Take a Bow, B.C.

 

By Johnny Hart

Copyright for this book is 1966 and 1967. In this collection we meet Grog, the prehistoric man, who is basically a head on legs. And also the apteryx (aka a kiwi bird) both of which are fun additions to the comic strip.

B.C. Big Wheel

 

By Johnny Hart

The copyright dates from 1963 and 1964. This collection features the usual gang and their lives in the beginning of time with modern times popping in unexpectedly through golf and baseball and hotels and a snakeskin marked as made in Japan. We also find out that the turtle's name is John. Named after the author? Time marches on but the comic strips remains just as funny as when it first started out.

B.C. Is Alive and Well!

 

By Johnny Hart

The copyright on this edition is 1964, 1965, 1969 but I think the comics date from the early 1960s. 

In this collection, the boys are exploring the idea of football, with limited success and still working on figuring out baseball. And golf is still a game the boys are playing. The Fat Broad is famous for her strange soups she cooks in her giant caldron. Snake is still getting flattened and the anteater is still enjoying the company of the armadillo and the bird is still sitting on the turtle. One of the boys invents the telephone but discovers someone else has beat him to it. The struggle between anteater and the ants continues, but the anteater's aim is off and he keeps missing the ants he is aiming at.

The B.C. comic strip is going strong in this collection. My only quibble is too much sports. I care not about football, baseball or golf. But overall, it is still funny and a pleasure to read with its goofiness.

My Cat Is Such A Weirdo Vol. 7

 

By Tamako Tamagoyama

A book about three cats and an axolotl. Mainly concerned about how the cats will adapt to a new house. And about the various health problems the animals experience. Not in great detail though.

The drawings are cute. But the cats don't seem any weirder than most cats. The axolotl's health problem was very weird, I think. 

For the most part, I don't get this book. It was very dull. How does a series this boring sell well enough to extend to seven volumes? That is what is weird about this book.

Anyway, here are three drawings from the book that I found to be a little bit amusing (Note -- the comic reads from right to left):

Number One Is Walking

 

By Steve Martin, drawings by Harry Bliss

A look back at his career in cinema by actor/writer/comedian Steve Martin. Steve provided the prose and Harry Bliss did the illustrations. 

I first saw Steve Martin on Saturday Night Live when he sang "King Tut" dressed like Egyptian royalty. It was funny and weird and introduced the world to an extraordinary performer who went on to have a very successful career in entertainment. Still going strong as far as I know. More power to him!

On the other hand, I had never heard of Harry Bliss so I looked him up on Wikipedia: "Harry Bliss ... is an American cartoonist and illustrator. He has illustrated many books and produced thousands of cartoons including 25 covers for The New Yorker. He has a syndicated single-panel comic titled 'Bliss'. 'Bliss' is syndicated through Tribune Content Agency and appears in over 80 newspapers in the United States, Canada, and Japan."

I enjoyed what Steve has to say and I really enjoyed the drawings Bliss contributed. They add so much to the story. Here are a few examples of his drawings from the book:

Here is an example the style in which the story is told. And also has an explanation of the book title:

B.C. Strikes Back

 

By Johnny Hart

Another collection of newspaper cartoons by Johnny Hart, copyright 1961 and 1962. These earlier cartoons about the world of B.C. are some of Hart's funniest and most charming, I think. Here are a few from the book to enjoy:

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You Might Be A Redneck If ...

By Jeff Foxworthy

A collection of Jeff's jokes about rednecks, with lots of amusing drawings included.

 Here are some of the jokes from the book:

You might be a redneck if . . .

"Your richest relative buys a new house and you have to help take the wheels off of it."

"You ever used lard in bed."

"You've ever been blacklisted from a bowling alley."

"The primary color of your car is 'Bond-O'."

A couple of the drawings from the book:

A fun little book full of Jeff's silly jokes, quite an enjoyable read. 

What's New, B.C.?

 

By Johnny Hart

Daily comics from copyright 1962, 1963, 1968.

Hart was at the top of his game at this time, so funny!!

Hurray For B.C.

 

By Johnny Hart

Selected cartoons from The Sunday Best of B.C. from cartoons published in 1958 to 1963.

Even though these cartoons are more than sixty ago, they are still very charming and very funny. Love it!

Spy x Family 1

 

By Tatsuya Endo

This graphic manga novel is the first in a series starring Loid Forger aka Twilight, Yor Forger nee Bond, and Anya Forger, an orphan girl that Loid adopted.

