Another Thing About Those Tablets ...

... when we got home from church Sunday both the kids (of course) wanted to play games, watch videos, and whatever else they do with those electronic thingamajigs. I was willing to let them, but five minutes later Sarah screamed because the one tablet she used -- that she and I alternate using, really -- wasn't charged, and apparently that was my error because I plugged it in upside down or something, I'll agree to that. But throwing a tantrum Sunday morning and then blowing up because Jeffrey could use his ... that just does not sit well with me. So I put the tablets away and asked the kids to bed some board games we could play. They used to have a lot of fun doing that, you know.


So before Martha got home (she sings in the church choir second service) Jeffrey, Sarah, and I got into a nail-bitingly exciting game of Sorry! which, for those of you who know the basics, can get ridiculous near the end. At least it did for us, we were within range of our home tracks we kept pulling cards that said go backwards or Sorry! cards that we used to send another player back to their starting space ... anyway, after trading a few dozen barbs back and forth doing this to other players with good-natured skewering, Sarah came in first, with Jeffrey second and their dad last. Bleah. But I made up for that by winning against Jeffrey in chess in just under thirty moves.


And it took us a minute to realize I'd done it; if it was one of those Russian-named strategies I used, I'm not aware of it. And now to tell you about the books I've read (two of them so I can get them back to the library) let me delve quickly into the 2015 illustrated -- or in the words of the cover, a marvelous -- memoir Amazing Fantastic Incredible (ISBN 9781501107726) by Stan Lee and Peter David and Colleen Doran about the first man. Covering the life of "Stan The Man" from his birth to roughly the present, the good and the bad, tongue-in-cheek and tender moments, and Stan Lee breaks the fourth wall quite a bit in this one!


I expected Stan Lee to be a big chapter two (the way D. W. Griffith is in movies) in Fred Van Lente & Ryan Dunlavey's 2012 The Comic Book History of Comics (ISBN 9781613771976, introduction by Tom Spurgeon) but it's nowhere near that simple. He did do and does a good deal of creating, but people saw -- and still see, I suppose -- him so much as the public face of Marvel Comics (hey, he's the one who gets cameos in every Marvel film!) that many other creators felt slighted and lost in his shadow and eventually struck out on their own. Many I'm told have done very well.


But the History goes back to the Yellow Kid of the 1890s, and even before THAT to woodcuts done by a Swiss gentleman named Rodolphe Töpffer who arranged them in order and when they got translated in America predated The Yellow Kid by a half century. Arguably he's the inventor of the comic strip -- that is, illustrations arranged in sequence depicting linear action -- and the graphic novel. Also was his own worst critic, so the story goes. Like any other medium, it helps to understand that comics is a business and this book shows that well.


And now at five paragraphs I take my leave of you,



David