Archive for the “Book Articles” category
John Seven • 13th Jun 2010 • Art Articles, Book Articles, Comics • Edward Sorel, Jules Feiffer, Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth, The Spirit, Village Voice, Will Eisner
Jules Feiffer is well known as a master of all trades and a jack of none when it comes to storytelling — a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, novelist, children’s book author and illustrator, Tony-nominated playwright, Academy Award-winning screenwriter — and a new autobiography celebrates his over 60-year career.
Feiffer’s memoir, “Backing Into Forward,” was released this year by Doubleday. He will make a Western Massachusetts appearance at the Eric Carle Museum for the Children’s Book Festival in Amherst on June 12, an all-day event featuring a talk by Feiffer at 2 p.m. He will be the subject of a major show at the Carle in the fall of 2011.
Feiffer, 81, boasts many high profile achievements — including authorship of the screenplays for “Carnal Knowledge” and “Popeye” — in a career that began more humbly in 1946 in the studio of revolutionary cartoonist Will Eisner, where Feiffer apprenticed for six years, starting at age 18. Eventually Feiffer ended up writing scripts for Eisner’s innovative detective series about The Spirit, a character recognizable to many people, thanks to the recent Frank Miller film.
“Eisner was instrumental in how I thought and how I learned to work — before I went to work for him he was one of my heroes,” Feiffer said in a recent interview. “I studied him, those early Spirit stories that were in newspapers.
“It was an extraordinary opportunity and a great education for me, just being around his office, as a kid who really was incapable of doing anything right for a long period of time until I accidentally backed into writing The Spirit stories. It was the one thing I could do in the office. I couldn’t do any of the drawings — I just wasn’t able to do that kind of comic book illustration — but I could write it. That surprised him and it surprised me.” (more…)
John Seven • 1st Jun 2010 • Book Articles, Science • e-reader, Facebook, Google, human brain, Internet, iPad, Kindle, neurology, technology
With the forthcoming book “The Shallows,” to be released from Norton on June 4, author Nicholas Carr uses a central concern — voiced in the book’s subtitle, “What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains” — as a springboard to a wide variety of scientific and historical information.
At root is the concern that the Internet is bleeding our attention span until it crumbles from the dryness. Carr agrees with that accusation and uses studies from various disciplines to illustrate his argument. He’s not just using direct proof, however — he’s pulling from the storehouses of not only how people think and respond, but also how technology has always changed the human mind.
Carr posits the simple notion that the Internet, as a tool for writing, research and socialization, is not exempt from the same sort of effectiveness as the printing press and typewriters.
The center of the argument is that technology — any technology — changes human behavior because any technology is designed to simplify, aid or mimic a human process. As Carr shows, each physical process is accompanied by a neurological one — conversely, what goes on in our brain chemically changes when certain physical processes cease, just as they do when they are performed.
Previously in medical history, the adult brain was thought to be a big lump of permanency, but recent advances in neurology show that the brain never stops growing and changing — it is alive in real time. Synapses grow — new connections are made all our lives — and these effects are created by processes both physical and mental. More importantly, our mental processes are strengthened over time through repetition — and depth of experience.
While online access increases the amount of information we can access, it also creates physical and mental obstructions to processing that information effectively — never mind that the human brain is only capable of processing so much information to begin with.
In revealing the how the Web’s tendrils have worked their way around your mind, Carr takes the reader on a journey covering the whole of behavioral science and neurology, offering the science behind why you are the way you are. He also takes the time to point out how others take advantage of these processes. The chapter on Google and its quest to build the world’s largest virtual library, even as it infiltrates so many aspects of our personal life, offers better than any other section in the book the parasitic relationship between ourselves and the Internet services we embrace.
At the same time, Carr is quick to point out that it’s not just modern humankind that is beholden to these dichotomies — Nietzsche was convinced that his new typewriter changed his writing, and it probably did, since the neurological side of the process had changed. Changing our brains through technology is an ongoing action.
