Category Archives: comics

It seemed appropriate for me to make a comic with three panels as review art for a book of comics of three panels (for the most part) of classic novels. Artist Lisa Brown uses whimsy and brevity for her small collection that summarizes classics like Moby Dick, The Handmaid’s Tale, Lord of the Flies, and more.

As both an avid reader and a lover of comics, as well as an appreciator of popping the balloon of pretension, I thoroughly enjoyed Brown’s small book and humor, and insights, too, that come from trying to find the most important thread from which to spin a comic piece of art. Long Story Short is a fun diversion and witty companion the serious novels of the so-called “literary canon.”

Note: there are references to sex and death in here (it’s a theme of many novels, as you might know) so if you are teacher wondering about the possibility of using this book in the classroom, you might want to pick and choose pages from Brown’s book, or at least, give it an entire read (you should anyway) and determine appropriateness for your students.

Peace (in three frames),
Kevin

From the prison thought experiment of the Panopticon (where every cell is visible to the guard) to today’s video street surveillance that uses face recognition algorithms, people have long and rightly worried about how to protect their privacy. In this graphic non-fiction book — The Machine Never Blinks: A Graphic History of Spying and Surveillance by Ivan Greenberg and Everett Patterson — the steady erosion of our privacy in public spheres is made evident and alarming.

Greenberg and Patterson have a progressive agenda here — it’s that the government should never be trusted with our data and that citizens must act against invasion of privacy and remain vigilant against such intrusions — and the stories of generations of spying on citizens is nothing new. Gathered in this one book, the collective stories become a powerful indictment of how technology has increased the pace of our loss of privacy and data — some of which we have willingly given up (social media, etc.) and some of which we have allowed our government to do in the guise of safety.

I’m not convinced the graphic format is the right format for this topic, however. In this book, the pages are crammed with text, reducing the reader’s ability to absorb the visual information. Which is why one would use a graphic novel format in the first place. I wish they had done more to leverage the use of the visuals on the page. In too many frames, it’s just people talking with speech bubbles or overflowing text boxes. I understand there is a lot of information to get out, but  better use of symbolic visualization and experimental art would have helped make the point, in my opinion.

And the point of the book is important and for those of us concerned about privacy and data, The Machine Never Blinks is another look at the topic. This book would appropriate for high school students but might be too dense with concepts and vocabulary for younger readers.

Peace (pushing back),
Kevin