Now there's no excuse.  Fence sitters can no longer complain about the format or the price or the confusing order of the previously issued  volumes of Alison Bechdel's seminal strip.  To celebrate it's 25th year, Houghton Mifflin has released this hunky hardcover edition.  Weighing in at 392 pages, it contains a very substantial serving of the extant DTWOF strips, making it much more than your standard "best of" collection.  Even longtime fans of the strip (like us) who own all the individual volumes will be hard pressed to resist this volume.  Format fiends may find that they prefer the balance of the squarish, vertical presentation of the strips as single-pages, over their previous horizontal formatting as side by side two-pagers.  And then there's the irresistible icing on the cake:  the all-new, never-before-seen, 12-page strip that serves as the introduction.  It is the long awaited (at least by us, anyway) "secret origin" of Dykes to Watch Out For, telling the story of Ms. Bechdel's gradual realization and embrace of her latent, long-repressed desire to be a professional cartoonist.  What's that?  You say you're not a lesbian and so why should you read this?  Well, listen up -- here's why:  DTWOF is the best ongoing continuity comic strip of its time.  The characters that populate this volume are pen and ink creations that live, breath and grow in concise single page strips that precisely capture the underlying humanity that we all share and in the process have defined an era.  Yes, it helps if your politics are towards the left of the political spectrum, but even this is not a prerequisite to enjoying the pleasures of this cartoon text (the Norman Rockwell homage of the front cover serving as ample testimony to this fact).  Open yourself up to opportunity and you'll make some new friends.

This, the fifteenth Mutts collection, is a large format volume like the four Sunday-only collections, but is the first to contain both the dailies in black and white together with the full size Sundays in full color. Not only that, but this volume contains 12 extra pages of rough sketches and watercolors and other neat stuff. As a result it's a jumbo size book -- the largest Mutts collection yet, 208 pages in all. What can we say: Mutts is good; more Mutts is better!

And, speaking of successful cartoonists, what more can we say about Mutts that hasn't been said already?  Patrick McDonnell has managed to somehow graft a poet's soul and fine artist's sensibility onto the studied craft of a totally classic old school newspaper comicstrip cartoonist.  Mutts is truly one of a kind; and in more ways than one, not the least of which is the way in which it unfailingly manages to raise the spirits.  Here in this fine oversized hardcover edition is the distilled essence of Mutts, both the black & white dailies and the full color Sundays, in 254 horizontally formatted pages each of which can and will be enjoyed by one and all.

Animal Friendly is, by our count, the sixteenth Mutts collection.  Mutts, already the best pure comics strip in the business, just keeps getting better!  This volume, the second, after last year's Everyday Mutts, in the new, all-in-one format, contains pretty much all the Mutts that appeared in 2006.  The Sundays are all reproduced here in full color, as they originally appeared in the Sunday comics sections all over America, while the dailies get the deluxe treatment, appearing full size, enabling the devotee to admire the subtleties of McDonnell's dynamic yet elegant brush work.  As an added treat, three Sunday strips and one daily are hand-colored!  Printed entirely on flat, bright white, recycled paper stock, Animal Friendly is filled with miniature masterworks each of which will make your day.