The Comics Journal #303: What is the New Mainstream?

Edited by Gary Groth. Published by Fantagraphics. 

Softcover, 160 pages, text, Colour and B&W, 2019.

The most award-winning, internationally acclaimed comics and graphic novel magazine in the medium's history returns to print!

The Comics Journal, which is renowned for its in-depth interviews, comics criticism, and thought-provoking editorials, features Gary Groth in frank and often hilarious discussion with the satirist and children's book author Tomi Ungerer. Ungerer talks about the entire trajectory of his life and career: growing up in France during the Nazi occupation, creating controversial work, and being blacklisted by the American Library Association. This issue, the first in its new twice-a-year format, covers the "new mainstream" in American comics — how the marketplace and overall perception of the medium has drastically shifted since the "graphic novel boom" of the early 2000s and massive hits like Persepolis, Fun Home, and Smile. It also includes sketchbook pages from French-born cartoonist Antoine Cossé' an introduction to homoerotic gag cartoons out of the U.S. Navy; and Your Black Friend cartoonist Ben Passmore's examination of comics and gentrification.

The Comics Journal #303 is part of the The Comics Journal series.

"Groth's insightful, funny, and probing interview befits the extraordinary legacy of one of the most important artists of the second half of the twentieth century." — Print

"Of all the long-running publications that have fallen by the wayside over the last few years it's undoubtedly the print incarnation of The Comics Journal that has been the most missed." — Broken Frontier