Somewhere at this very moment, a guy is contemplating getting a tattoo that will stain his skin for the rest of his life. He is narrowing his choices toward the select one for permanent status. Suddenly, it hits him: “I know! A pile of shit! With flies on ‘er!”

It happens. And with alarming frequency, if one is to believe the “art” on display in Aviva Yael and P.M. Chen’s NO REGRETS: THE BEST, WORST, & MOST #$%*ING RIDICULOUS TATTOOS EVER. In frightening full color, the humor collection prints page after page after photos of truly horrendous tats that their owners should have been talked out of. (Seriously, ignore the word BEST in the title.)

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When did comics go from good-time, fantastical escapism to altruistic studies of the human condition through contrived four-colored mythology? When did the nerds who loved the exploits of wholly ridiculous heroes become the embittered dorks that have to nitpick every single nuance of any character that crosses their path?

And with IRON MAN now out, perhaps the more pointed question is this: If you are just going to hate every comic-book movie that comes out, why do you even bother going anymore? You might as well stay in your mother’s basement, surrounded by your eggshell-long boxes, your Mylar-encased, graded first editions of THE INCREDIBLE HULK #181 (the first appearance of Wolverine!) and your multiple, stained copies of Wizard’s “Guide to the 100 Hottest Chick Superheroes” double-sized issue. You’re safe down there. No one will hurt you. I’m sure if you yell loud enough, Mom will even bring you a sandwich.

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What are the rich and famous reading? Let’s take a click!

HILLARY CLINTON
“I had no idea books like this existed. No longer will I ‘misspeak.’ Misspeaking can be as dangerous as sniper fire. This book will change your life … and save my campaign.”

ROGER CLEMENS
A fun read for fans of Bigfoot, UFOs and Atlantis — as long as you accept the fact that the subject matter is a complete myth.”

MILEY RAY CYRUS
“My dad and I have always been close. After reading this book together, I think we’re even closer.”

PAUL MCCARTNEY
“Why am I only now finding out about this book?”

CHUCK NORRIS
“I’m only halfway through reading this, but so far, it’s fantastic. Don’t tell me how it ends.”

HILLARY CLINTON
“I had no idea books like this existed. It will change your life … and save my campaign.”

–Ralph Gamelli

I can’t think of a newspaper headline more famous in all of history than “Dewey Defeats Truman,” but “Headless Body in Topless Bar” has to rank second. That gem was dreamt up by the staff of New York Post, of course, and it’s one of many all-bold wonders collected in the humorous hardback HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR: THE BEST HEADLINES FROM AMERICA’S FAVORITE NEWSPAPER.

During a 1989 student trip to the Big Apple in high school, I distinctly remember my journalism adviser decrying how New Yorkers snapped up the Post while letting The New York Times sit virtually untouched on the stands. This piqued my curiosity.

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Alright, these books are about as scary as something on COUNT FLOYD’S MONSTER CHILLER HORROR THEATER, but they do feature monsters in their own way – be it the fantastical kind or the evil genius types who pour out of pulps. Ooh, scary!

CODE NAME: WEREWOLF by Nick Carter – Yes, folks long before he was making a career out of the Russian police force, Martin Cruz Smith ghostwrote four Nick Carter books, including this 1973 entry. Guess you have to start somewhere to pay the bills. What is really funny is the cover blurb that proclaims it’s as chilling as THE DAY OF THE JACKAL. There is a real simple reason for that: Smith pretty much steals the entire plot of it.

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Who is killing the great hipper-than-thou of Brooklyn? Well, the guy in the Iron Maiden shirt, of course, but that’s not the point. What is the point of Rayo Casablanca’s 6 SICK HIPSTERS is that the pop-culturally elite aren’t safe – not the LP collector, underground filmmaker, album cover painter nor performance artist. And certainly not the comic-book store clerk who meets his demise for being unable to name six VOLTRON characters in two minutes.

