Comics Books

A must read for anyone with type 1 diabetes, or who knows someone with type 1 diabetes, or who likes to read a great book.

I was driving when my 8 year old daughter announced that "Stacy has type 1 too, mom!" "Who is Stacy?" I asked her. "Stacy, the babysitter..." she replied. I started to tell her she didn't have a sitter named Stacy when I realized she was talking about the book she was reading, The Truth about Stacy. How cool! My daughter has type 1 diabetes and had found a heroine who she could really relate to!

We got other BSC books from the old series to read (not the graphic novels), but they hadn't been updated the way the versions Raina Telgemeier illustrated and adapted. Kudos to Raina, who took the time to learn about type 1 and make sure the information was up to date and accurate.

I love the BSC, and the earliest books in the series are my favorites. Ann Martin is one heck of a writer, and this third book in the BSC series tackles some serious issues - Stacey's struggles with diabetes, moving to a new town and fitting in, the loss and re-gain of old friends. A subplot in this book is the girls dealing with a copycat club called the Baby-Sitters Agency that threatens to put them out of business.
Ann, I wish you had written every single book in the series and not used ghostwriters for so many of them!

Raina Telgemaier has outdone herself in this adaptation of a book from the incomparable Baby-sitters Club series!!

This book was one of the best books in the baby sitter club serious and you know there were a LOT! This book really got deep in to Staceys feelings about having deiabets and her strugles with that.
Also the whole club is faced with a problem...some one else has started there own baby sitters club!!!!!!!
Now this wouldn't be so bad if that club wasn't getting more people calling them....and then when that club pays a trick on them the baby sitters club knows the other club HAS to go!!!

I thought that this book was brillantly written! go AMM!I mean of course there is going to be compeition and everything with the club, and how sometimes parents can be so impossiable! even though we know that they do care they seem a little overprotective and dont really listen to what we have to say, so i like this book a lot. and i like it when stacey and charollete bonds, this book is realy good. and its so sad how stacey was upset because she cares about the babysitters club because she doesnt want to lose any of her friends, and i liked that her and laine[her former best friend] were cool again.

This is the first book of a wonderful series. Yostuba&! is a wonderful 'slice of life' story revolving around the titular character. The special thing about Yostusba's perspective is she may be a 5 years old, but she's also a touch weird for a 5 year old. I would definitely recommend reading this and it's other volumes when you are in a bad mood; her innocent charms will lift your funk immediately.

Yotsuba written by Azuma Kiyohiko (author of Azumanga) is one of the best mangas you will read. It is mainly focused on Yotsuba and everyday life, but of course if that were the case it wouldn't be interesting. The real reason why life is so much fun in the manga is because of characters such as Yotsuba, her father, the next door neighbors (Asagi, Fuka, Ena), Jumbo and others* (there are side characters but later on they became part of the main story) There are life lessons and there are fun stories that are realistic and that is one of the main reasons why I think readers can relate and connect with the story/character. This volume and in fact the entire series can be enjoyed by everyone and is recommended for anime, manga and even those who have not read any mangas at all! Please do not overlook this manga as it simply one of the best out there. Once you are done with the first volume, you must simply own all of them (which I do currently up to volume 5)

I picked up the first book after reading how great the reviews were about it and I was impressed. Yotsuba&! is definitely not the kind of book I normally buy, but I am really glad I did. I found myself laughing out loud a number of times because of the situations Yotsuba finds herself in and the mishaps she causes. I'm looking forward to buying numbers two and three tomorrow. If you like reading manga that makes you laugh, this book is a good choice.

Outside of reading Koike Kazuo and Kojima Goseki's massive twenty-eight volume Lone Wolf and Cub, I have rarely read a volume of manga over the past half decade. However, the one short series that I did read, Azumanga Daioh, by the artist, Azuma Kiyohiko, inspired me enough to pick up the first volume of his currently running series Yotsuba&, and I must say that it has been a long time since a comic, or any book for that matter, has made me laugh out loud repeatedly and made me reread it immediately after completing it.

