Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Art. Film. Music. Graphic Novel. Criticism &amp; Literary Theory. American History. Hybrid Genre. "Johnny Damm's SCIENCE OF THINGS FAMILIAR diagrams the ways we move toward and away from one another, exploring relationship through the failures and disjuncts that reveal it. In annotated illustrations taken out of their original context, in comics stripped of their narrative content, and in cinematic essays whose parts are sutured where they've been spliced, these pieces take apart the familiar to see what makes it tick. Troubling our assumptions about the workings of nonfiction, they reveal themselves as highly constructed, interweaving the personal and historical just as the book's "rat-a-tat" refrain rings out both drumbeat and gunfire. If we catch ourselves dancing, we've missed the point. Witty and serious, critical and compassionate, Damm invents a new visual poetics in which what we see and hear do not sync up. This is his way of waking us up with a "BLAM!" and "WHOOSH!" to the history of appropriation and conquest underlying America's popular forms. Nothing here is familiar, even as we recognize parts of the whole."—Amaranth Borsuk "Johnny Damm's SCIENCE OF THINGS FAMILIAR mashes up Classics Illustrated, vintage diagrams, and film director bios to create an unlikely fusion that is a oblique yet often poignant autobiography as well as an essay on the way that we transform culture as much as it transforms us."—Matt Madden "SCIENCE OF THINGS FAMILIAR captures 'freeze-frames' from the history of comic books, crime films, and blues music, all from the middle of the darkest century. Johnny Damm accents the pulpish poetics in both the visual poetry and the phonic milieu, experienced by the masses in each cheap genre made on the fly for everyone. "—Christian Bök Herman Melville performing jumping jacks. An experimental Brazilian filmmaker making British propaganda films. A legendary delta bluesman who prefers to play the pop hits of the day. In SCIENCE OF THINGS FAMILIAR, Johnny Damm sifts through cultural detritus to disturb the sleeping past. In an uncategorizable mix of image and text, SCIENCE OF THINGS FAMILIAR scavenges from 50's pulp comics, 19th century scientific diagrams, film noir shooting scripts, and more. Damm introduces the reader to an American landscape of bastard blendings, where the familiar swiftly gives way to the uncanny.

The Science of Things Familiar

Comics & Graphic Novels

Damm, Johnny

Graphic Novels

The Operating System

Damm's distinctive style of collage transforms 1950s horror comics into true stories of artistic failure.\nOne artist's quixotic quest to clone Martin Luther King, Jr. A pioneering silent film director pushed from the industry by her controlling husband. A writer who tries to write popular fiction but ends up in the avant-garde.\nFeaturing radical Argentinian art collective Tucumán Arde, conceptual artists Pope L. and Marta Minujín, filmmakers Alice Guy Blaché and Pere Portabella, Mexican superhero Superbarrio Gómez, and more, Failure Biographies celebrates the struggles of great 20th and 21st century innovators who attempted - and failed - to change the world.

Failure Biographies

Biographies & Memoirs

Operating System

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Books by Damm, Johnny