Not the most ambitious Crumb work, but there’s a lot of love here.
A scrapbook from the first family of American cartooning, containing collaborative strips that date back to the mid-1970s.
The title serves a dual purpose, underscoring the claim, made throughout the book, that the authors are “The World’s Only Cartooning Couple,” as the two-headed cover proclaims, but also indicating the qualities that drew them together and keep them together. In a flyer for the aptly named Dirty Laundry Comics, Robert Crumb dubs them “the John and Yoko of Underground Comics!!” There are some parallels. In both cases, he had a wider following, and some fans have suggested (as these panels admit) that she was horning in, co-opting his work by capitalizing on his renown. In both cases, he proved to be his wife’s strongest defender, suggesting that, if anything, she is carrying him. “Aline, I can’t do this without you,” he writes in one of the four-panel “The Crumb Family” strips (changes of pace from the longer, more elaborate narratives that dominate). “If I tell stories about my life it just comes out grim & sad.” Not only does her presence provide comic relief, but the two of them present her as the stronger, both physically and emotionally. And then there’s the sex (and there’s plenty of it). “I go where the butt goes,” he reflects while she beams, “So nice you’re actually moving to a remote village in a foreign country just to satisfy an impulsive whim of mine!!” Generally, each of them draws themselves, though the panels make note of occasional reversals. The collection documents the changes in their lives as they’ve grown older, had a daughter (now a published cartoonist herself), moved to the south of France, and received more attention than they’d wanted through a couple of films (a documentary on the Crumb family and the adaptation of American Splendor, the acclaimed bio-pic of friend and collaborator Harvey Pekar). From the bathroom to the bedroom, they respond to the question of just how open and honest a marital comic can be.
Not the most ambitious Crumb work, but there’s a lot of love here.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-87140-429-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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Laugh-a-minute or not, an accessible introduction to a densely complex subject.
A lighthearted effort to make the dismal science less dismal, though too often about as funny as a Yakov Smirnoff set.
Economics is all about managing scarce resources, money being one of them. Macroeconomics, the big-picture aspect of economics, “has two big goals,” writes Bauman (billed as the world’s “only stand-up economist”)—namely, to establish means by which living standards increase over time, which is where old Adam Smith’s invisible hand comes in, and to “explain how economies grow…and why economies collapse,” which, considering the collapsing state of things, makes the field both useful and timely. The “holy grail” of macroeconomics, Bauman writes, is “how to get economies to grow without crashing,” which would seem to defy the laws of thermodynamics—and there the fun begins, for on one hand you have Milton Friedman, on the other John Maynard Keynes, and any number of disparate and often contentious approaches to making everyone rich without, in the end, making everyone destitute. There’s a lot of ground that Bauman and artist Klein have to cover, so much that sometimes useful concepts—Joseph Schumpeter’s suggestive theory of “creative destruction,” for instance—get only a panel or two. Even so, Bauman hits his targets with pleasing accuracy. For example, he and Klein get, in just a few pages, what it has taken other writers whole volumes to express on the matter of the Keynesian view of the causes of cyclical unemployment. Bauman is also pleasingly subversive without overtly seeming to be so: He gives a lively, sardonic view of how inflation serves as a de facto means of wage cutting in the age-old war of supply and demand. The cartoons are ample, but the yucks few, particularly when Bauman recycles the old saw, beloved of Reagan and his Reaganomic acolytes: “In a recession, you lose your job…in a depression, I lose mine.” Which goes to show, it is called the dismal science for a reason.
Laugh-a-minute or not, an accessible introduction to a densely complex subject.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8090-3361-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
Life in all its bittersweet richness, depicted by a master who learned from the more personally revelatory work by younger...
Posthumous collection commemorates the pioneering cartoonist who gave his name to the comic industry’s top annual awards, the Eisners.
<\b>Revered by both his comic-strip peers and the legions of graphic novelists he inspired, Eisner (Will Eisner’s New York: Life in the Big City, 2006, etc.) never felt as comfortable with personal revelation in his narratives as many of the younger memoirists who followed his lead. Thus, the subtitle is only partially accurate. Only “The Dreamer” and “The Day I Became a Professional” make direct reference to Eisner’s prodigious career, and editor Denis Kitchen had to annotate the former to provide the real names of the pseudonymous characters. The longest piece, “To the Heart of the Storm,” is perhaps the most ambitious and overtly autobiographical, detailing the reminiscences of a young soldier on a troop train about the anti-Semitism he and his family have encountered. Yet the flashbacks aren’t presented in chronological order, and neither are these stories, though they’re the closest thing to a graphic autobiography ever published under Eisner’s name. They’re presented in the order he created them, with the first story, “A Sunset in Sunshine City,” providing an allegory of the artist’s twilight years in its tale of the reluctant retirement and relocation of a shopkeeper who has spent all his life in New York. The remaining selection, “The Name of the Game,” features a thinly fictionalized biography of Eisner’s wife’s family. This volume draws far more on personal experience than was usual in such earlier works as The Spirit, but it’s telling that the title is Life, in Pictures rather than “my life.”
Life in all its bittersweet richness, depicted by a master who learned from the more personally revelatory work by younger generations who were profoundly influenced by him.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-393-06107-9
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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