Word: comicalities
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...easy to underestimate graphic novels--after all, they look just like their less evolved forebears, comic books, and if that's not bad enough, they have been saddled with that awkward name. (Maybe it would help if we called them tragic books?) They get sold in comic-book stores or shelved in that corner of Barnes & Noble that buzzes with preteen X-Men fans, a place where self-respecting adult readers fear to tread. No wonder Pekar wrote American Splendor for 27 years before mainstream America finally took notice. The graphic-novel business is reportedly worth about $100 million...
...hands of underground-comic pioneer Spain Rodriguez, the 1946 William Lindsay Gresham novel (later a 1947 movie) gets the cartoon treatment its subjects--hustling and degradation in a 1930s carnival--beg for. Magician Stanton Carlisle hatches a plan to pose as a spiritualist to con rich marks, in the process revealing the family history that destroyed his faith in God and man. Nightmare Alley (Fantagraphics; 129 pages) is an existential novel wrapped in a noir chiller, and Rodriguez's lurid drawings strike just the right balance of sheen and sleaze. Step right...
Berman and Pulcini have devised a perky-quirky style to tell Pekar's story, blending documentary material, comic panels and some editing tricks to create a kind of bipolar movie, not exactly haha funny but true to life--at least, to life on that unlevel playing field where Pekar (and millions like him) does his level best to keep going. --By Richard Schickel
...sometimes by the knowledge that man is a beast in all senses. In 1939, one year after White Crucifixion, he completed Midsummer Night's Dream, in which a woman uses her blue fan to deflect the ardor of a goat-ass who is but also is not Shakespeare's comic Bottom. We are born partly of the animal world, says Chagall, but sometimes we transform our base impulses into gold...
...seeds for deeper frustration, the Tigers won the Japan Series (once, that is, in 68 years). But otherwise, as with the Cubs of America (Osaka is perennially called Japan's Chicago), their place in the national pageant, and the seasonal order, is as the lovable bumpkin and comic prop. This year, though, not according to plan, the Tigers soared into first place in April and then refused to leave. They trounced the Giants, again and again (and their rivals' woes are compounded by the fact that it's now their star, Hideki Matsui, who is hitting home-runs in America...