Welcome to a new edition of Things To Come, the column that guides you every month through Diamond's Previews catalog. But first, an announcement: Don't buy this month's Diamond's Previews catalog.

Am I trying to put myself out of a job? No, though that's kind of a tempting idea. No, you see, Marvel has decided that it needs more space than Diamond could allot, so it's spun its comics solicitations off into a separate catalog, called Marvel Previews. You can buy it on its own for 99 cents, or you can get it bundled with Previews for free! Absolutely free! And by "free", Marvel means that it costs 55 cents, because that's how much the cover price of Previews has been raised to accommodate it. Retailers will also be paying more for Previews, the rate of increase depending on how many copies they order.

Already there has been much online indignation over this typical bit of mendacity and greed from the eeeevil Marvel, etc. Frankly, this strikes me not only as overwrought, but as missing the larger point, which is: Why should anybody be paying to be advertised at in the first place?

If you're reading this, you must be online. And if you're online, there's no reason to buy Previews. The text of it can be found all over the web, mostly at comic stores' websites, a few days after it ships. The best place I know of to find it is Westfield Comics, since they include the cover art.

That was your public service announcement. I'd rant about the content of Marvel Previews, but I'm already running long this month, so let's get on with the...

PICKS OF THE MONTH

AMERICAN SPLENDOR: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HARVEY PEKAR, by Harvey Pekar and various, from Random House
SEP03 2456, pg. 313, $15.95

Pekar-mania is sweeping the globe! AMERICAN SPLENDOR: THE MOVIE is the non-stop action-packed edge-of-your-seat thrill-ride of the summer! For those of you not in the know, AS:TM is about Tank Huckabee, a two-fisted Secret Service agent who doesn't play by the rules. When he discovers a narco-trafficking ring being run out of the Oval Office, he decides it's time to take justice into his own hands and...

Well, no. The truth is more interesting than that. AMERICAN SPLENDOR is about the everyday life of Pekar himself, who was for most of his life a file clerk at a Veterans' Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio. He's also a little crazy. You know that if you've ever seen his old hyper-aggressive guest spots on The David Letterman Show, which used to be what he was most famous for. Now, he's achieved fame on his own terms, with a movie that for once, mirabile dictu, does justice to its comic book source material. It's performing extremely well for a non-Hollywood film, it's received near-unanimous critical raves, and Pekar, who's always been suspicious of popularity in art, now finds himself in a wildly unlikely vogue.

In vogue, that is, everywhere except in his home medium. You could be forgiven for having read comics your whole life without ever having stumbled across AMERICAN SPLENDOR.

So here's a briefing on Pekar. He has been writing AMERICAN SPLENDOR since 1976, and that's another of the ways you can tell that he's a little crazy. What's so crazy about that, you ask?

1.) 1976 was shortly after the collapse of the underground distribution system and during the embryonic days of the direct market. Pekar had hardly any venue in which to sell the damn things.
2.) Pekar was self-publishing it. This was before ELFQUEST or even CEREBUS. Self-publishing still had the stigma of vanity press about it, and nobody much thought it could be self-sustaining.
3.) AMERICAN SPLENDOR was, I believe, the first autobiographical series in comics. (The underground cartoonists did autobio stories every now and again, but I don't know of anybody devoting a whole series to it.) And Pekar was doing this in a medium specialising almost exclusively in heroic fantasy.
4.) Harvey Pekar can't draw. He's always had to rely on collaborators, which is tough in the best of times for self-publishers. If he hadn't gotten a lucky break early on, when R Crumb saw and liked his stuff, and agreed for the first time to illustrate somebody else's script, Pekar might never have made it.

Any sane person, faced with those kinds of obstacles would have gone back to bed with a cold compress.

This new collection, released to coincide with the movie, reprints Pekar's first two collections from Doubleday, AMERICAN SPLENDOR and MORE AMERICAN SPLENDOR. Together they cover the late seventies and early eighties. I own MORE AMERICAN SPLENDOR already, and I can vouch that you won't find either for less than the $14.95 that Random House is asking for the new collection.

