John Cuneo's Good Intentions

John Cuneo is an illustrator: he's done a bunch of New Yorker covers, worked for Esquire, and so on. But, like any artist, there's work that he wants to do that doesn't fit into what clients want him to draw.

So he's had a series of books collecting his other work, over the past twenty years: nEuROTIC, Not Waving But Drawing, Coping Skills. And, just last year, most recently, John Cuneo's Good Intentions.

His style is familiar, and the older book titles vaguely so, but I can't prove I ever read any of them, or point to a specific time I saw a Cuneo illustration. (That's the curse of illustrators: they're hired to provide distinctive and visually interesting work entirely to support something else. Cuneo has done a bunch of celebrity caricatures, as seen on his site, which I expect originally accompanied various profiles.)

So this was probably the first time I saw a bunch of Cuneo work - and definitely so a bunch of work I knew was by Cuneo. Good Intentions collects eighty or so color drawings, in three themed chapters: In the Wild, In the Studio, and In the Home. More than half of the drawings are captioned, but they're not quite cartoons - the captions are wry, descriptive, allusive, narrative.

And, of course, most of the drawings are about sex, one way or another. (That's what "personal work" means for artists, isn't it?)

They're not sexy, though: Cuneo draws mostly lumpy, middle-aged people, with a few more pounds and wrinkles than they'd like, and his loose line and watercolors can give their skin a mottled look, too. His women tend to be slightly more attractive than his men: their faces are grotesque only occasionally, while men are caricatures around half the time. But there's a lot of flesh in this book: tits and ass and dick, often engaged in activities with other people. Again, it's not particularly attractive tits and ass and dick, so don't go here if that's what you're looking for. (You're on the internet: attractive tits and ass and dick are always only a click away, photographic, hand-drawn, or AI-generated.)

So this is an odd book. It's not quite funny - it's not trying to tell jokes. It's amusing, and quirky, and definitely making commentary about modern life and types of people and things like that. It's not unlike a book of cartoons; it's just not aiming for a laugh reaction. And it is quite polymorphously perverse, which could be a bonus or a detriment, depending on the reader.

Drew Friedman's Chosen People

Can reading a book be an experiment? I thought of this one that way, but that may just be me being precious about something minor.

I've read previous books of Drew Friedman's art digitally, on my old tablet - a ten-year-old jobbie, 9.7 inches I think - and noted that the art was smaller than the real-world book size, so I didn't recommend that. (See my post on Heroes of the Comics in particular; the other relevant Friedman books are All the Presidents, Schtick Figures, and Maverix and Lunatix.)

But I had a birthday recently, and got myself a newer, fancier, bigger tablet. (I'm still getting used to holding it, since it seems to be approximately the size of a coffee table - they say it's 13 inches but it feels larger than that.) And I'm seeing how digital comics look on this new screen: so far, better and clearer, not just larger.

And so I read the 2017 collection of portraits Drew Friedman's Chosen People, and, I have to say, it looks just fine on a big tablet. This slab of metal and glass is close to the size of the real-world book, so the experience is close to the same. If you have a big-ass tablet, as I do now, even large-format books of art and comics look pretty good there.

And I'm glad I had that consumer note to give you because, otherwise, what's there to say about this book? It collects at least a decade of mostly editorial illustrations by Friedman, and is entirely miscellaneous. Friedman has put out some books that were specific projects, with pictures of people with some connection to each other, like Presidents and the Old Jewish Comedians books and the ones of comics-makers, but he also has done books that collect the other stuff he does that pays the bills, like this and Schtick Figures.

There is a section of potted bios in the back to explain who the people are. You might think that would not be difficult, since each page has the person's name, but Friedman often draws very obscure people, either because they intersect with his hobbies and loves (Forrest J. Ackerman, Max Asnas, Richard Deacon, Friedman's own father, grandfather, and brother) or for reasons that cannot be discerned from the book (e.g., Franklin Longbone and Carl P. Sodiwater, both of whom I vaguely suspect of being fictional).

The main section of the book has 117 full-page pictures. The front matter adds an additional picture of Shemp (there are two more later), plus Al Lewis, Friedman's wife Kathy, introducer Merrill Markoe, and Alex Gard, something of an inspiration for the whole project. In the back is a self-portrait with Friedman's bio and a nine-panel grid of a group of people in front of the American flag, which is not explained in any way. (The front cover is Muddy Waters and the back cover is Chris Ware, but both of those also appear inside.) So it tops out at 140 pictures of people, most of whom are "famous" in some way or other.

By the way, "chosen" here means "chosen to have Drew Friedman do their pictures." The person choosing may be Friedman himself much of the time, but also includes editors of various mostly New-York based publications, especially the New York Observer. The potted bios list (consistently? always?) where the illustrations first appeared, with notes on about half of them.

Friedman has a detailed, immersive style - his people look real and grounded. He's never gone out of his way to draw pretty people, and he tends to make them less pretty than they might like - he's an artist of jowls and dewlaps and ragged hairlines, laugh lines and creases and extra chins, scowls and smirks and incredulous glances. This is a fine book of a whole bunch of those drawings, some in color and some in his distinctive black-and-white stippled style, including some people you will recognize and some - no matter who you are - that will be a mystery to you.

E Is for Edward by Gregory Hischak

I don't read coffee-table books much. Very few people do, of course - there might be critics who do round-ups for something like the NY Times Book Review once or twice a year, but most of us read through a coffee-table book every few years at best. Assuming we read it, and not just plop it down in its natural home, to be poked through at odd moments when our phones are less compelling than usual.

(Thinking about it, the coffee-table book is yet another example of the wide array of boredom-reducing technology that was outcompeted by phones.)

But I did read this one - all the way through, beginning to end, like a "normal" book. So I suppose I might as well say something about it.

E Is for Edward is a celebration of the work of the illustrator, writer, and artist Edward Gorey. The subtitle is "A Centennial Celebration of the Mischievous Mind of Edward Gorey," and it was indeed published last year, the hundred anniversary of Gorey's 1925 birth. The author is Gregory Hischak, curator of The Edward Gorey House - the museum created from Gorey's home and full of his stuff - which means he's probably the best current person to give an overview of Gorey's work.

It is not a biography - there have been several of those. It doesn't reprint entire works by Gorey - the Amphigorey series already does that. It's also not primarily a process book, though there are some sketches and unpublished work. (That's good, because most Gorey fans will want to see the stuff they recognize.)

