The Playful Eye is a virtual feast of games and visual tricks gathered from around the world

The Playful Eye: An Album of Visual Delight
by Julian Rothenstein, Mel Gooding
Chronicle Books
2000, 112 pages, 9.9 x 0.5 x 12.7 inches, Paperback
$9 Buy on Amazon

These vintage cards and old placards display optical illusions, visual witticisms, hidden images, rebuses, and artistic paradoxes from yesteryear. They were the equivalent of Gifs back then — eye candy worth sharing. Here they are gathered in a oversized paperback for your entertainment and amazement.

– Kevin Kelly

April 21, 2017

Happy Punks 1 2 3: A Counting Story

Happy Punks 1 2 3: A Counting Story
by John Seven, Jana Christy
Manic D Press, Inc.
2013, 32 pages, 7.6 x 0.3 x 10.7 inches, Hardcover
$14 Buy on Amazon

Is punk all noise and nihilism, or is there fun and frolic to be found in the music and movement as well? At one of the last concerts ever held at CBGB, a muscle-bound skinhead invited all of us to embrace him. Amidst a maelstrom of colliding bodies slam-dancing and pogoing in place, more than a few of us took him up on his offer. The lesson to be learned amongst the shared grins and hugs was that punk is also about building a community that can find and have a good time together.

Enter Happy Punks 1 2 3. Husband-and-wife team “john & jana” took a conventional children’s literature staple, the simple counting book, and infused it with technicolor whimsy and abundant joy. Here the reader is invited to count a dozen playful punks let loose in a city where robots run corner delis, ornery penguins push gelato carts, cavemen run pizza shops and a supporting cast of nattily-dressed or immaculately groomed giraffes, hippos and elephants cavort in the streets and dance during the big concert at the end of the story. The punks themselves are as unique and distinctive as the world that they inhabit, encouraging the reader to peruse and linger a bit before turning each page.

So what are readers of Happy Punks 1 2 3 of any age to make of the book? john and jana create a vibrant, candy-colored party and invite readers to come out and play with their cast of literally and figuratively colorful characters. The authors convey that punk isn’t always a clenched fist. Sometimes it’s an open hand extending to the next generation, inviting boys and girls alike to take hold of it.

– Lee Hollman

April 5, 2017

The first children’s book about Burning Man

Burning Man — The World’s Biggest Playground
by Peter Armenia
2016, 56 pages, 8.5 x 8.5 inches, Hardcover
$19 Buy a copy

If you agree with Plato’s assertion that life should be lived as play, then what better place to test that idea than a playground? Playgrounds have sadly been remaindered to the province of schools, parks and childhood memories. Play is typically associated with children, yet thinkers and creators as diverse as Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso and Sigmund Freud affirm the value of play for everybody.

Photographer and author Peter Armenia vividly addresses this same truism with his children’s picture book, Burning Man — The World’s Biggest Playground. The Burning Man Festival in Black Rock City, Nevada is an annual gathering that attracts all types of artists, musicians and anyone else with something unique to build, share or express in a celebration of virtues such as creativity, individuality and “radical inclusion.” All are welcome to stay and to play, creating a temporary community in which everyone contributes to a shared experience of active imagining.

Armenia succeeds in conveying the essence of Burning Man to young readers with vibrant images and friendly, accessible text in a variety of fonts and colors that emphasizes the essential joy and whimsy defining Burning Man. This attractive and engaging book stands as a simple invitation for child and adult alike: come out and play.

– Lee Hollman

March 9, 2017

Ideal Boy, An: Charts from India

Ideal Boy, An: Charts from India
by Sirish Rao, V. Geetha, Gita Wolf (Editors)
Dewi Lewis Publishing
2001, 120 pages, 6.9 x 1.0 x 9.4 inches, Hardcover
$7 Buy on Amazon

Cheap visual charts were the main educational aid in Indian classrooms until recently. Meant to teach children good behavior, and to assist their reading skills, these inexpensive posters were plastered everywhere by local printers. They have a naive art aesthetic since the artists were unschooled themselves. Generally the charts follow a formula of filing in a grid with examples. Like comic books, their garish colors and simple forms have their own innocent charm. This book rounds up a hundred samples of what is now a rare folk art.

