Neon Visions

Neon Visions PDF Author: Brannon Costello
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807168068
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
Neon Revelations tracks the groundbreaking career of comics innovator and iconoclastic auteur Howard Chaykin and the impact of his work on the transformation of American comic books in the 1980s. Acclaimed (and often controversial) projects such as American Flagg!, Time2, and Black Kiss turned action-packed adventure tales of mainstream comics into a platform for personal expression, political engagement, and aesthetic experimentation. Chaykin remains a vital and prolific artist today, yet despite the original and influential nature of his comics, he has received scant critical attention. Spanning Chaykin’s career from his 1980s heyday to the contemporary period, the first book-length study of Chaykin’s work locates the unique power of Chaykin’s comics in their inventive explorations of the question of authenticity in popular culture. It examines the ways in which Chaykin’s work, which demands a mode of reading that is alive to the distinct affordances of the comics medium and the complexities of its history, reveals the limitations of valuing comics narrowly as "literature."

Neon Visions

Neon Visions PDF Author: Brannon Costello
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807168068
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Get Book Here

Book Description
Neon Revelations tracks the groundbreaking career of comics innovator and iconoclastic auteur Howard Chaykin and the impact of his work on the transformation of American comic books in the 1980s. Acclaimed (and often controversial) projects such as American Flagg!, Time2, and Black Kiss turned action-packed adventure tales of mainstream comics into a platform for personal expression, political engagement, and aesthetic experimentation. Chaykin remains a vital and prolific artist today, yet despite the original and influential nature of his comics, he has received scant critical attention. Spanning Chaykin’s career from his 1980s heyday to the contemporary period, the first book-length study of Chaykin’s work locates the unique power of Chaykin’s comics in their inventive explorations of the question of authenticity in popular culture. It examines the ways in which Chaykin’s work, which demands a mode of reading that is alive to the distinct affordances of the comics medium and the complexities of its history, reveals the limitations of valuing comics narrowly as "literature."

Neon Visions

Neon Visions PDF Author: Brannon Costello
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807168076
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 486

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Book Description
In the 1980s, Howard Chaykin broke new ground in American comic books with a series of formally innovative, iconoclastic works that turned the traditional action-adventure tales of mainstream comics into a platform for personal expression, political engagement, and aesthetic experimentation. His original creations American Flagg!, Time2, and the notorious Black Kiss, along with his reshaping of familiar titles like The Shadow and Blackhawk, generated acclaim and often controversy as they challenged expectations of the visual design and subject matter permissible in popular comics. Today, Chaykin remains a vital and prolific artist, but despite the original and influential nature of his work, he receives scant critical attention. In Neon Visions, Brannon Costello offers the first book-length critical evaluation of Chaykin’s work and confronts the blind spots in comics scholarship that consign this seminal artist to the margins. He argues that Chaykin’s contributions are often overlooked because his comics eschew any pretensions to serious literature. Instead, Chaykin’s work revels in the cliffhanger thrills of heroic-adventure genres and courts outrage with transgressive depictions of violence and sexuality. Examining Chaykin’s career from his early successes to compelling contemporary series such as City of Tomorrow, Dominic Fortune, and the controversial Black Kiss 2, Costello explores how this inventive body of work, through its evolving treatment of the theme of authenticity, incisively investigates popular culture’s capacity to foster or constrain individual identity and political agency. Challenging prevailing assumptions about the types of comics deemed worthy of scholarly attention, Costello reveals that the work of an artist as distinctive as Howard Chaykin demands a nuanced reading—one that confronts his unique approach to the comics medium, his blending of autobiographical themes and genre trademarks, and his engagement with comic books as artifacts of consumer culture.

A Vision of Neon

A Vision of Neon PDF Author: Angela M. Graziano
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780983828976
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
A Vision of Neon is a story of two friends - one who survives the complex years of adolescence and one who does not - and the unconditional love and commitment between these young girls. Wild, sharp-tongued red-head Kelsey embodies the confidence that her shy and quiet best friend, the story's narrator, only dreams of. But as time passes, Kelsey's seeming confidence and acts of teenage rebellion become overshadowed by day-long crying spells, invented stories of fictitious friends and thin slashes of scab that mark her skin. In high school, Kelsey descends into mental illness, while the narrator attempts to maintain a normal teenage life, despite continuing efforts to support her suicidal friend. However, both girls must ultimately face one difficult fact: regardless of their longings, Kelsey's sickness has a debilitating stranglehold on them both.

A Neon Darkness

A Neon Darkness PDF Author: Lauren Shippen
Publisher: Tor Teen
ISBN: 1250297559
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
A Neon Darkness, the second Bright Sessions novel from creator Lauren Shippen, features villain Damien, who can make anyone want what he wants. Robert Gorham always gets what he wants. But the power of persuasion is as potent a blessing as it is a curse. Robert is alone until a group of strangers who can do impossible things—produce flames without flint, conduct electricity with their hands, and see visions of the past—welcome him. They call themselves Unusuals and they give Robert a new name too: DAMIEN. Finally, finally he belongs. As long as he can keep his power under control. But control is a sacrifice he might not be willing to make. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Agatha of Little Neon

Agatha of Little Neon PDF Author: Claire Luchette
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374721300
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
A National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" Honoree “An enchanting, sparkling book about the many meanings of sisterhood.” —Kristin Iversen, Refinery29 Claire Luchette's debut, Agatha of Little Neon, is a novel about yearning and sisterhood, figuring out how you fit in (or don’t), and the unexpected friends who help you find your truest self Agatha has lived every day of the last nine years with her sisters: they work together, laugh together, pray together. Their world is contained within the little house they share. The four of them are devoted to Mother Roberta and to their quiet, purposeful life. But when the parish goes broke, the sisters are forced to move. They land in Woonsocket, a former mill town now dotted with wind turbines. They take over the care of a halfway house, where they live alongside their charges, such as the jawless Tim Gary and the headstrong Lawnmower Jill. Agatha is forced to venture out into the world alone to teach math at a local all-girls high school, where for the first time in years she has to reckon all on her own with what she sees and feels. Who will she be if she isn’t with her sisters? These women, the church, have been her home. Or has she just been hiding? Disarming, delightfully deadpan, and full of searching, Claire Luchette’s Agatha of Little Neon offers a view into the lives of women and the choices they make.

