Blinking Red Lights and the Souls of Our Friends
An activist writes on inner strength and squat life in this excerpt from the memoir “Maps to the Other Side.”...
Wolfsheim in Sheep’s Clothing
Four cartoons for the price of one! Watch as Schweef Comics and Meyer Wolfsheim venture into the WASP nest of West Egg. Coloring by Kevin TS Tang. Drew Lerman is a writer and cartoonist living in Miami.
In Defense of Nick Carraway
The narrator of The Great Gatsby is a textbook unreliable narrator, but maybe the kind we ought to rely on. Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby. Pic courtesy of Theiapolis Media. Nick Carraway is a textbook unreliable narrator, and when you read his story for class you learn to go,...
Impossible Objects—In Defense of Truthiness in Creative Nonfiction
We give movies “based on a true story” the space for artistic interpretation. Why aren’t memoirs given the same latitude? I’ve been at work on a novel about the Yugoslav Civil War for a few years now, and I can’t get more than a sentence or two into a description of the thing before my...
Crawdads Welcome
In this new strip from comic artist Ezra Butt, Teamsquad Manatee heard something about cake. There is cake here, right? Ezra Butt is a comic artist based in Oregon. His works can be found at: www.crawdadswelcome.tumblr.com.
Sisters
Through reworked photographs & letters, we see the hidden branches of Valerie Marie Arvidson’s family tree blossom into vibrant color. Siblings The two sisters were almost twins, or that’s how they were treated. Their surface traits— same mouse-brown hair, same grey-blue eyes— invited slip-ups and switched names. They loved each other deeply with a kind...
Mr. Block, Vol. IV
“Mr. Block is legion. He owns nothing, yet he speaks from the standpoint of the millionaire. He’s patriotic without patrimony.” Comics and politics were intermingling long before Alan Moore and David Lloyd ever slapped a Guy Fawkes mask on their freedom fighting hero in V for Vendetta. Back in 1912, a German immigrant named Ernest...
Get Rude: In Praise of Obnoxious and Annoying Activism
As student protesters up at Dartmouth College are proving, sometimes you need to get impolite to provoke an adult conversation. Photo by Jacob Weiss of The Dartmouth. As a rule of thumb, when someone dismisses a protest by insisting that it happened at an improper time & place, this person doesn’t give much of a...
A Walk Thru Park Slope
In the second installment of a collaboration between Blunderbuss and Schweef Comics, Drew sweeps an elderly Brooklynite off her feet. Coloring by Kevin TS Tang. Drew Lerman is a writer and cartoonist living in Miami.
From A Taiwanese Underground Band, Real Talk About Artists’ Insecurities
Upon receiving the biggest music award in Taiwan, the guitarist for 1976 gives one of the best acceptance speeches ever. Intro & translation by Kevin TS Tang. The Golden Melody Awards is Taiwan’s Grammies, founded to boost Taiwan’s robust sales of pop music in the Sinosophere. Few of these ceremonies take notice of the politically...
in case you are swallowed by a wolf
Pic courtesy of Low Bros. … When you are in a house that is swallowed by a wolf the best thing to do is to wrap yourself in a blanket of water and set the house on fire. The fire will then spread to the wolf and the wolf, once covered in fire, will burn...
Reminders
You may know this already, but in case you’ve forgotten, Portland-based comic artist Sam Alden is here to remind you. Sam Alden was born in 1988 and works as a cartoonist and illustrator in his hometown of Portland, Oregon. He’s the author of the comics Eighth Grade and Haunter. More of his work can...
Aubade: Delivery
During pregnancy, cells cross through the flat disk of placenta in both directions—mother gives the fetus her body and takes it back. They aren’t one. They’re separate as hands freeing the wood stick of the trapeze. But parting, something gets left like marks on a white doorframe. Thus I’ve never left my mother or the...