Bummer Summer

Saturday Leftover Day.

The next few weeks I will be out, on holiday. Actually, I am not going anywhere, but I am taking off for a couple of weeks. I don't know about you guys, but between Facebook and my emails I find it harder and harder to relax in the weekends. It seems everything goes on every day. As in the previous years, I will be giving you something special and preprogrammed in the period I am not here. A couple of weeks ago I held a presentation for the Comics Conference of the University of Amsterdam. Wedged in between proper academic presentations about holocaust comics and the extratextual justifications of that sort of books I did a suming up if the work of Hank Chapman between 1951 and 1953. To be able to do that, I collected all of his war comics from that period and I will be showing them here one day at the time, along with exerpts of my text. I have always found hank Chapman a fascinating writer and have written about him here as well. The 1951/1953 period is expecially interesting because he wrote some of the most cruel and defeatist war comics I have ever seen. These were the most effective anti-war comics ever made, eventhough I don't think that was his intention. One of the listeners to mmy rpesentation told me that surely he must have been an anti-war liberal, but the rest of his life and career do not suggest that. I tried to show that he was merely weary of war, maybe even effected by his own WWII experiences. On top of that, I tried to show what a terrific writer he was. like Harvey Kurtzman he wrote pure comics, using several different and intelligent storytelling techniques. But unlike Kurtzman, he did not sketch his story, he related his imigary to his artists merely by a typewriter. Making it even more of an achivement in my view.

So it's goodby for now and enjoy the brutal war stories of Han Chapman in the next few weeks.