its goal is to “challenge young people to think about the individual and global implications of AI” while also highlighting the importance of international cooperation, much of which takes place in Geneva. As a key pillar of Swiss foreign policy, the comic also aims to showcase the often-overlooked strengths of international Geneva to the rest of the Swiss population.

Well I hope they're not intent on trying to set up another political outfit to substitute for movements like the UN, because they have been a bad lot for years, and so has the Red Cross. If the comics project is meant to provide a better idea for people, like encouraging them to do technological research, that's what could make it palatable. But they need to stop acting like the UN is virtually everything, when it's not. And if they think AI isn't the best example in technology, maybe they should just say so.

Stars of Marvel movies are making it hard to watch them in hindsight based on their anti-Israel attacks

Mark Ruffalo's easily the most well known actor to appear in comics adaptations like the Avengers movies (as the Hulk), who's recently been viciously attacking the land of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's ancestry. He's done it again in his attack on Paramount over his opposition to a merger with Warner Brothers, as told in this Jerusalem Post article:

US multimedia giant Paramount slammed Hollywood actor Mark Ruffalo for invoking antisemitic tropes in an Instagram post on Friday in which he accused Israel of genocide and apartheid.

The outspoken anti-Israel ACTOR, known for his roles in the Avengers films, accused Paramount moguls David and Larry Ellison of “powering some of the most destructive and inhuman forces in the world” and warned of the danger of David Ellison’s bid to combine Paramount with Warner Bros. Discovery.

A spokesperson for Paramount said the company is “troubled when antisemitic tropes are invoked in purported service of a business dispute. Words like ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid,’ applied to a corporate transaction, aren’t just wrong – they’re a bridge too far, and they cheapen the very real suffering those words are meant to describe. This doesn’t deserve a response in kind – and to be clear, we don’t tolerate prejudice of any kind, against anyone.”

In his post, Ruffalo referred to Larry Ellison as a “classic oligarch,” and he shared a video of Safra Catz, vice chair of Oracle, discussing the technological assistance the company provided to Israel following the Hamas-led October 7 attack.

Ruffalo encouraged his followers to “look how she revels in what we now have come to see as a genocide, which was built on an apartheid system of oppression powered by Oracle.”

What Ruffalo's been up to gets even worse with his and several other actors' support for a jihadist:

Over 20 actors who have appeared in Marvel films have joined a campaign calling for the release of convicted Palestinian terrorist Marwan Barghouti, according to an Instagram post published on Friday by the group, freemarwannow.

Among the actors who have joined the "Freedom for Marwan" campaign are Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays Doctor Strange; Mark Ruffalo, who plays the Hulk; Ian McKellen, who plays Magneto; and Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton, and others. [...]

Barghouti is a former leader of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a terrorist organization that carried out many suicide bombings and shooting attacks during the Second Intifada.

According to Israel, Barghouti orchestrated or was responsible for, among others, the following attacks between 2001 and 2002: the murder of a Greek Orthodox monk on the road to Ma’aleh Adumim; the shooting attack during a bat mitzva celebration at a banquet hall in Hadera that killed six Israelis; a shooting spree on Jaffa Street in Jerusalem during which two Israelis were killed and 37 people wounded; a shooting attack in Neve Ya’acov in which an Israeli policewoman was killed; the murder of an Israeli at the Bashkevitz coffee and spice factory in the Atarot industrial zone of Jerusalem; the suicide attack perpetrated by Daryan Abu Aysha at the Maccabim checkpoint in which two policeman were wounded; the shooting spree at the Seafood Market restaurant which killed three Israelis.

It's going to be very hard watching these performers from live action Marvel movies playing their roles for a long time now, based on what they've just done in the now, even if they're playing villains. Their ignorance is stunning, and most chilling is, what if they fully know what Barghouti did years ago?

A rabbi writing for VIN News described the whole repellent case as follows:

Imagine that the Superheroes known as the “Avengers” were fighting for the wrong side. Say, for example, for the Nazis. Well, it is not such a stretch anymore. But it is not the Superheroes – it is the actors who play them.

Somewhere in a publicist’s office, likely, in Hollywood – a decision was made. A list circulated. Names were added, one by one, each signatory presumably assured that the others had already looked into it.

