Laurie N. Taylor April 23rd, 2008
VCU Libraries have announced a full digital run of Will Eisner’s work on PS* Preventive Maintenance Magazine! Here’s their press release:
VCU Libraries is honored to present these rare examples of the incomparable art work of the late Will Eisner. In an effort to encourage soldiers to keep better care of their equipment, the US Army hired Eisner’s American Visuals Corporation to do a digest-sized publication focusing on preventive maintenance. Each issue consisted of a color comic book style cover; eight pages of four color comic continuity story in the middle; and a wealth of technical, safety, and policy information printed in two color. Eisner drew and was artistic editor for PS Magazine from its inception in 1951 until 1972. Presented here are complete scans for 145 regular issues, 3 special issues, and 14 index issues.
The University of Florida just finished scanning our issues of PS, and we have them all openly online as well. UF has far fewer issues, and we were scanning them in hopes of soon partnering with other institutions to locate and digitize the other volumes, so it’s all the more wonderful that VCU both had all of the issues and was able to scan them and add them to an open access Digital Collection. In doing so, it lays an even stronger foundation for other projects involving comics. PS is especially important because these early issues were well read, well loved, and well used. They’re excellent sources for any study of visual rhetoric, technical writing, literature, media studies, the military, American culture, and more. Will Eisner is the father of the modern graphic novel, popularizing the term and showing what it could be, and his work in all fields is so relevant and so important that it’s essential to have access to materials like PS. Hopefully, we’ll continue to see more great materials go online like VCU’s complete run of Will Eisner’s PS.
Laurie N. Taylor March 17th, 2008
The annual University of Florida Comics Conference will be this Friday and Saturday. The conference events will be held at Emerson Alumni Hall (on University Avenue, across from the stadium) and the program is on the conference website and posted below. The keynote speakers are the incredible Phoebe Gloeckner, Gail Simone, and Sally Cruikshank.
Friday, March 21st
- 9-10:15 AM – Panel 1: The “Body” of the Text
“‘Time is a Man / Space is a Woman’: Narrative + Visual Pleasure = Gender Confusion,” Aaron Kashtan
“Eggs, Birds and ‘an Hour for Lunch’: A Vision of the Grotesque Body in Clyde Fans: Book 1 by Seth,” John Kennett
“Love in the Binding,” Laurie Taylor
- 10:30-11:45 – Panel 2: Groensteen’s Networked Relations
“Memory and Sexuality: An Arthrological Study of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic,” Adrielle Mitchell
“The Joy of Plex: Erotic Arthrology, Tromplographic Intercourse, and ‘Interspecies Romances’ in Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg,” Daniel Yezbick
“Our Minds in the Gutters: Native American Women, Sexuality, and George O’Connor’s Graphic Novel Journey into Mohawk Country,” Melissa Mellon
- 11:45-1:15 – Lunch
- 1:15-2:30 – Panel 3: Women on Top
“Buxom Moebius Strip: The Hyperreal World of Gilbert Hernandez’s Fantastic Women,” Sacha Krader and Austin Rich
“‘Are You Ready?’: Renee Montoya and the Question of Lesbian Identity,” Karen Burrows
“Just One Damned Dildo After Another: Pornographic Space in the Work of Colleen Coover and Molly Kiely,” Lyndsay Brown
- 2:45-4:00 – Panel 4: Performance and Positions
“The Queering of Haruhi Fujioka: Cross-Dressing, Camp and Commoner Culture in Ouran High School Host Club,” Tania Darlington
“She-Rambos in Lipstick: Authorial and Artistic Depictions of Androgyny and Femininity in Comics,” Hannah Dame
“Reading between the (Panty) Lines: The Body as Ethnographic Text in Jaime Hernandez’s Recent Narratives,” Derek Royal
- 4-6 PM – Dinner
- 6-7:30 – Phoebe Gloeckner Keynote
- 7:30-9:30 – Reception Ustler Hall
Saturday, March 22nd
- 9-10:15 – Panel 5: The Figure on the Page
“‘Gimme Gimme This, Gimme Gimme That’: Confused Sexualities and Genres in Cooper and Myerson’s Horror Hospital Unplugged,” James Newlin
“How to Draw the (DC and) Marvel Way: How Changes in Representation of Female Bodies and Attitudes are Changing ‘Superheroine Chic,’” Mollie Dezern
“‘The Muse or the Viper: Excessive Depictions of the Female in Les Bas-Bleus and Cerebus,’” Tof Eklund
- 10:30-11:45 – Panel 7: Let’s Transgress
