BOOK reMARKS

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

This book is a riveting menagerie of story, from the overarching tale of the novel, to the stories contained within it, to the Hans Christian Anderson tale referenced in the title. The co-authors both contributed to the story, with Mignola doing all of the illustrations in his characteristic fantastical Expressionist style. The prose is lucid, with a generally dark tone, leaving the highs and lows of the story to move the reader.

The setting of the story is an alternate Europe, during and directly after World War I. Events and places share many similarities with our world, but not all. Lord Baltimore is a former English officer suffering from the shocks of war, as well as an encounter with the titular vampire. The secondary characters all knew Baltimore at various times in life, and they meet in a tavern to tell stories about him and about their own lives. As it turns out, they have all experienced supernatural events that make them more liable to believe the narrative of Lord Baltimore's tragic life, and the ghastly plague that spread from the trenches of World War I to ravage Europe like the Red Death of Poe. In telling their stories, they come to grips with the damaging effects of evil and strengthen their resolve to do what is necessary to aid their own steadfast tin soldier.

Cabell Library PS3613.I38 B35 2007

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Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

The comic strip Boondocks ran in various locations from 1996 to 2006, at which point the strip ceased production, possibly for good. Subject matter included race, politics, religion, and all things African-American. The strip often followed current events closely, sparking intense debate and anger in many quarters, particularly with its intensely political turn after 9/11, and it was regularly pulled from or edited by many newspapers during its run. It stood out on the comics page, both for its largely African-American cast and for the vigor with which McGruder regularly laid into prominent politicians, media moguls, and self-appointed champions of Right.

All the Rage is a collection of selected 2003-2005 strips; articles about the strip and interviews with McGruder; and strips that caused controversy and/or were pulled. It comes packed with plenty of actual strips, along with enough behind-the-scenes information to give you a broad take on the comic. If you've never read Boondocks, which has since become an animated show, this isn't a bad place to start. Note that readers sensitive to cussing, racial epithets, or frank discussion of racial inequality may not find this book to be their cup of tea.

Cabell Library PN6728.B633 M34 2007

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Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

Robert Dennis Crumb is one of the more singular artistic talents America has ever produced. His deeply weird and unfettered genius gave birth to the underground comix of the 1960s and helped to separate comic books from capes and wish-fulfillment, bringing about the field of alternative comics as we know it. His work, beloved by some, reviled by others, has had a giant impact on comics people, from writers to publishers to editors, and they've all got something to say about the man.

The style and length of these appreciations vary greatly, from Alan Moore's commentary on Crumb's impact on him as a teenager, to the Rev. Ivan Stang's vision of Crumb as trend-evading creator, to Matt Groening's relived glee as a childhood consumer of illicit cartoons. This book makes for a fine, episodic read, the perfect thing to pick up, read some essays, and put it down again for a few days. Whether you enjoy it or not depends on how much you like comics, the history of comics, general weirdness, and the reminiscences of aging hippies about the zany 60s.

Those unfamiliar with Crumb's work should probably be aware that his detractors have labeled much of it as variously depraved, racist, misogynist, and obscene. Crumb's response to such criticisms has typically been to acknowledge and apologize for his flaws. At the same time, he defends his work on the grounds artists often use to defend transgressive works — that censorship is not a good thing, and that artists need to overcome voices of repression.

Cabell Library NC1429.C83 L54 1998

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Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

Charles Schulz is known worldwide as the creator of Snoopy, Charlie Brown, and all their other friends who anchored thousands of funny pages from 1950 to 2000. Among all the comics that have come and gone over the years, Schulz's Peanuts has stood the test of time. It was difficult at best to grow up in the United States in this period and not be in contact with Peanuts in some form or another: the comic strip, the television adaptations, the merchandise.

