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REVIEW: The Essential Peanuts

The Essential Peanuts
By Mark Evanier
336 pages/Abrams ComicArts/$75

I was growing up during Peanuts’ peak period, the 1960s-70s, and you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing images of the gang. Yes, I bought some of the Fawcett paperback collections from the Bookmobile and was thrilled that Apollo 10’s command capsule and lunar module were named Charlie Brown and Snoopy.

I was also overwhelmed by the ubiquitousness of Snoopy, who easily eclipsed the humans and was on t-shirts, a Thanksgiving Day parade balloon, lunch boxes, and so, so much more. I didn’t fully grasp the genius of Charles M. Shulz’s work until much later. It wasn’t my favorite strip, yet I read it every day, and I still do in the Classic Peanuts strip.

As a result, I was delighted to see this 75th anniversary overview of the strip and its global influence, along with the simplicity of Shulz’s linework. I learned about him from the recent Funny Things: A Comic Strip Biography of Charles M. Shulz and learned even more in this handsome collection.

The mammoth hardcover traces Peanuts in two ways: a 75 Essential strips, with commentary and supplemental strips; and a chronological exploration of the strip’s evolution, broken down by decade. As a result, you get some 700 daily and Sunday strips out of the 17,000+ he wrote and drew. One of the things that set Schulz apart from his peers was that he never, ever used assistants; he wrote, drew, and lettered each and every installment. That alone is worthy of celebration.

In Evanier’s clear-eyed prose, we see which new concepts or characters were introduced, which ones freshened, and which ones faded with time. Among the first casualties, for example, are Shermy and Patty, who were there on day one but were reduced to occasional background players within a year or two. We can see the rise of Snoopy’s sentience and then his playfulness as he turns his doghouse into a Sopwith Camel airplane, and how good ol’ Charlie Brown doesn’t quite know what to do with the newly arrived Peppermint Patty’s interest in him.

To me, the strip hit a crescendo in the late 1970s and then began a gradual decline, one that took the next 20 years to wind down. In the final years, health problems caused the steady line to wobble, the characters getting somewhat cruder, while the heart never left.

Accompanying Evanier are celebrity quotes drawn from Fantagraphics’ complete collection of the strip, as well as new sidebars written by translators and editors, who round out our understanding of the strip and its creator.

There is a second volume in this slipcase, filled with facsimiles of fun memorabilia that may bring back a memory, as it did for me, or just a smile. That’s all Shulz wanted from his readers, and he delivered daily for some 50 years, a totally remarkable accomplishment from the most unassuming of people.

ArkhaManiacs by Art Baltazar & Franco

Art Baltazar and Franco have been making a very particular kind of comics for twenty years or so – kid-friendly versions of popular superhero and superhero-adjacent properties, bright and happy and light-hearted, colorful and zippy, full of rubber-hose cartooning and vibrant colors, with usually a cluster of short related stories with minimal plots but a lot of (mostly goofy) character work.

It’s been a durable model, and it’s worked quite well, from what I’ve seen. I think they started with Tiny Titans, which ran for a long time and seemed to be a major success from my chair. The only comic of theirs I’ve covered on this blog was Itty Bitty Hellboy  a decade ago; I got their books for my kids when my kids were young, but my kids are in their mid-twenties now. So I haven’t read a Baltazar/Franco [1] book in quite some time, but I had a lot of fond memories.

ArkhaManiacs  is exactly the same kind of thing they do so well: it collects a short series from 2020 about a kid Bruce Wayne in a somewhat sunnier, happier Gotham City and his encounters with the inhabitants of the Arkham Apartments.

And…it just struck me as a bit odd, subtly off in ways that made me uneasy. Centrally, the problem is that it’s reminiscent of, or seems to reference, the classic creepy Grant Morrison/Dave McKean Arkham Asylum . In both cases, Bruce comes to this mysterious place, is led around by the Joker, meets a whole bunch of weird people, and is told repeatedly he needs to lighten up.

I don’t think Baltazar and Franco meant to make this rhyme with Arkham Asylum. But it does. So the subtext is that a whole bunch of colorful characters – whom we, the adult reader, knows as insane murderers – are urging a kid Bruce, pre-trauma, that he needs to become more like them by using his imagination.

