An enlightening collection of essays on the economic and social realities of making comics.
In this collection of essays, Standal discusses the pressures that money and politics have exerted on the world of comics.
Did you know that the first union in the comic book industry to ratify a contract—Comic Book Workers United—only did so in 2023, over seven decades after the first group of comic workers attempted to organize? The long, winding labor struggles of the industry are just one of the underexplored areas of comics history that Standal addresses in this essay collection. Another is the proto-feminism of Little Lulu, the curly-haired character created by Marge Buell who “impishly fought against anything she deemed unfair, particularly boys’ treatment of girls,” first in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post and then as a cartoon character on the silver screen. Standal writes about Héctor Oesterheld, the celebrated Argentinian author of The Eternaut, whose political activity led to him being disappeared by his own government in 1977, and David Mazzucchelli, the illustrator of celebrated 1980s runs of Batman and Daredevil who turned away from the big publishers at the height of his success to make and publish more personal stories for far less money. The book’s longest essay is a fascinating study of how three of the comics world’s most successful creators—Charles Schulz, Jim Davis, and Bill Watterson—navigated the hazards of stewarding characters popular enough to be turned into merchandisable products. “Calvin and Hobbes has remained a crown jewel, despite Watterson ending the strip almost three decades ago,” writes Standal in his plainspoken prose. “More impressive, this popularity manifested even though there [haven’t] been balloons, animated specials, or toys to keep the characters in the public eye.” The effect of the book is a bit like if Mike Davis wrote a history of comics, approaching the field through the lens of economic power structures. For those who only think of comics in terms of DC and Marvel superheroes, Standal’s essays offer insight into the myriad systemic difficulties faced by artists attempting to make a living.
An enlightening collection of essays on the economic and social realities of making comics.Pub Date: July 1, 2026
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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