Saturday Night at the Library With…
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Rick Stromoski, Lynn Johnston, Raina Telgemeier, and Bob Fingerman.
Rick Stromoski, the cartoonist of Soup to Nuts and Andrew’s Journal fame, returns with a second book, in what can only be called a series now, about the adventures of Schnozzer & Tatertoes, a pair of anthropomorphic dogs.
Schnozzer is a level-headed, intelligent schnauzer who keeps his flighty friend in check. Tatertoes is a mutt who’s often hungry, a little spacey, and gets most of the laughs in the book series.
With Shoot the Moon! the book has spawned a series and laid down habits and expectations for the characters. In doing so the delineation between these two heavies has been established and you can hear the chorus of indiscriminate high-pitched screams from younger elementary school students.
It’s the weekend, and best-friend dogs Schnozzer and Tatertoes decide to take an educational trip to the National Air and Space Museum. But when the dogs tumble into an active capsule in pursuit of a stray yo-yo, they soon launch themselves into outer space.
More from Daddy Mojo. Rick’s Schnozzer & Tatertoes: Shoot the Moon! paperback is available now.
In the first few weeks of 2024, eagle eyed Lynn Johnston fans will likely have spotted hints of something new and exciting to come from the famous cartoonist. On Johnston’s website and social media pages were drawings, but not of John, Elly, Farley and the rest of the For Better or For Worse gang.
Lynn Johnston left no doubt that her new project was a series, she debuted three Alottabotz books at one time.
“I’ve always loved children’s books,” says Johnston from her North Vancouver studio, a vibrant space where sofas come adorned with googly-eye shaped cushions, and cartoon aliens hang from the ceiling. “I love going into children’s stories, I love looking at the illustrations. If you’re a creative person like me, you want to take a shot at everything. I just wanted to give it a go.”
The first three books in the series, The Botshop, Marvellous Things, and A Dog With No Name, follow the adventures of Timothy Bot, a nine-year-old robot boy who moves to the sprawling ficticious city of Cyberland.
The North Shore News’ Mina Kerr-Lazenby visits Lynn to talk about Alottabotz, which are available now,
If you do not have a child under the age of 16, or are not yourself under the age of 16, you might have no idea who Raina is. So it was with me. I called a friend with kids and said, “Have you heard of an author named Raina Telgemeier?”
“Of course,” she said, sounding bemused, as if I’d asked whether she was familiar with the automobile.
Last spring, standing in the theater at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum in Columbus, Ohio, surveying the hundreds of kids and teenagers who had come to meet Raina, I realized the scale of my ignorance. Half an hour earlier, her fans had been standing on their seats, jumping up and down, waving their arms in the air, but now the long wait for autographs had begun.
The Atlantic writer Jordan Kisner discovers the Raina Telgemeier phenomenon.
More about The Billy Ireland exhibit, while Raina’s books are available at stores and libraries around the world.
Cartoonist Bob Fingerman asked for a few thousand dollars to finance his autobiography. He got that and more.
His comics career started in 1984, working for Harvey Kurtzman on the anthology Nuts before working for Mad Magazine and Cracked. Moving into full-blown comics like Minimum Wage has seen him work on the likes of Heavy Metal, Zombie World, From the Ashes, White Like She, The Mask, Heavy Metal, Otois Goes To Hollywood, Dirty Stories, Penthouse Comix and bizarrely, Scooby Doo for DC and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures for Archie Comics. There’s even a 2009 Unlimited, Star Wars Tales and Looney Tunes in there somewhere. And a couple of novels, screenplays and the like.
[I]n 2024, Bob Fingerman launched a massive career retrospective/monograph called That’s Some Business You’re In, taken from what his father used to say whenever Bob would talk to him about his work. I mean, I’ve read a lot of Bob’s work and.. yeah, his dad probably had a point. He’s crowdfunding on the do-everything-but-draw-the-book service Zoop, and will be “brimming with art, a career memoir, and all kids of anecdotal content from my four decades, thus far! From Cracked to MAD, from men’s mags to meaningful graphic novels, and everything in between!”
Justine at Gamers Grade reports on the fully funded forthcoming folio.
That’s Some Business You’re In is a career-spanning art book, brimming with content that even though old will be new to most readers. Plus, tons of recent art. It also is a damned good read, with a foreword by Bill Sienkiewicz, then starting with a detailed career memoir, and followed by individual sections highlighting and elaborating on specific topics and phases, from student years, to his time as “one of the usual gang of idiots” in MAD magazine, to his signature works like Minimum Wage, Recess Pieces and the more recent Dotty’s Inferno.
Check out Bob’s Zoop page to get in on the book and on extras.
hat tip to the Lexington Public Library for the Dewey Decimal spacers
feature image via The Library of Congress
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