In a kid context, we can just take it all as straightforward, as it’s presented: these colorful characters are harmless. They’re not inhabitants of an asylum, just goofy people living in an apartment building, and they have a lot of fun, and do clearly have great imaginations. And Bruce is a bit of a serious, quiet kid, who could use some loosening up – which is what happens here. In the book itself, it’s all sunny and kid-friendly, Killer Croc and Bane and Harley Quinn and the Penguin all just having fun and playing pretend around a pool.

But…that inevitably makes me think of this Morrison moment, which I don’t want to be reminded of during a book for kids set before Bruce’s parents are murdered:

You may be able to read ArkhaManiacs and not think about Arkham Asylum. Your kids, if you have any, will almost certainly be able to, and that’s probably even more important. But if you know Arkham Asylum, this book will hit more uncomfortably than you expect.

[1] Franco’s last name is Aureliani, which isn’t hidden, but he uses the single name professionally, like Ms. Sarkisian 

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Daredevil by Frank Miller & Klaus Janson, Vol. 2

The first volume collecting the Miller/Janson run on Daredevil included fifteen issues of the title series, plus two “try-out” issues of a Spider-Man comic Miller drew before that. Daredevil was published bi-monthly in those days, so that was a longer swath of time than comics readers these days realize: issues dated from February 1979 through July 1981.

This second volume, with the meat-and-potatoes title Daredevil by Frank Miller & Klaus Janson, Vol. 2 , is slightly shorter, collecting issues 173-184 of Daredevil, exactly a year’s worth of issues from August 1981 through July 1982. But Miller, writing and laying these comics out, was still changing and transforming his work; there’s almost as much difference between the first and last stories here as in the first volume.

The captions, and the overwriting tendencies of 1970s comics in general, is ebbing – only slightly in the first couple of issues, but noticeably towards the end of this stretch. There’s at least one very good multi-page action sequence that takes place entirely wordlessly. Oh, everyone still talks too much, and says the same things too much, and the captions are dull and obvious fairly regularly – but you can start to see daylight through them, like a massive overcast that’s starting to break up. We know, eventually, there will be entire stories written with a lighter hand and an ear for how people actually talk.

(And then that would all go away again, if we’re talking about Miller specifically. He is a fascinating example of a creator who started off in a standard, deeply artificial mode, managed to become close to naturalistic for a while, and then dove deeply into an even more clotted, personal, tediously artificial mode later on.)

The art looks a bit blander and stiffer to my eye in the first couple of issues, with an off-model egg-headed Kingpin and an Elektra just slightly off as well. I don’t know if it was Miller switching up how he worked – looser, tighter, different tools – on the way to his mature blocky style, or if the difference is mostly from Janson’s finishes. (I’m never sure how to take their “art” and “finishes” credits here – did Miller pencil these stories, mostly, or did he just lay them out? Did he do the initial work on the boards, or send Janson thumbnails? And did that working mode change over the course of the years they worked together?) 

This is also the soap-opera era of Marvel, so each issue has a vaguely separate story, but they run into each other – Elektra comes back to do some international-assassin-ing in New York, the Gladiator is tried and reformed, Kingpin schemes and hires Elektra as his new fixer, Bullseye comes back again like a bad penny. There’s a political campaign, in which Kingpin’s hand-picked mayoral candidate is likely to beat a glimpsed and unnamed Ed Koch unless Daredevil’s reporter buddy Ben Urich can dig up more useful dirt without getting himself murdered.

There’s a bit of vague Orientalism, but the ninja are mostly just mooks in funny suits at this point – they’re called ninjas, and we can assume they’re Japanese in origin, but that’s about it. Miller would appropriate much more, later on.

Like most monthly comics, this isn’t a single thing: it’s a thing in the middle of transformation, eternally. One story bleeds into the next, ideas work their ways through and conclude, art shifts and changes over time even when the team remains the same. It’s still getting better here, which is exciting and invigorating: captions getting shorter and more precise, art getting more dynamic and layouts more visual. It’s still assembly-line adventure comics for young readers, don’t get me wrong, but Miller and Janson had ambition and ideas, and they were aiming for the top of their particular genre – and that’s something to be celebrated, no matter what the genre is.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

REVIEW: Making Nonfiction Comics

Making Nonfiction Comics
By Eleri JHarris & Shay Mirk
272 pages/Abrams ComicArts/$29.99

There are numerous books available on how to write comics (I co-wrote one and am editing another), as well as on how to draw, letter, and color comics. However, no one really focuses on content like this excellent volume, which concentrates entirely on the growing field of nonfiction graphic narratives.

