Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: Read Beat (...and repeat)
Episode: Petrochemical Fantasies: The Art and Fantasy of American Comics" by Daniel Worden
Description: The comics page has long been a place for cars and energy. Comic strips like Otto Auto, Toonerville Folks, and Gasoline Alley related a nation that happily motored about in a car-centric world.Daniel Worden, an art professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, relates that history in Petrochemical Fantasies: The Art and Energy of American Comics.“This book analyzes how comics represented this transition to fossil fuels from the late nineteenth century to the present, a transition that shaped the comics medium itself,” wrote Worden, who teaches a course on comics at RIT.“I...