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Scott C
InsightI really loved Scott C.'s comics when he was in the Hickee anthology comics and I was a big fan of the Psychonauts video game that he did the visual design for. I also loved everything else, also this book.Scott makes images that incorporate cute things and pop culture references. I can imagine you rolling your eyes and thinking,"Yeah, like everyone else on the internet." But you had better shut up because this guy is a couple hundred cuts above that other shit.



Abrams
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Jose-Louis Bocquet, Jean-Luc Fromental, and Stanislas Barthelemy
Drawn & QuarterlyThis pretty little book tells the life story of Herge, creator of Tin Tin, through a series of three- or four-page sequences. It's drawn, colored, and packaged to look almost identical to a Tin Tin book too. The thing is, there aren't any Tin Tin books that attempt to tell Tin Tin's life story, and this is because telling the story of someone's life in 60 pages is hard to do. I guess they attempted something ambitious, but the book feels more like a collection of moments than a story. It feels like a list of events are being rattled off instead of an experience you're sharing with the main character. There'll be four pages in 1956 and then suddenly it's three years in the future.

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Faye Dowling
Lawrence KingThis is a nicely laid-out book with an interesting binding, but the ideals it serves are corny to me. It's a fun and mindless little tour through the world of skull imagery in popular culture but skull imagery in popular culture isn't necessarily a good thing. The press release refers to the skull as a symbol of anarchy and rebellion. It's funny that a skull could become a symbol of anarchy and rebellion since absolutely every human being has one inside them and absolutely everyone is going to die. If anything, the skull represents the least individualistic thing that humans do, which is die.When you look at a skull, the immediate message that is zapped into your brain is "Someday I am going to die. That image of a skull I am looking at is very similar to the one inside my skin right now and in some way or another my flesh will decay and what is now me will be that thing." To wear the image of a skull on your shirt is a pretty offensive thing to do. Imagine wearing an image of a rotting corpse, or a pile of dead bodies from a concentration camp on your shirt. It seems like the repetition of skulls within popular culture have removed their obvious meaning. Now people think of rock ‘n' roll and anarchy. You look at the Crimson Ghost and you might think of death, but you also think of an Alfred E. Neuman impishness.

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Meghan Rowland & Chris Rowland
AdamsMediaEvery time one of these fake guidebooks comes in I pick it up hoping I'll like it and I never do. I'm pretty sure that the Preppy Handbook was the first fake guide like this. Then there was that zombie escape handguide and now it seems like there's all kinds of fake books floating around. The only one that actually succeeds at being funny is Bart Simpson's Guide to Life. Oh, and all the books that Vice made with titles that start "The Vice Guide To--".
