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Alternative Comics
Alternative comics or independent comics cover a range of American comic book, American comics that have appeared since the 1980s, following the underground comix movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Alternative comics present an alternative to mainstream superhero comics which in the past have dominated the American comic book industry. They span across a wide range of genres, artistic styles, and subjects. Alternative comics are often published in small numbers with less regard for regular distribution schedules. Many alternative comics have variously been labelled as post-underground comics, independent comics, indie comics, auteur comics, small press comics, new wave comics, creator-owned comics, art comics, or literary comics. Many self-published "minicomics" also fall under the "alternative" umbrella. From underground to alternative By the mid-1970s, artists within the underground comix scene felt that it had become less creative than it had been in the past. Acc ...
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Art Spiegelman
Itzhak Avraham ben Zeev Spiegelman ( ; born February 15, 1948), professionally known as Art Spiegelman, is an American cartoonist, editor, and comics advocate best known for his graphic novel ''Maus''. His work as co-editor on the comics magazines ''Arcade (comics magazine), Arcade'' and ''Raw (comics magazine), Raw'' has been influential, and from 1992 he spent a decade as contributing artist for ''The New Yorker''. He is married to designer and editor Françoise Mouly and is the father of writer Nadja Spiegelman. In September 2022, the National Book Foundation announced that he would receive the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Spiegelman began his career with Topps (a bubblegum and trading card company) in the mid-1960s, which was his main financial support for two decades; there he co-created parodic series such as ''Wacky Packages'' in the 1960s and ''Garbage Pail Kids'' in the 1980s. He gained prominence in the underground comix scene in the 1970s ...
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Auteur
An (; , ) is an artist with a distinctive approach, usually a film director whose filmmaking control is so unbounded and personal that the director is likened to the "author" of the film, thus manifesting the director's unique style or thematic focus. As an unnamed value, auteurism originated in French film criticism of the late 1940s, and derives from the critical approach of André Bazin and Alexandre Astruc, whereas American critic Andrew Sarris in 1962 called it auteur theory. Yet the concept first appeared in French in 1955 when director François Truffaut termed it ''policy of the authors'', and interpreted the films of some directors, like Alfred Hitchcock, as a body revealing recurring themes and preoccupations. American actor Jerry Lewis directed his own 1960 film '' The Bellboy'' via sweeping control, and was praised for "personal genius". By 1970, the New Hollywood era had emerged with studios granting directors broad leeway. Pauline Kael argued, however, that "a ...
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Dave Sim
Dave Sim (born 17 May 1956) is a Canadian cartoonist and publisher, known for his comic book ''Cerebus the Aardvark, Cerebus'', his artistic experimentation, his advocacy of self-publishing and creators' rights, and his controversial political and philosophical beliefs. Sim rose to prominence with ''Cerebus'', which began in December 1977. Sim initially conceived it as a parody of ''Conan the Barbarian (comics), Conan the Barbarian'' and other sword and sorcery comics, but after two years he began to consider the series a self-contained work that would run for 300 issues and be subdivided into Graphic novel, novels. By the time the 6000-page work was completed in March 2004, Sim had delved into politics, and an examination of feminism and gender, while becoming progressively more sophisticated and experimental in his storytelling and artwork. Sim worked on ''Cerebus Archives'' afterward, and he produced the comic books ''Glamourpuss (comics), Glamourpuss'', which examines the hist ...
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Maus
''Maus'', often published as ''Maus: A Survivor's Tale'', is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Art Spiegelman, serialized from 1980 to 1991. It depicts Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences as a History of the Jews in Poland, Polish Jew and The Holocaust, Holocaust survivor. The work employs postmodernism, postmodern techniques, and represents Jews as mice and other Germans and Poles as cats and pigs respectively. Critics have classified ''Maus'' as memoir, biography, history, fiction, autobiography, or a mix of genres. In 1992, it became the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize. In the Frame story, frame-tale timeline in the Historical present, narrative present that begins in 1978 in New York City, Spiegelman talks with his father, Vladek, about his Holocaust experiences, gathering material and information for the ''Maus'' project he is preparing. In the narrative past, Spiegelman depicts these experiences, from the years leading up to World War ...
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Manga
are comics or graphic novels originating from Japan. Most manga conform to a style developed in Japan in the late 19th century, and the form has a long history in earlier Japanese art. The term is used in Japan to refer to both comics and cartooning. Outside of Japan, the word is typically used to refer to comics originally published in Japan. In Japan, people of all ages and walks of life read manga. The medium includes works in a broad range of genres: action, adventure, business and commerce, comedy, detective, drama, historical, horror, mystery, romance, science fiction and fantasy, erotica ( and ), sports and games, and suspense, among others. Many manga are translated into other languages. Since the 1950s, manga has become an increasingly major part of the Japanese publishing industry. By 1995, the manga market in Japan was valued at (), with annual sales of 1.9billion manga books and manga magazines (also known as manga anthologies) in Japan (equivale ...
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Elfquest
''Elfquest'' (or ''ElfQuest'') is a comic book property created by Wendy and Richard Pini in 1978, and still owned by them. It is a fantasy story about a community of Elves (Elfquest), elves and other fictional species who struggle to survive and coexist on a primitive Earth-like planet with two moons. Several published volumes of prose fiction also share the same setting. ''Elfquest'' was one of the first comic book series to have a planned conclusion. Over the years ''Elfquest'' has been self-published by the Pinis through their own company Warp Graphics, then Marvel Comics, then the Pinis again, more recently DC Comics, and, since 2013, Dark Horse Comics. All issues of ''Elfquest'' published prior to 2014 are available online for free. Publication history The first ''Elfquest'' story, "Fire and Flight", appeared in February 1978 in the underground comic book ''Fantasy Quarterly'', published by Lansing, Michigan-based IPS (Independent Publishers Syndicate). That company closed af ...