Instead, Hischak organizes Gorey's wide body of work into eight loosely-themed chapters, from "Hapless Children" to "He Wrote It All Down Zealously," to cover as many of the hundred-plus books Gorey published in his lifetime and the other projects (credits for PBS Mystery!, costumes and set design for a famous 1970s staging of Dracula and a few other theatrical projects, a mostly-just-mentioned vast flow of commercial illustration work that he did for decades) as possible. It's a well-designed book, with lots of Gorey artwork throughout, and Hischak is a knowledgeable guide through it all.

We do get sketches of bits of Gorey's life, mostly out of order, although the first chapter does the whole childhood thing. There's one exceptionally circumlocutious section almost smack-dab in the middle about the word "queer" and whether or not it applies to Gorey, which I take to mean that Gorey was probably gay but either led a mostly celibate life as an adult or that his affairs were so scandalous and so well-hidden that they can't be discussed in public even fifty years later.

(I prefer to believe the latter, but the former is more likely.)

Anyway, the book is mostly "here's a cluster of stuff by Gorey with loosely related themes," one cluster after another. Among those loose clusters are things like ballet, murder, nonsense verse, and clothing. It's informative and interesting, and does - as a coffee-table book must - include lots of Gorey's art, presented well.

My only complaint is that the book drops into reverse-type - white on a deep green - far too often. Designers used to know that knock-out type is inherently more difficult to read, and saved it for special occasions, but, like everything else, the standards of the past are no longer enforced, and children now disobey their parents.

Other than that, it's a handsome, comprehensive look at the work of an American original. And it's large and heavy enough to kill a small child if dropped on them from a height, which would probably amuse Gorey.

All the Presidents by Drew Friedman

I still wish Drew Friedman was making comics regularly. Oh, sure, his ultra-detailed stippled style takes an immense amount of time, and I have to imagine it's not great for his health to crane over a drawing table making all of those little boxes for hours on end.

But his comics were something unique, a stew of curdled weird pop-culture and photorealism, all filtered through a unique, funny sensibility - not to mention that magnificent, unparalleled art. His portraits have the same artistic strengths, but the bizarre storytelling of his comics is mostly absent.

The Fun Never Stops! will be probably the last book of Freidman comics; that was almost two decades ago. It now looks like comics is something Friedman did in his early career, mostly the '80s and '90s, before he moved into work that paid better and didn't require the same insane level of back-breaking effort. And, again, I completely understand. My wish is more that the universe isn't different - that comics weren't so remunerative that Friedman had to keep doing them, a few stories a year, and hadn't been seduced by the One Big Head model of drawing.

All the Presidents was right in the middle of Friedman's (still ongoing) One Big Head period, from 2019. It followed the three Old Jewish Comedians books, two books of Heroes of the Comics, and Drew Friedman's Chosen People (covering Jews who were not necessarily comedians, though still largely old). Since then, he's put out Maverix and Lunatix (basically a third Heroes of the Comics, focusing on the underground generation) and the very miscellaneous Schtick Figures.

And Presidents is just what it says it is: full-page headshots, drawn by Friedman in his inimitable, labor-intensive stippled style, of the first forty-five presidents, each opposite a page of their vital statistics. (Just the very basics: dates of birth and death, party, term in office, age at inauguration, and one "fun fact.")

This is possibly the least of the One Big Head Friedman books: most of them, for one thing, have more full-figure portraits throughout, but this is entirely One Big Head. It looks like a review of the money of a slightly sweatier and more disreputable world. Friedman doesn't have a personal connection to most of the Presidents - just JFK on - so it is somewhat a long succession of funny-looking dead guys with various outdated permutations of facial hair and jowls.

It can be amusing to poke through and turn up interesting coincidences - did you know Grant was the youngest President ever at the time? All those 19th century guys looked prematurely old, so it was a surprise to me. But the joys of  Presidents are slighter than the other Friedman books; keep that in mind if you dive in.

Queen of the Ring: Wrestling Drawings 1980-2020

I've always been uneasy when I write about art books here. I have no art training - I saw people go to art history classes at college, and talked to some of the art history majors, and might even have glanced at their oddly small-format thick glossy-paper paperback textbooks now and then, but I don't have the vocabulary or the grounding or the historical knowledge or even, in the worst case, necessarily even know what to look for.

I have been reading and writing about comics for a few decades, though there I tend to lean more heavily on story elements - talking about story, I'm on much firmer ground. (And even wordless comics are storytelling vehicles: the art is always purposeful, and I at least think the tools I have can be useful.) But occasionally I wander into the pure art book, usually because it overlaps with some other interest - in the past, I saw a lot of SFF art books, especially when I worked as a book-club editor, and more recently, I sometimes dip into comics-related art.

That's how I stand with Jaime Hernandez's 2021 collection Queen of the Ring. It's not comics; the book makes it clear that this was an entirely separate artistic exercise. (There's even a discussion of how his tools and working methods were different for this work than for his comics - I found it vaguely interesting; people who actually understand how art is made will get more out of it.)

This is a collection of individual drawings - some black and white but mostly colored in pencils - of female wrestlers. Some of it is "in action" - showing a moment in the ring - and some of it is posed, often as if it was the cover of a wrestling magazine or program. All of it is fictional; all of the wrestlers here were invented by Hernandez, part of a vague - but probably fairly clear in his head - alternative timeline of wrestling from the 1960s through about the '80s.

He made these drawings over the course of forty years, as the book's subtitle makes clear. (He's probably still doing it now, five years later.) The book is not organized in chronological order - either by art-creation or the fictional history of Hernandez's wrestling world - and the short bits of text here, from an interview Hernandez did with the book's editor (and fellow cartoonist) Katie Skelly, essentially say that he didn't date any of this work at the time, and can only vaguely tag it by decade at this point.

So: this is a whole lot of undated, non-comics art, organized in a vague sequence to make a pleasant book. There are recurring characters, of a sort, and we get a vague sense of their careers and personalities from the fake headlines of their wrestling magazine covers and other flavor text Hernandez put on the art at the time. (His aim, I think, was to make his own world of women's wrestling, roughly congruent with what he saw in glances as a kid, with heroes and villains and long-running plotlines and rivalries and shocking betrayals and all of the other standard wrestling story beats. He's somewhat successful in giving a sense that history exists, behind these individual drawings, even though it doesn't.)

