Hey Kids! Comics! Special Bud Grace Edition

A note from cartoonist Bud Grace of Ernie/Piranha Club fame:

Whew! I finally put together all the books that I intend to put together. It’s taken me a long time and a heck of a lot of work, but I’m finally finished. I’m going to back off now and take it easy.

The Piranha Club comic strip, originally called Ernie, ran for 30 years from 1988 – 2018.

All of the dailies are in [15 paperback or Kindle] books.

The Sundays have also been collected – but in “best of” collections, not “complete collections.”

… about 12 years worth of Sundays are in books. The Sunday collections are in full color.

More from Bud:

Before I started Ernie I broke into the cartoon business drawing magazine cartoons. I published cartoons in almost all the American magazines that published cartoons during that early period, as well as some international magazines, starting in 1982 or thereabouts. Ernie was launched in February 1988.

There are three collections of those early cartoons, What’s New in Science, I Thought They’d Never Leave and I’ll Have the Suckling Pig. Many of the cartoons in the latter two collections had been published in an earlier book titled Guess Who Got Lucky.

First, the What’s New in Science book would appeal mostly to people who are in some way associated with some branch of the sciences. You might know that before I started drawing cartoons I was a PhD physicist. They haven’t taken way my degree yet, so I guess I still am.

In the early Guess Who Got Lucky book, I had mixed dignified cartoons and naughty ones. That wasn’t a good idea. So I filled the I Thought They’d Never Leave book with the milder cartoons, and I put the edgier cartoons in the I’ll Have the Suckling Pig book, although not all of the cartoons in the Pig are naughty by any means. Nevertheless, that book is not for young people. The cartoons are black and white.

But wait! There’s more:

There is also my Babs and Binky book, regular and collector’s. King Features had changed the title to Babs and Aldo, I won’t go into the reason, but for me it was always Babs and Binky. There is no hard cover version. I did Babs and Binky for six months in 2003-2004. Drawing two newspaper comic strips and also drawing comic book stories was too much work, and I had to drop it. There are six months worth of strips. The Sundays are in full color.