But the title of this raucous debut novel refers to the group of guys who aim to solve this most twisted serial-killer streak. Among them is a rocker who looks like Jesus, but the protagonist is Harrison, who writes science-based pornography.

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A quick lesson: FLIGHT is the name for a series of loosely themed comic anthologies for older readers. The new FLIGHT EXPLORER: VOLUME 1, however, is a loosely themed comic anthology by the same creators, only for middle-school students. I happened to love it. As in, a lot. Does that make me 12 again? If so, I’ll take it – but this time, without the angst, please.

My only exposure to FLIGHT thus far (about to change, however) was from a sampler given away a few Free Comic Book Days ago. You need no introduction for FLIGHT EXPLORER; just open it, dive in and get lost.

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Did you hear the one about LOLITA’s pedophiliac Humbert Humbert being confronted by DATELINE’s “To Catch a Predator” segment? If not, consult THE MCSWEENEY’S JOKE BOOK OF BOOK JOKES pronto. This slim but satisfying anthology pokes a number of holes into the often-inflated world of self-important literature and writing with dozens of brief biting bits.

From the start – namely, the introduction by John Hodgman – you can tell you’re in for a good time. “It is hilarious that Herman Melville wrote MOBY-DICK,” he writes. “It is hilarious that it has a tattooed cannibal in it named ‘Queequeg’ and also a guy with a peg leg, and what’s more, it’s GODDAMNED TITLE IS MOBY-DICK. Priceless. I know, as we all do, that MOBY-DICK is hilarious, and I HAVEN’T EVEN READ IT.”

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Because time isn’t always kind: economic reviews in a world full of waste!

One has to give points to ESSENTIAL MARVEL SAGA: VOL. 1 for at least having its heart in the right place. The book collects a dozen issues of Marvel’s mid-1980s series, which aims to tell “the official history of the Marvel Universe” in more or less chronological order, using panels and pages clipped from the original adventures of Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Hulk, X-Men, Captain America, Doctor Strange and the like. But the text bridging the reprinted material is maddening, the tone is schizophrenic, and often the pages are ill-designed. Nice try, but I’d rather just have a collection of origin issues.

Who’s Josh Howard? Dunno, but he’s the proud ringleader behind JOSH HOWARD PRESENTS SASQUATCH, an indie-comics anthology of stories specifically about Bigfoot and his hairy ilk. Maybe you got a sneak peek via last year’s Free Comic Book Day edition? If so, make do with that. Had this been more horror- and suspense-oriented, Howard might have had something. Instead, too many creators go the “funny” and/or cutesy route, which makes most of it hard to stomach. A couple of exceptions lie in David Hartman’s gory “Sawmill Horror” or Christopher Graybill’s absurdist “… The Yeti,” but that’s not enough to save it from disappointment. Some of the pieces are so bad they’re unreadable, while others merely mildly amuse.

After being hurled through the cosmos by Captain Marvel, Dr. Fate’s wayward helmet seeks a new owner in THE HELMET OF FATE, a five-issue miniseries now in one handy trade paperback. Each chapter stands alone, with the helmet finding its way to a different obscure character from the expanse of the DC Comics universe. Furthermore, each is tackled by a different creative team, and thus, has its own style and feel. FABLES‘ Bill Willingham does wonders with Detective Chimp, Steve Niles goes the E.C. route with Sargon the Sorcerer, and Gail Simone places it in the hands of Goth girl Black Alice, but it goes downhill from there, with fairly pointless excursions with Ibis the Invincible and Zauriel. So, about half-good.

More dark adventures with the apparently schizophrenic crimefighter await you in ESSENTIAL MOON KNIGHT: VOL. 2, collecting 20 issues from the superhero’s early-’80s series. Here, Moon Knight goes to Mardi Gras, encounters a demonic creature, teams up with The Thing to tackle a Medusa-esque monster, fends off a trio of kung-fu chicks on an island fortress, tracks down a cabbie killer, takes on Kingpin, and just about loses his hot girlfriend. Brother Voodoo and Werewolf by Night also make appearances, and a couple of shorter backup stories serve as prequels, showing Marc Spector’s days as a mercenary. A lot of value is packed into these 600 pages, with great scripts from Doug Moench and greater art from Bill Sienkiewicz.

