The Macroverse Dispatch

Lily Renée survived the Holocaust, got to New York, and became a Golden Age comics artist. She was written out of history for forty years. She was 97 when comics finally found her again.

Hello and welcome to Episode 14 of the Macroverse Dispatch! With Supergirl coming this week, Spider-Man spinning his way back into cinemas in late July, and the upcoming animated Rogue Trooper (from UK weekly stalwart 2000AD and a personal favourite of mine), it felt like an appropriate time to do a dive into adaptations of comics into movies, and specifically what gets lost when comics become fil...

This week we’re running the clock back a good long way to look at one of the great, great grandfather’s of modern comics, a series of engravings published in 1735. The series had Dickensian character names, social satire, morality… oh, and the creator also accidentally invented copyright law. Follow us on Substack for more: https://substack.com/@themacroversedispatch

It’s Pride month, so this week I'm tracking the long, strange, frequently embarrassing but ultimately rather heartening story of how comics dealt - and continue to deal - with LGBTQ+ characters, creators, and readers. If you prefer reading, then please join us on Substack, and if you like the idea of some cool pre-code horror merch, then check out our Threadless store: https://macroversepreco...

War comics evolved - some of them at least - from being exclusively jingoistic military adventures during WWII to anti-war re-tellings of events during the Korean War... until restrictions on both the portrayal of violence and criticism of authority  in the mid ' 50s essentially shuttered them.

Welcome to Episode 10! This week we dive into the wonderful world of Manga, and its dwarfing of the US comics market.  This is something that I wasn't familiar with up until a couple of years ago, but my gateway drug was the anime of Attack On Titan, and I am now properly hooked.  I encourage you to do the same! If you prefer a reading experience to an audio one, then we just moved our newsle...

Small publishers - including ourselves - are still waiting to be paid, and some of us always will be. The rise and spectacular collapse of Diamond Distributors over the last 30 years has been quite the greek tragedy, and we will be feeling the effects of it for years to come...

Ridley Scott, George Lucas, and Hayao Miyazaki were all inspired by the same French comic that you've probably never read, so this week we’re looking at the non-invasion of European comics in the seventies that nonetheless influenced a generation of filmmakers. If you'd prefer to read this, you can find it on our Substack page: https://open.substack.com/pub/themacroversedispatch/p/europe...

Harley Quinn. Jonah Hex. Painkiller Jane. The Pro. And that's just the start. Jimmy Palmiotti's entire library is coming to Macroverse — and we're kicking it off with two free titles. We're doing things a little differently this episode, and moving away from comics history to dive into an industry legend, and the books that he is bringing to our platform. We're also previe...

In March 1938, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster signed a contract transferring the rights of their character Superman to Detective Comics, Inc. In return, they received $130 - split between them, so $65 each. Superman went on to become one of the most lucrative fictional characters in history, and Siegel, by the mid-1970s, was working as a typist in the mailroom of the Los Angeles Public Utilities Com...

Last week we established that 2000AD was one of the most important talent factories in comics history. This week we need to talk about what happened after the talent left. The short version: the 1990s were rough, a Sylvester Stallone film did not help, and the comic spent a decade trying to figure out who it was without the generation of writers who had defined it. The longer version is more inter...