“The Shallows” is its own best advertisement — in the argument that contemplation and concentration are required to digest information, it becomes obvious that the best means currently possible is through a bound book, without distractions.
Consider the e-reader — in the age of the Kindle and the iPad, saving trees is but one enticing argument to the contraptions. But take note that the gadgets come wired to the Internet, the world’s most perfect interruption machine, and this plays on the evolutionary tendency of humans to be distracted: Check your e-mail, check your Facebook page, look up a word, follow hyperlinks within the text. No longer is reading a solitary action — it’s become one that not only invites the whole world into your brain, but also you into everyone else’s while you try to read.
In evolutionary terms, human beings are trained not to concentrate — it’s a survival technique against predators — and part of the purpose of any education is to train the human brain to concentrate through the repetition of actually doing it. Attention deficit disorder might not be an aberration of behavior at all, but the norm — and fractioning our contemplative experience is pointing us all back to our natural state. This, of course, affects innovation, political thought and many other areas, including the careful stewardship of our own lives.
Carr’s book not only shows how science and technology really do affect the smallest details of your everyday life in ways you didn’t expect, but also offers clarity in the understanding of your biological self and how that relates to the way you live your life. If nothing else, it’s an essential manual to self-discovery — it offers the sort of revelations that really can help you improve your life. Entirely unexpected, it’s the kind of self help book that matters.
John Seven • 19th May 2010 • Book Articles, Comics • 2008 election, Barack Obama, Bill Ayers, education, graphic novels, teaching, Weather Underground
It was in the 2008 presidential election that Bill Ayers achieved notoriety as a would-be spoiler — the terrorist Barack Obama was supposedly palling around with was Ayers. This eye-brow raising recognition stretches back to his days in the activist group, The Weather Underground, which saw Ayers ad his cohorts conducting a bombing campaign in protest of the Viet Nam War.
For the decades following, though, Ayers has been a teacher, a writer, a crusader for social justice, and a progressive ideas in the field of education that has won him praise from the mainstream world he once fought against. His 1993 book “To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher” will be reborn in a new format this May — as a graphic novel adaptation from the original publisher, Teachers College Press, which Ayers wrote in collaboration with Xeric Award winning cartoonist Ryan Alexander-Tanner.
Ayers advocates for a form of education that downplays standards testing and focuses on the student as a three-dimensional human being, with a curriculum that plays to the students’ strengths and interests. Ayers also believes that a teacher should be viewed less as an authority figure and more as a fellow traveller with the students, with as much to learn from their experience as they do from the teacher’s guidance.
Ayers vision is of a collaborative classroom that could be, in which critical thought and alternative sources of knowledge are advocated and the ultimate goal is good citizenship in the form of an active and thoughtful individual. His book should captivate not only teachers and education administrators, but parents, as well.
Ayers is a long-time comic book fan, and credits his early love, Mad Magazine, as “the reason the country went off the rails.” His favorites include Joe Sacco, Alison Bechdel, and Art Spiegelman, all of whom he uses in his education work as well as reads for his own enjoyment.
JS: Why a graphic novel? It doesn’t seem like an obvious choice for a book on educational theory.
Bill Ayers: To Teach is a book I wrote a decade and a half ago, and in my little world of teaching and teacher education it’s been a very popular book used in a lot of teacher preparation programs. Teachers College Press approached me and said that it’s still doing very well, but we should update it, we should do a third edition, and to me that’s the way publishers think. I had already moved on and written several other books and while I know To Teach has a certain kind of standing in that little world, I just felt like it was something I didn’t want to do. I had too many other projects and I had already done it. I said to them that I’ll do it if you allow me to make it a comic book and I thought that would be the end of it.
