From Publishers Weekly
Rall's third effort in the Attitude series turns its focus to online cartooning, a somewhat nebulous field that Rall has only middling success corralling into a book. There is a basic contradiction involved with publishing Web material in print: if the medium is viable, why does the work need a book? But that speculative question aside, this is a decent massing of some young cartoonists who practice the gag-a-day format in cyberspace. Most are no different from what one might see in a local alternative weekly, with unremarkable but competent drawings, generic gags and so on. But there are a couple of standouts: Nicholas Gurewitch's funny, surreal comics come from a personal, highly idiosyncratic place, as do Ryan North's, who has taken a clip art approach to gags. It's still unclear how these comics benefit from being online, as they don't use any of the features the Web offers (besides nearly free space), nor is it clear if the Web breeds a new kind of cartoon sensibility.
Attitude 3 is an entertaining but random assortment of artists who happen to publish on the Web.
(July) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
The third set of Rall's profiles of cartoonists he dubs subversive focuses on artists plying their trade online. Mostly unable to break into alternative weeklies, these new cartoonists use the Internet as their venue. A few get paid for simultaneous print appearances, but most self-publish, which allows them the freedom to be more radical than their dead-tree counterparts. Steven L. Cloud's webcomics consist solely of a dialogue between a head on a stick and a blank-faced snake. As Rall aptly notes, the visual style of Eric Millikin's
Fetus-X "crosses Edvard Munch with an incipient victim of high-school suicide." Unfortunately, lack of editorial intermediation permits drawing styles including the primitive to the downright crude. The technology doesn't even require real drawing ability. Several of the represented cartoonists rely on digital cutting and pasting, and Michael Zole's strips just show two quarter-circles ("1" and "2") conversing. But the standouts--Mark Fiore's Flash-animated political cartoons and Nicholas Gurewitch's perversely gentle
Perry Bible Fellowship--are unique and personal.
Gordon FlaggCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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