Comics: A Global History

Comics: A Global History, 1968 To The Present (by Dan Mazur and Alexander Danner) is one of the few books to offer an international history of comic art. Most surveys have focused exclusively on either American comics or Japanese manga, though Comics: A Global History covers the US, Japan, and Europe. So, while it's not quite global in scope, it's more inclusive than previous books on the subject.

The authors begin their history in 1968, which they describe as "a watershed year in which a number of comics creators in Japan, America and Europe began to aggressively demonstrate that comics could be more than an ephemeral vehicle for children's entertainment". (That year marked the birth of the alternative comix movement.) The introduction summarises 1950s and 1960s comic history, a useful extension of the book's chronology.

The key artists and comics of the post-war era (Robert Crumb's Zap, Alan Moore's Watchmen, "God of Manga" Osamu Tezuka) are all included, as are the major international forms of comic art ("bande dessinee, manga, fumetti, tebeos, historietas, komiks") and their more literary sub-genres ("fumetti d'autore" and "bande dessinee romanesque"). Various manga formats and styles ("gekiga", "akahon", "kashihon", "shojo", "shonen", "seinen", "josei", and "watakushi") are explored, though the classifications are a little bewildering, as the authors recognise: "Categories diversified... The distinctions were blurry at times, and the terminology was fluid."

Aside from the major comic markets, the book also finds space for some less familiar territories, such as a brief history and taxonomy of South Korean "manhwa" (sub-divided into "ddakji", "sun-jung", and "myongnang"). Roger Sabin's Comics, Comix, & Graphic Novels and Maurice Horn's World Encyclopedia Of Comics (both of which cover the entire history of comics) are still essential reading, though Comics: A Global History is a unique international study of modern comics.

Fifty Years Of Illustration

Fifty Years Of Illustration, by Lawrence Zeegen and Caroline Roberts, profiles influential illustrators and graphic artists since the 1960s. The five chapters all cover different decades, though the emphasis is on contemporary examples, with the final chapter (the 2000s) being twice as long as the others. (Curiously, although Zeegen and Roberts are named as co-authors on the cover and title page, the text is credited solely to Zeegen, and Roberts is merely listed as one of four picture researchers.)

Each artist has either a single-page entry or a double-page spread, with a capsule biography and examples of key works. Some notable entries include Milton Glaser (one of America's most celebrated graphic designers), Robert Crumb (the comic-strip artist who created the alternative Zap Comix), Gerald Scarfe (the Sunday Times cartoonist), Fritz Eichenberg (an engraver, and author of the excellent The Art Of The Print), and Shepard Fairey (the street artist whose Hope poster became a symbol of Barack Obama's election campaign).

While the glossy, colour photographs are impressive, the text is less substantial. Each chapter begins with an overview of the decade in design, contextualised with details of contemporaneous news events. In the final chapter, for example, we learn that "on 26 January 2001 an earthquake hit Gujarat in India killing around 20,000 people". These news summaries seem like padding, and they're irrelevant in a book about illustration.

The bibliography is another weak point: only eighteen books are listed, five of which were written by Zeegen himself. All of the works cited were published in the last two decades, thus classic texts such as A History Of Graphic Design (Philip Meggs) and History Of The Poster (Josef and Shizuko Muller-Brockmann) aren't included. Also, two children's history books are listed (!), though I have no idea why.

In his introduction, Zeegen recognises that the book's fifty-year time-frame is "a mere slice of the discipline's rich heritage". Illustration: A Visual History, by Steven Heller and Seymour Chwast (who has an entry in Fifty Years Of Illustration) covers illustration from the Victorian era onwards, and is therefore more highly recommended as an introduction to illustration. A History Of Book Illustration, by David Bland, is the most comprehensive book on the subject.

The book's publisher, Laurence King, has produced definitive histories of various artistic disciplines, including A World History Of Art, A World History Of Architecture, A History Of Interior Design, Graphic Design: A New History, History Of Modern Design, and Photography: A Cultural History. Fifty Years Of Illustration is less ambitious, though it is useful as a sourcebook of modern and contemporary illustration.

The Innovators

The Innovators is Walter Isaacson's (potted) history of computing and the internet. Each chapter explores a particular aspect of digital technology: the computer, video games, the internet, the PC, the web, etc. (though not social media). Isaacson's focus is on the gestation and birth of each innovation, and the primary innovators responsible, rather than a comprehensive survey of every subsequent development.

Therefore, this is a book about pioneers and their inventions. They include Alan Turing (who theorised a Logical Computing Machine), Steve Russell (creator of Spacewar, the first graphical computer game), Nolan Bushnell (who popularised video games with Pong), Bill Gates (co-founder of Microsoft), Steve Jobs (co-founder of Apple), Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the world wide web), and Larry Page (co-founder of Google). The book also recognises the extensive contributions made by women in what is often perceived as a male-dominated field.

