Brief hiatus / secondary reading

I'm going to be out of town for a few days, so I won't be able to update this blog until next Tuesday. I'm happy, though, that since my new-year resolution to put more effort into writing about comics, I have somehow managed to post every day. And I've got a few good articles I'm working on, including the next installment of my Tim Drake series.

I've taken two books about comics out of the library and will be taking them with me to read on the bus. The first is The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History, by Robert C. Harvey. I've read the first chapter so far, about the rise of super-hero comics and Kirby's influence (among other things), and it's very informative. Although it covers a lot of material I'm already familiar with, it's a nice synthesis of a lot of information I'd never quite put together into such a clear historical narrative before. It also goes into considerable depth into some areas that I only had a passing knowledge of before.

The second book is in French and is more theoretical than historical: Principes des littératures dessinées, by Harry Morgan. It's a pretty big volume and I probably won't have time to read the whole thing before returning it to the library, but I'm hoping it will be useful especially in stimulating a reflection on the formal and technical aspects of the medium. Consider it research for a series of posts I'm working on, but which I'm not ready to announce yet.

Check back here Tuesday for my "Is It Wednesday Yet?" column.