Through his comic strip Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz (1922-2000) has left his signatures on American culture--Lucy's fake hold for the kickoff, Linus's security blanket, Charlie Brown's baseball team that never wins a game, and his everyman cry of -Good Grief -

When Schulz died February 13, 2000, the eve of publication for the last Sunday strip he would draw, the world mourned the passing of a gentle humorist and minimalist innovator, a comic strip artist who had become one of America's major pop philosophers, theologians, and psychologists in the last half of the twentieth...

In this collection of more than a dozen interviews one of the giants of American comic strips talks about his life and his craft. The years spanning 1937 to 1986, when the interviews were conducted, embrace almost all of Caniff's career as he was producing the legendary Terry and the Pirates and his post-World War II masterpiece Steve Canyon.

In long interviews with such comics luminaries as Jules Feiffer and Will Eisner, Caniff (1907-1988) discusses his signature chiaroscuro style, his passion for realism in every detail, and his relationships with such other cartooning...

Disney artist Carl Barks (1901-2000) created one of Walt Disney's most famous characters, Scrooge McDuck. Barks also produced more than 500 comic book stories. His work is ranked among the most widely circulated, best-loved, and most influential of all comic book art.

Although the images he created are known virtually everywhere, Barks was an isolated storyteller, living in the desert of California and preferring to labor without public fanfare during most of his career.

He created work of such exceptional quality that he was accorded the greatest autonomy of any Disney artist. He is...

R. Crumb's illustrations have appeared on the covers of albums by Big Brother and the Holding Company, on bootlegged T-shirts, and in several underground newspapers. He is, however, first and foremost, known as the father of underground comics and for work that paved the way for both satirical comics and autobiographical work in the comics medium.

He has been compared favorably to Brueghel, demonized as a misogynist, defended by feminists, and portrayed as the subject of Crumb, an award-winning documentary film. Having created such iconic characters as Mr. Natural, Fritz the...

When Mort Walker (b. 1923) was ten years old, he received an inscribed Moon Mullins cartoon from its creator Frank Willard that read, -Say Morton, those drawings you sent me were swell-I'll bet you'll be a big shot cartoonist some day.- By the time he was fifteen, Walker was a comic strip artist for a daily metropolitan newspaper. By the time he was eighteen, he was chief editor of Hallmark Cards.

In 1950, King Features picked up his strip Beetle Bailey for syndication. Four years later, Walker created a spin-off of Beetle Bailey called Hi and Lois. Both strips...

The imagination of Walt Disney (1901-1966) is still seen in theme parks throughout the world bearing his name, on numerous live-action films and television specials, on toys and assorted merchandise, and on an international corporation known both for the high quality of its creative output and its ubiquity.

Walt Disney: Conversations collects interviews and profiles of the man who created Mickey Mouse, and produced such full-length animated classics as Snow White, Cinderella, Fantasia, Bambi, The Lady and the Tramp, Dumbo, Sleeping...

Chuck Jones: Conversations brings to life the legendary Warner Bros. artist who helped shape the history of American animation, defining our impressions of such characters as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote, and Pepe le Pew. These interviews span more than thirty years, beginning with a 1968 conversation in which Jones (1912-2002) shares the spotlight with science fiction giant Ray Bradbury.

Throughout, the interviews illustrate the development of Jones's career, including shifts that came after the Warner Bros. animation unit closed in the early 1960s-from...

When the graphic novel Maus: A Survivor's Tale won a Special Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for its vivid depiction of the Holocaust and its effects, critics and mainstream audiences recognized that a comic book was capable of exploring complex aesthetic, moral, and cultural themes. Maus's creator Art Spiegelman (b. 1948) became the most famous alternative cartoonist in America.