“I for Integrity: Futurity, (Inter)Subjectivities, and Sidekicks in Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta and Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns,” Jordana Greenblatt
“The Joker Wears Purple: Gender Transgressive Villains and Trickster Archetypes in Superhero Comics,” Rachel Edidin
“Otherness, Perversion and the Transformed Male Body in Seinen and Shounen Manga,” Katherine Schaeffer
- 11:45-1:15 – Lunch
- 1:30-3:00 – Sally Cruikshank Keynote
- 3:30-4:45 – Library Exhibit of UF: National Obsessions: Twentieth Century Pop Culture, Comics and Cross-Promotional Merchandizing. Featuring comics, movies/TV, and pop culture items from Star Wars, Peanuts, Walt Disney, and Superman and Batman
- 5-6:30 – Gail Simone Keynote
Laurie N. Taylor March 5th, 2008
More comics collections are being added to libraries. Each time it’s wonderful news because it means more of the wonderful materials will be preserved. The most recent (at least the most recent I’ve heard of) is at the University of Minnesota, explained in this story and this story. The collection will be part of the University of Minnesota’s Children’s Literature Research Collections, which is also wonderful because so much of the history of comics and children’s literature connects in terms of illustrators, innovative designs, techniques, and more. Similarly, the University of Florida’s Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature is housed alongside the Popular Culture Collections, which include the Performing Arts Collections and the Comics Collections.
The closeness makes sense for our collections because of the interplay, but the division also makes sense because of the relationship of comics and performance related materials. The similarity and difference between these two configurations make sense because comics are so closely related to so many areas in terms of form, function, and content. Thus, comics collections can be added in a useful manner to any library collection and I’m hoping more will be added soon so researchers can benefit from greater access to these important materials.
Laurie N. Taylor January 4th, 2008
The Harvard Law School Library just announced a new digital collection highlighting crime broadsides. The collection is online here and the collection description is: “Just as programs are sold at sporting events today, broadsides–styled at the time as “Last Dying Speeches” or “Bloody Murders”–were sold to the audience that gathered to witness public executions in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.” The broadsides span 1707 to 1891 and include accounts of executions for various common and uncommon crimes. Now, researchers can see both the cultural reception of sentences as well as the court documents from London’s central criminal court, the Old Bailey (the proceedings of which are now online). Having these materials online is a boon to researchers for seeing the culture at the time in terms of law, news, and media. The entire broadside, zine-esque form is also interesting in light of blogs and online newszines.
Laurie N. Taylor December 19th, 2007
The Comics Digital Collection is slowly building, and the scans of the Imagerie d’Epinal broadsheets will soon be online. While they’re still processing, they’re also online within Picasa so that others can see them even if only the smaller versions. It’s great to have rare materials added online so that others can use them and it’s even better knowing that these are only some of the many materials being added.
These pictorial broadsheets known as the Imagerie d’Epinal sheets told simple tales and were made by the Imagerie Pellerin of France, and then reprinted by the Humoristic Publishing Co. in Kansas, Missouri. These are the reprints and are important for the history of comics and printing. In Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer, David Kunzle compares Töpffer’s “kind of graphic naïvete and that of the truly unschooled and awkward Imagerie d’Epinal” (77). Kunzle argues “the subsequent history of the comic strip occupies this middle groudm but inclining more to Töpffer than imagerie populaire” (77). Kunzle’s overall analysis places Töpffer alongside the likes of Gustave Doré, William Hogarth, Willhelm Busch, and George Cruikshank in publications like Punch, Le Charivari, L’Illustration, and Illustrated London News.
References: Kunzle, David. Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer. Jackson, MS: UP of MS, 2007.
