Tag Archive | "history"

The Longest Day

Monday, June 6, 2011

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Today is June the 6th. To those of us who grew up on a diet of comics like the immortal Commando Book (still going strong from DC Thomson), Warlord, Battle, Victor, Hotspur and many more we’ve known and respected this day since we were kids, as the ‘longest day’, when Operation Overlord saw the enormous [...]

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From our continental correspondent – Germany in comics format

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

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Dumont Buchverlag is not a publishing house that you would see represented on your average comic convention.  They publish high-quality literature, art books, history books, and the like, but since April of this year, they also have one graphic novel in their catalogue – but don’t expect any funny animals or superheroes.  In Deutschland, Ein [...]

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The cartoon guide to nuclear testing

Friday, May 27, 2011

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The Atlantic reports on a blast from the past – an atomic blast from the past, in fact. Between the 50s and 90s the USA tested hundreds of nuclear devices in the deserts of Nevada. Understandably residents of Nevada and neighbouring Utah and California weren’t entirely comfortable with the idea of their government detonating hundreds [...]

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History of British Comics

Friday, April 29, 2011

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We covered this quite a good while back, when the excellent Bryan Talbot created a potted history of British comics in three pages for the Guardian (in a similar style to his huge work Alice in Sunderland), but seeing as James at the Bryan Talbot site has just posted up some good-sized versions of the [...]

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Remembering Gagarin

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

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(cover to Yuri’s Day by and (c) Peter Hodkinson, Piers Bizony and Andrew King) Fifty years ago this very day, the early days of the Space Race, and the thunder of the great genius Korolev’s rockets carry Yuri Gagarin on a journey that no human being in all the ages of the world had every [...]

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Using comics to teach history in the classroom

Thursday, April 7, 2011

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OITQ has a short but interesting video of teachers using the comics medium in the classroom to get the kids much more involved in learning their history, not so much through using comics as a way to get kids reading about events (as we know comics can be terrific for getting kids to read for [...]

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A very brief look at DC’s history

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

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Vincent Molina fairly flies us at a superpowered pace through a very brief visual look at the history of DC Comics in about a minute:

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A retrospective of computer graphics

Monday, March 14, 2011

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1989: BoingBoing points us towards this interesting compilation by Metafilter which picks out a different example of computer graphics (from cartoons, animation tests and video games) from 1988 to today – the resulting contrasts are quite something to look at it. Seeing them back to back like this across some 22 years is a very [...]

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History of Science Fiction mindmap

Thursday, March 10, 2011

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This amazing image isn’t some weird Elder God or hitherto unknown to science creature of the deepest marine abyss – it is a mindmap history of science fiction and it is an astonishing thing to dive into, ranging across myth and philosophy, from ancient written works like Gilgamesh (humanity’s oldest surviving written tale) to more [...]

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Yuri’s Day

Thursday, March 10, 2011

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This spring will mark the fiftieth anniversary of one of the most remarkable events not only of 20th century history but of all of human history. It’s April the 12th, 1961 and something is about to happen that has never happened in all the long ages of the world; a mere few decades after the [...]

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Scottish claim for early comic book

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

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Scotland on Sunday has a two-page article discussing a forthcoming documentary “Scotland’s Amazing Comic Book Heroes” which is due for broadcast later this year.  In it, according to the article, there is a claim made for Glasgow’s 19th century publishing industry to be considered as the ‘birthplace’ of the comics form due to the Glasgow [...]

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Animated Bayeaux

Thursday, November 25, 2010

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The famous Bayeux Tapestry is often cited by some as an early form of proto comic strip and I am rather liking this animated version, complete with appearance of Halley’s Comet (from Open Culture, link via Routledge Arts):

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The Story of Comics

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

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Maeve Clancy has posted up a brief look at the history of comics, created for a community art project. It’s brief, but still interesting as a quick outline of the comics and I like that at the end she brings us up to date with comics creators in Ireland today, like Declan Shalvey, Philip Barrett, [...]

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Ethnicity in 20th Century American Comics

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

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Panel Borders alerts us to a talk by the Victoria & Albert’s comics expert Ian Rakoff; Ian will be looking into representations of race and gender in early 20th century American comics with  a talk entitled Ethnicity in 20th Century American Comics from The Yellow Kid to Tarzan at Oxford University’s Institute of Social and [...]

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The dark past of a seminal cartoonist

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

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For a few years now, rumours had been circulating about celebrated seminal Flemish cartoonist and comic artist Willy Vandersteen’s activities during World War II.  Comic historians discovered illustrations and cartoons in books and magazines published during German occupation time, which sympathised with the occupying forces or even presented a blatantly anti-Semitic sentiment.  The style of [...]

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