Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer prize-winning Maus was recently banned from a Tennessee county’s classrooms. The McMinn County School Board’s decision to remove Spiegelman’s graphic novel about the Holocaust from its curriculum has caused a national outcry, but this is by no means the first time that comic books have been accused of being dangerous for young people. In this episode of Art for the End Times, Lyta is joined by Sam Thielman—a journalist and an expert on the comics industry—to talk about comics as a medium, the anti-comics hysteria of the 1950s, the subversive world of alternative comics, and why we ended up with so many superheroes.

Sam Thielman is a reporter and critic based in New York. He is the editor of Forever Wars and co-creator of Young Adult Movie Ministry, a podcast about Christianity and movies, and his writing has been featured in The Columbia Journalism Review, The Guardian, Talking Points Memo, NBC News, and Variety. In 2017 he was a political consultant for Comedy Central's The President Show.
Pre-Production/Studio/Post-Production: Dwayne Gladden

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Art for the End Times: Moral panic at the disco! Comic books in the end times