Examining the artwork and correspondence in the Milton Caniff papers at the Ohio State University’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, this study considers the influential cartoonist’s involvement with the visual cultures of the Second World War, as reflected in the creation and application of pin-ups, military insignia and nose art. The appearance of cartoons, caricatures and comics on military equipment, clothing and housing speaks to an understudied aspect of wartime culture regarding visual branding and identity-formation. Attending to the complex circumstances surrounding wartime illustration enhances our general understanding of the circulation and contextualization of illustration and identity in visual media.

Design and How! The history, theory and impact of Virginia Lee Burton’s design pedagogy examines the career, work and design pedagogy of artist and illustrator Virginia Lee Burton. Burton is known for her illustrated children’s books such as Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and The Little House. The renown of Burton’s books has reduced her to the role of children’s book illustrator and mother, sequestering her career into a blind spot of illustration history. This article analyses the tensions between the successful aspects of Burton’s unpublished design pedagogy as a systematized practice, and how the classed and raced ideologies that contextualize her lessons complicate her original mission. Through investigating Burton’s successes and shortcomings, this article explores what Burton’s lessons can teach scholars and practitioners today about what it means to make an accessible pedagogy.

Illustrators are frequently asked to depict groups other than those they themselves belong to. When successful, such illustrations can be examples of authentic, nuanced representation, but, without critical thought and research, it is easy to fall into creating reductive repetitions of tropes. How can faculty teach students to view critically and consciously, avoiding pitfalls of subtle stereotype and appropriation? I share assignments I designed that require students to use visual research processes as a tool to combat their own unconscious assumptions about visually underrepresented groups. I also share case studies related to stereotype and appropriation of minorities in illustration. I establish why research is critical to the process of illustrating groups other than those the students’ themselves belong to and why educators should take an active role in teaching students to think critically about representation.

Review of: Materiality, Space and Embodiment: Transformative Illustration and Entanglements with the Other, Istanbul, Türkiye, 15–17 October 2021

This article will examine the critical potential of illustration practice through an examination of a BA stage project in which illustration was utilized alongside historical research to present both a subjective reading and empathetic critical analysis of a historical piece of fiction. It will look more closely at how both can interact with the idea of the archive to unpick or to challenge existing narratives. I will use my project The Yellow Wallpaper: An Illustrated Reader as a framework for this discussion. It is this practice-based project that sparked this initial line of enquiry and first influenced my thinking about the ways illustration can be a force for critical analysis.

This article assesses the prototypes of the maps that accompanied John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, their uses and functions in the books in which they appeared, as well as their impact on the reading and interpretation of the text. It analyses these maps while taking into account the illustrators’, the publishers’ and the readers’ perspectives. In doing so, it questions the nature of the interaction between these extra, global images of the journey and their initial, local textual counterparts as well as their more traditional illustrations. It posits that these maps are, in some ways, extra-illustrations – not only of a canonical work but also of earlier illustrations of that text. They are publishers’ rather than readers’ add-ons to the book, the literary work and its iconographic corpus, and yet they constitute interesting cases of ‘modern’ extra-illustration that invite us to rethink the very concept. This article also shows how these maps were re-appropriated in recent iconographic interpretations of Bunyan’s allegory, notably by children taking part in drawing contests, digital artists reinterpreting Christian’s journey, and firms commercializing prints and games based on Bunyan’s text. These latter creations provide examples of what could be called ‘extra illustrations of extra illustrations’ and therefore allow us to assess the process that leads from one type to another, and the chain of descent that binds them in spite of their historical, material and functional distinctions.

Abstract In this article I compare a set of early and mid-twentieth-century print publications supportive of the 'new' art teaching in schools. The educator Marion Richardson's reflections on her use of pattern in the classroom in is considered alongside publications by artist-teachers such as Robin Tanner's and . The monthly publication was a magazine for teachers of art which showcased the work being done in schools around Britain that were involved in the 'new' art instruction. Pattern-making in schools in these publications is positioned as a modular and constructivist form of learning encouraging multisensory and exploratory ways of looking at and making sense of the world. outlining theories of constructivist models for learning stresses the need for children to be 'builders of their own cognitive tools', and I argue that the exploration of pattern offers multiple strategies for the children to explore their phenomenological experience of the world. Pattern-making is also presented as a democratic form of creativity and a means of introducing the concept of art into everyday life, inculcating an appreciation of well-made things in daily life. I argue that through the lens of this pedagogic print culture with this emphasis on the benefits of teaching pattern-making in schools a nostalgic and pastoral English arts and crafts sensibility can be seen meeting a modernist cultural agenda via psychological theories of child development, creating a distinctively egalitarian, child-centred and craft-led model for learning. Revisiting this moment in childrens' education in Britain offers a timely insight into alternatives to the current educational landscape, with its emphasis on measuring pupil's achievement and downgrading of creative subjects in the school curriculum.

Abstract

Abstract The Vacuum was a free newspaper published in Belfast, Northern Ireland between 2003 and 2014. This article makes reference to illustrations produced by the author and his fellow contributors in order to explore a range of ideas connected to emergent public art practices. The time frame of The Vacuum’s circulation provides the article with critical frameworks drawn from contemporaneous discourse on social engagement and participation. The concepts of ‘dialogical aesthetics’, a ‘carnivalesque’ mode of humour and a ‘paradigm of the page’ are developed in relation to The Vacuum as a whole, to the illustrations that formed one of its defining features and to the author’s experience of community and public art commissions.