Zach Rabiroff

New York

Freelance Contributor at Freelance

I did some writing that nobody read.

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tcj.com

Articles

I'm Doing the Work I Need to Do to Live With Myself: Joe Sacco on Democracy, Genocide, and Drawing the Truth

1 week ago | tcj.com | Zach Rabiroff

If an artist can be measured in part by their capacity to look truth squarely in the eye without flinching, let it be said that Joe Sacco is an artist. For more than three decades, Sacco has been perhaps the most prominent and influential cartoonist-journalist in comics. His Palestine, published in 1993, was a probing and ambivalent first-hand report on a people and place trapped in a cycle of war and repression.
U.K. cartoonist Rebecca Burke on her ICE detainment: 'No one should be here'

3 weeks ago | tcj.com | Zach Rabiroff

On Feb. 26, 2025, Rebecca Burke became a prisoner of the United States immigration system. Burke, a 28-year-old comic artist from Wales, had come to the U.S. on a tourist visa on Jan. 7, in the waning days of the Biden administration, with a backpacking itinerary that entailed staying with friendly homeowners in exchange for her lending a hand with household chores.
The War on Gaza - The Comics Journal

1 month ago | tcj.com | Zach Rabiroff

On a November night in 1995, on the steps of city hall in Tel Aviv, two bullets struck Yitzhak Rabin at close range, fatally injuring the sitting Prime Minister of Israel. Rabin had been leaving a peace rally in support of the Oslo Accords, the landmark agreements he had begun brokering with Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat two years earlier to end the 50 year span of occupations and insurgencies that had persisted since the Nakba of 1948.
Political cartoonists on facing Donald Trump, again: 'There is no consensus reality anymore'

Jan 15, 2025 | tcj.com | Zach Rabiroff

On the evening of Jan. 3, 2025, a vanishingly rare event occurred in the annals of journalism: a cartoonist made the news. For the previous two months, since the election of Donald Trump to a second tenure as President of the United States, the headlines had been filled by the steady drip of media and technology barons paying physical and financial homage to the incoming president. On Nov.
'I don't really like narrative': A conversation with Wow Cool's Marc Arsenault

Dec 10, 2024 | tcj.com | Zach Rabiroff

When Marc Arsenault of Wow Cool Alternative Comics contacted my editors at the Comics Journal, I expected something on the order of a typical Retail Therapy column. Wow Cool had recently been experiencing some tough financial circumstances, Arsenault said, and was gearing up to I really should have known better. The conversation with Arsenault turned out to be anything but typical, but then, so was Marc Arsenault.
Gabe Fowler on Desert Island's past, present and future

Oct 25, 2024 | tcj.com | Zach Rabiroff

Someone looking at Brooklyn's Desert Island Comics from the outside could be forgiven for squinting skeptically. The Williamsburg-based shop has, since its founding in 2008, seemed to have sprung from the cultural ethos of the place in which it's located. Founder Gabe Fowler came from a dual background as a regular at punk rock shows and an art gallery employee - a rich brew for the sort of upscale hipster iconoclasm that has become synonymous with the north Brooklyn neighborhood.
Remembering Bernie Mireault: 1961-2024

Oct 20, 2024 | tcj.com | Zach Rabiroff

That this future, and all of Mireault's futures, are confined to the realm of the hypothetical is now a tragic fact. On Sept. 2, 2024, Bernie Mireault died at age 64. His death, announced in a Facebook post by his lifelong friend and fellow comics artist Howard Chackowicz, revealed the cause to be suicide.
The RashÅmon of Bill Jemas: Four Portraits of a Marvel Age

Aug 12, 2024 | tcj.com | Zach Rabiroff

Note: This is an excerpt from the upcoming The Comics Journal #310. We will be running more excerpts from that issue in the coming weeks. Part Three: The CrucibleNothing gets Bill Jemas more animated than talking about licensing deals. "From the time I followed DC closely, it was pretty clear that they were not making money from their comic books. Even with Batman and Superman, those geniuses were finding a way to lose money.
Flying Colors Comics - The Comics Journal

Aug 1, 2024 | tcj.com | Zach Rabiroff

This past May, as the annual Free Comic Book Day rolled around, the comics press appeared to be greeted with the sort of bad news that comes around with dispiriting regularity these days, in the form of another closure of a longstanding comic shop. This one seemed especially ironic, in that the purported victim was Flying Colors Comics, a 36-year-old establishment founded and still run by Joe Field in Concord, California.
Logan's Run: Roy Thomas, Len Wein, and the curious case of the Wolverine

Jun 23, 2024 | tcj.com | Zach Rabiroff

Note: This article has been updated to include a citation that had been unintentionally omitted. The Journal regrets the omission. Consider , an issue scripted by the Wolverine. The Marvel Comics character who bears that name made his debut in the July 1974 issue of The Incredible Hulk Len Wein and drawn by Herb Trimpe, in a one-panel teaser that preceded his star turn one month later. His deportment and appearance in those issues was, to put it politely, inauspicious.