Reading Copy Book Blog

There’s a lot of talk of wild things around the office here, today, and talk of curdmudgeons and cantankerousness, love of animals and children. Maurice Sendak, who has passed away at age 83, had a notable effect on books, and people who love books, like us. A famously blunt, outspoken and excitable grump, he always [...]

Kate Beaton’s Hark! a Vagrant web comic is now available in a book. It’s hard to imagine anything more wonderful.

Comic book artist Jerry Robinson has died at the age of 89. He worked on the Batman team and created Robin and The Joker. The BBC reports.

A copy of the first issue of Action Comics, which includes Superman’s first appearance, has sold for $2.16m (about £1.4m). There’s speculation that the seller is movie star Nicolas Cage, who is a Superman nut. The BBC has the story.

The ever-blunt illustrator R. Crumb talks about his art being rejected by The New Yorker.

Bil Keane, writer and illustrator of the long-running comic strip The Family Circus, died November 8th at age 89.

MetaMaus by Art Spiegelman is published this week. It celebrates the 25th anniversary of his ground-breaking graphic novel, Maus, and tells the story of how the original book was put together (via Jacket Copy). If you don’t know Maus, it’s a comic book description of World War II in which the Jews are mice and [...]

Albert Uderzo, co-creator of Asterix, is retiring after 52 years of drawing the Gaul because he is “a bit tired,” reports The Guardian. He’s 84.

A man called Andy Borowitz has written a book called The 50 Funniest American Writers: An Anthology of Humor From Mark Twain to The Onion. It comes out in October. USA Today seems to know who Borowitz is but I haven’t got a clue. It’s a shame Bill Hicks didn’t write a book because I [...]

My colleague Beth offers a double video review of books from American comedians – The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee by Sarah Silverman and Roseannearchy: Dispatches from the Nut Farm by Roseanne Barr. (I had been wondering what Roseanne Barr had been doing for the past decade and now I know.)