Caricature Books

The art does not represent Manga drawings at all, in my opinion. This book was a big disappointment to me and a waste of money.

My experience drawing Manga/Anime figures is that of a beginner. I bought about 10 different books to get started as I have zero drawing experience. Of the many fine works that have helped me improve my sketching in a very short time, this one was one of the two most helpful. The "tutorials" in the beginning of the book are great, especially helping a novice draw figures from different angles. The second half of the book is devoted to examples of various manga-style(and yes, in response to another comment...they ARE MANGA) figures for inspiration.

I am sure the book may not offer much to veteran manga artists...but this newb really appreciated the leg up offered by Mr.Galea's book.

This is a review of the Kindle Edition. The table of contents is not linked to the individual stories. Since this is a collection of stories, it makes the Kindle Edition book unusable -- you would have to click, page-by-page, to reach your desired story.

Philip has faithfully translated this collection of the Grimm Brothers' anthology of oral folktales. He has chose to include twenty of the classic German tales in this beautiful edition. Hardcover, with gilted pages, and metallic highlights in the illustrations creates a very stunning picture. Philip has selected some of the most well known favorites, but also a few that modern times have forgotten. The reading level is approximately third grade, though the stories look as though they would be better understood and more entertaining if read aloud. There tends to be just one illustration per story. While they are wonderfully done and framed with more artwork, they don't do much to tell the plot of the story and are not always matched up with the text. Every classroom should have a collection of Grimm's fairy tales, but this isn't the one. This book seems to have been designed more for collectors and to sit on a shelf than to be handled by youngsters on a daily basis in a classroom environment.

Why 4 stars?:
This is not a book to be read, but one to be collected and set upon a shelf to collect dust. The illustrations are beautiful and the information provided about the tales and the brothers is excellent. However, this book was not made for children to read their favorite tales from.

22 x 18 cm, 62 pages; color cartoon drawings and text.

I'm very open minded (especially about sexuality), I'm a fan of Peter Mayle's books, and I'm male: but unfortunately, I didn't really enjoy this book much -- I was actually a bit turned off in an vague kind of way. The content is clever and funny, but what I think I don't like is the style of the illustrator's cartoons. I'm pleased to _have_ the book, as part of my Mayle collection, but I wouldn't actually recommend it to anyone to read.

I read this book when it first came out and thought it humorously characterized the male attitude about sex -- I'm trying to find a copy to give my teenage daughter as part of her sex education.

Fans of Michael O'Donoghue's black comedy will be disappointed by this light-hearted collection of humorous observations of domestic and political life by Socks, the Clinton housecat, as drawn by J.C. Suares. Small children and cat book enthusiasts will be amused. As far as this reviewer is aware, this was O'Donoghue's last published book before he died in 1995.--Andrew Roaze

The book presents a cute and humorous view of Socks the Cat. The book is very accurate in terms of nature of a cat (shreading priceless antique furniture, destroying China, etc).

We were so disappointed in this book that we returned it to Amazon. I am an attorney and purchased the book for my gifted 12-year old brother. It was very age-appropriate in terms of level of writing, but the book only gives a sentence or two of the facts of the case......and then just the trial court and appellate court verdicts on separate pages in the back of the book. The book provides no discussion and no explanation at all -- just the court verdicts! Without any knowledge of the law, it will be very boring for most people. (The answers are listed by # in the back of the book, with trial and appellate court decisions on different pages, so looking up the very brief answers also can be a chore.) All in all, very disappointing. Fun idea, poorly implemented. Cannot recommend this book for anyone, of any age or education level.

I bought this book for my 13 year old because she has become interested in law, but I think my husband and I had more fun with it! Simple to read, easy to understand. Definately a good book for kids!

One day, walking back from school, I picked this book up off the sidewalk near a local elementary school. This book depicts single cell cartoons without accompanying text of people being the victems of "bizarre crimes". Stupid stuff like people's car tires being blown up with helium and floating, peoples beds being made into peanut butter and jelly sandwitches, etc (these are actual examples.) Although I can only hope this book was targeted towards children, I doubt this book would amuse even a three year old. You'd have to get someone really, _REALLY_ stoned to get them to laugh at this book. It's not even fun to make fun of. Just... bad.

This is a little book, consisting of 33 minimalistic cartoons depicting bizarre - and relatively harmless - crimes. You can easily go through the whole book in less than a minute. Several of the cartoons are funny, in their own little way. My favorite was the first one, in which a huge magnifying glass has been placed in a doorframe, thus making a little bug appear rather monstrous to the startled "victim." Many are just silly: a swimming pool filled with spaghetti, peanut butter spread between the sheets of a bed, bagpipes attached to a car's muffler. I didn't really get the joke on a couple of them.