Yotsuba& stars Yotsuba, a five-year-old girl whose father Mr. Koiwai describes not only as being "strange" but as someone that "can find happiness in anything," which she does numerous times within the book. Milk, air conditioners, ramen, etc. everything is a thing of wonder to young Yotsuba, so, therefore, it should be no surprise that her move to a new city with her dad causes her much joy, albeit much confusion. There along with her father and their gigantic friend Jumbo, they mete the Ayase sisters, Asagi, the pretty one, Fuka, the "unpretty" one, and Ena, the youngest but most serious of the three girls. With eyes open to everything, Yotsuba finds adventure and fascinating things everywhere.

Yotsuba& is refreshing. At least in the first volume, there is no drama, no doomed love affairs, or a blue-haired man hell bent to destroy the world. Instead, the reader is given a view of the world of a young child. A world that still holds wonders hiding under every leaf. I definitely look forward the reading the other volumes of this series to see how Azuma fleshes out the characters and to see the wonders which Yotsuba discovers day to day.

I picked up the first book from a book store. I started reading it and could not stop. I soon hope to pick up volumes 4&5.
Youtsuba it a little green haired girl who is very energetic. The first book starts with her and her dad moving into a new town. Then many fun things happen. (I will name a few but not alot or it will be spoiled) Three of my favorite events were: (1 Yotsuba got hit with a swing in the park. (2 One of Yotsuba's neibors met Jumbo(Yotsuba's dad's friend) for the first time. He is abnormally tall, and scary. (3 When Yotsuba thought her neibor was a stranger and got scared of her.
If you like comedy this is the series for you!
I hope my reveiew helps!

I have been a faithful FoxTrot reader for years. Roger, Andy and their kids Peter, Paige and Jason are always good for a reality check with a large dose of laughter. I've got two girls and let me tell you, I see a lot of my kids in Paige with, I believe, even a healthy dose of Jason thrown in. And they have Peter's bottomless stomach. Of course, they're faithful FoxTrot readers too. I used to read the strip to them, explain what was going on, but now they get it just fine and we three all laugh together. Then my girls try and explain the strip to their dad, who pretends he doesn't get it.

The FoxTrot folks are a great family, one we sort of got used to checking up on every day, so we took the news that Mr. Amend was going to cease daily distribution of his wonderfully funny people and turn his strip to Sunday only, with a bit of sadness. Still, we have these terrific FoxTrot books to keep us going with our FoxTrot fix. Mr. Amend is to be commended for his great gift to our culture and his great gift to so many lives. I truly believe a laugh a day, helps keep the blues away and the FoxTrot gang are always good for a laugh. Heck there are a lot of laughs in the FoxTrot books. I know, I have them all and I am, along with my girls and my hubby dear, eagerly awaiting the next one.

Oh yes, I forgot to mention, we don't have an iguana, but my girls do have a pet gecko and, you guessed it, his name is Quincy.

I've been a Foxtrot reader for a long time and personally I think there is something suspiciously wrong with people who don't find Bill Amend's characters funny as all get out. If you want a good laugh, check out Bill in your local newspaper, or better yet, get one of the Foxtrot books. They are all great, really, they are.

Like many of Mr. Amend's fans I'm a bit disappointed he's switching his strip to Sunday-only, but fortunately I can still read him daily in the Foxtrot books. Get them one and all and you can keep right on a laughing.

This book was the first Foxtrot book I ever got, the second was "Beyond A Doubt", and Jason and Marcus in this one are your typical geeky guys who think girls have cooties. At a sleep-away camp they go to for the summer there are 2 girls who do there best to out-do them in every way. This, of course, leads to hilarious situations. Anyone pondering the thought of buying a Foxtrot book. This one is the way to go. Of course, they're all great!

I never really read foxtrot before, and my parents got it for me on my 13th Birthday. I did'nt know why got it for me, because I never talked about liking it. But I read it, AND I LOVE IT! It is now one of my faverite comic stips EVER!
This Book is great, it is extremely funny. This book is two foxtrot books in one. It includes foxtrot books "Come Closer Roger There's a Mosquito on Your Nose", and "Welcome to Jasorassic Park". I think it is great. You should definetly buy it.

