Kristian Williams

I’ve written a lot about war the past couple months — war and comics.

The most involved is a six-part series for The Comics Journal on Garth Ennis’s stories of ariel combat.

Also for The Comics Journal, I wrote a review of the latest installment of Weird War Tales.

Doonesbury turned forty a couple months ago. Garry Trudeau put out a retrospective collection. And I wrote an essay about it for The World and I. (It’s online, but you have to have a subscription to see it. Sorry.) The essay it not only, or even mainly, about war; but it does talk quite a bit about the ways that Trudeau’s depiction of war has changed, and the ways that the experience of war changed the character B.D.

And finally: The Anarcho-Syndicalist Review reprinted my four-part series on the Spanish Civil War in Comics. ASR isn’t online, but the original is at The Comics Journal. The new version is shorter, but it has a stronger conclusion.

In the last few months, I’ve posted a couple reviews at The Comics Journal of books that are simply (or at least, mostly) humorous.

One, “The Success of Failure,” takes a look at Shannon Wheeler’s latest collection, I Thought You Would Be Funnier. Some people (like me) think of Wheeler mainly in connection to his strip Too Much Coffee Man. But now he’s also doing cartoons for The New Yorker — or trying to: this book collects the ones they rejected.

The other review is of the latest Lio collection, There’s Corpses Everywhere. I compare it to the Calvin and Hobbes book, There’s Treasure Everywhere. This isn’t doing Lio‘s creator, Mark Tatulli any favors — but, hey, he started it.

Attentive readers may recall that in January I also beat up on Nevin Martell for his biography of Calvin creator Bill Watterson.

So I both began and ended 2010 with attacks on people trying to follow in the steps of Calvin and Hobbes. There’s probably a moral here somewhere, if we look for it.

Saturday, December 11, 2010: I’ll be speaking at the Humboldt Anarchist Book Fair, giving a lecture titled “Cop Killers and Killer Cops.”

The bookfair is Dec. 11, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., at the Manila Community Center (1611 Peninsula Drive, Arcata, California).

My talk is scheduled from 4 to 5 p.m.

I’m not talking about the elections. I’m talking about literal disasters like fires, floods, earthquakes, wars.

Or rather — other people are talking about those things, and I’ve written the reviews.

Rebecca Solnit has written a remarkable book about the creative and sometimes inspiring ways people have responded to disasters over the last hundred or so years. The book is called A Paradise Built in Hell, and I reviewed it for Socialism and Democracy back in July. (It’s not on the web, I’m afraid.)

Around the same time, I wrote a review of Garth Ennis’ Crossed, Volume One — a comic about a plague that eliminates inhibitions and amplifies cruelty. It appeared on The Comics Journal site in August.

At popculturebomb.com, you can also read a review of my review of Crossed. (Spoiler: They didn’t like it.)