About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Abraham Riesman
Rave The Washington Post Riesman tells the story with lively and insightful writing. But he is hindered, as are all historians of comics, by that world’s ephemeral nature ... To his dying day, Lee claimed the stories and characters were his. Riesman is skeptical. (I, who live for this stuff, was enthralled by his deep-dive, inconclusive analysis of whether Lee or Kirby came up with the Fantastic Four, but won’t assume you’ll feel likewise.) ... This is an excellent dig below the geniality that shows casual fans who he really was.
Cullen Murphy
Positive The Washington Post Cullen Murphy’s excellent Cartoon County is a history of a group of those artists, the ones established in the 1950s and 1960s, whose work didn’t so much break rules as make them familiar to the tens of millions of us who started our Sundays with a look at the four-color comics ...seriously charming, in the sense that it made me want to travel to the enchanted time and place that Murphy presents ...delivers deft insights into the cultural anthropology of this vanished society, from the microscopic...to the ritualistic...to the global ...a skilled observer, and his prose is supplemented by a jaw-dropping array of cartoons, sketches and photographs ... Largely left out are the affairs and the insurmountable family conflicts... He really makes you wish you were there. And with this book, just for a little bit, you are.
Michael Tisserand
Positive The Washington Post ...skillfully returns context to Krazy Kat, revealing that it could have come from no other time or place than during the accelerated rise of the American media empire ... Beyond social niceties and a bit of scatology, however, his letters (transcribed here, perhaps more for scholars than the general reader) leave little evidence behind of whatever deeper matters drove him ... Still, Tisserand’s work is impressive. His seating of Herriman’s achievements among other battling art forms of the time is essential for understanding comics history.
Rob Spillman
Positive The Washington Post I want to assure him, as I’ve assured myself: Worrying about having the experience is the experience. It just happens that life is fabulously anxious. Writers are not the ones invited to the dance. We’re the ones with our noses to the window, wondering about the people who seem to be having such a good time. Spillman’s life is a good one to read, and when people start to quote from it, the dance will continue.
Paul Goldberg
Rave The Washington Post “The Yid is darkly playful and generous with quick insights into the vast weirdness of its landscape ... We are most immersed in the past, I think, when we watch someone manipulate it. This might be, ironically, a lesson Stalin taught, too, but it’s still an apt one for readers to consider when engaged with such a fine enterprise as this one.