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To the Letter: Peter Neumeyer on Edward Gorey
In the summer of 1968, Harry Stanton, then editor and vice president of textbook publisher Addison-Wesley, arranged a day of sailing with Harvard professor Peter Neumeyer (1929–) and the iconoclastic author and illustrator Edward "Ted" Gorey (1925–2000), plotting a collaboration in the form of a children's book about a boy and his housefly. It would be wildly successful, spawning Donald and the . . ., published in 1969, and two more famed collaborations (Donald Has a Difficulty and Why We Have Night and Day, released in 1970 and 1982). The illustrative style, which recalls Gothicism and Orientalism, still looks fresh today.
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Full Color: Serial Fiction by Charles Burns
In 2005, Charles Burns' serial graphic novel, Black Hole (Pantheon), combined 10 years of comic frames and 12 separate volumes (the first four by Kitchen Sink, the remaining eight by Fantagraphics) into one hard cover. Black Hole would prove to be arguably the first literary crossover of the graphic novel-not a memoir or a superhero, but a bona fide work of multi-media fiction.
Black Hole was typical of the work of Burns, a longtime illustrator for The Believer, for its evidently deep care, stark black-and-white lines, and spartan narrative and composition. In 2005, John Hodgman of the New York Times described the project—now a screenplay by Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman, with David Fincher attached to direct—with unqualified awe:
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Artists Do the Math
The division of art and text was, from the start, artificial; the technology of the printing press limited the art it could reproduce. Present-day media is restoring that relationship: art and text, back together, as it should be. The more difficult re-integration is art and science. The Romantics saw no distinction: scientists wrote poetry; poets contributed and borrowed from science. Today, the rift is vast.
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Malcolm McLaren Puts on a Show
"It's all the same," is an argument at the core of the Twentieth Century. We find it in the totalizing narratives of anthropology (Joseph Campbell or Sir James Frazer), and structuralist-inclined psychology (Freud or Jung)-even in notions of art as universal or timeless. But by the second half of the century, artists and critics were no longer convinced that everything was the same, world-over, even if they had gained assurance that as far as pop culture went, the same, over and over and over, was all there was: a uniform dimension of the spectacular, insipid, and unfathomably shallow. Step in, cultural decoders and re-fashioners like Andy Warhol—and prefabricator extraordinaire (and not coincidentally post-FabFour) producer-cum-artist Malcolm McLaren.
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Graphic Novelist Michael Kupperman Describes Modern Humor
In 2005, the first issue of Tales Designed to Thrizzle launched into the uncertain graphic novel and comics market. The publisher, Fantagraphics, eminent in the not-for-children category that emerged from the "underground comics" renaissance, issued the series in traditional fashion. The first five installments of Tales to Thrizzle, now compiled in Tales to Thrizzle Volume One, are comic books. Each book consists of a number of stories and segments, all adhering to a single sensibility—the sensibility of the author and artist, Michael Kupperman.But the Tales Designed to Thrizzle series is not all tradition; it's largely a satire, a satire of a pulp fiction oeuvre that didn't take itself that seriously to begin with. Kupperman's humor—a mix of genre, non-sequitur and nonsense—is a kind of laughter in the void, wonderfully lucid and slightly sickening.
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Collage and acrylic on paper, thread, string, plastic lid
48 x 30 ¼ in.
