Celebrating diversity in culture, myth and history

Links

Here are a few links related to the articles featured on this website that I hope you’ll find helpful…

Comic Books

In my comic strip and comic book articles, I list any comic books the featured character appeared in. Many comic books that were published before 1960 and that are in the public domain are available for free viewing at the Digital Comic Museum website. It is a fine website that I heartily recommend visiting for research or just hours of enjoyable reading. Cosmic Teams is a great historical resource for everything you ever wanted to know about DC Comics superhero teams, including Justice League, Teen Titans, Legion of Super-Heroes and Jack Kirby’s The New Gods. Alter Ego is the premiere magazine exploring the comic books of the 1940s and 1950s. Edited by comic book legend, Roy Thomas, Alter Ego is also where you can find my exhaustive history of a forties comic book company called Ace and my idiosyncratic look at their super-heroes and particularly intriguing villains. Issue #144, in case you were feeling an overwhelming urge to purchase a copy. I know, just what you never knew you needed–though I think it’s a pretty entertaining read..

Comic Strips

Thankfully there has been a major publishing push to issue collections of the most famous and lauded comic strips, such as Dick Tracy, Little Orphan Annie, Flash Gordon, Secret Agent X-9 and countless others. But if you’re looking to research lesser known or less popular comic strips that haven’t been collected or in a very limited fashion this can be a challenge. Enter the newspapers.com website. For an annual fee you can enter any topic you’re interested in researching and be taken to relevant newspaper pages. You can also enter a comic strip title and a year and have links to all of the available comic strips of that title for the year. It is a lot of fun and while not perfect–you can’t count on being able to find every daily strip (and Sundays are less accessible)–it’s a lot easier than going to the library and scrolling through microfilm rolls, believe me. Newspapers.com and similar services typically offer free trial memberships for a limited time, so if you’re interested, check it out. I recommend the “publishers extra” version. It costs a little more but you gain access to a lot more newspapers, which for this kind of research is useful.

If you enjoy a little snark while you’re catching up on the your favorite comic strips, it’s hard to beat The Comics Curmudgeon.

LGBTQ History and Resources

If you live in Minnesota you might be interested in Dick Hewetson’s history of the Gay Rights Movement in Minnesota. Hewetson is the co-founder of the Quatrefoil Library, another fine Minnesota resource for LGBTQ books, magazines and journals, and it’s a lending library to boot! Lots more when I find the time to upload some of the links.

Life Narratives and Personal Growth

There’s an engaging article on The Atlantic’s website entitled Life’s Stories which explores the links between the stories we craft about our lives, our personality and where we find meaning.

Progressive History Sites

Hmmm. Not so many as I might have guessed. Maybe that’s going to be my niche. I do have to give a shout out to a wonderful article on The Nation’s website entitled The Fifty Most Influential Progressives of the Twentieth Century. Really nice list–a lot of my heroes are included. Let me know who you think is missing and maybe I can write an article about them. Or better yet maybe you could submit one to me. I am open to other writers on my site.

Women’s History

National Women’s History Project is a site worth checking out, especially since their mantra “Writing Women Back into History” captures my sentiment about all non-dominant groups.

Additional links will be uploaded in the coming months. This site is a work in progress and not my day job so patience please. However, for a progressive geek like me it is a labor of love and I hope it will increasingly become a helpful resource and a fun place to spend a few hours in now and again.

Mark Carlson-Ghost

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