Form-3 Books

good reading after the death of a loved one--helps heal the mind,heart and sole.

In a world where many times the entire grief process is misunderstood or blatantly ignored, this book is a cool oasis in a time of personal need. There were so many passages in this book that I could see myself going through as a widow. So many relevant points -- sometimes we try to push the grief away, to keeping insanely busy. . .

Carol Staudacher urges those in grief to slow down and think about the loss, study it, let it come in so it can faced and a healing process can begin. It's certainly not easy, but better than avoiding the pain inside. We need to take "emotional inventory" so we can deal with our individual aspect of grief, realizing that our idea of normal will never be the same. Elaine Williams

This is a very comforting book to those who have lost a loved one. I discovered it after my son died 7 years ago and have purchased copies for others after their loved ones have passed away. I think it is the best grief book that I found, which is why I highly recommend it.

This book is so healing because one picks it up again and again, just about every day, and little by little it does it's miraculous work, like an ointment.
Every aspect of the innumerable crazy things our minds seem to be filled with in the aftermath of a loss are to be found there.
The author has done an amazing job of listening to bereaved people,and describing the different mental and emotional states, with the resolutions and practices that go towards healing, so one is encouraged to climb out of the hole or pit in which one finds one's self.
The tone is compassionate and encouraging all the way.
My husband of 38 years died almost three months ago, and this little book has helped me enormously.

We are a woefully undergrieved society in great need of good resources for those who are in need at the time during and following a major loss. This concise and heartful book will bring solace to most who read its pages.

Each short meditation is organized in the same way. The header has a "crux of the problem" statement from a griever - something like "I just can't deal with it now, it's too much to handle." or "People tell me not to dwell on it, to go on with my life." or "I wake up in the morning and I feel as if I am in a nightmare. I can't believe this has happened to me."

Below that, there is a quote from a wise sage, a short meditation and a closing affirmation supporting the meditation.

The quotes alone are worth the price of the book.

My only criticism is that I wish there was a table of context or a thematic index. It would have made it so much easier to find things.

If you are grieving and/or if you know someone who is grieving (and don't we all?) this book would be a great companion for the journey.

Highly recommended.

Just thumbing thru the book already has me laughing out loud. The business plan in disarray... the Family Friendly policy... and my personal favorite - the office thermostat! I wish I had Alice's chutzpah." I wouldn't be freezing to death all day!!!

Journey to Cubeville is a 224-page collection of Scott Adams' hilarious Dilbert cartoons. Dated between 11/1/96 and 1/4/98, these cartoons include all of the normal Dilbert crew: Dilbert, Alice, Wally, Asok, Dogbert, Catbert (a personal favorite), and so forth. The cartoons themselves appear as they did in your favorite newspaper, with the big Sunday ones printed in bright color! Plus, as a bonus, this book includes pop-out finger-puppets, which includes Dilbert, Wally, Alice, Dogbert, Ratbert, the Pointy-Haired-One, and a cubicle. (Dilbert wouldn't be Dilbert without a cubicle!)

This book is great, a must-have addition to the library of any Scott Adams fan. And, the finger-puppets make it that much better. This is perhaps the best Dilbert book of them all - buy it!

Dilbert is the perfect hero for the modern office, which consists mostly of cubicles, or cubes as we frequently refer to them.

What happens in a cubicle? Oh, you know. The boss comes around and indicates that he is the great power behind everything, though he actually knows nothing about the product. If anything goes wrong, downsizing of those best suited to fix the problem follows.

What of marketing? Well, they are selling a product we have yet to build, for a price we are unable to achieve, with features that marketing neglected to tell engineering about. When all else fails, hire a consultant!

But Dilbert also has to face things like synergies. What are synergies? Ah, well, Dilbert can tell you that when you hear a cliché word like synergies, down-sizing is sure to follow in Cubeville, along with additional doses of cluelessness.

Any Dilbert book is perfect for a modern office worker, especially if they are in engineering, as Dilbert is. This collection of cartoons published from 9/1/96 to 1/18/98 are sure to give you more than a few chuckles as you recognize behaviors from an office you once worked in, or, if you are unfortunate, an office your are currently working in. At least you get gain some perspective and humor from your misery!

Enjoy!

