His performance is matched by Paul Crauchet's and Liliane Rovère's sharp thumbnail portraits of two regular customers.
Ilán Lieberman's "Lost Child" series consists of a stream of hand-drawn thumbnail portraits, based on photographs in Mexican newspapers, of missing children.
Pip's text is integrated into the imagery, so "Thou Shalt Always Kill" rolls down the page as a psychedelic screed accompanied by a mass of thumbnail portraits and tangential hieroglyphs.
Ms. Kippenberger provides wonderful thumbnail portraits of the many key figures in her brother's life, while using their reminiscences to create a finely diced composite oral history that makes palpable both his charming and his repellent sides.
In both "New England White" and "The Emperor of Ocean Park," the basic mystery becomes tangled in subplots, flashbacks, masterly thumbnail portraits, and acerbic asides on such facets of haute-black-bourgeois society as the "club life of the darker nation".
Full of critical judgments, scabrous anecdotes, descriptive sketches, literary gossip, and thumbnail portraits, the complete Journal is at once a revealing autobiography and a monumental history of social and literary life in 19th-century Paris.
