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The Beats: A Graphic History
Availability:
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Price:
$22.00
$13.91*
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| Part No: | 0809094967 |
| Manufacturer: | Hill and Wang |
| MFG Part: | |
| Customer Rating: | 3.5 / 5.0 |
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In The Beats: A Graphic History, those who were mad to live have come back to life through artwork as vibrant as the Beat movement itself. Told by the comic legend Harvey Pekar, his frequent artistic collaborator Ed Piskor, and a range of artists and writers, including the feminist comic creator Trina Robbins and the Mad magazine artist Peter Kuper, The Beats takes us on a wild tour of a generation that, in the face of mainstream American conformity and conservatism, became known for its determined uprootedness, aggressive addictions, and startling creativity and experimentation. What began among a small circle of friends in New York and San Francisco during the late 1940s and early 1950s laid the groundwork for a literary explosion, and this striking anthology captures the storied era in all its incarnationsâfrom the Benzedrine-fueled antics of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs to the painting sessions of Jay DeFeoâs disheveled studio, from the jazz hipsters to the beatnik chicks, from Chicagoâs College of Complexes to San Franciscoâs famed City Lights bookstore. Snapshots of lesser-known poets and writers sit alongside frank and compelling looks at the Beatsâ most recognizable faces. What emerges is a brilliant collage ofâand tribute toâa generation, in a form and style that is as original as its subject.
| Not recommendable | 2009-12-09 | 1 / 5 |
| Having read some of Harvey Pekars other books with pleasure, especially the ones with artwork by Robert Crumb, being interested in comic books in general, and especially having been interested in the Beat Generation and the Beat writers and their work since I read Ginsbergs "Howl" in 1964, I thought that this book sounded like one I ought to have in my collection of Beat litterature.
I am sorry to say that it is a disapointing experience. The text is a brief introduction to the writers and the movement, a little unacurate here and there, but all in all a sober but short and not very exciting introduction and not much more. If you have read about this subject before, you don't learn anything you didn't know in advance. And I don't know how well it works as an appeticer for the newcomer.
My main complaints is about the poor graphics, and that's bad in a supposedly graphic novel.
The artist are not able to make a satisfying likeness to the real caracters. They couldn't even be used as caricatures, as they don't look like the persons they are supposed to portray. If it wasn't mentioned in the text who the persons on the pictures are, you wouldn't have a clue.
And the artist seem to lack a proper knowledge of the human anatomy. Sometimes the arms are too long for the body etc. For instance in the story about Kerouac, he can't decide wether kerouac is lefthanded or righthanded. In one picture he writes with his left hand, in the next he writes with his right hand. That's defenitly not a good thing in a cartoon.
So all in all, I cannot recommend this book. There are a lot of books about the Beat generation and the Beat writers, and lots of books with photos with the persons involved. I will anytime recommend readers with an interest in this subject to use their money on some of those instead of wasting them on this book. |
| Such a Natural Fit | 2009-11-24 | 5 / 5 |
| At its best, which is quite good indeed, The Beats reflects the creative energy of the movement it chronicles--it makes you want to dash off a poem before you have time to reconsider, or dust off your beret and organize some kind of jam session. Younger readers, in fact, might find inspiration in its pages while, one hopes, avoiding the excesses for which Jack Kerouac and his buddies are well known. If they do, credit largely goes to editor Paul Buhle, who has done an admirable job of presenting the "big picture" in terms of the Beats: One comes away with a sense that what counts is culture over the long haul, that personal demons take one out of the game and, obviously, diminish one's legacy. The counter-examples provided to Kerouac's sad flame-out are just too strong to ignore, whether it's the way Allen Ginsburg turned to spirituality and became a champion of social justice or how William S. Burroughs, apparently relying on pure, dumb luck, survived to become a hero to the punk crowd, among others, in old age.
Remarkably comprehensive, The Beats isn't content simply to spotlight the late-'50s explosion of the "beatnik" subculture onto the American scene. Instead, it traces its antecedents back to early 20th century circles of bohemians and left-wing artists/raconteurs, and also thoughtfully covers its influence on '60s and '70s counterculture through the lives of bridge-figures such as Tuli Kupferberg and LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. Many of these connections are explicit, but some of them readers must make for themselves. That's because the content isn't presented in a single, cohesively epic sweep, but in an anthology format that takes individuals and "scenes" (e.g., City Lights Books) as the topics for its sections.
The rewards of this approach are many, as it allows the book's contributors to spotlight more tangential personalities, even if only for a few pages at a time. In doing so, The Beats provides a platform for a variety of artists to fashion mini-bios of the figures that clearly move and inspire them; in this respect, the quietly transcendent profile of Philip Lamantia by Nancy Joyce Peters, Penelope Rosemont, and Summer McClinton comes to mind. But that's not the only gem here.
