Helen Chazan

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Articles

Heavenly Days - The Comics Journal

Jan 9, 2025 | tcj.com | Helen Chazan

A person, alone in their home, applies their makeup, examining the effect of their mascara and blush in the bathroom mirror. They hold a picture of themself, younger, smiling, a face dotted with unconcerned stubble. Slumped down on the edge of their bedroom mattress, they begin to cry but stifle their tears and hide away the old photo in a discreet dresser drawer.
Sunlight Maggots: Eroticism and Absence in Margot Ferrick's Half Gold/Half Dung

Oct 17, 2024 | tcj.com | Helen Chazan

Two men, lithe and androgynous. One is in armor, his long, white hair tied into a bun, the other in regal attire, his jet black hair straight and cropped short. The two hold each other and stick their fingers in the other's mouth. The blond looks downcast, dare I say crestfallen, while his partner appears eager, pleased and even amused, staring intently at his mate.
Bernadette - The Comics Journal

Oct 9, 2024 | tcj.com | Helen Chazan |Katie Lane's

Bernadette Magazine #1 arrives with a feeling of momentous portent. There are a lot of great comics anthologies around at the moment, but none have carried with them the sense of being a defining statement of what alternative comics might now be quite like Bernadette. Maybe it's the large dimensions of the magazine, maybe it's the glossy paper stock that evades both the pragmatic newsprint and the boutiquifying riso format that have been the norm for so much of the scene lately.
Sequential Bodies - The Comics Journal

Sep 11, 2024 | tcj.com | Helen Chazan

When I was starting out in this whole comics crit thing, the standard joke about crappy criticism or academic writing about art was to say a work was about "bodies in spaces." Is that still the joke? Talking bodies in spaces is, the maxim goes, a way to sound important while saying nothing of significance. But lately, when I'm reading comics, I really do find myself wondering - what could be more interesting in sequential art than bodies? Formally, what is more compelling than spaces?
Mind Body Split: Leo Fox's Lucille stories

Aug 28, 2024 | tcj.com | Helen Chazan

He looks tired. He looks anxious. His eyes are two wavering black holes cut into a pouch, ever so slightly indented by the face beneath or perhaps from the tear in the fabric which formed them. These eyes, or perhaps the windows from which they gaze, stream spectrally, offering the cartoon impression of a ghost, or else shame like the shame Charlie Brown felt when he covered his head with a paper bag. This man's covering is overlaid in spikes, threatening or perhaps distracting from his bodily form.
Legacy Comics: Two New Alternative Funnybooks

Aug 1, 2024 | tcj.com | Helen Chazan

What were alternative comics? Questions like this will make a seasoned reader of this publication groan - if the Comics Journal has any legacy it is its role in shaping what readers today will call alternative comics, comics for serious readers with an artistic or literary focus. Maybe this term is outmoded in a time when what we call mainstream is almost trivial, not nonexistent but as shifting and imprecise as naming an alternative.
Hurricane Nancy - The Comics Journal

Jul 23, 2024 | tcj.com | Helen Chazan |Alex Dueben

Swollen breasts, gaping cunts, and cocks shooting off semen inside swelling liberated wombs may be the height of vulgarity to some, but it's Nancy Burton's stippling that makes that fine word - vulgar - spring into my mind first at the sight of her art. That crude, disorganized, precise pressing down of ink onto paper in little dots, spread across the page to cast shadows, texture, across her images like a trail of stubble, like dust and cobwebs, like acne, like pubic hair.
Second Hand Love - The Comics Journal

Jul 2, 2024 | tcj.com | Helen Chazan

It is special to read a comic which not only stands on its own as a great work in the medium but also forces the reader to reexamine an artist's prior work and appreciate their voice in a new light. For example, Jim Woodring's Fran warps and unravels his already opus-culminating Congress of the Animals by introducing sexual anxiety to the surreal world of Frank, which had previously avoided confronting troubles such as gender.
"A lot of my comics are fart jokes": An interview with Bhanu Pratap

May 13, 2024 | tcj.com | Helen Chazan

There are a few cartoonists working today whose comics immediately redefine our sense of the medium. Bhanu Pratrap is one. When I first encountered Pratrap's comics on Twitter in 2021, and saw in them a totally fresh grammar of cartooning built on stark, contorted bodily forms, jets of tears and, enigmatic captions in eerily open city landscapes. At once post-Barks and post-Garo, Pratrap makes haunting, vivid stories in a netherworld between gag strips and poetry. I was hooked.
Comics Gridlock May 2024: Love is the Drug

May 6, 2024 | solrad.co | Helen Chazan |Emily Price

April is definitely the cruelest month. I read a lot of comics, and I didn’t have any time to write about them. I was really thinking about writing a 420 themed column for April. I actually think it’s worth talking about, I’m not here to take pot-shots at pot-heads. I can’t smoke anymore, I’m recently sober. But speaking as a lapsed stoner, I had a lot of formative comics reading experiences under the sway of the reefer.