LARB Digital eDitions #42: Comics

December 20159 pages

LARB Digital eDitions #42: Comics

The great pleasure of reading and thinking about comics is watching a new art form come into being. Of course comics aren’t really new – they’ve been around in newspaper strip form since the 1890s, in comic book form since the 1930s. If comics have existed for over a century, their elevation to something we consider art is a much more recent project. And we come at this project with a huge backlog of material that complicates what it means to label something “art” in the first place.


The six pieces in this digital edition exemplify a promiscuous mixture of creative and critical work, a disregard for cultural hierarchies, and a commitment to making sense of the contemporary. You’re in for a treat.