Al Capp: A Life to the Contrary By Michael Schumacher and Denis Kitchen Bloomsbury, 305pages, $30 No vernacular artist, and possibly no American humorist, had a bigger following during the 1940s and ‘50s than Al Capp did. That Capp had to be banned from campuses in the late 1960s after repeated sexual assault charges —…
Comic artist Vanessa Davis lets us in on life at her Jewish day school, where she was named “Mensch of the Month.” What are you day school memories?
Spiderman heroically dispatched countless foes since he arrived on the scene in 1962. Nearly a half-century later, Brian Michael Bendis managed to kill him. In 2000, Bendis was hired to write Ultimate Spiderman, a modern-day retelling of the classic Spiderman story. More than 10 years, 160 issues and several blockbuster Hollywood adaptations later, Bendis did…
Corpse on the Imjin! And Other Stories By Harvey Kurtzman, Edited by Gary Groth Fantagraphics, 227 pages, $28.99 Harvey Kurtzman (1924-1993) is today remembered as the Bronx-born genius editor who invented Mad Magazine, the most pervasive satirical influence of the 20th century. That single claim-to-fame is hard to avoid, but Kurtzman’s larger role in the…
Art Spiegelman just wants to be left alone. Or, rather, he would really like it if parts of his career and biography were minimized, and others celebrated more. The central tension, both in the long conversations he had with University of Chicago professor Hillary Chute, the germ and base level of “MetaMaus” (2011), and now…
Every frame in Rachel Loube’s “Every Tuesday: A Portrait of the New Yorker Cartoonists,” now screening at the Boston Jewish Film Festival, together with “The Art of Spiegelman,” threatens to dissolve into cliché. There is the premise itself: Every Tuesday, New Yorker cartoonists, young and old, submit their work, and then go for lunch. It…
Superman Is Jewish? By Harry Brod Free Press, 240 pages, $25 There has been a little boom, recently, in books about the links between Jews and comic books. Stack up Simcha Weinstein’s “Up, Up, and Oy Vey: How Jewish History, Culture, and Values Shaped the Comic Book Superhero,” Danny Fingeroth’s “Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews,…
The Carter Family: Don’t Forget This Song By Frank M. Young and David Lasky Abrams, 192 pages, $24.95 With a recent issue of Time magazine declaring “The Carter Family” to be one of the seven best comics of 2012, artist David Lasky has ascended to the top tier of Jewish-American comic artists, an august group…
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