Isaacson has interviewed many of the pioneers he profiles (all of the living ones, it seems), and his list of sources includes practically every major figure in digital culture. (He interviewed Steve Jobs extensively for his acclaimed biography in 2011; in The Innovators, he states plainly what he merely implied in the biography: that Jobs "filched the [GUI] concept from Xerox".) A History Of The Internet & The Digital Future, by Johnny Ryan, covers broadly the same territory as The Innovators, though Isaacson's book benefits from its author's unrivalled access to the key players involved.

The Innovators (subtitled: How A Group Of Hackers, Geniuses, & Geeks Created The Digital Revolution) might not be "the standard history of the digital revolution", as its dust jacket predicts. But it's surely the most authoritative history of the eureka moments that transformed computing.

Radio Times Guide To Films 2015

The Radio Times Guide To Films 2015, edited by Sue Robinson, will soon become the last remaining comprehensive annual film guide. Printed reference books such as this are an endangered species, as publishers react to the migration of information online. (Several dictionary and encyclopedia publishers have already announced that they will no longer be releasing printed versions of their flagship titles.)

Halliwell's Film Guide, for many years the standard UK film guide, died an undignified death with its The Movies That Matter edition in 2008. Its rivals, including the Virgin Film Guide (which featured longer reviews) and Elliot's Guide To Films On Video, were much more short-lived. The Time Out Film Guide (more opinionated and less mainstream) was cancelled in 2012. In America, Leonard Maltin's annual guide was split into separate Classic and Modern editions, and will no longer be printed at all after this year. VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever is still published annually, though it cuts more entries each year and is limited to films released on video.

Radio Times film reviews are all available online for free (as are Time Out's), so it's surprising that their annual Film Guide remains a viable proposition. The cover illustration - the poster for Jaws - perhaps indicates (like the Fistful Of Dollars cover from last year) that the book is aimed at an older demographic which has not yet switched over to online sources such as the IMDb.

There are precisely 23,099 entries in the new edition, including 547 new films; last year's edition contained 23,068 entries, thus there have been almost as many deletions as additions. In a spurious attempt to appear as up-to-date as possible, the Film Guide includes previews of forthcoming films, which are then rewritten as reviews in the following year's edition. This year, there are eighty-seven previews, which presumably will be converted into reviews for the 2016 edition.

The new reviews this year include Noah ("an impressive spectacle"), The Hobbit II ("dramatic tension comes in fits and starts"), and The Wind Rises ("older viewers and fans will be enchanted by this modest entry in Miyazaki's canon"). Martin Scorsese's The Wolf Of Wall Street receives a five-star review ("an exhilarating story of decadence and debauchery", as does Gravity ("breathtaking").

The Radio Times Film Guide had a little-known predecessor: the Radio Times Film & Video Guide, written by Derek Winnert and published in 1993 and 1994. It was pulped, and Winnert was dismissed as Radio Times film editor, after a plagiarism lawsuit from the publishers of Halliwell's.

Quote of the day…

“The next step would be some sort of electronic tracking device”.
— Kobkarn Wattanavrangkul

Thailand is facing a downturn in foreign tourism, after a coup earlier this year and the still-unsolved murder of two British backpackers on the island of Koh Tao three weeks ago. But tourism minister Kobkarn Wattanavrangkul’s attempts at reassuring prospective tourists seem more likely to dissuade travellers from visiting the country.

In a syndicated interview with the Reuters news agency today, she said that, in future, tourists “will be given a wristband with a serial number”, and that visitors would be assigned a local Thai “buddy”, in the interests of safety. If this seems like excessive monitoring of vistors, her next proposal takes the Big Brother surveillance approach even further: “The next step would be some sort of electronic tracking device, but this has not yet been discussed in detail.”

Previous quotes of the day: Prayut Chan-o-cha claimed that he orchestrated the coup because “we respect democracy”, Prayut dismissed criticism surrounding the GT200, an Election Commissioner agued against an election, hypocrisy from Suthep Thaugsuban, a yellow-shirt leader said that Thailand should be more like North Korea, the Information and Communication Technology Minister openly admitted to violating the Computer Crime Act, and a Ministry of Culture official patronised Thai filmgoers.

12th World Film Festival of Bangkok

The 12th World Film Festival of Bangkok (เทศกาลภาพยนตร์โลกแห่งกรุงเทพฯ ครั้งที่ 12) opens next month. One of this year’s highlights will be Fritz Lang’s masterpiece Metropolis, restored with almost thirty minutes of additional footage from a 16mm Argentine print, screening on 23rd and 25th October. (Metropolis was previously shown at the inaugural World Film Festival in 2003, accompanied by a live orchestra.)

The festival begins on 17th October, and runs until 26th October. Like the 11th festival, it will be held at the SF World cinema, CentralWorld. (The 6th, 7th, and 8th festivals were held at Paragon Cineplex; the 5th, 9th, and 10th took place at Esplanade Cineplex.) The event is organised by Kriengsak Silakong.

