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This post written by Clint Yotsuba&!
by Kiyohiko Azuma
[cover name=yotsubato]
Yotsuba is one of those kids who is always in her own little world. In fact, I’m not sure she’s ever not been in her own little world. I mean, she’s never seen a doorbell before. The thinks it’s some amazing button that makes people appear. She’s never seen an air conditioner before, but as soon as she sees one, she hates it.
The story starts with Yotsuba and her dad moving to a new city. When one of her neighbors asks where they moved from, Yotsuba says “Left!” She’s a strange little kid.
Not a lot actually happens in the story. At least, not in the first volume. I haven’t had a chance to read the others. Yotsuba wanders around her neighborhood, meets some of the people there, catches cicadas, and goes shopping at a department store. What makes this worth reading is that it’s like Yotsuba has never done any of this stuff before, so it’s all new and strange to her. Also, she has no filter between her brain and her mouth, so if she says everything that goes through her head. Everything.
Her facial expressions and the odd things she says and the really bizarre ways she misunderstands daily life are all just hilarious.
In case you are wondering, the title is pronounced “Yotsuba to!” which means “Yotsuba and!” Most of the chapter titles are like “Yotsuba & Shopping” or “Yotsuba & Rain” or “Yotsuba & something else that totally confuses her.”
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Where to Find It
[librarylist]
[linkplus name=”Yotsuba&!” url=”http://csul.iii.com/search/X?SEARCH=t:(yotsuba)&SORT=D&l=eng” series=false cchasone=some]
[librarydate]
This post written by Clint Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
by Terry Pratchett (UK website here) and Neil Gaiman
[cover name=goodomens]
Do you like stories about the apocalypse, complete with evil nuns, prophecies, angels, demons, and the Antichrist? Well, either way, you might like Good Omens. It’s a spoof of these kinds of stories – sort of like End of Days, except deliberately funny. And with no Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s also like Dogma, but without Chris Rock or Jason Mewes.
The End Times are near, but there’s a little problem. There was a little accident at the hospital when the Antichrist was born, and he was accidentally switched with a normal baby. Eventually, the forces of good and evil figure out that the guy they think is the Antichrist is just some kid, while somewhere out there the real Antichrist is living a normal life. Several different groups are out to find him. Unfortunately, figuring out which ordinary eleven-year-old boy is actually the Spawn of Satan and Prince of Lies is kind of difficult. In fact, the only person who had any clue about all this died 300 years ago. Her name was Agnes Nutter, and before she died, she wrote down her prophecies in a book called The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch. Agnes didn’t really understand the 20th century, though, so she had a lot of trouble explaining what she saw. As a result, her prophecies are almost useless – you’ll only understand one after it’s too late.
The cast of characters includes Elvis, evil nuns, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (who now ride motorcycles), the elite Witch-Finder Army (two people), a demonic Hell-hound, an unlikely team of the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley (who happen to be good friends), and quite a few other strange and amusing people.
If you take Christianity so seriously that you can’t laugh at it, you’ll probably hate this book. Also, if you don’t like sly humor, you’ll probably dislike this book. Otherwise, give it a try. How often is the end of the world a laughing matter?
To get the most from Good Omens, you need to be pretty familiar with the history of Christianity. The book is still very funny even if you know next to nothing about religion, but if you want to get every little joke and reference, there are a couple of sites that you might want to check out. One is http://goodomenslexicon.org, and another is http://www.lspace.org/books/apf/good-omens.html.
You can read a chapter online at the publisher’s website. There are funnier parts to the book, though. Also, for some strange reason, the people at HarperCollins couldn’t be bothered to proofread the excerpt. Basically, the book is way better than this excerpt would lead you to believe.
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Where to Find It
[librarylist]
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This post written by Clint Life Sucks
by Jessica Abel, Gabriel Soria, and Warren Pleece
[cover name=lifesucks]
Dave has one of the worst jobs on earth. He’s the night manager at the Last Stop convenience store, but that’s not why his job is so awful. The real problem is his boss Radu, who happens to be a vampire. Radu is big into things like team spirit, so to make Dave a better employee, Radu made him a vampire, too.
