Go, Read: Anthony Haden-Guest On Puck Magazine



The critic and sometimes cartoonist Anthony Haden-Guest has a piece up at The Daily Beast about Puck magazine, using IDW's publication of the massive history and art book What Fools These Mortals Be! as its springboard. I want to pull the link out and into its own post for the quality of some of the writer's observations but also because that's a gorgeous-loooking book I'm currently right in the middle of consuming and I haven't seen a whole lot of talk about it. We should talk about it. Haden-Guest paints the magazine's accomplishments in broad strokes and notes that at the end of its run you can see a shift away from the sumptuous art and criticism of its time to a heavier reliance on editorial art that's more directly communicative and even photography.

What interests me about a book like this one is that as someone that grew up during a really fallow period for comics and cartooning, I may tend to automatically divide the virtuosic from the subtly-expressed as a defense mechanism that allows me to engage more easily with a variety of styles and approaches, even unpopular or ugly ones. That viewpoint wants to process something like the art-making in Puck as a broadly-appealing display of craft, a performance, that seeks to lock in an audience happy to see that kind of visual splendor on the page divorced from meaning and nuance. It's kind of a dumb way of looking at things, and many of the cartoons in this books are as fully engaged on a variety of levels as any of the super-smarties currently dissecting our culture in graphic novel form. Puck faded at almost the exact time comic strips as we understand them today coelesced, and I wonder if there isn't a huge element of comics-making that isn't best described in terms of a falling away from a grander age in terms of entire modes of expression.
 
posted 10:15 pm PST | Permalink
 

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