As I said, I'm not great at talking about art. But even I can see the changes in Hernandez's style over the years, and appreciate them. In what seem to be the earliest drawings, he has a lot of lines, trying to capture every fold and wrinkle. The more mature work, to my eye, is more concerned with defining volumes and shapes - his bodies are rounded but strong, crisply defined and real, with fewer lines overall and vastly fewer in the middle of shapes and bodies.

I doubt I got as much out of this book as I could: I flipped through it, looking at the pictures, and finished it quickly. Good thing I read it digitally: this is the kind of book I would probably never buy, so being able to get it through my library app is a huge bonus. If you are anything like me, I recommend the same - for this and any other books you're vaguely interested in but don't necessarily want to own forever.

Only What's Necessary: Charles M. Schulz and the Art of Peanuts by Chip Kidd

Chip Kidd is one of the premier book designers of our day, and a big proponent of comics as an art form. He also has a tendency to get...let me say "fussy"...in his designs - he came of professional age in the go-go Nineties, and that can be seen in his work sometimes. He also seems to be fascinated by the physicality of original art, and I've occasionally complained that tendency is not a good match for books that mean to reprint stories.

Art books want to show art, as clearly as possible, shot from the originals - it should mimic the experience of visiting a gallery. But most books with comics in them are not art books - they're books for reading those comics. And, so, most of the time, versions of the art where you can see the color of the underlying paper or blue lines or lumps of Wite-Out or erasures are not what the audience wants or needs.

The good news is that this book here is an art book, which means Kidd's instincts and strengths are perfectly aligned with the purpose of the book. (See up top, for the original cover of the book, as an example of what Kidd does when he has his head. The current cover of the book - much more conventional, and much more useful for anyone trying to figure out what it is, is below.)

You can see the color of the underlying paper and some tracing lines and big swoops of Wite-Out and some erasures and loose sketches in Only What's Necessary: Charles M. Schulz and the Art of Peanuts - and that's the point of the book. It's a sampling of the collection of the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center, and the purpose is to show a much larger audience what it would be like to visit that museum and see a whole bunch of Peanuts originals and other Schulz drawings, full-size, up on walls with good light.

Only What's Necessary has a lot of words up front, mostly about how wonderful Schulz was and how awesome his museum is now. I assume anyone reading this book will already believe all of that, but I suppose a book does need to have words in it, and these are appropriate. Contributors include Jean Schulz, the artist's widow and head of that museum, Jeff Kinney, the "Wimpy Kid" creator, and Paige Braddock, cartoonist and creative head of the arm of the Schulz media empire that manages licensed properties (and, way back at the beginning of her tenure, the strip itself).

But the main purpose of the book is not the words - or, at least, not the words by other people. We do want to see Schulz's captions and dialogue, and to try to untangle his crabbed script on sketches. (Though I have to admit I had very little luck at that.) The art was photographed by Geoff Spear, who has worked with Kidd on a lot of these projects. It's the kind of work that doesn't get noticed much by readers like me (maybe like you, too), but the art is crisp and clear, and all of those artifacts of drawing are as clear in the photos as I can imagine them being.

Kidd doesn't have a formal organizational principle for the book - it's roughly chronological by phases of Schulz's career, which is all it needs. The focus is mostly on the strips themselves, as it should be, but there's a lot of ancillary materials - comic books and magazine covers, games and toys - as well as abandoned strips, a few early drawings, and just a couple basically complete strips that never made it into newspapers.

So this is a book with a lot of impressive Schulz art in it, presented well and often blown up to make it easier to see the little details. I probably didn't take as much time lingering over every page as some readers would, but I enjoyed it a lot, and was reminded yet again of the paradoxical truth of cartooning: it's harder to make fewer lines; the simplest drawings are the most focused and precise.

You need to be seriously interested in a creator to go for an art book of their work - otherwise you just read the work. But if you've dug into a lot of Peanuts, and in particular if you like the way Schulz drew and would like to draw more like that yourself, this is a book with a lot of examples and (potentially) lessons to teach.

Schtick Figures by Drew Friedman

Drew Friedman might have run out of themes for his big books of warts-and-all portraits. I say that because this, his most recent book, declares itself to contain "over 150 comedians, writers, humorists, musicians, actors, journalists, cartoonists, illustrators, editors, publishers, one art gallery owner, one magician, one photographer, two wrestlers, and one movie memorabilia store owner."

If that sounds like a coherent theme, I'll eat my hat. And I don't own a hat.

On the other hand, "Drew Friedman portraits" is arguably enough of a theme in the first place, and this book has, as mentioned, over 150 of them. They are miscellaneous, they are arranged in (mostly) alphabetical order, and they are glorious in their fleshy magnificence.

Schtick Figures came out this past summer, from Friedman's long-time publisher Fantagraphics, and I suspect it is the book that collects everything else he's done over the past decade or so - that it wasn't a specific project like Heroes of the Comics or Maverix and Lunatix. The pictures are presented full-page, captioned only by the name of the person - or, in a few rare cases, the project - with a section of short potted biographies at the back for those of us who don't know who (picking a few pages at random) Imogene Coca, Pigmeat Markham or Frank Kelly Freas are. (Friedman puts "Kelly" in quotes for Freas, which is weird and I think wrong, but oh well. There's also at least one entry in the bio section that doesn't have a portrait in the book, and a couple of places where the bio section is in a slightly different order than the portraits.)

The bios also contain occasional notes about the source of the image - there are a few commissions, mostly for the people pictured (which explains some of the weirder ones in the list up top), some covers for Mineshaft (whatever that is), work for Mad and The Village Voice and probably some other publications I don't recall right this second, and a few other oddities. Most are uncredited, which could mean Friedman has forgotten or wants to forget where they came from, that he doesn't have to mention original publication for those, that he drew them for this book, or that they came to him in a vision from the Man in the Moon.

Whatever: 150 Drew Friedman pictures. Mostly of people you will recognize, if you know who Drew Friedman is and have a passing acquaintance with 20th century pop culture. (Especially the odder, horror- and humor-tinged sides of it.) This book is a good thing, and it's fun to poke through. I may wish Friedman was still doing comics rather than single images - as I lamented when I wrote about his book The Fun Never Stops! some years back - but it's better for his health and bank account and probably life in general, so I can't kick too hard.

