The Warren Commission Report By Dan Mishkin, Ernie Colon, and Jerzy Drozd Abrams ComicArts, 160 pages, $29.95 Conspiracies are everywhere if you know where to look. Over the last century, Americans have increasingly looked for dire machinations behind the unbelievable. Much as our ancestors sat around campfires telling mythic tales to explain how the sun…
Star Trek: The Original Topps Trading Card Series By Paula M. Block and Terry J. Erdman 216 pages, $19.95, Abrams ComicArts Few fans today recall that Star Trek has been the focus of several trading card sets through the years, beginning with the Leaf Brands series prior to the better known Topps cards from the…
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward By H.P. Lovecraft and I.N.J. Culbard 128 pages, SelfMadeHero/Abrams, $19.95 I never could warm up to H.P. Lovecraft’s prose. It was turgid and overly descriptive, so on the one hand, he had a tremendous imagination but put me to sleep as he conjured up the unimaginable horrors. His visual…
Mars Attacks • Abrams ComicArt • hardcover $19.95, also available in electronic format. Publication date: October 1, 2012 There’s a seminal moment in every weirdo’s life where we experience something so outrageous our worldview is altered severely and forever. For Ray Bradbury and Michael Moorcock, it was Edgar Rice Burroughs. For nascent NASA scientists, it was…
The Art and Making of the Dark Knight Trilogy By Jody Duncan Jesser and Janine Pourroy 304 pages, Abrams, $40 There is so much visually wonderful about Christopher Nolan’s trilogy of Batman films that this book seemed an obvious event. An oversized hardcover, it has amazing production values with gorgeous photography on heavy paper, cleanly…
Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? By Brian Fies 208 pages, $14.95, Abrams ComicArts The future never turns out like people predict. Nostradamus was wrong. Authors, philosophers, painters, and clergy have all been wrong about what the world of tomorrow will turn out to be. Depending upon when you were born and where you…
The Art of Daniel Clowes Edited by Alvin Buenaventura 224 pages, $40, AbramsComicarts The world appears to have caught up with Daniel Clowes, the artist who looks at the ordinary and conveys that feeling of loneliness and cluelessness so many of us feel on a daily basis. When he grew up, just three years behind…
Mission: Impossible is one of those malleable concepts that can tackle any content and is only as good as the concept, cast, and director. As a result, the film version of the classic 1960s television series has had its hits and misses, but seems to be getting stronger with each film. J.J. Abrams reinvigorated the…
[[[Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular & The New Land]]] edited by Harvey Pekar & Paul Buhle with Hershl Hartman Abrams Comicarts, 240 pages It always seemed to me like mine was the last secular “Jewish generation” in America. Born in the mid-1950s, in the depths of Brooklyn in a neighborhood adjacent to the heavily Orthodox neighborhood of…
[[[Will Eisner’s P.S. Magazine: The Best of The Preventive Maintenance Monthly]]] By Will Eisner, selected and with an overview by Eddie Campbell 272 pages, Abrams ComicArts, $21.95 As far back as 1940, during the publicity campaign for the launch of The Spirit Sunday section, Will Eisner spoke of the potential for comic books to do…
Krazy Kat & The Art of George Herriman A Celebration By Craig Yoe 176 pages, Abrams ComicArts, U.S. $29.95/Can. $35.95 As a kid, my first exposure to Krazy Kat were the 50 animated shorts that were produced between 1962-1964 and ran with Beetle Bailey and Snuffy Smith cartoons in a thirty minute block. I found…
[[[Shazam! The Golden Age of the World’s Mightiest Mortal ]]]By Chip Kidd, with photographs by Geoff Spear Abrams ComicArts, 246, pages, $35 With one magic word, Billy Batson turned from a 10-year old orphan into Captain Marvel. It was a form of wish fulfillment that beat [[[Superman]]] and may well explain why Fawcett’s comics were…
