Here’s a variation on the cover of my next book, The Color of Paper: It’s an interpretation my daughter wove last spring for my birthday. The actual cover is a photo of a Love & Rockets panel I snapped with a microscopic lens: When she saw the mechanical pattern of CMYK dots combined to create […]| The Patron Saint of Superheroes
Beginning on December 4, 2016, I wrote my congressional Representative Bob Goodlatte a letter every day for nearly a year. I sent my last email on November 9, 2017, congratulating him on his decision to retire. My other blog Dear Bob chronicles all 338. I didn’t start writing Ben Cline when he moved into Virginia’s […]| The Patron Saint of Superheroes
A New York court of appeals ruled in August that Donald Trump’s penalty for multiple counts of fraud violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against “excessive fines.” Trump responded by tweeti…| The Patron Saint of Superheroes
2 posts published by Chris Gavaler during September 2025| The Patron Saint of Superheroes
A June email from the Generals Redoubt includes a list of courses that the president of the private alumni organization demands be canceled. He says they are “rooted in DEI subjects.” “Washington and Lee University’s curriculum,” according to Mr. Robinson, “revolve[s] around DEI,” and therefore is “discriminatory.” The claim is ironic, since the W&L that […]| The Patron Saint of Superheroes
Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares has been polling well behind his Democratic challenger Jay Jones. But Miyares knows that anti-trans posturing can win elections for Republicans. So two and a…| The Patron Saint of Superheroes
I’ve been teaching a version of “Superheroes” for my first-year writing seminar for about a decade now. My last major reboot was in 2020 (Black Superheroes Matter), with an inevitable annual refresh. I’ve really enjoyed pairing comics with authors’ non-comics writing (G. Williow Wilson’s The Butterfly Mosque, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, Eve […]| The Patron Saint of Superheroes
We’ve spent this year witnessing events that I believed could not happen in the United States of my lifetime. The levels of ugliness, cruelty, hypocrisy, and indifference stagger me daily and…| The Patron Saint of Superheroes
On his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.” It declared that “the previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties … to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech […]| The Patron Saint of Superheroes
I teach advanced creative writing fiction with an emphasis on what I call literary genre fiction — short stories that fulfill traditional genre expectations while also achieving high literary merit. I let my students choose which genres to focus on, and a lot of them are drawn to speculative fiction, especially dystopian fiction set in […]| The Patron Saint of Superheroes
The first book of comics scholarship I ever read was Joseph Witek’s 1989 Comic Books as History, when it came out four years before Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and five before …| The Patron Saint of Superheroes
3 posts published by Chris Gavaler during July 2025| The Patron Saint of Superheroes
A great deal of my professional life involves writing, so the prospect of copyedits on a book manuscript conjures a special kind of fear and loathing. I’m also a writing instructor, of both fiction…| The Patron Saint of Superheroes
I’ve had the pleasure of serving as comics editor of Shenandoah magazine since Fall 2019, when we debuted the new comics section with works by Mita Mahato and Tillie Walden. I’ve also h…| The Patron Saint of Superheroes
A version of this commentary ran in the Richmond Times-Dispatch last Tuesday as “editor’s pick” and “top story.” When Donald Trump took office, he swore to “preserve, …| The Patron Saint of Superheroes
Political cartoonists make their living on visual metaphors. How many different ways can you draw Donald Trump destroying the document he swore an oath to preserve, protect, and defend? Let’s…| The Patron Saint of Superheroes
My article “The Rise and Fall of Fascist Superheroes” was published in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics in November 2015 — a year before Donald Trump was first elected. I&…| The Patron Saint of Superheroes