(There's one other collection from the series, called THE NEW AMERICAN SPLENDOR ANTHOLOGY, covering up to about 1991. It's from Four Walls Eight Windows, which also published his graphic novel OUR CANCER YEAR. In 1993, Pekar was picked up by Dark Horse, which has collected hardly any of his work. All that their usually progressive graphic novel program has managed to cough up is the recent AMERICAN SPLENDOR: UNSUNG HERO, which Pekar barely appears in. In the absence of other explanations, I've decided that Dark Horse execs must spend all day laying about with their thumbs up their kazoos and blowing bubbles.)

So, now that the infodump is over, you'll be wanting to know: is the book any good? I'll be honest; if you're looking for drama, this is not the book for you. Pekar's mission is to find what's interesting in the quotidian. (He once devoted a whole strip to 'Peeling and Eating a Tangerine (and Disposing of the Seeds)', for example.) Furthermore, this book collects his earliest comics work, and he was still finding his feet, learning how much verbiage a panel will bear and such. But when he's on, when he and his collaborators click (the Crumb stuff, for example, or the Gerry Shamray-illustrated story where he ruminates about turning 43), it's something really special, not only like little else in comics but like not much else in fiction generally. And Pekar wasn't just one of the first, he's one of the best.

THE FIXER, by Joe Sacco, from Drawn and Quarterly
Hardcover: SEP03 2233, pg. 263, $24.95

Joe Sacco, after SAFE AREA GORAZDE, returns to Bosnia. Which ought to be all you need to know.

One of the things that distinguishes Joe Sacco as a war correspondent is that he doesn't pretend he's not part of the story. He remains aware that he's warping the thing he's observing just by being there. Here he writes about the weird and seedy underground economy of fixers that spring up around the visiting media, the folks who grease the palms and act as guides to the choicest bits of misery. He also revisits the war crimes his own fixer helped alert him to, back before Milosevic's ouster, and tries to find out if justice has been done.

The first several pages can be seen at D&Q's website, and they're spectacular - probably the most cinematic work he's ever done, for lack of a better word. Go now and look.

THE COMPLETE FABULOUS FURRY FREAK BROTHERS VOL 2, by Gilbert Shelton, with Dave Sheridan & Paul Mavrides, from Knockabout & Rip Off Press
SEP03 2390, pg. 304, $31.99

Oh, yes - I've been awaiting this ever since the first volume (SEP03 2391, STAR15022, pg. 304, $32.95) came out a couple of years ago.

THE FABULOUS FURRY FREAK BROTHERS was one of the longest running of the original underground comics, and deservedly so. Gilbert Shelton is one of comics' master comedians, and the strips are hilarious whether or not you can tell Acapulco Gold from Toledo Window-box. (Doubt me? Ask the Magus: "Recognition for Shelton's master of slapstick, his practiced comic storytelling and timing, and his remarkable skill as a draughtsman is long overdue. He is truly one of the greatest and most sublimely funny talents that the comic medium has to over..." - Alan Moore.)

This one collects all the colour FREAK BROTHERS stories, which means it includes the satirical tour-de-force "The Idiots Abroad." According to Shelton's '80s collaborator, Paul Mavrides (one of the founders of the Church of the Subgenius), they got so sick of drawing the Freak Bros' dingy apartment that they decided to do a globetrotting story with every wild thing they could possibly think of drawing. When they were done, they had a definitive takedown of the entire decade on their hands. It's got everything: survivalists, soccer hooligans, white slavery, international terrorists, satellite televangelism, a military coup in the United States, and, for the grand finale, the takeover and subjugation of the entire planet. As R Fiore said in The Comics Journal, it ought to be dated twice over, but it still holds up brilliantly. And this will be the first time it's been available in colour, as God intended, for many, many years.

DARK HORSE

HELLBOY: WEIRD TALES VOL 1, by various
SEP03 0025, pg. 25, $17.95

While series creator Mike Mignola is off consulting on the forthcoming movie, other cartoonists get to play in his sandbox. Definitely lightweight, but fun.

DC COMICS

THE SPIRIT ARCHIVES VOL 12, by Will Eisner
Hardcover: SEP03 0284, pg. 109, $49.95

With the end of World War II, Eisner gets out of the Army and retakes the reins of his signature feature - and he starts getting ambitious.

LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN BOOK TWO, by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill
Hardcover: SEP03 0310, pg. 114, $24.95

Just the thing for those of you who need to wash the memory of the movie out of your brains.

Meanwhile, Vertigo's just got a couple of their regularly scheduled trades:

TRANSMETROPOLITAN VOL 9: THE CURE, by Warren Ellis, Darick Robertson & Rodney Ramos
SEP03 0318, pg. 115, $14.95

The one where all the plot threads start getting tied up. But the overarching plot is not what I liked best about TRANSMET, if I'm frank. The Smiler was a Republic serial villain if ever there was one, for starters. Also [POSSIBLE SPOILER AHEAD], the analogue of the Lewinsky scandal Ellis made an integral part of the plot has not aged that well, and could have been better disguised.

But I'm quibbling. When TRANSMET was funny it was really, really funny, and the things it hated I hate too.

Also, from the author of everybody's favourite SANDMAN spin-off, LUCIFER:

SANDMAN PRESENTS: THE FURIES, by Mike Carey and John Bolton
SEP03 0317, pg. 115, $17.95

IMAGE COMICS

40 OZ COLLECTED, by Jim Mahfood
SEP03 1257, pg. 132, $9.95

Collecting all of Mahfood's mini-comics.

ABSENCE OF INK COMIC PRESS

FORLORN FUNNIES #5, by Paul Hornschemeier
SEP03 1972, pg. 202, $10.95

A correction: Last month, I said that FORLORN FUNNIES #4, the conclusion to the story "Mother, Come Home", hadn't been solicited yet. In fact, it has - and I ought to have known if anyone should - it just hasn't been shipped yet. My apologies. Clearly prolonged exposure to Previews is addling my brain.

This issue is evenly split between 'forlorn' and 'funny'. More than that is hard to say. But has Paul Hornschemeier steered you wrong in the past?

AIT/PLANETLAR

DEMO #1 (of 12), by Brian Wood & Becky Cloonan
SEP03 1995, pg. 206, $2.95

Original-graphic-novel booster Larry Young confounds expectations by putting out a monthly miniseries - and it's about superheroes (of sorts), yet. There will be 12 issues, all self-contained. This has its roots in a proposal Marvel asked Brian Wood to do for a book called NYX, about teenage mutants living on the streets of New York. Marvel ended up passing on it, but it gave Wood the inspiration to do DEMO, which he says has evolved far past his original ideas. His collaborator here is Becky Cloonan, a relative newcomer to comics and a real find, who also drew his recent sequel to CHANNEL ZERO.

Wood released a bunch of preview art for the first few issues when he took over Newsarama for a week. (It's below the section on Wood's COURIERS sequel.)

ALTERNATIVE COMICS

FURTHER GRICKLE, by Graham Annable
SEP03 1999, pg. 208, $14.95

Word is that GRICKLE was a bit like Sam Henderson with a case of melancholy, if you can imagine that. Haven't read it yet myself, but the reviews were quite good.

PEANUTBUTTER & JEREMY'S BEST BOOK EVER, by James Kochalka
SEP03 1997, pg. 206, $14.95

It's your monthly James Kochalka graphic novel, this one continuing the adventures of the cat (Peanutbutter) and the bird (Jeremy). Whenever my comics habit imperils my solvency, only one thought comforts me: "It could be worse - I could be a James Kochalka fan."

AMAZE INK (SLAVE LABOR GRAPHICS)

LIKEWISE #3, by Ariel Schrag
SEP03 2007, pg. 210, $4.95

Hey, a new issue! In this, Schrag continues to tell the story of her senior year in high school, as she copes with her parents' bitter divorce, the break-up of her relationship, the politics of dykedom, and the extra layer of weirdness added by her broadcasting all this to the world in her comic. (Issue #2 had letters in it from her friends and family, about how they were portrayed in issue #1.) So honest that it almost feels like an intrusion to be reading it.

BOMBABY: SCREEN GODDESS #1 (of 4), by Antony Mazzotta
SEP03 2003, pg. 208, $3.50

A Bollywood-style superheroine? I'm amazed nobody's thought of it before. Slave Labor is doing this one in colour, which is rare for them, and the preview pages they have up prove it was worth it. It's too early to try to judge the writing, but that certainly is a handsome-looking book.

