Target: Tim Leong’s Super Graphic: A Visual Guide to the Comic Book Universe
Profile: Comics!, Non-fiction?
Super Graphic is an aggregation of information. A sequence of colorful graphs, diagrams and charts that serve up a dizzying variety of information about comic books, the worlds they contain and the industry that produces them. It isn’t so much a book to be read cover to cover as it is an adventure, every page turn revealing something new and delightful. That is, if you’re a comic book nerd. Which is not to say thatSuper Graphic can’t be appreciated by a lay person. The data is Marvelously (tee hee) accessible and easy to digest, assisted by the tight focus of every page and the slightly-more-than-occasional joke that helps alleviate the march of trivia.
To understand Super Graphic, it’s probably best to start at the author. Tim Leong is a graphic designer and has worked at or contributed to a huge swath of entertainment and tech magazines including Wired, Fortune and Entertainment Weekly. A lot of the work he did at Wired is similar to the Super Graphic project; interesting visual representations of information. And on the surface, that’s really all Super Graphic is. But at the same time, it’s also an homage to the geeky obsessiveness of comic fans, and an intriguing taste of a very strange world for neophytes and dilettantes.
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