There's also the piece on Kenneth Patchen, drawn by Nick Thorkelson and cowritten with Harvey Pekar, which itself captures the innocent wisdom of this beloved poet-artist. Similarly, Peter Kuper (again working with Pekar, who scripted most of the book) supplies a mere two-page spread on Gary Snyder that nonetheless captures the meditative and nature-oriented tone of the subject's work. Equally inventive is Mary Fleener's portrait of Diane di Prima, in which each page-width panel resonates like a small mural. Resembling a conventional sequential narrative even less is Jerome Neurkirch's piece on Slim Brundage, which manages to be fun and challenging at the same time.
In fact, so effective, surprising and delightful are such passages that one wishes a bit more of the book functioned this way, as a kind of "tribute album" by a wide range of talents in contemporary comics. Instead, the first half is dedicated to the lives of a handful of major figures and features the same creative team of Pekar and artist Ed Piskor for its entirety. Not that this section isn't an engaging read, as the clearly well-researched text alternates crisply between the literary and the lurid. Rather, it's a problem of proportion more than anything else--Piskor's art, which relies on darkly humorous caricature and static portraits that often resemble demonic mug shots, is striking over the short run, but can get a bit exhausting over a hundred or so pages. On the other hand, stylistically his art is a perfect match for Pekar's voice, which somehow manages to be simultaneously deadpan and sensationalistic. So if you're already a fan of Pekar, his collaboration with Piskor here may be exactly what you'll thrill to.
And to be fair, occasionally Piskor is nothing less than inspired himself, as in a two-panel page with an image of Buddha framed by the limitless night sky atop a shot of Kerouac, booze in hand, framed by a brick wall. This kind of subtlety, in which the art suggests levels of irony beyond the straightforward text, is present elsewhere in these pages...and of course mirrors the Beats' own fascination with playfully juxtaposing art forms such as poetry and jazz. In fact, this marriage of the "multimodal" comics medium to the content is such a natural fit that one wonders why the graphic format didn't discover the Beats earlier.
-- Peter Gutiérrez |
| | I guess if you don't know much about the Beats and need a quick review, this might be worthwhile. But if you know anything, than most of the book will be pretty boring. I think the story and graphics of the majority of the book are pretty static compared to the dynamic subject matter. I think in order for a book about writers to successful there needs to be if not their actual writing than a flavor of it somehow. That said, there are some killer entries in the back of the book. One about Kenneth Patchen, another called "Beat Chicks" and another about Phillip Lamantia. There is a really cheesy plug for City Lights Books in there that made me want to puke. And I love that book store. Anyways, this one might best picked up at the library. |
| "The Beats" is a multi-part book about poets-- well-known and obscure -- of the post-War "Beat" era. Roughly the first half focuses on the three great Beats -- Allen Ginsburg, William Burroughs and Lowell Massachusetts's own Jack Kerouac. The book provides a phenomenally sanitized version of their lives, adventures and meetings over the years. Their poetry is always billed as relevant and groundbreaking. Their meetings and reading always momentous. But how can you write a book about some of the most influential poets of the 20th century while including so little of their poetry? While we see Jack hammering away at a long roll of paper, for instance, but hear precious few of his words. We see images of the San Francisco obscenity trial of the publisher of Ginsburg's "Howl," but we don't learn why he was acquitted.
The second half of the book focuses on a dozen or more of the lesser lights of the movement, like Leroi Jones. But again, the urge to canonize these men and women seems false. Sure, they experimented with new sexual arrangements, with drugs, jazz and far out politics. They certainly served as the foundation for the Hippy and Yippie movements that followed. But the only soul searching and truth telling about the movement comes late in the book. Joyce Brabner's piece on "Beatnik Chicks" is an honest critique about the often misogynistic, irresponsible and misguided worldview of the Beats. Without this lovely piece, we would never have learned that Kerouac had a daughter that he only grudgingly accepted, or that Neal Cassady and Leroi Jones abandoned their families to follow their muse.
The Beats is a confusing work that left me wondering why some consider these men and women so important. The art is rudimentary and uninteresting by graphic novel standards. Less of an objective view of an important movement, "The Beats" seems written by insiders bent on granting cosmic significance to those of their own circle. What long-term effect id they have, other than to influence Maynard Krebs of "Dobie Gillis"? Still, some information was valuable. It included stories about the Fugs, the City Lights bookstore, Roth Rexroad and other Beat era landmarks and artists that I was only peripherally aware of. For that bit of insight, I grant "The Beats" three stars rather than two.
Dig that, you crazy cat. |
| A fine survey of the Beat generation and its experiences | 2009-07-19 | 5 / 5 |
| | Comic legend Harvey Pekor, his collaborator Ed Piskor, and a number of other comic writers and artists have created a fine survey of the Beat generation and its experiences, offering an anthology of graphic illustrations in black and white that survey the Beat Generation's heroes, antics, and sentiments. An outstanding graphic survey blends history, culture and biography in a graphic account recommended for any general lending library. |
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