– Kevin Kelly

March 3, 2017

A catalogue and history of one of the most pervasive subcultures — UFO believers

Flying Saucers Are Real
by Jack Womack
Anthology Editions
2016, 288 pages, 11.0 x 8.5 x 1.0 inches, Paperback
$40 Buy on Amazon

I am not that interested in speculation on whether aliens have ever visited the Earth. What I am excited about, however, are all the ways we have imagined them, from the earliest grainy photos of saucer shapes in the sky to the orchestral-minded, big-eyed aliens from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In the 1950s and 1960s, UFOs became ubiquitous in the pulp magazines and cheap popular paperbacks. With their lurid cover and claims that “Flying Saucers Have Landed,” these publications would set the popular consciousness afire. They also opened up theories of ever sort as to the origins of UFOs and what role the government might play in covering them up. From the hollow Earth, to Mars, to other dimensions, the UFO myth could contain almost any form of conjecture. Jews? Maybe. Men in black? Most certainly. Spiritual avatars leading us to a new age? Let’s hope so.

“Flying Saucers Are Real” by Jack Womack collects the science fiction author’s personal collection of UFO-related ephemera, and reveals what William Gibson describes in the book’s introduction as the “source code” of the UFO idea that has been programmed into all of us. Womack introduces the popular UFO myth as starting with what is known as the Shaver mystery, the strange tales of Richard Shaver who claimed to have visited the great civilization that lives in the hollows of the earth. Their brethren fled our planet on spaceships, but those left behind—the Dero—seek to kidnap and enslave human beings for the own (usually sexual) means. The editor Ray Palmer published these in “Amazing Stories” in the 1940s, and he would soon go on to make a career of publishing the most garish stories about flying saucers and invading aliens. His magazine “Fate” and books like “The Coming of the Saucers” lead the way for decades to come.

Womack’s collection is startling in its variety: “The White Sands Incident” by Dr. Daniel Fry in which the authors claims to have been inside flying saucers; “Men From the Moon in America” by W.V. Grant explains that the devil lives on the moon and the space race with the Russians is a race to the power of evil; and “Ceto’s New Friends” by Leah Hadley that teaches children not to be afraid if they are ever abducted. Womack’s collection contains book covers with all manner of saucer-shaped craft, amateur drawings of aliens, and those ubiquitous grainy photos. If the images weren’t enough to recommend this book, Womack’s discussion and examination is a smart and funny travelogue through the forest of this wonderful material.

– Peter Bebergal

February 14, 2017

The popular fantasy skirmish game gets a devilishly-good supplement

Frostgrave: Forgotten Pacts
by Joseph A. McCullough, Dmitry Burmak (Illustrator)
Frostgrave
2016, 64 pages, 7.6 x 0.2 x 9.6 inches, Paperback
$13 Buy on Amazon

Last year, I had the pleasure of exploring “the Frozen City” of Felstad, aka Frostgrave, the ridiculously fun, retro-friendly fantasy miniatures game from Osprey. Designer Joseph McCullogh and Osprey have followed up the highly-successful Frostgrave book with a series of excellent supplements. The latest of these is Forgotten Pacts.

Frostgrave is a very psycho-geographical game, where the ancient, ruined and magic-saturated city of Felstad is really a central character in the game. One of the things each follow-up book does is shine a light in some new corner of that dark and ruined city. And with that light is also illuminated new stories of the city’s past, new wizard and warband types, new magic, treasures to unearth, and new monstrous adversaries.

Forgotten Pacts accomplishes two goals in advancing the game and setting of Frostgrave. It introduces a new region, the northern reaches of Felstad, and the barbarian tribesmen who have moved down from the hills to plunder and explore there. The book also introduces a new magical discipline for courageous wizards to attempt: demonic summoning using pacts. This region of the city is where demon summoning was de rigor during the city’s heyday and the barbarians have re-rediscovered the art of summoning among the temple ruins and incorporated the practice into their way of life. Venturing into this region, the players’ wizards get the opportunity to find a demon’s True Name (basically an unpronounceable name rendered as a sigil) among the ruins, and with that name, attempt to conjure and make a pact with a demon. These demons can grant all sorts of fabulous advantages to wizards who successfully bind them, but they come at a cost. Players must choose sacrifices that have to be made to the demon for as long as the pact remains between wizard and “extra-planar entity.”

