About the Author

David Carrier is Professor of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the author of many books, including Principles of Art History Writing (1991), The Aesthete in the City: The Philosophy and Practice of American Abstract Painting in the 1980s (1994), and High Art: Charles Baudelaire and the Origins of Modernist Painting (1996), all from Penn State Press.

Reviews

“The ingenuity with which the classical comic strip artists found ways of telling whole stories in four or five panels has been insufficiently appreciated by philosophers or historians of art. Carrier has written a marvelous book on these narrative strategies, from which we cannot but learn something about how the mind processes pictorial information and how the Old Masters coped with the urgent stories simple people had to understand.”—Arthur Danto,Columbia University

“Carrier is an academic philosopher who also works as an engaged commentator on contemporary art. His writings tend to be full of witty rhetorical constructions, and thus they are entertaining to read in ways that most contemporary academic writing, whether on philosophy or art or both, is not.”—Bill Berkson,San Francisco Art Institute

“David Carrier has written a most perceptive and readable account of that great American apparatus—the comic strip. Historically accurate and philosophically bracing, this is a truly terrific book. Carrier has done a necessary and brilliant service, and he has provided a true gift to all who admire the comic strip tradition.”—Archie Rand,Columbia University

“Carrier’s gracefully erudite book will do for the comics what Stanley Cavell has done for Hollywood movies.”—George J. Leonard Universal Pictures

“An indispensable and enjoyable contribution to discussions dealing with the end of Modernism, the function of art history, and the will to form a healthy development beyond current mannerist, postmodern malaise.”—Mark Staff Brandl The Art Book