-
4 Colour Commentary: Images of Racism in a 1950s American Comic Book
EC Comics, perhaps best-known today as the company behind Mad Magazine, spent the 1950s producing some of the most subversive and contentious comic books in history. These comics were remarkably cognizant of the social issues of their time, containing parabolic stories that dealt with anti-Semitism and Jim Crow laws while Batman was still trading blows with the Penguin. Though not conventionally considered to be works of literature, many of these comics contain the same fundamental division between form and content that books do, and can be subjected to literary analyses. More importantly, they are visual as much as they are textual; this added dimension compensates for their – admittedly –…
-
Separating Art from Artist
Some of the most renowned authors have been horribly problematic people. Salinger was an adulterer and has been accused of pedophilia. Anne Perry murdered her mother. T.S. Eliot was a raging anti-Semite – as were Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, and Ernest Hemingway. So why is it that we study these author’s texts with such fervent admiration in our English classes, fawn over their prose in our book clubs, and read their works on our own time? The simple answer is that bad people sometimes create great art. Yet the problem with putting so much importance on works by problematic people is that the things they’ve done and said become forgotten…
