An entertaining and sometimes pointed look at years in quarantine.
A collection of web comics with a feline accent about life during the Covid-19 era.
Denver author/illustrator Acevedo (Steampunk Banditos, 2018, etc.) finds humor in the pandemic in 300 single-panel cartoons that show varied creatures—cats, mice, aliens, and fictional characters, such as Big Bird and the Cat in the Hat—reacting to its challenges. Introduced by the award-winning journalist and NPR contributor Peter Heller, the book begins with one of the best of its six sections: “Broken Mirror” finds its nonhuman subjects reacting to drone deliveries, Zoom meetings, social distancing, and out-of-control quarantine hair, and more. In a “Community Stress Test,” Acevedo adeptly sends up multitasking by depicting a mother cat feeding her kittens while texting on her phone. Many other entries have a similarly light or whimsical tone. In one, a cat peers out from a toilet-paper tower. Another tweaks Covid-related weight gains with an image of a cat trying to button its pants, which are now much too small. Other cartoons are more macabre, one features a cat getting its temperature taken at the Pearly Gates with a Plexiglas shield present. As with most such collections, this one seems designed to be kept on a coffee table and picked up when you need a smile, and some entries work better than others. Inspired in part by the work of B. Kliban and Gary Larson, the black-and-white, pen-and-pencil illustrations are generally clear and to the point but occasionally hard to interpret: What are we to make of a drawing of an Aztec god buying food from a taco truck? But Acevedo, who once drew award-winning editorial cartoons for a Texas newspaper, doesn’t shy away from political disagreements and civil unrest related to the pandemic. Nor does he ignore the daily struggle of sheltering in place in these cartoons, which first appeared in his daily social media posts. In short, this book has something for everyone—or at least everyone who believes that, even in a pandemic, cats can be funny.
An entertaining and sometimes pointed look at years in quarantine.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73659-647-0
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Hex Publishers
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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