Nobody looked into it.

More than twenty actors from the Marvel Cinematic Universe — Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Ruffalo, Don Cheadle, Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton, and a supporting cast long enough to fill a closing credit scroll — have signed their names to a demand that the United Nations and the governments of the world work to free mass-murderer Marwan Barghouti from an Israeli prison.

The statement voices grave concern for his imprisonment and his treatment inside it. Grave concern. That is the entire emotional range on offer, and it is expended in full on behalf of the man serving five consecutive life sentences for murder.

For the five people he was convicted of murdering, the statement has nothing. No sentence. No clause. No name. Twenty-plus celebrated artists, working presumably with the assistance of professional wordsmiths, produced a document about a quintuple murder conviction that manages never to acknowledge that anyone died.

I'll never be able to watch a lot of these particular movies ever again, realizing just how far into the abyss the twisted perspective of the actors in the Marvel movies goes. They've desecrated the memory of many Jewish comics creators with this abominable act of theirs, and it's stunning they'd even take the roles they did in comics adaptations to begin with. The Marvel live action movies aren't aging well, as a result of what the actors who played the casts in the films have been doing lately.

Update: VIN News announced the Israeli foreign ministry condemns the Hollywooders glorifying Barghouti:

Israel’s Foreign Ministry on Monday denounced a Hollywood-backed campaign calling for the release of Marwan Barghouti, a senior Fatah figure serving five life sentences for directing terrorist attacks during the Second Intifada, saying celebrities cannot rewrite his criminal record.

“Hollywood can manufacture superheroes. It cannot manufacture Marwan Barghouti’s innocence,” the ministry said in a statement posted on social media. “Five murder convictions. Five life sentences. Five victims of his terrorist plots.”

The ministry urged the public to remember the victims rather than “glorify their murderer.”

The rebuke followed a new wave of support for the “Free Marwan” campaign from more than 20 actors linked to Marvel films and television productions, including Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Ruffalo, Don Cheadle, Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton and Ian McKellen. Campaign organizers say more than 200 cultural figures — actors, musicians, writers and directors — have signed on since Barghouti’s family launched the effort late last year with groups in the United Kingdom. [...]

The Foreign Ministry’s statement did not name individual actors but framed the celebrity drive as an attempt to recast a convicted terrorist as a political prisoner. “Remember the names of the victims,” the ministry said, “instead of glorifying their murderer.”

An absolutely correct point to make.

Video game about boy trapped in comic book unfortunately also trapped in horror genre

InvenGlobal tells about a video gaame titled Yurei, which is about the following:

Yūrei is a psychological horror game set within the haunted pages of a comic book, developed by Team Yūrei. The game was created over five months by ten second-year master's students from Cnam-Enjmin, the National School for Video Games and Digital Interactive Media in Angoulême, France.

Players must follow the comic's progression, reading the story to reach its end. The comic book, which is stuck to the protagonist Jun's hand, constantly speaks to the player, sometimes offering hints and at other times presenting challenges to solve. It acts like a narrator, yet it may also force you to make sacrifices.

The premise of being inside a comic itself may be clever, but making it part of an overused genre is not. It's regrettable the horror genre continues to be what's used as a theme for these kind of computer games, when here, if they'd wanted to, they could've turned it into a fanciful adventure with a brighter setting, yet they stick to potentially violent themes instead. That's the biggest problem with modern entertainment, and no telling how to convince anyone why it needs to change.

And I hesitate to think what they mean by "sacrifices".

Joe Simon's pro-Israel publication in the 1960s

The Canadian Jewish News wrote about the history of a comics-style project the late artist Joe Simon of Capt. America fame worked on following the 6-Day War in 1967 that was favorable to Israel:

After the 1967 Six Day War, the originator of the comic book hero Captain America produced a spoof on the war and its political aftermath. A Funny Thing Happened to Me on the Way to Tel Aviv was a 66-page satirical magazine created and edited by Joe Simon that sold for 50 cents.

Its pages contain photographs of Egyptian and Jordanian leaders with comic-style word balloons and corny jokes. For example: “The height of Israeli gall: while waiting for negotiations at the UN to begin, one of them opened a kosher restaurant in Damascus.” The magazine reflected the swagger across the Jewish world following Israel’s miraculous military victory.

