Jeff Smith’s Bone, Vol. 5: Rock Jaw, Master of the Eastern Border is the series at its most adventurous and, at the same time, one of its most morally alert instalments. What first seems like a comic detour into wilderness peril becomes, on closer reading, a sharp meditation on power, hierarchy, and the uneasy alliance … Continue reading T.A.E.’s Book Reviews – Bone, Vol. 5: Rock Jaw, Master of the Eastern Border by Jeff Smith
T.A.E.’s Book Reviews – Bone, Vol. 4: The Dragonslayer by Jeff Smith
Jeff Smith’s Bone, Vol. 4: The Dragonslayer is the point at which Bone stops feeling merely playful and begins to reveal the moral architecture beneath its comedy. The series has always balanced cartoon buoyancy with old-world menace, but here the writer sharpens that balance into something more intricate: a story about inherited violence, mistaken identity, … Continue reading T.A.E.’s Book Reviews – Bone, Vol. 4: The Dragonslayer by Jeff Smith
T.A.E.’s Book Reviews – Bone, Vol. 3: Eyes of the Storm by Jeff Smith
Jeff Smith’s Bone, Vol. 3: Eyes of the Storm is the series beginning to reveal its full weather system: comic mischief is still everywhere, but beneath the laughter the atmosphere darkens, thickens, and begins to press in with real narrative force. What makes this volume so compelling is not simply that “something happens,” but that … Continue reading T.A.E.’s Book Reviews – Bone, Vol. 3: Eyes of the Storm by Jeff Smith
T.A.E.’s Book Reviews – Bone, Vol. 2: The Great Cow Race by Jeff Smith
Jeff Smith’s Bone, Vol. 2: The Great Cow Race is the point at which Bone begins to reveal the full strength of its design. What first seemed in volume 1 like an amiably strange fantasy becomes, here, something sharper and more deliberate: a comic pastoral that is also a study in greed, spectacle, loyalty, and … Continue reading T.A.E.’s Book Reviews – Bone, Vol. 2: The Great Cow Race by Jeff Smith
T.A.E.’s Book Reviews – Bone, Vol. 1: Out from Boneville by Jeff Smith
Jeff Smith’s Bone, Vol. 1: Out from Boneville is a remarkable feat of tonal balance: at once a woodland fable, a sly comic adventure, and the first movement of an unexpectedly expansive epic. What appears, at first glance, to be a light, cartoonish fantasy quickly reveals a work of real formal intelligence. Smith understands that … Continue reading T.A.E.’s Book Reviews – Bone, Vol. 1: Out from Boneville by Jeff Smith
T.A.E.’s Book Review – In Celebration of Balance & Opposable Thumbs, Collection 1 by Joe Sorren
In Celebration of Balance & Opposable Thumbs, Collection 1 by Joe Sorren is not merely an art collection—it is a philosophical atmosphere rendered in pigment, a meditation on fragility, wonder, and the strange dignity of awkwardness. To approach this book as a conventional monograph would be to miss its essential gesture; the artist is less … Continue reading T.A.E.’s Book Review – In Celebration of Balance & Opposable Thumbs, Collection 1 by Joe Sorren
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
Brian Selznick's hybrid "novel in words and pictures" re-conceives narrative pacing by treating images as scene — and sometimes sequence — rather than mere illustration. The reader moves through long stretches in which single sentences act like inter-titles while spreads of meticulously rendered, black-and-white images perform the work of action, pause, and revelation. This formal … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – American Surreal by Todd Schorr
The lavish monograph published by Last Gasp and issued as the catalogue to a mid-career retrospective at the San Jose Museum of Art is more than a handsome picture book: it stages a sustained argument about how “low” imagery—cartoons, B-movies, advertising—can be retooled into a repository for moral satire, visual allegory, and painterly virtuosity. The … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – American Surreal by Todd Schorr
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The World of Edward Gorey by Clifford Ross
Clifford Ross’s The World of Edward Gorey is less a conventional monograph than an act of tasteful conjuration: a careful, lovingly lit cabinet that sets an uncanny miniature theatre at the center of view. Ross treats Gorey not simply as an illustrator who doodled at the margins of Victorian melodrama, but as a singular authorial … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The World of Edward Gorey by Clifford Ross
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Taboo: The Art of Tiki, edited by Martin McIntosh with an introduction by Sven A. Kirsten
"Taboo: The Art of Tiki" is at once a curatorial flourish and a cultural document: a small, handsome volume that archives a particular late-20th-century fascination with Pacific iconography as refracted through the sensibilities of Lowbrow and pop-surrealist artists. Edited by Martin McIntosh with an introduction by Sven A. Kirsten, and credited with contributions from figures … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Taboo: The Art of Tiki, edited by Martin McIntosh with an introduction by Sven A. Kirsten
The New Renaissance Mindset 