Skip to content

Tag: al capp

Published March 6, 2013

Midweek Miscellany

‘The Art of Harvey Kurtzman’ curated by Monte Beauchamp and Denis Kitchen opens at the Museum of American Illustration in New York on March 6th. Boing Boing has more (via Drawger).

On a related note: Steven Heller on Al Capp at The Atlantic:

[Denis] Kitchen…loved Capp’s unpredictable plots, his sexy women, and his uncouth, often grotesque cast. But as a college student, Kitchen told me, he witnessed Capp’s transformation “from a progressive figure to a student-hating, pro-Vietnam War pal of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. And not long afterward saw sex scandal headlines gut his fame. Almost overnight he lost everything.” This intense love-hate feeling toward Capp and his work is what led Kitchen to want to understand the man better.

And: Kitchen talks to Michael Dooley about the new book Al Capp: A Life to the Contrary, at Imprint:

“I thought Al Capp was a flat-out genius. That said, I had also known for many years that he had quite a dark side. I’d been collecting every article and scrap for years and interviewing any associate I could find, so I fully expected our biography to depict a deeply flawed and even tortured man…  The ‘monster’ we discussed earlier was also a devoted son and father, an often generous man with assistants and strangers, a man capable of great charity, a man who wouldn’t tolerate a racist or homophobic joke.”

(To be honest, Capp still sounds kind of irredeemable.)

Every day. Onwards. — A. L. Kennedy on writing for love (and money), at The Guardian:

The first novel was treated gently and coddled probably more than it deserved to be. This wouldn’t happen now. The short story anthology as a first book is rarer than unicorn pie. (May contain traces of horse.) The hope of making even 50% of your income as a published author any more in the UK has probably also gone – unless you are lucky enough to produce a bestseller, preferably involving porn. This may change when UK publishers discover that the production of ebooks reduces overheads as well as cover prices. Who knows – it does tend to take a while for UK publishers to notice most things. I worry in case, for example, their offices catch fire and they all burn to death over a period of weeks, coming and going, sadly unable to realise that their coffees are boiling away to nothing in their melting cups. And this is, of course, a hard time for all industries, from the sprightly to the moribund.

Kennedy’s new book On Writing has just been published in the UK by Jonathan Cape.

See also: a short interview with Kennedy in Metro.

Comments closed
Published March 1, 2013

Something for the Weekend

Impressionable Minds — Edward Tenner on Al Capp: A Life to the Contrary and the legacy of the controversial cartoonist, at The Atlantic:

I still think of Fosdick as Capp’s masterpiece, running postmodern-style as a comic strip within a strip and accepted good-naturedly by Chester Gould, creator of its target Dick Tracy, for whom Capp always professed the highest regard. Its greatness exists even if Capp bowed to 1950s social conservatism in marrying Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae (which his emerging rival Charles Shultz called the worst comic-strip decision ever) in 1952. Even Disney didn’t hitch Mickey and Minnie Mouse.

Yet Fosdick, who had been introduced a decade earlier, was a pivotal character, probably the most subversive of authority of any of the comic personalities, but presented with such engaging absurdity that even Dr. Fredric Wertham’s anti-comic crusade could not stop him. As Shumacher and Kitchen say, it was an adult strip—and yet it was one acceptable on a Sunday morning around the family dining table, whatever its effects on impressionable young minds.

Friends Electric — Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, on the difference between online and offline experiences:

The reason people struggle with the tension between online experience and offline experience is because there is a tension between online experience and offline experience, and people are smart enough to understand, to feel, that the tension does not evaporate as the online intrudes ever further into the offline. In fact, the growing interpenetration between the two modes of experience—the two states of being—actually ratchets up the tension. We sense a threat in the hegemony of the online because there’s something in the offline that we’re not eager to sacrifice.

And finally…

Who says publishing is full of over-caffeinated alcoholics? — Prospero on the future of bookstores:

For a bookstore to remain successful, it must improve “the experience of buying books,” says Alex Lifschutz, an architect whose London-based practice is designing the new Foyles. He suggests an array of approaches: “small, quiet spaces cocooned with books; larger spaces where one can dwell and read; other larger but still intimate spaces where one can hear talks from authors about books, literature, science, travel and cookery.” The atmosphere is vital, he adds. Exteriors must buzz with activity, entrances must be full of eye-catching presentations and a bar and café is essential.

Comments closed