Simon was no stranger to controversial humour. He edited Sick magazine throughout the 1960s which in its first issue described itself as “a grim collection of revolting humour.” It contained tasteless, politically incorrect humour much like the standup routines of controversial comics such as Lenny Bruce, who apparently purchased 100 copies of each issue that included excerpts from his routines. [...]

Simon used his pen and his sense of humour to stand up for the Jewish people. In his Funny Thing magazine, he includes this legal disclaimer:

“The captions in this publication are entirely fictitious. As for the characters, they should live and be well. Except, maybe, for one or two…”

Now that's amazing. The application of word balloons to live action photography is something the satirists at MAD magazine did too at times. Let's also recall Simon was a conservative in his time, and after September 11, 2001, he'd drawn an illustration similar to the cover of the premiere issue of Captain America Comics where, much like Simon and Kirby drew Steve Rogers punching Hitler, Simon drew Cap punching Osama bin Laden. The question now is whether that illustration was ever made public, or if we'll ever see it on display today? If his estate or anybody else responsible for retaining his artwork is withholding that Simon item, that's wrong.

For now, this is a pretty interesting bit of history of what Cap's co-creator did in the years afterwards, and from what I know, Simon did work in comics and other similar forms of entertainment at least until the mid-70s. His support for Israel, along with supporting the USA, is something important to appreciate.

French cartoon film adapted from Legendaires broadcast on Canal Plus

Sortir a Paris announced an animated film based on a comic called The Legends is airing on Canal Plus:

The Legends, the animated film adapted from Patrick Sobral’s comic, is airing on Canal+ on Friday, July 31, 2026 at 9:06 PM. Directed by Guillaume Ivernel, the feature marks the first time the adventures of Danaël, Jadina, Gryf, Shimy and Razzia leap from page to the big screen in the magical world of Alysia.

Released in French cinemas on January 28, 2026, the film draws on the Delcourt-published saga, a touchstone of contemporary French children's comics. Now airing on television, it invites families to experience this adventure — a blend of magic, humor, and action — designed for viewers aged 6 and up.

The Légendaires used to be the planet’s greatest protectors. But a curse left them trapped in the bodies of ten-year-olds, just like everyone on Alysia. Stripped of their adult forms, Danaël, Jadina, Gryf, Shimy and Razzia must join forces to confront the sorcerer Darkhell and free their world from this eternal childhood.

The story keeps the core ingredients that made the comic a hit: a team of heroes with very different personalities, an accessible fantasy world, spectacular battles, and humor born from tensions within the group. The characters’ transformation into children also fuels a narrative about trust, friendship, and the need to cooperate despite their disagreements.

That certainly sounds a lot more faithful to its source material than some mainstream USA comics adaptations can be. And it's hopefully a lot more respectable to what's in good taste for children than what comes out of Hollywood these days too. Maybe best of all though, is that it's not airing on a bad network like Netflix happens to be. Broadcasting it there would only be bad news. It's better than the cartoon remain on French channels like Canal.

Where the mid-90s adaptation of Tank Girl stands today

A writer at Men's Journal talks about the 1995 film adaptation of the British comic called Tank Girl, which was not a success, but is apparently the kind of movie that's since found a "cult following", as could probably be expected of some films of the times:

Arriving decades before the box office successes of Wonder Woman (2017) and Captain Marvel (2019), Tank Girl (1995) was a pioneer of the female-led comic book film, or pushed back their popularity for another 20 years — depending on who you asked.

There's just one thing not brought up - despite the huge box office gross 7 years ago, the Capt. Marvel movie is not considered an artistic success, and the sequel certainly buried any further chances for additional sequels for now.

Tank Girl was based on the British comic book series and strips of the same name by artists Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett — the latter of whom would go on to further global prominence as the visual co-creator of the virtual band Gorillaz — first published in 1988. Set in a post-apocalyptic Australia, the series is led by the titular character (real name Rebecca Buck), who, along with mutant Kangaroo boyfriend Booga, navigates the lawless outback in a series of misadventures in an abandoned military tank.