Whereas the SPIDER-MAN FAMILY one-shots rounded up reprinted material featuring a variety of Spider-Men across time, the new series – of which the first three issues are contained in SPIDER-MAN FAMILY: BACK IN BLACK – is comprised of all-new stuff featuring an array of characters from Peter Parker’s world. In this digest, Spidey fights The Sandman, Black Cat fights Hellcat, Spidey fights Venom, The Lizard fights a lab assistant, Spidey fights The Fantastic Four and Electro, and Scorpion fights Venom. It’s a bit ballsier than the all-ages rating on it would have you believe, but it’s still a bunch of fun.

After collecting 52 in a series of four trades, DC Comics still found a way to milk an extra few bucks out of the franchise with 52: THE COMPANION, which reprints noteworthy, non-52 stories of 10 of the series’ most valuable players, including Steel, Elongated Man, Booster Gold, Rip Hunter, Renee Montoya, The Question and Black Adam. Best are Grant Morrison’s Animal Man adventure in a time-frozen Paris, and Steve Gerber’s look at an unhinged Dr. Magnus, creator of the Metal Men. Skip the Adam Strange chapter, which is text-based and never before reprinted for a reason. –Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Because time isn’t always kind: economic reviews in a world full of waste!

I’ve never quite been able to get into Dennis Etchison’s work. I’ve always ending up liking the anthologies he’s edited more than the actual fiction he’s written. The same goes for GOT TO KILL THEM ALL & OTHER STORIES, Cemetery Dance’s new collection of his short stories – some new, others dating back to the birth of his career in the ’60s. To me, his fiction seems a little fill-in-the-blank, as if not everything he needs to say is said, leaving this reader feeling like either every other sentence has been removed or that I just don’t get the joke. This is a shame, because KILL THEM sports a number of intriguing premises … that just didn’t pay off for me. I’m in a minority there, I know.

Perhaps no one deserves a ribbing as much as the Nazis, and New Yorker cartoonist S. Gross gives them 120 pokes in WE HAVE WAYS OF MAKING YOU LAUGH: 120 FUNNY SWASTIKA CARTOONS. This rectangular hardback takes about five minutes to read, with one drawing per page. The entries fall into two categories: deliberate barbs at the Nazi party, and largely nonpolitical ones where the swastika merely takes the place of a random object, like a lamp or a Slinky. Despite the subtitle, not all 120 are funny (I’d say half are at least humorous), but you have to love the fairy waving a wand at a Nazi and saying, “Poof! You’re circumcised!” and the cactus who asks its armband-wearing owner, “Are you my mother?”

Every year, sorority girls wanting to get back at their dads pose nude for Playboy’s college issues, which may or may not later become a sticking point with prospective husbands. But imagine the explaining the coeds pictured in BOINK: COLLEGE SEX BY THE PEOPLE HAVING IT will have to do. Edited by Alecia Oleyourryk, Christopher Anderson and Vanessa White, this collection of articles and pictorials from the collegiate sex mag is most notable for featuring no-imagination-needed photo spreads of higher-ed student couples – same- and opposite-gender – playing around with themselves and one another. But like Playboy, you might want to read it for the articles, which include true confessions of a guy who’s still a virgin and a girl who’s a serial masturbator. Interesting to say the least, even if it leaves you wondering why.

