
Melinda Gebbie’s cover for Wimmen’s Comix #7, December 1976, Last Gasp. Reprinted in The Complete Wimmen’s Comix, Vol. 1, Fantagraphic Books.

Melinda Gebbie’s cover for Wimmen’s Comix #7, December 1976, Last Gasp. Reprinted in The Complete Wimmen’s Comix, Vol. 1, Fantagraphic Books.

From “Modern America” by Robert Crumb. Published in Arcade #2, Summer 1975, The Print Mint.

“James A. Garfield and All the Shot People”
by
David Berman
Insects are a manifestation of negative will.
—Anon.
I thought I saw an angel below the engine
but it was just vibrating air.
People used to see things
in the woods and the air and the closet:
spirits, dragons, and headless things,
lost and angry floats
conspiring to make every stomach pulse
like an almost accident
and every body’s head come unwound.
Our vision is not so fuzzy now.
We stare into eyes and see their parts,
have cameras, sidewalks, pills,
and other futuristic devices.
Some of our race have counted up into the highest numbers,
the high clear numbers.
Now we know the speed of light,
and that we never see anything just when it happens,
but a part of a second afterwards.
People are getting lost in their own houses,
wandering down hallways and through rooms for years.
We stumble downstairs full of water,
and when I wake up it all pours out of me.
From Caliban #8, 1990.
The issue also contains a few illustrations by Berman, including this one:


From “What Is Government?” by Clifford Peter Harper, a visual adaptation of text by Pierre Joseph Proudhon. Published in Anarchy Comics #3, July 1981, Last Gasp Comics.

From “Real of Karma Comix” by Barbara “Willy” Mendes, published in All Girl Thrills, March, 1971, The Print Mint.

From “The Revenant” by Scott Hampton. Published in Tales of Terror #8, Sept. 1986, Eclipse Comics.

From “Armed Love” by Jay Kinney and Ned Sonntag. Published in Young Lust #2, 1971, The Print Mint.

From “I Was a Captive of the Insect Fiends!” by Tim “Grisly” Boxell. Published in Fantagor #4, 1972, Last Gasp.

The cover for Middle Class Fantasies #1 by Jerry Lane, 1973, Cartoonists Co-op Press.

“Ada” by Willie Mendes. The piece is the back cover of Insect Fear #2, March 1970, The Print Mint.

A panel from Sergio Aragonés’ one-shot Dia de Los Muertos, 1998, Dark Horse Comics.

“Rollerettes Against Change!” by Melinda Gebbie. The piece is the back cover of Wimmin’s Comix #8, March 1983, Last Gasp. Reprinted in The Complete Wimmin’s Comix, 2016, Fantagraphics.

“Children of the Future?” a one-pager by Jim Osborne. From Slow Death Funnies #1, April, 1970, Last Gasp.

A page from Ben Passmore’s graphic novel Black Arms to Hold You Up, Pantheon, 2025. Assata Shakur passed away on 25 Sept. 2025. She was free.

I was psyched to get an early copy of Ben Passmore’s Black Arms to Hold You Up this week. I love the dramatic vibrancy of Passmore’s cartooning, and his economic use of black, white, gray, and red throughout the book. I should have a review out around its release on 7 Oct. 2025.

Here is publisher Pantheon’s blurb:
It’s the summer of 2020, and downtown Philly is up in flames. “You’re not out in the streets with everyone else?” Ronnie asks his ambivalent son, Ben, shambling in with arms full of used books: the works of Malcom X, Robert F. Williams, Assata and Sanyika Shakur, among others. “Black liberation is your fight, too.”
So begins Black Arms to Hold You Up, a boisterous, darkly funny, and sobering march through Black militant history by political cartoonist Ben Passmore. From Robert Charles’s shootout with the police in 1900, to the Black Power movement in the 1960s, to the Los Angeles and George Floyd uprisings of the 1990s and 2020, readers will tumble through more than a century of armed resistance against the racist state alongside Ben—and meet firsthand the mothers and fathers of the movement, whose stories were as tragic as they were heroic.
What, after so many decades lost to state violence, is there left to fight for? Deeply researched, vibrantly drawn, and bracingly introspective, Black Arms to Hold You Up dares to find the answer.