JOURNEY TO CUBEVILLE is the absolute best collection of Dilbert comic strips!!! The whole hilarious gang (`specially Wally,Alice and Dilbert et. al) just saturates every single page with their best laughs.So whether you`re wandering through a bookstore,or on the net,DO NOT miss out on JOURNEY TO CUBEVILLE.It`s worth the money!

It's amazing how Scott Adams is able to produce hundreds of hilarious Dilbert strips that revolve around just a few themes -bosses are stupid, engineers are geeks, and the whole purpose of management, marketing, and the like are to squash productivity. This book is proof that Adams is a genius because not a single strip fails to produce at least a chuckle. Get this book and laugh your a** off.

One of the funniest books I've read, even for a bit of a hypochondriac like myself. FULL of the most fear-inducing information that one shouldn't take on board- like the chapter on ordinary body quirks that could meant the most catastrophic of illnesses. Particularly amusing (for me) was the chapter where the author interviews a Proctologist. Hilarious, with insane little footnotes, and illustrations. Be prepared for a rather sobering finale. Great book.

Despite the macabre subject matter, this is a hilarious book. I laughed out loud many, many times. And while it may, indeed, feed a true hypochondriac's neurosis, it can also show just how obnoxiously far you can take it. I will admit that even I (not so much a hypochondriac) took a few of the `tests' presented in the book. I evidently have about a half-dozen serious medical conditions...

If you like Dave Barry, you'll like this book.

Warning... this is not for the paranoid, for those that read every bad bio-terrorisim book out there then wonder if they've contracted Ebola, or for those who call emergency when they've stubbed their toe thinking it's fleah eating cancer....
Great book full of witty looks at all the medical disasters that can kill ya...
It is well written, funny, well organised and lends itself to reading to friends and relatives who enjoy combining a lack of medical background with pure paranoia. Keep a copy around for flu season...

Several laugh out loud moments. Weingarten's newspaper column is funnier than this book. I love the column. The book isn't bad.

If you truly want to sample Weingarten at his best read his column.

Gene Weingarten used to be Dave Barry's editor at The Miami Herald. Enough said.

Got it for our 12-yr. old daughter's birthday. She loves it! She's a big fan of Calvin & Hobbes. This was her 5th book!

Is it possible that just 20 years ago that Calvin and Hobbes - - one of the finest comics strips ever created - - was fresh and poignant every day in the paper?

"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us," says Calvin, looking at the chain-sawn stump of a tree, in 'Weirdos from Another Planet' by Bill Watterson. The demise of Calvin and Hobbes is reason enough not to contact Earthlings.

Doonesbury by Gary Trudeau is sometimes still incisive, with the same brilliance in political observations as when it was new and Richard Nixon was newly president. But brilliance is boring after 40 years of repetition. Doonesbury is dated. Nixon is long disgraced, dead and gone.

Calvin remains relevant, because like Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales' he dealt with the universal human condition - - - as it applies to small boys and to the grown men they become without ever losing their small-boy outlook on olife.

"Do you believe our destinies are shaped by the stars?" Calvin asks Hobbes.

Ever the logical one, Hobbes replies, "Nah."

Calvin counters with words as relevant today as in 1988, because, "Life's a lot more fun when you're not responsible for your actions."

How do we greet strangers? Calvin went to Mars and, after mugging for the Viking Lander "to blow some circuits at NASA" he met a live Martian. Hobbes thought the Martian must be as scared of them as they are of the Martian. Like many of us when meeting a foreign culture, Calvin explains, "We're just ordinary Earthlings, not weirdos from another plsanet, like HE is."

Doonesbury was similarly brilliant in portraying Nixon as a weirdo; but, Nixon nostalgia remains firmly Nixon. "Weirdos from another planet" is sadly reminiscent of the usual reaction to the current resident of the White House, and most likely The-President-to-Be.

Calvin's Dad isn't all that slow either, as when he sets him up in the first three panels of one daily strip by asking, "Hey, Calvin! Guess what time it is!"

"Why? What time is it?

"It's a very special time!

"Oh boy, oh boy! What time is it?

"Do you really want to know?

"Yes, Yes! Tell me! Tell me! Quick! Please! Yes!

"IT'S YOUR BATHTIME! OH BOY!!

Gettting Calin into a bath is about the same agony as pilling a cat. In the final panel, a dejected Calvin is up to his nose in sudsy water and commenting, "You know how old people always write to Dear Abby, complaining that their kids never write,call or visit? Those letters really crack me up."