Who will like this book? All Foxtrot fans (even the finicky ones)!


Round up the usual suspects:

Jason: always living to the fullest of his 180 IQ, interest in computers, and irritating Page.

Page: will she ever get a boyfriend? Isn't she happy that Jason goes to summer camp?

Peter: his appetite will always exceed his interest in sports, but not by much.

Andy: are there any tofu recipes she DOESN'T know?

Roger: even with his golf and chess game, caffeine can't fix everything.


Camp FoxTrot is a fat collection of your favorite comics...250 pages worth. You will not read it all at one setting!

The Far Side Gallery is the first collection of Gary Larson's crazy comic strips featuring hordes of talking anthropomorphised fauna and fowl of all shapes and sizes.

These are generally very amusing, and generally very witty, and you are bound to get some fridge or door material out of one of these.

Gary is sorely missed. Almost no one saw it the way he did. I hope another comes along.

Okay, it's a collection of Far Side comics, which is what I want, so it's awesome for that reason. BUT, the actual final product in book form is a little disappointing. First, all the comics are black and white. Yeah, it's not about the art and you don't miss much without color, but come on, would a little color kill anyone (especially ones that were originally color)? Second, it's pretty thin on strips, with 4 to a page most of the time (a good amount) sometimes 2 on a page, and even occassionally one comic on a single page! It looks pretty silly with just one giant comic on a page.

Larson's original gallery has so many classic Far Side cartoons that you can not justify not owning this sensational collection of his work. Larson may well have retired a while ago but the power of these works of brilliance to make the reader laugh will never fade. There have been many who have copied Larson's style but I have never come across anyone else who has even come close to achieving the quality of The Far Side.

Buy The Far Side Gallery along with its sequels, the original smaller books that make up these galleries are also great buys, along with the calendars and other merchandise. Larson's 2007 calendar gives all the proceeds to wildlife conservation (which obviously inspired a lot of his work) so get that too. You can never own enough of The Far Side.

In this volume (originally released in 1984) of the Gallery collections you will find such classic Far Sides as on Noah's Ark "Well that's it for the unicorns, from now on all the carnivores are confined to C Deck", the father being held up by his shirt collar by an invisible man with his son saying "BigBob is tired of you saying he doesn' exist, the smashed bottle falling from the clouds with humans running away with the word Uh-Oh! from the sky. The bears riding in the circus car saying "Looks Like a trap I said, nonsense no one would set a trap way out here in the woods you said...." The crocodiles on the river bank saying "That was incredible, no fur, claws, horns, antlers or nothing, just soft and pink" and of course the classic picture of dinosaurs smoking with the caption beneath "The Real Reason Dinosaurs Became Extinct" are just a small sample of the classic laughs within this sensational masterpiece.

Some of my earliest memories are filled with reading The Far Side on my father's lap after the evening meal. Whenever I asked my parents for a one of the standard collections, they told me to wait, one day they would all be in one book. Then, for Christmas one year, I got this book.

What can I say, but thank you Mom and Dad and thank you Mr. Larson! The Far Side was, and still is, funny, original, and timeless. This collection gives you some of the best of the original strips and lends itself well to watching the progression of humor up and through until the end.

Count D, the androgynous, keen on the tranvestite clobber owns a very strange, supernatural pet shop, where you want to be careful what you wish for when you ask him for a recommendation. Apart from that, the first part he is on holiday with a detective and his kid brother, and they run across a man who claims to have seen a mermaid 50 years ago, and has been obsessively hunting it ever since.

Thrown in a volcanic eruption, to make it more interesting.

I picked up Pet Shop of Horrors on the strength of it's reputation as both one of the best josei (women's) manga and one of the best horror manga. It's a reputation well earned.

