Books

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26
Feb 10

Graphic Novel Pull List

Looking for a few titles to explore the hidden backlots of human experience? The four below dive deep into biographical and psychological hinterlands, ruminating on childhood, parenthood, and more amid all manner of circumstances. In each instance, the artists/writers unearth emotional veins buried deep in meaning and experience to produce unique and powerful stories.

  • Three Shadows by Cyril Pedrosa

    A father’s struggle to save his son from the fates takes him on an extraordinary journey. Cyril Pedrosa shows off artistic chops polished deep in the mines of animated film production (among his credits, Hercules and the Hunchback of Notre Dame) and takes full flight in this memoriam to a loved one.

  • Stitches by David Small

    The New Yorker artist and childrens book illustrator stirs up a cauldron of childhood memories and comes to terms with the powerful, often terrible, circumstances that made him the artist he is today.

  • Tonoharu by Lars Martinson

    A beautifully rendered debut by Xeric-award winning graphic novelist, Lars Martinson, tells the story of a lonely, depressed expat teaching English in Japan. I look forward to the second in this series — the look of which reminds me of Chris Ware‘s precise drawing style.

  • The Killer by Matz, Luc Jacamon

    Unlike the above, the Killer (“Le Tueur”) treads on more rarefied ground — an introspective examination of life as an assassin. Originally written in French, the story unfolds slowly but drips with menace and suspense. David Fincher is apparently bringing this to the big screen.

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29
Jan 10

Web 2.0 Nontrepreneurs

Journalist Sarah Lacy lays bare the often inscrutable mating rituals of VCs, founders, and startups in her recent book, Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good. Set in post-bubble Silicon Valley, the story goes something like this — burned by meddling boards, corporate bureaucracies, and ill-fitting outside managers, Web 2.0 entrepreneurs rewrote the rules of internet startups by maintaining controlling interests and stubborn faith in their visions (often at the expense of the early exit). The benefits of benign angel investors (friend-tors), startup-friendly business services (open sourcing, CCBy licensing, CPC advertising, cloud computing), and, of course, individual fortunes are also documented. Dubbed nontrepreneurs, their self-professed mantra? Build cool stuff. No surprise the PayPal mafia (whose members went on to found Slide, Yelp, and YouTube) are frequently cited in the narrative. Other fixtures in the Web 2.0 landscape (Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Kevin Rose of Digg, Jack Dorsey of Twitter, and Evan Williams of Blogger/Twitter) loom large in this breezy, often waggish read.
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4
Jan 10

Post-Holiday Read: Stealing MySpace

Astute retelling of MySpace‘s rise, recounted by veteran WSJ tech reporter, Julia Angwin. DeWolfe and Anderson as counterpoints to the tech-savvy enterpreneurs of Silicon Valley heralded a new chapter in web innovation. While Facebook has proven the more durable innovator/platform (especially among developers), MySpace along with various partners like PhotoBucket certainly showed Silicon Valley Friendster a thing or two about delivering game-changing products.

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