Calvin had his own four-panel approach to homework, "When I grow up, I want to be an inventor. First I will invent a time machine. Then I'll come back to yesterday, and take myself to tomorrow, and skip this dumb assignment."

Personally, for me, it was lima beans. Any time lima beans appeared, it was lima beans or no desert. Calvin and his Mom had more imagination; Calvin looked at his bowl of soup and horrified, "Hey! What's this stuff in my soup? Yeccch! Is this rice? It had better NOT be!"

His Mom was very worried, "Rice? Let me see!"

Calvin was insistent, "Look! These little white things! See, there's rice in my soup. I hate rice!"

His Mom looked closely and explained, "I didn't put any rice in. These are maggots."

Calvin was delighted, explaining, "Gosh, wait till I tell everyone at school what WE had for dinner.".

His Dad lamented, "Another lovely meal at home with my family. I wish my job required more travel."

Evolution? As Calvin explains, "Just think, Earth was a cloud of dust 4.5 billion years ago . . . 3 billion years ago, the first bacteria appeared, then came sea life, dinosaurs, birds, mammals, and finally, a million uears ago, man. Now, in 1988, there's me. The acme of evolutuion."

Hobbes, rolling his eyes, responds, "Oh, PLEASE."

Even Richard Feynman can't come up with better answers. Trudeau is always wordy, as Watterson was at times. But the genius of Watterson was the ability to draw a 14-panel Sunday strip showing Calvin filling a water balloon and sneaking up on Hobbes . . . . panel after panel. Only one dialoguie panel was needed, when Hobbes drily explains, just before he was otherwise to be doused, "As if life isn't short enough."

It ends with a thoroughly frustrated Calvin resting beside Hobbes.

This is the Master.

Calvin and Hobbes has always been a great read. This was the first one in book form that I read and thoroughly enjoyed.

The book has many good strips and quite a lot of Sunday strips as well. The aliens show up towards the end and there is a good many strips on that series where he explores the Martian surface and rightly is told by Hobbes that if one is not potty trained would you invite them to your home? So of course after damaging Earth, men need not expect a welcome from the Martians or anyone else.

There is a lot of wisdom and good humour in the book. The opening splash page itself is attractive about why intelligent life hasn't contacted us - with a picture of deforestation.

Other favourites are of course being a tiger, or the tiger's welcome to the kid coming home from school, Dad's approval ratings in the election, the family outing, room service for the ill kid, etc.

The parents are delightfully tolerant of the crazy nutty Calvin. The family outing to the woods is a riot. Calvin wonders what kind of vacation is it if he has to be with his parents, LOLz. Even Calvin's vulnerability is explored when he panics after breaking Dad's binoculars.

This book is cute as hell - and especially a great gift to pretty young girls who thank me endless for making their day. You won't ever be disappointed, probably not with any Calvin & Hobbes collection - they are a gem, a treasure, a laugh riot, a piece of modern art and culture.

Beware of Captain Spiff, the T-Rex, the paleontologist, the incredible comic strip from the best graphic art has to offer.

I am a Calvin and Hobbes fan. And this book did not dissapoint me.

I love all Calvin and Hobbes books, but this collection has a few of my favorites that never cease to make me laugh out loud, including:

"The Disembodied Hand That Strangled People" (I snicker just writing it)

The trip to Mars ("We're going in the wagon?" "Of course! What did YOU want to do? Flap your arms?" "I guess I hadn't thought about that part."
"Obviously."

I love Calvin and Hobbes. Period. The philosophy, the juvenile humor, the deep quiet truths, seeing the world through the eyes of a 6 year old. Any Calvin and Hobbes book gets 5 stars from me.

This book, just like all the other Calvin & Hobbes books, was an enjoyment to read. I recommend it to all ages of readers.

Calvin is the hero of all children with wildly vivid imaginations. He has great fun with his stuffed tiger Hobbes, going on numerous great adventures, including an attempted trip to the Yukon. Calvin is fairly typical in the sense that such children tend to drive their parents and teachers crazy, yet when they learn to temper and channel their imagination, they often end up doing spectacularly creative things as adults.
Since I was one of those imaginative children who spent all of my time either reading or playing pretend scenarios in the kitchen, I can certainly relate to this inventive misfit. He is hilarious.

