Amazon Top 50

Here are the Top 50 Graphic Novels on Amazon this morning. All the previous caveats apply.


1 (N). Twilight: The Graphic Novel, Volume 1 *
2 (+22). The Walking Dead Volume 11: Fear The Hunters
3 (-2). Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days
4 (-2). Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw
5 (-2). The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb
6 (-1). Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules
7 (-1). Diary of a Wimpy Kid
8 (-4). Watchmen
9 (-2). Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History
10 (-). Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
11 (-3). Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
12 (-3). The Complete Persepolis
13 (-2). Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began
14 (+15). Dark Tower: The Fall of Gilead *
15 (-3). Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
16 (-3). Batman: The Dark Knight Returns
17 (-1). Footnotes in Gaza: A Graphic Novel
18 (+2). Asterios Polyp
19 (-4). Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth
20 (N). Benny And Penny in The Big No-No
21 (+1). The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks
22 (-8). American Born Chinese
23 (+13). Stephen King's The Stand Vol. 2: American Nightmares
24 (-6). Stitches: A Memoir
25 (N). King of RPGs 1
26 (+5). Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight Volume 6: Retreat *
27 (N). Thor, Vol. 3 *
28 (R). Batman: Battle for the Cowl
29 (+20). The Walking Dead Compendium Volume 1
30 (-3). Predators and Prey (Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Vol. 5)
31 (+13). The Walking Dead Book 5
32 (N). The Cartoon Introduction to Economics: Volume One: Microeconomics
33 (-14). V for Vendetta
34 (-11). The Arrival
35 (-9). Blankets
36 (-8). Batman: The Killing Joke
37 (-20). The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale
38 (R). Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth
39 (+4). Wolves at the Gate (Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Volume 3)
40 (-6). The Long Way Home (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 8, Vol. 1)
41 (-8). Batman: Year One
42 (N). Fables Vol. 13: The Great Fables Crossover *
43 (-3). No Future For You (Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Volume 2)
44 (R). Time of Your Life (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 8, Vol. 4)
45 (R). Wolverine: Old Man Logan
46 (-25). The Complete Calvin and Hobbes
47 (R). Stephen King's The Stand Vol. 1: Captain Trips
48 (N). Little Mouse Gets Ready
49 (R). Invincible Iron Man, Vol. 3: World's Most Wanted, Book 2 *


Items with asterisks (*) are pre-order items.

N = New listing appearing on list for first time
R = Item returning to the list after having been off for 1 or more weeks


Commentary:

* The big news of course is the Twilight graphic novel, which is #4 on the overall Amazon bestseller list and towers over anything else in the comics and graphic novel section. Expect to see it enthroned at the top of this list for a long time to come.

* Other debuts this week include the Toon Book Benny and Penny in The Big No-No, the first King of RPGs collection, the latest (and last) JMS Thor collection, The Cartoon Introduction to Economics, the latest Fables collection, and Jeff Smith's Little Mouse Gets Ready.

* The Walking Dead gets a huge boost, no doubt due to the announcement this week that it will be turned into a television series by AMC.

* Marvel do relatively well this week. Mostly due to Stephen King, but Thor, Wolverine, and Iron Man also make appearances.

* Yes, I know I didn't get around to the big 2009 wrap-up post last week. Soon...

More Anniversary Ranting

Bizarro is brought to you today by Personally Humiliating Work From The Past.
As I mentioned in yesterday's post, tomorrow, Friday the 22nd of January, 2010, is the 25th anniversary of Bizarro. A few readers understandably wondered if the cartoon posted yesterday was the first one that ever ran. It was not, the abomination posted here entitled, "Sock Exchange" was the very first, as you can see by the publication date nestled beneath the psychotically scrawled signature.

Let's deconstruct the awfulness, shall we? At present, I draw everything with a small brush on bristol board, which is a kind of very thick paper that is standard among professional cartoonists. Back then, not knowing what I was doing, how I should do it, or my ass from my elbow, I drew with a rapidograph technical pen on tracing paper. Yes, TRACING paper! So if you were wondering why the image above looks as though it were etched by an asylum inmate on wax with a piece of wire, now you know. Using a tech pen is perfectly fine if you're drawing in a clean, neat style. Like this guy. But I was was trying to use a pen to do things a brush does. Took me a few years to figure that out. Perhaps I shouldn't have dropped out of art school.

The joke isn't so bad, I'd use it today if I'd just thought of it, but the drawing is really something hideous. I had been doing ultra-realistic commercial illustrations of food products for a living, similar to this, and had not been drawing cartoons long enough nor consistently enough to have developed any kind of style. My biggest influence was B. Kliban, but my early work didn't look anything like his, either. Besides, I didn't want people to think I was borrowing from someone else's style, so I just flew off in a random direction in hopes of developing my own look. Which I eventually did, but it took a few years.

And check out that winsome signature. Such style, such grace, such suckage. It looks like it was constructed of burned fragments of a wooden fence.

I'm happy my work isn't this clumsy anymore, that's one good thing about getting older.

Below are two earlier cartoons of mine from 1995 and 1998. By this time I was drawing with a brush and you can see that I changed my lettering style somewhere between those dates. I was still using a tech pen to letter, but later did that with a brush, too.

Tomorrow I'll post a cartoon or two from different years throughout the process to show how my drawings have changed.

Time Flies Coach

Bizarro is brought to you today by Socially Bold Deserts.

As a change of pace, here is an old old old Bizarro from the late 1900s. I just realized a few minutes ago that Friday, January 22, 2010, marks the 25th anniversary of the first Bizarro cartoon that appeared in newspapers. I had seven client papers on opening day: Dallas, San Francisco, Boston, and I can't remember the other four. Now I have something under a million client papers. (Keeping in mind that any number under one million qualifies for that statement.)