[...] With predominantly non-Australian accents and actors, alongside the rejection of the dry British humor of the comic and its overt violence and sexuality, the Tank Girl film was a far cry from what the fans of the comic book expected. With abysmal critical reviews and a revenue of $6 million against a $25 million budget, the movie venture was largely considered a total failure, particularly by Hewlett and Martin.

Hewlett, who was just 22 years old when MGM studios first approached him about a film adaptation, reflected in 2006: “The script was lousy – me and Alan Martin kept rewriting it and putting Grange Hill jokes and Benny Hill jokes in, and they obviously weren’t getting it. They forgot to film about ten major scenes so we had to animate them … it was a horrible experience.

In a 2017 interview with Vice, Hewlett elaborated, “They played that game of looking for things that are cool, buying those things and then turning them into something else.”

“Which is what Hollywood does. If they were to stick to the actual storyline of the original idea of Tank Girl, then you’d probably have an X-rated movie on your hands, and what they want is a family movie they can open and have a big box office weekend with,” he continued. “They take out all the essence – all the good ingredients – and then turn it into something else.”

There have been R-rated adaptations of several comics over the years, and IIRC, the 1998 Blade movie may have been a rare example to date for a Marvel adaptation. So, while the statements given by the comic's creators may be a bit naive, the fact is that given the chance, Hollywood will dumb down these adaptations considerably, or just plain make a shoddy film. It reminds me that a few years before the Tank Girl film was produced, there was an adaptation of Sara Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski novels starring Kathleen Turner that was similarly catastrophous, and stuff like that makes me wonder if some Hollywood studios have so much money, they're not against injuring the popularity of the source material with an awful film. Undoubtably, there are plenty of abortive adaptations whose producing studios have only so much contempt for the zygotes and creators, they're willing to damage the original product's potential. With some early female-led adaptations being the biggest victims of a Hollywood studio's refusal to comprehend what made the source material work in the first place. Just this year of course, we saw how well the new Supergirl adaptation worked out. And that was based on a story written by a very bad writer, by contrast.

It would be far better if some creators would prove they can resist the temptation to have a film adapted to live action, and depending on the situation, even to animation. After all, there's still plenty of examples today where a notable creation can be watered down very badly in Hollywood, and it's gotten considerably worse in an era where stuff like that is described as "woke". So maybe the time's come for comics creators to start reevaluating whether it's even a good idea to begin with, to have their properties adapted to the silver screen. If there's a chance a bad adaptation could send the comic into obscurity, that's why it's just not worth it to approve an adaptation. That said, it's interesting how it's become another film to find a cult following in the 30 years since it was made.

Indian cartoonist's work nominated for Eisners and Harveys

Scroll wrote about Charbak Dipta, an Indian cartoonist whose self-published comic was nominated for Eisner and Harvey awards:

West Bengal-based Charbak Dipta was nominated for the Best Digital Comic category in the 2026 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards for The World of Lublu (published in Bengali by Book Farm as Lublur Prithibi). Named for the pioneering comics creator and graphic novelist Will Eisner, the Eisner Awards are considered the “Oscars” of the comic book industry. The winners were announced on July 24 at the San Diego Comic Con International.

“Charbak Dipta is not the first Indian to be nominated,” scholar and cover designer Pinaki De remarked about the Eisner Award nomination, “but the fact that his work is done entirely in India, originally published in Bengali for a regional market, makes it so special. To think that anyone here can also make it without extensive ‘foreign’ connections augurs well for the future of Indian comics. In that sense, he is a trailblazer.”

The World of Lublu has also been nominated for this year’s Harvey Awards for Digital Book of the Year. This prize is named after pioneering American cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman, and no book-length, creator-owned work from the subcontinent has been nominated for either before, let alone both. Dipta hails from Bongaon – a town near the Indo-Bangladesh border, two hours from Kolkata. [...]

He started out as a cartoonist at The Times of India in Kolkata. He has, since then, worked as a commercial illustrator for tabloids, magazines, and publishers like Scholastic – book covers, cartoons, children’s picture books, and work-for-hire gigs ranging from Nordic mythology to Malgudi Days-esque tales to gangster narratives, while also committing to rigorous online outreach for each of his works, public appearances, and curated exhibits.