I thought that was a pretty glib and outrageous statement, and while I love comic books and I’ve read them all my life, and taught them even, so I know comic books from the outside, but I never really thought that I would do such a thing. I just said that to them to push them back and thought that’s the end of it. A month later they came back and said sure, let’s do it. Then it became intriguing to me and I thought, gee, what does one do?
I searched around and found this young comics artist. He was my niece’s roommate in Portland, and I knew him very, very vaguely. He had been a student of my younger brother who was a high school teacher in Berkeley, CA. I knew him vaguely and I contacted him and found his web site and then I checked with the experts, which are my three sons and who, at that point, were in their late 20s and I said to one look at this web site and tell me what you think of this guy because I don’t have a critical brain in my head about stuff like that. They came back with wild enthusiasm and said he’s young, but he’s got a style and he’s creative, he’s smart. So I contacted him and we began talking, and he became intrigued with the idea. He moved in with us in Chicago and spent six months living on the third floor. (more…)
John Seven • 19th May 2010 • Art Articles, Book Articles • Abrams, Wacky Packages, Yes Men
As art books go, “Wacky Packages: New New New” from Abrams Books comes on like nostalgia, and by the time it leaves the room, you’re surprised to find it’s said something more important than it promised. That may be because the idea itself is at the center of what constitutes art — something static in a gallery or a museum, or something alive, spreading through the viral enthusiasm of kids slapping the art on every surface imaginable.
I think I’m voting for the latter.
For those unfamiliar with Wacky Packages, these were novelty items, stickers sold in packets like baseball cards with bubblegum included. The stickers were parodies of popular products at the time, usually with an eye toward the gross — thus “Crust” instead of “Crest.” Like Mad Magazine, the stickers amounted to social criticism for kids by bringing manufacturers, advertisers, periodicals and plenty more down to their level, complete with a notion of ridicule that sits somewhere between childishness and the Borscht Belt.
Something like Wacky Packages was important and was empowering if you consider that they chipped away at the basic tenets of respect for the captains of American industry. Trusted items were to be made fun of by the most subversive means possible — questioning not only their contents and components, but also the claims made on their advertising and packaging. Was it possible that the trusted business of America were lying to us? (more…)
John Seven • 30th Apr 2010 • Berkshire Arts, Book Articles, Photography • folk music, Great Depression, New Deal, Rich Remsberg, roots music, Roy Stryker
Emmy-winning image researcher and photographer Rich Remsberg, who works out of his Eclipse Mill residence, has combined two of his passions — photography and music — for a new book that explores the world of homegrown music during the Great Depression.
“Hard Luck Blues,” was recently published by University of Illinois Press, in conjunction with the Library of Congress.
On the surface, “Hard Luck Blues” is a collection of photos featuring musical scenes from the 1930s, but what Remsberg has achieved is a document that peers into multiple facets of American lives and pursuits. The musical performances aren’t of the same context that we would think of in the 21st century, because performing music in the 1930s was a much different thing. There were nightclubs and bandstands — professional shows with musicians who plied their trade not only for money, but also for love and adventure — but in the scope of the photos in the book, Remsberg has uncovered music as a part of everyday life, a way Americans used to pass the time and even relate to each other, rather than just another commodity to be consumed.
This is at the center of what the term “folk music” really means.
“One of the things I think you can get looking at these pictures is the breadth of musical experience — that it isn’t just rustic old-timers living in cabins who hack out tune on fiddles and banjos,” Remsberg said during an interview this week. “You had this very vibrant live music scene at nightclubs and churches and community bandstands and other places that we don’t think of as folk music in the same way that we do the things that were made in the mountains or on the frontier, but very much do have an everyday folk quality about them — and it was in the way that they were lived.”
(more…)
John Seven • 23rd Apr 2010 • Art Articles, Book Articles, Comics • Fantagraphics, Jaime Hernandez, Locas, Love and Rockets, Maggie and Hopey
If there was one modern cartoonist whose importance — and potential appeal — really does spring beyond the world of comic books, it is Jaime Hernandez.