Graphic nonfiction has been around almost as long as graphic novels, with the general public first exposed to it through Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and gained notice for works such as Joe Sacco’s Palestine or even Joe Kubert’s Fax from Sarajevo. My first exposure was in 1982 with Jack Jackson’s Los Tejanos graphic novel, published by Fantagraphics. Today, many publishers produce series of biographies or explore stories from history. I have used Abrams’Economix to help understand financial concepts.

The authors and artists are experienced from the Nib, a graphic journalism website, and they break down the process step by step. Along the way, they educate us on some interesting topics as a way of demonstrating the lesson. There are chapters on research, interviewing, graphic reportage, personal narratives, and data usage, which walk you through each process.

Perhaps the most notable aspect of the book is the diverse range of people interviewed about their process. Several interviews are featured in each chapter, demonstrating the vast scope of graphic journalism. I knew of it from some newspapers, but here we have 42 different creators, each doing interesting work in the less obvious corners of the World Wide Web.

The authors also ensure that we understand basic terminology, along with chapters that focus on writing in this style, and the value of having a firm editorial hand to prevent creators from getting lost in the weeds with too much research or obscuring details.

The final two chapters are universal for creators, focusing on how to share and publish your work, as well as how to build a community. They then conclude by spelling out how they created the book, providing examples of a comics script, contract basics, and deep citations for further reading.

My Maryland Institute College of Art students have rarely explored nonfiction, but I intend to highlight this aspect, as many have fascinating personal stories worthy of sharing with the world.

Betty Blues by Renaud Dillies

I have two ways I could start with today’s book, neither of which has much to do with the book itself. I could mention I read another graphic novel by Renaud Dillies a decade ago, Bubbles & Gondola , and only vaguely remembered it when I saw a thumbnail image of the B&G cover at the back of this book. Or I could point out that the title is not the same as a certain smutty French movie from the 1980s, and reminisce that I saw that movie at college, and that the first line of the movie provoked one of the best, rippling, unexpected crowd laughs I’ve ever experienced. [1]

None of that gets us much closer to Renaud Dillies’ bande dessinée Betty Blues – copyright 2003 in France, published in this edition in the US in 2013, translated by Joe Johnson and colored by Anne-Claire Jouvray. I could mention that Bubbles was the story of a novelist and Betty is the story of a jazz musician, so I can assume that Dillies has at least a small tropism towards telling stories of the creative life.

Betty Blues, I learn from Lambiek, was Dillies’s first book, and won him the best debut award at Angoulême that year. And that does somewhat explain the ways that Betty is a bit too earnest, a bit too constructed, with some lines that read like Johnson is trying to take a very specific French idiom, probably a bit too high-toned for the immediate scene, and put it into the closest approximation to idiomatic English he can. Betty at times feels like a book stretching, reaching for something – meaning, purpose, universality – and getting very close but not quite selling it all in the end.

Little Rice Duck is the main character; he’s a jazz trumpeter in a band, playing at night, slightly drunk, in some bar as the book opens. We think he’s been doing this for a long time; we think he’s very good at it. We also know there’s very little money or prestige in it. But we think he was happy.

Was. He had a girlfriend, Betty, sitting at the bar, as we guess she did most nights. This night, a rich guy, James Patton, sits down next to her, plies her with champagne, and whisks her away. Rice is broken when he finds out, and goes on a drunken bender, throwing away his trumpet and declaring he’s going to give up music forever and move far away. The possibility that Betty could possibly come back, or that there might be any other woman in the world he might someday be happy with, is clearly not on the table.

The rest of the book follows two major threads and one minor one. The minor one is a married couple, Peter and Susan – he was injured by Rice’s falling trumpet and they get through some surgery and deciding to sell the trumpet. The two major threads are, of course, Rice and Betty. He travels as far away as he can get, takes a job at a sawmill, and gets caught up in industrial action. Betty, on the other hand, is basically kidnapped by James, who doesn’t let her get away or do anything, but pampers her for a while until she finally gets fed up with his obsessive rich-guy nature and walks away when he has her as arm candy at a public event.

Both Rice and Betty are pretty passive, Betty even more so than Rice. They’re mostly dragged into situations and don’t do very much to change their lives – their lives are changed for them by others.

We think this will probably be some sort of circular story, that Rice and Betty will reunite, or at least meet, after all they’ve been through. They might not get back together, but it’s the kind of story that looks like it should end that way.