AVATAR PRESS

YUGGOTH CULTURES #3, by Alan Moore and various
SEP03 2098, pg. 224, $3.95
Wraparound cover: SEP03 2099, pg. 224, $3.95

Avatar makes a late addition to the last issue of the miniseries: a coda to FROM HELL called "I Keep Coming Back," written by Moore and drawn by his excellent collaborator on A SMALL KILLING, Oscar Zarate, originally published in an anthology Zarate co-edited called IT'S DARK IN LONDON. There's also a story here drawn by Hunt Emerson, probably also a reprint. I would guess it's their story from OUTRAGEOUS TALES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT, which makes a sick joke out of the revelation of the Ten Commandments. Or rather, I hope that's the story they mean, because it's a scream and there are lots of people here in the States who need to read it. (Particularly certain Chief Justices of Alabama.)

Also included: a short story adapted by Antony Johnston and drawn by Marat Mychaels, and a new interview with Moore.

Also from Avatar this month: Warren Ellis continues to rake in money from his dashed-off e-mails (BAD SIGNAL VOL 2, SEP03 2088, pg. 221, $6.95), and Garth Ennis and John McCrea celebrate the birth of Christ (DICKS XMAS SPECIAL #1, SEP03 2103, pg. 226, $3.50).

DIRTY DANNY LEGAL DEFENSE FUND

LEGAL ACTION COMICS VOL 2, edited by Danny Hellman
SEP03 2231, pg. 263, $18.95

Welcome to Year Four of the endlessly enthralling Rall vs Hellman lawsuit!

For those of you who have mercifully forgotten what the whole mess was about, here's a quick recap: Ted Rall, one of America's fiercest left-wing political cartoonists, wrote a hatchet job of a cover story on Art (MAUS) Spiegelman for the Village Voice. Hellman, a well-known illustrator and notorious prankster, took it upon himself to defend Spiegelman's honour, for some reason; impersonating Rall, he announced the creation of a self-congratulatory online forum called TedRallsBalls. Rall threatened to sue, Hellman didn't take him seriously, and sure enough, Rall sued. That was in August of 1999, and they have yet to go to trial.

Hellman's side of the story can be found here; Rall's can be found here. I'm not taking a side - they've both been so obnoxious that I'm tempted to conclude, as plenty of comics people already have, that they deserve each other.

This is the second of Hellman's benefit books. As with the first one, the price is low, considering the length (288 pages). The bad news is that the page count is high because Hellman is in no position to turn much of anybody away. That opened the door for lots of amateurish work in the first volume, and because Hellman's angle was to revive the old underground comix taboo-busting gross-out spirit, the stuff that was bad tended also to be rank. One could also gripe that the two biggest names attached to the book, Crumb and Spiegelman, put in only token appearances.

There was some perfectly good material in there as well, most of the standouts coming from the closest comrades of Spiegelman (Kim Deitch, for example) or of Hellman (Tony Millionaire, Sam Henderson). And there will no doubt be some good stuff in this one, judging by the inclusion of Carol Lay, Kim Deitch again, Skip Williamson and the too-rarely-seen Harry S Robins. But probably not enough to justify buying it if you aren't already on Hellman's side.

DRAWN AND QUARTERLY

In addition to THE FIXER, there's a new softcover edition of Joe Matt's FAIR WEATHER (SEP03 2234, pg. 263, $16.95), wherein Matt proves (assuming his portrayal can be trusted) that he wasn't any more likable as a kid than he is as an adult.

FANTAGRAPHICS BOOKS

CATS DON'T EXIST, by Jis
SEP03 2283, pg. 284, $12.95

I haven't the slightest idea. Let's pull up the Fantagraphics bookstore trade catalogue for more details...

"Best-selling Mexican cartoonist Jis (Jose Ignacio Solorzano) makes his American debut in Cats Don't Exist. With a childlike mastery of the obvious, an inspired sense of mischief, and hilarious insight into the human divine, Jis' comics at once recall the sensibilities of both Jules Feiffer and Terence McKenna...