You can always rely on Calvin and Hobbes to deliver the funnies. And if you're a keen reader, Calvin's unique (if rather skewed) perception of the world with keep the kid inside you alive (I don't mean this literally but as a metaphor). Unless you've been horribley deprived you'll pretty much all remember the magic of a snow storm or a sunset while sitting under a tree or an adventure in the woods or playing Monopoly with a tiger.

The title refers to a series of strips in which Calvin and Hobbes plan to escape the Yukon to be free of the repressions of family rules. Needless to say, their journey is cut short when Hobbes eats the only two sandwiches Calvin bothered to pack.

Any Calvin and Hobbes fan will already own this. Everyone else must buy!

First, and foremost, it must be known: All Calvin and Hobbes are great. Yukon Ho!, however, is one that tends to rise above the rest. It's true this is one of the earlier books and includes the 9 verse tune The Yukon Song and has all the great cartoons, but why it seems to be more popular, I cannot say. All I know and can guarantee is that it's funny and is everything Calvin and Hobbes. From the beginning of the book where Calvin is convinced that he and Hobbes have traveled into the future (nope not with a cardboard box) it is too easy to appreaciate Calvin's motives. He's not after the secrets of genetic cloning or the what politician is waging wars with other countries. He's looking forward to floating cities and telling people in the present what he saw. And this is the real beauty of Calvin and Hobbes shows through. It's the quest of a six-year-old to have a good time with a furry friend. Rarely in a comic strip has such devotion and integrity of a kid been so accurately portrayed.

You'll chuckle at Calvin's dad 's explanation of the workings of a carburetor and the hilarious camping trip to a desolate rock that Calvin's entire family embarks on. Rosalyn appears again, and yes, again terrorizes Calvin. Calvin digs up dirt on his dad,which compromises his father's high-ranking position of dad. Calvin tries and fails to be the next Houdini and Susie and Calvin are assigned an a project together. All the way to the new and improved transmogrifier, it's pure magic, purely Calvin and Hobbes.

This particular book follows the eleventh and twelfth seasons of the "Simpsons." We are offered summaries for each episode, as well as chalkboard and couch gags, hard-to-know facts and trivia, and character sketches and designs from various episodes. This is a great addition to the first two books in the series, but seems to be filled with some extra, not very essential material, just to seem larger and worthy of the price. Yet, in any event, I think if you are a big "Simpsons" watcher, or want to know more about these seasons, this book is a great purchase.

This book is hilarious, even better than the other two! Every series,the simpsons just gets funnier and funnier. I can't wait for the next book to come out and the next series to be shown on C4. If you like The Simpsons, you will love this book.

Amazing. The ultimate for any Simpsons fan!

THE SIMPSONS BEYOND FOREVER! A COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUR FAVORITE FAMILY...STILL CONTINUED is probably the best book on the Simpsons that I've read, along with THE SIMPSONS: A COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUR FAVORITE FAMILY and THE SIMPSONS FOREVER! A COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUR FAVORITE FAMILY...CONTINUED. It includes, and I am taking this right from the cover, all new characters, episodes, and secret jokes you might have missed from seasons 11 & 12. The book was created by Matt Groening and edited by Jesse L. McCann. It details each episode and even has extras: Season 11 Production Art; Season 11 Character Designs; Season 12 Production Art; Season 12 Character Designs; Church Marquees; "D'oh"s and "Mmm"s; Itchy & Scratchy; Couch Gags; Who Does What Voice; and Songs Sung Simpson.

The books dedication even reads:
TO THE LOVING MEMORY OF SNOWBALL I:
YOU ALWAYS MANAGED TO LAND ON YOUR FEET.

My favorite sayings in the book are all on p. 104 - 105, "Simpsons Tall Tales":

A hungry, hungry Homer: "I haven't had buffalo in six hours. Marge, how about whipping up some buffalo sausage, huevos buffaleros, and some fresh-squeezed buffal-OJ?"

VICTUAL REALITY:
HUCK FINN (NELSON): I'm considerable hungry. We got any food left?
TOM SAWYER (BART): Hmm. Looks like we're out of cornpone, fatback, hardtack, fatpone, corntack...
HUCK: Any tackback?
TOM: Tackback?
HUCK: I mean, backtack.
TOM: Plum out.

