There’s always a hit-or-miss quality to such projects, and some question over the selections, but what’s great here is...
Graphic biographies of 16 of the most influential cartoonists by some of the great cartoonists they influenced.
It’s difficult to argue with the concept: Commission some of the finest contemporary graphic artists to pay homage to their heroes, the ones who inspired them to pursue their vocation. Editor Beauchamp (Krampus: The Devil of Christmas, 2010, etc.) has done a fine job in selecting subjects and matching them with acolytes (as well as collaborating as writer on a few of the bios). The pinnacle is Drew Friedman’s deeply personal appreciation of R. Crumb, in which he not only celebrates Crumb’s style, but demonstrates his influence. Other stylistic highlights include Mark Alan Stamaty’s visceral rendering of the legacy of Jack Kirby (“Captain America”), Owen Smith’s sepia-tone commemoration of Lynd Kendall Ward (“Father of the Graphic Novel”) and Sergio Ruzzier’s depiction of Charles M. “Sparky” Schulz as Charlie Brown. There are also revelations: Dr. Suess took his mother’s maiden name as his pen name, and the correct pronunciation—or the way her family pronounced it—was “ ‘Soice’ as in ‘Voice,’ but it quickly became ‘Soose’ as in ‘Goose.’ ” Harvey Kurtzman’s role as creator of Mad is just part of what he achieved before and after, when his editorial assistants included Gloria Steinem, R. Crumb and Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam. A major void is the lack of female cartoonists as subjects (and only two as contributors), and even within the stable of white male cartoonists, there are top artists who are glaringly absent. While it’s hard to argue about the cultural significance of either Walt Disney or Hugh Hefner, both of whom have contributed greatly to the profession, at least the latter would have never made the cut on his drawings alone. Common themes include broken marriages and artists not given their due, especially financially.
There’s always a hit-or-miss quality to such projects, and some question over the selections, but what’s great here is really terrific.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4919-2
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
