From Aargh! To Zap!: Harvey Kurtzman's Visual History Of The Comics

From Aargh! to Zap!: Harvey Kurtzman's Visual History of the Comics

From Library JournalThat this is Kurtzman's history is significant; the entire book is colored by his tastes and perceptions. Kurtzman spends an inordinate amount of time on his own work: Mad magazine and the true-life war comics, both of which he created for Entertaining Comics (EC) in the 1950s; the short-lived Mad -like magazines he did after parting ways with EC; and his Little Annie Fanny strip in Playboy . Yet he is denigrating to the creators of Superman and Batman and to the underground cartoonists of the 1960s, and his look at contemporary comics tilts a bit too often toward the commercial. The illustrations are uneven--some are reproduced beautifully, others are almost illegibly fuzzy. Despite the book's size (11 15), many reproductions are very small (4 6) and hence difficult to read. Recommended only as a supplement to other comics histories; this work is neither objective, nor academic, nor complete.- Keith R.A. DeCandido, "Library Journal"Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.Presents a full-color chronology of the art form, profiling the top artists and their best work