Recommend a book or essay about comics

[Francis Dawson]

Coincidentally 'The Hooded Utilitarian' is currently accepting nominations and submissions for the best comics criticism of the first quarter of 2012. Quite a few of the essays cited I've read, many I haven't. The link is also worth reading for the author's generally pessimistic view of the health of comics criticism.

http://hoodedutilitarian.com/2012/04...r-nominations/

[dan bailey]

How true. If there is a record for biggest impact with fewest issues, Steranko's Captain America run must surely win it. What was it, just two issues or something?

Three -- #s 110, 111 & 113.

In truth, its importance is generally overstated because ishes #111 & 113 (along with the stupendous #112, drawn by Jack Kirby in one friggin' weekend after Steranko apparently couldn't muster the energy &/or work ethic to spend enough time away from his fainting couch to actually hit 3 straight monthly deadlines) not only marked young Dan Bailey's introduction to one of his all-time favorite series, but just generally rocked his young world, period.

[tolworthy]

The link is also worth reading for the author's generally pessimistic view of the health of comics criticism.

http://hoodedutilitarian.com/2012/04...r-nominations/

I think that is a fair reflection of the piece. Though he less critical of Nadel and Hodler's nurturing and filtering of critics.
And I guess this makes me a critic of a critic of a critic of critics of critics. We are reaching a critical mass.

[Kaim]

On the art side of things, Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics is really seminal. Especially effective if you do a sidealong reading Zot! since he covers a lot of principles he applied there. It was what made me as interested in a book's art as its story.

[prince hal]

Virtually every title mentioned I've read and recommend. I'd add Feiffer's Great Comic Book Heroes, too, as well as Comic Art in America by Stephen Becker, andTen Ever-Lovin' Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo by Walt Kelly.

[Cei-U!]

I can't recommend R. C. Harvey's The Art of the Funnies and The Art of the Comic Book highly enough. Both are excellent, insightful looks at how the medium works.

Cei-U!
I summon the must-reads!

[Mladen]

"Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture and Sequence" is a very fine collection of essays touching on an excellent range of european and american comics, especially for anybody with a background or interest in Architecture.

[Gothos]

Men of Tomorrow is fantastically written and its subject matter - the way that SF fandom and East-Coast criminality were intertwined at the birth of the comic book - is dynamite. Michael Chabon's novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is an excellent companion to it.

I didn't know that there was a controversy about the author's methodology?

I don't think it was much of a controversy. In fact, now I can't remember just who quarreled about what detail. I will say that anytime Jones has a good story, he includes it even if it's unlikely, like the story of Jerry Siegel supposedly protesting Irwin Donenfeld with a protest-sign.

[Gothos]

Actually, I'm surprised that this list hasn't been discussed here. As far as lists goes, it is quite good. Sure, there are many comics that should have been mentioned, and others that perhaps didn't deserve it, but it honestly tries to cover a lot of ground and is a good starting point for those interested in classic and modern comics form all over the world. I've only read 311 of those (though lots of other ones are in my to-read list and already at hand), and they represent a good sample of what one can find out there.

I'm just puzzled at the criteria sometimes: why several albums of Tintin or Asterix listed individually, but full Yoko Tsuno (25 albums) or Thorgal (32 albums) series? It doesn't make much sense to me.

BTW, the full list here: http://www.paulgravett.com/index.php...ics/1001_atoz/

Yeah, the same thing happened when COMICS JOURNAL did its "canon" of best English-language comics. On one hand, there was all the Lee-Kirby FF's, on the other, just one particular Krigstein story (bet most of you can guess which one).

[Aaron King]

just one particular Krigstein story (bet most of you can guess which one).

"New York's Famous Theatrical District" from Target Comics #7?





Juuuuuust kidding.

[Fesch_]

Yeah, the same thing happened when COMICS JOURNAL did its "canon" of best English-language comics. On one hand, there was all the Lee-Kirby FF's, on the other, just one particular Krigstein story (bet most of you can guess which one).

At least Krigstein's story is already part of the canon, and isn't part of a series. But here the choices are sometimes puzzling. For instance, why just the album Triton of the Roco Vargas series? Why not the entire series, merely 8 albums? And why Triton, when the general consensus is that La estrella lejana (Far Star) is the best album of the series? (And personally, I think it's one of the best European albums ever made). Odd.

[pinkfloydsound17]

Not a book or essay....but I just watched Stan Lee's Mutants, Monsters and Marvels on Netflix. It's a pretty neat documentary. I really wish I could meet Stan Lee someday......

[An Ear In The Fireplace]

I'll kick it off with a couple:

The Paul Gravett edited comics instalment in the unlovable 1001 ... Before you Die series is a surprisingly excellent, serious minded attempt to represent the best of the comics medium. Its purview starts before the twentieth century and it covers comics in an admirable number of international traditions. There is much here that is recondite and wholly new to me. Also taking a road less travelled for Anglophone readers is The Essential Guide to World Comics edited by Tim Pilcher and Brad Brooks.

I've thumbed through this 1001 book in the bookstore from time to time, but I'm not impressed with it. Much more useful and what I have in my library are 500 Comic Book Action Heroes and 500 Comic Book Villains both by Mike Conroy. The Action Heroes book was especially useful in discovering characters I'd never heard of--or finding out more about heroes I was only vaguely aware of. Although from time to time Conroy's information isn't exactly accurate (I don't remember specific errors but I know I used it for an editing course a few years ago).

I also have the Essential Guide to World Comics--which was remaindered at a nearby bookstore so it didn't cost a lot. An interesting tour of some world comics, although it doesn't give a lot of attention to Canadian comics, folding them into its chapter on the U.S. (how insulting to Canada's independents).

