Our next book is Understanding Comics...

Now for something completely different:

A comic book about comic books = Understanding Comics. In an incredibly accessible style, Scott McCloud explains the details of how comics work: how they're composed, read and understood. More than just a book about comics, this gets to the heart of how we deal with visual languages in general. Exhaustive in scope, this detail-packed book includes a history of comics that reaches back to pre-Columbian picture manuscripts and Egyptian monuments, an explanation of how sequential art is constructed and why, and a running analysis of comics as art, literature, and communication.

Come discuss Understanding Comics Saturday November 20th at the Main Library in the 3rd Floor Program Room at 11am. Feel free to bring food and drink.

Some thoughts about The Atrocity Exhibition

- Is Traven (etc.) insane? 

- What do you think of Dr. Nathan? Is he complicit in T.'s "crimes"?

- Dr. Nathan says (pg. 13): "Yet these designs were more than enormous replicas. They were equations that embodied the relationship between the identity of the film actress and the audiences who were distant reflections of her. The planes of their lives interlocked at oblique commerical angles, fragments of personal myths fusing with the commercial cosmologies. The presiding deity of their lives the film actress provided a  set of operating formulae for their passage through consciousness." Really?

- Is Karen Novotny a  victim or a willing participant in T.'s "crimes"?

- Does mass psychosexual pathology play a role in historical events?

Come discuss The Atrocity Exhibition Saturday September 18th at the Main Library in the 3rd Floor Program Room at 11am. Feel free to bring food and drink.