Books about Cartoonists from Amazon.com

In this groundbreaking, bestselling graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel charts her fraught relationship with her late father. In her hands, personal history becomes a work of amazing subtlety and power, written with controlled force and enlivened with humor, rich literary allusion, and heartbreaking detail.

Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the "Fun Home." It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve..
Price: $7.45 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Amazon Significant Seven, October 2007: There's no book this year that made people's eyes light up when I told them about it more than Schulz and Peanuts, David Michaelis's new biography of cartoonist Charles Schulz. (And when they saw the obvious-but-brilliant Chip Kidd-designed cover, their eyes got even brighter ) Everyone, it seems, feels a personal connection to Peanuts (a name, by the way, that Schulz always hated), but few have a sense of the artist whose small troupe of big-headed characters still lives at the center of our imagination. If some mystery about the man still remains after reading Michaelis's sharp, engaging, and level-headed biography that's no fault of the biographer--in fact, it's to his credit. Michaelis parses Schulz's particular combination of Midwestern reserve and steely determination and the strip's still-surprising balance of exuberance and misery, and he reminds us what a colossal cultural force it became, especially in the 1960s. But even as he ingeniously finds sources for Schulz's four-panel vignettes in the events of his biography, he recognizes that the true, sometimes inexplicable drama of his life took place when he sat down every day for 50 years to trace Linus's wobbly strands of hair, fill in Snoopy's black nose, and, time and again, letter the words "Good grief." --Tom Nissley.
Price: $18.59 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The final volume of Will Eisner's celebrated instructional trilogy explores the critical principle of body grammar in comics storytelling

Designed and outlined by Will Eisner before his death in 2005, this posthumous masterwork, the third and final book in the Will Eisner Instructional Series, finally reveals the secrets of Eisner's own techniques and theories of movement, body mechanics, facial expressions, and posture: the key components of graphic storytelling. From his earliest comics, including the celebrated comic The Spirit, to his pioneering graphic novels, Eisner understood that the proper use of anatomy is crucial to effective storytelling. His control over the mechanical and intuitive skills necessary for its application set him apart among comics artists, and his principles of body grammar have proven invaluable to legions of students in overcoming what is perhaps the most challenging aspect of creating comics. Buttressed by dozens of illustrations, which display Eisner's mastery of expression, both subtle and overt, Expressive Anatomy for Comics and Narrative will benefit comics fans, students, and teachers and is destined to become the essential primer on the craft. 2-color art and text..
Price: $12.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Widely hailed as one of the finest humorist of the twentieth century, James Thurber looks back at his own life growing up in Columbus, Ohio, with the same humor and sharp wit that defined his famous sketches and writings. In My Life and Hard times, first published in 1933, he recounts the delightful chaos and frustrations of family, boyhood, youth odd dogs, recalcitrant machinery, and the foibles of human nature.

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Price: $5.70 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Is it possible to find humor -- corrosive, taboo-shattering, laugh-till-you-cry humor -- in the story of a 38-year-old- cartoonist who's both a quadriplegic and a recovering alcoholic? The answer is yes, if the cartoonist is John Callahan -- whose infamous work has graced the pages of Omni, Penthouse, and The New Yorker -- and if he's telling it in his own words and pictures. But Callahan's uncensored account of his troubled -- and sometimes impossible -- life is also genuinely inspiring. Without self-pity or self-righteousness, this liberating book tells us how a quadriplegic with a healthy libido has sex, what it's like to live in the exitless maze of the welfare system, where a cartoonist finds his comedy, and how a man with no reason to believe in anything discovers his own brand of faith..
Price: $4.87 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A treasure trove of Jewish comic book art by both acknowledged masters and little-known stars, from Rube Goldberg to Aline Kominsky Crumb.

"Jews built the comic book industry from the ground up, and the influence of Jewish writers, artists, and editors continues to be felt to this day."—MAD magazine writer Arie Kaplan

Readers have long cherished the work of comic masters such as Will Eisner, Jules Feiffer, and Art Spiegelman, all of whom happen to be Jewish. Few, however, are probably aware that the Jewish role in creating the American comic art form is no less significant than the Jewish influence on Hollywood filmmaking. Filled with the most stunning examples of this vital artistic tradition, Jews and American Comics tells us how the "people of the book" became the people of the comic book.

With three brief essays by Paul Buhle, the well-known historian of American Jewish life, Jews and American Comics offers readers a pictorial backstory tracing Jewish involvement in comic art from several little-known strips in Yiddish newspapers of the early twentieth century through the mid-century origins of the modern comic book and finally to contemporary comic art, which has at last found its place in museums, in private collections, and on the bookshelves of both critics and millions of avid readers.

Featuring more than two hundred examples of the work of Jewish comic artists going back a century—much of which has been unavailable to the general public for decades—this extraordinary collection will be a major contribution to Jewish and American cultural history. Jews and American Comics is also a gorgeous package, sure to be treasured by comic art lovers and fans of Jewish culture—and destined to become the bar and bat mitzvah gift of the decade..
Price: $14.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

JERRY SIEGEL AND Joe Shuster, two misfit teens in Depression-era Cleveland, were more like Clark Kent—meek, mild, and myopic—than his secret identity, Superman Both boys escaped into the worlds of science fiction and pulp magazine adventure tales. Jerry wrote stories, and Joe illustrated them. In 1934, they created a superhero who was everything they were not. It was four more years before they convinced a publisher to take a chance on their Man of Steel in a new format—the comic book. The author includes a provocative afterword about Jerry and Joe’s long struggle with DC Comics when they realized they had made a mistake in selling all rights to Superman for a mere $130!

Marc Tyler Nobleman’s text captures the excitement of Jerry and Joe’s triumph, and the energetic illustrations by Ross MacDonald, the author-artist of Another Perfect Day, are a perfect complement to the time, the place, and the two young visionaries..
Price: $10.69 [Notify me when price goes down.]