The interviews and appreciations presented in this volume vary in focus and length, ranging from 1956 to 1999 in date and including the exhaustive interview Schulz gave to comics publisher and editor Gary Groth in 1997. They provide remarkable insights into the life of the man behind this amazing American creation. Some are intriguing, some heartwarming, and some confounding. While it is never easy to hear hard things about idols or loved ones, this book displays the great man's strengths and weaknesses. While some interviewers glossed over the rough spots, others stuck doggedly to their guns, particularly Groth in his quest to understand Schulz's relationship with and attitude toward the commercialization of Peanuts.

If you have an abiding fondness for Peanuts or comics in general, you will probably enjoy this book. The details of Schulz's life, from little red-haired girls to his service in WWII, make for fascinating reading, and no one with a heart could fail to enjoy this beloved cartoonist's stories about the genesis and lives of his pen and ink creations.

Cabell Library PN6727.S3 Z4625 2000

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Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby is a tour de force among graphic novels, regarded by many comics scholars and aficionados as an instant classic. The story follows Toland Polk, a young white man growing up and coming to terms with his homosexuality in southern Alabama during the rise of the Civil Rights Movement. Along the way we meet his friends and family and other members of the town where he was born, each with their own story to tell.

Cruse’s storytelling is sure and restrained, and Toland’s journey is neither caricature nor pity party: he’s a young man with flaws, and you get to see him at his best and his worst. Cruse’s art is a fine example of mature draftsmanship -- reminiscent of R. Crumb’s crosshatching or Thomas Ott’s finely detailed scratchboard style. At the same time, the characters have a rounded, cartoonish quality that’s both amusing and disturbing, which in some way softens the blow when Toland witnesses horrible events, from beatings to knifings to lynchings.

Gay Liberation and the struggle for LGBT rights runs parallel in many respects to the history of the struggle for civil rights for people of all races. Cruse shows this in many ways, from the direct parallels between all the unrest of the 1960s and the gay rights struggles that followed directly on their heels. It's impossible to say when and how gay rights might have developed with the Civil Rights Movement, but as it is, the one owes a great debt to the examples of passion and pride set by the great black leaders of the 1960s, from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to Malcolm X.

Cabell Library PN6727.C74 S86 1995

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Celebrating Black History Month at the VCU Libraries

Reviewed by David Folmar, CLUAC Member

The book is a subversive statement in itself, masquerading as a book of graphics about the last great age of illustrated movie posters. It is really an examination of the so-called “Blaxploitation” movies of the 70’s and what they meant to the community of filmmakers then and now. The poster art is beautiful in a way that modern poster art for movies is not. It is heroic and informative and showcases the best of the illustrator's art of the period. The book, however, is so much more. It is a collection of interviews with the artists who made the black movies of 70 and the artwork that helped define them.

The interviewees include stars of the period like Pam Grier, Rudy Ray Moore and Isaac Hayes as well as movie makers like modern creative forces Ice-T, Samuel L. Jackson and Quentin Tarantino. They educate they reader about how the black movies of the 70’s were both a breakthrough for the black community and a chance for black actors to get work that let them star inside the Hollywood system. They hold that, far from being simply exploitative of the black community, they were part of a film movement that helped a lagging Hollywood system and proved a breakthrough for the black actors of today like Will Smith and Denzel Washington. The movies themselves also gave voice to a community that previously had no voice, and myths to a people who lacked heroes that were not just imitations of established, white-accepted roles for the black community.

Cabell Library PN1995.9.N4 M32 1998

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Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics is an engaging analysis of comics that delights while it intrigues. Written in comics format itself, the book analyzes comics throughout history, discussing their evolution and the conventions and methods that make them work, and it explores the possibilities of what they can do. First published in 1993, this book has justifiably received much praise and become one of the primary books read by people who want to know about comics.

Perhaps the best thing about this book is that it provides a solid defense of the worth of comics, showing the traditions comics came from, how most reader tend to confuse the medium (words & pictures) with the content (brainless superheroes, impossible musculature, etc.). McCloud packs a lot of information into each chapter, and if you take the time to think about what he's saying, you'll find yourself thinking hard about things you might never have considered, from the ingredients that combine to form complex emotions on a person's face to the ways we are indoctrinated into consuming texts to the effect created by putting a frame around something.

