edited by Art Spiegelman and Francois Mouly If the amazing kids' comics from the halycon days of yore are your thing, then you've hit the jackopot with this one!  Well over 300 pages of classics, all scanned from the original comics themselves, and printed at approximately 120% of the originals.  These scans have been digitally cleaned up a bit, so there's no newsprint background tones, just the flat white paper that they're printed on.  While this might upset some purists, it was probably a good call as this book is clearly going to be marketed as a gift for children as well as for older fans, and lay people will have difficulty appreciating the nuances of newsprint; and they did a more than decent job of balancing the tones.  The book is, somewhat arbitrarily, divided into five sections:  Hey, Kids; Funny Animals; Fantasyland; Storytime; and Weird and Wacky.  The book successfully draws across the spectrum of children's comics from the twenty years following the close of the second world war – the golden age of kids' comics that fed the baby boomers' imaginations before television took over.  While certainly no one is going to agree with every choice, the editors – along with the board of advisors – picked a good crop of comics that is certain to contain favorites of every fan as well as win the hearts of every reader and, more importantly, is sure to capture the imagination of the next generation.  Includes work by all-time greats Carl Barks, Basil Wolverton, Harvey Kurtzman, John Stanley, Bob Bolling, Walt Kelly, and many, many more (even Dr. Seuss, who started out in comics).  Get a sneak peek, here (just click on the image of the open book at the top right, under "Sample Toon Treasury").

FROM THE ARCHIVES

ONE NEW BUT SHELF WORN COPY