Lively, authoritative intellectual history.
Revealing the impact of images.
Dowd, faculty director of the Dowd Illustration Research Archive at Washington University in St. Louis, offers a wide-ranging global history of illustration, from ancient Chinese and Japanese woodcuts to contemporary websites, from the scroll to the meme. Focusing on North America, Europe, and East Asia, he investigates the interaction between text and image, asking how illustration contributes to reading experiences. Access to reading increased in the 19th century, with the rise of literacy rates that led to the popularity of novels. To the surprise of publishers—and authors—embellished volumes sold better than those that contained only text. Illustrators became newly in demand, both for books and magazines, where novels often were serialized. Magazine and newspaper editors also hired illustrators, and by the mid-19th century, photographers, to provide images for reporting on everyday life and exceptional events. From 1870 to 1940, a burgeoning consumer society meant a surge in advertising, with words and images aimed at luring customers and shaping public taste. The artists producing those images, though, were largely anonymous, except for a “small handful of celebrity illustrators” who signed their work. From package labels to posters, a “visual culture of publicity” initiated “a hybrid form of reading.” Dowd examines the cultural power of caricature, comics, and cartooning; wartime propaganda; images associated with race, ethnicity, and gender; and the messages conveyed in much turn-of-the-century children’s literature, which “drank from the cup of colonialism and racial animus.” He considers the graphic novel, “the most significant event in illustrated fiction for adults since the midcentury.” The lavishly illustrated volume contains over 400 images, explicated by the author’s detailed captions; each image is attributed, where possible, to its creator. Although Dowd demurs in calling his project encyclopedic, it is impressively capacious.
Lively, authoritative intellectual history.Pub Date: March 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780691245683
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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