Author Archive

Our March 2012 banner is by Lewis Trondheim, and Dr Michael Hill offers some pointers to approach his work.

Michael Hill pays a formal and historical visit to Neal Adams’ X-Men run in the late 1960s, looking closely at two pages of diagonal panels from X-Men #59, August 1969.

Michael Hill documents his trip to Suva, Fiji, where he gave a lecture and workshop on Japanese animation and its influence on popular culture at the School of Arts, Language and Media, University of the South Pacific, during the Japan Culture Week 2011.

Using the case of Joann Sfar’s The Rabbi’s Cat Michael Hill looks at the use of the regular grid structure in the page layout design of comics.

Michael Hill provides an introduction to Rumiko Takahashi’s celebrated series Ranma 1/2. By looking at shifts and changes in manga genre and gender reception that led to the creation of new subgenres and cross gender audiences, this post offers a starting point for further research on the representation of gender and sex in the popular narratives from Japan.

Michael Hill looks at Hutchings’ Dragon Hurtor as a parody of the action hero that plays with the character design conventions through the introduction of humour. He compares the approach taken by comics publisher Marvel to a more cartoony style in the construction of the heroic physique.

Michael Hill looks at a splash panel orchestrated by Roy Thomas, Keith Pollard, Chic Stone and Carl Gafford for The Mighty Thor #299 (1980), an adaptation of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung from the The Ring of the Nibelung cycle. In his first contribution to the Comics Grid, Hill describes the splash panel’s ability to point simultaneously towards the past and the future.