The primary setting is San Francisco's Chinatown, where the mysterious, effeminate Count D (we don't in fact learn his real name, as Count D is actually his globetrotting grandfather, but for the purposes of the story we'll call him D) runs a petshop with a seedy reputation and whose clients have an alarmingly high death statistic. Detective Leon Orcot vows to close the shop and put D behind bars for murder and whatever else he can pin on him. More on that in future volumes - for now we're just getting accustomed to the format of the series.

Each volume generally tells the tale of four pets and their owners and what happens to them after the sale. In the premiere, we meet a gentle, empathetic Bird of Paradise trying to lighten his mistress' depression; a monstrous rabbit who is both her new owners' desperate dream and worst nightmare; a Basilisk who falls in love with her master; and a noble, heroic Doberman determined to protect his blind mistress from the still-at-large murderer of her parents who might be after her next. Of course, this is Pet Shop of Horrors, not Lassie, and when their tales are told, things will only have turned out well for one of the four...

The pet shop scenario allows D and Leon to be a point of reference throughout the series so that new situations don't have to continuously be set up. The banter between them is often amusing, and D himself is fascinatingly ambiguous. In some ways the stories are somewhat predictable (although the ending of one gave me quite a whallop), but that's not always a bad thing, and some have rather deep things to say about treating not only our animal companions but fellow man well. The animals themselves are diverse enough to keep things from getting stale.

It is worth addressing the manner in which the animals are presented here. Throughout the series, they appear to their owners as humans, which anthromorphizes them (think the ballet Swan Lake, the musical Cats, or the anime Wolf's Rain). An interesting aspect is that the animals reflect the human cultures of their indigenous area. The Bird of Paradise, for instance, appears as a beautiful androgynous youth in the traditional dancing garb of Bali to represent his plumage, while the Doberman appears as a handsome young man in a German military uniform.

A mixture of fantasy and horror, this is worth a read for anyone old enough to handle the fact that it is a horror series with some frames which earn it a 16+ rating.

Pet Shop of Horrors has a lot of magic and insight in its stories.
Count D, with his love for nature and animals, webs a mystical tapestry in which mankind is another thread, that constantly menaces to rip the cloth of Life apart.
I recoment this manga for anyone who likes magic and animals, and sweets.

I really enjoyed this series and the artwork is definetly some of the best! ^.^ Also get the DVD version of this. Unfourtunately they only did one dvd of this manga but that was excellent also.

Affectingly humanistic AND gleefully misanthropic all at once, PET SHOP OF HORRORS is a 10-volume series revolving around a Chinatown pet shop, the highly unusual animals it sells, and the (often unpleasant) fates which befall its patrons. Running the shop is "Count D", a young Chinese man with a charming smile. Trying to run him in is Leon Orcot, a grumpy police detective who is convinced D is behind all those nasty, animal-related incidents.

Each volume contains three or four clever, creepy, well-characterized stories focusing on an individual customer. Meanwhile, the series as a whole gradually unveils the story of Count D, and his quasi-adversarial relationship with the dogged-but-dense detective.

A lot of reviewers here explain the "rules" of the series to you. But I really enjoyed reading Book One "cold" and figuring it out for myself. The confusion is half the fun, and the real charm of the series is the way the stories subversively mess with our perceptions.

Some stories are better than others, of course. I was briefly alarmed at a dip in quality at Book 4, but Book 6 bounced the series back. Even so, Books 4 and 5 each contain one first-rate story, and overall work just fine as a brief change of pace. Book 10 concludes the series with four interconnected tales focused on the recurring characters. It is one of the best final books of a manga series that I have yet come across.

The "rating" jumps from T13 to T16 after Book 3. But I think that Book 1 gives you a good idea what you are in for content-wise. The detective does not watch his language, mermaids don't wear tops, many of the stories, uh, don't end well, and there is gore and extreme weirdness. But it is never gratuitous or stupid, and risque content is clever rather than crass. My local library has the full series, but it is STILL at the top of my To-Get List. It is that good.