It does not: Betty Blues is much more French than that. I won’t spoil the ending, but it does have a quintessentially Gallic shrug at the end.

Dillies’ art is glorious, though – great smoky-jazz-club ambiance, with lots of organic, scratchy, quick-looking lines in his square six-panel grids. The art looks great, and sells the emotions of its anthropomorphic characters, even if the dialogue is sometimes a bit stilted and oddly-phrased.

I tend to be a grump about stories of artists and about people who do things for insufficient reasons, so I may not be the best judge of Betty Blue. I did see a lot of strength and life to it, particularly remembering it was Dillies’ first book-length project.

[1] The movie is Betty Blue. The scene is, as I recall, a tracking shot that comes in from outside a house to show the two main characters very energetically fucking…on a kitchen table, maybe? And the line is “I had known Betty for a week.”

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Sorcerer Supreme Title Moves from Dr. Doom to Scarlet Witch

New York, NY— October 30, 2025 — In the wake of Victor Von Doom’s fall, a new Sorcerer Supreme rises to take his place in SORCERER SUPREME, an ongoing series launching in December. Since its announcement, the mysterious series has kept fans guessing about which magical hero would receive the mantle. Today, it’s revealed along with the series’ creative team!

Wanda Maximoff has been many things: a mother, an Avenger, and the Scarlet Witch. Now, Wanda claims a new title: Sorcerer Supreme! Follow her adventures as Earth’s primary mystical defender this December in SORCERER SUPREME, written by Scarlet Witch scribe Steve Orlando and rising star artist Bernard Chang (Blood Hunters). Fan favorite artist Leirix will deliver spellbinding main covers. Superstar Scarlet Witch artist Russell Dauterman also returns to grace Wanda with a costume befitting her new title and provide variant covers for the first five issues. Each of Dauterman’s covers will spotlight a member of Wanda’s advisory council, including Clea, Chthon, Wiccan and more magical experts!

Defying tradition and breaking every rule, Scarlet Witch charts a bold, new path as the SORCERER SUPREME! But will her rebellious approach to the role bring magic in the Marvel Universe to new heights or leave it in ruin?

The Vishanti, unwilling to validate Wanda’s claim, anoint their own Sorcerer Supreme—AGATHA HARKNESS! Following a fiery battle with her former mentor, Wanda wakes up in Limbo, where nothing is as it seems. And if she’s going to escape, she must first defeat its ruler…MADELYNE PRYOR! And with Wanda and the Vishanti distracted, what rising mystical threats have escaped their notice? Determined to fulfill her sacred new duty, Wanda expands her scope and redefines her power to protect the world like no Sorcerer Supreme ever has!

On Wanda’s new direction, Orlando said, “When it comes to the Scarlet Witch…anything’s possible! Those are the works Wanda lives by, and they’re the words we as creators live by too. So, with the Sorcerer Supreme title in the wind after One World Under Doom, the question became—who’s the next to wield the cloak and the eye? Or more precisely, who could hear such powerful artifacts crying out from the edge of destruction? And in the Marvel Universe, there’s one person above all who hears you when no one else will—Wanda Maximoff!”

“I can’t wait for folks to see Wanda take up the cloak and the eye—for the primal disruptor to shake things up in the face of magic’s proprietors…with nothing less than the betterment of all in mind,” he continued. “And to be working with the incredible Bernard Chang and Ruth Redmond? That’s a dream come true, folks—each page they touch brings style and power to Wanda like never before!”

“I am overly excited about joining Steve and Ruth and the rest of the SORCERER SUPREME team,” Chang said. “We are putting our hearts and souls into crafting a new journey for one of Marvel Comics’ most powerful heroes. While this is my first time tackling the wonderful Wanda Maximoff, I look forward to the challenges ahead and aim to garner the trust and enthusiasm from both her longtime readers and new ones, and I hope you will come along for the ride.”

Check out the first three main covers by Leirix, along with variant covers by Rose Besch, Mark Brooks, Devmalya Pramanik, and Jenny Frison. In addition, check out the first three of Russell Dauterman’s variant covers as well as a variant cover spotlighting his original design sheet for Wanda’s new look. Plus, Inhyuk Lee captures the current state of Marvel magic in newly revealed connecting covers for WICCAN: WITCHES’ ROAD #1, DOCTOR STRANGE #1, and SORCERER SUPREME #1, all on sale in December, and Marvel’s Stormbreaker artist Geoff Shaw’s Winter Break Variant Cover for SORCERER SUPREME #1 is unveiled!

