Cartoons Books

This book is up there with Demon Diary! It is funny witty and has action that anyone can enjoy. It is a story about a girl who has emotional problems (I think) and a guy who turns into a fox. They are total opposites, but they make a great story together. One thing! Don't read the Character Profiles! Read them after the story or else you will not get the full enjoyment of the book! 6_6

Platina is a story about a quiet girl named Auna, who was forced to be the princess' slave after her family went bankrupt. One day the princess gives Auna a fox and tells her that she can keep him if she can turn him into a human. The fox turns out to be Jenin, a lively boy who was cursed, by the princess, to turn into a fox everyday at midnight and then the following day he turns back into his human self at noon. Both Auna and Jenin hate the situation they are in and don't exactly hit it off when they first meet but through hilarious circumstances they become the ultimate team. This manhwa has comedy, action, mystery, and a bit of romance. I loved this series so much that I went and bought the other 7 books in Korean just to see what happens. The story hasn't ended yet in Korea but I can tell you that the two main characters grow closer with every book and more crazy characters are thrown in the mix. The art style is what drew me in. I found it in Borders, grabbed it and flipped through the pages only to immediately get hooked by the comedy. I bought it and must have read it about 10 times already. You don't find many manga, let alone, manhwa this good. Yeon Joo Kim did an excellent job on the art and plot and I look forward for volume 2 in English, I will most certainly buy the whole series! Don't miss out on this one.

Platina is a poetic manhwa with more than just pretty pictures. This manhwa is quite unique, because it's hard to know its genre. Romance, magic, rich families,a boy who turns into a fox every midnight through noon, snobby princess, and complicated relationships. [br]
I actually read Korean version, which is up to 4th volume. It's so fun to watch quiet Auna and cute, talkative Jenin[the fox] and watch their romance grow.[Or is it only Jenin who has the feeling for Auna??][br]
In the first volume, Auna points her gun at Jenin when he's trying to escape her.[The summery over there says something about the handsome prince, but Jenin is actually a thief boy.I didn't say anything about 'handsome' part. Prince or not, Jenin's still so adorable.*Giggles and blushes*]For a moment, quiet Auna looked so tough!! *Sigh..*[br]
I REALLY reccoment this book for any manhwa fans. Beautiful pictures, poetic words,comedy, and romance is all there!! My favorite book so far.

This book is like all the rest: hilarious and strange i've read them over and over again and they never get boring! :)

And this books made me LAUGH. How WONDERFUL to know I'm not alone in the moments that I want to cry, this "full-time" mothering stuff is so hard, but instead I choose to laugh, not in a small part due to Baby Blues. I don't know if their books mirror my life, or my life mirrors their comedic endeavors, but I'm not complaining. If you're a parent, you will like this book. It'll either bring back memories, or show you what's to come, depending on the age(s) of your bundle(s) of joy. ENJOY!

The latest addition to the anthologized series of the popular newspaper cartoon strip "Baby Blues", Playdate: Category 5 once again reunites us with the family of Darryl and Wanda MacPherson, their three children (Zoe, Hammie, and Baby Wren), along with the motley assortment of their friends and neighbors. The humor arising naturally from the process of parenting and resonates so clearly with the familial experiences of the readers. And then there are those recognizably immortal quotes that range from "Showers are better than baths. If you stand really close to the wall, you hardly get wet!" and " We've gotta learn to travel lighter, or just put some wheels on the house." This latest installment on the life and times of Darryl, Wanda, and the kids, will leave their legions of fans looking eagerly toward the next anthology from wit, wisdom, and laugh-out-loud parenting observations from the cartooning team of Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott!

Mr. Steinkellner must have a highly tuned sense of the absurd. Where others see merely quaint old photos, he sees a world where a picture really does say more than 1000 words. They say just enough to fill a postcard. In this case, a picture says a thousand laughs.

A collection of rare and unusual postcards and their hilarious "back stories" from the rare and unusual mind of William Steinkellner. Each card has it's own story, some of them laugh out loud funny and others touching -- all of them interesting. It's one of those books that's even funnier the second time around.

Postcards From The Moon presents ninety of William Steinkellner's writings, so short and succinct that they each fit on the back of a postcard. His observations are satirical, poignant, irreverent, suspenseful, and sometimes simply hilarious. The picture postcards run the gamut of prom queens, beauty queens, bathing beauties, bathing babies, the Baby Jesus, dance classes, family reunions, lamp jumpers, bank robbers, space aliens, nuns, dogs, barbers, saints, and more. Postcards From The Moon is thoroughly entertaining, thought-proving, and occasionally enlightening. You'll never again look at picture postcards quite the same.

