Pogo, Vol. 2: Bona Fide Balderdash
by Walt Kelly -- I came late to the Pogo bandwagon; I've heard about it my entire comic-reading life (which only slightly trailed my breathing-and-pooping life), and seen snippets of Kelly's great comic strip a number of times, but I never pulled the trigger and actually read the thing. Until, that is, last year, when the first volume of this new series collecting the entire newspaper strip -- Through the Wild Blue Yonder -- showed up in my library, so I had to give it a try. Long story short: I'm a convert, and I expect to be waiting eagerly for the rest of the projected twelve volumes reprinting Pogo as they come out annually.
How to Tell If Your Cat Is Plotting to Kill You
, the second collection of the not-really-a-webcomic The Oatmeal, by Matthew Inman, who makes his name difficult to find on his work (though for apparently different reasons than Cris Ware does the same) -- I got the first Oatmeal collection during the death throes of Borders, and mostly enjoyed it, and my older son (Thing 1) more recently really liked it. If that's not worth a library check-out, I don't know what is.
Sailor Twain
by Mark Siegel -- This graphic novel got a lot of attention when it was published a few month back, but that was at a time when I was being flakier than usual with my reviews here and my relationships with publishers (I'm unabashedly amateur at Antick Musings; I'm serious about what I do but can be lackadaisical due to the general lack of remuneration), so I didn't get a copy of it, even though it probably wouldn't have been difficult at the time. But it was in the library, as I figured it would be eventually, and so now I can read it.
And last is Ellen Forney's recent graphic memoir Marbles
, which you may have heard of -- it's been kind of a big deal. I've reviewed Forney's work here -- her cute, memorable, smart what-it-was-like-to-be-me-as-a-kid strip Monkey Food and her utterly different illustrated-sex-personals book Lust -- and liked all of what I've seen of it, despite (or because?) how widely divergent they were.
