Meanwhile... Back at the Comic Book Blog

Never Learn Anything From History
by Kate Beaton

Oh man, these comics are awesome. I keep meaning to write about webcomics I read, but I never do. Clearly once they've released print books is the time to talk about them.

I will say once more, Kate Beaton's comics are awesome. So awesome I was willing to buy a book of them when I can (and did) just read them for free on the internet.

Beaton's comics are, mostly, comics about history. And while that doesn't sound very exciting, she is able to make it really funny. Mostly by taking real events, condensing them down to just a few panels, and making pretty much everyone act like an idiot. They are hilarious. Honest.

So this volume collects...a bunch of the comics from her website. Not all of them, I think due to quality problems and the like. Still, there's a lot here, and there's some commentary and the like. Though I think it's just the same stuff that was online.

So while the content is awesome, I had a couple of issues with the actual physical object. First it is expensive. Aieeeeee. $25? It's only like 80 pages or something. (Thankfully I got it at more than half off during a huge sale. Hurray!)

Also, I don't like the paper stock and the binding seems flimsy. I don't know if it is or not, but every time I open it, I am very careful because I am afraid the spine is going to break and all the pages are going to fall out. I don't want that to happen on a $25 book.

With this book Beaton decided to go the self publishing route (it kind of shows, there's not even a copyright notice in the book), and I'm guessing went through some sort of print-on-demand service, which a lot of webcomic people seem to use. I kind of wish they'd put more thought into this stuff. Or, alternatively, try to get someone else to publish it for them. Some publisher must have wanted to put this out right?

Anyway, here are links so you can go bask in her glory.

http://beatonna.livejournal.com/


http://www.harkavagrant.com/

!!! She's just put up a new one. Exciting.

Labels: comics, webcomics