Hillary Chute

  • fiction June/July/Aug 2014

    Trans Mission

    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

  • interviews September 02, 2013

    Bookforum talks with Jules Feiffer

    Jules Feiffer started publishing his regular comic strip Sick, Sick, Sick in the Village Voice in 1956, and went on to become a public intellectual and a cultural icon, winning an Academy Award, an Obie, and a Pulitzer Prize. The artist and writer talks with Bookforum about a dizzying range of topics, including the legendary cartoonist Will Eisner, the history of American comics, noir, Hollywood, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and his own graphic-novel-in-progress, Kill My Mother.

    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

  • culture December 22, 2009

    Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco

    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.