"Included in this collection are the title story, 'Cats Don't Exist,' which introduces us to a world where cats replace aliens as the boogeyman of the human psyche; 'To Our Dear Enemies,' a thank you note to the censors for infusing boring old sex with intrigue; and 'Guilt as an Aphrodisiac,' wherein the author discusses his lust for rat witches and expresses his desire to snore shamelessly."

I like the sound of this.

JIMBO IN PURGATORY, by Gary Panter
SEP03 2284, pg. 284, $29.95

Panter does Dante. Panter, in case you don't know him, was a stalwart of the original RAW and a designer for Pee-Wee's Playhouse. $30 for 40 pages, but they are densely packed and really, really big (12" x 17"). I bluff a lot in this column, I admit, but I'm not even going to try to suggest that I understand Panter's work. Let's move on.

BELLY BUTTON #1, by Sophie Crumb
SEP03 2287, pg. 284, $4.95

Yes, that Sophie Crumb, spawn of Robert and Aline Kominsky, now in her early 20s. You might already have seen her work without knowing it - she's the one who really did the drawings in Enid's sketchbook in the movie version of GHOST WORLD. This is her solo comic debut, and the solicitation promises autobio about her life in Paris, "plus other surprises".

HATE ANNUAL #4, by Peter Bagge
SEP03 2288, pg. 285, $4.95

Bagge's attempts at mainstream appeal at DC (YEAH!, SWEATSHOP) keep dying out from under him (see his NinthArt interview), but at least he's always got Fantagraphics to go back to.

It's a shame that SWEATSHOP has been axed after a meagre six issues, but not wholly unexpected. It was a great idea: do a comic book satire of the world of comic strips, where the old-time creators, secure in the knowledge that they've got a job for life, delegate most of the work to uncredited assistants.

SWEATSHOP's lead character, Mel Bowling, creator of the strip FREDDY FERRET, is supposed to be a real tyrant, a hate-ridden paleo-conservative, a monster of ego in the mould of Al Capp (LI'L ABNER) and Ham Fisher (JOE PALOOKA) - the sort of character Bagge excels at. The problem is that he doesn't really come across that way, because Bagge was constrained by DC and because he was aiming for sitcom-style accessibility in any event. Sitcom characterization demanded that Bowling be Crusty But Lovable, and sure enough, he comes off mainly as tiny, out-of-touch, and helpless without his assistants; in other words, not a threat, despite the build up given him.

The other problem is that, aside from a spot-on parody of THE BOONDOCKS, the series seemed much more interested in spoofing the world of comic books than of comic strips. (Issue #4 had Mel's crew swiping the styles of Frank Miller and Chris Ware, and issue #5 was set entirely at a thinly veiled San Diego Comicon.) One wonders why, if Bagge wanted to be accessible. After all, many millions of people read comic strips daily, but only a few thousand are going to get SWEATSHOP's references to Walt Simonson or Ivan Brunetti. And the people who would get the references would probably find SWEATSHOP a little too vanilla. (Assuming they heard of it at all. In Previews, DC always catalogued the book in their DCUniverse section, where it got lost among all the superhero titles.)

Oh, well - it wasn't Bagge's best work, but it was funny, and it deserved a longer run than it got. Better luck next time, Pete.

As for HATE ANNUAL #4 - almost forgot about that - it's got a new Buddy Bradley story, as usual, as well as illustrated reports from the 2000 Democratic and Reform party conventions, originally done for the sadly defunct Suck.com. (That could have been timelier, couldn't it?) Also, Bagge once again confesses his love of bubblegum pop.

APE, by Ted Jouflas
SEP03 2291, pg. 285, $4.95

A lefty political satire in the style of old monster movies by Jouflas, out of whose loosely-wired head previously came the impressively hideous FILTHY and SCARY. Not for the faint of heart.

And lastly:

LOVE & ROCKETS VOL 2 #9, by Los Bros Hernandez
SEP03 2290, pg. 285, $3.95

I-BOOKS

BLOODY STREETS OF PARIS, by Leo Malet & Jacques Tardi
SEP03 2356, pg. 296, $17.95

Tardi is one of the giants of French comics, and this is one of his most popular series. It's one of his adaptations of Leo Malet's detective novels, starring Nestor Burma, supposedly France's answer to Philip Marlowe. (He's got it worse than Marlowe - he's a former anarcho-syndicalist living in Paris during the Nazi-controlled Vichy regime.) Art Spiegelman, who did the introduction and who's been championing Tardi since the days of RAW, says of him "no comix artist has ever captured a Sense of Place with greater skill".