The California-born Latin American — along with his brother, Gilbert — was an early mover in the world of independent comics. The brothers were take-charge, DIY practitioners without whom this world we live in — the one in which major book publishers and The New York Times provide outlets for serious work, far removed from the biff, bang, pow cliché of the form — probably wouldn’t exist.
Hernandez’s achievements culminate from offering what comics never had prior to him, while diving head first into the traditional form as the means for providing these leaps. As time has worn on, there are plenty of innovators in the field of graphic novels whose work is barely reliable to the way comics have looked for the last 60 years, but Hernandez attached the styles he had come to love and master.
Self-taught from such disparate sources as Archie Comics, Jack Kirby superheroes and science fiction — and other talents within his own family — Hernandez mixed his influences into a serialized narrative that embraced people marginalized by those very places. His stories are ensconced in Latino culture — particularly the lower and working classes — as well as other nationalities of color, and such subcultures as the early American punk rockers, neighborhood gangs and low riders, homosexual communities, sex workers, the mentally ill and even the world of Latin American wrestlers.
Unlike the underground comics before him, Hernandez’s point was not to shock middle America but to offer analysis, understanding — to show three-dimensional, fully-realized characters using comic book narrative devices, to unfold epic tales of ordinary lives.
His Locas stories focus on Maggie and Hopey, originally teenagers and now women over 40 — they have continued in almost real time since the early 1980s and constitute one of the great literary achievements of the last quarter century, as well as being a marvel of visual storytelling that beats any movie or TV show in existence.
Hernandez has been given an important and lovely tribute with the new book from Abrams, “The Art of Jaime Hernandez: The Secrets of Life and Death,” which manages to serve both possible audiences well — the one that is already well-acquainted with Hernandez’s work and the one seeking real meat as the move to discover what they have been missing.
Author Todd Hignite succeeds where so many other art books focusing on comic creators never quite hit the mark, even the better ones, thanks to Hignite’s keen ability to deconstruct meaning behind Hernandez’s storytelling and techniques, as well as Hernandez’s participation in the analysis. Hignite does more than just relate Hernandez’s life story — he makes the connections between that story and what ends up on the printed page, aligning the artistic progression alongside the life experience as filtered through the narrative journey. Hernandez’s work over 25 years is a living and breathing pursuit that changes and matures in ways the work of so many other cartoonists do not — the work grows alongside its creator.
But Hignite is not content with just allowing Hernandez’s remembrances to dictate the analysis of the Locas series. He guides the reader through the nuances of the work, acting part art professor, part psychologist in nailing the power behind Hernandez’s work. Equally, the art choices for the book spring with the same revelations and really speak to why Hernandez was chosen for such an attractive tribute as this collection.
Through the interviews, Hernandez is revealed as both focused and down to earth, someone who eschews other mediums in favor of the way he naturally tells a story. His personality rings loudest through his work, though, and the book is filled with evidence of his charm and mastery of the form.
Hernandez is not often enough held up in his true status beyond the world of comics — even though publications like The New York Times and the New Yorker have made use of his talents — and that is set to change. He’s set the tone for so much that has come after him and done so through elevated storytelling that classifies him as an American original.
As the graphic novel form continues to become a more accepted form of literature, Hernandez is poised to take his place as the most accessible and brilliant of those working in that field. It will be an honor well-deserved — and “The Art of Jaime Hernandez” is a lovely document that brings us closer to that moment.
John Seven • 16th Apr 2010 • Book Articles, Photography • Barry Goldstein, Berkshires, Iraq, Photography, war
In a new book from photographer Barry Goldstein, the Iraq experience unfolds through the eyes and minds of the armored battalion of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team
As the end result of a project that has taken five years, Goldstein’s book, “Gray Land,” was recently published by W.W. Norton. It is more than a photography book. Combining Goldstein’s portraiture work with his journalistic efforts on location in Iraq, the book also allows the soldiers to speak for themselves. When all the parts are brought together, it stands as a documentary in book form that captures the real lives of the troops in Iraq with dignity and compassion.
