Documentation
Documentaries, long interviews and journalism about the field, including Terry Zwigoff's Crumb, released in 1994.
Part of Underground Comics
50 moments in this segment.
- - Behind The Scene (1979) Comics and comics conventions Documentary. An educational documentary on comics and the convention circuit narrated by Jonathan Winters, shot over at least two years before its 1979 copyright date.
- - Alan Moore talks horror on the BBC Saturday review 1986. Alan Moore discusses the horror revival then running through mainstream British media, arguing for the genre's capacity to carry serious ideas rather than shock alone.
- - Will Eisner (two 1986 interviews). Will Eisner traces his route from 1930s studio work to the long-form books he was publishing by the late 1980s, and the argument he made for comics as a narrative medium. Eisner died in 2005.
- - Alan Moore Documentary 1987. A British television profile built around Alan Moore at home in Northampton, following his writing method and his views on the industry that had begun to court him.
- - Comic Book Confidential - Trailer (1988). Ron Mann's survey of the American comic book from the 1930s to the 1980s is previewed through its cast of cartoonists, with the underground generation given equal footing with the newsstand publishers.
- - Alan Moore: London, 1988. An account of going to see Alan Moore interviewed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and what the room made of him.
- - Alan Moore on The Tube.. Paula Yates interviews Alan Moore on the Channel 4 music programme The Tube, one of the earliest British broadcast appearances by a comics writer treated as a cultural figure.
- - Comic Book Confidential Intro. The opening sequence of Ron Mann's film, introducing the cartoonists it interviews over a montage of covers and panels.
- - Inside Comix Sept. 1994 public access: Len Wein, San Diego Comic-Con, more. A Philadelphia public access programme reports from San Diego and other shows, mixing floor coverage with an interview with writer Len Wein.
- - André Juillard, naissance d'une bande dessinée (1997). Andre Juillard is followed through the making of a book at the CNBDI in Angouleme, from layout roughs to inked plates, in a film by Patrick Sausse and Jean-Pierre Mercier.
- - The Art of the Graphic Novel. Lynda Barry, Ben Katchor and Francoise Mouly sit with scholars Hillary Chute and N.C. Christopher Couch to work through what the graphic novel had become by 2010.
- - The Fabulous Picture Show - Tatsumi. Eric Khoo explains to Al Jazeera why he animated Yoshihiro Tatsumi's short stories and autobiography, and what drew a Singaporean director to postwar Osaka.
- - Columbia University Libraries: Comic New York - A Symposium: Day 1, Panel 3. A panel from a Columbia University Libraries symposium in March 2012 at which cartoonists and scholars discuss comics made in and about New York City.
- - Scott McCloud Discusses the Making of The Sculptor. Scott McCloud talks with Hillary Chute about The Sculptor, his first long-form graphic novel, after the theory books that made his name.
- - Gary Groth on Importance of The Comics Journal. Gary Groth recalls the first years of The Comics Journal, what the magazine set out to be and why he argues criticism still matters to the form.
- - Gary Groth On The Importance of Offbeat Comics. Gary Groth argues for keeping unusual and marginal voices in print, the editorial position that shaped what Fantagraphics chose to publish.
- - Gekiga And Its Influence Discussion. A long spoken piece asking what gekiga was for, and why the label mattered to artists who wanted their work read as something other than children's entertainment.
- - Virtual Memories #187 - Tom Gauld. Tom Gauld discusses Mooncop and the weekly literary gags he draws for The Guardian, and how he got the first of them.
- - Anne Elizabeth Moore & Comics Journalism: Visualizing Connections Between Sex & Garment Trades. Anne Elizabeth Moore presents Threadbare, her reported comic on how the garment industry treats the women who work in it.
- - SPX 2016 Panel - Comics Journalism with Joe Sacco & Sarah Glidden. Joe Sacco and Sarah Glidden discuss reporting through drawing, Sacco from Palestine, Safe Area Gorazde, The Fixer and Footnotes in Gaza, Glidden from Rolling Blackouts. Matt Bors of The Nib moderates the 2016 Small Press Expo panel, pressing them on where storytelling ends and fact begins.
- - How Comic Books Can Transform Student Learning | Illya Kowalchuk | TEDxCU. A conference talk by educator Illya Kowalchuk arguing that comics support reading for a wide range of learners, drawing on his classroom years and his work founding Pop Culture Classroom. Art Spiegelman's line about comics as a gateway to literacy supplies the framing.
- - Virtual Memories #220 - Seth. Seth discusses Palookaville, finishing the Clyde Fans serial after twenty years, and his view of the 1990s cohort of cartoonists he came up alongside.
- - Virtual Memories #299 - The Guest List & Bill Kartalopoulos. Bill Kartalopoulos describes the editorial work of assembling the annual Best American Comics, and what selecting from a year of small-press output involves.
- - "Is There Such a Thing as European Comics" panel discussion @ Angoulême Comics Festival 2019. A panel recorded at the Angouleme festival asks whether European comics exist as a category. Publishers, translators and creators from several countries discuss how bande dessinee sits alongside American comics and manga, and what a shared European comics market would mean.
- - MANGA HAUL | gekiga, alternative, indie, awesome!. A collector unpacks a month of secondhand buying, holding up gekiga and small press volumes including titles from the Latvian publisher Kus.
- - Comics Journalism: Lecture by Katherine Kelp-Stebbins, Ph.D.. Katherine Kelp-Stebbins argues that a form associated with humour and young readers became the vehicle for some of the most inventive reportage since the late twentieth century.
- - Vérité Magazine: Tsuge, Katsumata, Tsuneyama, Yamamatsu | Consigli Manga Alternativi. An Italian review of the Verite Magazine anthology, which collects self contained stories by Tadao Tsuge, Susumu Katsumata, Yoji Tsuneyama and Yukichi Yamamatsu.
