attitude 3

Attitude 3: The New Subversive Online Cartoonists Paperback – June 1, 2006
by Ted Rall (Editor)

This is a caustic collection of the top political and social e-cartoonists of today. It offers the best among the web’s flurry of unfettered opinions. The top political and social e-cartoonists found on the web today provide yet another incisive and irreverent alternative view of today’s society and politics. Like in the previous volumes of “Attitude”, Ted Rall’s interviews of the artists are featured along numerous cartoons.

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 Flagg

Biography
Ted Rall is a nationally syndicated political cartoonist, columnist, graphic novelist, editor, author and occasional war correspondent.

Twice the winner of the RFK Journalism Award and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Rall’s important books include “Revenge of the Latchkey Kids,” about the travails of Generation X, and “Silk Road to Ruin,” a survey of ex-Soviet Central Asia. He traveled to Afghanistan during the fall 2001 U.S. invasion, where he drew and wrote “To Afghanistan and Back,” the first book of any kind about the war. He was also one of the first journalists to declare the war effort doomed, writing in The Village Voice in December 2001 that the occupation had already been lost.

Product Details
Series: Attitude 3
Paperback: 128 pages
Publisher: NBM Publishing (June 1, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1561634654
ISBN-13: 978-1561634651
Product Dimensions: 0.4 x 8.4 x 10.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces

Leave a Reply