Grant Morrison may well be my favourite comic writer ever, by now. I find him and endlessly imaginative, exciting and delightful writer, one who maintains my faith in buying individual comics rather than, as many have, buying the collections – […]

The second half of the 20th Century was far less rich in great humour strips than the first half. Having said that, there were a couple that rank with the best ever.
The only place to start is with what was by far the dominant humour strip of that er[…]

I guess the place to start for SF comics, particularly on a British site, is 2000AD. Its title now makes it sound very unlike SF, but it’s been running future adventure stories for decades. It’s never been consistently great, but it&#8217[…]

American comics were almost entirely childish and pretty insipid after the Senate hearings in the mid-’50s. Unsurprisingly there was a reaction to this, and some cartoonists started putting out alternatives, full of drugs and sex and anti-estab[…]

Having mentioned ’60s superheroes, at Marvel and DC, and Alan Moore, I thought I’d talk about those who tried to take the genre somewhere else in past years.
Steve Gerber
It was Steve Gerber who got me back into comics in the ’70s, […]

All of my favourite newspaper strips were at the comedy end of the market – and it is worth noting here how big an influence Segar’s Popeye was on adventure strips. Nonetheless, there were some great adventure strips, back in the days whe[…]

EC
It was, more than anything else, EC’s powerful horror comics that led to uproar and US Senate hearings in the ’50s – and for years afterwards, comics were aimed more squarely at children than any time before or since.
They don&#8[…]

The last item (bar a bonus insert) in this series was on European comics. Two of the all-time great children’s creators could have been covered there. It’s worth noting that comics have been a medium aimed overwhelmingly at children, espe[…]

(I thought it was worth adding this review of a recent release as a supplement to the recent piece on old DC superhero comics).
The second Flash volume is, for me, the best Showcase* collection yet. I love Carmine Infantino’s art on these old c[…]

I remember long ago constantly being told that European comics was a mature artform for adults, to be envied. There is material like that, and material of the very highest quality – but my god there’s a gigantic amount of beautifully draw[…]