Any Crumb fan would want this collection. Lots of early stuff. If you are an art student you will get somthing out of this as well. Some really DARK stuff in here. However it also shows how ahead of his time he is(was) regarding Ecology and overpopulation. He actually is a GREEN CRUMB!

Like Daniel Clowes of "Eightball" fame, it could be fairly said that Robert Crumb's earlier work is his best work -- not to say his later stuff is poor -- far from it. But his earlier work has a raw cynicism, an agression, a desperation, a sadness, and a hilarious sense of hysterical, neurotic humour which is self mocking and stops him from ever coming accross as overtly judgemental, arrogant or holier than thou.

Most of this collection is from his 70's to early 80's work -- IMHO his best stage.

Regarding these packaged/themed collections/volumes of his work -- some of them are lukewarm, and padded out by his wife's ( imho not so great ) work, and assorted sketches and so on -- this is frustrating. There is nothing worse than shelling out good money for classic Crumb, getting home, ripping off the plastic wrapping -- only to find you can read the expensive volume in half an hour or less, because most of the damn book is made up of ( not always worthy ) sketches.

This book, however, is classic neurotic, disturbed, misanthropic, crazy Crumb in all his unique glory, from the 1st to the last page, and is NOT repeat NOT padded out by collector's filler sketches and ephemera for the obsessive fans.

It is an excellent misanthropic attack on humanity in general.

Don't miss it -- insightful, intelligent and stupidly funny.

For cynics, recluses,obssessives,weirdos,outsiders, the lonely, fools, mystics and misanthropes everywhere, prepared to laugh hard at themselves and their own views,opinions and certainties.


Crumb at his glorious, hateful , wittiest finest.

One of the finest features of Crumb's genius is his ability to poke fun at himself even as he's ranting and raving about a social system that he genuinely hates. His dismal self-appraisal doesn't negate the value of his social criticism--quite the contrary. It suggests a man who can recognize ranting and raving for the sometimes ludicrous exercise it is, but also recognize that there's good reason for the angry concern that grows into ranting and raving. Thus in this volume's wonderful "Point the Finger," a diatribe against unscrupulous fatcats such as Donald Trump, Crumb depicts himself as a spineless nerd who's good at dishing it out but not so good at taking it. Yet the point about fatcats is still taken. Similarly, in an untitled page that appears early on, Crumb makes fun of his paranoia about the U.S. government. But again, the point is taken: the government is an institution which it's not entirely unreasonable to be paranoid about.

R. Crumb's America collects some of his very best social satire, and it's even more devastatingly spot-on now than when he first inked it. He pillaries our throw-away society; the self-imposed burdens of uptight, white, middle-class males; institutionalized and freelance violence in our culture; the fakeness of high society; the American faith in technology; and racial stereotypes. It's all very funny, and sometimes sexy. But it's also all very serious. Curious, that a cartoonist is much better than talking heads or Ph.Ded suits at spotlighting the greed, narcissism, and fear that dominates our society.

I suspect that one of the things that makes Crumb such an astute social critic is the same fearlessness (or some might say insouciance) that allows him to draw and publish his sexual fantasies. Crumb, at least when he's inking paper, has no inhibitions. As a satirist, he's naked, unencumbered, unclothed. And that's exactly what's required to see that the emperor has no clothes on either.

This is the delightful little memoir of Saul Steinberg,
translated from the italian by John Shepley. Its great value
is that it is the closest we will ever come to reading
the work of one of America's great literary talents.

Now it's become a pretty commonplace observation that
Steinberg is as appropriate a nominee for the literary
hall of fame as he is for the graphic artists'. This is
the little book that seals the deal. It turns out that
Steinberg's aphoristically-turned phrases are as clear and
concise as his drawings. This book is sadly, all he wrote.

Steinberg did not intend this to be a personal disclosure-
he is a man who had his memoir written by somebody else. And
yet, it turns out that the very tightness of phrasing gives
the man away. What did he learn of Milan when he was there?
Not much. "My chief interest then was girls. .I was looking...
.to find myself through love."

There are a few drawings here, all of them small and printed
just well enough to make you wish they were printed better.
If you are amoung the unconverted and want to catch examples
of his drawing see the wonderful exhibit at the Morgan
Library in New York or one of the great collections
(my favorite is Passport). But for true believers, Reflections
is Steinberg's literary love song, a book that puts him in the
company of Borges.

