Martin Lund's Blog, page 4

A Soft Re-Open

So, I’ve been away from keyboard for a while now. There are numerous reasons, professional and personal for this. I won’t go into detail (it’s nothing that exciting). Rather, I’ll toss out a very general update as a teaser before recommencing regular posting next week.

Last month, I had three articles come out in various academic journals.

The first is the article “‘The roaring 30s’: Style, intertextuality, space and history in Marvel Noir,” published in Studies in Comics (at the moment, you...

Book Review: Sudhir Venkatesh’s “Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York’s Underground Economy”

Sudhir Venkatesh is a sociologist who has spent years studying the underworld, fist in Chicago and, more recently, in New York City. His 2013 book Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York’s Underground Economy is, in a sense, both a result of his years in the latter city and, perhaps seemingly paradoxically, about their lack of results.

In the book, Venkatesh traces his attempts to come into contact with people who work in the city’s underground economy – the sex and drug...

Comics Review: Josh Neufeld’s “A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge”

Josh Neufeld is a cartoonist who works mostly in non-fiction styles. His other work includes some drawing for Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor. Neufeld’s 2009 graphic novel A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge is a historical-journalistic account of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans that followed.

Neufeld’s story is based on the accounts of seven people: Denise, a young woman who experiences the storm and flooding from her apartment, a hospital, and the overfilled Convent...

Backlash, a Superhero Story

Comics are causing quite a stir these days. DC Comics recently recalled a cover because it caused controversy, to the point where threats were made over Internet channels. Not against the writers, editors, or the artist. Against people who opined that the cover was in bad taste. Days later, the conservative news website Breitbart published an article about Marvel Comics’ decision to replace Thor, one of their oldest characters, with a woman. The headline for the article, which claimed the rem...

Comics Review: Brian Wood and Rob G.’s “The Couriers: The Complete Series”

The Couriers was a three-volume graphic novel series by writer Brian Wood and artist Rob G. published by AiT/Planet Lar between 2003 and 2005. It was an independent continuation of Wood and Brett Weldele’s Couscous Express from 2001, telling three stories about the characters Special and Moustafa, who were first introduced in that volume.

Special and Moustafa are “couriers” for the New York underworld, which entails everything from moving contraband to, as we are both told and shown over the...

Comics Review: “Luna Park”

Author Kevin Baker and artist Daniel Zezelj’s Luna Park is a graphic novel that starts off interesting but winds up, in my opinion, a disappointment. Set initially in Coney Island – which once included an amusement part called Luna Park – in 2009, it tells a story about immigrant mafia enforcer Alik Strelnikov. This section, which takes up a bit more than half the volume, reads like a bleak and hard-boiled crime tale that connects with issues of identity, memory, trauma, and cultural decline....

Book Review: Michael Sorkin’s “Twenty Minutes in Manhattan”

Twenty Minutes in Manhattan is a book by Michael Sorkin, an architect and author whose other work includes the funny and insightful All Over the Map. Structured around the author’s walk through Greenwich Village from his apartment to his office – the titular twenty minutes – it would seem at first glance to be a potentially boring and myopic book. The table of contents seems to further suggest this, with chapter titles as inspiring as “The Stairs,” “The Stoop,” and “145 Hudson Street.” But th...

New Publication!

Academic publishing house Cambridge Scholars recently put out the collected volume, Comics and Power: Representing and Questioning Culture, Subjects and Communities, edited by comics scholars Rikke Platz Cortsen, Erin La Cour, and Anne Magnussen.

Nestled towards the end of its fourteen chapters is my own contribution, titled “'[A] matter of SAVED or LOST': Difference, Salvation, and Subjection in Chick Tracts”. In it, I analyze the construction of “difference” in the small religious comics p...

Book Review: Teun Voeten’s “Tunnel People”

Teun Voeten is a Dutch journalist who spent five months in the mid-1990s living with the homeless who had made their home in a closed Amtrak tunnel that ran below Upper Manhattan’s Riverside Park until they were evicted in 1996. His experience there is documented in the 2010 book Tunnel People.

Tunnel People is, in my opinion, an incredibly fascinating book. It documents the life of a group of people that has previously more often than not been sensationalized, described in Dickensian terms a...

Comics Review: “NYX”

This is the first of a series of posts dealing with Marvel’s New York mutant enclave, known variously as “Mutant Town” and “District X.” Throughout its lifetime of roughly six years, the neighborhood saw many changes in its meaning and configuration.

It first appeared in Grant Morrison and John Paul Leon’s New X-Men #127 (August 2002), as rumors of a monster lead to fearful protests against mutants in New York. After an establishing shot of the mutant-filled streets (see below), the scene cut...