A delightful homage.
Tribute to a beloved artist.
French cartoonist Jean-Jacques Sempé (1932-2022) was well-known for his instantly identifiable covers for the New Yorker, to which he began contributing in 1978. In his characteristic delicate lines and pastel hues, Sempé captured what he saw as the essence of a country that enchanted him from the first time he visited in 1965. His cartoons, covers, sketches, and doodles (170 illustrations in all), accompanied by essays translated by Dylan Rocknroll, make for a charming volume that reveals the “elegance, tenderness, and lucidity” of a unique artist. Françoisde Closets, Cape Kennedy correspondent for L’Express, recalls his colleague at the Houston Space Center during the Apollo moon launch in 1969. Sempé recorded his impressions of the gigantic rocket, the powerful technology, and the irony: in one cartoon, apartment dwellers all over Manhattan watch the moon on their televisions, while a huge, bright orb shines in the night sky. Janick Jossin recalls how Sempé, at L’Express, caught the “spirit of the times” in his drawings just as journalists did in their writing. Susan Chace describes the decaying, garbage-strewn Central Park that tourists avoided in the 1960s and ’70s. Yet Sempé loved walking through the park, with its joggers, bicyclists, and grumpy old people who lined its benches. His “amused gaze,” portrayed a lovely expanse, welcoming and bucolic, where “fear and decline were absent.” Journalist and lyricist Philippe Labro offers an affectionate recollection of Greenwich Village in the 1960s, a time of “violence and creativity,” music, and hippies, which Sempé captured in “brilliant sketches.” Sempé often took a lofty perspective—perhaps the rooftop of an apartment building where, in one cartoon, he drew a little girl gaily jumping rope. It was a view filled with wonder.
A delightful homage.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781962272025
Page Count: 200
Publisher: 26letters
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A cheeky, gossipy dual biography.
A study of two writers uncomfortably entwined.
After Eve Babitz (1943-2021) died, her biographer Anolik came upon a letter from Babitz to Joan Didion (1934-2021) that startled her. Filled with “rage, despair, impatience, contempt,” it read like a “lovers’ quarrel.” “Eve was talking to Joan the way you talk to someone who’s burrowed deep under your skin, whose skin you’re trying to burrow deep under.” That surprise discovery suggested a “complicated alliance” between the two. In sometimes breathless prose, with sly asides to the “Reader,” Anolik draws on more than 100 interviews with Babitz and many other sources to follow both women’s lives, tumultuous loves, and aspirations before and after they met in Los Angeles in 1967, sometimes straining to prove their significance to one another. “Joan and Eve weren’t each other’s opposite selves so much as each other’s shadow selves,” she asserts. “Eve was what Joan both feared becoming and longed to become: an inspired amateur.” At the same time, “Joan was what Eve feared becoming and desired to become: a fierce professional.” Didion had just won acclaim for Slouching Towards Bethlehem when Babitz, newly arrived from New York, began socializing with her and her husband, John Gregory Dunne. The reticent Didion and the sensual, energetic Babitz could not have been more different, and Anolik clearly prefers Babitz. “I’m crazy for Eve,” she admits, “love her with a fan’s unreasoning abandon. Besides, Joan is somebody I naturally root against: I respect her work rather than like it; find her persona—part princess, part wet blanket—tough going.” Their relationship—hardly a friendship—fell apart in 1974 when Didion and Dunne were assigned to edit Babitz’s autobiographical novel, Eve’s Hollywood. Babitz, resentful of Didion’s attitude and intrusion, “fired” her, pursuing her writing career on her own. Didion soared to literary fame; not, alas, Babitz.
A cheeky, gossipy dual biography.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781668065488
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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