Drawn to New York: An Illustrated Chronicle of Three Decades in New York City By Peter Kuper, Introduction by Eric Drooker PM Press, 208 pages, $29.95 This oversized, four-color 30-year compendium of comics, magazine illustrations, painting and sketchbook work by the artist best known for his “Spy vs Spy” pages in Mad Magazine, is stunning…
Poet, publisher and bookstore maven Lawrence Ferlinghetti is, at 94, arguably the most popular living versifier, or at least author of the single most popular book of poetry — the million-selling “A Coney Island of the Mind” (1957). It’s a distinction he carries lightly in Christopher Felver’s new documentary “Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder.” The…
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 —…
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…
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…
Crime Does Not Pay, Volumes 1 and 2 Dark Horse Archives, $49.99 per volume Someone once quipped that a history of American theater minus Jews would be far more difficult than a history of Jewish Americans without theater. The same goes for comic books in their glory era, from the late 1930s to the early…
Lost and Found: Comics 1969-2003 By Bill Griffith Fantagraphics Books, 364 pages $35 Bill Griffith, the one prominent figure of underground comix to reach the daily comic page mainstream, has delivered again with a phone book-sized volume both odd and pleasing. It comes with a Long Island back-story. Life (suburban life, that is), found this…
The Association of Jewish Libraries Guide to Yiddish Short Stories By Bennett Muraskin Ben Yehuda Press, 79 pages, $14.50 The title of this small but useful book might have been lengthened to include “in the English language,” but the point is taken. We are now in a veritable golden age of translation, though the “golden”…
100% of profits support our journalism
