Author: Jessica Baldanzi

Photo by Jill Steinmetz I’ve been a comics fangirl since I was a kid—Betty and Veronica to my big brother’s Spider-Man comics—and Chris Ware and Lynda Barry helped complicate my understanding of the genre when I lived in Chicago and their comics were serialized in New City and The Chicago Reader. I first brought comics into my professional life when I created and taught a course called The Graphic Novel in 2008. I’ve taught that class many times since then, have also given talks about comics to general audiences and scholars alike. Commons Comics began in 2013 as a way for me to learn how to blog and to stay current in the field. It was hosted first by my college, then picked up by The Elkhart Truth, a local newspaper, before I moved it to my own page. I teach English at Goshen College, a small but mighty liberal arts school in the “Michiana” area, east of Chicago on the border of Michigan and Indiana. My specialty in graduate school was twentieth-century and more recent American Literature, but my teaching has brought me into multiple fields. My upper-level courses have ranged from critical theory and gender and popular culture to memoir writing, and my introductory courses from to composition and speech to creative writing. I am now co-editing an essay collection with comics and religion scholar Hussein Rashid about Kamala Khan, the new Ms. Marvel. Look for it on the University Press of Mississippi in the coming year. (Working title: Ms. Marvel in America.)
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Building an Imaginary History: ‘The Encyclopedia of Early Earth,’ by Isabel Greenberg

Originally published on GoshenCommons.org May 15, 2014

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Images from npr.org.

“Readers! This book is not a real encyclopedia!” warns the back cover of Isabel Greenberg’s “Encyclopedia of Early Earth.” The back of the book does contain appendices and myths from an already made -up world:

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Image from boingboing.net. Continue reading “Building an Imaginary History: ‘The Encyclopedia of Early Earth,’ by Isabel Greenberg”

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Ed Piskor’s ‘Hip Hop Family Tree’: How to Build a Cultural Zeitgeist

Originally published on GoshenCommons.org April 21, 2014

(Update: “Hip Hop Family Tree” is up to Volume 4, which was released in August 2016. Check it out at Better World Books online.)

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“Hip Hop Family Tree,” the first collected volume from the weekly comic still running on Boing Boing, was backordered almost immediately after its release in December 2013, and is already on its third printing. Apparently I’m not the only one itching for the diversification of comics to pick up speed. Continue reading “Ed Piskor’s ‘Hip Hop Family Tree’: How to Build a Cultural Zeitgeist”

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Intrigue! Romance! History! ‘The Property’ by Rutu Modan

Originally published on GoshenCommons.org March 17, 2014

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Author photo by Dominika Leclawek, from npr.org.

Last post I reviewed “The Great War,” by comics journalism pioneer Joe Sacco. Turns out that Sacco, most famous for “Palestine,” his first-person exploration of the history of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, interviewed this week’s author, Rutu Modan, back in 2008. Modan, well-known in her home country of Israel and rapidly gaining broader recognition, had just released her Eisner Award-winning book “Exit Wounds.” Continue reading “Intrigue! Romance! History! ‘The Property’ by Rutu Modan”