“Breathtaking adaptations …” We’ll take that compliment any day of the week! Check out this from the Huffington Post and see what good company we keep. There are 14 recommendations in no particular order and I’m sure at least one of them will be new to someone out there. Maybe we ought to review them all here. Maybe we will. Stick around.
The Art of Ditko, by Craig Yoe. Introduction by Stan Lee. Yoe Books – IDW, 2009. ISBN 978-1600105425 (hc). 208pp.
Review by Gene Kannenberg, Jr.
Steve Ditko is best-known as the artist and co-creator of Spider-Man and Doctor Strange for Marvel Comics in the 1960s, his lithe, angular figures (with their expressive hands) defining those characters to this day. Comics cognoscenti also know him for various other superhero work at Marvel, DC Comics and Charlton Comics; his supernatural tales for various publishers, including Warren Publishing; and, most notoriously, his creator-owned work like Mr. A., based on the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand.
If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, what is writing about a comic about an architect? A damned difficult business, if that book is David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp. A bravura piece of formalist comics storytelling, Asterios Polyp is nevertheless a story rich in heart. Its eponymous “hero” is buffeted about by fate, taken for a turn on Fortune’s wheel, tested like Job, and ultimately found – ah, but that would be telling. Suffice it to say that Mazzucchelli takes a character who is, at first glance, a smug, self-absorbed ass, and slowly reveals depths to his character which make you at least pause to reconsider your initial impressions.
