Art Spiegelman, the artist most famous for his novel Maus, makes comix. No, that's not a typo, as he explains in an article The Atlantic published last week: Comix have a heritage distinct from the humorous strips found in newspapers. They're a gleeful blend of art and writing with roots in 1960s counterculture, X-rated cartoons, and the alternative press. Spiegelman is a well-known practitioner, but his path was paved by many earlier artists'people such as Jules Feiffer, who died in January at age 95, and whom Spiegelman remembers fondly as 'a trailblazer in seeking out a new audience that wasn't just kids anymore.' Another one of the genre's most influential figures, and the man who 'effectively invented' the form, is the id-driven, lascivious, hippie titan R. Crumb: an artist who 'dove to the depths not just of his own subconscious, but of something collectively screwy, bringing up all the American muck,' as my colleague Gal Beckerman wrote for The Atlantic's May issue. Crumb's outlandish, sexual, over-the-top characters and drawings are the shoulders that a generation of artists stand on, happily or not. As Beckerman points out, Crumb is the author of 'brutal fantasies' about women that blur the line between commenting on cultural misogyny and replicating it. He also created satires of racism so blunt that a white-supremacist newspaper reprinted them approvingly....

Nearly a hundred years ago, a hastily crafted spaceship crash-landed in Smallville, Kansas. Inside was an infant ' the sole survivor of a planet destroyed by old age. Discovering he possessed superhuman strength and abilities, the boy committed to channeling his power to benefit humankind and champion the oppressed. This is the story of Superman: one of the most recognizable characters in history, who first reached audiences in the pages of Action Comics in 1938 ' what many fans consider the most important single comic in history. As a historian of American immigration and ethnicity ' and a lifelong comics fan ' I read this well-known bit of fiction as an allegory about immigration and the American dream. It is, at its core, the ultimate story of an immigrant in the early 20th century, when many people saw the United States as a land with open gates, providing such orphans of the world an opportunity to reach their fullest potential. Taken in and raised by a rural family under the name Clark Kent, the baby was imbued with the best qualities of America. But, like all immigrant stories, Kent's is a two-parter. There is also the emigrant story: the story of how Kal-El ' Superman's name at birth ' was driven from his home on Planet Krypton to embrace a new land....

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Dashtoon wants to make anyone with a story to tell into a comics artist, even if they can't draw. It provides aspiring comics creator with a suite of generative AI tools, and a publishing platform that releases new episodes daily for impatient readers. To seed the platform, called Dashtoon Comic Reader, Dashtoon commissioned about 30 comics and will start adding almost 1,000 new episodes every month. It started monetizing in October and expects to make $15,000 in revenue during the first month, with plans to grow to $100,000 per month over the next two to three months. The startup operates on a freemium model that gives users one free episode a day for each comic. The San Francisco and London-based startup announced today it has raised $5 million in seed funding led by Matrix Partners India and Stellaris Venture Partners with participation from angel investors. Dashtoon was founded in December 2022 by Sanidhya Narain, Lalith Gudipati and Soumyadeep Makherjee. Before Dashtoon, Narain and Gudipati were on the founding team of Pocket FM, where they worked on growing the India-based audio content platform in the United States. Mukherjee comes from a deep-tech background, including Morphle Labs, which builds cancer diagnosis robotics....