. . all of these can make for captivating cartoons. But it's the artist who can take the simple, keep it simple, and still tell a story who really stands apart from the crowd. Patrick McDonnell, creator of Mutt's Mooch the cat and Earl the dog, is such a cartoonist.The quickest way to absorb McDonnell's mastery of his art is to pick up this third Mutts treasury, in which frame after frame and strip after strip he consistently displays his wit, cleverness, and ability with a pen. Mutts is the perfect way to escape into what appears to be an easygoing, carefree world. But just beneath the character's banter and endearing mannerisms are the universal concerns of animals and people alike. The cartoonist's spare style and gentle humor invite readers to fill out the frames with their own imaginations.Mutts, syndicated by King Features since 1994, enjoys a circulation of more than 500 daily newspapers. Nationally McDonnell has received awards ranging from Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year to Newspaper Comic Strip of the Year, and worldwide he has received such praise as being named the Swedish Academy of Comic Art's Best International Comic Strip Artist. This strip's a winner the world around.

    What the what?! Is there really a secret treasure hidden in the school’s basement?! Based on Cartoon Network’s award-winning original series, Gumball and Darwin head back to school! It’s a brand-new collection of shorts and illustrations featuring everyone’s favorite mischief-makers.

    But back in the 1930s, Mickey gained fame as a rough-and-tumble, two-fisted epic hero — an adventurousscrapper matching wits with mobsters, kidnappers, spies, and even (gulp!) city slickers! And Mickey’s greatestfeats of derring-do took place in his daily comic strip, written and drawn by one of the greatest cartoonists of the 20thcentury — Floyd Gottfredson.For its first quarter-century, Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse was a rip-roaring serial: the most popular cartoon-basedcomic of its time, a trendsetting adventure continuity aimed at both kids and grown-ups, and the foundation on whichall later Disney comics grew — including the adventures of Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge by Gottfredson’s Disneycolleague Carl Barks.Glimpses of Floyd Gottfredson’s masterpiece have been reprinted over the years, most famously in Bill Blackbeard’sclassic Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics. But the whole strip has never been comprehensively collected inEnglish — until now! Fantagraphics Books is proud to bring this classic Disney creation to a 21st century audience inits entirety, starting from the strip’s 1930 launch. Relive Mickey’s race to a gold mine with Pegleg Pete hot on his heels;Mickey’s life on the lam after being framed for bank robbery; even Mickey’s ringside battle with a hulking heavyweightchamp! The premiere volume features a dozen different adventures starring Mickey, his gal Minnie and her uncle Mortimer,his pals Horace Horsecollar and Butch, the villainous Pegleg Pete, and the mysterious and shrouded Fox.Gottfredson’s vibrant visual storytelling has never been more beautifully reproduced; we promise the best reprintingthe strip has ever seen, with each daily lovingly restored from Disney’s original negatives and proof sheets. “DeathValley” also includes more than 50 pages of fascinating supplementary features, including rare behind-the-scenes art andvintage publicity material from the first two years of the strip. Critics, scholars, seasoned Disney archivists, and fellowcartoonists provide commentary and historical essays on the strip’s creation and execution.Walt Disney often said that his studio’s success “all started with a Mouse” — Walt himself wrote the Mickey Mousestrip before turning it over to the able hands of Gottfredson — and today Mickey is among the world’s most recognizableicons. Now it’s time to rediscover the wild, unforgettable personality behind the icon: Floyd Gottfredson’s MickeyMouse.

    Thus he created a boy with a long hair covering his eyes and named him BILLOO. This lanky was liked by the readers so much that the editor of the magazine asked the cartoonist to increase the episodes from one page to two. Billoo is seen roaming the streets with his pet pup - Moti. When he is at home, he is stuck to the TV.Billoo and his gang which includes Gabdu, Jozi, Mono, Bishamber etc; are at loggerheads with Bajarangi, the wrestler and his aide Dhakkan. They are always in search of some excuse to showdown each other. Jozi is friendly to Billoo, but her dad Colonel Three - not - Three doesnot like the boy and always points his gun at him. Billoo and his friends are often seen playing cricket in lanes of the block, and their score is few smashed windows.

    Because I was trapped in Texas at the time, I needed to believe that the broken tractor out back was a car of the future. Japanese, I’ll say, because of the exotic far-awayness of Japan from Texas, and because of the Japanese monster movies and woodblock prints that reached out to me in Texas. Japanese monster movies are part of the fabric of Texas.”In 1983, Panter finally got a chance to fully explore this world, and share it with an audience, when the L.A. Reader published the first 63 strips. A few years later, the Japanese reggae magazine Riddim picked up the strip, and Panter continued the saga of Dal Tokyo in monthly installments for over a decade.But none of these conceptual descriptions will prepare the reader for the confounding visual and verbal richness of Dal Tokyo, as Panter’s famous “ratty line” collides and colludes with near-Joycean wordplay, veering from more or less intelligible jokes to dizzying non-sequiturs to surreal eruptions that can engulf the entire panel in scribbles. One doesn't read Dal Tokyo; one is absorbed into it and spit out the other side.

    Bullies and misers, dreamers and the narrow-minded, all got a taste of his wit, much to the delight of readers.

