Product Description
Photographs and documents from the life of Neal Cassady. ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (20)

A Real, like, Jumble, Maaaannnnnnnnnn
Ok...cool comics, but often the info given is wrong. Pekar needed a copy editor and fact checker badly. C'mon ALAN Ginsberg!? ALAN? Everyone knows it's ALLEN. The chronologies/time lines are all mixed up on many of the Beats featured. A real disappointment for a terrible perfectionist/sometime Beat aficionado like myself. C'mon Whalen wasn't in Japan until the 90s, he lived around the corner from me in S.F. The Burroughs caricature is ridiculous making him look like some hobo (the guy wore freakin suits, not t-shirts w/ holes, and he didn't hold anyone up w/ a gun--read the books and bios and interviews). Anyway...wish I felt I was being nitpicky but I'm not. I was particularly interested in the "Lamantia" section (why not "Philip Lamantia"?). Books on the shelf feature Ur-Vox and Faucheuse...wow. Nancy his wife wrote it, so you know it's factual. The other sections are terribly brief (Snyder's ends in 1974). Guess it can't be comprehensive, the book would be 10 times bigger (w/ ten times more factual mistakes).

I get the feeling the artists were not chosen for their personal knowledge of the Beat Generation, or its members.

A diverse and interesting portrayal of the Beats written by Pekar and others
This book is "by Harvey Pekar et al." with "art by Ed Piskor et al." While the majority of the text and art are by Pekar and Piskor, the book is actually 25 different pieces on various people and topics of the Beat Generation created by a diverse group of writers and artists.

In the first half of the book Pekar and Piskor tackle the lives of the three major figures: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. This is followed by shorter pieces on other people associated with the movement: Kenneth Rexroth, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, William Everson, Robert Duncan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Philip Lamantia, Gary Snyder, Diane di Prima, Slim Brundage, Jay DeFeo, d.a. levy, and my favorites Kenneth Patchen and Tuli Kupferberg.

To set these biographic pieces in context there are chapters on Jazz, Art, the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, and women in the Beat movement.

All together Pekar writes 18 of the 25 chapters, giving the book a continuity yet allowing for diversity of views, while Piskor inks just over half the graphics which keeps the book visually interesting.
Highly recommended even if you only read the two chapters on Patchen and Kupferberg.

Not a satisfying survey
Pekar's text is ok.Nothing stands out in memory, though, after reading.I can't say I'm any more knowledgeable about this generation than I was before reading (which is to say: not knowledgeable at all).

That paired with the completely uninspired drawings makes this a 'not recommended' work.Most frames have no information... just a character standing in the center, sometimes with a vague expression, sometimes with an arm raised, sometimes talking to another character.No background scene worth noticing.Completely dead, in comic terms.

I appreciate the effort though.Hopefully a future artist and editor will give this the revamp it deserves.

For fans only...
This book is probably drastically improved if you're a big fan of the main Beat poets.But if you were, you'd probably have already known a lot of the stuff contained within.As it stood, I thought the book was dragged down by a number of visual tics that the main artist (Ed Piskor) relied heavily on to get through his 100+ pages of artwork (everyone smiles exactly the same, pointless portrait panels, and a sort of sunburst background image that was used excessively whenever there wasn't an obvious choice for a background - to the point where it was used in the exact same panel on two facing pages).On the bonus side, I really enjoyed the stories by Joyce Brabner/Summer McClinton (which answers the question of what these guys' partners/wives were doing while they were getting smashed and screwing everything in sight) and the story about the Fugs (of whom I am a fan).

So yeah.Read it if you like Kerouac/Ginsberg/Burroughs.Otherwise, I wouldn't really bother...

The Beats
OMFG, this book is boring.Pass on this dull and dry history of the Beat Generation. ... Read more