Word: comicalities
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...there anything in life more comfortably certain than a comic strip? In the first two panels, our hero gets into a scrape, in the last panel something funny happens, and then you're free to get busy solving the Jumble. But Lynda Barry's comic strips work backward: you laugh at the first few panels, and the last panel leaves you feeling sadder and wiser...
...drawings pretty early on," she says. "They were a weird amalgam of Playboy and Betty and Veronica. I used to sell those for a nickel." At Evergreen State College, which she describes as a small "hippie" school in Washington State that she attended in the 1970s, she drew comics for the school newspaper. "I was studying fine arts," she remembers, "and I went through a period when I had to call them drawings with words, because comics seemed too lame." As it happened, the paper's editor was another aspiring cartoonist, Matt Groening, who went on to create The Simpsons...
...huge hardcover that weighs ton, costs fifty bucks and has become required reading. No, it's not a textbook. It's Dave McKean's "Cages," (NBM Publishing Inc.; 496(!)pp.) A self-described comic novel, "Cages" first appeared as a series of sporadically published books from 1991 through 1996. Then the collected "Cages" became a victim of successive publishing bankruptcies, and has been out of print for some time. As ambitious as it is gigantic, it has now returned. Possibly the most high-end comic ever published, "Cages" combines art-book production values with a story about Life, Death...
...Cages" will, without question, set people's pretentiousness alerts off to honking and squealing. Dave McKean wants nothing less than to create and explore an entire cosmology. (That he wants to do it through the "lowly" comic book only adds to his challenge.) . But pretentiousness only applies to art that overreaches and fails. McKean, with remarkable talent and nerve, has succeeded in making a comic like no other. "Cages" has all the qualities of a real universe -- sprawling yet contained, chaotic yet organized, mysterious yet discernable, comedic yet serious. Assuming you have a re-enforced bookshelf, $50 doesn't seem...
...Cages" can be found at better comic shops and smart bookstores. Online booksellers have it at a steep discount - "only...