A fresh, spirited look at a colorful cultural phenomenon.
Throughout the 1920s, the fun-loving flapper made her way into comic strips.
Comics historian Robbins, a “retired underground cartoonist” who is a member of the Will Eisner Hall of Fame, pays homage to six women artists of the 1920s and ’30s in a lively, vividly illustrated celebration. Published in newspapers across the country, the cartoons chronicled the adventures and misadventures of “happy-go-lucky society girls and co-eds” who styled themselves flappers. Flirtatious and adorable, they wore their hair bobbed, smoked, drank, partied, and reveled in the latest—slinky, glamorous, and sometimes absurd—fashions. Feminist Nell Brinkley, the “mother of comic strips that star pretty girls created by women,” wrote for Hearst papers. Her characters included Prudence Prim, Flossie, and the daydreaming Dimples, who fantasized about becoming an aviator, an artist, or even president of the U.S. Most cartoon flappers, though, were intent on finding a suitor and, even better, a husband, and their romantic escapades filled many Sunday magazine pages. Eleanor Schorer contributed “The Adventures of Judy,” and Edith Stevens often did a sendup of fashion, hairstyles, and hats for the Boston Post. Ethel Hays conveyed advice about romance in her popular series “Flapper Fanny Says”: Fanny, a skinny young woman with impossibly long legs (and short skirts) offered sly comments about men and dating. Virginia Huget, “the flappiest of the flapper queens,” drew society girls, “all sharp elbows and knees bent at forty-five degree angles,” and also working-class girls: “Babs in Society,” for example, featured a department store clerk; another series featured a manicurist. Published in many newspapers, Huget also drew cartoon advertisements for Lux soap, aimed at bolstering women’s self-confidence and self-image. The Wall Street crash of 1929 was the “beginning of the end” for carefree flappers, and by 1930, Brinkley noted that the flapper was “a fading mirage.”
A fresh, spirited look at a colorful cultural phenomenon.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68396-323-3
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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