To be precise, this is a perfectly fascinating book. I've been a Tintin affionado for decades, along with my children and now my grandchildren, and had no real understanding of how Herge's work intersected with 20th century history. Learning this in detail, and getting a notion of how the stories and their portrayal evolved, have greatly increased my already great appreciation for Herge's genius.

If you are a Tin Tin fan then you will love this book. I have to confess that I have not read the whole thing but what I have read is insightful and interesting. It gives excellent information about each Tin Tin story as well as a unique insight into Hergés life. I high recommend this book for any serious Tin Tin devote.

My kides are a little geeky and are enthralled by any of the series. It is good clasis sci fi for them. Suggested if you kids like adventure kid stories and sci fi.

This book has used the extensive archive of Herge, to which the author was granted unlimited access. The book is certainly enlightening and offers great insight into Herge's mind. The author rightly presents each Tintin adventure in its proper historical context, and exposes fascinating parallels of the adventures with Herge's own life. Most of the illustrations are juxtapositions of Tintin frames and concepts against the source material from Herge's archive of newspaper clips and books. Some comparisons are very convincing. Some comparisons are stretched, for example, the alleged inspiration for the carnival costumes of Les Joyeux Turlurons in Tintin and the Picaros. Groucho Marx amongst the crowd ogling at a blonde? I don't know about that... Please note that some of these comparisons are extracted by the author, who tried to read into Herge's mind. We will never know for sure what inspired Herge.

The criticism of the stories occasionally is uneven. The author knocks Flight 714 for stretching reality with its extraterrestrials and flying saucers. How about the Shooting Star, where a meteorite the size of an island drops out of the sky? Giant popping mushrooms and mutant arthropods, I don't know about that...

The text sometimes is dry, and sometimes too esoteric and only relevant to readers of the English editions of Tintin. I have read all Tintin books in French, so I could not care less about the subtleties of the English translations of French names. For other readers, this trivia may be interesting. Finally, the book ends abruptly, without as much as one paragraph of an epilogue, a reflection on the total Herge oeuvre.

Why the small print? The print is so tiny you almost need a magnifying glass. This is not a physics paper, it is a book about comics, and in comics readability is paramount.

Overall, this book undoubtedly was well researched. It definitely was worth the money. I came out with a renewed appreciation of Tintin and Herge. I wish the author was a more compelling writer.

A strange book! The information and illustrations in it is great, but there are curious qualities to it. The writer is a native speaker of English, but from errors in sentence structure and some obvious mistakes in word usage, this publication was translated from French. There are curious recurring preoccupations and repetitions, almost suggesting that each chapter appeared separately, possibly in a magazine. For example, the comparison of Herge's work and that of his studio with that of Raphael and his assistant Giulio Romano occurs at least three times! The reproduction of pictorial archival material from Herge's collections and elsewhere alongside panels from the books is fascinating. But Farr often dedicates a lot of space to discussion of the source of a particular image or set of images -- and then there's no illustration. At other times there are illustrations that are scarcely mentioned in the text.

Still, we have to be grateful for all the data given here. I remember an old Tibetan lama looking at "Tintin in Tibet" with my children, and pointing out corners he knew in the panoramic picture of Katmandu, being puzzled by the Abominable Snowman, and laughing at the pictures showing levitation. In the '60's I camped all through through Yugoslavia; my young kids were reading "King Ottakar's Scepter" and constantly pointed out details in the landscape that matched the book. Herge did his homework, and it's great to have the sources laid out.

Despite its flaws, this book is a keeper.

You will never imagine what kind of surprises are awaiting inside... the imagination is endless.

This book is a compilation of all "Mafalda"'s comic strips. Who is "Mafalda", you might ask?. Well, she is a very outspoken little girl who isn't afraid to say exactly what she thinks about many subjects, including her parents, politics, ecology and her enormous distaste of soup :)

"Mafalda" was created by Argentine cartoonist Quino (the pseudonym of Joaquin Salvador Lavador), and has been published in Latin America, France, Greece, Italy, China and Portugal. Even though "Mafalda" first appeared in the '60s, most of the stories you will read in this book maintain their edge. A great part of "Mafalda"'s charm is that these comic strips allow us to see many matters from the point of view of a young but highly intelligent girl, who isn't old enough to know that speaking her mind isn't always the right thing to do.