Forgotten Pacts is done in the same style as the Frostgrave rulebook and features more stunning full-page fantasy art by Frostgrave court artist, Dmitry Burmak. The book includes background on the northern region, the barbarian tribes, their magical practices (including demonic tattooing, called Mystic Branding, which grants the wearer certain favors), summoning spells, sacrifices and “boons,” demonic attribute tables (for creating more diverse and colorful entities), and advanced summoning rules for between-game demon dealing. There are also new soldier types, new treasures, and new beasties (including the barbarians). A series of scenarios, some linked, allow you to explore the northern reaches, search for demonic sigils, and battle barbarians.

As with the main book and previous supplements, Osprey has teamed with North Star Military Miniatures to create a companion line of plastic and metal miniatures for Forgotten Pacts. The boxed set of multi-part barbarian minis are compatible with all of the previous boxed sets, giving Frostgrave modelers a staggering amount of variety in how they can customize their wizard’s warbands and the city’s dark adversaries.

– Gareth Branwyn

February 10, 2017

Soviet Space Dogs is the fascinating & tragic story of the dogs who became the first living beings in space

Soviet Space Dogs
by Olesya Turkina
FUEL Publishing
2014, 240 pages, 5.0 x 0.9 x 8.1 inches, Hardcover
$26 Buy on Amazon

A weighty, chunky book gilded with a colorful gold foil cover and illustrated with bold graphics of dogs orbiting the globe miles above a prominent Soviet Union emblazoned in red, Soviet Space Dogs is the fascinating, sometimes tragic story of the dogs who became the first living beings in space. Scientific martyrs of the space race between the US and Soviet Union that began in 1957 with the launch of the satellite Sputnik, the dogs became the embodiment of two cultural ideologies; the West believing the use of dogs in space was cruel, and the Russian belief that the dogs were heroically dying for the Motherland. Russian scientists cared deeply for their dogs, and treated them well while on Earth, but saw them as a necessary sacrifice. In the pursuit of knowledge and the desire to beat their Western nemesis into space, some dogs were lost, including Russia’s most famous dog astronaut, Laika. After successfully returning to earth, the dogs became worldwide heroes, and the subjects of songs, poems, and stories, their likenesses on everything from matchbook covers to toys.

Featuring beautiful images of vintage photographs of dogs wearing space helmets, postage stamps depicting rockets in lift-off, propaganda postcards of dogs in space suits, space-themed spinning tops, candy tins with photos of grinning dogs, children’s books with parachuting canines, and ceramic flasks of rockets with dogs’ heads jutting out of it as if they’re on a Sunday drive, Soviet Space Dogs is a bittersweet book retelling the stories of brave beasts who boldly went where no one had gone before. With graphics on every page, the awkward placement of text below the images makes it somewhat difficult to read, and its slimmer than average width forces the reader to crack its spine uncomfortably. Still, it’s a handsome, educational book, and a quick, poetic read.​​

– SD

February 6, 2017

A series of poetic and illustrated vignettes full of heart and humor

Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s Through the Looking Glass (Graphic Medicine)
by Dana Walrath
Penn State University Press
2016, 80 pages, 8.2 x 0.2 x 8.8 inches, Paperback
$20 Buy on Amazon

Aliceheimer’s is Dana Walrath’s touching tribute to her mother, Alice, who faced the early regressive stages of Alzheimer’s while living with Dana’s family in rural Vermont. Illustrated by combinations of pencil work and collaged text from Alice in Wonderland, Aliceheimer’s is an honest but gentle account of family caretaking in the face of a degenerative disease.

Walrath, a medical anthropologist, first began depicting her mother in cartoon form as part of an e-mail exchange in which she and a friend agreed to send each other a drawing a day. Aliceheimer’s grew into a larger work through the Brooklyn Art Library’s Sketchbook project, and evolved into its current form, a self-described work of “graphic medicine.” The book serves as a collection of poetic vignettes that focus on the wit and personality that persevered while other parts of Alice began to fade away. In the book’s introduction, Walrath explains that she was drawing her mother in part to process the grief she felt in witnessing her mother’s illness, but also to “remember the magic and laughter” during their time together.