[Gothos]

I'm reprinting a mini-review I did for my blog,on a book that's not purely about comic books, but some of you might find the topic interesting.

_________________

Though I'm often not in agreement with many of the more extreme feminists in the comics-blogosphere, I may be on the same page with some of them in endorsing the existence of a good general study of the expression of female heroes and villains in popular culture.




Prior to the 2010 book I'm going to review here, the best-circulated study may be the 2006 work THE MODERN AMAZONS: WARRIOR WOMEN ON SCREEN by Dominique Mainon and James Ursini. However, to call it a "study" is probably over-ambitious. The work takes the basic approach of the "coffee-table" book, being extremely weak in terms of discussing the first half of the 20th century, not even making a token mention of the two NYOKA serials. There's scant discussion of the historical background of "warrior woman" films or of feminist theories about the topic.




Better in terms of detail, but concerned only with comic book superheroines, is Trina Robbins' 1996 THE GREAT WOMEN SUPERHEROES. Robbins' work is excellent on the Golden Age heroines, analyzing a number of obscure characters, but she's weak on other eras, particularly that of the Silver Age (1955-1970 in my opinion), barely acknowledging the advances of DC Comics in that period.




Now, as of 2010-- though I only discovered the work this year-- we have Jennifer K. Stuller's highly readable academic study, INK-STAINED AMAZONS AND CINEMATIC WARRIORS-- the "ink-stained" figures being those of comic books and strips, while the second group needs no explanation. Academic Roz Kaveney provides an introduction explaining that it is a "study of Buffy, Xena, Ripley, and the other most-studied female superheroes with a historical and cultural context"-- which does signify one limitation in that it is only about the "most-studied" figures. But that's not a serious drawback. In essence I do recommend it to those with an interest in the topic, but it does have some more substantive comments, which I choose to annotate here.




* On page 3 Stuller remarks that "myths can be fantasy and they can be real," which almost sounded like a re-statement of Kant's attempt to find a "middle way" between Rationalism and Empiricism. I suspect I'm the only one who had that reaction, though.




*On page 5 Stuller states that "superwomen narratives" are identifiable, in part, by the way the "narrative borrows from, or resonates with, classical themes and/or elements of world mythology." This sounds like a lead-in to a general Campbellian theory. However, Stuller doesn't explore mythic themes in detail, and the statement seems to serve the purpose of distinguishing "superwomen" protagonists from more mundane figures.




*Page 13 strikes the first discordant note, as Stuller repeats a rather oversimplified criticism (also seen in Robbins) to the way in which the word "girl" is supposedly an automatic downgrade as it occurs in the names of heroines like "Hawkgirl" or in descriptions like "Lois Lane, Girl Reporter."

*Stuller's first chapter focuses upon the two best known comic-book heroines: Wonder Woman and Lois Lane. While Stuller's description of William Marston's WONDER WOMAN is quite good, she does put down the subsequent adventures written for the Amazon by Robert Kanigher following Marston's death. While it's true that Kanigher's stories are not as good as Marston's, Stuller oversimplifies them as simple "infantile adventures," and skews the facts to imply that Wonder Woman herself became less powerful. Kanigher didn't share Marston's female-liberation theme, but in my view he usually continued to portrary Wonder Woman as dynamic and capable.




*Stuller's survey of Silver Age comics is condescending, implying that every heroine in the 1960s was simply a "token female" like Invisible Girl or Marvel Girl-- neither of whom is examined in detail. Stuller devotes more time to the late 1960s 'depowered' version of Wonder Woman, which Stuller automatically condemns as a falling-away from Marston's character. Here too, though I agree that Marston's original is superior, Stuller dismisses the "Modesty-Blaise-d" version of the character too simplistically. She also touches on Marvel's "Cat" character, apparently because she was the first superheroine whose origins were explicitly rooted in Second Wave feminism.




*Stuller's most egregious blunder takes place when she attempts to recount the plot of the Russ Meyer film FASTER PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL! Strangely, she only describes one scene of PUSSYCAT, and gets it entirely wrong in order to give it a feminist spin. It's true that PUSSYCAT revolves around the karate-chopping figure of Varla (Tura Satana), and it's true that the plot gets going because Varla and her fellow go-go dancers encounter two suburban members of a car-club, Tommy and Linda, running timing-trials in the desert. But Stuller describes Tommy as "cocky," when in truth he's so straight-edge he barely understands Varla's challenge, and he initially refuses that challenge until Linda, not Varla, encourages him to race Varla. Varla does not, as Stuller states, win the race-- she cheats by cutting across the marking-pylons and causes Tommy's car to spin out. And Tommy does not attack Varla because she wins, but because Varla steals Linda's stopwatch. The only nasty thing he does is that after being beaten down by Varla's karate, he pretends to give in and then sucker-punches Varla-- but he doesn't profit thereby, for she then kills him-- all of which sends Varla and her crew on the run for the remainder of the story.




In later chapters Stuller doesn't make so many mistakes or simplifications when dealing with the warrior-women of film and television, so it would seem that this was her main interest (Kaveney notes that parts of the book began as essays for SLAYAGE). There are some good, though never outstanding, analyses of feminist politics in XENA, BUFFY et al, so INK-STAINED does work as a primer for such commentary

[Gothos]

Also, Gerald Jones & Will Jacobs did a good reference book on the superhero culture from the Silver Age to the time of the book's publication, 1996, THE COMIC BOOK HEROES-- though parts of it were culled from an earlier 1985 history.