Every Sunday, we round up the best comics we’ve seen online in the past week. If we missed something, let us know in the comments below.
At The Nib, always a fruitful site for comics fans, four cartoonists—Lucy Bellwood, Brittany Long-Olsen, Zack Giallongo, and Sukjong Hong—depict the importance of health care and affordable insurance to their lives, and ask What Will Happen to Us? if it goes away.
Karen Green has one of the coolest jobs in comics-dom: She’s the comics curator at the Columbia University Library, a job that she basically created. A number of prominent cartoonists have donated their papers and artwork to the library, and Green has worked tirelessly to raise the profile of comics in academia, the library world, and popular culture in general. A Life in Comics: The Graphic Adventures of Karen Green, is written and drawn by comics scholar Nick Sousanis, the first Columbia student to write a dissertation entirely in comics form. It’s a fun little bio-comic that has a hopeful message for late bloomers and includes a number of visual allusions—see if you can spot them all!
Cara Bean is a high school teacher, which gives her plenty of material for her other career, as a cartoonist. Recently she attended a workshop on adolescent depression, and she distilled what she learned into a short comic, The Snake Pit. It’s informative, enlightening, and visually arresting in places, and well worth checking out.
This one has been kicking around for a few weeks, but it makes a good point: While men are stepping up and doing more of the household chores and child care, the woman is still usually the manager—the one who has to think about what needs to be done, and do things without being told. In You Should’ve Asked, a French cartoonist who just goes by Emma illustrates this point, with examples. The balance is different in every family, but it’s good to know what everyone’s underlying assumptions are.