This collection has a last-word feel to it, offering a delightful summation of a fruitful and very busy last few decades....
The noted artist, collector, and visionary offers a personal anthology/memoir, complete with junior high photos and memories of the cul-de-sacs of Omaha.
“Does the world really need another printed tome about an artist, let alone one about an admittedly marginal and rather questionable graphic novelist/artist/writer who has already littered the recycling centers and used bookstores of his home country with dog-eared examples of his own self-regard?” So asks Ware (Building Stories, 2012, etc.), deep into a collection whose Greek-derived and “somewhat self-referential” title speaks to his usual custom: writing alone, tucked away in a dark corner with pens and books. NPR host Ira Glass, who provides the preface, got him out of the house a few years ago, Ware writes, and the exposure helped him become better known to readers, but it wasn’t as if he was a hermit. He worked as a newspaper cartoonist, a graphic artist, an illustrator, and, as he writes, learned on the job to be a social being and to pay attention to deadlines and requirements, all good things for a budding artist to know. Throughout, Ware peppers his narrative with other lessons he’s learned along the way: about technique, the history of art, the links between cartoons and cinema, and yes, about life, aging, and so forth; it’s good to change your horizons and see the world, as he reckons, because “artists don’t develop in a vacuum.” The oversized book is overstuffed with art, each page spread containing numerous images, cartoon strips, sketches, mockups, snapshots, scrapbook items, and other such treasures that will be of immense appeal to fans of Krazy Kat and Joseph Cornell alike. The text is as smart and illuminating as the images, and Ware has wise things to say everywhere along the way.
This collection has a last-word feel to it, offering a delightful summation of a fruitful and very busy last few decades. Fans, of course, will want much more, but this makes a great start.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8478-6088-3
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Rizzoli
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
An exemplary demonstration of the transformative possibilities of graphic narrative.
A powerful, unsettling use of the graphic medium to share a profoundly disturbing story.
If a boy is not born a monster, how does he become one? Though Backderf (Punk Rock and Trailer Parks, 2008) was once an Ohio classmate of the notorious Jeffrey Dahmer, he doesn’t try to elicit sympathy for “Jeff.” Yet he walks an emotional tightrope here, for he recognizes that someone—maybe the other kids who laughed at and with him, certainly the adults who should have recognized aberration well beyond tortured adolescence—should have done something. “To you Dahmer was a depraved fiend but to me he was a kid I sat next to in study hall and hung out with in the band room,” writes the author, whose dark narrative proceeds to show how Dahmer’s behavior degenerated from fascination with roadkill and torture of animals to repressed homosexuality and high-school alcoholism to mass murder. It also shows how he was shaken by his parents’ troubled marriage and tempestuous divorce, by his emotionally disturbed mother’s decision to move away and leave her son alone, and by the encouragement of the Jeffrey Dahmer Fan Club (with the author a charter member and ringleader) to turn the outcast into a freak show. The more that Dahmer drank to numb his life, the more oblivious adults seemed to be, letting him disappear between the cracks. “It’s my belief that Dahmer didn’t have to wind up a monster, that all those people didn’t have to die horribly, if only the adults in his life hadn’t been so inexplicably, unforgivably, incomprehensibly clueless and/or indifferent,” writes Backderf. “Once Dahmer kills, however—and I can’t stress this enough—my sympathy for him ends.”
An exemplary demonstration of the transformative possibilities of graphic narrative.Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4197-0216-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
This is no idiot’s guide to math, but it could be useful as a supplement to a standard course in calculus.
A tour of calculus from the polymath whose illustrated guides have illuminated a wide range of subjects, from genetics and sex to the environment and the universe.
This time out, unfortunately, Muse cartoonist Gonick’s (The Cartoon History of the Modern World, Part 2, 2009, etc.) presentation is labored, the cartoons are primarily decorative and the course is tough. To begin with, calculus requires four years of high-school math, which the author reprises in the first 50 pages. For many readers this will be a slog through algebra, trigonometry, exponentials, function theory, etc. While most texts map equations onto lines or curves on a standard x-y axis, Gonick introduces parallel lines with arrows connecting an x value on one line to its f(x) value on the parallel line. This approach is particularly unhelpful when you want to visualize, say, minute changes of position (on the y axis) over time (on the x axis). Nor does the author discuss fundamental concepts like continuity or maxima and minima until well into the chapters on the derivative and differential calculus. While he does highlight fundamental theorems and classic rules, Gonick devotes too much space to how-to manipulations like how to differentiate inverse functions. The narrative improves when the author introduces the concept of the integral as the sum of skinny rectangles under a curve, and Gonick provides many helpful, practical examples of how calculus is used.
This is no idiot’s guide to math, but it could be useful as a supplement to a standard course in calculus.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-168909-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
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