- Comic Tropes
- [Bakuman, a manga about the manga industry](https://www.viz.com/shonenjump/chapters/bakuman
- The Steranko History of Comics is to me the capstone of the Golden Age of Comics. Not that it was contemporary to it, it came out towards the end or after the silver age of comics, but I think that retrospective look back at the Golden Age is what makes it so important to understanding the golden age. Contemporaries in the Golden Age couldn’t have known what the totality of their influences on the world would be. They were just part of a movement, and a lot of them were just there to get access to the stew pot. As the silver age closed, though, it’s very easy to imagine someone looking back past the silver age into the golden age and really see it for what it was, and to understand “This was actually something really influential, and another moment like this will probably never come again”
And then a lot of the rest of what I know comes from listening to people talk at conventions (mainly recordings of those). There’s a lot of oral history to comic books as they exist as a result of the relationship Comic books have with propaganda and street art. A lot of comic book purists believe that a comic book should not arrive to the reader with any instructions on how to interpret it. The reader must take it in and consider it, and once they are co-located with someone involved with the making of the comic, or someone who’s gotten the information word of mouth, learn how to interpret the propaganda from verbal confirmation. Oda, the mangaka of One Piece, for many years was very cage-y about how to interpret his work and would always answer any questions from readers with “I can’t just tell you everything, you have to figure it out” but lately has been a bit more direct and urgent about that his work is a monumental piece of fiction intended to communicate that liberation movements need the following:
- Laughter
- A willingness to do violence
- Queers
- A sense of found family
- An unwillingness by leadership to define themselves as heroes because calling yourself a hero makes you a self mythologizing autocrat
