The PreHistory of The Far Side: A 10th Anniversary Exhibit


Gary Larson - 1989
    A Far Side retrospective, celebrating its tenth anniversary.

Young Adults


Daniel Pinkwater - 1985
    Says author Daniel Pinkwater of this novel of sociological import: "I honestly don't remember writing this. Are you sure there hasn't been some mistake?"

Drawn and Quartered


Charles Addams - 1942
    Records show that at his birth the Addams' lived on Summit Ave. They moved several times before taking up permanent residence in '20 on Elm St. & stayed there until '47. He attended public school in Westfield & was fond of visiting the Presbyterian Cemetery on Mountain Ave. When he was a youngster he was caught by the police for breaking into a house on Dudley Ave. On the 2nd floor of the garage behind the main house there's a chalk drawing of a skeleton which is believed to have been drawn by him. That house on Dudley & one on Elm is said to be the inspiration for the famous Addams Family house. At Westfield HS, he became the art editor for the Weather Vane & drew many cartoons. He graduated in '29 & attended Colgate University for a year. He switched to the University of Pennsylvania & then studied at Grand Central School of Art in NY City. His dream was to work for The New Yorker Magazine. He started submitting cartoons as early as '35, his 1st was entitled "I forgot my Skates." In '40 he submitted "Downhill Skier" & that got him an offer to come on board full time for NY's premiere magazine. He continued there until his death in '88, drawing over 1300 cartoons. On occasion, his work appeared in other publications such as Colliers & TV Guide. 1937 was the 1st year that an Addams Family cartoon appeared. It featured only Morticia & Lurch. They didn't look like we know them today. Morticia's hair was styled differently & Lurch looked more like Boris Karloff in OLD DARK HOUSE than the Frankenstein monster. As years went by, other members started appearing including Wednesday, Pugsley, Grandmama & Thing.

A Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics


Michael Barrier - 1982
    

St. Trinian's: The Entire Appalling Business


Ronald Searle - 2008
    Trinian's, the gloriously anarchic boarding school for young ladies, became synonymous with outrageous behavior when Ronald Searle's drawings first appeared in Britain's Lilliput magazine in the 1940s. Searle said about his creations: "A St. Trinian's girl would be sadistic, cunning, dissolute, crooked, sordid, lacking morals of any sort and capable of any excess. She would also be well-spoken, even well-mannered and polite. Sardonic, witty and very amusing. She would be good company. In short: typically human and, despite everything, endearing." St. Trinian's girls are experts in the maidenly arts of torture, witchcraft, and mayhem of all description; their antics take the reader back to those authoritarian school days that begged for serious rebellion and all-embracing non-conformity. Poisonous mushrooms, medieval racks, and field hockey sticks as weapons of choice figure prominently. Gin-swigging and cigar-smoking are popular pastimes. Now, black humor and black stockings intact, the St. Trinian's girls reach American shores in this gleefully wicked collection of cartoons, published to coincide with the major film, St. Trinian's, starring Rupert Everett, Mischa Barton, and Colin Firth.

Jerktastic Park


Darby Conley - 2014
    The Get Fuzzy gang is back! Bucky the arrogant cat, Satchel the clueless pooch, and Rob the exasperated human make up one crazy and hilariously entertaining household. Collecting the cartoons from The Birth of Canis and The Fuzzy Bunch, this treasury is a rollicking read full of Bucky's signature bullying of Satchel and Rob's inability to keep the peace.

Actions Speak


Sergio Aragonés - 2002
    Sergio Aragones, forty-year veteran of MAD magazine and winner of the coveted Reuben Award and numerous Eisner and Harvey awards, serves up another helping of hilarity which is guaranteed to leave you speechless. This is one hundred and sixty pages of some of the wittiest comic strips from a true master of the form.

