Monday, January 2, 2012

Cartoon America Review

Customer reviews for Cartoon America



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Cartoon America Review by Maxwell J. Wilcomb (Olathe, Kansas United States)

I'm sure this is a great book, but I could read neither the mouseprint text nor see much of the cartoons. The unwieldy size made a manifier hard to use so I gave up and dumped it at the library.


Cartoon America Review by Arthur Katz (Lexington, MA USA)

This is a handsome book, covering the entire history of our country as seen by the critics with the least restraints - the political cartoonists and the comic strip cartoonists. It aims to be comprehensive, and it is, and it includes some wondeful text by people who have spent their lives in the field.

Buy it for your coffee table, but read it before you put it there.


Cartoon America Review by Craig W. Englund

What a disappointment ! ! ! With all the books published over the past fifty years on comic art in general, one would would expect more useful reference material to exist on the subject. Other than the publications of Brian Walker, Bill Blackbeard, Richard Marchall, and precious few others, most authors and editors, including those who produced this volume, fail to understand that not all art that is described by the terms comic and cartoon appeals to the same audience and that these various art forms are not all appropriately discussed in the same book. As an inevitable result we get books which do not fulfill the expectations of those interested in any of the loosely related fields.

Comic strip art and comic book art are closely related -- the initial and constant appeal of both lie in the existence of continuing characters who develope over time, thereby becoming small parts of the lives of the readers. Animation art can be similarly ingrained into the viewer's psyche, as the films that are the ultimate product of such art are viewed and reviewed over the course of many years. But it is hard to do justice to both comic stiip/book art and animation art in the same book, given the very different manners by which the two forms of art are produced. Political cartoons are even less compatible with discussions of comic strip/book art, since they serve a very different purpose and are intended for a markedly different audience. Very few comic strip or comic book fans have more than a passing interest in political cartoons.

Few readers seeing the title "Cartoon America" would expect a volume wherein at least half the text and illustrations deal with political cartoons. Aside from the reproduction of some important comic strip originals, this book will probably fall short of almost everyone's expectations. The animation and comic book chapters are particularly weak, not because of the commentary but because the examples of such art in the Library of Congress (specifically the Art Wood collection) are not at all distinguished. Even the chapters devoted to comic strip art are somewhat disappointing. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the vaunted Wood Collection was neither as broad nor as deep as most people assumed and that a large number of the thousands of items in that collection consisted of political cartoons, not comic art. Perhaps the collection would have appeared more impressive if it had been presented through serparate books on the various subjects. It is too bad that we have been given just another in a long line of books that fail to do justice to any of the art forms because they are lumped together in what is an inherently inapropriate mix.

Craig Englund

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