Moebius Library: The Art of Edena by Jean "Moebius" Giraud

I don't want to say "art of" books always come out as line extensions after a creator has died and can't produce new work, but...it's pretty darn common.

This book, for example: The Art of Edena, part of the vague "Moebius Library" (which seems to be primarily, if not entirely, posthumous itself). It was assembled in 2018 and credited to Jean "Moebius" Giraud, who had died in 2012. It also lists "Commentary by" Isabelle Giraud (his widow) and Moebius Production, which I suspect is the actual entity that assembled this stuff, signed publishing contracts, checked proofs, and so forth.

It is, as the title implies, an art book related to his graphic novel series The World of Edena - it has four short comics stories set in that world, plus a bunch of paintings, some rough pages, and more than a little text by someone clearly not Moebius about how awesome he was and how special and wonderful his characters Stel and Atan are in these stories.

Luckily, it's the kind of art book that is mostly art, and the art is presented clearly and well on large pages. The text is a bit much, particularly for those (like me) who think the Edena stories are goofy and weirdly lumpy, lurching from one Moebius obsession to another as they were created over a few decades, and not actually reaching a solid ending, either. But you have to assume that the marketing entity set up to exploit a dead creator's work will consider him the best things since spreadable cream cheese, so we just roll with it.

As usually, I find Moebius's art lovely, detailed, and particular while finding his ideas often second-hand, sophomoric, and faintly embarrassing. The stories here - I don't want to claim much; they are short and may be the main selling point but are not a majority of the book - are mostly wordless, which is always a big plus for Moebius.

Potentially positive: this book explains the plots of the Edena books in greater clarity than the books themselves did - at least to me, when I read them. So it does function as a solid companion to the series.

So, all in all, this is a nice book, of most interest to big Moebius fans obviously, with a lot of striking art and a fair bit of broad claims that the reader (if anything like me) will not entirely be able to swallow. Again: a posthumous "art of" book; that's what to expect.

Heroes of the Comics by Drew Friedman

I try not to let the best be the enemy of the good. Something can be just fine even if it's clear that it could have been much better if only one aspect was slightly different.

But when it's my own choice that downgrades something to "good," I have to at least point it out.

I read Drew Friedman's 2014 book Heroes of the Comics electronically, on a standard-size tablet.

Don't do that.

This is an oversized book, meant to be read at its real size. Even more so, the point is to be able to see the full-page portraits while you're reading the text on the facing back, glancing back and forth from one to the other. In a digital format, none of that is available.

Friedman has been making books like this for about two decades, starting with Old Jewish Comedians in 2006. The three Comedians books were pretty minimalistic, without much text and only a couple of dozen portraits in each. His books on cartoonists - I've previously read his later book on the underground scene, Maverix and Lunatix - are much larger and expansive.

Heroes has eighty-three full-page portraits of Golden and Silver Age creators and industry professionals, from Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson to Alex Toth, Will Eisner to Marie Severin, Al Feldstein to Lou Fine. If you don't know who any of those people are, this is not a book for you.

They're all presented in mid-career - not as the Young Turks they mostly were when they mostly did the stuff we remember them for, but as middle-aged or on the cusp of retirement. Friedman likes drawing distinctive, damaged faces, of course, so this is not a surprising artistic choice. And they are all identifiable to anyone who knows what they look like in the first place. That depends on the reader and the subject, obviously - there are very few people who have any idea what Max Gaines looked like, while Jack Kirby (our cover boy) is very recognizable.

So this is a book of pictures of mostly white-haired, mostly white, often Jewish guys sitting and smiling at the "camera," as if in a publicity still or heroic portrait, over and over, with a potted biography on the facing page. Even though they all did some great work, and were instrumental in the rise of a major American art form, it all gets pretty samey and potted by the time the book is over. There's only so many times you can say "this guy started out in the Eisner/Iger Studio."

This is an interesting book. I'm glad it exists; I'm glad Friedman has a career making his unique portraits, and that he's been able to catalog so many areas of pop-culture that he cares so much about. But, frankly, it's a little boring. It might be best sitting on a coffee table, so you can pick it up randomly, look at one or two guys, and put it back down.

Maverix and Lunatix: Icons of Underground Comix by Drew Friedman

I keep discovering new categories of books that don't work as well in digital form. I was a somewhat reluctant convert to digital - I very rarely read prose that way, and have been consuming a lot of comics digitally largely because the library Hoopla app has scads of good stuff, including what looks to be the entire output of Europe Comics - so this is not surprising to me, but it is vaguely annoying when I momentarily overcome my prejudices only to discover I was correct after all.

Anyway: this is not a great book to read digitally. Anything large-format fits in that category, obviously, and a book of full-page portraits even more so. And yet I persevered.

Maverix and Lunatix: Icons of Underground Comix is the latest "bunch of full-page portraits" book from Drew Freidman, who I think now has not worked as a cartoonist in at least a decade. It follows several books on Old Jewish Comedians, one of famous Jews who were not necessarily comedians, a couple on Golden Age comics-makers, and one with all the US Presidents. Of those, the only one I've seen was Old Jewish Comedians, the very first - I was a big fan of Friedman's dark, celebrity-tormenting comics all the way back to the 1980s, but he mostly transitioned from that work to much better paid illustration work over the course of the '90s. (For the comics work, see The Fun Never Stops! And for the illustration before he started doing the themed-portraits books, see Too Soon?)

This book is explicitly a follow-up to the two books of Golden-Agers; it has a hundred-and-one of those full-page pictures on right-hand pages, each one with a short potted biography of the subject (by Friedman, I assume) facing it, tastefully printed knockout on black, as if it were a gallery show or index of the deceased. All of the portraits are of makers of comics, all people (mostly men, a few women) who were active in underground comics from 1967-1975. There's also a short section at the end with much smaller head-only illos of major underground publishers of that era, though many of these are also in the main section, since that's the kind of scene it was.

That's what it is. But what's important is that it's all drawn by Friedman, the master of the realistic grotesque, who draws lumpy, sweaty, hairy, specific people in amazingly characteristic poses in that stunning photorealistic style (which I don't think he still does by stippling, as he did in the '80s). He seems to have worked from photographs, but not by copying photographs. These are all new images, of these hundred-plus people in their prime, presented each when they were at the peak of being underground comics-makers.