Goldstein visited Iraq with the platoon in the summers of 2007 and 2008 for a month at a time. Part of his mission was to rise above the politics — obviously as a human being and an American citizen, he has his own opinions of the war, but the point of the project was not to express those, but to present the stories and experiences of the people who fight it. Goldstein felt that was important information to know — it turns out the soldiers he became involved with did also. He found that one thing the soldiers had in common was the desire to be understood.
“They don’t get a choice in where they are sent or what war they get to fight in,” he said in an interview this week. “The points I think that they would often try to convey is that, regardless of where they were sent, they were just trying to do the best they could, both for their colleagues in terms of protecting them and very often the people in the area where they were working. There was a really genuine sense of wanting to improve their lives, both in terms of providing security as well as civil improvements.”
In getting to know the members of the battalion, Goldstein had worked documenting their training at Fort Benning, Ga., taking portraits and interviewing them about their backgrounds — it was never in the plan to go to Iraq. It was during a training session in California that he had accompanied the battalion on that he realized going to Iraq was a crucial part of the project. The training involved simulations of Iraqi villages, with people playing the parts of insurgents and villagers the soldiers had to deal with.
“I realized how different it was hearing all these stories and experiences involving people and activities and equipment, and actually seeing it,” Goldstein said. “At that point I realized that I probably should go and see them do what they spent all this time training to do. I made that decision, and of course training is very different from being in Iraq because nobody’s shooting at you.”
He went ready for the danger — he took a course designed to prepare journalists for conflict areas as part of his preparation — and was confident he was in good hands. If he was well prepared for the actual physical threats, though, he had not anticipated the toll they take on a person psychologically, without even ever happening.
“What I was unprepared for was the level of constant stress that exists in the war zone,” he said. “Of course this exists if you’re out on patrol or in a vehicle riding around, but it even exists if you’re in a relatively safe place like a base, because the base would be subject to mortar fire, random harassment fire. While you eat and sleep and wash and do all the things you would normally do on a day-to-day basis, there’s this constant stress. That was a new experience for me.”
Goldstein went out on a number of patrols, both in vehicles and on foot, and spent some nights in combat outposts. He also attended District Action Council meetings — liaisons between local neighborhood organizers and military representatives that tackle the job of the day-to-day running of the neighborhoods. The meetings covered everything from hygiene to security to budgets, and gave Goldstein a chance to meet with some of the locals.
“You get to see this whole other side of the Iraqi people and the sense of dedication of the people who would come to these, because obviously they’re at great risk from the people who didn’t want this to happen, and yet they’re quite passionate,” he said.
His mission was to capture the more routine elements of war that would usually not be the interest of war photographers — the grind of war. He would be less apt to seek out combat shots and more likely to spend a day with vehicle maintenance workers, capturing their role in the process and how they deal with that.
“I got a real appreciation for the idea that while some jobs are more dangerous than others, none of them are going to be easy,” Goldstein said, “and if you’re a clerk working in a hardened building, you’re away from your family for a year and you’re working seven days a week. We talk about 24/7 in the civilian work, but on deployment, that’s reality. People are working around the clock on generally very little sleep and have a lot to do. When you add on top of that the physical demands and then the dangers, you get to see how difficult this job really is.”
Goldstein was careful about the places he chose to go with patrols. He wasn’t tailgating the horrors of war and so consciously chose not to capture the evidence of them. His concern was with the inner life of these troops — the outer life figures into the work only in regard to how it affects the psychology of the people who live it. Besides, Goldstein never felt the amount of time he spent there really justified deep analysis of the actual situation of war.
“I’m always clear to point out that I was just a tourist there,” he said. “A couple months doesn’t begin to educate you about the complexities of this.”
