The Comics Journal

In January of this year, the Tokyo District Court handed down a guilty verdict to Tsuguhiko Kadokawa, the former chairman of Japanese media giant KADOKAWA, which also operates in the manga, anime, and video game industries.

It was not merely the conclusion of a corporate corruption scandal stemming from the Tokyo Olympic Games that were scheduled for 2020 (and postpone...

Years ago, I spent a cross-country flight seated next to a man who, in my recollection, never once looked up from his reading. Curious to learn what he found so absorbing, I took a surreptitious glance at his tray table and was surprised to see a bland-looking magazine immediately recognizable as a specialized journal — in this case, Sugar Journal, which subsequent r...

Back in the day, when the old Comics Journal was still a more-or-less bimonthly magazine, l wrote a piece called “They Shall Not Be Forgotten,” an appreciation of a number of obscure comics artists or obscure features by better-known artist...

There is a Michael Deforge quote, which I can only locate by way of Frank Santoro paraphrasing, that the way some in the art comics crowd extol the importance of comics history is like, “We’re all in these punk bands and we all go to punk shows and then we go home and we’re supposed t...

Back in 1990 Ed "ILYA" Hillyer's Slack strips in the U.K. magazine Deadline started off as quick-fire gags and slapstick about body odor and flatshare-cringe, ribaldry on a direct line from the U.K.'s alt-comedy boom of the previous half-decade. By the time Deadline expired five years later, the strip and the cartooning had evolved into The End ...