Archived Pages from 20th Century!!

   

THE BLOODSHED continues in Bosnia, Algeria, Palestine -- but for most Americans it is backpage news. War exists here as a media event, distant and distilled, as it has for over a century. During World War II, newsreels that aired at the beginning of feature films displayed war as healthy and heroic. The televised coverage of Vietnam was comparatively gruesome and sobering, with body counts and pictures of the wounded, but no actual depictions of the torture and lunacy. The Gulf War was a masterfully choreographed TV phenomenon that the American public experienced like a highspeed videogame, where the enemy is not ravaged, but eliminated.

 

Join us in the Loop for a discussion of war comics.   There are currently 2 posts for this area. 11.13.97chris lanier: "first war comic"

THERE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN notable literary jeremiads and cold, factual reportage, but ever since World War II, comics have existed as some of the rawest, most poetic and underappreciated media for war commentary. Laboring under a misleading name, the comics medium has been a framework for cogent political commentary since the turn of the century. The best war comics, by masters like Milton Caniff and Harvey Kurtzman, and ranging in approach from gung-ho patriotic adventure stories to grisly caricatures of war's victims, stand among the finest popular art of the twentieth century.

 

LIKE POETRY, good comics are made of terse, synergistic language; text and graphics play off of, and modify one another. The delicate balance between words and images repeats, panel after panel, with enough discontinuity to create space for the reader's imagination and enough continuity to keep the narrative whole. At best, the panels function simultaneously as a series of discrete, individual drawings and a larger, full-page or full-strip collage. When cartoonists coalesce words and iconic illustration, they can bring to bear an enormous range of effects on the reader: art styles from simple bubbly cartooning to detailed realism, and narrative strategies from drawn-out soap opera to black comedy.

 

IN HIS LANDMARK analysis of the comics form, Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud emphasizes the reader's role in reading comics. She must interpret, for instance, the connection between two distinct images as two events in a story, bridging gaps in time, inventing voices and body language, even background music. That level of immersion partly explains the cult of the cartoon: comics junkies can experience overwhelming identification with cartoon characters and story-lines.

 

FOR MORE THAN FIFTY YEARS, talented cartoonists like Milton Caniff, Harvey Kurtzman, Art Spiegelman and Joe Sacco have sought to draw their readers into the harrowing political and emotional landscapes of war, making typically detached coverage in the media intimate. This high-bandwidth Feature chronicles their work, and traces the history of one of the richest subgenres in the history of comics art.  -- Tom Spurgeon and The Editors