For anyone who wants a crash course in contemporary comics, or wants to teach one, this is your book.
A comprehensive, critically incisive survey of comics in contemporary culture.
Rather than a professor who happened to latch on to comics as a promising field for research, Chute (English, Art and Design; Northeastern Univ.; Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form, 2016, etc.) clearly has a deep understanding of, experience with, and affinity for comics culture. Best of all, though she analyzes with an academic’s rigor and supports her themes with extensive research, she doesn’t write like a professor. Tackling a tricky subject like Robert Crumb’s objectification and caricature of black female sexuality, she writes, “Crumb isn’t mocking black women, but rather he’s mocking a public discourse that either implicitly or explicitly mocks black women. And yet Crumb always makes tricky or unclear the line between the act of satirizing something and embodying it.” Rather than argue about the cultural legitimacy that comics have achieved, Chute simply treats this as a matter of fact—a fact with which she, as a fan, is very pleased. The result is a study, rife with full-page panels illustrating points she makes in the text, that will enrich the understanding of readers who know and care a lot about comics, from punk zines to graphic novels, as well as initiates who seek an understanding of how this cultural shift came about and what it means to academics who wish to research this fertile field. The cartoonists have even infiltrated the academy, as the author writes in her appreciation of Lynda Barry: “It is telling that Barry is currently a tenured professor, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, of what is called Interdisciplinary Creativity (the best job title perhaps ever!)” Chute also goes deep into the lives and work of Art Spiegelman (with whom she worked on MetaMaus), Alison Bechdel (whose Fun Home made the leap from graphic novel to Broadway), Matt Groening, Chris Ware, Charles Burns, and so many others.
For anyone who wants a crash course in contemporary comics, or wants to teach one, this is your book.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-247680-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.
A revealing biography of the fabled Manhattan hotel, in which generations of artists and writers found a haven.
Turn-of-the century New York did not lack either hotels or apartment buildings, writes Tippins (February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America, 2005). But the Chelsea Hotel, from its very inception, was different. Architect Philip Hubert intended the elegantly designed Chelsea Association Building to reflect the utopian ideals of Charles Fourier, offering every amenity conducive to cooperative living: public spaces and gardens, a dining room, artists’ studios, and 80 apartments suitable for an economically diverse population of single workers, young couples, small families and wealthy residents who otherwise might choose to live in a private brownstone. Hubert especially wanted to attract creative types and made sure the building’s walls were extra thick so that each apartment was quiet enough for concentration. William Dean Howells, Edgar Lee Masters and artist John Sloan were early residents. Their friends (Mark Twain, for one) greeted one another in eight-foot-wide hallways intended for conversations. In its early years, the Chelsea quickly became legendary. By the 1930s, though, financial straits resulted in a “down-at-heel, bohemian atmosphere.” Later, with hard-drinking residents like Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, the ambience could be raucous. Arthur Miller scorned his free-wheeling, drug-taking, boozy neighbors, admitting, though, that the “great advantage” to living there “was that no one gave a damn what anyone else chose to do sexually.” No one passed judgment on creativity, either. But the art was not what made the Chelsea famous; its residents did. Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Phil Ochs and Sid Vicious are only a few of the figures populating this entertaining book.
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-618-72634-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.
Photographer and author Stanton returns with a companion volume to Humans of New York (2013), this one with similarly affecting photographs of New Yorkers but also with some tales from his subjects’ mouths.
Readers of the first volume—and followers of the related site on Facebook and elsewhere—will feel immediately at home. The author has continued to photograph the human zoo: folks out in the streets and in the parks, in moods ranging from parade-happy to deep despair. He includes one running feature—“Today in Microfashion,” which shows images of little children dressed up in various arresting ways. He also provides some juxtapositions, images and/or stories that are related somehow. These range from surprising to forced to barely tolerable. One shows a man with a cat on his head and a woman with a large flowered headpiece, another a construction worker proud of his body and, on the facing page, a man in a wheelchair. The emotions course along the entire continuum of human passion: love, broken love, elation, depression, playfulness, argumentativeness, madness, arrogance, humility, pride, frustration, and confusion. We see varieties of the human costume, as well, from formalwear to homeless-wear. A few celebrities appear, President Barack Obama among them. The “stories” range from single-sentence comments and quips and complaints to more lengthy tales (none longer than a couple of pages). People talk about abusive parents, exes, struggles to succeed, addiction and recovery, dramatic failures, and lifelong happiness. Some deliver minirants (a neuroscientist is especially curmudgeonly), and the children often provide the most (often unintended) humor. One little boy with a fishing pole talks about a monster fish. Toward the end, the images seem to lead us toward hope. But then…a final photograph turns the light out once again.
A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05890-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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