--Lynn Hoffman, author of THE NEW SHORT COURSE IN WINE and
the forthcoming novel bang BANG from Kunati Books.ISBN
9781601640005

Published after his death in 1999, this is a meditation based on a series of interviews of Steinberg by Buzzi. Beginning with his childhood and youth in Romania, through his wartime experience in Italy and his maturity in the United States, Steinberg muses with an acute visual sense, appropriate for an artist. The book is illustrated with his drawings.

His ideas about influences on art are insightful. as he describes early photographers "inspired by the paintings of Delacroix and Ingres", to his thought that Bacon "clearly derives from the Polaroid". I was intrigued by his suggestion that the use of industrial paints in American art occurred because of poor artists used cold-water flats as studios, "and to make them livable they had to scrape and paint the walls, doors and windows, and floors . . . and this led them to work on a large scale, to use industrial paints, such as gold or silver on radiators, new materials". His description of the New York City taxi cab of the `40's as created out of Cubist elements, of the automobile influenced by Constructivism, Cubism, and "Fernandlégerism" makes one look at cars in a whole new light.

The title, Reflections and Shadows, comes from a section in which he discusses how what one sees in reverse in a reflection (in a mirror, in water) or shadow is often better - sharper, more intense - than the original. "If you look only at the reflection, and not at the reflecting part, you see a gratuitous reality that exists for you alone. For fun I throw a stone into the upside-down landscape, and seeing that the lower part moves I almost expect the upper part to move too."

If I quoted all my favorite parts of this book, I'd be typing almost the entire thing, so you'll have to go read it for yourself!

The autobiographical musings of a New Yorker cartoonist told to his old friend, and filled with wit, humanity and philosophical gems. Stories of escaping from the fascist police in Italy, too lazy to brutally arrest people at the usual invisible ungodly hour. Or civic life in 1950s Washington, and the charming people who knew exactly how to be courteous and to dismiss those who didn't belong. Or the poor white in kentucky, like protagonists out of American fiction, whereas the bourgeoisie, respectable people, "always the same". And Magritte's discovery of multiple sources of light in a painting (sun, streetlamp, electric light inside a house, the moon, reflections of light. Or American gastronomy, in which "the taste of the nation are governed by the tastes of children".

'Reigning Cats and Dogs' is an impressive book; entertaining for people of all ages to read because it encompasses a wealth of facts about the lives of famous people, from athletes to actors to politicians to poets to musicians, and beyond--all with a very clever and always highly amusing feline or canine twist. The full-color, full-page illustrations are adorable cartoons of anthromorphosized animals--(incidentally, it's certain to please the furry as well as the average person!) Two thumbs way up for this terrific gift idea. I got it as a birthday present from someone who knew I was an animal lover, and it turned out to appeal to so many more interests of mine as well. Always a cute one to flip through and to read.

i do think that this book was well thought out and
cleverly written and i am amazed that this mans talent has
not been recognised further

"Reigning Cats and Dogs," is a clever outlook at what some of our favorite and least liked celebrities would be like if they were canine-ized. The author uses his drawing talent to bring these anthropomorphic celebrity dogs and cats to life, using an almost British styled humor. Read about The Beatles, I mean, The Beagles, and read about other well known entertainers and journalists. Now, the only problem seems to be how to a get these pictures framed and on your wall.

Actually, as the saying goes, laughter is the best medicine. The Nose Masks are the vehicle for inspiring laughter. When wearing one of my favorite nose masks, I not only inspire hysterical laughter from others, but I myself laugh the hardest. I can not imagine life without my nose masks. This book is a must for anyone who is silly at heart, or wishes that they could be silly.

A "nose mask" is a mask made of paper through which the nose is inserted and helps to keep the mask in place. Return Of The Nose Masks presents 150 original costumes for the nose, including holiday nose masks, career nose masks, modern art nose masks, mustache nose masks, big vertical nose masks, and small square nose masks. Whether for Halloween, costume parties, or just playing around with friends, Return Of The Nose Masks offers novel, enjoyable, highly recommend fun for kids of all ages.

Nose masks are the best things to come around since sliced bread, which could in itself be used as a nose mask! This book is perfect for anyone and everyone! Buy one to save and one to tear up!

I was truly blessed at an early age to have this and Gymkhana in my room when I first began to ride. This is a marvelous and loving look at children and horseback riding. Any parent with a child, particularly a daughter, beginning Enlgish riding instruction ought to make every effort to find this book. Like my tattered copy, it will become an heirloom. PCK, NJ.