This is the daily bread of the commercial illustrator: a figure with a long and under-recognised history in India who has always worked across formats, languages, and markets with a versatility that does not easily lead to publishing boutique graphic novels. Dipta grew up on Indrajal Comics, Chacha Chaudhary, and the Bengali stalwarts, Narayan Debnath and Mayukh Chowdhury. The former designed cosmetic labels before becoming a one-man comics industry, while the latter moved fluidly between illustration and adventure serials. The tradition continues into the present in figures like Debashish Deb, Onkarnath Bhattacharya, and Uday Deb – commercial artists who straddle children’s illustration, political cartooning, graphic novels, merchandising, and branded work with the same promiscuous dexterity their predecessors mastered.

His later western influences and encounters with the Bengal School of Art and folk traditions aside, Dipta understands that survival in this ecology means taking on every role simultaneously. The mass market that could move hundreds of thousands of a single issue per month has fragmented considerably. What remains is a precarious ecosystem in which the aspiring cartoonist must also be the illustrator-for-hire, colourist, letterer, cover designer, and even publisher and translator of their own work in order to move across national boundaries.

This is certainly interesting background history, and what's additionally impressive is that Dipta helped develop the translation for one of the most famous GNs produced by the guy who founded one of the aforementioned award ceremonies:

The most satisfying loop in this story is his recent translation of Will Eisner’s A Contract with God (1978) into Bengali, completed almost simultaneously with his own nomination for an award bearing Eisner’s name. Dipta pursued the Eisner Estate himself, driven by what he saw as a structural parallel between Eisner’s Dropsie Avenue and his own Kolkata.

“The raw pain, resilience, and daily struggles of the Jewish immigrants in Eisner’s work resonate perfectly with the lived experiences of East Bengal refugees settling into the colonies of West Bengal post-Partition,” Dipta explains. “The damp, congested tenement living on Dropsie Avenue mirrors the narrow alleys, centuries-old decaying mansions, chaotic street noise, and tightly knit human relationships of North Kolkata.”

Translating Eisner also meant contending with Eisner’s lettering, blocky type that weighs on the images in very idiosyncratic ways. For a cartoonist of speed such as Dipta, who also letters his own work, one imagines this to have been both a technical challenge and a philosophical one. How does one carry the visual texture of a voice from one script to another without losing its grain? The artist always precedes the critic. Let’s leave it there.

We must also give the guy a lot of appreciation for recognizing the value of Eisner's most notable GN from the late 70s, at a time when he'd resumed comics development after working in the army and businesses more often during the 50s and 60s. Of course, it's a shame the Eisners have been abused as an award event in past years, recalling they nominated DC's offensive Identity Crisis from 2004 for awards 2 decades ago. I can't recall if it actually won any, but if it did, that was wrong, plain and simple, and explains perfectly what's gone wrong with even award shows nowadays. We have to hope their board of directors has moved away from associating with such atrocities, but that doesn't mean they aren't still heaping awards on other bad mainstream and conglomerate-owned comics that don't deserve them. It's good if they're now providing appreciation for indies that're hopefully in better taste, and Dipta's work looks like just what those seeking better taste could be looking for.

So congratulations to him for finding wider recognition for his art career, and good luck to Dipta in the future on comics illustrating.

The winner of this year's Fnac France Inter Comic Award is a story about an illustrator

Fnac Darty, a site run by the French books and music retail chain, announced their choice for this year's comics award under their sponsorship:

The graphic novel *Au-Dedans* (Editions 404) has just been named the winner of the 7th edition of the Fnac France Inter Comic Book Award. This debut graphic novel by Will McPhail, an illustrator for *The New Yorker*, is a refreshing and moving story centered on Nick, a withdrawn young city dweller who slowly begins to open up to the world.

Nick is an illustrator whose life oscillates between his personal projects and a day job at an advertising agency. He spends his time in cafés and craft beer bars, aware that something is missing from his life: other people and their inner worlds. Much more than a critique or a simplistic autobiographical account of a millennial’s life among other millennials, this slice of Nick’s life focuses on the divide that separates us all from one another.