- - Paul Gravett Talks: Everything Comics from the 80s to Today & Beyond!. Comics journalist and curator Paul Gravett looks back over his work since the 1980s, from magazine editing to exhibition curating, and gives his account of how comics publishing and criticism have changed on both sides of the Atlantic.
- - EP9: Crumb. Two hosts discuss Terry Zwigoff's Crumb, though one of them watched a different Zwigoff film about the same cartoonist by mistake.
- - Tatsumi (2011) | Trailer | Tetsuya Bessho | Motoko Gollent | Yoshihiro Tatsumi. The trailer for Eric Khoo's animated feature drawn from Yoshihiro Tatsumi's autobiography, following him from teenage publication through the occupation years.
- - Teaching (Practically Anything) with Comics. Malaka Gharib, Scott McCloud, Whit Taylor and Kriota Willberg present non-fiction comics used to teach science, politics and art, framed by Will Eisner's own instructional work.
- - Alternative Manga Spotlight: Comics Underground Japan. A look at the Blast Books anthology Comics Underground Japan, one of the earliest English gatherings of Garo affiliated artists.
- - O movimento Gekiga, o nascimento da Revista Garo e o Japão do pós-Segunda Guerra Mundial. A Portuguese language account connecting the gekiga movement and the founding of Garo to conditions in Japan after the Second World War.
- - An Interview with Joe Sacco. Joe Sacco is interviewed for the exhibition The Art of the News about building reported comics from fieldwork, from the Occupied Territories material collected as Palestine to the Bosnia books The Fixer, War's End and Safe Area Gorazde and the later Footnotes in Gaza.
- - Paul Gravett: Covid Comics in Asia: An Exploration. Paul Gravett surveys comics made across Asia during the pandemic, drawing on the reporting behind Mangasia and his earlier books on manga and British comics.
- - アメリカのアンダーグラウンド・コミックを代表する漫画家ロバート・クラムのドキュメンタリー映画『クラム』予告編【2022年2月18日公開】. Japanese distributors announce a 2022 rerelease of Terry Zwigoff's 1994 film about Robert Crumb, introducing him to Japanese audiences as the figure behind Fritz the Cat and the Cheap Thrills sleeve.
- - Violence, politics and the graphic novels. Hugo Frey, Hillary Chute, Mark McKinney and Eszter Szep examine how comics have handled historical violence, taking Maus as the point after which the form was taken seriously for it.
- - HGN4 Lecture 22, The legacy of Underground Comics. A lecture on what underground comics left behind, arguing that the form widened both the subjects comics could take on and the range of people making them. The speaker stresses that women were producing feminist comics throughout the period while recognition arrived much later.
- - The Artists Who Went to War on Manga | Manga Minute. A short argument over whether gekiga and manga are separable at all, tracing the split back to what artists were trying to get away from in the 1950s.
- - 046:The History of Manga : 04 : Gekiga. An episode on how comics aimed at adults broke the assumption that the form belonged to children, and which drawing techniques changed as a result.
- - Maus Now: Art Spiegelman in Conversation with Hillary Chute. Art Spiegelman and scholar Hillary Chute discuss Maus after a Tennessee school board removed it, and Chute presents her anthology Maus Now, which gathers writing on the book by contemporary authors.
- - 2023 Innovations in Storytelling Humanities Lecture Series - B. Erin Cole. Public historian and cartoonist B. Erin Cole gives a lecture on graphic history, arguing for what happens when an academically trained historian draws their own comics rather than handing research to an artist. The talk weighs the analytic demands of history against the visual pull of the page.
- - PAUL GRAVETT (UK): The Comics Medium is the Message, opening lecutre. Comics historian Paul Gravett gives the opening lecture of the Remix Comix conference at the Tinta festival in Ljubljana on 5 October 2023, arguing for comics as a persuasive medium and running through practitioners who have used the form to instruct, advocate and propagandise.
- - The Original Seinen. A survey positioning gekiga as the ancestor of seinen publishing, with a sourced reading list assembled behind the argument.
- - Drawing History. Literary scholar Hillary Chute discusses recent graphic books that take on serious historical and political subjects and how comics handle documentary material. A second segment features Nicole Lamy on matching readers to books.
- - 【つげ義春を語る】ラジオ・聞き流す、人類学。の木曜会（2026年4月22日収録）. Two hosts spend an episode on what draws them back to Yoshiharu Tsuge, treating his settings and silences as an anthropological subject rather than a biography.
- - 🎙「つげ義春」特集. A Kumamoto and Okinawa radio programme devotes an episode to Yoshiharu Tsuge, two hosts reading through his stories and arguing about what the silences are doing.
- - 【自〇・失踪】アングラ界のカリスマ達はなぜ消えたのか？【青山正明｜ねこぢる｜吉永嘉明】. An account of three figures at the centre of 1990s underground publishing, Masaaki Aoyama, Nekojiru and Yoshiaki Yoshinaga, and how each left the scene.
- - 【ガチャ速報】林静一の世界観をカプセルトイに「オルタナティブコミックサロン 月刊漫画ガロ 林静一 篇」8月下旬発売. Kenelephant turns Seiichi Hayashi's Garo era figures into a five piece capsule toy set sold from vending machines, reproducing the magazine's covers at palm size.
- - In This Issue... Excalibur 3 (1989) with Mike Dawson. Cartoonist Mike Dawson joins the hosts to read Excalibur #3 from 1989 by Chris Claremont, Alan Davis, Paul Neary, Glynis Oliver and Lois Buhalis. Talk covers Claremont's dialogue habits, Davis's deceptively plain draughtsmanship, the late 1980s glut of X-Men spinoffs, and Dawson's middle grade book The Hidden Dominion of Geordie James.