All the same, her candid but highly accurate views on many issues will make you laugh, and think. Young children, teens and adults will interpret her words differently, based on their diverse experiences. But I bet all of them will enjoy this book.

You must take into account, though, that this book is in Spanish. That being the case, you should at least know some Spanish, or be eager to learn it (and there is no better reason to do that than wanting to read "Mafalda"!). What is more, and in case you are not ready to buy a complete edition of "Mafalda"'s comic strips, you can always find a smaller and less expensive edition in Amazon.

All in all, I think that "Mafalda" is a treat that the English speaking readers deserve to have. The language barrier is there, but it can be broken with some effort. Truth to be told, it is worth it. Highly recommended!

Belen Alcat

I know Mafalda from its days in the leftist Italian newspapers as a comic strip. Every strip told an important social truth. But you don't need to be political at all to love her and her varied friends.

"A buen entendedor, pocas palabras," dice el viejo refran. Cuando se dice Mafalda, quien haya vivido en las ultimas tres decadas en alguna parte de Hispanoamerica (e incluso paises de Europa) probablemente sabe que se esta hablando de ese adorable personaje que desborda en genialidad y gracia con sus ocurrencias de niña precoz, asi que no hace falta elaborar al respecto.

Lo que si merece ser notado es que este espectacular volumen empastado (hardcover) de 658 paginas reune todas las tiras de Mafalda publicadas desde que el popular personaje fue introducido en este planeta por el legendario caricaturista argentino Quino. No tiene tiene desperdicio este libro y es altamente recomendable para el fanatico de Mafalda que detesta la sopa al igual que para el neofito en el mundo de Quino.

A mí siempre me ha encantado Mafalda, y ahora a mi hija
de tres años le encanta, a pesar de que no sabe leer!
Este libro es muy bonito y debe de tenerlo si le gusta
Mafalda.

This book was as good as the first one I bought.He is a prophet of our American Civilization. Someday; we will be like the society in his books. The best adult comic book writers come from United Kingdom. Since The UK is our best international friend; They earned the right to be our best critics. Again; As usual Amazon delivered.

Even though subsequent volumes in Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson's TRANSMETROPOLITAN series would surpass this very diverse collection of stories, it is still a first rate addition to the series. It is always outrageous, frequently funny, sometimes absurd, but always stimulating.

There two aspects of the series that make it especially interesting to me. First, no other comic series explores the meaning of the media in general and the Fourth Estate in particular. For all his cynicism and rebelliousness, anti-hero Spider Jerusalem is a journalist who believes that reporting should strive to make the world a better place . . . or at least not quite so bad. Sometimes Spider's posing and stunts get in the way of that, but Ellis does manage to get the story back around to that conceit from time to time. Second, the series goes further than any other I know in looking at the furthest extremes of what people will do to remake and reconstruct themselves. Many writers have pointed out that ours is already a Cyborg culture. How else can you characterize someone who has an artificial hip, a pacemaker, and lasik eye surgery? Other writers, like Ray Kurzweil and Hans Moravec, have fantasized about a utopian future in which the human brain is sliced up and downloaded into a database, where one's consciousness can enjoy a virtual immortality (though personally, I just think of this as a bizarre way to die). Many of these notions are taken up and explored in the Transmet series.

The two books that begin the series are good, but newcomers should keep in mind that it gets much better in subsequent volumes. So while I recommend this, I even more strongly recommend reading the volumes that follow.

This book too much focuses on "being punk" instead of focusing on story. There are great ideas but they are not really explored.

