Introducing Iconography, our new comic about pop culture’s most fascinating objects

Today marks the debut of Iconography, a new illustrated column by Nick Wanserski. Nick is a longtime A.V. Club reader who has done beautiful work on Gameological illustrations in the past. Each month, Iconography will take a close look at a vaunted object from pop-culture history—the first entry pays tribute to the golden idol from Raiders Of The Lost Ark’s opening scene and argues that it is the one pure, meaningless MacGuffin in the Indiana Jones movies. We would put all of this preamble on the article page itself, but we didn’t want to muck up Nick’s comic with a bunch of text. Go, read, enjoy.