One thing he did talk about with soldiers was conduct overseas — specifically how their approach toward Iraqis affected the job they were there to do. One young platoon leader expressed the maxim of “be professional, be polite, be prepared to kill” explaining the correlation between courtesy, the ease of their job and the probability of getting it done correctly and safely. Courtesy might be the area most difficult and crucial for a soldier.
“The most important thing where you need to use your head is to be polite, because not only is this the right thing to do, it’s also tactically valuable,” Goldstein said he was told. “They replaced a unit in this neighborhood that was very ‘kick butt and take names,’ and the people just didn’t trust them. When there were people outside the neighborhood who came in, the unit never heard about it, and their casualties were high.”
The platoon leader explained to Goldstein that his unit make it a policy to be as open with the Iraqis as possible. For instance, if a situation demanded a door being knocked down, the platoon would return the next day to explain and compensate — the idea was to promote trust and cooperation as a way of avoiding violence.
“That really had a big effect on me,” Goldstein said. “This was coming from someone in his mid 20s, and for someone at that age to have that attitude was pretty impressive, and it was representative of the attitude that I generally saw in all my interactions.”
With the project behind him, Goldstein has been busy with some promotional work in conjunction with the book and reflecting on his experience privately. After devoting so much time to the experience, he is now in the position of looking toward his next thing — and what that might be is currently a complete mystery to him.
“After an experience like this, some things that were interesting before are not interesting now, but I know that something will come up — and when it does, I’ll know it,” he said.
John Seven • 22nd Mar 2010 • Book Articles, Comics, Uncategorized • biography, Carter Family, country music, Johnny Cash, June Carter, Reinhard Kleist, Sun Records
For a while there, it seemed like Johnny Cash was relegated to being a remnant of your grandparents’ pop culture — yet another old country singer delivering the same old Nashville clichés as any other.
But in the early 1990s, he hooked up with producer Rick Rubin — at the time best known as rap and metal producer — and began to record tracks for what would become his most important album in years — “American Recordings.” This not only reinvigorated his career and creativity, but also re-established him as the brooding man in black who is constantly on the run from his own darkness.
Johnny Cash was cool again.
It’s probably no mistake that in the 1990s, even as Kurt Cobain self-destructed in real time in front of everybody’s eyes, that the dark heroes of yesteryear were being trotted out as relevant again.
Frank Sinatra certainly benefited greatly from this — all of a sudden, he was getting his due with the younger generation, and the troubled Sinatra of the Capitol years was the Sinatra of preference. “New York, New York” was to be ignored — “Angel Eyes” was to be embraced.
Dean Martin found himself in a similar situation, thanks to a biography by Nick Tosches that framed his life and his psyche within the American mystique of booze and mobsters. The problem with Sinatra and Martin — and others who got the same opportunity during that decade — was that they weren’t prepared to match their revived cool cache with new work that seized on why the public had decided to look their direction again.
Johnny Cash, on the other hand, rose to the creative challenge and won, remarkably.
It’s Cash’s persona as not only a dark rebel, but also a can-do one, that defines German artist Reinhard Kleist’s graphic novel biography of the singer, “Johnny Cash: I See A Darkness,” published by Abrams. Tracing Cash through his childhood and up to the concert at Folsom Prison — then taking a leap into the future and ending with the Rick Rubin sessions — Kleist captures a man burdened by his ghosts and acting out in his life, but not letting those problems stop him from focusing on his great talent and harnessing that into opportunities.
Kleist rolls out Cash’s life not just as a series of actual events, but as a psychological and artistic space in which Cash inhabits the stories that his songs tell. Through dream-like sequences, Cash does kill a man in Reno just to watch him die — he does battle the world after being named Sue, and he does run from ghost riders in the sky who chase him down.
But that’s the power of Cash — and any great singer — the ability to make any song their own, to put it in a context where the emotions or experiences related in the lyrics sound autobiographical. In this way, a good singer is not just a good storyteller but also a good actor, and Cash was able to play the role of the Man in Black to great effectiveness.