COMPARE AND SAVE:
APU: One jug of whiskey, three plugs of tobacky, and some extra-strength opium. That will be two cents, boys.
TOM: Gasp!
HUCK: Two cents!
APU: Hey, if you think my prices are high, go across the street!
(He points at a $0.99 Store.)

I would buy this book for double the price!

P.S. - I also reviewed the first two books mentioned above.

Wow, The Simpsons has been around a LONG TIME! Right now, they're on Season 15 and the hit show doesn't look like it will end anytime soon. Of course, the episodes are kind of stupid now and some are losing interest. The Simpsons Beyond Forever covers season 11 and 12. The book is basically a really detailed episode guide. Inside, there is an Itchy and Scratchy Filmography, Homer's D'OHS! and his mmm's, and of course, the couch gags. But, that's only part of the book.
Also, they tell everything you need to know about each episode in seasons 11 and 12. There's the stuff Bart writes on the chalkboard, quotes from the episode, a summary and hilarious pictures. With 2 pages for each episode, they have plenty of room to fit anything they want on it. They even do a The Stuff You May Have Missed section for every episode. They have even more information for the Treehouse of Horror episodes. 4 WHOLE PAGES! The episodes aren't even that great!
The book, I wouldn't consider short, but not long. The first book(The Simpsons: A Complete Guide To Your Favorite Family) almost has 100 more pages than Beyond Forever! But, Beyond Forever has enough information that the few pages don't really matter.
You'll find EVERYTHING you need to know about season 11 and 12 in this book. Basically, it's amazing. I would reccommend this true work of art to any Simpsons fan. You could watch one Simpsons episode and still find this book interesting. Seasons 11 and 12 weren't included in the drop of ideas that has suddenly come into The Simpsons. The wonderful episode HomR lets you discover Homer's only stupid because he lodged a crayon up his nose as a kid. Plus, there's the crazy Trilogy of Error episode where it tells where Homer's finger was cut off by Marge and her brownies.
All in all, this book is AWESOME! Buy it.

This is a classic around our house. My kids love it! The repetitive pattern is great for preschoolers and it teaches prediction skills.

I have looked for this book for years. I had read it in a Pre-K class for my students. Another teacher had borrowed it from her town's library and my class loved it.
Since then, I have looked off and on for years but could not locate it. I now have a 3 year old grandson and we love to find animals, birds, etc. in the clouds. We have read this book several times already and he loves it.

Thanks,
Jeri

This book can be used creatively with kids of all ages! As a speech therapist at an elementary school, this book provides many language development opportunities! I love it as much as the kids do!

This is a great book for pre-school age kids. It's a simple story with lots of opportunities for the kids to participate, saying what each picture is. I know a lot of teachers use this book and then have the kids make their own "ink blot" type images and then say what they see in their cloud. Very cute book.

Great book for teaching shapes and cloud, fun to read with felt board activity.

Oscar Wilde is a genius. His social satire is as crisp and hilarious as it was when it first appeared. He is one of the very first literary loves of my life. (I was reading his stuff before I even understood many of the references, while still loving his sharp language and witty repartee!) This is an excellent collection of his works - really well-done and well-edited. I highly recommend him.

Oscar Wilde is a master and writing is his art. His works--and indeed words--contain the many shades of humor, poetry, psychology and philosophy. He has a tongue-in-cheek way of narrating stories, usually keeping the reader on their toes (except when they're rolling on the floor laughing) but never alarming or abandoning them and never for a moment causing them to wish to put the book down. He is a legend, and his works are undeniably classics.

In this one book is contained all his life's works: prose, poetry and even essays. However long or short, all his writings are really fun to read. He has a way with words--his signature style, if you will--that not even a handful of other authors in this world can mimic. In that regard, he is second to none. The book also features several (black and white) photographs of Oscar Wilde as a bonus.

I highly and wholeheartedly recommend this book for every library and every fan of classic literature. I also suggest you buy the hardcover version of this book for just a couple bucks more if you're worried about wear and tear.

a most wonderful and pleasant reading throughout...i borrowed the book from the library first and while reading it decided that i have to have a copy near me so that i can pick it up any time i want. the only slight is that the dust jecket has a different photo of the author, the one on the older edition is much better. a great book.

This book has it all. If you are an Oscar fan, than it is a must for your collection.