Move over, Sudoku! Now there’s YUBOTU. You might known it better as Battleship. Peter Gordon, Mike Shenk and Conceptis Puzzles (the firm behind SNAKES ON A SUDOKU) here assemble 200 of these “addictive” pencil games for the armchair torpedo commander in you, divided into different skill sections like “petty officer” and “admiral.” As with the Milton-Bradley game, the object is to find – and sink – the fleet floating in a visually pleasing grid. Unlike Battleship, it’s not so simple. In fact, it takes about 15 pages of rules up front to explain. Because of that, the impatient among us won’t even make it to the first round. –Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

When Lisa Lutz’s THE SPELLMAN FILES came out in hardcover last year, I didn’t read it. I can’t recall whether that was due to overload or indifference, but what’s done is done. Now that it’s in paperback – all the better to tie in with the new CURSE OF THE SPELLMANS sequel – a wrong has been righted, but damn, I wish I would’ve read this the first time around.

The title refers to the Spellman clan of San Francisco. Mom and Dad are private investigators by trade, a gig which has fallen upon their middle daughter Isabel, still living at home and trying to make nice after hard-partying years.

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In junior high school, I was a Mad magazine freak. I’d bike a mile to the nearest grocery store every week just to see if they had a new issue. I couldn’t get enough of it. And then, I grew up.

Today’s Mad is quite different than it was 25 years ago – notably the addition of color and advertising – but one thing remains the same: the continuing, wordless adventures of two ever-dueling saboteurs known as Spy vs. Spy. David Shayne’s SPY VS. SPY 2: THE JOKE AND DAGGER FILES is the second huge collection of their injurious, hilarious missions.

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Because time isn’t always kind: economic reviews in a world full of waste!

About all I remember from the 1983 miniseries V of my childhood: 1) Faye Grant looked hot, 2) Freddy Krueger was in it, and 3) that lizard baby. V’s writer/director Kenneth Johnson revisits the loose ends of the resulting 1984 weekly series with the novel V: THE SECOND GENERATION. The reptilian alien “Visitors” have wrestled control of Earth by tricking its residents, except for the small splinter group of resistance fighters. Your enjoyment will help tremendously if you’ve revisited V on DVD, as several characters and storylines either are referenced or still in play. Everyone else may be working at a disadvantage, and may be better suited to awaiting the eventual screen adaptation, even if Johnson’s ever-thriving imagination is still in full force.

For THE FORTUNE COOKIE CHRONICLES: ADVENTURES IN THE WORLD OF CHINESE FOOD, Jennifer 8. Lee traveled the globe to find the very best Chinese restaurant. I won’t spoil the surprising winner for you, but the real charm of the book comes in the other chapters, in which she laments the dangers of being a Chinese food deliveryman, explores the origins of chop suey, visits the manufacturers of those white takeout boxes (a wholly American thing, by the way) and recounts a 2005 Powerball mishap when there were more payouts than usual because a fortune cookie string of lucky numbers actually was. Lee writes so friendly, you want to take her out for a bowl of hot-and-sour soup. This engaging buffet of travel, history and popular culture will put a smile on your face and a pang in your stomach. And no MSG!

Gonzo cruciverbalist Ben Tausig attempts to hook kids into pencil games instead of video games with MAD TAUSIG VS THE INTERPLANETARY PUZZLING PEACE PATROL. You’re supposed to stop madman Mad Tausig by doing crosswords, cracking codes, unscrambling words and tackling a variety of logic, word and other puzzles. The quasi-mystery is a lot of fun, with something to do on every page, and the cartoony illustrations by Goopymart – an alias, I’m assuming – help make the book irresistible. Buy one for your kids … and one for yourself. It’s not the most fiendishly clever puzzle book out there – that’d be Lemony Snicket’s THE PUZZLING PUZZLES – but it’s darn close.

The whole of our country’s cinema criticism is chronicled in AMERICAN MOVIE CRITICS: AN ANTHOLOGY FROM THE SILENTS UNTIL NOW – EXPANDED EDITION, edited by Phillip Lopate. Among its earliest entries are poet Carl Sandburg’s awkwardly phrased reviews (”Then it is for you this Caligari and his cabinet”) and Cecilia Ager’s take on KING KONG, which focuses solely on Fay Wray. Film criticism got better as the decades progressed, as Jonas Mekas’ all-question review of Andy Warhol’s SLEEP shows, or the rightfully praised works of Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael and Vincent Canby. More recent pieces of note include J. Hoberman’s bad movies essay/tribute and screenwriter Paul Rudnick’s take on DANCES WITH WOLVES, albeit under the satricial guise of Libby Gelman-Waxner, the über-yuppie columnist from the late Premiere magazine. At more than 750 pages, there’s a wealth of material here for serious film enthusiasts.

