Kirby: King of Comics

I'd been looking forward to Kirby: King of Comics since I first heard about it a couple of months ago. I saw it over at Bookstop the other day. Most of the copies were in shrinkwrap but one was open. I don't think I'll be buying this, after all. The first sign of trouble was that it was oversized, at $40 perfect for a coffee table book. And from my thumb through standing in the aisle, that's in large part what it is, Kirby's art and the book design overshadowing Evanier's writing. I guess my disappointment stems not so much from what Kirby: King of Comics is as from the fact that it's not what I'd hoped and thought it would be: a mainstream but scholarly biography of Kirby's life. 

He's been dead over ten years and it's certainly time for such a dominant figure of comics and pop culture to get the biography he deserves, more in line with David Michaelis' Schulz and Peanuts from last year. Or Gabler's Walt Disney. Just think about what a Kirby biographer would get to play with, even in pop culture beyond comics:  the history of American animation from Kirby working as an inbetweener at the Fleisher Studios on Popeye cartoons in the 30s to his design work for television animation in the 70s. And in fine art, his work was "appropriated" by Roy Lichtenstein in the 1960s. The man grew up in a world that no longer exists, New York's Lower East Side, pretty much a real Bowery Boy, and he fought in World War II. Not to mention that his life pretty much is the history of the American comic book industry. To me, he screams out for a writer (don't laugh) capable of the depth Robert Caro has shown in his three volume LBJ biography. Funny enough, I still think Mark Evanier--who has always shown such an impressive grasp of comics history in his blogging and other writing---might be the person to tell such a big story; he worked with Kirby, and he himself has spent years in the industry, but I just don't think he had the space to do it here. 

Of course with all that said, I was just thumbing through it standing in the aisle so maybe I'm dead wrong. 

100 Notable Books

100 Notable Books of the Year

As the year ends, we get inundated with best of lists. Here's one that always makes me feel like an illiterate piker, the New York Times' 2007  100 Notable Books of the Year. This year I did worse than usual. So far, I've read a grand total of four--and one of those is Deathly Hallows, which I suspect the Book Review included just to keep common folks from getting shut out. 

Normally, they throw genre readers a few bones with a Stephen King or Walter Mosley's latest, but this year the NYT went strictly hardcore. No sf, mystery, or horror fiction and one graphic novel, Adrian Tomine's Shortcomings. As a result, not only is there not much on the fiction list that I have read, there's not much on there that I think I want to read. I love Richard Russo and Bridge of Sighs is waiting on my shelf. I'm sure I'll eventually read Chabon's book. Maybe the Ha Jin book when it comes out in paperback. In non-fiction, I've heard great things about the Ralph Ellison biography. That's about it.  I'd be fascinated to meet someone who'd read a significant amount of the fiction listed here. To be fair, the non-fiction seems a bit more mainstream.

Are any of you reading what our New York Times overlords are telling us to read? 

(Next up is the People Magazine year end best book list, which I always use to make myself feel smarter. And just for the record, the other books on the NYT list I'd already read, each of which I can recommend, were Schulz and Peanuts, David Michaelis' biography of Charles M.  Schulz' surprisingly melancholy life, The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross' (not that Alex Ross) history of modern classical music, and The Day of Battle, Rick Atkinson's history of the Allied invasion of Italy in World War II. Two Leni Riefenstahl biographies came out this year and of course I read the one that didn't make the NYT list.  But it was pretty good and one is enough). 

Calvin and Hobbes Creator Reviews New Charles Schulz Bio

The Grief That Made 'Peanuts' Good

By BILL WATTERSON
October 12, 2007; Page W5

SCHULZ AND PEANUTS: A BIOGRAPHY
By David Michaelis
(Harper, 655 pages, $34.95)

The comic strip "Peanuts" was more than a decade old when I started reading it as a kid in the mid-1960s. At that time, "Peanuts" was becoming a force of pop culture, with best-selling books and a newly burgeoning merchandising empire of plastic dolls, sweatshirts, calendars and television specials. The overwhelming commercial success of the strip often overshadows its artistic triumph, but throughout its 50-year run, Charles Schulz wrote and drew every panel himself, making his comic strip an extremely personal record of his thoughts. It was a model of artistic depth and integrity that left a deep impression on me. While growing up, I collected the annual "Peanuts" books and used them as a personal cartooning course, copying the drawings with the idea of someday becoming the next Charles Schulz.

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