As I wandered through Barnes & Noble a week ago, I stumbled over a paperback titled Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain! It's by Dilbert creator Scott Adams and it consists in large part of postings from his website blog. And it's my kind of humor and comedic insight -- which is, of course, not to say I agree with everything he says. But wow, he is so bang-on with so much and says it so well, that I can't believe I haven't seen at least some of it before via my wide range of acquaintances.
He points out in the pb introduction that there was an earlier, hardcover version -- which I'd also managed to miss. Agh! On the other hand, that very introduction says, "The paperback version of this book is superior to the hardbound version in several ways. First, if you plan to read it aloud, there's a good chance someone will yank it out of your hands and start beating you with it. That's when you really appreciate the softness.
"The paperback version costs less, it's lighter, and the material has a solid track record of not triggering epileptic seizures. But most important, this paperback version includes some new content."
In any case, some of the entries (and they're all brief: ideal for consuming with your eyes in much the way you consume grapes or Cheetos [your choice] with your mouth) focus on being a newspaper cartoonist. Several essays focus on Dilbert strips that had to be changed at the behest of the editors at United Media. One passage, for example, is titled "Comic Asses" and discusses the strip that ran Nov. 12, 2006 -- and Adams' original version -- and resolves itself in a list of "acceptable" and "unacceptable" comic-strip butts.
Not all the essays are comics-oriented. One, for example, begins with the information that it costs about $25,000 to keep one criminal in jail for a year -- going on to suggest converting a spare bedroom into a prison cell and charging the government $25,000 a year to house a convict there.
Just keep in mind one of his remarks: "I may be dumb, but I'm not dumb enough to express my true opinion about anything important. The one thing I've learned about freedom of expression is that you really ought to keep that sort of thing to yourself." Love it.