Hell in a Handbasket: Dispatches from the Country Formerly Known as America


Tom Tomorrow - 2006
    In his weekly cartoon strip, This Modern World, "Tom Tomorrow uses images traced from photographic references (running from 1950s advertising art to recent shots of politicians) and a multipaneled comic-strip format to create a distinctive kind of postmodern editorial cartoon," writes Booklist. And the results are uproarious-and popular. His cartoons appear in about 130 alternative weeklies-making him the most recognizable cartoonist of the counterculture. His work is also seen in mainstream sources such as The New York Times and Salon, and on bestselling book covers, including Weapons of Mass Deception. This collection is the very first to present Tom Tomorrow's work in full color, as he originally produces his cartoons.

I'm No Scientist, But I Think Feng Shui Is Part of the Answer: A Dilbert Book


Scott Adams - 2016
    Luckily, our favorite office cog has a few tricks up his sleeve. Armed with a wearable brain stimulator and ingestible nanorobots, Dilbert discovers how to outpace stress, boredom, and sitting-induced early death. He may be a cyborg with a fake personality, but meetings are more tolerable than ever

Dr. Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel


Richard H. Minear - 1999
    Seuss was drawing biting cartoons for adults that expressed his fierce opposition to anti-Semitism and fascism. An editorial cartoonist from 1941 to 1943 for PM magazine, a left-wing daily New York newspaper, Dr. Seuss launched a battle against dictatorial rule abroad and America First (an isolationist organization that argued against U.S. entry into World War II) with more than 400 cartoons urging the United States to fight against Adolf Hitler and his cohorts in fascism, Benito Mussolini, Pierre Laval, and Japan (he never depicted General Tojo Hideki, the wartime prime minister, or Togo Shigenori, the foreign minister). Dr. Seuss Goes to War, by Richard H. Minear, includes 200 of these cartoons, demonstrating the active role Dr. Seuss played in shaping and reflecting how America responded to World War II as events unfolded.As one of America's leading historians of Japan during World War II, Minear also offers insightful commentary on the historical and political significance of this immense body of work that, until now, has not been seriously considered as part of Dr. Seuss's extraordinary legacy.Born to a German-American family in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1904, Theodor Geisel began his cartooning career at Dartmouth College, where he contributed to the humor magazine. After a run-in with college authorities for bootlegging liquor, he had to use a pseudonym to get his work published, choosing his middle name, Seuss, and adding "Dr." several years later when he dropped out of graduate school at Oxford University in England. He had never planned on setting poison political pen to paper until he realized his deep hatred of Italian fascism. The first editorial cartoon he drew depicts the editor of the fascist paper Il Giornale d'Italia wearing a fez (part of Italy's fascist uniform) and banging away at a giant steam typewriter while a winged Mussolini holds up the free end of the banner of paper emerging from the roll. He submitted it to a friend at PM, an outspoken political magazine that was "against people who push other people around," and began his two-year career with the magazine before joining the U.S. Army as a documentary filmmaker in 1943.Dr. Seuss's first caricature of Hitler appears in the May 1941 cartoon, "The head eats, the rest gets milked," portraying the dictator as the proprietor of "Consolidated World Dairy," merging 11 conquered nations into one cow. Hitler went on to become one of the main caricatures in Seuss's work for the next two years, depicted alone, among his generals and other Germans, and with his allies Benito Mussolini and Pierre Laval. He is also drawn alongside "Japan," which Dr. Seuss portrays quite offensively, with slanted, bespectacled eyes and a sneering grin. While Dr. Seuss was outspoken against antiblack racism in the United States, he held a virulent disdain for the Japanese and rendered sinister and, at times, slanderous caricatures of their wartime actions even before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. But Dr. Seuss's aggression wasn't solely reserved for the fascists abroad. He was also loudly critical of America's initial apathy toward the war, skewering isolationists like America First advocate Charles Lindbergh, the Chicago Tribune's Colonel Robert McCormick, Eleanor Medill Patterson of the Washington Times-Herald, and Joseph Patterson of the New York Daily News, whom he considered as evil as Hitler. He encouraged Americans to buy war savings bonds and stamps and to do everything they could to ensure victory over fascism.Minear provides historical background in Dr. Seuss Goes to War that not only serves to contextualize these cartoons but also deftly explains the highly problematic anti-Japanese and anticommunist stances held by both Dr. Seuss and PM magazine, which contradicted the leftist sentiments to which they both eagerly adhered. As Minear notes, Dr. Seuss eventually softened his feelings toward communism as Russia and the United States were united on the Allied front, but his stereotypical portrayals of Japanese and Japanese-Americans grew increasingly and undeniably racist as the war raged on, reflecting the troubling public opinion of American citizens. Minear does not attempt to ignore or redeem Dr. Seuss's hypocrisy; rather, he shows how these cartoons evoke the mood and the issues of the era. After Dr. Seuss left PM magazine, he never drew another editorial cartoon, though we find in these cartoons the genesis of his later characters Yertle the dictating turtle and the Cat in the Hat, who bears a striking resemblance to Uncle Sam. Dr. Seuss Goes to War is an astonishing collection of work that many of his devoted fans have not been able to see until now. But this book is also a comprehensive, thoughtfully researched, and exciting history lesson of the Second World War, by a writer who loves Dr. Seuss as much as those who grow up with his books do.