Loid is a spy who works for the fictional country of Westalis. Neighboring country Ostania is the main enemy of Westalis. Loid has a new spy assignment, find a wife and a child of school age and enroll the child in the prestigious Eden academy in order to get close to the son of an important man in Ostanian politics. This where Yor and Anya come in.

Yor Bond is an assassin. Her day job is working for City Hall. The people she works with don't know she is an assassin. She became an assassin as a way to earn money to support herself and her brother when they were younger. 

Westalis is a rather traditional country and Yor has been getting some flack at work about not being married. Unmarried women are viewed suspiciously so Yor realizes she needs to find a husband or at least a boyfriend in order to smooth things over at her day job.

Anya is a telepath and this ability gives her a rather uncanny air and has resulted in several foster families returning her to the orphanage. So when Loid shows up at the orphanage looking for a child to adopt in order to fulfil his mission, Anya has all the answers for his requirements. She is small and claims to be six years old, but possibly she is younger. 

Loid finds out he needs a wife because Eden Academy doesn't accept children of single parents. He encounters Yor while shopping for clothes for newly adopted Anya. They get to chatting and Yor learns he is a single parent and she asks him to attend an office party with her, posing as her boyfriend. In his turn, Loid asks Yor to pose as his wife and Anya's mother for an interview with the Eden Academy admissions committee. 

The office party is first on the list and Loid is late at arriving, leaving Yor subject to the teasing of her coworkers. He shows up late and rather beat up and bruised from a spy operation and tells everyone he is Yor's husband and that he is a psychiatrist and that one of his patients got violent. 

After the party is over, Loid is driving Yor home and the gang from the spy operation attacks Loid. He tells Yor the gangsters are all his patients. When Loid has to bash one of the gang on the head, he tells Yor it's a new, cutting edge treatment called concussive therapy.  While fleeing from the gangsters, Yor asks Loid to marry her. Since this is what he wants too, he quickly agrees and uses the pin from a grenade as an engagement ring and they make quick promises to each other and declare themselves married. And Yor soon moves into Loid and Anya's apartment, much to Anya's delight. Because her fondest desire is to have a loving mother and father. And she will do everything possible to make that happen.

Next step in Loid's mission is getting Anya enrolled at Eden. Which will require jumping through a lot of hoops to get her accepted into the school.

I enjoyed this graphic novel. The art style looks pretty typical of manga. Although I am no judge of that, having very little experience with manga. The story is quirky and amusing at times and I want to find out what happens to this odd little family. I am planning to get the second volume in the series.

Back to B.C.

 

By Johnny Hart

Excerpts from Hart's daily comic strip, B.C. from the late 1950s to early 1960s. Second book in this series.

Hart's B.C. comic strip is charming, funny, innocent and the humor holds up more than sixty years later. A pleasure to visit this collection again. 

MAD's Maddest Artist Don Martin Bounces Back!

 

By Don Martin

A selection of Don Martin's comics, featuring mainly his characters Fester and Karbunkle. 

It opens with National Gorilla-Suit Day where Fester is upset about people celebrating National Gorilla-Suit Day by dressing up in gorilla suits. The conclusion: 

And A Visit To the Dentist which does not go well for poor Fester.

Followed by The Hardest Head in the World which is a satire of boxing movies. It stars Karbunkle as the man with the hardest head in the world. He becomes very famous but the high life causes him to lose his tone and his head shatters when a feather falls on it. But all is not lost, Fester puts him through a strict training programming. Karbunkle hardens up again and the story ends with him being dropped from a plane, head first, onto an Egyptian pyramid. 

Then Fester and Karbunkle star in Swan Lake. Fester appears as Prince Siegfried and Karbunkle as the Swan Maiden. Karbunkle presents Fester with an egg at the end when Fester was expecting a kiss.

Next is The Barber with Fester as a barber who unfortunately accidentally cuts off his client's nose.

After that is The Gourmet in which Fester eats a wet mop, thinking it is a delicious plate of spaghetti. How it ends: 

The final story is The Painters. Fester and Karbunkle are house painters and Fester ends up in the toilet.

These funnies are funny and crazy and fine examples of Don Martin's work. My copy of the book is dated 1963.  But even though the cartoons are more than sixty years old, they are still so much wacky fun to read and look at.

The Book of Bill

 

By Alex Hirsch

So there was this TV cartoon show, Gravity Falls. Now I never watched this show. But I was shopping for gifts for a ten year old child who requested books for Christmas. So I decided to get three graphic novels because I wanted to get fun books. But before I got the books ready to gift, I decided to read them to make sure they were appropriate. Two of them were OK, if a bit boring for an adult to read. But looking through The Book of Bill, I decided it was too much for a ten year old. So I read it instead.

