From Publishers Weekly
Readers will find this book doing strange and wonderful things to their minds. Imagine someone going through old magazines and stopping whenever an unusual picture or story catches his attention. Then imagine this reader taking the time to cut out the oddities and stick them in a file folder. And finally imagine someone selecting the most unusual, striking things out of a drawer filled with such folders and printing them in an elegantly designed, lovingly printed anthology. Arf Forum features Max Ernst's surrealist collages (a man with the head of an Easter Island statue cavorting in various melodramatic scenes) as well as a sleazy photo story from the early 1940s about a visit to a comics studio where girls pose in their underwear. Yoe's warm memoir of a meeting with cartoonist Bill Holman (Smoky Stover) shows the modern audience how dazzling this comic strip was, while a piece about ultra-obscure artist William Ekgren (known only for three covers) offers a tantalizing glimpse of an unfulfilled talent. Yoe fills this volume to the gills: Stan Lee on irate readers, Italian cartoonist Kremos's girly cartoons, a photo of Elvis reading a Betty and Veronica comic. There's no overall theme here except Isn't this cool! but that's enough; it is cool. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Booklist
For his third exploration of "the unholy marriage of art and comics," cartoonist-designer Yoe unearthed another cornucopia of obscure and delightful artifacts. They include a sampling of Bill Holman's singularly screwball newspaper strip, Smokey Stover; excerpts from an experimental 1934 graphic novel in collage by German dadaist Max Ernst; an appraisal of the enigmatic William Ekgren's bizarre 1950s horror comics covers; and an assortment of caveman cartoons by early-twentieth-century hands. Comics themselves are the subjects of some of the most beguiling entries, such as a metastrip in which Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse read and discuss their newspaper exploits, a 1941 fumetti in which scantily clad models purport to show how comics are made, an early story by Marvel Comics' Stan Lee (a beleaguered comic-book editor defends his horror titles against an outraged citizen), and vintage photos of Rock Hudson and Elvis Presley enjoying the funnies. Those of a scholarly bent might wish for more documentation of these intriguing works, but Arf's focus remains, appropriately, on the visual qua visual. Flagg, Gordon