THIS MAY HELP YOU UNDERSTAND THE WORLD, goes Lawrence Potter’s slim little volume, which serves as an FAQ for this current crazed earth of ours. It seeks to tackle – through both commentary and good ol’ hard facts – many of the trickiest hot-button issues of today, including “Is Bush actually stupid?,” “Is it possible that global warming is not taking place?” and “What is Iran up to?” (The short answers, respectively: His IQ equals John F. Kennedy’s, not likely, it ain’t pleasant.) Chapters are divided amongst topics like China, Darfur and Russia. That Potter offers concise, easy-to-follow explanations justifies the book’s title; unfortunately, those in most need of knowing the answers may not even care.

‘Tis easy to see why they call New York “the city that never sleeps”: Because when you have a thousand-plus-page book like WRITING NEW YORK: A LITERARY ANTHOLOGY, you’d better be planning on some long nights. Edited by Phillip Lopate, the book originally was published in 1998, but this 10th-anniversary edition from Library of America is much more relevant with the inclusion of post-9/11 material, like a chilling excerpt from Don DeLillo’s FALLING MAN novel. A wealth of classic writers are here – F. Scott Fitzgerald, William S. Burroughs, Henry Miller, Edgar Allan Poe, Tom Wolfe, O. Henry – paying tribute to (and sometimes knocking) the Big Apple. If you’re a fan of the metropolis, or a New Yorker subscriber, this belongs on your bedside table. –Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Former New York Times reporter Sarah Boxer has picked what she deems the 25 best blogs – out of an estimated 80 million –  and provides examples of each in the anthology ULTIMATE BLOGS: MASTERWORKS FROM THE WILD WEB.

The end result? To borrow an Internet phrase: Meh.

Even if it didn’t purport to showcase “the best,” the book proves that tastes are entirely subjective, especially in the blogosphere. On most of what Boxer likes, I fail to share her enthusiasm.

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One man’s pain is another man’s pleasure. And does any time in life prove more painful than puberty? MORTIFIED: LOVE IS A BATTLEFIELD bets not.

Curated by David Nadelberg, the anthology boasts 34 writers sharing deep, dark pages from their personal teenage diaries and writings of years past –  warts (and yeast infections) and all –  unedited, but supplemented with biting hindsight commentary. If we knew then what we know … well, we wouldn’t have brave projects like this, would we?

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The inimitable Darwyn Cooke showcases the best of his work in the Batman world in BATMAN: EGO AND OTHER TAILS. Given that this collection contains his acclaimed CATWOMAN: SELINA’S BIG SCORE graphic novel in its entirety, plus several more stories should be all the reason you need to buy.

Not only his first Batman story, but also his first work for DC, the BATMAN: EGO one-shot kicks off the book. It’s an unexpectedly dark tale of The Dark Knight battling – at least verbally – his own ego, here rendered as a bat-eared shadow with horrendous teeth. Batman wonders if he shouldn’t just throw in the cowl and call it quits; his ego urges him to go the extra mile and end it all.

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That TRANSFORMERS movie sucked. You know it, I know it, and indie-comics artist Jeffrey Brown knows it.

However, his INCREDIBLE CHANGE-BOTS graphic novel – part-tribute, but mostly parody – is awesome. I know it, and you should know it.

The Incredible Change-Bots live on a planet called Electronocybercircuitron, and are separated into two factions: the good-guy Awesomebots and the bad-guy Fantasticons. They have a war. They accidentally crash-land on Earth. They have a war here. Hilarity ensues.