Look, I still prefer narrative to portraiture. I'm a story guy. So there's a small part of me still somewhat sad Friedman left the worlds of narrative for portraiture. But he's so good at it - so incisive, so particular, so super-real - that this is obviously what he should be doing.

Any of Friedman's books are more interesting and resonant the more you care about and know the people involved. That's been the case way back to his goofy comics about Joe Franklin. So you do have to know and care, at least a little, about the underground comics movement and some of the major figures in it, to get much out of Maverix and Lunatix.

But if you do have any connection, to any of Friedman's books, they're like a distorted mirror, more real than photography, that reveals true faces. I do recommend you read them in physical books, though: that's a better experience.

Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise by Gary Panter

This book is all about the art rather than the story. As usual with books like that, I'm not going to be a lot of help here: I can look at things like that, but I don't have the art background or vocabulary to describe or explicate it well. So I may be quick and desultory today; I apologize if so.

Also, I should give a consumer warning. Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise has a 2021 copyright date for this New York Review Comics edition, which indeed came out last year. And the 1988 Adventures in Paradise book has been out of print so long that it would be easy to forget about it. But this is that old book: the only new things here are the cover, the foreword by Ed Ruscha, and a potted life story of creator Gary Panter in the afterword by Nicole Rudick. The comics and the art are exactly the same as the 1988 version: if you have or had or read that book, you know exactly what's in here.

So this book collects pages from 1978 through 1988, collected and assembled in 1988 and put into what I will somewhat shakily call a coherent form at that point. From the Rudick afterword, it seems that most of the few story beats that are here were introduced for the 1988 collection; Jimbo was a collection of scattered moments before that. (And mostly still is, even afterward.)

Jimbo is the central character of these pages, a punk in some dystopic future - again, the Rudick afterword explains that "Dal-Tokyo" is a city on Mars a hundred years or more in the future, which Panter has used in multiple stories over the years , but the book doesn't explain or define that. It's just a name, for this place in which random things happen. Jimbo is a big, beefy guy, but he's not a warrior or anything like that - just a regular dude, trying to get by, to get a burger in an automated restaurant or go to a punk show or find a girlfriend. (Or defuse an atom bomb, towards the end, but he's no good at that, anyway.)

As I said, the pages are arranged in a sequence, but they're mostly disjoint. It's easy to tell, especially in the first half, where each installment begins and ends - there are some longer sequences (most of the better work, actually) but there's also a lot of single or two-page ideas. Panter uses wildly different art styles, often on the same page, and the early part of the book has a weird repetitive effect where the first pages of a "story" are the crudest, the most "punk," and he amps up the finish as the story goes on, usually because Jimbo is moving from his natural place into automated and mechanized spaces.

Again: stuff happens. But it doesn't mean much, and it doesn't connect. Eventually, Jimbo gets a friend, and a girlfriend (the friend's sister), and then the latter gets kidnapped, and...then there's an extended sequence of Jimbo pretending to be an "Indian" somewhere out on the Plains until he stops and gets back to what I might as well call the plot. And there's nuclear terrorism, because it was the early '80s, and the threat of nuclear death was what every creator had lurking in the back of his head. Panter ends with a long sequence that could only be described by someone with better art-describing chops than I have; there's a lot of pages with striking pictures overlaid on top of each other, aiming at an apocalyptic effect. I mostly just wanted to get through it.

I don't remember my reaction to Jimbo the first time around; I was a college student, and I don't think I expected to like everything, anyway. I had enough lurking respect or fondness in the back of my head to come back almost thirty-five years later, if that means anything.

I will say the first page of this collection - I include someone else's old scan here - is iconic, and one of the greatest expressions of late 20th century uneasiness that have ever been put to paper. There are other moments here that may strike you as strongly, too. Panter is a deep and thoughtful artist; he's just not making the kind of art that forms "stories" and "sense" and "coherent narrative."

Book by They Might Be Giants, Brian Karlsson, and Paul Sahre

So this is named "Book," but, frankly, it's not really a "book" in the normal sense. It's not sold all by itself, it's not available at all through the usual book outlets, and the point of it is to be an extension of something else.

Book is the new record (album? what do we call a specific, organized collection of music by one artist in a mostly-digital world, when all of the old words are about the format?) by the band They Might Be Giants. It's available in various forms. The most baroque, complicated form is the one I have: a big red hardcover book, with the CD in a sleeve inside the front cover.

The book is the larger physical object, but it's really there to accompany the CD. It exists because of the CD.

What's in the book are the lyrics for that CD, plus other stuff. So, yes, it is a really overgrown lyrics booklet. I don't know if this is the biggest lyrics booklet - the world is wide and full of crazy people doing crazy things, and I bet some other band has had their lyrics engraved on titanium plates in an edition limited to ten and sold at ten thousand dollars a pop - but it's got to be in the top ten.

Actually, it has lyrics not just for Book but for two previous records: I Like Fun and My Murdered Remains. Does that disqualify it as a lyrics booklet for Book?

Those lyrics are not printed normally, since this is as much an art object as it is a useful thing. Actually, strike that: it's much more an art object than a useful thing; that's the point. The lyrics were typed out, on an IBM Selectric, in various design-y ways, by Paul Sahre, who is credited with book design here. And that's how he designed this book: he picked a font, popped the ball into a typewriter, lined up the paper, and typed stuff - over and over again, often overlapping and generally laid out on the page in quirky and not-exactly-designed-to-be-read-clearly ways.

Also in the book: photographs by Brian Karlsson, who is of the wandering-about-and-snapping-random-things school of photography. (As opposed to the hours-making-a-complicated-set-up-in-the-studio school, or the trying-to-get-candid-photos-of-celebrities school, or even the put-on-your-nice-clothes-and-go-to-the-mall school. Come to think of it, there are a lot of schools.) They are mostly quiet and arty, and I suspect they would work better on a gallery wall in isolation rather than juxtaposed with random lyrics in hard-to-read layouts. The photos do not seem to be chosen to illustrate specific songs, or even to comment on them: the photos seem to be a separate kind of art embedded in this one.

