Pen and Wink
As any medium matures, its practitioners inevitably start to question its inner workings. Comics have a history of self-reflexivity and metacommentary dating back at least to the panel border smashed like a wooden frame by Winsor McCay’s Little Sammy Sneeze in 1905 and continuing over the years in venues as varied as Harvey Kurtzman’s strip for children, Hey, Look!, and underground comics’ flagship anthology, Zap Comix. Each of the five books considered here are likewise engaged with testing and prodding the raw material of comics, stretching it in startling new directions.
Art Spiegelman was