Walrath’s experiences of her mother and ability to find humor and absurdity in the sadness of her situation reminds me of my own mother, who often punctuates stories of my grandmother’s struggle with dementia by saying “as long as she’s happy, I can deal with it.” While anyone living in proximity to the disease is well familiar with the dark and heavy challenges that come with it, Aliceheimer’s maintains a light, respectful tone as it archives Walrath’s fondest memories of Alice’s later days, crafting them into entertaining anecdotes while honoring Alice’s dignity. It’s an easy-to-relate-to read for someone memory disorder adjacent; each page is like a familiar, meditative short story. The book, which is printed on a thick, glossy stock that feels good on your fingers and bolsters the quality of the illustrations, can easily be read in one sitting or taken in a bit at a time. Lovingly written and unique in its presentation, Aliceheimer’s is a sentimental read full of heart and humor.

– Janine Fleri

January 31, 2017

A visual and historical account of demonic Christmas character Krampus

The Krampus and the Old, Dark Christmas: Roots and Rebirth of the Folkloric Devil
by Al Ridenour
Feral House
2016, 248 pages, 7.0 x 0.7 x 9.9 inches, Paperback
$16 Buy one on Amazon

The Krampus is one of those enigmatic pieces of history that is often clouded by talk of nonsense and magic, but this book manages to cut through all that and provide a well-researched and historical account of the cultural history of this important and often overlooked part of Christmas history. Author Al Ridenour has weaved a fantastic tale not only about the history of the Krampus throughout various cultures and traditions, but also provides some additional context in the way of other related characters and practices.

I had no idea when I picked-up this book that it would be so well researched. The author literally traveled the globe to gather insight and first-hand information. The book is littered with fantastic full-color images of the cultural variations on the Krampus tradition, along with masks and images of other related celebrations around the world. The Krampus has become more popular than ever through a pop culture rebirth and this book is the perfect way to learn to true history of this fun, albeit grim, piece of history.

– Matt MacNabb

December 23, 2016

Aleister Crowley and Adolf Hitler wage occult war in Doug Rushkoff’s latest

Aleister & Adolf
by Douglas Rushkoff, Michael Avon Oeming (Illustrator)
Dark Horse Originals
2016, 88 pages, 6.3 x 0.5 x 9.3 inches, Hardcover
$16 Buy one on Amazon

Anyone who’s waded any distance into the murky waters of legend surrounding British occultist Aleister Crowley has likely heard the stories about his involvement with British intelligence in WWII. He helped interrogate Rudolf Hess after Hess flew a plane from Germany to Scotland to negotiate peace. He worked closely with Ian Fleming (and Fleming’s Blofeld is based on him). He falsified astrology charts to throw off Hitler’s soothsayers. Or, these are the apocryphal stories, anyway.

In Aleister & Adolf, author, media theorist, and now comic book writer, Doug Rushkoff makes clever use of these and other tales about the self-proclaimed Beast 666 to make a deeper point about the profound manipulating powers of “charged” symbols in our modern world. It’s ultimately a book about how the manipulation of symbols and the effective use of propaganda can have deep consciousness-changing effects on a population, and can lead to fascism. Timely, eh?

The book runs with one well-known story from the Crowley apocrypha, that he was responsible for creating the V for victory symbol to be used by Churchill as a counter-sigil (occult symbol) to neutralize the swastika. Rushkoff casts Crowley and Hitler as real-world superhero and supervillain (or maybe, supervillain working for the good guys and straight-up supervillain) in an intense war of symbols and psychic combat. Actually, we don’t see much of Adolf in this book, Aleister & Adolf is mainly about the Crowley side of the magical front lines, as seen through the eyes of a young American army newspaper photographer sent to spy on Crowley and possibly recruit him to work for the U.S. The Crowley story is bookended by a tale set in New York, 1995, of a young web designer for a big corporation who stumbles upon the Aleister and Adolf war story and its ominous relevance to advertising and the burgeoning web.

