The Rabbit thought he’d caught a superhero–book jacket designer and author Chip Kidd– in a contradiction. In a recent interview for the New York Times‘ “The Moment” blog, Kidd discusses how the cover he designed for The Dark Knight Returns can be seen in any comic book store “instantly at 200…

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We’re preparing for first publication elsewhere (newsprint lives!) a review of the Harvey Pekar-Paul Buhle collaboration The Beats: A Graphic History (Hill and Wang, hardback, $22) . Our love for all things Beat made its arrival an event, especially after Pekar’s honest and enlightening history of the SDS . (Frankly, we found the…

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Before slasher films, rap music and internet porn, even before rock ‘n’ roll, self-righteous America found cause for juvenile delinquency in comic books. Columbia journalism professor and former Entertainment Weekly editor David Hajdu unearths the largely forgotten 1950s campaign against illustrated pulp and discovers larger issues of censorship and Puritanical scape-goating…

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