I'm very pleased with the book. All of Wilde's wit is right there at my fingertips. It's a handsome book, too. Thank you.

There is no one better at spoofing the foolishness of how business is done than Scott Adams in his Dilbert strip. All quality spoofs are based on fundamental truths and Dilbert is no exception. That is of course why the Dilbert web site is one of the sites most frequently blocked by business managers.
While the truth often hurts, in the right hands it can be hilarious and Adams' hands are the right ones when it comes to business. Reading this book may not make your job better, but it certainly will make it more tolerable.

For some reason, I didn't find this book quite as funny as some of Adams' later stuff, but it still gave me some good laughs!

The funniest humor always has a root in reality. . . that's why Dilbert is so hilarious! Though sometimes outlandish, I can sometimes see similarities between the Dilbert characters and people I work with!

Fugitive From The Cubicle Police is a 224-page collection of Scott Adams' hilarious Dilbert cartoons. Dated from 1993 and 1994, these cartoons are from quite early in the Dilbert story. Most of the normal crew is here: Dilbert, Alice (her hair isn't pyramid-shaped yet), Wally, Dogbert, and so forth, but no Catbert. The cartoons themselves appear as they did in your favorite newspaper, with the big Sunday ones printed in bright color!

This book is great, a must-have addition to the library of any Scott Adams fan. And, the finger-puppets make it that much better. This is perhaps the best Dilbert book of them all - buy it!

Scott Adams has talent. That is a fact. His comics, Dilbert, are basically about this engineer who works in a cubicle and has no social life. They're so funny, and have such original characters. Bob the Dinosaur, who basically goes around giving wedgies to people, is probably one of my favourites. I find it very amusing how a lot of characters are animals, like Dogbert, Catbert, Ratbert, etc. It seems so funny, somehow, to incorporate animals into work at an office building.
So, overall, any Dilbert books are incredibly hilarious. Go buy one.

Monkey: Evolution favors monkeys. Eventually humans will be kept in cages as pets...
Dilbert: Impossible! We humans will never allow ourselves to be treated like that! Now, get out of my cubicle!

Dilbert, the mainstay of office-life critical witticisms, is the concept of Scott Adams, who quit his job to write the column, using it primarily to exorcise the demons that haunted him (and, indeed, seem to haunt all in small-to-large corporate America) during his tenure as a mid-level office worker.

In his introduction, he says: 'I was doing some thinking today. But I didn't enjoy it very much, so I decided to write this introduction instead....'

Who can argue with this? This, perhaps in a brief statement, summarises much of the underlying philosophy of the corporate culture Adams presents in his Dilbert column. It certainly epitomises the prevailing attitude of the boss and management structure. And of course, being in charge of his own column, Adams has graduated (or, perhaps sunk) to the level of management.

This book consists of a generous sampling of Sunday columns (complete with colour -- OOOH! AAAH!) -- colour of course being a Dilbert-ian device to disguise the lack of information. Yet, the information here is timely and timeless (insofar as anything about corporate culture can be timeless).

Dogbert's entry into and rising through the hierarchy is a good case in point, where LOUD equals results. After securing a corner office with a window by being LOUD, a task force ripe for empire-building within the company, the budgetary control of his boss, he is invited, at the end of his first week on the job, to meet with the president of the company.

President: You've made quite a name for yourself in the week you've worked here.
Dogbert: It was easy to grab power, once I realised that other executives were just imbeciles with good hair.
President: I hope you don't think that of me.
Dogbert: No, that looks like a toupee from here...

Onward and upward...

Finally Dogbert becomes president, exercises stock options after a disastrous but stock-market-friendly series of initiative plans (of course, they only have to be plans for the stock market to react), and retires to devote himself to philanthropy, which is 'mostly about watching people beg, and having buildings named after me.'

We are introduced to Dilbert's co-workers, who are variously competent and stuck in their jobs, rejoicing the occasional tiny victories, or, more frequently, plotting grand schemes to gain the minor advantage (a few more inches of cubicle space, for instance). We are introduced to incompetent co-workers who get promotions and jobs in other firms with real offices and perks. We discover what kinds of women will date (and dump) Dilbert. Of course, that might have become a bit of a different problem had Dilbert's boss not been corrected in time...

