Posting in the morn.

*I'm not sure how much I can really write about The Fun Never Stops!: An Anthology of Comic Art 1991-2006, which is the new Drew Friedman collection from Fantagraphics, but trust me in that it's a very nice pile of stuff. Friedman has struck me as kind of omnipresent in the last decade or so, as if I could run into his work around any corner of entertainment. He's got one of the most easily recognizable styles of any illustrator I can think of, so much that I suspect a much larger segment of the reading population can identify his work than can identify his name. But they'll know who he is in spirit - his famously fleshy, grinning caricatures embody so much revelatory force that after you've seen enough of them they don't even seem all that odd anymore. Rather, it's like you've been granted the gift of deeper sight, for a very short time (like, however long Friedman's drawing).

So, this is a nice collection of material. Mostly illustrations from that wide variety of places, but there's some scattered comics work, including collaborations with writers from Mark Newgarden to Bruce Handy to Howard Stern & Fred Norris (the classic Fred & Ricky Join NAMBLA). It also reprints (in "slightly different form") Ben Schwartz's lengthy, detailed profile of Friedman from the most recent issue of Comics Art, a very welcome addition as it's certainly the most thorough bit of writing on the artist that I've seen. Very nice price at $16.95, too. Little left to say. Flip through it.