Tag: comics

Book: Art Spiegelman “Maus”

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A comic book about the genocide of Jews? Sounds unusual, but why not? The important thing is to convey knowledge, and the method is secondary. Some people read books, some only watch movies, and some consume information exclusively through comics. And it’s long been foolish to think that comics are just for kids or the unintelligent. As the history of manga shows (see my review of Frederik L. Schodt’s “Manga! Manga!: The World of Japanese Comics”), sometimes comics can convey more knowledge than a specialized encyclopedia.

So the existence of such a comic didn’t surprise me at all. What did make me slightly wary, though, was the prestigious award it received. I have this odd quirk—I tend not to trust overly hyped or award-winning works. It seems to me that these awards often follow their own internal logic, which doesn’t always correlate with actual quality.

Maus by Art Spiegelman is “the only comic book to win a Pulitzer Prize,” as proudly stated on the cover. And it tells the story of a Polish Jew, Vladek Spiegelman, who struggled to survive after Nazi has occupied Poland but ultimately ended up in a concentration camp with his wife.

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Book: Debbie Tung “Book Love”

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The very existence of my book blog makes it clear that I read a lot and love books. But what few people know is that this love isn’t just a casual hobby; it’s a deep passion for collecting and cataloging that started in my childhood. Once I could afford to buy books with my own money, I would purchase far more than I could actually read. It brought me immense joy to lay out my collection, admire the covers, and revel in my growing library… “My precious!”

For a long time, I resisted transitioning to digital formats, but circumstances eventually forced me to. I simply had no more space for physical books, and it was far easier to bring an e-reader on business trips than to lug around several books (though I still remember carrying a 950-page tome with me everywhere and reading it at every opportunity).

Why am I telling you all this? Debbie Tung’s book Book Love immediately won me over the moment I read the synopsis: “If you love the rustle of book pages, the smell of fresh ink, find bliss in bookstores, and devote all your free time to reading or searching for new books, then this comic is about you and for you!” I thought to myself, this is exactly about me! Plus, the book was described as “a sharp, subtle, and humorous take on people who are deeply in love with books.”

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Book: Frederik L. Schodt “Manga! Manga!: The World of Japanese Comics”

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At one point in my work, I had to closely engage with the manga and anime industry (in the entertainment field, it’s quite normal for different areas of the entertainment industry to overlap: many games and movies are based on anime, and vice versa). However, I could never say I was a fan of this genre (unlike my older daughters). In my childhood, we didn’t have many comics, let alone their Japanese form in the style of manga, and my exposure to anime was limited to a couple of animated films that were allowed on Soviet cinema screens. I vaguely remember two: Taro, the Dragon Boy (which I really liked as a kid) and, later on, Puss in Boots: Travels Around the World. But we didn’t even know back then that this was anime.

After a closer encounter with it, I decided at some point to study the subject in more depth. Some aspects seemed quite strange to me, as someone raised in a completely different culture. For instance, when we were preparing to launch World of Tanks in South Korea, our Korean office practically created all the training materials from scratch, and to me, these pages on the site looked wild — it was a huge scroll of content in the form of a manga-style comic. But that’s just how they’re accustomed to receiving information.

As I delved deeper into the topic, I learned many interesting facts that all anime fans know, but the average person probably hasn’t even heard of. For example, many well-known Western franchises either have Japanese roots or were simply “borrowed” from Japanese creators due to a rather unique approach to copyright at the time. Here are just a few prominent examples to give you an idea:

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Fred Van Lente, Ryan Dunlavey “The Comic Book History of Comics”

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I can’t say I’m a huge fan of comics, but there are some superheroes I quite like (in their more modern interpretations), and I have read a few comics. I don’t consider it a lowbrow genre—many comics, in terms of emotional intensity, are just as good as highly respected books. Still, my familiarity with the genre is fairly superficial. That’s why it was all the more surprising that I became interested in a book about the history of comics. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that the book itself is made in the form of a comic.

Both authors, Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey, are comic creators themselves (not just this book), so they know the industry from the inside. In their book The Comic Book History of Comics, they set out to show where the essence of modern comics comes from, how they developed, became international, faced persecution, and evolved according to local traditions.

Initially, the book seemed light and purely entertaining, but it quickly proved that the authors were taking the subject very seriously. They draw constant parallels between comics and the animation industry, as these two art forms were closely connected in the early stages. Disney’s Mickey Mouse first appeared in a cartoon but quickly transitioned to comic book pages. The style of Disney’s animated films had a huge influence not only on American comics but also on the development of their Japanese counterpart, manga.

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Edward Ross “Filmish: A Graphic Journey Through Film”

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How badly I wanted to read this book! And how great my disappointment turned out to be! It’s much easier to list what’s wrong with this book than to find anything good about it.

In Russian the book is titled How Film Works: Theory and History of Cinema and was marketed as “an extensive study presented as a stylish and engaging comic.” But contrary to the title and description, it’s not about how cinema works at all. Frankly, the translators share some of the blame here, as the original title is Filmish: A Graphic Journey Through Film, which didn’t claim to be about how cinema works, nor about theory or history.

So what is it actually about? If I were to sum it up briefly, I’d say this: it’s a collection of completely unrelated paragraphs that try to appear as a scholarly article with deep insights. More often than not, these “insights” come from other people, whom the author frequently quotes throughout the book. This is criticism in its worst form, where the writer attempts to explain what the filmmaker intended to convey, or what they were thinking. But reality shows that often the filmmaker wasn’t thinking about anything of the sort (there’s a great example with the horse in the film Afonya, which Georgiy Daneliya wrote about in his memoirs).

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