    The 31 stories collected here combine Dragnet with The Twilight Zone with Tales from the Crypt in a world filled with aliens, good-time girls, and cocktail-bar nihilism. The stories are hip and funny, with a good dose of wacky 1950s paranoia and the kind of tongue-in-cheek morality that characterized the old E.C. horror comics. The Lloyd Llewellyn stories also trace the development of Clowes's style as a comic artist, from the angular early pieces that show the influence of 1950s advertising style to the grotesque Robert Crumb-inspired style of the more recent work in Eightball. Clowes is one of the most gifted comic-book artists around, and the retro-chic world of Lloyd Llewellyn deserves to be seen by a new generation of readers.

    It is here that Laxman's sense of parodyand satire find some of their finest expressions. A selection of these rare and masterly cartoons which comment caustically on our social and political character were togethter in the first volume of "laugh with Laxman", and proved to be immensly popular. This is the second volume in the series replete with timeless gems that continue to amuse.

    Without a smattering of inside information, the baffled but hopelessly-bitten book buyer is drifting unarmed and unprepared into a minefield whose perilous complexities will usually only be made plain when an eagerly awaited parcel of dream volumes arrives and mangled contents are revealed in all their deceptive glory.... But all is not lost. Help is at hand! After a lifetime of avidly scanning the frequently poisonously-tinted pages of innumerable book catalogues, Ronald Searle has become expert in the art of decoding those esoteric, poetic and usually approximate, descriptions of literary come-ons. Now, licking his wounds, he publishes his hard-earned findings in this fully illustrated pioneer guide, designed to foil the devious machinations of scheming and wicked booksellers for ever more. No longer will the innocent book collector need to puzzle over the finer meaning of 'old half road', 'good working copy', blind tooled', or 'tail-edged shaved'. The unvarnished truth is here exposed at last, both in the shocking explicit drawings and in the devastatingly frank glossary whose revelations will startle even the most battle-scarred of bibliophiles. The result is one of the funniest, most entertaining books to have emerged from the brilliantly perceptive pen of the master. No book collector, and certainly no bookseller, can afford to be without it - even the wicked ones.

    Also included is a bonus section featuring 50 of the most popular Dilbert comics form the past 10 years.

    Its subtle ironies and playful allusions never won a broad following, but the adventures of 5-year-old Barnaby Baxter and his fairy godfather Jackeen J. O'Malley was and is a critical favorite.Fantagraphics will introduce the wonders of Barnaby to a new generation of children and parents alike. Co-edited by Johnson biographer Philip Nel (Dr. Seuss: American Icon) and Fantagraphics Associate Publisher Eric Reynolds, with art direction by graphic novelist Daniel Clowes (Ghost World), this five-volume Barnaby series will collect the entirety of the original newspaper strips from 1942-1952. The first volume will collect all the strips from 1942 and 1943.Barnaby revolved around a precocious five-year-old named Barnaby Baxter and his fairly godfather Jackeen J. O'Malley. Yet O'Malley, a cigar-chomping, bumbling con-artist and fast-talker, was not your typical protector. His grasp of magic was usually specious at best, limited to occasional flashes, often aided and abetted by his fellow members in The Elves, Leprechauns, Gnomes, and Little Men’s Chowder & Marching Society.Barnaby's deft balance of fantasy, political commentary, sophisticated wit, and elegantly spare images expanded our sense of what comic strips can do. With subtlety and economy, Barnaby proved that comics need not condescend to readers. Its small but influential readership took that message to heart.

    The experimental, hilarious voice of CYANIDE & HAPPINESS embodies the spirit of BOOM! Box and we jumped at the chance to collect it.WHY YOU’LL LOVE IT: If you are on the Internet, you’ve read CYANIDE & HAPPINESS. Generating over a million hits a week, the webcomic is one of the longest-lasting strips out there, and everyone can relate to  its hilarious slice-of-life depictions. Since the dawn of man, stick figures have been used as an important device for storytelling. CYANIDE & HAPPINESS has taken this language and mashed it up with Internet culture, bringing us some of the best satire and dark comedy out there. WHAT IT’S ABOUT: PUNCHING ZOO includes a buttload of our favorite comics from the site, 30 brand-new, too-hot-for-the-Internet comics, “The Hot Date” (a choose-your-own-adventure where you decide the story), and a nice forward by Alexis Ohanian, one of the founders of reddit.

    

    The outrageous humor of cult favorite and syndicated cartoonist Lynda Barry--one of the world's "shrewdest chroniclers of sex, love and romance" (Mother Jones).

    The Moomins saw life in many forms but debuted to its biggest audience ever on the pages of world's largest newspaper the London Evening News, in 1954. The strip was syndicated in newspapers around the world with millions of readers in 40 countries.Moomin Book One is the first volume of Drawn & Quarterly publishing plan to reprint the entire strip drawn by Jansson before she handed over the reigns to her brother Lars in 1960. This is the first time the strip will be published in any form in North America and will deservedly place Jansson among the international cartooning greats of the last century.The Moomins are a tight-knit family — hippo-shaped creatures with easygoing and adventurous outlooks. Jansson's art is pared down and precise, yet able to compose beautiful portraits of ambling creatures in fields of flowers or rock-strewn beaches that recall Jansson's Nordic roots. The comic strip reached out to adults with its gentle and droll sense of humor. Whimsical but with biting undertones, Jansson's observations of everyday life, including guests who overstay their welcome, modern art, movie stars, and high society, easily caught the attention of an international audience and still resonate today.