When a panel of four esteemed graphic novelists have only an hour to address an auditorium packed with eager fans, it’s unlikely they can cover very much in very great depth. And thus it was when Ben Katchor, Mimi Pond, Anders Nilsen, and Vanessa Davis gathered at USC for “Illustrating the Point” at the L.A. Times Festival of Books a few weeks ago. Among the top questions they’d lightly touched upon: What other cartoonists have inspired you? What’s the value of higher educati

Peter Kuper’s seen it all. And he wants us to see it, too. So he draws it for us. His visits to Latin America, the Middle East, and beyond have been providing him with perspective and inspiration for World War 3 Illustrated – America’s longest-running radical comic book anthology, since 1980. His various comics autobiographies include ComicsTrips: A Journal of Travels Through Africa and Southeast Asia. And his graphic novel adaptions of classic literature by authors such as F

Over the last couple of months, I have been picking my way through I Read Where I Am, “82 reflections on the future forms of reading.” In the book, some contributors claim that we read less than we used to, while others suggest the opposite—though the definitions of “reading” and “text” differ. Is reading infographics the same as reading Shakespeare? Ellen Lupton points out that the postmodern tenets of deconstructionalists like Jacques Derrida inspired a generation to expose

We used to joke around the office that our work amounted to an unending cycle; “Another day, another rectangle,” we’d say. And in some ways, that still works. After all, new devices are popping into existence all the time; each one with its own unique, glowing, rectangular screen into which will eventually be squeezed the information we create. The trouble is with over-thinking the rectangle part. We used to get as specific as possible about the dimensions of our designs, doi