Cabell Library PN6710 .M335 1994

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Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

Edward Gorey was a strange, strange man who created odd, unclassifiable books (novels? comics? nonsense?) graced by decidedly weird illustrations. Aside from his books, his work appeared in many other places: the opening sequence of the PBS series Mystery, set designs for various theatrical productions, on lunchboxes, on the covers of other authors' books. His illustrations are generally very well suited to the works they accompany, and so even if you've never sat down with one of his books, it's easy to feel familiar with his work.

Prior to reading Amphigorey, my exposure to Gorey had been mainly to his work as an illustrator. This collection, which anthologizes fifteen different books (1953-1965), broadened my understanding and appreciation of Gorey as both a writer and an artist. It opens with The Unstrung Harp, the tale of one Mr. Earbrass' experience writing a novel, and it is better in many regards than a good three-quarters of all other books devoted to that subject. The Gashlycrumb Tinies is a macabre alphabet book, one of his many rhyming/verse works, illustrating each letter with the death of a child in a different manner. The Bug Book is the simple tale of the life of some very happy bugs, and how they deal with sudden appearance of a large and unpleasant bug. The West Wing is one of the oddest in the volume, a wordless book that may or may not have a narrative, and in which a house appears to be the central character. Taken together, the works in this collection are enjoyable, diverse, and fun, and they may challenge you to think in new ways about text and illustration, and what the relationship between the two is or ought to be.

Cabell Library PS3513.O614 A8

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Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

Fun Home is an autobiographical comic written in a nuanced, literary style, intermingling the stories of the author’s coming to grips with her sexual identity and her closeted father’s untimely death. Bechdel, author of Dykes to Watch Out For, draws in a style that meshes comfortably with her narrative, neither outshining nor underwhelming it. To consider this comic simple autobiography, however, would be a disservice. Through its pages one sees the trials and tribulations suffered by generations of queer America, both in the cities and in the small towns of America.

Fun Home will appeal to all readers who enjoy thoughtful literature. Bechdel's work is clever, emotionally gripping in a way that moves beyond simple feelings such as joy or anger and into the strange sensations (or lack thereof) that arise at life's crossroads. She includes many snippets of other authors' works when the characters are reading, using their texts to replicate their various epiphanies, from Camus to Colette.

Cabell Library PN6727.B3757 Z46 2006

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Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

Harvey Pekar is one of the people who helped begin the gradual broadening of acceptable subject matter for comics in the U.S. Starting in the 1960s, a number of comics creators began producing "underground comics" -- comics which had nothing to do with the typical subject matter of comic books. Harvey Pekar entered this arena in 1976 with his autobiographical series American Splendor.

This volume contains stories culled from recent decades of American Splendor. One of the most striking things about the book that's visible right away is the variation in the artwork. Pekar is a writer, not an artist, and has frequently been quoted as having said he "couldn't draw a straight line." Various artists have illustrated his stories over the years, and this book is a showcase of styles, from the rounded, almost kanji-like drawings of Frank Stack to the thin line realism of Joe Zabel.

The stories themselves vary quite a bit in nature, but all revolve around Pekar's life in Cleveland as a file clerk at a V.A. hospital. They have all the pluses and minuses of stories of anybody's daily life, but in each Pekar finds something meaningful to say that elevates it above the status of mere episode. The author is known for being downbeat and combative, and many of these stories deal with the pains and anxieties of real life, with no positive resolution. If you enjoy the fiction of Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, or perhaps Charles Bukowski, you might enjoy these stories of Harvey Pekar's life.

