Issue Description

Now revamped with more pages and higher quality reproduction, The Comics Journal continues to be the most wide-ranging and critically astute magazine about contemporary comics and cartooning. This issue features a cover interview with Ivan Brunetti, a cartoonist known for his caustic, scabrous, and self-lacerating comic Schizo as well as the cartoon collection Haw!, as well as his comics contributions to anthologies and illustration work in such magazine as Mother Jones, The Baffler, and Entertainment Weekly. Brunetti discusses his particular brand of misanthropic humor in an interview with Journal editor Gary Groth. Underground comics are highlighted this issue in two major features: Patrick Rosenkranz, the author of the underground comix history Rebel Visions, provides an historical profile of the major underground publishers — Gary Arlington, Don Donahue, Ron Turner, Denis Kitchen, Don Schenker, Bob Rita, and Fred & Kathe Todd — in a long essay based on interviews with all the participants. Second, his own book comes under the knife in a series of critiques of his own history of underground comix by the underground cartoonists he covered in the book itself! Plus our columns covering European comics, manga, newspaper strips, and other facets of the medium, industry commentary by Steven Grant, Dirk Deppey, and others, investigative journalism, letters, a full color reprint of a rare, archival comic from the 1950s, and a word or two about George Bush and Martin Heidegger, all in the most iconoclastic and unorthodox magazine about comics in the world.

The Comics Journal (1976)

Publisher

Fantagraphics

Volume Description

The Comics Journal is a magazine that covers the comics medium from an arts-first perspective, and one of the nation's most respected single-arts magazines, providing its readers with an eclectic mix of industry news, commentary, professional interviews, classic comics sections and reviews of current work on a regular basis. Due to its reputation as the American magazine with an interest in comics as an art form, the Journal has subscribers worldwide, and in this country serves as an important window into the world of comics for several general arts and news magazines.

Despite a contentious relationship with the rest of the North American comics industry, due in no small part to its investigative news stories and uncompromising review section, the Journal has won several industry awards, most notably the Utne Reader, Eisner and Harvey trophies.

In October 2009, we announced the next phase of the evolution of The Comics Journal, beginning in 2010 as a uniquely sized and formatted, evocatively visual and tactile semi-annual event, with expanded content at The Comics Journal website TCJ.com.

A comics magazine, which originally began as the New Nostalgia Journal, started in 1976 by Gary Groth and Mike Catron after the Nostalgia Journal (which ran 26 issues) lost their battle against the competing adzine, The Buyer's Guide. Gary and Mike, both in their twenties, had no plan, but somehow convinced the maker of the Nostalgia Journal to give them the paper.

As Gary Groth recalls:

I can’t remember how we talked them into this, but I suspect they were on their last legs and decided to hell with it, let’s give it to these two kids. Shortly thereafter, a box arrived in the mail with some back issues, a list of advertisers and a mailing list, and we were the proud new owners of Journal.

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Status: Not in Collection