Judged purely on its own merits, it's not a bad collection of cartoon sketches - but it is exceedingly short. It's not the kind of thing I would want to spend money on, although serious cartoonists might want to take more than a cursory look at Don Dougherty's work. Six of these cartoons, I should mention, originally appeared in the Saturday Review, so Dougherty isn't just some hack peddling his sketches.

The Anti Nuclear Handbook, written in 1978, asserts that nuclear power is going to kill a lot of people, and that we need to use "soft energy", such as solar, wind and hydro power instead.

On page 106, they get around to explaining that we'll need a "planned economy" (i.e. Communist government) to make it happen.

The book is written as a comic strip, using illustrations, and photos with word ballons, on every page. It is somewhat entertaining and informative. The dangers of the nuclear fuel cycle, which the author trumpets, are real.

Still, I don't think the communism thing would have worked out so well.

The book will be particularly appealing to dope smoking, maggot infested, peace pansies! (Just kidding Greg C.)

I wrote a review of this book a while back, but Amazon opted not to print it, apparently because it wasn't permissible to comment about the author him/herself but only the material. (Amazon was a lot more uptight then.) However, when an author is unqualified to write a book, this becomes pertinent information to potential buyers.

Aspiring cartoonists should know that Gautier is a cartooning HOBBYIST and not a "career cartoonist." He earned a living as an actor, playing, among other things, "Hymie" the robot on the old series "Get Smart." He may have had a cartoon published here and there (he never says, but my guess would be no), but he didn't write cartoons for a living, nor could he, with his limited talent, have ever come close to doing so. Would you buy a book called "How to Earn $1,000,000 in Five Years" by someone who earned 30 grand a year? It's the same thing here.

Gautier frequently cites as examples his own cartoons, which are horrible. He draws better than the average guy off the street, but his captions are unthinkably bad and serve EXTREMELY poorly in a how-to capacity.

Example: 1) A cockroach and a rat are eating dinner. The rat says, "I feel I was destined for the finer things in life." 2) The two are shown chewing. 3) The cockroach says, "Shut up and eat your garbage."

Please... you wouldn't even give this a "pity laugh" if your mother drew it!

The other cartoons he includes are as bad is his, if such a thing is possible. Example: a a self-portrait of an strikingly unattractive cartoonist in a bunny suit with the caption "Bustering with pride!"

Valuable information concerning what format various kinds of work should be in when sent to different publishers is absent. The information regarding selling your material is outdated and can today be easily accessed via the Internet, although of course this is no fault of Gautier's.

The book gets two stars because it does contain some useful information about artist's materials. Other than that, it's a bomb. Nothing against you personally, Dick. I loved "Get Smart." But your cartooning steeee-eeenks. (And yes, I bought the book, so how smart does that make me?)

I was disappointed in the quality of this book. The cartoons are amateurish and not all that amusing. The topics in which the cartoons are divided fall into only two categories: "Classroom Life" and "Training Topics". The concept of being able to download cartoons into your own presentation is great, but the applicability of what is contained in this book is very narrow. I doubt I will find much use for this book.

It's been a while since I was so disappointed in a book. The volume might actually be best described as a booklet or short story since it took only a little over an hour to read. Maybe it lost something in the translation from French to English? Ernest Hemingway wrote a brief introduction and hinted he'd probably never sign on to such a task again. I wonder if he was as embarrassed by the book's final draft as I was? Kiki, whose real name was Alice Prin, was a favorite model and mistress of Surrealist Man Ray and most of his famous artist friends from the DADA movement who resided in the Montparnasse section Paris at the same time.
After reading "Kiki's Paris: Artists & Lovers 1900-1930" by Billy Kluver & Julie Martin, (which is excellent) I was really looking forward to reading Kiki's life story written in her own words and illustrated with some of her artwork as well as reproductions of many of the more famous works of her by other world-famous artists. Reading her book was like reading an outline or a third grader's story of their life. It didn't get better. It's like her friends were all famous enough to allow her to have a book published and even then it was more like a before-the-meal cocktail without the rest of the meal. Looking at the pictures of Kiki, both clothed and nude, it really is amazing that she was so popular as a model. She had an odd shaped body and a rather plain profile. Her success at nude modeling makes the reader feel that Kiki must have been either very inexpensive or a world-class sexual acrobat in bed. Perhaps finding models was more difficult that it is today? Obviously her personality must have mesmerized her companions. It's too bad that some of her friends didn't sit her down and transcribe her story for her. As it is, her autobiography not only seems unfinished, but almost not begun. What a waste, she must have been a fascinating woman to have entranced so many artist admirers. Unfortunately, the source of her charming magic won't be found in this book. Apparently her skills as a dancer transferred well to everyone's bed. For a woman Hemingway referred to as "Queen of Montparnasse," this book was a royal dud!