VHS Video Cover Art: 1980s to Early 1990s


Thomas Hodge - 2015
    The art explodes with a succulent, indulgent blend of design, illustration, typography, and hilarious copywriting. Written and curated by Tom “The Dude Designs” Hodge, poster artist extraordinaire and VHS obsessive, with a foreword by Mondo’s Justin Ishmael, this collection contains over 240 full-scale, complete video sleeves in the genres of action, comedy, horror, kids, sci-fi, and thriller films. It’s a world of mustached, muscled men, buxom beauties, big explosions, phallic guns, and nightmare-inducing monsters. From the sublime to the ridiculous, some are incredible works of art, some are insane, and some capture the tone of the films better than the films themselves. All are amazing and inspiring works of art that captivate the imagination. It’s like stepping back in time into your local video store!

The Vertical Plane


Ken Webster - 1989
    

Garfield What Leftovers?: His 71st Book


Jim Davis - 2021
    They're all here in this brand-new full-color compilation comic strip book: Jon, Odie, Nermal, and, of course, our favorite fat cat, Garfield! Leftovers? Garfield doesn't get the concept. The conscientious fat cat does his best to reduce food waste, gobbling all the grub the first time. (Besides, ignored edibles develop low self-esteem.) Garfield fans will feast on this binge-worthy new collection of comics!

Achtung Schweinehund!: A Boy's Own Story of Imaginary Combat


Harry Pearson - 2007
    Not real conflict but war as it has filtered down to generations of boys and men through toys, comics, games, and movies. Harry Pearson belongs to the great battalion of men who grew up playing with toy soldiers—refighting World War II—and then stopped growing up. Inspired by the photos of the gallant pilot uncles that decorated the wall above his father's model-making table, by toys such as Action Man (according to Pearson—not a doll) and board games such as Escape from Colditz, dressed in Clarks' commando shoes and with the Airfix Army in support, he battled in the fields and on the beaches, in his head and on the living room floor, and across his bedroom ceiling. And 30 years later he still is. This hilariously self-deprecating memoir is a celebration of those glory days, a boy's own story of the urge to play, to conquer, and to adopt very bad German accents, shouting "Donner und Blitzen!" at every opportunity. This is a tale of obsession, glue, and plastic kits. It is the story of one boy's imaginary war and where it led him.

The Brass Ring


Bill Mauldin - 1971
    A semi-memoir covering a decade of the acclaimed cartoonists formative years (1935-1945), and including many reproductions of famous drawings and photos from the authors personal collection.