A few book related items have surfaced recently. So…
Our friends at Stoopid! take the comic part of comic book seriously and they have just released a new issue of the funny book. Order the new issue here and catch up on back issues you may have missed.
At the dawn of the Silver Age of Superheroes there was one way to keep up with news about upcoming comic books and the cartoonists who created them – On The Drawing Board, retitled The Comic Reader early on. Now the first 25 issues (1961 – 1964) have been collected.
The latest volume of The Complete Tom the Dancing Bug wasn’t included in the June Hey Kids! Comics! because Amazon had changed the release date to July. But we just got a notice from Clover Press that Eat The Poor: The Complete Tom The Dancing Bug 2007 – 2011 is available June 28.
Publishers Weekly has informed us of a selected lineup of Fall 2022 Comics and Graphic Novels.
Particularly noteworthy to The Daily Cartoonist was …
Number One Is Walking: My Life in the Movies and Other Diversions. Steve Martin‘s partnership with Harry Bliss takes a new direction with “an illustrated memoir of his legendary acting career, with stories from his most popular films and artwork by New Yorker cartoonist Harry Bliss.“
Another illustrated memoir – this one by cartoonist Nate (Break of Day) Fakes.
A Fade of Light is “[a]n intimate and moving graphic memoir by cartoonist Nate Fakes, dedicated to his stepdad Ron, a larger-than-life personality who gradually becomes affected by a rare form of dementia.”
Then there are a couple of cartoon collections.
Cartoonist Charles Johnson (also noted for a few other literary works) has his politically oriented cartoons collected in a 280 page hardcover titled All Your Racial Problems Will Soon End: The Cartoons of Charles Johnson.
This collection, Johnson’s first in nearly fifty years, brings together work from across his career: college newspaper gags, selections from his books Black Humor and Half-Past Nation Time, his unpublished manuscript Lumps in the Melting Pot, and uncollected pieces. Taken together, this volume reveals Johnson as long overdue for appreciation as a cartoonist of the first order.
A hardcover collection by a favorite New Yorker cartoonist is reason to celebrate.
Love & Vermin: A Collection of Cartoons by The New Yorker’s Will McPhail is “[t]he long awaited first collection by Will McPhail, with over 150 cartoons, including his New Yorker classics and new gems.”
Another hardcover collection of a favorite is coming in a couple months.
Macanudo: Welcome to Elsewhere by Liniers
Liniers (Ricardo Siri) uses a shifting cast of children, talking animals, imaginary monsters, sensitive robots, occasional elves, and anthropomorphized objects to perform gags, philosophize, muse on nature, and engage in surreal, artistic flights of fancy. With delicate, calligraphic pen work and understated watercolors, the comic skips lightly from style to style and subject to subject, as Liniers allows his imagination and observational humor free reign.
Welcome to Elsewhere is the first of a series of volumes collecting Liniers’ groundbreaking strip.
I don’t spotlight comic book collections a whole lot, but here’s a trio of them released a few days ago that maybe I should have.
Penguin Classics Marvel Collection Series
These are not “complete” collection, these are “best of” collections.
From Rolling Stone’s article about the books:
… And they all agreed that, unlike the majority of anthologies and hardback omnibus collections of Marvel comics on the market, the idea was not to go after comprehensive artist/writer runs or stand-alone storylines. They would have the freedom to skip around if it meant tracing a character or characters’ arc over several years, or even decades.
So, per Saunders’ dream, the Captain America volume does indeed begin with his first appearance delivering a right cross to Der Führer‘s face in 1941, before mentioning his failed resurrection in the ’50s as “Captain America, Commie Smasher”; it then skips ahead to his Stan Lee/Jack Kirby revival in the ’60s, and concluding with artist Jim Steranko’s brief mondo psychedelic, Pop Art tenure in 1969. The Black Panther edition opens with T’Challa’s introduction in Fantastic Four #52, before hopscotching into writer Don McGregor’s groundbreaking expansion of the Panther’s world in the early ’70s. And while the Spider-Man volume pulls heavily from the first two years of Lee and artist Steve Ditko’s gamechanging take on Peter Parker’s alter ego, it isn’t afraid to jettison some issues entirely in the name of chronicling the toll that great power — and the great responsibility that comes with it — takes on someone trying to finish high school.
Finally, for no reason in particular:
Well that’s not true, the reason is I have a youngster in my life who is nine, turning ten soon, and I have just bought her the Emmy and Friends box set by Terri Libenson as a birthday gift.
I think she’ll like it for part of her summer reading.