Flickering Light

Flickering Light PDF Author: Christoph Ribbat
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 178023127X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Without neon, Las Vegas might still be a sleepy desert town in Nevada and Times Square merely another busy intersection in New York City. Transformed by the installation of these brightly colored signs, these destinations are now world-famous, representing the vibrant heart of popular culture. But for some, neon lighting represents the worst of commercialism. Energized by the conflicting love and hatred people have for neon, Flickering Light explores its technological and intellectual history, from the discovery of the noble gas in late nineteenth-century London to its fading popularity today. Christoph Ribbat follows writers, artists, and musicians—from cultural critic Theodor Adorno, British rock band the Verve, and artist Tracey Emin to Vladimir Nabokov, Langston Hughes, and American country singers—through the neon cities in Europe, America, and Asia, demonstrating how they turned these blinking lights and letters into metaphors of the modern era. He examines how gifted craftsmen carefully sculpted neon advertisements, introducing elegance to modern metropolises during neon’s heyday between the wars followed by its subsequent popularity in Las Vegas during the 1950s and '60s. Ribbat ends with a melancholy discussion of neon’s decline, describing how these glowing signs and installations came to be seen as dated and characteristic of run-down neighborhoods. From elaborate neon lighting displays to neglected diner signs with unlit letters, Flickering Light tells the engrossing story of how a glowing tube of gas took over the world—and faded almost as quickly as it arrived.

The Neon Bible

The Neon Bible PDF Author: John Kennedy Toole
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802197329
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
“A moving evocation of the small-town South in the mid-twentieth century” that “belongs on the shelf with the works of Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, and Eudora Welty” (Orlando Sentinel). John Kennedy Toole—who won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his best-selling comic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces—wrote The Neon Bible for a literary contest at the age of sixteen. The manuscript languished in a drawer and became the subject of a legal battle among Toole’s heirs. It was only in 1989, thirty-five years after it was written and twenty years after Toole’s suicide at thirty-one, that this amazingly accomplished and evocative novel was freed for publication. “Heartfelt emotion, communicated in clean direct prose . . . a remarkable achievement.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “John Kennedy Toole’s tender, nostalgic side is as brilliantly effective as his corrosive satire. If you liked To Kill A Mockingbird you will love The Neon Bible.” —Florence King “Shockingly mature. . . . Even at sixteen, Toole knew that the way to write about complex emotions is to express them simply.” —Kerry Luft, Chicago Tribune

Visions of Cody

Visions of Cody PDF Author: Jack Kerouac
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101548789
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
“To read On the Road but not Visions of Cody is to take a nice sightseeing tour but to forgo the spectacular rapids of Jack Kerouac’s wildest writings.”—The New York Times Book Review “The centerpiece of all [Kerouac’s] novels.”—The Washington Post Originally written in 1951–1952, Visions of Cody was an underground classic by the time it was finally published in 1972, three years after Kerouac’s death. Utilizing a radical, experimental form (“the New Journalism fifteen years early,” as Dennis McNally noted in Desolate Angel), Kerouac examines his own New York life in a collection of colorful stream-of-consciousness essays. Always transfixed by Neal Cassady—here named Cody Pomeray—along with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, Kerouac also explores the feelings he had for a man who inspired much of his work. Transcribing taped conversations between members of their group as they took drugs and drank, Visions of Cody reveals an intimate portrait of people caught up in destructive relationships with substances, and one another, capturing the members of the Beat Generation in the years before any label had been affixed to them.

Benchmarking for Best Practice

Benchmarking for Best Practice PDF Author: Mohamed Zairi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1136426566
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
Benchmarking for Best Practice uses up-to-the-minute case-studies of individual companies and industry-wide quality schemes to show how and why implementation has succeeded. For any practitioner wanting to establish best practice in a wide variety of business areas, this book makes essential reading. It is also an ideal textbook on the applications of TQM since it describes concepts, covers definitions and illustrates the applications with first-hand examples. Professor Mohamed Zairi is an international expert and leading figure in the field of benchmarking. His pioneering work in this area led to the implementation of sixty comprehensive benchmarking projects in companies worldwide. He has written several books on this subject including 'Practical Benchmarking' in 1992.

Beyond the Neon Lights

Beyond the Neon Lights PDF Author: Hanchao Lu
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 052093167X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 474

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Book Description
How did ordinary people live through the extraordinary changes that have swept across modern China? How did peasants transform themselves into urbanites? How did the citizens of Shanghai cope with the epic upheavals—revolution, war, and again revolution—that shook their lives? Even after decades of scholarship devoted to modern Chinese history, our understanding of the daily lives of the common people of China remains sketchy and incomplete. In this carefully researched study, Hanchao Lu weaves rich documentary data with ethnographic surveys and interviews to reconstruct the fabric of everyday life in China's largest and most complex city in the first half of this century.