Book Review: The Rainbow Age of Television

With the last decade’s television boom across a multitude of platforms, producing hundreds of network and streaming series, American audiences are being treated to a cascade of shows that some have trumpeted as a second Golden Age. But something completely new is stirring, too—the Rainbow Age. For the first time in the history of American television, we have shows in which LGBTQIA+ characters have evolved from being an anomaly to being an almost given and celebrated presence on the small screen. But what more can queer TV do? Is each new queer character really breaking ground? And has the curse of the fictional dead lesbian finally been defeated?

Book Review: Three Rocks

From Bill Griffith, creator of Zippy the Pinhead and Nobody’s Fool, comes Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller - The Man Who Created Nancy This is more than the story of an iconic comic book artist. It is the story of this American art form, tracing its inception to 1895 with the Yellow Kid, the creation of Nancy in 1933, and all the strips that followed, including Peanuts and The Far Side. When Bushmiller died in 1982, Nancy was running in almost 900 daily newspapers—a number few syndicated cartoonists ever achieve.

Nancy is hailed as the “perfect” comic strip by fans and cartoonists alike. The title Three Rocks refers to the trope of three hemispherical rocks often seen in a Bushmiller landscape—just enough to communicate environment to the reader. This distillation is exemplary of the iconic, diagrammatic look of Nancy, a comic strip about the nature of what it means to be a comic strip—the perfect avatar for Griffith to expand upon his philosophy of creating comics.

Three Rocks was published August 29, 2023, from Abrams Books.