This is clearly a self-indulgent project: gigantic hardcover lyrics book by mid-rank rock bands can't be anything else. But it's a fun self-indulgent project, that is quirky and weird in a very Brooklyn way, and that's deeply appropriate for TMBG. I don't think I'm a huge enough fan of the band to have wanted to buy this all by itself, but as part of the huge secret package they did for this whole year, it's just swell.

Note: I wrote this on October 25, right after I read Book and almost three weeks before the album is due to be released. It will post on December 7th, and I suspect the big fancy red-book edition of Book will have sold out by then. But I really doubt anyone reading this will want to buy the thing; if you did want to buy the thing, you would have known about it already.

Phantoms in the Attic by Richard Sala

Don't come to this book expecting comics, despite my tag. Oh, there are two short strips at the end, because Richard Sala was a cartoonist at heart and had material that would fit, but that's not the point of the book.

Phantoms in the Attic is an art book, mostly collecting a bunch of full-page images. Some are monochrome, a few are black-and-white, but most are in Sala's usual softly creepy watercolors. I think the physical book is in a fairly small format, but I read it digitally: so, for me, it was exactly the size of my device, like every other book I read that way. (Reading digitally is excellent in some ways, but turns into a procrustean bed for anything heavily designed or full of art.)

As usual with Sala, it's all horror-tinged, with familiar monsters menacing very Sala-esque young ladies. Some of the monsters are creatures: vampires and werewolves and swamp monsters, ghosts and devils and mummies. But just as many are arguably human: maniacal children, slavering serial killers, depraved and deformed maniacs. What they have in common is that urge to attack and destroy cute barefoot girls - it's the core theme of Sala.

I say "girls" because Sala's female characters all skew young, and it seems deliberate. His men are sometimes young (and usually clueless) and sometimes old (and usually fiendish), but his women, evil or good, are all fresh-faced and clean-limbed and perky, in the first flush of youth. The man had a type, or at least his comics did.

Phantoms has nearly a hundred pieces of art like that. They're individual illustrations, so they're more static than Sala's comics pages: even the ones that depict a moment of action look more posed, and most of them are either montages or vignettes or just quieter moments.

You will recognize, I hope, most of the major characters - Sherlocks and Santa Clauses, monsters from this old horror movie or that one, various folkloric beasties - as they menace their particular girls, or cavort in their own image-spaces. If you're someone who would not recognize any of those creatures, Sala is very much not a cartoonist for you.

And, of course, Phantoms is an art book by a cartoonist, so it's audience will be a bit more limited than other Sala books. It doesn't tell a story: it just collects a bunch of unconnected pictures. They're all very nice pictures, and they're all exceptionally fun and Sala-esque, but you need to be a Sala fan to begin with to want this much unconnected Sala.

Love and Rockets: The Covers edited by Eric Reynolds

You can't tell this from your side of the screen, but my reserves are running low and my scheduled posts are getting dangerously close to the current day. This is because I'm still not reading all that much these days - oh, sure, I'm probably reading more than 90% of Americans, but it's vastly less than the rate I read in my, um, teens through mid-forties, so it's still shocking and annoying to me.

Since I'm not going to start commuting any time soon, or change jobs to something that gives me vastly more free time and mental energy (or something where I'm reading for a living again), this is the new normal, and I'm just living with it.

But it does mean that, every so often, I find a way to momentarily fall into one of my tricky old Book-a-Day habits, and find something I can breeze through almost immediately and blather here about equally quickly.

Hence Love and Rockets: The Covers, a coffee-table book from 2013 that collected the magazine and collection covers from the first series of Love and Rockets, 1981-1995. Yes, there was nearly another twenty years of covers available at the time this book was assembled, but making every book is a complicated matter of cost and projected return, so I have to assume the hope was that a second and maybe even third volume were hoped for in time. They have not emerged.

I'm crediting it as being edited by Eric Reynolds, but it's much more the kind of "edited" you see from the guy in the publishing house (getting everything organized, dealing with printers, color-correction) than the kind of "edited" a book of prose would have (writing words, editing words, arranging words in a pleasing order). This is an art book: the words are few and limited to a single-page Editor's Note up front to introduce it and short notes from the artists on each of the covers in the back.

I see I've neglected so far to mention who those artists are: I hope you know that Love and Rockets is by Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, occasionally also their brother Mario Hernandez, but, if you didn't, you do now. This book has a lot of Jaime, a lot of Gilbert, and three pieces by Mario in its 144 pages.

There are at least four covers in this book I consider iconic: #1, of course, #24, maybe even more so, and then the one-two punch of #31-32. That doesn't include the collections; from those I'd add at least Death of Speedy, maybe Flies on the Ceiling some days. Your list may be different: it may have a lot more Gilbert in it, for example.

But this is great art, presented well, in an excellent package. It's no substitute for the stories themselves, obviously: it's inherently a secondary, ancillary work. But it is great for what it is.

Cease & Desist: Inspired by the Music of They Might Be Giants, as illustrated by Todd Alcott

This gets a post because it is a book-shaped object, because it's a really neat thing, and because I "read" it and want to keep track of that. But it's not generally available and it's a coffee-table book if anything. So I'll try to keep this pithy.

Cease & Desist collects almost a hundred images made by the screenwriter and graphic designer Todd Alcott, all based on the lyrics, imagery, and ideas of the band They Might Be Giants. Apparently, he has some connection to the band -- maybe just that he knew a guy who knew a guy, or that they both were on the Internet doing creative stuff -- and started doing these images, some of which got posted to the band's official Tumblr account.

In fact, you can see a lot of this book there now. All the fake ads and book covers and magazines and random street ads that seem to be from 1963? That's all Alcott's work. In the book, it's often even more contextualized -- not just the cover of a fake book, but that fake book on a table, with the cover slightly curled and a pair of glasses in the foreground. The book is vaguely organized, but it's really just a nicely-designed package of those images.

Alcott is good at this stuff: both the technical making-pictures-convincingly-old-looking and the clever picking-the-right-image-and-song-to-mash-up stuff. Obviously, you do need to know the band's work to "get" most of the jokes -- turning lyrics into cover lines on a magazine doesn't work if you don't realize they're song lyrics.

If you don't know They Might Be Giants, this is not a book for you. And that's good, because I don't think you can get it at this point: it was part of a big annual package that closed last fall, part of our new direct-artist-support world a la Patreon and Indiegogo.