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Outsider Art
Outsider art is Fine art, art made by Autodidacticism, self-taught individuals who are untrained and untutored in the traditional arts with typically little or no contact with the Convention (norm), conventions of the art worlds. The term ''outsider art'' was coined in 1972 as the title of a book by art critic Roger Cardinal (art historian), Roger Cardinal. It is an English language, English equivalent for ''art brut'' (, "raw art" or "rough art"), a label created in the 1940s by France, French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture. Dubuffet focused particularly on art by those on the outside of the established art scene, using as examples psychiatric hospital patients, hermits, and spiritualists.Cardinal, Roger (1972). ''Outsider Art''. New York: Praeger. pp. 24–30.Bibliography The 20th Century Art Book. New York, NY: Phaidon Press, 1996. Outsider art has emerged as a successful art marketing category; an annual Outsider Art ...
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Robert Crumb
Robert Dennis Crumb (; born August 30, 1943) is an American artist who often signs his work R. Crumb. His work displays a nostalgia for American folk culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and satire of contemporary American culture. Crumb contributed to many of the seminal works of the underground comix movement in the 1960s, including being a founder of the first successful underground comix publication, ''Zap Comix'', contributing to all 16 issues. He was additionally contributing to the '' East Village Other'' and many other publications, including a variety of one-off and anthology comics. During this time, inspired by psychedelics and cartoons from the 1920s and 1930s, he introduced a wide variety of characters that became extremely popular, including countercultural icons Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural, and the images from his '' Keep On Truckin''' strip. Sexual themes abounded in all these projects, often shading into scatological and pornographic com ...
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Weirdo (magazine)
''Weirdo'' was a magazine-sized comics anthology created by Robert Crumb and published by Last Gasp from 1981 to 1993. Featuring cartoonists both new and old, ''Weirdo'' served as a "low art" counterpoint to its contemporary highbrow '' Raw'', co-edited by Art Spiegelman.Kartalopoulos, Bill"GETTING WEIRDO AT THE SOCIETY OF ILLUSTRATORS" ''The Comics Journal'' (June 19, 2019). Crumb contributed cover art and comics to every issue of ''Weirdo''; his wife, cartoonist Aline Kominsky-Crumb, also had work in almost every issue. Crumb focused increasingly on autobiography in his stories in ''Weirdo''. Many other autobiographical shorts would appear in ''Weirdo'' by other artists, including Kominsky-Crumb, Carol Tyler, Phoebe Gloeckner, and Dori Seda. David Collier, a Canadian ex-soldier, published autobiographical and historical comics in ''Weirdo''. The anthology introduced artists such as Peter Bagge, Dori Seda, Dennis Worden, and Carol Tyler. With issue #10, Crumb handed ov ...
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Françoise Mouly
Françoise Mouly (; born 24 October 1955) is a French-born American designer, editor and publisher. She is best known as co-founder, co-editor, and publisher of the comics and graphics magazine ''Raw (comics magazine), Raw'' (1980–1991), as the publisher of Raw Books and Toon Books, and since 1993 as the art editor of ''The New Yorker''. Mouly is married to cartoonist Art Spiegelman, and is the mother of writer Nadja Spiegelman. As editor and publisher, Mouly has had considerable influence on the rise in production values in the English-language comics world since the early 1980s. She has played a role in providing outlets to new and foreign cartoonists, and in promoting comics as a serious artform and as an educational tool. The French government decorated Mouly as a Knight of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Order of Arts and Letters in 2001, and as Knight of the Legion of Honour in 2011. Biography Early life Mouly was born in 1955 in Paris, France, the second of three ...
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Phaidon Press
Phaidon Press is a global publisher of books on art, architecture, design, fashion, photography, and popular culture, as well as cookbooks, children's books, and travel books. The company is based in London and New York City, with additional offices in Paris and Berlin. With over 1,500 titles in print, Phaidon books are sold in over 100 countries and are printed in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Mandarin, and dozens of other languages. Since the publisher's founding in Vienna in 1923, Phaidon has sold almost 50 million books worldwide. Early history Phaidon-Verlag was founded in 1923 in Vienna, Austria, by Ludwig Goldscheider, Béla Horovitz, and Frederick "Fritz" Ungar. Originally operating under the name "Euphorion-Verlag", the founders settled on Phaidon (the German form of Phaedo), named after Phaedo of Elis, a pupil of Socrates, to reflect their love of classical antiquity and culture. The company's distinctive logo derives from the Greek letter phi, ...
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Love Beads
Love beads are one of the traditional accessories of hippies. They consist of one or more long strings of beads, frequently handmade, worn around the neck by both sexes. The love bead trend probably evolved from the hippie fascination with non-Western cultures, such as those of Africa, India, and Native America, which make common use of similar beads. Quotes "At moments of suburban relaxation, in our circle of semi-bohemian homes, we smoked pot, wore dashikis and love beads, and frugged ourselves into a lather…" —John Updike "Love beads, mood rings, and candle light. Zodiac says the time is right ...", Janet Jackson, "70s Love Groove" In popular culture In music * Chet Atkins released a single titled "Love Beads" in 1970. * The Lemon Pipers released a song called "Love Beads and Meditation" in 1968. * Ray Stevens mentioned love beads as a key element of hippie attire in the song "Old Hippie Class Reunion" on his album I Never Made a Record I Didn't Like in 1988. In p ...
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