Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Published late in 2014, two books on classic cartoons and comics, with non-overlapping subjects:

Richard Gehr. 2014. I Only Read it for the Cartoons: The New Yorker’s Most Brilliantly Twisted Artists.  Houghton Mifflin. (With a foreword by Matt Groening.)

(#1)

Monte Beauchamp. 2014. Masterful Marks: Cartoonists Who Changed the World. Simon & Schuster. (16 graphic biographies.)

(#2)

On the Gehr. Twelve engaging essays (with photographs and some samples of their work) by Gehr, on these New Yorker cartoonists:

Lee Lorentz, Sam Gross, Roz Chast, George Booth, Edward Koren, Charles Barsotti, Arnie Levin, Victoria Roberts, Gahan Wilson, Jack Ziegler, Zachary Kanin, Robert Mankoff

Charles Addams is a notable omission, but he’s in the Beauchamp book.

On the Beauchamp. In this book the entries are themselves work by graphic artists, rather than conventional essays, and the subjects are quite wide-ranging, in genre (from superhero comics, underground comix, and caricatures through Peanuts and Dr. Seuss); in time (going back to the earliest comic strips); and in place (taking in European and Japanese artists as well as American). The 16 entries, listing both subjects and artists for the entries:

Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster (Superman) by Ryan Heshka and Monte Beauchamp; Jack Kirby (Captain America) by Mark Alan Stamaty; Chas Addams (the Addams Family) by Marc Rosenthal; Winsor McCay (animation and comic strip pioneer) by Nicolas Debon; Charles M. Schulz (Peanuts) by Sergio Ruzzier; Hergé (Tintin) by Nora Krug; Harvey Kurtzman (Mad magazine) by Peter Kuper; Robert Crumb (underground comix pioneer) by Drew Friedman; Al Hirschfeld (caricaturist) by Arnold Roth; Walt Disney (Mickey Mouse) by Larry Day and Monte Beauchamp; Lynd Kendall Ward (father of the graphic novel) by Owen Smith and Monte Beauchamp; Rodolphe Töpffer (creator of first comic strips) by Frank Stack; Edward Gorey (macabre children’s books) by Greg Clarke; Hugh Hefner (founder of Playboy magazine) by Gary Dumm and Monte Beauchamp; Osamu Tezuka (father of manga and anime) by Dan Zettwoch; Dr. Seuss (children’s picture books) by Denis Kitchen

One sample, from Drew Friedman on R. Crumb:

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This entry was posted on February 28, 2015 at 7:09 am and is filed under Books, Linguistics in the comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.