REVIEW: Globetrotters

Globetrotters: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s World Tour
By Julian Voloj & Julie Rocheleau
184 pages/Abrams ComicArts/$25.99

Elizabeth Jane Cochran liked to write under various names, beginning her journalism career as “Lonely Orphan Girl” for the Pittsburgh Dispatch before adopting the more familiar name Nellie Bly. As Bly, she checked into New York City’s Women’s Lunatic Asylum for 10 days in 1888 and documented her experiences for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. Her fame assured, she was no longer consigned to the “women’s pages” and could dictate her content.

A year later, she had planned to turn Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days from fiction to fact, beating the fictional record.

At the same time, another female journalist, Elizabeth Bisland Wetmore, was asked to travel in the opposite direction and beat Bly for Cosmopolitan. History shows that Bly beat Bisland by four days, and interestingly, the two competitors never met one another; yet, they are both buried in the same cemetery.

The race between the women and the best-selling novel forms the core of the entertaining graphic novel, out this week. Writer Julian Voloj brought their detailed chronicles to amusing life as they battled train schedules, seasickness, storms, skeptical customs agents, and more. As they race, both lament their inability to truly enjoy their visits, even when they were stranded for several days, such as in Bly, China.

Julie Rocheleau’s limited color palette and cartoony expressiveness bring the pulse-pounding race to life, nicely capturing the look and feel of this bygone era.

For Bly, it was all about the adventure, relishing her travels unlike the more serious-minded Bisland, whose New York Times obituary never even mentioned this aspect of her career. She left journalism after this, bringing her breathless worldview to serial novels.

Both women are characterized through shorthand, and I wish Voloj spent a little more time on them as people. Similarly, the craze surrounding their reports could have been given greater play, as two women racing around the world was unusual in this male-dominated era. The World even ran a “Nellie Bly Guessing Match,” encouraging readers to estimate Bly’s arrival time to the second, with the grand prize initially consisting of a trip to Europe.

Most people today may know Bly for the mental health expose and not even know about this event. Even fewer may remember Bisland and her output. As a result, we owe the creators a debt for bringing this to light.

Marvel ends Ultraman Association with FInal Miniseries

New York, NY— October 31, 2025 — The climactic chapter of Marvel Comics’ acclaimed ULTRAMAN comic book saga arrives this February in THE FALL OF ULTRAMAN! The one-shot will be written by Kyle Higgins and Mat Groom, the duo behind Ultraman’s Marvel journey since its inception, and drawn by artist Davide Tinto, who returns after his work on Ultraman: The Mystery of Ultraseven.

Made in collaboration with Tsuburaya Productions, Marvel’s venture into the Ultraman mythos began in 2020’s The Rise of Ultraman, which delivered a bold reimagining of the pop culture icon’s classic origin. Ultraman’s Marvel adventures continued in The Trials of Ultraman, Ultraman: The Mystery of Ultraseven, and last year’s Ultraman X the Avengers, where Japan’s greatest superhero finally crossed over with the heroes of the Marvel Universe! It’s all been leading to this—at long last, witness the end of this incredible chapter in Ultraman’s groundbreaking legacy in THE FALL OF ULTRAMAN!

Together, they’ve crossed dimensions, unfurled conspiracies, tangled with giant Kaiju, and saved civilizations. But now, Ultraman and his team are given an unexpected glimpse at the path ahead – and that path leads unavoidably to the loss of our world’s greatest hero! What cosmic threat will be Ultraman’s undoing? Will the United Science Patrol be redeemed? And will Earth finally be lost to the sinister machinations that have been plaguing it for decades? It’s time to find out!

“Our very first version of the initial pitch for The Rise of Ultraman, our first Ultraman limited series, included an outline of how the saga would end,” Groom explained. “Now, five years later, that end is here, and it comes bearing the same title as it did in that first outline: THE FALL OF ULTRAMAN.

“It’s bittersweet to be saying goodbye to Shin, Kiki, Dan, and the rest of the Ultra Guard — but we’re thankful that we get to give them the send-off they deserve, and give Ultraman a final challenge worthy of both his shining heart and towering stature,” he continued. “For the fans who have been with us from Rise to Fall, thank you — we hope you enjoy the finale!”

