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Well, a little bit of news and some bragging.

First of all, please join me and Chip Kidd at The Strand (NYC) on Wednesday, May 12 at 7 pm for a lively discussion, slide show and signing for Art in Time.

And, I’ve received some very nice reviews from Entertainment Weekly (A-!), The Onion A.V. Club, and The Jewish Daily Forward, and have managed not to embarrass myself too badly in an interview with Publishers Weekly.

Ok, now go about your business. But don’t forget to come to The Strand!

UPDATE 5/15/10: New interview at Robot 6, where I really gab “deep nerd” with Chris Mautner, and book excerpts at the LA Times.

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Very soon a new Chris Ware book will be hitting the stands, a volume that most people probably haven’t heard of. It is not by Ware, but it’s about him. It’s a collection of essays titled The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a Way of Thinking (University Press of Mississippi, April 2010), edited by Martha B. Kuhlman and David M. Ball.

I’m in the book so I won’t say too much about it except that the editors are very intelligent and the table of contents (pasted below) looks promising. The book will also have a lovely frontispiece by Ivan Brunetti.

As it turns out, my contribution to the book is relevant to the discussions we’ve been having here at Comics Comics about book design and reprints of old comics. My essay is about Ware’s work on the Walt and Skeezix series and the Krazy and Ignatz series, which I try to place in the larger context of the history of comic strip reprint projects and also tie to Ware’s thematic concerns in his own comics with family history, the legacy of the past, and the pathology of the collector mentality.
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Since the issue of Chip Kidd’s book design for The Art of Charles M. Schulz (as well as Kidd’s other books) came up in Tim’s earlier posting, I thought readers be interested in my review of that book, which ran in the National Post on Dec. 1, 2001. Re-reading it, I wish I had said even more about Kidd’s design, which really did shake up our familiar perception of Schulz and started the process whereby people started taking a closer look at the Schulz as a cartoonist.

Here is the review:

The Art of Charles M. Schulz is perhaps the most lavish tribute any cartoonist has ever received. Assembled by Chip Kidd, the most influential designer in contemporary publishing, the images in this thick book have been culled from a variety of sources, including Schulz’s high-school yearbook and his private notebooks.
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I will be the “M.C.” of this fine gathering of cartoonists opening for Chip Kidd’s band artbreak. Come on out and get some early New Year’s cheer.

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For those of you who don’t already know, Frank’s begun writing occasionally for Publishers Weekly. His latest piece is a review of the Chip Kidd-co-edited collection of Jiro Kuwata superhero comics, Bat-Manga! I wish I hadn’t read it myself, because now I have another stupid book I need to buy, but check it out if you have money to spare (or better impulse control).