Bargain bin

Not much happening in the art making arena these past few weeks but I'm not doing too bad with the art reading. Found a couple of great steals at Chapters. Or so I thought.

I just finished Peepshow: The Cartoon Diary of Joe Matt. It's an autobiographical collection of mostly one-page strips. Highly entertaining, but sometimes Joe shares a little too much about his life. It was great read but the book literally fell apart as I was reading it: the cover and it's "contents" are in a loose pile on my night-stand. No wonder it was $3.99. Note to publishers: yes, it's cheaper to print in China but you will get what you pay for.

In The Studio: Visits With Contemporary Cartoonists is just that. The first section is on Robert Crumb so I couldn't resist. He writes a great piece on his soon-to-be-released Genesis which I'm also anxious to pick up. At $14.95 I thought I was getting quite a steal but while poking around Google just now, I realize it's available for free at Google Books. Yeesh.

In retrospect, the bargain bin didn't really pan out.

Finally, The Beats, (mostly) written by Harvey Pekar and (mostly) illustrated by Ed Piskor, was the only full price book I purchased. I haven't read it yet but I'm looking forward to it. Like Joe Matt, Pekar is (usually) a self-deprecating, autobiographical writer. If you haven't seen the movie American Splendor yet, check it out: it's based on his long-running comic book series of the same title. He's also had a few entertaining appearances on Letterman which usually end badly.