Earlier this year, cartoonist Ward Sutton rocked the book blog world with a cartoon book review of Philip Roth’s recent novel, Indignation. (That excerpted image comes from the Village Voice)
Fascinated by this new kind of book review, GalleyCat caught up with Sutton for an interview. Sutton confessed that he would love to make more comic strip reviews, giving a whole list of tempting possibilities for book review editors.
The artist explained: “I would love to do more cartoon reviews. The Roth review was a first for me, and I really enjoyed it. As a freelancer and a parent, I hardly get any time to read for fun these days (beyond childrens books to my kids) and so I would welcome any assignment that involves reading, especially something as great as Indignation was.”
“I recently got to do a film review in cartoon form of Oliver Stone’s film “W” for the Boston Globe,” he added. “I love biographies and non-fiction. I’d love to review Michael Beschloss’s next volume of LBJ transcriptions. I also would enjoy reviewing humorists like David Sedaris, political commentators like Maureen Dowd, or other writers like Sarah Vowell, etc … really I would be interested in reviewing many writers – both those whom I like and some that I don’t!”
He concluded by describing readers’ reactions to the piece: “I got some nice feedback for the piece. I think that a cartoon review might attract people to reading something about a book in a way that a written review might not. I don’t believe that the cartoon form poses any threat to the art form of book reviews — if anything it’s a creative expansion of the form.”