It sounds like something even Japanese mangakas could explore, and just the kind of idea even USA creators should. Congratulations to the artist who conceived the tale.

A superficial article about Doonesbury history, and a sloppy one

Earlier this year in May, The Forward wrote about how cartoonist Garry Trudeau dealt with Jewish-related issues in Doonesbury, mainly spotlighting Mark Slackmeyer, possibly the 3rd regular cast member who debuted shortly after Mike and B.D in 1970:

Trudeau’s “Megaphone Mark” — who sported long hair and a bushy beard —was modeled on Mark Zanger, the leader of the Yale chapter of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). Mark’s first act in the strip is to take over the office of President King, the WASPy president of Walden College, who was based on the actual Yale president, Kingman Brewster. Over the next few months, Trudeau increasingly used Mark’s clashes with his father Phil, a New Jersey stockbroker desperate for his son to “succeed,” to dramatize tensions within postwar Jewish life.

Phil represents a generation of upwardly mobile Jews who believed acceptance in corporate and suburban America required conformity, restraint and the concealing of ethnicity. Mark, by contrast, is openly confrontational, culturally self-aware, and seems uninterested in assimilationist respectability.

Mark’s Jewish identity was not made explicit until the middle of 1971, when he and his college buddy Mike Doonesbury attend a talk by a famous religious crusader. Asked why he has not yet chosen to join the fold and lead a proper Christian life, Mark deadpans, “I’m Jewish.”

At Yale, Trudeau hardly knew Zanger and had much less in common with him than he had with Kingman Brewster, whose ancestors sailed to America on the Mayflower. Trudeau was descended from three generations of Ivy-League-educated physicians. Like his father, the hardworking family doctor Frank Trudeau, the cartoonist attended St. Paul’s — one of the most blueblood of all New England prep schools. And though the young Yalie, like the genteel Brewster, opposed the war in Vietnam, he wanted nothing to do with radical politics.

But Trudeau identified closely with some of the personal struggles of Megaphone Mark. After all, he was also bucking family tradition by becoming an artist rather than a doctor. As Trudeau told me, some of Mark’s quarrels with his father hit close to home. Consider the line that Phil tells Mark in the fall of 1973: “Life is not to be enjoyed, it’s to be gotten on with!” Those words came verbatim from the mouth of Frank Trudeau, though, the younger Trudeau said, “my father and I ended up getting along pretty well and later came to laugh about such harsh comments.”

A key reason why Trudeau saw a part of himself in his Jewish cartoon character is that this ultimate insider also knew what it felt like to be an outsider. For many American Jews of the postwar era, especially those attending elite institutions historically dominated by WASP norms and values, Jewishness came with a sense of conditional acceptance, of not fully belonging. Trudeau had an emotionally similar experience at St. Paul’s, where he felt deeply estranged from the school’s rigid social hierarchy and its obsessive emphasis on athletic status. As the cartoonist later stressed, his four years there were “a tortured time for me.” He hated the school’s culture and never felt fully at home within it.

While this is interesting history, Trudeau diminished whatever impact it had when in the mid-90s, around January 18, 1994, he wrote Mark telling he was homosexual (with Zonker Harris providing a narrative), which is odd, since, while there was a strip around February 10, 1976 where Joanie Caucus was talking to Andy Lippincott, who told her he was homosexual (Trudeau later wrote him passing away from AIDS in 1990), Mark may not have been established as such at the time. What that would suggest is that Trudeau basically retconned one of his strip's established cast members for the sake of an oh-so vital agenda. It adds nothing to the character, and only makes previously established points moot.

Interestingly, if it matters, I'm not sure there were ever any notable lesbian characters highlighted in the strip, unless we consider a cameo by the real life Rachel Maddow, though that's hardly an achievement if it's not a fictional character who could make a more plausible regular. And if there weren't any recurring lesbian cast members in Doonesbury, it beggars the query - why do only homosexual men matter here? And why, if gay men did matter, Trudeau had to turn an established regular cast member into such, but couldn't create a new one like he did with Lippincott back in 1976? Sometimes, I wonder if comics writers like William Messner-Loebs have to shoulder some blame, since he turned the Pied Piper in Flash gay around 1990, rather than introduce a new character who could fill that role. Arguably, Messner-Loebs was one of the earlier examples of a writer who went "woke" in his approach, and it's certainly led to a lot of damage by this point, with Obsidian from Infinity Inc. being one of the biggest victims, since Gerard Jones, who retconned Todd Rice in 1995, turned out to be a criminal, and a lot of the stories Jones wrote were very bad.

