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Saturday, November 06, 2004
From Crumb to Clowes
While at the TCJ board I found this thread on The New Smithsonian Book of Comic Book Stories: From Crumb to Clowes edited by Bob Callahan. From the thread, Norton employee John L. DiBello the book should hit stores around Nov. 15.
The contents according to Amazon.com:
A panorama of some of the most creative and subversive art of our times, this one-of-a-kind anthology celebrates the artistry and insight of comic book art, graphic novels, and graphic journalism from the 1960s to the present. Classics such as R. Crumb's I Remember the Sixties, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's Spider-Man saga "The Final Chapter" (from Spider-Man #33), and Dan Clowes's Caricature are featured, plus new sequences of work by Chris Ware and Ben Katchor created exclusively for this volume.
Other sections include work by Gilbert Shelton and Paul Mavrides ("The Death of Fat Freddy"), Harvey Pekar and R. Crumb ("Jack the Bellboy and Mr. Boats"), Carol Tyler ("Labor"), Stan Lee and Jim Steranko ("The Strange Death of Captain America"), Stan Lee and Jack Kirby ("The Hate Monger"), Bob Kanigher and Joe Kubert ("Enemy Ace"), Will Eisner ("Izzy the Cockroach and the Meaning of Life"), Rick Geary ("Farewell to Charlie Chaplin"), Kaz ("Dream of the Pork Rinds Fiend"), Charles Burns ("Robot Love"), Gary Panter ("Jimbo"), Art Spigelman ("The Honeymoon" from Maus), Frank Miller with Klaus Janson and Lynn Varley ("Born Again" from Daredevil), Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons ("Dr. Manhattan" from Watchmen), Neil Gaiman with Charles Vess and Malcolm Jones III ("A Midsummer Night's Dream" from The Sandman), Joe Sacco ("Hebron"), Jaime Hernandez ("Locos"), Gilbert Hernandez ("Pipo"), Dori Seda ("The Do-Nothing Decade"), Eddie Campbell ("Nobody Left at the Café Guerbois"), and more. The book is divided into four main galleries: Underground Comics, Silver Age Super Heroes, A Raw Generation, and Dark Fiction and Deep Fantasy, and includes a special supplement of four-color work by Lynda Barry and others as well. In his lively introduction Bob Callahan celebrates the achievements of American comic book art from the late 1930s to the present. An indispensible collection. 100 color, 300 b/w illustrations.
It's not unlike the McSweeney's book in that it's a sampler of comics that won't be new to long-time comics fans but will be for those who are unfamiliar with comics. Unlike the McSweeney's book, which was all modern alternative comics, this will include superhero and underground comics as well as alternative work.
Like many of you reading this I already have a lot of those works. Still, I can't resist having Charles Burns, Jack Kirby, Eddie Campbell, Frank Miller, Will Eisner, Rick Geary and others between two hardcovers. I don't think there's ever been an anthology of comics that has had quite this range of comics in it. The fact that it is all black and white also makes me interested. I do want to see the Watchmen excerpt in black and white as I felt the coloring of the book was its real low point.
They are no longer in print but if you can track down the older Smithsonian books, A Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics edited by Michael Barrier and Martin Williams and Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics edited by Bill Blackbeard (a name I've come to associate with excellent reprint books). I've only read the Comic Book one that reprints many Golden Age books, the latest of them were Harvey Kurtzman EC books. The reproductions are much better than what's found in the DC Archives books. It's much closer to what you find in the Chipp Kidd/Art Speigelman Plastic Man book or the Les Daniels books. I found it at two local libraries, so perhaps you can too. Of course, you'll be able to find this new book in most bookstores soon.
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