Books, Design and Culture
Tom Gauld for The Guardian.
My ‘to be read’ wall feels particularly bad at the moment. I did, however, read an ARC of She’s a Killer by Kirsten McDougall on vacation, which is fun if you like an unreliable narrator who is not quite a genius, but very possibly a sociopath (and has an imaginary friend).
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Tom Gauld‘s Midsummer’s Eve cartoon for The Guardian is from last month (obviously!), but I’m borrowing it to make a bit of boring and overdue social media housekeeping more interesting!
While I haven’t yet asked Wizard Toby to deactivate the Casual Optimist account like a some kind of despairing Baphomet, I have pretty much abandoned Twitter. It’s disappointing because I’ve met some great people through the app and it has always been a tremendous resource, but I can’t support it any more.
I’ve always hated Facebook and I haven’t posted to the Casual Optimist page there in at least a couple of years. I did, however, start an Instagram account which I’m trying to update at least once a month if you want to follow along there. I think it’s pretty unlikely that I will do anything with Threads.
I’m not on Bluesky, but I am trying out Mastodon. It promises a lot, I’m just not quite convinced by it yet (and I gather from more prolific posters than me that there is something of a sea lion problem there). I’ll post a link if/when there is a proper Casual Optimist account. In the meantime, you can find me here.
There is an RSS feed that you can subscribe to if you still use a reader (I use the Old Reader FWIW; I’m not sure what the cool kids are using), or you can get it as an email (it’s not perfect but it works).
Updates are also sent automatically to Tumblr if you’re still rattling around that haunted abandoned mansion.
Anyway, sorry for being very online and tedious. I’ll try to post some more interesting stuff soon (if I don’t quietly pack it in completely and put myself out to pasture…)
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A powerful cover for June 23 2023 edition of Guardian Weekly. Art direction by Andrew Stocks.
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I think pretty much every book cover designer I know shared this over the weekend. Every British one at least…
Tom’s latest collection of literary cartoons, Revenge of the Librarians, is out now.
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This is a tragically accurate portrayal of how it has been going during the pandemic.
(Tom Gauld for The Guardian of course)
1 CommentThe Guardian has an essay by American cartoonist Art Spiegelman on the events that shaped the original ‘golden age’ superheroes and their creators, and why these characters still resonate with readers and movie-goers:
The young Jewish creators of the first superheroes conjured up mythic – almost god-like – secular saviours to deal with the threatening economic dislocations that surrounded them in the great depression and gave shape to their premonitions of impending global war. Comics allowed readers to escape into fantasy by projecting themselves on to invulnerable heroes.
Auschwitz and Hiroshima make more sense as dark comic book cataclysms than as events in our real world. In today’s all too real world, Captain America’s most nefarious villain, the Red Skull, is alive on screen and an Orange Skull haunts America. International fascism again looms large (how quickly we humans forget – study these golden age comics hard, boys and girls!) and the dislocations that have followed the global economic meltdown of 2008 helped bring us to a point where the planet itself seems likely to melt down. Armageddon seems somehow plausible and we’re all turned into helpless children scared of forces grander than we can imagine, looking for respite and answers in superheroes flying across screens in our chapel of dreams.
Apparently a version of this essay was originally intended to serve as the introduction to a Folio Society collection called Marvel: The Golden Age 1939–1949, but was rejected for not being ‘apolitical’.
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Tom Gauld for The Guardian.
For some reason the Samuel Beckett Advent Calendar reminds me of the Half Man Half Biscuit song Joy Division Oven Gloves.
Tom has a new postcard book The Snooty Bookshop out now.
Comments closedWell, this is a little close to home isn’t it?
Tom Gauld for The Guardian.
On a related note, Tom’s musical cover for April 16 edition of The New Yorker is lovely.
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