Next up, in the past month, the Los Angeles Review of Books discussed the new history book about the now 56-years-old comic strip, and there's at least a few errors here, such as:

Doonesbury’s Slackmeyer came out as gay in 1976. It seems almost quaint now (and then again, not) that Slackmeyer paralleled rock stars like Lou Reed and Elton John, who felt comfortable enough in their own professional spaces to proclaim their queerness with pride. But this was the very first gay character in comics, and dozens of newspapers simply dropped the strip. Their editorial boards deemed it inappropriate for family reading, as if sexual orientation were inherently salacious. Trudeau refused to apologize or put his character back in the closet. He accepted the economic cost of moral clarity. Not content to be absorbed into the system, Trudeau gladly risked loss of distribution for the sake of truth-telling.

Oops, that's incorrect. It was Lippincott, not Slackmeyer, who was the first gay male character in the strip, perhaps also in all comic strips of the times. Most mystifying, I couldn't find any mention of Lippincott in the article. What gives on that? The glaring historical error aside, where do they get off lecturing everybody homosexuality's literally appropriate for children? Have they by any chance noticed what turned up in school libraries in past years? Do tell us about it. And then, there's another potential error here:

In Peanuts, the adult world feels incomprehensible, their speech reduced to onomatopoeia. In Doonesbury, the adult world tilts hypocritical and borderline psychotic, the source of colossal betrayal and moral rot. When Trudeau deployed abstract visual cues to depict presidents—Reagan as an empty brain, Bush Sr. as a “point of light,” Trump as a sentient toupee—he pointed Schulz’s abstractions at a new target: that power is often visually represented by its absence, by the void where thought should live.

I know Trudeau developed a gimmick where he'd depict some politicians as "invisible men", with certain symbols to replace them (Dan Quayle was depicted as a feather, meant to allude to what Trudeau thought of his personality), but I don't think it included Trump, and certainly not of recent, if the panel from last month says anything. But how disturbing that Trudeau's depicting Trump conversing chummily with a character named Trff Bmzklfrpz, a dictator from a fictional country called Berzerkistan, who's supposed to be murderous and antisemitic. Would he have written a leftist politician maintaining such friendships? Something tells me that, despite this, Trudeau doesn't have anything concrete to say about Trump's administration making a deal with Syria's current dictator, Ahmed al-Sharaa, who was a terrorist before, and there's bleak signs he hasn't changed. All that aside, the "joke" Trudeau made about Trump believing something's been named in his honor is one of the cheapest I've ever seen in the newspaper strip to date. What's that about "incomprehensible" again?

If Mike represented the political sell-out, Mark Slackmeyer represented something more urgent: the moral witness to governmental impunity. Originally a campus radical and DJ at Walden College’s radio station, Mark came out in 1976, a move that became a watershed moment for the funny pages. But the 1980s deepened the crisis. As the Reagan administration ignored the burgeoning threat of AIDS—the president refused to even speak the word in public, and homophobic legislatures debated whether infected people deserved treatment—Trudeau used Mark to bear witness. While Bible-thumpers attacked the “morality” of the afflicted, treating AIDS patients as deserving of their fate, Trudeau faced the grim realities of suffering and death. One 1985 panel still grates: Mark stands at a closed-casket funeral for a lover, his face a hollow, blank mask of exhaustion. The caption: “I’m just so tired of being brave.”

