Kat’s Film and Book Reviews

Erich Segal, best known as the author of the book Love Story, died Sunday of a heart attack.  His funeral was today in London.

Image courtesy of the Telegraph

Few people know (I certainly didn’t) that Segal was a classics professor at Yale when he wrote Love Story.  I, like many emotional teens, read, loved and wept over Love Story, and even briefly bought into its tag line: “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”

Obviously, he shouldn’t have been giving out relationship advice, but Love Story still stands as a romantic favorite for readers everywhere.

It was made into a movie in 1970 with Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw.  Segal co-wrote the screenplay, and the movie was nominated for 7 Oscars.

O'Neal and MacGraw in 1970's Love Story

Segal had been struggling with Parkinson’s for 25 years.  His daughter, Francesca, said in his Eulogy today, “That he fought to breathe, fought to live, every second of the last thirty years of illness with such mind-blowing obduracy, is a testament to the core of who he was — a blind obsessionality that saw him pursue his teaching, his writing, his running and my mother, with just the same tenacity. He was the most dogged man any of us will ever know.”

A full list of his novels and works on the classics can be found here.

Rest in peace, Erich.

The Colorblind Art Teacher

The Colorblind Art Teacher is a series of minicomics drawn by Mark Teel, who is, in fact, a color blind art teacher. Teel is not a stranger to the world of comics; he’s been writing and drawing them since he was in high-school, but this is his first effort at a widely-marketed publication. At our house we get the comic books, which come out roughly quarterly, in the mail at our house, and we also get the “webisodes” on his site, Bored Beyond Belief.

The Colorblind Art Teacher is chiefly autobiographical, and since Mark is 36, will appeal to any GenXer who remembers Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and the Thriller album. Even as a child, Mark was involved in pop culture, but never as a mindless participant, as so many were and are. Mark has always had a sense of the absurdity of things, the ridiculousness of the extremes that popular culture embraces, and that insight has always come out in some hysterical and biting satire.

In this new series, he turns his instinct for satire on himself. Mark seems to live in an in-between place, like so many of our generation do, where childhood is still real but we have adult repsonsibilities to meet every day. His comic goes back and forth between the two as we watch him try to parent his precocious daughter Audrey. Audrey is, in the comics and in real life, a mini-Mark, as Mark demonstrates by flashing back to his own childhood, and showing his parents trying to deal with him in strikingly similar situations.

The juxtaposition is always funny, especially for those of us who still think of ourselves in some sense as those children, and are sometimes bemused by a fate that would allow us to be parents.

Mark’s drawings are clean and expressive, done in black and white with little extranneous detail, and somehow reflect both a hard-won adult insight and a childlike joy that allow us to enter into some challenging experiences and come out of it chuckling. He holds family life in high regard, and places himself as the target of most of the humor; because of those two things, we are able to both sympathize and laugh.

You can go to Mark’s Website, Bored Beyond Belief, and buy paper copies of The Colorblind Art Teacher. While you’re there, read the past several webisodes, and don’t forget to leave a comment!