MONKEYSUIT PRESS

ROVER #2, by Michael Foran
SEP03 2401, pg. 306, $3.50

This is a silent strip, and a strange one. The Rover of the title is a small, skittish robot, basically a big eye on wheels, which lands on a distant planet, befriends a resourceful reptilian critter with a pointy head, who acts as his guide, and sets out to explore.

The nearest comparison I can think of would be to Jim Woodring's FRANK stories, but instead of being disturbing, these are simple and cute. The storytelling is inventiven - I especially liked the little inset time-lapse sequences - and the book has a great deal of personality. Check this out.

Issue #1, a year ago, reprinted everything that had been in the MONKEYSUIT anthologies, so this ought to be all new.

THE ADVENTURES OF MIA #1, by Enrico Casarosa
SEP03 2400, pg. 306, $3.50

Also a feature from the anthology. MIA is an anthropomorphic comic about a teenage aviatrix in Italy between the wars. The art's very cute - it looks a bit like Stan Sakai drawing NAUSICAA, if you can imagine that.

ONI PRESS

LAST EXIT BEFORE TOLL, by Neal Shaffer, Christopher Mitten & Dawn Pietrusko
SEP03 2436, pg. 312, $9.95

Neal Shaffer was the author of ONE PLUS ONE, also from Oni, a nice little noir piece with a dash of supernaturalism. This one seems to be a quiet character piece about a family man whose car breaks down in rural Virginia while he was en route to a business meeting, and who starts to question whether he's really happy.

If this sounds interesting to you, I refer you to the astute Greg McElhatton, who has already reviewed the book positively, and has helpfully included a dozen sample pages.

THREE DAYS IN EUROPE, by Antony Johnston & Mike Hawthorne
SEP03 2442, pg. 313, $14.95

A farcical romantic comedy with a killer set-up, drawn in a glamorous animation-derived style. To avoid accusations of logrolling (writer Antony Johnston is an editor here at Ninth Art), I'll limit myself to pointing you towards another of Greg McElhatton's reviews, and wishing there were a lot more comics like this.

Also from Oni, there's another JINGLE BELLE collection ( VOL 3: DASH AWAY ALL, SEP03 2439, pg. 312, $11.95), and a complete collection of Scott Morse's SOULWIND (SEP03 2441, pg. 312, $29.95).

RANDOM HOUSE

In addition to AMERICAN SPLENDOR, Random House has reissued several titles from the ...FOR BEGINNERS series. It began with a book by Mexican satirical cartoonist Rius called MARX FOR BEGINNERS, which very much took Marx's side, that became an international bestseller. (You can see the influence of Rius' style and approach strongly in Larry Gonick's CARTOON HISTORY books.) From there the series kept multiplying. You'll find the order codes below; note that the one on Freud was drawn by Oscar Zarate.

MARX FOR BEGINNERS, by Rius
SEP03 2460, pg. 314, $11

DARWIN FOR BEGINNERS, by Jonathan Miller & Borin Van Loon
SEP03 2457, pg. 314, $11

EINSTEIN FOR BEGINNERS, by Joseph Schwartz & Michael McGuinness
SEP03 2458, pg. 314, $11

FREUD FOR BEGINNERS, by Richard Appignanesi & Oscar Zarate
SEP03 2459, pg. 314, $11

RED PILL PRODUCTIONS

MATRIX COMICS, by various
SEP03 2468, pg. 314, $21.95

If there's anybody left out there whose interest in the MATRIX franchise wasn't completely squashed by all the pompous cod-philosophical speechifying and video-game CGI in the last movie, this is the book for them. It collects a bunch of comics stories from the MATRIX website (they're still there, at least for the time being), plus a couple of new ones. Contributors include Geof Darrow, Bill Sienkiewicz, Neil Gaiman (doing a prose story), Dave Gibbons, David Lapham, and, of all people, Peter Bagge. Production quality is supposed to be quite high, as the Wachowski brothers, comics geeks to the bone, are happy to bear the expense.