Alcott does similar stuff for other bands. Bands (he said, peering over his glasses as if in disdain) that you may find somewhat more familiar. These live in his Etsy shop, where you can buy posters of them for the walls of your groovy 20th century pad.

Anyway, this book is fun and very inside baseball. But I've been listening to TMBG since they showed up on late-night MTV randomly around 1982, so it's right up my alley. And maybe some of Alcott's other stuff will strike a similar chord for you.

Blitt by Barry Blitt

I've been off the art-book beat for a while now, but, back in my SFBC days, that was one of my regular areas of expertise. (Well, at least the SFF side -- we also had a very short-lived club for "real," aka famous, art, and other clubs had various kinds of art of interest to their members as well.)

But I dip back into it every so often, particularly when it crosses over to cartooning, where I've kept in touch with current state more consistently. (I haven't been to even a SF convention art show in five years or so now, or read Spectrum in about that long.) So that's the consumer warning: I used to care about art books, and this is one, but it's not the same kind that I used to care about, and that was in another country. (And the rest of that quote.)

That's how I came to Blitt, a coffee-table book collecting the covers, sketches, advertising pieces, random illustrations, and other drawings by Barry Blitt, best known for a series of New Yorker covers. (Particularly the "terrorist fist bump" one of Barack and Michelle Obama, if you're trying to place him.)

Blitt leads off with those covers, as you'd expect -- the first two sections are "The New Yorker" (mostly covers) and "Cartoon Politics" (largely New Yorker, and with a few covers as well). It gets more general from there, at about the halfway point, pulling out more obscure and odd work from earlier in Blitt's career (including a little illo I love, captioned "Burt Lancaster doesn't give a shit about you") through chapters about "Process" and "Not Rejected" and "Crazy Ideas."

Blitt is a great cartoonist and caricaturist -- not necessarily the same thing, but being good at the latter is a big bonus for the former -- who always seems willing to be looser and more energetic than a lot of his competition. And his use of soft colors (watercolors? I am no expert on art) is also great. A Blitt picture is funny and looks like it just happened, almost randomly, as he was attacking his board. (That is not how any great cartoons happen, of course, but being able to give that illusion is really powerful.)

Blitt includes a self-conscious introduction by Blitt himself and appreciations by New Yorker editor David Remnick, columnist Frank Rich, fellow artist/political cartoonist Steve Brodner, Steven Heller, and New Yorker art editor Francoise Mouly. It's the first book of his work to be published, after a career of about thirty years in illustration and political cartooning and other stuff in that vague territory, so it has all of the big hits you'd expect, plus a lot of process stuff and quirky pieces from his earlier, jobbing-illustrator period.

It's a good book. If you like political cartoons or New Yorker covers or Blitt in general, you should read it.

Free Shit by Charles Burns

Apparently, if you're a cartoonist and go to shows to sell your stuff -- sketches, self-published comics, comics published by other people, merchandise, whatever -- you also get a steady stream of people who don't want to spend any money and just want "free shit."

For whatever reason, Charles Burns decided to humor them, and started creating quick 8-page minicomics actually titled Free Shit around the turn of the century. Now, it doesn't look like he made them to actually humor the grabby lookie-loos, but instead gave them to "friends and VIPs" at conferences, which makes me think of Free Shit as a particularly odd business-development resource.

After almost twenty years, Fantagraphics collected the first twenty-five issues of Free Shit into a book of the same name -- though the cover coyly only has a FS, possibly to make it safer for work. (Note: very little of Burns's actual work is safe for work anywhere normal.)

It's a small hardcover, and it has all of the pages of those twenty five issues -- 25 x 8 = 200 pages of comics, sketches, collages, and other image-making detritus -- and basically nothing else. There's no front matter, and only a single page note from Burns in the back, saying more or less what I did above but in a more personal way. There isn't even a title page to say "Free Shit by Charles Burns," just a half-title with a big FS.

This is only rarely comics art; it's not in sequence. Instead, Free Shit is full of sketches, ideas, small finished ink drawings (lots of head-and-shoulders views), things that seem to be ripped out of mid-century magazines (and may well have been), and other random things. For example: Free Shit #8, the "special literary issue," was entirely made up of columns of hand-written phrases, presumably potential titles for something-or-other.

Burns' work skirts the verges of body horror regularly: his people, even the ones with normal body proportions and features, are fleshy in a vaguely unsettling way. And many of the people and things in these pictures are not of normal body proportions. But a sketchbook is hard to make creepy, so it's just images -- weird images, odd images, bizarre images.

This is obviously just for Burns fans, but it's a nice package for people who like sketchbooks -- smaller and more portable than usual, and cheaper than many "big selection from the sketchbooks of" books. The one thing it isn't -- unless you steal it from a store that is actually open right now -- si Free Shit. And that's just ironic enough to be awesome.

Book-A-Day 2018 #380: Royalboiler by Brandon Graham

This is not a comic. It's an art book by a cartoonist, featuring covers (from his own books and guest covers for others' comics), sketchbook pages, odd single-page comics from in-house Image newsletters, convention posters, a T-shirt design or two, some logos for porn companies and stars, a little bit of movie concept art, and other assorted stuff that Brandon Graham has created in the twentyish years of his comics career.

Royalboiler is an oversized paperback with full-bleed art most of the time -- it's a great size and format for an art book, and really makes the covers (here presented without logos) show up well. That does mean, though, that text is minimal and mostly restricted to some captions on pages where they can be accommodated. The captions are also all in Graham's lettering font -- I can't say if they're all hand-lettered or not; does anyone actually still do that? -- so they look like they're part of the underlying art if you don't slow down and pay attention.

But the point of an art book is to slow down and pay attention, so I don't consider that a problem.

There is minimal text here, again: just enough to say what this piece of art is, maybe who worked on it with Graham or what year it was done. But there is enough, from those captions and a few semi-autobiographical strips and some collages of photos and artwork from conventions, to piece together a bit of Graham's life, or at least the parts of his life that he wants to present in his art in public.

So it starts out with covers from King City and Multiple Warheads and then goes into some of his odder, earlier, obscurer, or more collaborative projects -- Prophet and Perverts of the Unknown and October Yen and so on, and then into lots of art for conventions and covers for other comics. After that comes the Comic Lovers strip for Image Plus, other odd pieces about comics, and so on.