Wow. I don't want to bore you with a lot of talk about how the time has flown by and I can't believe I've been doing this for a quarter of a century, but damn. All of that is true. To be honest, it fills me with a mixture of pride and sadness. Time is a mindf*ck.

Twenty five years is a long time to be doing anything. Before Bizarro I don't think I held any job for an entire year – as I recall, 11 months was my record. Of course, this job is more like freelancing than a "real" job, in that nobody cares what I do all day as long as I send them seven cartoons each week.

Things that have changed about this job in 25 years:

• 1985-1987, I finished my cartoons a week ahead of deadline so I could send them by U.S. post to my editor. I was making so little money that I could not justify any other means.

• 1988, I started making enough to get by and began overnighting them with Fed Ex. Now I could work on the cartoons up until 6:30pm the night before they were due and get them to the Fed Ex office by 7.

• In the early '90s I got a computer and email, but it was still a few years before Internet was fast and secure enough to send large images easily. I hadn't yet learned to color my Sunday panels myself yet, either, so I was still marking them up with colored pencil with CMYK percentages and having them done at a coloring service that the entire industry used. This was the way everyone did it then. I had no idea what the image would really look like until it printed in papers many weeks later. It was difficult, required a lot of guessing and the early Sunday panels were not as intricate as they are now, but I tried.

• In the late 90s I began doing all my own coloring and things haven't changed too much since then. Now I can achieve almost any coloring effect I can dream up and can wait until the last second to finish my work and send it by Internet in a few seconds. Usually, though, I send them a day or two after they are due. I'm bad, I know, but this creativity thing is difficult to do on schedule.

More reminiscing tomorrow, unless I die of old age in my sleep.

Cats, Pillows, Pain, Death

Bizarro is brought to you today by Dangers of the Forest.

I've always found the underdog irresistible, so cartoons about animals eating people are automatically fun for me. That doesn't mean they're also "funny" but I think this one is kind of a giggle. Bacon bits, indeed. Ha.

My back hurts today. It is one of those sore muscles right in between my shoulder blades, you know the one. Evidently, anything you attempt to do with your body starts with this muscle. I can't touch my forefinger to my thumb without feeling a twinge in the middle of my back.

The way I achieved this unbearable malady was by throwing something at a cat in the middle of the night. There is a cat door in our bedroom and two nights ago when I went to bed the wind was blowing so hard that the cat door was staying open by a few inches and cold air was flowing in like a mini tornado. So I taped a piece of cardboard over it.

Even though none of our three cats had been out for hours because of the weather, they found this temporary barrier unacceptable and began picking at the edges of the cardboard with their little cat hands. I shouted at them a few times, which is as effective as blinking real hard at them, then eventually I rose up on one elbow and threw a pillow. Pinch went the back muscle, the cats scattered, and here I am.

Curse this mortal coil.

Happy Trails

Bizarro is brought to you today by High Class Motors.

I got lots of emails about this one. A few were from people who liked it because they'd had various types of personal experiences with babies on motorcycles (!) and the rest were from so-called "airheads," people who are fans of the BMW air-cooled "slash-5" series motorcycles from the early 1970s.

The bike in the pic is fashioned after mine, although mine is white, and many readers familiar with this era of BMW bikes recognized it and wrote to ask if I am an airhead. It was nice to meet so many other airheads around the country, thanks for checking in. Once the weather turns nice here in the northeast, how about we all meet for a weekend ride?

Thanks also to all of you who wrote to me with suggestions of where I should move to escape the NY winters. All were good suggestions, and I adding them to my research list. I suspect that eventually I shall end up in California somewhere, probably more southern than northern if only because of the weather, but you never know.

One thing that surprised me was how many people suggested Austin, Texas. It's a great town and I love it but I always sort of thought that it was because I used to live in Texas. It is nice to see that it ranked so highly among people nationwide, right alongside the SF Bay Area and southern California in general. Way to go, Austin!

Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, Victoria, B.C. are all great and I'm very fond of it up there, but it rains too much. I've definitely got that light deprivation thing where if I don't get a LOT of sunshine, I begin invading neighboring countries and impaling people on tall sticks. Just bought one of those light-therapy-box-things and I hope it works.

Here's wishing you sunshine and unicorn until we meet again...

Monkey Covers

Sunday is Monkey Covers day here at YACB. Because there's nothing better than a comic with a monkey on the cover!

It's Grendel vs. Gorilla on Matt Wagner's cover to Grendel: War Child #5 (1999).

(Standard disclaimer about fighting gorillas not really being monkeys applies.)


Image courtesy of the GCD. Click on the image for a larger version.

Shell X Games

Bizarro is brought to you today by Bag of Death.

The idea of snails attempting to jump pretzels was suggested by my good friend, Dick Cabeza. I loved the idea and am really happy with the way the illustration turned out. I like to draw abstracted, cartoony images, but for some reason this sort of idea is more appealing to me as a realistic drawing. It adds to the surreal quality.

Brooklyn warmed up yesterday and I took "the Beast" out for a spin for the first time in months. So rejuvinating. At times like these I wish I lived in one of those year-round-nice-weather climates that you hear about. The problem is, those places are understandably very expensive and often full of rich people who tend to skew conservative. Does anyone know of a terrific warm weather community of liberals and artsy types? Could be a big city or a small town, would prefer the U.S but it's not a deal breaker. Here in America, those kinds of communities tend to be in the north for some reason. Hawaii seems like a good option, but it's so isolated from the rest of the world and live events come on TV so early there.