REED PRESS

Reed Press is the new book-publishing division of Reed Business Information, which publishes the trade journal Publishers' Weekly. This is their first time in Previews, and they're reprinting a couple of graphic novels whose original publishers are defunct.

COMANCHE MOON, by Jack Jackson
SEP03 2470, pg. 315, $14.95

Jack Jackson is responsible for what is widely agreed to be the first ever underground comic, GOD NOSE. Since the late '70s, he's devoted himself chiefly to graphics novels based on Texas history, and COMANCHE MOON was his first. It's the biography of Quanah Parker, son of a white woman and last chief of the Comanche Indian tribe, which under his leadership was the last in the region to succumb to the reservation system. I tend to find Jackson's books a little dry, I imagine because he had to compensate for the disreputability of the medium at the time. But they are very well crafted, in a way that owes a clear debt to EC, and Jackson is always at pains to be accurate and even-handed.

DAVID CHELSEA IN LOVE, by David Chelsea
SEP03 2471, pg. 315, $16.95

Against the stiffest imaginable competition, David Chelsea gets my vote as the single kvetchiest person ever to have written an autobiographical comic.

The story is simple: Chelsea falls hard for Minnie, a gawky, erratic girl who can't commit. He consoles himself by sleeping with just about every other female character in the book who isn't related to him. Also, he kvetches. A lot. The man makes Harvey Pekar look stoic.

To Chelsea's credit, he's a very accomplished artist. His normal style is heavily influenced by Winsor McCay, of all people, but he has plenty of other styles that he shows off throughout the book, particularly a stippling/charcoal style that works extremely well for the many, many sex scenes. He's very good at perspective - he's even written a manual on the subject. And his segues and layouts are always interesting, if sometimes too cute.

But in the end, Chelsea is just too wearying a presence to take throughout a 189-page graphic novel. He spends a lot of the book wondering why he keeps getting dumped; I have to say, on the evidence of this book, I never found that a mysterious question.

SYNCOPATED COMICS

HOW TO BE A REAL GOOD CARTOONIST, by Nick Bruel
SEP03 2502, pg .320, $6.95

A spoof of how-to books. I know nothing about Bruel's work. However:

"Nick Bruel's new book is funny, smart, and slyly caustic in a way reminiscent of SJ Perelman and Fran Lebowitz." - Jules Feiffer

Ding! Sold.

TOP SHELF PRODUCTIONS

SHUCK UNMASKED, by Rick Smith and Tania Menesse
SEP03 2539, pg. 324, $14.95

Dave Sim says of this book, "I don't think any explanation could do it justice, but how about: What if Seth and Alan Moore decided to do a ghost story with a George Herriman feel to it?"

I can't improve on that. Sim may be half-sane at best, but he's still a dab hand with a blurb.

Shuck, the title character, is a pagan horned god. His job used to be to keep souls in purgatory from escaping, but now he's retired to the suburbs, living among humans wearing a rather unconvincing mask. (It's good enough to fool neighbour girl Thursday Friday, anyway.) So far in the series, he's entertained the dead on Halloween, returned to his old job for an emergency soul roundup, and had a reunion of sorts with his wife Gaia. It's bittersweet, charming and very much unique.

My onliest cavilry wood be wif tha carrackters' ax sense. Smiff rites in a dire lecked unspired by tha affirm-menshuned Hairyman. Fir my munny, he strace to far beyon tha rage of imeedyit compry hint shun. But yer mile itch may very.

This volume collects issues #1-4, and the stories that had been planned for issues #5-6. I wholeheartedly recommend it. And if you're not sure if it's for you, just visit the website, where you can read extensive Previews. (You can also read coverage of Smith here at Ninth Art: there's a pre-SHUCK profile and a Small Press Spotlight.)

TROUBLETOWN: AXIS OF TROUBLE, by Lloyd Dangle
SEP03 2540, pg. 324, $10.95

When alternative-weekly strips tackle politics, and most of them do at least part of the time, they usually take their example from THIS MODERN WORLD. This hasn't been an unmixed boon, because, informative and usefully outraged as THIS MODERN WORLD is, it isn't funny all that often. Frequently it's just sarcastic, which isn't the same thing. That's why I'm glad there's TROUBLETOWN, which is genuinely funny and just about as sharp, even if it does look like it was drawn, as The Comics Journal once put it, with a toothpick dipped in ink. Because if you're a lefty like me, you'll be needing a laugh these days now more than ever.

