Ph.D. Craig Fischer

There are 22 included publications by Ph.D. Craig Fischer :

TitleDateViewsBrief Description
Book Review -- "It Is The Bad Time," Edited By Kazimir Lee Iskander 2016 592 Bad Time focuses on horror, specifically the aim to cultivate a sense of dread in the cartoonists themselves. Again, Iskander from the book’s foreword: “My mission statement was simple—every artist involved should write a comic that would contain at ...
Book Review -- “Pascal Girard’s Petty Theft.” 2014 760 A key to unlocking Pascal Girard’s Petty Theft is the book’s French title, La Collectionneuse (“The Collector”), a title shared with a 1967 film by New Wave auteur Eric Rohmer. Girard may have borrowed this title as a way of announcing a creative deb...
Book Review -- "Paul Joins The Scouts" 2013 1803 If you’ve enjoyed any (or all) of Michel Rabagliati’s previous graphic novels, you’ll love Paul Joins the Scouts, a French-to-English translation of Rabagliati’s Paul au Parc (2011) recently released by Conundrum Press. Scouts is also a fine introduc...
Book Review -- "Treasure Island: Part I" 2014 888 Book review of Connor Willumsen's Treasure Island: Part I.
Book Reviews -- "Hergé: The Man Who Created Tintin" By Pierre Assouline. "God Of Comics: Osamu Tezuka And The Creation Of Post–World War II Manga" By Natsu Onoda Power. "Looking For Calvin And Hobbes: The Unconventional Story Of Bill Watterson And His Revolutionary Comic Strip" By Nevin Martell. 2010 661 Three recent books—Pierre Assouline's Hergé, Natsu Onoda Power's God of Comics and Nevin Martell's Looking for Calvin and Hobbes—aspire to be comprehensive, accessible biographies/critical studies of their subjects, though these books vary widely in ...
Column -- "The Ballad Of Axe-Faced Anne: Comics, Criticism, Contexts" (Part One) 2012 546 Reading a comic book once made me sick. Like other Baby Boomer kids, I fell in love with Silver Age Marvel Comics, especially the Kirby/Lee/Sinnott Fantastic Four. I was imprinted by Lee’s narrative voice (simultaneously melodramatic and folksy) and ...
Column -- "The Ballad Of Axe-Faced Anne: Comics, Criticism, Contexts" (Part Two) 2012 430 Reading a comic book once made me sick. Like other Baby Boomer kids, I fell in love with Silver Age Marvel Comics, especially the Kirby/Lee/Sinnott Fantastic Four. I was imprinted by Lee’s narrative voice (simultaneously melodramatic and folksy) and ...
Column -- "Devils And Machines: On Jonah Hex And All Star Western" 2012 554 My complaint here is that Hex’s idiosyncratic qualities, including the series’ ambiguous, Western-style protagonist, and its focus on the ethics of torture, have been paved over by All Star Western’s pandering to the market. An unexpectedly lively co...
Column -- "Kirby: Attention Paid" 2011 494 Last month, I wrote that my “Monsters Eat Critics” column would focus on genres other than superhero comics, and this month my topic is (cue trumpets) Jack Kirby’s Silver Age Marvel art. But I can’t help myself. I love the detail in Jack Kirby’s art....
Column -- “My Back Pages" 2013 590 Column/Essay
Column -- "My Friend Dave" 2013 1254 Column published in The Comics Journal
Column -- "Night And Day: Notes On Building Stories" 2016 414 Building Stories? Take your time, and read it carefully. An obvious quality of the book/box is how its narrative spreads across its fourteen different pamphlets, posters and books, forcing the reader to choose where to begin and how to progress. Ware...
Column -- "One Life, Many Books: Michel Rabagliati’s Paul" 2013 733 I read Paul in the Country (2000), Paul Has a Summer Job (2002), Paul Moves Out (2005), Paul Goes Fishing (2008) and The Song of Roland (2012), and enjoyed them all, but I couldn’t shake my suspicion that Rabagliati’s art was too emotionally and visu...
Column -- "Pluto And Doubling" 2011 539 Welcome to the first installment of “Monsters Eat Critics,” a monthly column I’ll be writing for TCJ.com. I hope that “Monsters Eat Critics” sounds like the title of a Z-grade science-fiction movie, because I plan to write about genre comics, includi...
“Hawkeye Supercut." 2015 1444 Read and appreciated by a horde of fans before me, Hawkeye—written by Matt Fraction and often drawn by David Aja—is worth our attention. Marvel released Hawkeye #1 in October 2012, and to date 21 issues have appeared, with most of these collected int...
The Lives Of Insects: On Photography And Comics 2012 720 Feature Essay
“A Mad Look At Toes: A Tribute To Al Feldstein.” (Part Of A Celebration Of Mad Editor Feldstein) 2014 943 I’m bugged by much of the mainstream media attention given to Al Feldstein’s passing, because it feels less about the editor himself than about websites providing Boomers with yet another opportunity to wax nostalgic: “Mad’s editor died? Too bad. Hey...
Providence: Lovecraft, Sexual Violence, And The Body Of The Other 2016 6445 The subject of this essay is the first six issues of Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’ Providence, but let me begin with an apology. In Comics Journal #278 (October 2006), I wrote a negative review of Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls, arguing that M...
Spain Rodriguez: Tributes 2012 656 A tribute to the comic book artist Spain Rodriguez. Contributors include Craig Fischer. (Part of a celebration of underground cartoonist Spain.)
Teeth, Sticks, and Bricks: Calligraphy, Graphic Focalization, and Narrative Braiding in Eddie Campbell’s Alec 2011 1722 No Abstract
Tributes To Richard Thompson 2016 785 A celebration of newspaper cartoonist Richard Thompson.
Worlds Within Worlds: Audiences, Jargon, And North American Comics Discourse 2010 1096 Let me begin by describing four recent acts of comics criticism, all connected to each other like dominoes falling: 1 English translation of Le Piège diabolique (Paris: Lombard-Dargaud, 1962) published in the U.S. by (...)2The first act: In 2007, ...