Laurie N. Taylor November 16th, 2007
One of the major benefits of large digitization projects is that important and amazing artifacts, hidden in the archives, come to the surface and are easy to access not just by themselves but also within their overall context. One of these amazing artifacts is Droopy the Drew Field Mosquito by Harry Lampert. Harry Lampert is best known as co-creator of the DC Comics superhero The Flash. Lampert began his career at the Fleischer studios and worked on comics - including Betty Boop, Popeye, and KoKo the Clown - wrote humor comic books, worked on gag cartoons for many periodicals - including The New York Times, the Saturday Evening Post, and Time - and taught cartooning at the New York School of Visual Arts.
Harry Lampert’s Droopy the Drew Field Mosquito was published in the Drew Field Echoes, the newspaper for the Drew Field Army Airbase (in Tampa, Florida). The University of South Florida holds the physical issues and now the Digital Collections contain the first strip, published in August 1942, and all following strips through February 3, 1944, as well as an article on Droopy from August 13, 1943. The Droopy comics are important for comics scholars because of their popularity and influence, their place within Lampert’s work, and their role within the larger history of military comics and publications. Within the Drew Field Echoes papers, studies of fan cultures also benefit because the paper includes articles that specifically show the fan/community-support culture with articles like “Droopy’s Daddy Takes Himself a Wife.”
The individual Droopy comics are compiled on this page, and each is linked to the Drew Field Echoes issue in which it appears.
As the Digital Collections continue to grow, more treasures will certainly be found. Most fortuitously Will Canova, the project coordinator for the Florida Digital Newspaper Library, happens to be an excellent comics reader who ensures that important comics get the attention they rightly deserve.
Laurie N. Taylor October 18th, 2007
In working on some of the comics materials here and setting up the Alice exhibit, I was looking at other online exhibits and kept stumbling across online comics exhibits. Each of these are different in terms of material covered and scope, but together these are absolutely fantastic for comics research.
The exhibits I’ve found so far (in random order) are:
I found all of these looking for ideas for the Alice exhibit, but now I’m still looking because I’d like to do a comics exhibit once I have enough materials digitized. I was able to get the Superman Fanzine digitized, so that’s a great start and other materials are slowly being added to the comics collection as well.
Laurie N. Taylor October 8th, 2007
The Jewish Museum of Florida is having a comics exhibit starting later this month. The exhibit details are online and below. I’ll be presenting on October 21 on some of the resources available on comics for teachers.
Zap Pow Bam - Super Heroes of the Golden Age of Comics 1938-1950
OCTOBER 16, 2007 – APRIL 30, 2008
Look! Up in the Sky! It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane! It’s Zap Pow Bam, a colorful dynamic exhibit that immerses visitors in an interactive world of Super Heroes, highlighting the Jewish creators of comic books. These are America’s timeless icons like Superman, Batman, Captain America, Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman – including the phone booth where Superman changed his clothes and a Batmobile. The exhibit offers a unique perspective on the way pop culture portrays issues and how identity and culture can shape popular opinion. Fun for visitors of all ages and backgrounds. Originated by The Breman Museum, Atlanta.
Laurie N. Taylor October 1st, 2007
I’ve started working on digitizing photographs of comics creators. Don Ault, a professor at UF and a major comics scholar, is also a friend and he’s loaned me some of his materials. What’s really interesting about these photos is that they aren’t available elsewhere. Don has devoted a great deal of his life to the study of comics and so he’s amassed tons of photographs that span academic interests, comics collector-fan interests, and his personal academic-family chronology. For instance, a number of the photographs have Don in them and/or members of his family and members of the comics creators families. These personal, non-commercial photos are interesting for what they show of the people in them as well as for what they show about the history of comics and academia. I hope to have more of these online soon, and there are many, many to load.
Right now and for the next few days, the links to the larger versions of these images in UF’s Digital Collections won’t link properly. Until then, the images are in my Picasa.
Laurie N. Taylor September 28th, 2007
UF’s Special Collections Library includes a popular culture collection with loads of comics. I’m currently working on a small grant to fund the digitization of some of these rich materials. In order to help support the grant, I made the collection page and digitized one sample issue of Will Eisner’s PS* Preventive Maintenance.
Hopefully I’ll be adding a great deal more in the near future, and I’ll hopefully be doing it with support for a much larger project later on. In the meantime, UF’s Libraries will be presenting at the Jewish Museum in Miami, Florida on October 21, and I’ll post details on it as they become available.