Humor and Entertainment

NOW is the time to unload those comic books you’ve been storing for years! Hollywood is providing free advertising by creating movies based on your favorite characters and giving a new generation a love for everything old. Here’s a review of a book on how to do it.

It is our habit to re-read one of our favorite Christmas stories around Christmastime each year — aloud if anyone will listen, silently if not. Often as not, it’s A Christmas Carol, of which Emsworth never tires. Sometimes it’s one of Dickens’s lesser Christmas tales, sometimes O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi.” This Christmas Eve, we fell merrily back on P.G. Wodehouse’s only Christmas tale, “Jeeves and the Yule-Tide Spirit.”

With a presidential election there can be only one winner, but what happened to those who fought and lost? Some have eventually returned to win a future election, but what about those who never became president. Over the past 68 years there have been a dozen men who ran for president and never won an election; all of them have written books.

Anime comics came to America, for the most part, by way of television. The next generation of younger Gen-Y’s would look to Japan and China for their comic book series. They grew up with “Dragonball Z,” “Pokemon” and “Sailor Moon.” Anime comics came to America with surprising fervor and it’s not likely to dissipate anytime soon.

Comic books have entertained audiences since the 1930s with their quick, easy-to-read artwork and appealing, over-the-top characters. Behind Batman, Spiderman, Superman, the X-Men or other comic book heroes, there are behemoth enterprises that have dominated the comic book world for decades.

Started in 1986, writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons formulate a mystery based on the Cold War, wherein the threat of nuclear warfare is an imminent fear. The story explores the possibility that superheroes existed in the 1940s. Thus, in the setting of the Watchmen graphic novel, superheroes are roughly classified into two.

Batman is one of the most recognized fictional characters in the world, transcending his genre and entering the realm of characters such as Sherlock Holmes, Hercules and Dracula. Batman is simply an incredible modern legend, and this year, Grant Morrison has decided to take the Caped Crusader to his limits. In Batman: RIP, the Dark Knight Detective faces not death but devastating personal attack, in an attempt to break the man beneath the cowl.

Denis Leary spares no one in “Why We Suck: A Feel Good Guide to Staying Fat, Loud, Lazy and Stupid.” In this hilarious book, Leary offends just about anyone that could be offended, and you can add a couple more to that list just in case you forget someone. If you don’t like four letter words, if you don’t like Leary’s type of humor, and if you think day-to-day life in America is just hunky dory, don’t buy this book. You won’t like it.