BOOKS SECTION

It's a big month for designer Chip Kidd:

MYTHOLOGY: THE DC COMICS ART OF ALEX ROSS, by Chip Kidd & Geoff Spear, from Random House/Pantheon
SEP03 2773, pg. 353, $35

The inevitable coffee table collection of Ross' photorealistic refurbishings of DC's superhero icons. I find this sort of thing hopelessly corny, but there's no disputing that Ross is good at it and totally sincere about it. With an introduction by M Night Shyamalan, who one hopes does not make the topic of superheroes as deadly dull here as he did in his film UNBREAKABLE.

CHIP KIDD, by Veronique Vienne
SEP03 2783, pg. 354, $19.95

A critical retrospective of Kidd's career, including his work in the comics world and his recent novel, THE CHEESE MONKEYS.

PEANUTS: THE ART OF CHARLES M. SCHULZ, by Charles M. Schulz and Chip Kidd, from Random House/Pantheon
SEP03 2785, pg. 356, $16.95

This is the paperback edition. Kidd did some deep digging for this book, spending lots of space on PEANUTS' formative years and unearthing roughs, sketches, merchandise and oddities. Some have complained that Kidd's design was too intrusive; he has a penchant for blowing up artwork until you can see the Benday dots, for example, and he often shot strips from the original boards, or even from old newspaper clippings, leaving evident the blue lines and paste-ups, or the yellowed newsprint and off-register colour.

Me, I don't mind. As Kidd argued, PEANUTS has become such a familiar part of the landscape that it needs to be made strange before one can see it anew. Besides, I'm an utter softy for PEANUTS - show me things like Sparky's old drawing board, which he'd kept so long that most of the veneer had been scratched away, and I just melt.

On to books that do not involve Chip Kidd:

MUTTS: THE COMIC ART OF PATRICK MCDONNELL
Hardcover: SEP03 2784, pg. 356, $45

MUTTS may not have anything much on its mind, but it's got more visual verve than anything else on the modern-day funnies page by far. Some forward-thinking newspaper editor ought to give McDonnell the kind of space cartoonists got back in the Golden Age of strips, and let him cut loose.

SANDMAN: KING OF DREAMS, by Alisa Kwitney, from Chronicle Books
Hardcover: SEP03 2786, pg. 356, $35

Smacks of necrophilia. Has an introduction by and interviews with series creator Neil Gaiman.

BOB THE ANGRY FLOWER: THE ULTIMATE BOOK OF PERFECT ENERGY, by Stephen Notley
SEP03 2813, pg. 360, $13

I bow to no one in my admiration for BOB THE ANGRY FLOWER. It's been one of my favourite strips online since before the first book came out. Non-sequitur humour is really hard to do right, but Notley's strips, defying though they do just about every law of proper comedy construction, get me almost every time. So know that I say the following out of love. But:

Recently, Notley did some strips starring a new character (Lovebot) that didn't have Bob in them at all. And... they were kind of a relief.

Bob's not as berserk a character as, say, Milk & Cheese, but he's in something like the same vein. Evan Dorkin has carefully parcelled out Milk & Cheese over the years so as not to wear out their welcome. BOB, by contrast, has been running weekly pretty much continuously since 1994. And, much as I love the strip, I can see a day coming where some of Bob's trademark shticks (his robot fixation, the pestering of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the extreme science, the fifth-rate rogue's gallery, etc) hit the point of diminishing returns. Which would be a shame, for a strip whose great virtue is its unpredictability.

I think it might be refreshing for Notley to shunt Bob out of the strip for a while. He wouldn't have to change the name - after all, TOM THE DANCING BUG never did have a dancing bug or anybody named Tom in it.

Anyhow. Just a thought.

Chris Ekman is a political cartoonist.

This article is Ideological Freeware. The author grants permission for its reproduction and redistribution by private individuals on condition that the author and source of the article are clearly shown, no charge is made, and the whole article is reproduced intact, including this notice.