Rosa, the woman Dave has a crush on, thinks that being a vampire must be wonderful – eternal life, vampiric sex appeal, the charming company of other vampires, money, power, and other fine things like that. Unfortunately, Dave gets nothing of this. He’s got no money. He rides a bicycle to and from his dead-end job, and he’ll probably work at the Last Stop for all eternity. Also, Dave has a thing about blood. Plus, even though he’s a real vampire, the goth women he interacts with seem more interested in goth guys with expensive capes and boots rather than real vampires with name tags that say “Shift Manager.”
Another thing that makes Dave’s life miserable is that he has to interact with Wes, a psychotic surfer vampire who is also a servant of Radu. When Wes finds out Dave is interested in Rosa, he decides to be interested in her, too. This is bad, since when I said Wes is psychotic, I mean he likes killing or enslaving people. Thus, Dave has to try to save Rosa, but keep in mind that Dave is a big old loser.
You can read the first eleven pages at MySpace or read a different thirteen pages at New York Magazine’s website.
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Where to Find It
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This post written by Clint Kaput & Zösky
by Lewis Trondheim
[cover name=kaputandzosky]
Kaput and Zösky are two aliens who are out to conquer the universe. Zösky is the schemer, willing to try just about any crazy idea to take over a planet. Kaput is the psycho who would rather just charge in, guns blazing. Really, though, they both enjoy killing people.
Their problem is that they aren’t very good at being evil alien overlords. Usually, when they try to invade a planet, they lose. On the odd chance they win, the natives drive them out pretty quickly. Even when they find a planet that lets them take over, they find that they just don’t have what it takes to rule a world.
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Where to Find It
[librarylist]
[linkplus name=”Kaput & Zösky” url=”http://csul.iii.com/record=b26289013~S0″ cchasone=”some”]
[librarydate]
This post written by Clint The Dog is Not a Toy: House Rule #4
by Darby Conley
[cover name=thedogisnotatoy]
Get Fuzzy is a comic strip about a fairly ordinary guy named Rob, his slightly evil cat Bucky, and his lovable but stupid dog Satchel. Bucky is usually rude, insulting, and destructive, although every once in a while he’ll do something nice for Rob or Bucky. He is constantly coming up with crazy schemes that never work. For example, he has tried designing tee shirts, writing books, and making music, but he isn’t really smart enough to do any of it well. Satchel, on the other hand, is almost always in a good mood and likes nearly everybody. The only way he can live with Bucky and still be in a good happy all the time is to be a little simple, but we love him anyway.
One of the really impressive things about Get Fuzzy is that almost every panel is funny. A lot of cartoons use the first panel or two is used to set up the one joke in the strip, but Darby Conley usually manages to make the setup funny, too. Even when nobody says anything, you can probably find something funny in the picture. Bucky’s facial expressions are priceless – they combine arrogance, hostility, and total cluelessness. Rob has a very good “WTF? Why did I even get up this morning?” expression that he has to use a lot around Bucky and Satchel.
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Where to Find It
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This post written by Clint Nighthogs: a Pearls Before Swine Collection
by Stephan Pastis
[cover name=nighthogs]
Pearls Before Swine is one of my favorite comic strips. Pearls Before Swine is about the adventures of anthropomorphic (human-like) animals; the primary characters are Rat, Pig, Zebra, and Goat. Rat is dishonest and cynical. Pig is… special. But he’s happy, too. Zebra is always trying to help out his relatives who live in the wild, but they always get eaten by lions. Goat is the smart one, so naturally he doesn’t like interacting with the others.
There are a bunch of minor characters, too. Guard Duck is a paranoid duck whose first plan for any situation involves a rocket launcher. Unfortunately, he seems to own a lot of rockets. Snuffles is a cat who divides his time between looking cute and committing all kinds of serious crimes. A whole bunch of crocodiles live next door to Zebra. They would really love to catch and eat him, but they are far too stupid to be a threat (to him, at least). Stephan Pastis, the writer, shows up in the comic strip from time to time. Many of the other characters hate him.
There are a couple of features that may attract or repel you. First, there are a lot of death jokes. If crocodiles show up in a comic strip, odds are that at least one of them will get killed. Some strips start off like “So X died yesterday.” We’ve never met X, but he/she had to die to set up the joke that’s coming. Also, there’s cannibalism. Half the time, when Pig goes to a restaurant, he orders a ham sandwich or a BLT or something else with pork in it. Yeah, Pig’s special.