“It’s been one of the great honors of my career to spend the last five years helping bring a new interpretation of Ultraman to Western comic book readers,” Higgins shared. “Getting to play even a small part in expanding such a timeless, heroic mythology has meant the world to me. My deepest thanks to C.B. Cebulski, Tom Brevoort, Jeff Gomez, Danny Simon, Kei Minamitani, and everyone at Tsuburaya Productions, as well as the incredible artists who brought these stories to life. And most of all, to my partner through every step of this journey, Mat Groom — without him, there simply wouldn’t be a series.”

THE FALL OF ULTRAMAN #1
Written by KYLE HIGGINS & MAT GROOM
Art by DAVIDE TINTO
Cover by NETHO DIAZ
On Sale 2/11

REVIEW: Spider-Man Panel by Panel

Spider-Man Panel by Panel
By Stan Lee, Chip Kidd, Steve Ditko, and Jack Kirby
384 pages/Abrams ComicArts/$60

After the success of Fantastic Four Panel by Panel, this book was inevitable. Thankfully, we get not only Amazing Fantasy #15, but all of Amazing Spider-Man #1. As with the first book, the first few hundred pages are composed of close-up photographs of selected panels and pages from these issues. Geoff Spears is back to do the honors, and there’s a chance to relive the early Silver Age with inferior four-color printing, with its limited color palette and registration issues. There’s something quaint and almost comforting in seeing the old 64-line screens (Ben Day dots to old-timers like me) that we only know now from exaggerated Roy Lichtenstein pieces. When the FF book arrived, I questioned the number of pages devoted to this and still do.

The real treat, and the real substance of the book, arrives partway through. We get the cover feature from Amazing Fantasy, and there are pristine black-and-white scans of Steve Ditko’s original art opposite the printed pages. We therefore get a chance to enjoy Ditko’s linework and the occasional border notes. The side-by-side comparisons are a real treasure, and I remain thankful to the anonymous donor who gave the entire story to the Library of Congress.

The last few dozen pages are where the substance arrives in the form of essays. First, Chip Kidd is waxing nostalgic about these embryonic tales and talking about the approach to this book. Then, Marvel’s Executive Editor, Tom Brevoort, steps up to the plate and delivers a detailed analysis of the stories included, beginning with the cover, which Ditko initially rejected, and the one by Jack Kirby and Ditko that was printed. He nicely reviews the threads that led to the character’s creation, giving just credit to Kirby and his then-partner Joe Simon. He then takes us through both comics, page by page, calling our attention to the marginalia and the intent behind them, such as the stories in Amazing Spider-Man #1 were intended for the following issues of Amazing Fantasy before that title was abruptly cancelled. He shows the evolution of the hyphen in the character’s name and has us study how Ditko handled the FF for the first time.

The book concludes with a contextual essay from historian Peter Sanderson and some words from Sara W. Duke, curator of Popular and Applied Graphic Art in the Prints and Photographs Division of the LOC.

For me, these text pieces make the book worth having. You would have to love Spidey to buy this expensive book, gorgeous as it is with thick paper stock and excellent reproduction.

Last Kiss: Casual Fridays by John Lustig

I felt lazy yesterday, and wanted a book I could read quickly and then write something quickly here. I may have been too lazy, if that’s possible. (I have my doubts.)

So I read John Lustig’s Last Kiss: Casual Fridays . It’s a short, digital-only collection of that strip from 2013 – much like Sex Day , which I read a couple of months ago. In fact, go see that earlier post for all the details of what Last Kiss is and how it works, if you’re interested. The short version is: Lustig takes panels from mostly ’50s romance comics, cleans them up and has them recolored in a modern style (I think by someone else), then adds snarky new captions. So it’s a single-panel comic but entirely out of repurposed artwork, a quirky hybrid of Roy Lichtenstein and Wondermark.

As you can guess from the title of the other book and the cover of this one, the jokes are often directly sexual, but Lustig leans into other clichés as well – there’s a big cluster of “women hate cooking” jokes in this book, for example. Since these are all single panels, the jokes need to be quick and tight – not a lot of room for nuance or wordplay.

I got this book – and the previous one before it – from my library app, which is how I’d recommend reading them; they may also be available from the subscription end of Kindle or other similar outlets. There is a retail price, if you’re thinking about “owning” it, but, as a 68-page book, it’s a higher per-page cost than I’d be comfortable with.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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