My latest Nexus Graphica column is now available. This time, I explore the world of nonfiction comics.
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| Like most young comic book readers of that decade [the 70s], my comic reading selections were dominated by DC and Marvel. Outside of the occasional war comic, neither offered much in the way of true stories, so I rarely experienced the nonfiction graphical narrative until high school. |
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| Art Spiegelman’s Maus, cribbed from his father’s remembrances, understandably caught my interest. |
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| Published as collection for the first time in 1990, Larry Gonick’s The Cartoon History of the Universe appealed to my dual interests of history and comics. |
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| Perhaps the greatest historian to work primarily in the graphic narrative format, Texan Jack Jackson began his artistic career under the nom de plume "Jaxon" as one of the first underground cartoonists with the self-published God Nose (1965). |
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| In the early nineties, my own approach to writing changed when I discovered Harvey Pekar, who first started working on comics with his good friend, the legendary artist Robert Crumb. |
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| As part of their imprint Paradox Press, DC began publishing a series of "factoid books" headlined by The Big Book of… anthologies in 1994. |
I talk about and review several other books as well. So check it out.