But as Kleist makes clear, the role also had a way of taking over, and it’s this struggle that is at the center of Cash’s story, as well as the artistic endeavor to balance the role with the man, to utilize the role that is within the man to create great work while not letting it also pull the strings of the personal life.
That is why the “American Recordings” sessions are so important — Cash finally achieved that balance and control after years of dipping to both extremes. Kleist does a wonderful job at telling the story of a man through the incidents of his life, but he does a better one at capturing the flavor of his soul.
John Seven • 6th Mar 2010 • Book Articles, Comics, Uncategorized • biography, Che Guevara, communism, Cuba, Ernie Colon, Fidel Castro, Hill and Wang, Sid Jacobson
It certainly qualifies as an irony — and a pretty amusing one — that yesterday’s commie revolutionary sex symbol Che Guevara has been consigned in the popular imagination to some striking T-shirts worn by kids who probably only vaguely know who he was.
These kids are more concerned with buying into a fashion revolution than participating in a political one, that’s for sure. And it’s cute that Che’s face can still be utilized to offend somebody — like calling Obama a socialist comes off as a quaint, old-fashioned insult.
One further irony — or perhaps it’s more of a misfortune — is that Che really doesn’t inspire much more than that years later. In the 21st century, it’s his image that captures the imagination more than his ideals, fueled by his own Jack Kerouac phase. With buddy, motorcycle and memoir, Che isn’t so much inspiring progressive politics for Latin America as he is film adaptations of his book.
Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon take a dispassionate and reasoned approach in their “Che: A Graphic Biography” — one of the latest in exemplary Hill and Wang non-fiction graphic novel line — and this “just the facts, ma’am” motif is perfectly suited for younger reader.
It’s actually hard to explain in any kind of simple terms what exactly Che was. A revolutionary — what in the world does that mean to a kid in 2010? In terms of Jacobson and Colon — who have previously done fine work in their adaptation of the 9-11 Report and their self-penned follow-up, a history of the United States following that dark day — it means acknowledging the sex appeal without letting it obscure the meat on the bones in the career of a radical whose specifics are fuzzy in the memory.
Che — born Ernesto Guevara de la Serna — is a classic example of what Elvis Costello phrased as “a fine idea at the time, but now he’s a brilliant mistake.” An Argentinean rich kid with sharp intelligence, Che blamed many of the problems of Latin America — probably correctly — on the United States. For him, U.S. corporations lurked behind every corner, deep in the shadows, owning all opportunity in Central and South American countries and bleeding the inhabitants dry. No argument there.
Che’s passion for the people — and his embrace of communism as the solution — catapulted him into history, mostly thanks to the associations these led him to have. Many of these connections were made through his rich girlfriend — a woman he also took money from and begrudgingly married, even though she wasn’t quite up to his exacting standards of attraction.
No worries — even as Che winds his way into Fidel Castro’s embrace, he manages to callously betray two wives. He fights for the common man, but the women — they are another story.
The narrative cascades through Che’s career as a right-hand man to Castro onto his wind-down as a captain of his own revolution in the Congo — a disaster — and Bolivia. This last effort was where he met his fate in a naive attempt to replicate the situation in Vietnam as a way of drawing in the United States and creating a nightmare that Bolivia could climb out from somehow.
It’s the candor with which Colon and Jacobson deliver Che’s story that makes the book. They are obviously interested in presenting a complicated situation — one involving legitimate views presented through a sometimes stumbling messenger. They capture both the rightness and the wrongness of Che and the revolutions — including Cuba’s — that he stood at the center of.
Half a century later, communist revolution did not move like a fury through the world, freeing ordinary workers from tyranny — quite the opposite. With this in mind, it is perhaps best that Che is relegated to the flimsy adoration brought from T-shirt design, effectively placing him somewhere between Winnie the Pooh and Spongebob Squarepants in importance.
