MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
Comics and the counter-hegemony
STEVE ANDREW relishes a survey that sets the genre within a wider social, cultural and political context
The cover of The World's Comics 1, July 6 1892
[Public Domain] 
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
British Comics: A Cultural History
James Chapman, Reaktion, £15
RECENTLY published in paperback, this entertaining, thoughtful and detailed analysis of British comics from the late Victorian period to the present day is not to be missed. Written with insight and passion, if you don’t see yourself as interested in comic books then this might well be the text to get you started.
And let’s be honest, comics haven’t had a very good press, not just from mainstream commentators but from many on the left. Depicted as the worst of an already low and trashy culture, they have often been labelled violently right-wing, racist and misogynistic so much so that in the late 1940s and ’50s the Communist Party of Great Britain joined hands with some unlikely allies to campaign against what were seen as reactionary and effectively pro-imperialist imports.
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