Amazon.com's Best of 2001
Editors Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly have packed so much top-notch talent into this flabbergastingly funny all-ages comic collection that you'll have a terrible time deciding what to read first. Just as with the previous Little Lit book,
Folklore & Fairy Tale Funnies, you'll find some of the most hilarious, intelligent, and diverse short comics around inside these pages: Maurice Sendak's omnivorous infant gobbles up everything in sight in "Cereal Baby Keller"; David Sedaris pairs up with Ian Falconer to define true cuteness; "Where's Waldo?" creator Martin Handford searches for old socks; Paul Auster (yes,
that Paul Auster) and Jacques de Loustal's offering follows a man who's found he's disappeared; Crockett Johnson (
Harold and the Purple Crayon) brings back the beginning of his classic '40s strip, "Barnaby" (a favorite of Duke Ellington and Dorothy Parker, among others); and Spiegelman himself takes on "The Several Selves of Selby Sheldrake." And that's not even the half of it. This downright quirky collection will charm comic fans of all ages--and, no doubt, make fans out of those who weren't already. Even the endpapers are funny, thanks to Kaz of "Underworld." (All ages after 9 or so)
--Paul Hughes
From Publishers Weekly
Once upon a time, picture books got parental approval and pulp comics were a sneaky pleasure. In this sequel to Little Lit, Spiegelman and Mouly create a hybrid of the two that may well appeal to oddballs of all ages. Charles Burns leads the charge with his high-impact cover image of an alien reading a boy's space comics. The alien has kewpie-doll eyes and a puppyish nose, but its sinewy muscles and lurid green skin pack a perverse threat. In the endpapers, which suggest a pulp-mag correspondence course, Underworld author Kaz offers "Strange Cartoon Lessons" cards ("Bad at drawing legs? Put your character behind a desk"). After these engaging diversions, the treasury trots out stories from the funny-ha-ha to the funny-strange, many dealing with secret identities. Spiegelman invents a boy whose moods materialize as clones; Jules Feiffer's anxiety-prone child gets "Trapped in a Comic Book"; and Jacques de Loustal and Paul Auster collaborate on a melancholy Kafka-esque noir tale. As the title promises, some of the material is disturbing. Maurice Sendak's punny "Cereal Baby Keller" reprises his violent sketch of a ravenous baby that eats its parents; Ian Falconer and David Sedaris team for a gruesome story of a monster that flips inside-out because "Real beauty is on the inside." More benign picks include an exhausting maze game by Lewis Trondheim, and Barbara McClintock's buoyant story of a shadow that breaks loose. A lengthy reprint of Crockett Johnson's Barnaby strip seems misplaced here, but its airy layout and square panels are a strong counterpoint to the condensed, offbeat material. This compendium, with its stellar group of comix and picture-book literati, revels in its dark side and suggests that "strange kids" are the mainstream. All ages.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
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