Second, Stephan Pastis loves puns, and he goes out of his way to work them in. Sometimes a Sunday comic, one of the really long ones, is nothing but preparation for a single pun. I don’t think the puns themselves are always very funny, even for puns, but I really have to laugh at the massive amount of effort he put into setting it up
If you want to see what the comic strip is like, it runs in several Contra Costa newspapers, or you can read it online.
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This post written by Clint Three Girls and Their Brother
by Theresa Rebeck
[cover name=threegirlsandtheirbrother]
Daria, Polly, and Amelia, along with their brother Philip, are the grandchildren of a famous (dead) literary critic. The three sisters become major celebrities when The New Yorker publishes a photo of them. Daria, Polly, and their mom are thrilled. Daria wants to be a model, Polly loves to be the center of attention, and mom was almost Miss America and really wants her daughters to be famous. Amelia, on the other hand, has a special talent for seeing disasters coming, and Philip is smart enough to know trouble when he sees it.
The sisters get thrown into modeling, show biz, and the theater, where they meet the kinds of strange people who prey on celebrities – paparazzi, publicists, and a creepy fortysomething guy with a crush on the fourteen-year-old sister. The author, who has worked in the television industry, makes fun of all of these people.
If you’d like to read some of it online, you can, thanks to Google Books.
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This post written by Clint Yakitate!! Japan
by Takashi Hashiguchi
[cover name=yakitatejapan]
How can I describe Yakitate!! Japan? Take some kind of action manga like Dragonball Z or Naruto and replace all the fighting and martial arts and ninja stuff with baking. Or maybe it’s like an all-bread comedy version of Iron Chef, except where the main character is dumb. There’s action and difficult training and secret techniques and excessive drama, all focused around making bread products. There are actually a lot of manga like this in Japan, but they never seem to get translated into English. The basic plot of a lot of these manga, including Yakitate!! Japan, is that some extremely talented cook travels around and defeats many rivals in cooking contests.
Yakitate!! Japan isn’t just about cooking, though. It’s also about comedy. Everything is just over the top – people often have out-of-body experiences after eating a particularly good pastry, for example, and the characters are all a little bit crazy. There are a lot of puns. Other times there will be a parody of some other manga. There is also crude humor from time to time, just so you know.
The hero is Azuma, a sixteen-year-old who wants to invent the best bread in Japan. He calls this Ja-pan, which is a pun, since “pan” means “bread” in Japanese. He’s dumb as a post, but he’s a genius when it comes to bread.
Kawachi is Azuma’s rival/sidekick. They meet when they both apply for the same job at the start of the series. Kawachi knows more than Azuma does about almost everything (he knows what a croissant is, for example), but he is nowhere near as good at actually doing the baking. Even though they work together, he would really like to beat Azuma one of these days.
Tsukino is the manager of the store where they work. She is about Azuma’s age, but she has a talent for finding and hiring skilled people. She is actually fairly normal.
Matsuhiro works at the same store. He’s big, loud, and fond of horses. Oh, and he has an afro. He might be the craziest of the bunch, but he is also very skilled.
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Where to Find It
[linkplus name=”Yakitate!! Japan” url=”http://csul.iii.com/search/X?SEARCH=t:(yakitate)+and+a:(Hashiguchi)&SORT=DX&l=eng” series=true]
[librarydate]
This post written by Clint Emily the Strange: The Lost Issue
by Jessica Gruner and Buzz Parker
[cover name=emilythestrangethelostissue]
Emily the Strange is kind of like Wednesday Addams. She’s got black hair, pale skin, a fondness for dark clothes, and a gloomy, gothic, warped outlook on life. Plus, she’s strange. And funny.
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This post written by Clint Naruto
by Masashi Kishimoto
[cover name=naruto]
Naruto is a hyperactive teenager in one of the best ninja academies in the world. He wants to be the greatest ninja ever, but he’s kind of dumb, easily distracted, and obsessed with ramen. Still, he has a great deal of natural ability, if he can pay attention long enough to use it.
You can look it up on Wikipedia. You can also read some of it online at the publisher’s website.
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