edited by Michel Choquette  Well, here's something you don't see everyday:  a comics anthology that has been completed but unable to find a publisher for nearly forty years, finally being published!  As readers of The Comics Journal #299 – the cover feature of which was an in-depth article on the history of this volume – already know, this volume had reached a legendary/mythical status.  Robert Greenfield's introduction squarely situates the work contained in this volume as a document of "The Sixties," While comics critic/historian Jeet Heer's foreword provides ample context and background for the comics work the book contains as well as a chronology of its epic 40-year journey from inception to publication.  We've barely dipped out toes in this majorly oversize – 11" x 17" – 216 page, full color hardcover volume containing 120 comic strips by 169 creators, so we're not going to say much about the contents at this time, but we will provide you with some of the contributors, and let you do the math:  Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, C.C. Beck, Wallace Wood, Harvey Kurtzman, Arnold Roth, Don Martin, Gahan Wilson, Bobby London, Trina Robbins, Vaughn Bodé, Steve Englehart, Archie Goodwin, Denny O'Neil, Ralph Reese, Alan Weiss, Herb Trimpe, Frank Zappa, Harlan Ellison, William S. Burroughs, Roy Thomas, Barry Smith (before he added Windsor) Guido Crepax, Ralph Steadman, Leo & Diane Dillon, Walter & Louise Simonson, Justin Green, Bill Griffith, Red Grooms, Russ Heath, Jay Kinney, Denis Kitchen, (a very young) Art Spiegelman, (also very young) Stan Mack, Ever Meulen,  Joost Swarte, Tom Wolfe,  Federico Fellini, and many, many more!  Also included is a "92-drawing take on Choquette's travels by Michael Fog" that parallels and brackets the comics the volumes contains.  Surprisingly (at least to us), the intent to create an interweaving bracketing tale was a component of the original volume's conception, and blank spaces were deliberately left in many of the pages at Choquette's instruction.

Anyone old enough to remember reading the Village Voice back in the 1980s will surely remember Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies – "All dialogue guaranteed 100% overheard" – which appeared in pretty much every issue for the entire decade – and then some, as Real Life Funnies ran from the mid-1970s through to the early-1990s.  Now at last comes the opportunity to revisit well over 300 of these classic strips, printed full size in this massive, 12 1/2" x 9 1/2", horizontally formatted, 336 page hardcover.

For anyone – probably most of you reading this – unfamiliar with Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies, we heartily recommend that you take a few minutes to read of few of them on Stan Mack's own site, HERE and HERE (just click on the thumbnails).

"Back in the day, Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies was a weekly treat that became addictive to many readers, including Voice writers like me. We couldn't turn away from the words and images so innocently set down by the wandering artist as he overheard New Yorkers blurting out the social, political, sexual, and status anxieties of a generation. Indelibly candid, funny, startling, and occasionally even profound, these vignettes depict a magical lost metropolis that forever shaped our culture." — Joe Conason (journalist, author, and former Village Voice staff writer)

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