When they repeat the error with Mark's history twice, it starts becoming funny enough to fall off the couch laughing. Why wasn't the establishment of Lippincott as gay considered a "watershed moment", according to their poorly researched effort? That aside, what proof do they have that "bible-thumpers" took such a denigrating position? According to Religion Dispatches, that was far from the case. And why no provision of the 1985 strip in question, so we can ascertain the given year is accurate? The following isn't very accurate either:

When B. D.—the strip’s resident conservative and permanent helmet-wearer—lost his leg in Iraq, 35 years of character history freighted the injury. This wasn’t a policy abstraction; it was a friend’s tragedy. Trudeau became a fixture on Ward 57 of Walter Reed hospital, interviewing veterans and their families, detailing their trials and the government’s responses. Following B. D.’s journey through PTSD, Trudeau earned the title “archangel of Walter Reed” from the military establishment itself.

But here’s the paradox Kendall fails to articulate: Trudeau opposed the Iraq War vehemently, yet his humane treatment of its victims earned him establishment gratitude. When you become a “humanist,” you often lose your “teeth.” The military appreciated Trudeau’s compassion for wounded soldiers even as they pursued policies that kept wounding them. They could separate the caricaturist of their commanders from the chronicler of their suffering. They used his moral clarity about individual pain as cover for endless wars.

Regarding B.D, we once again have an error at hand, or at least a lack of historical clarity: in April 21, 2004, after 34 years, Trudeau drew the guy's helmet being removed after he lost a leg in the Iraq war. On the other hand, I don't think Duke and Ching Huan have been seen without their glasses in all the time they've been recurring cast members. Whatever, it's disturbing how the reviewer turns to claiming wars are "endless" because of the USA's conduct, not because of the foreign autocrat tyrants and ideologies that begin them. Such propaganda only lets savages off the hook, and proves the journal's not altruistic. Also, was Trudeau's reason for opposing the war in Iraq because he didn't think they were as dangerous as Iran's turned out to be? If so, I have yet to find him actually saying so. His turn to victim-blaming in the past decade after the Charlie Hebdo massacre certainly didn't help matters.

In 2014, Trudeau stepped away from his daily grind to work on HBO’s Alpha House, and most papers carried reruns of his greatest hits. He still writes a Sunday strip. Mike’s daughter Alex entered the cast, while the Duke (a play on gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson) lived long past his writerly role model to serve as as the proconsul of an Iraqi city. Like Donald Trump, the Duke acts like a monument to the Great American Grift. By the time Trudeau reached the Trump era, satire entered a predicament that made exaggeration almost impotent. Even late-night comics weary of ridiculing Trump, and logic simply vaporizes in the face of his daily harangues. Trudeau’s solution treated Trump as monstrous subtext—an unstable virus distorting his characters’ daily lives rather than a target for direct parody. It was a graceful retreat, but it also admitted defeat.

Sounds like somebody wishes the strip continued daily for longer, if that's what it took to ram Trump for ambiguous reasons. I sometimes wonder if Trudeau stopped drawing daily strips because he had little else to tell in this day and age, and his resort to cheap jokes at this point with Trump certainly proves he's way past his prime.

Doonesbury may have run for a longer time than strips like Peanuts, but has since proven overrated and pretentious, as the swipe at Trump makes clear. Even long before that, from what I could tell, it had long hit bottom. So what good does it do to write up a history book about it when the chances are it won't take an objective viewpoint?

An Indian comic building on imagery from a film

The Times of India announced the production of a concept art comic based on a film titled Ramayana:

Team 'Ramayana' has fans counting down the days to their big trailer launch this week. While kicking off the countdown to July 24 when the official trailer will debut online, fans have been busy turning the film's concept art into impressive first looks.

Following the grand event in New Delhi on Saturday, the makers unveiled a special comic book that offers an in-depth look at the mythology-inspired world of the film. The illustrated book showcases detailed concept art for key characters, kingdoms and locations, giving fans a closer look at the ambitious adaptation. Soon after images from the comic surfaced online, social media users began transforming the illustrations into real-life depictions using AI image-generation tools. [...]

The comic, unveiled during the film's promotional event also offers readers a detailed introduction to the kingdoms of Ayodhya, Mithila and Lanka, while also revealing character illustrations accompanied by brief biographies and mythological backgrounds.

If you think there's a good side to AI, then moviegoers having fun producing AI-generated imagery based on the comic panels that could resemble real life is indeed a better example of how to make use of the concept that's been gaining traction in the past 5 years or so. And a comic emphasizing concept art for the movie is certainly a great idea too.