Read Irresponsibly

To celebrate Banned Books Week, the staff here at the library has put together a flickr photo set showcasing various banned and challenged books. My choice, of course, was the now-infamous Eightball #22.

Check out the rest of the pictures, including more-famous-than-me Jim Ottaviani reading Fun Home and Watchmen.

(Also: Don't miss Unshelved this week, whose "Read Irresponsibly" theme gives this post its title.)

Monkey Covers

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

The cover of 1958's Marmaduke Monk #1 with the titular monkey about to get a bang!

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

"Girls in Mini Skirts Kicking People"

This weekend's On the Media from NPR covers manga and "manga diplomacy," as Brooke Gladstone talks to Roland Kelts (author of Japanamerica):

Amazon Top 25

Just for kicks on a Friday, here's the current Amazon Top 25 Comics & Graphic Novels:

1. The Perry Bible Fellowship: The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and Other Stories
2. Watchmen
3. 52, Vol. 3
4. Sopratos, The: A Pearls Before Swine Collection
5. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
6. Diary of a Wimpy Kid
7. The Complete Calvin and Hobbes
8. I'm Ready for My Movie Contract: A Get Fuzzy Collection
9. Marvel Zombies/Army Of Darkness HC
10. Dark Hunger
11. The Complete Peanuts 1963-1966 Box Set
12. Ultimate Spider-Man Vol. 18: Ultimate Knights
13. The Halo Graphic Novel
14. Process Recess 2: Portfolio
15. Captain America by Ed Brubaker Omnibus, Vol. 1
16. 300
17. Hellboy Volume 7: The Troll Witch and Other Stories
18. Cubes and Punishment: A Dilbert Book
19. The Complete Peanuts 1965-1966
20. Stephen King's Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born
21. And When She Opened the Closet, All the Clothes Were Polyest: A FoxTrot Collection
22. Naruto, Volume 19
23. Artemis Fowl: The Graphic Novel
24. The Death and Return of Superman Omnibus
25. Arrival


(All of our previous caveats apply)

Chris Butcher Talks Process

While I'm by no means a huge Belle & Sebastian fan, I quite enjoyed reading Chris Butcher's deconstruction of how he created his story for the anthology Put The Book Back On The Shelf. I'm a structure freak, so I especially appreciated how Butcher used color as a structural element in his story.

Ladies' Bookplate

Found this bookplate in the Google scan of The Pilgrims of the Rhine by Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton Lytton.

Zot!

So just a couple of days ago I was thinking that it was odd that Scott McCloud's Zot! was out of print. With his popularity as the creator of Understanding/Reinventing/Making Comics, it seemed a natural to make his seminal, highly praised work available again.

And then lo and behold, this week's PW Comics Week shows up, and Zot! is being reissued, in its entirety, as a massive 576-page volume collecting the black and white issues.

On the downside, while the first ten issues were originally in color, they will be in black & white in the collection (the remaining issues were originally in black & white). On the plus side, $23 for the entire Zot! saga is a fantastic bargain on some great comics.

Edit: Unfortunately, the collection will not contain the first ten issues that introduced the characters. While these issues were perhaps not as strong as the later issues, they form the basis of the series and what came after (fortunately for me I already have the original trade collection of the first 10 color issues!)

Start saving your pennies for summer 2008!

(As a service to the comics community, I will now start to think really hard about another lost Eclipse classic, Larry Marder's Beanworld...)

(Edited because I misread an important part of the announcement article!)