Boss: My boss says we need some eunuchs programmers.
Dilbert: I think he means Unix, not eunuchs. And I already know Unix.
Boss: If the company nurse drops by, tell her I said "Never mind."

Dilbert does sometimes win after all.

Many thanks to IDW for embarking on this publishing milestone. Even the earliest, crudest TRACY strips are entertaining and enlightening. Chester Gould's abilities as a storyteller and artist take shape over the course of years. His economy of action, character and suspense grows over decades. It's fascinating to watch the character and the strip develop in these early panels, especially if you know what's coming. At the rate they are publishing these volumes, it is expected to take five-six years to commit the entire work to book form. There have been other attempts over the years, both in hardcover volumes and comic book variations, to reprint TRACY, but it looks like IDW has come up with a satisfactory format, great design, and a commitment to getting it done once and for all. Please support them.

I recently received an e-mail from IDW Publishing who stated that both Volume 1 and Volume 2 have been reprinted and are due for release on 21 January 2009. If you've been tempted to spend a small fortune on these, save your money for the second printing!

An excellent start to a much overdue collection! Yes, this first volume was pretty much covered in Tommyguns, but its arrangement and hardcover setup make it worthwhile. I look forward to future volumes!

I've been a huge fan of the Dick Tracy comic strip since I picked up my first comic book reprint of the strip sometime in the latter '40s in the middle of the "Boris Arson" narrative arc from the mid-'30s. It was great stuff, and even at my young age I knew it was the real deal and drew upon some actual events for plot points; "Arson" used an iodine-dyed dummy pistol carved from a raw potato to break out of jail! (Ah there!, John Dillinger!)

I was hooked, and became a dedicated collector with issue #29 (toward the end of the "Flattop" arc) and had every single issue from that point forward 'til #137! (Somewhere, inexplicably, they all disappeared! They survived the disapproval of my father, but not, apparently, my first wife!)

Over the past 30 years I've acquired virtually every "Tracy" reprint I could get my eager mitts on, and they've been for the most part excellent. But due to the selectivity of the reprints (none of which touched on the "Boris Arson" arc), there's been no continuity of the Chester Gould oeuvre until this series debuted, and I was all over it!

I've purchased the first two volumes, devoured both, and, O joy!, "Boris Arson" has appeared toward the end of the second one. The publication date of Volume III is a month away, and I'm like a kid awaiting Christmas morning!

I imagine the reason this "Complete Dick Tracy" project wasn't previously attempted had to do with some sort of "rights" issue, but I'm delighted that it's underway... and I know that unless they accelerate the present two-a-year schedule, I probably won't live to see the "Moon Maid" years, but that's okay!

These early strips show how polished Gould had become since his rather crude beginnings, and how much he developed his technical and creative "chops" over the decades. The format is fine... anything larger to accommodate a fuller sized Sunday strip would probably have put the volumes well above the "widely accessible" price point... so it's but a minor inconvenience for me to wear my reading glasses.

Kudos to IDW Publishing.

Around the early 1930s, as Prohibition was coming to an ignominious end, gangster films began to really take hold. James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart led the way on screen, while Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler wrote the books, and on the comics page, it was Chester Gould, with his strip, Dick Tracy. Volume One of The Complete Chester Gould's Dick Tracy follows the detective from the very beginning in late 1931 to the middle of 1933.



As the comic begins, Dick Tracy isn't even a cop. When the father of his fiancee Tess Trueheart is killed by robbers, Tracy joins the police force and becomes a top detective without even needing to take an exam. He first solves the murder of Tess's father and then proceeds to be a one-man-gang against murderers, kidnappers, thieves and con men. His first real foe is the gang leader Big Boy, and most of the early battles are against Big Boy or members of his organization.



For those familiar with Dick Tracy's more bizarre foes such as Pruneface and Flattop, there may be a little bit of disappointment with the more mundane villains in this volume. Besides the bad guys and Tess, the main characters are Pat, a rather hapless fellow detective and Junior, a street urchin who Tracy takes under his wing. But it's Tracy who is the lead character, constantly meeting out justice with fist and gun. Like many such characters, Tracy himself is not that interesting, but is made more so by others around him.



Well-drawn and decently written, even these early Dick Tracy strips should appeal to fans of older comics. It may not be the best of these old-time comics (I reserve that compliment for other strips like Krazy Kat, Gasoline Alley or Popeye), but it is a fun read.