The Comics Journal Special Edition Volume 1: Cartoonists on Cartooning

The Comics Journal

by Anne Elizabeth Moore (Editor)

2001 marks the 25th anniversary of The Comics Journal, a monthly magazine of journalism, criticism, and scholarship. The magazine is celebrated as the most outspoken forum for evaluative criticism and debate in the history of the medium and equally renowned for its long, career-spanning interviews with the most highly regarded cartoonists of the 20th century—the cartoonist's equivalent of The Paris Review interviews.Twice a year, the Journal publishes a special "coffee table" theme edition with longer and more extensive critical and historical essays, a section devoted to a specific aspect of cartooning or a particularly noteworthy cartoonist (who contributes a new strip and is interviewed). The special edition also features a variety of new comic strips done especially for the magazine by today's best cartoonists. Our Winter edition happens to focus on the theme of comics journalism and spotlights Joe Sacco, whose Safe Area Gorazde garnered more favorable press in the political and literary press than any graphic novel since Maus, with a new cover, a long interview, and a never-before-published strip done especially for this issue.

Genres: Comics, Nonfiction

156 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2001

About the author

Anne Elizabeth Moore is an award-winning cultural critic. The Fulbright scholar and Truthout columnist behind Ladydrawers: Gender and Media in the US is also the author of Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity (The New Press, 2007), Hey Kidz, Buy This Book (Soft Skull, 2004), Cambodian Grrrl (Cantankerous Titles, 2011), Hip Hop Apsara (Green Lantern Press, 2012) and New Girl Law (Cantankerous Titles, 2013). Co-editor and publisher of now-defunct Punk Planet, founding editor of the Best American Comics series from Houghton Mifflin, Moore teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has worked with young women in Cambodia on independent media projects, and people of all ages and genders on media justice work in the US. Moore exhibits her work frequently as conceptual art, has been the subject of two documentary films, and has lectured around the world on independent media, globalization, and women’s labor issues. She has written for Al Jazeera, The Baffler, N+1, Good, Snap Judgment, Bitch, the Progressive, The Onion, Feministing, The Stranger, In These Times, The Boston Phoenix, and Tin House.

She has twice been noted in the Best American Non-Required Reading series. Her work with young women in Southeast Asia has been featured in Time Out Chicago, Make/Shift, Today’s Chicago Woman, Windy City Times, and Print magazines, and on GritTV, Radio Australia, and NPR’s Worldview.

Her friend (and one of her favorite fiction writers) Elizabeth Crane wrote a short story about Moore, and it was widely reviewed. Thus the Village Voice called her a “Possibly perfect protagonist”; Washington City Paper said she was “A woman who has always been comfortable in her own skin”; and Hipster Book Club said she was “A perfect altruistic punk-rock super-heroine.” She has appeared on CNN, GritTV, WBEZ, WNUR, WFMU, and Georgian television. Moore recently mounted a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

In 2016, she was awarded the third permanent residency in Detroit's Write A house program and now lives in a Bengali community in Eastern Michigan.