Fresh Comics #12: Rolling Blackouts
Some books take such a mammoth effort to produce that it’s hard to want to be critical of them. Rolling Blackouts is one of those books. The nearly 300 pages of delicately…
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Monica Johnson
12 posts
Monica Johnson is a comic artist and writer living in Brooklyn, NY. She is the author of The Adventures of Dorrit Little, self-publishes mini-comics through Wool & Brick Press, and is co-curating an exhibition in 2016 for the Interference Archive called Our Comics, Ourselves: Identity, Expression and Representation in Comic Art . Connect via @woolandbrick.
Fresh Comics #11: Gorgeous
Where in the world did Cathy G. Johnson come from, and why isn’t Gorgeous a much longer book? That’s what I want to know. This book is so good it…
Fresh Comics #10: Hot Dog Taste Test
When I started reading this book, I hated it. I thought, this is what happens when an illustrator takes a shot at storytelling. It’s just one drawing after another until…
Fresh Comics #9: Bird in a Cage
Countering our culture’s disregard for all things elderly, comics have become a medium of choice for celebrating the lives of our oldest and wisest generation. Bird in a Cage (Conundrum Press, 2016)…
Fresh Comics #8: John Black’s Body
In the imagined scenario wherein my apartment burns to the ground and I lose all my worldly possessions, there are just a few things I would miss—family photographs (of course), an…
Fresh Comics #7: Giving Up The Ghost
If you’ve never heard of Whit Taylor, then now is the perfect time to discover her. Ghost (2015) is her understated masterpiece, self-published just months ago. As I began reading the…
Fresh Comics #6: Abortion, Comics Style
Comics is a great medium for communicating complex or divisive topics, and so it makes sense that embedded within comics history we can find stories of abortion. Insane as it is…
Fresh Comics #5: Who is Lee Marrs?
That’ll be the name of the documentary that gets made when people learn to love Lee Marrs. Who is Lee Mars? Honestly, I don’t really know who she is. I’m…
Fresh Comics #4: Making Babies!
Aside from defecating or having sex, giving birth is one of the most common life experiences. Half of the world’s population is capable of doing it and every single one…
Fresh Comics #3: Remarkable Histories
One of the goals of the Fresh Comics series is to shine some light on superb works of comic storytelling. Another is to look a little deeper into the content of these…
Fresh Comics #2: Transmissions from Beirut
What are the fundamental differences between telling your own story, telling the story of another, and telling your story about trying to understand someone else’s story?
Fresh Comics #1: An Iranian Metamorphosis
The question that lingers even after reading the book is about the use of symbolism in the cartoon and who has the final say—the creator or the readers?