Tag Archives: Illustrated

THIS IS A BOOK BY DEMETRI MARTIN (2011)

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Demetri Martin’s wordplay-filled humor translates ridiculously well to book form, as this collection of drawings and short humor shows.  His best pieces expose absurd situations with exaggeratedly forthright reactions (a man obsessed with speaking into a megaphone, a Rashomon-esque recount of a bee sting that includes inanimate objects) while the least successful ones run with simple concepts far longer than necessary, such as the list of bugle performances that all include reveille or the protagonists’ hospital where male action heroes get treated for superficial wounds.  Fortunately the hilarious far outweighs the lame, making this book a damned funny read.

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The Big Book of Porn, by Seth Grahame-Smith (2005)

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This coffee table book would have worked a lot better had it focused solely on a detailed guide to classic ‘70s and early ‘80s porn, since that section is filled with history, insights into the industry, and a ton of cool ‘70s movie posters.  The rest of the book, though, is eye-rollingly uneven, alternating between genuinely enlightening info and some seriously lame jokes.  The lowlight of these extras is an overly detailed discussion of fetish porn, while the highlight is a hilarious list of porn title spoofs (Genital Hospital, Hump Up the Volume, etc.) that had me in stitches.

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The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis (1950)

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Do children’s classics still hold up when read by adults?  I never read the Narnia books when I was younger, but I did read The Screwtape Letters a few years ago and liked its sinister plot and epistolary storytelling.  Similarly, this book’s heavy Christian undertones fall just short of eye-rolling at times, though the themes of temptation, redemption, and righteousness enhance the plot so effectively that without them the book would have been forgotten as just another kid’s adventure.  A final plus is that the fantasy world feels real enough to immerse readers but not enough to overwhelm them.

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Fight Scenes, by Greg Bottoms (2008)

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Fight Scenes is about growing up in the 1980s with your friend whose dad keeps naked pictures of women he’s slept with under his bed; it’s about dealing with bullies and looking at porn with girls you like and sitting in front of the 7-Eleven and smoking pot in the woods and fending off crazy racists at the local Popeye’s.  Bottoms shows us these moments in a series of vignettes that all say more than they seem to at first glance, so that the book shows us both his ridiculous middle-school adventures and how fucked up life can be.

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Where I Got It

A 2016 Christmas gift from the same friend who got me Rose of No Man’s Land, which is also pretty rad.

Lichtenstein, by Janis Hendrickson (1988, 2012)

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This picture-filled guide to Roy Lichtenstein’s career covers both his paintings of starry-eyed comic-book heroines (an example of which graces the cover), his images of everyday objects like washing machines and golf balls, and his later, more abstract paintings.  There’s also a close technical and thematic look at the Benday dots used in so many of his works.  Though I was most interested in Lichtenstein’s Pop Art images, the book covers much more, though the latter half goes into more depth than I was looking for.  Still, a solid introduction to Lichtenstein’s life and work with cool pictures.

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Where I Got It

At a bookstore in the Germantown section of Columbus, Ohio in summer 2015.  I’d been interested in Lichtenstein’s Pop Art works for a while (one of my teachers had a large “I’d Rather Sink Than Call Brad For Help” print on his office door in college, below), and buying this book was my reminder to actually learn more about him.

 

 

The Medium is the Massage, by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore (1967)

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Marshall McLuhan is the guy Woody Allen pulls from offscreen to prove his point to the pretentious academic in Annie Hall.  His work in the 1960s tackles the power of media and its ability to deliver information in different forms; this book is a short, coherent explanation of how media affects us, assembled by graphic designer Quentin Fiore with black and white photos to enhance McLuhan’s points.  There are comics, two-page spreads, ‘60s pop culture, and a page printed in backwards text to keep things interesting, pushing the limits of what the printed form can do.  Very cool.

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Where I Got It

Found in a free box outside my apartment building with a bunch of other textbooks and books on programming, sometime in the fall of 2015.  This was the only one that looked interesting.

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