Kristian Williams

This month I have two articles out about policing.

The first, appearing in Against the Current, is an examination of policing and violence — both the violence cops face and the violence they use. I look at the narratives we build around particular instances of violence, the ways they serve to legitimize or delegitimize the use of force, and the emerging crisis in policing. My article focuses especially on the West Coast states, but since it came out there’s been a nationwide spike in attacks on the police.

The second is a review of three books, one about the criminal justice system and two about marriage. (They are: Queer (In)Justice by Joey L. Mogul, et al.; Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage by Nancy Polikoff; and the anthology Against Equality: Queer Critiques of Gay Marriage.) In the review, I compare two elements of the mainstream gay rights agenda — appeals for police protection and the demand for marriage rights — and point to the queer critiques of these demands and the institutions involved. The review is in the February issue of In These Times.

I’ve written a lot about war the past couple months — war and comics.

The most involved is a six-part series for The Comics Journal on Garth Ennis’s stories of ariel combat.

Also for The Comics Journal, I wrote a review of the latest installment of Weird War Tales.

Doonesbury turned forty a couple months ago. Garry Trudeau put out a retrospective collection. And I wrote an essay about it for The World and I. (It’s online, but you have to have a subscription to see it. Sorry.) The essay it not only, or even mainly, about war; but it does talk quite a bit about the ways that Trudeau’s depiction of war has changed, and the ways that the experience of war changed the character B.D.

And finally: The Anarcho-Syndicalist Review reprinted my four-part series on the Spanish Civil War in Comics. ASR isn’t online, but the original is at The Comics Journal. The new version is shorter, but it has a stronger conclusion.

In the last few months, I’ve posted a couple reviews at The Comics Journal of books that are simply (or at least, mostly) humorous.

One, “The Success of Failure,” takes a look at Shannon Wheeler’s latest collection, I Thought You Would Be Funnier. Some people (like me) think of Wheeler mainly in connection to his strip Too Much Coffee Man. But now he’s also doing cartoons for The New Yorker — or trying to: this book collects the ones they rejected.

The other review is of the latest Lio collection, There’s Corpses Everywhere. I compare it to the Calvin and Hobbes book, There’s Treasure Everywhere. This isn’t doing Lio‘s creator, Mark Tatulli any favors — but, hey, he started it.

Attentive readers may recall that in January I also beat up on Nevin Martell for his biography of Calvin creator Bill Watterson.

So I both began and ended 2010 with attacks on people trying to follow in the steps of Calvin and Hobbes. There’s probably a moral here somewhere, if we look for it.

Saturday, December 11, 2010: I’ll be speaking at the Humboldt Anarchist Book Fair, giving a lecture titled “Cop Killers and Killer Cops.”

The bookfair is Dec. 11, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., at the Manila Community Center (1611 Peninsula Drive, Arcata, California).

My talk is scheduled from 4 to 5 p.m.