Happy New Year, and welcome to the same old story… At least in the comic pages sixty years ago, the standards of line art were fantastic, such as the panel above in Alex Raymond’s Rip Kirby. Now
At first, the survey of political systems in Mack Reynolds‘ interstellar spy novel, Planetary Agent X, seems quite whimisical and superficial. There are planets full of anarchists, and planets crawling with feudalism, nihilism, socialism, and what have you. There are some playful jabs at democracy, individualism, and even the tyranny of the uninformed voters (a la John Stuart Mill). The tone is not as playful as Ron Goulart, but definitely not very serious either. So it came as a pleasant surprise when the protagonist, Ronny Bronston, is given a sarcastic lecture by his handler, the mysterious Tog Lee Chang Chu, on the disasters brought about by “industrial feudalism.” How strangely familiar!
Went to the opening of an exhibit called Arts of Subversion, Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union, which is a very nicely curated show that explores the lives of artists under the opressive fist o
After a terrible ordeal of being stuck in some sort of collective nightmare, Americans have somehow managed to bring themselves to back to planet Earth: we have elected Barack Obama to be President
Only by chance did I notice that Lloyd Dangle, cartoonist and creator of Troubletown, is currently tramping across America on a 20th Anniversary Book Tour, celebrating two decades of ceaseless trouble! How can it be that most people know Dangle only because of his Airborne packages, and not for his amazing comics?
Now where have I heard a similar story before? Where was it again? Give me a minute! It’ll come to me, if I think about it. Hmmm… something to do with crime. Something to do with politics. Yes, yes…
Once again, Ethan Persoff presents a great web feature: a gallery of anti-U.S. and anti-Imperialism political cartoons, which he has culled from numerous Chinese and Southeast Asian newspaper archive
DBR Podcast 2 - Memoirs of a Revolutionist. An excerpt from Memoirs of a Revolutionist, Peter Kropotkin’s Memoirs describing the ideals of young socialists in Russia during the late 19th Century, a