Hillary Chute
Ariel Schrag, now in her mid-thirties, has been a force in gay pop culture since she was fourteen. A prolific cartoonist, she started publishing her own autobiographical comic-book series, Awkward, her freshman year at Berkeley High, in 1995. Schrag produced a differently titled comic-book series for each year she was in high school—Definition, Potential, and Likewise followed Awkward. The appeal of her comics, which chronicle her own coming out, includes a razor-like attention to details of teenagers’ lives, as well as a richly expressed (you guessed it) awkwardness. Her comics attend to masturbation, body image, sex, drugs, family, and biology A twentieth-century cultural icon, Jules Feiffer started publishing his regular comic strip Sick, Sick, Sick—later known simply as Feiffer—in the Village Voice in 1956. (It was collected with the fantastic title Sick, Sick, Sick: A Guide to Non-Confident Living in 1958.) Feiffer broke into the comics world in the 1940s as an assistant and later a writer for the famed cartoonist Will Eisner. Feiffer’s strip, which ran for 42 years, came to define the exuberant political ethos of the Voice and opened the door for the existence of alternative comics. He became a public intellectual; ranging across the arts, Cartoonist and journalist Joe Sacco is the world’s foremost creator of “comics journalism”—a contemporary field he basically invented. His previous books, including Palestine—for which Sacco interviewed hundreds of people on both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict—record, sometimes in minute detail, what is absent from the flash of news reports: the texture of lives on the ground. Sacco doesn’t flinch when depicting some of the most atrocious episodes in recent global history; in Safe Area Gorazde, his extraordinary volume on Bosnia, he presents intricately rendered drawings of mass graves. Sacco, who was himself born to a Catholic family in Malta, is