Martin Lund's Blog, page 3
December 2, 2015
Book Note: Artists Against Police Brutality
About a month or so ago, Maryland-based Rosarium Publishing released APB: Artists against Police Brutality: A Comic Book Anthology
, an anthology of comics and flash fiction that, as it was first described to me, was “created in the wake of the recent events surrounding the #BlackLivesMatter movement and heightened awareness of police brutality.” The volume is edited by author and Rosarium chief Bill Campbell, writer and editor Jason Rodriguez, and art and visual studies scholar John Jennings....
New post at the Gotham Center blog
Yesterday, Gotham – A Blog for Scholars of New York City History published another post by yours truly, this time on Evangelical comics creator Jack T. Chick’s 9/11 comic Who Cares?
It starts like this:
The story should be familiar to the reader, having been etched into most people’s minds through constant repetition in the days following the attacks, and in the fourteen years that have passed since: on the morning of September 11, 2001, four planes were hijacked and sent to strike at targets...
November 10, 2015
Scandinavian Journal of Comic Art 2:1 out now!
A new issue of Scandinavian Journal of Comic Art (SJoCA), a journal i co-edit, is now out! SJoCA is an online, open-access, peer reviewed academic journal about comics and sequential art. The scope of the journal is interdisciplinary, encouraging a wide range of theoretical and methodological perspectives. The journal publishes articles, book reviews and news from the field of comics studies. The language of the journal is English.
You can read the issue for free, here!
October 29, 2015
Part two of my Michael Angelo Woolf piece is up on the Gotham blog!
Michael Angelo Woolf was never primarily a political cartoonist in the common sense of the word. He made “[s]ome vigorous cartoons of Tweed during Nast’s raid on the ring, and some cartoons which alternated with Nast’s in the Hayes-Tilden campaign [in the 1880 Presidential election], [which] are remembered as his best work in this line.” But, his obituarist stresses, “he never strayed long from the sketching of types and the preaching of sermons in pictures, half humorous, half pathetic.”
Che...
October 27, 2015
This week’s post is at the Gotham blog for scholars of New York City history!
This week, I will not be posting here, since I have a two-part post about the 19th century cartoonist Michael Angelo Woolf and his once-famous “waifs” coming up on Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History. Below is the first paragraph:
“The father of the modern comic picture — the man who woke the laughter of a generation […] — died at 1 o’clock yesterday morning,” theNew York Timesdeclaredon March 5, 1899.[1]The deceased was Michael Angelo Woolf, a now largely-forgotten cartoonis...
October 14, 2015
Book Review: Alex Shoumatoff’s “Westchester: Portrait of a County”
Journalist and writer Alex Shoumatoff published his Westchester: Portrait of a County
in 1979, in which he chronicled, as he saw them, aspects of life in a place he had a native’s perspective of: upstate New York’s Westchester County. The resulting book is divided into two sections, “The Land” and “The People.” The first section deals with the topography and wildlife of Westchester, beginning with a treatment of its woods and then moving on to a lengthier chapter on different kinds of rocks a...
October 8, 2015
Book Review: Kevin Rozario’s “Culture of Calamity”
American studies scholar Kevin Rozario’s (Chicago University Press, 2007) is a fascinating read. Rozario writes that Americans today live in a culture of calamity, and that their interest in disasters is a response to the prospect of personal and collective obliteration, and that they respond to them with both fear and enjoyment. This culture has been long in t...
September 30, 2015
Book Review: William Langewiesche’s “American Ground”
Journalist William Langewiesche’s 2002 American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center
is a unique piece of 9/11 literature. Soon after the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Langewiesche secured unrestricted access to the scene and proceeded to cover it extensively until the recovery and clean-up process was complete in May, 2002.
The resulting story, told in three (over)long chapters, is insightful.* The opening portion of the book is dedicated to a detailed account...
My article, ‘X marks the spot,’ is now open access!
My recent article on Marvel’s District X
, published in the latest issue of The Journal of Urban Cultural Studies (vol. 2, issue 1-2) is now available open access, which means that anybody can just click here and download it. The summary I had to write to got with it reads like this:
This article studies the ‘imaginative mapping’ of a real-world neighbourhood in one comic book series: lower Manhattan’s Alphabet City in writer David Hine and artists David Yardin and Lan Medina’s District X (Jul...
September 23, 2015
Book Review: David Friend’s ”Watching the World Change”
Vanity Fair editor and former photography director at Life David Friend’s 2006 book Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11
is in no sense of the word light reading. It is draining in both volume and content.
Friend’s intention with the book is ambitious: discussing in detail the week of September 11 through 17, 2001, it seeks to show how digital photography and electronic news-gathering came of age during that period, how photographs helped shape our understanding of...
