A fast-paced celebration of an underheralded legend within the comic-book industry.
An unauthorized graphic biography of the comic-book artist Jack Kirby (1917-1994).
“This is a biography…not an autobiography or memoir,” writes Scioli on the first page. “The first-person narration in this work is a literary device. The story is told through ‘Kirby’s’ point of view, adapted from a number of sources, including interviews he gave throughout his life.” One of the claims from the protagonist’s mouth is that he “saved Marvel’s ass.” While comic-book aficionados and cultural historians have long recognized Kirby’s crucial role in the expanding Marvel universe—and his creative development of Spider-Man, the Hulk, Ant-Man, and Iron Man—he has never achieved the name recognition among the public at large as Stan Lee, with whom Kirby had a troubled, complex relationship as a collaborator and rival. In Scioli’s treatment, Lee gets the chance to say his piece, but it is clearly meant to serve as a corrective to restore some critical balance. In a vivid style similar to Kirby’s, Scioli brings out his subject as a comic hero himself and gives repeated voice to his complaints: that Lee took more credit than he deserved, promoting himself as a hipster icon; and that as Marvel continued to generate revenue streams through TV and film adaptations and licensed consumer goods, the artist responsible for creating these characters saw little or nothing in the way of either acclaim or money. As the man Kirby knew as “Stanley” promoted his own legend, making himself synonymous with Marvel, his leading artist counters, “It’s all lies.” Whomever one believes, the book underscores how difficult it can be to assign credit or negotiate a fair deal in a market-driven business filled with copycats, where any popular success spawns numerous imitators and artists borrow or steal from each other regularly.
A fast-paced celebration of an underheralded legend within the comic-book industry.Pub Date: July 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-984856-90-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
A detailed look at an important chapter in the life of one of the iconic artists of the late 20th century.
Lavishly illustrated volume chronicling Lennon and Ono’s years in New York, leading up to the recording of John’s 1973 album, Mind Games.
The book is organized largely along chronological lines, with photos, interviews, letters, and poems from each period. The photos are the weakest element, with too many minor variations of the same shots. There is a fair amount of material on their political activism, a lot of it in response to Richard Nixon’s 1972 campaign for reelection. At first the couple associated with American radicals such as Abbie Hoffman and John Sinclair, but the attraction wore off when it became clear that they saw Lennon mainly as someone who could help draw attention to the movement. Lennon underwent a protracted battle to avoid deportation, nominally because of his 1970 London arrest for possession of marijuana, but just as likely because of his political activism. There is also a good bit of material on Lennon’s conversion to feminism and his work for women’s rights, on the mystical influences on his and Ono’s work, and on their lives together. The most interesting aspect of the book to students of Lennon’s music is undoubtedly the inclusion of lyrics from his songs of the era, usually accompanied on facing pages by the former Beatle’s handwritten drafts, with guitar chords indicated and his comments on the song’s inspiration. The final few pages are given up to interviews of the backing musicians and recording engineers who worked on the Mind Games album.
A detailed look at an important chapter in the life of one of the iconic artists of the late 20th century.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780500027783
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.
Musician, poet and visual artist Smith (Trois, 2008, etc.) chronicles her intense life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during the 1960s and ’70s, when both artists came of age in downtown New York.
Both born in 1946, Smith and Mapplethorpe would become widely celebrated—she for merging poetry with rock ’n’ roll in her punk-rock performances, he as the photographer who brought pornography into the realm of art. Upon meeting in the summer of 1967, they were hungry, lonely and gifted youths struggling to find their way and their art. Smith, a gangly loser and college dropout, had attended Bible school in New Jersey where she took solace in the poetry of Rimbaud. Mapplethorpe, a former altar boy turned LSD user, had grown up in middle-class Long Island. Writing with wonderful immediacy, Smith tells the affecting story of their entwined young lives as lovers, friends and muses to one another. Eating day-old bread and stew in dumpy East Village apartments, they forged fierce bonds as soul mates who were at their happiest when working together. To make money Smith clerked in bookstores, and Mapplethorpe hustled on 42nd Street. The author colorfully evokes their days at the shabbily elegant Hotel Chelsea, late nights at Max’s Kansas City and their growth and early celebrity as artists, with Smith winning initial serious attention at a St. Mark’s Poetry Project reading and Mapplethorpe attracting lovers and patrons who catapulted him into the arms of high society. The book abounds with stories about friends, including Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, William Burroughs, Sam Shepard, Gregory Corso and other luminaries, and it reveals Smith’s affection for the city—the “gritty innocence” of the couple’s beloved Coney Island, the “open atmosphere” and “simple freedom” of Washington Square. Despite separations, the duo remained friends until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989. “Nobody sees as we do, Patti,” he once told her.
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-621131-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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