Cabell Library PN6727.P44 B47 2005

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Celebrating Black History Month at the VCU Libraries

Reviewed by Robert Johnson, Education Services Librarian

Toni Morrison's Jazz begins in 1926, when a salesman shoots and kills his teenage lover. At the girl's funeral, the man's wife attacks her corpse. The ensuing pages skirt between past, present, and future as the drama reveals itself. Not only is Toni Morrison's novel Jazz a gripping story of love and betrayal, but it also functions as an album of jazz music. It isn't just that Morrison captures the spirit of jazz music, or that she traces the history of the music as it moved from the country to the city (which she does), but Morrison's novel is structured like a piece of music. Characters function as instruments, and sections as songs. In particular, it compares nicely to John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, for the differences as much as the similarities. Coltrane's album revolves around spiritual revelation and praise and is almost entirely music, while Morrison's album centers on sex and the secular world and is all words. Both are four songs long, and if the concept of an entirely written word song seems implausible, check out song four "Psalm," which is part music and part free-verse poetry written in the liner notes (not sung). Morrison's book is the work of masterful writer at the height of her powers.

Cabell Library PS3563.O8749 J38 1992

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Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian

In contrast to the lengthy Possession: A Romance, another A. S. Byatt work reviewed on this site, The Matisse Stories is a small collection of three short stories. Each of the stories incorporates a different Matisse painting, although they are about contemporary characters going about their everyday lives. Byatt's descriptions are colorful and highly sensory...not only when she is describing the Matisse paintings, but also as she describes setting and character. All three stories are primarily about relationships—between a woman and her hairdresser; between a husband, wife, and their housekeeper; and between an academic department head and a professor accused of sexual harassment—and how those relationships alternately hide and reveal complex human emotions.

Cabell Library PR6052.Y2 M38 1993

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Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian

Bel Canto opens with a lavish birthday celebration honoring Japanese businessman Mr. Hosokawa, whose sole reason for visiting this unnamed South American country is to hear the world-famous soprano, Roxane Coss. During the festivities, armed terrorists break into the Vice President's home, where the party is taking place. Their plan to kidnap the President is thwarted when they discover he is not in attendance, and instead, they hold the partygoers captive. The next day, several men and all women (except Roxane Coss) are released, and the captors and hostages settle into their new routines. The hostages are from all over the world, and have only Mr. Hosokawa's translator to assist them in communicating. As days stretch into weeks and weeks stretch into months, the captors and prisoners form strong bonds with each other and with the music that comes to dominate their existence. Life in the house becomes idyllic for many of its inhabitants, and preferable to the world outside the walls surrounding the mansion. Patchett's inspiration for Bel Canto was a 1996 hostage crisis in Lima, Peru, which lasted for more than four months and was said to include soccer games, chess matches between captors and hostages, and pizza delivery. Bel Canto won the Orange Prize for Fiction and was a P.E.N./Faulkner nominee.

Cabell Library PS3566.A7756 B4 2001

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Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian

Based on a Johannes Vermeer painting from 1665, Girl with a Pearl Earring is a fictional account of this mysterious piece of art dubbed "The Dutch Mona Lisa." The story takes place in Delft, a small but vibrant Dutch city where Vermeer spent his entire life. Griet is a young girl who is sent to work as a maid in his household which included his wife, mother-in-law, five children, and housekeeper. Griet is intrigued by Vermeer, a quiet and reclusive man. Because she has an eye for art, he begins to teach her about his processes and allows her to help grind paints, mix colors, and work with background objects, although they conceal these activities from others in the house. When Vermeer's patron insists that he use Griet as a model for his next painting, suspicion and jealousy, as well as a subtle undertone of attraction between artist and subject, force Griet to make a difficult choice that will impact the rest of her life.

A feature of this book that is particularly enjoyable is the artistic details, particularly of color and light, used to describe the city and its residents. In one vivid scene, Griet is at her parents' house and is chopping vegetables for a soup when Vermeer and his wife arrive. She explains, "I always laid vegetables out in a circle, each with its own section like a slice of pie. There were five slices: red cabbage, onions, leeks, carrots, and turnips." As Vermeer probes her about how she decided where to place them, he says "I see you have separated the whites...And then the orange and the purple, they do not sit together. Why is that?" She replies, "The colors fight when they are side by side, sir." Such descriptive imagery is what makes this book especially memorable.

Cabell Library PS3553.H4367 G57 1999

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