Features
- Cover Type: Paperback with 300 pages
- Published by: University Press of Mississippi February 8, 1996
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 0878057587
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0878057580
-
Book Dimensions:
10.7 x 8.2 x 0.8 inches
- Weighs: 1.4 pounds
From Publishers Weekly
Harvey (The Art of the Funnies), a working cartoonist and comics historian, has written a serviceable examination of the aesthetics of comics?what he calls the "verbal-visual blending principle," the interdependency of words and pictures that gives comics their unique communicative character. Among other things he outlines the critical elements of the comics medium (narrative breakdown into panels, panel composition, page layout and drawing style) and usefully debunks the all-too-frequent tendency to align comics criticism with film criticism, which overemphasizes analogous traits between them. Ostensibly about comics aesthetics, in large part the book is really a basic narrative history of the comic book industry and popular comics genres, tangentially but helpfully enumerating how the cutthroat economics of a Depression-born business have shaped the artifice of comics to this day, retarding their development (if not their mainstream commercial popularity) into a serious art form. On occasion his prose can be a bit stilted, but the discussions of Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzmann and Gil Kane alone (and the very liberal reproduction of their artwork) would recommend the book. His narrative history carries right up to the alternative comics and artists of today, culminating, naturally enough, with the most inventive, insightful investigation of comics aesthetics: Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Daniels (Marvel: Five magnificent Decades of the World's Greatest Comics, LJ 10/1/91) has produced an institutional history, and as such it is fatally flawed. Far too much space is spent on the recent Batman and Superman films, television series, and marketing schemes, while the revolutionary Neil Adams Green Lantern/Green Arrow series merits a mere two pages. The Teen Titans, DC's answer to the popular Marvel X-Men, gets short shrift as well. Despite the terrific reproductions of art and novelty items (including a 1954 book entitled The Adventures of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis), this will prove nostalgic for those who have thrown out their comics, but of little use to collectors or students. In contrast, Harvey's (The Art of the Funnies, LJ 8/94) scholarly study ignores corporate boundaries and attempts to situate the comic book in terms of its evolution from the comic strip to the world of publishing as a whole. Comic books became an entrenched medium during
World War II, when they were popular with soldiers who enjoyed the often lurid, sexy detective stories as well as the comparatively cleaner Westerns and superheroes. Harvey details the sea change brought upon comics by the institution of the Comics Code in 1954, which put horror and detective stories out of business and ushered in the primacy of superheroes. He also engages in close, critical readings of the art itself, focusing on the development of the vocabulary of panel, layout, story, and style, and the relationship between writer and artist during various stages of comic book history. In addition, he pays close attention to the masters, including Will Eisner (who merits only two mentions in Daniels's book), Gil Kane, Frank Miller, and Robert Crumb. The reproductions are ample and illustrate the points made in the text, not the other way around. Highly recommended for collections in popular culture and the history of publishing.
Adam Mazmanian, "Library Journal"Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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