John Seven • 15th Feb 2010 • Book Articles, Comics, Uncategorized • Dean Hale, Eleanor Davis, graphic novels for kids, Jake Parker, Kazu Kibuisihi, Nathan Hale, Raina Telgemeier, Scholastic, Shannon Hale, Toon Books
This year has already started strong in the world of graphic novels for kids. The books below, aimed at readers from ages 9 to 13, stand as some of the best. They’re perfect for picky readers — or just students who might be struggling and seeking something a little different to grab their interest — but any reader, including open-minded grown-ups, would love any of these.
Bloomsbury has released a sequel to last year’s feisty, wild west retelling of “Rapunzel” from Shannon and Dean Hale, with illustrator Nathan Hale, that centers on our heroine’s mischievous sidekick, Jack of bean stalk fame. In “Calamity Jack,” the duo return to his hometown to save his fellow citizens from the schemes of the very same giant so adept at sniffing English blood. This time around, he’s got the place under his thumb, thanks to some kind of fairy tale-themed protection racket. With the introduction of romantic rival Freddie Sparksmith, the story takes on a welcome steampunk edge.
Jake Parker’s “Missile Mouse: The Star Crusher” (Scholastic Graphix) mixes a lightness that never interferes with the seriousness that Parker includes in the work — he wants to tell a good space adventure even as he reveals that all that stands between the universe and a horde of alien villains attempting to uncover the ancient secret of manufacturing black holes to use as weapons is a humanoid mouse working for the Galactic Security Agency. Leaping from the pages of “Flight,” this full-length outer space adventure plays it fun but straight and even manages to incorporate more actual science in the details than last year’s “Star Trek” movie — and it’s a lot better!
Eleanor Davis returns with “The Secret Science Alliance and the Copycat Crook” (Bloomsbury) her first kids’ book since her award-winning “Stinky,” released last year from Toon Books. Davis’ new work is a slight science fiction comedy with a pretty elevated outlook. Typical geek Julian Calendar breaks 
from the bonds of stereotyping and teams up with Ben, a jock who moonlights as a master mechanic, and funky scientist DIYer Greta to battle a villainous old-timer — and washed-up purveyor of outdated innovation — Dr. Wilhelm Stringer. Hardy laughs mix with some genuine science — as well as whimsical flights of fancy — and a fabulous new book series is born! It’s a great antidote to the overabundance of supernatural potboilers for younger readers and a definite outreach to a generation being raised on Make Magazine.
Raina Telgemeier’s “Smile” (Scholastic Graphix) started its life as a serialized story online and comes full circle in the format it was born to — a complete YA graphic novel that can compete with the best of any prose work.
This autobiographical work follows Telgemeier’s traumatic dental experience as a middle schooler — not just braces, but a score of restorative dental work, as well as periodontistry, which weaves through the ground-zero years of puberty. Telgemeier’s purpose is to offer some self-deprecating humor in the name, revealing that even the worst thing that could happen is not always the end of the world, though it might seem that way when you’re 13. It’s also an amusing tale of empowerment, revealing that part of growing up is growing past the cruelty of other kids.
One of the best Web comics ever has been collected in book form — Kazu Kibuisihi’s “Copper” (Scholastic Graphix), a work that reached creative and intellectual clarity that few comics for adults ever seem to. Boasting the philosophical depth of children’s authors like Arnold Lobel and Peter Sis, and one of the most elegant and fluid cartooning styles you will ever encounter, Scholastic brings Kibuisihi’s Web comic to print form and we’re all the better for it.
Copper is a boy and Fred is a dog, and together they inhabit one-page adventures that mix the trials of giant mushrooms, apocalyptic cityscapes, DIY airplanes and jungle adventures with subtle investigations of self-esteem, the nature of contentment, the satisfaction of difficult challenges and enjoying the moment. Deep and satisfying and very, very funny!
