Word: comicalities
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...Comic books can be beautiful. Not just beautiful like touching, sad or poignant - though they can be all those things - but beautiful like an object. This may sound peculiar to some, and understandably so. Comics began as disposable entertainment. Investing the everlasting qualities of beauty into them would have been a waste of time. Only in the last twenty years, particularly these past five or so, have creators begun to explore the idea of the comic as a thing of beauty. With just a little care they can combine art, design and language into an orgiastic menage-a-trois...
...Earth," guest edited the hard covered book, taking over for regular "McSweeney's" editor Dave Eggers ("A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.") Ware's influence can be seen even before you tear off the shrink-wrap (an ironic touch given Ware's disdain for polybagged, untouchable collector's comics). The cover appears deconstructed. And it is, sort of. The dust jacket unfolds into a 29 x 21 3/4 inch, poster-size, full-color work about God, man and comic strips. The verso displays Gary Panter's giant mandala of cartoon and fine-art characters through the ages. Ingeniously, when wrapped...
...even a few prose pieces by the likes of John Updike, Chip Kidd ("Peanuts: the Art of Charles M. Schulz") and Glen David Gold ("Carter Beats the Devil"). The works have been loosely organized by genre. Early in the book appears what may be considered the world's first comic strip: Rodolphe Topffer's 1839 "The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck," about a despondent bachelor who perpetually fails at both love and suicide. A major revelation, in its charming way it lays the groundwork for both the jollities and existential torments of comix to come. This becomes the first...
...Added up, it makes "McSweeney's" #13 the finest comic anthology ever put together. Ware's talents as designer and editor have turned "McSweeney's" issue 13 into a work of extraordinary depth and beauty. It culminates his efforts at moving the public's idea of comic books from consumable juvenilia to museum-worthy artworks that still retain their puerile edge. (Ware's work has appeared in both the 2002 Whitney Biennial and Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.) This will be the standard that future books must meet...
...Kawato is calling for a 30-year national project that would combine government money, academic research and corporate know-how to build a humanoid with the intelligence and the physical ability of a 5-year-old. He calls the proposal the Atom Project--after the Japanese name for the comic-book robot superhero known in the U.S. as Astro Boy. "Atom was abandoned by its creator, who built it to replace his dead son, because it was incapable of growing," Kawato notes. "We know how to make our Atom learn." --By Toko Sekiguchi