In this definitive study of one of popular culture¿s favorite genres Robert C. Harvey, a cartoonist and comics critic, traces the evolution of the comic book as a potent form of narrative art. He takes it from its beginnings in the 1930s through the most contemporary of productions in the mid-1990s. In defining comic book aesthetics Harvey establishes both a critical perspective and a vocabulary for evaluating the art. Because he is an able practitioner himself, his insights are especially valuable. As he demonstrates how words and pictures function together to tell stories in ways unique to the medium, he explains the processes of narrative breakdown, page layout, and panel composition, and shows how these aspects of the art form can be manipulated for dramatic effects. Enhanced by many illustrations, this detailed examination of comic book art includes work from both the mainstream and the counterculture, both veteran and newcomer. Whether traditional or iconoclastic, their cartoon art continues to uphold the aesthetic that Harvey finds to be the basis of cartooning.
Publishers Weekly,Harvey (The Art of the Funnies), a working cartoonist and comics historian, has written a serviceable examination of the aesthetics of comics���what he calls the ``verbal-visual blending principle,'' the interdependency of words and pictures that gives comics their unique communicative character. Among other things he outlines the critical elements of the comics medium (narrative breakdown into panels, panel composition, page layout and drawing style) and usefully debunks the all-too-frequent tendency to align comics criticism with film criticism, which overemphasizes analogous traits between them. Ostensibly about comics aesthetics, in large part the book is really a basic narrative history of the comic book industry and popular comics genres, tangentially but helpfully enumerating how the cutthroat economics of a Depression-born business have shaped the artifice of comics to this day, retarding their development (if not their mainstream commercial popularity) into a serious art form. On occasion his prose can be a bit stilted, but the discussions of Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzmann and Gil Kane alone (and the very liberal reproduction of their artwork) would recommend the book. His narrative history carries right up to the alternative comics and artists of today, culminating, naturally enough, with the most inventive, insightful investigation of comics aesthetics: Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
