Our Politics, Ourselves: The Millions Interviews James Sturm
Doggedness is the essential quality that’s needed if we have any hope to cross the divides that separate us.
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An Attack on the American Experiment: On Gay Clubs and Orlando
I spent many boring hours in gay clubs, but I liked them because they were unsafe. You don’t learn anything in safe spaces.
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What Is Dangerous and What Is Just New: On 25 Years of Drawn & Quarterly
The initial phase of the comics renaissance is over, and the publication of this anthology offers an opportunity for understanding what defined D&Q, what we readers were looking for in comics throughout the past 25 years, and what we are looking for now.
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Some Kind of Tribe: The Millions Interviews Daniel Clowes
The aesthetic gulf between the kind of stuff I’m interested in and the kind of stuff that is mainstream is so vast that I can’t wrap my head around it.
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Readers without Responsibility: The Millions Interviews Scott McCloud
I would say that in the past decades, there weren’t that many comics like this one, in terms of the way it incorporates reader participation, [which is] something I see in manga but rarely see in American comics.
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Emancipation from Irony: On ‘The Best American Comics 2014’
When you read a comic, you are accepting a direct message from one singular honest soul. Your hand touches theirs. That soul can be strange. That soul can be sick. And it can also be oh-so earnest.
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John Waters’s America
In the back of his mind, Mark Twain probably imagined a dogshit-eating transvestite, but couldn’t find a place for him in Huckleberry Finn.
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The Survivor: On Magneto, Mutants, and the Holocaust
You can read Magneto as the nightmare of every post-1945 Jewish humanist. He is the Jew who lost the soulful liberalism of the Yiddishkeit, and who has allowed the Holocaust to turn him into everything he despises. He is the Jew who will bomb Gaza and say, with some credibility, that it is for defense while privately acknowledging a pleasure in revenge. He is the Jew who has allowed the Holocaust to instill in him a debilitating paranoia.
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A Beautiful Man: On Peter Parker and the Amazing Spider-Man
The problem with Spider-Man is the same problem with all popular comics heroes. Eventually, after several hundred issues, he hit a moment of stasis in which he stopped evolving, stopped discovering the strange hidden facets of his personality.
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You Can’t Avert Your Eyes: The Millions Interviews Teju Cole
You don’t become a war reporter because you love war. You report on war because it expands and complicates our idea of what war is. As a Nigerian-American who lives in the United States, I would like to complicate our sense of what Nigeria is, of what Lagos is, of what Africa is like. So that’s why I write about it. Not because I hate it. Not because I’m from there. I’m working on my second book on it, and it probably won’t be my last.
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Why Does Roddy Doyle Wish to Disillusion Us?: The Millions Interview
I couldn’t care less really if I’ve disillusioned you. It is within your gift not to read the book. So really, it didn’t give me the minimum pause for thought.
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Difficult History: On John Lewis’s March
The civil rights movement is a brutal place, where young men torture themselves for the great cause, and where the moments of euphoria are all too rare.
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Immersion Therapy: The Millions Interviews Ellen Forney
I set up a tripod and posed for every panel. I was drawing myself crying and lying. I got a chair that looked like my psychiatrist’s chair. I posed like my mother. I posed like my psychiatrist. And really, literally embodying these other characters, me and people who were around me, thoroughly immersing myself in that world and that time.
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The Superhero Factory: An Unauthorized Corporate History of Marvel Comics
Sean Howe covers the entire history of Marvel, from 1939 to Disney’s acquisition of the company 70 years later. The book has few heroes and villains, only figures who, with varying degrees of success and failure, negotiate the politics of a large enterprise for their own wants and needs. It’s a portrait of what capitalism can create and what it can’t create -- and what it can destroy.
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Getting Away with Murder: The Millions Interviews Ursula K. Le Guin
I think to admit despair and to revel in it -- as many 20th- and 21st-century writers do -- is an easy way out.
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The March of Progress Is Never Neat: Merle Miller’s On Being Different
If Miller’s book is an argument for dignity and acceptance, it is also an argument against politeness. It is an argument against letting stray homophobic remarks from your liberal friends just go in the interest of keeping the evening pleasant. It is an argument against letting someone change the topic of conversation when they tell you they feel uncomfortable about gay marriage. It’s an argument for demanding the part of the territory to which you are entitled.
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A Brief Wondrous Interview with Junot Díaz
Depression fucking sucks, dude. Depression sucks. And part of you thinks, “Well if I have to deal with being fucking depressed, I’ll figure out some way to make some art out of it.”
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Written through Tears: The Millions Interviews Katherine Boo
She made me talk about why I felt I could never make anyone care about these people the way I cared about them. She made me realize I just had to keep on doing my reporting. Obviously, it was late for those children, but if I could investigate and document a little better, maybe some attention would be paid.
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