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“She’s kind of picky about food,” Sammy said. “What are you burning?”
It just missed sounding like a wholehearted compliment; there might have been some comment intended on the deceptiveness of attractive packages.
“Kayn ayn hora,”
“He was all right,” Sammy said. “He was good. Yeah, I think he’ll do fine.”
was as if, she thought, he had been engaged in a process of transferring himself from Czechoslovakia to America, from Prague to New York, a little at a time, and every day there was more of him on this side of the ocean.
sudden popularity
the sympathy those parents felt for a homeless Jewish boy who had somehow managed to get out from under the shadow of the billowing black flag that was unfurling across Europe, and who was known to donate his entire fee to the Transatlantic Rescue Agency.
Luna Moth was a creature of the night, of the Other World, of mystic regions where evil worked by means of spells and curses instead of bullets, torpedoes, or shells.
Winsor McKay.
The urban dreamscapes, the dizzying perspectives, the playful tone, and the bizarre metamorphoses and juxtapositions of Little Nemo in Slumberland all quickly found their way into Joe’s pages for Luna Moth. Suddenly the standard three tiers of quadrangular panels became a prison from which he had to escape.
He experimented with benday dots, cross-hatching, woodcut effects, and even crude collage.*
The strip lay poised on the needle-sharp fulcrum between the marvelous and the vulgar that was, to Rosa, the balancing point of Surrealism itself.
working his way toward some kind of breakthrough in his art.
in her mission of love.
Every golden age is as much a matter of disregard as of felicity. It was only when he was settling into the back of a taxicab, or reaching for his wallet, or brushing against a chair, that there came the crinkling of paper; the flutter of a wing; the ghostly foolscap whisper from home; and for a moment he would hang his head in shame.
Neptune’s Kingdom. There were weird purple stalagmites
roll in the big rubber rock formations that were salvaged, so Mr. Dawson, the ballroom manager, has told him, from that Dream of Venus girlie show on the midway at the World’s
The Saboteur is well informed on the particulars of this evening’s reception, for it is the one he has chosen to make the scene of his greatest exploit to date.
It was at these times that he began to understand, after all those years of study and performance, of
feats and wonders and surprises, the nature of magic. The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But everyone knew that it was only an illusion. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.
aetataureate delusion. The rest of the world was busy feeding
of or pertaining to a golden age," referring to a period of peak achievement and excellence, particularly in a creative or intellectual field. It is derived from the Latin words aetas (age) and aureatus (golden). The word is used to describe a time of prime maturity and wisdom, and one notable use is in Chabon's novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.
the general mentality of the New Yorker was not one of siege, panic, or grim resignation to fate but rather the toe-wiggling, tea-sipping contentment of a woman curled on a sofa, reading in front of a fire with cold rain rattling against the windows.
is ironic that the April night on which Sammy felt most aware of the luster of his existence—the moment when, for the first time in his life, he was fully conscious of his own happiness—was a night that he would never discuss with anyone at all.
Louis Tannen’s Magic Shop
the Warlocks,
who met twice a month at the bar of the Edison Hotel to baffle on...
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Walter B. Gibson, biographer of Houdini and inventor of the Shadow, that Joe had come to know Orson Welles, a semiregular attendee of the Edison confabulations. Welles was also, as it turned out, a friend of Tracy Bacon, whose first work in New York had been with the Mercury Theatre, playing the role of Algernon in Welles’s radio production of The Importance of Being Earnest.
general impression of imminent catastrophe and red lipstick.
GREAT STUFF, THE ESCAPIST,” Orson Welles told Sammy.
he smelled like Dolores Del Rio.
his privilege to be alive at the very moment when the practitioners of his favorite music were at the absolute peak of their artistry and craft, a moment unsurpassed in this century for verve, romanticism, polish, and a droll, tidy variety of soul.
bar of the Edison Hotel.
In later years, in other hands, the Escapist was played for laughs. Tastes changed, and writers grew bored, and all the straight plots had been pretty well exhausted. Later writers and artists, with the connivance of George Deasey, turned the strip into a peculiar kind of inverted parody of the whole genre of the costumed hero.
was quite vain; readers sometimes caught him stopping, on his way to fight evil, to check his reflection and comb his hair in a window or the mirror of a drugstore scale.
While he continued to defend the weak and champion the helpless as reliably as ever, the Escapist never seemed to take his adventures very seriously. He took vacations in Cuba, Hawaii, and Las Vegas, where he shared a stage at the Sands Hotel with none other than Wladziu Liberace himself.
He was a superpowerful, muscle-bound clown.
The early stories,
are stories of orphans threatened, peasants abused, poor factory workers turned into slavering zombies by their arms-producer bosses.
sticking up for the innocent victims of Europe as he did taking divots out of battleships with his fists. He shielded refugees and kept bombs from landing on babies. Whenever he busted a Nazi spy ring at work...
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The camera hopped that spiky iron fence, soared like a crow up that sinister, broken hillside with its monkeys and its gondolas and its miniature golf course and, knowing just what it was looking for, burst in through the window and zoomed right in on a pair of monstrous lips as they rasped out that ultimate word.
The Amazing Cavalieri was going to break free, forever, of the nine little boxes.
want us to do something like that,” he said.
They would never forget the way the camera had dived through the skylight of the seedy nightclub to pounce on poor Susie in her ruin. They discussed the interlocking pieces of the jigsaw portrait of Kane, and argued about how anyone knew his dying word when no one appeared to be in the room to hear him whisper it. Joe struggled to express, to formulate, the revolution in his ambitions for the ragged-edged and stapled little art form to which their inclinations and luck had brought them.
Clearly Citizen Kane.The use of deep focus, foreground and background both clear as n the scene with the with Agnes Moorhead inside the cabin window, while discussing the child, Kane, playing in the background through the window in the snow and on his sled( Rosebud) Also his use of shadowy lighting, using a grid on top of the set to create a sense of mystery. He introduced so many conventions into film. Everything s about juxtaposition of shots from one to the next.
the total blending of narration and image that was—didn’t Sammy see it?—the fundamental principle of comic book storytelling, and the irreducible nut of their partnership.
In this one crucial regard—its inextricable braiding of image and narrative—Citizen Kane was like a comic book.
don’t know, Joe,” Sammy said. “I’d like to think we could do something like that. But come on. This is just, I mean, we’re talking about comic books.” “Why do you look at it that way, Sammy?” Rosa said. “No medium is inherently better than any other.” Belief in this dictum was almost a requirement for residence in her father’s house. “It’s all in what you do with it.”
“It’s not comic books that you think are inferior, it’s you.”
so much to him.
“You’re talking about getting adults to read comic books.”
“All right,” Joe said softly. “I will stop the fighting.”