While the subject-matter is certainly compelling enough, the whole project really becomes something special in the hands of artist Michael Avon Oeming (best known for the Powers comic book with Brian Michael Bendis). Oeming achieves some very intense and charged occult imagery within these pages. Using very vivid, bold, and black-saturated panels, Oeming’s graphic narrative creates a succession of dizzying, dark and shadowy corridors that you feel like you’re stumbling through in some opiated haze. This book feels like a trip through a haunted house. Or at least that’s where the visuals took me. I can’t think of an artist who could have done a better job of rendering Rushkoff’s story than Michael Oeming.

[Perhaps even more magical to me than the art in the book is watching Mike Oeming ink up a panel of it in this YouTube video]

– Gareth Branwyn

December 16, 2016

What Am I Doing Here? Existential absurdist cartoons from the 1940s

What Am I Doing Here?
by Abner Dean
New York Review Comics
2016, 168 pages, 7 x 0.75 x 9.5 inches
$19 Buy one on Amazon

In the 1930s and 1940s, Abner Dean was a highly sought-after illustrator who drew covers, cartoons, and illustrations for The New Yorker, Esquire, Time, Life, and Newsweek, as well as advertising illustrations for insurance companies and product manufacturers. In 1945, Dean quit his day job and drew the first of seven books that have been described as “existential gag cartoons.”

What Am I Doing Here? is Dean’s second book, and is generally regarded as his best work. It was originally published in 1947. This facsimile edition just came out today and contains about 100 single panel drawings, rendered in India ink and graytone washes (in the classic New Yorker style of gag cartoons).

Dean’s drawings look like cartoons but they aren’t very funny, at least not in the traditional sense. They’re absurdist and disquieting. Everyone is naked and the action takes place either in decrepit urban settings, living rooms filled with grinning desperate characters, or barren surrealistic wastelands. Each drawing features the same hapless character, a lonely youngish man who questions his role in the human race, represented by a crowd that changes its form and behavior from page to page. The people are sometimes club-swinging brutes, other times they are blinkered sleepwalkers, insincere mask-wearers, bloodthirsty mobs, hysterical celebrators, suicidal lemmings, or guru-seeking fools. They often look more like animals than people. The protagonist is at times foolhardy, delusional, disappointed, fearful, proud, insecure, ruthless, or bewildered.

In the introduction, Clifton Fadiman (chief editor of Simon & Schuster in the 1920s and 1930s, and editor of The New Yorker’s book review section for ten years after that) wrote:>

It is pointless to try to “explain” Abner Dean. His pictures are trick mirrors in which we catch sight of those absurd fragments of ourselves that we never see in the smooth glass of habit. Formulae for the art of Abner Dean are irrelevant. What is important is the fact that it jolts you into sudden awareness of your own pathos, your own plight, your own unending and gigantic laughableness.

– Mark Frauenfelder

October 11, 2016

Encyclopedia of Hell – “Written by and for demons, instructing them on how to destroy mankind”

Encyclopedia of Hell: An Invasion Manual for Demons Concerning the Planet Earth and the Human Race Which Infests It
by Martin Olson (author), Tony Millionaire (illustrator) and Mahendra Singh (illustrator)
Feral House
2011, 240 pages, 7 x 10 x 0.8 inches (softcover)
$14 Buy a copy on Amazon

In 1911 journalist Ambrose Bierce published a scathingly satirical book called The Devil’s Dictionary, which contained truer-than-true definitions of everyday words. (Example — Bore: A person who talks when you wish him to listen.) Exactly 100 years later came Martin Olson’s Encyclopaedia of Hell, “a book that was ‘written by and for demons, instructing them on how to destroy mankind.’” This encyclopedia is a blisteringly subversive book filled with illustrated definitions in the vein of Ambrose Bierce. Written as if Satan himself was the author, the definitions reveal a dim view of humanity. (Justice: Superstition of humans oppressed by the billionaires who own them. Robot: From the corporate viewpoint, the ideal human being. Soldier: A target made of flesh.) The book is lushly designed by Sean Tejaratchi, publisher of the late, great Crap Hound zine. – Mark Frauenfelder

September 2, 2016