It was kind of confusing, since I was not familiar with the TV series. It is copiously illustrated, full color, very artful. There is this thing, Bill, it's shaped like a triangle and is supposed to have escaped from a dimension that only exists in two dimensions which it destroyed while escaping. This Bill thing set its sights on Earth for some reason which had to do with its quest to rule everything? I'm not sure about that. Bill is a confusing thing, often referred to as a demon.

The book recaps, I guess, the story of the series and of Bill's encounters and temptations of the people of Gravity Falls, mainly with the Pines family. Bill is a really negative being and clearly cares nothing about humankind and our little planet. It basically has nothing good to say about us or this planet. It really does have a wicked sense of humor. Although I don't care about the TV series or the characters eventual defeat of Bill, I did enjoy the humor that is one of the best parts of the book. For example:

"What Is a Human? A human is an organic machine made out of blood and anxiety, designed to deliver a random bundle of genetic material into the future and turn to dust."

"Bill, Have You Ever Been In Love? Sure—tell your mom hi for me! By the way, have you taken a DNA test recently? Not asking for any particular reason."

"Remember, pal, at the end of the day, love is just the pupa stage for hate."

"How You Will Die: 4. Shockingly assassinated while simply trying to ride in your motorcade through Dallas with the roof down in the year 1963"

"Life doesn't care about your meaning, so why should you care about its meaning?"

Parts of the book are quite funny but the part that recaps the war between Bill and the humans was not that interesting to me. Not surprising since I never saw the series. It's certainly going to be more interesting to those who enjoyed the series. 

 

The Last Kids on Earth

 

By Max Brallier, Art by Brian Churilla

It's an ordinary day and four kids are on their way to school when everything falls apart. Most humans suddenly become zombies and giant, vicious monsters appear everywhere. 

The four kids scatter and thirteen-year-old Jack ends up living in a tree house alone. After struggling to survive for several weeks, he manages to contact his good friend, Quint, the science nerd. Later on Jack and Quint bring the school bully into their gang. Dirk, the bully, is just trying to survive like Jack and Quint and he is strong and brave and a good man to have on your side in a brawl. 

Jack has a crush on a girl, June, and he is determined to see if she has survived the monster/zombie apocalypse and he and his pals head out into a monster plagued world to locate June. Or die trying?

A child, 10 to 13 years old, might enjoy this graphic novel. It's nicely illustrated in full color. Jack and his friends are intrepid and manage to take care of themselves all by themselves. 

I read the book to make sure it was OK to give as a Christmas present. And it is OK. But, wow, was it boring! Kids might not find it so, but I sure did.

FGTeeV Blasts Off

 

By the YouTube stars known as FGTeeV and FV Family; Illustrated by Miguel Díaz Rívas

The FV family, Duddy, Moomy, Lexi, Mike, Chase and Shawn visits the National Space Center and end up taking an unauthorized trip in an experimental space ship. They get tricked into going on an intergalactic trip to find several vital artifacts that are crucial to the survival of humankind, or so they are led to believe. Turns out that was a lie put forth by a conniving little troll known as Xyle, the game store owner with whom the family is very familiar.

Anyways, they have exciting and improbable adventures on exciting and improbable planets and end up bringing a disaster back to Earth where the truth is revealed about Xyle. But the family steps up and counters his evil plans through a variety of video game challenges. 

This was a fairly interesting story, even though meant to entertain kids, which I expect it does. I enjoyed it and was surprised by the Xyle plot.  

I must admit that I have no idea who these YouTubers are. The book claims they are very popular which I suppose is true. I don't watch YouTube for kids. I bought this book as a gift and read it to make sure it was appropriate for the person I am giving it to. Which it is. It's pretty good, really.

Hey! B.C.

 

By Johnny Hart

B.C was a daily newspaper comic strip starting in 1958. This is the first collection of the strips, copyright 1958 and 1959.

B.C. and his group are cave men trying to learn the ways of the world. There are also two cave women but unlike the cave men, who all have names, the cave women merely go by their description, the Cute Chick and the Fat Broad, sadly. (According to Wikipedia, this changed in 2016 with the cute one being named Grace and the ugly one Jane.) 

I loved the B.C. comics as a kid and as a young adult. Going back and rereading this first book in the series has been a real pleasure. Here are a couple strips from the book to enjoy.