Keenan's Book Reviews: Search results for cartoon

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Saturday, October 17, 2009

The Hunter adapted by Darwyn Cook

Cook, Darwyn. Richard Stark’s The Hunter. San Diego: IDW, 2009.
ISBN: 978-1-60010-493-0

Donald Westlake (writing as Richard Stark) introduced hardboiled thief Parker in a series of novels in the 1960s. The novels have been adapted to film, but Darwyn Cook’s comic book adaption is the first authorized to use the name Parker.

Parker is not a gentleman thief, which is an oxymoron anyway. He is probably a sociopath. At the least, he has no regard for human life, property, law or much of anything else. He is as heartless and hardboiled as they come.

In The Hunter, Parker is on a cross-country mission of revenge. He narrowly escaped being killed, at the hand of his beautiful but week-willed wife, in a double-cross after a job to rob gunrunners. He cut was to e $90,000. He walked from California to Chicago and killed his way through a gaggle of gangsters to claims his cut and drive away with a price on his head.

Parker is horrible, but he is interesting and The Hunter is full of action. It’s understandable how the character became popular.

In this adaption, one can enjoy both a classic hardboiled story and the art of Cook. Cook is one of the greatest hardboiled illustrators in comics. His drawing conveys the sensibility of this type of story. In this book, he makes the bold choice of using just two colors, which conveys a sense of the graphic design of the ‘60s. The style is both simplified like a cartoon and complex, carefully designed, even painterly.

Many comic adaptations are not very good, just abridgements with colored drawings, but this book delivers. Cook tells the story with art and words. His drawings don’t just illustrate events; they convey the action information about the characters. There is a long sequence at the beginning of the book that that tells the reader a lot about Parker without words or even showing his face until the end, like a shot from a movie. Even the opening page, with just a few words and a composition reminiscent of Will Eisner, shows a lot about what kind of man is Parker.

Darwyn Cook also wrote Will Eisner’s The Spirit.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

Sunday, April 18, 2021

Comic Art in America by Stephen Becker

Cartoons did not originate in the United States, but Americans were innovative in the art, and its artists invented the newspaper comic strip and comic book. Stephen Becker wrote a survey of American comics of all types from their origins until his book was published in 1959: Comic Art in America.

Becker covers every type of cartoon in the book. Comic strips get a lot of attention because that is where a lot of the development occurred and gave rise to something distinctly American. Though comic strips are a thread throughout, Becker devotes chapters to editorial cartoons, single-panel humor and even animation.

Many of the comics Becker discusses are still published today, such as Beatle Bailey and Blondie. Others are well-known because of their former popularity or lasting influence: Krazy Kat, Terry and the Pirates, Flash Gordon. Others are largely forgotten, even if they were pioneers of their time that shaped the work of others or the popular taste. Fans of particular types of cartooning may notice omissions that seem glaring, at least in hindsight; the chapter on comic books makes no mention of Will Eisner, though perhaps his fame stems more form later work.

Of course, the intent was not to be exhaustive. It’s a single volume, not an encyclopedia. As a survey for a general audience, it works very well. At the time, it probably reminded readers of old favorites that had fallen out of print. It might introduce modern readers to those old masters for the first time. Necessarily it does not address some of the great work that came out after it was published; I suspect Becker would have been delighted by Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, as many of us are.

Becker was primarily a fiction writer. Comic Art in America is very informative, but it is not primarily an academic book. Neither does Becker come off as entirely fan-ish, though he certainly has the tone of someone who enjoys comics and finds them interesting, especially humor and editorial comics from newspapers and magazines. He mixes commentary with history and spices things up gossipy tidbits.

The book was published in a larger format to accommodate reproduction of comics that originally appeared in an even larger broadsheet newspaper. Though it has the look of a coffee table book, it is not dominated by images. The images are an accompaniment to the text. Even so, one can enjoy it for the comics reproduced in it, though many are of their time and may not make much sense without the context provided by Becker.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

American Splendor (Film)

Kirby by Mark Evanier

Miss Mizzou by J. B. Winter

The Spirit by Darwyn Cook

Why Comics? by Hilary Chute

Becker, Stephen. Comic Art in America: A Social History of the Funnies, the Political Cartoons, Magazine Humor, Sporting Cartoons and Animated Cartoons. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959.

Monday, November 8, 2010

Glossary of Phobias

A phobia is the fear of something, typically a strong, irrational fear that prompts an overreaction. Phobias can be serious psychological problems for some people, and some phobias are medical conditions.

acrophobia - heights

agoraphobia – open spaces; used to refer to very strong fear or anxiety of situations that cause a person to feel anxious, typically, but not necessary, in public or social situations

anatidaephobia – being watched by a duck; coined by Gary Larson in a Far Side cartoon

androphobia – men

anthropophobia - people

arachibutyrophobia – peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth

athazagoraphobia – forgetting, or being forgotten or ignored

cacophobia – ugliness

coimetrophobia - cemeteries

cenosillicaphobia – an empty glass; probably coined speciously by a Latin major on his 21st birthday

coulrophobia – clowns

cryophobia – cold, extreme cold, ice or frost

ergasiophobia – work or functioning, particularly a surgeon’s fear of operating

food neophobia – unfamiliar food; avoiding of or reluctance to taste unfamiliar food

iatrophobia – medical doctors

phobophobia – fear or phobias

photophobia – bright light; sufferers can have strong sensitivity to light and may experience pain or migraines

sesquipedalophobia – long words (a silly variation, not used in formal writing, is hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia)

xenophobia – foreigners

Saturday, September 5, 2015

Miss Mizzou by J. B. Winter

Miss Mizzou was a secondary character in the Steve Canyon comic strip. She may not have stood out from the other bombshells in the cartoon pilot’s adventures, but she made quite an impression on the university from which she took her name (my alma mater, the University of Missouri) and the town that proudly housed it (Columbia). J. B. Winter talks about the girl in the overcoat (and maybe nothing else) and her impact in a mid-Missouri community in his book Miss Mizzou: A Life Beyond Comics.

Milton Caniff was a very well regarded cartoonist. His work on Terry and the Pirates was an inspiration to many in the field. He left that strip in 1947 to start another adventure comic, Steve Canyon, which he would own. He spoke at the University of Missouri in 1949. It bore the nicknamed Mizzou even before then though the university did not officially embrace it until 2004. Caniff apparently enjoyed the trip because he chose Mizzou as the name of a character he introduced in 1952, and made Columbia her hometown.

Caniff took inspiration from waitress he knew as a student at Ohio State University, Marilyn Monroe, and, more directly, dancer and model Bek Stiner. Miss Mizzou, played by Stiner, appeared was introduced on television before appearing in newspapers. Caniff and Stiner, in the characters overcoat, appeared on the Bob Considine Show about a month before her adventure with Canyon ran.

Columbians and Mizzou students jumped on the opportunity to celebrate. The Missouri Student Government Association organized publicity events that Stiner attended over a weekend about a month after the character appeared in newspapers. In 1954, a journalism fraternity proposed a Miss Mizzou-themed contest and calendar as a fundraiser; Caniff agreed to let them do it. The contest ran from 1955 to 1971, and the skits that became associated with it were popular.

Winter’s slender book is a quick read, but still very informative. He concentrates mostly on the character’s impact on the titular school and city than on her adventures in the comics. Even so, comics fans may enjoy the book because few character have been embraced by community in this fashion or had such an influence

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan by Rick Bowers

Will Eisner by Michael Schumacher

Winter, J. B. Miss Mizzou: A Life Beyond Comics. Lexington, KY: CreateSpace, 2014.