Once Upon A Celluloid Planet

Once Upon A Celluloid Planet: Where Cinema Ruled - Hearts and Houses of Films in Thailand (สวรรค์ 35 มม เสน่ห์วิกหนังเมืองสยาม) is a unique photographic guide to Thailand's stand-alone cinemas, movie palaces from the pre-multiplex era. Sonthaya Subyen and Morimart Raden-Ahmad have photographed more than sixty cinemas, documenting their marquees, box offices, auditoriums, and projection booths. Many of these once-luxurious movie theatres are now derelict (such as Siam Theatre, destroyed by arsonists in 2010), though the splendid Scala cinema remains in business.

The book also includes nostalgic essays by writers and directors, such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who ends his piece with this comparison: "Tens of thousands of years ago, when our ancestors were living in caves, they often drew on the walls of the cave, showing us how they lived their lives. It seems to be an unknown force in our blood. Looking at it like this, you could say that cinemas, whether inside or outside department stores, are our modern day caves."

There are also chapters devoted to unusual forms of film promotion, from glass slides to painted mud flaps. The 500-page book - a valuable record of social history, film culture, and architecture - is part of the Filmvirus series, which also includes a monograph on Apichatpong, Unknown Forces. (A Century Of Thai Cinema, by Dome Sukwong, also features a few pages of vintage cinema photographs.)

Turning Point 1997-2008

Hayao Miyazaki's autobiographical Turning Point 1997-2008 is a collection of articles and interviews related to his films Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, and Ponyo. It's a translation of the Japanese 折り返し点 1997-2008, and a sequel to Miyazaki's first anthology, Starting Point 1979-1996. Miyazaki himself was surprisingly reluctant to publish it: "A book that has collected the likes of talks I have given here and there, or what I was obliged to say, or what I wrote because I was asked to write something seems to me to reveal evidence of my shame. So, frankly, I'm not too happy about it."

The book provides useful access to material previously available only in Japan. Fortunately, the chapters on Princess Mononoke (Miyazaki's first international success) and Spirited Away (his masterpiece) are the most extensive, with in-depth interviews and production notes. The Howl's Moving Castle chapter, however, has only a tangential connection to the film, and the final chapter includes only two short articles on Ponyo. It's odd that Turning Point was published some six years after the Japanese edition, and that it contains no new material on Ponyo or Miyazaki's final film, The Wind Rises. (One of the book's translators, Frederik L Schodt, wrote Manga! Manga!: The World Of Japanese Comics.)

The Making Of Gone With The Wind

Gone With The Wind, "the quintessential film of Hollywood's Golden Age", had three directors (Victor Fleming, George Cukor, and Sam Wood, with only Fleming receiving credit), though producer David O Selznick was the film's main auteur. The Making Of Gone With The Wind, by Steve Wilson, contains more than 600 items from the Selznick archive at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas, to accompany an exhibition which opened yesterday at the University of Texas.

The book includes correspondence from Selznick (with transcriptions of each document in a fifty-page appendix), concept artwork (including stunning drawings by production designer William Cameron Menzies), and on-set photographs. The material is presented chronologically, and the large (often full-page) photos are reproduced with surprising clarity considering they're seventy-five years old.

Selznick sought to adapt novels as faithfully as possible, a process he called 'pictorialization'; this literary approach, and his endless memos, led to creative tensions with his directors. (Thomas Schatz's book The Genius Of The System and the documentary Hitchcock, Selznick, & The End Of Hollywood discuss this further.) Alfred Hitchcock made Rebecca, Spellbound, The Paradine Case, and Notorious while under contract to Selznick; the villain of Rear Window resembles Selznick, and in North By Northwest, Roger O Thornhill's middle initial stands for "Nothing" in a reference to Selznick's similar affectation.

David Thomson (author of Moments That Made The Movies, The Big Screen, Have You Seen...?, The Moment Of Psycho, and A Biographical Dictionary Of Film) wrote the TV documentary Gone With The Wind: The Making Of A Legend, which was broadcast on the launch night of TNT, 3rd October 1988. The 70th and 75th anniversary Gone With The Wind DVD/blu-ray releases include a slim book featuring Selznick archive material, and reproductions of Selznick's memos.

Photography Will Be

An exhibition at the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art has been censored by police in Japan. Photography Will Be includes photographs by Ryudai Takano depicting himself and various male models posing nude. The photos were initially exhibited uncensored, despite Japanese obscenity laws prohibiting frontal nudity, though some visitors complained to the police.

On 13th August, instead of removing the twelve photographs (from a series titled おれと), the Museum draped translucent white sheets over them to partially obscure the nudity. Of course, this has also drawn attention to the censorship. The exhibition opened on 1st August, and runs until 28th September.