The best of the home-grown cartoon books this year, by far, is a reissue of Aongus Collins's The Legend of Charlie Haughey - A Cartoon Biography (Marino, £7.99),updated and redesigned to take account of recent developments. It is informative, witty and beautifully drawn. Much better than Charlie deserves, really.
Speaking of bloodsuckers, Sean Lennon has celebrated his ex-near neighbour in Marino, Bram Stoker, by producing Behold the Cartoons of Dracula, an extended cartoon essay on various aspects of that particular vampire legend and its Irish connections (Sceptic Tank Press, £4.99). Much work has gone into the book and yet he has barely scratched the surface of the theme - hardly drawn blood; more, please.
Steve Bell, the Guardian cartoonist, has packaged his "If" strip with his political cartoons and produced a chunky A4 compilation of recent work called The If Files (Methuen, £9.99 in UK), which is as good an overview of current British politics as you can hope to get. I confess to having had a part in the lame gag on page 123, so take this as a biased review. His stuff is as good as you can get, and the fear that with the demise of John Major and his underpants (which appear in blazing glory on the cover of this book) may have caused young Bell to struggle a little have been proved totally unfounded.
Mr Bell's Book of the Year, I suspect, would be The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book (Bloomsbury, £25 in UK), a mammoth full-colour hardback retrospective of Crumb's work. It doesn't add much to the existing Crumb catalogue and it wouldn't be something I would recommend to first-time Crumb buyers; it is, as Mr Natural says on the cover, big, pretentious, expensive. Something for the hardened fans.
I suppose the same could be said of the two vastly different Simpsons offerings. The Simpsons Uncensored Family Album (HarperCollins, £9.99 in UK) is a slim, overpriced piece of hokum which would divert and entertain a Simpsons fan for a very small part of Christmas Day afternoon. However, for another fiver, The Simpsons Complete Guide (HarperCollins, £14.99 in UK) is 250 pages of detailed information about every Simpsons episode produced up until May of this year. It's good value, well produced, delightfully illustrated (well, it would be, wouldn't it) and perfect , as Matt Groening says in his introduction, for "people who just can't seem to stop paying attention".
Matt Groening's real job over the years has been to produce the strange strip cartoon "Life Is Hell". If you ain't seen it, I can't describe it. It is difficult, at times, but also rewarding. Warner Books have produced the flimsy Work Is Hell (48 pages) for £5.99 in UK, while Penguin have come up with the fat, overstuffed Huge Book of Hell (158 pages) for £7.99 in UK.
Glen Baxter who, along with Larson and Kliban, was the father of the latest style of gag cartooning (as exemplified by Speed Bump in this 'ere journal) has returned to his original concept after straying into novels and the like in recent years with Glen Baxter's Gourmet Guide (Bloomsbury, £12.99 in UK). It is as bizarre and funny as his previous books. I especially liked the section "Fruits of the World in Danger". Highly recommended.
The Phoenix's deputy editor and the Evening Herald's cartoonist have got together to produce Stuff It All - A Sur- vivor's Guide To Christmas (Paul Farrell and Graeme Keyes, Blackstaff £5.99). No Christmas gag remains unwrapped. I look forward to a sequel about Easter.
Martyn Turner has recently illustrated The Earl Bishop, by Harry Barton, to be published in February