Michel Choquette: The Someday Funnies [2011] hardback

The Someday Funnies is the long-awaited collection of comic strips created in the early 1970s by world-famous artists and writers such as C. C. Beck, Rene Goscinny, Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Kirby, Moebius, Art Spiegelman, and Gahan Wilson. What started out as a special insert for Rolling Stone took on a life-and mythology-of its own as writer/editor Michel Choquette traveled the world, commissioning this visual chronicle of the 1960s, only to find himself without a publishing partner or the financial support to continue. Forty years later, readers finally get to experience this legendary anthology as Choquette celebrates the birth, death, and resurrection of The Someday Funnies-129 previously unpublished strips by 169 writers and artists.Praise for The Someday Funnies:"In 1970, National Lampoon contributor Choquette was asked by Jann Wenner to edit a special comics insert for Rolling Stone that would allow prominent cartoonists and writers to survey the 1960s. That collection, "The Someday Funnies," transformed over the next few years into a never-published book featuring the work of 169 writers and artists, and then-when Wenner pulled the plug-into the great lost project of comics history, a "Pet Sounds" of mainstream, underground, and European sensibilities existing only in Choquette's Montreal storage space. Thirty-one years later, it's finally seeing print and it's a doozy, featuring work from luminaries like Art Spiegelman, Joost Swarte, Jack Kirby, and Will Eisner. There are also comics written by Harlan Ellison and William S. Burroughs, and illustrations from such unlikely suspects as Tom Wolfe and Federico Fellini. What sticks with a reader now is the way the '60s had already begun to curdle in the memory even for those who had just lived them; more than one of these comics posits wild-eyed alternate histories of the '60s, including the book's kicker, a great Captain Marvel strip that ties the decade's woes to Billy Batson's mid-century silence. Though the collection is, by its nature, a mixed bag, it's a priceless time capsule of comics history, presented handsomely by Abrams in the large tabloid size Choquette always envisioned."-Publishers Weekly, starred review "[A] treasure trove of sixties cartooning finally hits print. . . . This graphic time capsule reveals that "the sixties" still define modern America's contradictory heart." -Village Voice "Where else can you see previously unpublished works by great artists like Kirby, Bode, and Beck, who have since passed on to that great bull pen in the sky?" -Cleveland Plain Dealer "As a portrait of the state of the medium of comics in the early 1970s in the U.S. and Europe, a yeasty blend of old and new that was poised to make a jump to the forefront of artistic endeavors in the twenty-first century, The Someday Funnies is a five-star publication all the way." -Tom Flinn, ICV2.com "Choquette was . . . reaching out beyond the insular underground comics circles, and filling in a bigger picture of where the world's collective head was at as the temper of the times changed. . . . Because Choquette recruited globally, The Someday Funnies avoids the usual American baby-boomer mythology, in which the sixties were born in Greenwich Village, nurtured at Berkeley, and killed at Altamont. Instead, the book reports just as much on the youth revolution in Europe, from the perspective of people who'd just lived through it." -Onion's A.V. Club "There's page after page after page of unique and exciting comics art in this incredible book. . . . Forty years after it was first organized, the legendary Someday Funnies has finally been published at long last. It [wa]s worth the wait. We never really knew what we were missing." -Comics Bulletin "The Someday Funnies is a wonderfully colorful, fascinating book with an incredible backstory." -Oregonian "There's no mistaking its masterful value for any comics collector. One of the medium's great, whispered-of projects is finally a reality, and it's a dream come true for everyone involved-especially its lucky readers." -Omnivoracious