Comic book series : Arf

The third volume of the popular "Arf" series, Arf Forum runs the gamut from Krazy Kat's kartoonist George Herriman to heartbreak rocker Elvis, Spider-Man's Stan Lee to New Yorker cartoonist Otto Soglow, Little Nemo's Winsor McCay to silent film star Charlie Chaplin, Nancy's Ernie Bushmiller to Surrealist Max Ernst. The sexy pin-up cover on Arf Forum highlights a feature on historical images of people reading comics: from a young Elvis reading Betty and Veronica on his first tour to a boxer-clad Rock Hudson reading the Sunday funnies. Also ratcheting up the titillation factor is a spread on the sexy cartoons of Italian artist, Kremos. The Arf books have a special fondness for cartoonists doing wacky and surrealistic comics. This Arf features a generous sample of Bill Holman's Smokey Stover, including unpublished rarities. Also in this volume, macabre cartoonist Henry Heath goes devilish in the ongoing "Cartoonists Go To Hell" series. A bona fide super-hero swoops into the pages of Arf when "Captain Marvel Fights The Surrealist Imp" in a classic tale from the Golden Age of Comics; meanwhile, real-life superhero Stan Lee introduces a section devoted to, in Lee's own words, Yoe's own "wacky, weird, wild comics that become Art with a capital 'A'!" And finally, "Yabba Dabba Been Done" examines the caveman and dinosaur cartoons of masters T.S. Sullivant, Winsor McCay and Frederick Opper — all pre-Fred and Wilma Flintstone!

"Readers will find this book doing strange and wonderful things to their minds. An elegantly designed, lovingly printed anthology." – Publishers Weekly

"No matter how hardcore a comics enthusiast you might be, there's a lot of weird stuff in these volumes that you should see, that you would want to see... I doubt you'll be disappointed, and you just might be amazed." – ComicMix

"When is an anthology not an anthology? Yoe's quirky collections bring together multitudes of art styles — clips, whole stories, paintings from well known and obscure comics/non-comics artists of all styles and eras, usually with some underlying theme, but Yoe isn't really interested in traditional anthology. ARF! is instead artifact, anthology as collage, and Yoe doesn't try to edit so much as create an experience. Experience it." – Comic Book Resources

"A series of attractive and engaging books exploring — with a scholar's thoroughness and a fanboy's passion — the surprising ways in which comic books and strips have leaked into the wider culture, particularly high culture... Brilliant." – Boston Globe

"Sublime." – Brett Warnock