Pedazo de libro que me he pillao

Hoy me he pillado un libro que promete ser de lectura interesante. Un compendio de autores de cómic que podrían considerarse "visionarios" en el arte de las viñetas, desde el 1900 hasta 1969. Ya os contaré cuando me llegue. Esto de Amazon.com es un invento...

Os dejo una crítica del libro.

As difficult as it may be to believe today — when comic-book superheroes fill our movie screens and serious, willfully obscure comic-strip creations such as Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan merit serious examination in the New York Times Book Review — there was a time when comic books and newspaper comic strips were considered the ghettoes of the art world, places for hacks and eccentrics: one step away from outsider art.

Now a big, beautifully designed book rescues some comics from obscurity and claims them as the fascinating, often striking original creations they are. Art Out of Time: Unknown Comic Visionaries 1900-1969, by Dan Nadel (Abrams), makes good on its title to shed light on what Nadel terms ''an impure medium… an awkward meeting of words, pictures, and commerce.'' The book begins near the birth of the comic strip at the start of the century and ends with the birth of underground comics in the '60s, after which the medium became rather less ''impure,'' in the sense that everyone from Richard Outcault (creator of Hogan's Alley, the first comic-strip success) to R. Crumb (keep on truckin'!) earned recognition for creating something approaching — and in some cases, culminating in — capital-A Art.

Nadel is interested in the more disreputable stuff, because he knows that it's often in the obscure corners of capitalist enterprise that odd, eccentric, even personal obsessions and fantasies get played out. Thus Art Out of Time showcases the work of 29 artists, including Fletcher Hanks, whose superhero Stardust the Super Wizard appeared in places like Fantastic Comics in the 1930s. Hanks' works were crudely drawn yet utterly hypnotic, absurdist comic-book tales about world disaster, featuring a hero with enormous shoulders and a neck that narrows upward to a tiny yet handsome leading-man's head. He battles a green, horned creature called the Super Fiend, who has the ability to set an ''entire planet afire by spontaneous combustion'' (''I'll start with Mars!'' he cackles).

There's also Boody Rogers, creator of strips such as Sparky Watts and Babe, Darling of the Hills, 1940s-50s comic books that combined cartoonish exaggeration (in the case of male characters) and the sexy, so-called ''good-girl art'' style (in the case of the female protagonists) to invent wild dreamscapes in which Sparky finds himself in the Kingdom of the Talking Bugs, some of whom are one-eyed green ovoids, and some of whom are conjoined busty babes whose waists are attached to a single, caterpillar-like lower-body.

As its title suggests, much of the work in Art Out of Time feels at once old and ageless, as though it could have appeared at any time in the 20th century's newsprint and comic books. These are the labors of men (it was a mostly male-dominated medium) working out their frustrations and fantasies, their overheated imaginations and their often limited technical skills... all to create fever-dreams in the minds of the kids who consumed this stuff, and now the adults who will buy this marvelous head-trip of a book.

By Ken Tucker

(Fuente:Entertainment Weekly/http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,1208966,00.html)