Everything you ever experienced at a riding academy with a chuckle on every page. Or if you've never been to a riding academy, you'll want to after looking this over. Angie Lohman

This is one of my favorite books from childhood. A tongue-in-cheek riding instruction manual, it is filled with cartoons about the antics of girls and their sometimes-naughty ponies. Add subtle British humor to the mix, and it's a must for girls in that "horsey" stage . . . my 10-year-old adores it!

I thought I'd reviewed this years ago, but maybe it was elsewhere. I love this book. I've been a fan of the late Al Hirschfeld for years, but here's a relatively new artist from New York who captures a little of that style but yet has his own. Well, the cover says it all! If you can look at the cover and not laugh, well, you're dead. The back cover will blow away any Diana Ross fan, as well. His caricature style is such that if you follow pop culture at all, you don't need to look at the index to see whom is who. Well, for me there were a couple that were unfamiliar. I thought he missed the mark with Michael Jordan, but nobody's perfect! The book is divided into TV, Style, Music, Thinkers, Film, Scandals, Media, Sports, Theater, and Politics. Nobody seems to be off limits with Risko. His artwork is just beautifully done on a technical level, and still there's humor in a lot of it. There's one piece in particular of singer Al Jarreau that's stunning--it's part Hirschfeld and part Picasso! It's hard to explain, really. If you've never seen a Risko, you just have to experience it for yourself. Buy this book! I can't say enough about this artist, and I can't wait for Volume Two!

Found this book to be an amazing collection of illustrations by one of the most talented artists in our time. His work has matured over the years to a fine point of perfection.

Outstanding collection of extremely witty and winsome caricatures of entertainment and political figures from the 1970's through today. Most of the work previously graced the covers and feature articles of The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Interview, and Rolling Stone and therefore will be familiar to the reader.

There is much excellent cultural and political commentary (in illustration form) collected in this one book by an outstanding illustrator of the 20th century.

Great for Christmas giving, the book is beautifully printed and guaranteed to bring miles of smiles to the reader.

My daughter (9) loves these books. Unfortunately, they are too easy and fast for her to read now. She started reading them when she was 7 and they were perfect. However, she still loves them and I buy each book for her as they come out.

There is no smarter or cannier look at school life than Jennifer L. Holm and Matthew Holm's Babymouse series. The traumas that plague Babymouse and her classmates are universal. Gym uniforms ARE ugly, lockers DO attack, school meat loaf SHOULD be regarded with suspicion and riding the school bus is ONLY for the very VERY brave.

In Babymouse: Rock Star, music is a solace and joy for our heroine but even there, chair tests create yet another pecking order, this time in Band. Hoping to work her way up from last chair for the school concert, Babymouse resolves that she will practice hard for the tryout. Alas, the results of her efforts are, "Screeech!" With the help of a friend, she learns that real music is something you feel in your heart. Band parents will completely identify with this story.

Babymouse's wonderful imagination (she is a reader) carries her daily struggles into the world of the Wizard of Oz and the Pied Piper of Hamelin and her musical dreams into the realm of American Idol-ness.

These graphic novels are rich in humor for young readers but junior highschoolers will also identify. If you have not added this series to your library collection yet then do so asap!

Brava!

Babymouse is back in "Babymouse: Rock Star," the fourth volume of the Babymouse series.

This time, school and music are getting her down. Oh, and her number-one enemy Felicia Furrypaws.

How does Babymouse cope? She daydreams, of course. First, she's a rock star. Then, on a boring Wednesday, a tornado whisks her out of school. But, daydreams won't save her from her biggest problem: she wants to play the flute better. She wants to move from last chair in the school band.

Felicia Furrypaws is second-to-last chair and torments Babymouse. Fortunately, Babymouse finds help from a fellow Furrypaws victim and succeeds in the end with a little practice, instruction, and targeted daydreaming.

Jennifer L. Holm and Matthew Holm triumph again with this latest installment in the tales of your average school-aged mouse. Babymouse's daydreams are fun and action-filled, but the beauty of the books is in the everyday. Everyone has angst about their position in the band, everyone fears a school bully, and everyone hates the bus.

The bus is the star of my favorite sequence in "Babymouse: Rock Star." The bus screeches up, the driver says, "Let's get moving! What do you think I am anyway? Your own personal chauffeur?" Then Babymouse comments that the bus "was like an obstacle course." The obstacles? "Doesn't open. Talks too much. Gets bus-sick. Soda spill. Bumpy. Rickety. Kind of scary. Gum. Picks nose. Yells." True, true, true.

"Babymouse: Rock Star" is highly recommended for school-aged children five and up. And, even though "Babymouse" is written at approximately a third-grade level, I've found young middle schoolers love Babymouse as well.