There's a lot in here -- the book has no page numbers, but informed sources claim it's 248 pages, and that seems about right. That's almost 250 big pages full of interesting art by a quirky creator -- the one thing I would note is that his cover/sketch work is often less dense than his story pages, so there aren't as many buried jokes or puns in Royalboiler as there are in his narrative comics. Or, maybe, they're buried even more deeply, so I missed them....

Book-A-Day 2018 #146: Erotica: The Fine Art of Sex by Edward Lucie-Smith

I'm sure there are worse literary offenses than quoting your own poetry at length in a supposedly non-fictional book.

None come to mind at the moment, but there must be some.

Edward Lucie-Smith does that in Erotica: The Fine Art of Sex. I've tried to forgive him for it. He also presents what's basically a art-history monograph, in a somewhat popularized form, with copious references to specific paintings and other artworks, but then embeds that monograph in a book with copious illustrations of other paintings and other artworks, of similar style and appeal.

(Speaking of quoting, Lucie-Smith has another odd habit: in every chapter, he has a long quote from someone, generally someone old and dead enough to be in the public domain, and then has a shorter pull-quote from the middle of that longer pieces, within a couple of pages of each other. I'm not sure if it's that these are his very favorite quotes of all time, so he wants to keep using them, or if he had a very limited budget for permissions or just words, and had to budget himself severely.)

I'm sure some of the paintings referenced in the text are also reproduced in the book. It would have to happen at least a few times by chance. But the text never says "see page 47," so connecting the two is left to any obsessive readers.

Erotica is a 1997 British book which I saw in its 2003 American edition from Hydra Publishing. I'm sure it existed entirely because sex sells -- and low-priced art books of sex sold quite well in those years before we all had high-speed internet. And I have a copy, I'm pretty sure, because the book-club company I worked for was publishing an edition of Erotica, and I was in the habit then of just grabbing every single book that looked even vaguely of interest.

It sat on the shelf for around fifteen years because a random book of sexy art isn't generally the next thing anyone wants to read under normal circumstances. But I'm doing Book-A-Day this year precisely to clear out random books of various kinds, so I took a whack at it.

And my considered opinion is that no one connected with the publication of the book -- except possible Lucie-Smith -- actually expected anyone to read the text. It's dry, dull in a vaguely academic way, organized haphazardly, and, as I said above, only very loosely connected to the art reproduced here, which is the whole point of this book.

What a reader would want from a book like Erotica is, on the low end, to be titillated for a while and then go on to other things. On the high end, one could hope it would give a potted art-history lecture, focusing on the saucy stuff, that would give you some interesting new facts you could use in your life. Erotica does hit that low end, though the art reproduced here is mostly newer and more heavily photographic than that discussed in the text -- still art photography, though, not anything from skin magazines. But I didn't kind it hit anywhere near the high end: I didn't learn a thing from it, and was bored and confused much of the time, which is not what one wants from a book about sexy art.

Book-A-Day 2018 #16: Amazona by Chris Achilleos

There's no reason why taste in art should follow national borders, particularly if we're talking about popular art, designed as packaging for consumer goods. And yet there's a definite style to British SFF cover art -- more pronounced in the 1960s through '80s when the UK and US were clearly separate markets -- which is noticeably different to the American styles of the same era.

So it's not that I don't like the paintings of Christos Achilleos. It's that he works in an idiom and a milieu that I'm not attuned to; that he's spent a long career pleasing and delighting an audience that I was never part of. I appreciate his work, but I've never really seen a painting of his that I loved. (Unlike a lot of his American counterparts, from Eggleton and Whelan to Maitz and Dos Santos and Picacio.)

But I do find that difference fascinating, particularly when it's embodied in someone really skilled and passionate about his work, as Achilleos is. He's a really good maker of art, both commercially successful and willing to move away from the just commercial to make pictures the way he wants to, for vague commissions or his own purposes.

I tend to appreciate Achilleos's tighter paintings best: he works on-and-off in airbrush, and some of his work has a really tight finish and sheen, particularly for human skin. (And, like many fantasy artists, he has more than his share of paintings showing a lot of human skin, mostly female and always attractive.) That's the opposite of how I feel about some American SFF painters, particularly Bob Eggleton -- Eggleton, to me, as at his best when he's loosest, and you can see the globs of paint on the canvas. For Achiellos, though, his work always feels static to me, even the action scenes -- so the ones that are obviously posed and still work best for me, as they fit the feeling his paintings give me.

I figured out that what I like best in Achilleos's paintings are the single figures, highly detailed, frozen in a moment of contemplation or preparation. Others will have different preferences; he's worked in a number of styles and varies the tightness of his painting to suit a particular project.

So, when I realized this week that I had a book of his -- it's from 2004, and I think I've had it since then, metaphorically under a barrel, until my Book-A-Day rummagings turned it up -- I jumped right on it. And still didn't love it. But that's just the way it is.

The book is Amazona, and it collects mostly art that wasn't in his 80s-era books Medusa and Sirens because he made it since then. (Funny how that works.) It opens with a long foreword explaining Achilleos's career to date (well, as of a decade ago), including some details about his disagreements with his former publisher, Dragon's World, and how that led to the sixteen-year gap between books. (In my publishing career, I worked somewhat regularly with agents for Dragon's World in the US, but I was always on the opposite side of the table to them -- I represented someone who was paying them, while Achilleos was looking to get paid by them. The details here basically match murmurings I'd heard at the time and afterward from other artists.)

The bulk of the book is divided into three long sections: Amazons, Fantasy, and Glamor. Two of the three, as you might guess, are primarily pictures of attractive ladies wearing not very much, but what they are wearing is exotic and strange in various ways. (Fantasy art has been about the female for a large proportion of the time for decades now.) Amazons is the fantasy art, and some personal work, along with some mostly historical paintings that can function as fantasy covers. Fantasy, right in the middle, is the work that isn't mostly about the female form -- battle scenes, and a few mightily-thewed warriors, and the like -- but that doesn't mean it's entirely devoid of corseted women. And then the Glamor section has paintings Achilleos did for fetish magazines and nightclubs and some private commissions. In this section, he talks about his models a lot more, and the point of many of the paintings is to depict a particular model, because was then a moderately famous nightlife personality or just particularly striking.

I'm still not a huge fan of Achilleos, but he's very good at what he does, and has continually worked on his craft and passions over a thirty-plus year career. And who ever said I was ever the arbiter for anything?