Lust for Life is probably the weakest collection of Transmet. It falls in between the initial story arc, and when Helix Comics, was shut down and the title was moved to Vertigo. It has some nice establishing moments, and sets up some characters that will play critical roles through out the series. But, it's that point in between where the story starts and where it finds its feet.
It's still a part of the larger whole though, and can't be skipped if you're trying to read the series beginning to end. And Transmet is still one of the best comic series out there, so, even at its weakest, it continues to be a very strong piece.
In the end, if you haven't read the first trade, this is a poor place to start. If you did and disliked it, Lust for Life does expand the characters, but, you probably won't find anything to change your mind. If you loved the first trade, or just found it mildly enjoyable, it's worth continuing, though, mostly for where the series does find its feet, in the third trade.

This is really something I could say is a Graphic Novel without smirking. I'm no veteran when it comes to comics, but I've lent it out to a few people I know that are, and they rave about it as well. It's very much like a Fear And Loathing influenced cyberpunk tale of journalism in a future that, for all its random technical advances, is still populated by people and therefore still plagued by the same kinds of problems we face today.

This is my first Graphic Novel, but not my last. I loved the story and I felt that the book had a really nice flow. Marjane Satrapi as an exceptional story teller and has a very strong voice. I read this shortly after seeing the movie, and though I loved the movie, I felt that it left alot of important stuff out. The book really helped fill in some of the gaps, and you also got to see Satrapi's personality a bit more. I look forward to reading her other works. If you have never read a Graphic Novel, this is a great place to start.

I was surprised to find it was in comic strip format, but I enjoyed the lite reading.

This book can join Art Spiegelman's "Maus" and Joe Sacco's "Safe Area Gorazde" as yet another graphical masterpiece. Very enjoyable book, couldn't put it down.

Without harping too much on what has already been said about the political observations that Satrapi makes or her commentary on the limits faced by everyone (and most especially) women in Iran, the truly inspirational achievement of this work is how honest she can be about herself in the story. That with everything whirling around her, the fact that she can be honest about both the good and the bad of the relationships she'd been in, the despair both at home and abroad, the flickers of hope that she clung to during the darkest times and how (true to the reality of a hopeful young woman) the very worst thing that can happen is ultimately to let down yourself and to let down your loved ones is stark and amazing. The scene where she loses the trust and the good standing with her grand mother is heart-breaking and yet could happen to any teenage girl anywhere in the world. That it's depicted in basic drawings doesn't detract from the power of the moment in the least.

And not that graphic novels these days have any trouble being seen as legitimate art, but Persepolis certainly puts a nail in the coffin of the arguments made by detractors.

Trust this book for it's emotion, for it's personal honesty, for it's attempts to always find something good even under the most extreme circumstances. It is not a history book. It is a personal history book. And it is one that deserves applause.

In the chapter "The Shabbat", set before she leaves for Austria in 1984, Marjane describes how Iraqi Scud missiles start raining down on Tehran, killing her Jewish childhood friend and neighbor, Neda. However, according to Jane's Intelligence Review and other sources, no missiles reached Tehran before Iraq's Al-Husayn missile programme in February 1988. Why would she lie about this?

As an aspiring cartoonist with my own cast of characters on my Captain Cockle website I found this book an excellent and yet simple guide to creating characters that leap out of the page. The inclusion of guest cartoonists, many of them very famous in their own fields, is a great idea and adds depth to the book. If you have a limited budget and are confused by the huge variety of "how to" books on cartooning, I would strongly recommend this one as an essential starting point.

This a great book for the beginning character artist. I often have a hard time drawing cartoon characters but this book always helps me out. Covers everything from personality to color, from exaggerated to semi-realistic. Highly recommend!

Nice book , a lot of ideas , examples. Very good choice for beginners. My students loved it.

This is a great book to take your drawings to the next step. I've been frustrated that my characters lacked that certain special 'something' to make them pop from regular ol' dry drawings to likable, engaging characters. This book illustrates simple examples of a line here, a curve there, to push it up a notch. I really enjoyed the suggestions, and this book has been very helpful. myspace/kris10cartoons

I am a student studying animation, and I purchased this book for my character design class. I really love this book, it is quite usefull, and my two roommates reference it as well! One is an illustrator, and one is a video game designer. Useful to anyone and everyone...