CBR15Passport Genre
The history of pinball and video games is just the start of Pinball: A Graphic History of the Silver Ball by Jon Chad. We get a little history of the country, and we get to see how things have not really changed on one hand (pinball/video games will corrupt our children! Lead them to a life of crime! It is just luck no skill!) and how they have changed (from the tabletop games to our known look for pinball machines, from France to the United States). Pinball comes to life on the pages of this graphic novel.
This presentation is clever, interesting, and fun. While the text can be a bit technical at times (while I am sure anyone interested in machines and mechanics would appreciate it, I skipped over some of that), it is accessible to the everyday person. There is some subject repetition, but it can be helpful to wrap things together and show the progression (such as the flipper is an important part of the machine, so information about it is repeated to show how it came to be, how it was adapted over the years, and how it would lead to other technical advancements). The machine changes show how the game would become more challenging, fit the needs of the players, and helped make it more accessible for all levels of players. This part is something that the history person can enjoy as well because we see how our cultural changes allowed for our technical changes (and visa versa), and how that allowed for entertainment changes, such as using pop culture (games with superheroes) to becoming pop culture (Tommy by the Who).
Well done illustrations, though they can be terribly goofy at times, polish it all off. The cartoon aspect can be crowded, busy, and can distract sometimes, but overall, they work well for the text and help make it more accessible. They help show what you are reading and can give you a break from the actual text used.
What I took away was mostly the fact all of this happened in a relatively short amount of time. While the game itself has been around for centuries in one form or the other, the real Pinball Era was only from the 1930s to the 1990’s, and especially the big heydays of the 1970’s and 1980’s was extremely short. However, if it was not for the pinball machine, much of what we have today probably would not have happened. So don’t forget to respect your elders and give pinball its due!