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Because time isn’t always kind: economic reviews in a world full of waste!

Being a big fan of the goings-on at 221B Baker St., I looked forward to Andrew Lycett’s weighty biography THE MAN WHO CREATED SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE. But it’s a little too – forgive the pun – elementary. Interesting snippets are dropped throughout – such as Doyle’s collegiate hobby of testing drugs to determine the point of overdose (or severe diarrhea), or his character almost being named Sherrinford – but the author’s life is rather dry in this telling. Doyle’s more colorful, eccentric phases have been made more exciting in other nonfiction works (such as the spiritualism debate, in THE SECRET LIFE OF HOUDINI), and it resembles more of a recitation of facts than a narrative with flow. Lycett’s effort is complete, to be sure, but also too safe.

Journalist Chuck Thompson got so upset that all the good stuff would get get cut from his articles for travel magazines that he decided to compile them all into a book, titled SMILE WHEN YOU’RE LYING: CONFESSIONS OF A ROGUE TRAVEL WRITER. After all, Thompson argues it’s the dirt on a faraway place that tells you what the place is really like, as opposed to the glowing write-ups edited simply to attract/trick tourists. Thompson’s often-hilarious adventures include a “show” in Thailand (”Fifty dollah for genuine pussy writing!”) that’ll make you rethink that afternoon glass of Coke, and supposedly straight men in Japan who hold a “penis olympics” to see whose erect phallus can withstand the most hanging towels. Yessiree, you don’t get goods like that from Condé Nast Traveler, which is exactly the point.

As it did with the recent X-MEN FAIRY TALES, Marvel places your friendly neighborhood wallcrawler into a quartet of old children’s stories in SPIDER-MAN FAIRY TALES. Once again, the merging of the two mythologies works well. “Off the Beaten Path” casts Mary Jane as Little Red Riding Hood against a Venom-ous wolf, while “The Spirits of Friendship” imagine Spidey as Anansi the Spider-God. “Eclipse” takes on Japan’s Spider Spirit legend, and “What You Wish For” is a gender-flipped “Cinderella,” with the unmistakable inks and colors of Mike and Laura Allred. C.B. Cebulski wrote all the stories in this enjoyable collection.

Edited by George R.R. Martin, INSIDE STRAIGHT is a nine-author quasi-anthology/quasi-novel that tracks a new generation of superheroes as they audition for a reality show called AMERICAN HERO, and the various challenges that await them both on the show and off, including a full-fledged war with the Egyptian army. Among these powered youths are Earth Witch (she digs holes with her mind), Hardhat (he makes girders appear out of nowhere) and Gardener (she makes things grow). Between the stories are the progressive blog entries of journalist Jonathan Hive (he can turn into wasps), chronicling his own experience. This franchise reboot of Martin’s WILD CARDS series – this is the 18th – is friendly to newcomers like me. While a bit repetitive, it offers a fun mix of pointed satire and fantasy. –Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

In THE FART PARTY, her collection of confessional comics, Julia Wertz does only one thing wrong: calling it THE FART PARTY. It’s an off-putting title that belies the actual content. It’s kinda like referring to sex as, say, “misery razor time.” It just doesn’t fit.

Wertz herself acknowledges this in an introductory letter to the reader: “If you are expecting a book full of fart jokes, I’m sorry. If you are expecting a well drawn, artistically informed and poignant book, I’m sorry.”

So then, what is THE FART PARTY? Damn good.

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I, Allan Mott, simply don’t have the ego required to believe that any of you regular BOOKGASM readers have noticed – much less lamented – my absence from this fine, nearly-award-winning site during the past nine months, but I myself was shocked when I realized it had been that long since I offered up a contribution, and gave Mr. Lott the opportunity to go one day without reviewing another book about zombie-werewolf CIA agents going for one last score by breaking the bank at a 23rd-century gladiatorial casino. (Seriously, folks, can we give that genre a rest? It’s totally played out!)

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