5 Things To Read This Week

Welcome to our somewhat re-branded link post highlighting five things we think should be on your radar from the week that was.

*John Jennings' Megascope, an Abrams Imprint, is coming up on its two year anniversary. Focusing on speculative ficiton by and about people of color, the impint is home to one of my favorite sci-fic graphic novels of the past few years, Blackstar, as well as Hardears, that earned creator Matthew Clarke an Eisner nom. Over at the Beat, Nancy Powell covers the Megascope panel at SDCC and previews what the next year will hold for Jennings and crew.

“Megascope as an imprint would look at the unseen world, uncharted territory, and focus on people of color and speculative technology, which includes horror." - John Jennings

The world of comics lost a giant on July 20 in the form of Alan Grant. The renowed writer was well known for his work with Judge Dredd and assorted Rebellion/2000 AD properties, and is best recognized on our side of the pond for his work on Batman and Lobo. At The Comics Journal, Tom Shapira pens a thoughtful and elegiac refleciton on Grant's career.

How should comics handle transgression? Comics have had a conneciton to the counter-culture almost since their inception, and the comix movement from which Art Spiegelman merged was never without contreversy. At Solrad, Publisher Alex Hoffman explores Maus in light of both the recent attempts to ban the classic and the infmaous Red Room cover in his essay, Art Spiegelman’s MAUS: Canon, Appropriation, Transgressions, and the Red Room

Scott and I, English majors both, joked that when Marvel first announced their Penguin Classic editions, they may have been directly targetting us. Now, the veritable Atlantic asks the question, Have Comic Books Officially Entered the Canon? As someone who read Persepolis almost 20 years ago for a class on the contemporary novel, I'd say they entered quite some time ago.

Ritesh Babu consistently composes such great analysis of Ram V comics that I sometimes stop what I've started to write as a result. This week, he tackles the beautiful and haunting first issue of Aquaman: Andromeda.

And to close this week, even Sluggo is getting in on this multiverse game.