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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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IN THE NEWS
Exemplary writing about the world and a welcome gift to readers.
Distinguished natural history writer and explorer Lopez (Outside, 2014, etc.) builds a winning memoir around books, voyages, and biological and anthropological observations.
“Traveling, despite the technological innovations that have brought cultural homogenization to much of the world, helps the curious and attentive itinerant understand how deep the notion goes that one place is never actually like another.” So writes the author, who has made a long career of visiting remote venues such as Antarctica, Greenland, and the lesser known of the Galápagos Islands. From these travels he has extracted truths about the world, such as the fact that places differ as widely as the people who live in them. Even when traveling with scientists from his own culture, Lopez finds differences of perception. On an Arctic island called Skraeling, for instance, he observes that if he and the biologists he is walking with were to encounter a grizzly feeding on a caribou, he would focus on the bear, the scientists on the whole gestalt of bear, caribou, environment; if a native of the place were along, the story would deepen beyond the immediate event, for those who possess Indigenous ways of knowledge, “unlike me…felt no immediate need to resolve it into meaning.” The author’s chapter on talismans—objects taken from his travels, such as “a fist-size piece of raven-black dolerite”—is among the best things he has written. But there are plentiful gems throughout the looping narrative, its episodes constructed from adventures over eight decades: trying to work out a bit of science as a teenager while huddled under the Ponte Vecchio after just having seen Botticelli’s Venus; admiring a swimmer as a septuagenarian while remembering the John Steinbeck whom he’d met as a schoolboy; gazing into the surf over many years’ worth of trips to Cape Foulweather, an Oregon headland named by Capt. James Cook, of whom he writes, achingly, “we no longer seem to be sailing in a time of fixed stars, of accurate chronometers, and of reliable routes.”
Exemplary writing about the world and a welcome gift to readers.Pub Date: March 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-394-58582-6
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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