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Check out this terryifying commercial for the banned 1979 giant doll. Even the commercal for the toy is scary.

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Lisa Hanawalt
Drawn & QuarterlyLisa Hanawalt's back with another book. It's old work, but the book is new and you probably haven't seen all of the stuff in this book unless you are very cool and cyber stalking Lisa Hanawalt. Dirty Dumb Eyes collects drawings, illustrated articles and comics that Lisa did for different magazines and blogs. It's fun and fast and requires zero thought or investment to enjoy.While reading this book I realized that although Lisa Hanawalt is known mostly as a person who makes comics, she hardly ever makes comics. Also her best stuff is not her comics. She makes illustrated articles for the most part and those are also the best thing she makes. Her drawings can be any combination of the following things: pretty, funny, disgusting. Also she is very good at making funny observations. I see Lisa as making the kind of work that will someday land her a semi-regular feature in the New Yorker. She is the future Roz Chast.

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Lisa Hanawalt: When I was first proposing this book, this is going to sound cheesy, but I was describing it in terms of "seeing the World through Lisa Hanawalt's eyes." And because I'm human I most closely observe the dirtiest and dumbest things.I really like your movie reviews.
Thanks! I really enjoyed making those.How do you think of yourself when you describe what you do? Artist? There are very few proper sequential panel style comics in here.
I say "I'm an artist…and cartoonist and illustrator…" and then I usually trail off because I'm bad at talking about myself. My comics are mostly improper, I agree.

Everything on the cover: dogs, birds, horses, partial nudity, and modes of transportation.

It's fun to switch back and forth, right? I don't really think of different approaches as gendered, it's more of a hard vs. soft or light vs. heavy thing. Right now I'm more interested in shape and color, but of course I can get more detail and control with ink line-work. Variety is always key.
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Spain Rodriguez
FantagraphicsThe back of this book describes it as being like an anti-Happy Days and it's pretty to hard to beat that description. This book collects comics by Spain Rodriguez who died recenrtly. The comics are all set in the fifties and tell stories about Spain's days as a member of the Road Vultures Motorcycle Club. The center of a lot of the stories in this book is Fred Toote, who was the wild n' crazy guy of Spain's group of friends. Spain's comics always feel lively and real and there's this sense that he was probably too cool to be making comics but somehow he was. You can tell he was for real because he put the most energy into drawing motorcycles and cars and his people always look kinda like they're secondary to their machines. Great book from a great artist and story teller.


Jack Davis
FantagraphicsFantagraphics are the kings of good bookness. This book is part of a new series of hardcover, black and white volumes that collect the EC horror and sci-fi comics by artist. It might not sound special but it is in fact VERY SPECIAL. You get the chance to see what most consider the best single group of comics artists evolve in the course of a book. You might think that their work would pop less without colors but it works great. Oftentimes black and white work that's later colored is drawn so densely that the color is needed to tell individual shapes apart but Jack Davis's stuff is totally legible.
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Out of the ShadowsMort Meskin
FantagraphicsThe title Out of the Shadows works two ways. The first is that Mort Meskin's work has never been collected before. The other is that his best stuff is dripping with black ink. Shadows everywhere. The stories are just a lot of old timey chatter where people calll each other chum and stuff but the compositions and choices that Mort Meskin made are pretty sophisticated.

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Brian Wood With Becky Wood
Dark Horse ComicsBrian Wood is terrible at drawing and this comic is some bizarre corniness. It's set in a dystopian alternative reality where punks scowl all the time and New York City is a police state where punks get shot in the head by mod cops for spray painting words in a subway train. I feel like I knew a lot of punks who were into this sort of mindset in the early 2000s. I knew punks who would get bio-mech tattoos that made them look like robots and there were these comics that made it seem like going to shows, protests and being vegan made you a sci-fi vigilante or something. I thought it was silly then and I still do. I think it trivializes real issues when you make a fantasy comic that's this close to reality but just off enough that it's not really a metaphor for reality.

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