I rarely read how-to books and think most of them are pretty lame, but this one is a clear exception. I hadn't read a how-to book on the pencil for decades (and I vaguely remember getting the basics from a couple of good books by Ted Kautzky and Paul Calle) and found this book by accident while looking for something else. I was instantly drawn to it (sorry...).

Seriously, though, this is one of the best how-to books I've ever read. Hillberry sets out to do, and does, exactly what his title says it's going do. I can't imagine someone working with this book and not getting something valuable from it. The author's prose style is like his drawing style, very clear and straight ahead. It's not verbose or vague and it's not too terse either. In chapters 1 and 2 he describes the basic tools and general methods of using abrasive media (not ust pencils but powdered graphite, charcoal, graphic blocks etc.). Then he moves on to some tutorials, well chosen to explain the problems of rendering general types of things - metal, wood, he human eye... There are many little gems within the tutorial that will reinforce the general technical points in chapter 2. Like all how-to books there is kind of a jump involved, a certain point where to the naive (most of the market for how-to books, probably) it seems like the author goes from point a, b, c... to point r. That's inevitable. How could it not be? If this stuff was easy, then everybody could do it. Drawing is not easy, but it's the most direct means of creating art, an irreplaceable core skill, useful to painters and sculptors as much as anyone else, and potentially a wonderful end in itself (think about it... think what Raphael and Michaelangelo did with a pencil; look at Henry Moore's drawings, look at... no, there's too many great works of art that are drawings to even consider listing them).

This book can help you with your drawing even if you're not a realist. Highly recommended.

There's no short cut to learning to draw the human figure realistically in space. What you will learn from Mr. Hogarth is in essence his own system with it's own deep-seated lapses. If you want to learn to draw like somebody else, why not study Alex Raymond and Hal Foster, two great realist-illustrator cartoonists who were far superior to Hogarth?

Although his fans will disagree, if you read carefully between the lines of their reviews, they're often saying the same thing; with a radical difference in emphasis. They think it was worth it. In my opinion learning this system is a form of artistic suicide, a one-way ticket to hack-dom. I sincerely doubt that what is valuable in this book can be separated from what is artificial, hackneyed, mannered and sterile.

Even if you want to draw super-heroes (the only application of this book that I can remotely entertain), you should read and work through a variety of books. The public library usually has decent ones available for free. Of the books that I've used, Master Class in figure drawing by Robert Beverly Hale gives you a taste of what it must have been like to sit in on Hale's legendary classes, and Artistic Anatomy by Richer provides more than you'll ever need to know about the human body. Learning to draw the figure should be approached as a great adventure (as all great challenges are). Learn anatomy systematically - don't learn a system of anatomy... You'll end up with a system anyway, but it will be your own, earned through study, practice and inquiry.

Using this book is caking out. Don't do that.

In a better world Kaz would be as famous as Martha Stewart, but, hey, that would probably ruin him... Next thing you know he'd be cracking up his Ferrari on the Bergen Turnpike while slap-fighting a raging Courtney Love...

Sidetrack City originally appeared in the anthology Snake Eyes. This Fantagraphics version reprints it in full in very nicely designed collection with a lot of other great stories. I had half of 'em already but I bought it anyway.

After many readings I still think Sidetrack City is a masterpiece.

This is not the kind of book that I normally read... young girl coming of age, dysfunctional upper middle-class family, Southern California... But that sounds more cynical than I really am. Though, as Mailer once said, I look for where the other guy cheated; I also hope that the author can pull it off, and this book does pull off some good things.

A lot of the reviews here are quite naive (as befits youthful feeling) and don't see the limitation of a novel like this. They relate to Medina, so they don't see that she's a symbol as much as a character. They don't see how over-determined the whole story is... why it must end as it ends, because that is the only way that it *can* end... I don't really believe the monster mom and her relationship with the brother and the brother's dissolution... Something like that could happen, but not quite that, as rendered... To me the inevitable plot is little more than a by-product of an authorial strategy which precludes anything but stylish fragments and intensity... Style and intensity can get you a long way, but not all the way.

If this book is 5 stars then what's The Bell Jar or Other Voices, Other Rooms to name two much better first novels? Or even Less Than Zero or Bright Lights, Big City?

Turn off your MTV, kiddies...

This is not the kind of book that I normally read... young girl coming of age, dysfunctional upper middle-class family, Southern California... But that sounds more cynical than I really am. Though, as Mailer once said, I look for where the other guy cheated; I also hope that the author can pull it off, and this book does pull off some good things.

A lot of the reviews here are quite naive (as befits youthful feeling) and don't see the limitation of a novel like this. They relate to Medina, so they don't see that she's a symbol as much as a character. They don't see how over-determined the whole story is... why it must end as it ends, because that is the only way that it *can* end... I don't really believe the monster mom and her relationship with the brother and the brother's dissolution... Something like that could happen, but not quite that, as rendered... To me the inevitable plot is little more than a by-product of an authorial strategy which precludes anything but stylish fragments and intensity... Style and intensity can get you a long way, but not all the way.

If this book is 5 stars then what's The Bell Jar or Other Voices, Other Rooms to name two much better first novels? Or even Less Than Zero or Bright Lights, Big City?

Turn off your MTV, kiddies...